The latest Strange Horizons includes my short story “The End of Tin,” about the Tin Woodsman of Oz and the end of the world.
In addition, if you follow the Saint of Daybreak link at the top of this page, you’ll find that I finally posted the rest of the novel. Sorry for the considerable delay in the middle — a couple of major projects landed on my plate right at a time when revising the earlier drafts wasn’t something I could do a little bit at a time.
Two bits of business this Halloween:
The anthology I Am This Meat includes my horror story “When Everybody Comes To Your Birthday Party.”
And for the first time since giving up the ghost of respectability and becoming a full-time writer, I’m participating in National Novel-Writing Month. You can read my creepy spookhouse novel Greywhistle as I write it, throughout the month of November.
I don’t mention it much here, but in my day job I’m actually a nonfiction writer. Most of what I write wouldn’t be of interest to you — high school textbooks, reference works, copywriting, that kind of thing. This, though, is on the border.
Dear Angela is a collection of essays on the television show My So-Called Life, along the lines of the excellent Twin Peaks book Full of Secrets that I read repeatedly as a college student majoring in popular culture. I wrote Chapter 11 (which through odd coincidence was my final piece of unpaid writing that wasn’t for charity): “One Of Those Fights Where It Feels Like The Fight’s Having You: The Patty Reading.”
It’s one of those silly little bits of academicka that is hopefully fun without being too lightweight — the conceit I take is that you can read the show as taking place almost entirely in the mother’s imagination, the only “real” scenes being the ones in which she’s physically present:
Consider the series as a narrative constructed by Patty, combining the actual events of her life with the events she imagines, fears, or believes transpire: consider a mother who has become less and less intimate with her daughter, and who can literally only imagine what her daughter’s life is like. Circumstance tosses her a handful of facts; like a gameshow contestant, she provides the connections and the narrative flow which explains some, negates others, and raises as many questions as it answers.
This is a reinterpretation of the series’ diegesis; the diegesis of a fictional text refers to all those things which are true for the characters, while non-diegetic material is all that which exists only for the audience. A film score is non-diegetic, while music playing on a jukebox in a scene is diegetic. A sudden close-up is non-diegetic, but the face is part of the diegesis. While the received reading of the show — the surface reading, the default assumption that this is Angela’s story and that what we see is real — posits a very inclusive diegesis, the Patty reading supposes that most of what we see exists only in Patty’s mind, and that she is likely aware that she is only daydreaming. It is diegetic in the same sense as Calvin’s conversations with Hobbes — who remains an inanimate stuffed animal to the other inhabitants of Calvin’s world, but who cannot be considered non-diegetic since he’s real for Calvin.
Diegesis was always one of my main interests in pop culture; I was always a fiction writer killing time in the academy.
My horror story “The Harrow” is the featured story in the September 2007 issue of Dark Fire Fiction.
Issue #5 of Explosive Runes (a free PDF download) includes my time traveling werewolf vs. zombies story “Ghost Town.”
My short story collection As Smart As You Are, He Was, And As Bad As He Is, He Was is now available at Lulu.com, as either a trade paperback or an ebook download.
The full table of contents is listed on that page, so I’ll just say a few things: this is what I think of as a “best of” collection. I’ve published much more than what’s in this volume, but I left aside anything published when I was young or that I simply don’t like anymore. Sure, some of them I would write differently if I wrote them now — but that’s true for things I wrote a month ago, too.
A few of the stories haven’t been published before. “The Ballad of Steven Rocketship” is a digression excerpted from a lengthy space opera epic I don’t expect to finish this decade. “Downbelow Domino” is excerpted from the novel of the same name, which I’ll say more about in the next few weeks.
The published stories include stories published at Strange Horizons and The Fortean Bureau, as well as harder to find work.
The latest issue of ChiZine includes my short story, “The Vine That Ate The South.”
That’d be kudzu, for the benefit of you Yankees.
My zombie story “The Cola Wars” is up at The Horror Library Slushpile.
Like “Everything Life Carries On Without” and an upcoming publication I’ll link to when it’s available, this is one of those stories I’m particularly happy to have had accepted because I’d decided to take a turn with the way that I was writing — and a lot of times, when you make those changes to your approach, the final product never finds an audience.
Most of what I’ve published isn’t available online, or isn’t anymore. These are the exceptions:
At Strange Horizons:
“The Minotaur,” the first of the Slumberland stories (an unofficial tag for my stories about a world in which an accident has caused everyone’s dreams to come to life).
“Start With Color,” the second Slumberland story, nicely reviewed here and there.
“You Can Walk On The Moon If The Mood’s Right.” This was originally, well, something that happened to me — sort of. I incorporated it into a novel about New Orleans, later extracted parts of the novel into this story, and have since reincorporated the story into a novella.
At The Fortean Bureau:
“David Bowie’s Mars Triptych.” I will forever love the kind and talented people at TFB for having published this story, which I thought damn near unmarketable. It is, in its simplest terms, fan fiction: “real person fan fiction,” which I’ve heard of but have never read other than, well, this story. Bowie’s been a bigger influence on my work than it may look like: I have a whole novel about a Bowie cover artist billed as the Second Coming of Christ. This story plays on the musician’s habit of reinventing himself, and his knack for suggesting worlds.
“The Kingfish and the Tunguska Machine.” I know Nikola Tesla alternate histories are a dime a dozen, but they’re so tempting. This one’s actually set after Tesla’s death, but there’s no question — as the title implies — that the setting’s point of divergence is his doing.
Elsewhere:
It isn’t available online, but Yog’s Notebook published my short story “Everything Life Carries On Without,” about a post-immortality Mississippi town, in their debut issue.