Obligatory Hugo Post

I've done a few eligible things this year, but I'm only going to mention one of them here, because I like the magazine a lot, and I think other people would like it if they had a chance to read more of it, at the scale of the Hugo Awards. There's this story I published in 2013, called "I Will Trade With You" and it is viewable here: http://www.3lobedmag.com/issue23/3lbe23_story6.html [quote] The north star is still in my palm. North, I keep on, but there’s no way to know how far I walked before I stopped to rest on this lump of sand instead of that one. I need to rest to keep walking with these old, uncertain bones. When I’m ready to move again, I crawl a little, and wait for my legs to work right below me. When I can’t walk anymore, I drink my own blood from my boots and joints. I was not put together well, nor will I ever be again. I do not know how many days there were before this, but it has only been a few days while I walked, and then it was night, and I slept sometimes during the night. Then it was day again and I kept on, where my hand still leads me. My old right hand is still mine. It was my first trade. My legs are shorter than I remember and it is hard to walk on them when they are this worn down. The sand slips through the cracks of very old boots. I’m bleeding somewhere in there, but most of it stays in my boots and I can sip it later when I rest. It’s all I have to drink. Let this body be numb and unknown to me. There was little I could do about it in the middle of a desert. I licked what I could reach of my blisters and sores and ill-fashioned joints, drinking back my own fluids. It hurt, but it had to be done. [/quote] If you're aching to nominate something by me, there it is. If you hadn't seen it before, well, now you have. Have a great weekend!

Price Wiggling Is Not a Strategy, Glitz is not a Strategy, Shotgunning is Not a Strategy

The thing about books and eBooks is that there are tried and true methods of advertising that seem to reach diminishing returns as more people do them and more people do them and too many people are doing them. Being free on Amazon meant something, when there wasn't really that much that was free on Amazon. Now there's so much free stuff on Amazon people don't need to buy anything if they aren't particularly discerning. Most people aren't. Remember, Duck Dynasty is the most popular show on television, right now. Also, print ads used to mean something, and a presence at book fairs. But there's too many places people go to read things, now. It's impossible to return the investment outside of a few, very expensive, and very specific sorts of markets. Genres narrow interests down into tiny corners. Comics go to comics. LitFic goes to LitFic. Romance to romance. True consumers of wide ranging media are not spoken to by marketing folks, yet most of us are true consumers of wide-ranging media. The manliest biker dude will sit through and try to enjoy the girliest romance movie if their significant other gets to pick this week. In fact, many romances, when well-done, are enjoyable no matter how macho one happens to consider oneself. How does anyone get the ubiquity of saturation necessary to get people to pick up a book? At the moment, films seem to be the deciders. This is where the marketing is narrowed to a point where instead of shotgunning out a whole bunch of books in huge wads with boxes and boxes of books arriving at marketing centers, the few movies that are released are targeted like laserbeams and positioned to maximize revenues both spent and earned. But, there's a huge limitation, of course. For all the good that Hollywood does at marketing, and cross-platform saturation, the moment the limelight looks away, there are crickets in an empty wasteland of forgotten VHS bins in piles at the dollar racks, and DVDs on sale that are all so easily and quickly forgotten. Nothing works. The great challenge that needs to be solved, then, is how to narrowly target over time a core set of folks who would like a book. Let's say a book about redheaded teenagers surviving in the poor, rural Midwest, from upscale New York exists. This imaginary book would appeal to people who shared that experience. It would also appeal to parents of redheads looking for a book their kids can relate with. How do you reach that group? How do you do it once? How do you do it for forty years straight, refreshing the message continually that this thing exists, and the audience of redheads and new midwesterners might find it appealing? How do you find that same set of tools for marketing when the book's subject matter is obscure? Who can relate to the Demon Children of Dogsland? Who would even want a literary cut-up epic fantasy novel about worlds that never were? There's something missing in all the noise and techniques that used to work. There is precision that is missing. I work at a Christian Book Store, but you wouldn't know it from the promos that show up. It doesn't look anyone really knows what we're doing, and who are demographic is, no matter how much we tell people that we are a specialty retailer, we get the latest YA thing that we don't know what to do with because our audience is much older than YA and buys a lot of books about the Eucharist and spiritual journaling. Bird by Bird is our kind of book. Teen vampire romps are not. Anyway, beyond just shotgunning books. Fidgeting with pricing will only work until everyone does it. Then, the audience will grow wise, and it will face the same problem that free giveaways have. What's the actual target? Fidgeting to drum up business seems to have no relationship to the target desired, at the moment, most of the time. And, there's simply too much of it happening to have any impact beyond confusion, for me, as a consumer. Internet advertisements are a flashing, red and purple noise in my eyes. They don't really work most of the time. Nothing works. Technology, build me something that works. Build me a marketing mechanic that is better than just shotgunning giveaways on GoodReads. Let me make a list of traits of likely consumers. (For example, readers of my books are probably interested in art installations of the grotesque and surreal, enjoy Wes Anderson movies, and drink oolong tea.) How could I build a target for my readers out of that? How could I make the marketing as persistent as the file for sale on eBook servers? Our eBooks never go out of print. Our marketing efforts dissipate quickly when our advertisements roll over and another book or another author stands blinking in the limelight of the world. How can we make our marketing as persistent as our eBooks and books?

Sunflowers to Save the World

Sunflowers are beautiful. They are also kind of huge, a little bit woody, and a favorite for all sorts of bees and bugs and birds impacted by climate change. Seriously, they are beautiful. They are amazing and beautiful. Just look at them.

(source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Sonnenblumen_im_Bund.JPG) Now, look at the world around you. Everyone knows of a patch of ground. This patch of ground could be the corner of your yard. It could be a scrap of dirt left bare after some construction disaster. It could be just wild ground, hard-scrabble and rough. Sunflowers are rough. They like disturbed soil. Grab a shovel, disturb some soil. Plant some sunflowers. Seeds are cheap and plentiful. Soak them in rainwater for a few hours before planting, and then place them about one finger joint down into the soil. They have deep taproots that reach down and pull up nutrients all up and down their big stalks. They have big, wide, nitrogen-rich leaves that provide shade in hot weather, and shelter for bugs and small birds. Now, once the sunflower is done, and the seedheads turn down to the earth, and the plant begins to brown, chop it off right at the root line, leaving the roots in place to decompose inside the soil. Then, take that big, slightly wood-y stalk, and bury it in another patch of dead ground. Right there, in that disturbed soil with the buried sunflower stalks, plant more sunflower seeds. Where the sunflowers were once planted, nature will find something useful to do there. It will probably involve generations of sunflowers. This is a good thing. It is a beautiful thing. And it spreads. It spreads, and the decaying sunflowers provide shelter to worms underground, and the roots release all those deep nutrients as they decay. Bring back the soil, and save the world. Desertification is the enemy. Do your own little thing. Be the sunflower ninja. Bring beauty and peace and healing to the world.

WE LEAVE TOGETHER set and loaded for June 2014

“Readers will be eager to return to Dogsland.” —Publishers Weekly I n a city where the rich stage decadent parties as the poor suffer in squalor, where assassins prowl and kings men keep order with truncheons and force, where gangs of children run like dogs and addicts die in the streets, a demonic strain has taken hold. The shape shifting priestess and priest of Erin have come to Dogsland stalking a fugitive, half-breed Senta Rachel Nolander, and plot to burn her to cleanse the world of her demon-tainted blood. Led ever onward by Rachel’s corrupted lover’s crying skull, Erin’s agents seek their hapless quarry, a frightened girl guided by one promise, one hope, one prayer... We Leave Together. News broke first on Twitter:

Straight from the pages of @LocusMag: Our 2014 schedule! pic.twitter.com/ugZKQ7JNmu

— Word Horde (@WordHorde) March 12, 2014

Watch for ARCs in the wild, people...

Spider in a Tree by Susan Stinson

The Great Awakening in American history was this moment in time, before we were a nation, before we were manifest destiny, where we found religion and it set our course all the way until today. In other lands on this planet, religion does not hold so much sway over public discourse. In ours, it does. For this reason, it is a very good idea to travel back and trace the source of the influence to those tiny towns in New England, that experienced a religious fervor that resonates with familiarity even to us, today.

Jonathan Edwards, famous for his sermon about sinners in the hand of an angry god, a fire and brimstone, unforgiving purist towards a faith that is fearful and trembling, and his tenure during the height of his fame at Northampton, Massachusetts. The little town of farmers and traders, at first, adores their famous preacher. Then, after the strict theology pushes too hard on the town's sense of public order, Edwards and his family are cast out. These are historical facts, not spoilers. Jonathan Edwards will be rejected by his parish. He makes bad choices that are theologically correct.

The light of this novel is not Jonathan Edwards, but the women of the town who endure the weight of the men upon them. Sara, the wife of the famous minister, is maybe holier than him. Their daughter, Jerusha, doomed to die young from consumption, embraces fully her father's faith. Martha Root, a young woman in the town, is seduced and abandoned with twins by a relative of Jonathan Edwards, who will not marry her. Their endurance, and acceptance, and quest for joy and union with God are magnificent in contrast to the arrogance of the men. Also, Jonathan Edwards was a slave owner. His slaves are the soul of the novel. Leah, Saul, and Bathsheba are all wrestling with faith in their own way, survivors of the middle passage and trapped between worlds. Leah converts with great faith and feeling, and carries her mother's memories in Africa, her painful middle passage, and her place in Northampton, while also falling into the realm of the spirit and faith. Saul quietly and stoically longs for freedom, and until the death of someone he loves, he does not find it. He flows out into the vast woods beyond civilized places, and is assumed by many in the novel to be going native with the Indians. Bathsheba remains with the family, enduring all that she has lost along the way, living with that haunting past inside of her, of her good friends gone, her place in the world narrowed, her future a stark and unforgiving place, without freedom from her burdens.

The men form the plot of the novel with posturing. In religious fervor, Edwards' brother-in-law commits suicide, and this man's sons become the future of the country, each betraying the Edwards clan that ultimately caused their father's darkness consumed. For this reason, I will not discuss them here. Just know that it is well-done, in the text, and forms what I would consider an excellent example of the "Great American Novel" form, wherein a hefty tome about America, containing a multitude of characters each representing some influence or direction of things to come, speaks to us from the shadows of history, illuminated by brilliant writing.

And, when Jonathan Edwards speaks to the world, steals the natural world for his metaphors and his certainty, the world itself looks back and speaks. Spiders correct the sermon, unheard. A mayfly speaks. Everything speaks. The clumsy tool of Edwards' theology is not enough to contain the wondrous beauty of the world, and his greatest failure is his inability to see exactly that. A tragic, beautiful novel, and highly recommended to anyone interested in American history, religious fiction, and/or fantastic writing.

A New Digital Short: VAST AND UNBROKEN

From the future, we travel back. We are not supposed to do it, but we do. When we do, we cannot be human, because it would put the future at risk. We have to do something else, then. We have to be something else. What's the point of all of this, in a vast and unbroken darkness?



Watch for it from your preferred eBook vendor...

Smashwords

Two General Announcements, and One Announcement to Come

First, my gratitude goes out to Jason Sizemore and Sigrid Ellis, who have been so kind as to include an excerpt from MAZE in the latest issue of Apex Magazine's digital editions. If you are a reader of Apex, and a reader of here, which is terrifically likely, you do not need to know these things. You have MAZE, and you have Apex Magazine, and you are happy! Good for you! For those of you that do not have either of these things, pick up an eBook edition of Apex Magazine, with stories by Cat Hellison, Mari Ness, Sunny Moraine, Jacqueline Carey, and Claire Humphrey from the fine folks at Weightless Books for DRM-free eBooks. (http://weightlessbooks.com/format/apex-magazine-issue-58/) If you do so and encounter MAZE, and wonder at reading more of it, there is a simple way to do such a thing. Again, from Weightless Books, pick up a copy of MAZE DRM-free! (http://weightlessbooks.com/format/maze/)

Second, my story "Dolores, Big and Strong" is available in the latest April/May 2014 issue of Asimov's Magazine! I'm writing there as Joe M. McDermott, in part because I am going to need a new author name, soon, and, in part, because I'm tired of people calling me "Jim" when I'm out and about. I may have announced this already, but I am excited and it bears repeating!

There is a third thing. If you sign up for the newsletter, you will hear about it first, and even receive a special code of special-ness!

You still have time to sign up!

breaking point comes

Doing page proofs late into the night, working in the day, being with family in the day, keeping the lights on, the lawn mowed, the dishes cleaned, and being an artist.

It's too much.

I broke yesterday, nearly falling asleep at one of my jobs. I had to go home early to rest. I still can barely stand up and walk around, I'm so exhausted.

It would be nice if I could get to a point where I wouldn't have to push myself up to the edge of exhaustion every day until I break down. I'm still learning how to be married and be an artist, and it's a challenge when people always have to negotiate space and time, and there's already so much negotiation because bosses want space and time, too. Bill collectors demand their due, always. The only solution that looks viable is to be independently wealthy. I'm working on that, but it is not easy to win the lotteries of life.

I've got a story in the latest Asimov's. "Dolores, Big and Strong" is a good story, I think. Go pick one up today and see if you like it. It's part of a novel I wrote that I have only just begun sending out into the world.

Tell everyone.

We are soil with legs, all of us. What system we build matters. I wonder, constantly, if I am a part of the solution of the world or not. Am I good soil? What do I need to do to be better soil?

The leaves break in the trees. The flowers bloom. Spring is here, and soon there will be peach blossoms, lemons hanging from the trees, and marigolds like sunlight reflected back up to sunlight. Find your peace, out there, in the springtime. Don't work so hard.

Save Creative Types: Raise Minimum Wage

The running joke of the Creative Writing degree, and quite a few other interesting but economically-stunted degrees, is that we are doomed to say "May I take your order please?" for the rest of our career, as if that is some sort of curse or bad thing to happen. The curse isn't that we work retail or food service or anything of the sort. These are actually enjoyable places to work, full of creative people who are fun to be around, with products that we care about. The curse is that we are doomed to live in poverty.

But, that curse that is repeated towards us creative writing majors, is not seen as a symptom of a broken economy. Don't do anything to actually make the low-wage positions anything but a prison of poverty. Just warn people that they are going to get trapped there, and curse them and their life choices and their calling.

It doesn't really matter what degree plan you're talking about, either, if it is not business, finance, nursing, pre-med, etc. If everyone's a lawyer, no one's emptying the trash. changing the lightbulbs, and fixing cars. If everyone's a business-owner, who works at their business? There is nothing wrong with wanting a simple, humble life, working quietly and going home. Treating these nice folks as "takers" or "ignorant" or whatnot is a trend in public political discourse that goes beyond disgusting. If everyone's following the teachings of Rand, we live in a lawless hellhole where even basic services must be acquired by tooth and claw and bone. If we actually follow the teachings of social justice, not everyone needs to own a business, or climb the ranks of middle-management to the top, and the economics of everything isn't more important than the humanity of everything.

This is why art degrees, creative degrees, and all that stuff that is considered "fluff" by the gristmill men, really matter. Education isn't about getting a job. It's about getting a life, finding a place, learning the things that take time and expertise to learn, and pursuing what is interesting. The impoverished hellhole of drudgery following such degrees in the public discourse is not a mark against the education, but against the society such education services.

If we raise the minimum wage, countless artists, authors, musicians, dancers, etc. will directly benefit from the increase. Nobody spends more money on books than writers. Nobody attends more theatre than aspiring actors. Nobody spends more of their precious income on art than artists. Raising the minimum wage raises everyone in the arts, from the struggling writer slinging coffee without a sale to their name, to the billionaire screenwriter that has an even larger audience for their work as more screenwriters have money to spend on movies. Every self-interested creative has a stake in the increase of our field. Raise up the bottom of us, and everyone lifts up.

To be an artist or creative in this country is to accumulate letters after one's name and join the economy from a position of educational authority. (Nevermind that academia, wherein I also currently work, is looking more and more like a shell game with the way student loans work, and administrative salaries work, and poets prop up themselves upon aspiring poets.)

Increase the income of everyone interested in the arts, particularly those at the bottom, and we increase everyone in the arts, and readjust our social values such that saying "May I take your order please?" is not a curse, but a quiet, happy life, wherein one can go home to do their real, meaningful work, without burning everything out onto the altar of art.

It's such a simple plan. And, it would help every single one of us who live the life of the creative professional. Every... Single... One... Of... Us.

Fear Death, Fear Meaningless Death, Watch the News

Analysts of media have long tried to come up with some explanation for the fear-mongering success of FoxNews, and the general malaise of an older, angry crowd spurning things like women being awesome in public, and the stories of minority authors or actors. I see the latest, inevitable flare-up in SFWA in very simple terms, related to the way FoxNews toys with the psyche of the elderly and the fearful. 

People who are afraid of death look out at a world that does not resemble their sense of identity, their sense of what things are in their own lives. The things the people were building towards with their own life and work spilled out far beyond their own control in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. The fear of death they feel means they see the loss of their own identity and place in the world-at-large as a kind of death. To stave off death, assertion comes of their own sense of identity and culture contrary to what is present in the name of preservation or something.

What's truly amazing is that the accusations of PC-policing are very ironic, and the people shouting about it don't see the irony. It is political correctness that allows the angry and the old and the anti-feminist a voice at all when their voices are so angry and toxic. It doesn't really matter if it is FoxNews' Tea Party fanatics or a few crusty, old bearded-men in grey, insular fandom: That there is a voice at all from them in the public sphere with such a toxic message; it is a testament to freedom of speech and PC-policing that such cruel and senseless stupidity is permitted in public spaces.

Fear death, I do. But, I do not presume to think that the world is going to shape itself in my little image. I don't feel the need to push my fear of the loss of my conscious self out onto others, to recreate my own image and self-image over and over in every corner of the nation and oversoul of man.

The parts of us that are eternal are generally not the parts of us that we want to be eternal. 

Genre has entered the mainstream, and it will fade out as the communities of genre disperse with all that hatred in the air, all those angry people shouting at each other. Abandon ship.

Motown is a sound that everyone knows, but it is no longer a movement. It entered the mainstream, and the artists toured the world, got caught in their moment in the light. Then, the energy of Motown dispersed. Artists of subsequent years may fall in and out of the "Motown-sound" but there is nothing new and innovative coming from it that isn't just an occasional influence of subsequent artists. SF looks like it's moving in that direction. Talented authors may pick up the sound of SF for a while, then dance away from it later. It's moving, and mainstream, and the energy that was built up in all those decades is rippling out in a splash. 

Fox continues on, fomenting a rebellion that will never truly come. What good is that soil? What good comes of telling people how awful they are all the time, fomenting all that fear?

The people that built something, once, are angry that they don't own it anymore, perhaps. Generations come. Generations pass. The past, and them that profit from it, are angry that the world is changing. They are angry that their energy is dispersing beyond what they know. The work will always become obscure. The great, heroic things, the glory, the fame, they are just dust passing away. 

We are soil with legs. Be good soil and build good soil. But, we don't control what grows in the field after we fade away. Let the world go when the time comes and find peace.

I'm poking around for publishers on this thing I wrote. I'm not really looking for a genre one. I'm really looking for someone that dances in and out of the genre, out of the mainstream where that outsider energy is building up and building up...

The Power of Brutal Allegory: Dino Buzzati's classic, The Tartar Steppe

Book-machine Larry Nolen recommended a text to me on Twitter (which I'm not on right now until I can work through all the things) and whenever he recommends a book, it is certain to be exceedingly good in many ways. Dino Buzzati's classic is no exception. This little review will include a spoiler-y outline, but it is the sort of book where you get where it's going very early, and it is observing the execution that matters most.

Drogo, a young Lieutenant, at the beginning of what he is convinced will be a brilliant and exciting career, receives his first posting. It is a miserable posting, a backwater fort in the far desert edge of the kingdom. It is where careers get stuck, opportunities dwindle, and everyone knows it. Everyone wants to leave. The fort is an old breastwork, and no one even recalls a time when war was imminent there. The Tartars are a myth, now, and the desert plain is bare along the horizon. Sentries post. Men march in formation. Inspections must be kept on track. Order, always, and military precision to be maintained, and proper rules must be kept. The young officers play chess and talk big of their futures. Drogo has no future. Initially, he almost feigns illness to escape the miserable backwater posting, but changes his mind at the last moment with the rumors that other officers are convinced that the fort, out at the edge of the kingdom, is going to be attacked by these mysterious nomads any day now. War is coming, and the king is foolish to allow the fort to decline so much, say these officers.

Drogo stays. Every opportunity to escape the posting fails. Fate, the indifferent and soulless and strict military system, and his own mistakes pile up until he is abandoned in what amounts to a prison of despair his whole life at the fort. He rises only to second-in-command of a forgotten nowhere place, never marrying, losing touch with all his friends and families. His life is trapped there in a kafkaesque horror that piles misery upon misery, until at last war comes.

When it does, at last arrive, Captain Drogo is a tired old man who had spent his whole life dreaming for one great moment of battle to justify all that time lost, youth wasted, and resentment built up, stubbornly clinging to a single hope of transcendent glory. Instead, he is told that he is too old, and sick. Instead of joining in the battle he had prepared for his whole life, he is moved into a carriage in front of all the new reinforcements: a walk of shame. Alone in a bed in an inn, sick and old with no hope for a better or brighter future, no children or friends or anything at all to demarcate a whole life, he dies alone.

The expression of the allegory is the point, suffering through it alongside him as all his hopes dash. Drogo's story, honestly, feels secondary in the text. He is a cipher of the reader passing through there, while the men around him, from Sergeant Tronk to Captain Ortiz to the military general, himself, far away in the capitol, express their nature upon Drogo, pour their truth and misery and cruelty into him. Do not read the book for Drogo. Read it to see how the soldiers around him, the women, how they look in at him, and what they see, and how it changes what they do.

The allegory of Drogo is very clear. Do not allow life to pass you by. Do not let any youthful dream of glory stunt your development as a fully-realized person. It doesn't really matter what the glory might be. It could be glory from military service, business, policing, etc. It could be a dream of art, of "making it" as an artist. It could be becoming a successful businessman even as fate itself pours down upon your business. It could be anything that leads you astray.

Also, that thing doesn't necessarily need to be rational. The fort is certainly not rational. The hypnotic hold it has on some of the men is widely-discussed. No one understands why they seem to choose the misery there, to stay in one place for so long dreaming of a war that is widely held as a joke. It is a mesmerism, a method that suffering has of beating humans into place. It is not rational. It is never rational.

Focus on humanity, not transcending it.

And, judge for yourself the various people Drogo meets along his miserable path, to see whether characters are truly able to achieve the greatness they desire. At least one young officer might be judged to achieve such greatness, but the general thinks otherwise. Does anyone escape the desolation of the Tartar Steppe? Do any of us escape it?

Notes From Elsewhere, and a Booksigning

First, and this is very important, expect to see me on Saturday at The Twig Bookshop!

Joe McDermott Book Signing - The Twig Book Shop - Current

I hope to see you all there!

I don't make a lot of public appearances, so do try to get the most out of this one, if you can. (Some authors can manage to do lots of signings all over, but they probably don't also have very time-consuming day jobs and a family!)

Guest posts have appeared here, there, and everywhere:

Beauty in Ruins:

Art feeds your dreams. Dreams feed your art.

I was pushing my head against the walls of the maze, writing Julie Station's sad story, and thinking about what it was I was writing, what it would become and the appropriate form for the maze-like halls. Tangled love affairs, certainly, but what else could capture this boundless unknowable space? To solve a maze is to destroy it. The puzzle must remain locked up in plain sight. Instead of lines fiddling and squiggling through the maps, the plot would follow the flight of birds over the walls. Alexander solved the Gordian knot with a single swipe of sword, How else to capture the unsolvable knot?

...

Wagging the Fox

Have you ever been lost at night in an unfamiliar city without a GPS? I was in Wiesbaden, Germany, and staying at my sister's apartment in Erbenheim. I was cat-sitting. I had gone to midnight mass for Easter at the cathedral, from the bus. I had to hurry to catch the last bus home. I missed the bus. Alone in the dark, then, in an unfamiliar city on foot. Germany has enough foot paths, and the cities were small enough, it could be done, and though it was as dangerous as you can imagine, it also wasn't as dangerous as all that. I walked through empty neighborhoods of mansions and industrial parks. I walked along the empty highway, oriented around a tall tower with neon lights. I walked alone.

My Superpower at Skiffy and Fanty

I am old enough, or young enough, to have played Street Fighter II in arcades without an inkling of expectation that it might enter the home console market at some point. I remember this well because the only place I ever had a chance to play it was at a local movie theater. If you were any good at it, you’d miss your movie. My friend, Ben Drake, was very good at it. I was not. I looked over his shoulder while he took on kid after kid, pounding them into virtual submission, while one of our mothers nagged us about how we were going to miss the movie we went there to see.

The Troubled Scribe

Traveling through most major cities outside the East Coast on foot is a terrible idea. I lived in Fort Worth for a while and I tried to walk and ride a bike as much as I could, but it meant dressing in long jeans and a denim jacket even in high summer for the brambles and trickling weeds. There aren’t safe paths for foot traffic since everyone drives. Pedestrians are dangerous. They must be vagrants and criminals and folks that don’t belong.

Midnyte Reader

Remember the scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth when the two doors stand side-by-side, one leads to the castle and the other to *dum dum dum* certain dooooom! and the guards are two entities. One lies, and one tells the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dgmgub8mHw

All right, there's a couple things I want to point out. First, one of them lies, the other tells the truth? But, they both tell the truth before the whole riddle begins. Also, there's four of them, not two. If the one on the bottom is lying about the ones on top, than he knows which one it is, and it sort of alludes to that when the one on top gives the answer by consulting with the one on bottom.

SFSignal

The end of genre is at hand. It did not die in a massive burst, and there was no single moment to point to that nails the coffin shut. No, it is the way things die when the demographics shift. The radios that play that song dwindle into the AM bands, go out like little lights, with a few hanging on a while, for old time’s sake. This is happening. This is our future. Genre existed to create a space for the marginalized dreamers, the outsiders, and the strange. But, everyone is strange now. Our biggest movies are genre. Our biggest musical acts are bisexual aliens. Everyone loves comic books, now. The conventions make the front page news all over the world. Like all good, American things, our young people love it more when it comes back to us made strange by a foreign culture. It’s not the Beatles, this time. It’s Anime.
Writing a book in this climate, a genre book, is a grand shrug against the tides of time.

One of the Artists on the Book, AnnGee, the amazing and beautiful and amazingly talented illustrator - also known as Mrs. McDermott - posted clean versions of some of the interior ornamentation she drew for the books. Go check out some of her other work while you're there!

http://flyingtangerinestudio.blogspot.com/2010/12/j-m-mcdermotts-maze.html

Right, so, remember: Book signing on Saturday at the Twig. On Saturday. This Saturday. Noon.

I will have all six books for sale, so come by and see what you're missing.

(I have an excellent relationship with the Twig, FYI, and if you ever are in need of a signed copy of anything by me, contacting them is the easiest way to do it, and I know they can take mail orders!)

I am lying fallow, working and reading. Lots of reading. Lots more working.

Be at peace while in my absence, fair intertubes.

winter lie fallow

I was sitting on my back patio in the brief respite between the Canadian fronts, today, watching the birds sweep over the lawn for scraps.

Despite the severity of winter, it is not winter itself that is the most deadly time for the creatures of the world. Spring is the worst, right at the beginning of it. Food stores run out. Acorns stored for winter sprout and break through the grass green and alive and inedible. The end of winter and the beginning of spring is the worst moment, the darkness before the dawn, and the flush of loquats and mulberries feed the world until the rest of the world wakes up.

Winter is still here, still passing through. I watched the brazen animals desperately scrounging through my raised beds and pots. I realized that the seeds I had planted must no longer be present in the soil. I would have to plant again, something else. Maybe I should spread birdseed and gruet out in the grass and cover the pots and growing places with wires or tarps until germination comes.

Another storm, another miserable flush of winter, in a day or so, and then quite nearly spring.

The winds blow out all the world. The terrible winds blow down from the north.

I would rather think of these things than anything else.

The preorders struggled to arrive in all this terrible weather, but they arrived. They are signed and sent away.

I have guest posted.

Let me rest. Let me lie fallow a while and watch the earth pass out of the worst times, that early spring, where there's nothing out there, and everything is fighting to start.

Growing on Mars

I have an ambivalence about agricultural technology that comes from how pointless it mostly looks. The things we do to improve yields come at such a high price. But my moral foundation - outside of my religion - comes from my belief that we need to abandon this rock to the birds and step out past the darkness in the sky. There is so much room for life.

So, to proponents of genetic engineering, and our destructive system of agriculture, I offer this response.

Someday this planet will be a vast, wild wasteland. The people will be gone. We will have stepped into the starlight. So, perfect your technique of genetic manipulation and the malleability of the organisms that evolve and evolve, but do not pollute this pristine mother with your experiments here. We are all only on one rock. A single outbreak could kill us all. One nuclear winter would be enough to wipe away all known life in the whole universe. Let us step into the stars, first.

Mars appears to be an amazing laboratory. The long growing season there, the water, the seemingly limitless supply of isolated spaces, and the gap between worlds all paint a picture of what could be done with man and beast and living green cell. There, build your organisms from scratch. Here, leave the ancient preserve alone.