Agent Zombies

Okay, I’m on a rant about the sad state of the publishing industry. Such rants are rarely interesting to a wide audienc. Feel free to skip directly to the cartoon at the end of the post. I’ll get over this eventually. Promise.

Okay, and onto the rant: Maybe there are good literary agents out there, but I have despaired of finding one in my lifetime. For years I went along, zombie-like, following traditional wisdom which was, like a message from on-high: YOU MUST HAVE A LITERARY AGENT TO GET PUBLISHED!

So for about two decades, I went sent off submissions to agents, waiting months for a reply, only to be turned down. As are most writers, I was insecure enough to take the rejections as note that whatever it took to be a novelist, I didn’t have it.

It was only when bypassed the whole agent process, skipping over agents entirely that I finally got published.

Two things pushed me over the edge: One was letting a friend — a lifelong science fiction reader — read a manuscript. She insisted my manuscript (The Unselfish Gene) was worth publishing, despite the agent rejections. The second thing that encouraged me was that the agent>publisher chain seemed to be selecting — over selecting, IMHO, for vampire romance novels. Why? After some thought and a little study, I decided it was agents, perhaps out of necessity, place the almighty buck over love of writing. So they — and the publishing industry in general — wants to go for the big bucks, the sure thing. The easily marketable thing. Anyway, I finally said screw the agent process altogether, and sent submissions in one form or another, to publishers of sci-fi fantasy who will accept un-agented submissions in one form or another. These publishers include Baen Books, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, NY.(TOR books). Soft Skull Press, Prometheus Books, Penguin -Ace/ROC Immanion Books, and DAW. (Let me know if you hear of others, please.)

I may still get rejected, but by cutting agents out of the loop, I will have saved myself months of waiting and reading irritating rejection notes.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

The Space Vampires

Yes, it is an unfortunate title, but that essentially how the book starts out.

I read this book years, years ago. Colin Wilson was one of those seminal sci-fiction writers that had a big effect on me as young man. I’m primarily reading it now because I was cleaning under the bed and found a 1977 Pocket Book edition. I reread it years ago because of the movie version, “LifeForce,” a cult classic, due in part I’m sure because of the full-frontal nude shots of the beautiful space vampire. But if you’re looking for a movie faithful to Collin’s book, you’ll be rather disappointed.

That unfaithfulness aside,,the movie was good for what it was intended to be, a good British Sci-fi B-movie, a genre which I contend no one can do quite as well as the Brits. (And the human victims of the Space Vampires turn into soul sucking (not brain sucking) zombies. What more could you want from a movie: beautiful breasts, occult themes, and soul-sucking zombies.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s an excerpt with the best line of the movie. (”I’ve been in space six months, and she looks perfect to me.”) Note the expression on the female astronaut’s face when her male astronaut colleague utters these words. Perfect!

Back to the book, whose premise is that we are all energy vampires to some degree. Still, the opening of the book and the movie are about the same: A huge, miles-long spaceship is found in space, apparently millennium old, but with perfectly preserved humans in crystal caskets. The Earth space ship bring the preserved humans back to Earth where all hell breaks loose as a vampire plague is released.

After that, the book and the movie diverge. More on this divergence later, but the book has a long occult middle. Collin’s space vampires don’t want to attract too much attention. Their plans for conquering Earth are more like that of a banker. They corrupt powerful people, and run things through them. At least that’s how it looks about 3/4 way through the book. In the movie, the space vampires get right down to business. In about 24 hours, London is a vampire zombie war zone.

More later.

Zombie Newpaper Reporters

My news release, headlined: “New phorid fly species turns red imported fire ants into ‘zombies’” is going International. I got calls from the NY Times, regional papers, and most recently, Ynetnews, an Isreali News Agency. (Human reporters are such easy prey.)

Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

or how we modern readers accept many artificial conventions of the modern novel in a mindless way — you might say Zombie fashion. (There, I got the zombie tie-in. hah!)

I was turned on to this book via James Wood’s “How Fiction Works.” Wood cites Saramago,who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, as a unique stylist.

That he is. I learned from Wood that the way we expect novelists to handle dialog . . .
(”I love you,” she said.
“I’ve heard those words before,” he said. “Show me.” )

… was the invention of Gustav Flaubert. In the 19th Century, it was innovative, but is a long way from realism.

In Saramago’s novel, we follow Ricardo Reis through the last year of his ‘life.’ I put ‘life’ in quotation marks, because we soon learn Reis is one of the personae of a real-life Portuguese poet. In this way, we are constantly reminded, perhaps in the same way as we are in some new wave cinema, that we are reading a work of fiction. As a result, one (at least I did) teeters on the edge of being emotionally absorbed by Reis’ struggle in 1936 fascist Portugal and intellectually unraveling the portent of his life. I know this sounds a bit obscure, but trust me it works.

Along the way, the reader has to give up the comfort of tradition dialogue. The dialog and exchanges between characters should be run-on and lose one, as their is not a single ,” he said. Or ,”she said, that I can find in the whole novel. But such is Saramago’s power of writing, that even without such punctuation clues, I always knew who was saying what.

Here’s an example, and the quotation marks are mine, not Saramago’s:

“Ricardo Reis is engrossed in these thoughts, some of them perhaps too difficult to unravel for anyone who like ourselves is on the outside, but Ramon, who sees much, inquires, Do you wish anything else, Doctor, a tactful way of saying, thought expecting the negative, that the doctor does. We are apt at understanding that sometimes half a word suffices. Ricardo Reis rises to his feet, says Goodnight to Ramon, wishes him a Happy New Year, and ….”

Maybe that gives you an idea. If you read novels for non-stop action or lots of sex, this book is not for you. Ricardo Reis and the world Saramago builds around him are both complex and compellingly human.

If you want a new way a looking at how an author builds such characters and worlds, then you might find this book interesting.

Both Wood’s book and Saramago’s are required reading for any novelist wishing to improve his or her craft, IMHO.

Robert Burns
http://unselfishgene.com
and
http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?b…





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Rejection Synchronicity and Breathless

Lately I’ve been experiencing some of those events of synchronicity a’ la Carl Jung. No need to hop to the link if you’re not in the mood. In the way I’m using the word here, it means simply experiencing people-events that shouldn’t be connected but are not. Specifically, believe it or not, I’m going to get around about talking about the different ways people respond to books and cinema.

In the last few weeks, I had the same conversation with a number of passionate book readers. (Passionate about books,not about me.) “I can’t go to films,” she says (yes I was trying to get a date) “They put me to sleep.” Or similarly, sort of synchronistic way. “I can’t sit still. I have to go out in the lobby.”

Now I realize that this might not be a psychic synchronicity, but simply the way women are reacting to me these days, that they might really be telling me that it is I who puts them to sleep or I who makes them want to get up and run away, but it got me thinking. All three women are of the type who can read anything; who might just prefer immersing themselves into a literary narrative to anything else. (Including me.) Then why can’t they get into the narrative of film.

It can be observed that for intelligent people many Hollywood movies today are tiresomely predictable, particularly the thrillers and spy moives, but the ones that rely largely on CGI effects too. But there are still good films made occasionally, even by Hollywood, one’s that can provoke thought, but admittedly not in the way that a good book does.

But why? I asked myself. Today I watched Breathless, the 1960’s French New Wave film by François Truffaut. It was, in someway, like reading a book. I kept dropping out to think about things. Because I’m an intellectualy wannabe, I turned on the narrative, in which a professor of film explained to me that’s exactly what Truffaut was up to. In a kind of anarchist fashion, he emphasized naturalism, but at the same time, was always giving these little signals to remind the audience that they were watching a movie. Then would skip over the boring parts of action, say the shooting of a motorcycle cop, with what were called “jump cuts,” in much the same way a writer would just hit the high points to keep the action moving. Truffaut would also spend a lot of time focusing on two characters just talking, not just because they were pretty people, but to expand on their character development.

At the end of the movie, I felt involved as with a book, not absorbed. In other words, the movie made me think about things — people, their relationship to each other and their environment — while the movie was ongoing, not afterward.

In the end, as he lays dying, the anti-hero’s either says life is a bitch or tells his lover she’s a bitch for turning him in to the cops, depending on the translation and how you view the situation. Sort of anti-climatic. The director was saying, I think, that everything is open to interpretation and the time and place, even a woman telling you that she doesn’t want to go to movie with you because cinema zombie-fies her.

Shameless self promotion: visit The Unselfish Gene and click on “Where to Buy.”