wasted sundays

1.  Don't get too sad if you're rejected from Knopf.  Also, don't submit to Knopf.
2.  Madeline "of-course-I'm-Meg" L'Engle is dead, sadly. 
3.  This is the most hilarious review ever.  "The two close female friends in Ann Packer’s ladylike, man-proof new novel spend 300-odd pages exploring the nuances of their lifelong bond. If this sounds like an interesting story, bear in mind that any synopsis will make this book appear better than its full, sprawling version turns out to be. Synopses emphasize plots, themes and dramatic tensions. They do not dawdle through descriptions of how cheese rolls can be “such a reliable pleasure,” how raisin-bran cookies have a “branny, raisiny” nature or how the essence of soccer is “the blunt, running, back and forth of the game.”"
4.  I'm starting to like Justine Henin, even though she is a bitch, partly I think because she clearly hates the Williams sisters, which I am also starting to do.  "She did not know that Venus Williams was struggling to steady herself through a dizzy fog, nor did she care... When told that Williams cited her health problems, Henin said sarcastically, “I’m surprised.”

anonymous fear... sitting in traffic, thinking, I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something else.

Above quote by Thom Yorke, in describing Radiohead's upcoming (much anticipated!) seventh album. 

John Grant: Gulliver Unravels: Generic Fantasy and the Loss of Subversion

Another interesting aspect of Generic Fantasy is that no one is responsible for it. Ask any self-designated fantasy reader and they'll tell you that what they really like is the cutting-edge stuff, not the pap which the publishers churn out in its place. Ask any publisher's editor when they're in their cups (traditionally an easy enough situation to engineer) and you'll be told that s/he can't personally stomach such garbage, but it's what the market wants: left to their own devices the editors would publish nothing but Helprin, Nabokov, Pynchon, Barth, Le Guin, Tepper, Borges and whichever writer has just asked them the question and whose synopsis is at this very moment, purely at the marketing department's insistence you understand, destined for the office shredder. Ask the writers and, with a very few extraordinarily honest exceptions, they will assure you that what themselves are writing is not Generic Fantasy but the true, dangerous, intellectually subversive stuff -- Jonathan Swift with all the sea elves, lisping dragons, good-hearted-but-constantly-getting-into-scrapes rite-of-passage kitchen-boy monarchs-in-exile, comic-cut trolls, Hoirish leprechauns, under-hormoned princesses, Dark Lords, sorcerers and the rest of the stomach-wrenchingly overfamiliar crew there purely as embellishments, as bell-ropes pulling different bells.

So nobody's really responsible for Generic Fantasy, just as nobody's really the father of a bastard.

I have a recurring nightmare, a terrible fear, and it goes something like this. One day I open up a copy of some magazine like Interzone and start reading the lead fiction review. The beginning of it reads:

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (presumably a pseudonym) recounts the improbable adventures of a man who sets sail on various sea voyages, where he meets strange folk. Some of these folk are big, some of them are small, and some of them look like horses. Swift should have realized that he thereby left very little room open for anything by way of romance, because Gulliver would have practical difficulties pursuing his passions with either the very little or the very big women, and the author bridles at the notion of letting his hero frolic with the horses. This lack of romantic potential leaves the novel without any passion at its core, something Swift should have thought about before he began this plaguey novel.

I had great hopes of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, since the blurb told me it was about a young woman going down a rabbit hole, and the similarity of "rabbit hole" and "hobbit hole" could not be, I thought, coincidence. However, the young woman in question proves to be a vapid Victorian miss, and her adventures underground are devoid of all logic. According to the press release there's a sequel on the way tied in with a popular board game, and perhaps Carroll will have more success with that.

Turning now to Dragonspume Chronicles of the Sorcerer Kingdom Ancients Volume 6: Sword of Blood by Jerome E. Housename we discover a real pearl, a delight of a book, a volume that according to its publisher's justified claim is better than Christopher Tolkien at his best -- one of those novels that shows us what fantasy should be ...

My nightmare, of course, is not that this review should exist but that I should read it, nodding my head in brainwashed agreement.

...

I also have many recurring nightmares, about Ilium, and how it would be construed, let alone marketed.  Would it attract the loathing that Eragon does?  Or would it be noticed at all?  I want it to be subversive but not parodic, and not a soulless political allegory.  Which it definitely isn't, so now here I am fearing that it isn't subversive enough, or... something.  Lacking. 

Christopher Paolini doesn't seem to enjoy science fiction, as a rule.  Therefore he writes fantasy.  I do enjoy science fiction, more than fantasy, but I don't have the brains for science fiction, and therefore I write fantasy.  Which is quite sad, really.  Ugh, I hate saying that I write fantasy.  Speculative fiction has such a better ring to it, but how pretentious of me to say that I write anything when I'm not published?

Blah, I'm just in a need-validation-gonna-die mood.  It comes in slumps.