I’ll be offline for a few days.
You’ll be all right here by yourselves, right? Please help yourself to the pretzels and diet Cokes. Don’t forget to mop up any spills. You know I’ll know you were here.
Love and Laughter
Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.
At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news and often alluding to the conversation on his own blog. Yesterday’s “This Week,” naturally, referred to the hypothetical questions he’d posed earlier — and to the answers, answers, answers, answers it elicited. And one of the mini-conversations resulting from the “This Week” post caught my eye.
It took place between someone identifying herself as Thomma Lynn, and someone with the moniker “a paperback writer” (evocative, for those of us Of A Certain Age). In the midst of a lot of hard-eyed appraisals of the harsh realities of art, the harsher realities of business, the naivete of writing newcomers, and the thick skins of writing veterans, Thomma Lynn and a paperback writer suddenly found themselves talking about — of all things — love:
On the Devil’s Side
It’s a cliché that villains are often more interesting — especially more interesting to write about — than heroes. The archetypes, I guess, are Faust’s Mephistopheles and old Screwtape.
(The latter must have been an especially delicious but guilty pleasure for C.S. Lewis to write about; I don’t really take it as gospel, as Wikipedia says, that “Lewis claimed that the book was distasteful to write.” Screwtape is the older, more experienced, wiser demon, offering advice to nephew Wormwood. The uncle has a wonderful voice. Or maybe — since The Screwtape Letters supposedly represent a Christian tract on temptation — maybe the wonderful, alluringly entertaining voice is exactly the point.)
From the ever-reliable whiskey river comes this, a quotation from Stephen Dunn:
Always a little more fun on the Devil’s side. I’ve been his advocate, have opposed what I most believed, testing if what I believed was true. It sometimes almost was; that’s the best I can say. But you can bedevil yourself if you keep playing that game. You don’t want to stand in a torturer’s shoes for long. Still, when it comes to seeking a truth, a certain cruelty can go a long way – right through the heart of a thing to some other side. Doesn’t every far-reaching truth cause a lesser truth to die? Most of us are content to stop at the heart. When I’ve been good’s advocate, playing the less clever role, I’ve gone as far as good can go. Maybe some orthodoxy or some abomination lost ground for a while. Maybe not. The one time I had the Devil down, thinking he’d give, he whispered, “Remember, the punishment for being good is a life of goodness.” I laughed, and he was gone.
“The punishment for being good is a life of goodness”: ha! That pretty much sums up a villain’s motives, eh?
Reassurance. Maybe.
Regarding the entry I just posted, and the references therein to neurotic uncertainty over whether a book is DONE, this quote from William Strunk, Jr. (the original author of the classic Elements of Style
It is worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.
Boy, do I hope so. :)
Remaking a Blog (a Little)
Obviously, I’ve changed the name of the blog. The former Meat and Poison was all right at one level; I’d come up with it after recalling the title of a collection of essays by E.B. White, One Man’s Meat
But really? The …and Poison was a bit creepy. Running After My Hat? Much more satisfyingly, umm, ridiculous.
If you haven’t read it already, you might be interested in reading the brief About page here, where I explain the origin of the new name.
How It Was: Getting the Books
I know, I know… I said, “In my next post on How It Was, I’ll include an excerpt from ‘Book 1: Spring.'” It’s coming.
In the meantime, please check this page. It describes how I’m hoping to make the whole process of posting, downloading, and reading excerpts easier for both you and me. Eventually, it will be the page from which all excerpts can be downloaded in some sort of coherent fashion.
