Stuff I've Been Enjoying This Summer

Stuff I've Been Enjoying This Summer

A few of those bits and pieces I've read that gave me joy this summer:

Stephen King's latest book, Billy Summers. I'm surprised this one didn't come out as part of King's Hard Case Crime run, since it's pretty much an ode to Lawrence Block, Max Allan Collins, and Donald Westlake.

I enjoyed the hell out of Billy Summers; it's an interesting King visit to the land of the Dark Half, only this time with the novel within a novel so well developed that the whole thing reads as a love letter to writers.

That said, if you are a writer, you might end up doing what I did and getting tangled up with the second half of this book. All in all, the book's story line fits within the genre (The Day of the Jackal/The Dead Zone). However, the second half went off in a slightly different tone and direction than I expected from the first half's setup.

This isn't a knock on King. It's just something I noticed, one of those times where the part of my brain that notices this stuff goes "Hey, I'd have done that differently".

And, once I did, I come up with a question for those writers and readers who end up with the same reaction: is it the introduction of a particular new character at the middle of the book, and their subsequent impact on the story and resolution? Yeah, how that character is introduced is a cliche (see the "Ode to Richard Stark" notes above), but that's so much a part of this genre as to be archtypical. I have my quibbles about doing it the way King did, and whether "it's genre appropriate" means you can't see things a little differently, but what I'm really wondering here is about the way characters change the story logic.

Or to put it another way: for me, every story has its own internal logic. And every writer sees that logic in their own way, in their own voice. This is the real magic of having so very many writers pecking away at their own stories. How often then do you get a chance where you can actually point to a story and go "There, that's where King's logic kicks in"?

That or I'm just seeing things, that's cool too. Either way, the story did what I think every writer wants, it made me walk away from it happy I'd read it, and tangled up enough with it to keep thinking about it.

I've been enjoying Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Monday evening short stories. Visiting Kris's weekly story every Monday evening has been a wonderful part of my schedule for a couple years now.

Since Rusch writes short stories regularly, keeping up with all of them can be difficult, so this is a great way to catch some stories that I would never have otherwise found, along with the occasional brand new story. Do you know of any other writers regularly publishing short stories on their own sites? If so, drop a line in the comments and point us all to them!

In the nonfiction realm, I've been enjoying Athena Scalzi's run over at John Scalzi's Whatever. Basically, Athena's taken a year away from school, and got put to work on her dad's website in the meantime. (As a father of a teenaged daughter myself, I admit I giggled. Especially as a grandson and son who got put to work variously with a shovel, a butcher's apron, a lawn mower, paintbrush...)

I got a kick out of Athena's view of the world, and how that came out in her writing journey, and I look forward to seeing whether she goes on to continue.

And, I'll be in her corner cheering for Athena as she wrestles with what her last post of this summer indicates has been going on behind the scenes this year. (Which is another parallel, as our own daughter is starting her own college journey. I am so proud of her I can't even, and I was delighted that she decided that she needed a year or two at the local community college before going farther. Not just that that means she's at home for another year or two (who's crying here, anyway?), but that she gets the chance to take a look at the savannah before the lions show up.)

Look, I took a similar face plant on the academic road, taking a year at community college is, can be, one of the enjoyable experiences if you embrace it. That said, formal or informal learning aside, I think and hope that Athena will go on to find a way through to something good, and I'll be happy to quietly cheer her along the way. And in the meantime we all got some pretty good writing out of her pause in the sojourn.