Thor's Day, May 8 2003

There is no joy in Mudville

Briefly, I had hope. With my money dwindling and a phone bill that has to be paid this weekend staring at me all beady-eyed, I revisited the local Unemployment website, and read something I hadn’t seen before… that the first check arrives ‘generally within ten days of filing your first claim’.

Now, since your first week on Unemployment is always unpaid, for reasons it does no good to complain about because the government just likes buggering people who can’t fight back, this means that you don’t get a check until… well, you don’t get a check for a long time after you lose your job, basically.

Nonetheless, briefly I had hope, because, as it turns out, today was the tenth day after I’d claimed my first legitimate week. So, I was seriously kind of hoping there’d be a check in the mail for me today, and I could breathe a sigh of relief and know that nothing had gone wrong with my claim (any number of things can, I know from past experience) and I’d have at least some money coming in, and could therefore spend the last little bit I’ve been hoarding like a miser for the past three weeks (on luxuries, like that phone bill, and groceries).

However… and you already guessed this, I’m sure, because I’m just such a good writer and I foreshadowed it so darned deftly… I got no check today.

So I’m depressed and freaked and scared and trying not to stress out, something not helped at all by the fact that I didn’t get any sleep last night, and they’ve been doing road work at the intersection forty feet from my bedroom all day long.

There is good news. My mom had a good day (she told us so in an email) and her health hasn’t been great lately, so that is, indeed, very good news, and has really made me feel a bit better. And in my life, I’ve gotten some nice emails from strangers lately who came across my work on the Internet and were kind enough to write and tell me how much they liked it. One of them, a Brit named Jonathan, seems to have some sort of electronic pulp adventure magazine that he wants to publish some of my work in, and there may actually be some (very small, he warns) amount of money in it for me, at some point in the abstract future.

Some other John, my editor at Joe Bob Briggs, recently sent me back my most recent review for my approval of his editorial changes. I loathe editorial changes; I hate it when people fuck with my writing, and honestly, I have never understood why people will accept your submission samples and give you a job writing for them (albeit an unpaid one) and then change everything you submit to stamp out every last vestige of your own individual style. But editors have to edit, I guess. I griped and bitched at him for messing with my opening paragraphs, but told him he was the boss and sent him back the review unchanged.

However, he did note in his response that as long as I’m writing for JBB, I don’t ever have to buy a book again; I can just tell him what I want and he’ll get me review copies. This is what we call here on Planet Darren a Very Good Thing, and I’m deeply grateful to John for pointing this out, and he can fuck with my writing all he wants if he’s going to send me free books… especially free books I specifically order from him. I mean, my God. Assuming I don’t piss him off (never a safe bet with me and editors), this means I won’t have to spend $40 on the new George R.R. Martin fantasy. (This is, of course, assuming George R.R. Martin ever manages to finish the next George R.R. Martin fantasy, and since every time he sits down to write the next George R.R. Martin fantasy he somehow manages to generate two or three intervening novels worth of material before he gets to it, I’m not taking any bets.)

I did place an order for new stuff from S.M. Stirling, Barbara Hambly, Lois McMaster Bujold, Thomas Harlan, and ‘Martha Wells’, and if I get al that, I will be a happy (and busy) camper indeed. Assuming, of course, I’m not homeless at the time. And even if I am, I’ll have stuff to read on the park benches.

Actually, my brother Paul tells me I’m welcome to move in with him. This would be good for Paul; he desperately needs a roommate, especially an older brother to kick his ass and make him clean his place up and stop smoking so much dope. And he has a group of gamer buddies, so I could probably run my RPG out there, and that wouldn’t be bad, I’d enjoy DMing again. On the other hand, leaving aside the fact that I hate living with people and the idea of me being a good influence on someone is just wrong and scary, Paul lives in Zephyrhills, and I lived in Zephyrhills for four months when I first moved down here, and there is no work in Zephyrhills other than retail… fast food service, waiting tables, working at Wal-Mart, etc. Z-Hills is forty miles from Tampa and there is no connecting bus service and there is no office work there, or anything that would use any of my skills. So if I end up getting carted out to Z-Hills, well, in addition to it being another Great Furniture Purge similar to the one I went through when I moved down here (and I have no idea where in Paul’s small apartment I’d put the stuff I HAVE to salvage, like my books and videotapes and DVDs and shelves and TV and stereo and computer stuff), well, it will also be a one way trip to Suicide Alley, since I sincerely doubt I could stock shelves in a K-Mart for a year without killing myself.

That may be putting the cart before the horse; I’m not sure there’s a retail manager in the world who wants to hire me.

Well. Maybe my Unemployment check will show up tomorrow.

Oh, yes. I knocked off that redraft of Zap Force the other day. It's as final as it's going to get until someone decides to pay me for it. And after getting some feedback from Hartmut, I'm sort of working on Revenants, a really bad unfinished horror novel of mine, again. If I get it finished I'll post it on the Doc Nebula site, but, honestly, it's really REALLY bad.

MORONS. I’VE GOT MORONS ON MY TEAM.

I feel like Lois Lane. I don’t look like her; whether that’s fortunate or not I leave as an exercise for the reader. But I certainly feel like her lately, since while Lois was the only person in the world who just KNEW Clark Kent was Superman, I seem to be the only person in the world who just KNOWS ‘Martha Wells’ is Barbara Hambly writing under a pseudonym.

Last year, I came across a new author at Borders, in the SF/Fantasy section. Her name was Martha Wells, and the two books I found by her were called Death Of The Necromancer and City of Bones. They sounded interesting, and being bored, I picked them both up. I started reading Death Of The Necromancer, and before I finished the first page, I said to myself “Whoa, this woman really likes Barbara Hambly”. Her narrative voice was extremely similar to Hambly’s, as was her technique for doing a lot of really intensely detailed description of minor scenery details as background atmosphere, her obsession with social and cultural nuance, and the fact that, as it quickly emerged, this book centered around two protagonists, a man and a woman, who were romantically linked and who had very different skills and specialties. All of this is very typical of Hambly.

Now, if you haven’t read Hambly yourself (you should!), just take my word for it when I say, she has perhaps the most distinct writing style in fantasy fiction. I wasn’t even remotely thinking of Hambly when I started reading this book by ‘Wells’, and within two paragraphs, I’d made the observation I note above.

Around the fourth chapter, things suddenly coalesced in my mind, and I realized… this wasn’t a book written by an author strongly influenced by Barbara Hambly. This was a Barbara Hambly novel.

There are a lot of reasons I concluded that, and now, having read everything else “Martha Wells” has written, I continue to believe it. I think the factor that tipped it over for me in Necromancer was that the setting, a fantasy empire named Ile-Rien, was very similar to Victorian London, with, you know, some supernatural stuff thrown in. And Hambly herself is fascinated with certain historical eras and places, and Victorian London is one of them. She set her flawed but still very enjoyable vampire novel Those Who Hunt The Night there… thus creating a Victorian London with, you know, some supernatural stuff thrown in.

Beyond that, I could write a doctoral dissertation dissecting the stylistic… not similarities, but, well, absolute identicalness… if that’s a word (and my word processor isn’t redlining it, so I guess it must be)… between ‘Wells’ and Hambly… the fact that ‘Wells’ and Hambly ‘both’ write about the same sort of protagonists living in the same sort of worlds having the same sort of adventures exploring the same specific themes, that ‘both’ are fascinated with the same specific historical periods, that ‘both’ occasionally use exactly the same background details in their work, like the artificially created ‘ruins’ casually mentioned as an architectural feature in both Hambly’s Those Who Hunt The Night and Wells The Element of Fire…

But, as I say, while I could go into all that at great and tedious length, I’m not going to, because, well, no one reading this cares. I am, however, going to say this:

People continue to astonish me.

Now, I found ‘Martha Wells’ website last year and sent her an email, asking, you know, if this was supposed to be some big secret, and if so, well, it wasn’t, it was pretty frickin obvious to anyone with three working brain cells who’d read both ‘Wells’ and Hambly’s work. ‘Wells’ wrote back and said she was flattered by my comparison, she was a big fan of Hambly’s (yeah, I bet) but she wasn’t her. No, no, no.

I wrote her back with a casual, quickly typed paragraph listing, off the top of my head, many of the similarities between her work and Hambly’s, and asked her who she really thought she was kidding, and she didn’t respond to it. And that was that.

Now, a year or so later, I find a Barbara Hambly fansite run by a woman named Deborah Thompson, who seems to be a very pleasant moron. No, that’s not fair. She seems to be a very pleasant authority-struck drone who is absolutely incapable of evaluating without bias any new data that in any way conflicts with her preconceptions, or especially, with those preconceptions fed to her by her Authority Figure.

People like this offend me on a fundamental level.

Anyway, I wrote and asked her the same thing I’d asked ‘Martha Wells’… was this something that was well known, or was there some reason for keeping it a secret, and if so, just tell me and I’d stop bothering people about it.

And here’s what Little Miss Couldn’t Think For Herself With A Gun To Her Head told me:

Ahhhhhh.

That’s, as she notes so wisely and succinctly, it.

See, she’s never read any of Martha Wells writing. Nonetheless, she just knows my hypothesis isn’t true. And how does she know? Well, because Barbara Hambly says so.

Stephen King tells us, in the introduction to his Richard Bachman collection, that people spotted the similarities in styles between his own byline and ‘Bachman’s immediately. And they wrote and asked him about it within months of his first Bachman book (which I think was Rage, and yeah, if I’d picked that one up on the spinner rack when it first came out, I’d have probably tripped on King, too) hitting the stands. King’s response, he notes, was simplicity itself: he lied.

So, you know, look… if a writer is using a pseudonym, they are generally going to have a reason. The writer themselves saying ‘oh, nooooooooo, that’s not ME under a pseudonym, oh heaven forfend’ isn’t exactly convincing.

But, again, according to Deborah Thompson… “that’s it.”

Now, I’ll admit, it’s just a hypothesis, and I could be wrong, and I freely admit to that. Perhaps Martha Wells and Barbara Hambly are two entirely different people and they just write about pretty much exactly the same things in exactly the same, very unique, way, and that’s all there is to that. And this isn’t really about whether I’m right or wrong, although, again, I note that I have read and reread everything Hambly has written, and everything published under the ‘Martha Wells’ name, and I am a writer myself and one of the very few analytical thinkers there are in this world (he said with utter candor) and I am as certain as I am of anything that ‘Wells’ is a pseudonym for Hambly. A great many writers… John Varley, Joe Haldeman, S.M. Stirling, Spider Robinson, Lois McMaster Bujold… are influenced by Robert A. Heinlein, but you can’t mistake any of them for Heinlein. And Heinlein’s style is extraordinarily simple and straightforward compared to Hambly’s. Hambly’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable, and I tell you this in simple truth… Martha Wells is a pseudonym for Barbara Hambly. As the Eagles have noted, I could be wrong… but I’m not. No I’m not.

Nonetheless, what this is really about is how astounded I am to run into a nominal intelligent adult who can tell me, quite flatly, that my theory is just plain frickin’ wrong, even though she’s never read anything by Martha Wells. She knows I’m wrong, because, well, the person my theory indicates is misleading everyone has told her I’m wrong. And, well… that’s it.

CORPORATE ANGEL

The Season Finale of Angel nearly has me hoping the show comes back next year, if only to see what Angel and his crew are going to do with the entire resources of a satanic law firm at their disposal… although, of course, anyone with a functional cerebrum knows that Wolfram & Hart won’t really be at their disposal, the whole thing is simply an exercise in subtle corruption.

Still, ‘subtle’ is something I’ve grown unused to in Angel, so I have to say, I enjoyed last night’s ep.

Some stuff was still irksome. There are doubtless viewers out there who found Gunn’s confrontation in the White Room with the panther totem to be charmingly enigmatic. Me, I’m a writer, and I have long recognized in Gunn that worst of all possible things for a writer… a token character put in for reasons having nothing to do with good melodrama, whom no one has the vaguest idea what to do with. Gunn is, pretty obviously, the token minority for the entire Buffy franchise, and no writer has ever had more than a vague glimmering on how to make him useful or interesting. He is, basically, a fighter, in a team that already has two superhuman warriors who will always be better fighters than he is. (Two becomes three or four, or four or five, if the scripters du jour decide to have ElectroGirl drop by for a visit, or forget for a week, as they frequently do, that Fred and Lorne aren’t supposed to be any good in combat.)

So when Gunn got sent up to the White Room to interact, in a dialogue free manner, with a great big black panther, and came back down again smirking smugly without giving us any real details on what happened, others may have seen it as brilliant and mysterious. I just realized it was an act of creative desperation. Gunn is a character without a characterization; what in the world was Wolfram & Hart going to offer to tempt him that would be anything like as nuanced and interesting as what they dangled in front of the rest of Angel’s crew? Well… the answer was, we don’t know, and that’s because the writers don’t know, either. Nice pump fake, guys, but I saw you move your eyes.

Other than that, though, I actually enjoyed the episode quite a lot. Lilah, as always, got all the best dialogue, and one can only hope that if the show returns next year, her reanimated presence will continue to be a recurring feature. The various permutations that Angel’s crew went through were (always with the exception of Gunn) interesting and fun, but what really sucked me in was the ‘happy ending’ for Connor. Once again, Angel sacrifices everything he wants most for the good of the one he loves… I mean, you gotta love that shit, don’t you? And the retroactive fairy tale All American Boy’s Life existence Angel bought for Connor neatly wipes out all Connor’s immoral acts and ethical lapses in a way I, personally, find completely satisfying.

Now, normally, something that ends up deleting a whole bunch of stuff from the subjective reality of a particular show bothers me. In this case, however, I’ve considered the Connor character to be a grotesque blunder since he came back from Quartoth as an angsty, snarling teenager, and when Fred mused aloud “Who’s Connor?” at the end of the show, well, I liked it. And Angel’s expression, as he gazed through the window at the son who now had as close to an ideal life as anyone ever could, bought by the sacrifice of the real father he will now never know, was a perfect alloy of despair and joy.

I should also note (intending no slight to Charisma Carpenter at all) that Cordelia has never been more likable than in the last several chapters, and yet another reason I found this particular episode so charming was that they didn’t ‘wrap up’ her plotline by miracling her out her coma. It might be cruel to say that the only good Cordelia Chase is a dead Cordelia Chase, and in fact, it would be inaccurate… a comatose one works fine for me, too.

If Angel doesn’t come back, I really won’t mind much… one good ep can’t make up for a pretty bad season, overall. But if it does come back, with this as a set up for a new direction… well, I can live with that, too.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough with, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.

NOTICE

There is such a thing as a social contract. Even among bloggers. And I pay attention to it.