Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen (which is on my Amazon Wishlist, in case anyone’s interested) and who edited the fantastic Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases has a blog, on which he writes about nearly being mauled by a wild pig.
I finished the rough draft of a story that will ultimately be a Birthday present for my wife. As she is a regular reader (hi honey!) I’m not going to go too much into the details of the plot, other than to say that it’s a gothic fairy tale about an undead king and his demented descendants, featuring a deranged prince with designs on the throne and his twin sister, an insomniac princess who stumbles on his plot.
I’m working on illustrations for the story while Kevin and Jenny are reading over the manuscript. My intention is to have a few copies printed up at a local print shop, give it a semi-profeshional shine to the finished product. The story I’ve written, in the rough, is just a little over 10,000 words in length. Jenny says it’s a short story while I say novella. So, when does a short story become a novella?
According to Wikipedia:
A novella is a story mid-way�in length (30�40,000 words) and structural complexity�between a short story (500�15,000 words) and a novel (60,0000 words, minimum). A novella focuses upon a single chain of events with a psychologically surprising turning point, e.g. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850�94); and Heart of Darkness (1902), by Joseph Conrad (1857�1924).
Commonly, longer novellas are addressed as novels; though incorrectly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are called novels, as are many science fiction works such as War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.. Occasionally, longer works are addressed as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella�novel threshold. In the science fiction genre, the Hugo and Nebula literary awards define the novella as: “A…story of between seventeen thousand, five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.”
The matter gets hazier when you look at the guidelines of various magazines whose short story requirements vary widely (3000 - 8000 words as the outer limits). While this is a minor technical definition and of no real importance since I’ll be self publishing the thing, I’m still curious since even the experts disagree. Any second and third opinions?
I’m out of cat pictures. Luckily, my wife is a photographer. Aparently, so is Lucy.
Inspired by Mustang Bobby, I’ve added the link to my novel-in-progress, The Tragic Circus, back to the sidebar. I was up late last night trying to figure out how to fix some of the holes in the story and I think I’m on the right track. Only time, and your impute will tell, however.
My problem is the character of Simon. I don’t know who he is or what he wants, yet. I don’t think he does either, which is a very human and realistic motivation but it makes for some prickly story telling. The writer asks himself, “would Simon say such a thing?” or “Would he really do that?” And the answer is, gee, maybe, I don’t know. A tad frustrating.
#49 is still Gormenghast, which I’m still reading. But I took a few days off to reread one of my desert island books. #48 is The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington. It’s got everything: little old ladies, werewolves, fights for the Holy Grail, Pagan Nuns, pole shifts.
Way back in July ‘03, I had this to say about The Hearing Trumpet:
A coven of little old ladies, with the help of a pack of wolves, a nest of bees and a freelance mailman named Taliesin, steel the Holy Grail from the descendants of the Crusaders and return it to the Goddess from whence the Christians stole it in the first place. While illuminating the pagan roots of the Christian Mythology, Leonora Carrington also admonishes the church for its historically cruel treatment of women, especially the elderly variety, as second class citizens. But more then that, Carrington, a surrealist painter and writer, manages to evoke a brilliant sense of dreaminess and real emotion, something conspicuously absent from most surrealist writings. Personally, this is one of my all time favorite books.
And I haven’t changed my mind. More on Gormenghast later.
Hay, you want to read something weird? I found this while looking through my archives for that bit about The Hearing Trumpet.
My wife heard form her sister in Iraq. The base’s water has been cut off for a few days now and next week, during the elections, the PX will be closed. But not to worry, they do have a Pizza Hut (and plans for a bowling alley). The good news is, Naomi and her battalion will be setting out for a three day convey to Kuwait for their debriefing and she’ll be on her way back to the states in early March.
I’ve always had a fascination with puzzels, even though I’m pretty lousy at solving them. part fo the mystique of encryption is the hidden meaning. The secret wish that what will be revealed upon solving the problem will be more than just a grocery list of insignificant data, but something profound that perhaps might give meaning to life. Then, their are the puzzles that are just frickin cool. Wired News:
What does it say about the Central Intelligence Agency that its agents can crack the secret codes of enemy nations but can’t unravel a coded sculpture sitting outside their cafeteria window?
It says, perhaps, that artist Jim Sanborn, who created the cryptographic sculpture named Kryptos that sits on CIA grounds, could have a career in covert operations if he ever grows tired of stumping the experts.
[…]
It’s been nearly 15 years since Sanborn installed the 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture inscribed with four encrypted messages at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters in 1990. And it’s been seven years since anyone made progress at cracking its code.
But publication of the novel The Da Vinci Code has renewed interest in solving the puzzle because author Dan Brown made two veiled references to Kryptos on his book’s dust jacket. Brown’s publisher sponsored a contest around the references, and Brown has hinted that his next book, which takes place in Washington, D.C., may feature the sculpture in some way.
This is good news to Elonka Dunin, an executive producer and manager at Missouri gaming company Simutronics, who is obsessed with cracking Kryptos and thinks that the more people who work on the puzzle the quicker they’ll solve it.“We have lots of different theories that we’re chasing down,” Dunin said of her band of sleuths, which includes some CIA employees. “But there’s no way we’ll know whether we’re on the right track until something comes loose.”
Kryptos isn’t a complete mystery. Parts of it have been solved.
In 1998, CIA analyst David Stein cracked three of the four coded messages after diddling over the problem with paper and pencil for about 400 hours spread over many lunch breaks. Only his CIA colleagues initially knew of his success, since the agency didn’t publicize it. A year later, California computer scientist Jim Gillogly gained public notoriety when he cracked the same three messages using a Pentium II.
But for 15 years, the last Kryptos section has remained unsolved. And when experts or amateurs do decipher it, they’ll know what it says but not necessarily what it means. Sculptor Sanborn said the text is a riddle, which requires sleuths to be on the CIA grounds to solve it.
[…]
Until now, only three people were said to know the solution to Kryptos. Sanborn, a CIA cryptographer named Ed Scheidt who helped him choose and alter the coding techniques for the sculpture, and former CIA director William Webster, who received a sealed envelope containing the solution, which sits in a CIA archive until the time when someone solves the puzzle.
[…]
The CIA required Sanborn to write the solution down and present it to Webster so the agency wouldn’t be embarrassed if the sculpture turned out to contain a message that was pornographic or critical of the agency. Sanborn gave officials an envelope with a wax seal. But Sanborn said he didn’t give Webster the whole story.
“Well, you know, I wasn’t completely truthful with the man,” Sanborn said, laughing. “And I’m sure he realizes that. I mean that’s part of trade craft, isn’t it? Deception is everywhere…. I definitely didn’t give him the last section, which has never been deciphered.”
I’m hip deep in a short story, a fairy tale about an immortal King of a fictional European country called Zembla and his weird descendants. On a lark, I decided to google “Zembla” to see what would come up. I expected a few hits, since Zembla is the name of the fictional country of origin of the poet in Nabakov’s Pale Fire. I only meant to rip of one of the great masters of 20th century literature and as a bonus, stumbled onto a great little blog called King of Zembla. Which means I’ll probably need to rename the kingdom to be a bit more original. Any suggestions?
My digital camera was stolen, so I don’t have any pictures to prove it but trust me, it’s coming down heavy. Looks like about six inches or so and from what I hear, we could have as much as a foot by tonight. Wowza.
Rick Perlstein in The Village Voice:
You might wonder�were you someone unfamiliar with or in denial about the ways of the Karl Rove Mafia�how George W. Bush could blunder into nominating someone as attorney general so obviously implicated in the most legally questionable and morally indefensible practices of his administration. You might wonder, too, how the administration seemed to be caught unawares by the bottomless pit of scandal in the past of its initial nominee for Homeland Security secretary.
Or you could realize that such nominations were not blunders, but intentional: that they were made not in spite of Alberto Gonzales’s and Bernard Kerik’s unsuitability for high office but precisely because of them. Keeping embarrassing facts on file about confederates is the best way to grip them into loyalty like a vise.
Read the whole thing, please. Then you’ll start to see what we’re in for durring the next four years, and probably for a long time after that.
