R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 43

Definition of the Day:

Moral outrage. 1) A pain in the shoulder generally brought upon by reaching for one's wallet. 2) A commercially popular way to treat the symptoms of ignorance and confusion.

For those of you who are interested, The Globe and Mail has published an article of mine regarding the latest WikiLeaks fiasco. You can find it here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/wikileaks-not-all-hypocrisies-are-equal/article1821262/

Definition of the Day:

Labour: 1) the renting of one's metabolic activity for the pleasure of another; 2) the single most important constituent of society, and therefore the most despised; 3) something the poor are lucky to give, and the wealthy are entitled to receive. 

Just thought I would drop a quick note to thank all the well-wishers and to clarify things. First, don't worry about me–or any other writer for the matter, especially if you work for a living. Trust me, as career paths go, this is slack. I'm only whining because I'm a slacker extraordinaire–I was made to do this for a living. I'm a monomaniac, for one, and organizationally challenged for another. But what I'm complaining about is the prospect–and at this point it's only the prospect–of going back to post-secondary teaching… The second most slack career path I can imagine!

Second, do not worry, the APOCALYPSE HAS NOT ENDED. The books continue to sell, continue to be backlisted. If it weren't for the pain the industry is suffering as a whole, I'm sure I would have the rights for all the remaining installments safely tucked into bed. It's the schedule I'm concerned about. And that's it.

Last night, as I paddled about the edges of sleep, it struck me like a bolt: by expressing anxiety about the series I was in fact undermining confidence in it. This has got to be one of the most bizarre, and horrifically important, dimensions of human social behaviour–as well as the reason the markets continually slip the noose of mathematical regimentation: the way doubt and belief gust through mobs of people. This is the real, 'power of positive thinking,' the one economists are so anxious to track. When the New Age cheeseheads prattle away about the need to beam positivity out into the universe they aren't entirely off their rocker: they're simply taking a fact of human intercourse (our attraction to confidence and positivity) and turning it into a metaphysical principle, one that–happily enough–makes everyone responsible for whatever fortune or misery the roulette wheel of indifferent existence spins out.

That, my friends, is what all blogs with any commercial dimension whatsoever boil down to: a kind of confidence game. Not only is it inescapable, it's absolutely essential, on a whole different variety of levels…

Now if only someone would tell Julian Assange as much.

Definitions of the Week:

Honesty. (1) Something to be fondly avoided in serious conversations. (2) One of two options people resort to only when their imaginations fail them and the silence becomes unbearable. The other is pretending to be distracted by something on TV.

Philosophy. (1) A kind of semantic manure, either heaped upon beautiful flowers until they die, or spread liberally across ideological weeds. (2) A rash developed by certain thoughts of weak constitution, insuring they will be incessantly scratched.

Conservatism. (1) The urge to hold one's testicles while asleep. (Not to be confused with Fascism, the urge to seize the testicles of others). (2) The tendency to confuse good luck for hard work, and beneficiaries for benefactors. (3) The ability of language to defeat reason.

Liberalism. (1) The tendency to sleep without underwear. (2) The ability of reason to fuck everything up.

Socialism. The reason Scandinavians are healthier, wealthier, and better in bed. See, Truth. Related terms, Boredom, American Literacy–the Decline of.

Mathias Clasen, who organized my recent lecture series in Denmark, sent me The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, and I've been thinking in definitions instead of aphorisms ever since. The thing is brilliant–tyrannically so. I imagine once I begin working on the epigrams for The Unholy Consult I will revert back to type.

I should be working on copy-edits for The White-Luck Warrior by now, but there seems to be some problem in the bureaucratic pipeline. I sometimes have trouble deciding precisely where I fit into the sanitation flowchart. Am I the toilet, or the waste treatment plant? It flatters me to think I'm a terminus of some kind. I mean, who wants to be a sewer…

Speaking of which, Disciple of the Dog is still doing nothing sales-wise in Canada and the UK, at least on Amazon. Having that ridiculous PW review posted at the top probably doesn't help. Even still, a number of positive reviews have popped up across the web. If anything, they remind me of the kind of guarded praise The Darkness that Comes Before received when it first hit the blogosphere. The biggest beef seems to be the way the story ends: where I thought I was doing something spare and Chandleresque, many seem to think I was too hasty.

Another lesson learned. Here's hoping that Disciple has a chance to profit from it.

For a couple of weeks now I've been exchanging emails regarding Disciple, cynicism, and murder with Jim Sallis for the Mulholland Books website, a conversation which should go up anytime now. My wife and I had an absolute riot with Jim (along with George Martin) in Spain a couple of years back. Aside from being one of the most funny, interesting people I've ever met, he's an award-winning SF and crime fiction novelist. One of his more recent novels, Drive, is about to become a major Hollywood production.

Maybe that will goose things, earn a few more reviews.

Either way, the time has come for me to reconsider my options, career-wise. For the first time in years I find myself without a backlog of projects. Unnerving. After The Unholy Consult is done, I could very well be done, at least as a full-time writer. My literary Grand Armee is over halfway to Moscow, the supply lines are growing ever more tenuous, and a long, hard, economic winter has begun. The Second Apocalypse is proving to be a gamble of Napoleonic proportions.

There's no cause to fear for the completion of the series. There's no turning back now. The question is one of how long it will take to finish without the luxury of time.

A luxury that you all have afforded… If only there were more of you!

I'm a creature of habit, which means that when I form the habit of not doing something…

Anyway, when I wrote Neuropath I included a number of 'hypothetical facts,' depressing results (based on a pessimistic interpretation of then-contemporary trends) from research that had not yet been conducted. Here's one of them, with a bunch of associated goodies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6S9OidmNZM

Definitions of the Day

Election: A process whereby many people congregate to commit one mistake.

Deficit Reduction: The redistribution of resources away from the poor, thereby improving their opportunity to secure minimum wage labour. The first step requires the slashing of revenues. The second step requires the verbal poo-pooing of expenditures. The third (optional) step, requires the expansion and/or prolongation of foreign wars. All three of these steps can be avoided if one simply blames the Chinese.

Hyperinflation: The consequence of obese men farting into the mouth of condoms.

American Dream: An aspiration most often realized in Scandanavia.

Aphorism of the Month: The Great Riddle of middle-age is deciding whether you're becoming wierd, or simply discovering wierdnesses that have been there all along.

Disciple, I suppose, could be described as a put-upon, down-on-his-luck investigator who tries to get his own back by continually ducking sideways. He takes the back way home. More and more it's starting to look as though Disciple of the Dog will be every bit as put-upon and down-on-its-luck as its namesake character. The Publisher's Weekly review has found its way to Disciple's Amazon page. It begins, "The cleverness Bakker displayed in his Prince of Nothing fantasy trilogy (The Darkness That Comes Before, etc.) is lacking in this suspense novel introducing Disciple Manning…" In other words, it starts with a dismissive tone. "Clever" is the word people use to describe things not quite as profound as they are: I should know, since this is how I use the term all the time myself! The review then lays out the shape of the plot before ending with: "A crude, off-putting hero with a flatulence problem may leave few readers eager for a sequel."

Had to break for a laugh… Too fucking funny.

Primarily because I would bet my next royalty check that whoever wrote this review farted at least ten times as much while reading the book as the two farts attributed to Disciple in the story. Funny how two farts can become a "flatulence problem" so quickly. Books are like elevators that way, I guess.

The reviewer should have ended with "Disciple is a dog… A yukky, yukky dawg."  Then I could have said, "Huh. Go figure."

Oh well. Dem da breaks. I've always said that liking this book depends on liking the hero. Leave it to Disciple to find his way into the hands of a prude. There's few mechanisms in the brain more difficult to get around than those involved in disgust. Once you trigger these systems, it's pretty much game over. They should get her to review Bukowski next (I'm just assuming she's a she because of the whole "fart chauvinism" thing, but I could be wrong).

As Disciple himself says, "One man's dog is another woman's pig. I get that." 

It really is a game of chance with every book: not only does it need to reach the right reviewer, it needs to reach them in the right way at the right time. Reviewers are almost as heterogenous in their make-up as the general population of readers. So if you game expectations the way I do, self-consciously try to rub against the grain of certain sensibilities (in the case of Disciple, the kinds of micro-proprieties that people use to cobble together the moral character of people they meet), you are bound to get smacked. All I can do is shake my head, shrug my shoulders, and hope the next roll of the review dice doesn't come up… craps.

And at the same time I can't help but feel that, "A crude, off-putting hero with a flatulence problem [that (sic)] may leave few readers eager for a sequel," would be a damn good blurb to put on the mass market paperback's cover. The only problem is that it would scare the prudish away, when I would much rather give them a rash.

And on top of that, I'm going to succumb to the gambler's fallacy and say that Disciple has suffered so much bad luck that his number is due. Not everyone is averse to his brand!

Daily Aphorism: Writers kill their characters the way alcoholics beat their children: it's their way of spreading the blame.

There's something to be said for working out all your raping and pillaging in your pre-Medieval past, because the Danes have to be the most urbane, friendly, and civilized people on the bloody planet. Last night I presented my final lecture (the fourth in two days!) in – get this – the English Department's bar… Too cool, I have to say.

They make me feel like the longhaired savage – except, of course, I no longer have long hair.

So I've been ranting and railing against the literary establishment in both its academic and non-academic incarnations, all the while expecting some descendent of Kierkegaard to stomp on me and tear my arguments to pieces. Nothing of the sort happened, with the exception of one bearded philosopher, who seemed to have more of a problem with me than with my arguments per se. I'm not a real scholar, see. I actually had a self-professed Derridean tell me that he agreed with 95% of what I said. That's the thing with these Danes – they're every bit as polite as Canadians! The only difference is that you get the sense that some element of their Wodenistic past lingers, and that behind their accomodating smiles they're actually thinking of way to grind your bones to roll into their flour. Make you into a Danish…

(Speaking of which, the danishes here are easily the best I've tasted in my life. I've made a couple of cavity raids to the wonderful bakery across from the Guesthouse here. Me, oh my.)

Seriously, though. Mathias, Nik, Lars, and Christian have treated me like royalty, and I will be forever grateful. The weeks leading up to this trip had been very difficult. Aside from my frustrations with Disciple's release and the resulting existential career fears, a wonderful friend of mine succumbed to cancer shortly before I left. I was literally cramped with guilt because I couldn't make the funeral. And as some of you have no doubt heard, Ralph Vicinanza, my agent's boss, and the genius who rewrote the agency playbook for genre fiction, passed away suddenly. It's strange the way a string of bad and painful news can convince you that only bad and painful things await you in the future. Such has not been the case. The talks have far and away exceeded my expectations. The Danes actually get my quirky – and thoroughly vulgar – sense of humour (and even managed to outdo me on several occasions (Christian, I'm talking about you, bud)). Today, the boys are cooking me a traditional Danish dinner – and the fools even bought a copy of NHL11 because they knew I would be missing the opening of the hockey season!

And they presented me with my very own Zippo as a gift.

I still miss my daughter horribly (this the first time I've been away since she was born a year ago), but I'm inclined to say that I'm climbing out of the fog of negativity that has baffled my heart for much of the previous month, infecting these posts, and leading to the indiscriminate slaughter of at least two major characters.

Daily Aphorism: Only fools burn anymore, which is why so many literary bellies are filled with fill–dirt shovelled from better graves.

I've been spinning my wheels this past week. The key to my productivity, since I quit my two pack a day smoking habit, anyway, has been routine. There was a time, back when I still tried to will my way into writing, where I really worried that I wasn't cut out for a career as a writer. I literally started working in the fields when I was eleven years old – I've spent the bulk of my life driven by the expectations of people who where actually looking over my shoulder as I worked. One of the first things I discovered when I began writing full time was that the solitude and independence that I had spent so long yearning for possessed an entirely different motivational structure, one that will send you skidding down innumerable paths of least resistence if you don't find some way to adapt. Before you know it, you're finishing your fifth full campaign of Rome: Total War, or winning you fifteenth EA Games Stanley Cup, cursing yourself for being such an unproductive loser.

Since I had no faith in my willpower whatsoever, I decided to relieve my will of command, and replace it with habit. So I started leaving the house every morning and going to coffeeshops – someplace where work was all there was to do. And that has been the cornerstone of every book I've written since The Warrior-Prophet (which I finished as a smoker and recovering graduate workaholic).

This is one of the reasons I'm so reluctant to do cons, even though I have a total blast whenever I do go. Any interruption in my routine, it seems, sends me crashing from the rails altogether. If I take even a single day off, I'm three days recovering. If I miss a weekend, then I'm at least a week recovering. Now, with Denmark looming, Disciple languishing, I find myself in a bona fide creative slump.

And I find myself wondering whether this is way literary writers must feel: as if they're stuck trying to ignite dirt.

I say this because I've come to regret my earlier post on Tom McCarthy. After watching and reading a number of interviews with Justin Cronin and Jonathan Franzen over the past weeks, I've come to appreciate the fact that McCarthy actually has a programme, that he is actually trying to accomplish something with his fiction. The easiest thing in the world, it seems to me, is to take shots at someone who is trying – earnestly trying - to forge a stormy relationship with readers, even if, as I happen to think, he is really only going through the motions of a certain bureaucratic genre.

He has the fire… You gotta give him that.

In an age where only fools burn, no less.

Daily Aphorism: A blog is a kind 0f linguistic crotch shot: no matter how you shave your message, only the perves are going to get it.

Okay. So I finally had a chance to troll through the comments. I feel like such a loser for not replying individually, but like I say, I really need to police the amount of time I spend on this thing. With Ruby, I literally only have seven hours a day with which to: A) read the paper (the single most important thing a writer can do, I think); B) write my...