Silverview

Late last fall, I had a pleasant surprise when I read a newspaper article which revealed (to me, anyway) that there was one final John Le Carre novel coming. When Le Carre passed away in 2020, I had thought Agent Running in the Field would be the last story we’d get from him, but it turned out that he had one more novel that was close to completion and he had asked his son to bring Silverview to publication.

I’ve talked about my affection for Le Carre stories and admiration for his craft several times on this thing, so no surprise I am sure that I was very excited by this, and sat down to read Silverview over the Christmas holidays with a lot of anticipation, and pleasure.

I’m not going to do a review of the book, because I don’t really do them at all, but very briefly if you dig Le Carre’s usual oeuvre of modern espionage and the people caught up in it, you’ll enjoy Silverview. As usual it’s much more about the people who live with secrets and the things those secrets do to them than anything 007-y, and although it isn’t set in his George Smiley continuity, nevertheless some of these characters may be comfortably familiar to people who have read a bunch of his stuff.

I liked it a lot.

It is very much the sort of thing you would expect a Le Carre story to be, which brings to mind something I saw on Twitter recently, basically that no-one really ever seems to have said to Agatha Christie: ‘what, you’re writing another murder?’ Writers are told a lot that they need to do something different things all the time and that our next story shouldn’t be anything like the last one we did. While there is certainly merit to challenging oneself and pushing limits as an artist, there’s also not a thing wrong with a) telling the kind of stories you love, no matter what they are and b) doing what you know you’re good at. It’s ok to pick the thing that you know how to do and you have a lot to say about and let that be how you express yourself.

There was also an interesting afterword by Nick Cornwell (the aforementioned son) where he wrote a bit about his father and his writing, and about Silverview in particular. He points out that it’s actually a bit unlike a lot of Le Carre’s spy stories, because <<<<SPOILER ALERT>>>> it ends with at least raising the question of whether intelligence agents and agencies like the ones Le Carre worked with and for accomplished anything worthwhile, and sort of suggests the answer is ‘no’. As Cornwell says, that’s not like most of Le Carre’s work that usually holds onto the idea that there was something of merit behind it all. That’s the conclusion George Smiley is still holding onto when we last see him.

Anyway, Cornwell suggests that perhaps it was Silverview that was left unpublished because it was hard for his father to arrive at that conclusion, or have one of his stories get there, anyway. I think that speaks to how a lot of writers are working through our own issues and dilemmas through our writing, and sometimes that does either mean that writing is a learning process for us too, or that sometimes we end up with a story that took us somewhere uncomfortable. Obviously I don’t know if either of those things were true for John Le Carre and Silverview, but it’s interesting to think over.

One last thing – this is not a book in which everything is ever spelled out for the reader. It’s up to you to connect some of the dots and figure out exactly what it was that happened in the shadows that got all the characters we met to the various places we see them in. There’s basically no action. The opening scene is a conversation where we don’t really know what is going on (what’s hinted at is compelling) and then we don’t see the characters involved in it again for about half the book.

To be clear, I love all this. Almost all the scenes are dialogue, either literal conversations or the internal dialogue of our main character, but Le Carre is so good at it that I could read various Le Carre conversations basically forever, and his use of language is such that you can, if you’re paying attention, put together a series of pieces and figure out how they fit, even without the solution being spelled out for you. My only complaint is that I can’t really read his stuff when I’m getting tired, because to really get the most out of it you have to be paying very close attention. But that close attention is rewarded.

So obviously I like the style, but I also take this all as a comfort to me as a writer because his stuff doesn’t at all follow the various Commandments of Writing that are thrown around so liberally. And look, I think all of those things are generally well-intentioned, and there’s a lot of value in learning some rules before you start breaking the rules, and all that sort of thing. But, if you look around there’s also tons of evidence that you can create art people will love without rigid adherence to a set of precepts. As someone who tends to write stories that don’t necessarily start with KABOOM and who also writes a lot of dialogue, even though I don’t do it half so well as John Le Carre I still like the reminder. That there isn’t only one way to tell a good story.

John Le Carre told us a bunch of them, and it was a wonderful treat to get that one more.

Thanks for reading.

Subtract Books, Add Books

I am bad at getting rid of books. I fully acknowledge that I am a book hoarder, which I justify in part because I am also a great re-reader of books, so a lot of the time when I keep a book it’s because I genuinely expect to read it again. On the other hand I also have a lot of books that I haven’t touched in years and honestly do not expect to, thus the very full bookshelves surrounding me.

Some of this is the leftover effect of the time when I thought I would have a career in academia, and kept lots of stuff that I figured would be important reference material for later. It’s still here.

I can’t blame everything on that, though, because the bottom line is that I hate to discard a book. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, at one point I somehow acquired two identical copies of William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome. Same cover, same everything. I still really don’t know how it happened, but the thing is that I kept them both for a really long time. The two Burning Chromes made several moves with me and sat next to each other on many shelves. Finally, only a few years ago, when I had absolutely maxed out shelf capacity, I got rid of one of them. It wasn’t easy.

I mention all this because I’ll be moving later this summer and I’m trying to weed out the bookshelves a bit, of things I do not need and will not read again. It’s still not easy. I have had for a long time now this huge and weighty tome analysing the work of Niccolo Machiavelli called The Machiavellian Moment that was a required text for a course in the distant past. It cost, as I recall, quite a bit and the resale market for used Machiavellian Moments is the next thing to zero and I suppose I thought I might use it for something, and so it moved and moved and moved again.

Today I finally took it off the shelf to get rid of it. Then I put it back. Then I steeled myself, and finally weeded out The Machiavellian Moment, along with a bunch of other stuff. There’s still more to do, but I have to break it up into chunks. Even the ‘easy’ calls, books by authors who I don’t want on my shelves any more, or dire tomes like the Machiavelli one, are hard to get done.

I’m not exactly sure why. Obviously I love reading and I love my collection of books, and so chucking stuff overboard has more weight than hucking out stuff I have no affection for. But it must be said that I am not great at throwing away stuff in general. Mostly I always think I might need it again later, and then I’ll be sorry. I suppose this is especially true for books, that are always good for something.

If, a year from now, I desperately need an expert perspective on Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, I’m going to kick myself.

Anyway, no big crescendo coming here, just … getting rid of books is hard. All of them, even the ones I only read once, are objects that I spent some time with and thought on, and I suppose they’re all part of my familiar surroundings, even the ones that usually stay on the shelves. Change is never comfortable, at least not for me.

—-

However in many cases it’s good, and in this case weeding out the bookshelves is good both because there will be a bit less to pack and move, but also since it provides room to buy more books! I don’t do a lot of reviews on this thing, mostly because I don’t think I am anywhere near widely-read enough to provide truly informed commentary, but despite that I’m going to make a recommendation of something you might want to add to your own shelf.

Jay Odjick’s new graphic novel The Outsider: Welcome to Newtown recently came out and recently arrived at my place. At the end of the day it showed up, I thought I would just look at the first few pages to get a sense of it. I ended up doing the extremely cliched thing of not being able to put it down and reading the whole thing.

Jay has written a fun post-apocalyptic tale that provides an exciting ride of gunfights, fist fights, and machete fights, and turns out to have a good heart to it as well. I know it’s one that he poured a lot of effort and energy into, and I think that really comes across. I think you’ll be glad if you give The Outsider a shot and add it to the bookshelf at your house.

It’s also a much, much, much better read than The Machiavellian Moment.

—-

For anyone who looked at last week’s Unknown Plant and thought ‘pansy’, give yourself a prize. A few days later the mystery plant bloomed and looks like this:

It’s a lovely deep purple and I promise not to make another tortured metaphor about coming out of the pandemic, but this plant is a survivor and I like it.

Thanks for reading.

Story of a Prayer

So I had a birthday recently, and I usually post something on my social media about the fact that I’m getting older, not because I’m worried about it, but because I want to acknowledge that it is happening. Life goes on, and changes happen. I am determined not to be one of those people stridently denying that they will ever grow old. Of course I will. It’s what happens. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just life, playing itself out.

Anyway often I have used a song by B.B. King or Junior Kimbrough, but I wanted to do something different this year and (loving the Middle Ages as I do) I went out looking for a medieval person’s thoughts on getting older. I did not find that, but I came up with something else that I thought ticked the box I was after.

I found an article in the Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics that cited a prayer, attributed to a 17^th century abbess, that had some clever turns of phrase and a kind of self-deprecating humour that I liked, and so I quoted it myself. I also looked up their citation, which led to a website that seems to be a stranded Geocities page (good lord above!) which also provides no source for the prayer aside from the assertion that it was written in the 17^th century.

Now, my academic spidey-senses were tingling at this point and if I had been engaged in anything serious I would either have had to investigate much further or regretfully abandon the prayer as a source, but I was just messing around on the internet so I didn’t worry too much about it. I posted it up, people liked it, and I enjoyed my birthday. However, a couple of people also asked for more information about the prayer and the person who wrote it, and so I did a little bit of digging.

I found a few writers pointing out that the language in the prayer doesn’t seem very 17^th century, but at this stage I wasn’t too concerned because if it had been translated into English from another language, very often the translators will modernize the phrasing and vocabulary, especially if they’re not doing it for academic purposes. So, I, er, noted the cautionary note and went on.

I also found that this prayer is exceedingly widespread, showing up not only all over the internet, but also being quoted in places like the Philippines Senate (in 1987) and as part of the ‘Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency’ in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971. So it’s far from obscure, and (somewhat to my chagrin) appears to be a common touchstone when someone wants something clever to say about the subject of growing older, and has been for longer than I’ve been alive.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything about its origins.

At this point, though, I found a website attributing the prayer to a nun (rather than specifically an abbess), and declaring that it was ‘found in an English church’. Now my spidey-senses were really tingling, because first of all, if it was an English writer, then the translation excuse for the modern language doesn’t work (or at least not so well), but even worse: after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1536, there were none again until 1791. So something is definitely up with at least part of the story of our ‘17^th century’ prayer, and it seems unlikely that the story of its origins hold much water, if it holds any at all.*

At this point I was relieved to discover that several journalists had done investigations much like the once I was engaged in, and happily vultured off their results. One attributed the prayer to a woman in 1950s America, and another pushed it back as far as an appearance in Reader’s Digest in 1922. There things seem to run into the sand, and (to be frank) I ran out of time to spend chasing down this particular rabbit hole.

So where are we? We can of course still imagine nearly any history we want for this prayer on aging and could insist that it really is the work of some anonymous 17^th century nun or abbess. However, on the balance of probability it seems to be much more recent than that, probably a 20^th century creation, but no less intriguing for that, although in different ways.

You would have to evaluate this thing as a successful piece of writing; it features in church decorations around the world as well as being plastered all over the internet, hanging on the wall in people’s houses, and being a part of government discussions. And yet, the author’s name has disappeared.

Was that a deliberate choice, on their part? Did they think their creation would get a better reception coming from a nun from a past century? Or was that a choice the audience made, misattributing the work as often seems to happen with quotations to who ‘should have said it’ or who it ‘sounds like’ rather than the actual speaker? At this point we are unlikely to know, or at least finding out would be a reasonably involved piece of research into what is no more than a curiosity, but I do find things like this interesting.

I usually talk to my history students about the fact that we make up things about the past all the time, or tell stories about the past that are not true, and we think some about the reasons why we might do this. We often cling to those objectively false narratives with great determination, usually because we want the message in them, what they communicate about where we came from or what kind of people we are or were, to be true.

I suppose in a way the ‘Nun’s Prayer’ is much the same kind of thing: it is a pretty cleverly written meditation on the aging process, and it seems like the sort of thing some wise old woman should have said or written. And so, at some point (it seems), someone decided that was what happened, and so it has gone on ever since. Because it makes the right kind of story.

We are great storytellers, we really are. We tell stories about ourselves constantly, some that are true and some that are not, but (as I try to tell my students) even the ones that aren’t true have truth in them, because they communicate something about what we want to believe in, and how we want things to be. And on this micro scale, I guess we want there to be a dryly humourous nun who can give us advice, across the centuries, about how to age with grace.

Thanks for reading.

* – I suppose it’s just about possible to argue that the prayer was written much earlier than the 17^th century and kept in an English church until its discovery, but it is usually described as a ‘17^th century prayer’, so that seems to be a fairly rickety argument about what is already the pretty rickety narrative surrounding this prayer.

John Le Carré

So as you may have noticed, I’m late with this again, because both Tuesday and Wednesday were days when Life Intervened and I did not want to rush through this week’s entry. That’s because the only thing that makes sense for me to write about this week is the passing of John Le Carré, and I would like to do the best job of it that I can.

If you read the blog much, you will know that Le Carré has been one of my favourite writers, both as a creator of stories that I enjoy and as an artist whose craft I admire. Admittedly I came to read and like his work relatively recently, and that may be just as well because I’m not certain Younger Me would have appreciated it.

Le Carré, of course, is best known for his spy stories, but they are quite far from the spy stories of Bond or Jason Bourne, full of judo fights, gun battles, and volcano bases. Le Carré’s stories are generally sparse on what is usually classified as action, and thick with mood, character, and brain work. I suspect his is a more accurate picture of the real ‘wilderness of mirrors’ of espionage; you’ve done at least something right if some of the terminology you invented for your fiction gets picked up by those who are really in the trade, as Le Carré’s did.

But Le Carré’s characters do tend to be nearly the polar opposite of a James Bond; his most prominent creation, George Smiley, is short and fat, certainly no match for a team of assassins, but someone who understands detail, people and their motivations, and knows how to manipulate all these things to his advantage. He is also, at least on some level, a basically kind soul. As others have pointed out, in what is now his final appearance, Smiley (finally tracked down reading quietly in a library) apologizes for putting his friend to any trouble, invites him to dinner, and offers to walk him to his train.

There’s brain work for the reader, too, which is one of the reasons I admire his craft; there is a great deal that is suggested and there for you you to figure out without being explicitly told, so that I find his stuff demands a reasonable level of attention, but then also deeply rewards a careful read. I tremendously admire his ability to convey character and atmosphere despite saying very little at all.

And they are just very good stories, too. Obviously it helps if you have a least some interest in espionage, but what Le Carré is really good at is conveying people (or at least, a certain kind of people) and what they’re like, the flawed choices they make and the reasons they make them. I admire that as well.

You could say the tone of a lot of his work is bleak: victories tend to come at a cost, people turn out to not be who you thought they were, and sometimes situations have no good solution. Smiley’s greatest victory is finally accomplished in a way that obviously leaves him quite dismayed about how he had to do it. However, if Le Carré is bleak about the world he once inhabited, and about the results of the work of politicians and spies, he is often fairly optimistic about people and their nature.

One of the last things Smiley says: ‘We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then.’ We did our best, basically. We tried to do something good. I increasingly believe that is all we can expect of ourselves, and each other – try to do something good, the best way we can. It won’t always work out, but it’s still important, and worthy, that we try.

Anyway, without lapsing further into philosophical ramblings, I hope it’s evident that John Le Carré was a writer who made you think, both while you were reading and after, and who made you care about his characters and believe them as people. I love reading them, I admire the craftsmanship in them very much, and I am deeply sad that we shall have no more from him.

Thanks for reading.

Find the Good Stories

So I gather there’s been another fuss where someone in the media has fired off their opinion that certain kinds of entertainment are not ‘adult’ and therefore people who enjoy them are contributing to the downfall of society. This argument seems to bubble up fairly regularly, although the frequency also seems to be ticking up a bit lately, perhaps because of the perception that certain kinds of stories have been growing in popularity in recent years, and that this is somehow indicative of the world’s onrushing demise.

There have already been a lot of good responses to this, but heck, I don’t have a better topic for the blog this week. I also do read a fair bit, and much of what I enjoy falls into the categories that tend to attract criticism. Many of the movies and TV shows I watch are similarly positioned. And then, of course, there’s what I write. So sure, it feels like a shot across the bows a little bit, as well as (I’m pretty sure) just driving me slightly insane on general principles.

I do think that you should probably try a bunch of different types of book (likewise for movies, music, whatever) to expose your mind to a wide range of experiences, challenge yourself and also because you might discover new stuff that you hadn’t known you like before. Like, you can’t possibly know that you like Ethiopian food until you try some. (Which I did, and it’s delicious) You absolutely should read more than one thing, but I would give that advice to someone who only reads cap-L literature just the same as I would to someone who only reads four-colour comic books.

But then, having done so, there’s nothing at all the matter with focusing on what you love. If your absolute favourite thing in the world is to curl up with a hardboiled detective story, then enjoy (schweetheart). Life is too short, and the world too full of stories, to waste your time on ones you don’t enjoy.

Presumably the people bellowing about the need for people to read ‘more challenging’ work are also out there on the weekend screaming at people out for a stroll about how they should be running a marathon. Look, anyone can. Not everyone wants to, and who the fuck are you to dictate what people ‘should’ be doing? I can read Middle English, but I don’t do it when I sit down to unwind the day. Most times, I want a book I can lazily settle into like a nice warm bath. There’s also the argument, which I have a good deal of sympathy for, that if you tell your story such that it’s hard for your reader to understand, maybe what you’ve done is written a terrible goddamn story? Or at least, it’s not better for having been made a chore for your audience.

It’s also true that this whole thing about absolute levels of quality always existing between different types of story (or music, or, or) is bullshit as well. To paraphrase Pat Rothfuss (and tip o’ the hat to Brandon Crilly for pointing this quote my way), there is some terrible SFF out there. But there is also SFF that I will put up against anything written by anyone, anytime, ever. Similarly, the stuff that gets published as cap-L literature includes some fantastic writing. It also includes some hideous drek. Repeat for every genre out there.

If someone asks you to recommend something to read, then whole different ballgame. Give that person your best advice. But if no-one’s asking? Stop trying to fluff up your ego and reputation preening about the perceived value of whatever it is you read. In general, I try to keep my advice to myself (honest), because ultimately giving advice when it isn’t wanted is a) annoying and b) really about ego. I sure have ideas about what I think people should be reading. I surely know most people don’t care what those ideas are just the same.

Ok, that got at least rant adjacent. Thanks for reading, and go find the good stories.

Review: The Quantum Magician

I don’t do a lot of book reviews on here, mostly because I don’t read enough of the latest stuff for it to really make sense. I am, however, going to do one today, because I just finished reading Derek Kunsken’s The Quantum Magician.

Now, full disclosure, and as you will know from previous blogs, Derek and I are friends, so factor that into your calculations as you read. However that may be, I had not read The Quantum Magician prior to it being published, and had only a very vague sense of what it was about – really just Derek’s one-sentence pitch of ‘Ocean’s Eleven in space’, which turns out to be about right.

Here’s the thing with Quantum Magician, though. Derek writes hard SF, and (as you will also know from previous blogs) I am not, in general, much of a hard SF fan. Very often when I read hard SF stories, I come away thinking that the ideas were neat but that there were no characters. All the stories I write are basically about people, and in a lot of hard SF I feel like there are hardly any actual people at all. Now, I have had this reaction to very well-loved and major award-winning stories, so I know this isn’t any kind of objective measure of quality, it’s just what I happen to like.

And The Quantum Magician definitely counts as hard SF. All of the science in it has clearly been very carefully thought through; nothing happens, and none of the characters do anything, without there being a rigorously established explanation as to how they do that thing and why that thing happens. I assume the science is all accurate. I would be lying if I said I fully understood all of it. But, after a thorough sensor sweep, we find no detectable levels of Handwavium here.

But, and here’s the big thing for me, the characters are amazing. The people we meet in this book are all really interesting and fun to spend some of your time with. I wanted to know more about all of them. A lot of love and care has very obviously gone into crafting each one of these imaginary people, and the result is a story, or interweaving of stories, that works on a human level just as much as it does on a scientific one.

So, I reckon hard SF fans will love The Quantum Magician, but if you’re like me and generally steer away from that particular flavour, I would still heartily recommend giving this one a shot. I’m not really qualified to assess whether the characters are better than the science, or vice versa, but they’re both really compelling and good. I’m already looking forward to the next book in the series.

—–

There’s been a lot of really upsetting and difficult things happen in the world since I wrote the last blog entry, and although I feel like I should write some kind of response, I’m also not sure what there is to be said about any of it. There’s a lot of darkness in the world right now, and it isn’t always easy to feel very hopeful.

I don’t have any deeply wise observations or magic solutions. About all I can think to say is that each of us can and should keep doing the best we can in the world around us, every day. We can’t single-handedly fix the big issues, but we can do little things every day. We can also call out the big problems when we see them. I think that’s important, too.

Part of doing both of those things is telling great stories. Let’s all keep doing that, too.

Thank you for reading.

Infinite Wars

This entry is not about the Infinity War trailer, although it is kind of caused by it. I’m pretty sure.

The more direct cause is a friend of mine complaining/observing on the internet that there are a great many movies about war. I guess the immediate reaction to that might be that of course there are, because wars are exciting (whether it’s a good kind of excitement or not depends on the reader/viewer) and people like to make exciting stories. It is also, of course, a weathered old chestnut that there is no story without a conflict, and a war is in a lot ways conflict writ large.

So it makes sense that there are a lot of war stories. Humanity has also, it is undeniably true, fought a great many wars, and many of those make for dramatic and exciting stories, either told as-is or used as fodder for embellishments, reweavings, and reimaginings. So again, it makes sense that there are a lot of war stories.

Particular to movies like Infinity War, superhero stories seem particularly to depend on violent conflict, good guys vs bad guys, and superhero stories are notably popular right now (although I reckon the wave is close to cresting, if it hasn’t already), so again – lots of violent stories to be told. At first glance, there isn’t much of a tale to be told about Tony Stark in a board meeting – at least, not compared to the whiz-bang-kaboom of the heroes fighting. So it makes sense, the stories that get told.

And yet.

There are of course many kinds of stories that do not include any kind of war or violence, that people find engrossing and thrilling and enjoy a great deal. There are whole genres of entertainment devoted to stories that, although they have conflict, don’t have any kind of fight. I suppose they tend not to get promoted quite as loudly as the warlike ones, which probably suits the subject matter.

This all seems relatively straightforward, and yet I don’t really think my friend was wrong in his complaint, because when you look at the particular genre of fiction that write and tend to consume the most – fantastic fiction – it does tend to skew very heavily towards stories that centre around violent conflict, in some form.

Not every story, of course, and the conflict is there to greater and lesser degrees in different stories, but it is a rare SFF story that doesn’t have a bomb go off at some point, or at least an assassin lurking in the shadows. We tend to tell fairly bloody stories, much of the time. Again, this is at least in part because conflict, violent conflict, is exciting. This has all been true for a very long time.

What I got to thinking was a very interesting question from all this, though, was whether or not there are equally exciting SFF stories to be told that are about peace rather than war. About solving problems, one would suppose, but solutions that do not involve shooting anything, hitting anything with a sword, or blowing anything up. It seems as though the answer very much should be yes – doesn’t it?

I’m sure I’m far from the first to think about this, I don’t have any good answers as to what such a story would look like, yet, and I feel ever-so-slightly hypocritical to be mulling this over at the same time as I’m finishing (he said hopefully) my tale of a rather lethal Victorian spy. But I think it’s an interesting question, I think it’s potentially an important question, as we consider what kind of stories we want to add to this intensely violent world we live in, and I’m going to keep working on it in the weeks ahead.

Maybe I can make that one friend stop complaining.

(I hope it goes without saying that if you have favourite non-violent SFF tales, shoot ’em my way. I would love to add to my mountainous ‘to read’ pile.)

In Praise of Readers

Late last week I sent out another (by which I really mean ‘the second’) chunk of the current WIP to some Eager Volunteers to see what they thought. I’ve been finding the writing hard going of late and I hoped this might help.

It did.

The Volunteers emailed back almost right away, one having read the piece while plagued by insomnia (which is a decision that’s possible to read in a couple ways, but never mind) and sent back their usual thoughtful response, which included some useful criticism, some questions, and some compliments.

On some level the praise is most obviously useful to me in my current situation. Everyone likes a pat on the head and having someone whose opinion I respect say that they’re enjoying what I’m working on will probably always feel good. So that’s a nice shot of positivity to encourage me to keep working away. It also helps to hear that someone wants to learn more about a particular character, or to know what’s going to happen; I guess obviously a writer is always hoping to generate interest and it’s both pleasing and a relief to know that in at least a couple of cases, I’m setting the hook okay.

The criticism is very nearly as useful, though, because concrete areas where the story needs work are better than a sense of generalized unease where I know there are things that aren’t right but not exactly what they are, much less how to fix them. It’s always easier to have something like a bullet list (har) of things that need to be taken care of than a vague idea that Stuff needs to be Fixed. Having people where there’s a strong enough trust that they tell me what they really think, and they know that I really do want to know what they really think, and not just get a pat on the head, is (as I am discovering) both rare and incredibly valuable.

The questions never cease to fascinate me, because the things readers are intrigued by and want to know more about seem always to include things that I never anticipated. I wrote a while ago about how a character in The King in Darkness that I didn’t think anyone would have any particular interest in ended up getting a scene added to the final draft to finish their story, because readers kept asking about it. So it already is with this piece, and what it mostly does is make me happy that what I’m writing can be interpreted and understood in a variety of ways (because if a reader understood it exactly the same way as I do, writing it, they wouldn’t have some of these questions), which is something I always enjoy when I’m reading and very much want to create when I’m writing. It also gives me ideas for things to do next, which is also very valuable.

All of which to say that the responses I get from my Eager Volunteers is a treasure to me as a writer, and makes my task in creating the story so much easier and the final project immeasurably better. I have had a good number of genuinely well-meaning people offer to take on the task and had it not work out (which I completely understand – if nothing else, it’s not easy to devote some of one’s precious store of free time to reading something they may not even like), so that makes the people who are willing to put in the time struggling through a rough-hewn story and then also take the time to share their responses and reactions to it with me a very special breed.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank them once again, because I appreciate what they do more than I can say. Perhaps I’ll pay my debt some day. Thank you very much indeed.

I am also aware that I owe a similar debt to each and every one of my readers, without whom my stories would be silent words on the page and none of my characters, who I love very much, would ever have a chance to live. If you’ve read one of my stories, and thereby given some of my made-up people a home in your imagination, at least for a while, I thank you as well.

It is, of course, a truism that without readers there are really no writers in a meaningful sense, but sometimes it’s the obviously true facts that need to be acknowledged. I’m grateful to everyone who has ever taken the time to read one of my stories; I can think of few better compliments for a writer than ‘I would like to spend some time with your imagination’. I am especially grateful to the readers who let me know what they thought about what they read. A lot of it makes me better, and all of it helps me want to write more. Without writers, people have nothing to read, and without readers, it would be the next thing to impossible to call oneself a writer.

So once again, I thank my readers.

Now to try to do some more of my half of the bargain.

Point of No Return

This is a little bit more of a reading issue than a writing issue for this week but I have writing questions about it as well, and anyway what the heck. There are no rules here.

Over the last week I’ve been enjoying a fantastic book by a friend of mine (it’s Daughter of the Wolf by Victoria Whitworth, and you should check it out) and I reached a point in the story where I knew I had to read through to the end. That meant staying up a little later than I planned, but it didn’t matter. The story had gone past some kind of tipping point where the idea of stopping was now unacceptable and I had to see how things were going to work out. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

This doesn’t happen with every book I read. There have been plenty of stories that I have read, even ones that I enjoyed very much, where I didn’t experience this feeling of momentum or narrative gravity where going on to the end was inevitable. To be clear, I almost always finish a book once I start it, and I feel guilty on the rare occasions when I don’t. However, that doesn’t mean that I always get that feeling of ‘I must finish this story immediately’.

I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the books where this does happen to trigger the feeling off. Most well-crafted stories have a narrative that builds towards an exciting or engaging climax and jack up the tension or stakes as they go along, so on some level you want to know what happens. A story that doesn’t do that doesn’t really work very well. So I would just say that this ‘tipping point’ I experience is just the sign of a good story, except, again – there are lots of stories that I’ve enjoyed very much overall where it didn’t happen. Like, I don’t remember it happening with Lord of the Rings, for example.

I guess there may be some arcane literary alchemy of suspense, plot, and character that generates the tipping point for me, and it likely includes something from my end of things as well. Probably my own mood and energy level are involved somehow – although again, in this most recent example it was late (for me) and my intention was (as it always is in the evening) to read a little to help me wind down and let the day go and get ready for sleep, as I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Instead I urgently needed to finish this story.

I’m not complaining – it was a great story with a good ending. I just wish I understood how it worked, both out of curiosity as a reader and also as a writer, because if I knew the trick I would love to be able to ensure that my stories all had such ‘tipping points’ where the reader is drawn irresistibly along for the rest of the ride. It’s a very fun feeling as a reader, and I guess obviously I’d like it if it was there in what I write as well.

Of course I suspect that there is no actual formula, and that it probably varies from reader to reader, and that probably some readers never experience the feeling at all. I think it’s a shame for those who never do, only because it is honestly quite exhilarating to have a story take you in its grasp and take you where it wants you to go, for a while.

I suppose it’s also better that it doesn’t always happen, because then starting a new book, I never know when, or if, I’ll hit the tipping point.

That’s what I’ve got for you this week. Thanks for reading.