World Enough and Time

Sale on Kindle edition of A Flight of Storks and Angels

Until US Tax Day (April 18th), I've lowered the price of the Kindle edition of A Flight of Storks and Angels to $2.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Storks-Angels-ebook/dp/B004IEAER8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1300241020&sr=8-3

Enjoy!

 

Marketing Your Literary Novel

Found a very interesting blog entry called "MARKETING YOUR LITERARY NOVEL THROUGH INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING" by Christopher Meeks.

Experimenting with Typepad to Facebook

I spend more time on Facebook than I do on my own blog.

Today, I'll see if I can share blog postings with my account on Facebook.

If a success, expect more substantive content here soon!

Robert

 

 

SLAUGHTERHOUSE HIGH now out from Eraserhead Press!

I'm pleased to announce that the novel once known variously as Ice Ghoul Daze and Deadolescence (as in Dead plus Adolescence) has at last found its perfect publisher in Portland's Eraserhead Press and is now called Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice.

The gist: "It's prom night in the Demented States of America. A place where schools are built with secret passageways, rebellious teens get zippers installed in their mouths and genitals, and once a year, on that special night, one couple is slaughtered and bits of their bodies are kept as souvenirs. But something's gone terribly wrong at Corundum High, where the secret killer is claiming a far higher body count than usual . . . Slaughterhouse High is Robert Devereaux's slicing satire of sex, death, and public education."

At last, the truth about high school is revealed.

You know you want it, so go get it!

Robert

Manifesto: Toward a Conflict-Free Novel

It is a given of literary criticism that conflict is the basis of all story. The more conflict, the more engaged readers are, and the moire likely they will stay with you until the last page, full of fear and anxiety for sympathetic characters in peril.

This essay asks, Can there be a powerful story for which the driving energy isn't conflict?  Is delight a sufficient driver?  Surprise and delight?

Consider books for young children.  Consider Curious George up in the sky, clinging to a kite.  And how quickly I needed to get to his rescue, Caitlin was so agitated at the idea that he might fall and hurt himself.

Now can there be an adult story where continual and unexpected delights are the driving force?  Might the creation of conflict, anxiety, and various sorts of violence--the reinforcement of the myth of duality--be the lazy writer's way out?

I'm just asking these questions.

Consider Don Quixote.  Surely there is conflict, but perhaps in greater measure there is delight.  Consider Falstaff in I Henry IV.  Delight.  Only later will he be rejected by the prince, but until then, easy banter and that grand persona.  Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence is similar, scampishness and no conflict.  Consider much of the Oz books, the unfolding wonders of the odd creatures and environments Dorothy encounters.  Or many of the tales in the Arabian Nights.

Is it possible to sustain the magnificent engine of a novel with these other-than-conflict drivers, told in prose so powerful and engaging that the adult reader cannot put the book down, and must immediately reread the novel as soon as the first reading concludes?

Might such a book bring to vivid life once more the lost innocence and delight of the child in us all, giving way as well to vast possibility, sparking our creativity and the bold optimism of the person for whom the whole world continually opens up infinitely?

Unchain my heart!

I have a confession to make.

The enabling of that fucker Bush and the whole criminal crew has, for six years, put a crimp in my writing--or, rather, my lack of writing.

Astounding, my love for this country when it's living up to its ideals.

To see it brought so low by fearmongers and war criminals, to watch as the corporate media lied for them, by omission and commission, these witnessings broke my heart.  Made me wonder of what use fiction writing could possibly be.  It must have been thus for many German artists beginning in 1933.

Ah but now, to have witnessed such a miracle--there can be no other word for it--as we have all witnessed this week, to feel a new surge of hope and wonder--this, my friends, this gets my creative juices flowing once more.

In the time immediately ahead, we are going to see a new freeing in the culture as well. 

And a regained respect throughout the world as we hold our unworthy faux-leaders accountable for their misdeeds, and bring forth worthy leaders from the ranks of Democrats and reformed, chastized, freed-from-their-recent-embrace-of-right-wing-insanity Republicans.

I'm so looking forward to being a part of it!

Robert Devereaux

Why do we write?

Susie Bright excerpts this chapter from her book about writing erotica.

Her opener:

If you write an erotic story — or any story, for that matter — and never publish it, you will have done a very good thing. If it stays in a box for you to cherish, if it is passed between you and your lover, shared among friends, or circulated on a private e-mail list, you will have accomplished something quite wonderful.

That's the heart of it really, the heart of the question, Why write?

Why have I been writing blog entries for the past few months?

Because it's highly pleasurable to spin out words, lightly to sense where they want to go, and to give them their freedom go there, then at times to shape and re-shape them so that the getting-there is even more pleasing, is just right.

You might say, and be half right, that it avoids tackling the longer forms, the short story, the novel.

You might also say, with a similar degree of correctness, that I'm lubing the engine, that this is my free writing, and that, when I latch onto the novel idea that grabs me quite, it'll be that much easier to write because, hey, here's my narrative voice, or here's the easy flow of this or that character's thoughts.

I have written entire novels, worthy ones, which haven't interested a publisher.  In fact, a few of them I intend in the fullness of time publish here, chapter by chapter.

But even if I didn't, the writing of them is the ultimately pleasure.

Robert Devereaux

As the rain falleth...

Here in northern Colorado, a cold rain has fallen pretty much steadily for the last twenty-four hours.  It teeters on snow without quite getting there yet, but perhaps tonight, the weather gurus say.

I chanced this morning upon this story about my friend Kelly Link and her continued success in the world of publishing, and of course giving her distinctive twist and vision to storytelling.

Having finished reading the Arthur Miller biography--and wanting American theatre to mount the intriguing later plays, so I can see them in the flesh, for the love of Christ!--that's a common theme coming into my ken:  Finding the right shape to best express this particular story's flavor and skew.

Coincidentally, which means synchronistically, I was wondering what impact it might have upon a novel to use dramatic soliloquies.  A scene limpeth along, or raceth rather, and a character, at just the right moment, "turns" and addresses the readers, no one else in the scene noticing a thing and the character as intimate with us as Hamlet or Iago.

Nothing may come of this.

But something might.

Plot ideas come and go.  A biography of Bush glimmers like a tempting bauble, one which begins with this hellspawn's birth, vividly imagined with all the trappings of demon summoning, Barbara writhing in pain and cursing her mate for his vile prickwork upon her.

But do I really want, as entertaining as it would be, to spend that much time with hateful Bush?  Well, maybe.

Thus do glimmerings come and go, as I look for a place to light.

Robert Devereaux

Donald Maass workshops...

If you're at all in tune with the literary agent scene, you know Donald Maass's name.

Through the good folks at Free Expressions, Don offers weekend and week-long workshops in writing the breakout novel.

With lodging and meals included, these workshops are an absolute steal ,and Don has the goods.  A great lecturer, funny, informed, full of life and vitality and the burning desire to bring better books into the world.

If you go with the week-long intensive, Don will receive the first 50 pages of your manuscript and give you a half hour one-on-one response to it.  You do understand, don't you, how valuable that is?

There are many more perqs, but that's the best of them, and potentially the most valuable if Don is sufficiently jazzed by those opening pages.

I had the privilege of being one of 30 students attending the week-long in Park City, Utah a little over a year ago.  No go with my manuscript, alas, but I'm slated to attend the one next March or April in the Pacific Northwest (the place yet to be determined as of this posting) and I'll be there with 50 solid pages.

Interested?

Then you should read these two books right now:

• Writing the Breakout Novel
• Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook: Hands-On Help for Making Your Novel Stand Out and Succeed

Save those pennies, boys and girls!

World Horror Convention...

Writers are just like you and me.  They hate being pigeonholed.

Take me, for example.  As the holder of a Ph.D. in English literature, I'm very widely read.  And I regard my work as literary fiction, which I've heard defined as anything that doesn't fit into a genre category.

But it's undeniable that I love injecting a fantasy element in my work, or rather crystallizing things around some magical idea.

For that reason, and because I chose in my first published novel, Deadweight, to draw together splatterpunk with a King-like plot, I'm usually regarded as a horror writer.

I had actually written an unpublished first novel, Oedipus Aroused, which someday I will get back to and revise, a twist on the Oedipus tale in which Pleusiddipus, a cynic about oracles (there were legions of these in Greece, the one at Delphi only the most renowned of them) convinces Oedipus to head back home, that there's no chance the oracle will come true.

I then wrote the original version of Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, much interest but no go.

So to horror I turned.

But this post isn't about Deadweight, my third written but first published novel.

It's about the World Horror Convention.  I have attended perhaps five of these since they began in the early nineties.  They wrre instrumental in bringing some great professional friendships into my life, and in leading to the invitation to submit to various worthy anthologies.

So if you've got the chops and "horror" is what you like to read and write, go to this convention.  Very friendly, most everyone.  You'll quickly be brought into the community and lose whatever awe you may have about writers as magical, mystical, otherly creatures only distantly related to actual human beings.

Nope, foibles on display and writ large.

But how refreshing to be among a group of people who have found comfort with, and do not deny, their shadow selves.