Awww... ;)

Yes, it's been interesting around there... and I've been reading, ackshly, just took a little break from posting - I'm tired today, so I've been playing blitz all night. Makes sense, right? Right? :p

I'll catch up with the commenting, don't worry. If you wanna alienate me, you'll hafta try harder. ;)

A couple of questions about the next paragraph:

<I guess people need their extracurricular lives.>

What are *those*?

<A person could go crazy in here, and (almost) nobody would notice the difference.>

What difference?! ;s

<Do you, btw, have any thoughts on Iain Banks's 'Culture' novels? >

Nope, don't know him, sorry. You should try your luck with <Larks> on that, he's far more up to date on recent SF than I am. :)

So the SF books are just "private" reading? Ah well. They all sound interesting. Looking forward to the reports!

<If the opinion of a MASTER counts for anything, our thoughts are being indelibly recorded by an omnipotent being said to have a bad temper.

Let's annoy him/ her/ it.>

"Banks is a phenomenon", sez William Gibson. I know why he says so, too: Banks has written 25 dense, hyper-intelligent yet popular novels in about 25 years. He's got an OCD approach to fiction: travels, drinks and goofs around in Scotland for six months every year, then produces a 500 page novel in the other half-year. Like clockwork. These alternate between SF (as Iain M. Banks) and 'literary fiction' (as plain Iain Banks). His very first book, The Wasp Factory, won all sorts of literary prizes, and then he horrified his admirers by writing a nihilistic space opera, Consider Phlebas. Then many of them realized the presence of angry green aliens on a religious crusade didn't make them less brilliant ... just different.

And they are really, really brilliant, as well as being wildly popular and selling in shedloads to people who claim not to read SF. Very strong female characters, one of whom even visits Earth (an otherwise boring pre-contact low-tech oxygen planet, file and forget). Her ship lowers her gently through the atmosphere in a perfect replica of a Volkswagen, which she drives to Paris.

It's full-on neo-van-vogtian space opera for anarchists, set in a 'post-scarcity society'. Rewrote the rules (trilogies please, titles of the form 'The X of ZZ' or 'The Man Who X to Y', frequent use of word 'Terra', etc) ... scaring SF publishers with his weird titles: 'Consider Phlebas' and 'Look to Windward' are lifted from TS Eliot's 'Waste Land'. 'The Algebraist' had neither a mathematician nor a bone-setter.

He's reached the point where he plays meta-games with his own genre. One book, Excession, consisted mostly of arguments between semi-psychotic spaceships. Sometimes they had a few humans, or a few million humans, on board, cruising the galaxy at 180 kilo-lights, but they were mostly decoration.

Another one, Feersum Endjinn, is written in quasi-phonetic Scots, but set in a world run by computers so ancient that million-year-old bugs have begun to surface.

And so on. Read *anything* by Banks, ideally one of the 'M' books. He's somebody I wish I could write like ... therefore I prob'ly do, sometimes.

Writing is easy. Sit at a keyboard and open a vein.

Not sure who I stole that one from.

Not sure who I stole that one from.>

Widely attributed to the sportswriter "Red" Barber, along with a similar version: <Writing is easy. I just open a vein and bleed.> Of course back in the day it was <typewriter> instead of <keyboard>.

It's a popular sentiment, however, so similar expressions can be found by other writers. Gene Fowler's version: <Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.>

Regards,
CC

<craw: <Maybe one of Fowler's other quotes is appropriate here: <The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.>>>

Exactly!

<Dom> thanks - I believe I saw the name Banks in the bookstores here at some point or another, so he may be available. I love the 'Feersum Endjinn' title, but I somehow doubt that would be easy to find... ;s

I'll have a look, anyway. :)

<It's full-on neo-van-vogtian space opera for anarchists>

Wait, wait - you know van Vogt? We actually have another SF writer in common?! ;)

<and we don't want *that*, do we?>

Nope! :)

Writing... yeah. IML*E (*limited), the whole thing begins with one story that just materializes on its own, and demands to be written, and simply won't go away.:s

In a sense. But for years I've been in the (bad) habit of letting go of something only when some external force applied a deadline to me. Result: a lot of not-quite-satisfactory journalism and a lot of unpublished fragments of fiction.

So you've been writing mainly for yourself. A lot of the best literature was written on that basis, as we know from that fragment thereof which eventually got published.

Btw - I seem to be picking up a possible misunderstanding here, so "just in case": I wasn't being either snippy/challenging or self-deprecating with that line you quoted. Au contraire, I was being "collegial" :) - in exactly the sense you brought up (in a limited way, to be sure - as I said, <IMLE> = "in my limited experience") but still; as I mentioned the other day, I did write a (fairly long... by my standards) crossover fic once, which I have "published" on two boards, and which put me among the fanfic "writers" of those sites; and, I guess, even the two short-short pieces I've written for the Moscow page here are enough to count me among the "writers of the Moscow page".

What I was saying was just that I understand a little bit of the difficulty of writing (fiction) when the story does not write itself, as it sometimes does. :)

In the same sense, you have "published" (online) a great deal more than you seem to have kept track of, yourself - and you are very good.

Impressive. Among the old guard, Asimov was famous for being so prolific. Except, according to him anyway, he was writing <all> the time. ;)

These belong to 'the cosy English disaster' genre. The world is destroyed except for a brave chap in tweed jacket and pipe, and his optional lady friend (also quite brave, though tends to need rescuing).

JG Ballard shook up the genre by making the disasters surreal and the protagonists psychotic: each reflected the other. But I didn't find Ballard until my teens.

Wyndham got me started, anyhow. Along with Wells and Verne (always some classics to fall back on) ... and that Poul Anderson book I read at the age of ... four? five? certainly no later than six.

Then I tried writing my own SF. Ouch. Prodigies exist, but not in fiction writing, even the formulaic kind. As I seem to recall my Dad pointing out, it helps to have experienced *something*.

So I did.

PS. *Snippy*? Wouldn't have crossed my mind and woulda been cool anyhoo. Snip away, if you're good at it. But collegial is also cool.

I really don't take offence. Not at words ... though sometimes certain personality types make me nauseous. So I go breathe somebody else's air.

And you're right. I do seem to have pumped an awful lot of words into CG-space. Quite possibly more than anyone else, given the number of one-liners emanating from the nine persons with more posts to their name.

But you (2nd person) don't take offence at imaginary slights either. Or have a highly-evolved capacity for seeing thru the momentary frailties that cause them.

Eh?

So, I read that <Snip away, if you're good at it.> comment earlier, and was just thinking to reply (tomorrow, I was just going to turn in now...) that I <am> in fact pretty good at it, that's why I try not to practice that habit anywhere near friends. :)

Then a little later I just checked in again, and saw the addendum, which made me smile, as I recalled several instances in which I probably could have taken offence if I didn't "get" them...

...and then, as in, later, I <finally> realized that the point of the addendum was the possibility that I may have taken offence at <this> (snip...) comment!!

Was that on purpose? ;)

Heh. OK, we were talking about SF - and btw, it <would> be great if you would go back to writing SF.

Wyndham still sounds familiar, but I don't recall reading any books by him - maybe a short story in some anthology?

<As I seem to recall my Dad pointing out, it helps to have experienced *something*.>

Sage advice. :D

<Wells and Verne>

Ah, the classics. :) Love them.

The first book I've read in English (without any real prior gradual progress leading up to it, just some years of English classes in school - good for basic syntax and a small vocabulary), was Verne's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth', when I was about 13. I've read Verne before, of course, but in Hungarian. And he was one of my favorites, which is why I wanted to read a new book by him badly enough to tackle English. So: Verne in one hand, dictionary in the other, and both getting about equal time... upon a re-read, many years later, I was pleased to confirm that I got it all right the first time around.

The second English book I tried was Ingalls' 'Little house on the Prairie', that my mother thought I might like because of my long-standing fondness of J.F. Cooper and Karl May... but it just wasn't interesting enough to be worth the dictionary-book routine. I did finish it, but it put me off English books for a while. There were still plenty of classics, European literature, and all sorts of other books, to be read in the home library in Hungarian. ;)

I've managed to avoid both book and TV versions of ... shall we go Dutch? ... Het klein hus op de Prairie.

Can't say as I remember *that* detail... I was trying to learn English at the time, not Icelandic. :s

<I've managed to avoid both book and TV versions of ... shall we go Dutch? ... Het klein huis op de Prairie.>

Good for you! ;)

<Although I thought the series shoulda continued verbwise: I robot, you drone, he and she automoton, they machine ...>

Excellent. :)

< chancho: Wildfire- Michael Martin Murphey > - A song I love to, yet, not so strangely, can't listen to.

< Roger Zelazny > Very fond of Amber, although, I'm pretty sure we're closer to the Courts right now.

<Zelazny> Deus Irae (?), co-written with Phil K Dick. Maybe a couple of others that I can't recall anymore ...