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New Novel Starts Today

Book Burning 2

Book Burning

Babel, and the past decade

This essay in the Atlantic is The Tongue Trade adjacent. The fragmenting of society happens along many fissures. I find this particular piece fascinating because it traces those fissures back to the birth of civilization itself. We have always lived on a patchwork quilt with its seems stretched. Sometimes to showing, sometimes to their limits. 

Sorry to sew together so many metaphores. What with our divisions and all. Am I jjust making things worse?

Global Book Award Finalist

 

The Tongue Trade is a finalist for the Global Book Award, in the Science Fiction Crime and Mystery catagory. Yes, that is a narrow catagory, like fastest three-wheeled car or Olympic slalom canoe, but it is the whole world. So that's cool: Nearly the best science fiction crime novel  IN THE WORLD!

Some ideas are their own

My idea, up on the screen. It should swell my heart like the Grinch’s on Christmas day, but no. It’s . . . I’m not going to write ‘bittersweet’, because I like bittersweet. That never struck me as exactly the right metaphor. Beet pie is more like it – lovely to look at, quite good for you, and tastes like a fraud.

The new Disney show, Star Wars Skeleton Crew opens in a delightful suburb on the planet At Attin. The cars, trucks, and trams move through the neighborhood like slot cars, tillers in tracks. I use the same idea in my novel The Tongue Trade. In my future, the troughs supply vehicles with power, so they don’t have to cart stored energy around. They also help manage traffic, preventing accidents and ameliorating congestion. Slots are also a metaphor for the kind of ruts in which people become stuck, language being the deepest one in my book.

But that’s writerly stuff and not nearly as cool as seeing what I envisioned, from gifted artists, on my television. I was thrilled my concept looked amazing and sad that it was not at all MY personal concept. No one at Disney got the idea from my novel. They probably got it the same way I did, by growing up playing with toys.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. In a way, I hope it’s not the last. It’s lovely knowing someone else liked the same idea you liked, it’s good for a writer to know your ideas have value, and it leaves a pasty taste in your mouth.