Two Jack-O-Lanterns

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It's Halloween!

I'm posting this late Saturday night, scheduled to up up early Sunday morning, and I'm fresh back from a Halloween party where I dressed entirely in white with talcum powder in my hair and beard.  (I went as Winter.)  But before I go to bed, I thought I'd show you this year's jack-o-lanterns.  I always carve them myself and it's always a very big deal for me.
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Above:  The serious one.  Below:  The frivolous one.  This is the first time I've tried shaving the pumpkin rather than carving it.  So long as I don't have to give up the traditional carving, I like it a lot.

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McSamhain Is Coming

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I live in Roxborough, which is a blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia, just above Manayunk.  The sort of place where cops and carpenters live.  I'm comfortable here.  And every now and then one of my neighbors does something that makes me like them a lot.


Above:  Somebody a block or so down the street made this jack-o-lantern for Halloween.  I'm proud to live on Leverington Avenue.



And you probably didn't know that . . .

"Roxborough" and "Leverington" are both puns.  I'll have to explain that to you guys someday.

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Halloween Stories

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Sunday is Halloween -- my favorite holiday of the year, for all the obvious reasons and one you probably can't guess.  I'll tell you it on Monday.

In the meantime, this is the season for Halloween stories.  So I'll remind you that I have two appropriate works available on the Web.  The first is Hush and Hark! which can be found at the Drabblecast archives, beautifully read, immediately after a light news item.  Just click here.

The second is, of course, October Leaves, written word by word on autumn leaves, photographed, and posted onto Flickr.  You can find it here.   Click on the photo to go to slideshow.



And we have a winner . . .

The raffle for Fantastic Fiction at KGB, the monthly NYC reading series (and if you're the area, you should definitely check it out; it's one of the best) is over, and winner for the physical ownership of the manuscripts for three pieces of unpublished flash fiction written by me, as well as four years in which to publish them online, offline, in whatever form or forms suit him best is . . . Jacob Weisman, my friend and occasional publisher at Tachyon Publications.  Congratulations, Jacob!

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In Way of an Apology for Not Posting for Two Days

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Those of you who have been with this blog from the beginning know that I only promise to post twice a week, on Fridays and Mondays.  I've been on such a roll this past year, however, posting almost every weekday, that my prolonged silence must look a little ominous.

The truth is rather disappointingly simple.  I've been working on a short story, "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again."  I began this story years ago, but it stalled out and I set it aside to age.  Periodically, I'd pick it up and give it another try, to little effect.  Then on Tuesday I started working on it and the plot tangles spontaneously unknotted and the structural difficulties all solved themselves.  So I've been working on and thinking about nothing else ever since.

But why -- I hear you ask -- such an ungodly long title?  Well, aside from the fact that it suits the story perfectly, I have of late grown impatient with the unvaryingly short and polite titles that are the fashion today.  The latest Asimov's, for example, has three one-word titles, a pair of two-word titles, and Gwendolyn Clare's "Ashes on the Water."  (Haven't read it yet, but I presume it's great.)  It's been a long time since such gorgeous monsters as "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" walked the earth.  So I'm doing my little bit "to rectify the regime," as they say on Korean historical TV series.

When I stalled out on the story, it was called "The Stone of Loneliness."  I can't help suspecting that was part of the problem.

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Orthopedic (Believe It Or Not) Horseshoes

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I'm on the virtual air again!  Herb Kauderer and Alan Katerinsky interviewed me when I was at Confluence, and they've apparently assembled it into two separate shows for their online radio program called (implausible though that sounds) Orthopedic Horseshoes, which you can find online at Think Twice Radio.  Here's how they describe the shows:

MOMENTS WITH THE BIG BOYS

Al & Herb have an extended conversation with Hugo, Nebula, WFA, and Sturgeon award-winning author Michael Swanwick. As the party evolves, they talk about "Foresight," reversed consciousness, 'Jack Faust,' the shortest chapter ever, Fritz Leiber, flash fiction, abecedaries, The Sleep of Reason, Goya's donkey, Clarion West, Tuckerization, Elena the Man-Hearted, winning his first Hugo, Jack Dann, Joe Haldeman, Samuel R. Delany, first moments with the big boys, telling Neil Gaiman stories, Terry Pratchett, signing autographs in China, the thatched hut of Du Fu, a tourist attraction for over a thousand years, it would be worth being fat if you could live in Chengdu, visiting the world, eventually getting some seniority, and a menagerie of pet peeves.  (29 minutes)

COINS LIKE DUST

Hugo, Nebula, WFA, and Sturgeon award-winning author Michael Swanwick talks with Herb & Al about his travels through Russia, and the resultant stories. Michael tells stories about Darter & Surplus, Russian fans, flavors of Russian police, the aftermaths of WWII, Yekaterinburg, 'Dancing with Bears', post-utopian fiction, Fritz Leiber, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, "Coming Attractions", Libertarian Russia, the train across Siberia, and "Pushkin the American".  After the closing credits, hear an excerpt from Michael Swanwick's reading of "The Pearls of Byzantium" at the Confluence SF Convention. (52 minutes)

I haven't listened to the shows yet, so I am taking it on trust that Al and Herb haven't made me sound bad.  They seemed like nice guys, though.  And their descriptions make the shows sound interesting.

"The Pearls of Byzantium," incidentally, is a stand-alone story that I crafted from the forthcoming Dancing With Bears by condensing the early chapters, adding an ending totally at odds with what happens in the novel, and then recrafting the whole into a shapely and satisfying story.  This is a trick I learned from my old pal Jack Dann.

There are absolutely no plans to ever publish "The Pearls of Byzantium."  But I'll be reading it a couple of times before the novel is published.  I'll let you know when I do.

You can find Orthopedic Horseshoes here.

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Leslie Howle, Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

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I had the pleasant duty yesterday of accepting an award for my good pal, Leslie Howle.  It was the Last Drink Bird Head Award (long story behind that; short version: it was created by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer) for tireless energy.  Given, as they say, "in recognition of individuals who selflessly give of themselves for worthy causes, websites, or organizations."  Below is what I said in its entirety:

Leslie spent over 20 years working as Workshop Director for Clarion West, another three years working at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame as Senior Manager for Outreach and Education, and two more years working on the museum’s Hall of Fame Committee after leaving that position.  In 2006 she started her own non-profit dedicated to running a series of speculative fiction writing workshops and readings through Richard Hugo House and the University Book Store, and that highly successful program continues to this day.  She helps out with the annual Locus Awards Weekend and this year will head up programming for writers at Norwescon.   

The award is specifically fore "tireless energy."  I've seen Leslie absolutely exhausted.  But she never let that stop her.


Leslie didn't believe she was going to win, but I nagged her into writing a few words anyway.  Here's what she has to say:

First I want to thank all the little people.  No wait, I AM the little people!  When I was twelve, my older brother came home on leave from the Army with a box of primo science fiction and fantasy paperbacks.  Naturally I dragged the box out of his closet the minute he went back to the Army and consequently was exposed to radically new ideas and ways of thinking about the world and humanity at exactly the right age. I was never the same.  I was always a reader and a writer, but I became an educator and provocateur, and the experience of working with and being inspired by creative, wildly imaginative minds like your Michael, for instance, is what fuels my so-called tireless energy.

What I do is not so much a function of tireless energy as it is the fact that all of the talented writers, readers, artists, and other imagineers I’ve had the good fortune of working with and learning from stoke the fire that keeps my motor running. 

I love this community and am continually inspired to do what I can to help writers and promote their work.  We live in troubled times, and more than ever need science fiction and fantasy’s ability to serve as a politically subversive medium for commentary and  warning against possible futures.  I do this work because I believe that what all of you do goes beyond entertainment.  It’s important and meaningful. You hold a mirror up to humanity and ask who are we?  You ask what if? 

I believe in you and I got your back.  Thanks.

You can find full info on the LDBH Awards here.

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Oneirographics

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I had a strange dream last night.  Well, my dreams are always strange.  Stranger than usual, I should have said.  In it, I was writing a letter to Eileen Gunn, as apparently I did on a regular basis.  I have no idea how the letters got to her.  It began:

Dear Eileen:

It's been over a year since I accidentally fell into this parallel world and found myself unable to return home.  The people here are all left-eyed, though none of them seem to be aware of this fact.  They are also largely right-handed, a fact to which they inexplicably attach some importance.  But what is most significant is their superiority in the field of electronics . . .

And boy are they superior!  They have computers you can hold in the palm of your hand.  They have wireless telephones that fit in a shirt pocket.  In my home reality, the best we can do are those little hand-held games which the alt-reality people had way back in the 1980s.

Most of the rest of the dream was tech stuff, finding a way to interface the superior alt-reality electronics to our inferior reality stuff, so the information could be passed along to uplift our electronica.

Ah, but then at the end of the dream, when the new tech made made it possible for me to be restored to home reality, I went looking for Eileen and found her in a small blue room with strings stretched from wall to wall and pendant on those strings slabs of asiago, emmenthal, longhorn . . .  Eileen stood surrounded by all this cheese-based information technology in an a data-trance, helplessly murmuring fractions of the data that was thundering through her traumatized brain.

Which was when I realized that our plan to update our reality's technology had gone too far, too fast.


And speaking of Homer . . .

Two Iliads in one month!  Two different performances of an ancient epic set in the ninth year of a seemingly endless war with no prospect of a happy ending ever.  I wonder what's going on.

Oh, yeah.


An Iliad, playing at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton until November 19, is a tour de force, a one-man retelling of the ancient epic.  Stephen Spinella  plays Homer as a restless nomadic storryteller, doomed to keep on telling his story while the world churns through war after war, learning nothing at all from it.

A little depresssing, if you think about it.  But well worth seeing.  I recommend it.


And I'm off again . . .

I'm gallavanting off to Capclave!  If you're going to be there either today or tomorrow, be sure to say hi.

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