Babel Clash

Unfortunately, my camera freaked out during Jeff’s reading (sorry, Jeff!), but I’ve posted Jeff’s intro to the festivities, my reading, David’s reading, 3 minutes of lost footage from Jeff’s reading, and 30 minutes of Q&A after the readings.

The vids.

Thanks again for having us on the blog, Morgan!

The short answer is that I’d love to if the opportunity arises!  Not so much screenplays.  I tried writing a screenplay once at the urging of friend Kris Meyer.  He liked a horror short story of mine called “The Harlequin and the Train” (4200 words) and thought I should try adapting it into a movie-length screenplay.  The resulting script didn’t entirely work, I don’t think, but I liked what I’d added in terms of story, so I took the adapted screenplay and adapted it again into an experimental horror novella where the reader is asked to highlight certain words of the text yellow.  Heh.

The 37K word novella was published as a limited edition by Necropolitan Press earlier this year.  Now, I’d love to adapt this one more time: for comics.  My agent and I have discussed submitting or pitching this to comic publishers (knowing it would be a long shot), but have yet to act.  Soon, though, I think.  I hope.

Would I be any good at writing comics?  Have I done enough to prepare to write comics?  I don’t know.  I’ve done enough research this year to know that writing a comic script would be an enormous challenge for me.  Learning another medium’s language and rules and nuances is daunting.  One can dream,  though.

To add to comic/fiction crossover folks, there is Warren Ellis, and the tireless Brian Keene (horror novelist who has also written Devil Slayer comics for Marvel and is doing an original comic The Last Zombie for next summer).

Yes, you can hear agents cringe and editors spit out their coffees at the mere mention of genre hopping or mixing; their jobs made, somehow, infinitely more difficult because there is no pre-fab marketing niche for your novel that mixes SF, western, and cozy mystery!

I say that with tongue only partly in cheek.  I’m of two minds on the commercial potential of genre hopping throughout your career, or writing a single novel that mixes genres (and I’m not talking paranormal romance as genre mixing either).  The pessimistic mind of the two knows that the industry wants to package you-the-author in a category so that they think they know who will buy your book.  Risk, particularly in this economy, is the four letter word in publishing, while trend is the publishing gold rush (see the idiotic proliferation of …and zombies books as an example of trend).

The optimistic mind sees that many of his favorite authors and recent books are in fact genre hopping.  2009 might be the year of the weirdboiled (coined, at least in public, by Geoffrey H. Goodwin in a Bookslut interview with me) novel:  novels mixing noir and fanatsy, or surrealism, or experimental fiction.  (See my blog post from earlier in the summer: Weirdboiled or Noird for more ramblings and a list of books)

So, the brief defense: I applaud and crave genre hopping books, the ones that don’t conform to singular genre expectations.  While I certainly understand the appeal of comfort fiction (recognizable stories, settings, characters, all as fluffy as your pillow), I don’t want to be comforted.  I want to be challenged.  I don’t want to feel safe when I read.  I want a new experience.  I want something that I’ll remember long after shutting the book’s covers.  To me, that’s what genre hopping fiction does and does quite well.

By no means an exhaustive list, but recent favorite examples of genre hoppers:

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, China Mieville’s The City & The City, Jeff Vandermeer’s Finch (of course!), Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent, Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather (or any of his work, really), Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying.

Phantom is a forthcoming (should be available later this month, and hopefully I’ll have copies on hand at the Boylston reading) literary horror anthology that I co-edited with Sean Wallace of Prime Books. When we originally put the anthology together, we imagined it as a relatively small selling, pocket-sized, boutique kind of anthology. And this was to be its cover:

Phantom 1

However, as the publication date approached, Prime got an unexpected (but most welcomed) bump in bookstore orders, prompting a change in physical size (so the book wouldn’t be lost on shelves) and a new, more eye catching cover.

Phantom 2

What say you?  Do you agree with Prime that cover 2 would be more likely to be picked up by a walk-by shopper/browser?

Jeff is 100 percent correct in saying that his level of input on the design of covers is not the norm.  Though like Jeff, I was fortunate that Henry Holt came to me for some pre-input on what feel/look I wanted for the cover of The Little Sleep.

My novel features a private detective who blacks out and has incredibly vivid hallucinations that muddy the waters of his reality, so I knew we had to get the mix of odd with noir across with the cover.   My pre-cover input focused on an image from a movie poster a friend had sent me: Anatomy of a Murder.

movie poster!

I liked the use of primary colors, the title being prominent, and the sense of general oddness of the silhouetted body.

Fortunately, my vague ramblings and movie poster landed in the hands of the incredibly talented Lisa Fyfe, book designer at Holt.  The finished cover of The Little Sleep was featured at faceoutbooks (a blog devoted to cover design), where Lisa described her creative process in more detail.

The Little Sleep