Fox and Tea

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This is from the same art magazine as yesterday's image. I can't tell you which one, however, because I don't remember. It fits well within one of the themes of the novel, which is storytelling. (Also deceit, but pretty much all fiction trades in that.) I think even back then I knew that the overall plot would be of a fairy tale--though not in the way you might expect.


Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 64 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.

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Two Hands

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This is taken straight from an art magazine. There is a suggestion of spirituality which fits well into the world I was building.


Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 65 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.

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Salamander and Flower Horse

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The top image is marked "Salamander." The middle left image is marked "Stone and eggs." The bottom image is marked "Flower Horse." None of them, I believe, made it into The Iron Dragon's Mother.

What I was reaching for here was not only characters but also items or creatures or situations that might fit into the novel. The images are still inchoate, still yearning to be transformed into word.




Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 66 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.

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Inwit

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This image, taken from an art magazine I suspect, I titled "Inwit" or conscience. On the side, I wrote, "It is all faces and hands." Which is a crucial insight, maybe, into the art of characterization.

It's the white eyes that make this image so creepy.

Inwit almost became a character.


And as always . . .

I'm on the road again. If anything happens, I'll let you know.


Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 67 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.

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Another Page from the Image Book

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This was probably the first image--a collage, obviously-- to be pasted into the Image Book. I filled the rest of the page with a sketch of a mountain with its shadowed side in light and its lit side casting a shadow parallel to the ground.  The rest of the page I filled with words. Or "words." This search for words is what the Image Book was all about. It was meant to, eventually, pull words out of nothing and place them on the page.


Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 68 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.

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The Bureaucrat Has Left The Planet

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Be patient with my title. All will be explained.

Gene Wolfe was a combat vet, a true and faithful husband, a practicing Catholic, and an accomplished engineer. He was also the author of The Book of the New Sun, the single greatest accomplishment of science fiction to date, and stories like "The Eyeflash Miracles," "Alien Stones," and "The Hero as Werwolf." Short fiction is not given its due these days but these and other stories by Wolfe will be read a hundred, a thousand years from now. I am not exaggerating here. He was one of our best.

But you want insight into his character. Well, okay. The first convention where I ever got to spend any serious time with the man, he and I and my wife, Marianne Porter, were sitting at a table and he started to tell us about a library book sale he'd been to the previous weekend. He was excited because he'd gotten several shopping bags of old books for two dollars each. Then he said, "Looking through them, books published a hundred year ago, so many had inscriptions like 'To Amelia from her loving Aunt Mame.' You look at them, so many inscriptions, and all these people are... are... they're all dead!"

And he almost burst into tears.

Afterward, Marianne said to me (keep in mind here that she immediately fell in love with him), "That is the most emotional man I ever met."

He was, and I don't think that was unrelated to his genius.

The first time I ever met Gene was long before, in the late seventies when he was working as an engineer but had already written  some of his most brilliant work, and I was struck by how astonishingly ordinary he looked. He was one of the most ordinary-looking men I had ever met. Later, upon retirement, he grew that wonderfully eccentric Gene Wolfe mustache and achieved an eccentricity befitting the man he was. But back then, in the Midtown Diner with Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (I was definitely bottom man on the totem pole) he looked like the Continental Op--a man who would disappear into a crowd if you looked away from him for an instant.

Much later, I set out to write Stations of the Tide.

The protagonist of the novel was never named. Throughout, he was referred to as the Bureaucrat. It was important to the story that he be underestimated for most of the book and only revealed as extraordinary at the end. So when I created him, I thought of him being Gene Wolfe. On the outside, he was extraordinarily ordinary. But inside, he was... Gene Wolfe!

Not to discourage you from reading my novel but at the end the Bureaucrat wins. Of course he does. Inside, he's Gene Wolfe.

And now, goddammit, he's gone.

Vaya con dios, Gene. If God is just, you and Rosemary are together again.


And today's Image Book page . . .

Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 69 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.
 

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The Image Book for The Iron Dragon's Mother

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In the beginning is the word. For novels, at least. There's that moment when you write the first word and everything that follows becomes possible, and that's a wonderful sensation.

But--in my case at least, all writers having their own ways and methods--before the word comes the image. When I decided to write the novel that became The Iron Dragon's Mother, I began by compiling images that had the kind of "feel" I wanted for the novel. Strange and otherworldly. Archetypal. Evocative. Something to arouse the muse.

It occurred to me that other people might be interested in them, so I decided to share.

Above is the cover of the book.

Here's the inside cover. The pic was cut from an art magazine, I believe.

Two more images.The bottom one is not a collage but a newspaper photo (I think) altered with a pair of scissors. The flame was added by pen.

There are more than a hundred such images and I'll be sharing one or more a day until I've posted them all here, in order. Sometimes I'll have something else to talk about and then I'll put it at the top of the blog. But there will be a new page at the bottom of the post.


And your daily reminder . . .

Only 70 days until The Iron Dragon's Mother comes out!

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