Writing 101: Thog's Masterclass at BayCon

If you've attended any of my convention panels having to do with the craft of writing, then you have undoubtedly heard me refer to Thog's Masterclass.

Who is Thog? According to Thog.org, "Thog the Mighty, a not terribly bright barbarian hero, is the creation of John Grant (Paul Barnett) in his 'Lone Wolf' fantasy novels. Thog first appeared in The Claws of the Helgedad (1991)."

Thog's Masterclass is a regular feature of David Langford's zine Ansible, enshrining prose gems primarily from science fiction and fantasy publications: "It is to be assumed that the chosen selections are stuff which brutish Thog really likes." The site goes on to explain how the tradition began at the 1993 UK EasterCon, when David edited the con's daily newsletter with Paul Barnett's assistance. I'll leave you to further investigate Thog's history should you so desire.... (and more on Ansible¹ later in this blog post.)

Over Memorial Day Weekend I attended BayCon, an annual San Francisco Bay Area convention that is now in its twenty-ninth year. And this year I participated once again in the Iron Editors workshop: writers present the first 2 pages of a story or novel for review and critique by the panel of editors. The author's name need not be included on the pages, so while the writing may be anonymous, the critique is public. This allows other writers to learn from the critiques as well. In fact, writers may attend the workshop without having submitted anything for review.

Along with moderator Kent Brewster, this year's panel of editors also included Jeremy Lassen, Deirdre Saoirse Moen, the Kollin Brothers, and Dario Ciriello. The review process is quite hectic, to say the least. Kent likes to keep things moving so that a marked up submission is always on the display screen and open to discussion. Often I'll be working on one submission and have to stop what I'm doing to comment on my mark ups on the submission that is being presented. Consequently not all submissions are reviewed by every editor.

Usually a Thog's Masterclass-worthy sentence will arise from the heaps of paper, which will provide me with the opportunity to introduce the audience to Ansible and Thog. Due to the hectic nature of the workshop I didn't have an opportunity to write down the specific sentence, so this one will have to do (it is similar in content). This sentence is from a previously published story that was part of a collection that I acquired and published with Golden Gryphon Press. The author and story shall remain anonymous, to protect the guilty.

...his face: a strong jaw, cheekbones ruddy with cold, softened by a well-proportioned nose, and eyes which skipped from aisle to counter to shelf like pebbles glancing over water.

The boldface is, of course, my addition to highlight the content that I know Thog would really like. When I brought this sentence, and Thog's Masterclass, to the author's attention, the author chose to rewrite the text before including the story in the collection. But this isn't always the case. In Liz Williams's Detective Inspector Chen series of novels, you'll find sentences like this one:

Sung's eyebrows crawled slowly up his broad forehead.

In the Chen novels, Liz wants that stylized, exaggerated content; a better word might be "campy." And as the editor for all five (so far) of her Detective Inspector Chen novels, I'm right there with Liz on this. So story content is dependent on your style, your goal, what you wish to create within the story. Just be aware that these types of sentences just may find themselves in some future entry of Thog's Masterclass.

"Graffiti in the Library of Babel" by David Langford (Part 2 of 2)

Graffiti in the Library of Babel

by David Langford

[Continued from Part 1]

Ceri liked the idea of TotLib staff handling the boring rote-work, but didn't want to get too far away from that tagged text. Layers of abstraction are great in software but tend to blur the focus of real-world problems. They compromised on a multi-view workstation: defaced ebooks here, grouped and sequenced tags there, and the clear light of understanding in the window that for a long time stayed dismally blank.

Clearing away the relentless tag repetition through multiple editions, critical cites and anthologies of quotations, there were just 125 tagged phrases in all. "Five to the third power," Ceri muttered. "The science fiction writers would say straight away that our friends must count to base five, meaning they have five limbs or five tentacles or…" She stared moodily at the significant number of jointed manipulators on her left hand. "Or not."

Joseph spread out a hand that proved to be missing one finger. "Just an old accident, but I would seem to be ruled out. Perhaps, though, that is merely my cunning."

The first of the eleven sequences, or maybe the last ("Has it never occurred to you that the ancient Romans counted backwards?" Ceri quoted), ran a gamut of fuzzily resonating phrases from "It is a truth universally acknowledged" through Hazlitt's "How often have I put off writing a letter" to E. M. Forster's "Only connect…"

"Translation: It would be sort of dimly nice to maybe talk in some kind of indistinct fashion, probably." Ceri glared at the screen. "Right, I'm going to lecture now. To be that vague and at the same time stick to a theme, the taggers must understand English. Not just literal meaning but metaphors and nuances and stuff. Otherwise 'No man is an island' wouldn't be in there."

"So they could choose to communicate in clear?" suggested Joseph.

"That's it. They could spell out an absolutely unambiguous message, one word or one letter at a time. I can't imagine a good reason for doing it this way, but I have a suspicious enough mind to think of a bad one. The taggers know all about us but they don't want to let slip a single data point concerning themselves. So they feed our own phrases back to us. We aren't to be allowed the tiniest clue to their thinking from style or diction or word order. Does that seem sinister to you?"

Joseph sighed. "It was so much easier when aliens said 'Take me to your leader.'"

"Or 'Klaatu barada nikto.' Don't let me distract myself. Here's the 'instruments of darkness' cluster, with the Tao Te Ching quotes, Zen koans and that mystic cobblers from Four Quartets that would cost them a packet in permission fees if the Eliot estate got wind of it. The general flavour of all this seems to be that they're using an acausal comms route that bypasses the Usual Channels. 'The way that can be spoken of / Is not the constant way.' Which would be most interesting to know if it hadn't been the assumption we started with."

An intern came in with plastic cups of coffee, which made for a few seconds' natural break. Ceri burnt a finger and swore under her breath in Welsh.

"Gesundheit. What about those quarantine regulations?"

"I think that's the most interesting one," Ceri said cautiously. "C. S. Lewis and 'God's quarantine regulations' -- the old boy was talking about interplanetary or interstellar distances saving pure races from contamination by horrible fallen us. Then there's a handful of guarded borders and dangerous frontiers from early Auden. 'The empyrean is a void abyss': that's The City of Dreadful Night, I actually read it once. Lucretius on breaking through 'the fiery walls of the world' to explore the boundless universe. There's a pun in there, I'm sure. Firewalls. Something blocks or prevents communication across deep space. Who? 'Masters of the universe.' Maybe for our own good, but who knows? In a nutshell: SETI was a waste of time. Don't let the coffee get cold."

Joseph sipped. "That seems something of a stretch."

"Well, right now I'm just talking, not publishing. And while I'm still just talking, I wonder whether we can try to talk back."

"Graffiti in the Library of Babel" by David Langford (Part 1 of 2)

To continue my celebration -- and promotion -- of Is Anybody Out There? (Daw Books, June 1), my co-edited anthology with Nick Gevers, another story from the book follows.

But first...

The second review of IAOT? has appeared -- from John Ottinger (@johnottinger) on his Grasping for the Wind blog. Typically a review of an anthology will specifically mention maybe 5 or 6 stories and/or authors at most, along with a critique of the anthology as a whole. But John's review contains details on all 15 stories, as well as the introduction, providing readers with a comprehensive look at the entire anthology. John writes: "In Gevers and Halpern’s collection of fifteen original stories, [the Fermi] paradox gets the fictional treatment, explored and examined as only speculators can do....the anthology is an enjoyable read, one that is fairly entertaining with flashes of storytelling flair. Recommended if you have ever asked yourself the very question which provides the title."

And if you decide to click on over to John's review, please do make your way back here for David Langford's story, "Graffiti in the Library of Babel," the third story to be posted in its entirety from Is Anybody Out There?

I've never met David Langford, but I've been a long-time fan of his sardonic fiction, and I've been reading his zine Ansible¹ for what seems like decades. (Wait! It has been decades!) In 2002, Claude Lalumière and I selected David's story "Encounter of Another Kind" (Interzone, December 1991) for inclusion in our co-edited anthology Witpunk (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003) -- a collection of sardonic fiction, with about half the stories original to the collection and the other half reprints. So, it was only natural for me to invite David to contribute to this anthology as well, and I'm so glad that I did.²

To quote from David's Wikipedia entry: "As of 2008 he has received, in total, 28 Hugo Awards, his 19-year winning streak coming to an end in 2008. A 31-year streak of nominations (1979-2009) for Best Fan Writer came to an end in 2010." Now that's a lot of Hugo Awards -- and nominations!

About his story "Graffiti in the Library of Babel" David writes: "Too many nonfiction commitments, not enough stories written. 'Graffiti in the Library of Babel' is my only fiction of 2009, inspired by our editors' kindly invitation, my inability to resist a Borges allusion, and some random thoughts about unperceived signals. Suppose the aliens out there made the traditional study of our Earthly communications, analysed the most popular forms of email, and offered us the boundless wealth of Contact in terms which we automatically filter out owing to the strong Nigerian accent? No, no, Charlie Stross must already have written that one.³ Some further supposing eventually led to 'Graffiti.'"

Graffiti in the Library of Babel

by David Langford

"There seems to be no difference at all between the message of maximum content (or maximum ambiguity) and the message of zero content (noise)."

-- John Sladek, "The Communicants"

As it turned out, they had no sense of drama. They failed to descend in shiny flying discs, or even to fill some little-used frequency with a tantalizing stutter of sequenced primes. No: they came with spray cans and spirit pens, scrawling their grubby little tags across our heritage.

Or as an apologetic TotLib intern first broke the news: "Sir, someone's done something nasty all over Jane Austen."

# # #

The Total Library project is named in homage to Kurd Lasswitz's thought experiment "Die Universal Bibliothek," which inspired a famous story by Jorge Luis Borges. Another influence is the "World Brain" concept proposed by H. G. Wells. Assembling the totality of world literature and knowledge should allow a rich degree of cross-referencing and interdisciplinary…

Ceri Evans looked up from the brochure. Even in this white office that smelt of top management, she could never resist a straight line: "Why, congratulations, Professor. I think you may have invented the Internet!"

"Doctor, not Professor, and I do not use the title," said Ngombi with well-simulated patience. "Call me Joseph. The essential point of TotLib is that we are isolated from the net. No trolls, no hackers, none of what that Manson book called sleazo inputs. Controlled rather than chaotic cross-referencing."

"But still you seem to have these taggers?"

"Congratulations, Doctor Evans! I think you may have just deduced the contents of my original email to you."

"All right. All square." Ceri held up one thin hand in mock surrender. "We'll leave the posh titles for the medics. Now tell me: Why is this a problem in what I do, which is a far-out region of information theory, rather than plain data security?"

"Believe me, data security we know about. Hackers and student pranksters have been rather exhaustively ruled out. As it has been said, 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'"

"'Holmes, this is marvellous,'" said Ceri dutifully.

"'Meretricious,' said he." Joseph grinned. "We are a literary team here."

Ceri felt a sudden contrarian urge not to be literary. "Maybe we should cut to the chase. There's only one logical reason to call me in. You suspect the Library is under attack through the kind of acausal channel I've discussed in my more speculative papers? A concept, I should remind you, that got me an IgNobel Prize and a long denunciation in The Skeptic because everyone knows it's utter lunacy. Every Einstein-worshipping physicist, at least."

A shrug. "'Once you eliminate the impossible…' And I'm not a physicist. Come and see." He was so very large and very black. Ceri found herself wondering whether his white-on-white decor was deliberate contrast.

# # #

I'm Going to Graceland...

Graceland / In Memphis, Tennessee...

Actually, I'll only be at Graceland in spirit. I will be in Memphis, however, attending MidSouthCon next weekend, March 21-22. Joining me at the convention will be two of Tachyon Publications's finest: author Andrew Fox and publicist Matt Staggs (of Deep Eight LLC). We'll be in Memphis to launch Andrew's new novel, The Good Humor Man, Or, Calorie 3501. Where else, but Memphis, would we have a book launch in which one of the "characters" in the novel is Elvis (well, not actually Elvis, per se, but a part of him!), and one of the major secondary characters throughout the story (beginning with Chapter 8) is Daniel Swaggart, Associate Director for Acquisitions and Exhibits for Graceland? [Note: I previously blogged about this book on Thursday, February 19; scroll down to read this earlier post.]

The official book launch is on Saturday (March 21) at 9:00 PM in the Chestnut Room. If you're attending MidSouthCon, please do join us for this program event at which Andrew, Matt, and I will converse most eloquently, and at length, on how The Good Humor Man came to be. There are definitely some tales to be told here. (And I believe Glen Cook, in the dealers room, will have copies of the book available for sale during the convention.)

Before I go any further, I would like to thank some of the staff of MidSouthCon -- Dan Gamber, Eric Groff, and Carlin Stuart -- for their most gracious assistance in helping us schedule this event, as well as their help with all of my programming and programming requirements. I'm looking forward to a great weekend, a rewarding weekend, and most likely an exhausting weekend, too.