immediacy: ephemeral thoughts on the immediate environment, a blog by Glen Engel-Cox

A form rejection today from Full Spectrum for "Sleep of the Just."

This one came from Jill's library, passed to me because she felt that I would enjoy it since I enjoy fairy tales. In fact, some of the stories included in this volume are anthologized from some of the books on my backlist. The selection criteria here is mainly tales that involve women, tales that were available in English, and/or tales that caught the attention of Carter. Some are fairly common, like "Little Red Riding Hood," while others are incredibly bizarre, at least to our culture, such as the Eskimo stories.

Maybe it's because I read this straight through, instead of simply reading a tale a night, but I came away strangely ambivalent towards these tales (with the exception of the Eskimo tales, which were too strange for words--short, vulgar, amazing). Not a bad collection, but if you are a fairy tale junkie, you'll want to go to her sources.

Quite unlike his other two books, The Soloist is a quiet novel of introspection about ethics, mental health, and music. I would never have bought this book if it had been by another author--in fact, I ordered it sight unseen based solely on my enjoyment of Salzman's other books. And, having read it, I wonder if I would have picked it up now that I know the subject and style. It's not that it is uninteresting. Salzman has a wonderfully transparent style that suffers only from a marked tendency to tell rather than show (not constantly, but enough to be irritating). There's just nothing special about The Soloist. Unless, that is, you go for novels about cello players.

Renne was a child prodigy who lost his gift in his late teens, and now teaches music in Los Angeles. The combination of his thirty-fourth birthday, jury duty, an unexpected student, and a possible love interest arrive at the same time, making for a remarkable frisson in his life. That's it. A simple tale of one man and the events that changed him. Okay, so it's nothing earth-shattering. I need a book every now and then to bring me back to the ground. At least Salzman is an engaging writer--I finished this book in two sittings.

The book to accompany the movie. I found it at a cinema book store in Seattle, as well as the cloth edition of Beginning. There's nothing new here, really, although one can take the screenplay and check it against the play to find out the changes that were made to the text.

Branagh says in the foreword that having the American actors was his idea. Perhaps. I had heard a rumor that he had included them for a wider U.S. distribution. In any case, it's worth noting that the Americans, with the possible exception of Denzel Washington, just can't hold a candle to even the meanest bit parts played by the British. I still think Keaton was way too "Beetlejuice" for Dogberry, although the explanation for his interpretation herein gave me new insight into it. If you're a Branagh admirer as I am, you shouldn't pass this book up.

Jonathan Bond of Pulphouse wrote this in his rejection of "Cinema Verite": "I liked the writing in this, but guessed the ending by the second page. I look forward to seeing your next."

I think sometimes I'm a literary snob. I say, what's the point of reading a book that doesn't contain merit, meaning, I do not read solely for pleasure. But I'm lying. I do read for pleasure--but what pleasures me now isn't the same sort of book that pleasured me when I was 18. Then, I could find joy in endless leaps of the imagination, no matter how rusty the springs on the pogo stick were. Nowadays, it takes a new spring on the pogo stick, or at least a whole lot of WD-40.

Tad Williams doesn't have a new spring--his is only as old as the 1960s and that seminal work of high fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. But his WD-40 is fast acting. I don't believe that Tad is offering anything new in this book, but his style is fluid, the plotting well prepared, and the world a strange mixture of reality and fantasy (much like the strange interplay in Tolkien). Compare this to Terry Brooks (who I did read back in my younger days). Brooks, at least in The Sword of Shannara, does nothing new. The characters were cardboard cutouts of those he read in Tolkien. Or how about David Eddings, whose work is one plot coupon after another. Williams at least knows that he is treading the same ground here, and he works hard to make it at least seem different. While he doesn't have the courage of Stephen Donaldson, whose Thomas Covenant novels, while excruciatingly purple, are fevered creations of misery and muse, Williams achieves a good balance between pleasing his audience with good writing skills.

The Dragonbone Chair is an epic. Clearly Williams set out to write a "winnebago" of a book, and constructed a double-wide. The protagonist is your typical young male role model who is a misunderstood dreamer. Luckily, the book gets weird quickly, with a strange intermix of politics, religion (something Tolkien doesn't really cover in the "Lord of the Rings") and magic.

It is the religious aspect that is unique here. Williams plays on some strange similarities between the fantasy world and our own history, and it shows itself best in the Christ-like figure Usires, and the Mother Church. Some say LotR was an analogy for WWII--perhaps Williams is striving for an updated effect. I can't tell as of yet, being only 1/3 through the tale.

I have the succeeding volumes and I plan to tackle them straightaway. I told Jill before I started these that I needed a new world to simply immerse in for a few books. Tad's fulfilling the bill nicely.

Three rejections today. Ouch.

First was from OMNI for "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead." Ellen Datlow said, "You've got some good writing and some good ideas in here but I feel on the whole it's a bit too heavy-handed for my taste."

Second was from Stanley Schmidt at Analog for "Going Mobile." He notes that Analog doesn't do reprints at all, even from small publications.

Third was for "Cattrap" from Glimmer Train. A form rejection notice with a handwritten "Thank You" on it.

Sent "In a Blaze of Glory" to Cemetary Dance, "Sleep of the Just" to Interzone, and "Earth Mars Venus" to Dead of Night.

The second in the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. About 3/4 of the way through this volume, too much of the influence began to show. Not that such an occurrence is surprising--it's damned difficult to write a fantasy epic without Tolkien influencing it in some way--but something pegged a memory cell, and I winced at the similarity. As I said about The Dragonbone Chair, Williams isn't as bad as Terry Brooks. Brooks' main character was a short halfling type; Williams' is a young boy who is maturing quickly. Brooks' main good wizard was a mysterious man who comes and goes; Williams kills off the good wizard halfway through the first book. The similarity that made me wince, however, was the knowledge that the main bad wizard (as opposed to the overlord baddie) was once a member of the good wizard group. Shades of Saruman, and, as Jill pointed out, Star Wars.

To break it down into these stereotyped roles is to reduce the work. Williams does a wonderful job in scene description, and his plotting ain't too shabby. Many times I was caught in a storyline that I wanted to see resolved. These were often the times that Williams would break from that action to cover a slower scene elsewhere, in the hopes that you stay fixed to the book looking for the resolution of the first. Unfortunately, there's more than just two of these situations going on, but something like four or five. Tolkien did the same thing, but in large chunks. (In fact, if my memory serves me, Tolkien had one group move on, and then returned to another and the time had to backtrack several months. Williams' sections seem to match fairly consistently in shorter durations than that.)

I'm still enjoying it, though I think I might take a little breather before attacking the last, and thickest, volume.

More mailing today. "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead" to Hitchcock's, "Going Mobile" to Fantasy and Science Fiction, "Cinema Verite" to Figment, and "Cattrap" to Pulphouse.