Twigs and Brambles

Dutch folk tale

2012-01-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

I just came across the old folk tale of the city of Saeftinghe, which stood in a part of the Netherlands that is now submerged in a brackish swamp. An ancient city, lost to flooding, seems like there are many such legends. A few things make it stand out for me. First, it's a real historic event: the Dutch had drained the land in the 1200s. The city itself actually survived the flood that destroyed most of the surrounding land in 1570, but then Dutch soldiers (for reasons never fully explained in the several articles I read) had to destroy the last dike in the midst of the 80-Year War. The city was lost and never restored.

The other is just the little details of the folk tale version that make it charm me. It's a wealthy city, but cruel to those who come to immigrate, and this cruelty and greed is explicitly listed as the reason for its punishment. The mermaid part is fun, though I think common to other folk tales. But the ocean fish found swimming in the well is a cool touch, one of those things you could play up in a horror story, with the slow-building awareness of what's in story. And the bell tolling in the fog, though again common to other folk tales, wraps the tale up with a pleasing fairy tale feel.

I have to admit I'm tempted to somehow make use of this tale in a short story someday.

De-cluttering

2012-01-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

We're working to get rid of the clutter around our house, in advance of possibly selling it and buying a new one closer to my wife's work. Several years ago, I blogged about getting a piano for free off Craigslist, and so I decided to get rid of it the same way--the house will look much nicer without that taking up so much space in our living room. And I'll just say, if you ever feel like you don't get enough email, offer a free piano on Craigslist... Admittedly, the picture I took with my phone made the piano look actually a lot better than it really is, but the first person to come by has agreed to take it off my hands. And here I was afraid I'd get no takers and have to pay to dispose of it at the dump.

Goals and plans for the new year

2012-01-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that new years' resolutions make me uneasy. Part of it is the contrariness of not wanting to blindly do what so many others are doing. Part of it is the fact that January 1 is just an arbitrary division, and treating it as more than that is suspect. And the main part, really, is that resolutions so often seem to be treated as drastic and unsustainable life changes, where the goal is simply to see how long you can stick to it, but with no expectation of actually improving anything long-term (except at most vague imaginations of some idealized version of yourself).

That said...goals, I've found, are very important. I always knew they were. When I was in experiential education, we would even create challenges that reinforce how much goals can help, and it was clear from group behavior that they really did. Yet until a couple of years ago, I wasn't really setting goals for writing, thinking that between the unpredictability of life with small children and the unpredictability (and uncontrollable-ness of certain aspects) of a writer career, it just wasn't worth trying. When I did start setting goals two years ago, it wasn't in the context of the new year so much as a result of reading Jeff Vander Meer's The Writing Life. So I set out to create a (n admittedly loose) 5-year plan, a (much more defined) 1-year plan, and a series of monthly and weekly tasks that would get me to those plans. I found, as I should have known I would, that the goals and tasks helped tremendously.

At about the same time, I began participating in a weekly, public goal-setting forum (titled, ironically enough, "Agraphia," which refers to a pathologic inability to write...), and that too did wonders for spurring me to accomplish what I have done. And three years of participating in National Novel Writing Month has taught me that I work well with that kind of publicly stated goal, even as I haven't really gotten involved in the other aspects of NaNo.

So I do believe firmly in goals, and a new year is a convenient time to reconsider those goals and think about what to do to achieve them. At this point, my 5-year plan is down to three years. I've revised it some, but I still want to reach those same things by that time, so I haven't created a new longer-timeline set of goals yet. Some I've already accomplished, actually. My goals for this year, then, include getting my novel Descent of Balloons out to agents (and/or publishers), doing the first revisions of the novel I finished in December (possibly titled Fugitives of the Avocet Road), and writing more short fiction than I have the last couple of years. Somewhat beyond my control (except for the tasks of submitting intelligently and often), is to have a second SFWA-qualifying sale and to acquire an agent. There are various other goals and tasks for the year, but that's the general outlines of what I hope to accomplish this year. If I have any resolutions, then, it's simply to be diligent about setting out my tasks to achieve them.

"Gallery of Vanquished Art" in Kaleidotrope

2011-12-31T14:12:00.000-08:00

So a month or two ago, one of my favorite quirky print zines became an online zine (Electric Velocipede), and now another one has, Kaleidotrope. After 13 print issues (3 of which included stories of mine), Kaleidotrope is switching to being an e-zine, and the website went live today with its first e-issue. Rather than "issue 14," it's simply listed as "Winter 2012."

One of the stories in this first online issue is my flash fiction story "Gallery of Vanquished Art." This one began as a writing prompt. A group of us had been throwing out ideas for future writing prompts, rather, and someone suggested a monologue. That one wasn't the prompt chosen, but I decided I liked the idea and patterned this story very loosely on Robert Brownings' "My Last Duchess," where you gradually realize just what a monster the speaker of the poem is. The little hints and things he leaves unsaid make this a story I'm quite proud of.

New look

2011-12-30T14:07:00.000-08:00

Well...it being nearly 2012, I figured it was probably time to update the look of this blog. The template was still from when I created the blog (back in...2006, wow). And it definitely looked like it was stuck in 2006. I don't know if this means I'll blog any more frequently than I have been, but it might. And I love having the ability to add a bibliography right here on the blog rather than on that old, ad-supported writing website I used to have.

Initially the bibliography was what started this change, actually. I hadn't updated the thing for over a year, which only left off the one 2010 publication, but left off everything from this year, which was quite a bit, as well as the few things I have forthcoming. But the thought of updating it always got pushed back, in part because of how primitive that old writing website looked, so I just didn't want to think about it. Updating it had been part of my goals for the month, though, so I finally got to it last night. The links should all work now, as far as I've been able to tell. Feel free to let me know if anything doesn't

Twitter haiku and an interview

2011-12-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

I have a few haiku coming out with @trapezemag, beginning today. I'm also the showcase poet, so there's an interview with me at the magazine's website.

One thing I didn't get into the interview is how addicting those kinds of things can be: whether it's twitter fiction or twitter poetry or other minimalist/micro forms of creative writing, I just find it very fun and rewarding to sit down and see how the words take shape. I can easily get very distracted from other writing (and, to be honest, other things I ought to be spending my time on) and spend a few days just playing with the form.

Novel complete*

2011-12-20T22:26:00.000-08:00

I typed the words "The End" on my NaNo novel today.

Is it really complete? I don't know about that. It comes in a little on the short side--about 75k words. There were a few times when I went back and put something in brackets like [need a scene here to show XYZ] or [elaborate on ABC here], so that will boost the word count some. I'm sure there's layering and other things that will add to that, but there will also be tightening to make the prose stronger, so it's hard to say how that will even out. So that's one of several reasons that I can't say I feel some big thrill of accomplishment--it doesn't (and never has for previous novels either) quite feel real, like there's still some big thing I have to work on before I set it aside for a few months and then tackle the revisions. But there isn't. There will be plenty of big things to work on when it comes time to revise. But for now, this draft is done.

2011-11-17T11:17:00.001-08:00

Short Fiction Thursday

I've actually had a little more of a chance to read some short fiction this past week, and there were three that seemed especially worth noting.

First, I just discovered that Electric Velocipede's new incarnation as an ezine has already begun. That in itself merits mention--I liked EV's selections in print and am looking forward to the online version. After signing up for the newsletter so that I don't miss any future announcements, I picked one of the stories at random, "Dancing in the Winter Rooms" by David Tallerman, and I have to say that it was a good choice to begin on. It's the story of a generation ship and the doctor who realizes they've long since missed the planet they were sent to colonize. His attempts to change the customs of the small society on board the vast ship do not go over well.

Second, "Held Close in Syllables of Light" by Rose Lemberg in Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of those where the richly imagined society is a large part of the pleasure of the story. That society has sprung up around trade and a form of magic that involves names and words and the making clockwork kinds of contraptions. In the course of the story, the heroine challenges social customs, uncovers mysteries, and is forced to take powerful action that will change her life. It's a rich story, and a setting I would love to revisit in other stories.

Finally, "How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars (Marsmen Trad.)" by Lisa Nohealani Morton in Lightspeed has a wonderful mythopoeic feel to its science fictional tale of the colonists on Mars and their rebellion against Earth control. It is, in essence, a creation myth for its people, and wonderfully written one.

2011-11-10T17:57:00.003-08:00

Short Fiction Thursday

I'm not doing a lot of short story reading this month, with concentrating on novel writing (and admittedly starting to feel antsy at seeing so many stories showing up in various places and feeling like I'm getting left behind in not reading some of them...), but there was one story at Strange Horizons shortly before the month began that I felt deserved a mention here. I was intending to wait and find another story or two to recommend at the same time, but then got too wrapped up in NaNo to do so.

So, here is a delightful story: Shaenon K. Garrity's "Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel."

One rather extended quote from the story that, I think at least, makes it self-evident why I find this story so whimsically entertaining:

The Branch Library is infinite. All Libraries of Babel are infinite. The Branch Libraries are just smaller.

Which is larger: all possible numbers, or all possible even numbers? Logically, they're the same size. A fraction of an infinite set is still infinite, isn't it? By the same logic, it's possible for an infinite library in which every other book is, say, Stephen King's Cujo to still contain all possible books, same as the main library. It's just that you stand a 50% chance of getting Cujo.

I'm only using Cujo as an example. As you know, we did not work at an infinite library where every other book is Stephen King's Cujo. That library is in El Paso.

As the story goes on, the librarian ventures deep into the labyrinthine library, encountering the residents who've made their lives within the stacks after getting lost. But her worst dilemma might just be the city council.

And speaking of getting antsy as so many good-sounding stories (and nonfiction) get posted that I really want to read...Weird Fiction Review went live last week. There are already several stories and bunch of other content--columns, reflections, comics--and some interesting things lined up for the week ahead. Looks like a great hub for all kinds of cool stuff.

2011-10-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

Gearing up for NaNo

(apologies to Lesli for the abbreviation...)

Here we go again. Two years ago I decided near the end of October to give NaNo a try. At first I was thinking of doing a novel based on an image that had been growing in my mind for a while. I'd done a short story that summer based on what would have been a much earlier time period and liked the result, but I quickly decided that the story was one that needed more time to simmer in my subconscious. So instead I wrote a sequel to an earlier project I'd done, and was very pleased with the result. I finished the story right around the New Year and revised, got critiques, and revised again until I think it's ready for publication. Being a sequel, I need to first get a publisher on board for the first book, and I've sent that to one publisher and am still waiting to hear back.

Then last year I picked up the idea I'd intended to do the first year, and that really took off. The book, I think, is my most assured--a quirky and surreal story that I have high hopes for. The critiques have shown me some things that need revising, but nothing glaringly off at a deep level that would require major re-working. I've just finished what I intend to be the final revision pass of the first two chapters before querying agents. I'll need to continue that revision pass through the rest of the chapters first, though, and that's on hold for November. January is possible, though February probably more realistic.

And now it comes to this year...and this time I didn't have any kind of long-simmering idea to play with, though I started thinking more deliberately about it over a month ago. For a long time I've been wanting to do something ambitiously non-linear. My first inclination would be that NaNo probably isn't the best time to tackle something like that--my experience the first two years was that the social pressure/encouragement of NaNo really prodded me along, but I was glad to have relatively straight-forward stories I could race through. This time around, I'm looking at a variety of layers of narrative and structural intricacies. So this is going to be a different kind of challenge for me, but if there's one thing I carry with me from my experiential education days, it's that challenge is good...essential, even. So here's to a challenging, highly ambitious month of crazy writing (to squeeze in around all the usual day-to-day work)!

2011-10-13T12:20:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Thursday

For a thoroughly entertaining subversion of chosen-one fantasies, check out David J Schwartz's "Destiny, with a Blackberry Sauce" in Strange Horizons. Turns out fate is rather dim...

Kat Howard's "The Calendar of Saints" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies is well worth a read as well. It's a story of sword-dueling as a means of justice and of a society where the church honors scientists as saints...until a challenge comes through the courts that would undermine the esteem given scientific investigation and discoveries.

2011-10-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

Nobel winner

In case you missed the news, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for literature. I found a couple of his poems online without even much searching: "Outskirts" and "After a Death" (both translated by Robert Bly). This was not a poet I was familiar with, but I liked these, especially the second poem, with its vaguely post-apocalyptic feel and the image of leaves as "pages torn from old telephone directories." There are a few more poems of his at the Poetry Foundation's page on him as well.

2011-10-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

Penumbra issue 1 available

Be sure to check out Penumbra's inaugural issue. The official launch is today, so you can get your pdf right away if you order now. The issue includes my story "The Square That Hides a Thousand Stories," which is a whimsical fantasy story about a temple-worker sent to fetch an ancient relic. The issue's theme is art--in a broad sense--with mine playing with the idea of storytelling.

2011-09-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Funny quote

Arthur John became initialized early in life. Initialization is a Southern rite of passage akin to the Hebrew practice of circumcision, but it is sometimes less painful and does not always occur on the seventh day. So Arthur John Longstreet became A.J., and A.J. he has remained.

This is from The Front Porch Prophet by Raymond L. (R.L.?) Atkins, a book I somehow got a free copy of for my Nook. Not sure anything about it or if I'll enjoy it--this isn't a recommendation or review or anything--but just reading the opening, I came across that line and liked it.

2011-09-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

Thoughtfulness

I was thinking, in part in response to a recent conversation on a writing forum, about how we as writers react to challenging or thought-provoking ideas. I've already noticed that some fellow writers react quite differently from how I do to articles about story construction or other writing advice kinds of essays. My initial reaction is, "Cool, someone's sharing some thoughts about writing. I wonder what I can learn from it." I don't always follow through and take those things I'd meant to learn to heart, but I try to be open, even if it might mean changing how I think about story structure or what kinds of things show up in my stories or whatever. It seems that some writers instead react negatively to that kind of thing, almost as if their initial thought is, "Ahhhh, someone's trying to tell me what to do. I just want to do it my own way."

There's definite value in finding what works for you and not blindly accepting what someone else suggests. I definitely agree with that. But I'll also strongly stand by the idea that the only way to grow is to keep challenging your assumptions, questioning what you've done, finding new ways to write (and new ways to think about story).

What really struck me was the umbrage one writer took when another said something about not trying to attack but to get us to think about the issue. The implication being, the first writer claimed, that everyone else hadn't thought about the issue. I can understand that as a knee-jerk reaction...but honestly, I don't care how many times I've thought about a thorny, tricky issue related to writing. I want to be challenged to think about it again. And each time I think about it, I'll come away reminded of what I've learned and challenged about things I've assumed...and my writing will be enriched because of it.

That's the thoughtfulness I want to have toward my writing (and politics, religion, science, justice...life in general).

2011-09-16T12:26:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Friday

This story has been up awhile, but I just got around to reading it: "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" by Yoon Ha Lee (whose stories have shown up as recommended reads here more than once). One of the comments on the bottom calls it "a great Calvino remix of hard-SF FTL handwaving," which really is as good of an explanation for why I like the story as any I could come up with.

I also remembered a pair of stories that I'd read this spring when I wasn't putting recommendations on the blog, both evocative and surreal stories by Genevieve Valentine: "Study, for Solo Piano" in Fantasy Magazine and "The Finest Spectacle Anywhere" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The stories are linked by their setting, within a traveling circus in a post-apocalyptic world, that's also the setting for Valentine's novel Mechanique. At the time I read those stories, I hadn't started hearing any of the high praise the novel has since been getting, but I bought it right away on my Nook and have been reading it slowly, lingeringly (because that's the kind of book it is, the kind you want to savor as you go) between other books ever since. It looks as if there was an earlier Circus Tresaulti story in BCS, "Bread and Circuses," that I missed when it was published...but I will be remedying that shortly.

2011-09-12T11:09:00.001-07:00

Strange Horizons fund drive

Don't forget that the annual fund drive at Strange Horizons is happening right now. There are a few online ezines that I'd have a difficult time picking between for a favorite, but Strange Horizons is definitely one of those few--weekly fiction, poetry, reviews, as well as articles, they do a great job balancing them all. There are also prizes to be had...

&amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;

2011-09-09T15:12:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Friday

The name alone of Mari Ness's "Love in the Absence of Mosquitos" drew me in (and cool artwork, as well). The story relies on the unconventional (to us) marriage relationships of its imagined people, where a pod of people are married to each other (or sometimes to just one person within the pod) and their interactions carefully proscribed by contract. The opening paragraph sets the stage perfectly, and demonstrates the story's intriguing invention:

When Andrea brought her new wife to the pod, the family welcomed her, of course, quite properly. And then, not intentionally, ignored her. They had issues of their own: the main huswife, their pod's Second, was leaving, taking a significant amount of the household income, and one of the more minor husbands needed significant surgery, and then they had all of the other individual and family issues that a pod might have.

It's the story of Andrea and her new wife, an artist who does not fit the social norms of her society.

For some whimsy, I'll also recommend Megan Arkenberg's "Lessons from a Clockwork Queen." I'm a bit torn between finding it great fun and finding it perhaps a bit too cutesy in places...but for the most part its whimsy carries it through in a series of vignettes about a queendom ruled be a clockwork queen. Each vignette ends with an arch moral, which fits the comic tone of the story as a whole.

2011-09-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

Fantasy names

I've read a lot more epic fantasy in the past half a year than I have in any similar span since in recent years. One thing I notice as I read secondary fantasies like that is that my mind seems to latch onto particular names--not for anything special in what that character or place means within the story, but just because I like the way it feels to say the word. Usually it's not a major character from the story, though I think "Otah-kvo" might have been on my tongue a lot this spring when I read the Long Price quartet. Just recently it was "Magnar of Thenn," a minor character in A Dance With Dragons. I seem to remember some of the place names of White Luck Warrior filling that role back a few months ago.

It's not only fantasy names that do this. Once a year or two ago I woke up with the word lepidoptera running through my mind for no reason I could tell--I even had to double-check that it really was a word relating to moths and butterflies and not just something my subconscious had created as I slept.

No grand wisdom to learn from this--I don't think there's even anything specific about the names that I end up latching onto, though I intend to pay some attention to which words end up striking me that way, see if there's anything to glean from it for coming up with my own names. But I'm definitely the type of reader who pronounces the words as I read, and I think this just reflects that fact.

2011-09-02T13:55:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Friday

I've been scrambling to finish a couple of books this past week and haven't read my usual array of short fiction magazines. However, my friend Lesli Wilder recommended a story the other day on Facebook, and as I trust her tastes, I'll put it up here as well: "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu. The title alone intrigues me (and makes me wonder how I missed it last spring). What I've read of it has a fun sense of whimsy, and I'll certainly be reading the rest once I get a chance.

2011-08-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Poetry sale to Illumen

I sold the poem "Haibun: Carved in Alien Stone" to Illumen. The haibun is a fun form to work with, combining as it does prose and minimalist poetry, so I'm happy this one found a home. I'll post a link when the issue is available.

2011-08-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Tuesday

It's probably worth revisiting why I do these short fiction call-outs. For more than a year and a half now I've been making note of particular stories I've found online. It's never been with the intent of doing a formal review, though. Rather, it's always been with the intent of a signal boost--these are (generally) free-to-read, online magazines, most of them pro-level. So I figure one way to support them is to talk about their stories and hopefully get other people to go read them. It's not necessarily a discussion here that I'm after...but I'm certainly willing to discuss them more, if there's any interest.

So this week I have three stories to mention. The first is from Daily Science Fiction, "Our Drunken Tjeng" by Nicky Drayden. Because of how DSF's subscription works, I was emailed the story and read it last week already, but it wasn't available online until this week. It is fiercely visceral and wildly imagination, a story of a people who live inside a huge human and take care of their host. Their drunken and aging host, which is seemingly also a spaceship, is not doing well, and the job of the caretakers (slicing away tumors, clearing arteries, making sure he doesn't thoughtlessly reproduce too often) is increasingly difficult. The ending is gut-wrenching and stone-heartedly pitch perfect.

Both stories in the most recent Beneath Ceaseless Skies stood out for me as well. "Bone Diamond" by Michael John Grist is a dark story of an ancient Egyptian who discovers a diamond in a crocodile skeleton, and of his logical and horrifying fall into cruelty.

"My Father's Wounds" by Ferret Steinmetz at first didn't draw me in as much as these other two. But after finishing it, it seems to keep drawing me back. It's the story of a woman who is expected to master the healing of her father, a form of healing he claims derives from a goddess, though she suspects it might be an inner ability...and fears it's one she lacks. The tension of faith and doubt, or the healers wishing to help and lamenting that they can't help everyone is just very well handled and memorable.

2011-08-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

Story sale to Penumbra

My short story "The Square That Hides a Thousand Stories" has sold to this new ezine and will be appearing in their inaugural issue come October. I love that cover--it reminds me in some ways of cover art from 20-30 years ago, in magazines that I come across but wasn't at all aware of at the time...and yet not in a completely throwback way: it feels contemporary as well.

I'll write more about the story itself and give a link to the issue once it's released.

2011-08-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

Twitter haiku

I have a trio of twitter haiku that were published today at @microcosms. There's something very addictive about twitter fiction and haiku--they're fun to do...and I spent quite a bit of time that I'd set aside for revision to play with these instead. But it's divine play, so that's OK, right?

I have another trio of twitter haiku plus a featured interview that will be appearing in @trapezemag in December.

2011-08-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

I absolutely loved a story in Daily Science Fiction the other day...but that goes out to subscribers one week before it's available online, so I'll have to post the link to that next week.

For now, "Crossroads" by Laura Anne Gilman (in Fantasy Magazine) is well worth reading. It's a western fantasy hybrid that plays on gunslinger tropes in a way that I found charming.

Also, in this month's ChiZine is the story "Visions of Destruction Series, Mixed Media" by Polenth Blake. This one is more difficult to pin down, which is part of its enjoyment. An odd, at times unsettling series of short glimpses into what seem to be subversive works of art in a dangerous city. It's a story that will reward rereading.

2011-08-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Back in college I took a one-month class in improv. I wouldn't say that improv itself is something I'm especially skilled at, but the purpose of the class wasn't so much learning to perform improv as it was learning to use the concepts of improv to spark creativity in other venues, especially in writing. Some of the ideas of that class I still draw on consciously. Even more, though, I think it's been something I've absorbed into my approach to writing so that it comes through subconsciously.

One of our textbooks for the month was the book in the title of this post, Free Play. I remembered it the other day during an online conversation and decided to pull it back out. I can tell I'd actually considered rereading it more recently and had taken it up from the basement and put it on the desk up here...but hadn't gotten around to reading it. So this time I'm planning to actually reread it...

I've actually read the first few chapters, and I'm hoping to post occasional thoughts about it as I read it--I'll probably dip into it for a chapter or two at a time and then set it aside for a few days, so the posts may be scattered. For now I wanted to just put the opening quote from the book. I've said at various times that I find writing to be play...but play, to me, doesn't imply frivolous. There's something deep and deeply important about play. It's an idea that I can trace back to well before I read this book (the first poem I remember writing in high school was called "This LifeGame"), but I can tell that my thinking was definitely reinforced and likely shaped in part by the opening to this book:

There is an old Sanskrit word, lîla, which means play. Richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation, destruction, and re-creaction, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos.

2011-08-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

Reviews of my "Tree Ring Anthology"

Des Lewis is collecting the links to all reviews on the HA of HA website. So far my story has been getting a lot of good comments, which as you can imagine is deeply gratifying. Karim Ghagwagi writes "The story is densely packed with rich, suggestive imagery. The original variation on the theme is refreshing, and the tale’s fantastical elements are also aptly employed to highlight environmental concerns." Matthew Fryer calls it his favorite in the book and writes, "Anthropomorphic, dark and strangely moving, this is a superb piece of unconventional storytelling and a great twist on the theme." Anthony Watson calls it "perhaps the most interesting" and says, "It's a clever story, beautifully written and even manages a sting in the tail." And the Stars at Noonday blog writes, "Daniel Ausema's 'Tree Ring Anthology' uses the description of the rings on a tree stump to recount a range of ecological nightmares with a science fiction edge, demonstrating again that perspective and voice can lend any subject a strange and disturbing atmosphere."

What really stands out as I read these reviews, though, is the high praise for the anthology as a whole. Not every reviewer liked every story, of course, but every reviewer (so far) comes away with a positive recommendation for the anthology. The anthology is not yet available from Amazon, but you can purchase it directly from Des Lewis (or from Lulu).

2011-08-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

Two moons

I've come across a number of fantasy and SF stories set on a planet with two moons. Some of the images you'll come across show a lack of understanding about how the phases of a moon would work, but that's really beside the point here...

Maybe it was those stories that made me take note of this article about a theory that the earth once had two moons. After that presumed early-Earth/Mars-sized-planet collision that likely created the moon, there might have actually been two moons, and there might have remained two moons for ten or a hundred million years before the second moon's orbit destabilized and it (eventually) crashed into the larger moon, creating some of the anomalies mentioned in the article.

It's an interesting parallel to one theory about that initial impact. One possibility is that the Mars-sized planet was at a Lagrange point with Earth and the sun for fifty million years or more until the orbit degraded, leading to the crash. If that crash led to a second moon at a Lagrange point for ten million years until its orbit was disturbed and they crashed...it's like chaos theory's fractals...

2011-08-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Story available for purchase

I mentioned this on Facebook the other day but not here on my blog...

Issue two of One Buck Horror is available now for Kindle and Nook, and their associated reading apps/programs. For one buck you'll get five stories, including my flash fiction piece "What Swims These Waters."

This story was a one-hour writing exercise. I don't actually recall what the prompt was...maybe something as simple as the story had to be about water in some way. By the end of the hour I'd written most of the story already (which doesn't usually happen for me with those exercises, even something as short as a flash). It certainly required some significant revising after that, but that was primarily wording issues and didn't significantly change the core story.

2011-07-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Friday

During the months of May and June, ChiZine had a plethora of excellent stories and poems as part of their fund drive. Those stories went down once the month was over, but there's a new issue now. I quite enjoyed the first story that I read from it, "Linking Words" by Grace Seybold. The opening image of the rebels dancing into the city is a resonant one, and I liked the way it plays with expectations as it goes.

2011-07-24T10:30:00.001-07:00

Dog-like Crocodiles

I so want to use these crocodile offshoot creatures in a fantasy story...

2011-07-14T21:03:00.000-07:00

Bar Book Club

We met last night at Coopersmiths for our book club.

Beer of choice: Scottish Highland Ale--a new beer for them, as far as I can remember. From the description I was expecting a darker beer, but it was good. I also tried a sample of their blueberry mead, another new offering, and liked that a lot. And then they had a watermelon beer. Beer mixed with watermelon juice. Those two should not go together. When you actually order it, instead of the little sample we requested, they shove a slice of watermelon on the edge of the glass. There are so many things wrong with that... I tend to be intrigued by new and surprising pairings in my food and beverages and am willing to try a lot of things, but from the first smell I knew I wouldn't like it.

I didn't get my copy of the book, At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen, until last week when we had visitors. So I'd only finally found a chance to read in the past couple of days and didn't finish it. What I read set up for an interesting conflict between a missionary beginning to realize he'd rather be an anthropologist (to the consternation of his wife and colleagues) and a half-Cheyenne mercenary who'd found his way down to the same South American jungle.

Our next book is Tea With Hezbollah. The book comes from an evangelical press, which makes me somewhat leery, but the idea of going in among these groups that we in the West label as terrorist and actually learning how they see things and who they are sounds interesting, if it truly is done in an open-minded way.

There was some question if the person who was supposed to bring books could make it, so I grabbed a backpack full of books from the library right before hand...and now I have a bunch of books checked out that I'd really like to read (and just when A Dance With Dragons comes out...). I'll probably have to bring books next month, so I could return them and try to check them out again then, but they're calling to me...

2011-07-11T15:09:00.001-07:00

Poetry Monday

Recovering from a few weeks of busy-ness here, culminating in family visiting through yesterday. So I haven't read a lot of the recent short fiction in my usual ezines (much less from the less frequent ones), but I was looking back at some recent poetry and enjoyed this one: "The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages" from Strange Horizons.

I also just recently discovered an ezine for minimalist poetry, Inkscrawl. Bruce Boston's "Surreal Wish List" is especially worth a read.

2011-07-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

A pair of stories available

In what's an impressively quick turnaround, my story "LumberJill is already available in Flagship Issue 6. You can buy the issue in text-only, audio-only, and text-and-audio-both versions.

This story is one I wrote the first draft of several years ago. I was reading Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, which includes a heading listing a number of tall-tale-ish animals that supposedly could be found in lumberjack camps. It put me in mind of Paul Bunyan stories, so I combined the two (without ever directly referencing Paul himself--the title character thinks about and refers to her uncle without it ever saying who exactly he was) in a fun riff. I'm very pleased for this story to be out there and available now.

The other story to have recently become available is "To Save a Hero" in Bards and Sages Quarterly's July 2011 issue (Amazon link).

This story came from a one-hour writing exercise where the prompt was something like "Your character is drunk because of something bad that just happened. A stranger offers to send him/her back in time to fix it, but when s/he goes back in time, s/he discovers that this time s/he's still wasted (making fixing anything problematic, much less trying to change the events)."

It's a twisty little tale that only gets revealed slowly. I gave it a sort of weird Western feel, which was fun to play with.

2011-07-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

"Fall of the City" online now

As I mentioned last week, this story is available to read now to non-subscribers as well. It even has some nice artwork there to go with it.

This story was one of many that started as a one-hour writing exercise. I forget the exact prompt, but what I had in mind was the butterfly-flapping effect (which may have been the prompt, but I'm not sure) of small events having big consequences.

2011-06-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

Changing characters

I've been sitting on a story for what seems a long time--really cool ideas in my head to stir into the mix, some intriguing characters and situations...but it was just never coming together. I would jot down notes, come up with new things to throw in the mix, get excited about the story, but then when I'd try to start writing, I could never find a way in to the story. It just felt flat, despite all the cool things flashing around my head.

While we were taking a mini-vacation this past weekend, it occurred to me that maybe I was focusing on the wrong character. The intriguing characters I'd planned to write about will probably still be fascinating, but fascinating (and perhaps somewhat terrifying) from the perspective of someone else. So I added a new character to the mix (at this point a pretty bland, undeveloped character, but hopefully that will change as I write), and writing the story from his perspective finally allowed me to get writing.

Now I haven't written much, and I can't promise that I won't flounder with him and decide a different tack is necessary. But at least I've started, which is something I'd been unable to say for the past month.

2011-06-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

"Fall of the City" at Daily Science Fiction

If you're a subscriber, you should have received this story this morning (actually, DSF stories always arrive at 11pm my time, so it would have been last night if you're in Mountain time or further west).

If you're not a subscriber (and why not?--it's free to subscribe), it'll be online in a week, and I'll post a link then, and say more about the story, if anything comes to mind.

2011-06-25T07:13:00.001-07:00

Poem in Aoife's Kiss

I just received my contributor copy of this magazine, which includes my poem "Spell." The magazine is a lot bigger, more colorful, and more glossy than a lot of small-press zines--I haven't read much of what's inside yet, but I'm impressed with the presentation. The poem itself has actually been online for a couple of weeks as a teaser for the issue, so you can read that (for now) at the magazine's main site.

This poem plays on the homophone connection between spell as in magic and spell as in the letters that form a word.

2011-06-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

"Horns or Wings" at Every Day Fiction

One story that was published during my blog hiatus (actually accepted and published both) was "Horns and Wings" at Every Day Fiction. It's received some good comments, so that's always gratifying. The story came from one of my writing group's one-hour quick prompts. The topic was to write about a routine visit to a doctor, and I remember thinking that that didn't seem, on the surface, to fit very well with what I tend to write. A doctor for someone injured, perhaps, but... So then I decided to give it a surreal take, and with Mervyn Peake's Mr. Pye vaguely in mind, this is what came through.

2011-06-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

Book club

Last night we had our (roughly monthly) meeting at Coopersmiths to drink beer and talk books.

Beer of choice: I tried a sample of a Belgian Kriek Ale. It's a very sour beer, and wasn't worth paying extra to have a full glass of that. In the right mood, I probably would enjoy it, but last night I went with the Horsetooth Stout.

Book: Blindness by José Saramago. I enjoyed this book a lot. I'd read his The Cave some years ago and enjoyed it, but often heard people refer to Blindness as his masterpiece. The story felt...very European, though I struggled to pinpoint what it was that made it feel that way. First I wrote that the prose felt that way, and to a certain extent it did, but it was more the mindsets of the characters, the way they interacted. And it's not that the characters somehow fit some stereotype of how Europeans think, which would be ridiculous, but that the book itself felt very much like it fit into the broader context of other continental books in ways that US and UK books often don't.

We had a good discussion about the book, especially about the one seeing character's actions and if she could/should have done more or differently. The style of the book certainly stands out, and the reactions to that aspect of different people in the group varied, but in general we mostly found it very readable despite the unfamiliar style and a memorable book.

Our next book is At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen. The description sort of reminded me of the movie The Mission, which I've loved since I first saw it. Apparently this 1965 book was also made into a movie (in 1991), but I'd never heard of it before.

2011-06-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

Review of my story "Cities of Nostalgia"

Kaleidotrope 11, which includes my flash fiction "Cities of Nostalgia," has been reviewed at SFRevu. Short reviews of each story, including this about mine (after a brief plot summary), "This was a lyrically-written little tale."

This is just one of a handful of stories and poems to be published or accepted while I've been taking a few-month blogging break. Now that I'm hoping to resume at least sporadic blogging, I'll make mention of those other stories and poems in the days ahead.

"Cities of Nostalgia" is of a series with two others that have been published, as well as a fourth that I recently wrote. I see them as homages to Calvino's Invisible Cities in part, with some touches of Dunsany and others as well. One little me-being-spacey moment I discovered after this was published: I originally wrote the first one with the intent of evoking Dunsany's short story "Idle Days on the Yann" about a river voyage and what awaits the narrator along that trip. In that first one, I named the railroad the Yahm Railroad, with the intent of reminding anyone familiar with Dunsany of his story without copying it. In the next two in the series, though, I meant to do the same and only now did I realize that I reverted to Dunsany's name instead. Oh well. The other two that have been published are "City of Games" in Sporty Spec and "City of Facades" in Cinema Spec.

2011-03-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

Bar Book Club

I haven't reported on these in awhile because I had to miss a couple (one because one of my wife's patients was in labor, another because my daughter chose that night to throw an hour-and-a-half tantrum, etc.). I was happy to finally make it back to one.

Beer of choice: They've opened the Existential Porter up--woo hoo! That's always been my favorite, and they only have it for a month or two before there's another long wait. It's a very dark beer.

Book: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This is a memoir of a strange childhood, first out here in the West in some of the desolate towns you see in Nevada, Arizona, etc., and later in even more dire poverty in West Virginia coal country. Her father was seemingly brilliant but also an alcoholic who, along with the artsy, flighty mother, tried to make their unconventional life into a principled stand against convention. I was reading it as I traveled through some of those same places in Arizona (and with memories of last summer's trip through northern Nevada), so I found those parts especially interesting. The discussion was good.

Our next book will be The River Why by David James Duncan. This was a favorite book of mine in college--being more a baseball person than a fisherman, his The Brothers K was actually more up my alley, but I enjoyed this and pretty much everything by Duncan I could find. So I'm looking forward to revisiting it.

2011-03-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

I have a freakish tooth

Getting some final dentist visits out of the way these past few weeks, and I learned that one of my teeth came in reversed--spun around 180 degrees. It's one of the pre-molars, which supposedly isn't very different on the outer side than the inner one, so they weren't surprised that I'd never noticed it. But weird.

2011-03-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

Travels

We've been back from our trip for about a week, but it's always crazy getting back into the swing of things. So I'm finally getting around to posting a blog entry. Here are some of the highlights:

Coming down through the mountains toward Santa Fe (my wife insisted on listening to the Newsies soundtrack...) with a thin-cloud snowstorm that showed the setting sun only slightly dimmed.
Albuquerque botanical gardens.
Snow-dotted cliffs outside Gallup, New Mexico.
Seeing a bit of the Painted Desert as we crossed Arizona.
A rainbow-colored cloud off to the side of Mt. Humphreys as we came toward Flagstaff. Of all the places we saw, Flagstaff seemed like the one I could see myself living in...though admittedly that's based mostly on the surroundings, as we didn't really see much of the city itself.
The Grand Canyon, with snow among the piñon trees along the edge.
Saguaro cacti and palm trees as we dropped down from Flagstaff to Phoenix.
Warm weather in Phoenix (almost too warm...but a nice break from winter).
The zoo and very cool children's museum in Phoenix.

There, that's my version of a you-gotta-see-my-vacation-photos blog post. Now back to my (I hope) regular blogging soon.

2011-02-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

Fighting for commitment while writing

I'm working on a short story at the moment. For some reason...it's been a struggle to get myself to focus on it. Not just on this story, actually--on any short story, it seems. I've been spending so much time on revising this past year-plus that I haven't done as much new writing anyway, but I'm trying to understand why short stories specifically have been more of a struggle. When I think about it, it seems that I really haven't been writing nearly as many short stories in the past year or two, so it's not just a recent thing.

Flash fiction has been easy, I think because I don't end up with as much invested in them. And the novel-length stuff I've done hasn't given me fits either, which perhaps is because of the manic NaNo kickstart that doesn't let me question. With a short story, though, I have dozens of fragments that came from writing exercises with no idea where they might end up going. A number of them are fragments that seem to hold good promise. Whenever I sit down to try to expand one of them, I either end up turning it into a flash story (don't get me wrong--I love flash, and I'm proud of the flash stories I've been sending out on submissions) or I end up doing revisions or getting distracted instead.

So, one of my goals over the next few months is to get a few decent short stories written. Perhaps they'll come from one of those writing exercise fragments, which is the case with the one I'm working on at the moment (and I think I've got it to the point where I'm past that uncertainty/unwillingness to commit), perhaps they'll be inspired by a themed anthology or writing prompt or something of the sort, and perhaps they'll just come out of nowhere. But whatever the case, I'd like to write at least one short story per month for the next three or four months, in addition to whatever revising I have planned, and see what that does for getting me past this sort-of block in my head.

2011-02-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

Enchanted Conversation: a Fairy Tale Magazine

Ralan's has had this new market listed for a little while now (not completely new, but an updated and revamped zine), but in case anyone hasn't had a chance to notice that, I thought I'd point it out here. Each issue will be themed around a particular fairy tale or fairy tale trope. There are certain fairy tales that I've seen turned into short stories so often over the past few years, that I'm hesitant about those particular stories...but I always like to be surprised by either a new, previously unfamiliar tale or a new take on one I'd thought I already knew too well to bother.

The word count is short, and the submission window even shorter, so if you're interested in writing something for it (the next theme is Rumpelstilkskin), check out their guidelines. The first issue of the year will come out on March 20.

2011-02-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

Short Fiction Thursday

I've just finished reading "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" by K. J. Parker, and it's a wonderful story. The narrator is a musician, accomplished and technically skilled, but so fearful of failure that his works never achieve the genius he aspires to...that is, until certain events conspire to twist his life around. The title really expresses where the story gets its power from: underlying what is a well told tale--with a complex character and arc and series of events--is that question of what price is great art worth. What cost, in life of others and freedom of self and dignity and truth, is too much to pay to create something of absolute genius?

This week I also enjoyed Corie Ralston's "Mamafield." A very different story from the other, it's a story told from the point of view of a sentient plant who (that?) is apparently capable of walking but so far has only ever known the area around its mother plant. One of the plant's siblings, though, has journeyed, and this has made that sibling anathema to both the mother and all those who had remained behind. After reading it and deciding it was worth mentioning here, I stumbled across Lois Tilton's review in Locus, and she took issue with the logic of the story. I can see her argument, but I tend to enjoy stories told from a strange perspective in general, and I think the strength of that voice still carries the story.

2011-02-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Whimsy

My favorite kind of whimsy has a bite. It skates playfully across the surface of the abyss with a subtext that refuses to let you forget the abyss is there, that the ice is thin, that water is deep, deep down to unimaginable darkness and weight.

2011-01-31T11:37:00.000-08:00

Short Fiction Monday

As I mentioned last week, Abyss & Apex's latest issue converted perfectly to work on my Nook.

First thing worth pointing out is that my friend Lindsey Duncan has a story in there, "Twice Given." It's a story of a priestess's sister and the deep bond they share. (She also has a poem out this week in Strong Verse: "A Thousand Strips of Parchment.")

I haven't read the entire issue yet, but another story from Abyss & Apex that I really enjoyed was J. Kathleen Cheney's "Of Ambergris, Blood, and Brandy." It's the story of a mermaid who disguises herself as human, and about seal-people/selkies, about an industrializing city spreading out into the water, and about the intrigue of mysterious, sinister forces. I have to admit that if someone had said it was a story of mermaids and selkies, I would have been hesitant about it--fascinating as the folk tales of selkies may be, I've seen a lot of stories based on those tales, and they often seem to follow very closely to the same pattern. This one does not, and the story as a whole feels very fresh and alive.

Darby Harn's "News Right Fresh From Heaven" in Fantasy last week also stood out for me, a story about poetry and apple children.

2011-01-27T14:54:00.000-08:00

Science Fiction article on Slate

I'm a frequent reader of Slate.com, so I was interested to see a science fiction article there today. It goes by the grandiose title "The Purpose of Science Fiction" and is by Robert Sawyer. Huh, I didn't realize there was only one purpose...but ok. Still cool to see an SF article there.

Except...not. The basic argument is that the essence and ultimate reason for SF is to prepare us for the future so that when things happen, when technology and new discoveries change our world, we won't be caught completely unprepared. Don't get me wrong, I think it's just peachy when one work or another happens to have that effect for some readers regarding this technology or that. But is that really it's main purpose? Seems a pretty limited mindset to me.

I know I've pointed before to Ursula LeGuin's essay that appeared as a forward to her science fiction classic The Left Hand of Darkness, but it's worth mentioning it again. I don't have it before me, so I won't quote verbatim. The gist of the article is that science fiction, for all its superficially futuristic appearance, really has nothing to do with the future. A science fiction writer claiming to predict the future is a charlatan, and even one claiming to predict a possible future if things continue XYZ...meh, that's not what it's about. What a science fiction writer does, LeGuin argues, is tell you about today, about her place in history, his life, what it's like to live here, now. And, ultimately, what it is to be human on a more universal level, as well. If they take a slant-wise, futuristic path to explore that, or a steampunk corridor, or a winding medieval road, or a completely mundane-seeming city street like the one just around the corner...well, that's all surface.

From the article,

George Orwell's science-fiction classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first half of this quote, but disagree with the second--it was a resounding success because it told us something of the fears and dangers of the day...and fears and dangers that may have changed in many ways but remain a part of what it is to be human today as well, and into the future. Science fiction doesn't fail or succeed based, either, on whether it comes true nor whether it prevents something from coming true. It fails or succeeds based on the same metrics and rubrics and aesthetic approaches that we take toward judging any work of literature, or any art.

2011-01-23T20:05:00.000-08:00

Using my Nook for short stories

I mentioned a month ago that I'd bought a Nook (hurray for credit card reward points!). I'm not going to go into a lot of the review kinds of details that you can easily find elsewhere. It's a good ereader for what I use it for, and I've been pleased with it.

One of the reasons I wanted to get an ereader was with the idea of reading the stories from places like Strange Horizons when I'm not at my computer--I could save computer time for writing and forums and such, and take those ezines with me to read when I couldn't be here at my computer. When I learned that the Nook has a basic web browser, I thought that'd be perfect. There wouldn't even be the hassle of converting files or anything.

Well...not quite. The basic web browser is a pain to use and not the least bit friendly for reading stories. So I had to convert the files after all. One way to do that is simply copy and paste into Open Office and safe the story as a pdf. That works, but I also got to discover the fun of Calibre to download and convert the web pages into epub format. Calibre downloads the rss feed and converts it into whatever format you want, but sometimes the rss has to be tweaked to work properly. So here are a few things I've discovered while playing around with this:

Calibre works great with Fantasy and Lightspeed. I have it scheduled to download the past week's updates every Monday morning. I had to tweak the format slightly for Fantasy's rss, because it was initially showing up with a black font on a dark background, but that was an easy fix. Abyss & Apex also worked great when I had Calibre convert its latest issue just the other day.

The rss for Beneath Ceaseless Skies only gives you the summaries of the stories, with links to the full text. There are fixes for that within Calibre, but BCS has each issue as an epub download already, so it's easier to just download that instead of using Calibre.

I'd have to play around with the recipe for downloading Clarkesworld some more to get that to work--the rss gave the pages with the audio as well, not a terrible thing but would be nice to get it to skip those pages. It also, this month, gave the entire texts (and audio pages) of the entire past year's worth of stories, because of the readers poll, which linked to them all. That'd actually be pretty cool for someone who hadn't had a chance to read it throughout the year...but it did make for a pretty big file. That wouldn't be a dilemma other months, of course. The biggest problem, though, was that the format didn't transfer very well, so I couldn't read the full lines. I think I could pretty easily fix that, but I'm thinking for now, at least, that for a zine that comes out with an issue once a month, it'd be better to just save and convert them manually.

Strange Horizons has no rss feed to subscribe to (that I know of), so I have to convert those manually. I'm pretty sure I've seen reports that a major upgrade is in the works for Strange Horizons' site, so I imagine that will be an option some point.

Some places I haven't taken a look at yet for, except to manually convert some myself, are Tor.com (I doubt they'd have an rss just for their fiction, and a full rss to their site would overwhelm me), Subterranean (also has an rss, but it's site-wide, it appears, not just the ezine), Chizine (which is going through a site redesign to be unveiled in April), and Ideomancer (has an rss, but that's next on my list for testing out).

2011-01-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

Short fiction Tuesday

I love the opening line of last week's story from Fantasy, "Ghost Girl" by Lauren Beukes:

You think of a city as a map, all knotted up in the bondage of grid lines imposed by town planners. But really, it’s a language—alive, untidy, ungrammatical. The meaning of things rearranges. The scramble of the docks turns hipster cool and the inner city’s faded glamour gives way to tenement blocks rotting from the inside. It develops its own accent, its own slang.

The stories that especially stand out from this past week (well, as in I read them this past week--they're actually a bit older than that) were from Lightspeed. First, a few weeks ago it featured a story by Ursula LeGuin, "The Silence of the Asonu." It's a reprint, one that I'd read before, but I always love to return to her stories. It's about as far from plot-driven as stories usually get, so I won't try to give a summary of the events, but it's about a people on an alien planet who seemingly lose the (give up the) ability to speak, or communicate in any way, as they grow to maturity.

And two weeks ago, Lightspeed's story was Corey Mariani's "Postings from an Amorous Tomorrow," which was incredibly powerful. It begins with a future that shades toward parody of social networking, in which people receive augmented brains in order to be able to connect, communicate, love, and be in love with millions of people at once. The opening goes:

As of this second there are 3,236,728,909 people over the age of four living in the world, all of whom I am intimately familiar with. Of these, there are 876,852,003 that I love, and one that I am currently in love with. In ten years, when I am twenty, I hope to love everyone on the planet as Gordon did once for almost two minutes. He is my hero.

From there it takes a dark and heart-breaking turn that's only made more powerful by the light tone of the beginning. A most excellent story.

2011-01-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

Feel free to mock me...

So, my NaNo novel summary that I posted a few weeks ago had one word that was wrong. See, the novel was already beginning to show glimmers of itself over a year ago, and I wrote a short story that was meant to take place long before the novel but in the same setting, to help solidify some of those images. In that story I included various references to factory smoke.

A factory. I had this image of a sprawling, early industrial factory, something like this:

Well, I started questioning if that was the image that people would get from the word "factory." If it were a steampunk novel, then probably, but it didn't seem to conjure that image for me as I was doing my last minute, pre-November planning. I started thinking that what I wanted was more along the lines of a coal-burning power plant (especially a particular one alone I-80 up in Cheyenne), mashed up with an oil refinery and a grain elevator, and other such industrial complexes.

Power plant didn't feel quite right, either, so I decided to call it the Refinery. Except...this was the scramble before NaNo, remember, and somehow when I wrote that down, changing "Factory" to "Refinery," I mixed the two words together instead of changing it, and ended up with "Refectory."

And I kept writing that throughout November. NaNo doesn't give time to question yourself. By the time November was done, I had convinced myself that a refectory really was some sort of general word that encompassed all the things I was picturing. It wasn't until mid-December (when my characters actually arrived there) that I paused to question myself. The dictionary shocked me. A dining room in a monastery? That's not what I wanted! The image had become so ingrained that it took me awhile to trust that I hadn't somehow been using some secondary definition or something.

Nope. Refinery it is. Or maybe I'll go back to Factory--I love that picture of the sugar factory that was just a little ways south of here. But not Refectory.

2011-01-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

Short Fiction Wednesday...plus Happy New Year!

I've been traveling (and recovering from travels) but now I'm back. I hope everyone had good holidays and wish everyone a happy new year.

I'm still behind the most recent short fiction, but I've been catching up, and two that I read during my travels especially stood out for me for their interesting settings.

Matthew Johnson's "Holdfast" in Fantasy Magazine tells the story of a land where rhymes and simple spells--and most importantly, knots--hold real power, if performed correctly. Even more, it's the story of a person who has chosen that his deeply magical connection to his land is more important than whatever acclaim he might earn by leaving the place and becoming a famous wizard. I could see Wendell Berry enjoying the story, though I can't say I could see him writing it, per se.

"A Bounty Split Three Ways" by Peter Kovic (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) is a well-realized story of a country bumpkin sort who has decided to become a bounty hunter in order to pay a wizard a fee he'd promised, knowing he had no way to pay. No one thing stood out for why I enjoyed this story, but I just liked how it all worked together.

Looking up the link to that one, I remembered another Beneath Ceaseless Skies story that I'd read earlier while traveling and enjoyed a lot: "As Below, So Above" by Ferrett Steinmetz. This is the story of a squid (always good to get the cephalopods involved), the story of a monster whose job is to protect an evil wizard, written completely from his point of view and with his understanding of who and what humans are.

2010-12-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

Story sale to Bards & Sages Quarterly

I mentioned this on Facebook last night--I sold a short (barely-longer-than-flash) story to Bards & Sages Quarterly. This is a fairly old one that came from a writing exercise prompt. I'm excited to see it in print. I'll post more about the story's origin and such when it gets published this coming July.

2010-12-23T12:34:00.001-08:00

Short Fiction Thursday

I've been trying to catch up on the short fiction I missed during November (as of a few days ago, doing so on my new Nook...). I've read a bunch this past week, then, and one that stands out is "As Below, So Above" by Ferrett Steinmetz in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It's the story of a squid whose job is to protect a supposed god he's never seen but his father has. The story does a good job creating the feel of a non-human way of thinking, and it just stands out as being a wonderfully creative, sometimes brutal, and ultimately satisfying short story.

I'll probably post more about the Nook and my thoughts on it in a few days.

2010-12-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

A December poem

This time of year I often find myself thinking about one of my favorite poems, a bleakly anti-war poem by the great William Carlos Williams:

These

are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The year plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night

to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought

that spins a dark fire--
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles

to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself--Not a ghost but

would be embraced--emptiness,
despair--(They
whine and whistle) among

the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,

the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused--

Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous

ears and eyes--for itself.
In this mine they come to dig--all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing--that is now stone.

This was a poem I first came across in a high school creative writing class, and it's been a favorite ever since. The images--an empty windswept place; the whine and whistle of war; a peculiar light that spins a dark fire; the hidden truth that grows roots; the counterfoil to sweetest music; the lake that's now stone--they force themselves into my stories...probably even more than I'm consciously aware.

Once upon a time, I posted copies of this poem (alternating with copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Apostrophe to Man") around the halls of my college to protest some sort of military action. Pretty weak as a protest, I admit, but it felt good to do something...

2010-12-09T16:48:00.001-08:00

Giant Storks!

One recurring thing in a lot of my stories is tall, stalking birds. Generally it's some variety of ratite-like terror bird (ratites are the birds that include ostriches, emus, the extinct moas, etc.; some prehistoric ratites in South America have been dubbed "terror birds" because they had huge beaks and could run down prey).

This article isn't about ratites, but still it caught my attention, even if it weren't for the Tolkien reference. The combination of dwarfism and giantism on this island makes for some very bizarre and cool juxtapositions.

2010-12-07T09:34:00.000-08:00

Bar Book Club

I got so caught up in wrapping up NaNo stuff that I forgot to blog last week about our reading club.

So, beer of choice: a new one, Imperial Bruiser Brown. I liked it, a good brown ale, dark and flavorful. I also tried a sample of another new one they had called Mild Insanity. It was about as different from the brown as you could get, but I still liked it--sweet but not overly so, so light it was almost clear. If they still have it available next time, I might order that for something different.

We had a good discussion on The Picture of Dorian Gray. It wasn't quite what I was expecting in some ways, but I'm certainly glad to have read it and to be aware of cultural references and such. I think it makes a good foil/companion piece for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand."

We had a number of good choices for the next time, including Daniel Wallace (who wrote Big Fish, which we read in this group a year or so ago) and Cormac McCarthy. We ended up picking Charles Portis' Dog of the South. Early on in this group we read his Masters of Atlantis, which is a madcap, hilarious farce, one that's led to many inside jokes in our group that more recent additions to the group feel left out of...so I'm looking forward to seeing how this one plays out. Watching out, as always, for the Jimmerson Lag.

2010-11-29T22:02:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on NaNo as it wraps up

I hit 50k last Tuesday--and very glad I did. Thanksgiving and everything else since then has made it much more difficult to keep up the pace I'd had earlier. Well...to be honest, part of that slower pace is due to having already met the 50k. I just hit 60k this evening, which was the goal I'd initially set for myself. I'm still hoping to get a little more over the last 24 hours, but it looks like the revised goals I'd set in the middle of the month were overly optimistic.

Enough about word counts.

I remain pleased with the story. I'm pulling in all kinds of wild and resonant images in a rather surreal way. The storyline itself, though, is pretty well grounded, which I think will keep it from the dangers of veering off into this-only-makes-sense-to-me surreality. As I think I wrote earlier this month, when I jotted down some ideas for the book, I realized I had two main turning points in addition to the final climactic scene, so I structured the book so that those would evenly divide the story into three acts, as it were. I just wrote that second turning point this afternoon (which would seem to put this right on track for a 90k-word novel). As with last time, I'm floundering a bit in this next section, but some of the things coming up that had been very vague are beginning to fall into place in my head.

I don't think I've posted here what I put on my NaNo novel info page, so here it is (and I still don't really know how that final confrontation will play out or what exactly she'll learn/discover/do in the ruins of the refectory):

In a sprawling, surreal city of inexplicable structures, ancient technology, and the mysterious rhymer-folk, where most people know only their immediate surroundings, Iymae is a guide, leading her clients through the alleys and tunnels of the city to their destinations. When a strange corporate boss hires her to travel to a part of the city even she doesn't know and guide his niece back to meet him, Iymae doesn't hesitate. The job, though, turns out to be more than she expected, shoving her into a mysterious culture of robotic constructs and arcane technology, and ultimately sending her beyond the city itself into the vast ruins of a pre-cataclysmic refectory where [...well, what happens there is part of what I'll discover as I NaNo this year...]

2010-11-20T20:37:00.001-08:00

Thoughts on NaNo, week 3

I've had a very productive week. I don't want to bore anyone by just posting about word counts and such, so I'll just say that I'm pleased with where the story's going. My initial outline is still holding up fairly well, though some things have surprised me and some things have made me shift the focus of what I was planning to write.

I did have one point early in the week when I went blank for a while. I'd reached a big turning point in the story, and once I got past that, I realized that I'd been writing with that moment in mind for the past several chapters at least (since the beginning in some ways), but what was supposed to happen after that for the next few chapters was still very vague in my mind. I ended up getting through it, but I have a fear that the chapter will feel as full of floundering uncertainty to readers as it felt while I was writing. Well, those kinds of worries can wait until the first draft is done.

I went to my first in-person write-in today. Only very briefly--I was out doing some other errands (haircut, buying new running shoes, returning something for my wife) and finished them more quickly than I thought I might, so I stopped by for about a half hour. I wouldn't say I got to know the people much while I was there, but it was good to be able to show my face, however briefly. I wrote by hand, which is something I only rarely do. Got about 500 words written, as it turned out. Nothing too impressive, but a decent half-hour of writing.

Now to do some quick things around the house and then see about getting a bit more writing done...

2010-11-17T12:32:00.000-08:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

I'm still not reading much short fiction this month, but you definitely should go check out this week's story in Fantasy. It's by my friend Barbara A. Barnett, and what I've read of it so far has made it a temptation to set aside writing so I can read the whole thing.

2010-11-13T21:43:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on NaNo, week two

Almost 27k words here, which is about a thousand above my goal of 2k/day. I decided I would really like to get closer to 65k or even 70k by the end of the month, so that I'm closing in on the ending--I know from last year that once the social pressure is over, it's easy to let up a lot on the writing pace. Last year I only needed to get another 15k or 20k done to wrap up the story, and it took me through the first of the year. This year's novel is likely to be at least 10k longer, if not 20k, so I don't want to let the final chapters take me too long.

I'm pleased with how well the story seems to be going. Maybe I'll come back to this in a few months and realize I should have been more critical with myself as I went along, but I'm into it at the moment. In some ways the story's been brewing in my head for over a year, but there's still much I had no idea about, so it's nice to see those things coming together.

I've always felt that the biggest threat to writing a novel (whether in a month for NaNo or over 2 1/2 years like the first novel I wrote) is doubt--once you let doubt in, it can so easily derail the whole process. When I look at writer friends who fizzled out in NaNo last year or this year or outside of NaNo, losing confidence in the product seems to come up in what they say more than any other factor. I'm a strong believer in finishing a project once it's begun. There are definitely times to question a project, but that's not (for the most part) at this point. And there are projects where you get to a point that you really do need to step away for a while instead of just pressing ahead, but those are the exceptions. So while I may not be fully able to silence the inner editor that makes me go back and quick change a few wordings here and there or correct for an awkward sentence, I've so far been able to avoid entertaining any more serious questionings about the story as a whole. Which is a very good thing for getting the first draft down in a way that I'm happy with.

2010-11-09T10:02:00.001-08:00

Strange Horizons

As I said at the beginning of the month, I won't be doing much short fiction reading during November. I have been glancing at new stories as they appear in my favorite zines so I have an idea of what stories to come back to come December.

In the meantime, big (though belated) congrats go to Susan Marie Groppi of Strange Horizons for winning a World Fantasy Award. And thanks go to her as she announces that she's stepping down from her work at SH, and best of luck Niall Harrison who will be the new editor in chief. Strange Horizons is easily a favorite of mine, so it's always good when it is recognized, and always exciting to see how it will continue to grow in the future.

Now back to NaNo-ing...

2010-11-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on NaNo-ing, week one

I hit 10k words last night, despite almost falling asleep while writing the last few hundred. So while I haven't written 2k words every single day, I've never ended a day with my cumulative total beneath the 2k-word average. So that's great, and I'm hoping to maintain that pace throughout the month. And I've managed to do that without cutting back on my running and biking or other stuff (a lot of raking this week, it seems).

The story itself...it's going well. In terms of narrative, it's pretty straightforward, which I think usually works better for something like NaNo. In terms of story and setting it's decidedly weird, which obviously was the intent all along with this story. In terms of character, I'm feeling good about the main character, feeling like I know pretty well how she'll respond to things, and the two supporting characters introduced so far are taking shape too--characters seem to often take awhile over the course of a book to reveal themselves fully to me, so it's still pretty early to have much more to say than that.

I still feel uncertain what to make of the whole NaNo culture. I respond well to having these publicly ambitious goals and an organized structure to support them. I've yet to make it to any in-person events, though, so my view of the culture itself is based on forum statements. There's someone in my local group who's already hit 50k...and I have to wonder how worthwhile those 50k words are. But then that's what people who haven't done NaNo say about NaNo in general, and I know for myself personally, I'm very confident in the 10k words I've written so far. They'll take revision, of course, but they're up to the same level as my first drafts usually are. I'm also not interested in the various competitions and challenges to see who can be the first to reach 50k or to see if people can whip out an addition 10k over this weekend, but that's just recognizing what works for me. Competitive as I am in some situations, I don't think that would be conducive to me writing a good first draft. But it's great if it works for others--I just fear sometimes that it encourages writing lots of stuff that's not worth its memory space...but then see my comment on the person who already reached 50k.

I'm still hoping to make it to an in-person event. Maybe this weekend? We'll see.

2010-11-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

Flash fiction piece at Eschatology

My story "A Haunting of Birds" is up today at the new Eschatology ezine. It's a flash story that I wrote a few years ago, one of those that began with a one-hour prompt, though I forget the exact prompt. It's a second-person POV story, which is something I like to play around with and see what effect that has on the storytelling. I don't think I mentioned on this blog when this story was accepted a few weeks ago, so this can be my announcement of that as well.

Eschatology is a new ezine focusing on flash stories with a Lovecraftian or apocalyptic feel to them...though the apocalypse can be (as in this one) personal rather than culture-wide or world-wide.

2010-11-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Bar Book Club

So here's November 1 when we're supposed to be all crazy, nothing-but-NaNo writing...and I spend the evening at Coopersmiths chatting about a book and hanging out with a bunch of guys. Well...I'd already met my 2k-word goal, gone for a run, done some raking, etc., so I can justify it.

Beer of choice: Horsetooth Stout

Book: My God and I by Lewis Smedes

I admit I was leery about this book. A spiritual memoir? By a theologian? But OK, it was actually a lot more readable than I feared. I wasn't familiar with Smedes, but he grew up not far from where I did and about 15 or so years before my dad (who also grew up there). So it was interesting to get a feel for what that area was like back then. He also went to my alma mater for undergrad and had good things to say about that, which was cool. We agreed that Smedes had a sort of tortured soul quality that made him more approachable than you might think of a theologian. And he's very honest about himself, even about his doubts, which also made the book more accessible for a diverse group (though admittedly I think all of us who were there last night had grown up in some variety of christianity). It was not a dogmatic or preachy book at all, which was what I'd feared when it was selected last month. So I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

That said...I was ready for a work of fiction this time around, and it was my turn to bring the choices. I'd say my choices were quite different in many ways... I brought Nabakov's Lolita, The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti, Galapagos by Vonnegut, Lullaby by Chuck Paluhniuk, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, and (the book we ultimately chose) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. All are books I haven't read and would like to read...but they're also all library books that I'll have to return sometime, and I'm thinking I won't have a ton of reading time this month. If I get a chance, though, I'd especially like to read the Nabakov and Vonnegut.

2010-10-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

NaNo 2010

Getting very close to November... I don't think I ever blogged about NaNo last year, but I had a great time participating last year and decided to do so again this year. Last year I wrote some 55k words on a sequel to my earlier serial fiction project, which is currently out on submission. So hopefully both the original and the NaNo sequel will turn into something people have a chance to read. What I didn't do at all last year was make it to any of the in-person events. And...I don't know if I will this year either, but I'd like to, if possible.

This year I'm working on a new novel, but one that's been bouncing around my head for well over a year--I'd actually considered doing it for NaNo last year before changing to the serial project. Even with all that time to let images and ideas simmer, I don't feel I know the characters nearly as well as I knew the characters last year--so it'll be much more a journey of discovery as I go this time around. There's a challenge to that I like, but a danger as well that I freeze up or lost confidence in what I'm writing.

I'm also not rearranging my life to do NaNo. I want to show myself I can do this while doing all the other things expected of me and other things I want to do. I'm sure some things will get pushed back to December or whatever, but for the most I'm committing myself to maintaining a clean house, doing the yard work, all the other work I need to do. And I've increased my activity level a lot over the past two months (having my son in kindergarten means it's so much easier to go running when I can just plop my daughter in the jogging stroller, rather than trying to have my son bike along next to me as I push the stroller). I need to make sure I continue that as well.

If you think about it, it shouldn't be that hard. Not even two thousand words a day? It requires discipline, of course. But as long as I can keep myself from getting distracted, it should be eminently do-able. (Check back to see if I still think that in a week or two...) I'm not a feast-and-famine kind of writer usually, so I'll be much better off if I can establish that kind of pace from the beginning, rather than trying for 5k one day and nothing the next. That said, this year has been mostly famine in terms of writing new fiction--I've been focusing on a ton of rewriting, editing, and revising. So hopefully that means I'll be rearing to go, come...a few hours from now, rather than it meaning I'm too rusty to stay focussed.

Well all I can say now is, we'll see. I'll probably not have the weekly short fiction posts (though maybe I'll have time to read some), but while I won't bore you with the minutiae of how the novel is going, I'll have some posts related to NaNo in the weeks ahead.

2010-10-28T21:34:00.001-07:00

Fantasy Magazine's "relaunch"

I just posted this on a forum for a crit group I'm part of, and then decided I might as well post it here as well:

I saw this news on Ralan's yesterday--there's a .pdf news release, if you missed it. Any thoughts on this? JJA has tons of experience, and I even met him at World Con two years ago, and he's a nice guy. The consistency between the two zines makes sense in a lot of ways.

At the same time, I've had encouraging comments from Cat Rambo in the past, so I'll be sad to see her leaving. And with two reprints a month, this essentially cuts in half the number of stories they'll be buying (which is a big disappointment). But it also sounds like a big change in style/format: instead of a blog, with an unpredictable but pretty frequent number of posts (articles, reviews, interviews, etc.) each week, it sounds like it'll be going back to a more issue-based magazine, with a set (rigid) schedule.

If you asked me a couple of years ago, I'd have said that the blog-based set-up is the future of online magazines, or at least the most likely way to succeed. Cultivate a regular readership, have them come back frequently--ideally every day/weekday, make them feel involved in the community of its readers. Originally Fantasy was more regular with its daily posts, and recently has dropped back to only about three a week (their once-weekly "Blog for a Beer" hasn't appeared in at least a year, I'd guess), so maybe that was just too much work for the editors. Even as infrequently as I commented, though, I did feel more invested in it than I am in some of the other online zines I read. When I visit Lightspeed or even my other favorites, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, etc. much as I obviously enjoy them all, I feel less like a participant and more like a consumer. (The blog model is essentially what Tor.com does...with, I'm sure, a much larger staff and resources...)

Maybe that's OK. Maybe the participant model was flawed--too much work, too little return. Maybe the rise of e-readers means a more issue-based format makes more sense. Or maybe this won't be as drastic a change as it appears in the release. I don't know. This announcement doesn't make me worried about Fantasy's future or anything, but it still makes me sad to see it seemingly abandoning what I had once thought was an exciting new approach.

2010-10-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Tuesday

I just returned a copy of Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" to the library and then discovered that Subterranean Online is posting the entire novella for free. Check it out. Chiang is always a worthwhile writer--Stories of Your Life & Others is one of the best collections I've read in recent years, and "Exhalation" (the link is to the Wikipedia article about the story and includes links to a pdf of the text and a link to Escape Pod's podcast of it) is an excellent more recent story that quite appropriately won a Hugo. This most recent story explores the idea of creating artificial intelligence more organically (so to speak)--instead of by programming all the factors the AI needs, by programming an entity to have the capacity to learn and presenting it with similar stimuli to what a human baby and child will encounter. From a storytelling standpoint, some of this one felt weaker than some of Chiang's other stories, but the ideas (and ideas are always a large part of the pleasure of Chiang's stories) are packed in and thought-provoking.

If that doesn't sound like what you like, I'll link to one more story, that's very different. Fantasy Magazine's "Bitterdark" by Eljay Daly takes an idea that wouldn't usually appeal to me--fairies and a very clear battle between good and evil--and tells a memorable and fascinating story with it. Part of what I like is just the idea of a former king and hero of the fairies who has left the faerie realm behind out of weariness--a hero's weariness has certainly been done before, but it still resonates with me. And the way the story turns out makes it noteworthy as well.

2010-10-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

Inspiration--space travel and exploration

I don't write a lot of what probably first comes to mind when people (meaning your average, not-deeply-involved-in-SF-fandom kinds of people) think about science fiction--spaceships and grand explorations across space and that kind of thing. Neither do I often seek out that kind of thing to read, but I do find it fascinating to wonder and speculate about how that might take place.

If you're interested in writing about (or just thinking about) the near future possibilities of space travel, MSNBC has a couple of recent articles that explore a bit of what that might look like and what challenges lie in the way. "Can Starships Survive the Journey?" is a brief article that addresses the danger posed by even tiny bits of dust, once a spaceship got going fast enough. And then it moves from some theoretical systems to protect spaceships to wondering if we might observe evidence of aliens using those kinds of technologies. "The Best Options for Flying to Faraway Stars" tries to tackle a broad and technical topic in a pretty short space, so it's not likely to uncover anything new to those who are already interested in this...but it's good to get a sense of where exactly the current research and technology is.

Combine these two with the surprising amount of water found in a moon crater and the White House adviser's study of emergency response to an asteroid (all posted within the last 24 hours), and you've got quite a space-focused news day...

2010-10-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

For a few weeks now I've had a Strange Horizons story open in a tab, a story that looked worth reading but for one reason or another I kept reading other things first. Then this week Fantasy featured a story by the same writer, Lavie Tidhar, so I decided it would be a good time to read them both.

The story in Fantasy, "Monsters," begins in a very self-aware way--something that often appeals to me, but I know some of my writer friends are less keen about--talking about stories as metaphors, spaceships and aliens as symbols. Then its narrator tells its own story, about the amphibian species it comes from and the planet left behind, and finally about the purpose of sending its message (something I'll leave for other readers to discover). I enjoyed the touches of non-Western cultures that are mirrored in the alien's culture (or at least the way it uses our non-Western cultures to explain itself), and the mood as the story wraps up creates a good effect.

The Strange Horizons story, "Aphrodisia," is also science fictional, though in this case more focused on the body adaptations people have taken, both in response to technology (so there's a definite cyberpunk feel) and to colonizing the Jupiter moons and other regions of the solar system. Those social touches are what stand out in this--the evocation of Earth society and the ways each of the main non-Earthborn characters feel in it. I'm less clear on why the narrator had been forced to seal his body data ports--at first mention, I'd guessed in was in response to some sort of crime, but later I wondered if it was more an intervention/rehab kind of thing to deal with addiction...though in that case I would have liked to see a stronger sense of the narrator's addiction earlier. Anyway, despite that, I enjoyed the story a lot.

2010-10-16T16:56:00.000-07:00

Gigantism's appeal one more time

A while back I did a series of posts on why I find myself drawn to stories where something is monstrously large--an impossibly large castle; a tree the size of a city; a mansion big enough to have many cultures within. Even the ribcage that surrounds the city of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's three Bas-Lang novels fits in here. Maybe especially that. I'd meant to do one more post on that topic, but never got around to it. I posted that it was simply something different, that it's a way of belonging yet not fully to the tradition of speculative fiction, and that it's a fantasy counterpart to SF's sensawunda.

As alluded to in that last post, this last one is the sense of wrong-ness that undermines the awe of big things. I was reading Danielewski's House of Leaves a few months ago, and one of Zampano's footnotes discusses the aesthetics of the uncanny. It apparently comes from Freud, and in German the various words translated as "uncanny" (the main one being unheimlich or literally "un-home-like") all have a root or connotation of something that's gigantic.

Given the way House of Leaves works, I can't say for certain that this claim is true, but it fits with what I'd been sensing about these kinds of stories. It's the juxtaposition, that sense of awe-and-yet-wrong-ness. Those two things working together, I think, is what gives these kinds of settings a strong power. Setting alone is not enough to make a great story, of course, but it's often the first thing that draws my attention.

2010-10-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

"The Interior of Mister Bumblethorn's Coat" by Willow Fagan is a wildly imaginative story, one that began with a fascinating and mysterious setting and I began building a shape in my head for how the story would go...but then it twisted itself away from those expectations, and then did so again. It's weird in all the best senses of that word, a story of man trying to forget his past while living in a foreign and constantly unsettling city.

Very different, but also a story I enjoyed this week, is Sarah L. Edwards' "The Girl who Tasted the Sea." It's a much shorter story. Into that length she packs a well evoked setting and some broken taboos, giving a very satisfying, quick read.

2010-10-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Inspiration--Tree Bridges

I saw this link on Ideomancer's LJ the other day--living root bridges. They create these amazing bridges in northeast India, taking ten to fifteen years to coax them into usable bridges. Check out the blog post in the link for a bunch more pictures, a video, and info on how they're build. Very cool stuff.

2010-10-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Friday

I was up late the other night, waiting for my in-laws to arrive so I could let them in and get them settled, and I had a chance to read some stories. One that really struck me was Jacque Barcia's "Salvaging Gods." It's a story in which gods are physical objects full of inexplicable code that you can manipulate by wiring them in certain ways. The main character and her father find discarded gods and have learned how to reuse them in new constructs. Fascinating and highly imaginative piece.

Also worth noting in the context of short fiction, my writer friend Lindsey Duncan has a new story available for purchasing (as a pdf) at Gypsy Shadow Publishing: "Taming the Weald."

2010-10-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

Vargas Llosa, Nobel winner

Congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa on winning the Nobel for literature today! I'm pretty sure I've read some shorter stuff by him, including essays, but the thing that stands out the most is El Hablador (The Storyteller is what its English translation is called, I believe), which alternates between two storylines. One is an account of a storyteller traveling the (Peruvian, I imagine) Amazon rainforest, using his stories to maintain a sense of cultural identity among a dwindling group of forest wanderers. The second is of two university friends and the way their lives diverge. I probably shouldn't say more about that aspect, because while I'd guessed the connection between the two storylines fairly early, based in part on the back cover copy, I think it's supposed to be a kind of spoiler. But it's a story of the difficult question of cultural contact (especially in this context from both missionaries and anthropology professors), of "advancement" and the losses that entails...but not in any kind of one-sided or strident way. A wonderful book.

(La Señorita de Tacma, that's the other thing I read in college. A drama. I don't remember much about it at the moment. And I also found we own Llosa's Lituma en los Andes. I'm not sure if that was a thrift store find once that I never got around to reading, or if it was one of my wife's college books. I may have to pull those down and see about reading one or both.)

2010-10-05T12:03:00.000-07:00

Inspiration

I'm still not completely back to the schedule I used to follow, so there's no reason to wait until Friday to post this link. Linguists studying a pair of little-known languages in northeastern India discovered a third, previously undocumented language, Koro. What's especially fascinating is that the speakers of Koro consider themselves to be a part of the Aka, Aka being one of the two languages the linguists were studying. And culturally they really are clearly connected. The language, though, turned out to be completely different in vocabulary, sounds, and syntactical structure.

While in one sense, trying to work this level of detail into a secondary world fiction would likely just leave readers confused or else bore them with dry data...I think you can hint at this kind of complexity, and it's something I aim for in my stories, the sense that there are always more wrinkles to the diverse societies and micro-societies that make up a culture. When successful, this kind of detail makes the story itself far richer.

2010-09-29T22:02:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

Just a quick note this week, as I'm still trying to work through a backlog of stories I've been meaning to read. Last week's Fantasy Magazine story, "Logovore" by Joseph F. Nacino stands out from what I've read. I love the concept of someone literally eating the words out of people's minds, and the wine-snob-ish descriptions of various words was delightfully whimsical. Fun story.

2010-09-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

More pirate ponderings...

We continue to listen to the Pirates of the Caribbean Swashbuckling Songs (over and over...my son says, "We've listened to the pirates CD sixteen times!" but I think he's off by a factor of ten...). There's this great, ponderous pipe-organ song, and it got me wondering where the connection between pirates and pipe organs comes from.

Alas, Google has not answered my question. The closest I could come to an answer is the suggestion that the connection between the movie's Davy Jones and an organ is a tip of the hat to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where Captain Nemo has an organ on the Nautilus. The problem with that, though, is that I remember cartoons having the same trope of pipe organs on sunken ships and shipwrecks. Even Goonies has it, doesn't it? A booby-trapped pipe organ? So if the connection is to Verne, then it goes back much further, and the movie is only continuing that earlier trope.

Unless...hmmm. The movie is loosely based on the amusement park ride. I have no idea how old that ride is or if it has the same Davy Jones/Flying Dutchman character. But if the ride is old enough and has a pipe organ (as a nod to Verne), then that could be the source of the trope. Lauren, you know all about Disney World. Come to my rescue here. Or anyone else with knowledge about such things, of course.

2010-09-18T13:24:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Saturday

Well, since I'm still trying to get back into a regular pattern of blogging here, I figured I might as well post this today instead of waiting until the usual Tuesday/Wednesday. Yoon Ha Lee's "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" in Lightspeed is a mind-bending story of a universe where the ending is certain, but the past is fluid and undetermined. Well worth reading.

2010-09-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

Reading Group

We met last night for our reading group. Every year a couple of the guys bid on a "Traditional High Tea" at a charity auction, so rather than the usual meeting at the pub, we met on the house of one of our members for Oolong and Black Pearl (yo ho ho?) tea and a couple of others, along with a big variety of scones and other foods. In past years we've combined it with a time to drink a variety of single malt Scotch whisky (my favorite last year was the Laphroaig), but this year our two experts on single malts were both out of town, so we decided to have that another night.

The person whose house we were at is also hosting a grad student in (micro-) finance/business who was born and grew up in a Tutsi refugee camp in Uganda. So he recommended the book Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza as a good way to understand the 1994 genocide. Immaculée's story is a powerful one, and I was especially struck by the way it was neighbors and childhood friends who, convinced by the wild propaganda, turned on her family and so many others. It also made me ashamed that more wasn't done internationally to try to stop it. The discussion of the book was good, as was the chance we had to hear the student's own story.

One of our members, a psychology professor, is fascinated with memoirs of theologians apparently...so our next book is Lewis Smede's My God and I.

2010-09-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Arrr, me maties

We like to check out CDs of kids music from the library (by which I mean, my kids like to listen to lots of kids music, and I'd rather not own lots of it...), and recently we've been listening over and over to a Disney CD of swashbuckling pirate songs. It's actually a lot of fun and makes me want to write a pirate story. What I find especially funny, though, is one very peppy, upbeat song about...how lots of pirates are dead and under the water. "All good pirates have a friend or two / down in Davy Jones' Locker..." Am I corrupting my children?

2010-09-09T19:46:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Thursday

I haven't done this (otherwise regular) feature for a few weeks now. I've still been reading the stories at my usual ezines, and I've enjoyed some of them as well. The silence shouldn't be taken as a sign that the stories haven't been good...though it's true that none has jumped out as definitely one I want to rave about. I haven't been reading quite as many, though, because I've also been reading short fiction in print, sometimes at times when I would otherwise be reading them online.

One anthology I'm making my way through is the John Klima-edited Logorrhea. I'd read several of the stories before, and some of them received well-due praise at the time (Daniel Abraham's Hugo-nominated "The Cambist and Lord Iron" certainly deserves its nomination). A couple from those I've read over the past week jumped out at me, though, in part because I don't recall any discussion of them at the time the book came out:

Neil Williamson's "The Euonymist" is actually a reprint, having appeared in Electric Velocipede originally (which, of course, is also edited by Klima). Euonym means an appropriate name for something, and the titular character's job is to decide how to name newly discovered things, from planets to plant species, within the context of the many competing intelligent species of a galaxy-wide Bloc. And having a name chosen from your own cultural history is a great point of pride. A very well-crafted and entertaining story.

Tim Pratt's "From Around Here" appears to have actually gotten some notice at the time, including being reprinted in a Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, but it escaped my notice. It's the story of supernatural spirits who are deeply tied to a particular location. The narrator, Reva, senses something wrong in the neighborhood he comes to and tries to figure out what it is so he can make it right. The story actually reminded me of Octavia Butler's Patternist stories, which is a very good thing to be reminded of.

These are far from the only good stories here, and I haven't even finished reading all of them, but these are two that jumped out at me over the past week. Next week I'm hoping to get back into mentioning some of the stories in online zines.

2010-09-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

An old soccer t-shirt

I was digging through my old clothes for something to wear running this morning and came across a shirt that was my favorite back in high school. The front is a big block of text, each line fully justified, but with a big variation in font size to make it work. Just thought I'd copy it here for fun:

It's been 90 minutes.

The score is tied.

You're sucking wind

& resting with your hands on your knees.

I am smiling & laughing.

'Cuz while you were sitting in front of the TV,

I was training.

So don't hang your head...it's too late.

just listen to your coach read you the riot act.

I'll be thinking about

how I'm gonna score on you.

On second thought, maybe you should hang your head.

At least you'll be able to see the ball

as I push it through your wobbly legs.

But don't let it get to you...

It's only a game!

I can remember wearing it to Cedar Point (or was it 6 Flags Great America?) and having people constantly tell me not to move when the line moved so they could finish reading it.

2010-09-02T16:49:00.001-07:00

Reading group

Sorry about the brief gap in posts, there. It's been quite an adjustment to get into the rhythm of school days, now that my son is in school all day. It means earlier mornings, which none of us here are used to.

Anyway, we met last week for our book club to discuss Falkner's Light in August. The intent was to meet at a different bar in a nearby town, where a couple of our members live (they live in the town, not the bar). The type of bar, supposedly, where you don't walk in the main entrance, or they know you're not a local. Which is bad. The kind of place with $1 PBRs. Unfortunately (?) a flood in the bar meant it was closed that night, so we went over to a nearby, non-chain Mexican restaurant.

So after all that...beer of choice: Modelo Negra, a dark beer imported from Mexico. It was a good beer, much better than what I was expecting to have to drink (though admittedly more expensive).

The discussion of the book was book. I had to miss the beginning of it, because I arrived late, but I enjoyed the book a lot, enjoyed Faulkner's writing style more than in other books of his (not that I'd disliked it in Go Down, Moses, for what it's worth). In all a good time.

Next time we've got a special guest, a CSU grad student who was born in a refugee camp as a result of the Rwanda Genocide. He's staying with one of our members for the current school year, so we asked him to suggest a book to read to help us understand that event and the cultural history that led up to it. He picked Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza.

2010-08-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Inspiration

"The most isolated man in the world" This article is a fascinating story about a man presumed to be the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe in Amazonian Brazil. You have to wonder how he sees these same events, what purpose the pits inside his huts serve, what the markings he makes on trees mean.

I'm reminded of Vargas Llosas' El Hablador, which is a novel about someone who leaves "civilization" to become the storyteller of the Machiguengua. What stories would this man tell? And how would those stories be different from the ones he would have heard before the destruction of his village and the rest of his tribe?

2010-08-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Tuesday

We missed this last week, didn't we? I, that is...

I love Bruce Holland Rogers' series of teaching/example pairs in Flash Fiction Online, where he has an essay about a particular flash fiction approach or advice and then has a story (or two) to illustrate what he means. The most recent was on the prose sonnet, which I thought would be fun to try sometime. Then I went back and found that I'd missed his essay on the prose villanelle, and the accompanying story, "Border Crossing" is stunningly beautiful. The repetition is just enough to give the piece unity, while the variations on those themes really deepens the whole thing. Besides, crossing borders is just a rich theme that brings all kinds of layers into the story.

On the theme of missing something when it first came out, I somehow neglected to check in at Clarkesworld when the August issue came up. It includes a Valente story, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time," which rather beautifully weaves together alternating sections of mythic, creation-type stories told with playfully scientific language on the one hand and seemingly autobiographical stories about a science fiction writer on the other.

2010-08-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ghazal

I just discovered this poetic form yesterday. There are good summaries of it on Poets.org (primarily on the English-language adaptation of the form) and Wikipedia (on the world-wide tradition). It's a fun form. I like the feel that the rhyme/refrain gives to the couplets.

So what do I do? I stayed up late (or...a little later than I'd intended to stay up, anyway) to throw together one, scribbling it onto a notecard. It came together nicely. I completely replaced one couplet this morning as I typed it up, which made it considerably better, and I posted it at a couple of critiquing sites, so I might easily be revising it again. But I think it definitely has good potential, even as is. Funny how a short story can take days of agonizing (I enjoy the process...but it can still be tedious at times) to get to that same point of feeling nearly ready.

2010-08-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

Gigantism's appeal: Sensawunda

Continuing this series of posts on why I find myself drawn to story settings that are abnormally large--giant factories, giant castles, giant trees, giant cities, anything beyond comprehension. This is, I think, the big reason I'm drawn to this, and it's the fantasy counterpart to science fiction's sensawunda. Actually, reading that wikipedia article, perhaps it's more akin to the Gothic numinous, but I didn't think it's paired with fear in this case, as that article implies for the numinous. It's not Lovecraft's incomprehensible deities, but there's still a sense of something beyond understanding. There is a certain wrong-ness to it, which is something I'm intending to look into more in my next post in this series, but there's a sense of wonder too, a sense of dawning comprehension of the sheer size of...things. It's the sense of standing at the foot of a snow-capped mountain, at the edge of the Grand Canyon, on the ocean shore on a clear day. A sense of awe, I guess...except with that undercurrent of wrong-ness, which at the very least undermines the mystical leanings of this sense of wonder/awe/numinous. I'll say more about that next time.

2010-08-04T12:38:00.001-07:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

A pair of stories this week from other ezines, which I don't always remember to read when new issues come out: ChiZine and Lightspeed.

Patricia Russo's "Turning, or Turning" manages to play on the zombie-story sense of humans changing into something else without actually being a zombie story. The sense of feeling left out that the protagonist feels is perfectly handled, the description of this non-zombie change (and Alberico's reaction to it) is engaging, and the ending adds the right kind of open-ended closure to the story. I'll admit that I was somewhat ambivalent about the story at first, as too much of a zombie story even if it's not (exactly) one...but the story won me over as I continued.

And then there's Catherynne Valente's "How to Become a Mars Overlord" which is beautiful. I'm biased, in that I've rarely read something of Valente's that I haven't fully enjoyed, but the concept of the many Marses, the inventiveness of the various overlords in history, and of course the melodic prose all combine to make memorable story. It's rather more fantastical that I was actually expecting to see in Lightspeed--science-fictional as well, of course, but more of a mythic, fantastical feel to the tone and mood of the story. Just an observation, though I'd say that it's a good thing that the new zine is casting a wide net. It certainly makes me want to do a better job of remembering to check for new stories there. And I definitely see this story as one I'll return to at the end of the year--it ought to at least be in the conversation of awards and Best-of lists.

2010-07-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

Gigantism's appeal, question of belonging

Continuing this series of why immensely large objects seem to especially resonate with me. It's certainly a topic that's been on my mind, as we saw the Giant Redwoods (and even the oil distilleries and other sprawling industrial locations), but that will tie in more next time. For this post...well, this one's a bit out there, but it was something that occurred to me a while ago. It requires a bit of an explanation.

In college I became obsessed with the movie Zoot Suit. "It was the secret fantasy of every vato..."

Zoot Suits were not only a chicano thing--they essentially cut across most minority groups at the time, the common tie being people who grew up in the US and so felt themselves a part of it (so usually not immigrants themselves, but children and grandchildren of immigrants, as well as grandchildren of slaves), but at the same time weren't completely accepted by the greater US society that they identified with.

So one analysis I came across in several articles tied zoot suits--as a typical aspect of US society taken to an exaggerated, oversized extreme--with low-riders, which do essentially the same but with cars instead of clothing. The theory was that in both cases, the zoot suit and the low-rider were ways of participating in the dominant culture and yet maintaining their distance by making them their own.

So the connection with writing... A few years ago, shortly after I'd begun my stories set in the impossibly tall trees of Boskrea, I recalled that analysis of zoot suits, and it occurred to me that I might be doing the same. I was essentially taking what otherwise has become a cliche of fantasy--people living in very tall trees--and exaggerating that to the point where it no longer felt cliche. At the time I was becoming aware of some writers that have become among my favorites, but because I wasn't spending much time online paying attention to the wide range of speculative fiction, I was basically tied to what my local library had on their shelves, which was a wide selection but definitely weighted toward the pop/commercial fantasies that were wearing thin for me. So I think I felt a sense of not fully belonging (though unlike the analysis of zoot suits and low-riders, it was by my own choice and tastes, not by the opinions of others, which I think is an important distinction), but fantasy and especially secondary world fantasy were still where I felt most at home in my reading.

So for me at the time, the Boskrea stories served as a way of identifying with the secondary-world fantasies that I'd loved so much, but also distancing myself from what was most prominently available. Whether this is an explanation I can generalize to the other forms of exaggerated gigantism or not, I'm skeptical, but I think it does play a partial role, at least, in what drew me to those stories.

2010-07-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Wednesday

This week's Fantasy has "Perhaps This is Kushi's Story" by Swapna Kishore. What I liked about this one was the way the story within the story works, interesting in itself but also important for Kushi. Key to that was the end of the inner story where the Tribemother asks each girl to suggest how the story would go from there. The society within the story is certainly a strong part of its appeal as well, even though so little is spelled out in any detail.

Also worth mentioning this week is Yoon Ha Lee's "The Territorialist"...though to tell the truth I'm not completely sold on it. I love the sheer sense of imagination that's clear throughout, but I think this is one of those stories that would have benefited by being longer, more fleshed out. I hesitate to say that, because often when I come across comments along those lines, they seem to carry a sense of this-is-so-good-it-deserves-to-be-longer, as if longer itself were always better. Me, I like the concision and immediacy of a good short story. I love flash and even microfiction. But...while this story's imaginative society and complex tensions pulled me along, I felt lost for parts of it, and I think the ending would have been more affecting if I'd had more time to get to know Jershi, Wrack, and Armain, and if I'd had more time to understand what was at stake for this place and its people. But that criticism doesn't change the fact that it was an enjoyable read.

2010-07-26T20:05:00.001-07:00

Back from our trip

It may not have been the most restful of vacations, but we've returned from our big road trip and are getting settled back in. We saw lots of cool things--the Earth does mountains in lots of different ways; Nevada is barren, even compared to Wyoming; the Great Salt Desert is weird and fascinating; the Giant Redwoods alone are worth the trip. That last one, of course, ties in to the gigantism series of posts...which I will be getting back in to shortly. I didn't do much actual writing while we were traveling, and it always takes a little while to get back into the swing of routine, but I've already gotten some good revising done since returning and looking forward to more writing-related things in the month ahead.

2010-07-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Vacation time

We're heading out early tomorrow (at least I hope it's still early-ish) to drive across mountains and desert and down to the ocean. So that will be my inspiration this week. Ocean, volcanic mudpots, mountains, and especially the giant redwoods. Less inspirational will be the extreme heat right until the last half hour or so, at which point the temperature will drop some 30-40 degrees.

2010-07-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction...Thursday

Getting ready for a road trip here, so I haven't had a lot of time for blogging, but I just finished "The Isthmus Variation" by Kris Millering and loved it. It doesn't have the things I usually latch onto when I say I like a story--the setting isn't particularly distinct; the structure isn't experimental or innovative--but it's just a great story about treachery, intrigue, art (in the broadest sense...drama to be more precise), and story. The story is told by the player in a slowly unraveling form of drama, the Slow Game, which takes place over the course of an evening at what seems to be an innocent dinner party for the nobility. Really I'd have to say of all those I've been recommending here once a week all year, this is certainly among my favorites.

2010-07-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

Gigantism's appeal 1: something different

I'm going to start with the simplest explanation and move on to other reasons as I continue this series of posts. There's nothing intellectually deep about this one, but the simple fact that a setting where the characters live inside/within something vast is different from the more common medieval and classical settings found so often in fantasy...that appeals to me. Different isn't automatically a sign of greater literary merit or anything of the sort, but for me, being different is something I value in stories.

I'm a member of a few writing communities, and frequently the question comes up of whether an idea is over-used or something along those lines. The answer that generally comes back is that clichés become clichés because people respond to them, and that it's all in the execution. Good and useful answers for the most part...but at the same time there's a part of me that wants to say, "Yeah, but don't you want to branch out, discover something new, attempt something different?"

So even if it's not a reliable marker for a better story or greater merit, when I find something that has a different feel from things I've read before (not just in setting, though setting is what I'm talking about now), that's likely to catch my attention and make me want to read it.

2010-07-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

Gigantism

One of the things I enjoy about Mervyn Peake's Titus stories is the sheer Gothic size of Gormenghast Castle. The seemingly implausible way that the collection of buildings making up the castle becomes essentially an entire world for the people inside.

Another book I loved was Iain Banks's The Bridge, where the main character, while in a coma after a car accident, finds himself among a people who live in a bridge grown to such size that a single span of the bridge is basically a large neighborhood, if not an entire city, and no one knows where (or if) the bridge ends.

Tad Williams's Otherland series sends its characters through dozens of different (virtual) worlds, and I remember especially liking one where the whole world was a house, with different, societies claiming different wings or rooms.

I can think of short stories or novellas that are set in an endless, house-lined road; a house; a hedge; a factory; a web-lined chasm. For some reason these appeal to me greatly. Whether the story as a whole is completely successful or not, they stick with me.

In my own writing, I've found myself drawn to these kinds of extreme settings as well. A several-million-inhabitant city colonizing four implausibly giant trees. A post-apocalyptic playground where the playground equipment is impossibly big. A network of vines big enough to hold dozens of small villages and all the game and hunting space those villagers need. A wall so high no one has seen the land below or remembers what they're guarding or from whom.

The big-ness isn't used to the same effect in all of these stories, and I wouldn't want to create some sort of rigid term for this grouping, but what draws me, it seems, is this sense of the characters being very small in relation to the Big Object(s). (I've left it vague in my stories whether these things really are impossibly big, or whether the characters are actually incredibly small...but really it doesn't matter as long as the story remains within the confines of the imagined society.)

I've come up with a few reasons of why that seems to appeal to me, which I'll explore in some upcoming posts. Before that, if anyone knows of other stories that seem to play with the same size weirdness, let me know about them!

2010-07-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

Bar Book Club

We had our reading group last night at Coopersmiths, discussing Why We Hate Us by Dick Meyer.

Beer of choice: Wayfarer Copper Ale, which is a new one, as far as I can recall.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book. I went in thinking it would be a rather facile list of all the things about our society that grate on us. Something that might be entertaining for an article in a magazine but not at book length. Instead I found it to be a thought-provoking book, all about how the societal shifts of the past decades have left us much less connected to, well, anything we can really identify with, and how that lack of connection leads to so much that annoys and frustrates us (about politics, media, Hollywood). It's not, though, a nostalgic, everything-was-better-in-the-50s book, to be clear. Rather it's how earlier society (including the 50s) for all the negative things there might have been part of that mindset, provided certain tools for countering this kind of selfish self-hatred. So now that we've left those times behind and enjoy all kinds of freedoms that weren't possible then...what new ways can we find of countering that?

In the end Meyer ties it in, somewhat at least, with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I found to be a very powerful book when I read it seven or eight years ago. The narrator's sense of Quality as a philosophical value, which is pretty much the same thing Meyer calls Authenticity, is what we need to forge for ourselves through our choices and actions.

Anyway, I don't mean to rehash the full argument, but I was pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed the book as much as I did, even if I didn't agree with everything he said. The discussion was good as well. Our next book is Faulkner's Light in August, which makes it the second Faulkner in about a year and a half. (There was some nashing of teeth on that count with someone who hadn't really appreciated Go Down Moses...)

2010-07-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Short Fiction Tuesday

Samantha Henderson's "The Red Bride" is a darkly wonderful story. It reveals that grim undercurrent of the story slowly, beginning in what seems a simple bedtime story told by an enslaved alien nurse to her human ward. The setup allows for some bits about how stories translate from one culture and language (and species) to another, and just in general it feels very skillfully handled. Beautiful story.

I also just discovered that Subterranean Online published a Peter Beagle story set in the same locale as his Innkeeper's Song and Giant Bones books, "Return." I haven't had a chance to read it all yet, and to tell the truth, I remember little from the book, apart from the fact that I really liked it on many levels when I read it some 10 years ago (I think...). Well, that's not quite true--I remember a lot of little snippets, brief scenes, images, but the underlying story that ties them together is largely forgotten. Anyway, that's next on my list to read, and I'll recommend it without even having read it.