Believe in the work that comes through you. And as an author, you may be called to fight for that Story. Fight for it. Write your heart out. Don’t save your best stuff for later. Don’t rest on your laurels.

Haunt and taunt your characters, and let them tell the Story. Use the right point of view. Know how your characters are intimately part of their environment. Let them see the world through their own messy, unsure and somewhat magical senses of their own. Don’t let them be arcane and alien. Emotions are very fine, delicate, ephemeral, sensitive things.  If you can get them right, you are probably way ahead of the game.

Words DO matter. The perfectly perched word opens up worlds in your heart, and poetry is a dancing lesson for a writer. Respect pacing. Make every sentence earn its keep. Don’t let your reader wander away. Make your story more and more exciting as it goes along. Theme is no minor device – it is the backbone of your Story. But stories don’t have to be perfect, curlicued literature to get the job done: Ideas, not words, drive stories.

It's the last week of October, and it's raining this morning. Everything about it fills me with delight: the sound of rain drumming in the gutters, the smell of damp pine and oak, the feel of moist air that requires extra socks, and robes, socks and pillows, the flavor of warm tea in my mouth, the sight of my little armies of young round nasturtium leaves being tousled about by grey rain drops. Can I convince my husband to go out into the rain to fetch a log and set me a fire?  Or perhaps easier, make me a mocha? It's a perfect day to read and write. It's  also a perfect day to finish the fortieth book in my "100 Fantasy Books" reading list.

The Lost Continent is also a lost book. I found it only after scouring many, many sources for interesting authors with the last name of "H." This one was published by Forgotten Books and was originally written in 1900. The only information I could find on this adventure serial writer was in the short preface to this book, which notes he -- and this story -- was quite popular in his day.  

Hmmm. Perhaps there is more under his novelist nom-de-plume,Weathersby Chesny.

This is a swash-buckling story with a very faux-modest warrior-priest-king named Deucalion, a delightfully devious empress, a red-haired mammoth, pterodactyls* ("hairless man-eating birds"), and of course, "cave tigers." If you thought Girl-Power was a modern phenomenon, this story proves you (and me!) wrong. It was written to provide delight, in short bursts and it does, and therefore reads as easily as much more modern works. The story only failed for me when it forgot its unique and imaginative setting and focused only on Deucalion's angst.

One of my favorite passages:

"But these tarry shipmen faced it all with an indomitable courage, and never a cry of quailing. Life on the seas is so hard and (from the beasts that haunt the great waters) so full of savage dangers, that Death has lost half his terrors to them through sheer familiarity. They were fellows who from pure lust for a fray would fight to a finish among themselves in the taverns ashore; and so here, in this desperate sea-battle, the passion for killing burned in them, as a fire stone from Heaven rages in a forest; and they took even their death-wounds laughing."

This author of serials has a great lesson for writers: Write your story as if the reader will only see this one part of it, not its entirety. Don't save your best stuff for later. Throw it out there!

                                                                             Forgotten Books has this story and other buried gems.        
*Pterodactyls are probably as necessary an element to every story as are dodos. So here is an important reminder from Deviant Art.                                                               

In 2006, when the Thunderbird Book Store at the Barnyard in Carmel had its going-out-of-business sale, I reverentially snagged, along with a couple of other precious books, this -- a collection of Harrison's novels and stories about the dream-logic city, Viriconium. I always planned to read it for the fantasy list. It's time, now.

In Viriconium was short at 60 pages, but every page gives poetry and deep heart, and also seems to directly channel Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, besides. I am thinking M. John Harrison HAD to be an influence for another short book that was also so rich: Old Souls and the Grammar of Their Wanderings by Berrien C. Henderson. I might have to ask the author.  With the reality of ebola on our shores this week for the first time in history, In Viriconium was a haunting read about not only citizens, but the city itself, being eaten by a capricious plague as the portraitist Ashlyme flounders at saving a doomed artist while gods dressed as slobbering fools cavort through the crumbling city to amuse the disillusioned and deluded both. 

I wasn't clever enough this month to read the first book, but I do want to read of all of these.  In time.
Here are some especially handsome passages:

"There is a certain time of the afternoon," said Audsley King, "when everything seems repellent to me."

"A wet silvery light fell delicately on the white bridges, limning the afternoon curve of the canal and perfectly disguising its shabbiness. Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughtly; while down below , among the ragwort on the towpath, writhed the thousand-and-one black and yellow caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, some fat and industrious, rearing up their blunt, ugly heads, others thin and scruffy and torpid. The Barley Brothers at them and were sick."

Lessons on writing? Poetry is a dancing lesson for a writer, I think. 


                                                               Visit M. John Harrison's very curious website. Do.

Finding books for the "100 Great Books of Fantasy" reading list is half of the adventure.  This last set of "H" authors has been a challenge. First, finding at least a handful of authors to consider.  Second, reading through the first pages on Amazon to see if it snags me. (Not many do.) Third, acquiring books, and even then, finding they are not my cup of tea.  As beautiful as the writing was, I did not have enough brain power this month to surmount A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison (I have since shifted to more scalable work of his). And as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as the descriptions of dragons are in Barbara Hambly's Dragonsbane, I know that I cannot get through this epic sword-and-sorcery quest, which is a hard genre for me, ironically: Not in fact my cup of tea.

But, oh, when the stories are found it is all worth it.  They are the honeycomb in the moldering branch, finally reached by my fumbling claws. It's such a profound joy.  If anyone is combatting boredom or a purpose for their life, I would recommend finding 100 things you want to explore, and doing it...