Melted My Brain

It is almost Spring enough to matter, which in Portland is a fine time of year. Parts of town feel very close, in more than just the current economic parallel, to the Great Depression I just had such fun writing about in a new time-travel piece called "La Vie En Rose." The fruit trees are blooming in the yard and the street performers are blooming everywhere. The ducks are back in Laurelhurst Park. Nature shrugs off her long wet blanket and comes out to tickle people in the line at Fred Meyer. Old fiends come in to roost, sometimes land, and occasionally lay eggs that hatch into all sorts of new enterprises. My cat still smokes crack cocaine. The seasons turn, and the rest of us catch wise.

Lou Antonelli tells me that his high alternate history novel 'Dance With Me, Henry' has just successfully made it over the transom to a major publisher whose name needs no intro with two writers I know now, or me either (one degree of separation, can't say the name until the fat lady sings...) I wish Lou the best with this, gods know he earned this the most of all. He has been a mentor, a collaborator and kind of a hero to me in the way he handles the whips and scorns of our craft. When I heard the plotline for this his first novel-length work, I damn near swallowed my tongue, so he'll have no trouble with the publisher. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to shock me.

In other news, I've done 5 short stories* in 5 days. All either new material or trunk stuff over two years old. Sixty thousand words, with writing and revision taken into account. I think I melted my brain.

"Starseeded" 12K . New material, started last year. Alastair Reynolds had expressed tentative interest in collaboration on this one, but the man is so busy he makes me look like a rank amateur, so I finished this up solo. The story is written in the style of 'Altered States', and looks at the outdoor rave scene in the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of a radio reporter named Scott Freeh and a self-avowed alien named Nomad Starfucker. Like Houdini before him, Freeh seeks to debunk the "alien." But, as omniscient narrative, Murphy's Law and even Aleister Crowley point out, when you go after a legend you have to be prepared to go all the way... madness included.

"Starseeded" draws on works as diverse as Terrance McKenna(Food of the Gods) , Vincent Bugliosi (Helter Skelter), Daniel Pinchbeck(Breaking Open The Head), Philip K. Dick (appears as the DJ) , the science fiction of Dr. William Sadler (and I use the phrase at0 its most sarcastic), and...yes indeed, Lou Antonelli (two references to one of our collaborations, an Atlantis-Rama war riff called "The Devil We Know".)

"La Vie En Rose". This one was just plain old escapist Jack Finney fun. There are these vintage trolley cars in Portland, which they sometimes run on the MAX line. I saw one coming once and thought someone had slipped me something. That night, Blossom and I rode one of them, and heard an extremely intoxicated conductor coming off duty, telling long hilarious stories about railway accidents. I forgot what year it was for a while, and the old-time beauty holding my hand made me realize that the year didn't matter. We could live through anything.

"Headhunter". Remember how nuts employers went after 9/11/01, especially in retail? I was unemployed for seven months, and spent just about every day at the Oregon Employment Department Of Misnomers. There was this smarmy little fuck outside with a big beard and a lisp, who always mechanically rattled on and on, "Thcuthe me, thir, are you looking for work?" I asked him what his scam was, once, when I had a head full of Ramsey Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother. My good friend Sgt. M'kesha Clayton (101st, Ret.) was responsible for the initial imagery of the front wall at the Grove Hotel. (I was later able to go back and update that, having worked in that mill of filth for almost six months.) I would believe that something like the ending of 'Headhunter' could very well happen at a place like the Grove, and the protagonist is left a broken, babbling shell like so many others at the Employment Office. As Zelazny once told a fan, sometimes that's just the way things are, and that's all.

"The Cage" Yes, Jeff VanderMeer wrote one with the same title, which was included in the Year's Best Horror, 2004 (? or '05?) I just emailed Jeff about this yesterday, and he was cool with it. The story is an homage, in a way, both to his "The Cage" (the most disturbing thing I had read in ten years, and still on my top three now; it is in City of Saints and Madmen, read it!!!!)
and to Tim Pratt's utterly beautiful story "Bottom Feeding" (Oct. 2005 Asimov's.)

I've corresponded with both these writers, and realized that my 'Cage' (original title:"Walking Catfish") benefited a whole lot from their influence. Tim Pratt's mythic works (the faery whose human parents cut off her wings, Orpheus in the cabbage heads, that heart-wrenching 'Little Gods') are a virtual how-to manual for deft, self-deprecating technique and a Mack-truck-sized heart.

And Jeff... No matter what you ask him about the craft, the answer is always illuminating. He's one of the most honest, transparent people I've ever "met" electronically, and we're fellow Central Pennsylvanians... sorta. I'd been waiting to give him his props in print for years, just hadn't found the right occasion until I dusted off the old elves-and-the-shoemaker routine and found two sets of eyes I knew staring back in it.

"When The Wind Blows the Water White And Black"
...came from a dream shared with me by local comedienne Kristine Levine. Levine and I also go back a long way. We used to do stand-up comedy together.

Levine had a dream that Africans were descended from Atlantaeans, and that the slaves who had hurled themselves overboard on the Middle Passage were just following some kind of distant conditioning to want to return to the arms of Mammy Watah. Having been steeped in Jamaican patois and folk music from another story, I grabbed this idea and started chewing on it for seven months or so. The result is a guardian-of-the-past sort of yarn from the real model for Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, who looks a lot more like Harriet Tubman than "that little red-headed white girl."

I had just read the two Dark Matter anthologies of African-American SF when this particular "great and gilded bark with oars upon the dark" was launched. I had a head full of a lot of the more heartbreaking tales in there, particularly Ihsan Bracy's "Ibo Landing" .

That was my five. Leaving the house now, when I can stop cackling like Lamont Cranston. Mission accomplished.

SATIRICA finally hit!

The other night, I had a vision (similar to the Elijah-Muhammad-on-his-golden-throne scene in Spike Lee's 'X') in which Bob Silverberg was reading over my shoulder, and told me that the past few months would toughen me up and "give your writing that necessarily brutal edge.**"

Hence, this:

SATIRICA, an anthology of collected satire-oriented SF, went to Cowboy Logic Press just recently.

http://www.cowboylogic.net

I am puzzled and bemused to be a bit of a catalyst for this. My short story "Imagine" (Interzone #200) was the first piece that Dr. Roy C.Dudgeon, Satirica Editor, requested. According to Doc, my 'yes' was the first domino in what has proven to be a really killer anthology. *

Bit of a mood today. The bedbugs are gone, the day job situation is still in the hands of two utter flakes who have left me holding a very messy bag, but... I appear to have just gotten a grant from one arm of a certain well-known alphabet soup writing organization who has an emergency fund for writers with health problems who are in dire financial straits.

That got to me. At the risk of quoting Heinlein again (long story, love-hate relationship), it is really an affirmation, in the way that publication only sometimes is, to know that "I have [people] around me who will pick me up because my skin means as much to them as their own." This is the second time folks in my profession have swelled my heart with their open hands and understanding, in that particular way. That's why I'm still doing this shit. That's why...

(*Not only that, Roger Haller at Cowboy Logic is the Emperor Palpatine to Shawn Gibbs' Yoda, as far as editors are concerned. I'd love to get those two knocking heads...)

(**I managed to stick my foot way in my mouth a few weeks ago, and Bob S. called me on it. Long story short, the last email discussion we had is getting ready to go in a frame. As one of the few surviving SF writers 'from the Fifties', Bob sees it as his duty to chime in whenever history or gossip starts mutating his contemporaries from back then. I was humbled and awed by his explanation of this, and twenty times more impressed with the planetoid-sized heart behind his smirk than I was before I met him in that elevator at LACon IV and made him laugh. Good dude. A+)