The Literary Intestinal Tract

NEW RULE.

No one in publishing, be they editor, author or assistant, is allowed to talk about a scandal until I get a chance to discuss it first.  It is very unfair of you to constrain me to the laws of time and space, as I am naturally a free-flowing, come-as-you-are sin against nature and such things offend me.  Hence, in the future, when something exciting like this happens, please stop and think: “Does Sam Sykes have anything to say on this?”

In this case, I’ll let the prior comments on the subject slide, since we aren’t actually going to discuss such things as editors rushing to the defense of their authors.  I can’t really offer anything on that, since my viewpoints are compromised by the fact that my editor, Lou Anders, does not actually go on business trips but rather travels around the world, snapping the legs of people who give me bad reviews.  And Simon Spanton once went all Reservoir Dogs on a man for saying Tome of the Undergates was “okay.”

Really.  He still has the ear.  Uses it as a paperweight.

Rest assured, I didn’t link that review for an extended Tarantino joke (though I have been known to go the distance for such things).  We are actually going to talk about what it did.

And what it did was make me buy Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns.

I’ll preface what I’m about to say next with two lessons I learned from Peter V. Brett.  The first, after I narrowly escaped his attempt to hunt me for sport, was that you should never drink a funny-smelling liquid that Peter V. Brett offers you.  The second is that it’s usually considered leery for an author to review another author, chief among which being that our motives are always suspect.  We might want to curry favor, strike against or just be nice to a fellow author.  It’s a little like Al Capone persecuting Tony Soprano.

This isn’t a review, mind you, since I think Peter’s advice is pretty sound, but it’s worth mentioning in the interests of keeping totally ethical.

I’m not going to go into vast detail about what I thought about the book (chiefly because I haven’t finished it yet), but I am going to go into small detail about something that struck me from page one that I feel is definitely worth talking about.

And that is Mark Lawrence’s guts.

Not his physical guts, mind, though I’m sure he has very clean bowels, but his spiritual guts in taking something that I consider to be a risk and (in my opinion) seeing it rewarded.

See, this book has guts.  A lot of it.  And it has heart.  And it probably has a liver to filter out toxins and a kidney to produce urine in a timely manner.  This is a very meaty, bloody, gutsy book and I’m very pleased that it is.  From the very first page (or screen, since I bought it on Kindle, like an asshole), this book does not hesitate to let you know it has character.  It’s going to talk to you as much as it tells you a story and sometimes it’s going to talk with a mouthful of food and spit crumbs in your face or tell a bad joke.

Let me condense myself before these metaphors are so tortured I’m tried in the Hague.

I’ll be totally honest: I haven’t been reading a crapton of fantasy lately and it wasn’t until I picked up Prince of Thorns that I realized why.  Prince of Thorns is a story that has a tremendous amount of character and heart.  Lawrence was not afraid to bleed himself out onto the page and the book was not afraid to vomit off the page and into my lap in a big, steaming stew of words like a freshman from Gamma Rae Hulk.  That might sound backhanded, or even condemning, but really, it’s intense praise.

See, not a lot of books are willing to do what PrioThor (I have shortened it because I am cool) did.  Not a lot of books have that kind of spunk to them.  I feel that a lot of people sometimes view publishing as an exercise in damage control and you need to take as many precautions as possible to minimize your losses or a gamble in which you feel the urge to hedge all your bets on sure things.  And I think more than a few young or aspiring authors take this attitude as gospel.

But in minimizing damage, we miss out on the really big explosions.  In betting on a sure thing, we never get to feel the rush of beating chance.  No one is ever going to say “that shot was one-in-a-million” when you level a cannon at the broad side of a barn and your book is never going to be more than “that book that’s like the other book” if you, indeed, try to write the other book because that book is popular.  It may work out for you.  Hell, that other book may just be so awesome, it influenced you to the degree that you wanted to do it justice in your book.  That’s cool, too.

But you can’t let safety drive your story.  You can’t write about the safe bet you took and were 90% sure would win or the time that thing you thought was going to explode didn’t explode.

I don’t mean to make it sound easy.  Being fearless never is.  In giving your book personality, you’re making it personable.  And in making it personable, you’re risking the chance that someone might not like it.  Sometimes it sucks.  Sometimes it really sucks, as in the case of that particular review.  I don’t begrudge said reviewer her views, mind, and there are some points she brought up that I’m starting to notice, but that’s neither here nor there…well, maybe somewhere over there.

The point is that “it might suck” is not a really good reason not to do things.  In every day life, it’s lame.  In writing, it’s heresy.

Don’t ever be afraid to vomit on someone else.

The very worst that could happen is some angry author takes notice and decides to blog about it.