A blog for Mrs. Neese

I’m neck-deep in two books right now, so here’s a blog entry inspired by my eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Neese.

If you knew Mrs. Neese, you’d be really excited by that sentence. From second through eighth grade, I attended a school that I’m still convinced was actually an outer ring of hell. I was miserable. Mrs. Neese was one of only two teachers I had during that time who had the good sense to take a highly self-motivated low-level genius and, rather than making her sit still and do what everybody else was doing, just let her run. One of those teachers put me in the school spelling bee so I got my longed-for chance to show everyone that I really was good for something (albeit not sports or being pretty or having rich parents). Mrs. Neese just let me write. 

I was in middle school by then, and she made clear early on that she was totally fine with my writing stories in her class as long as I also did the homework. And she was surprisingly flexible about the homework part. She let me write weird takes on her in-class assignments, like a love story with only one onstage character in it (he dropped dead at the end) and a legend in which the god of dreams was really a frustrated actor. The very first sentence of the very first story about Rae—which happened to be the very first story in what became the Masks universe—was written in her class. I even remember the seat I was in that January day: in the back row, the seat on the far left as I faced the chalkboard, the northeast corner of the room. I remember looking up and seeing her glance my way as I scribbled frantically in the notebook I’d stolen from the supply cupboard at home. There’s no way she believed I was doing eighth-grade homework in a 300-sheet three-subject spiral notebook. But she didn’t stop me. 

So when Mrs. Neese (a fan of Masks on Facebook, because she’s awesome like that) suggested recently that I blog about writers who have inspired me, I couldn’t exactly say no, could I? Here, then, is a by-no-means complete list of five authors who have something to do with who I am and what I do today …

1. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – All right, nobody’s ever going to accuse me of writing fantasy in the style of either of these two men. My writing is about as far as you can get from the plummy Oxfordian tone of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia or the lyrical high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. These two make the list, and make the list together, because their books are some of my earliest memories. My dad read me The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham when I was four years old, and the Narnia books followed soon after—in their published order, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, not the stupid retcon order beginning with The Magician’s Nephew. And say what you will about Lewis’s many shortcomings as a novelist or Tolkien’s bouts of academic logorrhea, they didn’t matter to me when I was too little to be reading tiny print by myself. Those stories showed me what was possible—that kids could wander into alternate worlds through mysterious objects called wardrobes, that animals could talk, that a creature called a hobbit could find himself on an adventure with dwarves and a wizard but keep worrying about his kettle and his pocket-handkerchiefs. Even though I didn’t go into fantasy writing as an adult, and I don’t even read much fantasy now (I joke that Tolkien set the bar so high that no one else will do), that baseline informs much of what I write now. If you ever wonder why Rae talks to figures of legend and why I think it’s totally okay to have a zombie arrow sitting next to the death ray at a supervillain auction, it’s because somewhere in the back of my brain is a five-year-old who knows that dragons exist, and that their scales can be pierced by arrows and by lion claws …

Best jacket photo EVER.

2. Timothy Zahn – This author made the list because where Tolkien and Lewis were the foundation of my childhood reading, he formed the basis of my “grown-up” reading life. I got into Zahn the same way most of his fans probably did—I read his first Star Wars tie-in novel, Heir to the Empire. I was ten years old and had just seen the original Star Wars trilogy, and I was starving for more Luke/Han/Leia action. But two things stuck out to me in that first book and never really went away. 

The first was that Zahn wrote one-sentence paragraphs. Heck, some of his paragraphs were sentence fragments. And it worked for him! I’d never seen anyone do that before, but for him it worked perfectly. He’s to blame for every one of my sentence-fragment paragraphs since then. The second standout point was the way he ran multiple plotlines simultaneously—something I hadn’t seen done much up to that point—and more importantly, several of those plotlines were intensely emotional. I was used to stories that painted human emotions in broad, melodramatic strokes; things like rage and grief and joy all served to advance the plot. Zahn used subtler emotions to color his scenes, to move his story along without requiring those emotions to spur an action, and occasionally to gut-punch his readers. For example, after a plot-heavy scene where a ghostly Obi-wan Kenobi tells Luke some plotty stuff and then says his final goodbyes, Luke’s reaction really stuck with me: “For the third time, he’d been orphaned.”

I admit, my ten-year-old self hadn’t thought about the situation that way; that sentence hit me like a wave. Suddenly the story wasn’t about space battles and laser swords anymore; it was about a kid who’d lost his family three times over. Lightsabers, hell; I read the next three books looking for more of that feeling. As soon as I finished that trilogy of novels, I tracked down every other Zahn book I could find, hunting for that thread of human emotion tangled up in his knotty sci-fi plots. And more fragmentary sentences, of course. (I also listened to several of his more action-oriented books over and over on audiotape, so he’s probably had a bigger influence than anyone else on how I write fight scenes. I even hear his readers narrating them in my head.)

Also the best author photo ever.
"What duck?"

3. Terry Pratchett – Good Sir Terry is a more recent addition to my list of influences, but he’s an important one thanks to my years-long battle with insomnia. Not long after I discovered Pratchett’s brilliantly satirical Discworld books, I began to have trouble sleeping at night, and my doctor advised me to set a rigid bedtime routine—the same actions repeated at the same time, every night, to cue my body and brain that it was time to power down for a while. The doctor recommended that I include reading in the regimen, as most people find that a relaxing activity. However, I tend to get really intensely excited while reading, so perhaps in hindsight it wasn’t such a great bit of advice. For several nights, I lay awake thinking anxiously about whatever I’d been reading before bed, wondering how the story would turn out. I finally decided that I’d have to read something so familiar, so utterly predictable, that I could go to sleep without thinking about it. I grabbed the nearest Discworld book, which I’d recently read two or three times, and started reading a few pages a night.

I want to emphasize that the works of Terry Pratchett, lyrical and innovative and side-splittingly funny as they are, don’t actually make a very good soporific for most people. But when you’ve read them enough times to know most of the jokes by heart, they at least won’t keep you up at night. Over the next several years, I read almost every book in the Discworld series, except for a few of the earliest volumes that I didn’t like so much, over and over and over again. There are about 20 Pratchett books on my shelf that just rotate across my bedside table. Right now I’m probably on my tenth reading of Monstrous Regiment, averaging 20 to 30 pages per night. That much exposure has to seep in somewhere, and I’m beginning to notice little signs: more absurd situations creeping into my stories, a certain renewed interest in wordplay, and an awful lot of British slang that I have to delete on the rewrites … 

4. Spider Robinson – Where I grew up, “hippie” was a dirty word. All that peace-love-dope stuff was for cowards and sissies. In my town, the most important social events were all held at the local shrine to Richard Nixon (it had a topiary effigy of Checkers in the garden and, at least when I was a kid, no mention of Watergate anywhere). Consider, then, the effect of Spider Robinson, a proud self-identified hippie best known for a series of witty and unexpectedly touching humorous SF stories set in a Long Island bar. The short stories in his Callahan series made me giggle, and then immediately made me think. While I won’t claim to agree precisely with Robinson’s views on everything (we will always differ in our opinions of the Beatles), he never stopped impressing me with a) the speed and subtlety of his wit and b) the breathtakingly human heart that beats in every sentence he writes. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more human writer, and I mean that in the best possible way. When he’s not writing about drinking games, punning contests, and intergalactic insanity, Robinson likes to wrestle with Big Ideas. He doesn’t always win, but how can I not love a man who defines what it means to be human as “to live forever or die trying … to strive in the face of the certainty of failure … to persist”?

I freely admit that I stole his definition of personhood—that a person is anyone who voluntarily says or otherwise communicates, “Excuse me”. (Thus, several dogs of my acquaintance are people, and a great many humans are not.) Robinson taught me not to shy away from the big stuff.

He also taught me that talking dogs are always funny if you write them right. (You’ll see what I mean by the end of Volume 2, if I can keep that bit about eggs from getting cut …)

5. Peter S. Beagle – This is the most recent addition to the list, but he has to make it just because I’ve spent the last couple of years tracking down every book of his available in every local public library. He got me into fantasy again, pretty much, because he wasn’t writing Tolkien wannabe material. Instead, Beagle’s stories focus on the liminal spaces where ordinary life interacts with the extraordinary bits of fantasy. His most famous book, The Last Unicorn, combines the familiar tropes of fairy tales with a very modern schlemiel of a wizard and a breathtakingly alien force in the unicorn herself. For my money, though, it’s his short stories that are best—like “The Rabbi’s Hobby”, in which a rabbi and a 12-year-old would-be bar mitzvah take on the case of a mysterious young woman appearing in old photographs, and end up unwrapping a tale of ghosts, and regrets, and unexpected uses for antique keys. Or there’s “Oakland Dragon Blues,” in which a dragon (loosely based on the dragon cut from early drafts of The Last Unicorn) comes to life in Oakland, California and goes looking for the author who stopped telling his story before it was done. And for my money, “Mr. Sigerson” is one of the best Sherlock Holmes pastiches I’ve ever read, focusing as it does on the exiled Holmes, now a violinist in a tiny backwater orchestra, becoming involved in a tricky local mystery and learning an unexpected thing or two about his own long-denied humanity. 

 

While I’d like to cite Beagle’s glittering, lyrical prose as an influence on my own, I’m not that good (yet—I hope!) and he’s really on this list for two other reasons. First, his stories gave me the guts to write poetry for the first time since high school, and that’s something I desperately needed for Teh Novel. And second, the very fact of those stories’ existence—the way they shine like perfectly cut jewels—makes me want to write, and write better, and finish things well. I’ve met Mr. Beagle twice at conventions, and both times he has been a faultless gentleman and a warm, wonderful human being. For all I know it’s a clever act and he’s really a total jerk, but at least when I talk to him, he makes me want to be a better person and a much better writer. He’s over 70 years old, though, and you never know with older authors and their health, so I’m hammering away at my current projects, hoping to finish something worthy of being presented to him someday, before I run out of opportunities. I want to thank him for the lessons he’s taught me with his stories, and for the encouragement he’s given me when he didn’t have to do any such thing. Peter S. Beagle and his writing make me want to create something worthy of them both; I hope someday to hand him a copy of a published novel with his name in the acknowledgments, or even the dedication. Even if he never reads it. Even if he never opens it. I just want to thank him properly. Some people are like that.

There are more than a few authors who didn’t make the cut—Jim Butcher, for example, whose joke about his writing motto being “Suffer, Harry, suffer!” inspired my own joking mantra Suffer, characters, suffer. And I can’t go too long without mentioning Homer’s Odyssey, my favorite work of Greek literature, or the original Sherlock Holmes stories, or Neil Gaiman’s Neil Gaiman-ness, or the glorious pulp adventures of Johnston McCulley and Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Michael A. Stackpole’s short story “Peer Review,” which taught me that prose stories about superheroes were a thing. And Stan Lee? Oh, yes.

 

But for now, these five will do. And I hope I’ve done Mrs. Neese proud, sentence fragments and all.

It happened again.

Panel from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

What do I say?

Some execrably pathetic excuse for a human being walked into a suburban movie theater with a small arsenal and opened fire on a group of people whose only crime was buying a Batman ticket. What do I say?

This problem was supposed to be solved by now, you know that? It’s like those flying cars we were all promised 50 years ago. In the future, we’ll all have flying cars! There are even songs about how baby boomers are still waiting for their flying cars. Well, for my generation, it was mass shootings. We were supposed to be done with those by now.

I still remember sitting on a bus on a middle-school trip and reading about a now-forgotten rampage in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Someone had smuggled a newspaper onto the bus, and all the girls were giggling over pictures of Leonardo diCaprio in the Oscars section. The front page was abandoned on the floor, and I picked it up and read about a couple of teenage boys pulling a fire alarm and picking off their classmates as they ran for safety.

I was a freshman in high school when the Columbine shootings went down. I remember reading over a classmate’s shoulder as she wrote a letter to a friend, saying she was “hearing all about the ‘tragedy’ in Colorado,” and I remember thinking, no, that doesn’t need quotation marks. It’s not a so-called tragedy. It’s a tragedy, full stop.

And the grownups always told us, reassuringly, that in the future we wouldn’t have these problems. All we had to do was put a stop to bullying (ha!), or get these kids on medication (pfft!), or pass stricter gun laws (snrk!). In the future, there will be no mass shootings.

Well, it’s the future. I’m an adult now, more or less. And what is this I wake up to, one fine Friday morning? What do I have to explain to a room full of ten-year-olds when I go to work?

I can tell you one thing I didn’t say. Not once on Friday did I utter the phrase “in the future”. Because this will happen again, and I know it. Congress isn’t passing any gun laws in an election year, and probably not after that, either. More idiots will get their hands on more guns and go to more public places and kill more people. Some of them will be full-on deranged; some of them will just be depressed, or enraged, or sick of the world. Some of them will be trying to get famous, because let’s face it, that’s one way to do it.

I’ve heard a few people say already that the solution is just to take the guns away. Gun control? Don’t make me laugh. Even if we do manage to greatly restrict the sale and ownership of guns, the most that will do is reduce the body count slightly. Anybody remember the headlines from Europe and Asia about “stabbing sprees” and a burgeoning “knife culture”? Unless the future is a place where all of our food comes pre-cut, determined monsters will always have weapons, no farther away than the kitchen drawer. And even if we ban knives, we’ll probably hear about biting sprees. We’re just that kind of species.

No, the more I hear about Aurora—no matter how much I don’t want to hear about yet another public massacre—the more I think about something a very wise man once wrote:

“… sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.”

“It's a lot more complicated than that—”

“No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.”

“Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes—”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things...”

That exchange is from Terry Pratchett’s novel Carpe Jugulem, a hilarious little book about vampires and witches and pictsies and a truly ridiculous amount of alcohol. Pratchett’s grammatically challenged speaker is a mountain witch named Granny Weatherwax. Seek out his books about her if you can—I highly recommend them, like I recommend all his work—but watch out for landmines like that one. Pratchett’s a satirist, and satirists wait until you’re laughing and then stab you with a thought.

People as things, that’s where it starts.

I don’t know what motive, if any, the Aurora shooter might have had. It’s possible that none of us will ever know. But I remember an interview with a military sniper I saw once in a documentary, and I remember the man saying that the first thing you notice about a living human target when you look at it through a gunsight is that “the target has eyes, and the eyes move.” It’s a jarring realization, I’m told—that the creature whose life you’re about to end has such human features. And I think about a young man in a gas mask, in a dark theater. You can’t see eyes very well that way. Not enough to see them move.

People as things.

Kids running from a distant school, onto a killing field. People as things. Students huddled under tables in a library, their faces obscured. People as things. Shadowy faces in a movie theater, their features blurred by flickering light from the screen. People as things.

There are so many causes, so many complex explanations, so many justifications and ramifications and otherications that you quickly lose track of them all. But at some point, I’m beginning to suspect, it always comes down to two people, one of them holding a gun and seeing a thing through the sights.

I hear my students talk trash about people who are different from them—people of other races, other creeds and countries, the opposite sex. They laugh about “blowing away” the latest boogeyman on the news sites. And I know it’s just talk, just kidding around. They’ll grow up and realize how problematic those solutions are. They’ll realize that Dr. Seuss was right all along—a person’s a person, no matter how small (or how strange). A person is not a thing.

In the future, we won’t have mass shootings.

People as things.

The future is something we build. We make it ourselves. What kind of future would we make, I wonder, if we taught our children never to think of people as things? If we reminded one another that a person’s a person, no matter how small? If we looked one another in the eye, and saw the eyes move?

The deranged we will always have with us. We will always have weapons, even if they’re only our teeth. This won’t stop the real psychopaths, or the tragic accidents. But could we stop some of the horror this way?

In the future, people will never be things.

It’s a start.

A Halloween hallucination

It’s a strange feeling to meet your character in the real world.

I’m told that Sir Terry Pratchett visited the set during the filming of the TV version of his excellent novel Hogfather. He had a cameo role in the production, sharing a scene with perhaps his most iconic character, but actually running into the guy was a little jarring. You see, his co-star was Death—the Grim Reaper himself—robes, scythe, and all. Death makes a personal appearance in nearly every novel in Pratchett’s Discworld series (37 of 39), and takes center stage in Hogfather, where he takes over the role of a Santa-Claus-like figure after the fat man’s untimely demise. (Imagine children waiting up for Santa and getting a skeleton down the chimney instead. Exactly—hilarious!) So you can imagine Pratchett’s reaction when the first person he met on-set was a 6’7” Dutchman in a black robe with a polished white skull for a face. On the one hand, it’s delightful to see the fruits of your imagination brought so vividly to life. On the other, it does tend to make you worry about your sanity—and, in the case of Sir Terry, your impending mortality as well.

So here’s what Johanna looks like in her custom-tailored Peregrine costume, which you’ll all be seeing later on the cover of the collected edition of Masks:

I was happy to find the costume came out pretty close to Nicole’s original drawings. The tunic turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected—any big sewing project always does—but I think it’s still within the abilities of a talented sixteen-year-old with sufficient motivation. The real problem was appliquéing the Peregrine insignia on the back, which was probably eight or ten hours’ very fine and fiddly work. (Next time I design a superhero costume, the insignia is going to be a circle or something just as easy to sew!)

I’m rather proud of the pin, though. I was unable to get a metal fabricator on board, and unlike Rae, I don’t have access to a metal shop, so I had to make do with polystyrene and the judicious use of a Dremel rotary tool. It was my first time using a Dremel, and I am inordinately proud that I didn’t injure myself in the process. Last time I checked, I still held my high school’s record for the largest number of objects broken in a single chemistry experiment, so I fully expected to spend my weekend in the emergency room, but I didn’t even come close to cutting myself, and with a little touch-up paint, the results weren’t too bad. My only real complaint about the pin is the mirrored finish; I don’t think Rae would wear anything that reflective, but I didn’t know how shiny the plastic would be when I ordered it, and it was either that or take my chances applying silver paint to flat black styrene. Still and all, not a bad job, and any little inconsistencies can be fixed digitally when I take the cover photos.

Still and all, it was weird to look at. I’ve known Johanna for years, but as soon as she pulled that hood up over her hair, it was like someone else was standing there. She borrowed my favorite black bandana to use as a facecloth, something I’ve done myself as part of other costumes, and even though I’d seen and handled every part of the costume while making it, something about seeing her pull the bandana up over the bridge of her nose transformed her into someone I didn’t know in quite the same way. I found myself taking mental notes on little things—the way the folds of the bandana settled around her neck when she tugged her mask down, the way her eyes moved in the shadow of the hood—as if I were observing a stranger.

So this is what it’s like to hallucinate, I thought as I put my camera up between myself and my creation.

There was a little bit of pride involved (hey, look, my character design actually works!) and a little trepidation (gee, I hope this doesn’t look stupid to everyone else), but mostly it was just weird. I remarked that I was probably more excited about seeing Johanna in the costume than I would have been about wearing it myself. Johanna asked why.

“Because,” I said, “if you dress up as my sixteen-year-old character, it’s cute. If I dress up as my sixteen-year-old character, it’s creepy.”

But that wasn’t the only reason, of course. There’s more than a little of me in Rae, and I can’t help wondering … if I start dressing up as my own creation, how will anyone tell where she ends and I begin?

Will I still be there at all?

Oh, well. Happy Halloween, everybody!