[ Author's note: kludgey sonnets a speciality. ]

Reasons for this are potentially manifold. For a start, I think I may be coming down with some sort of plague. I woke up on Monday feeling like my lower back had been pummelled with a socket wrench while I slept; experience dictates that this either means I drank way too much the day before or am undergoing some sort of viral assault, and I had maybe two beers all of Sunday. That said, Saturday was a bit more drinky, and involved lots of walking and sitting on awkwardly made pub benches… but I’ve felt rum as hell all day today also, which I’m also trying to put down to other environmental factors, in a kind of desperate attempt at coercing reality itself by barraging it with evidence in favour of my preferred conclusion… so, yeah. Maybe I’m ill, or just a bit run down. No biggie, but, well, schedules – and quality material is hard to come by when my body’s shouting too loud for the brain to work. Slow progress, like ploughing a concrete field with a toy tractor.

Also: I have continued to read Burroughs, to the point where I have decided to stop for a while. Like so many drug-centric writers, he attained something of the same power as the drug that obsessed him. I’d forgotten how much you sink into Burroughs’ writing, like a warm clean bath taken in the bathroom of a filthy squat paved with used needles and empty wraps… and once you’re in there, the prospect of getting out looks very unappealing. And in your own local consensus reality (should you venture there, as I must from time to time), you notice something newly chitinous about your fellow pedestrians, a horrible mechanical grace, a speeding-up of action and urgency like something out of a wartime newsreel, herky-jerky every limb and grinding jaw, Max Schreck lurches and the leers of cornered foxes… Burroughs gets into every cell, tries to make you into him, a colony, your DNA rewriting itself before starting on your body from the inside out, a nanofactory that consumes itself to produce its one and only possible product. What you read can definitely affect you physically — I remember taking two sick-days running off one of my old factory jobs after reading Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, which I spent laying in bed, exhausted and weepy, battering my mind with cheap soapbar hash in the hope of being able to sleep without dreams. Perhaps I’ve overdone it on Burroughs, cooked a grain too many for the comeback spike. If I turkey off immediately after this binge, though, I might just get away without and further ill effects…

… unless that assumption is in and of itself one of said effects, in which case the mugwumps are probably disembarking at Sloane Square as I type. Point being, I’m headed up to Sheffield for work on Thursday afternoon, and I could really do with not getting ill right now. Selah.

Now, yeah, titles. I really liked the original working title I had for this… thing I’m writing, for the sake of the word itself and also because it sums up one of the dominant motifs of the fictional world in question. Regrettably for me, a certain Charlie Stross and a certain Catherynne Valente have both written very well-received (and well remembered) stories with the title Palimpsest in the last fistful of years, so I can’t use that, and have know it from the start. (OK, technically I could use it, there’s nothing to stop me, but it would haunt me forever, because that’s the way my brain works. Selah.) But in a serendipitous fashion, an alternative just rolled on out of my Twitter timestream this afternoon, courtesy Gary Gibson.

A paracosm is, apparently, the elaborate fictional world people often create when they’re young. Had no idea such a word existed. I like it.

— Gary Gibson (@garygibsonsf) May 8, 2012

A definition of paracosm:

A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world involving humans and/or animals, or perhaps even fantasy or alien creations. Often having its own geography, history, and language, it is an experience that is developed during childhood and continues over a long period of time: months or even years.

Now, any genre writer or critic will recognise that as being either a fully-fledged secondary world, or something that would wander toward the liminal fantasies of Farah Mendleshohn’s deliberately provocative taxonomy of fantastic literature: fantasies where the demarcation between the ‘real’ world and the fantastical elements in play – not to mention the actuality of their fantastic-ness (fantasticality?) – is elusive for the reader, and very often for the narrators too. (I’m probably mangling that definition a bit, but I plan to go back and re-read that chapter sometime soon, so I’ll leave it for now.) But the suggestion of childhood and immaturity around paracosm as a term fits nicely, because I’ve realised that what I’m really doing with this novella is exorcising a whole load of mental baggage associated with Portsmouth and the years I spent there, flailing my way through adolescence and a succession of rewritten selfs/identities.

Which sounds absurdly pretentious, of course, and makes it little different from much of my writing to date, but this story is much more explicitly set in a recognisable Portsmouth, and isn’t going to be a ‘proper’ science fiction or fantasy story. It’s a slipstreamy kind of thing, and the metafictional aspects make that even more slippery; I’m deep into unknown territory, here, and kinda making it up as I go along. Which is why it’s incredibly frustrating to get bogged down – if I can make anything happen, why can’t I get myself out of this transition?

The obvious answer is that I can get myself out of it, and that I just haven’t found the right route yet… and it occurs to me that thinking about paracosms might help me find it. (As might reading less Burroughs.) So, that’s the plan: pick something new to read, read it, and head back to the cliff-face tomorrow with my pickaxe all shone up and sharpened.

And that, ladies and gents, is how you publicly pep-talk yourself out of a writing funk.

Can’t believe I never tried it before.

[ Physician's note: all optimism herein should be considered retrospectively null and void in the event of poor progress tomorrow. The patient must not be unduly encouraged in these grotesque performative ramblings. ]

Now, the way I write means I kinda end up self-documenting as I go; it’s a by-product of the process. When I have a question about what needs to happen next, or where a character wants to go, or even just which compass-point I should be pointing the plot-jalopy toward, I tend to just literally ask myself that question and answer it on the page in front of me (screen, notebook, whatever). I picked this method up from reading John Berlyne’s mammoth work of obsessive fan-scholarship, Powers: Secret Histories, which includes images of pages from Powers’ original scripts and notebooks, where you can see him doing just that[1]. “So, maybe Harry’s just lost his job? That could be good — but no, he needs to keep the job a bit longer because Sally will meet him there, but not until after her courtcase, which hasn’t happened at this point (though we could have the courtcase scene earlier on as a false flag)…” (I’m not paraphrasing there so much as showing you how it works out on the page when I do it.)

This leaves me with a bunch of metadata chunks that describe how I came up with the chunk of text-proper that follows it. The transition from one to the other can happen mid-sentence, and often does (techniques that get the words coming out are the ones that get kept). While it’s not common for me to argue about technique in these braindumps, they stand as a window into my own mindset as I wrote them, and that will make the storying of the stylistic choices I make during writing and editing far easier, as well as sounding more self-reflective than saying “that’s just how it looked like it should be written, y’know?”(which, if I’m honest, is about as much as I can ever recall of the process of writing immediately after the process has ceased… assuming, of course, that the true fugue-state of Actual Writing has happened; by contrast, I can recall every single second spent in the more easily-accessed state of Trying To Write, in horrible and vivid detail.)

All of which is a rambling way of explaining that whatever gets posted here will be like the next layer of meta-ness out from those raw notes. I will probably do some kicking around of the bigger questions that crop up in the writing processs here, not least because – beyond the initial concept and character and a few ideas for set-pieces – I’m making it up as I go along. This is a deliberate choice, and a chance to push against a long-held personal hang-up, the “you can’t start writing the story until you can see the whole of its shape in your mind” fallacy. The first half of the course has convinced me this isn’t the case (or at least isn’t a cast-iron Law), and writing in a different way will make me more conscious of process, which in turn will make the documentation of said process easier. That’s the theory, anyway. Yeah.

Speaking of theory, though, the novella-to-be is already veering hard into metafictional territory (which wasn’t unexpected), so I figure a record of contextual guff might be useful, or at least interesting (to me). Especially as I’m planning to do some cut-up stuff in the text. Which brings me (finally, elliptically) to the title of this post. Now, as I’m doing cut-ups, I need to be going to some good primary sources, and who’s the man for cut-ups? Ol’ Bill Burroughs, of course. So I got myself Word Virus, the Burroughs ‘reader’ anthology, and dug up his original article on the method (which is now manifold, with dozens of re-annotated or re-introduced examples scattered all over the intertubes).

Now, Burroughs is a sychronicity trigger, perhaps because of his own fascination with sychronicity. I’ve also heard this called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – a phenomenon whereby shortly after first encountering a concept or idea or person, you subsequently run into loads of things that connect back to it or them in really obvious ways. Think of it as a more paranoid version of “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon”, if you like; it’s a pattern-making mind connecting three dots and calling it an elephant, perhaps. Whatever the cause, it happens, and it always feels odd, like a mild deja vu that rings on for weeks with occasional spikes of volume or intesity, like the chime of a temple gong.

Today’s example, for your delectation (or for posterity, or to kill the time while I wait for them to finally announce whether BoJo gets to keep his crown for another four years). While doin’ my Inbox Zero, I find an email from a guy telling me about the piece he wrote for the LA Review Of Books for the A E van Vogt’s centenary. So I click through, and there’s a page of all his van Vogt pieces all linked in a row. Scroll down to the World of Null-A review, encounter reference to Alfred Korzybski and his theory of general semantics. Look up Korzybski on Wikipedia… discover footnote to the effect that Burroughs went to one of Korzybski’s workshops. See?

So I took things to Twitter, as I am wont to do. My reasons for including the results should become clear upon reading them:

The sphincter of Theory

While bleating about the inevitable synchronicities attendant on reading Bill Burroughs…

Storified by Paul Graham Raven · Fri, May 04 2012 18:46:41

@BrendanCByrne Semicolon, Shirley? Paul Graham Raven

Hmm. Well, I guess when you’re doing cut-ups, everything’s literally grist for the mill.

And that’s probably enough DD for now, as I’ve put in about the same wordcount on it as I have today’s fiction output. There may be more of this to come. Hell, at some point I might even get around to explaining the concept, explaining why that concept led inevitably to metafiction, and explaining (to myself, in increasing panic) why I thought any of it was a good idea when I started.

[ 1 - The great irony is that I have yet to read a Powers novel in published form. ]

So, the facty bits. 253 is named for the number of seats on a standard Bakerloo Line tube train: seven carriages of 36 seats each, plus one driver up front. Each passenger gets their own page of story, limited to 253 words per entry (not counting footnotes), and arranged in three sub-heads: ‘physical appearance’, ‘inside information’, and ‘what [they] are doing or thinking’. There are footnotes: some pertinent and logical, some digressive and orthogonal. The print remix also has lots of po-moroborous extra material that both mocks and celebrates its own ironic lampooning of itself: adverts for non-existent products and services, witheringly sarcastic exhortations to become a writer, that sort of thing^[1]. In true metafictional tradition, Ryman himself appears as passenger 96, the fall-guy of a guerilla theatre troupe. And as an added bonus – especially for me – another passenger is reading a copy of Vurt by Jeff Noon.

The timeline is restricted to the few minutes between one station and the next, and the strict wordcount limit means that bringing in the external lives of the characters can only be done briefly; the narrative of 253 is momentary, collective and emergent, but it reaches out into the world beyond the train through the connections between some of the passengers – perhaps they work in the same place, or are pondering a similar topic. In the online version, many (though not all) of these are clickable links; with the print edition, the reader constructs them by progressing through the book and remembering previous characters.

253 isn’t an sf novel, but those familiar with Ryman’s work will recognise the keen eye for workaday tragedy and moments of personal transcendence he brings to the story. At turns bleak, uplifting, sad and silly – changing tone with the turn of a page – I was quite astonished at how much affect Ryman wrings out of the form. While reading it (which often took place on tube trains, though never the Bakerloo – doesn’t go anywhere I ever need to go, that one) I had some actuLOL moments, as well as a fair few where I had to blink away a suspicious stinging in the eyes. If anything, its temporality – rooted as it is in a very specific point in history – is its greatest strength, offering a snapshot of London and its people in 1996, as the fag-end of Thatcher’s reign burned right down to the filter.

I am very interested in constraints as a writing tool; not only do they erase the fear of the blank page to some extent, but they can produce unexpected and interesting results. 253 is a wonderful example of this in action.

*

There’s an interview in the Salon.com archives that catches Ryman in the process of converting the hypertext 253 for the print remix, and he discusses the different experiences of the two formats:

“253 with links is about what makes people the same, because you can follow through — the grandparent theme, the people thinking about Thatcher. It’s about the subliminal ways we’re linked and alike. You just read it passenger by passenger, and it’s about how different we all are. The links change the meaning of the novel. I think I’m going to like the print version more because it emphasizes more just how multi-various the cars are, but the linked version is fun.”

For one thing, the need to follow themes and create links unexpectedly generated ideas for characters. “For example, somebody works in a dry-cleaning shop and has decided she can’t do that so she’s learning how to be a taxi driver, so you say, how can I have a link with taxis? How can you have anything link with taxis on the tube?” He found a way: a character who’s come up with an automated system to install in cabs that would replace The Knowledge — the encyclopedic mental database rookie drivers of London’s black cabs spend years mastering in order to get a license.

“The other thing I found about the links,” Ryman says, “is that you have to be careful that they’re not a little bit unsubtle. You don’t want to deprive the reader of the fun of putting two and two together.” This has become more of a problem as he encodes the second batch of characters — the ones for cars five, six and seven. “The links make irony very, very easy. It’s almost too powerful a tool.”

I don’t have any primary sources to hand that provide a solid definition of hypertext fiction, but an aggregate of the secondary and other sources suggests it’s pretty loose: if the work partakes in hypertextual methods (which includes the hyperlinks that are such a daily part of our web-based lives, but also their forerunners, like the “turn to page [x]” instructions in choose-your-own-adventure books), then it gets admittance to the club. (I dare say getting closer to contemporary practitioners of the form would reveal all the usual factional disputes and taxonomic warfare, however.) The emphasis tends to be on the non-linearity of narrative that hypertext permits, and the web version of 253 provides opportunities for random exploration via embedded links providing extracontextual connections between passengers (i.e. connections that exist beyond the confines of their being on the same train), and maps of the tube cars that let you browse passenger pages at random (or at will, if there’s any difference). Clicking around it now, a week or so after finishing the print version, I’m quite surprised by the degree of defamiliarisation produced by the hypertext format: unless you approached 253 with some sort of coherent reading strategy, it might take quite a while to locate a coherent narrative, and – counter to that – there’s the lingering nervousness that I’ve come to recognise as the fear of disappearing down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole for a few hours after popping over there to check a date. (Does the German language have a word for this fear yet?)

The 253 print remix provides you with an off-the-shelf reading strategy, and in the process reveals the linearity inherent in the novel. After all, it’s set on a train – and what could be more linear than a train, with the driver’s cabin up front and a neat succession of carriages following along behind, one way only, please mind the gap? Reading the print edition from front to back allows the emergent and branching subnarratives to accrete in the mind, as if your brain were caching the pages to which you’ll find yourself linked later on; reading from front to back means you can be certain that you’ve read the lot and not missed anyone (or anything); reading from front to back also suggests strongly (to me at least) that it may well have been written from front to back, and coded for hypertextuality after completion. I was surprised at how effective a novel the print version is, though the few contemporary reviews I can find online suggest that 253‘s bitty and piecemeal structure was off-putting for others.

However, the narrative experienced when reading is a collaboration between writer and reader, and form influences the work that emerges from that partnership. And so, one must assume, do paradigms and schemas of narrative; so, how much of my feeling that 253‘s original/”natural” form was linear is a function of me having been raised as a reader of linear narratives delivered in a linear medium? Would a web-native Millennial find the book baffling and dull, preferring instead to skip around within the online text, guided by the links and their whimsy, uncaring of whether there were good bits they’d passed over, or something vital they’d missed? In other words, I’m wondering whether Ryman’s assumption that the medium changes the experience is not, with hindsight, slightly backward; perhaps it’s familiarity with the medium that modulates the experience.

Having said that, I now find myself wondering if this isn’t why I have to maintain a lot of discipline with respect to social media like Twitter if I want to get anything done: the thought of missing out on some nugget of news or wonder keeps me grazing anxiously, one eye on the conveyor-belt of pasture. Am I perhaps a member of the last generation that ever imagined – even casually or naively – that they could perceive totalities? Are web-native youngsters intuitively clued in to the fact that there’s too much stuff for them ever to consume anything but a fraction of it? Or am I just jealously imagining non-existent capabilities in them that I wish I had for myself? I’m still very leery of Eeyoresque technoLuddism that blames the failings of [$demographic] on [$newTechnology], but it’d be foolish to completely dismiss the notion that some sort of paradigmatic shift in attitudes to knowledge might emerge from a sudden and unprecedented flowering of access to knowledge…

I’m intrigued to see how far contemporary hypertext fiction has moved away from recontextualising linear narratives and toward generating narratives that are more reflective of (or native to) the form itself – if it has at all. It begs the question as to whether linearity of narrative is something that speaks to the way we experience the passage of time and causality; would it be possible to create a hypertext fiction with no single dominant thread that was still interesting enough to keep people reading? Or might that only be accomplished by writing a hypertext large enough to contain a number of linear core narratives, only one or two of which the reader might unearth in full in their journey through the text? Experiments and possibilities suggest themselves; perhaps I flatter myself (dangerously) that my years of webdevving have given me a wider grasp of what might be possible with hypertext fiction than other writers. (Folksonomies! Javascripted skullduggery with links that only appear to readers who have – or haven’t – read a particular page or passage! External links to concretise intertextuality!) Whatever the case, I’m pretty sure there’s work to be done in this direction…

[ 1 - Technohistorical digression: it's amusing to note that the design and layout of the Print Remix is far in advance of that of the original hypertext, what with the comparative crudity of the HTML protocols at the time; worth remembering, next time someone bitches about lazy formatting in ebooks. ]

… and some dramatic props. [Thanks to Chad Dixon for the photo.]

I often compare Eastercon to my experiences of Glastonbury back in my twenties: it costs me a fortune, I overindulge in my usual vices, I see less than a third of the stuff I vaguely planned to see, but yet I roll away with a warm glow that comes from sharing a highly specific chunk of space-time with a community of people who share one of the greatest passions of my life, inspired to do new things.

Granted, I’ve never left Eastercon coated in mud, wrapped in a space blanket and trying to chew my own left ear, so the analogy isn’t perfect. I’m pretty sure I never came back from Glasto carrying approximately a third of my own bodyweight in books, either. But hey, I need the exercise… and my Bruce Sterling collection draws nearer to Stage One completion^[1].

Olympus was not utterly devoid of controversy and upset, however, and I find myself wanting to talk about that. After the initial heat-of-the-moment furore, what would really have helped would have been a good solid apology and admission of error from the primary source, but… well, this ain’t one.

So, look: you can watch what actually happened right here, and whatever side you take I think that’s gotta be the absolute entry level for having an opinion on this, unless you were actually at the BSFA Awards ceremony. And here’s a record of the Twitter backchannel as it happened.

I was in the audience. Things went from cringeworthy to worse; it was the sort of thing the “trainwreck” metaphor was made for. I was sat a few seats from Lavie Tidhar at the time. That was a very uncomfortable moment for me, as a straight white male British person who just happens to be Lavie’s friend. I can’t imagine how he felt… especially given that early in the day an audience member from the Non-Anglophone SF panel had breezed up to inform him that, despite English being Lavie’s second language, he spoke it very well indeed. Condescending, much?

The common factor here is that both cases of offence were not intended to offend – quite the opposite, in fact. But that doesn’t negate the offence.

The sad thing about this, for me at least, is that Olympus felt very diverse and inclusive with respect to its roster of guests, panel topics and panel composition; a real step forward, even within the short timeframe of my own involvement with fandom. The con committee and the BSFA worked damned hard to make that happen, and as much as I believe it’s important that the failures are acknowledged, I think the good stuff needs to be remembered, too; the sheer scale of effort and passion needed to make these things happen is staggering, and to overlook that energy and commitment would be grossly unfair, no matter what may have gone wrong along the way. So, for the record, let me congratulate the BSFA and the Olypus con committee, the gophers and techs and the folk behind the scenes: I wouldn’t even know where to start, and there was oodles of great stuff over the weekend for which praise is rightly due. There’s a tendency for the baby to go the same way as the bathwater in these situations, and in terms of the grand project – making fandom a space where everyone can feel safe, valued and included, regardless of gender, nationality, skin colour, sexuality or anything else – I feel that it would help to acknowledge that, as a community, we’re “working on our shit”, as the saying goes.

But that’s my privilege speaking, and I know it. It’s easy for me to sit here and hand-wring, rehearse weak or global versions of a The Tone Argument, and recruit for the Cult Of Nice. I’m a white able-bodied just-about-heterosexual cis-male British person, and as such it’s incredibly rare that anyone gets a platform to give my culture a proper kicking, deserved or otherwise. (And hell knows it’s deserved more often than not.)

It’s never pleasurable to have worked damned hard on something, only to have someone pull out the flaws and wave them in your face. But in the context of, say, writing fiction and subbing it to editors for publication, it’s widely acknowledged that that’s how you get better. Yeah, it hurts. Emotional growth, at least in my experience, always does. If the choice is pain or stasis, though, then pain it has to be.

One final thing: I am not holding myself up as an exemplar, here. I owe what personal politicisation I’ve achieved over the last decade to fandom – to debates and discussions (yes, and slapfights) just like this one. Hell knows that I’ve said countless dumb or offensive things over the years, secure and comfortable in my ignorance and privilege, and my unwarranted opinion of myself as a pretty progressive liberal kinda guy, thankyouverymuch. You could probably trawl through the archives right here at VCTB and find enough material to throw me right into the same sin-bin as Meaney, in fact, if not even a deeper one with sharper spikes. Perhaps you could even say that my invisibility was an added layer of privilege; it’s easy to get away with being thoughtless when thoughtlessness is ubiquitous, just one more voice in the crowd.

It is not for me to stand in judgement atop the mountain of the gods.

But this is my community, too, so nor is it for me to ignore or dismiss the hurt I see expressed by others less privileged than I, especially when some of them are people I count as good friends… and there’s a significant amount of it floating around on the intertubes today. (If you’ve not seen any, then perhaps it’s time for you to go look for it.)

I honestly believe the vast majority of us want fandom to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone, even if we aren’t quite as far along with that project as we’d like to think we are. So if I could have one wish, it’s that we keep to the inclusive spirit with which Olympus was put together and executed, and listen to those who are telling us that the story we tell each other (and ourselves) about our community has flaws that still need editing out.

Redrafting sucks. But it’s the only way to make the story better.

[ 1 - Stage One completion involves acquiring one copy of all extant titles, in or out of print; Stage Two will involve trading up all titles to the best editions available, preferably signed hardback firsts. I did a lot of collecting of various things as a kid, and nowadays I realise the best way to get lasting value from assembling a collection is to delimit the set and pick a completion goal with very low likelihood; non-set-limited collections soon lose their appeal for me (because how will you ever know when you're done?), and completion means you have to find a new thing to collect. Think of it as a sort of vice management strategy; accept the inevitability of the vice, then steer it as safely and cheaply as possible into a cul-de-sac that you think you could live in for a good long time.

Yes, this is how I think about my hobbies. No, I don't know why. It works for me. Selah. ]