Last December I said I’d likely never write another novel. And what did I start doing before a month had passed? Writing another novel. Never say never and all that. The story of how this novel, The Storytelling Cat, came to be would make for an interesting essay on creativity and art in itself.
Later in this post I’ll explain more about the creation process, together with info on how to get the novel – a free download is of course available – but for now there’s something intriguing you should know: This book is unlike any other I’ve written; there’s a lot of peculiarity involved.
That the protagonist is a cat with human knowledge is the least odd thing about this book.
The cover of The Storytelling Cat is one of my favorites (of my own books, that is), though I’m not objective. You see, I painted it myself!(more…)
“The meaning of novels: What’s so novel about a novel”. If you think the title is a bit insane, that’s what you get when you make a post out of a discussion between me and Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. We talk about novels, language, and whatever else comes to mind. Igor is also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.
Chris: This convo kind of started with my suggesting “No news is good news, I suppose”, which you expertly picked up.
Igor: No news is neither good nor bad, because there is no news to be valued or assessed. Yet, a certain literary background allows you to use this sentence the way you did. In a sense, it is a paradox. But it is only a paradox insofar as that paradox is the clearest and most direct way of saying what is condensed in the sentence. But how so? As I always say, but few people listen to me: Logic concerns only a very limited subset of human languages. Everything that really matters to say, that is, everything that is really interesting in the events of language lies beyond the limits of logic.
To jump to a more interesting part of the reasoning: This means that literature carries (with)in itself – encodes, someone will (wrongly) say – a knowledge (of a generative kind). But why all this? The strongest empirical (from the marketplace) evidence of what I am saying is in the growing trend of publishing houses adding “a novel” to the front cover of fiction books!
Usually I would’ve inserted here a stock photo relevant to the topic, the meaning of novels. But one meaning of a novel could be this: Create your own meaning. So, take this photo and create your own meaning on how it’s related to the “meaning of novels”.(more…)
Imagine a world where people snub literature and knowledge. Those who read are “readers”, a derogatory term barely superior to being a burger-flipper. It’s a world just like our own. When you think of it, it is our own. Welcome to Illiterary Fiction, my latest literary-fiction novel.
What if people stopped reading altogether? What if there existed professional readers, whose job would be to read and summarize for those who wouldn’t read anything longer than a tweet?
The world of Illiterary Fiction is not a pleasant one. It becomes even less so once you realize it doesn’t differ at all from our world.
