Nick had never had an apartment with a view before. Granted, it wasn't much of a view, just a graffiti-bombed bus shelter kitty-corner on Bathurst Street, and the furtive older women and frothy clusters of teens who kept the corner store below his window in business. Still, it was better than the cinderblock wall of the building next door and the rust-scarred paint can the neighbour's kid used to hide his cigarette butts that he saw from the window of his place in Kitchener. He could hear the streetcars trundle by at all hours of the night, wheels scraping up dirt and trash from between the rails, the bow collector clicking and rattling as it passed through the intersection. The noise woke him up sometimes, but he didn't mind; he'd been in Toronto less than two weeks, and he was still having nightmares. Waking up was often better.

He hadn't brought much with him to Toronto. His clothes, his Macbook, a guitar he'd never quite learned how to play, his iPod, a pocket-sized digital camera, some things for the kitchen and a little shelf with a few DVDs and books. There was also a photograph, a murky blue Polaroid of Amy, the only reminder of her he hadn't left in the dumpster of his old building. His apartment came furnished with a single bed, a small kitchen table with two tube-steel chairs, a dresser and a pressboard desk. He kept the Polaroid in one of the desk drawers to avoid temptation, but instead he took it out five, sometimes six times a day, letting the shame burst out from his skin like a flop-sweat. The sight of it would make him squeeze his eyes and fists tight, anger and jealousy and fear and lust and things he couldn't name passing through is body all at once, eating his brain. He hated her for leaving, and hated himself for missing her.

He hadn't found a job yet. His parents had been angry that he'd gone to Toronto without lining up work first, had given up his job at Manulife—not a great job, but with potential, they thought—but he couldn't spend another year, another month, another week in that city knowing she was out there, shopping in the same stores, eating at the same restaurants, breathing the same air, living under Andrew's roof. Andrew and his fucking BMW. Andrew and the security she said he could provide, Andrew who had managed not to gain any weight sitting behind a desk eight hours a day. Andrew who could buy her things and take her places and could still fuck like he was eighteen. Andrew, she said, who was in a better place to help her keep her life on schedule. It wasn't about him, or what they'd had together. It was about owning a house before she was thirty. There wasn't anything to be upset about. It was a matter of goals.

Nick couldn't afford the apartment after Amy moved out, and he didn't have it in him to look at dozens of empty apartments, couldn't face the hardwood floors she would have insisted on, the windowsill he could see her sitting by, the kitchen sink where she would come up behind him and hold him for no reason at all. He just opened the Record, called the number for the cheapest ad he saw, and took the apartment without a viewing. It turned out to be a grubby basement walk-in, bigger than it should have been for that price, with blue-veined industrial tiles on the floor, foam-wrapped hot water pipes snaking through the bedroom, and off-white walls that dripped nicotine when it got humid. He stayed there a year, spending two and a half hours each day busing to and from work, staring blankly at the bakers on Victoria, the insurance brokers, students and Vietnamese hustlers up and down King Street. When he got home at night he would log on to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. He and Amy were no longer connected on any of these social networks, had unfriended each other. He had no direct access to any of her profiles, nor she to his, so instead he looked at her friends, the corporate websites she managed, read her favourite blogs and webcomics. He made himself a picture of her life by feeling his way across its negative spaces, brushing the edges, never looking directly at it, afraid it would blind him like the mid-day sun. Nick never called her, never took the bus to her and Andrew's neighbourhood, never ate at the bagel place across from her office, never sent her emails. But he felt guilty just the same, was afraid of his own weakness and obsession. Eventually he told himself this was okay, he was doing nothing wrong. He was able to justify it, because one night nearly eight months after he'd moved into his sad little basement, Kate, one of the few friends he and Amy still had in common, shocked him with the news that Amy did the same thing to him. "E-stalked" him, she'd called it. She had moved on, hadn't she? Gotten the life she wanted? She was happy with Andrew, right? Nick didn't know what it meant, but he knew he shouldn't let it lead to hope. He went to the bathroom and stared in the mirror, saw the layer of fat building up on his neck, and told himself in the sternest voice he could manage that this did not mean she regretted her choices. The idea creeped in anyhow, and that night he started having nightmares. Kate never should have told him. He felt like he was starting to rot from the inside out. Nick was afraid that if he stayed in Kitchener much longer, it would kill him. He started to save money, and four months later he found himself in a tiny Toronto apartment, looking down on the streetcars as they passed.

This is not a post about the Bechdel test, nor The Frank Miller test (dramatised here), aka the How To Tell If A Male Science Fiction Writer Is Obsessed With Whores Test. This post is not actually about gender representations at all. It does, weirdly, come from my having just read a post that is kind of, sort of, about those things.

You see, a while back I wrote about China Miéville's novel, Iron Council, and I had some trouble explaining exactly what was wrong with it, stylistically speaking. What I wrote was:

Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made use of the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness interludes that are a kind of trademark of his novels. They are always, always, always the worst parts of his work, and they are a chore to read through, because he's frankly not very good at the technique.

Reading thene's post today, in which she referred to those passages as "that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book that some people hate and I hopelessly adore" got me thinking about the gaps in experience between readers of genre fiction and readers of literary fiction.

I suppose I'm a crossover reader to some extent, but my reading habits are heavily weighted on the literary fiction side, and I only stray into genres like science fiction, fantasy, or crime if I can be assured of the quality of the work (the author has a solid reputation), or something about that specific book has piqued my interest. I find I'm atypical in that respect. Most of my friends who read literary fiction only read literary fiction. I also have a great many friends who are genre enthusiasts, and they will read literary fiction, but pretty much all of them stick to literary works published before the Moderns (ie. before "literary" fiction was established as a marketing category). I hate to generalize, but it seems like a deliberate pact for the two communities to ignore one another. The literary types avoid genre as beneath them (or if you find that too harsh, then "not serious enough"), and the genre types avoid literary fiction as pretentious. Either way, I can just as much count on my friends who are SF fans to have read absolutely nothing by Lisa Moore as I can on my literary friends to not have a goddamn clue who Samuel R. Delany is.

And then it hit me what was really wrong with Iron Council.

James Morrison (the Caustic Cover Critic) recently posted about a gorgeous new series of Margaret Atwood covers designed by Nathan Burton, and had this to say:

[H]er science-fiction (which she goes out of her way to pretend isn't science-fiction) is usually awful: it has the self-satisfied unoriginality of somebody who hasn't read anything in the genre from the last 50 years, and so thinks that their daft cliches are new and exciting.

That's exactly how "that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book" from Iron Council felt. For those of us who have spent years pouring over Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, hell, even David Foster Wallace and Jeanette Winterson, what China Miéville was doing in those passages was not fresh or wild, it was a fumbling, clumsy-as-fuck attempt to tackle a convention that authors of literary fiction have been refining for something like a century. To a science fiction fan who hasn't read widely in Modern and contemporary literary fiction, the "daft clichés" I saw in Iron Council probably do seem "new and exciting."

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that reading more widely outside our preferred genres would be of benefit to us all, readers and writers alike. A diverse gene pool is a healthy gene pool, after all.

On a more personal note, friends of mine from way back will know that I've always wanted to write some science fiction and high fantasy, and over the last ten or fifteen years I've written reams and reams of plots, character profiles, background information and supporting documents, enough to spawn a dozen novels. And I can assure you that there are more than two female characters, none of them are prostitutes, none of them get raped, they get to talk to each other about things other than men, marriage, or babies, and they even get to have adventures.

The following is an excerpt from the Encyclopaedia of Crypto-Anthropology, 2^nd Canadian Edition, published in 2005 by The Society of Canadian Crypto-Anthropologists, Ottawa Chapter, compiled and edited by S.F. Jameson and E. Forrester-Pratt. Reprinted with permission.

Jarvis, Mark Samuel. born March 12^th, 1963 — missing December 2^nd, 2003

Mark Jarvis was a Canadian businessman, venture capitalist, and prophet. He was born in the small Northwestern Ontario village of Sioux Lookout to parents Samuel David Jarvis, electrician, and Ethel Marie Jarvis (née Hermann), nurse. Jarvis was born with a teratoma, a kind of tumor, usually benign, characterized by the growth of tissue associated with parts of the body other than where it is found. In males teratomata most often present at birth and tend to manifest as fleshy lumps on or about the coccyx or the neck. The tissues most commonly found in such tumors are from the lungs, brain, and kidneys, though more complex tissues may develop. Teratomata in females tend to present later in life and more regularly in the reproductive system. They are also more likely to develop more complex tissues and organs, and there have been anecdotal reports of the tumors developing as eyes or limbs. As a result, teratomata in women can often be mistaken for malformed fetuses. Jarvis' teratoma was unusual in several respects; first, in that it was located around the anus, second, that it included extremely complex tissues such as teeth and hair, and third, that it could predict the future. His tumor took the form of a row of five teeth circling the outside edge of the anal sphincter, a small flap of skin covering the sphincter itself, and a row of thick hairs near the teeth that resembled eyelashes. His teratoma was diagnosed as benign, but declared inoperable due not only to its proximity to the anal sphincter, but also due to extensive intertwining of the tumor's tissue and the inferior rectal nerves.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, changed the way I look at fiction. I read the book first as an undergraduate, and then later as a graduate student. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is astonishing, and I don't think I'd have connected to the work so strongly if I'd read a lesser version. There's any number of ways that you can divide up Gogol's stories, but the obvious way is to place them in the same two categories Pevear and Volokhonsky do; rural Ukranian tales, and urban St. Petersburg tales. Seeing them side by side in that way, the careful reader will notice that the rural/urban division mirrors another division in the tales. The rural tales are very clearly oral in nature. They are loose, fluid, comfortable, adaptable. The urban tales, on the other hand are tight, structured, detailed. They are the very embodiment of written stories. I suppose you could read them aloud, but they wouldn't work in quite the same way. When I realized that, I realized what kind of writer I was.

None of my stories really work when you read them out loud, but they do work on the page. This was brought home to me with particular vigor when I read from my story "Tobacco Hand" at the Draft Reading Series on October 4^th. "Tobacco Hand" is part of a rather large group of stories and other scraps, orts, and fragments I've written that take place in the fictional Northwestern Ontario town of New Prospect, which is modeled very loosely on my home town of Dryden. The plot of the story is fairly simple; a man named Earl is such a dedicated tobacco user that he has deep stains on the fingers of his right hand. His wife Janine has left him, and she has convinced him that it's because of his stains. Earl gets drunk in his kitchen, has an emotional break, and ultimately mutilates himself with a belt sander in an effort to get rid of them. Earl's story is told in a limited third-person subjective mode, and I think it's fairly clear that the voice is Earl's, more or less. It hasn't yet been published, but those editors that have seen it have all sent it back, to my delight, with considerable praise (the one consistent criticism, which seems to be the thing preventing it from getting picked up, is that it lacks context; this is true, but it's also deliberate, and that decision—and why I haven't changed my mind about it—is a subject for a whole other post), and on the whole they "get" what I'm doing with the language of the piece.

Now with all that in mind, "Tobacco Hand" fell rather flat at the reading. I've done work on the stage, and can be a charismatic reader of other people's work, but when it comes to my own, put me in front of an audience and I become a stuttering, nervous, flat-voiced fool. As I read from "Tobacco Hand" and looked out at the audience, I could feel the disconnect between what I was trying to get across and what they were receiving, and I'm not willing to blame it all on my abysmal performance as a reader. There were a fair number of men in the audience, but I did a couple of head counts and found they were clearly outnumbered by the women. Not an unusual thing at literary events, and of no particularly significance in and of itself. But as ridiculous as a sentence like "Earl's been working all his life and he's a big man with a big temper to match, but he's never hit a woman no matter how angry he got and that's probably one thing he knows he can be proud of" sounds when read all on its own, imagine reading it to a roomful of women writers whose work your respect. It doesn't fall flat, it trumpets out like a nasty wet fart during someone's wedding vows. It declares itself boorish, clichéd, a tad misogynistic, and perhaps even naive. Which of course it's meant to, because that's exactly who Earl is, and exactly how he thinks. Even as I was saying it I knew that wasn't the effect it was having. I felt embarrassed by that sentence. The bigger problem is that while, yes, it is one of the weaker sentences in the piece, it still works on the page, and more importantly, it still feels necessary.

Why? There's violence behind that sentence. The first time I read Alice Munro's "Royal Beatings"—indeed the first time I heard of it—there was this discourse surrounding it, a mostly urban, undeniably middle-class Southern Ontario discourse, about how horrible it must have been to go through a primary school experience like that, how different, how violent was the past, and isn't it great that we have all these zero tolerance policies and have been able to put all the behind us. That's all well and good, of course, except that we've done no such thing, and I'm not entirely sure we should. I'm not going to go into depth about my views on minor violence (and as a recipient of some genuinely severe physical bullying in my youth—among other things, I've been punched, kicked, bitten, stabbed, slashed, whipped with a toy bullwhip, beaten with blunt objects, and once four boys held me on the ground spread-eagle while a fifth jumped on my ribs from a height of four or five feet—I can assure you that most schoolyard fights and bullying are minor), but I will say that rural Ontario is still very much the world depicted in "Royal Beatings," and there are some pretty important lessons in that world for someone like Earl. If that kind of childhood violence doesn't break you—and it won't break most, though it marks them forever—it could leave you with a deep understanding of the consequences of violence. The ethics of violence are surprisingly nuanced for someone like Earl, though he's not equipped to articulate that nuance. He knows in his own flesh what happens when you strike someone, and though he knows there are situations where a man can, and indeed should commit an act of minor violence, there are also times when no justification is sufficient. He simply doesn't have the language to articulate that either, so he falls back on simple clichés like "a man never hits a woman," and takes justifiable pride in living up to the hidden complexities of his ethical system.

Of course none of this is explicit in the text, but I think that once Earl's voice gets inside you, enough of it becomes implicit. But it wouldn't without that damned embarrassing sentence, and a handful of others like it. I can't recall who said or wrote it, but I do recall one author lamenting on how terrible it is when a godawful cliché really is the best way to say something, and that's exactly how I feel about that sentence. This is not to say "woe is me, editors don't 'get' my story, and nobody will publish it." I'm actually quite pleased with the rejections I've gotten so far. They tell me that the piece is being taken seriously by editors I respect, and the feedback I've gotten make the rejection letters some of the best and most useful I've ever gotten. They are encouraging rather than disheartening. The point of this rather red-faced confession and sort-of-case-study, is that not all pieces will work in all ways. I enjoy going to readings, despite my bumbling and my nerves, and I think it's a great opportunity for me to put myself out there, to network, and to meet writers whom I greatly admire, like the wonderful Rebecca Rosenblum, but aside from one unusually successful bawdy house reading I gave in 2003, it's not a very good venue for the kind of work I produce. Too much of what I do depends on the page. After years of hearing advice like "read it out loud to see if it works," I think I'm finally okay with that. After all, if it's good enough for Gogol's St. Petersburg tales, it ought to be good enough for my New Prospect stories, right?

The Biblioasis folks, who have published many fine books, including Rebecca Rosenblum's fine short story collection, Once, are running a Revenge Lit contest to celebrate the launch of Terry Grigg's new novel, Thought You Were Dead (looks quite interesting, actually). Many of the entries are being posted on the contest blog. "Speak Softly", my own entry, went up today. Check it out! And remember, there's still time to enter.

They had never been lovers, were barely friends, and he could count on one hand the number of times they had touched. He still felt deep in his bones, and lightly across his skin and hair, every one of those moments. If he closed his eyes, he could relive them all. The first time, when he had said or done something, he couldn't exactly remember what, her eyes had lit up the way he imagined newborn stars would, the change from dark indifference to the powerful, blazing expression of life and attentiveness so abrupt and affecting that it was, paradoxically, almost imperceptible. She had reached out to him, impulsively, and given him one of the light embraces with which young girls so often express unexpected pleasure, careless of their potential force and investing in them, or so they think, only transient meaning. That first time was for him still the most powerful. The hairs on the back of his neck had stood at attention, and the whole of his consciousness briefly settled, and then became painfully focused, on those few square inches of his bare skin as it was kissed by her naked forearm. He was not too young to understand the weight of that experience; when she released him his lower lip hung slack, and for a brief moment he was outside of himself. He saw with a kind of double vision, as though his consciousness had taken a quarter-step to the right, was somehow almost, but not quite, in the same space as his body. Very quickly the world, his backpack, the linoleum floor, his locker, all snapped back into focus. He went back to what he was doing, back to his life, which was the same, but which would never be the same again, and the sense of being both inside and outside his body would stay with him for the rest of his life, climbing occasionally from some older, reptilian part of his brain to confront him whenever, by chance, they would meet on the street, in a café, at the grocery store. Was this what love felt like? He decided, then and there, that it had to be.

With several stories out there in the hands of editors waiting for acceptance or rejection (including one I spent six years writing) I find that my biggest problem isn't anxiety, it's figuring out how to write "and then I woke up" (or similar) a third of the way through the story I'm working on now without my readers thinking everything so far was just a dream. I'm horrified that the exact right phrase I need is a goddamn cliché. It's things like this that drive writers to drink. That, and spending six years trying to get a ten page story just right.

For three years I published and co-edited (as fiction editor) an online journal of literature. Lately I've been feeling uninvolved in the literary community, and I'm searching for ways to connect. I'm considering relaunching the journal. In the past we published fiction and poetry. If I did decide to relaunch it, I would publish only fiction.

My question is this: would you be interested in reading such a journal? Would you submit to such a journal (on the understanding that I couldn't pay you)? Would you be willing to post about such a journal on your blog? If yes to any of these, would you be willing to donate money (I'm thinking about micro-donations, a dollar here or there), with the understanding that any donations would go exclusively to the hosting bill? Why (or why not—this last question being an addendum to any and all of the above)? Please leave a comment below (and if you wish your answers to be more private, feel free to email me).

Thanks in advance for your time.

Cliff Burns made a name for himself by publicly venting his spleen after years of rejection letters. A former editor recently mused at The Guardian about both the writing and receiving of rejection letters, because apparently there will soon be an entire book of them. There's even a quite clever blog devoted to literary rejection. It seems that writers and publishers like nothing better than to discuss their rejection experiences in the harsh halogen glare that is the public eye. Allow me, then, to add my voice to theirs; I got another rejection letter today (well, rejection email, I guess, since I asked to be informed that way, to save on stamps).

I had sent my story to a newish publication, not entirely certain it was right for them, but hoping that they would accept it anyway—after all, they might still be struggling to define their vision. They did not accept it, and told me so in a simple, polite letter. So what did I do? This afternoon I wrote another cover letter to a different publication, printed another copy of my story, stuffed the whole thing into an envelope, and walked to my nearest post box. The rejection elicited exactly zero emotional reaction from me. Just like every other rejection letter I've ever gotten. Where is my spleen? Where is my bile, my anger, my self-righteousness? I'm really proud of my story. I think it's wonderful. I think other people should consider it wonderful. To top it off, I'm a notorious suck about other kinds of rejection. Bad job interviews (or applications that result in no interviews) send me to a pint of Tofutti—it was Ben & Jerry's until I stopped being able to eat dairy. Romantic failure breaks me. I am a sentimental fool at the best of times. I feel like my spleen is missing out on some much needed exercise here. Okay, every writer knows that at some point he or she is going to get one of these. It's not my first, and no doubt it's not my last. It comes with the job, but somehow, given all the hullabaloo I brought up in the first paragraph, I can't help but feel like it's almost unwriterly of me not to be upset.

I suppose I should mention, since I promised updates on my novel-in-progress, that I put my novel aside back in June for personal reasons, and did no writing at all until August, when I attended the Salon des Refusés launch party. I was so inspired that I went back to some short fiction I had lying around. I now have one story out there looking for a home, and at least three more packing their things, combing their hair and asking me for bus fair. Fingers crossed.

Also, I apologize for the lack of updates here recently. We're on the cusp of the holidays season, and things are hectic around Casa del August. Normal posting will most likely resume next weekend.

Often many of the most important choices a writer can make about a work of fiction are unconscious ones; the decision to use first or third person narration can seem more like intuition than anything else. There are times when I agonize over it, particularly when I'm heavily invested in the raw material (if I'm writing in the semi-autobiographical mode, for example). It's not enough that it "feel right"; the choices I make also have to work with whatever point I'm trying to make, with whatever themes I've (consciously) chosen to include. For A Temporary Life, my novel-in-progress, one of the themes—or maybe it's more accurate to say "problems"—I'm working with is that of memory.

Using the first person form of narration came most naturally, but I'm not satisfied with how most writers present dialogue in first person narratives. Let me give you an example from a book I actually quite like, Michael Helm's The Projectionist:

She stands and collects our plates, though I haven't finished yet, takes them to the kitchen counter and returns.

"What's the biggest secret you've kept?" she asks.

"This won't be easy, will it?"

"You've never asked me why I didn't come back home all those years."

"Some people don't. It's not that unusual."

Do you see anything wrong with that passage? Probably not, but I do. Not in terms of Helm's novel, of course, but in terms of my own. How can I create a narrator with an untrustworthy memory and allow him to quote dialogue with such precision? The answer, of course, is that I can't. How many people do you know who can remember conversations with that kind of accuracy? I can do it for moments of extreme emotional intensity, but otherwise I can't recount a conversation that I had an hour ago, never mind years or months or weeks ago. I make exceptions for this "problem" in works of what I think of as "Dear Reader" or "Gentle Reader" fiction, so named for the somewhat antiquated convention of the narrator (not necessarily the author) directly addressing the reader and thereby explicitly indicating an awareness of the novel as a specifically written construction, rather than a representation of memory or an oral retelling of events.

It would be easy to say that I'm frustrated with or dislike or am in some way in conflict with the conventions of realist fiction. Nothing could be further from the truth; all form of fiction have their conventions and great art can be made working both within and against those conventions. I quite enjoyed the Michael Helm novel that I quoted from above, and though it sticks rather rigorously to the conventions of the realist novel, it's also elegant, inventive, and challenging. It's a very strong work of fiction.

In the instance of A Temporary Life I've come to the conclusion that using the standard realist presentation of dialogue isn't the right choice; instead one of the things I've done is stripped nearly all the dialogue from the piece, and I'm even contemplating removing all the quotation marks and using long dashes like William Gaddis or James Joyce or any number of authors you could name. When (note the optimism) my novel finds a publisher I have no doubt that it will be called experimental (should it even receive any attention), though that's not at all my intention. As an artist I don't feel like I'm obliged to reinvent the wheel (or the novel, as it were), nor even to work outside of the conventions of whatever genre I'm working in (I would love to write some urban fantasy or science fiction some day). What I feel it's most important for me to do is make the choices that are most appropriate for what I'm trying to say with (or in) any particular work of fiction. If it means abandoning traditional forms of dialogue in one piece, or being relentlessly true to convention in another, then so be it; the only yard-stick I use is whether or not it's appropriate to the spirit of the work.