Masses of monsters!  Bountiful beasts!  It’s the Shared Worlds Critter Corral!  I am delighted to have helped out with this fantastically cool project, part of a registration and fund drive in support of the Shared Worlds SF/F teen writing camp!  It features all new flash fiction from Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Scott Westerfeld, Gene Wolfe, Patrick Rothfuss, Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer, Lev Grossman, N.K. Jemisin, and on and on:  a who’s who of speculative fiction including my wondrously talented Clarion 2010 colleague Karin Tidbeck.

Jeff VanderMeer conceived the idea, which was based around an image from the always astounding Jeremy Zerfoss.  The delightful Teri Goulding compiled and edited the stories, and I did the web coding and contributed a small story of my own.

The image here is just a sliver of the wonders that await.  Head over to Shared Worlds and explore.  And if you like what you see—and I am sure you will—then consider leaving a donation to support these sort of projects and a truly great writing program.

Here’s a preview of Episode One:  the arrival at the mysterious planet and the introduction of one of our heroes: FE, the Flying Eye robot.  Check his blog for pictures of some of the amazing puppets and props.  And stay tuned for the final release of Episode One!

Spinning the Thread: a love story disguised as historical horror.

“He was quiet,” she said.  “Didn’t wake me until you got out of bed.  All I saw was your back until you were in the middle of the room, and then I saw him in front of you.  Him and the gun, and him whispering ‘keep walking.’”

You come see what you done, he’d hissed in his broken English, you keep walking, you bastard, and I show you what you done.  Those words echoed in that dark gap.

“I sat up,” she continued.  “The door was open, and I sat up and Janicki, he jumped like he’d been electrocuted.  I guess he hadn’t seen me there in the bed.”

He’d been staring, wild white-edged eyes to mine.  All he’d been seeing was what he’d wanted me to see, wherever he was taking me.

“He jumped, and the gun went off,” Bridie said.

I tried to lift my hand to my head, but her grip stopped me, those small fingers strong from the spinning.

“Could have blown my brains out,” I said.

“Oh, Billy,” she said in a voice not much louder than my own.  “He did blow your brains out.”

I closed my eyes again, shutting in the swirling stink of powder and blood and black anger.  The only words I could find in that dark were, “What, then?”

Bridie brushed my cheek with her fingertips, that could spin a lost child to finding or a grown man to fear.  “Then I caught them,” she said.

Tell the Bees: the mystery of Mel’s childhood is caught between the conflicting meanings of change and superstition.

There was silence then, or so Mel thought at first, and Pearse, never one for standing still, began to turn away.  But under the distant chittering of the birds and the wayward breeze, there was low rumble like a growling, and the hive quivered.  Mel thought of Cook in the moments before her hand struck out at some failing, and flinched.  Pearse stopped and turned a dry impatient eye to the hive.

A bee flew from the dark mouth of the hive as if spat; a straight line toward the garden.  A second one shot north toward the barley field, and then dozens, hundreds were fleeing the hive, spreading in all directions.

“They swarm,” Pearse cried.  “You’ve said it wrongly!”

“They’re na’ swarming,” Ralph said, come up quietly to lean on the broom a few yards back.  “Hive’s got two, three hundred hundred.  And it’s no swarm without the queen.  Try the words again, Mel.”

Mel looked to Pearse, who gave a sharp nod, and a frown for Ralph.  The gardener replied with his usual look of eroded amusement; the grounds and above all the bees were his keeping, and he had little fear of the butler.

“Mistress sweet, Mistress—”

Mel was stopped by a buzzing, not from the hive but all around, thick and rising in pitch; it was as if they had stumbled into a fog of sound.  Bees whizzed past ears and eyes, ruffled hair and sleeves, far more than had fled, all heading back to the hive.  Some entered, but most landed on the straw or the surrounding stone in a swirling carpet.

“They fetched the workers from the fields, is what,” Ralph said.  “Third time’s charmed, Mel.”

Pearse prodded Mel beck into place with sharp fingertips, a step or two closer than caution would advise.  The bees slowed their writhing dance as if waiting, antennae aloft and quivering.  The buzzing died down, the rumble once again audible.  ‘Attentive’ was the word for it, Mel thought.

“The words,” Pearse said, though quietly, as if he too felt the attention of the hive.

“Mistress sweet, Mistress sharp, the lord is dead—”

The bees exploded.

Lost Wax: Leena says, “Ah, but art improves on nature.”

Ma’am Roenard’s Cuttlefish Cabaret was back at the Court Theatre.  Nadin got tickets from one of his students—“have them, dear boy; we’re all a bit, what was your word… sated with the cephalopods”—and fluttered them in front of Leena’s face as she leaned over the tiny ball joint for what looked like a toe.  Her scowled annoyance melted to delight as she blinked the tickets into focus, and ten minutes later they were on the street grabbing finger pies and shave ice on their way to the theatre.

The show was not much changed from the last tour, but neither of them minded; they breathed in the briny air and sighed it back out as the swimmers spiraled in shifting colors.  “‘Sated with cephalopods,’” Leena muttered as the pas de duex began.  Nadin nudged her silent; she captured his elbow and gripped it tight as the great Sepiida traced the lines of his partner’s long arms and legs with tentacles of fleeting green and gold.

The Modesty of Bone: An accidental, absurdist revolution in a twilight city.

Though I imagine you have heard otherwise, it was not my idea to carry the table out the front door of the Bistro Indènt and across the square to place it under Pensencour’s cage.  Some accounts have me climbing on the table and making a frothy declaration of rebellion before the inspired patrons of the bistro lifted the table to their shoulders and paraded across the square, myself astride like an icon of the Blessed on a feast day.  But really, look at me.  I am an editor and a printer and at times of desperate need for copy, a writer; my shape is no more suited to climbing tables than my nature is to declaiming manifestos.  No, it was Leanore’s suggestion to bring the table to Pensencour, since he could not bring himself to the table.  Yes, that Leanore; she was the barmaid at the Bistro Indènt, by the way, and not the owner as that hack DeLinsk would have it.

It was, however, my idea to bring the fiddler along with us.

That evening was the third that Pensencour had passed in his cage.  Mind you, he had been known to go without food for days at a time when deep in his writing, and it was raining a little in the evenings, as is common in early spring;  the guttering oil lamps around the Plana at dusk revealed the caged prisoners with their heads back and mouths open, a hanging garden of ruddy night-blooming flowers.

More to come…

In December I did the design, artwork, and animation for the Cheeky Frawg Books website, working with Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, artist Jeremy Zerfoss (who did the Frawg logo and the wonderful book covers), and web guru Danny Fontaine.  This is the same crew with whom I worked on my Myster Odd animation last summer, and it was once again a delight.  In fact, the Cheeky Frawg site is based on Myster Odd’s writer’s garret.  I designed and built the “set” with the Autodesk Maya software, using hand-painted textures and lighting to try to capture the quirky, timeless spirit of the Cheeky Frawg publications.  There are a lot of odd easter eggs and free stuff on the site, so go ahead, poke through Myster Odd’s stuff!  And while you are there, check out the catalogue for some extraordinary e-books and dare the ODD.

My novella “Slow Boat“, originally published in the July 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, was reprinted in Russian in the November 2011 issue of Esli Magazine.  There are a number of footnotes that seem to be addressing some of the obscure slang I threw in, or in some cases, simply made up;  I imagine it was a head-scratcher to translate, but such is always the lot of the translator…

Check in tomorrow for an update on my stories-in-progress!

For maximum oddness watch this fullscreen at 720p HD!

I made this video to celebrate the release of the ODD? anthology series from Cheeky Frawg Books.  The first volume features a odd and awesome story from my Clarion classmate Karin Tidbeck, as well as stories from Amos Tutuola, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Hiromi Goto, Stacey Levine, and Jeffrey Thomas and many more.

For more information on the video, check out my film & music website: www.SuddenSound.com

Dustin’s prose is mad, effortless, and extraordinary.  And his screwed-up, screwed-over, big-dreaming characters are so real and deftly drawn that the writer half of me itches with envy and inspiration.  The reader half of me just wants more.

Goner is about Char, an twelve year old boy trying to hold onto his small family and friends at a time when they are all changing and moving away with time and age, when humanity itself is changing and moving away, into te solar system and beyond.  Holding people together is hard, Char is discovering, when all they seem to want to do is fly apart.  He’s beginning to wonder if it is better to let go.

That change is made literal in the form of the Pilots, ‘Goners’, the nickname even they themselves use, for the far-gone, for the fact that in order to survive the rigors of near-lightspeed travel they have undergone conversion by nanotech into ghost-like webbings of carbon, debatably no longer human, debatably no longer alive.  Char’s friend’s father is one of the handful of successful conversions, back on Earth unexpectedly, and in meeting him, Char comes face-to-face with costs and wonders of letting go.

So, I have a main character with well-defined motivations.  I have a setting of a small hometown, friends and family, a wider culture and technology.  I have a Science Fictional element: the Pilot conversion process and the frightening nanotechnology behind it.  I have conflict and resolution, which I will not detail here, as it is better encountered in the story itself.   What’s the problem?

I thoguht at first that it was an issue of voice and presentation.  My original Clarion draft had a simple, straightforward plot presented in simple, sequential scenes, told in simple sentences (relative to my usual convoluted prose, anyway).  I was hoping for the sort of at-the-end-of-childhood, on the edge of fable tone of early Bradbury or Heinlein: aim high and shoot wildly is the motto!

What I found in the critiques at Clarion, however, is that folks were reading the story more literally than I had intended, and getting lost in the nitpicking details of the technology and plot.  That tells me that the central story, of Char and his choice over fighting to keep people together or letting them go their own way, was not coming through strongly enough; if that central story is compelling enough, the reader will accept any number of improbabilities and absurdities along the way.

That sounds like a pretty straightforward analysis, but it took a good part of last week to figure it out, and my initial attempts at revision had meanwhile gone in a different direction, attempting a radical change of tone and scene structure towards something less straightforward.  That may not be a bad thing, mind you; it’s probably closer to my strengths.  But it doesn’t directly address the issue of making Char’s story stronger, and may in fact obscure it further.

But, I’m going to set it aside until week six, and move on to the next story.  That should be Forks and Hope, my Week Three alien plant landmine story, but I may swap it for the Week Five story Twelve and Tag, about which I had somewhat of a revelation in the middle of the night last night…

In the meanwhile, here is a snippet of the original Clarion version of Goner:

A man floated below the cathedral ceiling, just under the skylight, anchored by an orange cable that ran from his chest down into the strange machinery.  A sketch of a man, rather, a tangle of lines in charcoal black against the white wall, like the models they had in class, the Visible Man, when you toggled off everything but the nervous system.

“Crap on a crutch.  It’s a–” Nok said.

“He,” Char said.  “He’s Cord R. Jones.”

Drum walked across the room, still looking up, and put his hand on the orange cable; they could see it vibrating under the tension.  Drum mouthed a syllable, airless, but Char knew what it was.

“Drummond dang Jones,” Nok said.  “Drum, dude, you been here months, come you didn’t say your dad’s a Goner?”

Drum gave the cable a tentative tug.  “Dad,” he said again, not quite a question.

“Mr. Jones?” Char added, louder; the figure — Pilot, he thought, PostConv — seemed to be asleep.  In his shock, Char couldn’t remember if they slept.

Nok pushed past Char and grabbed the cable.  “Why’s he up there?  He’s gonna fall.  Pull him down!” he said.

That was Nok being his usual idiot self, and Char opened his mouth to say so.  But, “Dad!” Drum said, and pulled; Nok put a foot against the side of the machinery and yanked.

There was a clack from the machine, and a snick-snick-snick, and the other end of the cable went snaking through their fingers.  Nok ducked back from the whipping connector, and fell straight into Drum; the two of them went sprawling onto the carpet.

Char had been looking upwards, about to shout again, so he saw it; the shape that had been Drum’s father shot off through the skylight, so fast it looked like he’d collapsed into a dot, like the black holes in the books stacked by Char’s bed; a singularity, they called it.  But Mr. Jones — Pilot Jones — hadn’t gone in, he’d gone up, at an incomprehensible speed.

“What on earth…?”  Drum’s mom was standing in the doorway.  Nok scrambled to his feet.  Drum was still on his back, gasping, eyes on the spot where his father had been.  There was a crash from the backyard, the dome of the skylight hitting the deck railing.

“Mrs. Jones,” Char said.  “Drum’s, um, Mr. Jones, he…”  Char felt himself blushing, though he wasn’t quite sure why, and leaned down to give a hand up to Drum.

“He broke loose,” Nok said.

“He flew,” Char said.

“Why,” asked Drum, gasping and a bit hunched over — Nok’s elbows again — “Why is he here?”

Mrs. Jones stepped forward and smoothed Drum’s hair, left her hand on his head.  “They sent a message after you left for school.  The Olympia dropped in-system this morning.  They found a–”  She looked up.  “Well, I’ll let your father tell it.”

Char looked up.  Drum’s dad was descending silently through the remains of the skylight, coiling the orange cable around one arm; he settled to the carpet and covered Mrs. Jones’s with his own.

Char stared at the hand.  It was a web of charcoal threads, more like the tangle of Drum’s hair than the pale smooth flesh of Mrs. Jones fingers.  Char could see the gold of her wedding ring glinting through the network of carbon and fiber that made up that other hand.  He wondered if Mr. Jones’s ring had been converted, too, but no, it was the wrong hand; the ring was there on the other, a plain loop of gold, and that somehow made the rest of it all the more strange.  Char shook his head and looked up, into the face he’d seen in countless vids and pics, into the faceted sensor arrays that had been Cord R. Jones eyes, before the Conversion.

Because Delia Sherman and special guest Ellen Kushner were the first week instructors, I went with a fantasy: just my second attempt at the genre up to that point.  And for reasons that surely made sense at the time, e.g. delerium, I decided to go for comedy, which was entirely new for me.  But the real test wasn’t the genre, it was the deadline: I had only written six stories ever up to that point, and each one had taken many weeks to complete.  I got myself in a bit of a panic, and started just typing wildly; as it turned out, both the panic and the wild typing would continue for the next six weeks…!

The critique was (arguably) not quite as painful than having my intestines removed with a butter knife and no anesthetic.  Folks in general thought the funny bits were funny—a relief, as nothing stinks like failed funny—and the supporting characters were entertaining, but everyone agreed that the story lacked, um, a story.  It was a series of vaguely related scenes in an unclear setting without real motivation or stakes.

I should add that this is not a matter of plot, per se.  Plot and story are different things; plot is constructed from a sequence of described events, whereas story is a pattern of tensions—conflict and resolution—created by the characters’ motivations colliding with the setting and the other characters.

So, this week’s reWrite-a-Thon efforts have focused on clarifying the motivations of the character,  Jack:  he wants a great story to tell his nephews.  His unexpected trip to the Land Beneath the Hill gives him his opportunity, but at the risk of being trapped there forever.  The characters he meets are, conversely, trying to trap him there by getting him to doubt that what is happening is real: their magic works through doubt and dream.

Here’s an excerpt, in which Jack and the Horse (a Pooka trying to get a promotion to Night Mare) encounter a strange creature who is trying to convince Jack that he has gone mad:

***

“It’s madness, I tell you.  Madness!”  The thing’s cry echoed off the shadowed stones.

Jack and the Horse looked at each other, and back at the thing.  It lay sprawled on the great rune-engrave altar, its stubby tentacles twitching with its agitation.

“It’s is, now, is it?”  Jack asked.

“Rank madness!” the thing shouted.  Its lush red mouth gaped, needle teeth glittering in the starlight.

“And what would ‘it’ be, then?”

“All this!  This horrid ring of rough hewn rock, the cold uncaring glitter of the stars above, the dank and dangerous Kelpie beside you—”

“I’m a Poo— pool-dwelling Night, uh…”

“—and my own incomprehensible shape,” it roared on, “that hints of things Man is Not Meant to Know, all this is your madness, the unreal delusions of a madman in a quiet cell…”

“Not all that quiet, now, really,” Jack said.

“Even this voice, that shatters echoes like a thousand gibbering fears against the stony ruin of your sanity, is but emblematic of that Lurking Darkness in all men that in your case, ah, has crashed into the…”

The thing blinked its one eye, apple-sized and shot with green, and waved its fringe of tentacles vaguely down the hill.  Jack and the Horse looked behind them.

“Path,”  Jack guessed.  “Tree.  Meadow of murky madness.”

“Icy creek of cold, burbling darkness,” the Horse suggested.

“He already used ‘darkness’ in that sentence.”

“To be sure.”

“Flimsycurtainoffleetreality,” the creature blurted out in one breath.

There was an awkward pause.  The Horse whistled quietly through the gap in its teeth, which gleamed in the starlight.

“So what you’re saying,” Jack said.

“Bellowing,” the Horse said, looking off down the hill again.

“Is that all this is not real, but rather the product of my deluded, and no doubt drink-addled mind.”

“INDEED,” the thing replied, and with a glance at the Horse, continued at a more conversational level.  “Indeed, these are but the terrible shards of a brain that has wandered past the borders of What Must Not Be.”

Jack nodded, and looked around.  “Because, I’m thinking, it’s not all that terrible, really.  Present company excepted, of course.”

The thing waved a tentacle in acknowledgement.

“But apart from yourself, it’s pretty much a hill, you know.  With a bit of a lawn there, and some wildflowers, and a rabbit or two.”

“The Standing Stones…” the beast began.

“Are a copper a dozen in my part of the world,” Jack finished, somewhat apologetically.

“Your mind reaches out in its terror for Things Familiar!”

“A talking Horse?”

“Poo–h…” the Horse left off, and whistled another bar or two.

“A dark demon of desire!  A Mare of the Night!”

The Horse grunted, and tore off a mouthful of the flowers.

“The thing is, you see, I am pretty confident that this is all real.  Or real enough for the likes of me, who believed every word of my uncles on the one hand and of my sainted mother on the other.  Relative to the discussion round the supper table on a long Sunday night, all this is not really a stretch.”

“Does not my very form, arcane and uncouth, sunder you from your petty reality?”

“You’ve never met my uncle Pat.  Though, now that I think of it, there is somewhat of a resemblance.  You’re never a Carter out of County Dunn, are you?”

“I am called Dreae-Iltws, the Wound That Gapes Like An Endless Scream,” the thing replied.

“Nuts,” said the Horse.

“Nuts,” Jack agreed.

***

This coming week, I’ll be working on Goner, a science fiction story with, I think, a good story but a weak plot.  I have some ideas for a major restructuring, which will either simplify things or muddle them beyond all hope…

I think the Clarion Writers’ Workshop is a marvel–the UCSD incarnation and its Clarion West sister–and worthy of support from both writers and readers.  Take a peek at my other posts on Clarion to get an idea of how wonderful, challenging, crazed, and successful the program and my classmates have been.

The Stories:

The Last Cup

Jack has been stolen away, taken Under The Hill by sinister forces: a Pooka that wants a promotion to Nightmare, an unspeakable Elder Creature, a Raven well-read in forbidden tomes.  Only…  this fearsome trio doesn’t quite have its act together: instead of giving way to terror and madness, Jack is taking it all in stride; worse yet, he seems to be enjoying the adventure.  ”Thing is, you see, I would not mind a story to tell my own nephews one day around the fire.”  And sure enough, Jack and his unlikely companions find a story…

Goner

Char just wants to keep his family and friends like they have always been.  But in these first days of his teens, those efforts seem ever harder and less appreciated:  his Mom is acting like a… like a person, with all the confusions and imperfections that implies. And his friends are acting like idiots.

When his friend’s father returns from space, one of the handful of Pilots—the Goners, post-conversion beings of carbon nanostructures able to withstand the stresses of near-C travel—then Char starts thinking that if holding things together is so difficult and thankless, then maybe letting go is a better choice.  And no one has gone farther—from Earth, from their lives, from humanity—than the Goners.

Forks and Hope

A Bloom is a colony creature, a ten-meter circle of alien life that can strip an animal, or a human, down to a puddle of parts and goo in seconds.  A “Circle of Life”, one sarcastic scientist dubbed it, an “Improvised Evolutionary Device”.

Ki Ninurta is the only person to have survived stepping on one.  Isolated by her terrible scars, her survivors guilt, her loneliness and rage, she has dedicated her life to the study of the Blooms. Her defiant nighttime walks on the dangerous surface have never led to another accident, not until she found a couple of thrill seekers out on the surface:  a newbie from Earth, eager for alien skies, and a mechanic, eager for the newbie.

Ki is leading them back to safety when there was a crunch underfoot, and the sharp unmistakeable smell of a Bloom.  The slightest move, a hand put out for support, a falling tear, could set the Bloom off, as they crouch there in the dark…

Twelve and Tag

We were all there in the bar that night, the entire crew of the ship that went down under the ice of Europa, and the two new hires out of Earth.

“It’s not just ice that breaks,” Cheung said, “doing what we do.” His thin, fleet fingers mimed something snapping. “It’s equipment, people, whole ships, sometimes. Got to know each other.”

“Gotta trust,” Nava said.

And that’s what we were doing there:  getting drunk, telling stories, looking for that trust.  None of us was likely to be rich enough to afford a Transcription and revival contract:  we got dead out here, we stayed dead.  But these new crewmembers, Adra and Zandt, their stories were going somewhere dark, and dangerous…

Parts per Billion

The great colony ships of the 22nd century—generation ships that took centuries to arrive—were finally reaching their destinations, only to discover worlds already settled by FTL travel.  Annette de Grey and Sadar Mehta were a First Contact team out from Earth, trained to break the news to the arriving colonists that times had passed them on.  It was a sad, difficult work, and occasionally dangerous, as the disaster of the Ulysses had shown.

The crew of this new arrival, the Fargo, were strange, warped by contaminants in their closed ecosystem, a culture centuries out of date and warped itself by long generations in space.   And the local Chí system was notoriously elitist, concerned with propriety and appearances.  The situation was volatile enough without the Chí bureaucrats that insisted on accompanying Annette and Sadar, and worse, a reporter…

Two Things About Thrand Zandy’s Technotéque

There are two things you do not want to do when walking down the six steel steps and through the accessway into Thrand Zandy’s Technothèque. First is carry a weapon. Second is have more cash in pocket than you’re willing to spend.

If you go in packing, even something like a cryptoceramic blade, the scanners embedded in the airlock are going to catch you, or Martta’s nose for trouble will; either way, Martta will have you kissing floor before you can raise a hand or an objection. If you go in flush, Zandy will know how much you’ve got on you, sure as Martta can tell a piece from a pecker at a glance, and Zandy and his techs have more ways to separate you from your stash than there are cheap dives and bam flops in all of New Singapore Station.

That’s why I’d left my hardware in a locker at Transit Terminal Seven, and then had to walk the loop all the way back from Burton Module because I’d forgotten to add my bootknife to the pile. And that’s why I had a creditchip for two million Exchange Credits in my back pocket, and another eighty-seven creds in cash tucked into my bra.  Assuming the drop went down and I got my commission, I could afford to drink and jack my way through the eighty-seven creds. The two million creds weren’t mine…

I was in debt down to my boots, and Nana Io was threatening to kick me out into the corridors again. Xujenc was finally offering me decent contracts. I couldn’t afford a screwup; I was running out of potential employers.

That’s how I felt when I picked up the first Borderland book in 1986.  The blending of punk and faery, the idea that the border with the fée might cut through through our modern cities as easily as it does through the countryside distant in place and time, the grimy half-starved reality of faery’s traditional peril, it all was manifestly, essentially right.

I bought every book that followed, the shared world anthologies and the novels from Emma Bull and Will Shetterly.  And those two and their Scribblies colleagues, and folks like Charles de Lint Ellen Kushner and the group Boiled in Lead and all the fantastic anthologies from Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow continued the discovery, which led to places as far ranged as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and the current boom of urban fantasy.

The thing about these sorts of ideas, the ones that seem not fabricated but rather revealed, is that they they are impervious to trends and times.  And that’s why I feel that first thrill again at the anticipation of the new “Welcome to Bordertown” from Holly Black and Ellen Kushner.  It features an amazing set of authors, some of whom worked on the original books, some of whom might just have been born when the first book came out (and no doubt felt the Border open in their cribs, and cooed in wonder…)

Borderland has always vibrated to a wild whirling beat, and shimmered with images of things glimpsed through the boundaries, so it’s great to see that the fantastic new website includes art from folks like Iain McCaig (who once dared me over pizza and beer to write something, and so I did, and since have done) and music from groups like Garmarna, who I am pretty sure actually do gigs somewhere just over the Border.

So, don’t just order the book and peruse the website from one end to the other, for goodness sakes, pack your bags and hit the road; I think the Border is just round this corner here…