Yet Another Rave Review

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Technically speaking, I’m supposed to be flogging The Dragons of Babel here. But my latest collection, The Dog Said Bow-Wow (available for a shockingly low price from Tachyon Publications, as well as better bookstores everywhere) just received a glowing review in online literary zine Rain Taxi. Modesty prevents me from quoting exactly what Kristin Livdahl said about “one of the best short story writers in speculation fiction,” but you can read the review itself here.


Or, better yet, just check out the entire zine.

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Diagramming Babel (Part 24)

Diagram 24. Is there no end to these things? The terrifying truth is that I'm not even being comprehensive here. These are only the best of the lot -- there are plenty more I'm not posting.

Here's another way in which these diagrams are useful. Some mornings you boot up the machine, stare at the screen, and don't have the slightest notion of how or where to begin. That's when it helps to diagram out the chapter before you as clearly as you can. Stare at it and then add bits of dialog or plot to be included. You're already working on the chapter. From there to actually writing is only the slightest of transitions.

Sort of like warming up a car on a cold morning.

From bottom to top:

Ch. 15

A W

A Walk Through House L'Inconnu

Things she will not tell you

I have fantasies too. One day she will weaken
and I will pull her through the mirror
to slave for me as I slave for her

A

ACf

M -- "WE ARE INVADE!"

"... don't seem worried"

"I am charged to see you home safe"

B.M.

manticore-ride

V

Annotations:

Look how crisp and sure this is! The writing is going smoothly.

A is for Alcyone and W . for Will, of course. I will not tell you why Alcyone's plot-line splits in two, nor who ACf might be (actually I forget what that stands for; the character acquired a different name in the writing). But how appropriate that her line should look like a martini glass! If characters were drinks, Alcyone would definitely be a martini: Austere, a bit astringent, commanding respect, infinitely desireable. A gin martini, of course. Probably Boodles.

The lack of comment along the stem suggests that I've already written the opening of Chapter 15.

M. stands for Manticore. The grammatical error in the dialog is a reflection of exactly how quickly I made these things. Also that I had the next couple of bits already in mind and was anxious to get them down before I forgot them.

B. M. is the Burning Man. Admirable fellow. But he does tend to butt in at the most inopportune times.

"Manticore-ride" is (no duh) a ride on a manticore. It's scenes like that which fantasy exists for.

V. is for the vixen. Yet another character to whom Will is rather an incidental inconvenience.

Note that arrogant flourish at the end. It means "and so on, to the end." I had the entire rest of the novel in my head by then.

Oh, and this being Chapter 15 means that I'm three-quarters of the way through the novel. My natural length for novels is twenty chapters of twenty pages each. Since there are about 250 words per page, that's five thousand words per chapter and a hundred thousand words in the book. Normally, each chapter hits the mark within one page. This time around, several were noticeably longer or shorter. I can't tell you how much that worried me.

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Nearer, My God, To Thee

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It always happens. I walked into Saint Mark's Square in Venice and my camera died. Five photos into the Kremlin, my camera died. Two days before Chattacon, my camera died.

So I don't have a photo of myself hovering forty feet above the ground in a bucket truck (what we here in the North call a cherry picker) at Chattacon. But my friend and editor, David Hartwell, was there, and he had a camera, and he's shared with me the photo above and the one below.

Here's what happened: I was at Chattacon this past weekend as a guest of honor (and I've got to say that Chattanooga's got enough cool stuff for one very enjoyable weekend; but, virtuous person that I am, I resisted the impulse to blow off the convention), and had a great time . . .

Okay, let me digress. The other author goh was Lynn Abbey and in conversation she told me that she's "caught my second wind." I. e., she's bursting with new ideas, which should be great news for her fans. Peter David, probably best known to most of us for his Sir Apropos of Nothing series, confided that he regretted calling the second book The Woak to Wuin because it turns out that if you ask for that title in a bookstore the clerk will assume you have a speech impediment and won't find it, and then, turning to Lynn, swore that in the next book Sir A. would take refuge in Lynn Abbey. David Hartwell shared with the convention as much insider publisher info as he was legally allowed to. Eric Flint turned out to be one helluva nice guy. John Ringo held forth to an appreciative audience at a local restaurant. And on and on and on.

Which is to say that Chattacon was rich in the kinds of encounters you go to a convention to have.

But the coolest part of the weekend was that Taz (formally known as Jeff Reneau) brought his bucket truck to the convention. He services signs at car dealerships across many states, a job that has to among the best in existence on a good day and the exact opposite on blustery one. So, emboldened by the fact that he was an awfully likeable guy, I asked if he'd take Marianne up in it. And then . . . if he could . . . maybe . . . me?

Up I went.

Each bucket truck is custom-built, and Taz's truck is cooler than most in that the boom has a full 360 degrees rotation. And the experience? Wonderful and unlike anything else in the world. As Marianne said, it's not at all like being high up on a building because there's empty space all around you. And though it's rather like flying but slower and smoother. Birds would have envied me.

Even better, Taz taught me how to operate the boom and, under his watchful tutelage, I brought it down.

Oh, man, is that fun!

Taz told me that sometimes he'll take a bottle of wine and his wife Priscilla up with him to watch the sunset -- which they're able to see for something like half an hour after the people on the ground are lost in darkness.

Husbands! When was the last time you gave your wife a present half so romantic?

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An Early Friday Blog

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Hi, yes, I know it's still Wednesday. But tomorrow morning I fly to Chattanooga, home of the fabulous Chattacon, and on Friday I'll be in full convention mode. So, rather than shortchange you guys, I'm blogging early.

And for the very first time, I'm going to write a blog-like blog! Yes. One where I simply send you to someplace else on the web where something genuinely cool is happening.

Here's why. Years ago, I was on a panel at a computer human interface convention. I could talk for hours about how how much fun that was. But one thing that really grabbed me was a device that some major Japanese corporation (Sony, I think) had come up with. Something I think of as a "hand-grabber."

The hand-grabber was simply one of those cheap webcams, except that it detected only IR. It also had a ring of weak IR lights around the lens. So anything that moved in the near-range focus of the camera registered on the program. In practice, this meant that your body was too far away to matter. But if you reached out toward the camera, it could place a wireframe of your hand (either visible or invisible) into the appropriate program.

A corporate model demonstrated this by playing a set of virtual bongos, stretching a manga character by grabbing the air with her hands, and moving icons about on a (projected) computer desktop.

Why did I want this? Simply because instead of clicking-and-dragging, it would have given me the capability of grabbing a program or document I no longer wanted and SLAM DUNKING that bastard into the wastebin.

Nothing ever came of this, alas.

But now an uber-nerd named Johnny Lee has come up with a very similar (and lo-tek) way of using parts of a Nintendo Wii to enable a one-person virtual reality program. Here it is:



Yes, children, Bruce Sterling's spex have taken a faltering baby-step toward reality! Johnny Lee is one cool fellow. I like the way this guy's mind works.

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Diagramming Babel (Part 23)

Diagram 23. We're closing on the end of the novel, and I'm really in control of what's happening here. Look how crisp and sure those character lines are! So on track am I here that I have to mask the identities of several major characters to keep from giving the ending away.

From bottom to top:

W

T/V

The Burning Man

Trying to Cheat Fate
& Failing

"There is nothing wrong with the world."
"There is everything wrong with it."
"Yes, but so what?"
To this he had no reply.

"Where's Esme?"
"I sent her away"

She winked & then waggled her fingers.
[blocked out] she meant, and Goodbye.

Out-Witting Fate

Annotations:

N/V refers, of course, to Nat and (don't call her Vickie) the Vixen.

There is a distinction between cheating fate and outwitting it. But Will is going to have to learn that one the hard way.

The conversation about the world is central to the book's argument. However, with so much coming together at the very end, there simply wasn't room for it. So I'd later have to find a way to shoehorn in that information another way.

The "She winked" and "Where's Esme?" notations are means of accounting for characters and clearing them out of the way so the climax can happen without a roomful of unresolved personalities all jostling for the reader's attention.

Note how at the climactic moment of decision (indicated by the little circle bisected by Will's character line), two separate characters come together in opposition. Then, afterwards, there's a surprise appearance by another character before everybody goes their separate ways. That nice clean plotiness wouldn't have been possible without these diagrams. At that point, I've accounted for everybody and there's a clear stage on which the major forces can battle for Will's soul. Not that he has a soul, of course -- he's a fey. But you know what I mean.

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Bottled Stories

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Everybody needs a hobby and this is mine. I'll write a short-short story, print it out, and place it in a bottle. This particular bottle once contained Knappogue Castle Irish whiskey, one of the great tipples of the world. It may even (I forget) be the bottle that I brought back from my first trip overseas in 1982, back when each bottle was individually numbered by hand.

After the story is placed in the bottle, I sign and date the glass with a diamond-tipped pen. Then I cork the bottle and Marianne covers the top with sealing wax. After writing a letter of provenance, I destroy every copy, physical or electronic, other than the one inside the bottle. It is now, in the original, unspoiled sense of the word, unique.

Finally, I give it away. Usually to a charity auction or such, but sometimes to a friend. The owner of the bottle, whoever he or she is, can either read the story or else possess the object -- but cannot do both.

Copyright is withheld.

The above bottle was given to my good friend Henry Wessells on the occasion of the publication of What Can Saved From the Wreckage? mostly because I knew he would appreciate it, but also in some small part because I wanted to have something of mine in the shop of James Cummins, Bookseller (where the launch party was held), which was as rare as anything else there.

How much is such a thing worth? I have no idea. Selling one for profit would destroy the purity of the thing.

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Slow Monday

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Surely I'm not the only person who remembers the Harlan Ellison column in which he spun great Catherine wheels of rhetoric, verbal sparks flying every which way, hissing and spitting into the night air only to reveal after enormous verbification that . . . he had nothing to say.

Well, I'm not quite there yet. So rather than admit defeat I'm going to say that, today being Martin Luther King day, Marianne and I went far, far away from human society to Bombay Hook, there to look at tundra swans and harrier hawks, buffleheads and maybe just maybe three eagles, and on the way home a pregnant coyote (in Delaware!) which saw us and watched us warily even as she walked steadily into the reeds and out of sight.

All of which is tantamount to saying that, yes, I've posted today as I promised to do every Monday, and here's the proof of it; but the substance of the matter will be posted tomorrow.

Tomorrow: The long awaited explication and explanation of my bottled stories! Don't miss it.

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Separated at Birth?

Last week I made an appearance at the South Street Seaport Museum, as part of the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series. In the audience was new writer Jermaine Hall (he's midway through his first novel), who is something of a caricaturist, and was kind enough to give   me the above sketch, which he made while I was reading.

"Your hair isn't that spiky," Marianne said when she saw the drawing, and promptly carried it off to hang in her office. So I guess that means that everything else is pretty much spot-on.

But looking like me is a private tragedy. Here's what I wanted to draw your attention to: Notice the slovenly slouch, the smudged glasses, the self-absorbed scowl. I could be the long-lost brother of Dave Davenport, the much-put-upon minion of evil scientist Helen Narbon in Shaenon K. Garrity's webcomic Narbonic.

Not close enough for you? Then how about this? Dave and I used to both be three-pack-a-day smokers. I quit by going to Ireland without my cigs when Marianne and I decided it was time to make a baby. Dave quit by going back into his own past, as part of an involuntary time travel experiment, and not acquiring the habit as a teenager.

Coincidence or conspiracy? You tell me.

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My Chattacon Schedule

Chattacon is only a week and a day away, and it's roaring down on us like some mighty . . . some enormous . . . Oh, damn, I just know there's an appropriate simile for what it's roaring and hissing and chugging down on us like.

In the meantime, I just received my marching orders. I mean schedule! Here it is:

Chattacon Programming Schedule

Friday

7PM Finley Opening Ceremonies: Guest Speeches

8PM Gallery A&B Meet the Pro's Reception

Saturday

3PM Gallery A Is it really worth the effort to write a book? Consider the odds: in 2004 over 1.2 million books were published-only 10 sold more than a million. Michael Swanwick, Toni Weisskofpt, Gerald Page, Peter David

4PM Centennial Lobby Autographs: Michael Swanwick

5PM Gallery A How Big is Big, How Small is Small, How Far is Far: The size, scope and majesty of space. Phillip Sacco, Michael Swanwick, Tom Dietz, Brad Strickland


6PM Gallery B Reading: Michael Swanwick

Sunday

12 Noon Finley A last chance to meet the guests-Q&A time. Michael Swanwick, Lynn Abbey, Peter David, Eric Flint


And of course, there's a lot of stuff involving other people which attendees will want to look into, including live music, belly dancing and (I am not making this up) a "haiku slam."

I've posted my schedule so that anybody looking to say hi or get an autograph or whatever will be able to find me. But I expect to be wandering about and easy to locate for the entire weekend. Here's a tip for anybody who's new to convention going: When you're looking for a writer, always start with the bar.

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Diagraming Babel (Part 22)

Diagram 22: Things are coming to a head. Will and Alcyone have finally reached a point in their relationship where they can speak frankly to one another. And, quite frankly, they speak more frankly than the reader is probably expecting.

I'll transcribe the notes at the bottom in the annotations. From bottom to top:

Will

Alcyone

The Office

H

Flight *

W

Thesis
antithesis
synthesis
& truth

Aftermath

Annotations and Explanations:

There are two footnotes/additions after the diagram. The first and lower one reads: Trickster Tale RAVEN.

The second is in a kind of pidgen shorthand I invented and reads:

Alcyone is fearless. She can speak truthfully.
– Why did you steal the ring?
–To learn the truth
–Did you?
–Yes
–Did it make you happy?
– What do you think?

As before, the dialog is in my college pal Jay's abbreviated emotional gist for what I want said, rather than the actual words they'll use.

What I'm doing here is basically figuring out where I can find room to fit all the explication that has to come out naturally. Otherwise, the chapter will turn into one of those dreary exercises where two characters explain things to each other. ("So the monster was actually seven men in an elephant skin?" "Yes, all part of my sister's warped plan to get elected to City Council." "But then why ...?")

By this time the reader has to have doubts that the Missing Prince scam will actually work, so Will has to explain its mechanisms. The hastily-scrawled footnote sign shows that I decided on the spot to have him do so by telling a trickster tale, and specifically one starring Raven. Since this is a trick that hasn't been done in the novel before, it should be more entertaining than straight exposition would be.

The office section is heavily shaded because that's the scene I expect to spend the rest of the day working on. The back-and-forth arrows in the office are people coming and going with orders from higher-ups and work they expect to be done. Anybody who's ever tried to work through the nuances of a romantic entanglement during work hours will understand how annoying this can be.

The H stands for "hippogriff." At this point I meant to establish exactly why the ring had been stolen while the two were in flight to interview the West. By the time I got to the flight, however, there was so much going on that there simply wasn't room for it. So I added a scene in a later chapter, where the reader gets to witness the ring in use, rather than hear about it.

The W is the West. One of the few significant characters in the book who is non-recurring. I forget what the thesis-antithesis-synthesis-truth thing was all about, but I'm sure I took care of it in the text.

Note that I originally thought Will and Alcyone could go off with each other at the end of the novel. The ring scene pretty effectively put the kibosh on that notion.

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Another Perfect Review

My friend, Gail Roberts, has just now forwarded me the text of a starred review (this is very good) from Library Journal, which I thought I'd share with you. Leaving off the plot synopsis, here's what the reviewer had to say:

“In his long-awaited sequel to the convention-shattering Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Swanwick continues to turn traditional ideas of Faerie life upside down while remaining true to ancient Celtic Faerie lore. This masterfully written expansion of an iconoclastic vision belongs in all libraries of all sizes.”

Now if only the readers will like the book as much as the critics seem to!

The reviewer, incidentally, is Jackie Cassada. Reviewers get little enough credit in this world, I should at least acknowledge them when they make me happy.

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"Yes, I Am Wonderful, Aren't I?"

When I was in Chengdu, Neil Gaiman told me that he was in the middle of a months-long publicity tour for Paramount. Me, I made two jaunts to New York City last week to promote The Dragons of Babel. One was to read at the New York Review of Science Fiction readings series, which I'll post about sometime later this week. The other was a 5 a.m. appearance, if that's the right word, on Jim Freund's Hour of the Wolf radio show on WBAI (99.5 FM). Which raises the question -- which of us is the more fortunate?

I'll answer that question, too. But first I should talk about the show.

It was an amiable, ambling two-hour-long conversation. As Jim warned beforehand, the time melted away quickly. I read a couple of short-shorts -- which led one caller to assume that was all I wrote -- reminisced about collaborating with Bill Gibson, denied ever being a cyberpunk, talked about Being Gardner Dozois, and so on and so forth. Those who'd like to hear what I had to say (but if you're reading this blog, surely you know more than enough about me already?) can find the show posted on Hour of the Wolf's own blog at www.hourwolf.com. After two weeks, it'll be put in Jim's archives, which stay online for something like eight months. I should mention that Lucius Shepard was on recently, and Jim says that his interview went on beyond splendid. Lucius is one of the great writers of our time. So that might well be worth looking into.

At one point in the interview, Jim Freund asked one of those questions that I'd always assumed they trained radio talk-show people not to ask. It went something roughly like: You're such a great writer, and so prolific, and you write both science fiction and fantasy and long and short lengths, from flash fiction to novel . . . and rather gushily on.

I could only smile and say, "Yes, I am wonderful, aren't I?"

(Here's a tip for any new writers who may be reading this: Readers are funny beasts. Those hearing the above statement were willing to take it under advisement. But if I'd said, "Actually, I'm not that good," they'd have believed me. Nobody knows why this is so.)

Afterwards, Marianne and I went out into the city looking for breakfast. The day was bright and new and particularly scenic, since WBAI is located at the corner of Wall Street and South Street, right by the South Street Seaport Museum, a photo of whose docks is above. It was Marianne's idea to come along, just because it tickled her to travel a hundred miles to New York City for breakfast. That's the sort of person she is.

So there's the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this blog. In my totally unbiased opinion, I'm the more fortunate man because I'm Marianne's husband. Neil may well disagree with me on this one; he seems to be perfectly content with his own family. But what the heck. He can be as happy as he likes. No skin off my nose.

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Three Answers

Reader Stephen Saperstein Frug has posted a message on an earlier entry here that he has blogged a review of What Can Be Saved From the Wreckage? The review is mixed, and obviously I am more in sympathy with the essay I wrote than with the essay which he wishes I had written. But his opinions are honestly felt and intelligently expressed, and so I see no need to argue with them.

However, in the course of the review, he asks three questions (the first of which is phrased as a cluster of questions and the third of which is implicit) which I believe I can answer here without being discourteous. So I shall.

1. “Do I need to begin at the beginning with The Cream of the Jest? Or is Jurgen independent enough to begin with, but then I need to read The Cream of the Jest? Or can I just read the ones Swanwick says are best and get to the ‘structurally necessary components’ later?”

Read them in whatever order you like. I recommend starting with Jurgen, which is the book you are most likely to enjoy, though others are particular champions of The Silver Stallion and Figures of Earth. These three, at any rate, are the most easily appreciated. The Cream of the Jest and Something About Eve are “structurally necessary” because the former (which is extremely light on the fantasy element) introduces the Poictesme sequence and the latter concludes it. These five books should be read first, and then The High Place and The Way of Ecben. After which, the adventurous reader can go exploring. Keeping in mind that he or she should stop as soon as the books cease giving pleasure.

2. “And while Swanwick talks about the rewriting Cabell did for his collected edition, he isn't clear about whether one needs to get the rewritten texts (are the others still around? In libraries, probably, if nothing else) or if the additions are hindrances, or too minor to matter.”

I confess that after reading through some forty-five books, plus critical materials, I lacked the ambition to perform textual comparisons. But nothing I read in any of the secondary literature suggested that the changes were so great as to compel anybody but a scholar to seek variant texts.

Those who are interested in doing so, however, will probably have to go to the Library of Congress or possibly the James Branch Cabell Library in Virginia Commonwealth University. Even at that, it may be several other libraries will have to be consulted. Even a first-rate institution like The Free Library of Philadelphia has only something like 37 volumes penned by Cabell. The demand for his work is not great, and library storage space is in high demand.

3. “Why this essay wasn't released on the web -- perhaps as a pdf -- where it could have gotten a lot more readers, and quite frankly probably made Swanwick more money as an ad for his other books (or even this one) than it made in royalties, is beyond me.”

If I were convinced this was true, I’d do it. I just haven’t seen any hard research supporting this assumption. Publicity is all very well and good. But as my friend Bob Walters likes to say, “You can die of exposure.”

And that's all. I'm entering this post a day early because tomorrow night I drive to NYC for a five a.m. appearance on Jim Freund's "Hour of the Wolf" show on WBAI. So I'll probably be spending much of the day napping.

Oh, and . . . Children? In the future, please remember that this blog is for the purpose of ruthlessly selling product. You should resist posting links to anything but unqualified praise, okay?

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Diagramming Babel (Part 21)

Diagram 21: It's odd how popular these things are in certain circles. In the January Locus, Russell Letson gave The Dragons of Babel a glowing review, which I'll almost certainly be quoting here in the near future, and ended with a plug for this blog and the diagrams in particular.

We're moving into the endgame here. From top to bottom:

Will

Lion . . . . . . . . Lion

Esme

Nat

Madness! Fear!

Z

Nat . . . . . . . .Will & Vixen

Relationship of Nat & Esme

Determines to follow it through

“Well,” she said

Bond over cigarettes

“He’ll never lie. He’ll just
convince you not to
believe when he is telling
the truth.”

Annotations:

You know my methods by now, Watson. Will has an encounter with two stone lions, one talkative and the other silent. Esme appears briefly and then Nat for some serious face time. When Z (none other than our old friend, Zorya Vechnayaya) appears, there is an essential split the nature of which is narrative surprise, and Will "determines to follow it through." Which moment is brief in the telling but essential to the book.

The lions, for those who don't live in NYC, sit outside the central branch of the New York Public Library.

Funny thing about the cigarettes. Everybody used to smoke in popular fiction. Open any book of a certain age, and the air is blue. Nowadays, nobody smokes at all. Not even the villains. They chomp down on raw broccoli instead, I guess. In the interest of realism, I decided to reverse that. In the course of the book, Will acquires a nicotine habit which he never does abandon.

(At one point, I was going to evoke a recurrent sacrifice-based magic. That way, Will could achieve some large magical effect by giving up smoking. Which, paradoxically enough, would give him a reason to acquire the habit again, as soon and hard as he could. Clever bit. Didn't need it.)

The final "he'll never lie" bit is just one of many similar snippets jotted down quickly as they occurred to me on the rest of this and all of the facing page. They're things I've thought of that need to be fitted in but which aren't structural. The vixen delivers this riff to Will, but Zorya V could have done it as well, or even (if it were set up right) Esme. And it could go earlier or later in the chapter. But Nat must depart as the Vixen enters, and Esme must appear before Nat does. The diagram is the frame and the other notes are the flesh.

Note how crisp the lines are for the parts of the chapter I've figured out, and how the diagram dissolves into scribbled words thereafter.

Reading Today!

Just a reminder . . . I'll be appearing today (January 8) at the South Street Seaport Museum (Melville Gallery, 213 Water St) in New York City, for the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series, along with my good pal and fellow Philadelphia, Judith Berman.

Here's a small promotional tip for any writers reading this: I always read from a printout, because it's easier to handle than a book. When I'm done reading, I sign and date the printout, put it back in its folder and leave it behind for whoever wants to take it. It costs me nothing, and it's a pleasant little item for those who like such things. And -- who knows? -- it might be worth something, a few years down the line.

I used to hand the typescript to whoever wanted it, but when two people stuck their hands up simultaneously, that puts you in the awkward position of turning one down for reasons they can only guess at. So now I just lay it down, make the announcement, and walk away. Luckily, I am not yet so famous that people will do each other an injury to nab it. Stephen King doesn't have this luxury.

A Boxful of Angels

Our last Christmas presents arrived the other day. My sisters Mary and Barbie, who are the executors of my mother's estate, organized various remembrances and keepsakes and sent them to the rest of the family.

The above picture will take a moment of explanation.

Every year my son, Sean, sent each of his grandmothers an angel. Marianne and I started this tradition for him when he was an infant, and it continues to this day for his Grandmother Porter but only to last year with his Grandmother Swanwick. Mom, as it turns out, saved every one. So Mary put them all in an archival box and returned them to him.

My mother died last summer. Millie Swanwick was an O'Brien by birth, and she knew more than her share of heartache -- she lost her husband and her younger son both long before their natural times. But she was a good woman and her children all loved her. An interview I did with her about her childhood in New York City is posted here.

Never Throw Anything Away!

Before I write a word, I should note that I will be appearing at the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, along with fellow Philadelphia writer Judith Berman, this coming Tuesday, January 8th. The doors open 6:30 PM, and the requested donation is $5. That means that if five bucks pinches, you can just breeze in without paying and nobody will say boo. I'd be happy to see anybody who cares to show up.

For today's blog, I was going to finally write about bottled stories -- but then I couldn't find the photo of one I took. So I decided to write about my as-yet-unpublished review of the miniature book show at the Grolier Club -- and while I could find the picture, I couldn't find the review! Luckily, in the course of looking for it, I ran across the following unpublished (and that's rare for me) item. A couple of years ago, Capclave solicited a Dewar's Profile style series of answers to canned questions. They were going to run it in their program book if they got enough responses.

Well, they didn't. Not everybody was as good a sport as I am, apparently. And I was stuck with an item of orphan writing, for which there was no obvious market or venue. However, now -- God bless the Web! -- there is. And so here it is.

(The 11th question I added myself, incidentally. The fantasy novel in question was the exact same one I'm flogging here. So, mirabile dictu, I was telling the truth.)

Capclave's Profiles
Michael Swanwick

1. What is the first science fiction or fantasy novel you remember reading?

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron.


2. It is the year 2020; what kind of computer are you using?

Probably one of Charlie Stross’s cast-offs. I just hope it isn’t too condescending in its opinion of my writing. I know it’ll sneer at my programming skills.


3. Superman has kryptonite; what is your weakness?

A new Gene Wolfe novel or the latest episode of The Immortal Yi Soon Shin will incapacitate me for as long as it takes to finish it. I can always save the world later.


4. If you were forced to move to another country, where would you go?

Ireland for the conversation; Canada for the neighbors; Finland for the saunas. Maybe I could commute?


5. Who is your favorite fictional villain?

Odysseus. He was a wily bastard and a murderous thug but, alone among the Greeks, capable of using his brain.


6. What is your favorite herb or spice and who taught you how to cook?

Marianne’s sweet red bell pepper and garlic rub; she dries, grinds, and mixes it herself. Good on close to everything. Living with a brilliant cook, as I do, it would be presumptuous of me to claim that I have learned how to cook yet. I can make a pretty good tuna goo, though.


7. Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

Let’s see. Paul Klee’s Fish Magic inspired a scene in “Slow Life,” a Marc Chagall retrospective was responsible for “A Midwinter’s Tale,” and “The Blind Minotaur” was based on the etchings in Picasso’s Vollard Suite. So, yeah, a thousand words seems about right. If the picture’s good enough.

8. What do you want to be when you grow up (i.e., what would be your dream profession)?

A writer like I am now, only much, much better. I’m working on it.


9. Would you trade places with J. K. Rowling (i.e., be the author of the Harry Potter books)?

No, but then she wouldn’t trade places with me. She does her thing, and I do mine. Let history judge which of us was misguided.


10. What is your favorite alcoholic (or non-alcoholic) drink?

A Boodles martini, very dry, straight up, with a twist.


11. When are you finally going to finish that fantasy novel you’re working on?

Soon, soon, I promise. Real, real soon. Really. Soon.

Diagramming Babel (Part 20)

Diagram 20. These diagrams have proved to be strangely popular among a particular sub-set of readers -- new and developing writers. (Old pro Tom Purdom tells me that they're the only entries which he finds boring.) But, as a rule, they'd like more info on how to translate my squiggles into something useful. Hence, today's diagram, the simplest of the lot, which is little more than a list I made as the novel moved into the end-game of major characters whose individual stories need to be resolved by the time the novel ends. Just so I didn't find myself trying to cram in all that resolution in the last five pages.

From top to bottom:

Bullets in Flight

Burning Man

(Name Withheld)

The Dragon

Alcyone

Nat

Fox-Spirit

Oriental features?

Annotations:

There are obvious omissions here, such as Esme, who are not included simply because they don't have a story that requires closure. Esme, by her very nature, has no story. She sold it to the Year Eater.

I went back and forth over whether to mention the fact that Victoria il Volpone Sheherazade Jones (if that truly is her name) has Oriental features. As a fox-spirit, it should go without saying. And, indeed, her human form was originally described with one short sentence: Her eyes were green and her hair was short and red. But finally I decided that with a last name like Jones, it was something that should be mentioned. So when Will meets her at last, several chapters later, she's described as follows: She was one of those women who were beautiful at first glance, then showed their age, and then were beautiful again. Her hair was red and cropped. Her features were sharp and Asian.

That is, incidentally, an unusually detailed description. Aspirant writers are convinced that fictional characters need lots of physical description. Not so. The reader is ready and willing to do the heavy lifting of imagining how the characters look. A zaftig blonde with a birthmark by the side of her mouth is all the description Marilyn Monroe requires. Paul Bunyan has a big black beard and is ten miles high.

Notice how when you read Her eyes were green and her hair was short and red you assumed that Victoria -- never call her Vickie -- was beautiful? That was a good example of the kind of hard work and good faith the reader puts into a story. Never underestimate it.