I don’t post music videos normally, but I thought this was exceptional. It’s music based on China Mieville’s truly excellent novel, Embassytown, which I urge everyone to get, read, immerse yourselves in. This novel goes on my list of “novels to be used to teach science fiction” along with a handful of others. Enjoy.
Category: Art
Missouri Has A New Poet Laureate
From the Governor’s Office we have the announcement of Missouri’s third state poet laureate:
Gov. names university professor poet laureate
Jefferson City – Gov. Jay Nixon announced the appointment of William Trowbridge, Lee’s Summit, as Missouri’s new Poet Laureate.
Trowbridge is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Mo., and the author of more than 340 published or forthcoming poems. His appointment will run for two years, and during his term, he will present and lecture on poetry to school, community and civic groups throughout the state.
“Professor Trowbridge is one of the country’s outstanding poets, and we are honored to have him as Missouri’s poet laureate,” Nixon said. “With a number of outstanding candidates from our state, the decision is never easy. I appreciate the work of the Missouri Center for the Book and of the advisory committee in making its recommendation to me.”
Trowbridge has published eight collections of poems, including Ship of Fool in 2011, and his work has been reprinted in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks. He was co-editor of The Laurel Review from 1986 to 2000, and his poetry has earned several awards.
Trowbridge is Missouri’s third poet laureate; he succeeds David Clewell, of Webster Groves.
http://governor.mo.gov/newsroom/2012/Gov_Nixon_appoints_William_Trowbridge_as_Missouri_s_new_Poet_Laureate
On A Roll
I’ve been having a productive month. This morning I polished up and submitted the fifth short story in two weeks. Granted, most of them are rewrites, but a couple of them are such thorough redrafts that they might as well be all new, like the one I finished today.
Normally, I let a story sit for a while before sending it out, but right now I just want material in submission. It has been a long time since I’ve had this kind of productivity in short fiction and I want to take full advantage of it. Of course, it would be nice if some (or all) sold, especially to the markets they’ve been sent.
Soon, now, I’ll have two novels to start rewriting, once the notes are finished from the two people going over them. Then I will set the short fiction aside and bury myself in the lengthier pieces. There was a time I could finish a novel and write a few short stories with the left-over energy, but since about 2004 I have been in full novel mode almost continuously. (The last brand new short story I sold was Duty Free for Lee Martindales Ladies of Tradetown anthology.) During these past years, I either haven’t been able to finish the stories or they’ve come out crooked, sorry beasts requiring much T.L.C. and more time than I’ve been willing to devote.
Plus there have been the almost nonstop worries that are deadly to the creative process. For whatever reason, those worries seem to have receded for the nonce. Oh, they’re still there, they haven’t been solved, but they aren’t looming over me with Damocletian malevolence.
For the time being.
The other thing that has been distracting me, of course, is this thing here. This. The blog. It seems my need for short work is satisfied by spinning out the varied and sundry expository forays here. Granted, I usually pick a topic that I’m interested in, that I have, I think, something to say about, but really, I am no pundit, and if I were really good at this wouldn’t I be doing it for money?
But I do it and since it’s my blog, I say what I please, and that serves a need. Sometimes I do this in order to codify my own feelings. There’ve been a few times I’ve written something and found that I’d changed my mind about the subject by the time I finished. Not often, but it’s happened.
However, I want to say thank you to any and all who come visit me here. Whether you agree with me or not, even if I piss you off, the one thing I hope I never do is bore you.
I have another non-boring, froth-fomenting post coming up soon, but I wanted some breathing space between the last and the next.
Have a good weekend. I’m going to do some more fiction now.
Morning Rain
One of the above I decided to try out for a new banner.
Spring, Damp, Coolth
I haven’t done any new images lately, so…
I made these on Bellerive, off of Grand, last Saturday evening after a light rain.
You might wonder what I was doing there. Well, it was just before the coffeehouse at which I play and of which I just wrote. I did a few images there, too. To finish up, here’s one.
Just thought I’d share a little pleasantness before the forthcoming, which may or may not be…stormful. We’ll see.
Music On A Saturday Night
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Storms apparently kept a lot of people away. A shame. The monthly gathering at the New Covenant Methodist Church on Bellerive happened anyway, a St. Patrick’s Day session complete with a pot of corned beef, and the limited audience enjoyed an evening of good music delivered by people who were having an enormous amount of fun.
More fun than I’m used to having inside a church.
I’ve been attending these now for almost five years. Maybe longer, someone would have to check. When I began, these open mic sessions offered nearly 80% karaoke, of variable quality. Rich and Annette (Annette more forcefully—though Annette’s “forceful” comes across with the glee of a 12-year-old wanting to share a puppy) had been on me to come play. I didn’t play at first. When I did…
Let me explain something about my music. Way back in the distant past, in a galaxy far, far away, I had aspirations to be a rock star. Never happened, and in hindsight it never was going to happen. As hard as I worked for those years, I really didn’t have the full range of dedication it would have taken. I wanted to get up on stage (or better yet in a studio) and rock out, mainly on my music, music I wrote.
And it frankly wasn’t very good. Like my fiction, it required time to ferment, to acquire some growth, some maturity, some…worth. And playing other peoples’ music was just a stop along the way.
So I quit. Didn’t touch a keyboard for, oh, almost 15 years. I bought a guitar, learned enough to play along at parties, and then started writing a few songs (not very good ones) and Donna bought me a better guitar, and so it went, and there were even a few gigs, but…
After Clarion (1988) I came home, started writing stories that actually sold, and about a year later we found a piano that I thought would be perfect. A Yamaha Clavinova. It has a lot of bells-n-whistles, but mainly it has the touch of a real piano and two piano samples that are superb. So, we bought it and I started noodling again.
Fifteen years is a long time to not play an instrument, and I had forgotten nearly everything. But I didn’t buy it to restart a career that was never going to happen, I bought to for stress release. (And in that cause, this machine has taken a beating. I still have it, it still functions well, and I assure you I have pounded on it. I’ve had it repaired once in 23 years. That’s pretty reliable.) So while I occasionally pull out some sheet music and painfully struggle through material I once knew by heart, for the most part I just jam.
I’ve developed a free-form style built around a handful of basic motifs that can be mixed and matched into a variety of presentations that allow me to fly. Just the sheer joy of playing is what I want and I don’t care about the tune. What I play sounds like something, has a familiarity to certain things, and people listen and apparently enjoy it while thinking “I just can’t quite place that…” It’s pyrotechnic, utterly improvised, and I do it because it makes me feel good.
Well…when I started playing at this little coffeehouse, it apparently made others feel good, too.
Gradually, the musicians have taken over from the karaoke. There are now some fine players doing their bits. There’s a floutist of considerable talent, two drummers (one of whom is phenomenal), a couple of good guitarists, plenty of singers (not me) and occasionally a violinist, a conga player, and once we had a first-rate saxophonist, and a trumpet player.
Then there’s me.
Charitably, I think I just shock people. They don’t know what to make of me, but either they’re too polite or too stunned to not like it.
Occasionally, I even play well.
Last night we hit some grooves. Some? All night the playing was excellent, by everyone.
I brought a composed piece. I wrote it down because the changes and the overall direction was more complex, more disciplined than what I normally do. I arrived early with the intent of (hopefully) working it out with a couple of the others and at least including drums and maybe a guitar solo. We ended up rehearsing—
Monkees.
Yes, well—don’t scoff, I liked the Monkees, and I was saddened by Davy Jones’ passing. For the ending sing-along, we did five Monkee’s tunes.
Rehearsing those took all the time we had, so I didn’t get to work on mine with anyone. I mentioned it to Bob, the drummer. I asked him to sit in on the free-form I intended to do in the second half, just a basic 4/4 rock beat over which I could waffle.
When I began playing my prepared piece, all of sudden I had a rhythm section. Bob and the conga player, Robert, just joined in, laid down a solid beat, and to my deep pleasure I didn’t stumble, and it was…
It was like flying.
A word about Bob. He’s a musician’s musician. Keyboard, guitar, vocals, and drums, he plays it all, and he plays it with a natural grace I envy. But as a drummer he is surpassing good. He found my groove, figured out how to nail it, and played as if we’d rehearsed it a dozen times. I felt my face stretching into a grin halfway through.
I haven’t had quite that much fun playing in a long time. Last year we did something fairly complex with a spoken-word piece I wrote (which is posted on this blog, the Jazz posts) that came together surprisingly well. But I expected that, we had rehearsed. This time it was spontaneous and it just rocked! They made me sound pretty good, I think.
The rest of the evening was as good or better, and the Monkees’ jam was just fine, even if Rich’s voice was a touch raw and he couldn’t quite make those Davy Jones high notes.
And a lot of people missed it.
We didn’t.
I am so glad to have music in my life and so fortunate to know first-rate players. Thank you all.
The Chance of Failure
Watch this TED video from economist Larry Smith, then continue.
I have done almost all the things in his presentation to excuse my failure. I have done them (except for having children of my own) and then fought like the devil to get out of the trap in which they’d ensnared me.
I’m a procrastinator. I’m doing it now. I have a novelette open right now that I should be working on, but here I am, writing about my terrible penchant for procrastination instead. Why? I have never figured this out. It’s as if there is a subroutine in the deepware of my brain that presents as continual distraction, like one of those little bugs on the internet that no matter how hard you try to get to this page, it always takes you to that one.
I have thousands of little tricks to keep myself from doing the hard, important work.
But somehow I’ve written over 15 novels, published 10 of them, along with many short stories. My failure, such as it is, will not be seen in my production (though I see it, indeed I do) but in Follow Through.
I’m terrible at self-promotion, self-marketing, all the little component parts of conducting a Career that are necessary but, to me, intimidating. After all, I’m a writer—dealing face to face with people is not what I do, not what I want to do. If I wanted to do that I’d get a job as a salesman. I’ve been a salesman, I was even good at it long ago and far away, but I loathed it.
That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.
The one element Mr. Smith did not discuss is an intrinsic failure of finding the right way to do what you want. I have the passion, I have the drive (though I’m getting a bit frayed around the edges) but I somehow keep driving off the road into a ditch. I can see the road, I just can’t seem to stay on it. All by virtue of producing product that has, in the past, not attracted the right attention.
Or so it seems.
Even this, I know, is an excuse, but sometimes a necessary one to maintain sanity. These are the nibbling ducks of chance—the right publisher, the right agent, the right window for publication, the right reviews, none of which are in your control.
Nevertheless, you need to do, and do well, the one or two things that are in your control, so that when the stars are right and the planets align, the work is ready. The most necessary and often hardest thing to do to facilitate that is to ignore all the other stuff. It is the Work that matters. Never mind the market, never mind the dwindling bank account, never mind the critics who were boneheaded about your last book, never mind all the ancillary shit that is certainly important but only serves to distract you from the Work.
That’s hard to do. It takes practice. And it’s wearying.
But I do recommend hearing Mr. Smith out. Because what he’s talking about are all the things people do before they even get to the Work to sabotage themselves.
What you have to do is take a chance on yourself. Just…take a chance. Regret is a terrible thing on which to end your days.
Thirty Two
We cleaned part of the garage today. Put up shelves, threw stuff out, made new room for more stuff. A chore, sure, but it was a pleasant day.
Oh, and it was our anniversary. Thirty-two years ago Donna and I went on our first date. We saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (which she had never seen before) and ate Chinese (which was new to her). At the end of the evening, she agreed to go out with me again. Little did she know. Or me, for that matter.
More about that later.
Saturday Cat
I don’t do many cat photographs. Unlike many folks in science fiction and fantasy, I’m not blown away by them. I’m a dog person. For one thing, I’m mildly allergic to cats. For another, it’s hard to take a cat for a walk (which I admit, sometimes, would be a plus).
But they can be marvelously photogenic. So here is our friend Lucie’s cat, in the hallway of her apartment building, being a most essential cat.
A Moment For A Promotional Message
Tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 28th, I’ll be reading at a venue that is somewhat a departure for me. It will be at a little ongoing literary rumpus called Noir At the Bar—here’s a blog post to give you a taste—in University City, on Delmar, at a little place called Meshuggah’s. I’ll be there with three other readers—Kevin Lynn Helmick, Caleb J. Ross, and Gordon Highland—and what makes this unusual for me is that Noir at the Bar is, as the name suggests, for NOIR.
Now, yeah, I write mysteries. After all, my three Asimov robot novels were “robot mysteries.” Remains is as much a mystery novel as a near-futre SF novel. Realtime was a police procedural of sorts. But I haven’t published any straight mysteries. And having attended a few of these events before, I can state unequivocally that my work is very different from theirs.
Or maybe not. We’ll see. But I am the first science fiction writer invited to attend, so it will be interesting to say the least.
I thought I’d write something new for it, but since I’ve been eyebrow deep in finishing the current novel I haven’t had time, so I’m taking a few possibles along to see what will be the best fit.
If any of you in the St. Louis area want to come by and lend some support, I can promise you something different. It’s a good crowd and the stories are…unique.
So: Meshuggah Cafe, 6269 Delmar, St. Louis, MO, 63130 tomorrow night, 7:00 PM.