Author Archives: ogresan

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About ogresan

Richard Parks' stories have have appeared in Asimov's SF, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies, including several Year's Bests. His first story collection, THE OGRE'S WIFE, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is the author of the Yamada Monogatari series from Prime Books.

Don’t Get Comfortable

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Our Lady of 47 Ursae Majoris The problem with being comfortable is…well, the “comfort” part. As human beings, we like our comforts. Very smart people spend a lot of time trying to figure out new ways of making people comfortable, and there’s a reason for that. Kick up the recliner with a beer and a bag of nachos, watch the game, what could be better? So far as comfort goes, not a lot. Just everything else. Comfort is the killer.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

For writers, painters, musicians, artists of all sorts? Not just a bad thing, but possibly the absolute worst thing you can do is to get too comfortable. Not physically—we’re not talking “starving in garrets” here–but in every other way that matters to your work. And it is way too easy to get comfortable, because as you progress in your work, whatever it is, you will eventually discover your strengths. We all have them. On a process level, you may find that you have a gift for tight, vivid descriptions, or catchy dialogue. So much so that you find yourself fighting the urge to make your stories all description or all dialogue, and that’s a good thing. You’re going to know instinctively that overemphasis on one or the other is a bad idea structurally and esthetically. Yet there’s a level to this where instinct doesn’t serve quite as well.

Once you get out of process, there are more things to be good at. Yes, I know, that’s not a bad thing…until it is. Say you have a gift for painting landscapes. Comes easily, almost naturally. You’d be quite happy painting landscapes for the rest of your life. Or writing space opera. Say you’re really good at writing space opera, you have a devoted readership who will devour whatever you write on the subject. Even if the tenth book feels a lot to you like the first three. Are you writing the same story over and over? Maybe not, you work at keeping it fresh, for yourself if for no other reason. Or maybe what you’re really good at is writing one sort of space opera. Maybe your readers won’t notice. Chances are they will, eventually, but chances also are that you’ll burn out long before they do.

Playing to your strengths can be a trap. If you want to avoid it, every now and then you have to get out of your comfort zone. This can be easy or extremely difficult, but what matters is that you do it. I’m mostly a fantasist. That’s where I’m comfortable, and I don’t plan to leave. But every now and then I have to do a pure quill science fiction story. Partly because the story was there to write, but also to stretch the writerly muscles that don’t get enough exercise. I’ve done comic scripts for the same reason. Or to talk about an extreme example, for our last anniversary I wrote and performed an original song for my wife. Music and lyrics both. I’d never written a song lyric in my life, and I’d certainly never attempted music. As for the result, let’s just say the critics were being kind. I may not do it again. But I might.

Or as one of my guitar mentors put it—“Don’t practice what you can do. Practice what you can’t do.”

And, now and again, surprise the hell out of yourself. It’s good for you.

Oh, Black Water

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LucilleI’m going to talk about my home state just a bit, prodded by getting a tag for the new vehicle. The new MS car tags have an image of BB King’s “Lucille” guitar (Gibson ES355) on the central medallion. My home state gets a lot of grief, most of it deserved, a lot self-inflicted, but it’s nice to be reminded now and then that we don’t get *everything* wrong. (Though I do count it a major irony that a state with such a musical reputation has arguably the worst state song in the Union. If you doubt me, look it up. And see if you can get through the whole thing without passing out laughing.)

Ahem. Where was I? Oh, yeah–A friend from up North once asked me if I liked living in Mississippi. I had to think about that one for a while. What follows is as close as I can come to an honest answer, with the understanding that it’s an issue I’m never going to be objective about. Take it for what it’s worth.

I don’t think “like” is the right word. Say rather that I was born here, grew up here, and I understand it. I admit that sometimes I get righteously pissed off when I hear some of the knee-jerk putdowns the state often gets from outsiders, usually from people who 1) Don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and 2) Live in states whose own houses are not only “not in order” but a hot mess besides. I also get righteously ticked off when the people of my home state do stupid and self-destructive things, like voting for people who are blatantly and obviously not looking out for their best interests (We haven’t had a decent governor since William Winter). All that aside, and contrary to perception, there are a lot of wonderful, generous and enlightened people here. There are also far too many ignorant jackasses who proudly believe that their bigotry and ignorance are Biblical virtues.

So, like? Don’t like? All I can really say about it, as is said of many relationships–“It’s complicated.”

Yume no Monogatari

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SleepingBuddhaThis is an account of a dream, so those of you bored by such things can be forewarned and skim elsewhere. I dreamed that the old Victorian-style house I spent most of my childhood in was still standing (it isn’t). Since we weren’t using it, I had volunteered it to be blown up (think Mythbusters), but my mother said no, we can’t blow it up. We should sell it.

Fine, says I, but if we’re not blowing it up I know the attic is full of things I need to look at before we sell it to anyone else. So I go into the attic. In real life the attic was just an attic, unfinished, no flooring, and the only time I ever went into it was the time I accidentally set the house on fire and needed to make sure that there was no smoldering going on, but that’s another story–which I will never tell, because it’s just too embarrassing. Anyway, in the dream the attic was HUGE. Bigger than our living quarters even. Divided into large rooms. Each room held something different. In one room there was nothing but very large stainless-steel vessels, which I recognized as parts of old milking machines. Another room held nothing but quivers full of arrows. The last room I visited was, to me, the most interesting because it was full of old books. Apparently I had spent quite a bit of time there as a kid, and one book was lying on the floor, open to the page I’d been reading years ago before I’d gone off to college and never finished it. Yet even that wasn’t what caught my attention, that was yet another book. A large book. And by “large” I mean about four feet high and three across, a picture book called something like SCENES FROM TOKYO. It was published just after WWII, and show paintings (not photos) of street scenes from the early 1950’s.

I opened it and it happened to fall open on a page showing three large men dressed as either Mongols or Tibetan Sherpas standing in a Japanese ice cream shop. The proprietor is handing one of them an ice cream cone.

Caption Reads: “Visitor Being Presented With the Ice Cream Cone of Redemption”

I was relating the dream to Carol, but after the Large Book she just sighed. “You know, I was doing pretty well parsing this in symbolic terms until ‘The Ice Cream Cone of Redemption.'”

Maybe it means something. Maybe I just had a craving.

How About “Free”?

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A Warrior of DreamsJust a quick note in case anyone didn’t know that LightSpeed Magazine now has reprinted “The Man Who Carved Skulls” on their website, and as of the 7th, it’s free, along with an Author Spotlight mini-interview which will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the story and the process that put it there. It’s set in the same universe as A Warrior of Dreams, but you certainly don’t need to have read the book to follow the story.

For no particular reason, I was thinking about rewards, those little things you do for yourself when you’ve accomplished something and deserve a treat. For a good hour’s guitar practice, for instance, last night I rewarded myself by jamming along with a recording of Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood playing “Cocaine” on YouTube. It’s also practice, in that it helps with things like taking cues from other players (play softer during Eric and Steve’s solos!) and keeping in time. Also a lot more fun than doing Spider Fingers.

Then I thought about writing rewards. What’s the reward for a good day’s writing? And I realized that I don’t give myself rewards for that. I look at the words produced and that makes me feel good all by itself.

“Having Nothing to Say, He Says it at Length”

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Hailstone1Writing short stories—good ones—is a skill and an art and a craft. Writing a novel is all those things too, plus a marathon. Just as the novel is paced differently, so is the mindset of the person writing the thing. At least that’s what I’m contemplating at the moment, so far as how it pertains to blogging. There are a lot of—in my humble opinion—interesting things happening, but 1) they’re internal 2) they make almost no sense out of context and 3) I can’t talk about them anyway. The reason I can’ talk about them is illustrated by the advice a famous pulp author once allegedly gave to Ray Bradbury when Bradbury was letting his youthful enthusiasm get the better of him and he’d talk out his stories before he even wrote them. That advice being: “Ray, shut up.”

A bit dutch-uncle blunt, but very good advice for a writer. If you want to talk about a story or novel, talk about it on the page by writing the darn thing. Because we are storytellers, and telling the story aloud really does take the edge off your desire to get the thing written down. And unless you are a professional verbal storyteller who gets paid for keeping a crowd entertained, the story doesn’t exist until you write it down for your own crowd, who are, if you’re lucky, your readers. Which means a healthy dose of STFU is indicated.

Problem is, though this is good advice for someone trying to get a novel finished before year’s end, STFU is the exact opposite of what one has to do to keep up a regular blog. So I will talk about something I can talk about, referencing that humoungous hailstone seen above. Those who follow this blog may remember the massive hailstorm we suffered back in March. Well, with one thing and another I just got around to filing a claim for the damage to my truck, and Sunday the claims adjustor got a look at it.

That frickin’ hailstorm totaled my truck. That is, it was an old truck, and now the cost to repair it exceeds the value of the vehicle=totaled. I’m going to miss that truck. I called it T-Chan, and old fans of Ranma ½ may get the reference. It hauled a lot of loads over the years: paving stones, lumber for Carol’s meditation pyramid, the flooring of at least half the house, our new couch. But then I thought, if I don’t have a truck, I won’t have to haul all this $&^t any more. So we went out last night and bought a hybrid.

Was that interesting? I’m guessing no. But remember, the good stuff I can’t talk about. Yet.