Sir Hugh and the Snail

February 21, 2014 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

When Mollusks Attack

We don’t know why images of armed knights fighting snails are common in 13th and 14th century illuminated manuscripts.

Through a tweet from one of my favorite authors, William Gibson, I found my way to a post by Sarah J. Biggs at the British Library. “One of our post-medieval colleagues noticed a painting of a knight engaging in combat with a snail.”

Knight v Snail V: Revenge of the Snail (from the Smithfield Decretals, southern France (probably Toulouse), with marginal scenes added in England (London), c. 1300-c. 1340, Royal MS 10 E IV, f. 107r) | Medieval Manuscripts Blog, British Library, Sarah J. Biggs

Images of knights fighting snails are all over these priceless books, Biggs writes. “But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange.”

Her brief essay, Knight v Snail, fraught with gastropods and gallantry, refers to an article by Carl Purdym. He proposes that the imagery was a joke. “Medieval readers thought there was something funny…but none of them bothered to write down what that was.”

So we have the setup. But we’ve lost the punchline. And our poor, peculiar, and staggered business—the focus of this month’s Inside Publishing theme here at Writer Unboxed—has earned a chance to take comfort in the obscurity of such a medieval meme.

Our authors at last may be pulling up alongside those snails and gaining the right to a little modern mysteria of their own: making creative decisions without the bias or prejudice of the publishing realm.

And yet we’re still trying to work out the punchline, to decide what it all means. [Read more…]

To the Disconsolate Writer Who Hates Her Pace

January 20, 2014 By Jan O'Hara

Moai Rano, Easter Island from Wikimedia Commons

From an anonymous email:

Dear Jan: I’ve seen you describe yourself as a slow writer. I am one also, and it makes me discouraged to the point I’ve considered quitting. Do you have any advice?

Ah, yes. Speed-of-sloth is the precise phrase I use, and while at one point it was a way of laughing through my pain and frustration, now I type it with a sense of peace. It’s simply become a way to adjust others’ expectations.*

I also consider it to be temporary in that, as I learn about my process, I believe I’ll accelerate. Someday I’ll hit speed-of-snail.

How did I get to that healthier self-concept? It’s often easier for me to see what I believe and why I believe it when I think of others in a similar situation. So I asked myself, What do I know about how to treat people who’ve been labeled slow in other contexts?

While I could talk about my experience with adults in my former medical practice—in fact, I did when I wrote the initial versions of this post, and the principles are the same—you deserve a more visceral and unvarnished truth. Let me tell you about a fine-boned child in my life and the phone call I received one evening, concerning his reading abilities. “Sam” wasn’t keeping up in the educational system, they said. Sam needed help. Caring for Sam took me out of an intellectual headspace into a fierce and stormy advocacy.

Do you have a similar child in mind? Keep them with you as we go through this exercise and I prod you with questions.

[Read more…]

Scale: That All the Books Should Be Counted

December 20, 2013 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Caesar Augustus: All Is Forgiven

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
Luke 2:1, King James Version, New Testament

That glow on the faces of so many of us Protestant ministers’ children this time of year is a reconnection. Like sticking our fingers into the science-project sockets of our childhoods, we sit around tempting mythology to fry us again, gazing at this verse and that phrase by the self-published (papyrus format) author Luke.

And, lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone ’round about them: and they were sore afraid.

We read Luke as we still hear him: in the heaving, ancient, world-splitting spectacle of the King James Version of the New Testament. Those wild, even preposterous images thunder again in our heads:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Our good colleague, the publishing consultant-prophet Brian O’Leary has reminded me in the Tweeterie this week that, of course, we may well be hearing more from crafty translators than from that busy desert scribbler Luke, himself.

And what would the everlastingly quoted apostle say now if he could see how many times he has been published?

In how many translations?

In how many formats across the millennia?

[Read more…]

Be Bigger Than Chickens: an Interview with Joshilyn Jackson

November 18, 2013 By Jan O'Hara

I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could.

The opening lines of Someone Else’s Love Story belong to Shandi Pierce, a young, virgin mother who is determined, if she can dodge bullets, to confront the secrets of her past. That choice will impact her friends and family, as well as the above-named William, currently at war with what feels like a dark destiny.

And their author is Joshilyn Jackson (pronounced JOSSilyn), a NYT-bestselling author, award-winning audiobook narrator, actor, MFA instructor, and all-round firecracker—which you’d know if you’ve ever taken time to visit her blog Faster than Kudzu. From her home in Decatur, Georgia, I’m so glad Joshilyn’s agreed to answer my questions about writing.

Jan: “Bullets” is the title of Part I of SELS, and it begins with the Emily Dickinson quote about hope being “the thing with feathers.” The dark humor and theme are familiar to those of us who’ve read your work. Why are you drawn to redemption stories? Are they inherently funny?

Joshilyn: Story is how I explain the world to myself. I have a hard time sitting still through a sermon, but I will listen to a parable all day long. I tend to engage with big questions, not to answer them, but to explore them.

Some of the questions that always interest me: What are the mechanics of redemption? How far can we go into the black, and what tiny lights can call us home? What does the imperfect, broken, sometimes ugly human modeling of perfect grace look like?

I think I touch on all these questions in every one of my books to some degree or other, and then each book has its own question, too. More on that in a second, but I don’t think redemption stories are inherently funny. I think they are inherently heartbreaking, and humor is my favorite coping mechanism. As a bonus, it can get people to read books on topics they might otherwise avoid like plague. But it has a downside, too. It can make me easy to dismiss.

Last week at a tradeshow dinner, one bookseller was recommending Someone Else’s Love Story to another. She said, “You’ll like it. It’s hilarious. A very fast-paced, light read. [pullquote]…humor is my favorite coping mechanism. As a bonus, it can get people to read books on topics they might otherwise avoid like plague. But it has a downside, too. It can make me easy to dismiss.[/pullquote]

The second bookseller asked what the book was about, and the first one began trying to explain. It was such a list of horrors: desperate grief, attempted suicide, extremely damaging sexual felonies, loneliness, terror, the willingness to trade your own life for another human being’s life.

She eventually petered out, and there was a pregnant pause. Then the second bookseller said, “That doesn’t sound hilarious.”

The one who had read it said, “It was, though. But…” She turned to me, slightly irked. “Dammit. Now I have to go back and read it again.”

Shandi grew up in a home with religious tensions, where minor decisions, such as meal choices, could ignite familial wars. For the most part, she’s learned to avoid spiritual conversations. Yet it’s her virgin birth and other “miracles” which push others into growth and accommodation. However accidental, is this a book about how America might heal its divisions?

[Read more…]

Leveling Up: In Praise of Writer Dads

November 15, 2013 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Image: iStockphoto - FunSand — Image: iStockphoto – FunSand

According to my kids I’m “funny a lot” and make them laugh. I’m a goofball. My wife says I’m excited because I have my perfect audience right now. I’m yucking it up for all I can get, because I know that shit’ll evaporate come twelve or thirteen. Hopefully by then they’ll like video games, or books, and we can continue bonding there.

New York Times bestseller Tobias Buckell is a Hugo-, Nebula-, Prometheus-, and John W. Campbell-nominated author.

His twins are four years old.

When I was their age I basically didn’t have a father. By the time my stepdad arrived, I was a thirteen-year-old pretty set in his ways, so I don’t really relate to anyone on that level.

Buckell is the interview subject of Guy LeCharles Gonzalez in the debut of his new series of such profiles, “Writer Dads,” at VQRonline.org—Virginia Quarterly Review, the digital edition of which is directed by Jane Friedman, our great, good colleague and friend.

In the inaugural outing of the monthly series, Gonzalez introduces a new focus on a member of our community who has been overshadowed for a long time: the writer dad.

The writer dad.

“The writer who,” you ask?

We know the writer mom, of course, as a cherished icon in today’s authorial community and in publishing.

Even to say we “know” her is an understatement. We rightly revere her. We find her nourishing energy at every turn in writing today. Whole communities, major ones, revolve around the concept of the writer mom, this brave, inspiring soul who manages, somehow, to tackle the exhaustion of having and raising children, running a household, usually working outside the home as well, and writing.

Not for nothing, after all, are Therese Walsh and Kathleen Bolton, the creators of Writer Unboxed, itself, referred to as “Founders & Mamas.”

If anything, it’s not rare for the writer mom’s story to sound like this passage from Buckell in his interview:

When the twins were first born, as I write late at night, I just took on the late shift. My wife would go to bed at 10:30-ish, and I would be on. I’d write, and then wake the twins up with bottles, feed and change them, then put them back to bed every few hours until about six a.m. (at first they were on a strict feed-every-three-hour due to jaundice, and it became a regular schedule). Then I slept during the early part of the day. We teamed up for late afternoon and evening. We each got seven to eight hours of sleep.

[pullquote]I’m grateful to Gonzalez for spotlighting this subject so many are hesitant to touch, not with a 10-foot poll of how many among us think family men can have as viable and praiseworthy a challenge in writing as family women do. [/pullquote]

But we don’t hear or read such passages frequently by or about writer dads…who also know exhaustion, sacrifice, the wry laugh about “finding balance” in life, and the everyday heroics of struggling to keep a manuscript fed along with everyone else in the house.

[Read more…]