I cannot sufficiently elucidate my giddy lightheadedness. I have been walking into doors the past couple of days.

Dora Goss and Delia Sherman bought my short story, “The Utter Proximity of God”, for their Interfictions Anthology. Which means it’ll come out in a year, in a fricking book, which unless I am mistaken will be distributed by the very small publisher for whom I intern. My first ‘pro’ sale. To sweeten the buzz of this nitreous high, I realize the story I sold is actually the one that, at the moment at least, I consider to be my best work to date–mostly because it’s my first serious (meaning: post-Odyssey) attempt at magic realism.

An old world on the verge of collapse.

Tangent Online, that touchstone of the internet’s spec-fic readership, has reviewed the heroic lay I wrote, “Hope and Erosion”, which Dragons, Knights & Angels ran as their lead story for July.

Dragons, Knights, & Angels, #34 by Donna Watkins, August 6th, 2006.

She liked it! Not only did she like it, she gave it more words than anybody else in the issue. Three whole paragraphs. Very exciting.

Interestingly, like almost everybody who critiqued this for me (with the notable exception of the WriteShop folks, who saw the first incarnation, wherein I’d made it blatantly obvious), Ms. Watkins didn’t catch on to the allegory underlying this story. She wonders why the Hermit could breathe underwater. I like what she said, though: “However, once under the waves, what he sees and experiences makes up for this overlooked detail”. It’s nice to know I can leave some things subtle and rely on the quality of the writing to carry people along.

Some people, anyway.

Well, TNEO has been over a while now. It was pretty great. I did all my crits ahead of time, which is clearly the way to go. On the other hand, next year I will definitely be re-reading both crits and stories while at TNEO, before I have to sit down face to face with the author of the story in question. Otherwise I forget what the hell I said and make a general nuisance of myself stumbling over my own thoughts.

Oh, and one other set-in-stone TNEO 2007 resolution: absolutely no pornographic scenes from romance novels shall be read aloud in any company while under the influence of delicious microbrews and whiskey. It just isn’t worth it.

Lessons learned from reading aloud, at the Slam and elsewhere: uber-poetical stuff that rolls off the tongue like music does not do well at holding audience attention. It lulls them to sleep, is what it does. Good for reading to hyperactive children, not hyperactive spec fic writers. Check. The thing to read aloud is the story with simple POV and plenty of suspense. And comedy. Boy does comedy work, if you can pull it off. Of course maybe there’s some kind of synthesis to be had here. I’m thinking The Telltale Heart. Couldn’t ask for a better read-aloud story than that. And it is certainly poetical, cadenced, like the music tuned-down violins lingering on minor chords. But I digress.

Lessons learned from other writers: (1) Pay more attention to what wins awards. (2) Stop being so touchy when it comes to form rejections. (3) Write every day (knew that already, but still counting it here).

What I’ve been up to since: Posted something in Writings about magic in the centaur world and its influences. Posted some pictures in Visions. Wrote a new story you can see if you belong to a certain elite.

A blog resolution: If everyone else can post brief inanities once a week as to the current goings on, so can I.

“Suele olvidarse que (los diccionarios) son repertorios artificiosos, muy posteriores a las lenguas que ordenan. La raíz del lenguaje es irracional y de carácter mágico.”
–Borges

“It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together
well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.”
–Borges

I based it on the following influences:

(1)
The fictional experiences of Carlos Castaneda. Manifestations include an instinctual kind of future sight, superhuman physical ability and the rare capacity to change physical form. Requires mental and perceptive discipline, experience with alternate planes of consciousness. Castaneda’s sorcery is in large part a spiritual sorcery.

(2)
The notion of true words, which is found in mystical, mythical and religious explanations of the nature of existence from pretty much every culture. Plenty of other fantasists do this. Le Guin, Weis and Hickman, Tolkien. Mind you I am trying to distance myself from them, but the influence is there. Of this idiom I am culling specifically the concept of runes, holy symbols.

Which I am promptly and blasphemously cross-sectioning with
(3)
The Lacanian perception of language as endless, ineluctable act of transference between meaning and its object. This is a hard thing for me to explain, since Lacan himself can barely string together a coherent sentence about it without half-constructing his own broken and unreasonable sublanguage out of six or seven perfectly organic and legitimate others. The distillation of it is this: Lacan pisses me off, and so I want to laugh in his face by positing a universe where there is a means of breaching the gap of signification, a technique of sheer willpower and mental focus which forces meaning on an object in such violent fashion that the object’s nature is changed to suit your intent. The way this manifests in the world is via symbols, such as the spiral brand Eurytus inflicts on those he claims his own. A sorcerer can impose aspects of his power and intent upon objects and living things via some symbol he assigns to his desires.

This concept has equivalents both in
(4)
The native american system of naming, of meaningful affinities between human identities and certain associated abstractions, such as animistic spirits.

And
(5)
The divination techniques of Classical myth, in which the confluence of symbols in the natural world codifys an underlying order to the course of fate.

So what does all this get me?

A magic which allows its initiates to extend their own lifespans, possess superhuman stamina and constitution, and create limited artifacts of intent, such as a knife whose blade goes red hot at its master’s touch. Some more adept sorcerers are capable of creating living extensions of their intent via branding, such as a brainwashed flying electrostatic sea turtle or a colossal man-eating bull–of course only the centaurs would think of anything so unnaturally fucked up. Likewise, certain advanced sorcerers can take a second physical form, that of a bird or animal, or even travel outside of the physical plane–but only human sorcerers are capable of this level of refinement, and centaurs even go so far as to scorn the existence of such power.

Why, oh why, did I make all this so complicated?

That’s a good question, with a long and complicated philosophical explanation about what exactly I am trying to convey with these centaur stories. An explanation which I am way too tired to even try to get into now.

Another entry. Maybe.

Sixteenth century German wheel-lock pistol and comb morion, Higgins Armory Museum