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Ten years of blogging: A literary eulogy

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Cover of Peking Story, by David Kidd
David Kidd

Previously: Portable dreamweavers
Next: An all-too-familiar utopia

Blogging in 2017 was again marked by another foray into the world of Kindle Scout, this time for my Bridge Daughter sequel Hagar’s Mother. That year I also ran a three-part series discussing the crossover between writing fiction and writing code, and some short entries on how I use a writing notebook when preparing to write a novel.

Panel from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics

The most popular entry from 2017 was, by far, on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I first read this groundbreaking book in the 1990s, and have reread it at least three times since. McCloud wrote (and drew!) more than a treatise on how comics work. It’s a manifesto praising comics as the ultimate communication form ever devised. As I wrote, McCloud is “not merely comics’ Aristotle and ambassador, he’s its evangelist. Understanding Comics may be the first foundational lit crit text written by a fan boy.” I followed up a month later with “Blood in the margins,” which takes some of the lessons McCloud offers and back-ports them to fiction.

Peking Story by David Kidd

The 2017 entry I’m most proud of is on David Kidd’s memoir Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. Originally anthologized in 1961 under its original title All the Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd’s classic is one of those remarkable nonfiction books that’s largely flown under the cultural radar. I have a theory why.

Kidd was an American, born and bred in the Midwest, who traveled to China at the end of World War II, where he married into a prominent Chinese family. When the book opens, he joins them behind the walls of their mansion compound, where they sip tea and reminisce about their family’s illustrious past. Meanwhile, the Communist insurgency is beginning to assume control over the country. Kidd pines for China’s past and mourns the loss of its ancient cultural traditions to the incoming revolutionaries. This is why I call the book “a literary eulogy.”

On the surface, it’s a wonderful book, with economical prose both graceful and straightforward, and lots of well-drawn authentic detail. Structurally, it’s as classical in its design as the Parthenon. As far as I can tell, it’s the only book Kidd authored, but what a book to rest your laurels upon.

As I wrote, Kidd was an unusual narrator for his memoir: “There are moments that read like a Graham Greene novel, the world-weary British expatriate turning up his nose at the dreary reactionaries and their anti-imperialist manifestos.” An uneasiness grows as you read between the lines. You sense that Kidd is, on one hand, a snobby and mildly myopic WASP, and on the other hand, an unrepentant Sinophile infatuated with China’s exotic past. His new in-laws, while not nearly as wealthy as their forebears, live a rather luxurious life compared to the peasants in the fields and the servants washing their clothes. Kidd seems as blithe to to the inequities as his in-laws are. When I reread Peking Story for the blog post, I kept wishing Kidd would at least once acknowledge the disparity. The acknowledgement is never really offered.

And that, I think, is the stain that prevents Peking Story from becoming a true classic of nonfiction or New Journalism. It’s not due to political correctness gone amok, but a lack of social awareness that modern readers expect from authors. Kidd should be the outsider peering in, but no, he is such a Sinophile, he eagerly jumps onto the garden divan to loll about with his new Beijing family. Even Fitzgerald—who never met a person of breeding he couldn’t write about—had the necessary introspection to offer the reader asides on the absurdities of the ultra-rich.

As much as I admire Kidd’s masterpiece, I can’t help but sense that the shadow casting a pall over it is not from what he wrote, but what he left unsaid.

Twenty Writers: David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China


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Ten years of blogging: Portable dreamweavers

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J. Hillis Miller

Previously: An unusual parable
Next: A literary eulogy

2016 was a busy year for blogging. Amazon accepted Bridge Daughter for their Kindle Scout program, which entailed a month-long nomination process before they agreed to publish it. It was the start of a fairly intense roller coaster ride, most of which I captured in blog posts along the way.

Amazon’s imprimatur on the novel opened many doors. With a single email sent on a single day of the week to a mere sliver of their customer base, Amazon could generate hundreds of book sales, as though rubbing a lamp to summon a djinn. Amazon’s backing also led to a movie production company inquiring about film rights. They read the book and they asked questions, but ultimately they passed.

(Amazon dismantled the Kindle Scout program in 2018, which I still consider a tragedy.)

Of the long-form blog entries in 2016, I produced three that I remain proud of. I’m torn which to feature here. My account of Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber tour still evokes nostalgia. Don Herron is the creator of the classic Dashiell Hammett tour in San Francisco. Getting a chance to meet Herron and take his lesser-known Fritz Leiber tour was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he no longer leads it save for special occasions.

Another piece I’m proud of is my review/analysis of the Generation X cult classic Slacker, one of my favorite films. This entry has an untold side story: A few months after posting it, an online film aficionado site on Medium asked if I was interested in adapting the review. Unfortunately, what the editor wanted me to write about wasn’t what I found interesting about Slacker, and the opportunity fizzled out.

On Literature by J. Hillis Miller

The third is a blog post I keep returning to as a kind of manifesto: “Fiction as a controlled experiment,” a write-up of my thoughts on the book On Literature by J. Hillis Miller.

Miller was a scholar at Yale and U.C. Irvine, and known for promoting deconstruction as a means of literary criticism. I discovered On Literature on a shelf of used books in a Tokyo bookstore, and assumed it would be thick with postmodern terminology and abstruse theories. Instead, On Literature is personal and ruminative. Parts of it read like a confessional. Miller admits to a lifelong love of reading, and writes in glowing terms on several children’s books he marveled over in his youth.

What caught my attention the most, however, is when he confesses to viewing a work of fiction as a “pocket or portable dreamweaver.” He describes books as devices that transport the reader to a new “hyper-world” for them to experience. The way he describes it reminds me of the linking books in the classic video game Myst.

Myst linking book
Myst linking book

This quaint vision of narrative is unfashionable in the world of literary criticism. Miller’s vision is also, in my view, charitable to lay readers, who are less interested in high theory and more interested in enjoying books, and curious why some books are more enjoyable than others.

But I do think this vision—”a pocket or portable dreamweaver”—is also a useful guide for an author developing a story or a novel. Miller insists a work of fiction is not “an imitation in words of some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld.” That is what the creation of story is—not merely revealing or reporting an already existing world, but creating a new one in the author’s mind, and, in turn, recreating it in each reader’s mind. These multiple worlds are similar but never exactly the same.

Miller died in 2021 due to COVID-related issues, one month after the death of his wife of over seventy years. Reading On Literature makes me wish I could have enrolled in one of his courses. Whereas so many of the European deconstructionists seemed intent on subverting the power of literature, Miller was plainly in awe of the written word, and strove to promote it. We need more readers like him.

Fiction as a controlled experiment


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Ten years of blogging: An unusual parable

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Photograph of Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett

Previously: The mysterious B. Traven
Next: Portable dreamweavers

The year 2015 was more productive than the prior for blogging. I managed to eke out twenty-six blog posts, or about one every two weeks. In the world of blogging this is nothing to crow about. I never intended for this blog to be a daily writing exercise, though. I sought to stretch myself in terms of research and preparation for the longer pieces, and to produce longer work that stood on its own, rather than be impressive in its volume.

It was also an eclectic year. I wrote a piece on Japan’s sakoku (its two-hundred and fifty year period of isolation) and rangaku (literally, “Holland learning”). I had no business writing this. I’m not a domain expert on the subject, and my experience is based solely on some personal research and visiting Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki where Dutch traders bought and sold goods until the end of sakoku. 2015 is also the year I started writing about story structure and fiction workshopping, topics I feel more at ease discussing.

Humphrey Bogart holding the Maltese Falcon (film prop).
Humphrey Bogart and “the dingus.” (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By far, the most popular blog post of that year, and for this web site’s existence, is “Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon).” This long post gave me the chance to air a theory I’d developed on the Flitcraft Parable, a brief tale private eye Sam Spade tells femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy in an early chapter of the infamous detective novel. It’s an odd digression for straight-talking Spade to make, and an odd digression in general, for the novel is a model of brisk narration and economical prose. As I wrote in 2015:

One cannot imagine the Flitcraft Parable finding a place in pulps like Black Mask, magazines that instructed their writers “When in doubt, throw a dead body at ’em.” No gun is leveled, no whiskey is poured, no dame is saved. In The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett crafted the most iconic private detective novel ever, the singular representation of an entire form, and yet in it he wrote the most unorthodox story of detection ever.

And that is an important point about the Flitcraft Parable, for it is a story about a rather simple bit of detection Spade was hired to perform many years prior to the events of Falcon. There’s not of a lot of chin-scratching in the parable itself. Rather, the chin-scratching comes later, as Spade attempts to explain what it all means, while O’Shaughnessy characteristically shrugs off its significance.

Like the parables of Christ and the Buddha, the Flitcraft Parable’s shape and ending is ambiguous, and its meaning elusive. Even the reason for Spade telling the parable is debated. I won’t cover it all here, it’s best explained by my post.

By far, the most substantial criticism I received for it was that I’d over-thought my reasoning, and that there was no proof Hammett knew of Charles Sanders Peirce’s work (which I think unlikely). I posted a follow-up in November 2015 giving an alternate, but related, explanation of the parable.

Twenty Writers: Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon)


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Ten years of blogging: The mysterious B. Traven

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T. Torsvan, 1926. This photo was taken in Mexico without his knowledge. It’s widely assumed this is B. Traven.

Previously: Introduction
Next: An unusual parable

This blog launched on the first of August, 2014. It was not a big year blog-wise, but I still managed to put out eleven posts (one of which I’ll return to later this year). Worried I would run out of ideas, I devised “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books,” a series where I discuss the books and authors that have left a deep impression on me. (So far, I’ve only managed to finish twelve of the twenty writers. To look at it another way, this writing project is still generating blog posts ten years later.)

Those last months of 2014, my focus was fixed on the finishing edits of Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People, the first book I put out under Kindle Direct Publishing. The novel’s opening line (“The Petrenkos were barbecuing people”) was first typed by me in 1999. After fifteen years, countless drafts and rewrites, and a couple of near-misses with agents who were interested but couldn’t get behind the book, I gave up trying to find it a home. I even considered giving up on writing altogether. Thankfully, I reconsidered, put it on Amazon, and began working on my next novel. (The whole tortured history can be found at The Tusk.)

But my favorite blog post from that first year is without question “B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the first entry in my Twenty Writers series. Oddly, it’s one of the newer books on the list, in the sense that I had read it only a few years’ before (whereas most of the other books on the list I discovered earlier in life). Sierra Madre made an indelible mark on me. It made me think about why an author writes a book, and not merely how—but I was doubly fascinated by the mystery surrounding the identity of its author.

It turns out that while the book and John Huston’s movie are incredibly well-known, the true identity of the author has been largely shrouded in mystery to this day.

Hal Croves, 1947. Taken while on the set of John Huston’s adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart speculated Croves was actually B. Traven.

I love a good literary mystery, and the mystery of B. Traven is one of the best of the 20th century. While researching the blog post, I read numerous online sources and articles, two books on the subject, and even scoured old editions of Treasure, including the rather optimistic (and rather incorrect) introduction to a 1963 Time-Life edition which declared the matter of his identity settled.

One notable outcome of the blog post was former Chief Executive of BBC Broadcast Will Wyatt reaching out to me via email in 2015. Wyatt wrote and developed the BBC documentary B. Traven: A Mystery Solved and its companion book The Man Who was B. Traven, titled The Secret of the Sierra Madre in the United States. (A transfer of the BBC show can be found on YouTube.) Wyatt’s gracious email pointed out that no one to date has refuted his theory of Traven’s identity. By utter coincidence, I had just weeks earlier discovered a copy of the UK edition in one of the last great used bookstores, Phoenix Books of San Luis Obispo. (I’ve long intended to write a post about The Man Who was B. Traven, but never followed through.)

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post in late December, Wyatt again reached out to me via public comment. He once more defended his work, but also challenged the other theories of Traven’s identity, most of which are based on speculation or hunches. Due to his comment, I’m updating the 2014 post to better explain Wyatt’s research, which was previously only alluded to briefly.

As I replied to him:

Perhaps not reading your book first was a mistake on my part, but I, a mere fan of Traven’s books, and writer of the occasional novel that does not sell in high volume, did not intend [the 2014] post to be the final word on Traven’s identity.

Rather, this post was intended to cover the breadth of the theories out there, farfetched or otherwise, and to give a general feel for Traven’s most likely background. I also wanted to explain why I find so much inspiration in Traven’s works, especially The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Alas, all this came too late for the original 2014 post, which relies on Michael L. Baumann’s B. Traven: An Introduction (1976). Baumann treats the question of Traven’s identity as a mystery of literary analysis, which lines up with my interests in the subject. As a German-speaking German-American, Baumann discerns that Traven’s work was most likely written in that language and then crudely translated to English for an American audience. He also offers a clear-eyed interpretation of the themes and political bent of Traven’s novels.

Since I wasn’t interested in proposing a candidate or “solving” the mystery, Baumann was a good primary source to work from. I only wish I could have delved more deeply into the breadth of the Traven theories proposed to date. The tornadic multiplicity of names and initials and pseudonyms linked to Traven is bewildering, fostered by Traven’s generous use of them to cover his tracks.

My fascination is not to keep the mystery alive, but to turn the mystery around and face the mirror at the reader, to give a name to the insatiable curiosity Traven inspired—to remind us there was a time when authors shunned publicity (“the creative person should…have no other biography than his works”) rather than relentlessly strove to build their personal brand.

Twenty Writers: B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre


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Ten years of blogging

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The Bridge Daughter Cycle covers

True story: I started blogging before the word “blog” was coined. In 1995, I created a web site known as Ad Nauseam, where I sporadically vented about the software industry, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the World Wide Web. Like most blogging efforts, I ran out of steam after a few years, and set it aside.

In 2014, I returned to blogging. I told myself this new blog would be different. I wanted a web site to showcase my books, sure, but I also wanted to blog with a focus on writing, literature, and film. I also strove for a softer, more positive tone. No ranting, no finger-pointing (although I do get my hackles up now and then). I’d rather write on things I’m passionate and positive about, under the assumption that there are others out there with similar passions.

Over the next year, I will feature one or two blog posts a month from the past decade that I think shine a little brighter than the rest. The first look back will come in January.

I won’t say this blog has been a smashing success, but after ten years of chugging away at it, it’s in a good place. I’ve put out over two hundred blog posts, with over 100,000 views since I began tracking them in 2015. I’ll discuss more milestones and notable high points (and low points) as the year progresses.

Looking forward to seeing you in 2024. Happy holidays.

First up: The mysterious B. Traven


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What’s going on in my world?

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The Bridge Daughter Cycle

It’s been awhile. Although the web site has been mostly quiet, I’ve actually been juggling a few projects and staying busy.

First, I am working on a new novel, which I hope to have mostly finished before the end of the year. It’s a bit of curveball compared to my past work—an absurdist caper comedy shot through with gallows humor. I’ll share more details when the manuscript shapes up and the final book comes together.

Second, I’m developing another interactive fiction video game. I’ve filed my intention to submit it for the Interactive Fiction Competition this fall, although having it ready and debugged in time for the comp will be tight. This one will be a bit different than my prior title (According to Cain), in that this new game more like a detective story, where interviewing people and gathering clues is vital to finishing the game. Again, more details will be coming as development finalizes.

My presentation at NarraScope went well. I had a great time in Pittsburgh, meeting a variety of people in the interactive fiction space from academics to seasoned game developers. A casual and positive conference. If you’re interested in my presentation, a PDF of the slides are here. (I’m told a video of the presentation will be available later; I’ll post here when that happens.)

Finally, I have a few blog posts in the hopper. Keeping busy with the above means I’ve neglected the blog. I do plan on paying a little more attention to it in the coming months.

As always, if you’re looking around for your next read, please consider my latest (A Man Named Baskerville), my Bridge Daughter series if you’ve not picked it up yet, or any of my other books. If you’re not on my mailing list, sign up and you can download a preview of A Man Named Baskerville.

Stay tuned!


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Of grognards and grimoires

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Dungeons & Dragons Basic Edition
Dungeons & Dragons
Basic Edition (1977)

Last time I wrote of my praise for Monsters and Manuals, a long-running blog on role-playing games. How I came across Monsters and Manuals is a story itself.

In 2012 I somehow found myself reading a now-defunct Dungeons & Dragons blog called Grognardia. Now, I haven’t played D&D since Ronald Reagan was president, although I was active in the game throughout the 1980s. Why I came across the blog is long-forgotten to me, but there I was reading about D&D in theory and operation.

Grognardia was a bit of a revelation: People—adults—were still playing D&D, even after the rise of the Internet and smart phones and hellaciously ambitious video games. For years I’d thought back on D&D as an odd teenage avocation of mine, a 1980s trend that faded with Rubik’s Cube and glam metal. For me in 2012, the image of four to eight people around a table with paper and pencil rolling saving throws was a sepia-tone daguerreotype of a more innocent age. Now I know better. D&D (and role-playing in general) has changed and evolved, but it’s still going strong.

Reading Grognardia for the first time made me feel like Mel Brooks’ 2,000 year-old man stepping out from a 33 A.D. time capsule and discovering people are still abuzz over that Jesus guy. I lost contact with D&D after 1987 (or so) and Grognardia was my re-introduction to the community. Amazingly, I found the community was talking about the state of D&D prior to 1987.

Reading Grognardia’s love-letters to Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, and its many tributes to old-timey role-playing was a massive syringe injection of nostalgia. Reading closely, I deduced blogger James Maliszewski was about my age and had been introduced to D&D around the same time I was (the late 1970s).

Grognardia gave Maliszewski a platform to lay out his dim, gimlet-eyed views of the state of D&D in the 2000s. In fact, Maliszewski held a pretty dim view of all things D&D after about 1983. (“Dragonlance Ruined Everything”, “I Hate Change”) His scheme of D&D’s eras has the game exiting its Golden Age before 1983 and waving goodbye to its Silver Age around 1989. From there, in Grognardia’s estimation, Dungeons & Dragons was downhill.

Maliszewski’s writing is forceful, lucid, and mostly consistent. The early Grognardia posts were manifesto-like, each chiseled from a bedrock belief in old-school D&D, each post a brick set in mortar like a fervent parishioner building a country church by hand. His brimstone sermons on original intent and calls for a return to the soil earned him a wide fan base at his blog’s height a decade ago.

Alas—and you probably saw this coming—cracks in his reputation began to appear not long after I began reading his blog. (Like most Internet dramas, it’s a mildly complicated story and better explained by him and others.) Grognarida ceased updates soon thereafter, and I so searched for a replacement blog to fill the nostalgic void. That’s how I discovered Monsters and Manuals, which I’ve been reading ever since.

While writing my last post, I spent some time revisiting Grognardia. I’d not read it since my first encounter in 2012. The reread gave me a new appreciation for Maliszewski’s idiosyncratic but thoughtful perspectives. Back in 2012, his posts forced me to evaluate (and reevaluate) my memories of D&D and its impact and history. In my reread, I found myself returning to those evaluations once more.

I’m by no means a D&D insider, so my thoughts on the game may earn a collective yawn from the community, but I’ll record them in future posts in case they’re of interest to anyone.

Other posts on Grognardia and D&D


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