A Writer’s Life in October

Posted on October 25, 2008 by fsdthreshold

Such busy, busy days and nights, and so much happening! It’s been one of the best Octobers I can remember in quite awhile. For the most part, the weather has been gloriously warm and sunny, and I’ve spent as much time outdoors as possible. (The sun is so rare in Niigata that when it comes out, you drop everything and run outside in full absorption mode.)

Seriously, where to begin? First, the Fan Art is beginning to roll on Cricket‘s website, and they’ve got the first three pictures up of “The Star Shard” done by young readers. (www.cricketmagkids.com) I can’t describe the feeling of seeing artwork drawn for a story that entered the world through my mind and fingers. It’s humbling . . . it’s moving . . . it’s awesome . . . it’s — well, indescribable! Actually, it’s the second time I’ve had this rare joy. The first was years ago, when a teacher friend cajoled his students into drawing various villains from Dragonfly. I still treasure those. When kids draw the Harvest Moon heavies, they’re terrifying!

Second, just today, a friend passed along to me a review of Dragonfly written by a friend of hers on LiveJournal. (Ooh, am I allowed to say that on WordPress?) It’s truly uplifting to know that someone somewhere curled up with my old book and spent the day riveted. That’s the wonder of art. That poor book has been wandering around out in the world for close to a decade now — knocked around, remaindered, pulped, offered for sale on Amazon for a penny. . . . But it still connects with readers now and then. It still offers a world to escape into. This reviewer gave it an “A+.” She writes:

“Today was a good day. I spent it in bed under my pink polka-dot blanket reading page after page of Dragonfly until I could read no more and it was finished. /…/ I found it utterly fantastic. /…/ Frederic S. Durbin creates an entire world in only 350 pages [sounds like the paperback], and I would have to say that the world he creates is one of the biggest, most creative worlds I have ever ventured to by way of reading. /…/ Throughout the end chapters of this book I found my eyes welling with tears. I honestly did not know how this book would end up until the very last battle, and even then I had my doubts; but I will leave you to find out which side prevails.

“I think that everyone that enjoys embracing the dark side of life or ever wonders what hides in the shadows of a dark room will enjoy this book because it acknowledges our worst fears. I also think that anyone that enjoys female leads will find entertainment in this novel. Dragonfly is a strong and witty little girl wise beyond her years.”

Soli Deo gloria! And thank you, o thou friend-of-a-friend!

So, I’m about to head to Calgary for this year’s World Fantasy Convention. I’m really excited about that, as you can imagine! I’m scheduled to do a 30-minute reading again this year. Last time, I opted for three shorter selections to fill the half-hour, going for variety. This time, for the sake of experimentation, I’m planning to use the whole time to deliver one unified whole — namely, the Brigit and Phocion section from “Seawall,” the last novelette in Agondria. I chose that one because it’s an encapsulated, standalone tale, and because I think it’s some of the best writing in that book. (It gives me a little chance to act, too! Oh, the drama! “Alas, poor Yorick!”)

At the Convention, I’m also planning to have lunch with my agent on Friday. It will actually be our first face-to-face meeting. He is truly worth his weight in gold and then some — he’s working so hard to get my novel-length version of “The Star Shard” sold to the best possible publishing house. (I’m now thinking of calling that novel The Star Shard. Isn’t that brilliant and innovative? Maybe some fans of the story will notice a connection between the titles!)

While I’m dropping phrases like “my agent” and sounding all like a hoity-toity writer, I’ve got to tell you about a day I spent recently. The theme of this posting is a writer’s life in October, and this day in question, my major activities really sound like I’m living the writing life — like a page from the G.Q. of Writers, if such a magazine existed. Heh, heh — read on:

First (this is all one day, mind you), I made notes on a bundle of my poems from my old chapbook Songs of Summerdark at the request of a colleague at the university. She’s a composer who delights in setting words to music, and she wants to take a whack at some of my poems. So I was going through picking out poems, suggesting instrumentation, and writing notes on what I was trying to capture in the poems and what I thought the instruments and voices should be doing. It will be great fun to see what she comes up with!

Second, I worked on timing my reading for the Convention. The only way to do that is to read it more-or-less aloud from beginning to end and notice how much time elapses. I ended up cutting a bit from the middle.

Third, I put together a promotional package of some things for The Star Shard to deliver to my agent when we meet. I try to keep him supplied with anything and everything that might be useful in selling the book.

Finally, I read and carefully critiqued a novelette for a good friend, which was pure joy, not work.

If that ain’t livin’ the writing life, I don’t know what is! I’m thankful for the chance to be here, to be now, to be doing the things I’m doing. It’s not a matter of course — it’s a matter of grace. I’m thankful for the sunlight this October. I’m thankful for my students . . . for words on paper . . . for imagination and the coming of Hallowe’en . . . for the gift of participation in this incredible, unforeseeable sprawl that is life.

Speaking of Hallowe’en: I’d like to encourage another round of reader participation. Are you all still out there? If so, we can’t let this holiday slip by without a proper celebration — a proper revel in smoky lantern light while shadows caper. Two questions I offer: you can (ideally) answer both — or one. (Answering neither is not an option!)

1. What do you do to celebrate Hallowe’en? If you love the season, what is one thing you do to make it particularly shivery and delightful? Dredge up your dearest All Hallows customs and confess them here! A certain mode of decoration? A way you greet the trick-or-treaters? A book or story you read in October? A traditional jack-o’-lantern face you carve? Anything at all . . . how do you greet the long shadow season?

2. What is your favorite Hallowe’en memory? This is your chance to go into detail on that time you. . . . Or when you made that. . . . Or when. . . . Childhood? The threshold between childhood and adulthood? Later still? What was a particularly memorable Hallowe’en for you?

Okay, I’ll get you started on the memories. One Hallowe’en I’ll never forget was 2005. That was the year my mom unexpectedly passed away on October 18. I flew back to the States to be with Dad and for the funeral and all. On the day of the funeral, the town was breathtakingly gorgeous — trees a miraculous palette of brilliant reds and golds. The procession of cars to the cemetery was the grandest Hallowe’en parade one could hope for — couldn’t have ordered a better day for Mom’s last ride through the town she loved. I saw a whole lot of friends and relatives that I don’t normally see — all very loving and friendly, all gazing into Eternity and aware of the brevity of life, all with an awareness of how much my mom had meant to them. A surreal time, when I’m normally teaching but wasn’t that year.

The town was decked out in Hallowe’en glory: fake tombstones like gray toadstools in yards; chokingly thick webs in trees, covering bushes; scarecrow figures, jack-o’-lanterns, ghoul dummies, witches, oddities, orange lights. . . .

I bought Hallowe’en candy, which yanked a crown off my tooth, and I had to go to the dentist. I bought pumpkins — big, orange pumpkins, so abundant and cheap in Illinois, so rare and expensive in Japan. I carved them, and my dad smiled. He said they looked like a couple, this one male, that one female. I took pictures of them.

I took the jack-o’-lanterns to my aunt’s house, because she has the best location ever for trick-or-treaters — no kidding. She’s right on the main street, in the safest neighborhood in town, where parents trust and everyone is home in well-lighted houses, and kids flock thicker than clouds in August. We set the jack-o’-lanterns on the porch and lit them. We set out my aunt’s Indian mannequins: a man and a woman (though the woman is really a man wearing a wig and a dress — a transvestite Indian). They have feathers and moccasins and fringe, and older kids love them, and middle-kids gaze at them in half-terror, and babies fear them and bawl, but still their moms carry them to the porch to receive their Hallowe’en treats. I am proud of how some kids whisper to each other about my jack-o’-lanterns — “Look at their pumpkins!”

My aunt lets me hand out the candy. We are both still somewhat numb in this world without my mom. My aunt makes popcorn, and we eat it in the brief intervals between visitors. The intervals are brief — we have something like 150 kids the first night and nearly 100 the next. We run out of candy and have to buy more for the second night. My aunt keeps a tally, making a mark on paper for every kid that comes to the door. We laugh in the quiet intervals and talk about how many of the girls seem to be dressed as hookers. There’s vampire hooker, witch hooker, and just plain hooker.

One of the most amazing things is how kids appear out of the night. They materialize from the darkness out by the street. Some cut straight across yards, through the drifts of dry leaves, crunch, crunch, crunch. But some — usually boys — RUN from the curb, a skeleton or a Scream-masked horror swooping toward our porch. Kids stand under the street lights, comparing loot, plotting their courses. Tall witch hats tip and bob as they speak. Many carry little sticks that glow in phosphorescent colors.

I comment on the kids’ costumes (though I avoid saying things like “Oh! A hooker!”). Isn’t it odd how most kids seem oddly disinterested in their costumes? One girl has a knife through her head, with blood trickling down her temples. I say, “Wow. You might want to have that looked at.”

I’m wearing a flannel shirt. For some reason, that sticks in my mind — that shirt, in that surreal October of grief and the Otherworld. Candy, candles, trick-or-treaters. Dragonfly hit the mass market that year; it’s in stores, in Barnes & Noble, in Waldenbooks — for a few brief months. I’m making it as a writer. I sit in a rocking chair opposite the door. I make the decisions about how much candy to put into each bag. My aunt sits off to the side, making her tally marks. She can see the kids through the plateglass window.

Toward the end of the evening, when the visitors trail off, and we’re eating the unpopped kernels that can break your teeth if you’re not careful, my aunt wants to call it quits. But I insist on staying open for business until the end of the time the city allows. I’m so low on candy that I can only put two or three pieces of boring stuff into each bag. But I want to stay as long as I can in my flannel shirt, up and down from my rocking chair, watching the dark, listening for the whisper and giggle of stragglers. A few bigger kids come, kids too old to be trick-or-treating — but, like me, clinging to this night.

This night. Hallowe’en. This year, this 2005, I’m  halfway through writing “The Bone Man.” Mom passed away during the restaurant scene, and I got a phonecall in Japan from the coroner, because no one else in my family could make the international phone number work. “The Bone Man” will go on to receive honors — publication in Fantasy & Science Fiction [Dec. 2007], translation into Russian, anthologization in Year’s Best Horror, honorable mentions from Dozois as a science-fiction tale and from Datlow as a fantasy/horror story. It will be on the ballot for Locus and for the International Horror Guild in their last-ever round of awards. It’s on the ballot against a Steven Millhauser story. A couple people nominate it for a Nebula. Wonder and love and family, sadness, childhood, adulthood . . . Japan, the U.S. . . . life, death, loss, success, crisp air, the imagination. . . . Everything flows together. The world turns toward winter, but on these nights, we’re linked to the earliest times, the beginnings. We are all storytellers, said Paul Darcy Boles, sitting around the cave of the world. “Why don’t you write a Hallowe’en story?” a friend of mine in Japan suggested at the beginning of that October, when I was feeling down and agonizing over what to write. So I started to write “The Bone Man,” just to distract myself. Just to have fun.

Yeah . . . as wonderful as my childhood Hallowe’ens were, I think 2005 was my Hallowe’en, the one single one I’ll never forget.

* * * * * * * * *

Don’t be overwhelmed — mine was long, but short is great, too! What do you do to celebrate Hallowe’en? What are your Hallowe’en memories? Back me up here! Let’s hear from you! Come running from the dark. I’m waiting!

Howlets Nightly Cry

Posted on October 10, 2008 by fsdthreshold

I’m back, and the new school term is underway, and it’s time to give you an update on the writing life in my corner of the world. First of all, if you’ve already read Dragonfly and Something Wicked This Way Comes and the December 2007 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction and nothing else fills the great void in your reading life in October, then this is absolutely the year to scare up a copy of October Dreams, that amazing anthology of Hallowe’en stories edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish. This is a book I take off my shelf every year at the beginning of October. I’ve been reading it in no particular order — it’s a big, thick book, so if you read like I do, it will last you five or six Octobers, at least. Like a well-laden Hallowe’en goodie bag, it’s brimming over with treats of the season — a cornucopia of frightening tales by a huge range of writers, some whose names you know well, some whom you’re probably hearing of for the first time. Almost better than the stories themselves are the “Favorite Hallowe’en Memories” interspersed. When I finish reading something in the book, I make a tiny X in pencil at the top of the section. It will probably take me another year or two to get through everything, and by then, I will have forgotten enough that I can start all over again. By FAR the best story in the book — among many that are brilliant and delightfully creepy — is Richard Laymon’s “Boo.” It pretty well encapsulates everything there is to love about Hallowe’en: the mystery, the adventure, the chills, and that wistful nostalgia that the holiday forever carries for all of us who are too old to trick-or-treat.

Okay, other news: it’s been a delightful summer of answering the letters from young readers who are enjoying “The Star Shard.” They’ve been writing in steadily to Cricket‘s web site, and I’ve been doing my best to answer. If you’d like to follow the discussion there, stop in at www.cricketmagkids.com/corner/frederic-s-durbin. Cricket has recently invited readers to send in their own illustrations for “The Star Shard,” and the artwork will eventually be displayed on the site. I can’t wait to see what readers will choose to depict and how they’ll go about it!

One especial highlight in the publication run was the cover of Cricket‘s September issue — Emily Fiegenschuh’s illustration (for “The Star Shard”) of Cymbril on the bow of the Thunder Rake! Poster prints of that image are available at www.cricketmag.com/coverprints.htm.

My current writing project is expanding “The Star Shard” into a novel-length book. Through a connection made by my diligent and wonderful agent, an editor at a first-rate publishing house has made me some careful notes on what he’d like to see in such a revision. Every suggestion he’s made is right on the money, so I’m going at it. Please wish me well! I have ideas for what I think will be a five-book series — Lord willing!

Finally, I’m gearing up for Calgary and this year’s World Fantasy Convention at the end of this month. I’m looking forward to seeing how a Canadian WFC will be different from a U.S. one.

Now here are some pictures. This first one is of me and my cousin a few years back — I’m the littler one, with the “What’s out there?” expression.

Then come a couple images from the Dragonfly tour, this time from the U.S. side: the actual alley behind the bank (as featured in the book’s Chapter 1) and the funeral home on which Uncle Henry’s is directly based.

After that, some images of October in Niigata, Japan: the rice fields after harvest, persimmons, the track of the famous shinkansen or bullet train (not an October thing, but included, anyway), a view of the Shinano River (Japan’s longest), and willow leaves — included for the Hallowe’en connection, since in Japan, willows have a strong association with ghosts; they’re the trees under which ghosts often appear.

A warm seasonal “Boo” to all!

Rice field after the harvest.

Rice field after the harvest.

Bullet train tracks
Bullet train tracks

Persimmons
Persimmons

Shinano River
Shinano River

Sea of Japan at Niigata
Sea of Japan at Niigata
Sekiya Canal
Sekiya Canal
The Matsubayashi
The Matsubayashi

The Olympics and Writers

Posted on August 22, 2008 by fsdthreshold

Hello from the midst of summer vacation! I’m traveling now and don’t have a regular Internet connection, but this is to remind you that I’m still here, and regular posts to this blog should begin again at the end of September when I’m back at my desk.

I’m generally an “asportal” person, but when the Olympics roll around, we’re all affected. The Olympics bring the world together, but they also serve as a kind of cadence or set of mileposts for our lives. When we think back through the years, we remember who we were and what our lives were like when such-and-such an athlete was on everyone’s mind. Just today, a friend of mine said, “The Olympics are more than just sports.” That’s true, and I think I’ll leave it to you to interpret that idea however you want to.

I was surprised to note that Lang Ping, now known as “Jenny,” is coaching the U.S. women’s volleyball team! I’ve never forgotten Lang Ping from the 1984 summer Olympics, when watching the women’s volleyball at those games was a happy pastime for me as I lay around in the hospital recovering from a hernia operation. That year, the Chinese women (of whom Lang Ping was one) won the gold medal, defeating the U.S. in the final match. According to what the commentator said yesterday, she became tired of her fame in China, tired of always being recognized, so she moved to the U.S. for a life of relative anonymity. But apparently she wasn’t meant to be apart from Olympic volleyball!

Anyway — for us as writers, there’s a lesson to be learned from the Olympics. If you want to win a gold medal, your whole life has to be about doing what you’re best at. Think of the intense focus these athletes fix upon their respective disciplines. If we aspire to write books that will touch the lives of readers everywhere, that’s what we need to do.

However, I do find myself wishing our task were as clear-cut as that of an athlete training for the Olympics. In sports, what you need to do is clear; and if you don’t quite grasp it yourself, you have a coach who does and will tell you. You just have to do things over and over until you can do them perfectly. Studying Greek in college was like training for the Olympics.

Writing, on the other hand, is a murkier prospect. There are no absolutes about the right thing to do, other than that you need to keep writing. Who knows if you’ve got a good idea? Who knows what the right way to execute it is? When you’re finished, if it doesn’t immediately knock readers off their feet, who knows precisely what’s wrong with it and how to fix it?

Not long ago I took a personality test, and one part of the results, I thought, was quite insightful: it said I’m capable of making tremendous effort, but that I often do that in directions that don’t necessarily do any good or produce the results I want. The more I think about that, the truer I find it to be. Oh, I can move mountains (with the help of God) — but whether the mountain is standing at point A or point B, so what? I can scoop water out of the ocean for days on end, cup after cup after cup. Oh, for clear tasks to bend our efforts toward!

Here, then, is an often-overlooked aspect of what writers ought to pray:

Oh, Lord, send us clear vision and good coaches.

Keep your noses to the grindstone, all you who would write for an audience. Let’s press on for the gold!

A Long Time Ago

Posted on August 8, 2008 by fsdthreshold

This is an unprecedented (on this blog) next-day posting. If you’re an occasional visitor, don’t miss yesterday’s entry! I’m about to head Stateside for summer break, and I expect there will be more lulls coming. So I’m taking this opportunity to post while I have the Internet connection.

I have here seven old photos that all belong on this blog — now, I guess, is as good a time as any. If I don’t survive the trip — a possibility that’s always in my mind when I travel — our lives are in God’s hands — then this will serve as a fitting farewell. But chances are good I’ll be bending your ears again soon, so don’t start mourning me yet.

These first two photos reveal my personality like none others ever taken. This is me. The Dreamer and the Imp. They were taken in the early 1970s behind The Book Center, my parents’ bookstore. I was out in back playing one day, wandering around in my daydreams and jiggling the little piece of rope I always carried (like Linus carries his blanket). Our good friend and landlord for the business, the gentleman who owned the photography studio next-door to our store, came out with his camera. (Out of respect for him, I won’t say his name here, but those of you to whom his name would mean something know who he is — I met him about two years ago in a restaurant, and he was still doing fine. And he brought up the little piece of rope, which he’s never ceased to wonder about. . . .) Anyway, he asked me to put my elbows on the hood of my parents’ car and look that way, now look this way, click, click. And here we have the results. Pretty cool, huh?

This next one was taken in June 1970, even farther back. That’s my mom’s Volkswagen Bug — you can actually see my mom sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s me at the front end. Nice haircut, huh? That may have been the time that Mom really did put a bowl on my head and cut off any hair that stuck out past the rim of the bowl. I think Mom pulled a Tom Sawyer that day: she told me and my cousins Charley and Bobby how much fun it would be to wash her Volkswagen. Something else to notice here: the stable next door hadn’t been built yet — nor had the house beyond it. This is the landscape I grew up with: that towering, unbroken oak forest all across the southern horizon, a great cliff of trees, green and mighty and ancient. We’ve looked into the history of the region, and it’s pretty well established that the young Abraham Lincoln, then a circuit-riding lawyer, would have passed along on his horse not far from where this picture was taken. He was riding from the long-vanished town of Allenton to the new, burgeoning community of Taylorville, his last stop on the 8th Judicial Circuit. The road in his day may very well have lain exactly where our tar-and-gravel road lies today — and the trees in this picture are old enough that Lincoln would have seen them as he trotted past. So there you are.

Next, me in high school, circa 1983 (?), dressed as the Tom Baker Doctor Who. That’s a yo-yo in my hand. This must have been for some event during Homecoming Week. No, we didn’t have a “Dress as Doctor Who” day — it was probably something like “Hat Day,” and when they gave me an inch, I took a mile. Later, we got a copy of the official pattern for his scarf from the BBC, and my mom, bless her bless her, knitted it for me! That scarf (the official one, not the one shown) is so long that it goes around my neck with the loop hanging down past my knees, and then both ends hanging down to just about my ankles. I still have it — in some later year it was slightly damaged by mice, but it’s safely stored now.

Next: Mom, Dad, and Grandma Emma. This is before I was born. Wow.

Finally, these two just for laughs. Me in high school again — first in my costume for madrigals, and second trying to look like Peter O’Toole in Masada. Heh, heh, heh.

Yeah, we’ll get back to writing talk one of these days!

The Light in August

Posted on August 7, 2008 by fsdthreshold

Today I turned in semester grades to the university office. We have the option of mailing them in, but I’ve always enjoyed hand-delivering them. It’s like a victory lap when the term is over, when the hard work is behind us all, students and teachers, for a little while. The campus is pretty much deserted these days, but it was such a perfect summer day, absolutely cloudless, that I decided to take along my camera and capture, for your viewing pleasure, some of my favorite places there.

First, there’s this wonderful, whispery stairway between the new Lawson convenience store and the library. The campuses I can remember being on the States are all pretty much flat (maybe because I’ve only been on ones in Illinois, and non-southern Illinois, at that). But Niigata University’s grounds have delightful drops in elevation such as this one. The land falls sharply below the main plaza outside the General Education building. The trees and underbrush have been left untouched where the ground is steep, providing patches of what amounts to full-scale forest in the midst of the pavements and traffic of university life. More than once I’ve been startled by a lizard scuttling underfoot across the bricks or clinging to a bush’s leaves beside my elbow. Today I was marveling at the spiderwebs in the thicket behind the bicycle rack. I could see ten spiders at once without turning my head — it was Mirkwood, right here in Niigata — the webs catching the light of the afternoon sun, nets of flashing gold. [I’m still getting used to digital photography, and I couldn’t get the webs to show up, no matter what post-production tricks I pulled, so those pictures aren’t here.] Note the weeds growing from the roof of the bicycle parking shelter (very top picture) — pretty cool, huh? I also saw an actual pheasant browsing along in the undergrowth at the southwest corner of the General Education building!

I’ll also include here some views of one of my classrooms. This is B-354, the one in which I taught Advanced English for economics students and the Practical English Seminar for (mostly) humanities students. This is pretty typical of Japanese classrooms, with long, straight rows of desks. In conversation classes, though, it’s not at all uncommon to move the desks around, gathering them into little “islands” when the students speak in groups. Notice also the platform for teachers to stand on. This wing of the building was just remodeled, so this room was brand-new this past semester — very nice, roomy, bright with the row of windows along the side, and air-conditioned. The row of inner windows looking out into the hallway can be screened off with pull-down blinds. The only problem I’ve noticed is with sound: much more than with the old classrooms, sound from neighboring rooms carries quite loudly. It was hard for us all to keep straight faces one day when a class somewhere nearby was apparently studying traditional minyou singing (I think) — I’m not sure if it was the professor demonstrating, or if we were listening to a tape, but it did make it hard to concentrate.

Another of my favorite little features is the way a treetrunk and a hedge form a living framework around a doorway into the General Education building. The picture is here on the left.

In a much earlier blog posting, I showed you “the birthplace of Dragonfly.” This photo tour includes the place where, just over a year ago, I worked out the details of “Here About to Die” during the late spring/early summer. I frequently ate lunch here, above a stagnant pool in a basin. Sometimes a crow would hop around at what it considered a safe distance and would “beg,” snatching up the little pieces of bread I tossed its way. So it was here, in this green light, that I thought about Lucia and Athria and the Grand Arena on Cheleboth.

Finally, a view of the place I usually park my bicycle (the little photo on the left). To the right here is the Lucia grove above the stagnant pool.

Those of you who know me well know that I speak at times of regret. I was reflecting on how one thing in life that I do not regret in the least is teaching at this university. I really do love it — the chance I’ve had to intersect the lives of so many students at such a formative, direction-finding time for them, a time when they’re making all sorts of discoveries, realizing how wide open the world is, and trying to choose their courses in it. If I live to be an old man, I know a great many of the images that will come to me and make me smile will be the faces and the words of my students over the years. What a privilege it is to be here!

What does this all have to do with writing? What, I ask you, doesn’t have to do with writing?!

Crouching Meaning, Hidden Meaning

Posted on July 26, 2008 by fsdthreshold

Some years ago, a friend of mine, a native speaker of Japanese, was frustrated after a tough English test, and he said, “In Japanese, words just mean what the dictionary says they mean. In English, you always have to use your imagination.”

I thought that observation was so true — and so (unintentionally) laudatory of the English language — that I wrote it down. Probably every writer in the world would say this about his/her own mother tongue, but it seems to me that English is simply made for art. There are so many possibilities for expression — as painters-with-words, we have palettes that are miles-wide. In English poetry, a single word can resonate with two, three, or four different meanings at once, maybe more.

As a native English speaker, I’m forever applying imagination to my communication in Japanese when I don’t know the right word for something, and it either draws blank stares or cases of rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-out-loud. Once I was trying to express “turtleneck sweater,” and I had no idea what it was called in Japanese, so I said it literally — and boy, did people laugh! In English, our names for many objects tend to be descriptions of those objects made from combinations of words (phone + book = phonebook). But in Japanese, there’s much more often one specific word for every single concept. (You have to learn the word for “phonebook” — you can’t get by with combining “phone” and “book.”) Another time, I said, literally, in Japanese “chicken sandwich” — and people rolled on the floor again, because they pictured a clucking, full-feathered chicken thrashing between two pieces of bread. The special word for it in Japanese is, very specifically, “chicken-meat sandwich” — which gets no laughter at all.

But anyway, we live in this glorious language in which a word can have more scintillating facets than a jewel. Here’s an illustration from my book Dragonfly (hey, this is a blog, okay? — people expect you to talk about yourself!): the Untowards are teams of just-barely-domesticated (or maybe not) goat-like creatures. As large as horses, the Untowards are highly intelligent, wild as Faery, and when they’re hitched to a wagon, they buck and scramble and dance. Surging, rebounding off each other and off whatever may crop up along the roadside, they seem determined to tear the harness and the wagon into pieces and careen away in opposite directions. Yet somehow, they end up together at the journey’s end, with the wagon (usually) still intact. They’re called Untowards because, 1.) they’re difficult to guide, manage, or work with, as expressed by the English word “untoward”; 2.) a second meaning of “untoward” is marked by trouble or unhappiness; unlucky; not favorable; unpropitious — as reflective of the feelings any sane person might have when boarding a wagon about to be dragged away into the night by Untowards; 3.) they seem not to be heading in the right direction at all, and not interested in doing so: “un-toward” — not at all toward; 4.) but ultimately, they ward you unto your destination — they are “unto-wards.”

Thanks, folks! You’ve been great! I’ll be here all week.

Okay, here’s a more recent example that most people haven’t heard. In The Fires of the Deep (the book set in the dark underground world), a village is called a “paling.” There’s Lodin Umbir Paling, Sand Paling, Bridgend Paling, Dunsan Paling, Lost Echo Paling . . . you get the idea. That’s a purposefully-chosen word that indicates the Hurlim people’s relationship with their vast, lightless, silent, largely empty environment. In the subterranean realm, the darkness — or rather, the obscurity, since there is no light, and hence no “darkness” — is absolute and ubiquitous. It’s called Lachii, which means everything beyond what you can see; it is synonymous with “infinity” and “eternity.” The sea which has no farther side known to mortals is the Vooren Lachii.

Anyway — where people gather and live, there is a tiny, tiny circle of sound and motion in the Lachii — a “paling of the darkness,” in a light/dark analogy: only a paling or dimming of the dark, because the dark doesn’t go away; the dark is supreme. But people, in their little communities of warmth and activity, temporarily push the darkness back a little.

“Paling” also has the meaning of a stake or post, and by extension, a fence or perimeter you might build out of such stakes. Again, a good name for a community in the Hurlim world — a place where humans have staked out a small plot of ground.

Finally, “pale” has the meaning of a zone of influence — and so, in this story, a place where people exert a bit of control, for a time, over the eternal Lachii.

Okay, one final example, from a poem of mine written years ago, titled “I Am Looking at Lilacs”: in one pair of lines, I talked about “Traveling fernwise / The whispering hedge.” Fernwise can mean both “in the direction of ferns,” as in “clockwise” — and “with a knowledge of ferns, a wisdom born of ferns,” as in “streetwise.”

So — this could be the springboard for a great list. Has anyone else got good examples? No, no, they don’t have to be from my oeuvre! They might be from your own, or from the vast world of stories out there. Can you think of a wording that has stuck with you, an instance of a writer using a word to do amazing double- or triple-duty?

Words are fun, and they can wear many hats. We live in this language that always forces us to use our imaginations.

Light and the Writer

Posted on July 19, 2008 by fsdthreshold

This is a quintessential summer night. The moon is just past full, and my electric fan is humming away, and I’m sticking to everything I touch. This is the sort of night for reading Millhauser’s Enchanted Night — just reminding you all. If you haven’t done so, that’s your homework — before the end of August. And read him at night. And read his story “Clair de Lune” from The Knife-Thrower and Other Stories. But seriously, seasons just don’t get any better than this. When people talk of severe weather in the winter — deep snow, record low temperatures, etc. — it’s just dismal and dismaying. But when people complain about the summer heat, about how they can’t sleep, about how plastic containers in their kitchens are melting and all, I get an excited tingle in my stomach. Yesss! This is the season. THE season. The imagination boils over, and dreams are born. The nights are electric, with whole worlds crackling in that residual heat. I LOVE the feeling of lying in bed when it’s far too hot for most mortals to sleep — you lie there as if in a frying pan, sizzling away, as outside the moon rides in all that velvet sky, and the wings of insects hum in the dark. Oh, read Enchanted Night! Read Lud-in-the-Mist and The Hobbit and . . . what else? Tell me your summer books! What else should we be reading in this most excellent of all seasons? It’s a good time to catch up on H.P. Lovecraft, if you like that sort of thing.

Also, just in case anyone is missing out, I invite you to look at the comments posted after the previous entry on this blog, where you’ll find the vindication of my Tolkien tantrum and the verdict on Cymbril.

But anyway, to the nitty-gritty of this posting — I came across the following quote earlier this evening. It’s talking about the cathedrals of Europe:

“The divine presence lives in nature, in space, and in light, and the cathedrals brought these elements together in such a magnificent way that even today modern man, so cut off from his own divine nature, can still feel them.” — Janet Brennan, “The Cathedral Code,” Fate, December 2006

When I read those lines, they resonated with me. I felt they provided a clear elucidation of the reason I love caves and caverns so much. Nature, space, and light. When I think of the most holy places I’ve ever seen (churches aside), I have to nod in acknowledgment. Those three elements are always present. The barn I played in as a child: a lofty, dusky space, scented with fragrant hay and old wood, suffused with the green glow of light falling through Virginia creeper leaves. The barn was built by man, but nature had embraced it and encroached upon it, peeking in at all its windows, skittering across its plant-sprouting floors. And then caves: Grand Central Station in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky — a place where soaring passages come together, an enormous space in the deep Earth, with towering boulders dim in the distance, a shadowed ceiling high above — a place made by the hand of God. Nature, space, and light. Some of my favorite places in Mammoth Cave are the grand stairways, where the path ascends flight after flight of stairs, all within a gargantuan chamber.

In The Lord of the Rings, my favorite setting by far is the mines of Moria. How I would love to have seen it when it was Khazad-dum, during the noontide of Dwarrowdelf, before Durin’s folk disturbed the Balrog! Nature, space . . . and light — for it’s the dim lighting that makes the place so alluring. The Chamber of Mazarbul: we’ve got indirect lighting filtering in from outside. That was an ideal I strove for in my years of designing dungeon for my Verralton campaign: echoing halls in the Earth, dimly-lit by filtered sunlight through fissures or from various haunting sources of light. (For anyone who may be going “Huh?!” right about now, I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons.)

That got me to thinking about my writing. Dragonfly was written when I was in my early twenties, and (I’d like to believe) it still holds up pretty well. My second novel, called (in various drafts) Lachii or The Fires of the Deep, was an absolute disaster. I labored away on it for five years before I ever showed it to anyone. When an editor and two agents rejected it, I went on laboring away on it in isolation, striving to bring it to “perfection” before I ever let it out of the nest again. And it became, as I later described it, “like a clan of inbred hillbillies” — worked over, re-worked, and re-worked so many times, with no input from anyone but me, that it got to the point where I couldn’t even see it anymore. The world in which it’s set had become intimately familiar to me. But that world is vastly different from our own, and the more I lived in it, the less capable I became of communicating it to people who didn’t live there. In the draft I eventually let some friends read, I realized that, in a single sentence, there might be four or five specialized terms of which only I knew the meaning. Oh, I provided a glossary, yes indeed, a magnificent opus that I worked on night and day. But as one friend commented, “Do you realize that a third of this book is glossary?” Um, oops.

What was missing from the book, I now know, was light. The “nature” was there: a subterranean world, echoing and epic in every way, built directly upon my childhood love of caves. The “space” was there: endless, miles-wide corridors called dulons, large enough to fly airships through without getting anywhere near the world-walls (Shur) or the ceiling (Ra). The world was built — elaborately built. Just as Inuits have all those words for different kinds of snow, my Hurlim people have many different words for stone: lodin are the dry boulder fields; kalodin are the huge, dry boulders; lys is wet, living stone; lysshur is a wet, living stone wall; losshur is a dry wall; los is dead, dry stone. There were abundant folk sayings that made sense in the context of the Hurlim world: “He’s on a skurl under the needles.” “That’ll happen when los becomes lys.” “Hey there, all! What’s in the bucket?”

Yes, the world was painstakingly built. Yet it still didn’t feel alive. Somehow, it seemed all merely academic — a theory.

I know now what was missing.

Light.

I’m not saying this is true for all fantasy writers, but what’s revealed in that Janet Brennan quote above is certainly true for me. The triangular equation is nature, space, and light. When the three are present, I can build a setting that feels real, that invites the reader to come in. (The hot Orcharan sands of the Arena seem to work for test readers of “Here About to Die.”) But in my Hurlim world of Ama, I was trying to manage without light. The Hurlim people rely on a sense called yla, which is also an energy that flows through the Earth, emanating from the core. It passes through all spaces and solid objects, bearing a record of all it has passed through. Hurlim eyes, attuned to the yla, can read in it the distances and the surface textures, but it is a sense wholly apart from color. Water appears opaque: if calm, it appears as a flat surface; if rippling, it appears to ripple — but nothing can be seen beneath the surface; hence, the Hurlim fear of water, which seems solid, but which can swallow the unwary traveler who sets foot on it.

In contrast, look at Dragonfly — also set in a subterranean world — yet one in which the descriptions (though often horribly overdone — hey, I was a kid, cut me some slack) are vivid. Dragonfly, for all its dimness, is full of light: torchlight, jack-o’-lantern light, firelight, balloon-light, moonlight, starlight. . . .

The lesson to be learned is this: when a writer doesn’t have light to work with, his/her hands are tied. Imagine an artist trying to paint a picture of a landscape without light! Take any book in which the settings are vibrant, in which you can picture everything so clearly that you feel you’re there, living inside the scene — and then notice how light makes those descriptions possible. See what I mean?

Maybe it seems elementary to you, a principle that we wouldn’t need all these words to arrive at. But for me to realize it, I had to write draft after draft of an enormous novel. The hardest thing I’ve ever done as a writer was trying to tell a story without light. In the next draft of The Fires of the Deep, you can be sure I will have found a way to introduce light into the Hurlim world — and we’ll have the shadows and the dimness and the glimmers and the silhouettes — to give the characters a vivid setting in which to live and breathe.

The act of writing any story, to use Tolkien’s term again, is an act of sub-creation. We rearrange elements God has provided and stack them up in our own way, in our own tiny corner of the universe. Looking back to our prime model, the original Creation: it began with “Let there be light.” Seems to me that’s the way to begin.

Perspectives and Punctuations

Posted on July 17, 2008 by fsdthreshold

“So what I said was true,” says Obi-Wan to Luke, “from a certain point of view.”

A friend of mine is making a whole bunch of hats to sell. She has her sewing machine humming away, and every day she adds to the mound of hats, each one a unique design. It’s looking very Bartholomew Cubbins-like around her place.

Well, the  other day when I stopped by, she asked, “Kyou no mitai?” — meaning, in Japanese, “Do you want to see today’s?” — that is, did I want to see the hats she’d made that day?

But here’s the way my mind made the word-breaks: “Kyou nomitai?” — “Do you want to drink [alcohol] today?” To which my response was, “Huh?!” (That’s not the sort of question she would typically ask!) We eventually had a good laugh over it. Or at least I did. Her reaction was more a rolling of the eyes. But it all ended well as I admired the day’s hats.

The experience reminded me of something I heard last week. Supposedly a scientific study was done (though it wasn’t verifiably cited — I suspect maybe someone made up the part about its being an actual study) in which a teacher wrote the following sentence on the chalkboard and asked students to punctuate it:

A woman without her man is nothing

According to this tale I heard, the male students mostly did it this way:

A woman without her man is nothing.

And the female students rendered it as:

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

 

Next story: my dad used to tell me about a prisoner in the old Soviet Union who was set free because the jailer in charge of him received orders without punctuation. The commander sent this telegram:

RELEASE IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA

The commander had intended: “Release impossible. To be sent to Siberia.”

The jailer understood: “Release. Impossible to be sent to Siberia.”

Again, as the old Italian proverb goes: “It may not be true, but it makes a good story.”

 

Finally, another story of my dad’s: A traveler wandered into town and got along pretty well there, but one feature of the antique setting always mystified him, and no one seemed inclined to say much about the subject. In the center of the ramshackle town where the dusty streets converged, visible to all like some icon of a long-forgotten religion, was a weathered standing stone, tall and narrow, its surface pitted with untold years of sun and rain, freezings and thaws. And still clearly visible, these letters etched into it:

TOTI

EMUL

ESTO

Some travelers who came into the town seemed to understand the signficance of the inscription and would nod or even walk away chuckling, perhaps at some esoteric spiritual enlightenment. Others, like the first traveler, could only scratch their heads and go look for clues in Leonardo’s paintings.

The message for us as writers in all this: have fun with words. Be aware that what you take for granted about a sentence you’ve written may be understood in a nearly opposite way by your readers — do all you can to cover all bases, which normally means bouncing your stories off lots of test readers. And finally, as an editor’s rejection letter once brusquely advised me: “Learn standard punctuation.”

Oh! One more somewhat related note: In “The Star Shard,” now appearing monthly in Cricket Magazine, the main character’s name is Cymbril. I know how I pronounce the name, and I never imagined anyone would think to pronounce it any differently. But during the editing process, the editor asked me whether the C was hard or soft — was it “SYMbril” or “KYMbril”? (The editor, by the way, was pronouncing it the opposite of how I was.) I told her my way, but I suggested the Bugs in the margins of Cricket not tell the readers how to pronounce it. The editor agreed.

So then, on Cricket‘s Web site where readers are writing in with questions (www.cricketmagkids.com/corner/frederic-s-durbin), I put the same question to readers: How do you pronounce Cymbril’s name? So far, the results are 50/50 — the Symbril school and the Kymbril school! What do you think?

Nomination

Posted on July 12, 2008 by fsdthreshold

We interrupt the ordinarily somnolent flow of this blog to announce that it is official: my story “The Bone Man” has been nominated for the International Horror Guild Awards for mid-length fiction! You can read about it and see what else is on the ballot at:

http://www.horroraward.org/

There’s also a little more information about “The Bone Man” on the blog of John Joseph Adams, the assistant editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction, at:

http://www.johnjosephadams.com/?p=1301

Also, while I’m doing commercials, Cricket‘s tech people got the bugs ironed out on their site, so the replies there are once again nicely paired with the reader letters they’re answering:

http://www.cricketmagkids.com/corner/frederic-s-durbin/

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled blog. . . .

Summer Nights and Reading Spaces

Posted on July 11, 2008 by fsdthreshold

I remember the first time I noticed that a bright moon can throw your shadow as sharply onto the ground as the sun can. I made that discovery because I was out in a summer night, reveling in the cool breeze, the warmth rising from the land, the symphony of the crickets, and the smells of mown grass and horses and leaves.

In Japan, autumn is said to be the time for reading. Of course it can be done year-round, but for me, books and stories called most insistently when the world warmed up in spring, and when the spring unfurled into glorious summer. Naturally, there was the pragmatic reason: kids are burdened with school for most of the year, and it’s summer that offers the freedom to read unchecked, unhindered by that travesty that is organized education. In Japan, to describe hot, perfect summer weather, I still use the phrase bunshou no tenki — “writing weather” — which, yes, raises some eyebrows, since most people see no correlation between sweating profusely and a celebration of the arts. Sigh.

But as a kid, warmer and longer days meant that it was time for me to grab a book and go outdoors. Out in the shade of trees, out in that immemorial green light, was the truest and best place to escape into the worlds of stories. I can recall reading The Martian Chronicles in the open doorway of the barn’s hayloft, my bare feet swinging in space. I read Avram Davidson’s The Kar-Chee Reign and Rogue Dragon (a “double-feature” book that flipped in the middle, one novel beginning from each end) sitting cross-legged atop a barrel on the grounds of our local historical museum, where my mom was ever active. I read some of the post-Jaws rogue animal books there, too, on the steps of the courthouse where Lincoln himself once practiced law.

I had a “reading grove” in the northwest corner of our front yard (where my dog Hooper was later buried). I would sit there on a folding chair with my feet propped in the fork of a young oak, reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In the same spot, using a lapboard, yellow legal pads, and a soft mechanical pencil, I wrote a great deal of The Threshold of Twilight, my first full-length novel manuscript.

Ooh, check out this picture! This is in the backyard of my house in Illinois: the gate from a long-gone corral, leaned against young maples in years gone by, half-swallowed by the growing trunks. This tendency of nature to reclaim human artifacts has always fascinated and thrilled me. I was thinking of such things in college when I wrote the lines, from “Urban Requiem”:

“In the rainy end of days the satyrs

Came and rolled on spools the broken wires,

Rekindled the old infernal fires,

And scooped clean soil over oily matters.”

But I digress. I read a whole lot of Lovecraft in various places in the yards. I read most of Stephen King’s It on the banks of our pond and on the back porch. I read on shed roofs, in trees, on the hoods and trunks of cars, in the tire swing, atop the root cellar, and everywhere in between. When darkness forced me indoors, yes, I read there, too.

When darkness fell, though, sometimes I’d wander back outdoors, not reading now, but marveling at this wonder that was summer. As a teenager, I was quite taken with celebrating Midsummer’s Eve. It’s a big deal in Tolkien’s works, and I think those are what introduced me to the concept. “Elvish singing is not a thing to miss, in June under the stars. . . .” Pretty much all folkloric sources agree that it’s probably the most favorable time of year for encounters with the Good Folk. The question arises, though, as to when exactly Midsummer’s Eve is. Some say it’s the night before the solstice — June 20. Some prefer the night of the solstice — June 21. Some Christians choose to go with June 24, the eve of the celebration of John the Baptist’s birth. I say that whole week is fair game. Go with whatever night it isn’t raining.

Yes, I haunted the yard on Midsummer’s Eve. I’d take along a lantern — an oil-burning lantern, not just a mere flashlight, though I usually had one of those, too; I’d take a wooden staff I’d found in the woods, a fallen tree branch that I’d sanded and varnished. I’d take a copy of Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder and another book, the front cover long gone, so I don’t even know the title; but it was a collection of stories and poems about fairies. And I’d take stationery and a pen.

I’d wander along the hedgerows, run my fingers over the oak bark, gaze up into the trembling firmament of leaves and stars; I’d raise my lamp and stoop beside the knothole among the roots of the two-hundred-year-old oak, which seemed indeed a likely place for wee magical folk to live. I’d sit on the picnic table and read from the books. Then I’d write myself a Midsummer’s Eve letter, describing the sights, sounds, feels, smells — the whole of the night, as best I could; and I’d tuck the paper into an envelope, to be kept with the books and read again on the next Midsummer’s Eve, along with the other letters from previous years.

After coming to Japan, for three or four years I dragged a group of good-natured friends along and combined this letter-writing custom with the practice of reading poetry aloud, a la the movie Dead Poets Society. But that’s moving on into another set of stories.

Finally, I should add that summer goes on for a long time: there’s no need to confine the celebration to one week in June. July brings what I call the “Deep Summer,” and August brings the grand Dog Days. It’s the best of all seasons, and we shouldn’t miss a moment of it. Garrison Keillor advises, too, that we should make the absolute most of it: “Don’t try to sleep in the summer. You can sleep in the winter.” I remember a particularly nice June Eve, the last night of May, when I celebrated by watching Field of Dreams with my dad. If you’re blessed to still have your dad with you on this side of Eternity, that’s a really good movie to watch with him.

So, the discussion questions are two:

1. Does anyone care to tell us what is your best/favorite place to read in, either now and/or when you were a child? (It doesn’t have to be outdoors. Indoor reading is also condoned and encouraged.)

2. If summer nights are magical for you, what’s a way you’ve found to capture and enjoy that magic? What do you do (assuming it’s fit to print) to enjoy a night in summer to its fullest?