On the plus side, getting a new operating system has also forced me to degunkify my desktop, which also serves to clear my head via a process of sympathetic magic. Being gone for seven workdays (eleven calendar days!)* has also helped with the head-clearing. And now I get to learn some new computery stuff about the operating system and new versions of various software tools I use for work (Windows 7 and Adobe CS5).

The head-clearing quality is especially welcome as I dig into novel rewriting before and after hours (I’m changing the ending as well as continuing my previously planned rewrites) — about 9 weeks of work.

When I arrived in Kansas, I learned that they set the grasslands on fire here on purpose, typically early in the spring, to clear out the dead stuff and make room for new growth. It’s called a controlled burn. It’s a useful concept, and beautiful to see in real life: both the sweeping flames and huge columns of smoke (DON’T try to drive through the smoke) during the burn itself, and later the lush new green that makes the hillsides look like they should have hobbit children playing on them or maybe riders of Rohan thundering across them.

But maybe that’s just me.

*I was at the CSSF2010 Repeat Offenders workshop (for science fiction and fantasy writers, not convicts), which was a worthwhile endeavor, BTW.

While you’re there, you might want to check out Lyndall Gordon’s article about Emily Dickinson, which I believe is excerpted from her new biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns.

On the upside, revisions of the novel’s second act are going swimmingly.

Subterranean Press » Fiction: The Bohemian Astrobleme by Kage Baker.

Good stuff!

This is also a good time to send out positive cosmic whirlies (and maybe a card or email?) to the author, who unfortunately is seriously ill. I’ve been an avid reader of Kage Baker’s Company books and am sad to hear it.

This falls under the category of “not quite news,” since various scientists and historians have reported on our species’ long history with alcohol, BUT it’s relevant to me at the moment because of my current project, a novel set in a culture similar to some of those that sprang up in ancient Mesopotamia (the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Akkadians). Date beer in particular shows up fairly often, with the occasional appearance of mead and wine.

The article linked below highlights several reasons why a desire for alcohol could have helped fuel agriculture and taken us down our current path of civilization, including the pharmacological effects, but the author leaves out three I think may have been pretty significant:

1. Unsafe water. Alcohol kills germs, and alcoholic beverages would have been safer to drink in many cases than water.

2. More protein. The process of brewing increases the amount of protein in beer, which would have been important when other protein sources were relatively scarce and hard to get.

3. Thriftiness. Some alcoholic brews are made from things people can’t eat anyway (or don’t want to), like grape stems (grappa) and crushed or overripe fruit (cider). Also, without refrigeration or canning equipment, our forebears used fermentation to preserve extra food (along with drying and pickling) – not just for beer and wine, but for yogurt and cheese (which is a different type of fermentation, of course!).

Did a thirst for beer spark civilization? – Features, Archaeology – The Independent.

This one goes out to everyone who longs to write (or read) a good sword-and-sorcery tale, because without the sword, it’s just not the same — and if you don’t know swords, you’re liable to make a gaffe or two along the way.

The Book of Swords by Hank Reinhardt came out earlier this year; it was edited and published posthumously by Reinhardt’s wife, Toni Weisskopf Reinhardt. The book is fantastic, and makes me sorry I’ll never have a chance to meet its author.

Reinhardt steers the reader through the history of the sword, throwing in some metallurgy, archaeology, poetry, and applied research as needed along the way. The focus is on how these weapons were used in combat and how they were adapted over time to changing technology (i.e., the discoveries of iron and then steel), battle conditions, and societal conditions. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading, most from Reinhardt himself.

Whenever possible, Reinhardt tried out reproduction blades himself and described the results (sacrificing innumerable pork shoulder roasts in the process) — what kinds of wounds different swords made; how well they penetrated chain mail; which were good for cutting, thrusting, or both. He also takes time to discuss armor and other weapons used against swordsmen to give readers a clearer context for how swords were used. Finally, he discusses the differences between the sport of fencing and sword combat, and dispels a few myths and excessive liberties taken with the facts, perpetrated by the movies and other popular sources.

It’s an interesting topic, and Reinhardt made it a delightful read, full of quirky asides and the kinds of details writers find eminently useful. If the story you are writing has a sword in it, you should read this book.

Find this book at a nearby library or purchase it.

Re-reading Stephen King’s account of his long, painful healing process after the infamous hit-and-run accident that nearly killed him really makes the self-pity evaporate (if you want to skip to that part, it’s in the postscript, which is titled “On Living,” but then go back and read the whole thing). His lower leg was broken in nine places; his hip was fractured, and so was his femur; a gash in his scalp required twenty or thirty stitches. Here’s a passage about his recovery after surgery:

“A large steel and carbon-fiber apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child’s drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses would unwrap the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swab the holes out with hydrogen peroxide. I’ve never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens, I’m sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin-care.”

King was still in a wheelchair and recovering from the accident when he wrote the last half of On Writing.

“The first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent sitting upright since being struck by Smith’s van. When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying–it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.”

Then a bit later: “There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz–not that day–but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start…. After that, things can only get better.”

If that seems like a naive pronouncement, read the rest of the book. The writing advice is all solid, and some of it is inspired. Even the advice that seems like it ought to be common sense is not commonly practiced. The parts that stay with me, though, are the object lessons King provides from his own history, from the rusty spike under the eaves on which he impaled…wait for it…his early rejection slips (he’s really a pretty mild-mannered guy; what did you think I was going to say?) to his clear-eyed recollections about his alcoholism and recovery (even less self-pity here than in the postscript). Writers have to be uniquely courageous to do what they do, as King illustrates.

This is not just a book for horror writers, or genre writers; it was recommended to me by a successful narrative nonfiction writer with half a dozen respected books to her credit, and has popped up on many others’ bookshelves. (Never mind that the title as it appears on the paperback cover appears to be scrawled in blood on a wall, reminiscent of a certain novel about a haunted resort hotel. Really, it isn’t about how to write horror fiction specifically.)

Find this book at a nearby library or purchase it.

If you read a lot of books and you’ve never used WorldCat, do yourself a favor and go bookmark it right now.

There are citation and bibliography-building tools for students and other researchers, tagging and list-making features and plug-ins of various kinds, but the reason I love WorldCat is that you can look up any book or magazine title and find the closest libraries that have it. You can also search for music and movies, too. Even if I’m not planning on taking a road trip to K-State or Kansas City to get it, it gives me some idea of how quickly an interlibrary loan (ILL) request might get filled if I request it at my own library. (One book I requested through ILL at my library had to come from Australia, so I figured in some additional wait time for it!)

That’s about 1% of the features available, but it’s what I use most. When you find a nearby copy of an item,  one click takes you to that library’s record of the item, where you can request it, jot down the call number, et cetera. All in all, it’s a simple, free tool that makes life easier for readers and writers.

There’s also a mobile phone version at www.worldcat.org/m/, if you’re fancy like that.

This week, I’m recommending a book to all those tired and bedraggled writers who are now more than two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). If you need balm for your weary souls, this is it: If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. This book was first published in 1938, but is absolutely relevant today. The current publisher is Graywolf; I have their 1987 edition, but there is a 2007 edition with an introduction by Andrei Cordescu (which I haven’t seen).

Ueland taught creative writing at a YWCA in Minneapolis for several years, and also rubbed elbows with a bohemian New York City crowd that also included Eugene O’Neill. Carl Sandburg was a friend and, not given to half measures, he told her that “This is the best book ever written about how to write.”

Her first lesson is this: “everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.” Oh, a dewy idealist! the snarkier among us might say — but Ueland came to this conclusion after teaching writing at a YWCA for three years. So idealist she definitely is, but more of a hard-boiled one, if that’s possible.

Her whole purpose, I think, is to get the reader into the best possible mental state to write: fearless, honest, and optimistic. Someone who is already half-wincing, waiting for the blow of criticism to land, is not going to do the kind of fiercely original writing that Ueland (along with most readers, I think) hopes for.

“Though everybody is talented and original,” Ueland cautions, “often it does not break through for a long time. People are too scared, too self-conscious, too proud, too shy…. Another trouble with writers in the first twenty years, is an anxiety to be effective, to impress people. They write pretentiously. It is so hard not to do this. That was my trouble” (63). That’s the bad news: it takes work, a lot of it, for a long time, to “break through.” On the plus side, if you follow Ueland’s advice, it will be an adventure, not drudgery; the preceding quote came from her chapter, “Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write.”

She has much to say, too, about the rest of life that intrudes on one’s creative endeavors, so for those who are continually battling guilt — thinking they aren’t living up to their various duties when they are writing, and thinking they are not living up to their art when they are being dutiful — this book is essential reading.

Find If You Want to Write at a nearby library or purchase it.

Part memoir, part literary analysis, part psychological study, this aid to the confused and weary writer sets out to explain:

1. just what the hell it is we think we are doing (Ch 1, “Orientation”),
2. the relationship between writer and reader (Ch. 5, “Nobody to Nobody”),
3. where we go and what we bring back when we are writing (Ch. 6, “Descent”), and more.

Apply liberally during bouts of existential crisis. It’s also useful as a gift to writers’ loved ones. “When she gets that faraway look, this is what’s going on in her head.”

Negotiating is notable for Atwood’s dry wit and many fun leaps of the imagination. One of my favorite bits is the list she compiled of reasons writers have given for becoming writers. It’s telling, I guess, that the only one I can ever consistently remember is “To show the bastards.” There are two full pages more where that came from, though, and it’s a fairly comprehensive list. Atwood determined that there was no “common clutch” of motivations, and abandoned the attempt to systematize on that front.

But she spends a lot of time dealing with how one experiences what one is doing when one is writing, thinking about writing, revising, and reading, which is comforting. That’s how I experienced the book: comforting. I may be a bit freakish, but I’m not the only one!

Atwood is good at spinning engaging hypotheses and making lots of imaginative leaps (but with pretty good logic underpinning most of them).  She explores many metaphoric roles that other writers have either tried on or had forcibly applied in the past (writer as priest, writer as murderous twin/uncanny double, writer as hero venturing into the underworld — also, especially for the girls, writer as grim virgin or blood-drinking dark priestess), and pokes at them to see what insight they yield about this whole shady enterprise.

I find some of her experiences, especially having to do with being a woman and a writer, are vastly different from my own, because of differences in generation, geography, upbringing, and personality. For the most part, I’m very happy about that; I think women writers of my generation have it much easier in many ways than hers.

Even if you don’t find Atwood’s metaphors completely relevant to your immediate situation, her line of inquiry invites further consideration: what is it, actually, that I think I’m doing when I’m writing? Being a writer is qualitatively different from being a plumber or a cook or a kindergarten teacher, and to pretend otherwise is a distortion that doesn’t help the process (unless you’re on a deadline, when “sausage factory worker” may be exactly how you feel about what you’re doing).

One of the metaphors Atwood touches on only briefly is probably closest to my idea of the writer: the artificer. I think of a writer as a sort of optician, patiently grinding lenses and looking through them. Some are abandoned as flawed early on; the rest get perfected and polished. Each reveals different details of the surroundings, and all can betray the myopia, astigmatism (and one hopes, far-sightedness) of their creator. In each case, though, the lens-maker sets the latest project aside or puts it in a shop window for sale and starts on the next one. That one will show her everything she wanted to see.

Find Negotiating with the Dead at a nearby library or purchase it.

I’ll kick things off with the wonderfully fun Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart, featuring illustrations by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and Jonathan Rosen (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009).

Stewart’s style is entertaining and breezy, with lots of historical anecdotes thrown in (in addition to Lincoln’s mother, we learn about President James Garfield’s assassin, details of how Socrates met his end, and more) as well as some nice tidbits of science (how poison ivy, oak and sumac cause skin irritation, types of toxins found in various plants, etc., etc.).

Stewart explores plants with a wide variety of traits: some kill-on-contact deadly, some mild irritants, some useful-but-dangerous, some used recreationally by humans (several of which are also deadly, notably tobacco). It’s a beautifully designed book, and the illustrations, particularly Rosen’s cartoons, add a certain whimsy to its macabre charm.

Wicked Plants is particularly of note to writers because of its focus on plants that are poisonous and/or noxious in some way, which makes it a nice supplement to herbal guides that focus on edible and medicinal plants, or more general field guides. Murder mystery writers in particular will find much to love here.

I found the book useful for world-building in speculative fiction; my work-in-progress has some scenes outdoors in the desert and in grassland, and using a few of these plants as models made things much more interesting for my characters, who had to avoid some and use others VERY carefully.

My one criticism is that the book lacks an index; the table of contents is fairly detailed, and that helps, but it would be extremely handy to look up plants by the active toxins they contain, for instance, or the region in which they grow. Stewart does include a bibliography for further reading and a list of “poison gardens” (botanical conservatories and the like) that contain specimens of some of these deadly beauties, both useful to researchers.

The links go to Stewart’s page for the book, which I think is also notable as an example of a marketing tool for writers – many of the things she does there would work for nonfiction and fiction writers alike: http://www.amystewart.com/wickedplants.html