Tag Archives: Onward and upward

Better (Late)

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A onetime coworker turned published author recently asked his Facebook followers what they wanted in an author’s web site. A few items popped up regularly. Upcoming tour dates, author bio and bibliography seemed to be most common, with a few requests for favorite books. One person wrote enthusiastically about J.K. Rowling’s site(s?) for the Harry Potter books, which apparently offered behind-the-scenes and other ‘insider’ content.

The gap between the requests and what’s been on offer here, at this web site, didn’t go unnoticed. I’ve revised the ‘about’ section to include explicitly biographical information. Until I get a traditional publishing house to bring one of these manuscripts into print a ‘bibliography’ page would be premature. Book tours, likewise.

The only thing I’m missing, really? More people like you.

On the Role of Imaginative Fiction, etc, etc. (Part II)

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I don’t suspect anyone would argue with the notion that one role of imaginative fiction is to provide readers with an opportunity to escape the everyday. Professors might sniff at escapist fiction, but there is good and not-so-good escapist stuff. The good stuff…

  • Features relatable, sympathetic characters
  • Provides a consistently and imaginatively detailed setting

    • J.R.R. Tolkien famously crafted his own languages and myths. His chum C.S. Lewis cobbled together Narnia out of bits borrowed from hither, thither, and Christianity. Narnia fascinated me as a child but lost my interest long before Middle-Earth. I attribute that in part to more vividly drawn characters (with Eustace the principal exception in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Tolkien also offered a more disturbing villain and heroes without access to a (lionesque) deus ex machina.

    He also offered a haunting vision of a utopia under threat. I’m not sure it’s fair to say good imaginative fiction is to required to present a vision of a world we think superior to our own. But that notion has never been far from my mind all these years I’ve been thinking about the world of Northern Arcadia.

    Hidden Structures in the Jungle

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    Back in the days when there were such things as physical bookstores, people had full time jobs doing nothing but ordering books. You met with publishing representatives, dined at the rep’s expense, and when you got back to the office you flipped through catalogs of upcoming releases and decided what titles you’d carry, and how many copies. You filled out order forms in long hand, and you became intimate with inventory management software of the same vintage as Lotus 1-2-3. You also got free books. More books that you could read.

    One book I did find time to read (after the bookstore closed) was Charles Nicholl’s The Creature on the Map. Reconstructing Walter Raleigh’s historical journey to find El Dorado is Nicholl’s overt purpose, but his prose does not shy away from lyricism. He describes the inability of Raleigh (or anyone) to find El Dorado:

    “The last, synaptic gap is never bridged. No one ever gets there. There is only the journey, the approach towards something that you cannot reach, something… that you dare not reach.”

    That resonates with me, even now that the city in the Amazon which no one believed existed (outside men like Raleigh) has been revealed as a reality, albeit without the streets of gold.