Like me, he's not a manic blogger; sometimes weeks will go by between posts. But he is one of the finest, most nuanced writers in our field, and if you're not visiting his site then you're missing out on something special.
Anyway, here's a excerpt from the excerpt; click the pretty blue letters to read the whole thing.
Superblogger Charles Tan conducted an interview with me a little while ago, and it just went live. I think the only thing you really need to take away from it is that I want to write a Hellboy novel.
Here it is.
Lucius Shepard did decide to write about it, though, and I'm glad he did. I agree with everything he says here. Here's a taste; click to read it all.
Okay, so I've let the blog go dormant for a while. Obviously I'm not one of these people who believes one should post something every damn day, regardless of whether or not there's anything to say. However, there is a happy medium between daily filler and a tumbleweed-strewn wasteland, and I will endeavor to find that place again.
So here's a highlight reel of what's been going on recently, told in an annoyingly disjointed Larry King style.
Mia is visiting her mom in Alabama for the summer. This time we're breaking up the visit into two segments, instead of one long stretch, in the interest of making the transitions a little easier for her. Summers tend to be a stressful time for the little one. So the first leg of the trip is due to end next week, and she'll be home for a couple weeks before going down there again. She turns nine right around that time, so we're going to celebrate by going whitewater rafting. Also, with kittens.
I went to the Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop last week, and had a great time. The other attendees were Dale Bailey, Karen Joy Fowler, L. Timmel Duchamp, Molly Gloss, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Alice Sola Kim, Meghan McCarron, Richard Butner, David Schwartz, Paolo Bacigalupi, Christopher Rowe, and Veronica Schanoes. I went with a story that wasn't quite ready for prime time, called "Alpha Dog"; it got a very enthusiastic reception, and I got some killer advice. It's now called "Wolves," and is about 600 words leaner. It's out in the world again, looking for a home. Alice Kim blew everybody away with a story called "Yellow Trash," which I hope you will all have a chance to read very shortly. Since both Timmi and Paolo flew in and out of Asheville, I got to spend some time with each of them, before and after the workshop, sitting over coffee. They're both pretty magnificent people. I think I left Sycamore Hill with some new friends, which I liked even more than the constant immersion in the craft. All in all it was a great experience.
I just found out a story of mine is getting reprinted in a forthcoming anthology, but since I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it yet, I'll just leave it at that and announce the specifics later. Suffice it to say it was welcome news, and it's a story I'm still proud of.
My friend Alexandra Duncan, who -- along with her husband Jeremy -- comes over to my apartment on Sundays to play boardgames with my daughter and me, just made her first professional fiction sale. Her story "Bad Matter" will be appearing soon in F&SF, and you should really seek it out. (I'll let you know when the issue hits the stands.) I'm not just saying that because she's my friend. I think this story will garner her some well-deserved attention. Congratulations, Alexa. You deserve it.
Finally, I will not be able to attend Readercon this year, as I am just too damn broke. Laird, I expect you to do all my drinking for me. I like good Scotch and dark beer. Man up, big fella.
Grandpa Elliott, one of the best buskers in New Orleans
My dad sent me the link below. It's pretty damn great. I'm glad to see that New Orleans is well represented here; I listened to Grandpa Elliott on many occasions in the French Quarter, and was both surprised and thrilled to see him here, and to listen to him again. I was constantly amazed by how good the buskers were down there. Better than any record.
Follow this link!
From Ellen Datlow's blog comes the cover art and the table of contents for Lovecraft Unbound, in which "The Crevasse" -- the story I co-wrote with Dale Bailey -- takes the lead-off spot. I said this before, but it bears repeating: there are a lot of truly remarkable writers gathered in here, a few already famous, and a lot more that should be. I'm particularly looking forward to the stories by Michael Cisco and Brian Evenson.
Here's the list:
Introduction by Ellen Datlow
"The Crevasse" by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
"The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes
"Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour
"The Din of Celestial Birds" by Brian Evenson
"The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum
"Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane
"Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips
"Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer
"Houses Under the Sea" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
"Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco
"Leng" by Marc Laidlaw
"In the Black Mill" by Michael Chabon
"One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar
"Commencement" by Joyce Carol Oates
"Vernon, Driving" by Simon Kurt Unsworth
"The Recruiter" by Michael Shea
"Marya Nox" by Gemma Files
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear
"Catch Hell" by Laird Barron
"That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas
To my discredit, my first reaction was irritation. We had just finished a conversation in which she described being bullied by her cousin. Every time I pressed her for details, though, the story changed dramatically. It ended with my saying, curtly, "Well I don't know what happened today, Mia. You don't seem to be able to tell me the truth about it." She got quiet. I know she has troubles with her cousin, and it frustrates me that I can't help her with them -- and it frustrates me even more when I can't figure out exactly what they are.
So that was the mood when she offered up her opinion of her own picture in the group class photo. I sighed. "Oh come on, Mia." We've been working with maintaining a positive self-image, especially through choosing the words we use to describe ourselves more carefully. (I need this as much as she does.) She's been making great strides, and my first thought was that this was a regression into bad habits. I just didn't have any patience for it today.
So she retrieved the picture from her Hello Kitty backpack and held it to herself until I brought the car to a halt. Then she wordlessly passed it over.
My poor little girl.
It was bad. Not the kind of picture a parent thinks is bad, but the kind that will devastate a self-conscious kid. While most of the kids wore the standard motley of sheepish grins, baleful stares, and bizarre leers, my poor Mia looked like she had just been goosed by The Joker. Her eyes were round as small moons and her grin was a wide, fearsome display of clenched teeth. I've seen this face before, many times: it's her goofy face, her I'm-a-little-too-happy-for-it-to-last-mu
God help me: I chuckled. Then, horrified at my own reaction and trying to cover it up, I asked, lamely, "Were you trying to be goofy?"
"No," she said, and then she broke down into tears. "I didn't know my eyes were that wide. I thought the he was supposed to pick the best one. He took lots of pictures. He was supposed to pick the best one."
"Oh, honey."
I didn't tell her it looked fine. She knew it didn't. It was embarrassing, and she's going to get teased about it. It can't be stopped.
She kind of leaned over in my direction. I unfastened her seat belt for her and she climbed into my lap. I hugged her and she put her head into my shoulder, just sobbing, this gentle, effortless cascade of grief and shame pouring from her like water from a jug. I stroked her hair and said "Oh, kiddo," a couple of times; and then, incredibly, despite my stupid reaction and our argument of only minutes before, and despite the world-altering catastrophe of this photograph, her crying eased to a stop. She just sat there with me for a few moments more, sniffling a little. But the tears had gone away.
I made up a story of an even worse face I made during one of my own class pictures; it wasn't true, but she didn't know that, and it got her to laugh at me and mimic my ridiculous face.
It's good to know, even as she's growing older and the rules between us are constantly being reset, that there are still hurts I can take away with just a good long hug. That there are some things I can still make better just by being Daddy.
Although I'm looking forward to seeing Chicago, I have to tell you the part I'm looking forward to most is the drive back home. According to GoogleMaps it's about eleven hours. There are few things I enjoy more than long, long drives. What makes it better is that I'm taking my vacation from work that week, so my schedule is entirely my own. The drive can last as long as I want it to. There may be detours along the way.
Originally one of my best friends was supposed to come with me, but she's succumbed to economic necessity and bowed out. While this diminished my enthusiasm for the trip at first, I'm starting to look forward to it again. I'll bring a notebook, a camera, and spend a lot of time with my own thoughts. Although I'll miss my friend, I think the isolation will be good for my soul.
If anyone knows of anything in Chicago I should see before putting it in my rearview mirror, please let me know.
I've been drunk on memories for a long time now. In many ways my years in New Orleans made me into who I am now -- like Neil Young said, "all my changes were there." I think that who I am doesn't fit very well in this city. There's a feeling of walking through life here like a deepsea diver, bound up in my bulky suit, watching a strange, alien pageant play out all around me, and pulling oxygen from a place that doesn't even exist anymore.
I know this is because on some level I still don't believe that this is what life is now. I still half believe that my old life is still waiting for me, ready to be worn comfortably again, like a favorite hat. And of course it isn't.
But while I'm suspended here, Mia isn't waiting for me. She's listening to Britney Spears, she's watching tv shows where pre-teen girls are wearing shirts that say "Parole Baby." And tonight -- for the first time -- she dismissed me from our nightly bedtime reading, telling me that she prefers to read to herself now. So I left her there and pulled the door nearly shut, a sliver of light carving into the dark hallway. I told her that she had to turn the lights out after she finished the chapter. She did. And the world moved on, just a little bit.
I'm trying to wake up from this. I'm trying to accept that I live here now. My daughter is fully engaged with this place and with her family here. She's thriving. Someday, inevitably, she will leave me behind. That's the way it's supposed to be. But not yet, please. Not just yet.
Mia: "Yeah, even though I'm really bad at catching things. Especially hedgehogs."
I am caught up in them, and now I will inflict them upon you:
You many assaulted cities:
Have you never yearned for the enemy?
Yearned that he might besiege you
for long irresolute years, until
in hopelessness and hunger you receive him?
He extends like the land beyond your walls,
and he knows he can hold out longer.
Look from your balconies:
there he camps. He does not tire
or diminish in size or strength.
He sends no messengers to threaten
or to promise or persuade.
He who will overcome you
is working in silence.
-- I, 49, by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke's Book of Hours
(trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna May)
I am seduced by trains. When one moans in the night like some
dragon gone lame, I rise and put on my grandfather's suit. I pack a
small bag, step out onto the porch, and wait in the darkness. I rest
my broad-brimmed hat on my knee. To a passerby I'm a curious
sight -- a solitary man sitting in the night. There's something
unsettling about a traveler who doesn't know where he's headed.
You can't predict his next move. In a week you may receive a
postcard from Haiti. Madagascar. You might turn on your
answering machine and hear his voice amid the tumult of a
Bangkok avenue. All afternoon you feel the weight of the things
you've never done. Don't think about it too much. Everything
starts to sound like a train.
-- "Trains," by David Shumate, from The Floating Bridge
Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
nor the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
will be so mysterious a gift
as the sight of your sleep, enfolded
in the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
and see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you --
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.
-- "Anticipation of Love," by Jorge Luis Borges, from Selected Poems
(trans. by Robert Fitzgerald)
A flower bud is the Bermuda Triangle
it's full of wonders.
A flower bud is a sleeping baby,
it expects new things to happen.
A flower bud is a volcano,
it's ready to burst at any second.
-- "A Flower Bud," my little girl, age 8
"Curses" by Jim Butcher
"How the Pooka Came To New York City" by Delia Sherman
"On the Slide" by Richard Bowes
"The Duke of Riverside" by Ellen Kushner
"Oblivion by Calvin Klein" by Christopher Fowler
"Picking up the Pieces" by Pat Cadigan
"Underbridge" by Peter S. Beagle
"Priced To Sell" by Naomi Novik
"The Bricks of Gelecek" by Matthew Kressel
"Weston Walks" by Kit Reed
"The Projected Girl" by Lavie Tidhar
"The Way Station" by Nathan Ballingrud
"And Go Like This" by John Crowley
"Noble Rot" by Holly Black
"Daddy Long Legs of the Evening" by Jeffrey Ford
"The Skinny Girl" by Lucius Shepard
"The Colliers’ Venus" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
"King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree" by Elizabeth Bear
Once again I'm pretty excited about this one. Sharing pages with John Crowley is definitely a high point for me. Look for it sometime in 2010. Provided, of course, the world still exists.
Here's the table of contents, apparently not yet in its final order:
"Houses Under the Sea" by Caitlin R. Kiernan
"The Din of Celestial Birds" by Brian Evenson
"In the Black Mill" by Michael Chabon
"Commencement" by Joyce Carol Oates
"One Day, Soon" by Lavie Tidhar
"Catch Hell" by Laird Barron
"Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" by Michael Cisco
"Leng" by Marc Laidlaw
"Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane
"Vernon, Driving Simon" by Kurt Unsworth
"Marya Nox" by Gemma Files
"That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" by Nick Mamatas
"Sincerely, Petrified" by Anna Tambour
"The Tenderness of Jackals" by Amanda Downum
"The Office of Doom" by Richard Bowes
"Mongoose" by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear
"Cold Water Survival" by Holly Phillips
"The Recruiter" by Michael Shea
"The Crevasse" by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
"Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love" by William Browning Spencer
"Good writing is not an act to excite tolerance because it is good, but anguish because it is not better. Who can swear there has not been something catastrophic to America in the failure of her novelists? Maybe we are the last liberators in the land, and if we continue to thrive on much less than our best, then the being of us all may be deadened before we are done"
Also:
"It is this necessity to travel into one direction or the other up to the end which makes the writing of novels perilous to one's talent and finally to one's health, as the horns of a bull can be doom for the suit of lights. If one explores the world, one's talent must be blunted by punishment, one's artistic integrity by corruption: Nobody can live in the world without shaking the hand of people he despises; so an ultimate purity must be surrendered. Yet it is as dangerous to travel unguided into the mysteries of the Self, for insantiy prepares an ambush. No man or woman explores into his or her own nature with submitting to a curse from the root of biology, since existence would cease if it were natural to turn upon oneself."
And a little later:
"Yet a turn into the other direction, into the world of the Self, is not less difficult. An intellectual structure which is debilitating to the instinct of the novelist inhabits the crossroads of the inner mind -- psychoanalysis. An artist must not explore into himself with language given by another. A vocabulary of experts is a vocabulary greased out and sweated in committee and so is inimical to a private eye. One loses what is new by confusing it with what may be common to others. The essential ideas of psychoanalysis are reductive and put a dead weight on the confidence of the venture. If guilt, for example, is neurotic, a clumsy part of the functioning of a great machine, then one does not feel like a hero studying his manacles or a tragic victim regarding his just sentence but instead is a skilled mechanic trying to fix his tool. Brutally, simply, mass man cannot initiate an inner voyage unless it is conducted by an expert graduated by an institution."
-- from "The Argument Reinvigorated," collected in The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, by Norman Mailer.
But I have been stockpiling cute kid stories. You lucky thing, you!
I just received word that "The Crevasse," a short story I collaborated on with Dale Bailey, sold to Ellen Datlow's forthcoming anthology of stories inspired by Lovecraft. This was my first effort at collaboration. The process was a bit tentative at first. Both Dale and I have pretty strong ideas about what we want a story to do -- not to mention healthy egos. But after some minor wrangling, some concessions from both sides, and finally each of us just retreating to our corners with our laptops, our shared aesthetic won out and we came up with a pretty darn good story, if I do say so myself.
I was kind of stunned by how quickly it came together. We sat on Dale's back porch one Saturday night -- bottle of Scotch close to hand -- decided to do it, and kicked around some ideas until we found one we could agree on. We started the next morning and had a finished draft by the end of the day. We made some very minor edits over the ensuing week, shunting the manuscript back and forth over email, but most of what we produced in that day is what eventually sold.
This is a wake-up call for me. I've always been a notoriously slow writer, and I've allowed myself to believe that this was a necessary side effect of producing the kind of fiction that I do. I've now discovered what a load of crap that is. That weekend we were fueled by a need to get this done quickly, and also by a healthy competitive streak (neither of us wanted to be outdone by the other); the end result proved to me to what degree this illusion of meticulousness and fine tuning is really just an avoidance mechanism for getting work done.
It was an epiphany of sorts. And a welcome one. I'm working much harder since that weekend -- to good effect, I think.
Also, Dale and I will be writing more stories together; it was too much fun to stop now. (Well ... at least as long as the Laphroaig holds out!)
A few weeks ago, I lost my mind. It happened so quickly that it took me some time to register the fact that anything had happened. And by then, of course, it was too late.
At the beginning of the school year, Mia signed up for Girls on the Run, a program for third through fifth grade girls. They spend a few months running in preparation for a marathon in December, and it's meant to foster health and positive self-image in the girls. This seemed like a wonderful idea, and it was an easy sell to Mia. They meet after school on Wednesdays, which quickly became Mia's favorite day of the week.
A few weeks ago the permission slip came home for the marathon, which is a 5K called Winter Wondergirl. The course winds around the UNCA campus, and is described on the sheet as "hilly and challenging." I chuckled warmly to myself. Somebody was going to go to bed early that night! I read through the form and came upon a discovery: Mia needed a running buddy. The girls couldn't run without them.
"I'll be your running buddy, kiddo," I said. That's when it happened. Right there.
Now, Mia is young and has lots of energy. She runs even when she doesn't have to. I'm serious. When she goes outside to play? She runs. There's not even anything chasing her. She just runs like a demented person. I think the last time I ran was in 1978. But I've started again, because it turns out 5K -- which sounds nice and innocuous, especially when paired with a cheery, glitter-dusted name like "Winter Wondergirl" -- is actually 3.1 miles in American, which might as well be the Bataan Death March to someone who is Round, like me.
Fletcher Park is just a short distance from where we live, and that's where I go to run now. There's a big, looping trail which is, I think, about a mile and a half in circumference. I'm trying to get to where I can make two circuits. I'm not there yet. But I can make one circuit, if you count running for two minute stretches interspersed with fast walking. But each time is a little better. A friend of mine from work is going to join us on the run; the problem here is that she's a real runner. She can probably sleepwalk through this thing. I predict she'll be a bit dismayed at our ridiculous rate of progress.
But the thing is -- and here's the really crazy part -- I'm not worrying too much about how we'll do this year. I'm looking ahead to next year. Because I've discovered that I really like it. It turns out that the runner's high is a real phenomenon. When I'm finished, I feel tired, but it's a fleeting kind of tired; more than that, I feel energized. I feel physical, if that makes sense. It's a strange new sensation for someone as sedentary as I usually am, and I want more of it. Last night, getting ready for bed, I found myself actually looking forward to running this morning. A month ago I would have thought such a thing was impossible.
So after I stink up the route in mid-December, Mia and I are going to keep running. Next year we're going to do better. (Well, Mia's going to do just fine anyway. Next year I'm going to do better.) And maybe I'll be a little less round, too.
I just received word from Ellen Datlow that she's taking "The Way Station" for her urban fantasy anthology, Naked City, due out sometime in 2010. Now, back to the grindstone; no rest for the destitute!
Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country has been nominated for the National Book Award this year, a fact which has set some followers of literary politics aquiver with indignation. Because you see, Shadow Country is not exactly a new book; rather, it's a thorough reworking of three novels published throughout the course of the nineties: Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone.
I actually couldn't care less about the debate over whether or not this version of the story is new enough to justify its nomination. What's interesting to me is the obsessive desire to rewrite and refine which this massive undertaking illustrates. Although I doubt I would ever have the stamina to distill three novels into one for the sake of perfecting it, I recognize the impulse to return to a work again and again. It's one of the reasons it takes me a long time to write a short story. I can't just blow through a draft; I have to fine tune sentences and paragraphs until I'm happy with them before I can go on to the next segment of the story. And now that I'm close to having enough stories to start approaching some publishers about a collection, it occurs to me that there are very few of them I would not like to retouch, even if only a little, one more time before they're republished.
Dale Bailey and I once had a discussion about this impulse; he argued that once you sell a story and it's printed, it's finished; and if I remember correctly (this was a couple of years ago), he also intimated that the story as written represented a stage of development, a reflection of the author at a specific time, and that changing it was a kind of distortion of the record.
I see his point but I don't hold to that belief. I want to tinker endlessly. My current thought is that once the stories are put together in a collection, I'll be able to leave them alone. (I certainly hope that's the case.) But prior to that, I feel they're fair game for revision. I suppose, though, that most writers never get to the point at which looking at their published work doesn't cause them some pain. I smiled in sympathy at Matthiessen's response to a question posed to him at the end of an article in today's New York Times:
