It’s live over at LitReactor. And it’s in keeping with that write-up I did over at Fantasy Matters a bit ago. And I guess I also kind of winged off the same stuff in my reviews of Freedom and The Last Werewolf. And, hopefully it’s not in any working against my first write-up dealing with all this, “On Genre,” at The Cult. And, I could have even been talking about some of this stuff (though running it through ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfi…

and, nothing against Oklahoma, either. I watched Saving Grace, I mean, and I’ve read some good books and stories out of there — however, when I wrote ATBS, I remember very specifically driving everybody way around Oklahoma. Just because I knew that if I let anybody set tire there, that the story was going to be forever getting up to Kansas like ATBS needed.

None of which is what I’m about to link, here. What I’m linking is my invective against “OK…

Back in 2005 or so, I was under contract to write a sequel to All the Beautiful Sinners for Rugged Land — they’re gone now, but they were hot for a while, and produced some gorgeous books, and, as far as I know, did the first ever serious book trailer, too (For Henry’s List of Wrongs) — and it was supposed to be a sequel, this “Seven Spanish Angels,” a title I was of course ripping off, but also, it was a title that I felt would keep me honest. Becuase, I mean, you …

For ten Wednesdays the subject will be fiction. Mostly yours. With our class meetings going all afternoon, too, it’s not unlikely for you to be bringing a story to workshop each week. No essays or memoir or journalism either, please. Just lies, told in a fashion so compelling that we impart reality to them, that we extract truth from them.
Stories we get lost in and and don’t want to find our way out. Perfect titles, irresistible hook lines, scenes paced such that th…

1. : “Seven Things I’ve Learned So Far”
2. Predicate

…

1) Characters are most interesting when they lie. It’s when they’re the most naked, the most vulnerable, the most perplexing — the most like us. Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn’t thrown out of balance, and so there’s no need for a ‘rest of the story’ to balance it back.

2) If you keep having to dip into the story’s past to explain the present, then there’s a good chance your real story…

Or, the logo Jen Michalski’s got up over there’s so cool, I have to paste it here. Click on it for the post on “Exodus.”

…

not based on a true story

So I read more fiction than non-fiction. It’s a moral failing, I know: I prefer the make-believe. Too, though, I mean I write fiction. Makes sense to read it, yeah? Where else am I going to learn technique, cue into little narrative shuffles this or that writer pulled off, all that? To take it a little further, if I want to be part of the ‘dialogue’ of fiction, then I need to be listening to what the other writers are saying. But this starts …

Doing a reading today, a Dead Authors thing, where we all take turns reading stuff from writers who died this year. I’ve got David Foster Wallace, and’ll of course be doing the aloud thing to some Infinite Jest. Too, it was cool: I wrote a friend, asked him what I should read, and one of the two passages he got back to me about was one I already had marked. So that one it’ll be.

Anyway, paging through again, and I remember buying this book. I was in Tallahassee at the …

If only I could. But this would definitely be in there, right along with the TOTALL RECALL/2001 saga:

“The ‘Road to Perdition’ novelization was a nightmare, frankly,” Collins says. “I went after it for obvious reasons — I didn’t want a ‘Perdition’ novel written by someone else out there. I proceeded to write the best novelization of my career, staying faithful to David Self’s script — which was alre