Genre Aphorisms
Find your own golden age. Don’t settle for another generation’s.
Genre fiction is bigger, looser, and more unexpected than a publisher’s marketing department wants you to believe.
Adults who use “–punk” as a suffix are still bitter about how uncool they felt in high school.
The Eye’s a Filter For You to See
Jin and I went to the beach to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. I’ll probably write about the place one day, but if you’re ever in Pohang it’s behind Tilt, the foreigner bar, maybe about a block or so in.
Afterwards we wandered around a nearby neighborhood where I snapped the above picture. Posting it here has started me thinking how the city must look to people only reading about it on this blog. There’s certainly a trend in my pictures that runs counter to the actual. For one thing the city has people in it, and most of it doesn’t look like the weird, dirty, and empty parts I post pictures of.
This coming week I’ll post more mundane pictures. Maybe the quotidian will be as strange.
Five Authors / Five Questions: The End
Last week Shimmer magazine posted the fifth question on their blog. This time we talked about endings.
5. How do you craft the perfect ending for a story? How do you keep an ending from falling flat?
I didn’t say this, but thought it was pretty spot on: “I’m always a fan of stories that leave the reader in the mystery, in the wonder. Which means risking not explaining everything, thus (hopefully) leaving the reader the space to make it perfect.”
Use these links to catch up with the whole series:
4. How do you decide whose story is being told? Do you have a favorite POV to work in?
3. How do you keep a story from slumping in the middle?
Thanks again to everyone at Shimmer. It was great fun being part of the series. (I’ll spare the Internets the dollop of self-denigrating out pouring… but, yeah, thanks!) Also it was great fun reading the answers from my co-interviewees: Luc Reid, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Don Mead, and Vylar Kaftan.
“Your Mother” Goes Wild With Space Squid
I have a story in “Space Squid Gone Wild: The Best Comics, Stories, and Features From Five Years of America’s Favorite Unknown Zine.”
My story is all about “Your Mother”.
Actuate a copy for yourself today!
Some Recent Pictures
Most of these were taken over Chuseok.
The last picture is of a Buddhist temple near Jin’s parents’ apartment. There are hiking trails around it and we went out one morning to explore the area, but didn’t get far because I slipped in a puddle and pulled a hamstring.
And you’d think my hollering in pain (and passing out) would have roused up a monk or two, but nope… I rode that wheel of Samsara all alone.
F’n Buddhists…
Gerard Jones on Finding Your Story
Oh no, this is my third post in a row on writing (!) after I’ve said how much I hated writing posts (!!). But it’s true I do hate writing posts, only this is from an interview with Gerard Jones. I loved Jones’ Killing Monsters and Men of Tomorrow. Read them. They are great.
(Thanks to pal Jay Ridler for sending this my way and absolute stranger Meghan Ward who conducted the interview.)
The Secret To Writing
From the movie adaption of Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser. I can’t remember the exact quote from the book, but I think this is close. Possibly the best piece of writing advice you’ll ever find in a misogynistic 1950s smut novel.
Ignoring Critiques
In my continuing quest to make rules to ignore apply to myself, here’s another one:
I read two books this week. Their names don’t matter much. I liked them both. They had me “turning pages”. But both had what I’ll call critique problems.
A critique group’s job is to find faults, but not all faults need to be corrected, nor can all faults be corrected. A critique problem is that thing your critique group would suggest changing, but shouldn’t be changed because doing so would grossly alter your vision of the story. Perfection shouldn’t be your goal. Your best and the space beyond it are your target. If you have control of your material and are achieving a certain effect and if following the advice of a critique would have you alter so much that that effect would be lost then ignore the critique.
This has been my second writing post. Chuseok pictures to follow.
Happy Chuseok!
Happy Chuseok! We’re off to Jinju for the holiday. We should be back sometime early next week.
10 Quotes For Today Apropos of Nothing
1. “Do not be afraid of irreverence towards the memory of those who controlled your childhood.” – Bertrand Russell
2. “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” – Samuel Johnson
3. “Everyone has inside themself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to their advantage.” – William S. Burroughs
4. “The collapse will not be televised. Ignored and alone, each of us will experience it singly. As blemish and accusation, you will be photoshopped from the American Dream group portrait. The lower you slip, the more invisible you will become. The disconnect between what’s real and what’s broadcast will become even more obscene by the day.” – Linh Dinh
5. “It was like becoming nothing and realizing one was nothing anyway, ever.” – Patricia Highsmith
6. “My work is one long triumph over my limitations.” – Charles Willeford
7. “Unknown to us, we live in the midst of causes whose effects will surprise posterity.” – Jan Potocki
8. “But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city’s essence says more about our own lives and our own states of mind. The city has no center other than ourselves.” – Orhan Pamuk
9. “Much is familiar there, little has changed except, of course, for those who return.” – Karen Lord
10. “So much knowledge could only end in starvation.” – Victor Hugo
Yesterweird 