Stealing bread from the mouths of dead writers; or, strange adventures in fiction research.

Fergus Hume was an English writer who lived in New Zealand and Australia for a time, and wrote a number of proto-detective novels and various other things. He died in 1932. He wore an admirable moustache.

F.W. Hume and his admirable moustache. 

I recently started a new and hopefully more desirable novel, set in 1870s-1880s Victoria. My initial research is to include reading a whole lot of other books set around the same time and place. I came across the good Mr Hume's book The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which is an early murder mystery set in Melbourne.* According to wikipedia, the book was:
a) a huge success, selling over 500,000 copies -- it's been called Australia's first international bestseller -- and:
b) self-published.

The 'Mystery of a Hansom Cab' is, apparently, not 'How does that guy sit up there without falling off backwards?'.

The contemporary irony of point b) probably doesn't need much on-about-banging by me, but it's there if you want it. Instead I thought I would mention how many potential sources for the (obviously decades-out-of-print) book there now are thanks to the wonders of the internet; where you can get a copy; and how it seems faintly on-the-nose that various publishers and retailers are treating out-of-copyright works as easy money.

I'm not a lawyer or an expert on copyright, but as far as I can make out, copyright in Hume's works lapsed in 2002. So as there's no royalty to pay on any sold copy of his work, any subsequent publisher and retailer can split the proceeds between them. Hume can't disagree, partly because copyright legislation gives him no right to do so, but mostly because he's dead. What's interesting about this in the ebook+scanner era is that the (longstanding) industry built around making relatively small sums of money by printing limited runs of dead people's intellectual non-property no longer requires the very real expense of doing so via a physical product. Here, the 'ebooks cost nothing to make' argument is closest to being literally true.

Evidence of which: I searched the Kindle store for Hume's book, and found five separately-owned, separately-published (where 'published' really could be excused here for being confused with 'regurgitated') versions: one audiobook sold on behalf of a prominent audiobook publisher, $11.95; one version supplied by publishers unknown, bundled with various other Hume stories (with the bonus feature of 'an active table of contents', and which claims to be over 4000 printed pages long!?), $1.99; another standalone version from an unnamed publisher, $5.59; one apparently annotated version from another (?) anonymous publisher, $4.50 (no sales as yet); and one (unreleased until late April) 'classics' version from one of Australia's best independent publishers, $9.99.

It's not hard to see the point of the audio version and its relatively high price - clearly someone has done substantial new work to get it out there. The rest of them are a strange mess of price points, all of which apparently are believed to be sufficient to repay the 'producer' for the inputs they made. Indeed, the main contribution of each of the other 'publishers' appears to be to make a bland cover largely using freely available photographs (excepting the named publisher, which is using one of those anti-contextual but interesting artwork styles that publishers sometimes use to tie their classics collections together), and to slap together some promo text -- which in some cases is an empty box, and in others is an unremediated slab of text from the story itself. I have not checked for editing, but I'm unconvinced that there is any of note; likewise I'm not sure of the value of exhibit D's annotations.

Like these guys, Project Gutenberg** knows it's important to keep forgotten works and loved classics alive after copyright lapses -- but P.G. does it differently, and for different reasons. If only because of Hansom's historically enormous sales success as an Australian novel, this is a book worth preserving. But is it so worth preserving that e-retailers and e-publishers should be allowed to make money from someone else's (even a long-dead person's) work, without providing any value themselves? In particular, when the text is perfectly available for free from groups that specialise and see value in putting these sorts of things out there for all to read and use? I got my free copy here from ebooks@Adelaide, a project of the University of Adelaide, under a Creative Commons licence.

I'm definitely not one who argues that all writing should always be free. But if the author's no longer getting (nor in any condition to use, you'd have to say) a cut of the proceeds, and someone's out there willing to provide the infrastructure to make e-copies available for free to interested readers, what business do others have trying to make money for doing nothing of value? Worse, who are exploiting the laziness or lack of knowledge of those Kindle users (and others) who won't or can't explore a few links via Google? It's on the nose, in my opinion.


*Interestingly, though his best-known, highest-selling work was about Australia, Hume claims in his preface to Hansom that he 'belong(s) to New Zealand, and not to Australia'.
**Many other fine organisations have the same goal and similar methods; P.G. is just the best-known and most obvious example. It's a bit like how we now 'google' something. One day free-classics-repositories may say they're going to 'projectgutenberg' a worthy item. Maybe they already do.

Running out of monsters

We're running out of monsters - at least as far as literature and entertainment generally are concerned. You might think that seems unlikely: we're overrun, lately, with vampires; werewolves are almost as common; zombies still won't lie down; and there's a supporting cast of predatory aliens, robots, serial killers, you name it, who pop up to make a contribution.*

But these creatures aren't monsters any more. Well, zombies are still largely monstrous, and it should become obvious why, but vampires are about as dangerous as the dudes from Mills & Boon -- misunderstood local bigshots, advertising executives, sharp dressers; a cast of good-looking misogynists, fated to be redeemed by the love of a whatever. Werewolves are misunderstood and cuddly. Cuddly! Ask an old woman from 14th century Latvia about werewolves (assuming you can find one) and I'm pretty sure her answer won't contain any of the medieval Latvian words for 'cuddly'.

Even in the new(ish) tv series with all the blood and violence and boobs, the vampires and werewolves aren't monsters; they're bad boys and girls; powerful but motivated by entirely human desires. The drive of the new monster narratives (from Buffy through, in particular, the Twilight books, and down to True Blood and so on) is not to scare; it's to look in on monsters' lives and explain why they're better than ordinary old us.

Stare long into the abyss and the abyss stares also into you, according to Nietsche. But also, stare long into the abyss and you'll eventually take all the fun out of it. We've been staring into the abyss quite a bit since Buffy first got to know Angel, and what's happened is that all those creatures we used to rely on to scare us have turned into self-absorbed superheroes. In Nietschian fashion, the human characters take on the lost quotient of evil. The narrative that Anne Rice shares with Stephenie Meyer, as much as Rice might want to deny it, is that it's good to have a vampire on your side. (Dangerous, perhaps, but danger only realised in that thrilling way where you suspect yourself to be in deadly peril of letting a vampire into your pants.) Good to have a vampire on your side? I suspect Bram Stoker would rather have shot himself in the face than write Dracula that way, and Nosferatu's Orlock would make a pretty disturbing bedfellow.

Nosferatu: terrifying undead monster or misunderstood potential boyfriend? You decide.

Team Edward,** Lestat, Buffy the Vampire Slayer As Long As The Vampire Isn't One Of Those Other Kind Of Vampires...the quality obviously varies, but the effect is the same: lots more vampires, but no more monsters. Serial killers? Dexter. (Maybe even Hannibal Lecter.) Werewolves? Twilight again, along with lots of less-popular books and properties. Dragons? Almost every dragon post-Tolkein I can think of has been a proud, put-upon, too-big-for-this-puny-human-world beast.*** If we were only enlightened enough to understand them, we'd stop seeing them as monsters.

I guess this isn't an unreasonable motivation for an individual story -- I mean, it was pretty effective when Mary Shelley did it -- but it seems like it's all we're getting. We're running out of monsters.

Something can't be a monster if you understand its motivation, if you explore its limits and possibilities -- get inside its head. This is (he said uneducatedly) basic sociology that we try to apply (much less successfully, it seems) to schoolyard bullying, oppositional politics, sexism and multiculturalism. Understand the 'other' a bit better and you won't fear it so much. The literary version of this -- which has to contain an element of essential conflict to be worth reading -- is 'poor monster, everyone else misunderstands you, but I know better, or at least I will after I've spent the first half of this book wrestling with your superhero monster broodingness. And one day, when the cruel human world is as enlightened as I am, we will live happily together as thing and wife.' And as literature is especially good at showing us the map of the self held by someone else (and thus is a teacher of compassion), it's a terrifically effective way of making molehills out of monsters.

If we are too busy understanding the Creature From the Black Lagoon, we won't be frightened of it. But being frightened is a valid story-telling technique, at risk of serious dilution by all this 'understanding'. And besides, if we're not frightened by monsters, what have we left to be frightened by? Ourselves, I suspect. Oh look, Avatar.

In fact, in a neat piece of mirroring, as monsters become more sanitised, heroes are darkening to the point where you can barely recognise them as the good guys. I mean, sure, the pretty knight is not especially interesting any more, but hasn't the opposite been done to death? Bring back monsters and let us defeat them (at least some of the time) -- and let the way they get my pants off be by scaring, not by charming.


*Mad scientists are out of favour. I deplore this state of affairs, but I think the rest of my thesis explains why it's happened: we (think we) understand science too well.
**Edward is the vampire, right?
***Gaming is beating literature on this one, you'd have to say: witness Dragon Age, Deathwing, Skyrim. Dragons that would still want to eat you even if you hadn't just transgressed some ten-thousand year old dragon society rule far too complex for us short-lived humans to understand.

Stardate: 2012. The Search Continues.

"The Quest is the Quest", 

They traversed galaxies in this kind of two-handed hairdryer thing. No wonder they couldn't find the other Minyans.

according to those crazy, Confucian, trope-embodying Minyans of Minyos. Endless searching certainly seemed to keep them motivated.

Seeking is important. Progress in (but explicitly not completion of) our own quotidian quests (for meaning, for promotion, for learning, for donuts) is one of the keys to happiness, according to positive psychology. So the fact that I'm starting out 2012 by continuing the search for an agent is clearly a good thing that will provide me with joy.*

I had a short but flattering comment about The Queen of Crakesville from the agent who requested the full MS last year, which sweetened the rejection a bit. (Writers! We're so easy!) They made it clear, though, that Australia is no place to try to get a novel with goths and zombies in it published, an opinion other friends have confirmed. (Picture me at this point, steeling myself for the avalanche of evidence to the contrary that you, imaginary reader, are about to heap upon me. No?)

So the search continues -- overseas. Thank goodness for email, says I: I'm not sure if I would (will, if it comes to it) have the strength to navigate international reply postage for queries en masse. One of the agencies I've got on my list mentions that they've only just opened up to email queries, and that their resistance was broken down largely because otherwise they'd go to the bottom of pretty much every foreign author's querying timetable, and therefore be getting the last look at at least some good stuff. It seems that many of the prominent UK agencies are still avoiding email queries too, perhaps as an effort to auto-gatekeep (It is so a word.): by putting a surmountable obstacle in the way, presumably the most casual will be dissuaded.

No doubt some days I could be described as that, and wouldn't be surprised if most writers weren't in the same boat. So thank you, Abhay Bhushan, Ken Pogran, Ray Tomlinson, and Jim White, for documenting the standardised network mail header. I couldn't have done it without you. Now I only have to worry about convincing someone a thousand miles away to love my work, and also that JZ is not too sweary for the US.

I don't mind admitting that it's a bit frustrating to be still searching for an agent, despite the at-least-a-bit-positive signs. To cheer myself up here are a few other people still searching for something important in 2012 despite having some reason to hope they'd have hit upon it in 2011:

• Sachin Tendulkar (the search for 100 international-match hundreds not helped by unexpectedly good Australian bowling over the last few weeks)
• CERN (the Higgs Boson is almost found, but not quite. In particle physics, 'almost found' is a legitimate state for matter to exist in...yay weirdness!)
• Google (still searching. You'd think they'd have given up by now.)
• Steve Carell, in the upcoming Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Read the blurb...it sounds simultaneously stupid and pretty feasible. Descriptive of the strangeness of being human, or just a dumb attempt to squeeze some cynical cash out of the Mayan calendar business? Hard, though, to go completely wrong with Steve Carell.)

*How deflating it must have been for the Minyans when the Doctor solved all their problems and ended their quest. "You competent bastard! Now what's going to give our unnaturally extended lifespans meaning and purpose?!"

Advertising: playful narrative or just weirding us out?

There's a series of TV ads for an insurance company going around at the moment, in which we are exhorted to believe that taking out private heath cover will cause us to 'meet a healthier version of ourselves', or some such twaddle. The money shots are a lot of teary and/or stoic reunions between two incarnations of the same person: men sharing almost-bawling man-hugs with their dopplegangers; women brought to speechlessness and bouts of meaningful-slash-pitying hand-touching.

I can't tell, in any given pair, which of the two is meant to be healthy. Perhaps it's all the movement, or perhaps it's truth-in-advertising at work: the advertiser implying visually that they can't deliver what their slogan promises. Anyway. There's a set of internet banner ads, of course, that go with it. (Remember seven or eight years ago when everyone was saying internet advertising was going to die out because nobody was bothering to click on it?) In the internet ads you can see much more clearly which is the unhealthy and which the healthy version. To whit, exhibit A:

Hint: the one on the right is the 'after' shot.

The message here seems to be that this health insurance company promises to stop you experimenting with crack (she really doesn't look well). Or alternatively that in order to become healthier, what you really need to do is wear makeup, blow dry your hair, and hang around in flattering light.

NaNo Day Three - The Tricky One

Day three of NaNo is traditionally the first difficult day for me. I woke up this morning knowing where I wanted to go with the morning's writing, but it still hasn't come easily. I'm bogged down with missing facts; I'm trying to write a wiccan coven scene, but I don't know enough about it. Time, I think, to just make something up, and resolve the problem of facts later in editing.

The best thing about NaNo, though, is that even when I'm struggling, I'm struggling to get beyond 300 words, not struggling to get beyond zero...

A moody little snippet from this morning:

None of the other women shifted. They all met her eyes as she looked at each one in turn, but they didn’t look comfortable, or entirely present. Lash wondered whether they were trying to make themselves believe her, or whether they already agreed and were nervous about it. Incarnating the God! Chaos, even the beloved and important chaos that would result, is not by its nature a comfort.

New beginnings - a hackneyed phrase

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. Auspiciously, is it a Tuesday -- usually a Writing Race day. Though the races are on hiatus (or out of season?) at the moment. My username is Dirtman, if anyone randomly should decide to add me to their NaNo buddy list.

I've started NaNo three times, and succeeded twice. Last year was a washout -- I think I was thinking too much about John Zombie to write a different novel. I certainly didn't feel sufficiently committed to it -- and tried to start other new things at the same time, a rookie NaNo mistake. This year I'm starting the JZ sequel, which I'm calling The God of Crakesville (cue ominous music). The third book will be called The Ghost of Crakesville (cue other ominous music probably involving thunder and/or a theramin). There may or may not be a sort of a theme going there. I'm discovering that the books are about the value of persistence, in a sense: John Zombie is a detective, but definitely not in the mode of forensic psychiatrist or super-spy or military thriller protagonist. His greatest skill is bloodymindedness -- though I'm trying hard not to write him as any kind of everyman. His struggles are those of a normal person faced with enemies more powerful/skilful*/determined than himself. My friend Dawn pointed out that his struggle against iconic figures with special powers (voodoo queens, gods, ghosts) is a handy metaphor for trying to get published, with which I have to agree.

It is past time, I suppose, to let the previous book go a little bit. I will keep sending it out if the latest agent passes on it, but I don't think I can keep submitting it to mentorship and MS development competitions and the like; it has had its day there. And I'm not prepared to do another big editing pass on it without some better (external?) reason beyond the vague possibility that I'll hit randomly on a version of it that better satisfies the next lot of QWC/ASA/Hachette/whoever competition judges.So this NaNo definitely has the spirit of a new beginning, hackneyed as that may be. I'm also enjoying the short stories I've been writing -- and learning that there is some room in that style for me has been a new beginning too. Though given the 50,000 words I'm about to spew out, I think the current story will have to wait a bit to reach its conclusion.

So, in light of these new beginnings, here is the first-draft beginning of the new book, and just for kicks, the beginning of the short story (which I wanted to call The book-thief, but I think that's a bit close to a certain global shelf-busting colossus of which you may have heard). The first one stars the sociopathic egotist wizard Giordano. The second one stars the rather limp and timid recent retiree, Clive. I don't think they have much in common.





The God of Crakesville: from the Prologue

Giordano rolled away at the completion of the ritual, gasping and sweaty. He buzzed with effort and power, though the heated urgency of the moment and the sense of out-of-self, of transposition into the greater thing, had snapped as soon as the ritual was finished. He tried to hold onto it.

Lash’s white belly skin was cool under his hand. He looked at her and gave her an expensive porcelain-white smile. She smiled back, but looked quickly down at his hand and put her own over it, entwining her fingers in his. This made him smile again, to himself this time. Doubtless she was nervous, still: eager to be near and yet reluctant to give in to his accelerating advances. Desperate to begin their work, too, but frightened of what it required, or what it meant, or both. He had no doubt she was terrified of the consequences of success; he had reservations himself, though his longer years had taught him how little those reservations mattered.

“So: we have begun,” he said.

Inside the locked book

Antique shops are foreign places. For all the prettily run-down furniture that comes in in container-loads and wobbles out the door again at a price that could shock the original owner out of his grave, what really fills antique shops is a lot of stuff hardly anyone recognises. Maybe your grandmother used this or that to prise or shuck or peel; maybe your grandfather’s grandfather knew of a use for that thick, rusted bent thing, but now it’s as foreign as a street sign in Russia in the background of a Cold War spy movie.  By which I mean you don’t expect to understand everything you see, nor expect it to have anything important to do with your life. So coming across a tin bucket full of greyish sand on a storeroom shelf was hardly more remarkable to me than stumbling over some cast-iron multi-purpose doorstop, or a set of novelty darning tools. I didn’t remark upon it until I pushed it off the shelf and spilled the sand all over the concrete floor.

At that time the apple of my increasingly watery eye was the owner of the antique shop, Maria. She was a Spanish lady with all that that suggests; a passionate temperament, dramatically waterfalling dark hair, full lips in olive skin. I was five years her senior at 50, and still in good shape then, but she was very much the leader, if there was such a thing, in our short but hopeful friendship. I was trying to impress her by helping out for free in the antique shop she’d recently come into. Early retirement from my own commercial ventures had left me well off, or well enough; and when I’d offered to help her out with her business for free I’d been thinking  of chilly evenings spent staring moodily into her mesmerising eyes over profit and loss statements and glasses of wine, and not this dark, infernal, uninsulated back room that seemed to produce dust spontaneously, and all the pushing and carrying and relocating that I had apparently agreed to do inside it.

*'skilful' is one of those words that looks weird if you stare at it too long. Skilful skilful skilful skilful. See?

I suppose we will.

Recently I finished Marieke Hardy's book 'You'll be sorry when I'm dead'. I dearly wanted to like it, because I think Hardy is fascinating; because I've always liked her written work; because we're not so far apart in age and I remember living in the Melbourne she describes -- so it was a relief, really, that it turned out so well. The writing is at turns restrained and excitable and emotional, and it all seems done deliberately and with skill, bringing out Marieke's feelings, not leaving the reader to judge (in the first instance) how they think they'd react or feel in the same moment. There's quite a bit to judge, so this is important. It seems the point of the book: to deliver Marieke's emotional responses to things in her life, not to explore (at least not directly) the human condition, nor to transport the reader to memories of similar things in their own life, and it seems the point of this book beyond the usual aim of the autobiographer. Marieke seems to want us (increasingly as the book continues) to know something important about her, and it reads (no doubt deliberately) as if it takes her a while to figure out exactly what that is.

There's a stunning movement from light to darkness in this book, which is arranged emotionally rather than chronologically. Hardy claims she will not spare us her own failings, but her despair at the particular failings she presents to us increases dramatically in the second half. Because the events are not listed chronologically, Hardy allows herself room to build emotional depth. The hook for the average reader is, of course, the promise of amusing tales of hedonism, and Marieke doesn't shy away from that,* but the book's depth comes from her fears, which she reveals only later. Her choices here are interesting: she depicts her friend's diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer as a story about bravery and resilience, yet later reveals her own deep-seated fears about mortality in tales about old school friends and step-children -- the stand-out passages in the book, I think.

The anecdotes are brave and open. Bravery is something to which all writing is supposed to aspire -- an unflinching carrying-out of the responsibility to search and then reveal. Autobiographers -- and particularly memoirists of this kind -- have in some senses an easier time of it: it's intellectually a simple task to be brave when your subject matter is your own proclivities; you just tell it like it was. At the same time there are higher stakes in autobiography; real people revealed in necessarily fallible rememberances potentially pay a real cost as a result. Hardy reveals, through an interesting if clunky series of emailed responses from people she writes about, both that there is a cost for those others and that the cost is rarely as high as she fears it might have been. Her father's preface, in which he wishes she might have used fake names for everyone, is amusing but smells of device, serving mainly to call attention to her (nevertheless brave) decision not to go down that path.

In her correspondences with some of the book's subjects, Marieke reveals the thread of fallible memory that tacitly underlines each anecdote. She claims, in the first one, that she herself is likely to appear as the villain if any of the stories were to require one. It's a fascinating and convoluted decision to include that particular correspondence, because it is in the story to which it pertains that she comes across (in light of her ex-partner's response) as being the only time she may not have been generous in her recollection. Again you can't fault her for openness and bravery, but it's hard (given her skill) to imagine that she never considered how being able to make herself look bad could make the book look better. Her description of her fears over her failed (and possibly failing) memory is extraordinary writing, and much more uncomplicatedly honest.

I have wondered about Marieke's very public obsession with Bob Ellis, who usually seems to me little more than a highly talented shit-stirrer whose partisanship exists largely because it gives him a target. That she chose to explain or at least describe this obsession in the darker last parts of the book is interesting; it makes Ellis appear particularly scary, and her obsession with him particularly charged, more dangerous -- through some trick of the positioning and the writing -- than the binge drinking and drug-fuelled promiscuity she describes earlier. She includes his frankly disturbing response near the end of the book, and it is a frightening counterpoint to all that she wrote about herself, perhaps to underline the book's subtext that the truly talented are dangerous people.

I'm eager to see her write a novel -- I want to read what she has to say about all of us, now that I've read this complex set of things she has to say about herself. This is marvellous, warm-hearted work.

UPDATE:
I just found this entry on Readings' site wherein Hardy discusses the writing of the book, worth reading because it further suggests that the titillating hedonism is far from her own motivation for the writing. It's interesting particularly for her short comments on the emails from her story 'participants' -- she notes that these pieces 'took control of the story' from her, which I think is the source of that clunkiness I felt in reading them. She says she's most proud of having included them regardless, and it's hard to fault that.


*Her choices around the break between hedonism and perversion are interesting, though.