Return - With New Fiction!

 It's been a while - ages, in the life of the internet - but I am making a return to blogging, particularly to fiction blogging...I hope the world is ready for it!!

Joking aside, I was actually able to write a lot of new stuff this spring, mostly because of a fiction class I took, which resulted in a whole bunch of fragments, or germs that could metamorphose into stories, if given a little time and energy. In order to narrow down the options, and decide for myself which little story stubs are viable options and which are not (mixing metaphors like crazy, here!). I am going to post what I think are my four best fragments from the last few months, and ask for reader feedback about which should get longer and more evolved. The challenge for readers, should you chose to accept it: read the following passage, and the next three that will emerge over the course of this week, and post back to me which you think it the best.  I'm calling this "market research." I hope you tell me what you like!

Story Fragment 1:

At night she dreamed that she was underwater. The surface above her, like great translucent panes of marbled glass tinted in shades of steel and cloud-damp skies, wavered and buckled, bending the bars of light in oblique angles as they bored their way downwards. Piercing the aqua shadows, the rays of illumination seemed impervious to the shifting swirls of current. Where their light settled on her skin, though, it shifted and danced, so that patches of greenish glow fluttered over her limbs, revealing them, from moment to moment, as the pale color of abalone meat.

The movement of the water tugged at her body, gently, but with a great inertia, as if the mass of the oceans moved around her, and the depths of that great, liquid space spread down and out beyond her perceptions, extending on and on, until the far reaches lapped at the shores of distant continents. Looking up, she saw a bright light flare and expand above the jagged glass ceiling of the sea. It reached long fingers of light down to her, turning the water to clear gold. It was as if the sun was sinking into the sea. Any moment it would break the surface and sink down, obliterating her in a rush of steam as the world’s oceans boiled away. She opened her mouth to shout in fear--or possibly just excitement--and the water rushed in, choking her senses.

She awoke gasping, and powerfully thirsty. As often happened, she had curled into a tight and protective ball in her sleep, her head tucked forward between bent arms. In this instance, she had even pulled the rucked and rumpled sheet over her head. The thin cotton pressed against her eyes and mouth like a shroud as she struggled awake. Finally free, she lay for a moment uncovered in the darkness, and then pushed herself upright, bare feet reaching for the dusty floor.

The hot, dry air felt as gritty as the earth against her feet after the cool illusion of her dream. She pushed though it as she got up, padding out into the empty front room. It was almost as dark as her bedroom, with only a faint, amber glow from the ancient, incandescent light in the parking lot faintly delineating the shape of the window and outlining the harsh, aggressive angles of the shriveled cactuses growing up from below the level of the pane.

She went to the door and opened it to another breath of acrid air. The grit was even thicker on the concrete walk outside, and it rasped between her toes as she climbed the cinderblock stairway with its superfluous, overly ornate, cast-iron handrail, whose curlicues and twists of metal seemed both effete and out of place adorning the siding of a pay-by-the-hour motel, now defunct.

She reached the walkway along the top floor, and went past the line of close doors, their once-white paint flaking and chipping, and their numbers hanging askew, until she reached the fire escape ladder at the end. Via that rickety means, she finally attained the roof, and stood erect on the flat expanse of gravel and tar, looking out over the desolate expanse of desert, broken only occasionally by the irregular shapes of ruined buildings, skeleton palm trees, and shrubby bushes.

In the east, whose side of the motel was distinguished by the empty cavity of a dehydrated swimming pool, now half-choked with dust, her line of sight was less encumbered. And what buildings there were were more fragmentary, piles of rubble that hardly interrupted the expanse of flat land stretching to the horizon. At that seeming edge of the world, the division between earth and sky, a red glow began to make itself visible.

With a sigh, she eased herself down onto the edge of the roof, and sat, with her feet dangling, waiting for the sun to rise and explode the world into nothingness.

Geek Chic

We live in a post-Revenge of the Nerds era.  As the phenomenal success of certain famous (or infamous), ex-college dropout, computer whiz CEOs (not to mention every friend of yours from high school who taught himself to code in his basement and is now making more money than you) has shown, geekdom is no longer--if it ever really was--the province of a handful or outsiders (how many people are at ComicCon this weekend, again?). The myth that those who read fantasy, watch sci-fi movies, play video games, and pwn computers are doomed to scuffle on the the sidelines of life, reveling with a sort of abashed arrogance in their intelligence and sense of difference, needs to be finally put to rest. The Nerds have taken their Revenge already, and emerged into the light.

I don't think that this is a very controversial statement, and I am not writing this post to advocate any great increase in nerd pride (its out there, and I, for one, already have it).  Instead, want to make the point that in this era of nerd dominance (if I may be permitted the term), we need to acknowledge a change in image.

Let me put it simply: being a nerd (or a geek, or a dork), is not the same as not being cool. I will demonstrate with an example of what I see as the problem. I'll use visuals.

When I joined facebook (back in practically antediluvian times, when you had to have a .edu email address to do so, and things like farmville were only an irritating glimmer in some Zinga founder's eye), pretty much all you could do for entertainment was join groups that then did very little except for show up on your profile page. In a fit of self-description, I joined the group "I was a dorky kid." This was all well and good; it was true, and I was in no way ashamed of the fact. There was only one problem. This was the picture for the group:        

Now, I think it is a huge mistake to imagine that just because somebody is fully involved with the life of the mind, they can't be bothered to deal with the physical world don't know how to dress themselves. Put another way: Geeks can totally be stylesters.

With this in mind, I would like to present and example: Colin Temple of the British TV show "Primeval." Colin is totally dorky. He is a graduate student in computer science; he studies dinosaurs; he is so brilliant it makes it almost impossible for him to have a rational conversation; when you first meet him, he is writing a research paper about aliens...and yes, he is a little socially awkward. 

He is also, however, a totally snappy dresser. Colin definitely undergoes a transformation over the course of the show, becoming more grown-up, responsible, honest--in short, more of a man. However, he doesn't undergo this evolution at the cost of losing his own identity, and one of the things he keeps is his sense of style, which is personal, idiosyncratic, and very cool. It involves fedora hats, digital watches, striped vests, and fingerless gloves. Sometimes it threatens to slide over into hipster territory, but it never quite goes there. (Thank God.) Colin never stops looking like a geek, but also never stops looking original, and--in his own way--very stylish. It's awesome.

So it would conclude this post with a repetition of my rejection of the idea that dorky is code for sloppy and poorly put together.  Proud geeks of the world--and I know you're our there--reject tevas with socks; reject faded trenchcoats; reject black tee-shirts with anti-social messages. Embrace geek chic. I know you can do it.

Fantasy Faction Update

Hello blog-reading friends! (If you are still out there, that is...)  I wanted to let you know that although I have let this blog languish yet again, I have not ceased writing all together, and although many of my prose efforts are at the moment disappearing into the maelstrom known as cover-letter and resume-writing madness, I am still producing the occasional review or article for www.fantasy-faction-com.  Here, in fact, is a link to my latest review, China Mieville's tentacled creature from the deep, Kraken: an Anatomy:

"'Octopus! with lots of wriggly tentacles!' Cried the babies." (Kudos to whoever can name that quote source!!)

 http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/kraken-an-anatomy-by-china-mieville

I also have published some other reviews recently on Fantasy Faction.  I'm particularly proud of this one:

http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/the-historian-by-elizabeth-kostova

Oddly enough, I lot of what I have been reading and reviewing lately has to do with suckers of different sorts.  I'm not quite sure what this says about me as an individual...

For the love of God, Montressor...

[Note: I realize that in my last post, over a month ago (!) I promised updates from my vacation in the south, but none of us can escape the fickle humours of the Fate, and in this case she chose to cut the thread of my computer's existence at a most inconvenient moment.  I have been, as a result, technologically impaired for the past few weeks, which has interfered with the posting.  Nevertheless, here I am again]

I am in Paris for the weekend, mostly to do interviews for my article on SF/F in France for Locus (http://www.locusmag.com/), although I am also taking the time to do some tourist-ing while I'm here.  I have to say, though, I could have orchestrated the schedule of my activities a little better!  Today was a logistical nightmare--I ended up crossing the Seine six times, and trekking for what feels like miles.  My feet will feel it tonight.

Part of the reason I ended up walking so much is because I covered two km alone underground.  This was not just the result of having to change trains in large metro stations (although sometimes they feel as if there are kilometers of tunnels to get though), but because I finally was able to get to a tourist attraction that I have had on my list since the first time I was in Paris, namely, the city catacombs.

 I am not sure if I can claim that my interest in the catacombs was a historical one, or if it was the less high-brow product of reading too many books about vampires in the last year.  It's true that it's a fairly morbid thing to want to see.  I had not realized how creepy it would be until I actually got down into the ossiary itself.

The catacombs were once the site of the Parisian quarries (so, apparently, you can go to the city and find employment in a quarry, like the boy in the temperance song), but when mining was outlawed in the city, the excavations were mostly filled in, and the remaining tunnels were designated as the depository for the bones from various city graveyards, which had been causing poor health conditions in more populous parts of the city.  To remedy this problem, they dug up all the bodies from their first resting places, threw the bones higgldy-piggldy in carts, and rolled them across town, draped in black cloth, to the site of the old quarry.  This began in the early 1780s, and I have to say that the idea of carts full of skeletons being trundled across Paris at that time is a potent auger of the slaughter that was going to come with the Revolution and the Terror.  On the other hand, it might not have stood out so much.  Death was never as hidden from view then as it is now, especially in the States.

Now, the catacombs are a standard tourist destination, and you have to queue for at least half an hour as they let people descend the long, spiraling staircase a few at a time, to wander along a set path through low-ceilinged tunnels (it's definitely not for the claustrophobic), and across the chambers of stacked bones, ornamented with various carved quotations expressing morbid Victorian-ish sentiments about the fate that awaits us all.  It's easy to imagine tourists of the the late 19th century tracing the same path, beneath the dripping walls, shivering and indulging their taste for the macabre.  Less easy to imagine, although the shadow of their past existence is more troubling, are the lives of the people whose anonymous bones line the walls.  There is no way to tell who is who, although in the course of the catacombs' completion, cemetaries were emptied that contained artists and poets, saints, and terrorists and victims of the revolution.  The man in the iron mask is even supposed to be there, somewhere.

Cre-e-e-e-epy

Much Belated First Post from an Adventurous Winter Vacation

I meant for this post to go up yesterday but, in what has been the latest in a series of technological crises, my computer became indisposed and is now languishing in an inert state until I am able to get it to a repair shop.  This was doubly inconvenient, not only because it happened on a Saturday afternoon, just in time for the shops to be shut for 36 hours, but because I am now in Spain, where I am not only abroad, but I do not even speak the language.  I am now reduced to internet café usage, at least for the next day or two, and since I only have 10 minutes remaining of my paid time slot, this post will not even be able to begin to cover my travels over the last week.

One of the nice things about working for the government of a socialized state (and there are benefits, a fact I sometimes forget when I am dealing with all the bureaucracy), is that I get a serious amount of vacation time.  I am currently in the middle of my two week winter vacation (not to be confused with spring or Christmas vacations).  I have been using my time to go south, where it is warmer and there are at least hints that spring is coming.  My traveling companion and I have been making a tour of south-western French towns--a day in Montpellier, a day in Nîmes, a day in Carcassone, a day in Perpignan.  Each one has been more Mediterranean-feeling than the last, and I am starting to believe all of the 19th-century travelogue clichés about the heart opening up in the south where there is more warmth and sunlight.

Most of our sightseeing has focused on ruins and historic buildings--the Roman arena in Nîmes and the fairy-tale medieval citadel of Carcassone.  I was in the middle of organizing my (or rather Miriam´s) photos for display when my computer failed me yesterday, so a visible component of my report will have to wait for a later posting.

The Internet Ate My Homework

...I'm not quite sure what happened this year, but I seem to have fallen under the sway of the movement that has been taking my generation by storm for the past ten years, namely, wasting time on the internet (dun dun DUN).  Actually, I probably do know what happened:  I graduated from college and stopped having to spend every waking minute on school-related activities.  Then I moved to a small town, got job that is only part-time, and discovered tv tropes wiki (click if you dare; you risk losing untold hours of your life).  Of course, I had about this much free time when I was dancing, especially the first year...but I didn't have an internet connection then, or even a computer--something which boggles my mind now, when I think about it.

I am doing my best to keep the procrastination monster bound and gagged, or at least held on a very short leash.  But it's a slippery slope.  I think, "Oh, I'll just go over to tor.com for a minute or two," and before I know it I end up clicking on some link, and ending up at some completely random (and yet fascinating) destination.  It does lead to some pretty rad discoveries (see below), but my sense of myself as a serious person with a long attention span and (any) ability to focus is somewhat shaken.

This is pretty accurate compared to my perspective...

...This one less so, but they're both pretty rad.

I have been able to crawl my way up out of the abyss frequently enough that I am still keeping up with the things I need (or, in the case of this blog, want) to do with my time, but you know what they say, "The first step is admitting you have a problem..."

Publication!

I have become a contributing writer to Fantasy Faction, and online forum for fantasy reviews, commentary, and fan talk.  Check out my first article, a tribute to the late Brian Jacques: http://fantasy-faction.com/2011/brian-jacques-an-appreciation.