Well, done

Can’t help but notice that I haven’t posted in a century or so. Sorry much. Am trying.

Lots of things going on, this side of the screen. I’ve undertaken to produce a new anthology, to benefit author/editor Joe Pulver and his wife, who are having a tough time of things due to illnesses, and that’s going great guns, with a ToC to die for and early days still. We have about 90K of material on hand and every indication that there will be twice that at least.

Nightmares in Yellow, it’s called. The cover will be decorated with work by artist Derek Pegritz, and it should be out in time for Christmas.

The three chapbooks are soon to debut. All three are set in the CRAZYTOWN universe… two of them are part of the book, and one takes place shortly before the events in the book and the short novel THE FORGOTTEN GOD, which is set to appear next spring.

GREEN will be first,

Bone Sequence second,

and the former Pizza story NARANJA SOUL should be out by Hallowe’en.

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Despondent saith not

I gave up blogging in favor of Facebook posting years ago, but I’ve come full circle and am back to blogging instead. This form has a little more permanence, I think, and if I’m gonna be ignored, I may as well own it.

Though my first published story was in 1977, I’ve been a full-time writer for just a couple of years. I attempted to go full-time just after coming hope from the illness that caused my disability, with a big backlog of material that I fondly imagined was ‘good enough’ and a lot of ‘belief’.

Didn’t work out that way — one, I didn’t have the energy or stamina I had been used to and couldn’t maintain that schedule, and two, the material desperately needed reworking — which I’m still doing, six years later.

Hard to keep going in the face of such massive apathy. I haven’t written anything that has galvanized people into talking about it for years, though that doesn’t stop stuff from getting pirated. I’ve sold more than 5000 kindle-copies of my chapbook, mostly through direct sales. But I have four reviews on Goodreads/Amazon.

Gotta trust in the process though. I know my stuff is good enough. No editor has ever returned a piece saying “This really sucks.” Instead, “this really doesn’t fit what we’re trying to accomplish here. But good luck with this story. I’m sure you can sell it — somewhere else” is the common response.

I resist comparisons…and some of this is sour grapes probably, but I see people whose work isn’t real good selling consistently, and it chaps my ass. But I’m a middle-aged white male, and I guess I should just get used to being marginal. Isn’t like my imagination is inclined to the mainstream.

And I’m not gonna stop, though it gives me pause (and yeah, there are times when I want to stop because working in a vacuum sucks). Friends and even some objective critics have told me they enjoy the work…it’s just that it doesn’t reach enough people. And I don’t know how to get that to happen, other than to keep throwing spaghetti.

I’m not alone. There are lots of us pasta-throwers.

But I ask you — if you’ve read a thing of mine, how about some feedback? Just “I liked it” would be fine. I think you have to write a couple more words than that, but it doesn’t have to be in-depth…that’s the point. People who write for themselves rarely try to get public.

Yeah. I’m having a minor crisis. Not ‘impostor syndrome’, but ‘invisible man’ syndrome…brought on by lack of success of worthwhile material. Help a brother out if you can.

Thanks for reading.

Accepting Authority

The final two pieces of the “Area X Trilogy”: I’d have to recommend reading the series at least once, but I’m not happy with the level of resolution.

Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t like the main character’s nickname. It’s as bad as Hiero Protagonist. “Control” is cutesy. It’s a shorthand way of imputing that the mc is the normal one, the one that doesn’t get the drugs or the treatment or whatever, and misleading in that regard.
A good part of this book seems based on department infighting and the other half goes a little Rogue Moon if Algis Budrys had written the Manchurian Candidate into the story.
It’s odd, and there’s enough conflict on various levels to be effective, and yes, weird stuff happens and characters undergo mindbending changes…but it’s a bit numbing to me because I didn’t really like any of the characters. They all seem to operate at a remove, and the narrative works at arm’s-length too.
And there’s little exposition in a narrative that seems to call for it. I’m gonna go with Aliens did it.

View all my reviews

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had a lot of trouble getting through this book, the second time. I found it unsatisfying, ultimately. The reason why Area X exists is never explained. What Area X actually is remains mysterious. Some of the character arcs are completed, and there are hints of resolution, but they’re only hints.
The tone continues to be the same scientist-as-hero that gives this series its Golden Age echoes. Events unfold, to a point, but one gets the idea that the author is holding back a lot of information, and also setting up for more stories in this milieu.
It’s effective enough, but I was left wanting.

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annihilation nation

I couldn’t sleep. Strange things happen when I’m sleepless, which happens entirely too often. I am very bad at sleeping and have periods where I might sleep two hours at a time for weeks, or stay up three or four days.

It’s been that way since I was very young. I missed about two weeks of third grade because I wasn’t sleeping well enough to move around safely on my own.

Reading has always been my fallback. If I can’t sleep, I read, first. I like a little noise when I read, but just a little, and it has to be familiar, comfortable. Old sitcoms or crime shows will do. I need the rhythms. Talking-head shows work too.

I’ve been re-reading the Area X trilogy, these last few days. I have the kindle versions, so I can turn out all of the lights except the tv and greedily drink the words. Jeff VanderMeer is one of those practitioners of the “weird” that comes from sf, like I do, and I very much enjoy, in fact prefer, that approach. Jeffrey Thomas, too, has those echoes, the clanking rhythms of cyberpunk informing his harrowing parables. VanderMeer is the co-editor of the Big Book of SF, about which more will be said, in another post. His stuff has more New Wave in it…the world of the Southern Reach being a fine example. Annihilation, the first book of the trilogy, is not the first of the author’s books that I’ve read, but so far, it’s the best. I put it on my ballot for the Hugo nomination. We all know what happened there, and I’m not going to get into it…anyway, I thought it the best work of the year.

I loathe using comps to make my points, but I’m going to have to either resort to that or do out-and-out spoilers, which I hate worse. So comparisons it is….Michael Bishop’s anthropological pieces, especially Death and Designation Among the Asadi, his 197- award-winner, have this same sort of straight-up Scientist-As-Hero, performing-a-survey trope going, and deploy a similar air of strangeness, of menace, just offscreen, or in so strange a form that it goes unrecognized. I am  minded, also, of Kate Wilhelm’s The Clewiston Test, and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, which had similar main characters.
Of course the mc is also exploring the interior landscape at the same time. It goes with the territory. Even though the biologist is working with others, at least initially, she’s always alone, remote.

It turns out that some of this anti-teamwork is the result of hidden persuaders, in a nicely-Dischian. way. Good. Very subtle. The second read reveals the process of hints and allegations that lead to that conclusion, but on the first encounter, it’s almost subliminal.
It takes a practiced hand to do that. Reader manipulation on that level isn’t done often.

Outstanding book. Really good. The main character is interesting enough to listen to, the story has psychological depth, strange detail, interior travelogue, and an inevitable if slightly maddening conclusion. Five stars.

Another tomorrow.

Madness

I got a little bit exercised today by this article, about the “8 Tribes of Sci Fi.”
Rubbish, absolute rubbish. An ill-considered word salad.

To start with, it considers “sci-fi” which I consider to be the z-movie mentality that pervades tv and pop movies. And it calls the wrong things “sci-fi”. The article might fare better if it were said to be talking about “fantasy”, the umbrella term for science fiction and other related imaginative fields, or about “speculative fiction”, a higher-brow way of saying the same thing.

Read the thing for yourself. Feel free to regale me with your version. Or not.

Method

Though I conduct my fictional affairs with a good bit of handwavium and a helping of deus ex machina, because that’s the nature of the beast, still, I’ve railed against such use in the past. And I was probably right, then.

Context.

Heh. Yeah, right, you say, and rightly so.

But boundaries, fuck ’em. I was wrong, plus it’s addictive…to be unleashed, to not worry about what hard-sf fans are gonna say, or what plot twist came straight out of tvtropes. To just tell the story as it occurs to you. Er, me. Because pov.

That’s a fun plaything, too. Perspective.

Just tell the damn story. I was good at that when I was young. I would just write until I was done. Wrote a 67,000 word novel in one day, on notebook paper, in pencil(s), longhand. It was awful. Only three people have even read part of it. They’re all on Facebook. *ducks*

Of a mind to…

Nightmares from a Lovecraftian Mind by Jordan Krall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Smooth, polished, professional. Disturbing, subtle, and definitely nightmarish. The stories in this volume are not so Lovecraftian as the title would have you believe. There is a dollop of cosmic horror, but none of the usual suspects are present. No hooded cultists, octopus-headed monstrosities, cyclopean ruins, non-Euclidean space.
Headspace is more the issue. The Lovecraftian “mind”, indeed. Some of the matter-of-factness of JG Ballard, the inventive weirdness of David Lynch, the slightest hint of Philip Dickian mindrape, a tinge of the existential, a small infusion of the Gnostic. The reading of strange texts informs the text. Mr. Krall has been turning some strange pages indeed, and he melds all of those disparate elements into a surreal collage all his own.
These are pictures of minds after “experiences”, continuing to try to function in mundane space, and largely failing.
Recommended reading.

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More to come.
I really enjoyed this book. It kept me from sleeping soundly, both by engaging my attention while reading late at night, and then speaking to me in my dreams.
This was not my introduction to Jordan Krall’s work but it is the first full-length book I’ve read of his. I have seven more, which will appear in these pages at some point.
I also have another nine bearing the name of his small press. And I’m not a serious collector. I just buy the best that I can find.

Son of the Big Dumb Object

One of my very favorite things in the world of fiction is that cosmic force, the presence that is imposing just because of its size, the very Big Dumb Object itself. An example, seen below, adds consciousness to the mix. The presentation is excellent. I love the image. But not enough was done with it, plotwise, back in the day.
One of the things that makes me create is the desire to see a better version of things, at least in my eyes. My first writing was done in response to a comic-book villain I thought terrible (the Stilt-Man, as in DD#48). So I come by it naturally. My art is, at least initially, imitative. It always has been. I like a certain amount of structure, a framework to stand on, before taking the great leap into the unknowable seas of imagination. My first drafts, first versions of things, almost always have a large portion of synthesis, of combining previously-known ingredients into a new stew, stirring it up, and then improvising over the changes.

bEastliness

For Joe…but a small tributary, hardly a capillary, late, but seemingly necessary. At least to me.

 

 

 

This was before the Play. This was before everything.

Cassilda and Cassandra and Caterina and Calliope and Cassiopeia were seated on their pedestals, which spiraled ever-so-slightly upward so that Cassilda was uppermost (done by the strong urgings of her mother, to be sure), having a rather nice chat about their lessons that day, when courtier Jenkin burst into the room all a’titter over something or other that he imagined, a slight so small that it had passed beneath the notice of everyone else at the Ball.

Jenkin carried on tittering and gnashing his teeth and gibbering complete nonsense for quite some time.
Cassilda admired the draperies, which were quite a nice shade of eggshell, and a very fine weave, and Cassandra and Caterina made the motions they had practiced earlier. First up with the right hand, palm up, then the left, then turn them over palm-down simultaneously while stamping both feet.Calliope stamped also, and Cassiopeia said the words.

The girls were all precious and precocious, and they conspired to turn poor Jenkin into a thing. And he just released from the shore-prison, where he had been a rock for just eons.

Now he’d hands and feet, and a smaller and more wizened version of his usual visage, but he was also equipped with a prodigious and very scaly tail, which twitched in annoyance, and a short-furred body about the size of a medium-sized dog’s, though bearing a distinct resemblance to rattus rattus.

How he howled!

His footman Mazuriewicz came then, and fetched Jenkin back before the King, to see if something could be done.

“By the very hoary and hallowed Gods of defile!” Declaimed Mazuriewicz. “These young ladies have gone too far this time. First animating the garden of stones, and now this. And with visitors coming too!”

He huffed off seeking his audience with the regent, not hesitating to take his fill of any provender, victual, or canape that he encountered along the way.

His footsteps and his grumbling echoed in the great groined halls and reached the King long before his personal aroma did. The King was not in fact overtaken with ardor for either Jenkin or Mazuriewicz, and undertook to be elsewhere when they arrived.
His relatives, their relatives and friends, and several persons as yet uninvited but present nonetheless, addressed themselves to the buffet, which was groaning with joints of beast and whole dressed hams, yams, clams, spam, and jam, with a great many varieties of bread and rolls and buns and cakes and pies and tarts and pastries and cookies such as remained uneaten thus far.

Mazuriewicz and Jenkin joined them before continuing on, seeing that the King was not in residence at that moment.

Jenkin also availed himself of several pieces of flatware and a small candelabra.

He resigned himself to his fate.
“I’m resigned to this fate,” he squeaked to Mazuriewicz. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”
“Nonsense,” came the reply. “You simply lack persistence.” Mazuriewicz shrugged elaborately, dislodging his powdered hairpiece somewhat. He patted it back into place absently. “The King will set things to rights.”
“I am not a particular favorite of the King’s,” Jenkin squeaked. “He will make it worse. The last time he was displeased, he turned me into a living rock for a few thousand years.”
“Well, there is that,” Mazuriewicz admitted, shaking his head and making his hairpiece jiggle dangerously. “But time isn’t the same here, so it didn’t seem that long.”

“To you,” Jenkin snarled.
“Well, of course, to me,” Mazuriewicz replied testily. “Who else would I be talking about?”
“I was talking about me,” squealed Jenkin.
“Aren’t you always?” Mazuriewicz raised his left eyebrow and glowered at Jenkin from beneath it. “You’re your own favorite subject.”

Jenkin rushed him, jumped upon his back, began gnawing on his skull. “I will have you for lunch. This very day,” he snarled, taking the wig in his mouth and hurling it. A cloud of powder followed. Jenkin reapplied himself to his task with vigor.

Mazuriewicz covered his head with his arms and tried to move Jenkin by pulling his cloak over his head and making a bag out of the inside-out thing.

Jenkin ate through it.

By then Mazuriewicz was two hundred yards away and widening the gap.

“He’ll be back,” said Jenkin, taking his place at the endless buffet again, among the rest of the misfits, malingerers, malformed, malignant, and misunderstood.

When he was quite round enough to feel comfortable, Jenkin moved on to his chambers and began to collect the things he’d need, for he didn’t feel that he could stay, under the current circumstances.

“I don’t think I could stay,” he said, “or that I should stay. If I stay there will be trouble. If I go there will be trouble. But if I go the nature of the trouble is unknown. I don’t want to be a rock again. This body works, after a fashion.”

Cassilda and Cassandra and Caterina and Calliope and Cassiopeia were all watching of course, because everyone watched everybody else constantly, because how else to know what you should be doing except by comparing one’s plans to others’ plots?

Anything else would nonsensical. So said Demhe, and Demhe knew all.

Demhe was from the universe before this one, and knew what was going to happen before it happened.

Some even said Demhe caused things to happen, but that’s simply not possible. Demhe doesn’t move, have arms, legs, fingers, toes. Demhe is just a stone.

In those days, except to things like Jenkin, it was a happy time. Good days on Carcosa, not long after the universe was born, and the city Carcosa on the planet Carcosa, near the western shore of the great frozen lake Hali, was young and whole, and its marbled avenues and metallic hues rivaled the very five suns for splendor.

For there were five suns then, not just two, and a great many moons, moonlets, satellites, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and personal craft plied the spaceways.

He who is not to be named had not yet arrived. It is unknown if he had yet been quickened.

For, as you recall, it was a very very long time ago.

Cassilda and Cassandra and Caterina and Calliope and Cassiopeia finished their chat about their lessons and practicing their signs, warnings, weavings, castings, and wards, and took leave of one another, making for their respective dwellings.
“I’ll see you later,” called Cassilda. “I’m for tea and a hot bath.”
“Marvelous,” trilled Cassandra. “Oh, a bath. With lots of bubbles!”
Caterina and Calliope thought the bath capital also.
Cassiopeia demurred.
“Be a stick in the mud,” the others jeered.
Cassiopeia’s eyes widened. Cassilda was beginning a weaving. The stars were darkening.

“NO, Cass,” she said.
Cassilda smiled thinly, showing the tips of her teeth, and tied the weaving off.

The stars came back out.
“I wouldn’t do that, to you,” Cassilda said. “But I could.” And she and the others sashayed off to the baths. Cassilda in white, Cassandra in green, Caterina in yellow, Calliope in red.

Cassiopeia, blue, stayed behind.

She had business with the stone.

Her bath done, her precious self fragrant and enveloped in a robe of the palest persimmon, her pert lips parted parsimoniously, Cassilda addressed herself to her instruments, first directing the engine to imitate the sounds of the crimson dawn, utilizing screams and squeaks of her own devising as ambient underpinning for the music of the spears.

Using the visions she had gleaned from the stone, of beasts of all descriptions throwing themselves onto the long blades in the Forest of Knives, of terror that resonated even into the Outlands, Cassilda poured her soul into the music.

Her familiar began to howl along with the melody, to become the melody. He bayed half-formed thoughts, parts of words learned parrot-fashion, his twin throats in counterpoint.

“I can’t stand when he talks like that,” giggled Cassilda, holding her nose. “And the way he sings. But his music flows, and I want some of that.”

She bent over her megatar, tightened a drone string to get it in tune with the others, strummed a chord.

The chord sounded, and hung in the air. As it began to crumble, she sent another one after it. Soon, three was a crowd.

She reached out, made a gesture with her fingers somewhere between a wave and a slap, and the chords reappeared and repeated. She added bass notes, and patiently continued to assemble her song. Her familiar howled and bayed and gibbered and glubbered along, and the engine relayed it all into the stone, into Demhe, and out into the universe.

The King caught the performance. He enjoyed Cassilda’s rage, her desire for destruction. He thought he might like to express some of the feelings her music generated, in words.

He took up his pen. He wrote, and Demhe assimilated those words.

Cassilda 2015 by Duane Pesice

Monday musings 3/21

Photo by Ian Sidlow

Monday. Edit/rewrite sorta day. The NIGHTMARE GROVE collection opens with the story “Ink,” which was cribbed from the CRAZYTOWN collection since it was originally set in Oak Grove and only recently moved to Tuxtown.

So I have to fix the references (for the most part-there are connections between the two collections) and there are a couple of scenes that could work more smoothly.

“Ink” is based on one of my more successful stories, “Parchment” in its original incarnation. It was published in three languages, and in seven separate magazines/ezines, and also kindled a fabulous audio reading by the redoubtable Morgan Scorpion (Parchment).

“Ink” makes the process of transposition clearer and ramps up the body-horror and psych-horror.

There is a sequel, which will be part of CRAZYTOWN, perhaps with some input from the inestimable Frederick J. Mayer. That’s getting processed after “Ink” and “stars” Nate Jenkins, who had previously appeared in the BROWN JENKINS series of stories and in “Pnakotic Reaction”.

Art by Candra Hope

I’m reworking the text for the CRAZYTOWN cover. It looks like there may be a few things to add. Maybe a blurb or two, and the ToC has been monkeyed with. This is a copy of the original art, which is just beautiful, with the rot beneath the surface admirably depicted. Also in the current pipeline are the novella Fear and Loathing in Innsmouth, which is as gonzo as gonzo gets, a weird/bizarro treatment of the themes of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth and the preoccupations and subtext of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I do plan to run that one by Nick Mamatas and Brian Keene before it hits the stacks. They should be amused, as the authors of The Damned Highway, which has some of those ideas embedded within its pages.
FALII…

Art by Will Jacques

Unfortunately, the graphic novel version of this story never got off the ground. But this version should knock everyone’s socks off.

Also in the 2016 pipeline is BETROTHED TO YOG-SOTHOTH, a Barbara Cartland meets Tom Tryon sorta version of the Dunwich Horror, with a lot of Lavinia’s biography filled in. The novel was inspired by a piece of art from someone at deviantart that doesn’t answer their email, and so that picture won’t be on the front cover. Instead, I have this evocative art:

Art by JB Lee

Those are the four books I have planned for this year. They’re all in the finalizing stages — the i’s have been crossed and the tees dotted. Walpurgisnacht and the 4th of July, All-Hallow’s Eve, and Xmas are the projected release dates.

They’ll all be under my Planet Moderan imprint, and will be available in both ebook and treebook incarnations. I’m going to revive BEFORE CRAZYTOWN instead of sticking its stories into NIGHTMARE GROVE. That’s getting done this week too.