Posts Tagged ‘Novel’

an Interview with Greg van Eekhout, author of Norse Code

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Greg van Eekhout is one of the fun­ni­est con atten­dees I have had the plea­sure of being around. On top of that, he’s a damned good writer with sto­ries like “The Osteomancer’s Son” and “Will You Be An Astronaut?” (appear­ing at EscapePod soon, read by Christiana Ellis).  Greg’s first novel was recently released.  I’ve watched the progress of Greg writ­ing this book on his blog, and so I’ve really been look­ing for­ward to read­ing it.

A Quick Review of Norse Code

Norse Code is Greg’s debut novel, and it’s a fun one. The book focuses on two char­ac­ters pri­mar­ily. The first is Mist, a recently recruited Valkyrie who is work­ing for the Norse Code project. The goal of the Norse Code project is to find and recruit the descen­dants of Odin to pre­pare for the com­ing Ragnarok. The sec­ond is the iten­er­ant Norse god Hermod, the only liv­ing entity to ever travel to Helheim and return.

It’ll come as no sur­prise to you that the paths of these two pro­tag­o­nists cross in the inevitable run-​​up to Ragnarok. Along the way, we meet a cast of char­ac­ters both drawn from Norse mythol­ogy and not, but all are  imbued with a pecu­liar van Eekhout sense of humor. This is not a comedic story exactly, but aspects of it are very funny.

Norse Code does feel at times like a first novel in that you sense the author feels a bit uncer­tain about the plot in places, but van Eekhout’s will­ing­ness to take what you know about Norse mythol­ogy and twist it for his needs makes this a hell of a lot of fun to read. Mist and Hermod are heroes in an older sense, not ter­ri­bly flawed, but sim­ply decent peo­ple with rocky pasts deter­mined to do the right thing despite that.

It’s a short read, one I man­aged to burn through in an after­noon, so you really have no excuse for not pick­ing it up and giv­ing it a try. While the novel didn’t pack the same punch for me as some of Greg’s short sto­ries, it’s a fine first out­ing and demon­strates that he’s an author to keep Odin’s eye on in the future.

The Interview

Can you share with me a lit­tle bit about the day-​​to-​​day nuts-​​and-​​bolts of your writ­ing process? How did you make time to write the book? How long did it take you to write the book from first con­ceiv­ing the idea to fin­ish­ing the book and sub­mit­ting it for publication?

I used to be able to talk about mak­ing time to write with at least some small degree of cred­i­bil­ity, because I had a job that often took up way more than forty hours a week, and I still found time to write sim­ply by mak­ing sure I started each day with an hour of writ­ing. For me, that kind of con­sis­tency was the key. But I don’t have a day job right now and I have the lux­ury of more writ­ing time, and I don’t blame peo­ple if they don’t want to lis­ten to me talk about carv­ing out time and ded­i­ca­tion and all that. That being said, peo­ple who really want to write find the time, some­how. Maybe by giv­ing up TV or games or what­ever. Maybe by devot­ing one hour before work to writ­ing, as I did. Maybe by writ­ing on their lunch break or on the bus. Maybe by just get­ting ten min­utes here, five min­utes there. It adds up. Really, it does.

It took me years and years and years to write Norse Code if you count all the false starts, words that got tossed out (at one point, 30,000 of them in one fell swoop), time squan­dered think­ing about writ­ing the book instead of writ­ing it, and time spent writ­ing short sto­ries and other things because I was stuck on the book. I’m going to say maybe ten years want­ing to write Norse Code, and maybe two years actu­ally work­ing on it. Fortunately, the book I wrote after Norse Code went much more quickly and smoothly.

I noticed quite a few L.A. cof­fee shops men­tioned. Are these all real places that you know from grow­ing up in L.A.? We’ve seen the pho­tos you take for each writ­ing ses­sion of your empty cups. How many cups of cof­fee did you drink in the process of writ­ing Norse Code?

I did grow up in L.A., but there really weren’t many cof­fee joints back then. Instead, we had “spooky houses,” where you were given a pot of a thick, pudding-​​like bev­er­age, an open flame with which to soften it, and sort of a com­bi­na­tion of spoon, fork, and hook, which we called a “spook.” Nonetheless, the cof­fee houses in Norse Code are real places. I think a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate for the num­ber of cups of cof­fee con­sumed dur­ing the com­po­si­tion of Norse Code would be 1,000. It takes a mil­lion bad words, 10,000 hours of prac­tice, or 1,000 cups of cof­fee before you can begin to say you’ve passed out of your appren­tice­ship. Really, the point of all those pic­tures of cof­fee cups next to my com­puter weren’t to show how much cof­fee I drink, but just a way of mark­ing the fact that, on the day each photo was posted to my blog, I worked on the book. Just some­thing dif­fer­ent than post­ing a word count.

What kind of research did you do to write the book–it’s clear that you famil­iar­ized your­self with Norse mythol­ogy. Can you talk about your research process and how it led to the plot you came up with for the book?

The pri­mary mate­ri­als that give us most of Norse mythol­ogy are short and finite: The Elder, or poetic, Edda, and the Younger, or prose, Edda. We’re only talk­ing a few hun­dred pages here, and they were my chief research mate­ri­als. H.R. Ellis Davidson also has some good books on Norse mythol­ogy, and I used wikipedia and pan​theon​.org some­times as well. My method was to read the Eddas and just sort of keep track of things that seemed par­tic­u­larly cool, like wolves eat­ing the moon and stuff like that. Sometimes it just led me to think through the impli­ca­tions of the myth, which made the plot obvi­ous to me. For instance, when you’ve got a story about the end of the world, and the myth tells you some gods are des­tined to sur­vive it and pre­side over the world that comes after­wards, you apply a basic what-​​if to that sit­u­a­tion. What if I were a god des­tined to sur­vive the end of the world and take over ruler­ship? Would I just wait for the end of the world to hap­pen? Would I encour­age it along? How would I do that? And so forth.

Some parts of the book seemed a bit trun­cated, like the Norse Code aspect itself. Did the Norse Code project play a larger part in the book in ear­lier drafts, and if so, what led to its role being reduced?

I think when you have a book titled Norse Code, peo­ple are right to expect a big part of the book to be devoted to Norse Code (which in the book is a genomics oper­a­tion run by Valkyries). But I never intended that par­tic­u­lar aspect of the book to play a huge role. What hap­pened was, the book was called “Greg’s Damn Norse Novel” for most of the time I was writ­ing it. When it came time to sub­mit it, it needed a real title. Norse Code is all I could come up with. I sort of expected the pub­lisher to give me a “real” title, but I guess they were happy with it, so it stuck.

What’s next from Greg in terms of books? It seems that Norse Code is a stand-​​alone book, which is sur­pris­ing given all the tril­ogy deals genre writ­ers seem to be get­ting lately.

I actu­ally can’t talk about what’s next! I’m not con­tracted to write any­thing else for the pub­lisher of Norse Code, though they get first look at the next book I write for adults. But the next thing out from me won’t be a book for adults, and when I’m free to talk about it, you can believe I’ll be Mr. Blabby McInterHype wher­ever I can.

Is Norse Code your writ­ten first novel in addi­tion to being your first pub­lished one, or did you write oth­ers before sell­ing Norse Code?

Norse Code is actu­ally the sec­ond book I’ve fin­ished. Somewhere in the mid­dle of that stalled-​​out time I men­tioned ear­lier, I wrote a whole other book. That one’s trunked for now, but you never know. Another whack or two at it, and it could pos­si­bly be decent enough to try to sell. If not, though, that’s okay. My goal with the cur­rently trunked novel was just to fin­ish a book, so I con­sider it a suc­cess even if it never leaves my hard drive. Writing it gave me the con­fi­dence to fin­ish Norse Code, and fin­ish­ing and sell­ing Norse Code gave me the con­fi­dence to write other books, so that first, unsold novel will always be impor­tant to me.

Thanks for answer­ing my ques­tions, Greg!  So have any of you read Norse Code? What did you think?

Recommended: The City and The City by China Miéville

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When I stum­bled upon a copy of The City and the City at Barnes and Noble on Saturday after­noon, I knew my week­end was doomed. Ever since Perdido Street Station, and despite the dis­ap­point­ment of The Iron Council, Miéville is still pos­si­bly the most excit­ing author work­ing today for me.

This book is not a New Cobrazon book. It is not out­right fan­tasy in any way, actu­ally. But it’s still fan­tas­tic in a more sim­ple sense of the word. The story is essen­tially a police pro­ce­dural, but one set in the kind of city that is dis­tinctly Miévillian.

If there is a com­mon theme among Miéville’s work, I would say that it is “the city as char­ac­ter.” Because even here, the city takes the fore­front. Bas Lag, also, in most of that series. China has a preter­nat­ural sense for cities, and for what makes them tick. As some­one who has never lived in an urban cen­ter with more than 100,000 peo­ple, I find it utterly fas­ci­nat­ing. It’s as exotic as the Far East to me.

The cities of Bezel and Ul Quoma are utterly unique, at least to my expe­ri­ence. I won’t even say another thing about them, because learn­ing about them as I did, with lit­tle pre­con­cieved notions, was a great way of expe­ri­enc­ing the book. Trust that things are not all that they seem in the open­ing pages. This is no bog stan­dard police pro­ce­dural (and that it would been fine if it was). This is some­thing more, dis­tinctly from the author who gave us one of the best cities in fan­tas­tic literature.

Am I dis­ap­pointed that this wasn’t another book set in his wilder, more fan­tas­ti­cal uni­verse? Before read­ing it, yes, I was. Now that I have read the book, no, not even a lit­tle bit. This new place will have much more main­stream appeal, and any­thing that sells more books for Miéville makes it that much more likely we’ll get more fan­tasy novels–at least I hope so. Miéville clearly has break-​​out poten­tial with the main­stream, and if I have a fear, it’s that the money will be so much bet­ter, he would be a fool not to go down the less fan­tas­tic road and to its broader audi­ences. Everything I have read about China indi­cates that he would never aban­don sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy entirely. So I have to go on faith that he won’t.

But even if he pulls a Lethem, I’ll fol­low him wher­ever he goes. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Book 2009 #1: Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The first book I have read for 2009  prob­a­bly shouldn’t count.  I started it in 2008.  But I set the rules and I have decided that it is books fin­ished in 2009 that count.  Maybe  I will finally get through War and Peace after all this time.  Unlikely.  The Russian authors have rarely done much for me.  Although, now that I think about it, Crime and Punishment gave me some nasty night­mares in high school.  Something about a bloody ham­mer. No bloody ham­mers here, but there sure was a lot of blood in general.

So I read the rather long titled Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. I picked this one up after hav­ing seen the really inter­est­ing cover a cou­ple of times at the book store and read­ing the back copy.  I wasn’t quite sold, but then Cory over at BoingBoing posted a glow­ing Doctorowian review and­con­vinced me to give it a shot.  Speaking of  Cory, I think I’ll put Little Brother up on the chop­ping block next.  I’ve been mean­ing to get to that for a while and I sus­pect the­mat­i­cally it’ll go down well after the six course meal of this book.

Sheesh, that’s a lot of words with­out actu­ally talk­ing about the book itself isn’t it?  I was talk­ing with Nick Mamatas about this one and he said he thought it read like bud­get Pynchon.  I’ve never read any Pynchon but I trust Nick knows what he’s talk­ing about.  I’m actu­ally look­ing for­ward to read­ing some Pynchon now based on that com­par­i­son.    (Finally, I address the book itself, eh?)

Yeah, I liked this one for a lot of rea­sons.  The prose is wan­der­ing and wild and full of words that go together like choco­late and peanut but­ter.  Just some great writ­ing here, and it breaks rules of POV and such in lovely ways that just make every­thing slightly sur­real, and yet still grounded.  This is sci­ence fic­tion, but there are ghosts.  Are they metaphor­i­cal? I guess you could say that.  If this weren’t genre, you wouldn’t even ask that ques­tion though.

Post eco­nomic col­lapse America sounds a hell of a lot more ghoul­ish than I imag­ined it per­son­ally.  For one, Slattery sees slav­ery com­ing back.  I had a hard time buy­ing that at first but it does make a kind of grue­some sense.  I hope he’s wrong if things ome to that.

The main char­ac­ter here is really America (post col­lapse, but our his­tory as well).  Everyone else, espe­cially the pro­tag­o­nists, are just sup­port­ing cast.  That’s not to say they aren’t well-​​characterized.  I’ll prob­a­bly remem­ber Marco in par­tic­u­lar for years to come. But I like a book with a broad char­ac­ter like that once and a while.  It’s some­thing I would love to pull off some day, as I work to grow as a writer.

And every­thing here is so fuck­ing cool.  It’s almost Beats cool.  The Slick Six are very slick, very suave and I think there’s almost a comic book atmos­phere at play here.  They’re larger than life in some ways, par­tic­u­larly Marco (espe­cially Marco).   It’s so weird to me that Slattery has made his post-​​collapse America seem cool, but it really is.  Bursting with weird­ness and cool.  There’s a scene in par­tic­u­lar that I am think­ing of, involv­ing a con­fronta­tion between Marco and an assas­sin that is just great and so so cool.

Also, the villain’s name is the Aardvark which may be more ridicu­lous than cool, but I liked that.  What kind of vil­lain goes by that istead of the Hammerhead or the Wolf or some­thing suit­ably fright­en­ing?  Aardvark is not a word that strikes fear in any­one unless you hap­pen to be an ant.

This book will stick with me for a while, I think.  I am def­i­nitely look­ing for­ward to the next one by Slattery.  I may even read this one again, more care­fully this time, to enjoy the prose at my leisure.  I rec­om­mend this one if you like post-​​apocalyptic fic­tion, gonzo style road trip nov­els, or ninjas.