Vocalizing Magic

When I was younger, I thought certain physical things were magical. Coins, keys and locks, playing cards and games, candles and mirrors, clocks. I still do, it’s not that I’ve stopped; even more things are magical for me now, like the flashdrive I keep my work on. The difference is that I’m starting to assemble more of the why.

When I was a kid I couldn’t have expressed the reasons for my visceral feeling that these things had a special power. Some of it is obvious, like candles; contained fire, a light in the darkness, something you see in old places, in mysterious places. Mirrors seem obvious, because they’re such a part of western folklore — Snow White, Bloody Mary — but of course then you have to ask yourself why they’re so popular in folklore, why they were used.

These things come with their own set of rules, which are sometimes inexplicable in themselves. Why do playing cards have worth? Did you know that the face cards have names? Not king or queen, actual names. I’d have to go look up my notes, but they’re named things like Alexander and Arthur. Coins have a very simple worth wrapped in very complicated imagery. Keys fit certain locks; locks are safe or unsafe, and like clocks are intricately built, difficult to understand.

They’re also multiple in their purpose or construction. They combine the practical and the mystical. Coins can be used as offerings, and they crop up in a fair few fairy-tales as well. A key has no use without its matching lock, and a key found on the ground is an eternal mystery. Mirrors can show us what we look like, but they hold an entire separate backwards-world inside them. Clocks tell time, but are also works of mechanical wonder, some of the earliest automata that exists, and they’re based on timepieces that used the sun and earth to regulate the world. My ridiculous flashdrive is a thin little stick, practically an adornment that hangs on my neck, but it contains whole worlds I’ve made up.

It seems to be that these things are crafted, not just made; they contain mysteries, and their rules are different to the rules of the everyday.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t perhaps be important, and understanding them certainly wouldn’t be wise; the essence of magic is mystery (viz the old saying — Magic is just Science we don’t understand yet) and solving the mystery kills the magic. But part of the job of being a writer, particularly one who deals in magic in their writing, is to understand things others don’t, and to poke at mysteries until they’re not mysteries any longer but tools. There’s a reason I opened The Dead Isle with a coin; I didn’t understand at the time, but I felt I had to include it. I understand better, as I get older.

The process of writing is sometimes the process of breaking down symbols from our culture, not just from our own heads. It’s an oddly un-artistic activity, quite analytical. Perhaps that means there’s no more magic for us, but to be able to wield those symbols skillfully makes us magicians, in a sense. That’s pretty powerful.

The mundane is full of magic, and magic is made out of the most interesting mundanities. That’s an elemental aspect of both steampunk and magical realism. It’s really no wonder they attract me; they engender a sense of wonder at the world.

 

Contacts and Contracts

I wrote a week or two ago about the work I was doing adapting my short story Out Of Rome to a novella-length work, which eventually ended up being submitted to Riptide Publishing under the title The City War. I have to say that while I worked really hard to make sure I cared as much about the quality of this story as I would about one I’m publishing myself, there was no loss of thrill when I got the acceptance letter from the editors on Monday.It’s very validating; it’s like someone saying “I work in this field, and I officially approve of you!”

I’ve been working lately to build up a network of writers and editors, not so much for my own sake but because it’s really fun to hook them up with each other and watch what happens. It’s like matchmaking; it’s very satisfying. Even so, I didn’t realise when I emailed the submissions editor that I actually knew at least one of the editors, possibly more, through livejournal. This world is smaller than we know, most of the time.

But it’s cool, now I have a whole new publishing house to add to my repertoire of places I can send people I think have promise.

I’ve always sort of let the numbers side of the business slide past me. I’ve read plenty about it in my trawlings for information on how we, as a literary culture, are making the leap to digital; I’ve read about how publishing houses work, how authors interact with them, and how that process has to change with the advent of e-readers. The information’s been there, but it wasn’t something I paid a lot of attention because it didn’t seem terribly relevant except in the “Wow, authors get shafted” sense.

Thing is, I’ve apparently absorbed enough about it that I can tell when I’m getting a good deal; with both this contract and the last one I signed for Candlemark & Gleam, I was capable of reading the whole thing over, making sure I was protected and so were they, and signing with a free heart. Both Riptide and C&G are small presses, and the terms are generous as only an e-publisher or a print publisher with a very efficient model can be. At any rate, I signed this morning and sent it off, which is always fun.

Sometimes when I take the envelope with a contract in it downstairs to put it in the mail box, I pretend I’m a spy mailing secret coded messages to home base.

I’m a writer, these are the things I do.

The Glacial Writer

It’s not difficult to see a writer’s progress if you read a couple of their books at once. The way their skills and techniques change can be pretty evident, especially in cases where talent sometimes outstrips ability at first. Sometimes it’s just a matter of having breathing space to be creative, or of knowing your characters — Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” series improves drastically over time from his first pulp attempt. It’s my personal opinion that the later Narnia novels are much better than the earlier ones, but that’s more up for debate, I think. At any rate, it’s possible to watch a writer mature — or sometimes, naming no names, regress — if you can get a look at several eras of their work at once.

It’s much, much more difficult for a writer to see their own work change and grow. As immediate as it seems when reading, when writing you’re undergoing a process that takes months to begin with, years and decades to progress. The pace for the writer is glacial, and it’s always more difficult to be objective about your own work.

It’s been an interesting process, reading and re-writing The Dead Isle, because I wrote it going on four years ago, before I’d put Nameless up for mass critique. That process sped up a lot of my skill acquisition so that now, four years on, I am a visibly better writer. I think this would have taken longer without Extribulum, but who knows.

In rewriting Dead Isle these past few months, I often asked myself what the hell I was thinking, writing this or that phrase, or putting a scene where I did. The truth is, at the time, I either had a perfectly rational reason for doing it, or I just wasn’t paying attention. More likely the latter. The more lessons about writing that I internalize, the easier it is to pay attention, so that now I can fix what was broken and add new flourishes to cover the breaks.

But I can also see where I was doing things on instinct that were good, and now I can put a name to why they were good.

Learning to write is a process that takes pretty much your whole life, I think. I believe that writing has a lot to do with connecting to the reader and trying to evoke certain feelings or thoughts, which involves a lot of different identifiable techniques — structure, prose, arc — but also involves understanding the way people think and feel, and why they think and feel that way. It’s almost too big for any one person to grasp, trying to comprehend cultural shifts and motivations, trying to tap into the spirit of the moment. I don’t necessarily need to know what’s going on in order to write a better character; I need to know what’s going on in order to write better for the reader.

I feel like there should be more depth to this whole theory of literature than “It all comes down to the reader”, but so far that’s all I’ve got. Perhaps that’s just a place from which to build, and I just need to fumble in the dark until I find some blueprints. But I feel that it is a basic, fundamental truth: I am writing for a reader, and everything I do, every skill I learn, every technique I perfect, is aimed at forging  that link with the reader. I don’t often feel that link anymore when I read a book, but I used to; it seems like something that began and ended in childhood, or perhaps it’s just not that permissible as an adult to allow yourself to be influenced so heavily by something.

Maybe it’s time I learned more about the reader; I’ve learned a lot, but never in any systematic way. Perhaps the next step is to ask why people read books and how, and what kinds of books people have bonded to. The way we read is changing, and the written word has never been more popular — high literacy rates and the necessity of textual communication over the internet have made writing important in a different way than it was before. Perhaps that needs study, too.

These are big, scary things, but then writing a book isn’t as big or scary as it used to be, for me, so a new challenge may be just the thing.