But "Syfy?"

Are you fucking kidding me?

I feel more rant on the way. Stay tuned.

Imagine this: a young man, disaffected with life and its thousand daily stings, channels that raw emotion into a work of imagination. He dreams up a world where all the little cruelties of modern life are given a concrete form, where hope becomes a personified, unstoppable force, and where the future is a shining jewel whose mysteries, good and ill, hide behind an impenetrable veneer of red crystal. He takes these thoughts, this expression of his dreams and his very soul and puts them to paper, and out from from his quivering pen flows... something akin to the infamous Eye of Argon, often lauded as the worst piece of fantasy literature ever written.* Most people can agree that our young man’s work is terrible. But to paraphrase Kipling, it’s not very clever, but is it art?

What got me thinking about this, as usual, is video games. For anyone who hasn’t picked it up, I play a lot of video games, and the perennial favorite argument in the video game circle is “can video games be art?” A recent post by carrie_ryan rebuts some specters of the same argument directed at YA lit, and we see this type of argument directed at all types of allegedly “genre” literature. That got me thinking about the nature of “art,” and rather than doing a bunch of high-falutin’ research on the history of art criticism, LJ seemed to be as good a place to take the discussion as any.

So my question is, while we sit and talk about whether the latest summer blockbuster movie or chick-lit release or first-person shooter or whatever is really good enough to be called art, does quality really have anything to do with being artistic? I’ve seen enough works I’ve really thought were amazing flop and enough things succeed, both commercially and critically, which I personally could not imagine anyone ever letting out into the market that I have come to accept the fact that taste is way subjective, and my tastes may not in any way reflect those of people at large. May not even be similar, in fact. So if quality really does matter to artistic merit, how do we judge it? And if it doesn’t, then isn’t a child’s stick figure drawing just as artistic as Picasso?

To my point: I think writers write for two different purposes: 1) to entertain; and 2) to achieve artistic merit. Some people write for the former, some for the latter, and probably most of us for both. But we take this idea of art very seriously. And I wonder if that isn’t a cop-out, a way of allowing ourselves to aspire to something without ever forcing us to define exactly what it is we want to be. Is it really universal appeal we’re trying to reach? Emotional resonance? Effective storytelling or innovation? If we nail down what we’re aiming for, maybe that will help us reach it. And maybe it would help us focus our criticism and not be so pretensious if we acknowledge that even a story we don’t like is a work of art.

Anyway, these are just my impressions. What I’d really love to hear are your thoughts on the issue. Does “art” have a meaning to you? Am I just missing the obvious, or way off base? What do you aspire to in your writing?

* I have no reason to believe that this is in any way the origin of The Eye of Argon. Its reference here is purely for demonstrative purposes.

So the other day, I wrote a story and even polished it up a little. Yay! And that’s when it occurred to me that in the last year of novel work, I have completely and totally lost all of my critiquing connections. Of course I still have my vaunted First Reader, and brother-man JED, to both of whom I am eternally grateful, but I used to frequent sites like Critters and Baen’s Universe’s slush boards (which don't even seem to be working right now) to get feedback advice from a wide variety of readers with a wide variety of perspectives. Now, not so much.

It’s not that those sites have fallen off the map-- it’s more that I have. Each of the sites I’m familiar with essentially require (whether overtly or through practicality, in the case of Baen’s) you to review a bunch of stories before you can expect to get reviews on your own. While this is a perfectly reasonable request, I just don’t have the time anymore to review 3 to 5 stories a week to get one of mine reviewed three months after I write it (okay, that was directed straight at Critters. Some of the other sites aren’t nearly as bad, but the same principal applies).

So now I am in the market for short story critters. My output is way too low to join a regular group, but I’m hoping to find someone else out there in the same position, who produces a story every once in a blue moon that they’d like to get an objective opinion on and who wouldn’t mind doing the same in exchange. If anyone knows of such a person, send them on over!

Utterly unrelated note: played the Tomb Raider Underworld demo yesterday. I will say that it’s fantastically gorgeous, and despite some rather frustrating camera issues, it’s good to see Lara back to her old-school tomb raiding archaeology-be-damned hijinx. But because I am a bizarre person, what really annoyed me was when I pulled my way through a jungle to find two separate groups of not one but three tigers waiting for me. Seriously, people, is one tiger not enough to keep Ms. Croft limber these days? I mean, tigers are solitary animals, they establish a range and chase other tigers out of it. They don’t wander around in freakin’ hordes looking for adventurers to narf on. Let’s get some scientific accuracy up in this piece, please?
 

            On Tuesday, I spent all day knocking on doors. Metal doors, wooden doors, doors peeling with paint, doors that creaked and shuttered when I banged on them until I was scared I might knock them down. Sometimes there were people behind those doors, more often not, more often we just left little paper hangers that said “Vote TODAY-- Obama.”

            I don’t think we saw a person who we didn’t harass twice. At first, when I started doing this, I felt awkward, self-conscious, upset to be intruding into people’s lives. But then we kept hearing the same response over and over again: “Thank you.”

            Thank you for doing this. We appreciate your efforts. We’re so glad to see you. We were beyond welcome, in neighborhoods where we clearly didn’t belong, in areas where most people, myself included, would be scared to walk around in the middle of the day. I don’t know that I personally achieved anything, but it showed me what is really going on in America today. The unbelievable energy that went into Barack Obama’s movement. The very unexaggerated feeling that this presidency is really a turning point for race in America. The fact that this is a milestone that people have been waiting for since the birth of this nation.

            But one man stuck out to me the most. He was a young man, sitting on his porch at 11:30 in the morning, low-backed. He was the one who said “I’m not going to vote.” He said “it doesn’t matter.” I gave him the campaign spiel, how it was really close in North Carolina, yadda yadda, how this was change, didn’t he want change? “Yeah,” he said. “But my vote doesn’t matter.”

            That night, as I watched Barack Obama give his victory speech, I kept thinking about him. How I really wanted to go back to that neighborhood Wednesday, to find him, to say “See? You do matter.” And for the first time, it’s true. And it’s not just race. Listening to Obama, I realized that we all matter. That he’s not just taking the reins and let us go. This movement really is about us, all of us, even those who didn’t vote for him, even those who still oppose him, to which they are of course entitled.

            Everyone here matters. It’s an amazing feeling, and one that everyone should share, not just here, but all around the world. Tom Brokaw, after the election results were announced, said “We don’t really understand the significance of this. Now, people are going to be energized to go to Washington like we haven’t seen since Kennedy. They’re going to feel the energy and want to be a part of this, to stand up and say ‘count on me.’”

            I feel it. For the first time in my life, I feel like we really can change the world. And I’m no politician (thank god), and I don’t know if I’ll pack up and go to Washington, but this is the way the world changes, and I want in. I hope you’ll all join me, each in our own way, each from our different backgrounds and points of view, black, white, Republican, Democrat, gay, straight. Because agree or disagree with Mr. Obama, there’s one thing he said that is now undeniably true: “Yes, we can.”

            Thank you, Mr. Obama. Thank you, everyone who worked for him, who voted for him. Thank you everyone who gave him the opposition he needed to really blossom. Now let’s go change the world.

It has come to my attention that some people I swear-to-god I friended were not, for reasons unexplained, added to my friends list. And here I thought you were just being very quiet of late. This situation has hopefully been rectified. If you are among those people, know that I and Zoidberg Jesus still love you.

That is all.

I normally am not one for the memes, but when I saw the 100-book meme going around, I had to check and see where I was anyway, so I figured I might as well post it here. So like ta here we go!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

And I am adding a fourth category, as per the wise

raeputtputt

The very talented Aliette de Bodard had some nice things to say about my story Spamdemonium over at The Fix. She reviews the entire issue, so take a look and see what other good things are going on in there, too. The current issue of Baen's with Spamdemonium in it is still available on-line, a mere six bucks for heck of a lot of content.

I also have some great news about the anthology I mentioned earlier, but I'll save that for its own post a little later.

Finally, after some furious stops and spurts, a word count update:

36,332 / 70,000 (51.9%)