Influences

“Take care of your backlist, and your backlist takes care of you”

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Lawrence Block
Crime writer Lawrence Block.

At an AWP panel discussion in 2014, Lawrence Block related a bit of wisdom he’d learned from another author: “Take care of your backlist, and your backlist takes care of you.” He added the advice had served him well over his writing career.

By that point, I’d been writing fiction for several years. I’d met many authors (aspiring and published), attended numerous workshops (formal and informal) and worked with many writing teachers in different genres. Yet, in all that time, I’d never heard this piece of advice. I found Block’s advice to be quite sage, and I continue to believe in it. (It’s also a rare example of writing lore that is worth paying attention to.)

The problem was, in 2014, I didn’t have a backlist. How could I take care of that which does not exist?

(Quick terminology clarification: The standard use of the term “backlist” or “back catalog” refers to a publisher’s catalog of titles released in prior years but still in print or stock. I took Block’s usage to indicate the sum of an author’s work, in print or otherwise.)

He went on and told the panel audience that, when he investigated Amazon’s Kindle Publishing, he realized he could release all his out-of-print books in electronic form and sell them direct without having to shop them around for a publisher. He went through his old contracts and reacquired rights for books his publishers had let lapse. He even paid his agent fifteen percent of the royalties he earned on his direct-sale ebooks “because it was the right thing to do.”

This is a great example of taking care of one’s backlist.

In many ways, Lawrence Block persuaded me to jump onto the Kindle bandwagon. On my way home from the conference, it occurred to me that I was selling myself short. I’d published several short stories in literary journals in the U.S. and Britain, enough to put together a story collection. A few years earlier, a small non-profit in Oakland published a short run of a novella they’d commissioned from me. A big-name author might not call it much of a backlist, but for a small-fry like me, it was a start.

And it was a significant start. I turned my oh-so-modest backlist into two Kindle ebooks. The experience reinvigorated me to finish my first novel, a book I’d been working on and stewing over for nearly fifteen years.

Today, I’ve written seven novels, and have an eighth on the way. I’m hardly an active blogger, but over the last decade-plus, I’ve put out over three hundred blog posts, including many book reviews and critical analyses that I’m proud of. All of that is backlist.

Eleven years after first hearing it, Block’s advice returned to me when I decided to “go wide” and move my backlist to Kobo. And I was thinking of Block when I sent an email to MX Publishing in London inquiring if they’d be interested in taking on A Man Named Baskerville, which I’d already put out as an ebook and in paperback. They accepted—and produced a hardcover and a fantastic audiobook edition, which I brag about to everyone I know, even strangers on the street.

The words you’re reading right now are from my backlist. Years ago, I took a stab at running a Substack. It didn’t work out, but a few of those newsletters are still pertinent, including this one. I freshened it up and posted it here.

Taking care of your backlist

Anything you’ve written and published—an old blog, a book review a university journal printed, that thing you wrote for a neighborhood newsletter—is part of your backlist. Scour your computer’s “Documents” folder. Dig up old clippings. Make a list of everything you’ve written to completion.

Some ideas for taking care of your backlist:

  • If you’re building a book series, bundle them into a ebook boxed set edition.
  • Take a hard look at your older books. Is it time for a fresh cover? Is that title really catching the reader’s attention?
  • Also take a look at your books’ metadata—are they listed with the right keywords and categories?
  • Is there a publisher out there that might be interested in taking on one of your old books or series?
  • Is it time to go wide and make you books available in more markets?
  • Collect your short stories into a book. That short story you couldn’t place? Dig it up and polish it as well. Even the short story collections of big name writers often include unpublished work.
  • Convert your blog into a book. Over the years, I’ve written a number of entries on book, film, and television. I’m thinking about gathering them up and producing an essay collection.
  • Work with writers you know, who live in your area, or who write in the same genre. Assemble a collection of short stories or first chapters as a sampler. Each author can include a short bio and links for readers to buy more of their work.
  • YouTube, audiobooks, translations, Substack, and podcasts offer new ways to make your work available.

What’s the point of all this? Will it make you money? Will it sell more books?

Maybe…and maybe not. Don’t overlook using your backlist to increase your exposure. Short story collections don’t sell particularly well—they never have—but you can offer a collection as an incentive for people to sign up for your mailing list. Services like Patreon are always asking you to think creatively about sharing premium or subscriber-only work with your patrons. Plus, a few additional titles on your web site and social media profile doesn’t hurt.

You never know when one of these side avenues piques a reader’s interest and leads them to try your more recent work. Even one new reader is a success. I rejoice every time someone reads one of my books. For me, that’s the whole purpose of this crazy focus in my life.


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Ten years of blogging: Waiting for Neuro

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Fan-made movie poster for William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Previously: A unique manifesto

In this series where I review my last ten years of blogging, I tend to focus on posts that either made some waves, or posts with subjects I want to take up again. The 2022 post I want to return to has both qualities. It regards William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer.

Back then, I wrote about the Waiting for Godot-like patience the book’s fans have endured in anticipation of a movie adaptation. Rumors and announcements have come and gone over the last four decades: Directors taking on the project, studios arranging funding, big-name actors being tapped, and so on. Joshua Hull, author of Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made calls the elusive Neuromancer movie “the white whale for a number of filmmakers throughout the years.”

It was yet another rumor in 2022 of an Apple TV+ adaptation that led to me to ask “Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?” As usual, nothing came of it.

At this rate, we may reach the year Neuromancer is set—some time in the 2030s—before a movie version is produced.

Fan-made "teaser" movie poster for a hoped-for Neuromancer film.
Fan-made “teaser” movie poster: “The future is already here”

Whatever else William Gibson will be remembered for, his fiction has almost always centered on the proles and lumpen claiming technology and repurposing it for their own ends. Gibson put the punk into cyberpunk. As I wrote in my 2023 follow-up,

[Gibson] took computers out of the realm of men in lab coats standing over coffin-sized boxes in dust-free rooms. He put tech on the street, in the pockets of skate punks and the ears of all-night sushi line cooks. … Instead of an obscure nerd subculture, he gave exotic tech to everyone, even folks sleeping on mattresses on rain-soaked streets. Neuromancer is a book set during a perpetual war between the haves and have-nots, and the battlefield is cyberspace.

So it’s delicious how this has folded back on itself. Today’s video and photo technology has been claimed and repurposed to craft hints of a film version of Neuromancer. As exhibited here and in the 2022/2023 posts, the proliferation of fan-made Neuromancer film posters is evidence of what can be done with some Photoshop skills and a DeviantArt account. Likewise, as the fake movie trailer below proves, it’s now possible to assemble, score, and distribute worldwide a cinematic amuse-gueule of what a movie might look like.

This leads to a tantalizing question: What if someone simply made their own version of Neuromancer? Not a movie trailer, but the movie itself?

When Neuromancer was published forty years ago, the suggestion would have been ludicrous. The indie film scene was only starting to find its feet. Movies like David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) were some of the earliest to gain traction outside of college-town theaters. Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) was the first film I knew of to be financed on credit cards.

As in Gibson’s Sprawl, today’s film-making technology is fast, cheap, and out of control. A new breed of auteurs exist, capable of filming and editing movies with consumer electronics—even filming with iPhones. Distribution is as easy as clicking on an “Upload” button.

Unlike the high production costs associated with most science-fiction movies, Neuromancer could conceivably need far less in terms of costumes, set design, and special effects. Most of the book takes place in locales like neon-saturated Chiba and modern luxury hotels, locations that could be reproduced in many cities in North America. The “future tech” of Gibson’s Sprawl is off-the-shelf these days. Data gloves? Check. Virtual reality headset? Check. That leaves the bulk of the special effects to his vision of cyberspace, which an experienced computer animator could flesh out.

Perhaps I’m lowballing the effort required. Even if the production design is within reach, the make-or-break line will be in the acting. The power of Neuromancer is the characters and the human drama, and not a lot of splashy CGI. Get good actors, and be ruthless in cost-cutting the rest of the production.

Given all this, perhaps the question to ask is: Why hasn’t an amateur fan production been mounted?

Fan-made movie poster for Neuromancer: “Jack in soon”

The obvious hang-up will be copyright law. But the dreaded DMCA take-down notice shouldn’t be feared too quickly. Others have worked around this in clever ways. Three high school friends recreated Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot, in the 1980s, and released it wide with the blessings of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Charles Ross performs a “One Man Star Wars Trilogy” stage show, doing all the voice lines and sound effects, again, with the permission of Lucasfilm. Innumerable Star Trek fan films, from shoddy to surprisingly worthy, abound.

In the 2000s, an acquaintance of mine in the theater business gave me his take on Charles Ross’ “One Man Star Wars” shows. He said Ross started performing the act in his living room for friends and family, and then at local theaters for low pay, until he was filling city auditoriums. He didn’t approach Lucasfilm until he had some success under his belt. He pled that his show was an act of love for the source material, and Lucas relented.

In other words: Start low to the ground, work your way up, and ask forgiveness after-the-fact rather than begging permission to proceed.

A fan-made Neuromancer film could gingerly tiptoe across the finish line with a similar strategy—and maybe even get away with it. If the movie were a labor of love, and not an easy-money cash grab, who knows? I have to believe the game of red-light/green-light Gibson has played with Hollywood over the decades has soured him on the studios, not to mention his rejected script for an Aliens sequel and all the trouble the studios made for Johnny Mnemonic.

Stephen King had a “Dollar Deal” program where he permitted filmmakers to adapt any of his short stories for one dollar, providing they (a) sent him a copy of the final product, and (b) they did not exhibit it commercially without his permission. (To get an idea of its success, The Shawshank Redemption began as a Dollar Deal.) Lucas made similar agreements with the Raiders kids and Charles Ross.

Fan-made Neuromancer movie poster: “Hack Into a New Reality / December 2031”

Earlier I wondered if I was low-balling the production effort. I may be low-balling the copyright issue twice as much. Thanks to a lawsuit by CBS/Paramount against the fan production of Star Trek: Axanar, the heyday of Star Trek fan films appears behind us. Stephen King concluded his “Dollar Deal” program at the end of 2023, with no stated reason. My guess is that the proliferation of studio streaming services—the “plusses” like MGM+, Disney+, and Paramount Plus—has unlocked a new revenue stream for old intellectual property, and the copyright lawyers are battening down the hatches.

Still, there is no extant movie or TV version of Neuromancer to compete against. Who knows? An under-the-radar fan production might stand a chance, if done with care and passion for the source material.

Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?


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Ten years of blogging: A unique manifesto

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Cover of The Atlantic magazine, July/August 2001
The Atlantic magazine, July/August 2001. This issue featured the first installment of B. R. Myer’s original “A Reader’s Manifesto”

Previously: Flaubertian three-dimensionalism
Next: Waiting for Neuro

My favorite blog post for 2021 would have to be my review of B. R. Myers A Reader’s Manifesto, a book of literary criticism with a remarkable life: It started as a different book, was published as a two-part essay in The Atlantic, and then was published in book form yet again. (The history of its repeated rebirth is remarkable unto itself, and something I spend a little time digging into.)

Myers’ original 2001 essay sparked a debate over the state of American literature that was singular in my lifetime. His thesis was that American literature had grown pretentious, stunted, and dull. It’s wild to think there was a moment in recent American history when a good chunk of the public was discussing literature, contemporary or otherwise.

I did a bit of extra research for my post, digging into online newspaper and magazine archives to locate contemporaneous articles. (As I wrote, this was “a time when most people had their news delivered to them via bicycle.”) I also put the review through several extra editing cycles, in a lawyerly attempt to make certain everything on the page was either supported elsewhere or comported exactly to my personal viewpoint. There’s an admirable cleanness to Myers’ prose that I wanted to emulate.

Cover of A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers

As an example of Manifesto‘s continuing relevance twenty years later, here’s a paragraph from the acclaimed 2021 novel Leave the World Behind:

The store was frigid, brightly lit, wide-aisled. She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared! She bought a three-pack of paper towels, and a spray-on sunscreen, and aloe, because the children had inherited their father’s pale skin. She bought those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and those carrots that are tumbled around until they’re the size of a child’s fingers. She bought packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you could while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, a bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberries, a dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes and a sandy bundle of cilantro even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. It was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind.

If you skipped ahead, go back and read it again. After all, Leave the World Behind won over twenty “Book of the Year” awards.

Myers called out these “skim-friendly” lists as indicators of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” He was speaking about White Noise back then. He could very well be speaking about Leave the World Behind today.

When I first read Manifesto in 2001, and again in 2021, my view was that Myers should be taken more seriously than some would have us believe. I remain convinced. Then and today, literary readers are pressed into accepting an author as a modern-day genius by dint of their credentials, their identity, their subject matter, or their elite supporters in the press. Myer’s Manifesto is more than a work of literary criticism, it’s a work of media criticism—he’s also taking aim at the literary gatekeepers and taste-makers perched in positions of cultural privilege.

In 2001, B. R. Myers asked an emperor-has-no-clothes question: Instead of rewarding authors because of who they are or who they know, why not judge their books by story, language, themes, and meanings? That question caused a big fuss back then. It turns out, it still can, if you ask it in the right company.

Twenty Years Later: B. R. Myers, A Reader’s Manifesto


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Ten years of blogging: Flaubertian three-dimensionalism

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Flannery O’Connor

Previously: Writer’s block
Next: A unique manifesto

The year that was 2020 will most likely go down as one of the most turbulent years of my life: The COVID-19 pandemic, lock-downs and masking, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots, all leading up to the most contentious presidential election in memory that some still deny was properly tabulated.

In contrast, 2019 had been for me a rather productive year creatively, and I wound up publishing two novels in 2020 back-to-back: Stranger Son in April, followed by In My Memory Locked in June.

That aside, as 2020 trudged onward and the pandemic fevered on, it grew apparent normalcy would not make an appearance any time soon. I began to suffer a low-grade depression, a toothy rat gnawing at the ankles of my mental health. I needed to do something creative to keep a hold on my fragile state.

I made a personal goal of putting out a compact book—my previous two were unusually lengthy for me, with In My Memory Locked clocking in at 120,000 words. I had been binging on streamed movies (and who didn’t that year?) Viewing the masterful The Day of the Jackal motivated me to pick up Frederick Forsythe’s original novel, which I learned was inspired by his tenure as a journalist in Paris reporting on the assassination attempts made on Charles De Gaulle’s life.

I committed myself to write a taut thriller about the pandemic and lock-downs, short and sweet, with as little fat as possible, and saturated with paranoia and claustrophobia. The result was Man in the Middle, published in November 2020 and my most overlooked book. I’m proud of it, though, especially considering the conditions I was working under. I also believe it to be the first novel published expressly about the COVID-19 pandemic—but I cannot prove that.

As for blogging in 2020, I put out a number of short series which garnered some interest. At the start of the year, I did a mini-series on Dungeons & Dragons, including my take on Gary Gygax’s Appendix N, which was his book recommendations he included in the first AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. Another series took at look at Hollywood novels, which gave me a chance to write on a few books I’ve been meaning to cover for some time, including The Day of the Locust and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert

But the post I’m most proud of from 2020 regarded a bit of writing advice I’ve heard on and off for years now in writing groups and at writing conferences: “Use three senses to make a scene come alive.” Invariably, this advice is attributed to Gustave Flaubert.

As far as writing lore goes, this one is rather economical in expression. It’s also not altogether obvious why it’s true. Why three sense, and not four or five, or even two? The resulting blog post was satisfying to write because investigating the origins of this saying led naturally to explaining why it appears to be true.

There appears to be no evidence Flaubert ever made this statement, at least, not in such a direct manner. Rather, the textual evidence is that it originated from Flannery O’Connor, who in turn was summarizing a observation made by her mentor, Caroline Gordon.

Now, I’ve read many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories—anyone who’s taken a few creative writing classes will eventually read “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” her most anthologized work. I had never read anything by Caroline Gordon, however, so it was fascinating to delve briefly into her work.

It’s a shame Gordon is not more well-read today. It’s probably due to her work not taking the tangents and experiments that other American modernists risked (such as Faulkner and Jean Toomer). She remained a formalist to the end. Her How to Read a Novel is an enlightening book, and while a tad dated, would make fine reading for anyone serious about writing a full-bodied, red-blooded novel.

Mostly, my pride for “Use three senses to make a scene come alive” is that it’s a solid essay: It starts out with an interesting question that leads to more questions, takes a couple of detours and unexpected side-roads on its journey, and ends on a note of successful discovery. It’s about all I can aspire to when I sit down to write.

“Use three senses to make a scene come alive”


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Ten years of blogging: An all-too-familiar utopia

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Rod Serling, 1959.
Rod Serling, 1959. Serling penned the early drafts of the script for the Planet of the Apes film.

Previously: A literary eulogy
Next: Writer’s block

Earlier when I’ve paged through my past blog posts to locate my favorite for a particular year, one usually jumped out at me. For 2018, I find myself torn between two favorites. The tiebreaker in a case like this is: Do I have anything more to say on the subject?

On one hand is my write-up of Cat’s Cradle, a book I’ve adored and been fascinated with since I was young. I could easily write another 5,000 words on the many dimensions and subtleties of Vonnegut’s greatest work—yes, even greater than Slaughterhouse-Five. For the purposes of this series (a look back on my favorite posts over the last ten years), I’m willing to stand pat. My 2018 post doesn’t express everything I could say about the novel, but it touches on what I think are its most salient aspects.

Cover of "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut
1970s edition I purchased in junior high school. I still have it on my bookshelf.

The other post from 2018 I’m proud of regards Planet of the Apes—the original 1968 film, and not any of the sequels in what has become a rather exhausted movie franchise. I opened that write-up copping to the film being “a guilty pleasure,” that it is

campy, riveting, preachy, and provocative— Franklin J. Schaffner’s sci-fi classic is the very definition of middle-brow entertainment, in that it pleases the senses while challenging the mind.

It turns out that, yes, I do have a little more to say on the subject.

Often when I gear up to write about a book, I’ll go back and re-read it so it’s fresh in my mind. For my Apes post, I didn’t re-watch the movie, but rather read Pierre Boulle’s original 1963 novel, which I’d never picked up before. I didn’t spend too much time discussing the book, though, since my focus was on the film. That’s a shame, because the novel is quite the curiosity.

Boulle dismissed attempts to label his Apes as science-fiction, preferring to call it a “social fantasy.” The term comes across like a hipster pose, but it makes sense. Much as Gulliver’s Travels isn’t really about seafaring, the interstellar aspect of Apes is a literary contrivance for explaining how his character Ulysee winds up in a society run by simians.

Structurally, the book reads something like utopian literature. In works such as Ecotopia, The Dispossessed, or, obviously, Thomas More’s Utopia, the narrative is not centered around character(s) dropped into a tight situation and navigating conflicts toward some kind of resolution. Rather, utopian works spool out pages of exposition to detail the clockwork innards of a fictional society operating on principles quite different from our own.

Cover of "Planet of the Apes" by Pierre Boulle

Boulle likewise spends many precious pages explaining how the simians live, work, compete, and cooperate. So, is Planet of the Apes a utopian novel? It’s not so simple. As with the film, the human astronaut Ulysee is feared by the simians, who view his existence as a threat to their comprehension of the universe. Their plans for him are not kind.

While that might make the book sound dystopian instead, that’s a difficult label too. Prior to Ulysee falling from the sky onto their planet, things seem to be going pretty well for the apes. Their society isn’t bleak or oppressive or authoritarian. They merely have an all-too-recognizable reaction to the unexplainable, this human that talks and reasons, a creature they normally hunt for sport and trophy.

The genius of Boulle’s book is that it’s structured like a utopian novel, but instead of describing an alternate society, it describes our society, with humans swapped out for apes. (Unlike the film, the apes of the novel live in a mid-twentieth century world, with cars, telephones, and even tobacco.) Boulle’s clever twist permitted him to write about our world as though it was an exotic place. In the terminology of critical theory, it defamiliarized our society. That, in turn, permitted him to write about us from a distance. As with the movie series, the ape device became a powerful fulcrum for criticizing all manner of human activity, from animal cruelty to racism, from religion to capitalism.

I remain surprised how under-appreciated the book is today—another sad example of a successful Hollywood adaptation smothering out its source material.

From Chimpan-A to Chimpanzee: The Swiftian genius of Planet of the Apes


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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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