I just answered my first batch of questions from Formspring.me earlier today. If you don’t know what that is, click the “Interview Me” button in the nav bar and ask me a question! I put it there because I know sometimes I was frustrated that the interviews I read with authors I admired didn’t ask the questions I was the most interested in. So make my day and ask me a question, if you feel like it.

I’ll continue to repost them here, periodically.

Q: If you could change one thing about The Water Sign what would it be?

A: As I continue to write additional books in its setting, I’m sure there will be additional foreshadowing I wish I could go back and put in for effect, but generally speaking, the book is exactly as I intended it to be.

Q: If there was one thing you could tell Ayax what would it be?

A: Don’t give up, there is still hope.

Q: What would you say were you biggest influences? (Assuming this isn’t too personal:) how much of the book would you say was inspired by personal experiences and emotions?

A: I read Ender’s Game at a very early age—probably my first ever “adult” novel. The work of William Gibson and Frank Herbert also made similarly strong impressions, so I think those three probably account for a lot of the ways I approach/think about SF. This is a huge question though as I feel like so much of what I’ve seen and read throughout my life went into this book, my list could go on forever. James Joyce, Alan Moore, Hideaki Anno, David Foster Wallace, Takashi Murakami, Carl Jung, Radiohead, Allen Ginsberg, C. S. Lewis, The Bible, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mamoru Oshii, T. S. Eliot … sorry, this is without much reflection. Ask a follow up if you’d like more specifics.

As far as the personal part: obviously, I was never a child soldier. But many of the situations Ayax encounters, specifically in their emotional quality, draw from my life. I’m not sure I’d like to say any more than that.

Found this article over at assertTrue() about the myth of Japanese longevity amusing and insightful.

We perpetuate a lot of myths about Japan. Part of it is certainly a fetishization. We take their prominent and longstanding cultural identity and make it all-encompassing of their nature instead of a lens through which to understand highly specific and sometimes contradicting identities. (That is not a uniquely American mistake. There are a great deal of myths about America from the perspective of the Japanese also.)

In this case, I found the disrobing of the myth a little too delightful not to make note of it. Yes, the Japanese are a quite healthy people for a variety of reasons, but they are not above defrauding the government. Perhaps if the bureaucracy were a bit more diligent in its bookkeeping, the life expectancy numbers might not look so impressive. Instead the statistics remain skewed by those collecting dead grandparents’ pensions.

But the most interesting question: is the myth now perpetuated by us, or by the Japanese themselves?

Five years. That’s how long it took me from the start of writing this novel to getting it published. Five years of struggle and self-doubt. The worst-best best-worst years of my life.

I had never finished writing a novel prior to writing this one. I’d been writing stories since I was seven-years-old, but at some point my imagination got so big and determined that I started attempting things with a finish line too far out of reach. I would write the start of something, get frustrated, give up, start the next one, get more frustrated, give up again, get a little further again … and endless series of failures.

I was an utter failure of a writer for most of my adult life.

I have no idea how many novels I failed to write. I don’t know that I could accurately count them if I tried. There were too many over too long a period of time to offer more than the vague guess in my biography. All I know for certain is that all of them, every single one, failed. I failed to finish them. They failed to be great enough, engaging enough to earn the sweat and frustration of additional pages. They did not have the brilliance to deserve that momentum so they died, skeletons of creatures that will never live.

Eventually, one unhappy October, I sat down and started what would become The Water Sign. I’d just had one of my first real disappointments in life. Heartbreak. It was chewing me up like the starving digging into a hot meal. (That’s something else to keep in mind about writing. Its engine is comprised of the ugliest emotions: shame, hubris, self-loathing, horror, anguish, rage. I’m not sure you can be a successful novelist without suffering deeply. I try to imagine a life without it but I don’t know if words coexist in that life.)

At some point, the thing I was writing (really, the thing I had tried and failed to write twice before) started taking on a life of its own. I would get back to my apartment after working as a reporter all day and put down more words, trading nonfiction for fiction. They kept building, awful at first, mediocre after another 10 revisions, less-than-hideous after 10 more. At a certain point, they would reach the plateau of my limited ability. Worse, the endless attention and care with them produced no further pages, only a continually evolving set of about 60 or so. So I had to make a rule—once I finished a chapter I wasn’t allowed to return to it. I could read it again, if I absolutely had to, but that was it. For three years I worked like that, showing no one.

I don’t know if it’s possible to even imagine that. Imagine if someone said, “Graph your soul for three years. Show no one. It must be beautiful because they may see it some day and in seeing it, see the truest you.” Who can handle that pressure?

Eventually, I found myself writing the secret final lines of the book and shipping two drafts to Hawaii where my parents would open them in time for Christmas. That elation was short-lived. Don’t buy into anybody who tells you writing a novel is a series of highs and lows. It’s a series of lows and lowers, punctuated by the occasional week of sunshine to catch your breath. Three years after starting, I knew there was still a huge amount of work to be done. Sweeping revisions necessary, tens of thousands of words to be added and further sculpted. More intricacies to be spelled out in the plot that’s beginning to spiral out of control. Another year. Back at the screen. Sitting alone in the coffee shop, struggling, raging, growing bitter with the work, how it takes you away from everyone, how meaningless it might be anyway. Four years now, but what can you do? Throw it away? The only thing that might be worse than to keep going.

I would emerge at the end of the day a crumpled shell of myself, beat down, my brain swimming in clauses and structures too complicated to diagram any longer. It would take me an hour or more sometimes to have coherent conversation with friends again. I dove so deep into the fictional world that I had trouble living in the real one.

I went through a series of drafts. I began to struggle with serious depression. The harder I worked on it, the worse I felt about it and myself by extension. I began to dread my friends’ requests to read it, their friendly enthusiasm. Who wants to strip in front of their friends? What if they don’t like you anymore? What if they don’t think you’re beautiful? What if it sucks? What if it’s garbage? What if they don’t understand? Of course they won’t understand.

Finally year four came to an end, and I was so beaten by the manuscript, I knew I couldn’t take it through any more drafts. That’s how a novel finishes. It crushes you through all its staggering, endless work, and finally you abandon it.

Now was time to query agents and hopefully, eventually, publishers. It’s no small miracle I got an offer so early. Normally a novel has to suffer through years of countless rejection to even wind up on the bookshelf. I was hoping to have a publisher within two years if I collected enough rejections. So I grit my teeth and started the absurd, stupefying task of telling someone why they have to read your book in a paragraph or less.

I got one rejection and two non-answers before, by the grace of God, Booktrope made the fastest offer I’ve ever heard of. It was another year of editing and further disappointments to get it to the shelf, but this time I had allies. An incredible, thoughtful editor. A book manager who wanted me to succeed. A brilliant cover artist. The light at the end of the tunnel was starting to shine.

Then one miraculous day, five years after pushing the boulder up the hill, there it is on Amazon.

Now comes the new struggle. The held breath while I wait to see if the world ignores it. Even after five years of giving it everything you’ve got, it’s no guarantee. It might fail anyway. No readers, no reviews, no interest, no discussion, no excitement, no approval. You still might be an utter failure of a writer anyway.

Of course life doesn’t quit with the disappointments. More heartbreak. God, how could you how could you how could you?

So you sit down at the coffee shop. You open up Scrivener and you type The Fire Sign, then the first line. Then the next … the next … the next … You put it into the work. All the pain. You have to. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe you aren’t beautiful after all.

But what can you do? Quit? The only thing that might be worse than to keep going.

CELEBRATE? SHIRTLESS!

See the book.

Bad news guys. It turns out the internets will make you poor.

Besides the fact that this mythical “middle class of creative professionals” never existed in the publishing industry as far as I can tell and that new blood to the game is offered absolutely abysmal terms if they want to play by big publishing’s rules, there are holes in this argument large enough to fit a .torrent of the entirety of HBO’s line-up into. Primarily, the adolescent proposition that scarcity equals ease of reproduction. Although an artist’s work can be infinitely copied/pirated/whathaveyou, this does not mean that there was not scarcity in the original act of creation. In fact, artistic works represent the most obviously kind of scarcity when considering their originality. It is derivative or uninspired work that is non-scarce because equivalent entertainment exists to compete against it and drive down demand. In this light, a single novel’s value approaches infinity relative to its originality.

What must be worked through is how to adequately benefit the artist from that potential value but I don’t think the answer lies in a regression toward draconian DRM schemes and other virtual implements that manufacture “scarcity”—that way lies credit default swaps and economic unfeasibility and inevitable catastrophe. If we presume that piracy must accompany a devaluation of the product, this argument almost holds together, but the motivations behind piracy are more complex and multifaceted than perceptions of value or lack thereof.

What disappoints me is that this article reads more like an excuse to excoriate capitalism, wage class war on behalf of a vaguely disenfranchised other (who may or may not exist), and argue for some vaguely marxist utopian internet revolution. Sadly for the author, the internet is most certainly a microcosm of libertarianism if it exemplifies any one political tendency and marxist ideology seems all but incompatible with an anarchic global communications network. What we need to really wrap our brains around is a post-scarcity future, a concept which may be more utopian an untenable than even these idyllic Marxist visions, but which minor elements of capitalism appear to be marching toward like some inevitable event horizon. In a quasi post-scarcity microeconomy, like the publishing landscape in the advent of the ereader, how does the market reward the novelist and what terms must she adapt to to best utilize its unique properties? That’s the million dollar question.

The revolution will not be live tweeted.

There is a destructive insularity to academic language. We see it in the sciences, where the terminology has grown so specialized that many find themselves unable to read the journals outside of their field with any comprehension. But even more destructively, the humanities seems more and more intent on dressing its assertions in the garb of pomp and importance and incomprehensibility, a language designed to alienate its readers and obfuscate its message. It is a language which implies meaning and hyper-intellectualism but merely hides what can be stated plainly. A language that fatigues itself in its pointless convolutions, hiding base assertions under layers of vocabulary and cross-disciplinary reference to sound “academic” (as if appearing so confers the merit of true study). What is the value of a literary theory that lacks the precision and lucidity of the texts it seeks to critique? Does it deserve investment?

In this regard, I found this article on Lacan particularly damning. It seems whole generations of the academy have been bamboozled into thinking he had something to say or that it held any importance for their field. It’s a fascinating look at cultural chauvinism and the temptations of hubris presented in the formation of psychoanalysis. More than that, it’s an honest indictment of intellectual masochism, the need to appear to be smart, and the sycophantic response offered to such insular languages that allows them to perpetuate. Reading it certainly made me think twice about anyone who dares to drop his name in their argument.

For further reading, here are two equally enjoyable articles on the subjects touched here: the poverty of structuralism and further antics of Lacan.

On Saturday, Aaron Swartz killed himself.

As a long-time user of Reddit, I was taken aback at the news. When I read into the circumstances of his death, his legacy of promoting the public good through the internet, and the absurdity of his Kafkaesque legal situation, I felt only a rising anger.

I’ve been trying to make sense of just how appalling this is. For essentially a non-crime, Swartz was hounded by overzealous prosecutors into a state of despair so acute that suicide seemed a reasonable course of action. I don’t know that there’s any other appropriate way to understand the series of events.

Swartz got into legal trouble after downloading a large quantity of articles from JSTOR, a database of scientific papers, through MIT’s internal network. In the era of copyright absurdity, even though the legality of his actions is only vaguely questionable, a couple of prosecutors decided to try their best to destroy his life.

I suppose they will be pleased with themselves to know they succeeded.

If you’d like to add your voice to the chorus demanding justice for Aaron, a good start might be this petition to the Whitehouse.

This will be old news for many of you, but my goodness does Saul Bellow know how to write a sentence. The overall arc of the story I’m less impressed by, but his ability with the language just shames me when I observe it.

There was (and still may be) a critical urge to declare that Americans were not very graceful with their inherited language. We’ve reached a refutation of this mode I think because it seems that now the more recently a voice has inherited English, the more their words are examined and regarded. (I’m speaking indirectly about the popularity of immigrant fiction here, against which I hold no malice. Merely an interesting note on how tastes have changed.) But going back to my original point, it seems to me there’s been a kind of euro-centrism or maybe even just a certain line of thinking in the literary establishment that Americans didn’t really seem to know how to handle English on the page, or had become too exhausted to make the fullest of its possibilities. Maybe this attitude still prevails. I don’t pay this kind of person much attention anymore, but one need only look at Bellow to scoff at such ideas.

You may have noticed there’s something a bit unusual going on with the banner image. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

There’s really nothing to add to something like this.

People are surprised when they see footage like this, but it’s a common state of affairs. Recent estimates have said that child soldiers participate in three quarters of all ongoing conflicts.

Pause and consider that for a moment.