On Writing

So this is not going to be a review.

There is a book by the given title (a short guidebook for the aspiring writer by Stephen King: GET IT NOW) but it does not merit a review, if only for the sole reason that I can find no flaws in it. It is short, awesome, hard-hitting, and helpful without being overbearing. Of special note is King's deadpan humour, which gets...

...But I digress.

This short little ditty is about the act of writing itself.

It is currently 3:25AM in the morning. I do not exactly have a healthy sleep pattern, but I generally call it a day at 2 or 3 by the latest (by calling it a day I mean crawling into bed to play Angry Birds or read some short stories on Kindle, but screw it).

Tonight, however, I feel pumped. I feel alive. I feel like the king of all I survey.

And that's simply because of writing.

You see, I started this short story last week. It was meant to be around 5,000 words; two nights worth of effort, three at the most. I worked on it for three days, wrote all the offbeat humour and random violence, and then... Stopped. Somewhere near the 4,000 word mark.

Because I now had to write about normal human interaction; something I do not happen to be very good at. I left the story alone for the next two nights (wrote a poem one day and watched Up the next-awesome flick!) and was going to work on the next one tonight before I thought

I'll be damned if I give up on the one thing I really honestly want to be good at.

Mr King has no illusions of grandeur about the actual act of writing: in his book he speaks of writers using their creativity as an excuse for their other flaws (melancholia and alcoholism amongst them) and also of muses that shit on the writer's head (long story).

One thing he stresses upon, however, is not to give up. He says stories will mostly be fun to write, but that one must not get discouraged at the tough parts, either. Because writing isn't always gonna be a bed of roses.

I stuck by my story (it was mine, after all: who else would stick by it?) and have worked on it for four hours before coming here to pour my incoherent heart out.

At the time of writing, The Last Laugh finally lies in a state of completion: not polished, yet (that shall come later) but in working condition. Readable from start to end. My baby's 6,500 words long (I was never good with estimates) and went for 18 pages of hoots when I read her over again (dunno if everyone else will like it, though).

I might not make it big for a long time to come - heck, for the rest of my life if I'm really unlucky. But right now I honestly think I wouldn't mind. Because as long as fiction, or poetry, or rambling prose (like this one) gives me as much of a kick as it did tonight, it will always be the one drug I'll need to feel truly alive.

Would rant a bit more but I need to mail her off for dad to take a print. Tomorrow I shall edit her a bit, try to keep her soul and trim off a bit of flab, and then maybe I'll post a short excerpt here for your perusal.

Thank you for reading this far. Dunno where a writer would be without his reader(s), but I'm willing to bet it would not be too happy a place.

Peace.

UR

And so we finally come to this.

To be honest it wasn’t supposed to go like this; the review on the cards for tonight was Blockade Billy, a stunning novella by Stephen King, about baseball – one of the things he loves so.

However, by virtue of the fact that the title of this blog professes to contain the views of a so-called bastard of the cynical variety, it wouldn’t have been kosher, so to speak.

You see, this blog was originally started with the intention of bashing upon badly-made films and badly-programmed video games and (perhaps most cathartically) badly-written books. We’d have us a couple drinks (cold coffee, if you must know), lounge about in the living room, and make light of the things that piss us off.

The first two entries veered more towards the Oh-Look-Here’s-A-Lesser-Known-Jewel persuasion; and while that is not a bad thing for a blog to be, the readers (yes, someone did read the goddarn thing already – my shock exceeded yours. Honest) found the less-popular subject matter a bit too obscure for their liking.

And that brings us to tonight’s rant. For the novella I am about to bash (spoiler alert) is not too well known, either. But it is Shite. So we get to cut loose.

UR is a rather recent work of fiction by (hold your horses, folks) Stephen King. The same guy who gave us sublime horror and literary fiction and a most enlightening guide for the aspiring author called On Writing. UR was released as a promotional title for the Amazon Kindle, and was exclusive to that platform-and therein lies the crux of the matter.

You see, UR is nothing but a two-hundred-page-long love letter for the Amazon Kindle. The book meanders through a vague (or mediocre, if we follow the author’s lead and slap the word upon every page) account of an English teacher whose girl leaves him because he does not have an... Amazon Kindle. The book begins by him attempting to spite her by buying an... Amazon Kindle (which, incidentally, has to be the most mediocre way of spiting someone I’ve ever seen. Kinda like putting a horsehair brush in a jockey’s bed to send a message). The whole tale revolves around something that is off-kilter with his... Choice of Lifestyle. Oops, sorry folks, I meant his motherlovin’ AMAZON KINDLE.

Stephen King has already forayed into the realm of e-literature by releasing a story called Riding The Bullet as an eBook exclusive (it has since appeared in the collection Everything’s Eventual and is pretty darn awesome, all things considered). However, he noted with displeasure that people were more interested in his choice of medium than whatever it was he actually had to say.

I can’t say I don’t sympathize with him; writers need to take a firm stand regarding the treatment of their creative output. but UR is the literary equivalent of bending over and praying one doesn’t stay sore for too long afterwards. The lead character is shown to be a traditional Books-Belong-On-Paper sorta guy, but subsequent events bury his preferences under a torrent of Hemingway and Poe and a bunch of other guys, all of whom have undiscovered works in some phantom dimension that happens to be KINDLE-EXCLUSIVE.

A couple of moments were chilly- the take on world events in other worlds, for example-but one expects King’s work to be packed with such moments; any relevant message he might have had is buried under walk-on characters mouthing a single line about how THE KINDLE IS THE EARTHLY MANIFESTATION OF GOD and YES, YOU NEED TO USE A LITTLE LUBRICANT BEFORE THINGS GET GROOVEH (pardon the cringe-worthy metaphors but the picture that pops in my head is even more disturbing) before vanishing somewhere in the background –a Chinese sweatshop where they make Kindles for an angry population, most probably.

Anyway, apart from the blatant advertising spots, there were a couple more irksome things that I despised.

Firstly, why thrust supernatural creatures of judgement into an otherwise-sane story at the eleventh hour (Spoiler Alert)? The way they kept referring to the circular notion of things and the significance of the Tower were both sickening, to say the least. I mean, obviously your regular fanboys won’t really buy something so derivative; and those unaware of the Dark Tower mythos will only pick their noses and ponder for a brief moment before going back to reading their SPANKING NEW STEPHEN KING EXCLUSIVE on their AMAZON KINDLE.

Secondly, after everything has died down and the guy has finally disposed of his Kindle on grounds of sanity, what do you get? A picture of his girl in the local paper (Spoiler Alert!) And a pathetic desire to call her up right then. I mean, you take the one likable character in a crappy story (that's the english teacher's girl), build them up to the point where a satisfactory conclusion would do verra-well, thankee, and then abandon them with no sense of closure whatsoever.

The cumulative effect is that of banging your head on a wall, if the wall were a freight train and your head was, oh, I don’t know-THE AMAZON KINDLE?!?!

In conclusion: This is a crappy book that serves as a crappy advertisement for a device that was outdated the second it rolled off the conveyor belt. I read this whole novella on the Kindle app for Android (it has a 16-bit colour display and can-gasp!-access the internet and play music, among other things) and am now thankful I did not pay for it.

Seriously, though, if you’re looking for a mad old time, you could always print the story out on paper and then read it-a book about the Kindle read by a bunch of guys with no electronic assistance.

Way to be ironic, Danny boy; now pass the bottle of absinthe.

Meanwhile, I shall finally call it a day-thank you for reading this far. Do drop in from time to time, and pray keep your eyes open for Blockade Billy. He’ll probably make his appearance after my brain stops feeling as clunky and overheated as, say, an AMAZON KINDLE.

Peace.

Transmetropolitan

Let us begin with a history lesson, fellers.

Ever heard of a guy named Hunter S. Thomson? Wrote a bunch of swell books. Most famous one was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They even made a movie starring Depp and Benicio del Torro out of it.

Anyway, Thomson was famous even in non-fiction-reading-circles (read: tightass prudes) because of his writing style, which is now famous as Gonzo Journalism. It works by putting the reporter in the center of things rather than the peripheri, making him an active participant rather than a mute spectator. This lends Gonzo journalism a personalized touch that helps endear it to the masses (although endear is probably the wrong word in this context).

End of history lesson.

This long-winded monologue leads up to Transmetropolitan, whose narrative and presentation style both pay homage to Thomson and his brainchild. It deals with the (mis)adventures of Spider Jerusalem, a famous reporter who is yanked out of exile by an unfulfilled literary contract. The series follows Spider as he goes about exposing the uglier face of a city that is pretty darn repulsive to begin with.

Oh, and it is set in the 23rd Century. Bring on the cyberpunk!

The comic itself is built around the experiences of Spider, and subsequent entries in the column he writes ("I Hate It Here") for his local newsfeed (The Word). The comic itself reads like an eclectic seizure of outrageous events, punctuated by strangely haunting moments.
"Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world."

Spider Jerusalem himself is a Nihilist, an arrogant prick, a junkie, a sadistic asshole. But once he starts writing he becomes the center of his own universe: everything else just falls away. And a deranged man becomes the voice of reason in a dark, dystopic time. That has to be what sets this book apart from all others.

Transmetropolitan was the tour de force of Warren Ellis, the acclaimed comic writer and novelist who'd earlier worked on cult titles such as Hellblazer and The Authority. His friend Garth Ennis claims the series was inspired by Ellis's own frustrations while working on mainstream titles and not being taken seriously. You can certainly see where he's coming from-bizarre issues such as cryogenic revivals and posthuman secessionist movements are used as metaphors for the more familiar themes of alienation and discrimination, to give an example.
Or maybe the writer just enjoys being a complete lunatic.

Either way, Ellis's warped vision is brought to life by the by the stunning wizardry of penciller Darick Robertson, who brings alive the seamy underbelly with his art. The panels are heavily populated with cutaway gags and obscure pop cult references in the style of Bill Elders, although the actual artistic merit is Robertson's own.

At the time of writing I have reached only the fifteenth issue in a run that lasted five years; however, both the comic and the wikipedia page suggest that all issues following the twelfth will tie into the theme of the new presidency campaign and subsequent shenanigans of the Smiler (read the book!) and Spider's attempts to stop him; in which case, I guess this is the right time to give out first impressions-before they'll buried under an avalanche of meta-references and grand story arcs.

Not that I'm complaining, of course: Hunter S. Thomson's most critically-acclaimed book was the non-fiction Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and I can't wait to see how Ellis tackles the challenge of finding a big enough mirror for modern society.

In conclusion: read Transmetropolitan. If you can buy back-issues of Archie comics or download the Batman/Deadpool bibliographies (wait, that's me), you can spare a few hundred bucks/a little bandwidth to try out something that is at once too moving to be just a comic book and too graphic to be anything else.

"These are the new streets of this city, where the New Scum try to live. You and me. And here in these streets are the things that we want: sex and birth, votes and traits, money and guilt, television and teddy bears.

But all we've actually got is each other.

You decide what that means."

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

Fantasy has always been something of an oddity, as far as discussions of genre are concerned. Unlike a murder mystery (which tends to follow a set of basic checkpoints: murder, suspects, motives, vital-clues-revealed-at-random-points) or even historical novels (which tend to be themed around exotic times and places whose differences from our own time and place are highlighted), there is no tangible way of actually describing what fantasy is. You could mutter something about dwarves and elves and ogres, but that would just be you describing the mark left on the literary landscape by Tolkien and his ilk. Fantasy is Quidditch, or a dragon’s egg discovered by a farmhand, or a sly genie toying with a cocky young magician, or a world where strange and wonderful things happen because of Dust falling from-

Okay, tell you what, Danny Boy: go stand in a corner until you can stop dribbling; we’re trying to have a serious discussion here.

Now.

Fantasy is anything that is strange (or fantastic) without becoming completely unlike the world which we inhabit. You could write about a bunch of semi-developed merpeople flouncing about in the primordial ooze; but it only crosses into the realm of fantasy if they have some quirky mannerisms that we can associate with real people. And Stephen King – a man who has now spent over five decades writing weird and wonderful things (even though he is still mostly associated with horror because that’s where some of his best work has been) – manages to do exactly that with the Gunslinger.

Write a credible fantasy, I mean. Not something about merpeople. That one’s still on the table.

The Gunslinger is the story of Roland Deschain – the eponymous lawbringer in King’s dystopic realm – who also happens to be the last of his kind. He is laconic, single-minded and unimaginative: a plodder and a bludgeoner, as he describes himself. But his skill with his trusty revolvers is unmatched; and his grit and determination make him the only one who can ever hope of reaching the Dark Tower, which happens to be the central theme to the entire saga. The novel (which is actually a collection of five related pieces in chronological order) deals with Roland’s pursuit of the Man in Black, and a few glimpses at his illustrious past. On the way we meet a bevy of believable characters and are offered a glimpse at ourselves through a funhouse mirror – which is the hallmark of a good piece of fantasy writing.

The world of Roland and the Dark Tower is shown to be a dusty, dying place: the once-proud land of the gunslingers has fallen into decay, with sparse settlements in the harsh environments of deserts and mountains. But it is the small touches connecting this world to ours that make the story enthralling and somehow disturbing; for instance, the song Hey, Jude repeats in the background at many crucial junctures in the story, serving to remind us that this unforgiving land might be our own world in the distant future.

Both the back cover of the book and King’s afterword remind us that the current volume is only the first in a much larger work that will follow; so perhaps the world will be fleshed out further as we progress through the story. But the story itself is not the prime concern here. It travels through a fulfilling arc and reaches a satisfactory conclusion (for now), but the focus remains on the characters in general, and the titular gunslinger in particular.

Roland’s character is lovingly crafted into a credible antihero – you may or may not like him, but he does manage to earn your respect by the time the tale (almost, but not quite) ends. There are shades of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and also of the Childe Roland from Robert Browning’s poem (who was the chief inspiration behind his conception). The other characters are also fleshed out well – from the townsfolk of Tull to the two birds who play a vital role in the story (you read right). My favourite aspect of the characterization has to be the interplay between Jake, Roland and the Man In Black: the white, grey and black who both define and challenge the roles they’re meant to embody.

Speaking of Roland, his own back-story is far from complete at this point-we’re only told of how he became an apprentice, not the last gunslinger-but something tells me he will not be touched upon in so much detail in further volumes – he will remain the protagonist, of course, but as King introduces an ever-growing roster of characters (it is like a trademark of his) we will probably be subjected to the occasional flashbacks rather than the full-fledged detours that this volume afforded.

All the more reason to cherish the beginning, I guess.

The Gunslinger was written over a period of twelve and a half years, one segment at a time, while

King worked on larger pieces in the interim. He confessed that while the story seemed almost impossible to finish at his current pace (the afterword suggests a further length of around 3000 pages to follow) he had bright plans for it’s future.

At the time of writing this review, it has been almost six years since the last volume of the Dark Tower saga came out (the first edition of the Gunslinger was published a decade before I was born) and to be sure, I shall discuss the rest of the books as soon as I get my hands on them. But before I conclude, I would like to admit a small grouse: It seems King recently rewrote the Gunslinger in order to bring the cultural references up-to-date, and also to correct a few inconsistencies with future volumes. But while looking up the differences online (the copy I’ve read is a tattered old first edition) I thought they removed some of the grey aspects of Roland and made him... Well, a whiter character, so to speak. Plus I’m not exactly a fan of rewrites, per se: if the writer found it fit for publication to begin with, he has to respect his own decision.

So I would like to finish with a solid recommendation for this book: if you want to see what mature fantasy can be like – with dark undertones and minus the heavy reliance on Tolkien’s mindscapes – try the Gunslinger. An original, unrevised edition, if you can find it. Because it is a fine example of King at his prime, with a significant amount of literary weight minus the pretensions that sometimes go with the genre. And also because a new companion novel is due next year, and you owe it to yourself to be up-to-date with a phenomenon that precedes Potter, Bartimaeus, LEP Recon, Lyra, and everyone else on the spectrum.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."