The marking continues, moving into the final third, but things have now reached the Heart of Darkness stage. The cycle of the last week has been pretty consistent: I grade papers until my brain fries, then flake out in front of the TV watching bad movies until I fall asleep. There’s been no time for writing or research over the last week, and very few opportunities to leave the house. The system the university uses for submissions means I need to have an active internet connection in order to mark papers, and that means a lot of my usual change-of-scene haunts aren’t feasible.
Net result: I’ve been getting a little stir crazy, and I’ve started ranting to my partner on a semi-regular basis (never a good sign).
Fortunately, I was far enough ahead that I could afford to take today off and get out of the house. I headed for breakfast at the Low Road Cafe, went late-night shopping with my partner, and generally spent today catching up on things that weren’t grading papers. Between all that I read a little, finishing off the Tor.com version of Caitlin Kiernan’s Black Helicopters (which is spectacular) and starting on Charlotte Wood’s collection of long-form interviews with Australian writers, The Writers Room.
The latter, at least, involves a vague genuflection towards research reading, courtesy of James Bradley’s answers regarding genre and his love of superhero comics. Specifically, this explanation:
One of the things I think is really fascinating about the superhero comics I’m interested in is that in the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe you actually have the single largest fictional creation that’s ever been made. They are vast. There are hundreds of thousands of characters, spreading over fifty, sixty, seventy years. The Mahabharata is not that big!
I love the sense of narrative complexity and interconnectedness that arises out of that scale, so if you’ve been reading them for forty years like I have, you’re always operating with a deep well of knowledge that enriches it all.
Peter Parker is still around—he was a fifteen-year-old character when I started reading them as a kid, but these days he’s in his late twenties, and although he hasn’t aged that much in some ways, I’ve seen him change and grow. And there’s that sense of narrative exaltation that comes from the way suddenly, something will click into place. You’ll go, ‘Oh my god, that man, the villain here, it’s the Molecule Man, I remember the Molecule Man from 1982. And he’s back!’
If it’s done well, it’s like having a little jolt of that quality Cocteau describes when he says that everything that happens in a story should be absolutely surprising and completely inevitable.
James Bradley in Charlotte Wood’s The Writer’s Room
There’s a moment in a Raymond Chandler short story, a single line that refers to the events of another short story even though they have minimal bearing on the current tale, and it’s one of my favourite moments in Chandler’s work for exactly the same kind of narrative exaltation.
Approximately six days to go before I clear all the grading off my plate and reclaim the daylight hours for writing and thesis work. On the plus side, my partner will be at a training course for at least half of that time, so there is no-one but the guinea pigs to rant at.
And Low Road does a spiced mushroom breakfast taco now. I didn’t notice it on the menu because I don’t look at the menu that often, but I had all kinds of jealousy when my partner ordered it.
I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume
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