Paper Fruit

There’s a really neat interview with Ross Lockhart, the fine gentleman who edited The Book of Cthulhu, up on Omnivoracious! Go check it out.

These semi-confessional accounts of horror, terror, and the unknown inspired by Lovecraft are…. oddly inspirational and life-affirming. It’s not just that nothing really makes you appreciate Something like life more than being chased by some oozy Shadowy Nothing through a dark forest strewn with odd ruins. A deeper impulse seemed at work, too, in many, many of the stories. Why, there was even what appeared to be useful advice for the modern reader!

Could it be that the lessons taught by Lovecraft were less mechanistic and existential, less hideous and ritualistic, than I had thought? I had to get to the bottom of this strange phenomenon—by interviewing the editor…

Fun times! Thanks to Jeff VanderMeer, and to Ross, of course!.

Over at Strange Horizons, I reviewed Sensation, Nick Mamatas’s latest novel. I liked it a lot! I tried to keep the spoilers to a minimum, so, you know. Go check it out! And they have a new comment system, apparently, so you can leave your own stories of the time parasitic wasps poisoned your brain and you started thinking you liked natto and got really into macrame and murdering industrialists.

1. I went camping last week. We hiked a little bit, and I read, ate snacks, sunbathed on rocks. The first night I cooked some stew over a campfire in my dutch oven, the second night we toasted tofu pups. I saw what I think was a long-tailed weasel (that’s not my photo, but I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of creature I saw), a mouse (who was trying to creep on our snacks), a bunny, and a bunch of birds. It was pretty awesome, except lots of the free campsites around Nederland have been trashed by careless assholes who leave toilet paper and broken glass everywhere. Pack it in, pack it out, folks!

2. The Book of Cthulhu is shipping! I received my contributor copies and it’s really beautiful, heavy, and filled with so much excellent Lovecraftian fiction! And my story.

3. I finally read Ender’s Game and came away with mixed feelings. I really liked the ending, which I should have predicted but didn’t, but getting to that ending wasn’t all I’d hoped. After reading a bunch of Card’s short stories I had high hopes for my first novel-length trip with him, but it just wasn’t my thing. Also some of the discussion of Jewry, which I think was also maybe supposed to be a comment on affirmative action, made me deeply uncomfortable. In terms of “awful stuff done to children” and “military SF” books I was more into Shade’s Children and Starship Troopers, but I have to give credit where credit is due. The ending of Ender’s Game got to me big time. Even if the pacing, the plotting, and all the female characters (all meaning, um, two) left me a bit cold.

3. I watched Drive Angry and The Expendables. I enjoyed Drive Angry, even though I thought it could have been a better film with just a few mild tweaks; The Expendables was a big pile of turds that disappointed me in every way. I just don’t know what to make of action movies these days. ::shakes cane:: Seriously, though, if your lady characters make me long for the liberated, progressive days of, say, The Running Man, you’re doing it wrong. The Expendables, as was pointed out to me, was less a movie and more “a patent attempt to capture the audience of middle aged men who wanted to reprise the films of their youth,” and “meant to be set on the mental mantlepiece and admired by those who are prone to gulled by it.” Fair enough, maybe, but I dunno. I’ve seen a lot of those aforementioned films, and many of them had scripts where the lady characters had better roles than that of “holy saint who drives a pickup truck” or “cheating slut.” On a different note, I’ve heard a lot of shitty action movie dialogue but never anything as bad as “I’ll have to have you over for dinner sometime … IN ABOUT A THOUSAND YEARS” or whatever it is that Arnold says to the bizarrely swollen-faced and blush-enhanced Stallone. Ugh.

4. I’m finishing up a short story and within sight of the finish line with my novel.

5. To console myself over being unable to attend WFC this year, I’m making an epic Halloween costume. So epic I already started on it so it will be done in time.

6. I will be attending MileHiCon, with more details to come as I receive them. Not sure if I’ll be involved with programming or not yet, but hopefully I will!

7. I’ve switched up my exercise routine lately, and now have started working on endurance, body strength, and addressing a few long-term issues with my body, such as my weak spine/lower back. The new routine includes a lot of different kinds of pull ups, push ups, squats, lunges, core work, and cardio. I’ve also started running a mile a few times a week, for the first time in my life. Running is still not my favorite, and I’m not sure if I’m actually getting better at it, but whatever! Maybe I am getting better, since today I ran a mile in 12 minutes 13 seconds, which isn’t the worst. Still. Ugh.

That’s … about it.

My parents are coming into town for Parental Invasion 2011 tomorrow, which should be a fun rumpus (frumpus? funpus? never mind) of hiking, Denver Botanical Gardening, taking them to restaurants for delicious food, and hanging out, but in preparation for such, I’ve been nosing to the grindstone and keeping my head down. Thus a lone hand-wave at the internets to self-promote, but so it goes. I’ll be more interesting post-visit, I swear!

That said, I did come up for air to e-chat with one Mr. John Hornor Jacobs, a gentleman of quality. I met John at WHC 2011 and I’m also currently reading his book, Southern Gods. It’s super-good so far, some real southern gothic Lovecraftiana. Big win just for combining those three words, and the execution is tight.

John, you see, is currently running a feature on his blog called WHY I’M BADASS and for some reason he picked me to participate. You should go check out my entry as well as all the others, since if you comment on any of the interviews this week, you’ll be entered into a contest to win one of two signed copies of Southern Gods. Pretty friggin sweet! WARNING: if you are a relative of mine and/or are easily squicked out by discussions of certain erotic playthings I might own, you should definitely skip this one.

So that’s about it for now, except I sold a story to Future Lovecraft, the companion volume to Historical Lovecraft. It’s called “Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee” and is sort of a response/love letter to Sonya Dorman’s “Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird” from Dangerous Visions, a Harlan Ellison-edited anthology from aeons ago. Many thanks to Silvia and Paula for including it! The title of both stories is taken from “Burnt Norton,” the first of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Full text here.

I got behind on Boot Camp blogging, but as I just finished up my final workout for the program I wanted to commemorate it, because wowza! I don’t need a scale or a tape measure to tell me how good I feel or how proud I am of myself for sticking with it. I conquered this Boot Camp, even with my week off to go hiking and play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with friends.

Speaking of, though, before I talk Boot Camp, during that week of hiking, I totes summited a 14er. Here’s me with the mountain:

Woo! Mt. Bross is on the far left of the photograph, and obviously that’s me in the stylish hat. The hike was beastly beyond reason, 8 hours of sweat and glory.

Anyways, over the course of this eight weeks, I completed every single workout I was assigned, and I also:

—Hiked Green Mountain (my goal for the summer–ticked off the list weeks ago, actually)

—Summited a 14er

—Swam a mile

WOO. So now that I’m at the end, I’m looking forward to new goals and new kinds of workouts! Since 5 out of my 8 weeks of Boot Camp were circuits, I’m really looking forward to lifting weights again. Though I confess I did come around to the circuit training, in the end.

But alas, I am super-busy and that is all for now, except for a few pictures from my stellar vacation, and also the cover of The Book of Cthulhu (plus bonus banner by the inimitable John Hornor Jacobs, whose book, Southern Gods, I am currently very much enjoying–I got an ARC, that’s right!)

Check it:

ME ME ME:

Fun Times:

You guys. YOU GUYS. Ross Lockhart’s ToC is up for The Book of Cthulhu, coming out through Night Shade, and OMFG OMFG OMFG:

Caitlin R. Kiernan – Andromeda among the Stones
Ramsey Campbell – The Tugging
Charles Stross – A Colder War
Bruce Sterling – The Unthinkable
Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Flash Frame
W. H. Pugmire – Some Buried Memory
Molly Tanzer – The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins
Michael Shea – Fat Face
Elizabeth Bear – Shoggoths in Bloom
T. E. D. Klein – Black Man With A Horn
David Drake – Than Curse the Darkness
Charles R. Saunders – Jeroboam Henley’s Debt
Thomas Ligotti – Nethescurial
Kage Baker – Calamari Curls
Edward Morris – Jihad over Innsmouth
Cherie Priest – Bad Sushi
John Hornor Jacobs – The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
Brian McNaughton – The Doom that Came to Innsmouth
Ann K. Schwader – Lost Stars
Steve Duffy – The Oram County Whoosit
Joe R. Lansdale – The Crawling Sky
Brian Lumley – The Fairground Horror
Tim Pratt – Cinderlands
Gene Wolfe – Lord of the Land
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. – To Live and Die in Arkham
John Langan – The Shallows
Laird Barron – The Men from Porlock

Sooooo yeah, the ha ha. . . ha? you hear is the sound of that aforementioned nervous laughter, because unlike Théoden King, I am not so sure I’ll be going into this company unashamed. Also, I have been assured by none other than Mr. Lockhart himself that “if I like the TOC, just wait ’til [I] see the cover…” which means I will probably explode and thus never get to hold the book in my hands.

Seriously, though, I can’t even? Charles Stross’ “A Colder War” is one of the finest pieces of Lovecraftian horror I’ve ever read, and I’ve devoured writing by nearly everyone else on the ToC that has made me shiver and gnash my teeths with awe. That the Twins are rubbing their filthy shoulders with Michael Shea, whose In Yana, The Touch of Undying is so completely insanely awesome I, again, can’t even, fills me with joy and fear. And I would be remiss without mentioning that I owe a debt to ToC-mate Silvia Moreno-Garcia, without whose confidence I could never have submitted my story for consideration, as she was kind enough to select it for its initial publication in Historical Lovecraft.

Whew. Whew! This is an awesome last-day-of-internet access (tomorrow I’m heading off into the wild woods for a week-or-so of role playing, hiking, and—likely—total insanity), but while you’re all busy missing me (ahahaha) why don’t you console yourselves by seeing what Jesse’s been up to over on his blog (getting awesome reviews, posting amazing covers for his international editions, discussing Danish directors he enjoys, you know—the usual), or checking out a copy of Jeff VanderMeer/S.J. Chambers’ tremendously gorgeous The Steampunk Bible, or going out and reading some of the amazing fiction penned by those badasses listed above! Caitlin R. Kiernan had a kick-butt reprint up on Lightspeed a while ago, Charles Saunders’ Imaro is pretty much the awesomest (also, his story from this anthology can be found over at Innsmouth Free Press), Joe R. Lansdale’s The Magic Wagon is a FTW piece of weird Western-ry, and Silvia Moreno-Garica had a truly truly truly outrageous story up on Fantasy a while ago.

Gots to run! Oh, and I’m still kicking ass with my Virtual Boot Camp, my latest triumph being hiking Green Mountain base to summit. Woo-hoo!!

x-posted to my LJ

A few random things of import:

• Historical Lovecraft doesn’t yet have any reviews up on Amazon, and I haven’t seen any reviews around the intarwebs except for a nice one in Italian. If you’ve read it and have things to say about it (good things, I hope!) please consider taking the time to write something, somewhere, please! The Kindle edition is only $3.99, which is a ridiculously low price for as much as the anthology contains.

• My friend, and co-worker at Fantasy, T.J. McIntyre, put together a charity anthology to help  support the Red Cross’s efforts to aid tornado-ravaged Alabama. You can purchase Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction for $2.99 at SmashWords, or for the Kindle. It has 46 stories by writers such as An Owomoyela, Mari Ness, Darby Harn, and T.J. himself, so this is a good deal and an easy way of helping out.

• If you’re interested in Finnish Weird or Finnish Scifi/Fantasy, check out this roundup of neato links to such things, provided by Jeff VanderMeer!

• Speaking of the VanderMeer, he interviewed my ace dawgg Jesse over at Omnivoracious about his latest, The Enterprise of Death. If you’re sitting on the fence about getting a copy, check it out, and then go and read the actual novel!

Anyways, in personal news, I’m still doing Sandra’s Virtual Boot Camp. Going to the gym was totally kicking my ass this week, but I still did everything. I’m sore and tired, and ready for a rest-day! More on such things as sweating next week.

In personal news, I’ve been. . . kind of maybe a little burned out on my novel lately. But, in the way of things, I took a little time off to write a short story this week, and I feel inspired again! Woo! So once I power through some things on my to-do list, I’m back to it. I’m actually excited to get to open the document, which is an improvement. We (the novel and I) have been fighting, and thus avoiding each other. I dunno why—I’m totally in the home stretch—but hey, it happens. I’m energized to get back to it, and all it took was writing a little bit of awfulness. It might even be good! I’m not sure yet.

How you doin?

x-posted to my LJ

First, I’d like to thank Molly Tanzer for hosting my guest-blogging effort on behalf of Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time, and editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia for arranging the guest-blogging exchange. And a more general thank-you to all the wonderful authors with whose works my story is sharing space in the pages of Historical Lovecraft for making it such a wonderfully frightening anthology.

When I think about discussing my short story “Red Star, Yellow Sign,” the first thing that comes to mind is how it wouldn’t even have been possible for me to write it a few years ago. In fact, it might be better to say it wouldn’t even have been thinkable to write it as I did, with Nikolai Yezhov as the protagonist and principal point-of-view character.

I originally studied Russian in the late 1980’s, when our knowledge of that period of the history of the Soviet Union was still fragmentary, and largely the product of either Soviet propaganda or the accounts of defectors. As a result, I got the standard view of the time, which portrayed Yezhov as a psychopathic monster who gleefully fabricated cases against people he knew to be innocent, motivated entirely by bloodlust reflective of a lifelong moral emptiness. After all, nothing much was known about him prior to his sudden appearance as the head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), so it was easy to assume the worst.

After the fall of the USSR, more information began to come out, including first-person accounts by people who knew him before the Terror, including Anna Larina, widow of Nikolai Bukharin. In spite of having suffered terribly as a result of her husband’s destruction in the Terror, and thus having every reason to hate Yezhov, in her autobiography This I Cannot Forget, Larina recalls him warmly, telling stories of how Yezhov and her late husband joked about having the same forename and patronymic, Nikolai Ivanovich, in the years prior to the Terror, when neither of them had any reason to expect they’d end up on opposite sides in a social cataclysm.

Then there was the story of Yezhov’s daughter, who after his fall from grace was sent to a hellish orphanage and subsequently has endured a lifetime of poverty and social rejection (she is as of this writing still alive, elderly, ailing, and crushingly poor). Generally the children of brutal killers recall their childhoods as being full of abuse, but she recalls Yezhov as a loving father, quite possibly the only person in her life who truly loved her. In the only English-language interview with Natalya, her steadfast love for him shines through the writer’s use of slanted language to portray her as a contemptible person (perhaps to justify his humiliation of her in her own home) and Yezhov’s ability to inspire such love in the face of overwhelming pressure to disavow him suggests that we need to take another look at the standard view of Yezhov as bloodthirsty killer devoid of any human qualities.

This was when I encountered two very significant scholarly works that changed my whole view of the Great Terror: The Road to Terror by J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, and Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941 by Robert Thurston. Suddenly I get an image of the Terror not as a systematic operation of mass murder directed from the top by Stalin (as frequent comparisons to Nazi Germany’s genocides suggest), but of a moral panic affecting all levels of society, more akin to the Salem witch trials, or what the McCarthy Era might have become if the US didn’t have due process protections to slow down the wheels of (in)justice long enough that Ed Murrow could get the truth out and people could calm down. Instead of the pathological mastermind of mass murder, Stalin’s role becomes more that of throwing gasoline on a fire that would have burned no matter who was at the top (so much for all those alternate histories in which Sergei Kirov outmaneuvers Stalin and the Terror is averted). Thus it became possible to see Yezhov not as a psychopathic monster, or as Stalin’s witless tool, but a sincere Soviet patriot in over his head, not realizing that his entire society has gone mad around him because it can’t name the Elephant in the Middle of the Living Room that is the abject failure of Communist theory in the disaster of forced collectivization.

However, the final link came not from history, scholarly or popular, but from science fiction: namely a story from Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars anthology series. In Jerry Pournelle and S. M. Stirling’s “The Children’s Hour,” (which is reprinted in The Houses of the Kzinti), one of the characters claims that Communism was created as a self-limiting tyranny to control humanity’s self-destructive impulses. The idea of the tragedies of Communism being the result of a shadowy Illuminati-style conspiracy foisting Communism onto unsuspecting dupes who sincerely believed they were creating a better world really bothered me.

Thus, when I saw the call for submissions to Historical Lovecraft, I immediately saw a possibility in substituting Cthulhu’s minions for Pournelle and Stirling’s shadowy Illuminati-style conspirators. My original idea was to have a modern researcher discover evidence of the tampering, and come under fire for appearing to be exculpating Yezhov — but then the editors add a line in the guidelines that they do not want to see frame stories set in the present day. So now I’ve got a story written from Yezhov’s point of view — but how can I convey the manipulations of history by Cthulhu’s minions when Yezhov’s supposed to have only the most glancing idea of what he’s discovering?

Thus I developed the idea of a series of memos back and forth between R’lyeh and Cthulhu’s agents in Leningrad, interspersed through the narrative. This technique also had the benefit of rejecting any grandiose portrayal of Cthulhu and his minions, instead portraying their evil as utterly banal and bureaucratic. It’s rather appropriate when one considers that one of the failure modes of bureaucracy is a loss of the sense of personal responsibility for actions, such that people carry out terrible orders fully believing that they’re not just doing the right thing, but fulfilling a positive duty, and that failure mode has been such a major part of several of the worst horrors of the 20th century.

After that it was just a matter of actually pulling everything together into a finished story. I got some wonderful suggestions for that from some of my friends who are also writers, and some help from my husband on the final edits right when his computer had major problems and he needed me to get it working again.

I’m participating in the Blog Buddies contest for Historical Lovecraft, which means if you go here for the guidelines, read a few blog posts on how the stories in the anthology came to be, you could win cool stuff like an Innsmouth Free Press mug!

Today, you can find my post on what-all I poured into my novelette, “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” over in Leigh Kimmel’s blog. Tomorrow, you can read her guest post right here!

Fun times—hope you participate! And, if you have Historical Lovecraft, and liked it, please think about leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon or on your blog.

Things have been super-busy! Awards! Story sales! Readings! Interviews! Trips! OMG!

Lightspeed is up for a Hugo, in the Best Semiprozine category! A Lightspeed story, “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn, is also up for a Hugo, as is John Joseph Adams himself, for Best Editor, Short Form. I’ve been super-proud to be a part of the Lightspeed team since coming on board, and to see our hard work get acknowledged in such a major way is a tremendously exciting feeling. Also: big congrats to all the nominees!

World Horror is coming up. I have a reading! It’s at 9:30 on Thursday night, in Robertson, and I’ll be reading from my latest publication, my novelette in Historical Lovecraft (which launched last week!). The novelette is called “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” and it’s completely filthy. Before me, in the same room, Jesse Bullington will be reading from his second novel, The Enterprise of Death. I’m hoping he chooses an amusing selection, because that novel has the potential to reduce me to tears in places, it’s so fucking good.

I’ll also be moderating a panel on Friday at 11 AM, called “Why We Write Short Stories” and this terrifies me. First time moderating and all. I’m very excited, though, to meet my co-panelists Joe Hill, Brad Sinor, Orrin Grey, Suzanne Church, and Claude Lalumière. Woo!

In terms of stuff I’ve done recently, my interview with Jonathan L. Howard just went up on Strange Horizons. Lots of fun, and the interview contains the blurb for his forthcoming third Johannes Cabal adventure, Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute. I also had a few quick words with JLH over at Fantasy, as he just published a Cabal short with us, “The House of Gears.” I hear the podcast is super-good, so I’m saving it for a car trip.

I also sold a story to Megan Arkenberg’s journal of historical fiction, Lacuna. This October, “How John Wilmot Contracted Syphilis” will be going up, and I’m super-stoked. It’s about John Wilmot contracting syphilis, strangely enough! I love this story, and so I’m really happy it found such a great home.

There’s about a million shout-outs I need to give, too. As I mentioned above, The Enterprise of Death has been out for a while now, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t go buy it and read it right away. It’s seriously amazing. I liked The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart—I love this book. Over at his site, Jesse’s been doing plenty of review-roundups and providing links to the articles he’s written to go along with the novel. Some neat stuff, and worth checking out!

Also amazing: my longtime friend and ex-roommate Brad Deutsch published a totally fascinating and accessible article in Lightspeed on quantum theory, which accompanied “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son,” by Tom Crosshill, which is probably my favorite story we’ve had up in a while. I recommend both!

In non-newsy things, I’ve seen some cool stuff recently. And some not-so-cool stuff. Re: the latter, I’ll be blogging about the completely dreadful and unintentionally hilarious Atlas Shrugged movie at some point, probably after World Horror. For now: ha ha and stay tuned. Regarding things which are actually intelligent, well-written, and watchable for reasons other than schadenfreude, holy balls the Regency-era Blackadder is like, my new favorite thing in the universe. I was underwhelmed by the Medieval ones when I tried them back in the day, probably because of the lack of fops and also I don’t get as many of the jokes. As for the rest of the things I’ve been viewing, such as oh let’s just say motherfucking Warlock, Jesse and I are allegedly going to re-start Films of High Adventure after World Horror so I’ll save up for that.

So anyhow, I feel like there’s tons of stuff I’m forgetting to mention, but I’m crazed with trying to get my act together before I leave Thursday. I mentioned a trip, and while I have one forthcoming (Austin), I also got back from one a while ago, where I heard about things like my reading (eep!) and my panel (eeeeep!). I was in Florida for a week, and got to see my family, mine and John’s both. My dad is doing tremendously well, I’m happy to report. John’s family was a hoot as always, and I was super-happy to see his cousin Grace get married to her wonderful now-husband Garfield. John’s grandmother could use some happy thoughts sent her way, though, as she suffered a heart attack while we were staying with her, and is now in hospital recovering. I’m glad we were there when we were, and I’m hoping she continues to improve!

More later, my friends—and seriously this time, I’mma be better about updating this site. . .

(x-posted to my LJ)