Scolyard's "The Constructs Foresee Their Doom" in Three-Lobed Burning Eye

A bit late with this, but the new issue of Three-Lobed Burning Eye went live last week, and includes this story, set in the city of Boskrea. This story was a long time in seeing print. I wrote the initial draft when I was still living in Michigan, as I realized when I was going through some old papers recently, which makes it early 2005. It was my first story set in Boskrea (a much more recently written story that takes place long after "Scolyard" appeared in Penumbra's dreams issue last summer, "A Dream of the City's Future" and a Boskrea poem is forthcoming in Nameless, and there are quite a few others awaiting a home). It was frequently praised by editors...but always "not quite right for our publication" or something along those lines.

So naturally, I'm thrilled to see it in print, and if you take a look at that table of contents, I feel like it's in very good company. You can read the issue for free online or order a .pdf from the site. Enjoy!

The Dissolution of Society

So apparently, according to Fox News commentators yesterday, my lifestyle is a contributing factor in the decline of civilization.

Why is this, you ask? Something to do with sexual orientation? No. Religious beliefs or practices? Criminal activity? Illicit drugs? No, no, no. Politics? No...well, probably that too, from their perspective, but that's not the point here. It's that as a stay-at-home dad, I am part of the 40% of US households in which the primary breadwinner is a female.

What?

There's a video clip and a transcription of part of the exchange at TPM.

I mean, who knew? A healthy, egalitarian relationship based on mutual respect, one in which our roles are complementary not based on some pseudo-science of what roles gender is supposed to play but based on our actual, individual talents, abilities, and interests...what kind of message are we sending here? How awful.

Is my situation not what they have in mind in their screeds? It's possible that for some of them, they're picturing something different, with uninvolved dads or something they are equally opposed to. If so, the fact that they base their outrage on those other images without even having the imagination to recognize that there might be perfectly healthy and positive reasons in many of those families...well, it should call into question their ability to analyze things in general. That's clearly not the case with this Erickson guy, though. He's incensed that anyone would challenge traditional gender roles and not accept his interpretation of how families ought to be. By his estimation, I'm anti-science and according to his later update, have my panties in a wad. Well...no, my boxers are perfectly comfy, and while I'm definitely anti-pseudo-science and anti-false-science and anti-nonsense, I am not anti-science at all. If your goal is to create another 40% block of people from across the political spectrum who would hesitate to support a candidate that you support, though, well done.

Story in Miscellanea Library

My story (ish) "The Delicacies and Delights of Boskrean Cuisine" is up today at Miscellanea. If you dig around the Library a bit (something I definitely recommend doing), it'll be clear that this was written specifically for the Library. The concept of Miscellanea is that these are excerpts from books that you can imagine existing, which leads to great Borges-tinted whimsy. So I took the Boskrea setting--which I've used for a number of stories, including "A Dream of the City's Future" in last summer's Penumbra and the forthcoming story in 3LBE and poem in Nameless--and just did something fun and whimsical to go in the Library.

(Probably worth apologizing for no posts for a while, though I don't want to make a habit of blogging about blogging... Suffice it to say that our now-four-month-old is demanding more of my time than either of his siblings did at this age. I expect posts to continue to be highly sporadic for the time being.)

Short Fiction Friday

I haven't been following all my favorite ezines as closely as I'd like, but I did get a chance the other day to read some of what I have collected on my Nook (I automatically upload Lightspeed, Electric Velocipede, and Weird Fiction Review and manually upload Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and Abyss & Apex to my Nook, while reading Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld and quite a few others online at the moment). I haven't come close to catching up on everything that's waiting for me (either on the Nook or in browser tabs on my computer), but the November 29 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies I found well worth reading.

"The Telling" by Gregory Norman Bossert tells of a manor and what happens after its (presumed) lord dies, especially its effects on Mel (a child whose role in the structured patterns of the house is uncertain) and the bees (which react dramatically to the news that the lord has died). Though the narrative style is not like Mervyn Peake's, there's something of Gormenghast in this manor and its ritual- and propriety-focused inhabitants, and without revealing too much, something of Titus Groan in Mel's decision at the end.

John E. O. Stevens' "The Scorn of the Peregrinator" is one of those stories where the strange and evocative setting is the draw. It's the kind of wildly imaginative society I tend to love, immersing the reader into it with little explanation because our eye in the world is entirely familiar with it. So as the story goes, you're constantly realizing more and more of how strange and fascinating these bird-like people are. Into this society, the Peregrinator of the title has come to conscript soldiers for some distant war. The main character and his relatives don't believe they owe any more.

Interview question

I'd nearly forgotten that I wrote up a blog post for Penumbra as part of their one-year anniversary celebration. All of us who'd had stories in the inaugural issue were invited to contribute something to their blog. I wrote up and sent in my answer to the question they posed me, "How do you turn a simple idea into something publishable?" in the day or two before heading to the hospital, so I guess it just slipped my mind that this was coming out. Looks like late last week, though, my post went up on their blog.

Absence: newborn

So shortly after posting my last post, I went rushing off to the hospital with my wife, and my son was born that night...at two minutes to midnight, and that's the actual time not fudged just so we could say he was born on 10-11-12 (as dates are written in the US).You have no idea how many times I keep hearing that insinuation... We're doing well, though I will admit I haven't been able to concentrate much on any writing (or blogging, critiquing, etc.).

Next Big Thing meme

I was doubly tagged for this meme, first by W. E. Larson and shortly after that by Nick, who specified that he'd like me to focus on the work he's currently reading the draft of.

1. What is the title of your Work in Progress?

Fugitives on the Avocet Road

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?


No one source. I wanted to write a book for last year's National Novel Writing Month and started piecing together scraps and pieces from my mind a few months before hand. I wanted it to center on a family, not just a lone individual (which is often my default, I'm realizing). I wanted it to be a family that is not treated well by the people with power in their world. And then I got the image of a society where everyone is constantly on the move: families, villages and towns, even entire cities moving constantly up and down the road. As I was brainstorming this, I was coming back from a jog to the Children's Gardens (my daughter's favorite destination) with the jogging stroller and passed a street called Avocet, and I couldn't quite place what an avocet was. Once I looked it up at home, I added that into the mix, and everything started falling into place.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy, I suppose. Or speculative fiction at any rate. There are some SFnal touches to it and certainly some influences from other sub-genres, but really it's a non-epic secondary world fantasy.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I watch few movies and less TV, and even when I do, I don't pay attention to who the actors are, really. So no idea, to be honest. Teeana would need to be on the older side of middle-age (she'd likely seem older than her actual age, after all she's been through). Someone who can come across as tough and a little bitter, though not overcome by the bitterness. Vosef should come across as playfully child-like and inquisitive.

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?


Fugitives on the Avocet Road is a non-linear fantasy of a family of refugees, pursued the length of a mysterious, barren road through a land where the soil is deadly to those who stay in one place for too long.

6. Will your book be self-published or traditionally published? Represented by an agent or no?

(I've re-worded this question, as the original set up an odd either-or that didn't make much sense.) I have no plans to self-publish it. I'm in the process of querying agents for a different novel, so having an agent would be ideal, but I wouldn't be opposed to submitting it unagented if necessary and if the right publisher happens to have an open reading period.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?


Two months. I wrote about 65k words during NaNo and finished the draft by the end of December.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?

Hmmm. Perhaps Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine. That was certainly an influence on my decision to make it a non-linear book. I've been intrigued by non-linearity for a long time and wrote one novel some years ago that dabbled with it. Reading Mechanique around the time I was brainstorming the story reminded me of my interest in that and helped me see how this was a story that would benefit from such an approach. Other than that, there are influences all over the place, conscious and unconscious, that I'll let my biographer some day attempt to trace.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It sounds disappointing to answer that NaNo inspired me... I wouldn't say any particular person or thing inspired it--well, maybe a touch of Occupy Wall Street rhetoric--but mostly a wish to tell a story and to stretch my ability to write it, to try something new and see how it plays out.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Bees! Honey! (Another influence as I was brainstorming that worked its way in was Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month.) The constant threat of body mutation from the soil. Fighting against injustice. Camel-drawn villages. A city that winds its way up and down the mountain road by being pulled by a pair of massive chains.  Another city that is not a place but an amoeba-like grouping of people who choose to self-identify as belonging together. Deadly poisons and a sweet escape that tastes like revenge.

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

The links are above, at the beginning of this post. I'll have to try to come back and tag some people later...

Human skeleton spiders and frogs

I try not to post Io9 links much from my blog, partly because I figure other people are already seeing those posts on Io9 and partly because I'd be tempted to post so many links that it would just take over the blog, but this movie of frogs and a bird and a spider, all with human-like skeletons visible inside is just too cool to not link to. Creepy and mesmerizing, and seems to gel with the human-animal-robotic interactions that crop up a lot in my stories, even if there's nothing actually mechanical involved.