I found this to be fascinating, but I was mystified by exactly what the “1/f fluctuation” is. I’m not a physicist; I’ve read one book on chaos theory and a few other titles that tried their best to explain Einstein’s universe to me, but I’m not about to be able to explain what the 1/f fluctuation has to do with the attention spans of movie audiences or engineers or economists. The paper itself, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Films” (http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pubs/cuttingetalpsychsci10.pdf) is sufficiently technical to have me feeling out of my depth as I read it trying to find a clear answer to my simple question.

A wonderful article on the PhysOrg website, however, clarified it for me (http://www.physorg.com/news185781475.html): Cutting and coauthors “found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals. The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.” Furthermore, “Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.”

Okay. Got it. Same lengths recurring at regular intervals. That sounds (ho ho) like a noise pattern to me, as well as Nile flooding and, interestingly, also hints at what many of us find to be appealing about some landscapes and naturescapes, as one of these articles points out. It is a kind of “sweet spot” that we all appreciate, as Stuart Fox says in an article on popsci.com: “Cutting doesn’t believe that this increasing conformity to the 1/f fluctuation resulted from a conscious decision on the part of the directors. Rather, he theorizes that films which fall into people’s viewing sweet spot better hold their attention, and thus seem more gripping, and make more money. Then the other directors naturally copy the pace of the more exciting, more profitable movies, and the 1/f fluctuation trend spreads. However, this formula seems a better predictor of box office than quality. For instance, Cutting found that the Star Wars prequels all conformed nearly perfectly to the 1/f fluctuation. Sure, all three of those movies made a ton of money, but man, did they suck” (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/mathematician-cracks-box-office-gold-code).

It sounds to me as though what Cutting and his coauthors established was a formula for how successful montage is in films. If I recall my film theory correctly, montage (a term introduced and widely used by Russian filmmakers and film theorists in the 1920s) is how a movie’s separate shots are put together in a certain rhythm in order to gain maximum effect from an audience. The Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin is perhaps the best-known example. So what is going on appears to be a style of montage or film editing in modern movies that, through the random (chaos theory) repetition of sequences of shots of a certain length, matches our natural human heartbeat as well as our natural human attention span. A pulse beat, a rhythm.

None of these authors talks about language in this regard, or poetry. This is a mathematical model, so the discussion in the formal science papers had to do with sine waves and fractals. These are not the elements that I typically get involved with during my work day, although talk of fractals led to me another fine website (http://www.miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual-math-natural-fractals.html) that contains this sentence: “Fractals are unpredictable in specific details yet deterministic when viewed as a total pattern—in many ways this reflects what we observe in the small details and total pattern of life in all its physical and mental varieties, too.”

Whoa. The first part of that sentence is as good a definition as any for what occurs during the process of editing a movie: “Shots are unpredictable in specific details yet deterministic when viewed as a total pattern”—that is, a sequence in a movie. You put the shots together into a sequence such as the Odessa steps slaughter or the chase through the marsh in The 39 Steps, and what do you have? Pulse beat racing and pure, undivided attention.

Back to language and poetry. Doesn’t it make sense that language itself, the popular rhythm of sounds, syllables, and words, would also lend itself to the attention-grabbing rule of the 1/f fluctuation? I wouldn’t know how to design such a study, but it makes sense to me that the meter and beat of great verse and appealing prose really must, in some way, approximate this fluctuation. Is it possible that at the root of some fiction that critics find intellectually unsatisfying but which audiences love is this 1/f fluctuation? Is this same pulse beat at work in comedy, in the timing of comics’ and great actors’ delivery? I really want to know. If I could figure this out, why, I would start writing my stories with this in mind; perhaps it would make my fiction more appealing to a wide, general audience!

This isn’t the whole story, of course. As Cutting himself noted in his paper, his favorite type of movies are film noirs, and few of them accommodate this 1/f fluctuation pattern. Still, they are satisfying. So it really does come down to attention span in the moment, the undistracted attention of an audience glued to the screen—and, perhaps, to the un-put-downableness of some stories? If this is part of the appeal of the Harry Potter books or the Twilight series, whatever their flaws, I’d like to determine this and bottle it and sell it at writers’ conventions. Little glass bottles of Honest Dave’s 1/f Storytelling Formula and Writers’ Block Cure: Guaranteed to Win You Lots of Sales and Audience Devotion.

Hmmm…. Wait a minute. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and 1/f! I’m onto something….

In fact, given the state of affairs of the past seven thousand years or so, the question actually is this: Shall we turn the world over to women this afternoon, or shall we give ourselves until sometime next week?

I have a couple of good reasons for bringing up this topic, and, frankly, I think that getting on with it is absolutely necessary. That is, if women actually would take us up on the deal. Women are pretty smart, and they may not accept any such offer. They have a pretty clear understanding of human behavior, mainly because they give birth to humans and raise these human children more or less by themselves. So they immediately gain that firsthand experience into human behavior, which by and large is not a pretty picture. You know, the whiny baby stuff, the me-first stuff. It can’t be easy turning such raw material into a halfway sensible, reasonably competent, socialized member of our species. I have known men in their sixties who are still pretty much in the diaper stage of human social interaction. Maybe you know them, too.

The other reason is that, no matter how you look at it, women are still pretty much regarded as second-class citizens in this world (where they even are citizens), and so they gain insight from that, as well. It’s my old rule: if you really want to know how things are going, don’t ask the manager or the boss: he or she will simply cover his or her ass and say everything is going fine. This is how it’s done in a kick-down, kiss-up hierarchy or bureaucracy. If you really want to know how things are going, ask the workers on the assembly line or the ones digging the ditch. And get ready for an earful. However, given the fact that most women are the ones basically working on the assembly line every day and therefore know the facts about how things have been run so far, maybe the world is more trouble than it is worth as far as many women are concerned.

Still, this line of thinking brings me to my first reason why women should be running things: they give birth to us. Therefore, they have dibs. The hand that rocks the cradle and so forth. If only we could have this situation take place in an environment that really nurtured and supported moms (rather than nurturing and supporting, say, pathologic Wall Street dickheads), we would be better in the long run.

Another good reason: Women are more intelligent than men. This is true, although I’d have to do some research to back it up. And maybe the studies aren’t there. Yet. Anecdotally, however, many of the brightest guys I know, and I mean doctors and surgeons and people like that, men who themselves are really bright, all sigh and nod and say that it is so.

Maybe it’s because women have two x chromosomes and we all start out as girls, or as protofemales, in the womb. Then some of us receive this huge dose of testosterone and, voila, we get a gimpy y chromosome instead of continuing with a second strong x chromosome. And it really is gimpy. Look at any biology book or go online and you’ll see that it’s so. I attended a lecture years ago by Ashley Montagu, the British biologist, who made this point and showed us slides corroborating the evidence. By gum, there is was, the odd y chromosome. So Mother Nature has already made up her mind. We evolved so that, as is the situation with all higher order animals, we have two sexes in order to get a lot more work done during the day. Division of labor. Dads evolved to help moms, though, not the other way around. It’s not a science fiction or fantasy story like the book of Genesis, where women come in second and are told that they’re here to help men. It’s science: logically, guys are here to assist the first sex, which would be women.

Science, in fact, is coming up with lots of reasons to revisit the assumptions most of us have about men and women. There’s a very important article in the current (May-June 2010) issue of Miller-McCune magazine titled “Make Birth Control, Not War” (available at http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/make-birth-control-not-war-11399/). The authors, Thomas Hayden and Malcolm Potts, make the point that war is in our genes, that “humans—human males, really—are not peaceful animals,” but that birth control measures and family planning decisions could alleviate much of the testosterone-driven bloodshed that has defined our species for so long. Putting women in charge, in other words, to make the decisions about when to have children and how many to have, could be the key to our survival. These authors report that, like chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, humans lived “for the vast majority of evolutionary time . . . in male-dominated social groups in which the males are all blood-relatives and only females move between troops. The dominant males largely monopolize mating opportunities and take the best food and other resources. Younger males are left either to work their way up the in-group hierarchy or attempt surreptitious matings with females of their troop or others—high-stakes strategies that often end in a beating or worse. But, in a unique evolutionary innovation, these young males can also band together and launch attacks on isolated members of neighboring out-groups, ultimately eliminating their ‘enemies’ and securing territory, resources and females they require to survive and pass on their genes.” Sounds like the old neighborhood, right? And like the Iliad.

Passing on the genes is what it’s all about, as anyone knows who has kept up with current developments in the biological sciences. What’s good for the species is out; what the selfish gene desires for itself is in. “We are all descended,” Hayden and Potts continue, “ . . . from particularly successful rapists, murderers and brigands. Human males today bear the marks of this legacy in the behaviors and impulses that still spur us on to lethal conflict—including the widespread and devastating association between war and rape—even when other solutions are both available and preferable.”

At the same time, though, they point out, “there is no doubt that other apes, like people, can be empathetic.” This biological behavior is emphasized in long-term observations made by Ernst Fehr, a professor of macroeconomics and experimental economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In the article “Ernst Fehr: How I found what’s wrong with economics,” in the May 4, 2010, issue of New Scientist (available at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627581.300-ernst-fehr-how-i-found-whats-wrong-with-economics.html), writer Marc Buchanan states that, 20 years ago, “Fehr had a seemingly sensible idea—that a deep-seated human preference for fairness might play an important role in economics.” Fehr had an uphill battle against the received wisdom that economic activity in the real world, like all other activities, is basically a winner-takes-all battlefield where evolved chimpanzees with flags and shooting irons—us, in other words—fight each other over the biggest slices of the never-expanding pie. Such “hard-headed thinking,” however, “has turned out to be profoundly naïve” and, in fact, “played a fundamental role in the recent economic crisis . . . the worst financial crisis in nearly a century.” Fehr has been concentrating on the field of neuroeconomics, helping to establish that “our precious moral values may ultimately be biologically based.” The idea that people are strictly self-interested, Fehr says, “has been the dominant mindset for decades . . . . It’s a biased way of perceiving the world.” (Certainly it is the mindset of pathologic, pseudorational, selfish Ayn Rand-style “positivists,” with their positively self-deluded sense of entitlement as alpha-male and -female go-getters who cleverly leave the rest of us in the dust as they charge in, Achilles-like, to prove their social dominance.)

Interestingly, when it comes to testosterone, literally the bad boy of the sex hormones, Fehr and colleagues, in a recent paper in Nature, “showed that testosterone, despite its reputation as a promoter of aggressive behavior, actually made people more cooperative when playing economic games. They used female volunteers since previous studies have indicated that women are more likely than men to show behavioural changes if given very low doses of the hormone.” (Eisenegger C, Naef M, Snozzi R, Heinrichs M, Fehr E: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behavior, available at Eisenegger C, Naef M, Snozzi R, Heinrichs M, Fehr E: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behavior.) Naturally, however, as Hayden and Potts state, many people are resistant “to the idea that something as apparently complex and unique to humans as our social instincts could find a relatively simple basis in chemical changes in brain activity.”

Well, we had better get used to the idea that we humans fundamentally serve as responders to selfish genes and chemical changes in brain activity because that is where advances in scientific inquiry are taking us. And study results such as these make the argument for women running the world all the more self-evident. Midway through their article, Hayden and Potts list the factors that “interact in one way or another with the warlike biology of the human male, and each is influenced quite directly by population growth rate”:

- Environmental stress and/or resource limitation

- Extreme economic disparity within or between groups and lack of opportunities, especially for young men

- Subjugation of women and a culture of male dominance

- A high proportion of young males relative to older males

I was certainly familiar with the first two items in their catalogue: stressing local resources intuitively seems to lead to attacking the people over the next hill in order to take their stuff, and the age-old question of what to do with the young men has bedeviled every culture since we came down from the trees. For years I’ve been saying that, if we really want to help out in Afghanistan and other hot spots in the world, what you do is give all of the hormone-driven young men the following: a wife and a family; a steady job; and one night a week out with the boys so that they can bond with their peer group by playing poker or going down to the local to throw back a few. It is not complex. That we haven’t done so tells me that, ultimately, the characters who make the decisions that shape the world have more profits to make by keeping things stirred up than by keeping them sensibly within domestic limits. As a matter of fact, Hayden and Potts point out that the crafty Yasser Arafat, when he needed to score points with the United Nations following the attacks in 1972 by the terrorist group Black September on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, “flew eligible young female volunteers to Beirut and offered militant members of Black September $3,000, an apartment with a TV, long-term employment and $5,000 if they married and had a child. The offer was overwhelmingly accepted, and Black September as a terrorist movement collapsed almost overnight.” My point is made. Case closed. No mention of whether these formerly deadly young bucks got to spend one evening out a week with the boys, but that’s beside the point. Given the choice between being losers or winners, they went with being winners.

Female subjugation is a topic of endless discussion, of course. Suffice it to say that it is based, so far as I can tell, on fear of the feminine, most often, literally, fear of women. That’s what it comes down to, pure and simple. It is what is behind every fundamentalist religious sect and thought in the world. I know what I personally would like to do to jerks like the extremists who attack young Muslim girls on their way to school, but my reaction would be purely testosterone driven. I’d prefer to wait until next week when women are running the world and leave it to the mothers of these cretinous slobs, and the mothers of the hurt girls, to deliver whatever punishment the moms feel would be a fair and balanced response.

And speaking of fair and balanced, I am troubled by women who make themselves available to the alpha males of such conservative, testosterone-driven, He-Man Woman-Hater Clubs as Fox News as well as every other place of business or enterprise in America, if not the world. It makes sense, no doubt, biologically, as it has for thousands of years, to catch the eye of the alpha males, but as a matter of self-respect, I can’t help but recognize that these women are exactly what they appear to be: prizes available to the highest bidder in the chimpanzee troop. Conservative women are basically holes. They can tart themselves up as much as possible, they can bottle-blond themselves no end and undergo plastic surgery, but essentially all they are doing is what is required to be done in a conservative chimpanzee troop, which is to serve as highly visible pieces of candy. We all recognize that the owners of the shapely stems on Fox News are not equal partners. They are holes. Conservative women are holes. Of course, many so-called liberal males also regard women basically as holes. That’s a fact. But we need to try to get to a point where, selfishly-gened and sex-hormoned as we are, we all keep in mind most of the time that women got here first and that they are the mothers of our species. This will happen faster once we start, later today, letting women run things.

The fourth point in the Hayden and Potts article, about a high proportion of young males relative to older males leading to trouble, really makes sense. When you have a suitable number of dads, older brothers, uncles, and granddads around to guide the next generation of young men, you have at least a halfway decent chance of providing some decent guidance to these up-and-comers. It might be a code of conduct, it might be a direction for intellectual inquiry, it might simply be warning the young bucks to treat girls the way they want their sisters treated. Whatever. Trouble comes when you have too many young guys leading each other around in circles and causing trouble for themselves and others, whether because they broke into dad’s store of alcohol, or some religious nut gave them marching orders, or any of the million-and-one other ways young men have found since the Stone Age to get themselves thrown into buzz saws.

Any type of revealed religion is potentially poisonous, as far as I’m concerned. And fundamentalists, whether inspired by revealed or secular religion, are always trouble for the clear-thinking and the truth-seeking among us. They are all the same, these true believers. Same animal, different color of fur. But we can save that conversation for another blog.

Anyhow, Hayden and Potts conclude their essay by stating the obvious: if we made family planning available worldwide and let women take charge of their own wombs, we would be well on the way to having fewer hostilities and instead having more nights out with the boys that wouldn’t lead to mass destruction. We would all sleep better knowing that the four factors that contribute to war and rapine are being addressed sensibly. By women. For the good of our species and our genes.

A final point to follow up on where I started, many paragraphs back up there, and then I’ll save further ruminations, assertions, and rants for future blogs. Let’s be frank about this: Women are more inclusive and more tolerant than men. However, having said this, I must remind you that, bearing in mind many things I’ve provided in this essay, all generalizations essentially are false. Make a sweeping statement and immediately some clever person in the back raises a hand and gives you an example that disproves the statement. We all know this. I’m sure you have your own list of mothers from hell; bridezillas; dominatrices in business attire; subversive in-laws of the feminine gender; suburban blonds and similarly toxic, high-maintenance narcissists; shoe fetishists and Humvee drivers and other take-no-prisoners women consumers who are essentially slaves conditioned to respond to the marketplace; painfully embarrassing parvenus, social climbers, and divas; foolishly drunk girls gone wild; soiled doves; and further examples of womanhood whom no one, male or female, wants to see in positions of authority. Understood. Nevertheless, you know as well as I do that guys are exclusive and women are inclusive. It’s built-in, it’s hardwired, and it’s a good thing. Most guys want to beat up the neighboring troop of chimps in order to get to some of those hot chimp girls. But it serves us all better, I say, to allow the chimp girls to have some say in the matter in order to have as much variety and diversity as possible in the social make-up. That variety and diversity is where the innovators come from. It’s where the artists come from. And it’s where the next batch of cool moms, women scientists, and smart writers will come from.

Consider this a Mother’s Day blog in honor of women and moms. I will continue ranting about this because it is one of my favorite topics about which to rant. But to anticipate one possible objection: You want to ask, Dave, if them womens ran the world, could we still have mixed-martial arts contests and boxing matches and hunting and stuff? The answer is yes. Most women love sports, and they really understand and are attuned to the physicality of being alive. They may not get into blood sports; that’s my impression. Not most women, anyhow. But in a world run by women, we’d have at least as much vibrant activity on the playing field as we do now. However, women might also go for stuff that has a little more finesse, like your figure skating, as opposed to head-crunching cage matches. But there would be room for everyone. I don’t want to live in a world—and I don’t think many women do, either—where we wouldn’t have sports and athletics. Besides, I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world in which my mom would not have been able to root for the Cleveland ball clubs. If you’re not going to let my mom root for the Browns every fall, well, then, why have a world at all?

Jill’s agent in Manhattan is energetic and very proactive, and she knows her business. Talking with Jill this past Sunday, then, gave me a good perspective about where genre fiction is these days. And pretty much it’s in the situation I surmised in my previous blog.

Eight-five percent of fiction readers in this country are now women, says Jill’s agent. Eighty-five percent. Women agents, women editors, women writers, women readers . . . chicks rule. It is pretty much completely upside-down, I suppose, from the situation—I don’t know, 50 years ago? 60?—when publishing in all of its aspects was run by men. Women weren’t entirely excluded—dames and other just-one-of-the-boys sassy types were more than welcome—but sexist it definitely was.

In terms of social progress, then, times are better now. In terms of lowered levels of literacy, however, things are not better. And publishing’s following the zero-sum mentality that has long been a hallmark of the music industry and Hollywood, the all-or-nothing mentality, is definitely not good, in my estimation. But whether good or not, it was inevitable that publishing would move in this direction. Whatever else American-style late capitalism is, it’s a juggernaut; it is a large mouth, an appetite that constantly wants to be fed; and the larger the chunks of food you can give it, the better the juggernaut likes it. Rock-star authors, huge opening weekends for movies, break-out tweener singers and performers—the devouring gullet adores them, loves ’em, swallows them whole, and in return, coughs up gold.

That all-or-nothing attitude, though, is the problem when it comes to what coyly used to be regarded as the midlist. Got a book that 50,000 readers might like? Well, too bad. We’re not interested because it’s not a big enough chunk of food for the juggernaut. So what do we do with the bite-sized morsels that appeal to the tastes of everyone other than those of the juggernaut?

It appears, to no one’s surprise, that the new Yellow Brick Road is e-publishing. Jill confirmed this as she and Joe and I sat around her kitchen table last Sunday. My daughter, Lily, and Jill’s son, Elliott, played in the other room, chasing each other around in circles, and we three adults drank root beer and ate carrot sticks, and it was made clear, as Jill’s canny agent told her, that within five years, publishing will mean electronic publishing. Paper won’t go away; books of cardboard and paper won’t even become antiques or nostalgia because, as implements or tools, they are pret’ near perfect in their design, in filling the need that they serve.

But America is all about technologic advances, and the arts in America proceed according to the latest technology. (God help us, this means that a tidal wave of contrived 3D movies is now heading toward us, without doubt mostly overgrown-adolescent fare spawned by the likes of James Cameron, just as, a decade or more ago, it seemed as though George Lucas and his remarkably awful, post-adolescent sense of storytelling and character development stole our sensibilities with his ghastly Star Wars prequels. We should all start planning right now to get in line for the 3D reissues of the Harry Potter pictures, let alone the 3D re-release of The Lord of the Rings. I am fairly certain, though, that no one, absolutely no one, will go back and try to reformat 7 Men from Now in Cameronian 3D, or The 300 Spartans, or Maniac Cop III, or any of the other peculiar cinematic fossils so dear to my heart. So my Saturday afternoons on the couch are safe from James Cameron.)

Jill’s agent also pointed out something else that is very interesting: that even the final two fiction genres pretty much dominated by men—horror and science fiction, the last holdouts, as it were—are now becoming secured by women writers. We are living through the greatest commercial expression of weirdness and horror in popular storytelling since the early 1930s, and this time, it’s “just us girls.” In one sense, I don’t mind: everyone should have her or his chance to get into print. In a second sense, I even like it, because I am really looking forward to introducing my three-and-half-year-old daughter to the delights of reading such girl-centric fiction when she gets to be older. (It’s hard to believe right now that anything will displace Pablo and Uniqua of The Backyardigans in her interest, but one of these days, surely, it will be resourceful young women who ride dragons or learn to become sorceresses or something or other.)

What has happened, simply, is this: that as technology and expression and the arts and business have become postmodern, genres and even methods of storytelling that were merely modern have been left behind or been allowed to manage the situation as best they can. I wrote sword-and-sorcery fiction; there is no home for that sort of fiction now in the commercial publishing business; so that fiction and its writers are now marginalized in the way that, say, gay and lesbian writers were in the 1940s, or that science fiction writers were in the 1950s. Right now, the modern type of sword-and-sorcery mentality that was more or less prevalent in the genre in the 1960s and 1970s has not had to move forward or develop very much; it has found a home in video games and in a resurgence of theatrical movies that—no surprise—take advantage of improved technology. So now we have the grunts of 300 and a remake of The Clash of the Titans, for example. We will probably see one or two of these sorts of movies every year from now on, at least for a while. If it can be done, it will be done, and technology makes these efforts acceptable, even enjoyable, compared with the lumpenprole embarrassments made in the 1980s, the awful beefcake-fests with Southern California bodybuilders pretending to be generic “barbarians” on a quest.

I still think that sword-and-sorcery is best on the page. Even though these stories are basically Westerns, they require a greater suspension of disbelief on the screen than Westerns do. Sword-and-sorcery stories are radio shows, or campfire stories, or yarns on the printed page: they work best when you fill in some of the story yourself, in your own imagination. Show it and you kill it. How many effing dragons have we seen flying around by now since the 1980s? Are any of them as good as the ones you imagine? They’re like the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies, so technically perfect that you don’t have to do any work at all to appreciate them or meet them half way. They might as well be cocker spaniels. And they’re about as scary as cocker spaniels, too. We’re on to their tricks.

Joe and I have been talking lately about just what sword-and-sorcery stories are. He is about done reworking his Dorgo the Dowser stories from the 1970s. In a broad sense, they’re like film noir in a fantasy setting but featuring a character who is partly tough, partly good-hearted and honest. Dorgo is a strong character around whom good stories can be fashioned. Myself, I have been reworking my fantasy short stories from the 1970s and am almost half way through the lot of them. There are 18 in all; they’ll form a collection called Tales of Attluma or something similar. Tales of Attluma is how Morgan Holmes has referred to them, and that was the title under which the late, deeply lamented Steve Tompkins was reading them in preparation for writing his introduction. I deeply regret that the collection will not have an introduction by Steve; that’s how selfish I am. I was looking forward to his wit and insight and erudition. But the collection will still come out in one form or another. And, of course, I continue to poke along on Sometime Lofty Towers.

The point raised by Joe, and it is a point well made, is that the fantasy fiction that has been published since the commercial demise of sword-and-sorcery in the 1980s is all about world-building. And sword-and-sorcery isn’t about world building. Sword-and-sorcery is intimate. Go back to the very beginning, to Howard’s Conan stories, and you have intimate stories: one guy in a heap of trouble, either getting into it or trying to get out of it. The stories are not about some long-term fascination with exotic cultures and building fake worlds to impress middle-class suburban kids: they’re about dire peril and staying alive. The scale is intimate; life screws you; fight back. Even when the backdrop is something epic, the scale is still intimate and about characters, not about spelling out the minutiae of some Never-Never Land.

In a word: these old sword-and-sorcery stories, up through the 1980s, are modern. That’s what I wrote, and what Joe wrote, and what Robert E. Howard wrote, and what the rest of us wrote through the eighties. Not Tolkeinesque world-building and not dragon-riding and not empires. We wrote Old Testament stuff, Homeric stuff, The Song of Roland, and Njal’s Saga. Westerns. War stories. Intriguing, small-scale mysteries or thrillers. But with the added dimension or depth that sword-and-sorcery brings to its readers of what I always come back to calling the abyss, the breath of the eternal darkness, the silence from which we come and the silence to which we go, the existential frisson of meaninglessness and nothingness, that none of this matters although I am alive and, being alive, I will do everything I can to stay alive, despite the meaninglessness.

Howard’s fiction is Darwinian; I’m going to write a blog about that fact pretty soon. Basically his stuff is about the organism fighting to stay alive, hell or high water. That’s what sword-and-sorcery is about. That’s why this other stuff, going on and on with its world-building and BBC-style characters, is not sword-and-sorcery. I’ve written world-building, epic fantasy with BBC-style characters: The Fall of the First World. Sometimes I want to read about these characters who use their brains and their abilities to try to exist rationally in an irrational world. That’s most fiction. But sometimes we want to be reminded that, essentially, before all of that or underneath all of that, we exist on an animal level. We don’t have to like it; we may prefer to deny it; we may be disingenuous about it. But when a terrorist sets off a bomb in a subway, or some lowlife kills a child in gang warfare on the south side of Chicago, or a soldier has to go door to door to secure a neighborhood in Iraq or Afghanistan, we are standing side by side with the elemental thrill and awareness that is related to sword-and-sorcery fiction. There are monsters; they make no sense; life is a wound that throbs and is alive; we are the wound, and we will do whatever we can to stay alive for one more moment, and then one more, and then one more . . . or we will kill, kill it, lash out and fight back before life finally takes us.

That’s the intimacy of modern old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery. So what shall we do about it, those of us who write and want to read this sort of fiction? A couple of things, I’m convinced.

First, write sword-and-sorcery, not an imitation thereof. Don’t wimp out and do juvenile or domesticated writing. Go for the heart; go for the throat; write with blood. Push it to the limit. Scare yourself by how deeply you go.

Second, write as well as you can. The commercially available models of what is now acceptable or passable prose are not good enough. Go back and read writers from fifty years ago. Read for style, for grammar, for character development, for story. They were better at it than writers are now. And don’t create a commercial product; write a damned yarn. Agents tell you to write what you love and what you like to read, not what you think the market wants. Correct.

Third, let’s develop the genre. Joe wonders whether his Dorgo stories are sword-and-sorcery. They are, but they’re sword-and-sorcery-plus, in the sense that women detective stories are hard-boiled-plus. Those stories broke new ground and were initially a hard sell to agents and publishers. Now they’re mainstream.

Fourth, we need a venue, and e-publishing seems to be it. What the pulps were in the 1930s and the fanzines were in the 1970s, e-publishing is to the 2010s, the technology by which plebe fiction can be experimented with and made available. Let’s face it: do you really think that Tor, a big, mainstream commercial house, is going to want to publish Tales of Attluma? What’s in it for them?

I promise to do my part. I will finish revising those old fantasy stories so that anyone who wants to read them will have them available. There are at least six or seven of you. And I will finish Sometime Lofty Towers. Let’s see where those projects take me. Let me see if I can put my money where my mouth is, or be as good as my word. We already have four of the five Imaro novels available again from Charles Saunders via print-on-demand. So this little knot of us who began writing this material 40 years ago or more is still at it. I am thinking that e-publishing is how I should approach this. Let me know your thoughts.

And at some point, what was modern and new and then was forgotten or set aside will come back around full circle, and the best of it—the Imaro stories, maybe some of my short stories and possibly Sometime Lofty Towers, likely the Dorgo stories, any of the superb Kane stories of Karl Edward Wagner—will surprise readers with what was in there all along, good writing, strong characters, and a level of quality that makes it worth keeping them around and that makes them worthwhile to use as models for new writers to adapt.

For the past year, I have been actively trying to land an agent to represent one or all three of the novel-length manuscripts I’ve completed in the past few years. I am not having much luck. Part of the problem may be me. Perhaps I’ve lost my edge. In the mid-1980s, I dropped out of writing fiction; despite a few forays into popular fiction since then, I’ve largely stayed out of it. So perhaps I am not up to speed.

But that’s not the whole story. Publishing has changed dramatically during the past twenty years, while I was effectively sitting on the sidelines or being Rip Van Winkle. The stories I’ve written in the past couple of years are what you’d expect to see from me: a thriller about a killer-novelist; a supernatural story about a sorcerer and his enemies. The best of them is atypical in that it is literary—Seasons of the Moon, a story about a boy coming of age in a rural community that worships women and lives in harmony with nature. I published it myself in 2005 through iUniverse and occasionally still see royalty checks for it. It is not a very commercial book, but it is deeply appreciated by those who’ve read it.

I warrant that if I had tried to attract an agent with one of my manuscripts, or an editor, four or five years ago, I would have managed to get into print again for the first time since 1991. I say this because, before the economy crashed, there was a boom in publishing throughout most of the aughts and, despite a general trend among publishers to shrink the midlist, there were, as author Victoria Strauss said in a blog in December 2008, far too many titles being released, with publishers tossing out books “like spaghetti, hoping that at least some will stick to the wall” (http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2008/12/victoria-strauss-publishings-week-of_07.html). So the manuscripts I’ve been pitching lately would likely have had an easier time finding someone to champion them back when the spaghetti-throwing was going on. Which is all it comes down to, an agent or an editor becoming your new best friend because she or he is excited about the chance to make money with your manuscript as well as push forward her or his career as well as yours.

As to the midlist. When my first novel was published in 1977, I became, although I was not then familiar with the term, a midlist writer. This is the midlist, as described on the website for Mid-List Press (http://www.midlist.org/about.cfm): “quality titles of general interest that are rarely bestsellers, but, in the words of noted media critic Ben H. Bagdikian, ‘nonetheless account for the most lasting works in both fiction and nonfiction. . . .’ In the past, publishers built their reputations on midlist books. In recent years, however, such factors as the enormous prices paid for high-profile ‘frontlist’ books and the growing domination of mass merchandisers have eaten away at the traditional support for the midlist. The most disturbing aspect of this decline has been a corresponding decline in writers’ access to publication and, hence, to their audiences.”

I like the fact that the authors of this web page include the word “quality” in their estimation of the midlist. By and large, I think it is true that these novels reflect a certain level of quality, or at least used to. Myself, I have always thought of the midlist as being the paperbacks that filled the racks at the old Gray’s Drugstore at the Liberty Plaza that I went to as a kid, the same kinds of books that were sold at train and bus stations. The midlist thus includes genre titles (Westerns, detective stories, thrillers, and science fiction, as well as, since the 1980s, fantasy and horror titles), along with the well-crafted books of litterateurs and excellent wordsmiths, such as, for example, the admirable Robert Stone. Perhaps quality is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps it is a stretch to include Stone in the same broad midlist as science fiction and detective story writers, but who can say? Some of the pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s are now in the Library of America. For God’s sake, H. P. Lovecraft is in the Library of America. The work of these writers, removed from the context of those times, now reveals qualities not so apparent back then. This aspect of gold hidden in the rough is particularly true of genre fiction, which, like jazz and the blues, draws readers to it rather than proactively going after an audience—a siren’s song, rather than a carnival barker’s pitch. Popular writing was technically or grammatically better in the 1920s and 1930s; as a society, we were more literate then than we are now. But the powerfully human tendency to ask, What next? and to keep us turning the pages predominates in this proletarian literature. Rather than being fine cuisine, it is steaks on the grill. Popular storytellers drive us along, or drive along and take us with them. This is what strong storytelling has done from the dawn of human self-exploration—gestes, poems, myths, tales of the ancestors and of culture heroes. (I heard Clive Barker on a radio interview ’long about 1989 or thereabouts say something to warm the hearts of all of us who appreciate the wonderful peculiarities and advantages of genre fiction: History, he said, is very kind to genre fiction. And it is. This is where the “lasting works” part of the Mid-List Press quotation comes in.)

So here I am, in my middle twenties, in the middle 1970s, writing for the midlist. My good fortune in becoming published occurred by a mixture of pluck and luck as well as timing. I thought then that the world generously welcomes talent and that there is always an extra chair at the table for someone good of heart, hard of work, and shining with talent. On some other world, perhaps. I was lucky, however, to have met people early on who steered me toward some book contracts that allowed me to write the kind of stuff I loved to write at that time. Perhaps I was really no more than a useful idiot, naïve and eager and easy to take advantage of. Still, I was hired to write sword-and-sorcery novels, a genre I like but, as it turns out, not a long-lived genre in publishing. Sword-and-sorcery had great success in the pulps in the 1930s and 1940s and moderate success during a paperback revival in the 1970s. It made publicly available for the first time some of the talented writers of the 1970s—Charles Saunders, Richard L. Tierney, and Karl Wagner, as well as myself. However, popular publication of this genre was soon superseded, by design as much as by exigency, by juvenile and young adult fantasy fiction and Tolkeinesque adventures. Sword-and-sorcery stories, which are basically Westerns, continued to exist in low-budget movies and, particularly, video games.

This is probably as it should be because publishing, beginning in the 1980s, became dominated by many bright and energetic women who championed peppy, adolescent fantasy novels geared to young readers and the young at heart. The exuberant, overwhelming presence of this juvenilia coincided with the rise of publishing conglomerates and rock-star authors. As agent Andy Ross said in a blog in August 2009:

“You read about these high profile deals in the newspaper: Sarah Palin (or Tina Fay [sic]), Dr. Phil, Stephen King. These deals are actually pretty simple affairs and mostly revolve around the concept of a lot of money changing hands. But the vast amount of publishing deals are something entirely different.

“Most of my projects are what is referred to in the trade as ‘midlist.’ The midlist books are the ones that aren’t lead titles. The midlist is most of the books that are getting published. The midlist appears to be what publishers are most shy about acquiring in bad economic times.

“Even though advances for the midlist are pretty modest (often less than $10,000), publishers see these books as a risk. Like every other business in America, publishing is having a hard time. The lead titles seem to be holding pretty well, but the midlist is struggling. There are other factors involved in the decline of the midlist as well. Concentration of retail bookselling in the hands of chain stores and mass merchants, the cult of celebrity, a reading public that has developed internet-inflicted ATD, irrational exuberance over all things media-driven. All of this works against good books with smaller audiences. . . .

“When you read about the big deals, the word ‘auction’ usually comes up. But with most midlist books, you might find only one publisher who really falls in love with the book. Or no publisher.” (http://andyrossagency.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/deconstructing-publisher-rejection-letters/#comment-273)

So what I’m trying to do is to find the one agent or the one editor or publisher who will fall in love with one of my manuscripts. This, I realize, is precisely the situation I was in during the 1970s. I lucked out then in that my timing was right for the sort of fiction I was crafting. Today, finding that one agent or editor or publisher is likely just as difficult as it was then, only I’m no longer writing fiction right for the times. I have no plans to write Jane Austen zombie novels, for example, or adolescent vampire stories. World-weary sorcerers filled with guilt, on the other hand . . . that I can do.

(The older I get, the more I want to infuse some sense of maturity into my fiction, or depth, or insight, whatever comes from years of living thoughtfully, and more than ever, after all of the time I have spent teaching English and doing editorial work, I want my use of the language to be as good and clean as I can make it. Genre stories for grown-ups, written as well as one can attempt it, are not the first thing that agents are requesting. I am aware of that, yet I continue to pitch my projects.)

I never wrote bestsellers, and likely I never will. My talent is not sufficiently facile. Most of the books I wrote sold a minimum of 50,000 copies, a perfectly respectable number, but to a reading public that is now largely gone. (I am still annoyed that Avon screwed up the promotion and distribution of The Fair Rules of Evil in 1989. This is a book that I think could have become a “profit center” for them, or a “franchise,” or whatever the kids call it these days. Doubleday, in fact, wanted to look at the manuscript, but the clever agent I had at the time claimed that he could do better than to show my story to the publisher that had first put Stephen King between hard covers. I’m still angry. I think that Fair Rules and its sequel, The Eyes of Night, would have been popular back then if they’d gotten decent distribution. But maybe they were both ahead of their time, like the fantasy trilogy I wrote in 1983, The Fall of the First World—completely forgotten now. Pinnacle published it and then went out of business. I am jinxed. Timing is everything, and I had my moment. Timing and the right connections, let’s say. Still, a young director in California wants to film Magicians, the script Joe Bonadonna and I wrote based on The Fair Rules of Evil, so who knows?)

So much for the old dogs part of this essay. As for the new paradigm? This is still an open question. I’ll continue to write, whether for five readers or 50,000 or 500,000, but what’s the best way for me to reach the audience for my stories? The old paradigm—commercial paperback publishing—clearly seems out of reach, and least so far in my attempts, largely because of that shrinking midlist and the emphasis on frontlist authors, celebrities, and juvenilia. Still, there are avenues to be explored. Ted Rypel, interestingly, has found a publisher in Germany that has not only translated and reprinted his Gonji novels but also has requested six new novels from him. Incredible: Ted is getting contracts for original sword-and-sorcery novels, which is how things used to be here in America; now the offer comes from Germany. Still, in America, Ted has just seen the first of the original Gonji titles released as an audiobook; the whole series will follow. Are these examples of a new paradigm? I have a friend in Germany who’s sold some of my short stories there. Perhaps Germany or Europe generally is more accommodating to stories or genres not seen as worth bothering with here in the States?

The publisher that a few years ago brought back Charles Saunders’ Imaro books pulled out after the first two, so now Charles is taking control of the matter and publishing the Imaro saga via Lulu. The third volume, like the first two a recasting of the books originally published by DAW in the 1980s, came out last year, and the fourth—the first new Imaro title in thirty years—has just been released. Charles will be bringing out the fifth and final Imaro title soon. Is self-publishing in this way the new paradigm? It’s not unlike the small press, the fanzines and the semi-pro zines, in which Charles and Ted and Joe Bonadonna and I first saw print. Joe, in fact, is now polishing the manuscripts for his planned collection of stories centering on Dorgo the Dowser. These yarns are a throwback to forties pulp fiction and also were ahead of their time when Joe started writing them in the 1970s—sword-and-sorcery modeled on noir detective fiction. The combination works; the stories are good. In the same way, I’m slowly but surely going through my old fantasy short stories from the 1970s—“Descales’ Skull,” “The Passing of the Sorcerer,” all eighteen of them—to put together in a collection. It’s not even worth trying to interest a commercial publisher in this project, so my only avenue probably is to publish it myself. Should I offer it by subscription, another old model that may be part of the new paradigm? Let me know if you’d buy a copy; if I get enough potential readers, I’ll go ahead and publish it.

What do we do, we writers who used to fill a niche for 50,000 readers but are now no longer regarded as worth the effort to put between paper covers? I ask myself this question: What does any artist do who is basically small potatoes? Small potatoes with oodles of talent and drive, of course, but . . . small potatoes. Well, that artist does local theater, or plays small blues clubs, or shows in small galleries. In other words, such artists pay their own way in hopes of reaching the limited audience that appreciates their work. For me, does this mean Lulu, or iUniverse? Web publishing or e-books? Self-made audio books?

I am still undecided. Still writing, but still undecided.

Note: I apologize to those of you who follow this blog regularly for being silent since early January. Tough winter. But I expect I’ll be posting more stuff at a reasonable pace for the foreseeable future. Thanks for your support. And I’ll start answering the comments on my blog postings, too! I will, I will!

Maybe my fondness for these kinds of catalogs goes back to when I was in junior high school and used to send away for lists of old comic books for sale. I don’t remember paying for these. Did I? Maybe they were a buck, but that seems high. A dollar was a lot of money back then for a kid in junior high school. Maybe you just requested one. A first-class stamp was about eight cents then, so maybe these were free. Anyhow, I’d spend an entire period in study hall reading these dumb lists that offered such items for sale as the first issue of Detective Comics with a Batman story in it—Batman when there was no Robin and he was more like the Shadow and he killed guys with a .38 revolver. Or the first Superman comic for sale, or the first issue of other old comics from the 1940s and 1950s. It was the same romantic thrill I got from looking at Johnson Smith catalog, the one with the infamous X-ray specs and whoopee cushions. So the lesson is: you get a catalog in the mail with lots of small print and tiny pictures, well, the amount of cool stuff you could add to your life is pretty much endless.

This is absolutely true when it comes to remaindered-book catalogs. I’m looking at the new Edward R. Hamilton catalog right now; it came in the mail yesterday. It categorizes all of the titles in a table of contents on the inside front cover, and the result is that this makes me feel like I have the encyclopedic interests of a Renaissance man or an intellectual titan. I can’t do higher math to save my life—lower math itself is a daily challenge—but, as I browse through the titles listed on page 60, why, I come to understand that there is hope even for me. My latent or nascent fascination with higher math, which did not exist until I turned to page 60, comes to life. Algebra Demystified by Rhonda Huettenmueller! Calculus Demystified by Steven G. Krantz! Come on, if these people can write a book about it, I can read the book and master calculus. It’s like being in a candy shop, the list of books in these catalogs. Like the library was when I was a kid. The whole world is here, the whole freaking world, and so, by extension, I am capable of anything. It’s kind of like watching the cooking shows or the woodworking shows on PBS on Saturday afternoon. You have these people who cook moose ribs with a red wine reduction over campfires and produce five-star meals and they make it look so nonthreatening that I feel I’ve already done it. Come on, I want to say, give me a challenge. Moose ribs? For babies.

I feel that I want to split off part of my soul or something so that that part of me could indulge endlessly in all of the really interesting stuff offered in a remaindered-book catalog. Am I really going to order and read The Immortal Game: A History of Chess? Unlikely. But just seeing a book on the immortal game offered for sale, simply considering that someone—David Shenk, in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Shenk’s kid—so loves chess or has so much time on his hands to devote to chess, that he is such a chessophile that he wrote this book, and that some outfit spent a lot of effort and time to publish it—at the very least, this means that I should consider, if only briefly, the existence of chess, the reality of chess, the very chessness of chess. My intellect feels expanded merely by considering this.

Public libraries are the living repositories of the wisdom as well as the crap of the ages. In libraries, we can join the parade of multitudes of those who, since at least the days of the Roman Empire’s public libraries, partook in the great thoughts and great diversions of those who came before us. Books are living things. A good library is like visiting the home of an intelligent relative or a curious, probably eccentric, person, maybe the old-timer in the neighborhood.

Used-book stores can feel like museums; sadly, some of the stuff there is dead and is interesting to us precisely because it is dead. However, some among the dead can be revived, and that is the wonder of used-book stores: think of the material there that, ten or twenty years ago, people discarded as worthless. Crime novels you could pick up for a dime. Issues of magazines you could pick up for a nickel. A generation later, someone takes a serious look at this stuff, puts it in a context, tells us that it is important Americana, and then you have to pay top dollar for redesigned trade paperbacks or coffee-table books of those throwaway crime novels or the cheap magazines. It’s the Joshua Bell effect all over again, isn’t it? H. P. Lovecraft in old paperbacks from the early 1970s is somebody’s weird habit; H. P. Lovecraft in the Library of America volume is now safe and clean.

But the best part of a remaindered-book catalog is that you can order this material and have your own library or museum and indulge your own weird habits. I still have on my shelves plenty of those books I ordered in the 1970s. Books on cinema, mainly, now long out of print. Some volumes on this or that aspect of erotica in antiquity. (Did you know that people in the ancient world had sex? I know! I didn’t either until I got one of these remaindered books!) The 1970s was a ripe time for books on sexuality; times were freer, everybody likes sex, and, in retrospect, we can see that these books likely served a role as a precursor to gender studies in the 1980s and 1990s. I have a lot of books on philosophy and thought and general humanities that I ordered back then from Edward R. Hamilton and other catalogs. And lots of fiction, particularly the reprints in hardcover of writers then considered oddball but who, in a generation, would become mainstream or contribute to the mainstream. The 70s was also a rich period for reprinting gaslight science fiction and fantasy, for example, and Edwardian and late Victorian era curiosities.

So…. There are new categories in the recent Hamilton catalog to allow for things that didn’t exist in the late 1970s or were merely in their infancy. Computer books, for example. Books on the Vietnam War, which no one wanted to talk about back then, or only very few people; it was the “late embarrassment,” I suppose. DVDs of movies and documentaries and TV shows. I see that there are books here about Princess Diana; she has become the Elvis of Great Britain, hasn’t she? These humans who become living, present gods for some people exercise their own fascination for me, not the people so much as the fact that people willfully bend their imaginations in that way, that their hearts move so as to keep fires lit for Elvis and James Dean and Princess Diana. In the classical world, yes, these our departed would have thereby been elevated to the status of gods. Or perhaps genius loci, at the least. Or imps of the hearth or the fields or children of the Muses.

Here we go: Viking Wars—The Norse Terror. That’s for me. The True History of Troy. I have my own small library of books about the Trojan War and the late Bronze Age. The older I get, the more it fascinates me. And I have a growing shelf of books about Appalachia and hillbillies; I am not finding too many books on that topic, but I hope to find more. Neither do I order many books on gardening or cook books, but here’s stuff on the Old West. And if I can get the collected writings of Tom Paine in a Library of America volume, I may do that and replace the battered old paperbacks I bought one time in a used-book store. And which have been living in my own library since then. I think these remaindered-book catalogs open a window into our times that in some ways is more insightful than what’s on talk shows and in news broadcasts. They’re snapshots, really. Time capsules, maybe. And far more enjoyable to browse through than a mimeographed list of comic books for sale.

On the one hand, I am envious of any fanboys out there aged 11 years or more because they get to live in a period of fanboy heaven in which imaginative movies that look this good hit the mall on a regular basis. This is what sitting in the auditoirium of a movie theater is now for. When I was a kid in the early sixties, we could never have dreamed that we’d ever see movies with monsters and creatures and landscapes done like this.

On the other hand, the imaginative pictures we did have were so much better written than this that to make any comparison is quite pointless. You could see the strings on the wires of the Martian spaceships in The War of the Worlds, but the movie had an excellent script, one of depth and suspense, and it featured good acting. It goes without saying that the scripts for the Ray Harryhausen movies of the period were well thought-out and featured good-looking leads and great character actors. The stop motion of Harryhausen (and of Jim Danforth and others) may seem dated to some young moviegoers today, but the one thing these movies had in spades was imagination. These movies required the suspension of disbelief.

Remember the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies, how perfect they are? They’re so technically perfect or believable that, after the first jolt of surprise at seeing them, the sense of wonder vanishes. Mine did, anyway. They’re like lions in movies. In the 1910s and 1920s, maybe it was thrilling to see lions endangering Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan or prowling down the path after pith-helmeted violators of the African wilds, but pretty soon, the lions got boring—predictable and boring. On the other hand, when you look at the dinosaurs in the original King Kong or the stop-motion pterodactyls of Ray Harryhausen, they still kind of work; they capture your imagination because they’re flat-out weird. They don’t move perfectly. We can’t deny that they’re alive—we can see that—but they’re just damned peculiar in the way they’re alive. We have to suspend our disbelief to involve ourselves in what’s going on, and once we do that, we’ve bought into it, weirdly moving dinosaurs and all. We’re now part of the show. We’re not simply passive voyeurs; we’re helping to make the imaginative story happen by willingly suspending our disbelief to become actively engaged.

Now, the goal of Harryhausen and other animators was not to do things half way. They were doing the best they could to create as vivid and believable an experience as possible. Still, the technical limitations of stop-motion photography meant that we had to use our imaginations to help. And the harder Harryhausen tried to top himself or improve his skills, the more we had to buy into it. If we wanted to, we could, at any time, have thrown up our hands and walked away by deciding that we’re no longer buying into it. But even my uncles, say, who didn’t suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy a pterodactyl flying around believed, or bought into, the agony of the actors portraying soldiers in World War II, and those scenes were just as conventional and technically imperfect as the pterodactyl scenes. Just as demanding of the suspension of disbelief.

It may be unfair of me to consider Avatar as a movie with special effects inserted into it because clearly what James Cameron was trying to do was to present the whole movie as so perfect a special effect that it becomes a virtual reality. It achieves this, and not just by the 3-D effects but because of the actors involved. For me, the movie was almost like listening to an old radio show: the acting, the emotions, the story came through the voices of the performers. Sure, we had extraordinary facial features and realistic expressions on the blue creatures of the planet Pandora, but the voices of the actors are what sold the show, at least for me. Insofar as that was the case, I was suspending my disbelief and working with the picture to make it as real for me as possible.

But the very fact that Cameron was creating a virtual reality seemed to work against itself. I’m not sure that I can explain this perception of mine to my own satisfaction, let alone convince anyone reading this of what I’m getting at. And maybe it’s simply a matter of my getting to be too old to suspend my disbelief when it comes to much of anything anymore—politics, religion, blue people on the planet Pandora, what have you.

Except for my three-year-old daughter. She and I can sit on the floor, each of us with a little puppet or doll or stuffed animal, and share a conversation or adventure through these little boogers, and she is instantly into it. Daddy is no longer in the room; her stuffed animal is talking to the stuffed animal in my hand, and she and I are out of the picture. And the part of me that is observing this, that third-person entity that shows up in car accidents to watch it happen in slow motion or that arrives like a guardian angel to whisper some warning in my ear, that third-person part of me is in awe of the ease with which my daughter accepts the reality of two made-up stuffed animals talking together and becoming friends.

And maybe that is what I miss and what I found lacking in Avatar, except for the wonderful emotion in the voices of the performers. The lines they had to speak were worse than anything in an old B movie. The script was patched together from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Anne McCaffrey and Ursula LeGuin novels. The soldiers walking around in twelve-foot tall Rock ’em Sock ’em robots were recycled from one of the Alien movies. The ten-foot-tall indigenous people duking it out with the corporate soldiers give us a good idea of what Barsoom will look like when A Princess of Mars is made.

But all of these perfect cartoons with their perfect computer-generated effects make me want to watch an old Western in which the special effects were inside my head. There’s a reason why the Dr. Who television show has been so popular all of these years. The special effects are done on a shoestring budget. But the imagination is there, the dialogue and the wit and the fun, the insistence that we are as much a part of the show as the performers. And that is what I find lacking in Avatar.

But Ron Goulart interviewed the publishers and editors and writers and artists. And one of the best parts of this book for me is the section of excerpts in the back taken from conversations with the pros who worked on these magazines. This is Ken Crossen:

I was married in 1936 and answered an advertisement for a job. I was hired to work on Detective Fiction Weekly. The Munsey Company was an interesting place when I went to work there. Although Frank Munsey was dead it was run in much the same fashion that he had, since he was known for evaluating the worth of a manuscript by how heavy it felt on his hand.”

This is Richard Wormser:

That year of 1933 was a desperate time. There was no chance of getting a newspaper job. The number of N.Y. papers had halved in the past few months. One of my duties had been the reading of short stories to fill the back of The Shadow, which used four shorts an issue to back up Walter Gibson’s 60,000-word novel. I knew we had been searching desperately for a 1300-word story, and also a 1700-word one. We had been laid off at five o’clock on Friday. Monday at eleven in the morning, I laid a 1300-word story on John Nanovic’s desk. He read it and sent through a voucher for thirteen bucks. At four I put a 1700-word story in the same spot, and by closing time had made thirty bucks, which had been my salary the week before. And here I had four more days in which to scrounge.”

These people were my heroes. Still are. There was a revival of interest in the pulps in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which coincided with a general mood of nostalgia in the country then. In particular, there were paperback reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and Max Brand, the Shadow and Doc Savage, and tons of crime fiction and Westerns. This nostalgia was reflected in the movies of the period, as well—The Day of the Locust, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? based on the novel by Horace McCoy, Hard Times with Charles Bronson, Murder on the Orient Express, The Sting, Paper Moon. This mood extended to television (Banyon), recordings (Bette Midler’s Songs for the New Depression), and Broadway (a revival of 42nd Street, Minnie’s Boys, about the Marx Brothers). I am convinced that it’s no accident that this nostalgia for the 1930s occurred during the terrible recession of the early and mid 1970s, because that period was one of hard times, too. Not as bad as the Great Depression, but the worst we’d seen in a long time.

Until now. Even if we are not clinically in a depression (although the jury is still out on that), still, we are in hard times. And tough, grotesque, earthy, weird fiction seems to come on strong during periods of economic downturn. It happened in the 1970s, and we’re seeing it now, too. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Is their any real difference between the terror pulps of the late 1930s, in which mutants terrorized trapped women while their boyfriends were chained in the dungeon, and the Saw and Hostel movies? Isn’t there more similarity than difference between all of the vampire-werewolf-gothic detective and romance novels now and what was published in Weird Tales and Strange Tales? In the Depression, you had to rely on science fiction pulps and adventure magazines in order to vicariously fight aliens and foreign armies; now we do it with PlayStation and online. So the technology used to deliver the thrills has changed; pulp magazines were cheap and quick in the 1930s, and DVDs and video games are similarly as cheap and quick now. Our attitudes are more lax than they were then; nothing like the Saw movies would have been allowed on screen in the 1930s. But the argument holds: hard times calls for extremes in fiction. So we have our own cheap thrills today.

Still, because I am of a certain age and grew up reading outlandish fiction, or what was then considered to be outlandish fiction, I turn back to the printed page more often than not for my cheap thrills. In his chapter “Dime Detectives,” Goulart refreshes our memories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and many another topnotch writer whose names, most of them, have not, alas, become so commonplace in the seventy-five years or more since this fiction was new—Horace McCoy, for example, and Lester Dent, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Hugh B. Cave. Hammett and Chandler were the stars of Black Mask, a pulp started by the famous H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, and it made them rich (along with such naughty, under-the-counter zines as Saucy Stories and Parisienne). Goulart quotes a passage from a story by Raymond Chandler:

I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.

But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence…. I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.

“To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said aloud. “Just another four-flusher.”

I flipped her pearls out into the water at the floating seagulls.

They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.

This is good writing. More than good—it is perfect. It’s writing that is as American as jazz and baseball and driving down endless roads, and for as many things as the pulps got right in their heyday of cheap thrills, bringing us writing such as this is the best thing they got right.

As an example of what is offered in “Out West,” Ng recounts the story of One-Eyed Charlie, “a stagecoach driver known for his hard drinking and itchy trigger finger,” with a reputation as “one of the best drivers in the wild West.” Following his death in 1879, however, it turned out that Charlie was actually Charlotte—Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst. “The discovery of her true gender became a local sensation,” says Ng. “And her story still fascinates U.S. historians, some of whom believe that she was the first woman to have voted in a presidential election, long before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.”

I want to say that somewhere over the years I’ve read elsewhere about One-Eyed Charlie, probably in the same place or places where I came across other fascinating minutiae and footnotes to history. Certainly she is reminiscent of female pirates such as Anne Bonny and Mary Read. And surely it should come as no surprise to anyone that gays, bisexuals, transgender folks, and the many assorted others we pass on the street every day made up the population of the frontier following the Civil War as well as the populations of anywhere and everywhere else in history. What intrigued me most, however, in Ng’s article, is the following observation:

“Patricia Nell Warren, a historian and author, said that same-sex relationships between cowboys were often tolerated in the early days of the West largely because manpower was scarce, thus making it impractical for landowners to be choosy about whom they hired. But attitudes changed with the introduction of mechanized agriculture, which rendered human labor more expendable.

“‘Tolerance went away after that,’” she said.

This tells me something that I’ve long suspected, that frontiers are where the unconventional people go because where else will they find a home? Define frontier as you wish and define unconventional however you like, but every generation has its children who don’t fit in with traditional society, be they gay or transgender folks, be they hucksters or dreamers, con artists or card sharks, or simply souls restless and eager to live life every day rather than simply put in their time. No doubt the frontier serves for them the same purpose that cities have since time immemorial: the opportunity to create one’s identity oneself rather than accept an inherited seat at the table, the freedom of becoming anonymous or of taking risks impossible to undertake otherwhere.

Yet the anonymity offered by cities is tenuous and depends on shifting moods of tolerance. Similarly, the freedom of frontiers is always going to be domesticated by the attitudes that come with the introduction of mechanized agriculture or mechanized anything else. Technology enters the scene, the situation becomes regulated, and the big middle moves in to civilize everything within reach, to nail it all down within well-monitored perimeters.

And this is absolutely necessary. The big middle—the majority of us who aren’t at one extreme or the other, who keep our dreams in check, who don’t take the risks, who do not remove to the frontier to live out our identities—the big middle is needed to foster the dynamic tension that leads to progress. The big middle consolidates everything for the benefit of all: it regulates traffic laws and provides education and builds hospitals. It does this so that the dreamers and oddballs, the artists and fools, the gay and the straight and anyone trying to find his or her own voice, have someplace to leave when they try to find a new frontier.

It really is a necessary creative tension or dynamic tension, too. My hypothesis is this: that once a frontier—mental, physical, or social—is settled, extremists push against the borders from inside and, by doing that, redefine both the borders and the middle. Think of the civil rights movement or the women’s movement. The so-called extremists pushed things past the point where the great middle was most comfortable, like a rubber band pulled almost to the breaking point. Yet once the tension in the rubber band was relaxed, why, we find that the middle of the great middle has itself moved a bit, and likewise has pushed the perimeter past where it was previously. Advancement therefore comes from taking two or three steps, and then a step or two back—but not all the way back.

So the first woman to have voted in a presidential election did it in the guise of a man, and it wasn’t discovered until after she died? That’s pushing several borders at once. And it, too, is a hoot. One-Eyed Charlie surely had to be smiling to herself as she cast her ballot.

Keep stretching those rubber bands, I say.

Books such as these are as addictive as lists of the ten best this or ten worst that. I picked it up impulsively because one of my former agents years ago suggested, rather dismissively, that I am myself a cult author. I’m not so sure that I have attained even that status—being a guy with a bunch of out-of-print books identifies my station a bit better—but I am happy to be included by at least one person in such a repertory company of “genre benders, beats, gurus, drunks, junkies, sinners, and surrealists.” I’ve never been a junkie and I’m no surrealist, but I’d like to think that I’ve written a few pages here and there that have been worth reading on occasion. Time will tell. Or maybe it has already told. Still, many of my readers whom I’ve talked to agree that they got their money’s worth from my paperbacks.

The usual suspects are here—Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Willeford, Arthur Rimbaud, Hunter S. Thompson, Proust and Mishima, John Kennedy Toole and Ursula LeGuin, Cornell Woolrich and Charles Bukowsky, H. P. Lovecraft and Elmore Leonard. Some of my favorite writers also are catalogued, including Leigh Brackett and Nathanel West, as well as authors that I’ve become aware of only by chance—for instance, John Fante. (I had the collection of letters between Fante and H. L. Mencken put out by Black Sparrow Press, but it was destroyed in the infamous basement flood of September 2001 that ruined dozens upon dozens of bankers’ boxes of books, correspondence, videotapes, and sundry other items that I had foolishly stored in the cellar. I regret the loss of that book and many others, as well as of all my correspondence with such people as Robert Bloch and J. Vernon Shea and my early correspondence with Dick Tierney, Joe Bonadonna, Fred Adams, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Charles Saunders, and many others.) Anyhow, to give you the flavor of the grand talent that this Rough Guide celebrates, it mentions the passage in one of Fante’s novels, The Road to Los Angeles, in which the author’s alter ego, Arturo Bandini, “massacres a group of crabs he imagines have mocked him, while railing against a world that has ignored him.” And haven’t we all been there?

Cult Fiction is a treasure trove of graffiti and trivia, as well as suitably alarming anecdotes illustrating how demented and semiliterate we have become: a discussion of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” quotes an anonymous “reviewer” on amazon.com, who complains that “the paragraphs are all really long and the author tries to throw a lot of ideas at the reader all at once. The main character seems to ramble on and on about things that could have been kept out of the book. There are a lot of symbols for ‘darkness’ in the story.” Wasn’t one of the purposes of education to weed out morons like this?

Any number of the writers profiled are new to me, and this is perhaps the most useful service this book provides, to introduce me to interesting original wordsmiths worth my time and attention. I didn’t know that the excellent television series Homicide: Life on the Streets was based on Homicide by David Simon, a 1993 account of detectives working on hundreds of cases. I’d never heard of Weldon Kees (1914-ca. 1955) before picking up this book; Kees wrote “miserable, bitter, powerful poems” and short stories, and one July day, he simply disappeared. Who knows if he is still alive or is dead? James Crumley (1939-), who called himself “a bastard child of Raymond Chandler,” wrote whodunits featuring “male friendships, whiskey, and guns. The characters zing, the epigrams bite, and the prose has a restless vitality.” I have yet to read anything by Italo Calvino, Gűnter Grass, or Richard Yates, whose Revolutionary Road was recently made into a critically recognized movie; all are discussed. And this list doesn’t even touch on the continental and Asian writers reviewed in Cult Fiction whom I never before heard of.

And then there is an author whom I have indeed read but didn’t recognize. A sidebar in the article on Raymond Chandler discusses Janwillem van der Wetering, who wrote police procedurals set in the Dutch capital city, Amsterdam. Never heard of him or them, I thought—except that van der Wetering lived for years in a Japanese Buddhist monastery and wrote The Empty Mirror based on that experience. I read The Empty Mirror twenty years ago and still recall many scenes, yet I remembered only that the author was Dutch, I thought, or perhaps German or Scandinavian,

Cult Fiction also offers many more bonuses. It doesn’t merely list eccentric, weird, forgotten, or disappeared writers; appended are sections on graphic novels and cult characters as well as oddball sections such as “Mostly Factual” (“trips on roads or drugs; bongo-playing physicists…”), “Readers’ Digest” (including lists of what some authors did when not writing—Philip K. Dick worked as a disc jockey; W. P. Kinsella sold advertising for the Yellow Pages—as well as a catalog of strange deaths—Roland Barthes was run over by a laundry truck; Anton Chekov’s body was delivered home to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car marked “oysters”), and “Lords of the Ring” (literary giants who have also had experience as boxers, including Lord Byron and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).

Inevitably, there are titles and authors missing that I thought might have been included, but if a volume such as this tried to be completist, it would be five or six times the convenient size it now is. Still, Ayn Rand is not mentioned. She was a lightweight and her art and so-called philosophy the immature expression of a narcissist, but there is no doubting that she remains a cult author of some concern. I am most familiar with action fantasy writers, so I think that it is too bad that neither Robert E. Howard nor Fritz Leiber is mentioned. Also missing is any mention of First Blood, a terrific novel, and the children’s book Goodnight Moon. I would never have paid attention to Margaret Wise’s Goodnight Moon had I not become a father; now, I can’t get enough of this jewel. It is an endless poem, insightful, beautiful, perfect, as pure as a Zen insight or a finely done haiku. If I could have only one book to keep me company on a desert island, sometimes I seriously consider that Goodnight Moon would be that book.

Then again, perhaps I would opt for Cult Fiction.

To learn to write, copy other writers. Literally. I did this with Jack London stories because, years ago, I read that Jack London used to copy out or type out Rudyard Kipling stories. That’s how Jack London got a handle on how to write. So I tried it, too. What I discovered was that, by doing this, I was able to watch the story take shape in slow motion as I typed. No matter how slowly you read, you type a lot more slowly than that. Sometimes, it was almost as though I could sense why Jack London chose this word rather than that one, or went in this direction rather than the other.

I didn’t do this to an extreme degree; I typed out perhaps half a dozen of his stories. But it was sufficient that a professor at Kent State University, whom I met in the 1970s, commented that in my early stories, I sounded kind of like Jack London. When I told him what I’d done, he was amused.

Another good idea: Take a book you like by a writer you admire and tear the book apart. Literally, if you have to. Make an outline of that book the way you learned to do outlines in high school. Tear out the passages that describe characters and their backgrounds and tape them onto notebook paper. Retype the dialogue to see if you’d do it the same way. You’ll get inside that story like nobody’s business and very soon feel confident about building your own stories. Everybody starts at ground level, so tear that writer’s story back down to the ground and then rebuild it.

Meet the Muse halfway. The phrase is Tchaikovsky’s; I read it in his collected letters many decades ago. What he meant was that he would sit down every day at the same time and start to work whether he felt like it or not. Make it a habit to sit in that chair at that desk or table at that time every day. If you don’t feel like writing, tough. Put in the time.

And if you don’t feel like writing, write anyway—just don’t worry about working on the story you’re in the middle of. Pretend to write a letter to someone—your sister or your spouse, your friend—telling them about the story you’re working on and complaining about how you have hit a rough patch of weeds. Pretty soon you’ll have talked yourself into a way out of the weed patch.

What is the emotional age of each of your characters? Characters act and react according to their emotional ages, not their actual ages. A middle-aged woman might well behave as a 16-year-old girl would. We’ve all met grown men who are basically still 18-year-olds, and young persons who, because of what they’ve had to put up with in life, are old beyond their years.

Storytelling, especially popular storytelling, deals with the part within us, or the person within us, that is the star of our own story, our ego or our inside self. This self is the larger-than-life self that we carry around and whom we feel is the real us. Our lives are our emotional lives, and we live them big. That’s the age of your character, the person inside who wants to scale mountains or dreams of fighting in a distant land, or who wants to start her own business and so is in the process of faking it until she makes it, as the phrase goes.

Have each character interact with every other character at least once. Draw a grid. The interaction might be in the form third-party conversation, an old diary, an imaginary meeting, anything, but it serves to tie all of the characters, their actions and motivations and emotions, together as a kind of net to contain the world of the story or to provide the perimeter of the world of the story.

I erred in a recent manuscript by not doing this, and the story became too focused on two of the characters. The story started to feel hollow and directionless. Well, think in terms of putting two characters together that you otherwise wouldn’t have, and the story livens up immediately and points you in an interesting direction.

When in doubt, have your character perform a physical act. We are our physical bodies, and I contend that, even though most of spend most of our time inside our heads (and, in fact, spend way too much time inside our own heads), we feel most alive when we are active. So if your story has slowed down or you’re not sure what to do next, have a character make a meal and anticipate eating the food. Have your character go for a walk. Or think about making love or having made love. Or have the character experience cold, rain, wind, heat. Have him or her go for a swim, or jab his or her finger. Or suffer from the flu. Anything physical. We can all identify with that, and it brings the story and the character to life.

Write as though you are telling what actually happened. Report what occurred. Even though you’re making things up, the feeling you have while writing the story, and the feeling that you want your reader to feel, is that you’re presenting events that actually took place. So even if you run into a weed patch or a wall and aren’t sure what to do next, simply ask yourself what it was that happened or what the characters did. They did something. Something happened. Tell us what it was. Be a reporter.

Maintain consistent person in your story. In other words, if you’re using third-person omniscient, stick with that. Same with third limited, first person, even second person (as Jay McInerny did in Bright Lights, Big City.) But do not, do not, do not mix these up in the same story. I read a novel once by James Patterson and, honest, he switched from third person to first person every couple of chapters. Jesus Christ, after a while, I didn’t know what had happened to my brain, and I regretted ever having learned to read. Please don’t mix up your story in this way.

Could actors portray your characters? If your character isn’t sufficiently deep or interesting that an actor could find enough in that character to want to play him or her, then work on that. This is particularly true, of course, of main characters. Even if you’re writing a novel and not a play or a movie script, readers are going to believe in your characters the way they would if someone were portraying them on stage or on the screen, so give us enough in the character to build on that. How would an actor research the character? What physical tics, habits, or features would an actor pick up on? Where’d your character come from, how does he or she speak, what got them to this point in the story before you started writing it? If you were hired to portray this character in a movie, how would you go about it? What would you want to know about the character? That’s what you want to know about your character as you create and write about her or him.

Join writers’ groups or attend writers’ conventions. A guy I used to work for used to say that people like to do business with people they know. The regular client or the regular service person, in other words. Networking. I went around for years thinking that turning out good work is sufficient; surely someone will notice good work and go out of the way to publish me or contact me. Well, maybe. But just as you need to meet the Muse halfway, you need to meet publishers and editors and business people halfway, too. We know our own kind; hanging out with word people and storytellers is what word people and storytellers do.