Tad Williams

Tad enjoys sharpening his perpetual-motion imagination on the various creatures populating this house, as many of you regulars to this site know. I caught a few of these pearly Tadisms in the past week, and reproduce them here for your pleasure (tho’ not for your edification.)

The dogs – often referred to by the Big Dog as “the useless biomass” – have been renamed Krypto, Toto and Ratso. The Chihuahua, who comes in for the worst of the teasing (deservedly so, I am forced to admit) has in past days been told he is “Like a piece of toast with teeth” and “the blemish on the baby-bottom of my life.” (I particularly liked that last one.)

Tad also made much of telling the kids a pretty dreadful shaggy dog story about a pig coming to the city from the countryside filled with theatrical ambitions, who is nevertheless too conventional of character to pull them off until his big break as understudy, replacing the lead dog in a troupe: but sadly he gives a subpar performance and thereafter all is lost because IT’S NO USE TRYING TO FIT A SQUARE PIG IN A HOUND ROLE.

The kids just looked at him.

Girl quite enjoyed it when Boy was frustrated by his father in the following exchange: BOY Oh, why must tomorrow be Monday? DADDY, WITH WIDE EYES: Because otherwise the week would be really messed up.

And boy got in his revenge-laughter when this one happened: GIRL D’you think I need to cut my toenails? DADDY, UNABLE TO RESIST Child, those are the sort of toenails that koalas grow so they can cling to you and pee down your leg.

Mind you, Girl is learning. Driving back from dinner out one night this week, she shut up Tad (or at least, stopped him with laughter) by telling him, after 20 minutes or so of teasing:

Daddy – you made my mood ring turn yellow.

So I recently bought me a subscription to Harper’s Magazine, which is “An American journal of literature, culture, politics and the arts published from 1850.” I did so when they ran a stimulating interview with Ursula K Le Guin (boy, and I thought I could breathe fire) on the state of publishing and reading and all. Suffice to say, I find it the most amazing magazine, and although I’ve been reading The New Yorker for 20? 25? years, I’m ashamedly late to the game with the marvelous Harper’s.

Anyway, the April 08 issue runs many letters in response to Ms Le Guin, and this one’s my favorite: to this I say a resounding Yes, yes!

Having sat down to write a few hundred words on the decline of reading, I realized I could get by with two: Yeah, yeah. People are reading less; literary illiteracy is on the rise; publishing conglomerates have no interest in publishing anything that won't sell. But what if, out of sheer contrarianism, one were to argue the opposite? People are reading more; they are reading books (or at least consuming "content") at a higher level; publishing conglomerates are making a heroic effort to continue publishing books of value-that is, "midlist" books-while trying to stay in business. These assertions would be just as valid. There's no point in quarreling with the numbers: reading is in a state of atrophy. But what kind of reading? Le Guin notes that non-fiction has been excluded from the NEA's survey for some mysterious reason; so has the reading of high- end magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and, yes, Harper's Magazine. Is the only worthy kind of reading the reading of books? And what about reading online? Of mindless junk there is no end, but a lot of people staring at their screens are reading the Guardian or Slate (or chapters of books available through Amazon's "Search Inside" feature). Intelligence-gathering at a sophisticated level is not necessarily in short supply, it's just available in different forms. [Deb note: my emphasis.] As for "the stupidity of the contemporary, corporate-owned publishing company," I agree with Le Guin that publishing is a poor fit for Viacom and TimeWarner, which expect a 15 percent return in a business where breaking even is considered a success. But the publishing companies owned by these conglomerates are staffed by lots of literate and well-meaning editors who have read deeply in the works of Henry James, and the culture needs them as much as it needs distinguished independents like W.W. Norton. To her credit, Le Guin is impatient with pieties about our fallen literary state: "It is bad that we don't read; we should read more; we must read more." So why the reflexive dis? The relationship of art to capitalism may indeed be "vexed," as Le Guin asserts, but capitalism is the system we have, and those who read books are adapting as best they can to the merciless pace of change that invariably drives its progress.

James Atlas
President
Atlas & Co.
New York City

Mr. Atlas, I raise my hat to you.

It intrigues me that Boy’s teachers at his school by and large emphasize not types or forms of reading, but reading, period. (Boy’s current reading matter is several collections of the cartoon strip “Pearls Before Swine,” bought him by Tad [late at night we hear him laughing mightily and giving himself away] and a number of sex-ed books, O my.)

I’m also bemused when people confuse the decline of the literary novel, with a decline in reading. In mine own not-very-humble experience, it was reading literary submissions (for Picador, back in the Sonny Mehta days) that put me off literary fiction. There is nothing so bad as bad literary fiction. In any one year, there were only ever a handful of literary novels worth reading. But thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, mysteries and “women’s” fiction – now, there was the thing – there, so much more to be had (including mine own career path)!

I said this last-but-one post, and I’ll say it again: I don’t fear for reading. It’s too powerful, the written word, as a conveyer of big and powerful and epoch-shaping ideas. I love TV, I love films, but I don’t get the same concentrated punch of knowledge and information as with reading, and so I will ever prioritize magazines, books, and the web.

This is a sticky subject for me and I can bang on ad infinitum, so here I’ll stop and just throw out a few loose ends from the scuzzy corners of my Easter-Sunday mind.

Quote of the week, from Richard Rayner, author of The Associates: How Four Capitalists Created California (it’s mine own history now, plus, I’m reading it because of what I might find for Ordinary Farm):

“Writers don’t write what they know, they write what they can.”

Too true! Too true!!

“The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.” Harold Rosenberg

Yeah, the writer too.

And – news from the Williams & Beale front, which I have been sadly remiss in reporting since this blog began – Tad’s going great guns on Shadowrise. He’s back in his think-for-four-hours, write-12pp-in-one-hour, mode. Also, the UK auction for The Dragons of Ordinary Farm is underway. Always surprising, auctions… Definitely more fun as a publisher than as a writer. Lastly, I am big strides into the second Ordinary Farm novel, and having much fun with it.

And the garden’s blooming. And the kids are happy. And I fell in love with an Anole lizard yesterday with a face like an emerald dinosaur. But now I am off to get my Easter dinner.

So one thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is point to MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE BLOG, which is the Bookslut blog. It’s everything a blog should be, and the one I come back to for my home page again and again. In the spirit of promoting that blog, and because I know a few of you out there are as fascinated with that dastardly festering raven of Tad’s – Skurn – as I am, here’s something typically Bookslut-fascinating.

[quoting Jessa Crispin at Bookslut]

And while falling madly in love with Roger Deakin's Wildwood, I came across the following passage about rooks. If it doesn't break your heart, you don't have one my dear.

[quoting the above book]

Most interesting of all is Lorenz's discovery of the subtle distinction between 'Kia' and 'Kiaw.' The first is the cry uttered in flight by the dominant jackdaws to urge the whole flock outward to new feeding grounds. The second is to urge them home. Thus, 'Kiaw' plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the flock when one meets another.

Most birds seem to keep their song quite separate from their language. The staccato alarm cry of a wren or blackbird is quite distinct from its sweet song. Jackdaws, however, incorporate their words into their songs to create, as Lorenz puts it, something more like a ballad, in which they can re-create past adventures or directly express emotions. Not only this, but the singer accompanies the different cries with the corresponding gestures, quivering or threatening like the lustiest performer passionately enacting a song. In a way, the jackdaw is mimicking itself, as a solitary jackdaw kept in a cage will come to mimic human speech, but it may also, Lorenz thinks, be expressing emotion. When a marten broke into the roosting aviary at Altenberg and killed all but one of his jackdaw flock, the lone survivor sat all day on the weathervane and sang. The dominant theme of her song, repeated over and over, was 'Kiaw,' 'Come back, oh, come back.' It was a song of heartbreak.

On Jan 31, 2008, at 6:31 PM, Nicole Berger wrote:

What do you see as the best approach for a new novelist to take when trying to get their manuscript read? (Agents? Editors? Conventions? Contests? Book doctors? Something else entirely?)

What challenges do you see as the most difficult to overcome? As someone inside the industry, what do you think when you see a new author trying to get their first book published?

I think very often of late — this being if it is fiction — that most of the people approaching me asking how they can get their manuscript published are asking the wrong question. The real question is, How do I become a writer? Because if one novel has been written, then for almost everybody it's just the beginning. You've done Fiction 101 but must really reach something much more advanced in acquired skills in order to produce a publishable first novel. Mostly it takes several unpublished novels to get there, and years of learning from other writers and obsessive pursuit of writerly skills. It will take working in other jobs in order to support oneself — see Tad's own history; many of his jobs were pretty lowly — and an incredible amount of hard work. Plus, there is a toll taken on family life. The truth is that many people make compromises on family life in order to do the amount of work necessary. See Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's memoir, for his single-minded non-family-connected pursuit of his dreams — very well described. It's all better done as early as possible in life in order to get your start. There is a tremendous leap of faith to be taken. It will test you to your very core. It's scary stuff. You must conquer fear. There are no guarantees and many risks.

But the creative path itself, if pursued self-honestly and with diligence, is an amazing one, and sometimes its own reward. You know when you're beginning to get it right. You know when what's coming up from you, and out of you, is the authentic thing.

And as my amazing teacher* told me the other day, You’re shooting for the stars again, Boudicca. Well, if you shoot for the stars, then I suppose you’ll hit something. Which is true. Dreams come true, they really, really do — just don’t expect them to be the ones you start out with.

In some ways becoming a writer is a Darwinian process — from a publisher's point of view, most people who want to write fiction write one manuscript, realize how tough it is, and give up after being rejected however many times they submit it. The ones who go on after that are the ones who simply have to write. The science-fiction and fantasy author Michael Swanwick once told me, "My best advice to you is, don't do it unless you really truly have to."

I had an approach recently from someone whose material I was obliged to read for reasons too long to describe here (neither Tad nor I do so normally, because we get too many approaches and just don’t have the time — plus, we can't teach people to write, and that’s what a few people seem to be asking for.) But she had made some classic mistakes, primarily, as it seemed to me, having staked her sense of self and identity, and all her hopes for her future, in writing a novel. It wasn't very good, as these things generally aren't very good (but that’s part of the process.) I got the sense that I was dealing her a huge psychological blow when I emailed to tell her she wasn't ready to be published and had a lot to learn.

(I myself have made all these mistakes, and more. Big-time. But that’s another story.)

As for the practicalities of getting someone to notice your work —

Hang out at conventions of all kinds. Find ways to approach agents and writers, very nicely and respectfully, but at the same time persistently. Making personal contact will work for you, because people remember it. Yes, enter competitions — pursue anything that's an opportunity. Join on-line writers' groups. Join any writers' group. Learn how to pitch an idea. Learn how to identify what you are writing, and learn how to write — this is so very important — for what the market is, and what people want to read. Learn how to feel your work. The "inner game" of it all kind of becomes something zen, something ineffable. You find it inside of you — it comes to you.

As for the industry itself, it's in flux, like all things right now — a period of great and accelerated change underway in our society. I don't actually fear for books, and for reading, because it's too powerful. No other media compares for that alone — the power of the delivery of these huge ideas. Quite how things will turn out, though, I can't predict.

Footnote 1 : here’s an example of what can be done, when someone who describes himself as having intrinsically no talent, shoots for the stars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwsPcn4381g

Footnote 2: * Tom Abrehamson of Yoga of Los Altos, and a few yoga schools besides. His lessons are mind-bogglingly wonderful — life-changing stuff — and heartily recommended to anyone in the South Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.