Tag Archives: Ursula Le Guin

Confession Time

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I am a writer, so it should go without saying that I’m a reader. Show me a writer who didn’t start as a reader and I’ll show you someone painting by numbers and connecting the dots.

On the other hand, or foot, or whatever—there’s more than one kind of reader. Most true readers start as the voracious sort, and I certainly did. Once I learned that those black ink spots meant something, there was no stopping me. Storybooks, philosophy, cereal boxes, whatever. Put it in front of me and I’d read it. I wouldn’t always understand it, mind, but at the time this hardly mattered.

That’s fairly common among readers. Later, after that initial insane rush, we start to specialize…or drift, depending on your point of view. We start to recognize that certain forms “speak” to us more. It may be a phase, it may be lifelong. I started with books and later moved to an intense affair with comics when I had a bit more discretionary income and could, you know, acquire things that weren’t already in the family library. I came into that about the time Jack Kirby moved to DC and started the New Gods series. But all good and bad things come to an end, and if you’re lucky, new good things appear (and bad, whether  you’re lucky or not) and by college I was back to books. LOTR and The Earthsea (at the time) Trilogy. Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith and those echoes of the pulp era. HPL, REH.

And then…well, my true bent manifested. Turns out I am a butterfly. I go to whatever catches my attention. I am not focused. Some readers make it a point to, say, read the Romantics and ignore everything else until they’re done, then move on. I can’t do that. I go back, I go forward. I read collections and novels by current writers. I go back to things I’ve missed. Bear in mind, this is for pleasure. There’s also writerly research, which is another subject entirely. It can be and often is pleasurable, but that’s not the reason you go there. You need to know about something and try to find out what you don’t know. You go where you think that information is.

Just another way of saying I am haphazard in the extreme. For instance, I’ve managed to read ULYSSES, but not FINNEGAN’S WAKE. I’ve read Eddison’s THE WORM OUROBOROS but not Morris’ THE WELL AT WORLD’S END. You get the idea.

So the confession part. I, a fantasist, have never read George Macdonald. At all. This is something I feel a sharp need to address. So I’ve acquired copies of THE GOLDEN KEY and PHANTASTES.

Which, at the very minimum, will tell me what, if anything I’ve missed. Other than, you know, almost everything.

Journal of the Vague Years

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I was thinking about re-titling this “Journal of the Plague Years” but that one’s already taken. Not that there’s anything much to journal. My day is pretty much like anyone else considered “nonessential” going through Corvid-19 lockdown.  Twice a week I drive First Reader to physical therapy, which she needs and as a medical function hasn’t been closed down yet. Other than occasional forays for essential supplies, that’s pretty much it. Cook when I want to, order takeout when I don’t. Intending to hit all the restaurants within range since they’re having a bad patch with this and we do what we can.

Trying to stay calm and centered, occasionally ranting about the stupidity of the governor of my home state who is going to get people killed. In a lot of ways I feel fortunate to be in NY state now, even with it being one of the hotspots. At least our governor has a working brain, whatever other human faults he may possess.

Working when I have the energy and focus. I know some of you have been waiting a long time for the concluding volume of the Laws of Power series. I am working on it, I promise, and assuming the virus or something else doesn’t get me first, I will finish it.

As for A Wizard of Earthsea above, It’s because I was remembering a Benedryl-fueled dream from last night. I was back in the house (long since torn down) I spent most of my growing up years in trying to fix a blown fuse. Only the fusebox had been mounted to the side of a tree which had long since overgrown it. Just inside I could see my copy of the Ballantine edition Le Guin’s book, now grown over, woke up wondering how on earth I was going to get it out.

I really should stop taking antihistamine before bedtime.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula Le Guin

October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018

I haven’t written anything about the passing of Ursula Le Guin before now because I couldn’t put two coherent thoughts together. I’m still not sure I’m ready but I’m going to try, despite the cat purring in my lap demanding all the attentions. Living creatures have their own priorities and in that sense I’m no different.

I never met her. Other people who knew her best will have the personal remembrances of the woman herself, I can only speak of her work and its effect on me. I’ve spoken at times about influences that made me whatever I am as a writer, though as I look back on it these influences were more about teaching me something I needed to know at the time I was ready to learn it. Parke Godwin? He taught me lessons about humanity. Fritz Leiber? That the limits of genre were illusory, and there was very little it could not do. Ursula Le Guin? She taught me what magic was and—just as important—what it wasn’t.

There are other lessons, of course. Some I still may not be ready for. Take her classic, The Word for World is Forest. I’m going to have to come back to that one, I hope when I’m a little stronger and wiser. At the time I needed it, however, there was The Earthsea Trilogy, which later became the Earthsea quintet with Tehanu and Tales of Earthsea. Yet in the beginning, there were three: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. They were first marketed as “young adult,” probably because Atheneum, the original publisher, didn’t know what else to do with them, and it was true as far as it went. However, I read them in college, when I really was a young adult, or maybe just a kid trying to figure out what “adult” as in “grown up” really meant. Ged, the young wizard in Earthsea, was trying to sort out the same thing, and in the course of the three—then four—books, he does, even though all the books, especially the last few, aren’t really about him. Which makes sense—a lot of growing up isn’t about you at all, but everyone around you and your relationship with them. Some things I can see now that I couldn’t then, but that’s all right. The lesson was waiting for me.

Then there was her classic, The Left Hand of Darkness, which made me and a lot of other people think about gender and what it does and doesn’t mean. Her early collection of stories, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, which remains one of my favorite books ever.

Now Ursula Le Guin the person is gone from the world, but Ursula Le Guin the writer remains, and there is, I realize, a lot of her work that I have yet to get to, and I hope I will.

I hope I’m ready.

 

On Efficiency

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For those of us by our natures who are forced to figure things out as we go, there’s a part of the creation timeline I’ve come to refer to as the “Fits & Starts” stage, which is rather where I am now. In a short story it usually doesn’t last very long if the story is going to work. A book, if you’ll pardon the expression, is another story. It can last for chapters at at  time and often does. If it lasts more than that, well, that’s a problem.

Fortunately for me, my characters usually sort that stuff out themselves, once I’ve got a handle on them and what they’re up to. Yet sometimes it seems that this “sorting out” happens when they insist on talking to each other for extended periods. Sometimes these are the sorts of conversations that the eventual readers needs to be in on from the start. Sometimes not.  Or as one of Ursula Le Guin’s early editors of what became the Earthsea Trilogy is alleged to have said–“Ged is talking too much!” With all due respect to everyone involved,  I think I know why.

I definitely  know the time will come when, after the sorting out period and rough draft period, there will eventually come the rewrite period, and at least some of these fascinating (to me) conversations will have to end up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. Pity? No. Pitiless. When something once served the book but no longer does, “When it’s a drag on the flow, it has to go.” It’s our job to write it, and our job to cut it if and when the time comes when sections of the prose no longer serve the story. Chunks of any given book are completely necessary for us to write, and absolutely useless, nay counterproductive, for the reader to slog through. It’s sort of a paradox, but there are a lot of them in this process, so you just go with it.

As others have rightly observed, writing and then disposing of these chunks of superfluous wordage is not a very efficient way to go about the job of writing a book, and I heartily agree. I might find myself in envy of those people who can work all this out in a detailed outline before they even start. Then again, writing a hundred page outline of a three hundred page book doesn’t strike me as all that efficient either. Maybe writing is not supposed to be “efficient.” Maybe it’s just supposed to be done, and any way you can do it is the absolute best way there is.

 

I’m Late…Again

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I’m late again. Yesterday was filled with getting taxes finished and dealing with a long-overdue ophthalmology appointment. (Odd fact—I have better close-up vision in my left eye than even bifocals could give me. The right…not so much). But apparently I’m not going blind anytime soon, which is a good thing.

I need my eyes to do things, like look over old blog posts to remind myself of subjects I’ve already covered…and covered…and probably covered again. That’s the problem with interests and pet peeves and such. You tend to repeat yourself. Boring, for you and everyone else. Plus it’s easy to see how badly certain subjects will age. I just spent a few minutes on a report of my hunt for a new agent several years ago. Back then I was convinced I needed one, even though I’d been through three very reputable agents who hadn’t been able to do a thing for me. I only started selling novels when I forgot about the agents and just did it myself. So that was a lesson hard learned, but all water under the bridge.

One subject that apparently has not aged is the subject of a writer’s “odds.” It came up again just a few days ago when a well-respected editor blogged about it and I read that and thought “Wow. Déjà vu.” Does it still need to be said? Apparently, so once more from the writer’s side which, oddly enough, is pretty much the same as the editor’s side. This applies to novels as well as short fiction, but my more immediate examples are from the short story side. It goes something like this: new writers trying to break into one of the major short story markets (and the specific ones vary, depending on the time and the writer’s interests) look at the submission/acceptance ratios and get all discouraged. A publication might get anywhere from 500-1000 submissions a month, from which they accept maybe three. So your odds of being one of the three are either 1 in 167 or 1 in 333, depending on how many subs the market got that month, right?

Wrong.

Those odds would only be accurate if everyone submitting a story had an equal shot at one of those three slots, and the fact is they don’t. Most stories are rejected out of hand for a multitude of reasons: wrong length, wrong genre, general incompetence, misspellings—or worse, being autocorrected to the wrong word. Sloppy work. Their odds are never higher than zero.  Maybe about fifty stories a month get serious consideration, and those are the real odds you have to beat, about 1 in 17.Even those odds don’t matter if your story is just what the editor is looking for, in which case the odds are 1 in 1.  Provided, of course, you can get your story past the first hurdle. Right length, right market, at least competent writing professionally prepared according to manuscript guidelines. Do your homework, polish and hone your craft, and the odds get a lot better.

There now. I trust there will be no reason to repeat this ever again? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Speaking of things that shouldn’t need to be said, I just glanced at my bookshelves and realized I’ve never read either Planet of Exile or City of Illusion, both by Ursula Le Guin, one of my all-time favorite writers. I have to correct this soonest.

I’m rambling and there’s a rough draft to rewrite and painting to do. Time to stop.