11/8/2000
On Writing, Memoirs of the Craft - Stephen King
I had already seen Biography on A&E featuring Stephen King, so I knew he had come from abject poverty to huge success. On Writing is so much more personal. He talks about his life, his early writing adventures, and his tips on writing. It's written in such a conversational style that it's like you're sitting there, hanging out with Steve King in his writing room in his house in Maine.
I got a lot of encouragement from this book, in part from getting the picture -- once again -- that the writers we see as so successful today spent years and years perfectly their craft.
As I often do when I'm reading a biography, I found his birthdata and printed on his horoscope to see, in this case, if his writing skill and huge success could be seen in the pattern of his birth chart. Depending on the accuracy of the data (9/21/47, 1:30 a.m., Portland Maine), he has Sun in Virgo, Moon in Sagittarius, and Cancer rising. I think the most significant pattern might be the Mercury-Neptune conjunction at the fourth house cusp. This gives intuition and imagination, including the ability to 'channel' the characters he's writing about, to really get under their skin. At the fourth house cusp, he's connecting to deep memories, our collective root consciousness and maybe our fears. With that aspect alone, he might imagine his stories but never get them on paper. The sextile to his Saturn-Pluto conjunction makes his writing energy more constructive and connects with the struggles between the everyday life and the deep unconscious that Saturn-Pluto implies. Sun squared Uranus - unusual, unique, creative - combined with Sun sextile Jupiter (wealth) show his worldly success, along with Mars just above the Cancer ascendant symbolizing powerful determination.
Of course, what Stephen King says is: he just likes to tell a good story.
All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson
William Gibson writes books about people plugged into computers, people plugged into the 'net. His best characters are able to see the patterns in the swirl of information and predict future patterns and events. (Sort of like being an astrologer or psychic.) I'm a fan of the future. I like to see how sf writers take an idea that's present today and expand it into a future reality. Gibson is a master at this.
And its
always about computers and virtual reality in Gibson's world. I had
read Idoru, his previous book, in which a computer construct becomes sentient.
This book picks up some of the same characters and takes them farther.
His descriptions and language are superb, his characters quirky, and the
action nonstop. I loved this book.
Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison
This book was even more interesting having read the mystery set in China Death of a Red Heroine recently. The Skull Mantra is another mystery about a Chinese man, Shan Tao Yun who is a political prisoner in a Tibetan prison work camp. The Tibetans are being forced to build roads through their sacred mountains. Many of them are monks who secretly practice meditation and Buddhist rituals despite the possibility of severe, even capital, punishment if caught. When the work crew finds a headless corpse in the construction area, Shan (a former inspector in China) is assigned the task of solving the mystery.
The best part of the book is Shan's attunement to the Tibetans and his pursuit of Buddhist spiritual study with the monks who are his fellow prisoners. The Skull Mantra also does a good job of descriptive background on the suffering and daily life of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule, and the complications of Chinese politics. In terms of language, of course Qiu Xiaolong in Death of a Red Heroine was more convincing in making me feel the protagonist was truly Chinese. It's the turn of a phrase and the thought patterns that come to mind. In other words, Shan as a 'fish out of water' in Tibet, resonated more as a westerner than as a Chinese. Am I too picky? They were both good books, and I enjoyed reading both. Death of a Red Heroine was a superior book but Skull Mantra was fascinating and well worth reading whether you are a mystery fan or a person concerned about the Tibetan holocaust.
(c) 2000 Marcia M. Sacks
