Long Short Stories

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last updated this blog.  I’ve been trying to finish a story that seemed to get longer the more I wrote of it: it was intended to be a short story, but it’s ended up as... well, a long short story.  14,000 words – according to whose definition you go by, that might be either a novelette or a novella, but I prefer long short story.

At one time, back in the days where print was the only option, this might have been a problem.  Magazines certainly did publish stories that long, or longer, but usually only if they were by a well-established author; lesser mortals were restricted to shorter pieces.

Epublishing has changed all that, even without resorting to self-publishing.  It’s not so much that magazines will take longer stories – some do, but still very few – but that an ebook, unlike its print counterpart, can be any length you choose.  The “book publisher” pages of Ralan and Duotrope are full of epublishers looking for anything at all from short story to novel length.

I’ve already had some success with this, besides several publications of fantasy erotica (that’s another story).  Last year, Darwin’s Evolutions released my story The Temple of Taak-Resh, which is just over 8,000 words, as an ebook, and I have another to come from Musa Publishing, The Treason of Memory, at nearly 13,000.  It’s highly unlikely that the latter, in particular, would have ever seen the light of day in a magazine.

There are pros and cons to this approach.  The big advantage of being published in a successful magazine is that it has a ready-made readership: readers with a subscription, or who head to it as soon as a new edition comes out, and will read your piece along with the rest.  As long as your work is sufficiently arresting, it’s easy to make new friends for your stories this way.

Of course, a publisher like Musa has readers who’ll check out what it produces because they trust its taste and judgement, but the ebook still has to individually attract them enough to make them part with their money before they can read it.

Beyond that, it’s up to the author to market the book, just as they would if it were self-published, through blogs and social networking.  Some people are good at that and some aren’t, and it doesn’t really reflect how good their writing is, one way or the other.  I’m in the camp of those who aren’t.  I do my best, but it feels uncomfortable.  Maybe it’s traditional British reserve – it’s bad taste to tell people how brilliant you are – but I think not.  I’ve spoken to American friends who feel the same.

On the other hand, publishing your story as a book, even an extremely short book, means its yours and no-one else’s.  Being in a magazine’s a great feeling, especially if your name’s on the cover, but it’s an achievement shared with a number of other people, and there’s always the nagging paranoia that maybe the readers are skipping your piece.  A book stands or falls on what you’ve put into it.

There’s nothing quite like having a book published, especially – in my opinion, although I know not everyone agrees – if it’s been published because someone else is as enthusiastic about it as you are.  I can imagine that, in the next few years, I’ll be submitting more of my stories to this kind of market: short stories, novelettes, novellas.  And, of course, long short stories.

Two Forgotten YA Classics by David Severn

The name of children’s author David Severn is most likely now to be welcomed by a rousing “who?”, but during the 40s and 50s he was highly successful, writing three broad types of book – holiday adventures in the countryside, picture books about animals for the very young, and a series of stories “for older children” (what would now be described as Young Adult) based on fantasy, paranormal and SF themes.

David Severn, who was born in 1918 and died in 2010, was in fact the pseudonym of David Storr Unwin, son of the publisher Sir Stanley Unwin, best known as Tolkien’s publisher – he took the name Severn from an uncle, to avoid trading on a well-known publishing name.

I wasn’t especially interested in the holiday adventure stories as a child, but I found my way to two of his YA novels – I had (and still have) a copy of one, but the other I’ve only just tracked down and reread after decades.

The Future Took Us, the book I’ve had for many years, was published in 1957, and tells of two teenagers being transported in time to approximately the year 3000 AD.  They find a post-apocalyptic civilisation that mixes subsistence peasant farming with a passion for advanced mathematics.  They discover, eventually, that the only learning to survive the destruction was an elementary maths text book, and that this forms not only their main pastime, but also their religion, in which the circle is the ultimate sacred symbol.

However, this isn’t the whole story.  The boys find an autocratic police state, run by the Controller from the sinister Counting House, where mathematical experiments have reached the point of manipulating time.  Many unsuspecting victims have been plucked from their times through history – and the idea of wasting calculating time in returning them is unthinkable.  The boys must join a rebellion and bring down the regime, for their own sakes as well as that of 30th century England.

Besides being a fine adventure story, The Future Took Us has two ideas that have haunted me ever since I first read it.  One is the cataclysmic war which, the boys learn, lasted a lot longer than might be expected.  It’s explained to them that, The atom part of it must have been over very quickly.  After the Great Powers had destroyed one another, the other countries couldn’t agree and went on fighting with guns and high explosives.  As the years passed, the wars became more local and the weapons grew more and more primitive, until a century or so later, men were still fighting each other – but with clubs and pikes.

The second is an issue that most time-travel stories either ignore or shuffle round – the language of the future.  English proves to have changed as much over the next thousand years as it has over the last thousand, and the boys are unable to make head or tail of it, except for identifying individual words.  My only complaint is that Severn didn’t provide more of his future English, but he gives tantalising examples – brade for bread, drap for horse (they speculate it might derive from “quadruped”) and grancat for tiger.  Even a friend from the 22nd century, though quite comprehensible, speaks a little strangely – perhaps as it would be to hear Jane Austen speak.

If The Future Took Us is fascinating, Dream Gold (1949) is absolutely riveting.  I reread this last week for the first time since I was in my teens, and it hasn’t lost its power.  This is what would now be described as paranormal.  The main character, Peter Manning, meets a strange, disagreeable boy at school called Guy Trelawney.  Though they don’t get on much of the time, they developed what passes for a friendship, and Guy invites Peter to his home on the Cornish coast for the winter holiday.

While there, Peter and Guy begins to share a series of dreams about a deserted tropical island, in which every sensory detail is real.  Guy, who has been dreaming of the island for as long as he remembers, speculates that it’s equivalent to a stereoscopic effect, where two identical pictures, viewed through the right equipment, merged into one 3D image.  (I remember having one of them as a kid).

It doesn’t end there, though.  The island is the place where, three hundred years before, Guy’s ancestor had sailed to dig up buried treasure, which was reputedly lost in a shipwreck right by his house.  Eventually, the boys witness the arrival of the ship, and their discovery of what really happened breaks apart their already fragile friendship.

The descriptions in this book are stunning – both of the searing heat and light of the tropical island and the Cornish coast in winter, where the forbidding house, Chyradoon, broods on a rock in the sea, linked to the land only by a causeway at low tide.  The characters and relationships, too, are striking.  The strange mixture of friendship, hatred and love between Peter, Guy and Elizabeth, the young daughter of Guy’s housekeeper, is most reminiscent of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, nearly two decades later. 

These books were far ahead of their time, helping to establish the idea of YA contemporary fantasy before anyone else was writing it.  The spectacular breakdown of Peter and Guy’s friendship in Dream Gold, still a little shocking, was utterly unlike the relationships expected in children’s books at the time, and the kind of ideas Severn was playing with wouldn’t be taken up again till the 60s and 70s.

That’s not to say the books fit seamlessly into modern YA fiction.  For one thing, they share the unconscious snobbishness of much older children’s fiction, in which the characters, as a matter of course, attend posh boarding schools, and a family chauffeur is casually mentioned.  And, of course, Severn could only go so far in the 40s and 50s.  Although Dream Gold gives the modern reader a few hints of the kind of adolescent sexual tension explored in The Owl Service (Elizabeth certainly seems to have a crush on Peter) there was no way this could be explicit in a book for children.

Nevertheless, both these books deserve to be considerably more famous than they are.  It would be good to think that, one day, an enterprising publisher might see fit to republish some of David Severn’s work.  In the meantime, second-hand copies can be tracked down on line.  If you’re interested in early YA fantasy, I’d definitely recommend you find these two.

More information about David Severn’s books can be found on the University of Worcester’s website.

Nemesis in Penumbra

The new edition of the excellent magazine Penumbra is out today, featuring material about Greco-Roman mythology, and including my story Nemesis: The Case of the Hell-Hound.  All is not well in the Underworld.  Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the realm of the dead, has been stolen, and Hades turns to Sam Nemesis, private investigator to gods, heroes and monsters.  Sam doesn't normally do lost pets, but Hades is his landlord...

The issue features fiction by Michelle Lang, Anaea Lay & Marsheila Rockwell, poetry by Ira Schaeffer, and articles by Lori Basiewicz, Celina Summers, Richard C. White & Brandie Tarvin.

All this for a mere $3.99 from

http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=16&products_id=289

Transition by Iain Banks reviewed

The first interesting thing about Iain Banks’s 2009 novel Transition is the name on the title page.  Banks famously publishes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and SF under the cunning disguise of Iain M. Banks, and Transition might very easily have had an M, dealing as it does with alternative realities.  Probably: it’s just possible it’s all the psychotic delusions of a patient in a mental hospital, just as the exotic settings in The Bridge were the dream-life of a man in a coma.

Transition is a bizarre book, and sets out its stall from the start.  The novel (described as based on a false story) begins with the announcement Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get.  It proceeds with point-of-view sections from a number of characters, varying between first and third person, and between past and present tense. 

The premise is, initially, a familiar one: there exists an almost infinite number of alternative realities of the Earth, some more like our own than others.  An organisation, variously called the Concern or l’Expédience, has developed a way of transitioning (or flitting) between these realities by taking over a body in the target world.  It uses this ability to adjust events to their liking on the basis of how they’ve seen similar events play out in other realities, a little like a non-time-travel version of Asimov’s The End of Eternity.

Out of the many POVs, “the Transitionary” is perhaps the most central character, a man usually, though not always, called Temudjin Oh.  An operative of the Concern, he nudges, encourages and assassinates those he’s told to, but is caught between the ruthless ambition of Madame d’Ortolan, the leading figure of the organisation, and the schemes of the mysterious rebel, Mrs Mulverhill.

As the conflict proceeds, other characters gradually find their places – the Philosopher, a torturer by taste and profession, and Adrian Cubbish, an obnoxious drug dealer turned hedge fund dealer, as well as the most colourful character of the lot, Bisquitine.

The whole set-up is very dubious ethically, and even the “good guys” like Temudjin treat the bodies they flit into and out of with utter disregard, often leaving the host either dying or caught red-handed for murder.  Nevertheless, an author whose debut drew us into the viewpoint of a psychopathic killer has little trouble making the reader feel attracted to certain people, while never ignoring the moral issues.

The story is told across many worlds and in the series of nested flashbacks and flashforwards characteristic of Banks, and at least half the book has gone by before it’s possible to get much idea of what’s going on.  It hardly matters, though: as in all Banks’s novels, it’s an exhilarating ride as we’re buffeted between vivid characters and fascinating ideas, ranging from an examination of the economics of greed to the notion that, if aliens are going to visit our planet, it’s most likely to be as tourists to view our unique solar eclipses.

Like many writers in total control of what they’re doing, Banks breaks “rules” of good writing left, right and centre, with total success.  One of the most notable cases is Bisquitine, a character introduced briefly in the prologue and then utterly ignored until about three quarters of the way through, after which she comes into her own.  She’s an absolute tour de force, a character who must have been as much of a delight to write as she is to read, but Banks’s instinct is right: enough is enough.  To have her as a main character throughout the book would be a bit like making the whole of Waiting For Godot centre around Lucky.

Oh yes, and that Unreliable Narrator.  Part of the story is about a mental patient who claims to be in hiding from the Concern, but may actually be making the whole thing up.  The ending suggests not, but inconclusively, and it’s interesting that Banks leaves one glaring inconsistency in the novel, which just might be a deliberate clue.  I’ll leave each reader to spot it – let’s say that it comes when the story’s at its peak.

Transition isn’t an easy book, and I’m not sure it’ll displace my favourites by Banks (currently a photo finish between The Crow Road and Whit) but it’s a fascinating read and well worth persisting through any initial difficulty.  I’d definitely recommend it to hardened readers of Banks, though perhaps not as an introduction – for which my recommendation would be The Crow Road for mainstream and The Player of Games for SF.

What's in a Novel?

So what exactly is this thing called a novel?  Most of us read them, whether we go for classic literature, fantasy epic, romance, thriller, or any of the other innumerable forms, and we know what one is when we see it.  Defining what it is – that’s another matter.

It’s often said that the novel began with Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, published between 1605 and 1615.  It’s probably true that the modern European tradition of the novel (and, by extension, those of the Americas and other areas) begins here, developing through the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  The novel in English, similarly, is held to begin in 1719 with Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.

Were there novels before any of this, though?  The easy answer is that there weren’t, since the word (even in its various western European forms) wasn’t used before this.  In fact, Don Quixote wasn’t described as a novel at the time of publication.  This is hardly an adequate answer, though.

Perhaps the best approach is to attempt to define what a novel is and, with due respect to a few centuries of literary criticism, I’ll venture a working definition.

A novel is a mainly prose narrative, designed primarily to be read off the page, rather than heard.  It’s substantially fictional, though it may include real people, places and events, either contemporary or historical, within a fictional framework.  It’s narrative must tell a single story, however complex and multi-layered this might be.  It must be of sufficient length that it contains numerous sequences of events within that overall story, each with its own dynamics.  It explores its themes by the use of various devices, including plot and characterisation.

This is probably inadequate.  In any case, as with all attempts to impose simple rules on art, there’ll be some great classic novel that breaks each one of those rules.  In fact, Finnegans Wake alone breaks most of them.  The novel’s also constantly changing – for instance, the rise of the audio book may start to challenge the “designed primarily to be read off the page” stipulation, although I’d say that stands at the moment.  Anyway, the definition offers a starting point.

The “read off the page” aspect means there are two main requirements for novels to take hold in a culture.  One is a means of wide distribution – preferably printing, or else a thriving copying industry – and the other is a literate middle class with enough leisure time to read.

Possibly the earliest culture that met those requirements was the later Greco-Roman world – by that stage, Greek and Roman cultures were too mixed for the distinction to mean much.  That period produced a number of works that could plausibly be described as novels, such as The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Daphnis and Chloe by Longinus.  These had an effect on post-Renaissance Europe, but the tradition died out when the decline of Roman order put paid to both distribution and leisure time.

A more fertile area is China and Japan, both of which had novel traditions well before Cervantes, with works such as The Tale of Genji from 11^th century Japan or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms from 14^th century China.  These, of course, developed into ongoing novel traditions as valid as the Western one, with modern Chinese and Japanese fiction developing out of it.

One of the most interesting novel traditions comes from mediaeval Iceland.  While this didn’t really have a large middle class, it did have widespread literacy – it’s estimated that in the 14^th century around 70% of Icelanders could read – and enforced leisure in those long, dark winters, and it produced some of the great novels in the form of the Sagas.

Many people misunderstand what the Sagas were.  They were neither oral tradition nor in verse, and, although some retold ancient legends, the most characteristic ones were historical fiction about the early development of Iceland in the 10^th and 11^th centuries.  Stories like Njals Saga and the Laxdaela Saga are extraordinarily sophisticated literary works, portraying vivid, well-rounded characters who reflect and are shaped by a society moving from anarchy to order.  They fulfil every one of the criteria given above for being novels.

Not all long narratives, though, can be defined as novels.  For instance, Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory fulfils many of the criteria, but it can’t seriously be described as a single story.  Although it starts with Arthur’s birth and finishes with his death, it goes very much by the scenic route and can be better described as a series of stories.

The modern Western novel is one of the world’s great literary traditions and has produced staggering works, but it’s not the only one.  Like storytelling itself, the novel is an idea that humans gravitate to whenever circumstances are right.

Fantasy Politics Redux - What's Not Like the Real World

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about politics in fantasy stories, emphasising how writers can make their worlds more convincing by learning from the politics of history.  Though I stand by this, it’s occurred to me that some aspects of fantasy politics are very unlike anything that can be found in history books, and the attitudes of characters and nations to these situations need to be adapted accordingly.

A very obvious example occurs in my own novel, At An Uncertain Hour, in which a war has been going on for a thousand years (1023, to be precise).  While this isn’t entirely impossible, it far outstrips anything in real-world history.  In European history, for instance, perhaps the longest conflict that could plausibly – though only just – be regarded as a single war would be the Crusades, which lasted overall from 1095 to 1272, although it could be argued that its effects are still being felt today.

The Crusades, of course, weren’t a continuous war.  There were lulls of decades, sometimes, although a certain amount of skirmishing would have continued.  In the same way, the Hundred Years’ War – actually 116 years, from 1337 to 1453 – was actually a series of conflicts over the same ongoing issue: whether the House of Valois or the House of Anjou had the right to the French crown.  The popular perception of this being a war being England and France, incidentally, is misleading in terms of mediaeval thought.  It just happened that the House of Anjou also possessed the English crown.

In fact, the thousand-year war I created follows a similar pattern, alternating between periods of intense campaigning and long stretches of watchful peace.  However, keeping this up for a millennium is a rather different proposition than a century or two.

What makes the difference, and ensures that the same situation is unlikely ever to arise in our world, is that the two sides are led by the same individuals throughout the whole period.  Tolkien has a similar situation in The Silmarillion, where the war between Morgoth and the Elves of Beleriand lasts over five hundred years.  The difference here, though, is that not only the leaders, but their subjects too, are immortal – at least, until the arrival of the Edain in Beleriand.

What effect would an immortal leader have on the psychology of their people?  In the case of my war, one side is an alliance led – but not ruled – by the Traveller for the whole time.  He provides both inspiration and focus to the peoples in the alliance, but many of them, and even more after the war, rationalise this with the assumption that he’s actually a succession of leaders who take the same title.

The other side is an empire, ruled for the best part of three thousand years by the Demon Queen of the South, regarded by many of her subjects as being, for good or ill, a goddess.  At one point, the Traveller reflects on how differently he views these time-spans, compared with everyone else he encounters, and comments ruefully:

It was the single most powerful weapon that the Demon Queen had against us, that she was not only a fact of life but a fact of history.

This is, perhaps, not so very unlike some aspects of real-world history, where institutions, if not people, can achieve the same kind of status.  It must have seemed impossible, in the fifth century AD, that the Roman Empire could be gone.  Indeed, much of the history of western Europe since that time has been a series of attempts to recreate the great European Empire in various guises, including the Holy Roman Empire, the Third Reich and the European Union among many others.

In the same way, to the mediaeval world the Church was the one stable, unchanging reality in an uncertain world.  In fact, it was anything but unchanging, but that was how it seemed, and it’s sometimes underestimated what a shock it was to the collective psyche when the Black Death showed the Church to be as helpless as everyone against against such a terrible “Act of God”.  Although it took a while, the eventual outcome of that shock was the Reformation.

Still, the knowledge that the same specific person who was your distant ancestors’ ruler or enemy is also yours, and may still be in the same position in the time of your remote descendants – that isn’t the same as an institution.  Government will be very different if it’s undertaken by someone who expects still to be in power centuries into the future.  So too will the policies of that person’s opponents.

And suppose these people, with their kingdoms, republics, democracies and oligarchies, have to take into account dealing with not only an immortal, but a god?  In the real world, whether or not this or that deity actually exists or not, we assume their will is going to be subject to interpretation – something the politicians of every world are good at.  Suppose, though, you know for a fact that your god might come stomping down to the senate-house and say, “No, this is what I want, and if you don’t obey, I may just unmake the world.”  How might that affect the politicians who have to deal with the situation?

There are no easy answers, of course – it’s up to every writer to solve these questions as she or he sees fit – but knowing what the questions are is important.  None of this alters the fact that real-world history can offer valuable templates for the political reality of a fantasy world.  It just means that a few other things may have to be taken into account.  It is fantasy, after all.

Editors - What They Are & What They're Not

Having just signed a contract with Musa Publishing for an ebook, I’m looking forward to another editorial session.  Not a lot of it, this time, since the story’s only around twelve thousand words, but knowing something of the company, I expect it to be thorough.  So I thought this would be a good time to talk about some of the common misconceptions of the editorial process.

Ideas about editors go all the way from believing they’re an optional extra to assuming they’re there to fix all the problems the author should be paying attention to.

So, first: no, the editor’s job isn’t to fix all your typos, poor grammar and random punctuation.  Of course, an author who chooses to hire a freelance editor can ask them to do anything they want, but that’s still not a good reason for doing it that way.  Language is a writer’s main tool, and expecting someone else to fix it is like a musician relying on the producer to edit the bum notes out of their recordings.  You might get away with it, but you’re still faking it.

As for a publisher’s editor, unless you’re a celebrity, your uncorrected text won’t even make it as far as being edited.  The editor’s job is to work with the author to put a polish to the nth degree on the work, not to do half the author’s job.

Nor is the editor’s job to rewrite your precious work and force you to accept the new version.  A good editor may sometimes suggest a particular rewording for a phrase or sentence, but the feedback will more normally be something like, “This doesn’t read smoothly.  Can you rephrase it, bearing X and Y in mind?”

The author doesn’t have to accept the editor’s recommendation, but is obliged to take it seriously.  There have been times I’ve disagreed with what an editor has said, and I’ve explained why it needs to be that way, which editors will usually accept.  Or else I’ve accepted why they don’t like my version, but haven’t agreed with the suggested alternative and have rephrased it in a different way.

On occasion, an editor will suggest a more radical change, even to the extent of adding an entire scene.  That happened to me on one occasion.  My first reaction was huh?  My second was to go for a walk and think about it, and I came up with a way to approach the change.  I wrote the extra scene, and the story was immeasurably better for it.

A professional editor is something most authors don’t encounter at any other stage of the creative process.  Every one of the pieces I’ve had edited have been revised, polished, beta-read (often by several people) and revised and polished again, but there’s always plenty for the editor to pick out for improvement.  The editor is professional and disinterested (yes, I know – go and look the word up in a good dictionary).  They’ll hopefully be enthusiastic about producing as polished a final product as possible, but they’re not your mother, your best friend, or even your dog.  They’re going to be frank, based on a wide knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, about what’s in front of them.

And this is one of the main drawbacks of the current self-publishing craze.  There’s nothing actually wrong with self-publishing, as long as it’s done properly, which includes using a professional editor.  The problem is, of course, that this (like hiring a professional artist/designer for the cover) can be expensive, and the vast temptation is to skip that stage.  The result is an avalanche of self-published books which, even if they’re worthy of being published in the first place (by no means all are), are put out half prepared, with all the clumsiness that an editor would help to smooth out.

None of this is any reflection on the author, any more than a musician would feel belittled to need a producer, or at least a recording engineer.  Not only are the author’s and editor’s talents fundamentally different, but few, if any, authors can achieve enough impartiality about their work to see what a good editor will see. 

Personally, I have a reasonably good opinion of my ability to polish my work, but I’d be extremely reluctant to allow anything longer than a short story to be published without having been through the editorial process.  I’m looking forward to working with Musa’s editor.