Literary blackmail, televised DIY surgery and other lite squicks

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I wrote a post this week for TOR.COM, about blackmail in fiction, and in Veronica Mars. The post is here; I hope to follow it up with some musings on other varieties of crime. Let me know what you think?

Second: I dunno how many of you have seen this past week’s new episode of a certain medical drama, so I’ll confine my comments on that to “OMG, squick! Ewww!” Either you know what I mean or that evil chuckle you hear is your DVR, waiting for you to boot it up.

Also TV adjacent, I am 3/5 of the way through watching Mildred Pierce on HBO and should probably hold my tongue until I see the conclusion, but I have to say that as viewing experiences go, this one so far has been entirely bizarre. Kate Winslet is fantastic, as usual, and her Lauren Bacall accent is a marvel to hear. And I’m always so happy to see Melissa Leo in anything.

But the story–I haven’t read the original novel–has all this peculiar class and gender stuff.

The message so far seems to be that men are useless parasites, and… um… something about social class and snobbery involving Guy Pearce’s naked bum. Seriously. The class stuff is, at this mid-point in the story, entirely murky. Mildred was a snob, but now she seems to be evolving. Unless she isn’t. It’s incredibly hard to tell.

The story is just intriguing enough to keep me watching, but it’s also very cold. Kate as Mildred seems as though she should be poised to be a source of joy and warmth in an otherwise harsh and chilly world, but she’s as icy as everyone and everything else. I am entirely baffled by it.

Fall From Grace

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You know how, in a certain type of (often-British) mystery, your protagonist has some big, self-destructive flaw? He drinks too much, he has intimacy issues, he’s all hung up over his lost love or he’s Sherlock Holmes and shoots heroin? It’s sort of grittily romantic, if you have that thing where you sometimes imagine taking people home, feeding them soup and kindly sorting out their lives?

Yeah. So Wayne Arthurson has raised the bar on this particular literary convention. The sport isn’t even high jump anymore… he’s taken it into the realm of pole vaulting.

In Fall from Grace we meet Leo Desroches, a guy so spectacularly screwed up he makes Cracker seem cuddly and functional.

Leo’s a journalist and a full-time mess on legs. He’s been in jail, he’s been homeless, and even though he currently has a job, it’s in Edmonton. (Okay, Edmonton, sorry for the swipe. Where was I? Ohhh… balmy balmy Vancouver.) He has a regular gig at a local paper and a place to live, but he’s also a howling black hole of gambling addiction and bad choices, and he’s found a devilishly inventive and thoroughly shocking way to keep himself out of the casinos.

When he is first on scene at a murder, Leo gets a chance to put his career back on track. And since there are two Leos–the Gambler, and the earnest guy who wants to put his life together and maybe even reboot a relationship with his kids–he makes the most of it, turning one anonymous murder victim into front page news. As he digs deeper, of course, it turns out that poor Ruby Cardinal is hardly the first strangled sex-trade worker of Aboriginal descent to turn up in an area wheat field. The police are officially unaware of the trend, but they’re also more than a little sensitive about the suggestion that there may be a serial killer in the city.

Which is great for Leo, because what self-destructive person wouldn’t want to antagonize the hometown police?

Leo’s investigation brings him all the danger his self-loathing side could hope for and then some. Because Fall from Grace doesn’t pretend to be gritty–it embodies grit. It’s rough-edged and scary, a fascinating crime novel about a guy who can’t quite surrender to his own darkness, even as he continually, compulsively sets himself up to lose every single thing he’s got.

Opportunities for new writers

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A very exciting newsflash: author Saladin Ahmed is offering one on one mentoring for interested writers:

I am pleased to announce that I am currently offering a limited number of one-on-one creative writing mentorships. These mentorships will be individually tailored to the needs of the client, involving a combination of detailed manuscript critique and advice on publication and professionalization. My areas of teaching expertise include poetry and fantasy fiction.

Full details are here.

Second, PEN USA’s Emerging Voices Fellowship is open for applications. This is a terrific program. One of my students, Natashia Deón, was a PEN fellow, and everything I heard about it from her made it sound like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Exquisite Words

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I haven’t been posting many text fragments lately… becoming more of an e-books person has helped me to fall out of the habit of collecting them. But since I’m working on reading more I want to get back into this habit, and I also want to post some of the lovely bits and pieces I’ve collected but never posted. And one of my favorites–even though it’s very short–is this crisp, elegant, utterly perfect image from Samuel R. Delaney.

The moon, revealed once more, was a polished bone joint jammed on the sky.

–Samuel R. Delaney, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION

What I admire about this is that it has the economy and precision of poetry–it needs nothing more than what it already has.