Moving

I'm not sure if anyone is still coming here, given that it's been months since a post showed up here, but I should formally announce that I have moved to a spiffy new blog over at Wordpress. I am leaving this up partly because there is stuff here I want to refer back to, but at some point I will probably move the posts that matter to some sort of archive over at the new site.

I moved because Wordpress works better, for one thing. It's not as simple, and there are things to learn about running the site, but I like it. Also, I needed to make the shift from an Internet handle to my real name as I undertake the process of writing professionally. I am still toying with what name to use (John Stevens, J. H. Stevens, etc.) but it is time to come out from behind my cute name and be me. This is in part something I need to do to own my writing, to be more confident in my work. The new blog will be much more focused on writing, and less on personal stuff, which I think will make it more interesting to folks.

So come on over!

A Roundup, and a Readercon

I've been silent recently, but writing a lot. My SF Signal column has several new entries, including a two-parter on "The Death of Science Fiction." I did not write a new column this week, but I did pen a review of the VanderMeers' The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. I just submitted an article for publication, and as soon as I have more info on release I will post it. I am also still slogging away at my Clarion Write-a-Thon project, a bit behind at 11,100 words but working to catch up.

Today I am off to Readercon, and I will be posting assorted updates from there over the weekend. It should be a fun and thinky con.

Write-a-thon, One Week and Many Thoughts

So, what has seven days of writing raw, unformed prose given me?

1) Confidence. Yeah, this zero-draft stuff is not much to read, but doing this on my blog, regardless of responses, is good. I am writing every day, I am writing without fear, which sounds grandiose but is not meant to be. I started this solo workshop with a very general sense of what I wanted to write, and I am finding that as I write a lot of elements of the future story are becoming clearer. Writing this protean stuff in public is helping me break down some internal barriers, and as a result I am writing more overall with less hesitation.

2) Discernment: When I write an early draft, I do a couple of strange things: first, I write actions and interactions in excruciating detail. which I parse in later drafts. When I compare what I am writing here to a few other pieces, this problem stands out mightily. Feedback on previous stories has pointed this out, and this excessive detail was also a problem in essay-writing in grad school. This is linked to confidence, in part, this to a need to map out everything. I hate missing something, so in early drafts there is too much. I prefer to whittle rather than add on.

One of the things I learned in my creative writing education and in graduate school was to not be wedded to what is on the page. One of my writing teachers in college was Taylor Stoehr, who saw this tendency of mine to overwrite immediately and spent a very patient year pointing out its effects on my work. He even gave me a collection of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry to inspire me to do more with less. I took the lesson a bit differently than he wanted, I think.

In academic graduate school, you are encouraged to overwrite, and then chided for it. I tried to follow what I found to be the conventions of authorship, and had some of those whose writing I studied tell me what I was doing it wrong. I soon learned that "do I say, not as I do" was the motto to follow. But their advice was theoretically precise, yet technically vague. Again, one person gave me some excellent advice early on; Thomas Kirsch spent most of my first semester giving me pointers on how to approach not just academic writing, but the process of practice of writing itself. He was fascinated with the tension between anthropologists "getting it right" and their often larger-than-life self-images and aspirations. This often resulted in writing that was very detailed but had little behind it, or dense academic discussions that were far removed from the ethnographic material. What he counseled was simple: write clearly, always keeping not just your point but the world you are writing about in mind.

3) Rhythm: Spattering ideas on the screen often shows me what objective I want to achieve (see above about detail, etc.). I think through writing more often than I form a full idea in my head. What I am noticing in this project is that this influences the rhythm and flow of my writing, and I need to pay more attention to that when redrafting and shaping the story in revision. I also tend to search for characters' voices and personas in this manner, and that affects the rhythm as well. In this novella I am trying to play with the third-person perspective a bit and let a focal character influence the perspective in each section. We'll see how well that works as I keep unfolding the story.

4) Exercise: This Write-a-thon is good exercise, partly because there are prompts from Clarion. I am going to tackle this exercise tonight and see what it yields, then get back to writing. I am a day behind but I will catch up after working the prompt.

5) Enlightenment: There is nothing like working on a story to remind you of how difficult and amazing the writing process can be. Even without publication, fiction writing does a lot for me, from improving my mood to influencing how I talk about writing in my column and articles. It's hardest sort of fun around and I get a lot from it.

Write-a-thon, Day One

Here is the next bit of my Write-a-thon novella:


The creekside plots were cukes and pumpkins this year, although Leigh had little use for the former and had asked that they not be grown. Bloody useless little peckers. But the vegetation here was turning lush quickly; this was still some of the best ground they had for cultivation. There just wasn't very much of it, especially with the boulders here and there and the rock formation that jutted out from the bridge and came down the shore from what used to be the big lawn, when the Falls were a park. Now that was a precious little grain patch, barely enough to feed a few people for a season. Too little, too little. . . . .

She realized that she could hear music now, some twangy guitar notes. She came over the hump and saw Eoin standing at attention, hands behind his back, watching Gracie play on the big boulder. The maple gave them both ample shade. It was still warm under the canopy but lulling and sweet. Leigh felt herself smiling. She compressed her lips, lingering for a moment until the tune ended, then turned and headed back to the homestead.

* * * * *

When she got up to the top of the bridge she heard something scream, and her smile returned, but this time she let it spread out over her wide face and wrinkle her eyes. As she topped the road she saw the chugger backed into the main driveway, and a small open-topped trailer with its gate open, empty. The screaming stopped as soon as she crossed Lake St. By the time she took the short-cut behind the houses and got to the sort-of courtyard they crowded around, it was all over, and a burly older woman and a tall, rangy teenage girl were grunting as they pulleyed a blood-spouting pig to swing from the thick branch of an elm tree. Most of the blood was falling into a filthy plastic bucket.

"Ah, protein." She waved to the other two as they secured the rope. Their sun hats had been pushed back, and their hair, short and gray for both of them, was soaked with sweat. They both wore light ponchos and blood-stained aprons, but the older woman's clothes were dark red and slick. The girl brushed a few droplets from her face and smiled at Leigh.

"Good size. Meaty."

The older woman nodded. "Hello Leigh. We have a prize pig here for sure!" She laughed; the other two women smiled and nodded politely. "Like El said: good size, plenty of flesh. We'll have him butchered in no time. Smokehouse most of it, have barbecue for the rest tonight." She tromped past Leigh and opened the hatch to the small house's cellar, disappearing inside.

"What's the word?" Leigh asked El.

"I talked to Heather; they have enough pasture for the season, but they may have to convert next year." She undid the apron tie behind her neck and slipped out of the blood-spattered garb. "Levy on pasture might up to triple, with all the food drop delays."

"That's stupid. Who's going to work it? Brad, Heather, and their grandkids?" Leigh heard something clang in through the open basement hatch and cursing erupt. "Too much field. It's ridiculous."

El nodded and tossed her apron over by the tree. "There might be more Unemployed by next spring."

Leigh wrinkled her nose. "You're kidding."

El gave her a funny look. "Of course I'm not. Brad saw some tax revenue projections, and even with the shopping bonus the Employed got, still not enough coming in, he says."

"Fuck the Employed," Leigh replied, "I told them that horseshit plan wouldn't work."


Words for tonight: 607.

Write-athon and on and on. . . .

Last time we left our ogre he was discussing his participation in the Clarion Write-a-thon, and then apparently fell into a wormhole or portal to another world. He is back, and will now talk about himself in the first person.

I have updated my Clarion page with my specific goal for the six weeks, which is to write a novella of at least 25,000 words, currently entitled "Waterfall Pulls the Sunlight Down." At 600 words per day, and no editing, I can make this goal, and I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges, raw as it may be.

The Write-a-thon officially starts tomorrow and runs until 6 August, but some writers started early, and I did some writing earlier in the week, which I will not count towards the 25,000 word total. Part of the process is promoting your writing and getting people to sponsor you, so if you enjoy this story, please do donate. As incentive, I will happily tuckerize every donor who wishes it into the story, and the person who makes the largest contribution will receive the final product in whatever form it is eventually published in.

Here's the first installment:



June, The Month of Hoping Things Grow

Eoin found Littlegrace Bear by the falls, strumming the dead woman's guitar. It had rained overnight and the water was roaring, throwing sparkling drops into the air and crashing down into a white maelstrom below the chunky rock formation it ran over. The little waterwheels craned out on the near side of the falls were spinning and rocking in the spray, but the din of the water drowned out their creaking and whirring. Maybe we'll get enough power for a movie tonight.

Gracie watched the falls sparkle and ran her fingers across the strings, lightly depressing them near a middle fret. That guitar twanged with poor tuning, but she swayed along with the slow rhythm. Eoin cleared his throat. The strumming changed, became lighter and slower.

"You doing alright?"

She smiled at the waterfall and blinked as the wind came up and blew a little spray their way. "It was nice of her to give me her guitar." The strumming picked up speed again. "The waterfall likes the music." She closed her eyes and raised her face to the breeze-driven droplets.

"Yeah." Eoin tried to quell the light shaking that had been in his hands since dawn. He looked down at them, thin but strong hands. He still had a bit of the dead woman's blood under his fingernails, he noted. He put his arms behind his back and stood up straighter. "If you need anything, you let me know."

She smiled at the waterfall. "I have a guitar. I ate breakfast." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "There'll probably be a movie tonight." She moved her fingers down the neck and the guitar moaned. She bent over it and started playing it for real, bluesy and curt notes groaning out of it. She sped up the rhythm a bit and started shaking her head to the music.

He felt a tear form at the side of his right eye, like one of those cocoons a wasp would spin on its victim/protector. Maybe this one will take some anger with it. His stomach rumbled. His arms were tired. He nodded at Gracie, stepped back to the edge of the shade given by the massive tree they were under, the last one by the creek on this side of the falls. Far behind and up on the little bluff he could hear people talking, maybe shouting. He checked the sun, out beneath the cool canopy of the maple.

He stood there, still as stone, and listened to the rough, sad music until the sun went behind the shattered house on the ridge across the creek.

* * * * *

Leigh went out to the upper field as soon as she unloaded the runabout. She made sure the trike was charging this time, although according to the meter there wasn't much juice banked for it. She looked over at the smallest of the three houses by the main driveway and heard music blaring from it. As she walked by the rear door to cut through the backyard she shouted "Turn it off, Darkboy!" She heard the volume decrease as she fast-walked by the little playground and a patch of perky greens, rounded the last house standing on the block, and cut between two foundations (one that smelled more and more like a garbage dump; best get that on Damon's list too) out to the street. She cut across the pothole-filled road to the tax garden and waved to Nutmeg and Kit, who were weeding and looking for slugs and such under the self-standing umbrella.

She crossed Lake St., which was hardly a street anymore, partly cleared off but even more pocked than Falls St. Up the old driveway of the former parking lot to what was now the lower field, a combination of tomatoes and squashes slowly maturing in the harsh sunlight. She skirted the edge of the field and kicked at the rich soil along the edge, the imported stuff that had cost them a horse and 900 hours of server time. If Darkboy's stereo eats the reserve power I'm going to feed his testicles to the hounds. She scrambled up the rough steps along the top of the rockface overlooking the creek gardens and wished once again there was some sort of railing.

She found Damon on the little bluff near the falls in his sun hat and puffy shirt, squatting down in the new field, looking at a row of seedlings that were stunted, some of them browning. She made noise as she approached when she saw the gun on his hip. He let some soil drop from his fingers and wiped them on his trouser leg, then put his gardening glove back on. She pulled her kaffiyah back and cleared her throat.

"Hey," he said as she came up beside him. He kept looking at the seedlings. "How's town?"

"Still there," she replied. "Mail's late. Food drop's late. Treatment plant is down again." She looked over the field to the far side, where some recently cut-down trees lay near a tall chain-link fence. "I got the new parts for the tiller, finagled some grain for those extra tires." She heard him mutter and caress a wilted shoot between his fingers. "There's a Common Council meeting Thursday night."

He quieted and looked sideways at her shins; the fabric of her silky beige skirt clung to them in the rising breeze. "For what?"

"What do you think, Damon?" She sneered a bit at the top of his head. "Second week with no drops, no mail, just a few independents and tinkers rolling through with wares." She looked down the length of the field, which was farmed right up to a thin stand of trees about back to the creek before the falls. She squinted and saw one of the thin irrigation pipes dripping water, but as the wind kicked up soil blew off in stinging puffs. "How's the field?"

She was pretty sure she heard him whisper "fuck you" before he raised his voice. "Trouble with the irrigation; DeShawn and Alice are working on it, may just drag the manual gear up here and try to hose the field for now. Darkboy says weather forecast is for rain on Wednesday, but three days is a long time for no water." He flicked at the plant he had just been fondling. "But it's not just water; something else is up. I need to run some tests. . . ."

She sighed. "Really? Again?"

Damon finally looked up at her, his milky right eye as piercing as the clear green one. "Yes Leigh, again. This seed was supposed to be clean and delinked. Signal free. Parent. Untampered with."

"It's corn, Damon. What did you expect? I told you. . . ."

He hissed to cut her off. "I expected that my preliminary analysis was right. And this is not. . . it's not. . . ." he turned away from her and tossed a pebble down the row. "I'm not sure what's wrong, and I need to find out, deal with it before. . . ."

"Next week?"

"Thursday." He stood up, finally. Slowly, his knees creaking. His clothes were too big for him and the intermittent breeze pushed the roomy white fabric of his voluminous shirt sleeves against his bony elbows as he hooked his thumbs into his belt. "I need to know what's up by Thursday."

"Yeah, I guess." She shook her head at the tiny plantlings. "How's everybody doing?"

"Fine. The girls are working the tax garden, kids are over at the big playground, Mischa and El are bringing that pig back from McLean. Vim and Darkboy are doing their thing. I think the rest went down along the creek to forage, and check around."

"Eoin and Gracie are down by the falls," Leigh said after a moment. "They're under the maple, but I don't think they have any other protection."

Damon sighed. "Gracie I don't worry about; she's the proper skin. But Eoin, he knows better. They should be checking the animals and getting ready for milking."

Leigh rubbed her lower teeth along her bottom lip. "Right. But, how's everybody doing, Damon?"

"I just said they're fine. They're doing their stuff, except for Eoin and Gracie. Could you. . . nah, I'll go down when I'm done here and get them going on the animals."

Leigh sighed again. "How about I do it, and you just do your little tests." She turned to go before he replied.

"Please remind Eoin that we need him," he said towards her, then settled back down near the dying plants. He waited until the field was quiet again, then brushed the back of his fingers down a bending shoot of immature corn. "What the fuck do you want?"

* * * * *

Leigh trotted down the path to the lower field, then jumped down over the concrete wall and cistern that separated it from the creekside area. She remembered when she was a kid how she and her friends would clamber all over it, safe in the shade of the scraggly little woods. They would play tag on the big lawn near the bridge, sometimes chase each other through the tall grass that grew around the rocks and trees. One a week their teacher would bring them down to the creek and give talks about the ecosystem, about the geology, and have them hunt for rocks or just watch the creek flow. She had them write essays on how the water looked running over the stones, lapping at the shore, cascading down the falls.

Now the creekside was crowded with vegetable plots, some raised-bed, one an experiment in "lasagna" gardening. Without the trees, and with the smaller rocks removed, she found it uninviting. The huge old maple down by the falls stood out like an arrogant old fart. The skinny, almost leafless trees across the creek felt envious, the ones who hadn't snapped or died already at least. The carefully-plotted land on this side left no room for play, and it seemed to Leigh that it stole all the life from the areas around it. Perhaps that's the problem with Damon's stupid corn.

-----

Note: farming, animal husbandry, and some other technical matters that come up in this drafting process may not be accurate, so if you see a gaffe or problem in the story, please let me know!

I will be posting each day's entry here, and as soon as I find a word count indicator I will put that up as well.

Clarion Write-a-Thon!

So, since there was no way I could participate in The Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop at UCSD this year, I decided to do the next best thing and sign up for their fundraising Write-a-Thon. I've got a page at the site (click on the badge to the right to go to it) and am now soliciting donations for the project. Details are all on the Write-a-Thon page. I'm looking forward to being pushed to write more.

I write a lot now, but I need to branch out, to take the confidence I've been building with the columns and reviews and write more fiction without letting apprehension get the best of me. It's all about being willing to suck, at this point, and keep writing and developing.

Some Writing, and Some Writing-To-Be

Several writings have recently come out on different sites. Over at Functional Nerds I have a review of Sam Sykes vigorous, engaging Black Halo. At Aidan Moher's A Dribble of Ink I talk about "mind-blowing" fantastika. And in my regular column at SF Signal I talk about ecstasy and vision in the genre. A new column will be out tomorrow and I have a review in process, and books for two more in queue.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes. I have two assignments in the works that if successful will result in publication. I am very excited about this, although it is odd that my first "real" publication will likely be a non-fiction piece. Part of that is a result of my writing online, but another part is my own reluctance to put my fiction out there. I've written two stories that I have set aside, and the current one is at the "this sucks. . . PANIC!" stage. The novel is a different creature, because while the end of the initial draft is in sight there is more comfort in the sheer deluge of words and ideas.

Caitlin Kittredge issued a challenge on her blog a few days ago, and I took her up on it. To that end, I made the following to-do list that I vow to fulfill by 1 September:

1) finish the first draft of A CROWN OF CRUSTED BLOOD (am at 77K, looks to be about 110K for some sense of drafty completeness)

2) Finish current short story, then go back and finish the two I bumped because I had an attack of the “I sucks.”

3) non-fiction book proposal.

4) finish up some assorted legal documents and obligations.

5) do all this while writing a weekly column, a monthly column, and two reviews a month, while also reading a book a week.

6) oh yeah, not get fired at Day Jobbe.

And I have to add a 7) take care of my daughter and give her the proper love and attention. It was implicit but I think it needs to be said.

I've been looking at the calendar and re-figuring my commitments, and as always it comes down to sticking to a schedule, putting my ass in a chair and writing. Although with my hip getting worse, sitting is increasingly painful. I should probably add an 8) continue to improve my health, eh?

All the Little Moments Between

Yesterday as I was riding the bus to work I opened my bag to take out Jo Walton's new novel Among Others, which is a wonderful and heartfelt, but not schmaltzy, book that I look forward to reviewing in full soon. But when I opened my courier satchel, I found that I had left the book at home, and instead had a few duplicates that I was bringing to the store to trade in (it is a bad habit of mine to see a book, bring it home, and later find its twin elsewhere in the collection. The other returns were The Master & Margarita, Sputnik Sweetheart, and The Yorkist Age). One of the books was Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is one of my favorite books of his and is one of the best examples of fantastika of the 20th century. I got so absorbed in it that I missed my stop, and I was honestly surprised that I could get so lost so quickly.

This morning I left Walton at my bedside and brought along Jeff VanderMeer's new collection Monstrous Creatures, which is also in the review queue. I read "The Third Bear" which was a lot of fun, and finished "The Language of Defeat" before I got downtown (and got off at the right stop this time). This piece was downright inspirational, in part because Jeff makes what I think of as an anthropological argument for looking at genre's effect on our conceptions of literature. In particular, his discussion of "the syntax of defeat" resonated with me, because the ideas of symbolic capital that inhere to certain genre categories and distinctions can powerfully affect how we look at books and their place in our creative and imaginative lives.

What I took away from that was an odd thought: that in both over-valorizing or denigrating particular literary categories, formations, and ideas, we miss all of the little moments between conceptions, when literature works its way into our minds and our ontology, makes us feel and dream and reassemble our view of the world, if only for a few seconds. It was heady to read the Murakami and feel those strange episodes dance with the warm ideas of Walton's book. I wonder how I would have responded to the golden beasts in the Town's fields as a teenager like Mori, far more damaged than she but with far less magic in my life, except that of the library. Back then these moments in-between were blurred as I fled for the solace of genre, for the security of escapism and the comfort of books that had nothing to do with the world around me.

The syntax of defeat is part of a struggle on multiple levels, of meaning, belonging, and representing our conflicts and desires. People would not invest so much energy in these debates if there were not affective elements to them. Sadly, this does not make the debates much more useful, unless people do use them to better understand theirs and others' ideas of the power and joy of literature. Wrangling over an "umbrella term" for fantastic literature, for example, seems more about authorial or critical identity, about one's position in relation to various literary conceptions and communities, than about finding an agreeable way to characterize a massive swath of literature. Don't misunderstand; these debates fascinate me, and I personally stick by "fantastika" as a useful term, but they do contain within them some of that syntax of defeat.

The trick is to think about those moments between, what lies inside and between the categories and assumptions that we project and ingest and wrestle with as we read and think and imagine. It is easy to conflate the cultural and literary utility and pleasures of genre with other considerations, and create not just borders, but outright barriers that inhibit our ingenuity as readers and writers and editors. The syntax of defeat creates obstacles, rather than conditions for creativity. The question for me is, what ideas enrich our experience of literature, increase our insights into what it gives us, and help us to recognize and incorporate the little moments between into the life of the mind and spirit that literature invigorates in us.

Because it in those moments that the magic of the word becomes powerful, when it evades and exceeds expectations and pretensions, when an assemblage of words is becoming literature. A "science fiction book" is not literature until we apprehend it, overlay our notions and understandings on it and turn its symbols into a literary experience. Those moments between are individual instances of sense and comprehension that we pattern and render significant. Genre can give them added meaning or shape, or help us relate them to constellations of stories in our heads, give us another angle of perspective or flavor of experience, but when we lose all sight of them, and think of them as building blocks rather wonders in themselves, we give strength to the syntax of defeat and lose a bit of the gift that literature gives us.

The drunkenness of things being various

I have always loved the poetry of Louis MacNeice, particularly his "Snow." I am not sure I understand some of it, but I feel that it is trying to tell me something big. The line that forms the title of this post is my favorite line from that poem, and I understand it, at least as it relates to my own life. The feeling that it tries to qualify is one that I struggle with often.

I wrote a new column for SF Signal and once again forgot to link to it. So here it is. I also led the contributions to last week's Mind Meld, about genre-related guilty pleasures, and felt oddly proud that I did not try to take apart the idea of "guilty pleasure" first. I just wrote about my favorite one, which was enjoyable and right.

I've been thinking a lot about different modes of writing lately. As I write fiction, columns, reviews, and blurbs for the bookstore, I find that I am shifting more comfortably between modes, that I am more agile in responding to the demands of the moment, to the goal for each piece of writing. I am enjoying my writing more, I am writing more as a result, and I am producing more for people to read. The latter two might seem a bit odd to separate, but it has been a gradual process of getting my writing in front of people's eyes. I am slowly putting more of work out into the open. After over a decade of most of my writing (conference papers, academic book reviews, even the journalism) being meant for small, very particular audiences, the shift to writing for a wider, more public audience, with a simultaneous shift in what I am writing, has been a bit of challenge, for several reasons, ranging from lack of confidence to depression to the tumult of everyday life.

What is gratifying is that the writing gives me what I need to build up to the new challenges. I have to be careful not to objectify the writing or grant it some mystical powers; it comes from me, after all. But the act of writing is powerful to me, and it always has been. There is no surer sign that something is awry than when I stop writing. "Writer's block" to me is, and pardon the overdramatization, a crisis of the spirit. When the words don't come, regardless of their quality or lucidity, something is jammed up inside me, something needs release.

Writing regularly is a practice that opens me up, often regardless of what I am writing. It is not about catharsis (usually), it is about flow. It clears ideas and anxieties out of the way and exercises my imagination and intellect in ways that help me see other parts of my life more clearer. The act itself is engaging, but the fact of the act gives me confidence and a feeling of anchorage. It is a practice of expression that exerts ineffable creative muscles, and in doing so loosens up other aspects of mind and spirit. The product is important, but the process is where I get most of vitality and value from the work.

Variety is not just the spice, it is the meat and wine of writing.

A Story for Sunday

Today is #samplesunday on Twitter, and after tweaking the following tale for a bit I've decided to release it into the wild. I like it very much, but I am not sure it is salable. That may be my own lack of confidence speaking, but it seemed like a better idea to let it go, and see what readers think of it. Enjoy, and do comment.

"A Fine Day to Watch the Dragons Die"

Dorlé awoke to a rumbling chorus of dragon whimpers.

As he opened his eyes he had to shield them from scabs of mud that were flaking off of the hut wall next to his cot. The ground trembled like a rapped drumhead and sent a quivering rhythm through the thatch and framework of the little shelter. Dorlé pulled his thin blanket over his head and buried his face into the bundled old deerhide that was his pillow, and waited for the shaking and flaking to stop.

Quiet gradually returned to the hut. Dorlé slipped out of his cot and right into his sandals. He looked around as he rose; the other two cots were empty, one neatly covered with a threadbare quilt, the other bereft of bedding. Two cups and plates sat on the only other piece of furniture in the shelter: a high, three-legged table with a round top, like an ogre’s barstool (which, given the wear on top, it might well have been). Near the table was a small fire whose thin smoke wound up to the smokehole in the roof, and through a few other holes near it. This hut would be poor shelter if it rained here.

He pushed through the goatskin door and emerged into the beigeness of another day. The sun was filtered through clouds the color of trail dust and worn saddle leather. A few ribbons of gray delineated cloud banks, but the light that reached the ground muted clarity and washed out dark tones. Sky and earth were the same color, separated by distant humps of hillocks and wisps of crinkled vegetation. Dorlé walked to the small garden plot behind the hut and surveyed it glumly. When they had first arrived, it had contained bouquets of herbs, sinuous medicinals, and even some ebullient flowers for the hornetsprite altars. Bristletack had been coaxed to form around the plot to keep out vermin and a night-singer had been granted a home in the middle of the plot to call out when unfamiliar people came near.

Now it was little more than several disheveled rows of withered shoots and petals. A few things still grew steadfastly; the toughest herbs and tubers stood out amongst the clusters of limp stems and frills. Dorlé walked up and down the rows, toeing a few plants, then he shrugged and knelt down to pull what he hoped was some sort of onion. “So many dying,” he muttered as he dug at the ground, which seemed quite black and dense.

“Not dying,” a dry voice said behind him. He tilted his head backwards until he could see the speaker, who stood with a slight bend on the roof of the world to Dorlé’s overturned eyes. “Not truly dying, pupil. Just. . .” the man sighed, his thick master’s braid, weighed down with silver stars and small wire-bound rubies, swaying next to his downcast face. “Just. . . bereft.”

Dorlé’s face pinched up. “Bereft? What do you mean, master?”

The master smiled for the span of a wingbeat. “I mean that something’s lacking, and until those plants or that earth can figure how to do without it,” he walked over and plucked the slightly wizened bulb from Dorlé’s hand, “we eat . . . dispirited things.” He shucked the skin from the onion with a slice of his silvered thumbnail and one pull, biting into it as he walked away.

Dorlé crossed his arms, frowning. He realized he was hugging himself. He looked around, squinting at all the dullness in the distant hills and the monochromatic sky. He shook his head, pulled another onion from the plot, and jogged awkwardly after his master.

* * * *

The hut sat behind a rise that gave them a little solace from the wind and the morning sun. It also blocked a lot of the noise from the field. Dorlé tossed the ends of onion and the skin aside as he munched, saving a soft, greenish top to chew on as he hiked over the rise. As he got to the top the breeze hit his face: thin, acrid, and moaning. Its stinging warmth made him squint, made his cheeks tighten and a sweat break out on the back of his neck.

And, with his first full breath, came the stench of dying dragons.

There were nine in the field; four in a group near the northern edge, three close to the rise, and two singletons farther east. The quartet had dragged themselves close together after falling; to commiserate, Dorlé assumed. The three has been dropped by the main ritual and had fallen in a rough formation, hitting straight and snapping their necks. They lay twisted and broken, unable to move like the others; one was crumpled into a ball, the second was flopped on its back, and the third was stretched out on its side, it’s left rear leg pointing absurdly upwards.

The singletons lay shriveled and stretched-out at the far edge of the field, having dragged themselves here from father away. It had been a garden plot for the seasonal nomads who claimed the area, but they had fled during the final battle to the north and not returned. All evidence of horticulture was now buried under draconian carcasses, the eroding traces of their sudden landings, and the rough, gray-green grass that had started sprouting in the last few weeks.

Barand was in her usual position, standing at the edge of the field near a large, flat rock. She surveyed the field dramatically, Gabrydotir in her right hand, point down. Dorlé’s master sat at the other end of the slab, sketching awkwardly and sometimes picking up his leather journal to make notes. As he came around the rock he realized that the tremor-inducing noises from the dragons had subsided; for the first time since they had arrived, they were all silent.

“Good morning, champion,” Dorlé said to Barand, with a slight tilt of his head and the turning of both palms towards the ground. “How do you fare on this. . . “ he looked up at the sky, “ . . . day?”

“The same as the last nine times you have asked that question,” she growled, shifting her shoulders under her polished, yet curiously dull, breastplate, which creaked and ground against her gorget. Her dialect was very formal; Master Gunningam had said they taught only the higher dialects in the battle schools. “I am vigilant.”

She shifted her shoulders again as Dorlé came around to his master and knelt next to him. Gunningam smiled at him briefly before handing him a piece of ragged parchment and a stick of sharpened charcoal.

Dorlé looked up towards her and smiled. “Your neckpiece is making a bit of noise; has the dryness gotten to it?”

“No,” she grated, turning a bit away from Dorlé to watch the group of dragons closest to them. A small clump of fur fell from the back of the gorget. “The whulvenhide has become motley.” She cocked her head downwards so that he could see her profile: sharp chin, brawler’s nose, dark brow. “Why do you note that today?”

He pointed at her back with the tip of his charcoal. “You are shifting your shoulders quite a lot, which you haven’t done before.”

Her lips moved; probably swearing to herself again. He had never heard her utter a profanity or an imprecation, but she often said them to herself, he thought.

She turned her head to look at him, her eyes scanning him as she did. Or, he realized, her eye scanning him.

Her right eye was a meticulously-carved chrysoprase cabochon, its verdant sheen flecked with black spots. It had always moved with her other eye and, she had told him on one of their first nights here, it allowed her to see through guises and half-truths. Today, it sat blankly in her eye socket, and he could see her eyelid was rimmed red, and the cheek beneath it glistened. She squinted with it as she spoke to him.

“I see. That is good to know. I will take care to do that less often.” She turned back to the dragons and straightened up. She even shifted her massive sword, it’s pommel nearly even with her shoulder, to make sure that it stood up straighter.

Dorlé pulled his scribner’s cloth from his pouch and slipped it under the parchment. He waited, listening to pebbly groans from the nearest dragon and some creaking from Barand’s armor. He rolled the parchment in it and unrolled it again. It flopped over his thigh.

“Master,” he began, turning to Gunningam, but the older man nodded and cut him off with a wave of his free hand.

“Yes Dorlé, the cloths no longer work. I had hoped that their properties came from the plant fibers that compose them, but,” he sighed, “I was once again mistaken.”

One of the easterly dragons began to burble like an untended furnace. All three of the observers stood up and moved forward a bit; Barand jerked her sword from the ground and it dragged a bit behind her until she choked her grip up to the hilt. She grimaced and held it before her with both hands. A talisman stance, Dorlé recalled.

“That’s Ashfentomyr,” Gunningam said to them. He started walking towards the creature, flipping to something in his journal. The other two followed him; Barand keeping her sword raised awkwardly in front of her. Dorlé watched the huge blade waver in front of her. Was she sweating?

They stopped a dozen strides from the beast. It did not appear to be breathing; it looked completely still, like a broken statue. But from within it they could hear some burbling, thick and grating. Dorlé’s skin tingled; there was a faint vibration in the air. The dragon’s eyes were open, which startled Dorlé; they were glittering opalescent orbs of a dark color he could not name. He frowned; that wasn’t right.

Barand huffed and lowered her sword; it clunked on a small stone. She drew a few breaths before she spoke. “What is it doing? I’ve never heard such a noise from a dragon.”

Gunningam shook his head. “I am not sure that it is doing anything. It does not move, it cannot see out of such eyes. . . .” He closed his journal and stepped a bit closer. One of its wings dipped a bit towards the ground.

“HAI!”Barand shouted, and charged, jerking her sword up over her head. The massive blade warbled in the air as she ran forward, but after several steps it came down in her path and she stumbled to maneuver around it, pulling it from the earth as she continued running at the dragon and swinging it like a broom at the monster, missing its shoulder and causing her to almost collide with the beast. She stopped herself with an ungainly slide and recovered by leaning on her sword.

Gunningam smiled into his hood briefly, then cleared his throat. “A bit of an over-reaction, good champion?”

She scowled back at him. “Curb your cawing, magpie. My duty is to ensure that these creatures pose no more threat. I have been content to watch them die slowly, but when it moved. . . .”

“But it did not move, really,” Dorlé said.

Barand straightened up, trying to watch the dragon and Dorlé at the same time by backing away from both. “What?”

The boy pointed a copper-tipped index finger at the wing. “The dragon did not move; look at the wing.”

Barand sneered as she looked back to the dragon. “It is in a different position than before. I saw it shift. Clearly it. . . .”

Dorlé snorted and walked right up to the dragon. Barand raised a hand but he ignored her and pointed to the base of the wing. “Look,” he said.

There was a great crack at the joint of the wing, like a fissure on an over-baked brick. As the boy pointed, a flitter of dust escaped it. As Dorlé looked at it, he realized that the dragon’s skin was different. It was not just overlaid with the dust of the dry steppes; the wind was slowly blowing the skin itself away.

Gunningam raised a tufted eyebrow. “I see.” He moved forward slowly.

Dorlé put his palm near the fissure. “It’s warm, warmer than the wind.”

Barand gritted her teeth and pulled at her sword. “It may be recovering. Stand back, boy, so that I can ram this blade through its skull.” She grunted as she moved forward, the blade constantly dipping to the ground.

“Step back, Dorlé,” Gunningam said quietly, stopping a few strides from the dragon. Dorlé opened his mouth to protest but saw his master’s face and complied, stepping past the champion as she moved towards its head. The noise inside the creature was fading. Barand stood before the head and, with some effort, raised the sword, blade pointing downwards in her joined hands, at its ridged temple. She muttered the ritual invocation and stabbed downward.

There was a loud ringing noise, and a burst of dust. But even before it dissipated they could see that Barand was hunched over her weapon, desperately trying to push it into the creature’s skull. A small area around the swordspoint showed rough obsidian stone. The sword itself had made a tiny groove on the surface.

Barand growled and pressed against the sword’s pommel. Something inside the dragon sighed and the noises stopped. Dorlé’s skin stopped tingling, and he felt something in his belt pouch shift. He looked inside and then pulled at his master’s sleeve, pointing into the pouch. Gunningam nodded.

Barand was snarling incantations and twisting the sword, all of which had no effect.

“You know, champion,” Gunningam said, “I find it odd that you waited so long before doing that.” He did not move any closer; Barand’s face was reddening and her boots were digging into the ground. “Why have you withheld your fury for so long?”

“Because,” she grunted, “my task was to protect you and the boy as you observed them. The Grands wanted them ‘studied,’ remember?”

“But you have made it obvious that you care nothing for that. You have stood beside us and watched for any movement, any excuse to attack.” He indicated the ineffective sword. “This isn’t the first time that hasn’t worked, is it, champion?” he said gently.

“Quell your chirping song, charm-crow,” she said through clenched teeth, leaning even harder on the sword. It made a harsh scraping noise and began to slide off of the skull. With a frustrated shout Barand pulled it back before she toppled over entirely.

“Gabrydotir,” he continued, “is a sword of legend, wielded by the Frost Chieftains, taken from them in a quest so wondrous they write a new play about it each year for Holdfast.” He gestured more pointedly at the weapon. “And now, it has no sheen, and a chip on the point.”

Barand pulled the sword up, wincing. Even from where he was Dorlé could see a large nick just below the point. Barand stared at it with her mouth open, heedless of the dust still in the air, a dust that the breeze was slowly sloughing off the dragon.

“A sword you have wielded easily for 12 years, that you can now barely lift,” Gunningam said quietly.

“It is but a feather’s weight!” Barand shouted, trying to raise it over her head, and barely doing so.

“It is a feather’s weight . . . when enchanted,” Gunningam replied. “How much does an unenchanted giant’s sword weigh?”

She looked at him like a thwarted hawk. “I do not know. I have never trained with any other blade.”

“Perhaps,” he replied, “you should begin to do so, and with a smaller weapon.”

Barand spat futilely in Gunningam’s direction. She opened her mouth to curse him, but instead turned and walked away from him, from the field of dragons, dragging her useless weapon behind her.

Dorlé exhaled loudly. The wind was picking up, and there was more dust in the air, a thicker dust, coming from all around him. “Master, they. . . .”

Gunningam pulled his hood closed with one hand and moved towards Dorlé. “Don’t call me ‘master,’ Dorlé, not any more.” He came up beside the boy and laid a hand on his shoulder. “All that I know of is contained in this dust.” He guided Dorlé over to the dragon, bent down and laid a hand on its ridged back. “This is where all that I was came from.”

Dorlé nodded. He reached into his pouch and held up his scribner’s cloth, now frayed and falling apart. “As they wither, so does the rest.”

“Aye,” the old man replied. “In their dissolution comes our own.” He stroked the thing’s back, watched its spines disperse into gritty motes. “We had hunted them, for scale and horn and blood, because of the potency they gave potions and rituals.” He squatted down next to the dragon’s head; already the slight breeze was erasing its scales. “Now we know why. They hunted back; out of revenge, or to keep us in check. . . .” He sighed, looking around the field. “The others are already turning to earth; soon they’ll be no more than a memory of moonglow on the grass.” The wind gusted, and both of them put their backs to it and closed their robes. When it susbsided, Gunningam threw his hood back and looked up at the sky.

“My favorite trick,” Gunningam said quietly, “was to make the wind play a tune as I worked. I had no gift for music as a child but, after a few months of chantercraft, I could make a breeze play a symphony.” He looked at his silvered thumb and smiled. “You had best go back to your flute, my boy, or else we shall have no music at all.” He raised his watery eyes to the boy as the wind picked up again. “And if you could teach me to sketch better, I would be grateful.” He turned to the rise and walked away, grabbing his braid and starting to work the baubles out of it as he strode up and over towards the hut.

Dorlé squatted by what had been the dragon’s head, which was now more an oblong lump of stone. He pulled an eyepiece from his pouch and looked at the eye carefully. “I suppose one of us should say ‘sorry,’” Dorlé whispered to the head, as he carefully removed its gem of an eye, and then reached around to grab the other one. He patted the earthen neck, and the dust that was raised was a comforting sight, the dragon rejoining the sky, bit by bit. I would not see you rot like dumb meat, after all.

The sun seemed a bit brighter in the sky. The gray and beige had softened somehow, the warmth of the day a bit more mellow. Maybe he was just getting used to the lack of color. He wasn’t sure, as he closed his pouch and stood up.

The future is, well, murky at the very least

Happy Dystopian February everyone! Lenore over at the Presenting Lenore blog is presiding over another month-long celebration of dystopian literature. I decided to join in since I am reading several such works for a SFSignal column (coming out probably in two weeks). So, at some point I will review a dystopian novel for the blog, maybe Jack London 's The Iron Heel. I'd like to read some of the YA stuff coming out, but time is my enemy.

I am a little leery of "celebrating" dystopia, for reasons that I have touched on before. On a certain level (especially given some comments on Lenore's blog that there are people who "love" dystopian fiction [and they are not alone]) I feel that an event like this normalizes dystopian writing, buffs the sharpness of its potential for unease and critical ideas, and that bothers me. It becomes another setting for entertainment, rather than debate and reflection. But it makes more sense to me to join in, since I am discussing the subject, and have my review and thoughts added to the mix. I hope that some good conversations get started as a result.

I've been thinking about dystopia as I draft my next SFSignal column, which is on the need for us to not only champion but engage "difficult" works, not just those with tough messages or dark content, but those that challenge us through poetic language and surrealism or non-standard associations. Dystopian fiction began as a reaction (sometimes a very reactionary one) to utopian fiction, but then became somewhat more sophisticated, although a lot of dystopian works have a sharp, singular point to them. But there have been periods where dystopian works have not been heralded as entertaining and have made people consider the shortcomings of the world around them, and the one that they were helping to make. It seems that today a lot of dystopian writing has lost that edge, just another sort of difficult literature domesticated for mass consumption.

The Focus of Sunshine

The day outside is lovely. Cold, but starkly grounding and bright. My desk window faces southeast so I get a nice (sometimes blinding) dose of sunshine through it. This morning, it is most welcome.

My new SFSignal column is up. I was not prepared for it to be a difficult piece to write. The writing was made more difficult by a (rare) two-day headache and pain from my arthritic hip. I found myself wanting to write it more boldly, more interstitially, but I stuck to my purpose, to meditate about the idea. I think it turned out well.

When I considering being all interstitial in my presentation I wrote a few odd things, like this snippet of poetry:

So, how many conventions

or concatenations

does it take

for an interstice

to collapse and break?

How big are the spaces

between western and romance

space opera, horror

seven different fantasies

and a Gothic post-punk roarer?

But given the poverty of my poetry, I stuck with a more straightforward approach.

There are a lot of great pieces on mythpunk that have come out in the last week or so. I read a number of them for my SFsignal column but realized that talking about it would lead me too far afield. It was educational to read them, and today Paul Jessup has a blog post about the label, with links to a few other pieces, including Theodora Goss' excellent meditation. The energy that animates how they and others describe mythpunk demonstrates for me how genre/movement designations can create vitality in the literary field of production. The social and conceptual utility of such categories emerges quite strongly in these discussions, and I am eager to read and hear more about it.

But now, the sun is in my eyes and the curtains are poor protection from it.

Updates! Opinions! Tomfoolery!

1) My second (and apparently more controversial) column went up on SFSignal on Thursday. I am a bad blogger. . . .

2) My new Apex column went live yesterday. Very reflective. I really need to do a review roundup soon so that I can say more about Dark Faith and why, despite the unevenness of the stories in it, I found it to be a stimulating read.

3) The discussion topic in fantastika right now appears to be whether the term "speculative fiction" is useful or not. It started on the Coode Street podcast and has been discussed by Cheryl Morgan and now (with more depth and a pile of comments, including a few from me) by Cat Valente. I come down, unsurprisingly, on the "side" of fantastika as an umbrella term. "Spec fic" and "speculative fiction" are terms that I have used sometimes in the past, but I have abandoned them for either my preferred umbrella term or for something more specific. As I said on Cat's blog, genres are imperfect representations and subject to contestation. I wonder if it's worth writing a column about this?

4) I am reading and writing a lot. In addition to the columns I am working on two stories at the moment, and once February comes I am going to get back into the novel. Can't wait to start getting rejection slips.

Writing and Thinking

It's a bit late to announce here, but I am happy to proclaim that my first SFSignal column is up! It's been well-received and I have gotten some good comments on it. After chatting and exchanging ideas with people I would like to expand it in the future, especially regarding how expectation and structure of narrative work together in the production of a story. One friend's comment on the exaggerated Manicheanism within epic fantasy also has me wondering about the moral components of the literature.

I am working on the next column, which is about the rise of the anti-epic and other shifts in the literary terrain like the creation of the "urbanfantasy/paranormal romance" black hole). I feel very inspired by the move to a larger venue and I am working harder on the columns than I did before. Also, Ekaterina Sedia recently posted a strong analysis of the problem of exoticizing language in fantastika that has me thinking about language and expectations in fantastic literature. So much to think and write about! I just need to watch my time and not lose out on fiction writing.

Some Thoughts on a Unicorn Apocalypse

Theodora Goss discussed the utility of writing exercises over at her blog yesterday, and I found one of her ideas particularly fascinating, that of (following Holly Black) a unicorn apocalypse. While I have never been a great lover of the unicorn, it is a creature rich with symbolism and weirdness. And the act of imagining how these creatures might be the destroyers of civilization, rather than purveyors of glitter and happiness, was too good a challenge to pass up.

I decided to go with the Rule of Three and just discard my first two ideas, which were unicorns as secret harbingers of a worse apocalypse, and unicorns as a warning from Mother Nature about ecological imbalance. My third thought was encapsulated in a comment I posted on Theodora's blog:

"The first title to come to mind was ENDLESS RAINBOWS ON A CLOUDLESS, EVER-LASTING DAY. The first line I thought of was 'On the fifth day, Ellis died, most likely from an overload of rainbows. We decided to go to the lake and give him to the narwhals, hoping to placate them and, perhaps, their earth-walking cousins. No other sacrifice had yet helped to stave them off, or bring any measure of blessed darkness back to the world.' I like the idea of the world itself being transformed by this apocalypse."

After a bit of poking around on Google (between pricing outrageously rare poetry chapbooks), I realized that this was ludicrous; there is NO WAY there would ever be narwhals in Cayuga Lake, even in the event of a unicorn apocalypse. Besides, narwhals are actual animals, and only very pale stand-ins for the unicorn, which here is the harbinger of destruction and remaker of the world. And not in a "back-to-nature" way, but in a "we're tired of being pushed around and made into cute notebook covers" kind of way. The entire way the world works must go, decree the unicorns, and the apocalypse arises from there.

The blend of classical traits and tropes with the current softening of unicorn symbolism seemed like an enjoyable path to take. Unicorns are detectors of virtue, instant healers, and savage fighters. They are hard to kill, not just because of their swiftness, but because, as Holly Black points out, their death shakes the universe. I decided that this was literally true, and what makes the unicorn apocalypse even harder to deal with is that a unicorn's death wreaks earth-shaking havoc around it. Sorry humans, killing them literally does more harm than good.

This remaking of the world, on the surface, might sound compelling or even pleasing. As the unicorns emerge in strength from haunted woods, unknown canyons, and the other hidden places of the world, they spread sunshine and rainbows, flowers and blue skies. But quickly people realize that these new conditions are permanent; the skies are cloudless, it never rains, and it never gets dark. The new flowers act like hyperactive weeds and choke all native foliage out of an area, creating endless carpets of cheerful wildflowers that sink their roots into the earth and climb anything they can't choke into oblivion. They thrive in the everlasting sun, but are sadly inedible to all except the unicorns. Monstrous rainbows appear in the skies, hypnotic and maddening in their omnipresence and unfounded joy. The land masses turn into vast unicorn playgrounds where humans (and indeed, most animals except for the chirpiest of birds and most pleasantly buzzing bee sand dragonflies) can no longer thrive.

Initially human governments try to use coercion, and then force, to deal with the unicorns. But once the first few are successfully killed, the effects of their demise obviously far exceed what little benefit is gained from eliminating one. Some humans go to sea, hoping to avoid this bright, shiny horror of a world. Others retreat to extreme climates such as mountaintops and deserts. A few just lay down in the endless fields of flowers and wait to become fertilizer. Others attempt to figure out a way to fight back, until one day, a young woman asks an odd question: what if fighting them is not the answer?

That's as far as I have gotten.

EDIT: Here is Theodora's take on the unicorn apocalypse. I'll happily link to others as they appear.

EDIT THE SECOND: This was quite helpful as a loosening-up exercise! I wrote about 250 more words on a story and polished up a complete story (cut about 200 words from it, slightly altered the characters' main interaction). I'm debating whether the latter is ready to send somewhere.

The Idea Train and the Alluring Countryside

Work was slow this evening, and I had ample time to think about writing and life as I priced a seemingly endless pile of books. I got several ideas for stories and solved an impasse I had in one that I am trying to complete right now. The idea train was chugging along, which was nice, but then I turned to some practical considerations, such as timetables for writing, noting to myself that, during Nanowrimo I had done a decent job of putting words on the screen, but since the end of that exercise my fiction writing had slowed down. The stories I've been working on have not flowed as well as the initial novel-writing had in November.

I started thinking about why this was so. It was partly due to illness (myself and the kidlet both has stomach bugs, and she got a second one), and partly due to the season. There was more to it than that, though; my work habits had not slipped, but I was much less productive with the short fiction in the time that I wrote. One problem? The gods-cursed internet!

It came to me a little while later, as I noted to someone earlier this evening, that when I am writing non-fiction, the internet is both more necessary for research and sourcing, and less of a distraction. When I am writing fiction, however, it is hugely diverting, like losing yourself watching the endless countryside roll by. The idea train barreled along with no problem, but when it came to settling in with the idea, distraction was a given. At the time, I wasn't sure why I had thought of that, or why that might be the case, but as I pondered this conundrum on the way home from work, some ideas came to mind.

Non-fiction is relational, links much more to external matters, and does not come from deep inside me, unless it is some sort of memoir. And non-fiction is easy for me; after years in academia I can formulate arguments, outline papers in my head, calculate paragraph proportions, and put the puzzle pieces into place quickly. I can theorize, criticize, and analyze adeptly. But fiction is more creative, comes from inside, and is more contingent on a combination of confidence and interior generation of material and structure. Fiction is more personal, comes more completely from me, and having not written much of it in the last decade, I am both getting back into the groove and rediscovering my voice now, unearthing ideas and meanings and connections that are dependent on me much more intensely than a piece of criticism.

And my confidence in that process is rather shaky.

When I feel particularly distracted I usually get off the main laptop and pull out another machine to write upon (longhand is not really an option, given my horrid handwriting and the speed at which I write) that is not connected to the internet. That helps sometimes. But what I need to cultivate more is confidence and a sense of groundedness in my creativity. Nothing in my life has done more to keep me sane and happy than writing, and more than ever I am committed to writing as much as I can, to get published, and to live the life of a writer as fully as possible. It is easy to lose that anchorage when you're careening down the tracks and there are so many interesting things outside your window. It is easier to watch the world go by. But that is not the point of the ride.

A Few End-of-Year Thoughts

With the closing of the calendar year comes many things. First, my final Forces of Geek column. After over 18 months in residence, it was time to move on. I really enjoyed writing the column, and I think I wrote some good ones (and a few, well, OK ones), but I felt a bit like the oddling out there, sandwiched between TV show discussions and viral videos. I am very appreciative for Stefan's support, however, because the column got me back into writing.

It was the confidence I gained from writing that column that made me take up Jason Sizemore's invitation to write for the Apex Book Company blog, where I had the, ahem, honor of writing the the Christmas Day entry this year. A totally random honor, you understand, but it made me think about celebrations, stories, and endings. I tend towards the dark and critical perspective on some things, and I tried to write something a bit brighter, but still smart. It was a bit of a challenge and a lot of fun to write.

And now I am moving on to something bigger, in three senses. First, I will soon be the newest columnist for a website that is much more my cup of tea than FoG. It should be set up by the New Year, and I am extremely excited to be writing for these folks. Second, I am at the critical point in writing my novel, just over the 50K mark, and I have had an avalanche of ideas come crashing down on my head, and I am currently digging my way out of the pile and figuring out how to put all of this material together in a strong narrative edifice. Third, I will have two stories ready to send out after the first of the year, perhaps three if I can get past my thinking that it's "not my kind of story."

I am writing more, and more seriously, now than ever. It is so gratifying to be doing the work, even if I still need to work on consistency and discipline a bit more. For the folks who read this wee blog, and my work, and for the support and comments you have sent my way, thanks. 2010 was difficult, but productive, and I look forward to 2011 being much better in every way.