erudite_ogre

In no particular order:

---I've been reading more the past few weeks, which is grand.  The coming of the Daikini Baby had slowed my perusal of literature, but I am returning to a beloved tradition of reading before bedtime, and reading on the bus to work.  Now that we have a car again I will be bussing less, but a few weeks of commuting allowed me to finish Jay Lake's Escapement and most of the Extraordinary Engines anthology.  My reaction to both was about the same: they were OK.  Lake's world of brassworks in the sky and a massive wall cutting the world in half was intriguing, but the story being told about it was a litle disjointed. There are some cool ideas, and the writing is solid, but there is too much left unexplained and unexplored and he tries to bring several plot threads together in a forced manner. The characters are compelling but also not fully developed; I liked al-Wazir quite a lot but I was told what he was like and what he could do more than I saw it, and I felt a lack of connection with him. Paolina was more fleshed-out, but it was not always easy to re-connect with her after the episodes with other focus characters.   I enjoyed it but wanted more than it gave me.

The steampunk anthology was more uneven, partly due to the tenuous link some of the stories had to steampunk.  But i also felt that they were rather lightweight in terms of seriously engaging or challenging the imagined universe of "steampunk." I enjoyed james Morrow's and Jeffrey Ford's stories the most, more on the basis of their writing than their steampunkishness.  I'm pondering the structure and tropes of some of these stories for my Forces of Geek column, wondering how they relate to the social life of steampunk that is growing within fandom.

But not for the next column.  The new column is picking up on a spate of recent ritual invocations of what novels (particularly SF novels) should and should not do.  I'm focusing mostly on Lev Grossman's column from Saturday's Wall Street Journal and the question of what authors think the reader wants to read.   I don't just want to stick a toe in the debate, however; I want to talk about how this relates to our conception of the author-reader relationship and the social reception of the SF novel.  I am especially curious about the question of "difficult" work, and a good friend sent me a great essay on this written by his late partner, who was a poet and literary critic (you can read that essay here), and how authors often project assumptions onto the reader while seeming to mask the fact that they are also readers.  So far the column has been fun to write, but it's getting loooong.  I may need to cut it for the column and put the rest on my blog.

Fiction writing continues slowly; my daughter loves messing with my writing schedule.  But the new short story is coming along and I've been socking away plot lines for the novel that have given me a better handle on where I'm going.  It's just a matter of bearing down and making the schedule work.

Of course, I'm writing this from work during dinner break, so I'm learning how to be flexible :-).