my first proofs

Two days ago I received the proofs from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for the story the magazine bought. As I have been since my first contact with them (a month and a half back), I am impressed with the dedication of the F&SF staff. I think just about all the e-mails I received were sent after hours or on Sundays. I sent my one correction today although I had until May 15 to get back to them. As it was, I frittered away one whole day avoiding reading the proofs until I got to wondering if some response was expected - such as "got the proofs, will get back" or if that response would be regarded as lame, or, or, or, ... so I figured I should just read the thing and get 'er done.
During the day of avoidance, I did get to spend bits of time - mostly while taking Ronan for a swim in Lake Erie - thinking about how I did not want to read the story and be embarassed and worried about it. And sad. Embarassed because I am a very harsh judge and I am no longer sure that the story meets my peculiar first criterion for writing anything: Is it worth the paper it's printed on? Or rather: is it likely to produce anything of value to equal or exceed the environmental cost of its existence? Perhaps, I should take some comfort in that the story has a lot less to answer for with its little life than I do for my existence. Worried, because I no longer write like that, which leads directly to sad - F&SF just rejected the story I really wanted to send them. The one that I was going to send out on the heals of the rejection of the first story, while they still had some memory of who I am and a hopefully favorable impression that I understand the rules of English and standard manuscript format.
No big surprise that life is full of surprises. Also it should not come as a big surprise to me that the second story - at 13000 words, three times the size of the first story - is still going to be a hard sell coming for someone only one small step up from a total unknown. I would like to not be surprised to find out that other writers go through similar idiotic contortions with their first proofs - as opposed to being properly and jubilantly happy like we should be. One final non-surprise: F&SF lived up to my experience of their efficiency and professionalism; the rejection came back in less than 14 business days and was a short personal letter, graciously worded.

As for the backlog of posts clogging my mind ... I have now figured out how to get my father's computer in Cleveland to act sort of like the one back at home (I couldn't figure out how to adjust the size of pictures, which was turning them into monsters that clogged the post space). In the meantime the backlog has grown. This is starting to feel awfully reminiscent of bummers and gummers never-completely-conquered pile of not-yet-answered mail. Now if I write, "Patience, please" the deja vu will be complete.

Toilers of the Sea - reprise

Warning: this post gives away the plot. But were you really planning to read it?

Note: at left, art by Victor Hugo: "The Lighthouse."

Oh damn. Toilers of the Sea is due back at the library and now I must deal with the many slips of paper stick out of the pages. What were those all for? I hope I can remember.

I do still remember what an inspiration this book was. The novel starts with a 55-page natural and cultural history of Guernsey and the Channel Islands (containing among other treasures a sentence fragment that fills an entire page and sports 27 semi-colons, 46 commas, and 4 dashes and is utterly readable). "The Archipelago of the Channel" was a thoroughly enjoyable section, and I was more than a little eaten up by envy as to how V.H. managed to get so intimate with Guernsey as to know so many of its grass species (!!) by name (not to mention everything else). Also I was thrilled to find such a precedent to a problem I've been working on, that of place-as-character. Whether Hugo wanted Guernsey to be a character in his novel is not clear but it does appear that the ocean - The Abyss, as was his first title to the novel - was meant to be a character. Does it work? Was it obvious enough without being too ponderous? I can't say for anyone else; me, if the ocean is a character, then I think the relationship between Gilliatt and the sea needed to be limned out more bright and clear in the early pages - but then I am quite profoundly dense most of time and capable of missing the most overt references. Hard work, but enlivening, this problem, because I think place-as-a-character can only work if the land (or sea) has a personality that is both described and yet so vast, so other, that it does not interact with humans in a recognizably human way. Which makes it kind of hard for a reader who has never thought of place, of locus (and its genius), as a character before to realize that this is what the writer is doing. Doing that - bringing in alien characters, even if they are of this world - is the work of speculative fiction, which one doesn't usually expect to be reading when curled up with "literature."

Back to Toilers: Later, the pinnacle of the story arc again pierces the envelope of what fiction usually does by casting the reader adrift upon a 146-page sea of dialog-free words that then reels you up, gasping, with a step-by-step how-to exposition. And d'you know what? It didn't drag. Admittedly, if I had half my dad's brains I would have enjoyed it more, because the how-to was a clever problem for engineering: How might one person all by his lonesome salvage the engine of a steamship when the ship has been wrecked in such a way that it is wedged up in the air between two lofty points of a reef. While the goal of the exercise may have been for Hugo to show off how much he knew about various sorts engineering (including hydraulics), it was still admirable -- to someone who used to publish a how-to zine that criss-crossed the boundary between fact and fiction, from time to time.

It was also during these sections that I was glad I had read the introduction. Left to my own devices, I never would have noticed that the ship wedged in the reef made a gigantic "H". If I had, I never would have assumed that Hugo meant it to be thought of as an H or for it to refer back to him or that the whole book was all about him. It's just not the focus I tend to have or to assume that someone else has. When I write fiction I'm writing about values and ideas, not about me or the state of my life. One of Hugo's biographers, though, suggests very strongly that Hugo was almost always writing about Hugo. Once I got the little point about the H drilled into my head, I could read the book as the story it is and also as Victor Hugo's epic struggle to salvage his life from the wreck of being exiled on Guernsey. This also explains why Gilliatt is not an illiterate fisherman from Guernsey but rather a genius from France.

I do have one quarrel with Hugo (or with him, his culture, his time, his way of being and seeing). Should I ever get to reading Les Miserables, I will be eager to see how Hugo casts Cosette. The female entity in Toilers is barely human and not very interesting as an animal. Hugo takes repetitive pains (but that is his style) to illustrate how mindless she is, how in the moment, how she has no idea of the consequences of her actions and nor any memory of them when the consequences happen. She is beautiful as the roses she tends (a tribute to Hugo's rose-growing mother) and more shallow than spilt water on a mirror. This is the thing that Gilliatt falls in love with. He salvages the engine to win its hand. But he never spoke to it, so it never knew that. While he is away, Deruchette falls in love with a clergyman suddenly made rich (and who is also not twice her age). Score! for thoughtless beauty. And Woe is me! for the multi-talented, brilliant, intrepid, and stubbornly toiling Giliatt.

The book ends with a second hydraulic marvel. Gilliatt, having relinquished his claim on Deruchette, goes to a place on the cliffs of Guernsey that is a sort of rock throne. A place that gets totally submerged during high tides (and from which Gilliatt once saved Deruchette's clueless love interest). As Deruchette and her rich husband head to England for happy-ever-aftering, Gilliatt sits in the throne, and the ocean slowly rises up his seated body until it covers his head and he unites with the Abyss. ... Maybe he had a really fierce grip on the rocks with his toes. And maybe the fact that he got starved down to a near skeleton while rescuing the steamship engine kept any part of him from floating. Oh, but what a dramatically tragic ending scene it makes. How very French.

Overall I loved the book and Hugo's rich language. Rich? It's clabbered cream; it's a napoleon pastry of prose! I can even excuse this amateur naturalist's demonizing of one of my favorite animals in the world (the octopus): I am willing to take that as a needed plot device. But I must say that regardless of any deeper symbolic meaning I should be applying to Deruchette, Hugo's female character really burnt my bouillabaisse.

rounding the horn, beating into the wind

Yesterday I once again thought I had finished revising a story. At least enough to have it workshopped with one of the writing critique groups I'm a part of. I still wasn't happy with the storm-at-sea scene. I had talked with two fishermen already - much of their information pattering right over the top of my oceanic ignorance like the skittering feet of storm petrels - but I did get a lot of help. One fellow also gave me the final key-word clues I needed to dig up a song on the internet that I had been looking for all the time I'd been working on the story. That song, about a selkie and her fisherman and his lug-sailed dory, had an multi-verse intermezzo involving the fisherman's battle with the wind - including a fair amount of dialog between the wind and the man. I mapped out the progress of what the wind did (changing quarters and suchwhat) and what the fisherman did, battling alternately with sail and oars, then redrew it all again because my fisherman was on the west coast of Ireland and Tommy Makem's was on the east coast.

But I still didn't feel good about it. I still felt marooned on the Island of Secondary Sources - or tertiary if I count that I have not personally been on a small sailboat in a storm. To my reading, the scene was neither tight not tense. I needed (gulp) to go back to my fishermen.

I was still wrestling with my awkward shyness about approaching people when I picked up Jack London's "The Pearls of Parlay" (now there's a guy working from primary sources) and read it over my morning tea. The introduction to the story praises London's grand achievement of writing about a typhoon from a boat inside it with accuracy and grandeur. I picked up a few more secondary-source bits (sigh) I can use for my story and one other thing: his story didn't make my pulse quicken either. In London's case maybe the problem is this: all the main characters typified everything great and wrong about humanity, with the wrong inextricably woven into the great. Absolutely inextricably. I was routing for the typhoon from the outset, and the typhoon didn't win. After the hurricane blows past the atoll, there are a handful of humans left: the very worst, most evil one (described as a perfectly conformed and perfectly self-assured specimen of a man), and some of the best ones of the bunch that went into the storm. But every last one of them was there in the path of the typhoon out of mankind's insatiable hunger to acquire (in this case, pearls), a hunger that could never, ever, be sated and that would not be turned aside by any danger (not the approaching hurricane that they had all been warned was coming and not by accounts given of how many men had died - from murder or from the screaming agony of the bends - to get those pearls). I could go on - there are as many sub-themes to be found as there are layers of hardened oyster spit in a pearl when you (gasp!) slice one open and look close - but you should read it yourself. "The Pearls of Parlay" could be seen as a symbolic literary snapshot of this very moment of human history in this world.

Oh, but to get back to what my own greedy need to acquire got from the story, which was, as I said above, a few more details I need to transport and adapt to the other side of the world, and the still monumental task of talking to Damon and Dean again (two people who aren't even strangers but that doesn't make it any easier), and a flotsam memory blown ashore from another book I read. That book was Rounding the Horn: Being the Story of Williwaws and Windjammers by Dallas Murphy. (Read it! It's great and, aside from the fate of the Yaghan Indians, not entirely depressing.) I am feeling very much like the ship Murphy wrote of in one section of the book, a ship that spent a month or so trying to round the horn of Tierra del Feugo. The ship was big and powerful (and badly captained) and had spent so much of that month being pushed backwards as well as blown forwards that it made no progress or negative progress at the end of thirty days of work and terror and dead sailors.

Okay, so maybe I exaggerate my own plight. A little. But after one shipwreck and a lengthy careening and a great many fiddly repairs to the rigging and sails, I just want to get this story in the water ... and now, What is this? ... A hole in the keel below the waterline? Arrrgh!