Saturday I drove through downtown Boston in torrential thunderstorms to drop off Justin at South Station. Made it back to my parents’ house only mildly soaked, ducked into the kitchen, and what do I find sitting on the table?

It’s the cover art for a YA urban fantasy novel called The Lightning Thief, whose content, judging by the prologue and my mom’s astute appraisal, sadly fails to live up to the quality of the illustration. A little bit shallow, a little bit derivative bandwagon-jumping, though action-packed, I’m sure. Her kids are supposed to be reading it at school. Who makes these decision, I wonder?

Anyhow, I’m content to ignore the attached work of fiction and drool over the cover. A kid with a conch shell and an orange-glowing sword wading through the flooded ruins of Manhattan–what’s not to love?

The artist is John Rocco; his gallery is here.

It was half an hour before sunset, and I parked my car just off some state highway in southern NH, on the side of a dirt road leading down to a cornfield. It was hot, I’d been driving for three and a half hours and I was hell bent on a swim. I’d just driven over a bridge–some tributary of the Connecticut.

So I ducked the chain into the cornfield teeming with buzzing bugs lit golden by the late light like nebulous starfields. I pushed my way through the stalks, then through sycamore branches, climbed down a muddy twelve-foot bank to the shallow, pebbly river. The water smelled faintly of fish and sunbaked mud and barely came past my knees. The sycamores were full of mockingbirds. I peeled off my clothes and swam at a leisurely pace, upstream so the current kept me in place. Then I found a piece of beaver-chewed driftwood for a walking stick and took a barefoot stroll on a rocky sandbar.

Normally I’d frown on this sort of thing. Pieces of grimy video arcade accoutrements half-submerged in the middle of a river. This particular instance, however, arrested me completely. I stood there and stared at it for a while just to reassure myself that I’d actually seen it.

Change.

The driftwood stick is now planted in my garden holding up tomatoes.

I have another reading coming up. I know, what is the deal? I am really not all that important.

Anyhow, this one is The Never-Ending Odyssey Short Fiction Slam, at a Barnes & Noble in Manchester, NH, next Wednesday night, July 25th, at 6:30 PM. Once again there will be a whole bunch of better writers than I involved. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

I swear, sometime soon, there will be a post up here with some actual content.

“In time, one inevitably comes to resemble one’s enemies.”
–Borges

Still one day to go, but the best stuff I’ve seen so far has been as follows:

A coffee klatsch with Paolo Bacigalupi in which he discussed at great length the technical details of his writing process from idea kernel to draft. I’ve been thinking about my own version of that process a lot lately. Bacigalupi was very frank about the difficulty he still has. The iterative and organic meticulousness with which he expands a concept into prose, as well as the importance and function of theme in shaping the end result, rang very true for me. Knowing the complexity and depth of the characters, worldbuilding and themes that result from that in his work gives me hope for some of the recent chaos into which my own ambitions have led me.

Vandana Singh reading from a new novella, “Of Love and Other Monsters”, forthcoming in October from Aqueduct Press. The voice of her narrator is just so startlingly direct and perceptive about the nature of human relationships and interactions, it throws me right out of all my expectations for a genre story and allows me to experience it in a different way, as something much more immediate and real–without using any of those magic realist tropes I’ve been trying to wield to that same effect. I asked her about how she does this, and it seems to have to do with her approach to the speculative from a cultural context in which genres and styles of writing, not to mention languages, are just so multiplicitous and fragmented that she never encountered those elements of standardized genre (the tropes I percieve as so cramping and tired in the American marketplace) until she had already arrived at her unique voice and outlook.

Sitting behind the Small Beer Press table in the book shop and watching every last copy of Interfictions disappear off the shelves. I signed a few copies. Made me feel ashamed at the general crappiness of my handwriting, but otherwise generally warm and fuzzy.