Archive for January, 2017

On Pens & Mayhem

Posted: January 25, 2017 in A Choir of Exiles, Books, ChiZine, Dawn Song, horror fiction, Publishing, Stuff from Mike's Life, Uncategorized, Writing
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Ordinarily when I write longhand, I use a Lamy Extra Fine Point fountain pen or a Shaeffer Extra Fine on old accountant ledgers. (Why old accountant ledgers? See this post: https://michaelmarano.com/category/lovecraft/) Why a fountain pen? I love the feel and flow of a fountain pen and, best of all, I love the scritching sound they make on paper. I use ballpoints all the time for note-taking and regular, everyday writing not related to writing fiction. But the sound ballpoints make on paper isn’t nearly as satisfying as a fountain pen nib’s scritching. I’m old enough to have begun my writing career on a typewriter, and to write in a way that is not associated with some kind of sound feels like a cheat. (For that matter, as a journalist, I’m of the very last generation to have worked in a newsroom with a typewriter and a teletype. All that wonderful noise and clatter helped me to focus and make deadlines. I still have a few sheets of used teletype paper in my files, on the backs of which I scribbled copy.)

Why write longhand at all? Simple. I get really fucking sick of looking at computer screens. Past a certain point, they hurt my eyes, and my hands get all achey from too much typing. Plus, it’s just a good idea to grab a pen, a tablet of paper, plop down in a coffeehouse or a library and just write, without any interfacing digital technology. I think it’s a healthy way to use different parts of your brain, so they don’t get all creaky and gummed up.

Today, though… I wrote with a Cross Medium Point. Why? Because in the novel I’m writing, A Choir of Exiles, I had to kill two sympathetic characters, and the ink had to really flow along with the mayhem. I gotta finish typing it all up before I make dinner.

Maybe I’ll play a sound file of a teletype machine going, so it’ll sound like a race with a real deadline?

 

 

On the passing of William Peter Blatty

Posted: January 13, 2017 in Uncategorized
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I never met William Peter Blatty. Yet as someone who was not, as he was, educated by Jesuits, but was educated in History and Theology and Philosophy by people who were educated by Jesuits, I felt a certain intellectual connection to him and his work. And, as someone who has always loved a good joke, I admired the hell out of the guy who could pull a fast one over on Groucho Marx, as Blatty did when he posed as an Arab prince on Your Bet Your Life.

I hold Mr. Blatty’s thematic trilogy of The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and Legion in such high esteem because of the deep humanity and humor present in those works. Admirers of these novels, and their film adaptations, need only hear the following words to break out in an uncontrollable grin: “Carp”; “Rabies”; “Lama”. (Or maybe “Fritos.”) If you’ve read his comedic book Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing, the question “Did you fuck my sister?!” will probably make you guffaw. His humor was always based on deeply human interaction. As was his horror.

It was with Mr. Blatty’s understanding of humanity, and our shared intellectual background (albeit, mine was second-hand Jesuit instruction), that I approached him to blurb my first novel, Dawn Song. I wrote him at the end of 1997. he sent me the following reply, postmarked Dec. 31…

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The generosity with which Mr. Blatty extended to me the courtesy of reading my book, and providing it with a thoughtful and very kind blurb that has graced every edition of it, demonstrated to me that the humanity present in his fiction was, in fact, the humanity present in the person. On this day of his passing, I know that I shall miss this person, knowing his humor and humanity are no longer in this world.