Yet Another Rave Review

.

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.

*

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.

*

Nearer, My God, To Thee

.

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?

*

An Early Friday Blog

.

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.

*

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.

*

Bottled Stories

.

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.

*

Slow Monday

.

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.

*