At 12:00 AM (now), “Of Thinking Being and Beast” goes online at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, alongside a story called “Dragon’s-Eyes” by the significantly-better-than-me Margaret Ronald. Yah! It is a high day to be me.

A disclaimer: the centaur stories—of which there are many more, though this is the first I’ve sold—are bleak, vicious, and include not a little of the old ultra-violence in the Anthony Burgess sense. Kid friendly they are not.

This is Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur. Doesn’t he look innocent and retiring. Don’t be fooled.

Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection isn’t actually out yet officially, but I have had the great good fortune to read it in advance.

It’s one of those rare books that does everything I want a book to do. Normally I need to be reading at least three different things at once to satisfy my reading moods: something stylistically complex and challenging whose prose I can pore over like poetry in the morning over a cup of tea, something factual and obscure about the nature of belief or the evolution of consciousness that I can resort to in the middle of the day when I ought to be working and write off as “research”, and something with an engrossing story and lovable characters I can pick up and get lost in before falling alseep. The Manual of Detection provides all those things. The jacket copy seems satisfied referring to it as a surrealistic detective story, but to me it almost seems to be carrying secondary-world fantasy around, hovering just above its shoulders like an invisible umbrella. It is meticulously structured, ornate and beautiful and inexhaustibly inventive—a page-turner, mindfuck, and cozy all at the same time.

Miss Palsgrave looked down at him. In the dark he could see only the dull gleam of her eyes. “The sleeping king and the madman at the gates,” she said. “On the one side a kind of order, on the other a kind of disorder. We need them both. That’s how it’s always been.”

Apologies for the sparseness in posts of late, and in particular for the dropping off in volume of observational literary profundity. I too have undertaken some new year’s seasonal self-scrutiny and subsequent knuckling down. I took a gig reading submissions for Strange Horizons recently; it’s only a matter of a few hours a week, but like everything else has carved away a little of my blogging time.

What else is going on?

It’s been so persistently cold here (-9 F was the worst I actually went outside in) that on Friday morning, the Connecticut River was completely iced over, and a weird fog of sublimated water crystals hung over everything as if it were 50 degrees warmer. Today, the weather snapped. It snowed some deep fluff and even got above freezing around noontime. I ran around without a hat. Woo.

The second quarter 2009 edition of Abyss & Apex will feature an SF short story I wrote for TNEO ’07, “Starlings”. And I believe “Of Thinking Being and Beast” will be live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies within the next couple of weeks. Hopefully I can muster the energy to post about that when it happens.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two new stories in need of editing and two in need of some serious finishing. Plenty of knuckling down still to be done.

And that’s about it. Sorry I have nothing more exciting for you. If you’re bored, why not go read about how to properly harvest mandrake root without being driven mad by its banshee-shriek.

Yeah. I’m a Whistler fan.

Birch and oak near dark.

Shadows of my backyard apple tree by the almost-full moon.

The tree casting the shadow.

I just got my contributor copy of Shroud magazine Issue #4, which includes, in addition to my Mayan temple story “Sketch of a Ruin”, fiction by Tim Waggoner and fellow Odyssey grad Sara King. This issue was a bit delayed in production, but looks by all appearance to have been worth the wait. It’s 100+ pages, perfect-bound, magazine-sized, with a glossy color cover—very satisfying to behold. Copies are available from Shroud Publishing and Amazon.

“Sketch of a Ruin” was born sometime in early 2007, not long after the visit to the Yucatan Peninsula which yielded so many of the photographs I used to decorate The Mossy Skull (and which I blogged a fair bit about, if you care). The story features the intrepid Great White Explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and was inspired in part by Stephens’ fantastic 1841 travelogue, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan.

I shall resist nerding you people to death with the ramblings of my pre-Colombian obsession and restrict myself to transcribing here the excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe’s review of Incidents with which I open the story.

“No one can deny his personal merits as a traveller, his enthusiasm, boldness, acuteness, courage in danger, and perseverance under difficulty. … Of Central America and her antiquities Mr. Stephens may know, and no doubt does know, as much as the most learned antiquarian. Here all is darkness.”