Paper Fruit

John Langan, that illustrious author of quiet horror, was so good as to nominate me to be part of a Writing Process Blog Tour. I goofed and did not get to it in within a week, and as it’s sort of a chain letter, I guess I’ll be cursed or something. But, hey, first-hand curse experience isn’t such a bad thing in my field, I guess?

1) What are you working on?

Currently I’m working on a short novel. It’s been sold but not announced, so I don’t feel comfortable revealing the title yet. I will say it’s a period piece, and one with a limited speculative element. I hop it will please anyone who enjoyed the title novellas in A Pretty Mouth and Rumbullion.

2) How is your work different from others’ work in the same genre?

I tend to be a lot goofier, I guess. And I often write in historical settings. Horror/Weird/Lovecraftiana these days is very often Very Serious, or quiet and meditative, and largely modern. (I’m not dismissing any of the above; I love quite a bit of that stuff, most recently this story by Simon Strantzas, but you asked how I was different!) My most popular works, by contrast, tend to be ridiculous, and set in the past. For example, the first chapter of A Pretty Mouth (the novella), which is set just barely before the Restoration, involves a pudgy loser writing a poem honoring a schoolmate, not realizing it’s full of homoerotic entendre, getting shamed for it in front of his class, tripping, farting loudly, and then getting kicked in the ass by his professor. Not really deep, serious stuff. “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” got a lot of attention because it has twincest and… okay, probably because of the twincest. And “Herbert West in Love,” another story that has been reprinted and will be reprinted again (announcement when I can!) is just ridiculous.

3) Why do you write what you do?

I write stories I’d like to read.

4) How does your writing process work?

With short fiction, sometimes a title comes first; sometimes an anthology has a theme that calls to me. Most often these days, someone asks me to write something for a project, and I try to produce something that I think will be different from everything else they’ll get, and that (again) I’d like to read if I picked up that anthology. I write so slowly it’s been a long time since I’ve just written a story “because.” I’m not bragging; I hope once I clear my plate of my current obligations I can write some short fiction just for fun, but I came up with an exciting new idea for a novel a few weeks back so I’ll probably go down that hole once I’m a bit more free.

I don’t know if I have a writing process, when it comes to getting words on paper. I sometimes just blart out things and then go over them, revising and reworking until the story I want takes shape. Sometimes, especially with longer projects, I’ll use Scrivener to organize myself. I wrote the first draft of Vermilion, my forthcoming novel, in Scrivener. But I wrote A Pretty Mouth in Word, so, who knows?

As most of what I write is historical, I tend to make a trip to the library to research before I put down a single word. Like with what I’m working on, I grabbed such books as Developments in the History of Sexualities, Disorderly Women in 18th Century London, and How to Create the Perfect Wife. (So that’s a clue as to what I’m working on!)

Then I just spit on my hands, pray to Dionysios, and hope for the best. Sometimes it works; sometimes not. I junk a lot of biz.

Okay! Thanks again to John Langan, whose trust I squandered. I think I’ll tag… Simon Strantzas, as I mentioned him above, and Ross Lockhart, who is a writer as well as an editor. Huzzah!

What?

Anyways, updating to say that (yay) I’ll be a guest—a real, actual guest—of AnomalyCon in Denver next spring. Heyyyy, aren’t I publishing a sorta-kinda steampunk-ish novel around that time? Fancy! Maybe I’ll have an ARC or something to give away?

Come see me! And Selena Chambers, who will also be there!

I’m really excited to announce that Vermilion, my first novel, has been acquired by Ross Lockhart of Word Horde. It’s scheduled to come out sometime in Spring, 2015. Hey, that’s next year!

Vermilion (which for those of you who read this blog/know me, yes, it used to have a different title) is the story of Elouise, more commonly known as Lou Merriwether, a gunslinging, chain smoking, cross-dressing Taoist psychopomp who keeps San Francisco safe from ghosts, shades, and geung si. It’s an important job, but most folks consider it damn spooky. Some have accused Lou of being more comfortable with the dead than the living, and, well… they’re not wrong. Not entirely, at any rate. Then again, it’s not like Lou gets less guff from those what haven’t yet been buried. But when Lou finds out that a bunch of Chinatown boys have gone missing somewhere deep in the Colorado Rockies she decides to saddle up and head into the wilderness to investigate… even though she fears her particular talents make her better suited to help placate their sprits than ensure they get home alive.

Many, many thanks Ross Lockhart for taking an interest in the project, and to my agent, Cameron McClure, for representing it. I couldn’t be happier—Ross and I have worked together since he shocked and surprised me in the best way possible by picking up “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” for Book of Cthulhu. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and it just keeps getting better.

Got a cool thing in my inbox the other day—the cover for The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time, which I have a thing in. It also contains things by Nick Mamatas, Jesse Bullington, S.J. Chambers, Livia Llewellyn, Simon Strantzas, “and more.” Lots more!

I wrote my piece for this approximately a million years ago so I’m excited to see it’s all coming together so beautifully.

I also have my latest Roald Dahl blog up on Pornokitch, on Memories with Food at Gipsy House, which is a cookbook co-authored by Roald Dahl and his wife Felicity Dahl. I tried to make a meal out of it! The story is all there. Plus a recipe for vegan vanilla ice cream that is pretty much foolproof.

Other than that, things have been quiet. Except, not really?

I’m going to Japan in mid-October for two weeks. Whaaat. I know! I’m going to be spending most of my time in Toyko, as my girl Raechel is living there whilst dissertating, but we’re planning a side-trip to Kyoto. So fun!

I’m still training for my triathlon, which is tiring but really rewarding.

I’m culturing up some Rejuvelac for cheese making.

Oh, and I’m working on writing and editing stuff, of course.

Things have gotten so busy in that regard I’m having to scale back my involvement with certain recreational activities, sadly to say specifically lion dance. I hope to get back into it later this year, but after mid-August I’ll be done for a while. I don’t like to half-devote myself to things, so I’m focusing on my professional life for a while.

So, if you (1) are reading this, (2) live in Boulder or around here, and (3) care, you should come see me perform either at Boulder Asian Fest, which is on the 9th and the 10th (lion both days) or in Aurora at GlobalFest, on the 23rd.

With one thing and another, I’ve been neglecting this space. So, here’s what’s up:

I guest-edited this month’s issue of The Big Click. It’s a themed Bizarro/Crime mashup issue, featuring work from Cameron Pierce, Stephen Graham Jones, and J David Osborne. I’d really appreciate it if you picked up an issue or linked to it if you enjoy what you read for free online. This is my first solo editorial project and your support means a lot to me, and to us as a magazine!

I’ve published two more in my series about reading Roald Dahl since I last blogged. Here’s one on The Gremlins, a children’s book that was a failed Disney project. The next is also about Gremlins, but it’s on Dahl’s first novel for adults, Sometime Never. Spoiler: it kind of sucks. Another spoiler: I get to debunk a Cracked.com theory that Snozzberries are dicks. Anyways!

I have a story in The Children of Old Leech, a Laird Barron tribute anthology. It’s beautiful (Matthew Revert, who did my cover for A Pretty Mouth) and full of lots of cool people, homies if you will. My story has gotten some good buzz, including this writeup from Publishers Weekly, which specifically mentions “Good Lord, Show Me The Way.” I think this might be the first time my name has appeared in PW, which is pretty exciting!

Hm, what else? I signed up for a sprint triathlon, so I’ve been training for that. Running still sucks, but at least this is giving me a good excuse to swim. And bike more!

This space is going to have some exciting news soon (what could it be??) so maybe it would behoove me to blog more. I’ll try to be more enthralling in future.

Oh, who am I kidding? Hahaha. I’m never enthralling.

This month I read Roald Dahl’s Going Solo, his sort-of followup to Boy:

As someone who writes Lovecraftian horror, I am familiar with the go-to excuse when a modern person wants to divert criticism away from his or her literary heroes: “He was a man of his time.” This doesn’t work well with Lovecraft, who was far more racist than his colleagues… but I’m also uncomfortable applying it to Dahl, though he might actually fit that description. There’s simply a weirdness in being a white person saying, “he was just a man of his time!” about another white person who obvously takes pleasure in describing his boy’s “superb black body… literally dripping with sweat” and his “beautiful pure white absolutely even teeth.” It excuses attitudes or behaviors that were never excusable, and so I don’t feel I can just leave off discussing this tension in Going Solo by typing “Dahl was a man of his time” and washing my hands of the matter.

Fun times! TL;DR summary: Going Solo was super-good, but also very uncomfortable reading at times. Thanks again to Jared and Anne at Pornokitch for hosting my musings!

January is over? Crap.

Okay then! Monthly blog right quick.

Along with Jonathan L. Howard, Nick Mamatas, Jesse Bullington, and Ekaterina Sedia, I’m in this good-looking anthology from Stone Skin, which just dropped:

Nick described my story as being about “magical cowboy fights or something,” and while that’s not too far off the mark, it is actually it is about a scheme (see title/anthology theme) to steal the remains of Chinese immigrants who died working on the Transcontinental and, if they arise as jiang shi, use them for underground undead no-holds-barred boxing. There may be other schemes involved.

Jesse’s is about the devil, I think?

Anyways, if you’re into schemes, and who isn’t, consider it.

Also, I’m in this crazy project.

Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath will be available on Feb. 10th. I… I don’t even know. It contains a reprint of mine, a companion piece to “Ho Pais Kalos,” which if you were one of the five people who managed to figure out how to buy Geek Love you hopefully enjoyed. Anyways, ““All This For the Greater Glory of the 7^th and 329^th Children of the Black Goat of the Woods” is sort of my ode to Amicus/Hammer/other Brit horror films staring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing, et al., and is about a sentient dildo.

SO! What else…

I’m blogging all year about trying to read everything Roald Dahl wrote. I’ve read a lot of his stuff, but never tied up those loose ends. The first installment just went up on Pornokitsch, huzzah huzzah, so check it out if you’re interested. This month was all about Dahl’s uncollected shorts, like “The Sword,” “In the Ruins,” and the uplifting “Measles: A Dangerous Illness.”

Oh, and happy new year! Last weekend was the first performance of the season for the lion dance troupe I volunteer for. Some kind mom was good enough to film our drunken routine! So, check it out. I’m in the tail of the red lion, center stage!

2013 was a strange year. I didn’t expect to have a book come out; instead, after being contacted by Egaeus Press, I wrote a weighty novella (“Rumbullion”) and subsequently held Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations in my hands this last October.

I thought I hadn’t published much, but looking back over this year, I had a story in the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, a porny piece in Geek Love, a great, raunchy anthology that seemed to go largely unnoticed for various unfortunate/silly reasons, a zombie story in Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, a mummy story in the beautiful anthology The Book of the Dead, and a tale of Chinese vampires and illegal betting in Schemers, which is (apparently) out. Also, “Herbert West in Love” was reprinted in the last ever volume of Icarus. I already have a few pieces scheduled to come out next year, so all in all, I’m pleased.

I also began and have subsequently written a substantial chunk of a new novel, something I have not done since 2010. Over the last three years I wrote and published plenty of short stories, and two novellas around 45k (“A Pretty Mouth” in A Pretty Mouth, and “Rumbullion” in Rumbullion). But the last time I set out to write anything weightier was a long time ago. I’m very happy with it so far, and hope to continue to be so…

In terms of things I read, which is also something (writerly) I finally read Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy, and the subsequent volumes. Damn. So good! I think The Heroes was my favorite, but it’s difficult to pick. The First Law books were so smartly constructed, they really blew me away. In terms of other books I enjoyed, standouts ambling through a lot of Wodehouse, Astoria by S.P. Miskowski, both books out from Lemony Snicket’s latest series All The Wrong Questions, Diary of a Young Girl (which I’d never read), Showdown in Oakland, and the comics from Avatar: The Last Airbender, which were by and large better-paced and written than most of the third season. Oh, and  a friend got me American-Born Chinese by the same author (Gene Luen Yang) for Christmas, I devoured that already. It’s hard to remember everything I read… I need to get better about keeping track of such things. But I won’t.

Overall, I’d have to say that 2013 was a good year!

My two weeks in England were both exciting and exhausting. I think I’m over the worst of the jet lag and thus reality seems a bit clearer.

my mom stands on london bridge, across from tower bridge.

My first week abroad I spent with my mom, in London, doing like… everything touristy in London. It was wonderful. I hadn’t done a lot of the big deal, famous stuff to do the last time I was in town, being on more of a budget. But this time, mom and I decided to do the whole London Pass thing. Man, we used it! Some, but not all of our adventures involved the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Aspley House, All Hallows at the Tower, The Soanes and British Museums (I went twice to the British—once with mom, and once during my last day in England, as there was an amazing exhibition of shunga that’s well worth the £7, imo), Windsor Castle and Eton, the Royal Mews… awesome. I have some pictures on Facebook, but there are far too many to put here. Also I’m not much of a photographer.

We also did some fun shopping around town, including a semi-traumatizing trip to Harrod’s (so busy! so snooty!) and a lovely walk around the Borough Market, which was just as fun as I remembered, having done that with John when we went six years ago.

My birthday occurred during the trip, and that night I got to do something very special: attend the book release party for The Book of the Dead, the anthology of mummy stories where my piece, “Mysterium Tremendum” appears alongside work by such authors as Will Hill, Den Patrick, Louis Greenberg, David Thomas Moore, Glen Mehn, and Jenni Hill—all of whom I met that night (and was lucky enough to spend more time with at the con down in Brighton). They are all extremely awesomely nice, as are Jared Shurin, the project’s editor, and Anne Perry, his partner and editor in her own right. And I’m sure the other contributors are fabulous too; having briefly met Gail Carriger once, and knowing Jesse Bullington well, it seems more than likely. Also: I wore a ridiculous dress, which you can almost see in this picture—sparkly and one-shouldered! I know, right? I figure turning 32 means I should spend more time wearing prom dresses intended for 16 year olds, not less. Anyways, pick up your copy of The Book of the Dead in ebook or paperback at Amazon or Spacewitch! It’s worth it! You’re worth it. 

The next day was equally exciting, as I got to see my second book! Yes, I held Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations in my hands for the first time. That was a serious thrill. This book… the texture of it! It feels like parchment under the fingers, the black letters shine like wet ink, the paper is creamy and smooth. And I like to think what’s inside matches the outside. Um, meaning the prose is pretty, too. Anyways! You can order your copies either via Amazon or through Egaeus Press. (Also, check out our bordello-like hotel room in the background.)

I confess that after all the excitement of London, I was a bit apprehensive about heading to World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. I’d met a few attendees at the release of The Book of the Dead, of course, and knew others from the internet, but it was, on the whole, an intimidating prospect.

I needn’t have worried. Everyone I met was completely lovely. Things started off well when I was both delighted and terrified upon seeing Jonathan Howard had come to my reading (Jonathan is the author of the Johannes Cabal books which I adore). For some reason I was already feeling like I might faint… that didn’t help. So weird—I do readings all the time, and usually I’m totally cool about them, but that one threw me for a loop. Thankfully, everyone who attended was willing to make eye contact/talk to me after I gave what was undoubtedly the worst reading of my entire career—including Damien Walter, the chap who gave me that review in The Guardian that I squeed all over the place about earlier this year.

After I regained most of my color, Damien was kind enough to enquire if I wanted/needed a drink and dinner. Which I did. This chirked me up immensely, and began what proved to be extremely fun weekend at a con where I got to (among other things) discuss whiskey and matters sartorial with Mark Newton, eat the worst dinner I’ve ever eaten seated between Glen Mehn and David Moore, meet Nathan Long, and… uh fangirl out over Joe Abercrombie this one time. These are just a few highlights among many, many exciting moments.

Sometimes… to be honest, many cons have the effect on me where during and afterwards I want to /ragequit writing. Forever. This WFC, however, left me feeling enthusiastic about being part of a vibrant community of interesting people whom I like and respect. I won’t name everyone here who contributed to this sense of well-being, as I’d surely leave out someone, but I hope you know who you are. Many are already named above. Seriously though, damn. I won’t list all my theories as to why this was a better con for me. Suffice it to say that it was, and I feel like a changed, happier person in the wake of WFC ’13.

Oh! Oh! And if all that wasn’t enough, I totally took myself to Perfect Nonsense, the Jeeves and Wooster play now at The Duke of York’s, in London, on my last night in town. It ruled! I mean, there was little dramatic tension, as anyone who knows their Jeeves knows the storyline from The Code of the Woosters, but the clever staging of the production makes it more than worthwhile.

As I said, whew! 

Now I’m back. And writing.

Hello all,

Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations is now available for purchase from Egaeus Press. For those of you who pre-ordered, they’re already shipping! Anyways, I’ll have very few copies for sale at World Fantasy—like, maybe one—so your best bet will be to order through the Egaeus site even if you’re planning on coming to see me read Thursday the 31st. (Which you should still totally do.) That said, if you’d like a signed copy, let me know… I will have flyers for the book that I can sign, and then you can paste into your copy or tuck between the pages later.

I’m behind on blog updates/posts, as I leave for England in a few hours. But, I very much appreciate all the wonderful attention the book has already received from friends, readers, and admirers of Egaeus Press’s beautiful editions.

Thank you again, and please, order your copies sooner rather than later if you want one! There are only 250 in the world…