Stations of the Tide

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For some reason, I've been having extraordinarily good luck with covers lately.  Just take a gander at what Tor commissioned for the upcoming reissue of Stations of the Tide.  Moody, evocative, romantic, and -- not that this matters half so much to readers as it does to authors -- accurately based on a scene in the novel.

So I am grateful to Tor's director Irene Gallo for commissioning it, and to cover designer Jamie Stafford-Hill for putting it all together.  But most especially to the artist, Thom Tenery, for the kind of creation that makes you pick up a book and read the first page, hoping against hope that it will be as good as the cover promises.

You can check out Tenery's website here.  Terrific stuff.  You'll forgive me, I hope, for thinking I got the best of the lot.

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My Weekend in Rhinebeck

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I had one heck of a great four days wandering up to Rhinebeck, New York, and back.  Marianne and I toured Storm King.  We dropped in on Opus 40.  We tromped through Dia: Beacon, staring at challenging art until our brains hurt.

And, oh yeah, we attended the wedding of my favorite goddaughter in all the universe.

Alicia Ma is my niece.  I've known her since she was an infant and thought I was the wittiest man in the world because I knew how to play peek-a-boo.  Now she's a grown woman and married.  It makes me feel old -- but in a good way.  I've known this beautiful and talented woman all her life.  That's an extraordinary privilege.


And over at the Commie bar . . .

The hosts of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series (held in the KGB Bar in NYC, which is decorated with vintage communist posters and statuettes) are holding their annual fund-raiser.  It takes the form of a raffle.  Dozens of writers contribute prizes and you can buy one-dollar raffle tickets for the specific prize you want.

Let's say you really, really, really want the pre-submission draft printout of the first chapter of William Gibson's new novel, Zero History, signed and inscribed to you personally.  You can buy a chance specifically for that prize, rather than for the story critique by Nancy Kress.  (Nancy is, incidentally, so extremely acute on the mechanics of fiction as to leave me aghast with admiration.  And I am not an easy man to impress in such matters.)  Or, if you absolutely need Neil Gaiman's used keyboard, to infuse magic into your computer, you can improved the odds by buying lots and lots of chances.

Or you might look for something cool by a writer who's not terribly well-known yet but will later turn out to be the new Robert Heinlein.  That way, your chances of winning go way up, as do your bragging rights later on.

I myself have contributed three pieces of unpublished flash fiction.  This includes the original manuscripts, autographed, and also the right to publish -- under my name --  "Fish Story," "The Last Astronauts," and "Your Dream Book WIth Lucky Numbers" on your blog or Webpage or Facebook page or fanzine or whatever.  Or keep them to yourself, if you prefer.  I pledge not to publish the stories myself before 2015, so you'll have exclusive use of them for years.  The stories are 196, 281, and 407 words long respectively.

Click here for the Fantastic Fiction at KGB site.  Or here for the list of prizes.  I guarantee you that there's something there you want.


Above:  My brother-in-law Shieh-ya Ma, Alicia, my sister Pat.  Not shown in the picture is Alicia's husband, Kevin Bolz.  He's an impressive young man and I like him.  

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Something I Will NEVER Have In My House

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Greetings from Rhinebeck, New York!  Yes, Marianne and I are on the road yet again.  Our next-door neighbor Pat refers to us as "the gallivanters."

On the way here we stopped in at Opus 40 to enjoy October's bright blue weather and clamber all over that wonderful frog-nurturing and quarry-filling sculpture.  Before his premature death in 1976, accidentally crushed by a slab of stone, sculptor Harvey Fite created many stone statues, one enduring work of what would later come to be known as landscape art, and a number of minor whimsies.   Two of which are shown above.

I love those things!  But, as you've observed yourself if you've ever visited my house, there are no swan-shaped anythings  anywhere to be seen.  That's because with a name like mine, if you break discipline once, you'll put it into people's heads that you're a collector and you'll be given more and more swan-shaped trash until the house is entirely full and there's nothing to be done but to move to a foreign land and change your name.

Still.  Clever bit of found art, eh?

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Storm King

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On the road again!  Tonight I'm in Saugertes, which inevitably means that I stopped at Storm King along the way.  Storm King is located in Mountainville, New York, and is an outdoor museum of modern and postmodern sculpture.  If you ever have the chance to miss it, by all means don't.

My favorite sculpture is Andy Goldsworthy's Wall That Went for a Walk.  Sauntering from the information center, guided by their site map, you notice along one side of the path an old and fallen stone wall of the sort that is ubiquitous through that part of the country.  Then, slowly, it raises itself up and becomes a sturdy, five-foot-tall dry stone wall.  As it progresses, it begins to wander, curving gracefully one way and then the other.  Then it plunges downslope through the woods.  As it does, it begins curving back and forth, to one side of trees and then the other, more and more wildly, more and more tightly, like a boy running down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill, the wall plunges into the water of a pond and disappears.

At the far side of the pond, the wall reappears again and runs straight as a rule up a meadowed slope and then across the fields.

The speed of the thing is dizzying.

Above:  You can't see it, but at the very last bit of the wall before it disappeared underwater were two turtles, sunning themselves.

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Fictions Critical and Otherwise

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I appear to be extraordinarily in print.  In addition to October Leaves on Flickr, there's "Steadfast Castle" in F&SF and "Libertarian Russia" in Asimov's.  And now, on Abyss & Apex, there's "Spirits in the Night, a work of flash fiction.  


You can go directly to the story by clicking here.  But why would you?  Instead, go to the home page of the current issue and check out all the fiction by clicking here.


To celebrate the appearance of "Spirits in the Night," I present the recipe for the drink formally known as a Whisky MacDonald, though it is almost inevitably shortened to Whisky Mac:


Two shots blended whisky 
One shot green ginger wine (most commonly Crabbie's or Stone's)
No ice


And that's it.  I discovered this drink when I was in Edinburgh this summer, and it's perfect with autumn weather.  American bartenders appear to have never heard of it, though it's a mainstay in Scotland.




And meanwhile, over at The Endless Bookshelf . . . 


Bookman Henry Wessells, my friend and sometimes publisher, has written a short essay on Wendy Walker's critical fictions.  Critical fictions being one of his particular interests.  (He's been known to write them himself.)


And exactly what is a critical fiction?  Henry proposes his own working definition:

fiction that works as fiction while simultaneously articulating a critical response to a literary work, and citing phrases and images from the earlier work to new ends ; looking at familiar works in unfamiliar light, to bring out responses and ideas one didn’t know that one didn’t know. I would distinguish the critical fiction, which takes an existing literary work as a point of departure — from the pastiche, which is fundamentally imitative or continuative of the earlier work

And now you know whether you wish to read the whole thing or not.  You can find it here.

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OCTOBER LEAVES

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I have a gift for you today.  I've just posted a Halloween story online.  It's a good old-fashioned, Bradburyesque tale presented in a format that may well be unique.

Unique how, you wonder?  I'm glad you asked.


I wrote October Leaves last fall, a word at a time, on autumn leaves.  I photographed the leaves where I found them -- in parks and cemeteries and city streets --  and then left them where they lay, possibly to be found by puzzled passers-by.  To indicate paragraph breaks, I used photos of gravestones from historic Laurel Hill Cemetery.


Now I've posted the photos, in order, on Flickr.  You can go there and read the entire story for free.

October Leaves can be found at:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/54366973@N04/5035946705/

Or just click here.



And for those of us who have a restless urge to buy books . . .

October Leaves is also available as a physical book.  You can go to Blurb Books (www.blurb.com) and run a search on "Michael Swanwick."  Or you can go straight to the book by clicking here.  Be sure to check out the preview first.



Above:  The cover photo for the book.  It's the only picture where the words are spelled out a letter at a time.

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The Beauty of Entropy

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I'm on the road again!  Yeah, it was a last-minute decision.  But when duty calls, you and I sigh and roll up our sleeves.  That's just the kind of people we are.

But there'll be interesting stuff galore next week.  Guaranteed!  See you then.

Above:  It's raining in my neighborhood.  It's also yard saling.  And here's the strangely beautiful result.  It takes a heck of a lotta canvas to get a yard moving.  But when it's under weigh, cresting the wave of a city hill, there's no sight like it.

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