It’s amazing to see all these huge cultural institutions (Google, Wikpedia) standing up for freedom on the internet. And I’m happy to stand up with them (Weightless is participating too).

However I am more than a little disappointed that there was no such uprising a couple weeks ago when it was time to defend actual individual freedom from the NDAA. I guess when they come to take me away, at least I’ll have the comfort of knowing Google is still out there fighting the good fight. Great.

If I’d given myself a little more time to plan this out you’d see here one of those empty Anonymous suits with a skull floating on top.

Ahh, hell.

How many jokes/invocations/questionably ironic references/panicked remonstrances will I hear this year about the coming end of the world? When they’re talking about it on The View and the Nightly News with Brian Williams, it’s time to give up counting. How much more mainstream can a nutso newage conspiracy theory get? Consider Y2K. That apocalypse was about Jesus and Revelations; its poor conclusions and minimal research were drawn from the mythology of (one of) the world’s most popular religion(s). This apocalypse is about obscure blood-drinking deities last best personified by Hernán Cortés and a religion legitimately practiced by far less than 0.01% of humanity. Yet already the 2012 hype seems to have far outstripped the 2000 hype. Blame the internet, I guess. It was a far tamer place 12 years ago than it is now, that’s for sure. For the title of last bastion for shamanistic folkloric mythmaking on earth, the competition is hot between the internet and one tiny uncontacted village in the Amazon.

I’ve already done all the debunking of the Mayan apocalypse I’m going to do on this blog, at great length and with much windbaggery, in posts such as Circular Time and No Apocalypse. I also have a little sidebar essay about it (as applied fancifully to the plight of the working writer) in A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2012, available from Small Beer Press in print-on-demand and ebook form.

Instead I want to talk about how great it would be if there actually was an apocalypse.

Read the rest of this entry »

I realize it’s been months since I last posted. My computer HD died sometime in September, causing me to lose a month’s worth of cool mushroom photos, Hen of the Woods, Giant Puffball etc, which I would otherwise totally have put up here otherwise. But it’s cool, no need to pretend like you noticed—who reads blogs anymore?

I’ve been tweeting some, that’s got to count for something. Maybe I should port my tweets over here so the skull doesn’t look so dusty.

Anyhow, I have not been idle in the interim. Weightless Books is tearing right along; this month we’re running an Apex subscription drive, 25% off, plus some freebies for participants and a game of Nook Tablet roulette. The Homeless Moon put out a special edition best-of chapbook for World Fantasy, which you didn’t hear a thing about unless you were there; it was all very hush-hush. We used the space octopus cover castoff from chapbook 4, I thought it came out quite nice.

And, the real reason for this update, Small Beer intern and audiophile Julie Day has started a podcast series, the current episode of which features me, yes me, talking a bit about Weightless, a bit about beer, then reading aloud “The Hour of the Fireflies” by Karen Chacek, one of the stories I translated for the forthcoming SBP anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. Which is a lovely story, a brief, crisp confection with a darkly bitter center, into the translation of which I put much effort, just so that you, non-Spanish-speaker, could enjoy it. So please go listen. Then in a week or so, I believe there may be another podcast episode wherein Gavin, Julie and I sit around on a late Thursday morning drinking beer and rambling about beer on tape. Fun!

And that’s about it from me. I have another of my own stories upcoming on Pseudopod—I’ll let you know when it happens. In the meantime, be well. Don’t lick any toads you haven’t first positively identified.

My story “The Eater”, about the guy at the beginning of time whose job it is to taste everything and decide what will kill us and what will keep us alive, (which originally appeared in Apex back in July), is live today at Pseudopod!

Pseudopod, should you have been unaware, is a weekly horror fiction podcast, sister to Escape Pod and Podcastle, a triumvirate I have been struggling to break my way into for quite some time. I love reading fiction aloud, and hearing fiction read aloud, and “the Pods”, as they are affectionately known, are some of the best places to do that. For a reader, I am lucky enough to have netted Laurice White. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet—will do so on my ride home—but I expect it will be great.

Pink Lady’s Slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule, mixed deciduous woods, Bull Hill, Sunderland, MA
(AKA/e.g., the replenishing pitcher flower of legend.)

Jay Ridler’s first novel, a noir wrestling thriller (!), is up now at the Kindle store:

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. Amanda Hocking and Konrath have been made much of (and have made much out of themselves) as the poster/tentpole children of a brave, new, exponentially expanding market for self-published ebooks, raking it in hand over fist, generating buzz and dreams and misconceptions wherever they pass. But they appeared on this stage fully formed. They were already successful, hugely so, before most of us heard anything about them. We can go back and read about how they did it (as much as they’re willing to share), but we won’t be getting the whole story, and what we do get will be all distorted by the rah-rah haze of success. (So, nephew/son/grandson/husband/cousin/brother, when you going to write the next Harry Potter? Bleh!) And by now it’s completely unclear whether what they did will work for anyone else, because the market they’re selling through is so new and changing so rapidly. Nor does it make any sense to compare them to grassroots print self-publishing successes like Christopher Paolini (and certainly not to Rowling), because there was barely any market in place for them to target/advertise to/gladhand.

All of which makes me very excited indeed to watch Jay’s epublishing debut, because it gives me (and you, too!) the great advantage of observing from the ground up, from the inside. Yes, of course, I’m rooting for him because he’s my pal and I’m already vested in the whole ebook thing. But I also know (because I read all that stuff about Hocking and Konrath ad nauseum) he’s got a lot going for him. I know how much thought Jay has put into this. He’s a brilliant, lovable guy who keeps an entertaining blog and knows everybody. He’s incredibly prolific. He knows how to spin a yarn. I know how much heart he puts into his writing, and it shows. I guarantee Death Match will be fast-paced and gritty with a gripping emotional core. Frankly, he’s a better writer than Hocking and Konrath put together. Which may or may not mean a thing in this context. But it will be fascinating to watch. I can’t wait to see what happens–not just in the next couple of weeks, but when he puts out the next book and the one after that.

Should you care to watch him too, Jay’s blog, where I hope he will regale us with further news of his forays, is at ridlerville.wordpress.com.

Where I live now, no matter where I stand or how far I walk, it always looks like the woods are just beginning beyond the farthest-away squat little fenced-in company cottage I can see. I can pursue them, but when I get there, they’ve inevitably receded to exactly the same distance as before.

These days the actual forests have barb-wire fences around them and the skulls are decidedly un-mossy, so I dwell in forests of the mind. Justin has recently introduced me to the concept of psychogeography, which I gather basically demarcates any attempt to interpret urban landscape as the product, or the manifestation, of the internal landscapes of its inhabitants. I’m going to bend that a little to fit my own purposes. Or maybe completely ignore it, just fall back on the usual influences—Castaneda, Borges, Freud and Thoreau—under a different auspice.

Outside my office window there is an auto-body shop. It’s ugly. It makes high-pitched metallic noises repetitively. I have undertaken the mental exercise of replacing it with various monolithic elements of natural landscape lifted from my experience: a lichened granite ledge shaped by glacial processes, a kettlehole pond, a field of wildflowers, a hemlock glade, a Yucatan thicket, a colossal zoomorph of the Classic Maya. It works, to a point. There are some landscapes to which that space just won’t lend itself, even in my imagination: the mazelike warrens of thirty-foot boulders populated by owls and deer and Polyporous berkleyii in the woods of Satans Kingdom surrounding the neighborhood where I grew up. Or, you know, any mountainside I’ve ever fallen down.

But it keeps the bats out, if you get me.

Jack, do you never sleep
does the green still run deep in your heart?
Or will these changing times,
motorways, powerlines,
keep us apart?
Well, I don’t think so
I saw some grass growing through the pavements today.

—Ian Anderson

Against all odds, there will be a Homeless Moon chapbook number four. I just sent it off to the printer. This year’s theme is a shared world generation ship, though I suspect you’d be hard pressed to guess that from the stories alone. We’re very different writers—it’s our shared hell-bent-ness that holds us together—and it’s awesome. As usual (though likely for the last time), I’ll have 200 copies to hand out at Readercon, and when those are gone, there will be ebooks on the HM site and at Weightless Books.

Here’s a cover we decided not to go with:

Space Octopus!

Readercon, by the way, is next week, and I have a ton of stuff going on. My schedule looks like this:

11:00 AM Friday – What Writing Workshops Do and Don’t Offer.
2:00 PM Saturday – Three Messages and a Warning group reading. This is Small Beer’s Mexican SF anthology, which I hyped up at last year’s Readercon. I translated two stories for it and have read a bunch of others, all fascinating, very different, surprising stuff.
2:30 PM Saturday – Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading.
3:30 PM Saturday – My solo reading, wherein I shall read my Apex #23 story, “The Eater”.

I’ll also be at the Small Beer table in the dealer’s room quite a bit, and hopefully at Kelly and Gavin’s Kaffeklatsch, where awesome not-so-very-secret things will occur. This summer marks Small Beer’s tenth anniversary. I think there are t-shirts to celebrate the occasion. I have also brewed a beer. O it is an exciting beer I am having to struggle very hard not to crack open and drink. I wrote a Literary Beer entry about it.

And then—even then, after Readercon, it still is not done, because then I’ll be at another reading on Thursday the 21st at the NEIA Library in Brookline for the new LCRW #27, which also happens to be coming out at Readercon.

And then that same day I move.

It used to be easy. I could just step out into the garden with my whiskey and corncob pipe of a steamy midsummer night, maybe fiddle about a bit with the maize god statuettes guarding the tomatoes, look up across the hazy cornfields at King Philip’s Rock and pour out a bit of libation to the turning wheel.

Instead, I spent the moments surrounding midnight wandering the side streets east of a walled-off Boston Common, looking up past the evocative rootlike patterns of plinths and facades at the starless sky, smelling the smells of stir-fry and subway exhalations, marveling at the thirty kinds of not-English I heard from passersby.

Here’s this new blog Justin led me to, Next Nature, that deals with the unpredictable “natural” phenomena which arise from human culture. Fascinating stuff. I love this:

Our technological environment
becomes so complex
we start to relate to it
as a nature of its own

Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA

Happy Solstice, wherever you are.

Conifer mulch under hemlocks, Hemlock Hill, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA. I’m not going to be able to positively identify the species… best guess is the deadly Galerina marginata.

O I am so neglectful of posting…these are from the end of May, nearly a month ago. I’d say I promise to get better, but it’s busy times. No dancing in fairy rings for me, not these days. Not that I’d do that. It would hurt the mushrooms.

Someone has drained the colour from my wings
Broken my fairy circle ring
And shamed the king in all his pride
Changed the winds and wronged the tides
Mother mercury
Look what they’ve done to me
I cannot run I cannot hide

—Freddie Mercury, “My Fairy King”