Some good stuff to link to today.
1) Stevie One, my ongoing serial. I know I didn't post anything last week, but that was because the scene I was writing was particularly complex, with a lot of levels. But today it's done, so there's a big chunk of new stuff to read. This is Part Four, which started here. The new stuff starts here.
I'm anticipating that there will be two more parts. Part Five will be called "On Patrol."
2) I just discovered a new blog called The Swing. I like it because the writer, Jodi McClure writes about serial fiction, and (even better) she's actually doing it. She's the writer of the emotobook serial Swing Zone, which I'm quite enjoying.
3) As I said here, I've started to follow the New York Review of Books blogs, and I saw another excellent post there, called "Why I Still Write Poetry." I could describe it, but it tells its story better than I could. Check it out.
4) Here's an interesting article called, "Why The Avengers is the best TV show in movie theaters." I can't speak for the movie, obviously (haven't seen it), but I think the article makes a very good general point. Certainly, as I've talked about before, the big appeal of the Nero Wolfe books (far beyond whatever mystery Wolfe and Archie are investigating) is spending more time in the brownstone on West 35th Street, with Wolfe and Archie and Fritz and Saul Panzer and Inspector Cramer (and Purley and Fred and Orrie and Lily Rowan and so on).
I remember during the days of the Claremont/Byrne X-Men comic books, readers used to write in and suggest that one issue just have the characters hanging around the mansion, interacting, with no big menace to fight (and, as a matter of fact, I think there was just such a story at some point). And, as I've said, the best thing I've read about The Avengers is that Roger Ebert compared iit to Rio Bravo, and movie that has so much fun hanging around the jail house with Chance and Dude and Stumpy and Colorado and Feathers that it forgets for at least an hour that it even has a villain.
This is kind of ironic timing, since one thing I'm doing with Stevie One is, for a moment, showing Jan Sleet much more on her own than usual. We've had glimpses of Marshall and Ron and Christy, and I think Fifteen will pop up for a moment, but this is mostly her show (within the fact that, of course, it isn't her book). But this is just a solo turn for her. Her supporting cast, her family, isn't going anywhere. And I'm already planning how it will continue to expand.
Two quotes from the Why I Write Poetry post that resonated with me:
“I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going.”
It’s funny, first of all. Probably my favorite part of the post because of that. But there’s also something in there about writing (or doing anything) because you want to not because of “getting something.”
“All I knew with any certainty about my poems is that they were not as good as I wanted them to be and that I was determined, for my own peace of mind, to write something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show my literary friends.”
I wish I could write poetry, but I can’t manage it. I’ve written some haiku that I don’t think are too bad, but whenever I try to write anything longer, anything with emotion, I end up hating it for being too trite. But sometimes I do it anyway, hoping that someday I won’t be embarrassed by it…
That first quote also caught my attention, too, because that “even” rang wrong to me. In other words, I wondered if I might have put it “young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry after being told they were geniuses.” The writer seems to think that being told you’re a genius when you’re young is a positive thing, and for some it is I’m sure (Orson Welles was raised to believe he was a genius, and I think it worked pretty well for him). But for other people, I think it would have a very bad effect.
When my father was teaching me to drive, he learned very quickly to hold back on any praise until we were done and he was back behind the wheel. If he said “You’re doing well” when I was driving, I always went right into a ditch.
I always remember a Peanuts cartoon which ended with the thought, “There is no heavier burden than a great potential.”
I never really tried to write poetry. I fiddled around with it a few times, but not seriously. But I don’t read poetry, so I suppose that’s not surprising. I wrote a lot of song lyrics once upon a time, but that’s kind of different (and I do listen to a lot of songs).