Please Help Me Stop Playing the New York Times Spelling Bee Game

Thank God it only comes out once a day

My final form

I write Substacks when things are going well and I have extra prose-energy to burn off, and also when things are going badly and I can’t seem to write anything else. So the blank spots on my Substack indicate bits where things are going pretty well.

Also bits where I’m playing the New York Times Spelling Bee game too much. Actually that’s all the time.

So all (novel,¹ other novel which consists entirely of fight scenes—hear me out—comic, movie treatment, TV thing, other TV thing, middle-grade series, picture book about eggs) is going fine, but it does mean my Substacking has suffered, so just to break the silence I’m doing a chatty cop-out post about things I’ve been enjoying lately. For example:

-- I’ve been reading a lot of Robert Harris lately. I have at this point read Enigma (at first I mistyped Enigman, which I’m now saving as a future superhero name, hands off), Fatherland, The Ghost, The Fear Index, Act of Oblivion, and I’m currently halfway through Munich. I feel like I should read his Cicero books too, because everybody loves them, but I started one and got bored.

I’m reading Harris for the same reason I read anybody while I’m working on my own stuff, namely because he does things well that I want to do well. He has great narrative pacing and structure. He’s also an absolutely marvelous descriptive stylist—far better than a thriller writer really needs to be. Look how he takes the perilously abstract business of WWII code-breaking and gives it a tangible, urgent reality:

There was a fireproof safe in one corner, leaking intercepts, and a rubbish bin labelled CONFIDENTIAL WASTE. There was a telephone with a red handset. Paper was everywhere—on the floor, on the table, on the top of the radiator where it had baked crisp and yellow, in wire baskets and box files, in tall stacks and in piles that had subsided into fans.

Le Carré couldn’t have done it better.

— The Beheading Game, by Rebecca Lehmann. Ann Boleyn wakes up the night after her execution, sews her head back on and goes looking for revenge. It’s not out till next year, but the publisher sent it to me for a blurb, and it’s even better than it sounds.

— Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. I am the last English-speaking person in the world to have read this book, which is stunning and made me think about Mello Yello for the first time in decades.

— The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. A Holmesian mystery that starts with a man dying by having a tree grow out of him. It’s high on my list of novels that, like The Bright Sword, did not win the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

— The Racket, by Conor Niland. This is how Percival Everett describes having the idea for James: “I was playing tennis, and as I watched my crosscourt backhand barely miss the sideline by the length of the average adult body, I thought, has anyone ever told Huck Finn’s story from Jim’s point of view?”

For reasons that are not well understood, I am obsessed with tennis, even though like Everett I have a lousy backhand. I play two or three times a week, and think about it approximately every five minutes. Conor Niland, by contrast, has an amazing backhand and was once ranked 129th in the world, and his book The Racket is a gloomily but deliciously frank account of what it’s like to be a mid-level professional tennis player, i.e. to be sensationally gifted and incredibly disciplined at something and still only barely scrape a living. I’ve heard it argued that the same qualities that made Niland only a medium success on the pro tour—his thoughtfulness, his intelligence, his clear-eyed self-assessment—are the ones that make him such an excellent writer.

In fact Niland’s account of life on the lower tiers of pro tennis—many flights, going hotel to hotel, living on protein bars, questioning one’s self-worth—reminded me a bit of being on book tour. And as it happens (←TRANSITION!) I’ll be turning up in person in a few places to ‘launch’ the paperback edition of The Bright Sword—first in Evanston at Bookends & Beginnings on July 8th, then in NYC at Books are Magic on July 10th. Please come by!

Then I’m on to Celsius 232 in Spain, a country I have never been to before. If you’re reading something you’re loving, do let me know in the comments, as I am rapidly running out of Robert Harris.

1. Working title: The Fifth Sun. Or maybe The Sun Is a Chariot, which is better?