Brian Trent dot com

Just a quick note on this Thanksgiving morning.

This week Michael Crichton’s posthumous novel Pirate Latitudes was published. It was discovered on his computer, and seems to have been written as a side-project while Crichton was toiling at his novel Next. (I like to do this myself; I rarely work on a single book at a time. It gets the creative juices flowing when you can bounce back and forth between two often unrelated projects! Sometimes they even help each other out!)

I have not bought this book yet. I feel conflicted. Crichton may have finished the book on his computer, but it wasn’t complete. I have several novels I’ve written that are not ready to see the publisher’s desk yet. This is true for most writers. Having a beginning, middle, and end does not a completed book make. There’s more work to be done. Chiseling, polishing, editing, layering.

Pirate Latitudes may well have been a second or third draft, and was surely not ready for submission to the publisher. It might just be the core story, after which Crichton would have poured on the finer details, asides, and historical/technological digressions he is so well known for.

On the other hand…

He’ll never write another book again.

Should I accept the body of work he has published, or read something the author wasn’t ready to publish?

Discovered manuscripts are always open to this debate. Franz Kafka gave instructions that all his work was to be burned after his death. Mercifully, his friends ignored this part of his will. Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century, a remarkably prescient novel with — no surprise — all sorts of accurate forecasting about where Europe was headed in a technological, cultural, and societal way. Verne’s book was submitted to the publisher, who hated it, and so the great Frenchman tucked it into a chest where it remained, forgotten, until being found by a relative and published at last.

There is one professional review out there I’ve read of Crichton’s latest, and it wasn’t very favorable. Of course, it was also an emotional and heavily biased review which made no bones about disliking Crichton. Crichton was certainly not the most gifted writer in the world, but he was an enthusiastic storyteller and, hit or miss, he brought a unique stamp to the literary marketplace.

Oh well. To buy or not to buy? Whatever the case, Crichton’s longtime admirer and collaborator Steven Spielberg is making Pirate Latitudes into a film.

On to other matters:

Thanks and happiness to all here. May your holiday be warm, wonderful, and full of well-wishes.

Oddly warm November. Wet and gray, humid and misty. One freak blast of chilly weather earlier in the week. At night, traffic looks like a glistening wet snake of red and gold, slowly pushing its bulk easward along I-84.

A few pieces of good news this week.

The Writer’s Digest Annual Competition results are in and I’ve scored a few successes. I won two Honorable Mentions in the Best Genre category. The first story was a historical fiction piece about the great Archimedes and his final hours, when the Romans were storming Syracuse and he was drawing circles in the sand. I was very moved writing it. Archimedes is one of my favorite people in history.

The second story was science-fiction, about a survivor of a nuclear war who witnesses a rip in the fabric of time. He sees a world of blue skies and green grass which contrasts with the radioactive hell of his daily life. He is startled by this vision… and more startled by the sight of a primitive caveman who has noticed the rupture from his side of time, and is coming nearer to investigate. But is it the neolithic past our nuclear survivor is seeing? Or a view of things to come?

The Writer’s Digest contest also awarded me seventh in the nonfiction article category for a piece on medical research.

My story “The Titans of Camp Four” has been accepted for publication in the prestigious magazine Atomjack, to be published next month. It takes place on a lunar colony… fortuitous timing, now that NASA is wildly circulating press releases about the confirmation that water exists on the moon. In fact, my story already assumed that there were several large deposits of water-ice that tomorrow’s lunar colonists will be using. But it’s a story with a twist. No spoilers. I’ll post here when it appears in publication.

Late last week I had another piece accepted by Clarkesworld. “Science Fiction Video Games Come of Age.” The title is self-explanatory but the article deserves a little background. The genre of speculative fiction has been explored in books for years. Go back to Lucian’s True History and you find the earliest example of science-fiction literature, and on your tour make special note of Voltaire’s story “Micromegas,” and the antigravity island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Pay respect to Mary Shelly, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells along the way.

In films, sci-fi has also been extensively examined. Start at Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and go from there.

And video games? They’ve come a long way, and can now be considered legitimate venues for story-telling. I decided to dig in and pay the subject some attention, how speculative concepts of some merit have begun appearing in the latest games on the market. I’ll post here when the article is published.

On Monday, my second alternative history story has been accepted by the Hugo-winning magazine Electric Velocipede. It’s a story I’m specially proud of: “The Empire Never Ended” postulates a world in which the Greco-Roman civilizations never fell, but expanded and eventually cross-pollinated with China. The good? Scientific and cultural evolutions resulting from this cross-pollination have resulted in a mighty empire. The bad? An absolutely implacable enemy has arisen in consequence. And the title is my little tribute to the mad visionary Philip K. Dick…

I’m very excited about Electric Velocipede. I’m honored to be part of their family now.

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I received an email earlier this week from a young and aspiring writer. She was an eager bibliophile with lots of energy and enthusiasm. It’s always nice to see that in up-and-coming generations. She mentioned the books she likes, and the types of writing she loves to do. And she asked me about writer’s block. What do I do about it?

I told her the truth: Writer’s block is no longer a consideration for me. Doesn’t happen anymore. I slew that dragon fourteen years ago.

Consider the causes of writer’s block. There’s really one of two reasons why it happens to creative people, and there’s a special silver bullet for each case.

The creative process is not entirely conscious. Some would argue that it’s not even primarily conscious, and that most of the work is happening on a different level of the mind. I don’t really know, but certainly when sentences and paragraphs and characters fly from my fingertips with each tap of the keyboard or stroke of the pen, it seems to be coming from a very deep place in the untamed wilderness of imagination.

The subconscious is basically the guy in the crow’s nest. He sees the icebergs ahead. He navigates the ship, and if a scene or character isn’t working, the subconscious knows it first. Writer’s block is the early warning system, warning you that there’s a problem. That’s the first root of writer’s block.

The solution? Well, this varies among writers, but I’ll tell you what I like. Let’s suppose you’ve written a scene where this fellow walks down to the nearest diner. His girlfriend works there, and at the diner he is supposed to have a volatile argument with her. Say you’ve written the walk to the diner scene, but the diner confrontation is proving impossible. You sit at your typewriter or computer, facing a blank page that seems as surmountable as a huge sheet of glacial ice. What to do?

How about skip the diner confrontation entirely. Hop, skip, jump over it. The scene isn’t going to migrate when you’re not looking. Put it aside, and get to the next scene. Write the return journey from the diner. Write what happens the following day. Later when you feel ready, get back to that diner argument. It’s like drilling through a mountainside; sometimes you need to do some demolition from the other side.

So what is the second root of writer’s block? I picture the imagination as an immense reservoir of creative energies, drawn from a lifetime of reading, working, fighting, loving, running, traveling, learning. Sometimes the waters get low or stale. When that happens, you need to STOP writing for a few days. Stand up, back away from the computer. Put your shoes on. Go out and do something new. Learn Swahili. Try your hand at sailing. Watch a black-and-white French noir about samurai after you’ve rollerbladed. Run a few laps, without headphones drowning out your thoughts. Fill the reservoir up again. A writer is nothing without experience.

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Now reading: Descarte’s Secret Notebook

Now watching: The Hudsucker Proxy, The Abyss, The Dirty Dozen, The Player, In the Heat of the Night.