Paper Fruit

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, as a few elements were finalized—and some stuff may still change, of course—but I could not be happier about this:

Click to enlarge and bring up all the cool little details!

So, yeah. I love my publishing company! Many thanks to my editor Cameron Pierce and my cover designer Matthew Revert. Seriously, I don’t know if I could love this any more!

Oh man. October seems frighteningly close and yet so far away…

Dad passed away. I got there in time to say goodbye, and help Hospice as much as I could, and be there for my mom, who handled things like a champ … but that’s about it. He went into a coma the day after I arrived, and did not come out of it again.

His last conversation was with my mom, and I’m glad they were able to say a few last things to one another. And I’m glad he went peacefully in the end. He deserved it, after fighting an unwinnable battle for 30 months.

I miss him like hell. It was strange having so many family friends gathered together without Dad there. I don’t know if I’d ever felt an absence so keenly before. He was always so very present during gatherings like that, keeping people on schedule, teasing everyone and taking it in equal measure, laughing, telling stories, cooking amazing food, and handling any and all situations that required knowledge of which roads to drive on, what technology to use, or which cars to take. And he loved it. One of the speakers at his service remarked upon how much Dad enjoyed everything about life, citing as an example his enthusiasm over even the little things, like buying a new kind of light bulb. It’s so true, and it made me smile—as did hearing his former co-workers at the Tampa Courthouse giggling over my dad’s love of his pedometer (“I’ve gotten in 12,000 steps today!”) and always eating the same sandwich for lunch every day (“It’s good. Why change?). And I know Dad would have wanted us to be smiling. He loved to laugh, and to make people laugh, too.

I think it always surprised him to see how much he was loved by so many different kinds of people. Dad always thought of himself as being a gruff, matter-of-fact kind of person, the guy you’d go to when you wanted to hear how it really was. And we who loved him saw him as that, yes, but also as an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, a photographer, a brilliant financial and legal mind, a great appreciator of the natural world, a husband and a father, a mentor, and a friend. And that doesn’t even begin to cover it. He was the definition of unique. I loved him so much, and still do, and always will.

This has certainly been a strangely Lovecraftian year for me! I’m not sure when it began, but so far I’ve placed three Lovecraftian stories, attended/participated in the Lovecraft Film Festival/CthulhuCon, and then this October, my sort-of kind-of Lovecraftian collection, A Pretty Mouth, will be coming out through LFP (a press that, by the bye, has been in the news quite a bit recently! Super-proud of my publisher and my fellow LF author Patrick Wensink).

The first Lovecraftian story I placed is forthcoming in The Book of Cthulhu II, and is one of the pieces that will be in A Pretty Mouth. Super-stoked to work again with Ross Lockhart, who rocks. But since then…

Nate Pederson, working for PS Publishing, is putting together one of the coolest concept anthologies I’ve ever heard of. I was a bit nervous when he contacted me, frankly, but it turns out I acquitted myself well enough that once again my Lovecraftiana is hanging out with stories written by my heroes and peers. Whee!

The Starry Wisdom Library …. well, Nate puts it better than me here:

What if, on the eve of disbanding, the Church of Starry Wisdom organized a rare book auction of the various tomes in their collection? What if the accompanying auction catalogue was privately published and privately circulated, disappearing for over a century until its recent rediscovery in the archives of Miskatonic University?  What if we could read the 1877 original today?

My new (and first) anthology for PS Publishing is just that: a “facsimile” publication of the 19th century auction catalogue, entitled “The Starry Wisdom Library: being a catalogue of the unsurpassed occult library held by the recently disbanded Church of Starry Wisdom, offered for sale at private auction Midsummer’s Eve, 1877 by Messrs Pent & Serenade of Arkham, Mass.” The anthology will be presented and designed exactly like a 19th century book auction catalogue, with entries describing the major books in the Church’s collection, accompanied by essays from “noted scholars” on the history of each dread tome. The “noted scholars” will be contemporary horror and speculative fiction authors.  Their contributions will be similar in length and content to Lovecraft’s own “History of the Necronomicon”, a slightly edited version of which will also appear in the catalogue.

Fuck yes! And fuck yes to Liv Rainey-Smith illustrating it. I was privileged to see her art first-hand at the Lovecraft Film Festival, and it’s perfect. A triple fuck-yes to the list of contributors, among them Ramsey Campbell, Michael Cisco, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Livia Llewellyn, Nick Mamatas, Joe Pulver, and Genevieve Valentine. More on the way, too, from what I hear!

My book was the Hieron Aigypton, one of those myriad way-obscure eldritch tomes that had only the briefest of descriptions: Written by “Anacharsis” around 200 BC, it contained a description of the dreaded ritual called miri nigri, and the “Revelations of Anacharsis.” This vagueness allowed me to do so much with the project that was self-directed and awesome, and I had a lot of fun with it. I’m proud of my piece and I know the whole anthology will be cool and beautiful.

My third Lovecraftian placement this year is my Victorian pornography/Lovecraft mashup about wanton fornication, magic drugs, and tentacles, “Holiday at Two Hoots.” It will be appearing in the anthology Coming Together, Arm in Arm in Arm, a charity anthology of tentacle porn. Proceeds will benefit Oceana, an organization devoted to conservation and protection of the world’s oceans. Fuck yes! I’m really happy to be in this, and I hope anyone who has enjoyed anything I’ve written that’s even mildly naughty picks it up. It’s for a good cause, after all. Here’s the contributor list, and the article about the antho that was featured on io9.

Very happy and proud to be a part of all these project, and I’m very happy indeed to see how beautifully A Pretty Mouth is coming along. I should be able to reveal the cover soon. I’ve seen a draft and it’s stunning. I can’t wait to show the world! But I must, as with all things.

That’s all for now. Be well, and healthy—and read lots of Lovecraft!

I conquered my second 14er last Tuesday: Mt. Bierstadt, the mountain that conquered me this past January. I went up maybe a third of the way with Courtney Schaffer and a few other friends, but the snow, cold, and need to slog through two miles of fresh powder along what, in summer, is just the road up to the parking area, made things a little hairy.

When it’s not freezing cold and snowy as hell, Bierstadt is no big deal:

Bierstadt is the mountain on the right. If you click on that picture you can see a little protuberance on the left-ish side of that big round mountain; that’s the summit. It’s a short hike (maybe 7 miles round-trip), and it’s essential in the summer to get up early to do it. Bierstadt’s closeness to Denver and relative ease makes it very popular, and the threat of thunderstorms in the summer means it’s much safer to start early. My hiking partner Jesse and I met up at four thirty A.M. and hit the trail at six thirty. We were not the first up there by any means.

To hike Bierstadt, you go through that valley on a series of bridges over the marshland, then wind up the ridge that’s in the sunlight in that picture. After that you head up up up but the ascent is never particularly dramatic. You do, however, reach one heck of a false summit:

Neither of those bumps is the top. Bwahaha!

Still, the absence of any hard or technical climbing to the summit makes it a breeze to get up that final ascent. You just kind of find patches of dirt and stable rocks to mountain-goat/scrabble up the whole way. I managed it easily in my Vibrams (the hiking kind).

Then you’re at the top! Someone had brought a poster to document their trip, and were passing it around:

Here’s the view from the top of where we’d come from. If you look to the right of the lake you can see a little loop of road. That’s the parking lot!

The back of Bierstadt:

Epic, amiright? That’s why people do 14ers if they’re not into the machismo aspect of the sport.

So then you go back down. No big deal, right? Well, it wouldn’t have been except that I misstepped and sprained my friggin’ ankle about a quarter of the way down. Well, I think I sprained it; it might be a bone bruise. Whatever it is, it’s still hurting. Whatever, anyways, the injury meant I had to hike about three miles back to the car. Here’s about where I sprained it:

That looks far, but it’s really just off the summit. 14ering makes for weird perspective.

The injury was not comfortable, and yet … it’s kind of awesome knowing the amount of pain I can endure and still get myself to safety, if things ever got really real on a hike. It was a hell of a lot easier with Jesse’s help though, mad props to him for tolerantly inching his way down the mountain with me in my hobbled state.

I’m off to Florida, and sea-level tomorrow, where I will continue rehabilitating my ankle!

I can never get to these con posts in a timely fashion!

Anyways, ReaderCon was awesome! I’d never been before, but certain people, among them Nick Mamatas, Geoffrey Goodwin, Michael Cisco, Caitlin Kiernan, Jeff VanderMeer, Livia Llewellyn, Nathan Ballingrud, Mike Marano, and John Langan made it an awesome and memorable experience. There were many, many others—lists like these only serve to exclude—but those mentioned above really made me feel welcome and at-home the whole time. Also I got a tutorial on push-hands and Chen-style Tai Chi from Nick and Michael Cisco which was kind of the coolest thing ever.

I only saw two panels: One on Frankenstein (that, sadly, was ruined by the moderator being a blowhard and a jerk to Genevieve Valentine), and one on “Wet Dreams and Nightmares” which was awesome and weirdly raunchy. Otherwise I worked the Prime Books and Clarkesworld tables, wandered around, and tried to find food I could eat. On that front, the first day and a half were pretty dire, but Geoffrey took me to a Trader Joe’s on the second night which enabled me to get provisions for the rest of the con. Oh, and Genevieve totally brought me a vegan brownie from the Tiptree bake sale because she is amazing.

Now I’m home again, catching up with reality. I had/have some deadlines going on, but the Major Thing I wanted to accomplish before ReaderCon was accomplished. Yay for that.

More anon, including pictures of the 14er hike I did on Tuesday that left me with a sprained ankle!

I’ve got A Thing That Must Be Finished that I’m working on right now, and it’s taking up all my brain-hours, so it’s not that this blog is defunct, it’s just that I’m super-busy. Anyways, I love you all. If I met you/saw you at Denver Comic Con, thanks for making it a great experience! Special shout-outs go to Jason Heller, Carrie Vaughn, and Classic 60’s Batman. You know who you are. I had a fabulous time, and the Strong Ladies-themed panel that I was on was certainly the best panel I’ve ever been on.

Bye! Later!

Well, okay, I can show you TWO of the covers I’ve seen in the last few weeks. One—the cover for A Pretty Mouth, which is currently undergoing copy edits and shaping up to be the weird, pervy, nerdy book I always dreamed of one day publishing and thus confirming everything everybody always thought about me—is not finalized, and so I can’t show it. Yet. But omfg, it’s amazing. I … might have cried a little when I saw it.

But! There are two other totally rad covers I can show you. First up, from Innsmouth Free Press, here’s the cover for Fungi. I think they revealed this whilst I was traveling in Florida. Check it!

So fuck yes Team Innsmouth! This is obviously insanely cool. Super-stoked to be in this alongside so many fine peoples.

Next up! The first story I sold this year, “The Poison-Well,” will be appearing in The Lion and the Aardvark, forthcoming from Stone Skin Press:

“Aesop’s Modern Fables” is pretty self-explanatory as to what this project is. They aren’t all retellings—mine is original, for example—but all are supposed to be Aesopian stories, relevant to the modern world. I mean, as an armchair classicist, I must say that there are plenty of Aesop’s fables that are still relevant to the modern world, of course, but yeah. Anyways, “The Poison-Well” is sort of more … let’s say deeply misanthropic Beatrix Potter than Aesop, so I’m glad editor Robin D. Laws thought it was a good fit!

Cover mania! Yay!

And seriously, I cannot wait to unveil the sweet, adorable cover for my sweet, adorable little book…

Man, what a great con. Probably the best con I’ve ever been to! And not just because Portland is the best city ever: Because the people were all really nice, the programming was fabulous, and most of the films were excellent.

It’s been over a week since I left, but I’ve been in and out of hospitals and trying to help my mother as much as I can while my dad’s going through some challenges with his pancreatic cancer. So rather than doing an articulate, fresh-off-the-high-of-awesomeness post, here were the highlights:

• Meeting people. I know I’m going to leave someone off and feel bad, but here goes. I got to meet my editor Ross Lockhart from Night Shade, my editor Cameron Pierce from LFP, his wife Kirsten (who’s my copy editor for A PRETTY MOUTH and she is fabulous), and various sundry people I’d only met online before, like Andrew Fuller (the programming chair for the con), Wendy Wagner, who is even more amazing IRL, which I did not think possible, Gwen Callahan, who runs the Arkham Bazaar and also the con itself I believe, Wilum H. Pugmire, a writer I’ve respected for many a year, Cody Goodfellow, who is a hoot, Jay Lake who I met but briefly whilst we were co-paneling, E. Catherine Tobler, who is a Colorado local who I met in Portland for the first time, Jeff Burk, a fellow Bizarro person, Rose O’Keefe, the publisher/CEO at Eraserhead, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, my editor at Innsmouth Free Press. Whew! But seriously, they were all amazing and fabulous and I loved meeting them, getting drinks and eating foods, and generally having a good time. Thanks all of you for making me feel so cool and welcome and one of the group!

• Watching Stuff. Stuff like Wilum’s reading (fabulous!), stuff like the Editors’ Panel where I got to see Ross, Silvia, E. Catherine, Jeff, and a few other people talk awesomely about publishing. Oh, and movies of course. So many movies! I got to watch The Whisperer In Darkness, which was goddamn fantastic. Wow wow wow. Everyone should see this, it was well-produced, beautifully scripted, the special effects were great, the music was amazing, wow. I was genuinely creeped out at times, and while Lovecraft is great at cosmic horror, he doesn’t really give me, you know, the heebie-jeebies so that’s an accomplishment. I also saw a lot of the shorts, which were on the whole awesome. I liked Coda, a short film the aforementioned Andrew worked on, Re-Animate Her, Black Pharoah, GAMMA, Bedtime for Timmy, The Shadow out of Time, and the fabulous (if baffling) clip from The Evil Clergyman, part of an anthology that is being released later this year. I had mixed feelings about Monsters, I guess, because of a lot of reasons, but it had fabulous special effects so I came away feeling neutral about it. Really the only total dud for me was It’s In the Blood, which I watched because it had Lance Henriksen in it, but oh, dear. Full disclosure: I’m never going to be won over by the premise of “father and son go into the woods to figure out their feelings and talk about dude stuff” so maybe the film just wasn’t for me, but the graphic rape of the only female character, and menacing non-Caucasian villain didn’t help me come away with many positive feelings. Extra points taken off for Lance pretending to be a girl having an orgasm for maybe five exceedingly uncomfortable minutes, and the line “if you want to become a man you have to kill the boy inside you.” Or something. Close enough. But you know, it won an award, so maybe it just wasn’t for me. Fair enough. Anyways, my meh over that film aside, the movies were by and large excellent. John got to see Die Farbe, which he said was awesome, so yay!

• Foods. Voodoo Doughnuts. Sizzle Pie. Hungry Tiger Too. Sweet Pea. Blossoming Lotus. Some coffee shop with fabulous sandwiches that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of. Some pub with great beer and, unexpectedly, a vegan pot pie. More Voodoo Doughnuts. Fuck yes.

• Miscellany. The VIP reception. Getting to hang out with everyone at The Moon and Sixpence and Tony Starlight’s and the Lovecraft Bar during afterparty stuff. Hanging out with Bizarro peoples. Getting a Miskatonic University t-shirt. Signing stock at Powell’s. And doing it all with my husband. John had never come to a con with me before, and getting to introduce him to people was amazing.

I want to come back to the Lovecraft Film Festival every year I can. It was so, so fun, and I feel so lucky and honored that I was invited to come speak and read and just simply hang out with such fabulous people. Thank you everyone who was involved in making it such an amazing experience. I miss you so much already—but hope to see you next year!

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon are happening this weekend in Portland, Oregon, and I shall be there, doing things!

Saturday at 3 PM I’ll be paneling on “Women and Gender Roles in Dark Fiction” along with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Scott Connors, and Robert Price

Saturday at 8 PM I’ll be paneling on “Writing New Horrors” with Cody Goodfellow, Edward Morris, Jay Lake, and Andrew S. Fuller

Sunday at 3 PM I’ll be doing a reading alongside Andrew S. Fuller. I’ll likely read something from A Pretty Mouth, the title novella for my collection forthcoming this fall from LFP.

The rest of the time I plan on being at various screenings, bars, and restaurants, along with my husband John. I’m excited about seeing The Whisperer in Darkness on the big screen, as well as a bunch of other crazy stuff such as new footage from a lost Jeffrey Combs film called of all things The Evil Clergyman.

So anyways, if you’re there, say hi! My hair is brown again, though, so don’t look for some blond lady.

Starfest/DigiFest/HorrorFest/etc is this weekend! If you’re going to be there, say hi. Here’s where I’ll be:

Friday, 6PM: Asian Cult Cinema Panel

Saturday, 3:30: Writing the Dark Side

Sunday, 12 noon: Multimedia Reading w/Jesse Bullington. We two are collaborating for ours as we’ll be reading our co-authored story “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus.” If you’re looking for it in the program, David Boop, Mike Hance, and Quincy Allen will also be reading.

But! Here’s what you really came here for today: Tahini Blondies!

So I wanted halva but I couldn’t be bothered to buy a candy thermometer. Thus: Tahini Blondies. Adapted from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar, these are amazing tahini-ful squares of sesame bliss. Not for tahini-haters. If you’re on the fence, try ’em—they just might change your world. Or at least your ambivalence about tahini.

Tahini Blondies

3/4 cup tahini (I used Joya)

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1 cup brown sugar

1/4 c. non-dairy milk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1  cup all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

2 tsp sesame seeds (I used a mix of white and black)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease an 8×8  baking dish.

In a mixing bowl, use a fork to vigorously mix  together tahini, oil and sugar. Stir in milk and vanilla. Stir in  flour, salt and baking powder. The batter will be very very thick and won’t spread on its own. Transfer to baking pan and press it into place. Sprinkle on the sesame seeds and lightly press them into the top.

Bake for 22-27 minutes, the edges should be just barely brown. The top will appear soft, that’s okay. Remove  from oven and cool completely before slicing. I bolded that because they are super gooey if you don’t. Also, I had to go the whole 27 because of altitude, so check yours at 22.