Tawny Petticoats

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Pleasant news, if you happen to be me!  My Darger & Surplus story, "Tawny Petticoats" has been accepted for Gardner Dozois' and George R. R. Martin's Rogues anthology.

Of the story itself, I shall say only that it takes place in New Orleans and that it involves zombies.  Not George Romero brain-eating zombies, I hasten to add.  Old School zombies.  Of its eponymous heroine, I shall only remark that she makes a great addition  to the team.

And her name?  It comes from Mother Goose.  Before you read it, though, you should be aware that at that time the rhyme was written, "lusty" meant healthy and hence physically attractive.  Nothing bad.

Here it is:

As I went by a dyer's door,
I met a lusty tawnymoor.
Tawny hands and tawny face,
Tawny petticoats,
Silver lace.

I isn't that lovely?  Isn't that Romantic?  Can't you just see the young lady blush when the poem's narrator pays her his compliments?

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Nonfiction and Me

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I spent the day roaming about New Jersey in search of a crested caracara (pictured above) that had wandered far, far from its usual territory -- Texas and Mexico, mostly, but there are some as close as southern Florida.  Alas, Marianne and I did not see it, though we did talk to a man who had, only a few minutes before.

That, anyway, is why this blog post is almost (but not quite) late.  But it's still today, so I'll share with a letter I received over the weekend.  The writer's name has been removed because there wasn't the time to ask his permission to use it:

I'm a long time fan. I actually briefly met you at the SFWA event in NY earlier in the fall. I had a quick question. Are there any plans afoot to reprint "Hope-in-the-Mist" and "What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?" Maybe even in one volume? If not, I think your non-fiction is due for a collection. I've had my eyes peeled for those for a while and really am desperate to read them. Anyway, thanks for what you do.  

The short answer is that while there's no collection of my non-fiction in the works, I have plans on the back burner to publish an e-book of Hope-in-the-Mist with a couple of short related non-fiction pieces, just to make it available to scholars and other interested individuals.  Since there's so little material available on Hope Mirrlees, anybody who wants to write about her pretty much has to read my book, which is now perilously close to being unobtainable.  So I feel an obligation to do something about.

So why haven't I done that already?  Well...

Years ago, while the project was cooking, I told critic John Clute that I was writing a book on Hope Mirrlees.   He looked alarmed and said, "You do realize that there's no money in it?"

"I do, and I'm researching it in my spare time, as a hobby."

"Good, good, good!" John said, visibly relieved.  Obviously the man had some experience with how naive commercial writers could be about academic publishing.

Which is why I haven't done more with my non-fiction.  Because it's a hobby.  Most of my time goes to my fiction, which pays me pretty well.  A lot of my free time goes to writing non-fiction, which because I only write about things I feel passionately about is satisfying to the soul.  And the rest...

Well, much as I'd like to have a collection or three of my non-fiction, I don't currently have the time to go looking for a publisher.  Maybe after I've got the next two novels finished things will open up more.

And that's my unsatisfying answer.  I apologize for it not being more like what you and I would prefer.  I write for the love of it and the work which I write for love which brings in money has people who will do all the grunt work of selling it and publishing it.  That which brings in little money simply has to wait.

Someday, though.  When I can find the time.

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Free Me!

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Well, technically speaking, a free story by me.  In a free e-book anthology from Tor.com.  With a refreshingly honest title.  Every year, in his introduction to his Big Fat Best of the Year anthology, Gardner Dozois comments that, given the lack of any possible means of objectively defining "best" stories, the anthology really ought to be Stories That Gardner Dozois Thought Were Cool This Year.  Editors Gorinsky, Nielsen Hayden, and Hartwell, got around this ethical dilemma by calling their volume, Some of the Best From Tor.Com: 2012 Edition.  Implying, I believe, that they consider all the stories they publish to be top-notch.  Which is true.  They pay top rates and they get first look at a lot of cool short fiction.

Anyway, it's a cool anthology, it has my own"The Mongolian Wizard" in it, and it's absolutely free.  If you read books in e-form, there's no reason not to get it.

The announcement and links for downloads are here.  There's also a 2011 version, which has my own "The Dala Horse," in it (along with other good stuff), also available free.  When you download this year's collection, you should poke around and download last year's as well.


And I have advice for those who have just published their first story . . .

Updating my records for the above publication put me in mind of some advice I've been meaning to pass along.  Here's something that every writer should do upon publication of your first story, even though it's going to make you feel foolish:  Start a bibliography. 

This should be the very third thing you do (after breaking open the champagne and the hot sex which you may or may not regret the next day) after your story comes out.  Look up the proper formatting, write down all the info, and then save the sheet of paper and the e-file in places where you can easily find them.

As is only natural, that first story is going to going to look mighty small and lonely on that great big sheet of paper or screen.  You're going to be tempted to delete the file, trashcan the paper, and put the chore off until you've got enough publications to fill an entire page.

Don't do it!

By the time you've had enough stories published for your bibliography to look good, that information is going to be difficult to assemble, and you'll never be entirely sure you haven't missed an item or ten.  There'll be a reprint in Portugar, a posting on the Web, a pirated copy in a former Soviet Republic, something which doesn't get included.  Which I guarantee will bother you.

Also, it'll be a great incentive to keep you writing when you feel like goofing off.  One more story and the bibliography will look less silly . . .  Another two and my career will begin to look promising . . . Four more and it goes to a second page!

These are little things, admittedly.  But that's what a writer's life is made up of:  small gestures.

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One Rule To Judge Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

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So . . . You saw the movie version of The Hobbit and it was like the parson's egg -- parts of it were excellent.  But then the gang went on Mr. Troll's Wild Ride, and you thought:  Oh dear God!  Now you can't decide how to judge the movie.  Given its virtues, can you really, with a clean conscience, declare that it's a bad movie?

Unca Mike is here to help.

Long, long ago, I formulated a rule by which one can dismiss most bad cartoons without having to endure them all the way to the end.  If the assembled good guys suddenly find themselves all in a clump, flying through the air screaming . . . that means the cartoon sucks.  It's possible that three-year-olds think this is witty.  I wouldn't know because when Sean was that age, we told him that that there were no TV shows on Saturday mornings.  But for ages five and above, it's witless.

From Dennis the Menace and his friends flying through the air in a Radio Flyer screaming to Winnie the Pooh and his friends clinging to each other while flying through the air screaming (and surely there are Disney executives who will burn in Hell for that), it's an infallible rule of thumb:  anything containing that scene is a sucky cartoon.  Doubly so if they also abruptly fall screaming down a long slide that suddenly opens up beneath them.

By this infallible rule, what you saw was not a bad movie -- it was a sucky cartoon.

I'm glad I could clear that up for you.

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Sound & Spirit & Tolkien Too

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I found out too late to post it here but last Thursday, January 3rd, was J. R. R. Tolkien's birthday.  According to a young tradition invented by the Tolkien Society, on that day you should, at 9 p.m. local time, stand, raise a glass, and toast the man in the British fashion by saying, "The Professor."

It's a good tradition.  I took part in it for the first time last week and I expect to honor it every year henceforth.

And closely related . . .

The thing I remember most about Ellen Kushner's wonderful and now-extinct radio show Sound & Spirit (which she once characterized to me as "Joseph Campbell meets Ellen's record collection") is how the local PRI station kept changing when they aired it so that I was always frustratedly trying to find where they'd hidden it now.

The thing I remember second-most about it was the hot summer day when my then-teenage son Sean and I were cleaning out the garage.  He excused himself to go to the bathroom and a good ten or fifteen minutes later I chanced to glance at a handful of kibble I'd picked up and found myself staring at the grinning skull of an opossum.  After gently depositing the thing on the garage floor, I went in to see why it hadn't been Sean who'd picked it up and found him talking intently on the phone.  "Who are you talking to?" I asked him (politely, thank God!) and, covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he replied, "I'm being interviewed for public radio."

[That was for a show Ellen did on nostalgia, and Sean was being interviewed because he'd just named his generation.  Maybe I'll tell you that story someday.]

The third most memorable thing is that I ... What's the word?  Not "appeared."  I was heard on the show's Tolkien episode, talking about reading The Lord of the Rings to my son Sean when he was nine years old and discovering that we were experiencing two entirely different books.

That's the show up above.  There's a lot of good stuff in it.  Enjoy.

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Looking Back on the Year 2012

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I'm still on the road,  so . . . Some eye candy and some mind candy today.

First, from Slate, a selection of the best astronomical photos of the year.   Click here.

And, from Smithsonian Magazine, a summary of the coolest dinosaur discoveries of the year.  Click here.

Finally, Myscienceacademy has a list of 27 science fictions that became science fact last year.  Not all are as significant as the list's compiler thinks they are.  But a couple are game-changers.  And the Slow Singularity continues to pick up speed.  The world is going to be a very different place in ten years.  To read, click here.

The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder

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I opened my post office box today and discovered  a royalty check, which seemed an auspicious way to start the year.

Not half so auspicious as the first mail day of the year 2000, however.  A few weeks earlier, I'd sent Gordon Van Gelder, the brilliant and occasionally snarky (deny it if you can, Gordon!) editor of F&SF, a short-short story titled "The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder."  It was not a submission to his magazine.  A series of incidents involving him, which I spelled out in the story, had occurred and on a whim I jotted down an admittedly witty tale about him discovering that he got a sexual kick out of buying bad fiction.

So I sent it to Gordon with a note saying, in essence, "Here's something pleasant for you -- a story which you neither have to buy nor reject.  Read and enjoy!"  Then I forgot about it entirely.

(Gordon disputes parts of this story, by the way, because he thinks it implies that I gamed him into buying the story and he's very watchful about being gamed.  But he's wrong in his suspicions.  I sent him the story knowing there was not a chance in Hell of him buying it.  No games involved.)

On January 2 or 3, 2000, whichever was the first mail day of the new Millennium, I went to the post office, opened my box, and  discovered a familiar-looking envelope, that which contains a check from F&SF.

I didn't sent Gordon a story, I thought in puzzlement, and opened the check.  Then I saw that he'd bought a story I'd never tried to sell him and had honestly forgotten existed.  Half because it was (to be honest) a good story and half because he has a Puckish sense of humor, Gordon had bought my short-short.

A surge of megalomania filled me. I OWN this century! I thought.

Which is my New Year's story.  May your new year be equally filled with madness and joy.


And because we all make resolutions this time of year . . .

I have resolved to limit my blogging to three days a week, in order to free up more time for serious writing.  I can't guarantee to keep to this resolve.  Things keep happening which I want to share.  But I'll be doing my best to keep to it.


And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  But I ought to be able to post on Friday anyway, fingers crossed.  Wish me luck.

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