They All Fall - #fridayflash

Gravity was a good god, and that was his downfall. He always did his job, pulling things down or together, and did so with such reliability that humans could measure him. How Loki laughed at the idea of a god with such low self-esteem that he let himself be measured. But Gravity broke none of the rules: humans still couldn’t see him or talk to him directly, and he never tampered with someone else’s domain. Loki never had to fear Gravity playing tricks.

The problem came, then, that humans didn’t fear him like they did Loki or Zeus, and they certainly didn’t revere him as they had the sun or that Jesus kid. They made planes, helicopters and went to the moon without so much a prayer – except the typical calculations for landing and such. Even when he did something nasty it was always the suicidal prick that jumped off the bridge that got the credit, not Gravity for providing the very force that enabled the tragedy.

The rise of scientific thought only insulted him further as people believed less in his friends, but never even bothered to question his existence. He wasn’t even part of the cultural debate. One year Carl Sagan, of whom Gravity had always been very supportive, actually mocked theology by saying no one prayed to gravity. Then one morning Gravity picked up Scientific American (well, not “picked up” – he never picked anything up that he didn’t have to) and saw some theorist asking why gravity was so weak in this universe.

“So weak.”

Gravity snapped and finally took old Loki’s advice. They’d regret not appreciating him. They’d regret it when gravity ignored them, and they learned the terror of floating.

Mum At the Final Act

Apologies for recent and short-term blogging silence, friends and fellow readers. The biggest thing slowing The Bathroom Monologues has been on my novel-in-progress, We Don't Always Drown. I've just finished re-plotting the final act and think it's devious enough to go forward. Right now it weighs 76,000 words and feels ready for a big trick of a conclusion. I'm hoping to finish the rough draft before next weekend, when I hit NYC to see Waiting for Godot with friends.

This composition string has taken its toll on reading time; I'm even days behind on blogs, let alone my NaNoReMo pick.

I'm a third of the way through The Master and Margarita. At this stage in my career, I still feel awkward critically assessing the novels of others. So far the novel is delightfully cheesy in a way that none of the Russian heavy hitters I've ever read has gone for, including the deliberate, knowing setup conversation between those darned secular elites and the man we know will turn out to be Satan, as they deny his existence only to be blown away.

This is a good cheese, and an unusual cheese, especially for the contrast of flashback narratives to Pontius Pilate's encounters with a Yeshua of some renown. This Yeshua behaves skittishly, mortal to a fault, even denying his own teachings to get out of being convicted. Where the Satan-against-Soviets satire seemed gleefully pro-Christian, this depiction reads highly anti-Christian. Am I wrong? I almost hope not, because the collision of those two themes could make an incredible novel, and one third of the way in, The Master and Margarita hasn't uncloaked its true shape yet. It could wind up as a number of kinds of novels.

What this really calls for is research on cultural context, but I'm so deep into writing my own novel that reading time is slim. This has slowed down my consumption of Bulgakov's novel, but I'm no less enthused to read it.

Phallus for the Sky - #fridayflash

A gorgeous shot from Icy Sedgwick's photo prompts.

"Hey honey."

"Oh for God's sake, Earth."

"I know you see it. It sure sees you."

"Put that away. It's not even morning. I'm tired."

"I can see the sun behind those clouds! Come on, it's the weekend."

"Where'd the romance go? You're all architecture these days."

"I sent you that shuttle!"

"I know it's the last one, Earth. All your TV satellites are floating in me."

"Have I told you that you look spacious lately?"

"I'm going back to bed."

"I bet a full moon will be out!"

"You're the worst planet I've ever dated. Pluto never needed artistic viagra."

"And look what happened to him! No, baby. I got you figured. You go take a nap. Dream on all this. "

"The single worst planet I've ever..."

White Knighting

Discussed feminism with my girlfriend. She didn't understand why I kept walking in L-shapes around her. I explained that I was White Knighting her.

We broke up.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2013

It's March 2014, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2013. If all the griping on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Robbed Award
Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is still on my mind more than whatever won Best Picture

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Too Little/Too Late Award
Going to the movie I missed by several years,
but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time

Lawrence of Arabia

#NaNoReMo Round-Up

It's March, and that means we're kicking of #NaNoReMo!

If you're just checking in, National Novel Reading Month is a support system to finally read the classics you've been putting off. It's not a book club and we don't all read the same book, though you're welcome to read along with me. Instead, every participant chooses their own classic based on their own definition, and blogs or tweets about their progress. It's been a great experiment every year, and everyone is welcome.

And if you've got a book picked out, sound off in the comments so I can add you to the master list!


The NaNoReMo Master List

John Wiswell: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Ross Dillon: Old Goirot by Honore de Balzac
Helen A. Howell: Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes
Cindy Vaskova: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Beverly Fox: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Sonia Lal: Murder on the Orient Express by Agathe Christie

Thanks to everyone who commented and e-mailed about which book I should pick. My friend Ross rightly chided me that I'd been talking about reading Bulgakov for too many years, and so I've chosen the Russian classic The Master and Margarita. It's got the wonderful elevator pitch of "Satan vacations in Soviet Russia," which is a wonderful sort of alien satire and immediately reminds me why I bought it. Even if it I bought it an embarrassing number of years ago.

I prefer satire from other time periods and countries because I have a tricky mind. I can't watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report regularly because, great as their hosts are, the social commentary is inevitably obvious and I can always find ways in which it's somehow inaccurate. No, that's not the problem. The problem is my mind always finds the ways they are inaccurate, even when they're arguing my position. But when I read the meaty social criticism of other countries, the requisite invention of context occupies my mind long enough that the criticism can sink in and has a fighting chance. As much as I respect Garrison Keillor, Avarind Adiga is just bound to give my mind more to work with.

Rest and Repel Those Aliens - #fridayflash

It’s so cold out that he has to build a robot. After he’s shoveled the snow, and cut the wood, and the stoked the fires, his bones are still heavy with persistent chill. He’s weary and climbs into bed, beneath layers of sheets and blankets, from which he constructs the robot.

Technically the robot is a military exoskeleton, but there is no time for technicalities because the planet is under siege. There’s a jersey knit sheet over him, full of microfiber transmitters. A heavier quilt lays over that, but he puts his arms over it, because they always get too hot under all the blankets, and because when he makes fists in the quilt, it feels like two flight controllers molded to his hands. There’s another blanket over that so his arms don’t get too cold, and to seal him into the cockpit. The only thing it doesn’t cover is his head, though he can pull the blanket over it if he gets a nightmare.

The beauty of his robot is that it convects his body heat, storing and building it up much better than a snow suit or a single blanket unit. Also, it has hard light lasers that can smash alien ships with armor that’s heat resistant, and that’s wicked. His weary eyelids slide closed and he enjoys a heads up display that targets all the enemy craft hidden in the sunspots.

His robot is so smartly built that he doesn’t feel it take off. It moves through the stratosphere without a whisper, powered by Generation Two Improbability Drive Tech. The invading aliens don’t even have Generation One.

The wind rattles his windows like a hundred tractors driving by. He imagines a hundred enemy space crafts, out-numbering him, but they are out-teched and out-gunned. Just one squeeze of his imaginary triggers fills up the sky with his hard light lasers.

Sometimes he shoots them down. Sometimes he goes up and talks it out, and becomes instrumental in the peace process. Sometimes he falls asleep right away. Saving the world is oddly relaxing.

What Recharges Writing?

Probably unrelated?

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about how to recharge writing. There are some people who never seem to stop – Stephen King infamously told the public he took three days off a year, only to reveal he’d lied and that he wrote on those days too. At Viable Paradise I was awed at how Elizabeth Bear could hit her laptop in-between lectures, critique manuscripts while jogging, and always seem to maintain writing progress even in crowded rooms of people who wanted her attention. She reported something like 200,000 paid words last year. From afar, King and Bear seem like model authors.

Update: Bear responded on Twitter that she takes breaks all the time.

I’m not like them. Based on an informal survey of professional authors I’ve been conducting, most aren’t like them. Most who would disclose their beliefs believe in significant periods of recharge, whether it’s a day or weekend off, or a few weeks or months after finishing a novel. More authors wouldn’t disclose or couldn’t come close to pinning down their processes.

Vacations don’t help me very much. In recent years I’ve kept data on myself around when I take breaks from composition and editing, and there’s very little correlation between a break and output at resumption or upon starting something new. While my recent novel-writing campaign started amazingly, it was one of seven projects I took significant breaks between in a three-month period, and was one of only two that seemed to jump out of the gate. The others ran on will power and routine until I could build up the steam.

Perhaps more importantly, I notice I don’t feel mentally refreshed upon returning to work. Most recently I was derailed from my novel by bronchitis, and then had to leave home for travel. As awful as bronchitis was, I was relieved to stop work because of anxiety about whether I was executing the novel correctly. After weeks off, I resumed yesterday and felt absolutely as incapable of getting it right as I did before. This morning I awoke feeling like I had nothing left inside of me, which is disturbing for a living being to believe.

It wasn’t until I helped a mother in a check-out line that the feeling changed. A joke fell out of me, and she laughed, and seemed a little relieved despite the child kicking her hip. It was as though giving someone that little relief temporarily validated me, and I felt like if I had a keyboard right then, the clouds would part.

This isn’t a whining session. It’s an invitation to you, friends, fellow readers and writers.

What do you do to recharge?

We know that it’s something taxing, partially on the body and partially on the mind. It’s something that everyone needs to pause from, and walk away from for the day. It may be that everyone has a different recharge cycle, or a different set of recharge cycles – surely some full-timers take the occasional afternoon off while also taking periodic vacations, while others are more idiosyncratic. That leads us to question what we do in those periods that restores us.

I’ve tried both avoiding reading anything and reading a great deal, and within the latter, reading narrowly and broadly. None of the above seems to change things. Do you read to recharge? If so, what? Is it research? Is your reading compartmentalized?

Many of my breaks have been around my home. If you know my health, then you can figure that I don’t travel often. Yet when I do travel, returning home doesn’t seem to have changed anything, whether I departed for family emergencies or to hang out with friends. Do breaks work on you? What is it about them?

There are authors who juggle 8- and 12-hour jobs and write in excavated free time. There are authors who are full time parents and still hit the keyboard every day of the week. Is there a shorter recharge cycle there? Do the Kings and Bears of the world recharge primarily in shorter runs, in breaks to jog or have dinner with family? If so, how do those refresh cycles operate?

A few questions for you. Perhaps too many. Feel free to drop any answers you have, even the partial ones. Most of the writers I’ve talked to about it seem to live on partial answers.

The Last Cat on Earth

Toby slipped on the thick leather jacket. He flipped up the collar to shield his neck and cheeks. Next came a second pair of jeans, buckling them over the tails of the jacket. Gloves and construction boots were necessary. He looked out the window as he donned the ski mask. He watched the undead shuffling on the street corners before flipping goggles to protect his eyes.

He couldn’t risk getting a speck on him. He was the last man who could do the job.

He followed the undead through the windows of his house. Two windows on the west wall, then the one next to the porch. Four of his former neighbors shambled along the driveways. Their eyes were blind, noses turned up to sniff. Maybe they could smell him. Or maybe they smelled Mr. Tibbs.

Scuffling rose behind him. Toby whirled and saw the basement door shake. He rushed over to it, but the button was depressed. It was locked. He heard his sister – his former sister – groaning down there.

He frowned at her through the door. She couldn’t do this job anymore.

“I’ll take care of it,” he told her. “Even though you know I never wanted it here. Do you know how dangerous it is?”

The deck door slid open quietly. There was a little whoosh of air, and then the saddest sound left on earth. A keening, churning whine. As much as he hated these things, it made even him feel a little sorry.

It padded around the plastic deck furniture. It arched its spine, so that when it walked between their legs it would rub its sides. Mr. Tibbs was a self-petter, but that wasn’t enough affection. Even self-rubbing, it looked so damned pathetic.

Toby drew a plastic sheet from the living room and closed the door. No sense in letting dander get inside. This was going to be an allergic nightmare as it was.

“I don’t like you any more than you like me,” he said down to it. It didn’t seem to dislike him, but cats lied with their faces. “This just doesn’t feel right. And you're not eating the food I throw out here. What's wrong?”

When Toby didn’t immediately pet the little bastard, it keened again. It sounded almost human. Kickably human. The kind of humanoid sorrow that’d haunted him up in his safely boarded study the last three days. His wonderful, hypoallergenic study with the view of the wonderfully silent, dander-free undead.

The plastic chair creaked as he squatted into it. He laid the plastic sheet over his chest and lap, hands flattening it into place over his jacket. When it was ready, he patted his thigh. Mr Tibbs quirked its wretched head, then began to climb into the last lap on earth. Even now, there was a little affection left in the world. But only a little. He’d kill the bastard if it got any hair on him.

Dedicated to Marshall, the cat that inspired this piece. Rest in peace, little guy.

March is #NaNoReMo – Help me pick my book!

This March is National Novel Reading Month, dedicated to getting more people to read classic literature. It’s moved back from last year to help a few people’s schedules, and sits neatly in-between the U.S.’s Black History Month and the April A-to-Z Challenge.

We all have those books we’ve put off reading for too long. Maybe we’ve owned them, or eyed them in the library, or have just heard about them our whole lives. Each reader is responsible for what he or she thinks is a classic. Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights are classics to most people, but if Ray Bradbury looms heavily over you, then you get to Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

Then across March we all blog about our journeys through our classics. Does the book measure up? Are there things about it you're surprised you've never heard of? Even if you hate it (and I did, one year with Jane Austen), it's worth sharing the experience of canons.

Like the last two years, I’m asking for opinions on which classic I should knock off my list. Because writing my own novel is taking up a great deal of my mind and time, I’ve cut the 1,000+ page novels from the list. I simply wouldn’t do The Infinite Jest or Les Miserables justice this March. This leaves me with five possible books:

1. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

2. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

3. John Irving's The World According to Garp

4. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities

5. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

I have only ever previously read Wolfe and Nabokov, but never these two particular great novels. Dickens is one of my great hollow spots, while The Master and Margarita is the most commonly recommended to me.

So, friends and fellow readers, which of these five do you most recommend?

Bathroom Monologue: Hollow Tree

We laughed at prophecies that we'd be devoured by hollow trees. We didn't know "hollow tree" is arbor-speak for "house." Not until the ceilings caved.

At 130

I'm on the road this week and so am sharing an updated story. I'll be reading this piece live at Boskone's Flash Fiction Slam on Sunday morning. If you're in Boston, feel free to say hi!

At 0: the first computer fills a large room with thousands of coiled wires, billowing steam and punch cards. It crunches numbers. It will help perfect the hydrogen bomb.

At 20: government workers rely on computers the size of desks for data entry and records.

At 25: 72% of respondents don't know what a computer is.

At 35: an assassination plot is stopped thanks to information shared between computers in different countries. They're connected by some kind of web.

At 40: diagnostic x-ray machines enable physicians to see inside their patients. Many patients fear side-effects.

At 50: fearing children who are not computer literate will be left behind, an affluent school district takes out loans to buy as many computers as it has pupils. The computers outweigh their incoming class.

At 55: multiple miniature cameras are deployed inside a surgery patient, minimizing size of incision and granting a radical vision of the living body.

Also at 55: a teacher receives a phone call in his pocket.

At 60: a student finds an answer on her cell phone faster than the teacher can pull it up on Encarta.

At 65: a physician releases nanomachines into her own bloodstream. They collect images and data about her cardiovascular system that she releases to the public domain.

At 75: a protein-based computer smaller than a pimple is revealed in the brainstem of a leading mathematician. It solves equations as fast as he can think them.

At 85: legislation to ban “internalcells” is overridden in the Supreme Court. 49% of respondents disapprove. 32% are undecided. Wall Street sees record highs.

At 90: fearing children who are not e-literate will be left behind, parents race to implant “cell chips” into the heads of newborns.

At 101: the first class of children whose motor skills are entirely pre-programmed by their “cells” attend their first day of school.

At 120: less than 3% of respondents under twenty do not have “at least some” of their emotions digitally regulated.

At 130: the prodigy who bought too much, including a large room full of wires and punch cards, executes a command. Everything turns off. He goes outside without shoes or socks and feels the grass between his toes. Without wifi, his natural hearing is so weak that he misses all the grinding and screaming around him. He wonders what this feeling is called. For the first time in his life, auto-fill does not answer his question. For the first time in his life, he has to wonder.

It's been a while since I've won a Liebster

My buddy Margit Sage bestowed a Liebster Award upon me last week. These awards are really little blog hops and tend to be fun. While I’ve won this one a few times, the Liebster has never looked so pretty. Look at that sweet new badge! 

These things always have a few rules. They can be simple, like these:

1. Link back to the person who nominated you.
2. Answer the 10 questions which are given to you by the nominator.
3. Nominate a few other bloggers who’d enjoy it.
4. Create 10 questions for your nominees to answer.

It’s an unspoken rule of mine to change the rules of all of these games. It’s a flaw in meme theory I like to exploit. Did I change these? You’d have to read Margit’s post to know. Speaking of Margit, let’s dig into her ten questions.

He Put the Ten Commandments in the State Capitol, and you won’t believe what happened next!

A little while ago a judge erected a statue of the Ten Commandments at the court house in his state capitol. You probably didn’t hear about it because there are many more important things in the world, but if you did, you might have heard that some people were upset about it.

The first great protest came from the Satanists – all eighteen of them who lived in the major metropolitan area, and several thousands of their friends who donated funds online. The Satanists delivered a hulking goat-headed statue of their lord and demanded that, if Judeo-Christian religions could be commemorated, then so must theirs.

The local Hindu Temple called the governor the next morning to inquire how many of their gods were allowed representation. Methodists, Roman Catholics and Unitarian Universalists called up asking if that one statue in the capitol was their only shot, because each caller had his or her own idea of what belonged, and really, shouldn’t every denomination have its representation?

Atheists lobbied for a statue as well, perhaps one commemorating the atom, the substance of which all humans are made. Their lobby was shot down by a majority who claimed the absence of a statue was the best statue to atheism, and given that most of the capitol had no statues, atheists were technically overrepresented.

Soon Christians were protesting that, as they made up over 70% of the local population, they should get seven tenths of the state capitol covered in their statues. One per denomination was offensively dismissive of their numbers and sincerity. Soon came great granite crosses, recreations of The Mount, and busts of the Lord in contemplation, and agony, and ecstasy, and in a diversity of ethnicities, as the Black Baptists and Roman Catholic groups seemed to differ as to how their Lord had looked. Even local Archaeological Society, a secular institution that worshipped historical accuracy, modeled the most plausible visage of Christ and had it 3D printed and donated it to the increasing crowd of idolatry.

Within one week people summoned to the court house could no longer navigate the number of religious icons in order to reach chambers. Several people who were one hearing away from sentencing for high felonies had to be dismissed – a miracle, in their eyes. The judge who had installed the original Ten Commandments was never found, and it’s suspected that he left town on one of the trucks carrying all the statues, so as to avoid the sheer of tonnage of press chasing him. There’s a statue of him hunched over reading at the court house now, though the stone commandments he would have read have since been removed.

Bronchitis and Guilt

Bronchitis is a lot like a baby turtle trying to eat a strawberry.
This may make more sense in Paragraph 3.

Bronchitis and guilt. Of the two, guilt will kill you quicker. Guilt will make use of your bronchitis, your student loans, the girlfriend you disappointed and the holiday you never make special enough. Any of those elements are dangerous, but guilt uses them all.

I'm a delusional sort. Scratch that - humans are a delusional sort, and it's the rationalists I distrust. One of my delusions is a guilt complex that I'm never doing enough. For the last week I've been relatively silent because I've been relatively bedridden with a splendid case of bronchitis. That's an infection of the bronchial tubes that cakes my lungs with solid snot, throws off my internal temperature, locks my joints, saps appetite for the nutrition necessary to fight it, and drives my neuromuscular syndrome nuts. By Thursday I'd pulled muscles in my back, both biceps, and pulled both hamstrings, simply from coughing or contorting in discomfort. It was such that I could no longer lie down without excruciating pain, and thus had to alternate between exhausting myself by sitting up for any relief, and lying down and making the muscles worse.

I am doing much better, and thank you for asking. But I also felt pangs of guilt over not continuing my novel, even when my head was so fogged I couldn't speak an entire sentence. I even felt the pangs when, in the sort of nonsense despair excessive pain causes, I worried my whole novel was garbage and had to be thrown out. Even when I was sure the work was worthless, I felt vile for not transcending and doing the work anyway. The Joker would laugh at me, and The Joker is never wrong when he thinks you're funny.

Writing is beautiful, and prose is one of my great passions in life. This morning I'm excited to be able to think straight and consider these characters again. Yet the anxiety I soaked in this weekend is the kind of mindset that you may wind up with if you become too attached to goals. I've argued it before and won't go on at length now, because I desperately need to sleep a full night soon or it's off to the hospital. But please, think about how stupid John Wiswell is because he's driven the next time some successful author tells you to lock it down and work harder.

For now I think what the last few months were like. Everything was held up in October for Viable Paradise. Then...

November: wrote my first screenplay.
December: wrote four short stories.
January: wrote 51,033 words of a new novel.

For these fruits, I think I'm not doing enough. The Joker would bust a gut.

I've got about a week left before I head to Massachusetts for Boskone, where it turns out I'll be reading in the Flash Slam competition. If you're in the Boston area, I'd love a little cheering section. I can't wait to practice, just as soon as my voice comes back.

I'm trying to figure out when I'll have enough wherewithal to write more of the novel. Maybe Monday? And whenever, how much I can get done before I ship out. I think the break is actually helping the plotting in a way I'll have a better handle on next week. Too funny if not writing for a while is the best aid to writing better fiction.

Finding Buddha in the Road - #fridayflash

This is a re-post from a few years ago. As I type this on Thursday night I am sick as a dog and not sure if I'll even get up tomorrow. Please excuse the redux, and if you can, giggle at it.

My teacher always said, “You’re not supposed to have teachers. The truth is already in you.”

But I kept visiting him, so he wound up saying other things. On that day, the thing that came to mind was, “If you find Buddha in the road, help dig him out.”

It came to mind because I saw a rotund man in an orange robe flailing his arms. He was buried up to his navel in gravel. I took him by the hands and jerked with all my might, but he would not budge. I thought him too hefty to pull free, but he explained.

“A nasty old philosopher stuck me in here. Said the only way out was the way that could not be known.”

“I didn’t think you were the sort to get into fights,” I said. “Or call people nasty.”

He folded his hands together. “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.”

“Oh, I don’t!” This was the first impression I wanted to make. “I mean, I think you are what you are, not what I think you are.”

“Then you think I am what I think I am. I am still bound within what you think of me.”

“But I only think you are what you think you are.”

“Do you think you know what I think I am?”

“No. That can’t be known.”

“Then why do you think I am whatever I think I am?”

“You shouldn’t be bound by other people’s conceptions. It’s your internal existence.”

I don’t think the Buddhism I’d picked up from a master who wanted me out of his house impressed this man very much. He started playing with rocks.

“What if I think I am whatever a third person thinks I am? If I then invest my identity in another, am I any longer what you think I am?”

“I swear, I don’t think I know who you are. You’re just the Buddha.”

“Now I believe you don’t know who I am, regardless of what you think. My name’s Qi Wei, not Buddha.” He scratched next to his eye, perhaps idle motion, perhaps drawing attention to his distinctly Asian features. “You know, he was Indian.”

It makes you feel very guilty, when you want to punch a man who is buried to his navel in gravel. I curled a fist, then released it and turned to walk away. Qi Wei let me get five paces before imparting something.

“But if I am the Buddha internally, and not Qi Wei as I espouse externally, then I am what you admire without you thinking it, and you would have met Buddha in the road and done nothing more than walk away. Can you live with that?”

“You said you weren’t him!”

“I also said not to believe in anything simply because you have heard it.” He picked a stone out of his belly button. “I’ve said that one more than once, over the years.”

A year later I read some Chinese philosopher commanding that if you found Buddha in the road, “kill him.” He must have met this guy, too.

Why John Should Die On Your Next SciFi Expedition

Jeff VanderMeer will soon release the paperback and audiobooks of Annihilation, a novel set exploring the dangerous Area X. It sounds neat, and because it’s from the VanderMeers, it’ll probably be very neat. He’s running a little contest asking people why they should be part of the next expedition to Area X, where so many explorers have died, presumably from mysterious causes. Exhausted from a day of novel-writing myself, I couldn’t help proposing why I belong on any such voyage.

Area X sounds beautiful and highly dangerous to explorers, and thus I am the sort of person you need on your team. I have spent the last twenty years with a highly compromised immune system and am guaranteed to die in any sort of unknowably hostile environment. You will be able to dissect me and figure out what the greatest potential hazard of Area X is to the other explorers before any of them experiences so much as an allergic reaction. Atop this, I’m chipper and gregarious around strangers, and thus several people are likely to bond with me and mourn me acutely when I die out of nowhere so early into the expedition, giving you all a good bit of pathos before Pinch 2 sets in.

Bathroom Monologue: Twenty Years

They were the high school sweethearts who didn’t know they were in love. They ran the school blog, spending long nights figuring out HTML and never so much as touching each other’s hands. They were each other’s default guest at parties.

They were running jokes for all their friends, through college and into work places. No one spent that long on the phone with somebody they weren’t screwing – except they weren’t. They were starting up a company that was going to revolutionize non-invasive ads, a topic that was only exciting for the two of them, and an excitement that everyone else understood differently from the two of them.

Too broke to buy houses, they pitched in for rent on one apartment from which to launch their venture. They did each other’s laundry, drove each other home from surgery, and patiently faced down accusations from each other’s parents about the location of sin and their proximity to living in it.

It was almost twenty years before a college intern shoved one of them on New Years Eve and demanded they kiss. And they might have been drunk, and they might have been hiding things, but they did and it lasted an eternal seven seconds – they both knew because it made them so nervous they couldn’t focus on anything but their watches.

Then they were quiet.

Then one of them said, “We should do that more often.”

So they did. They spent another twenty years together starting the next morning, and another twenty after that.

Bad Good Habits

I’m bad with goals. On January 8^th I started writing my next novel with the goal of a minimum of a thousand words per day, but with my attention on writing scenes, chapters and arcs – of getting the text right. I write much more when I focus like that, which became the problem, because on the first day I wrote about 2,900 words. On the second day, I wrote about 2,900 more. On the third, I wrote 2,300, and felt exhilarated, having never started a novel so quickly, but also like I’d cheated and profoundly failed.

Do you recognize the problem? Do you have it, too?

Last week I managed to drag my chubby butt to 2.54 miles on the elliptical machine. It was the farthest I’d ever gone, and was so hard on my body that I was trembling for the next hour and felt exhausted the next morning. When I climbed on the next day and didn’t match that all-time record, my heart sunk. I was sweaty, and spent, and my neuromuscular syndrome flared up so badly I couldn’t bend my knees, and I felt like I hadn’t done enough.

I've habituated expanding my goals to a cancerous degree. We often talk about failure in terms of not reaching goals. Figuring out what you can achieve and what’s reasonable to push is vital. You have to learn to make a routine, and then to push. I fail in these ways all the time – it is, allegedly, mortal. But there are other ways to fail. Victory can defeat you.

It's a good line. ... Shut up.

Goals can’t remain static. It’s ridiculous to teach a baby to take her first steps and then never expect her to perform more than that. In writing, you want to push you productivity up if you can. If you can write 500 words in a weekend for months, then it’s healthy to try for 1,000. If you can bench fifty, try sixty. Sure.

But figuring out the limits above those goals is essential, and it’s something I’m terrible at. You can psychoanalyze me as the boy who learned to walk again, who didn’t readjust into school well enough and was brutalized for it, who wound up with nerds who all pulled better grades, and thusly craved to exceed his performance. I don’t think the mind is that simple, or that one reason is ever trustworthy for a whole personality. But I knew within seconds of seeing “2.56 miles” on the elliptical’s panel that I was going to guilt myself over not hitting that again tomorrow. And I knew I shouldn’t, and that it wasn’t healthy, and that I couldn’t stop it.

This is part of why I hate critics who backbite at authors for having a slow pace. It took Harper Lee a lifetime to make To Kill a Mockingbird, and then she was done. Truman Capote, of significantly faster work and greater output, supported and championed Lee. They weren’t competitors, and one wasn’t failing for not having the process of the other.

Goading people into rushing risks breaking them. Screw breaking their work – and yes, dashing towards word count like #NaNoWriMo ruins plenty of decent novels – it can damage their development.

No one browbeat me into writing 33,700 words in my first two weeks on this novel. That I am now significantly ahead of schedule and feel the dread of being behind is a doom of my own making.  It’s hardly fast composition – I have friends who are self-publishing books like they shed manuscripts. But today, after writing two emotionally demanding chapters in separate time lines, and having difficulty even sitting up in the chair afterward, I didn’t feel accomplished. I felt sicker and I felt like I’d failed.

Don’t do this. And if you’re like me, let’s talk it out.

Consequences.

There are authors I respect who advise to lock everything up, to be cold, and be as productive as possible. As someone who won’t fall asleep tonight because the mere strain of writing has jacked up his health problems such that he may not fall asleep tonight, please take my advice: ignore those authors. Mind yourself. Mind your goals and your limits.

And if somehow I become the Capote to your Lee, trust me that I will be overjoyed to share your one book with the world.

The Post-Net Neutrality Dystopia [NSFW]

I don’t recommend following any of these links. Some aren’t real. Some will get you fired from work.

Little Jamal has pimples and doesn’t like going outside, but he has needs. We all deny what his needs are, but we know them. We know them when he buys aloe lotion and Kleenex. He sure knows them when he tries to load redtube.com.

But it’s a brave new world, and because of his ISP, redtube.com doesn’t load for him anymore.

So he tries richgirlsmakingmistakes.com, but it times out too. It’s like they knew his browsing history and torpedoed it.

hottiesandnaughties.com. rule34.com. spankbank.org is up, somehow, but has blacked itself out in protest.

Little Jamal pulls up Twitter to complain and ask for links to good skin sites. Because Twitter hasn’t inked a kickback deal with Little Jamal’s ISP, it doesn’t load at all. After two minutes, the Fail Whale mocks his unopened box of Kleenex.

Many of the blocked links have a redirect to the ISP’s homepage, which has shoddy design and unappealing functions, which is why people only wind up there from redirects. It loads really fast, though, with its animated menu of contract options. Little Jamal scrolls around for some function to bitch them out and stumbles upon the bio of the CEO, a 68-year-old woman who smiles fakely.

Little Jamal looks into that JPEG of a smile. It’s Friday night and he doesn’t have anywhere to go, and he has needs. He squints at the JPEG and reaches for the aloe. The ISP has brought this upon our world.

Manly?: Examining Paul S. Kemp's Criteria for "Masculine" Characters

I lied when I wrote that I hadn’t been reading anything while writing We Don’t Always Drown. One of the most interesting things on the web in the last couple weeks was Paul S. Kemp’s attempt to explain why he writes “masculine fiction,” which promptly exploded in a feminist fireball. Kemp is not an author I read frequently, which made his explanations more interesting because they were purely theoretical. They were also grossly gender-prescriptive and problematic.

My idea of a manly character.

Kemp has been taken to task by many writers, including Teresa Frohock and Sam Sykes. Most responses have either been contrasting his ideology with their own fiction, or yelling “Screw you.” Both are understandable responses. But I’d like to break down one specific paragraph from his post, in which Kemp listed criteria for what makes a character “traditionally masculine.” 

So brace yourself for some meat-headedness and follow me to the bold quotes.

 “They answer violence with violence.”

-That sounds like boring storytelling, but is hardly exclusively masculine. I know plenty of women who both respond with and instigate violence. What’s worrisome about this being the first criteria is the possible inference that women have another default – particularly that they may cower and be passive in the face of violence. If that’s your inference, you instantly resent Kemp. I hope, naively, that he means women have a broad range of reactions to violence rather than always punching back, so that some characters in his world are dynamic. But we doubt that’s what he means, right?

“They’re courageous in the face of danger.”

-No feminist is listening to you after this point. If courage in the face of danger is masculine and not human, then some other response is feminine. Even if he didn’t intend it, holy shit does it sound like he means that traditionally women are meek and need saving in the face of danger. Is it true? I don’t know, nor do most of the people who are mad at him right now. Most don’t care because the misogynist inferences are too easy, especially after…

“They’re stoic in the face of challenges/pain.”

-A marginally less offensive version of the highly offensive previous item. This one I’ve also never considered masculine because I’ve known so many women who are stoic in the face of challenges. And not to downplay the misogyny of his claim, but it’s also incredibly harmful to a young male reader’s psyche depict men’s default response to pain as stoicism. More of that in the next item.

“They have their emotions mostly in check.”

-This one speaks to me. For my whole life I’ve felt like American culture was telling me to bottle up or strangle my emotions, and that feeling and sharing were privileges for girls and women. “Be a man” means shut off your heart and serve. It’s messaging that screwed me up and several men who have been dear friends of mine, not all of whom are still alive. And thus this is the most troubling item on the list, because it suggests Kemp writes stories endorsing this psychologically scarring horse shit.

“And they act in accordance with a code of honor of some kind.”

-Hey, most of us like codes of honor, at least safely removed from our world and cemented in fiction where it never revenge-kills our families. This is the one where I’d need to be a Kemp reader to know what the heck he’s talking about. I hope that he’s not writing stories in which men are the only ones with honor or morality. However, I don’t know a tradition in which women have none of this. Systems that seek to strip it from them, yes, but that’s something grotesque that also deserves ripping apart.

"Thematic elements in a lot of my work that square with this involve the obligations of fatherhood, the depths of friendship between men who’ve faced death together, the bonds of brotherhood (figuratively)."

-If this is what he led with and emphasized, I’d be down. Who would blame any one author for being interested in these themes? That’s half The Iliad right there. But it’s hard to read it as just “my interests” after so much hard gender-prescription in front of it, and Kemp later tries to justify it by saying he believes men should die on ships before women and children, and if that doesn’t convince you, also offers the credentials of being irreligious and a Democrat.

There’s the temptation to yell at Kemp, but there are two sides to this. It’s a great service to see a man name off the things he thinks are expected of him, and Kemp makes it plain in the comments that he feels these sorts of behaviors are expected of a man. The aggravating element is that he’s also endorsing these things, and endorsing them as gendered. Saying women “can” do these things but they are still more masculine is so frustrating that… well, the internet might yell at you for doing it.

Writing a Lot and Reading Nothing

This is going to be a quick post. I wanted to write an essay Saturday afternoon, but I wrote on We Don't Always Drown until evening, and then had to beta read for a friend.

So I intended to write an essay after hitting my word count goal on the novel on Sunday, maybe during the football games. But word count is horse hockey, and I kept writing until I'd finish an arc in the novel around 9:30 PM. Then I needed to find food.

Once the rough draft is done I'll post the breakdown of words-per-day on We Don't Always Drown, but I have never had a book start like this. In five days I've written over 13,000 words. It is the most I've ever gotten out of the beginning of a book. The big cheats are knowing the characters, loving their chatter, and already having the major plotting ready. It's a rush, and I'm blessed with the strength to stay upright and keep working. I don't know how long I can keep it up, and keep expecting to crash. The syndrome always gets its day, you know.

Serious work in books.

The downside is that, besides beta reading and some #fridayflash, I haven't been reading. I'm spending all that literary energy on composition, which can get dangerous. It makes me look forward to #NaNoReMo in March, when we'll all draw our classics from our shelves and do a penance unto the canon.

I rummaged through my book boxes and unearthed most of last year's candidates, as well as a few books that have been around and unread even longer. I don't know why my list is sausage fest after two straight #NaNoReMos of reading women, but it is. I figured I'd share, particularly if anyone has questions or recommendations based on these. I'll open up a proper poll in February. For now, the long list is:

-Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

-Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

-Alex Haley’s Roots

-Victor Hugo's Les Miserables

-Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace

-Fyodor Dostoyevksy’s Crime and Punishment

-John Irving's The World According to Garp

-Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities

-Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

-David Foster Wallace's The Infinite Jest
-Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Any winners?

Very Superstitious

I’m the first to say he’s not boyfriend material. He came on too strong, and then he backed off too fast. Plus, all these hurricanes he’s causing suggests if it does work you guys will need a lot of couples therapy.

But Helen, you don't friend-zone a weather god.

The highway’s flooded, and it’s snowing inside our apartment. The McDonald's where you two had your ironic non-date? I don’t want to know what happened in the ball pit. I just want it to stop being struck by lightning.

Look, remember the time Mark grabbed my ass at the office New Years party? He'd been hitting on me all night even though I straight-up told him I'm straight, and come midnight he's giving me a rectal exam? Remember how I reacted?

Yeah. I decked him.

But if he threw hurricanes along with his temper tantrums, baby we'd have moved to Virginia and be raising a little family of Pomeranians right now. Because you don't screw with that. At least not until our lease is up and we can get out of here.

Look. Your mom's a Reformed Episcopalian, right? Well this god is a fixer-upper too. And this is all still his fault, but just for right now, and this is the only time I’m ever going to say it… lead Thor on.

Unless you’ve got somebody else we could stick him with.

There Is No Generation X

I didn’t have a meltdown the other day, and neither did Michael Bay. He was on my television for no good reason and for lots of money. Beneath my television sat a box of non-perishable food I was about to run over to the local Methodist Church. Bay’s teleprompter malfunctioned and so he stammered, failed to adlib, apologized, and walked away from the giant curved television he was supposed to pretend to like. Then I walked to the car to drive food out for the homeless

This is what we have in common.
Unless you like Beta Ray Bill.

The real news story is that CES has celebrities pitching 100-inch televisions that cost $5,000 on the same day that Obama arm-wrestled the Senate over unemployment benefits. This is one of the great examples of our union barely being united, and the notion of a “generation” being meaningless. It’s not about Haves and Have-Nots, which is a blisteringly false dichotomy. It’s about difficulty pretending we’re all one.

It pings off a recent screed that “Generation X is Tired of Your Bullshit.” As though there is a Generation X. Generation X has as many bullshit-producers and -profiteers as any previous generation – perhaps more, with technology and secularism providing more pulpits.

There is staggering disparity of experience among my generation, and more in the generation that followed. Some of the children I grew up with make six figures on Wall Street. Some can’t afford the internet and sleep in parks. Some are dead.

What does any generation have in common? Being born within a few of the same decades before life happened to them? Genes, economic background, religion, sex and gender and sexuality, and the experience of all those items is wildly disparate. Most of my generation doesn't know what it's liked to be pulled over at 2:00 AM for driving too nice a car, yet my generation contains both the profiled and the profilers. Half of Generations X and Y never opened a book last year, and more of Generations X and Y have published books than any in American history. These generations are in the Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, Anonymous, political lobby firms, the unemployment line, the military, and the living room on X-Box Live.

The first non-ironic version of Ascent of Man you've seen in years.
We have this in common!

It’s beautiful and ugly and irreconcilable It’s why I can read Avarind Adiga while my brother watches Howard Stern clips on Youtube, both of us busy while my sister bakes cupcakes shaped like snowmen. That’s why Facebook walls are full of political memes that three people Like and eighteen people roll their eyes at and scroll past. That’s why the media says the media is lying. By disregarding the monolith, more people have opportunities at satisfaction. And more people means less in common.

If you’re waiting for me to say that I hate or love this, you’ll be disappointed. I experience both of those emotions towards this issue, and other emotions. It’s a complicated response that has changed and will likely change again. If I, one person, occupy so shifty a node on so obvious an issue, how are we supposed to pretend that New Yorkers, white people, Americans or Homo sapiens sapiens think one thing?

Lit Corner: Embarking on the Next Novel

Photo of controversial non-celebs?
So topical! I feel more bloggy already.

Happy January, everybody! I hope your New Years had minimal embarrassments and car wrecks.

One thing I learned at the end of 2013 is that I’m very bad at traditional blogging. Divert massive amounts of brain juice to write fiction every day? Can do. But personal missives and polemics every 2-3 days? I clearly need to learn. Let’s take a crack at this.

Because it’s January, I’m embarking on another novel. For now the project title is We Don’t Always Drown. January has been kind to my compositions for the last three years and is fast becoming the ritual spot to start new books. I know this project is right because I wound up bailing on everything last night just to outline bits of it. It’s demanding a more robust plot skeleton than usual, possibly because I’ve had this idea for two years and plot vines kept growing out of it. There are so many matters to consider when Fantasy criminals compete for a corpse stuck in an ice cube.

Results from a brainstorming session
on genre blending.

We Don’t Always Drown is the direct sequel to The Last House in the Sky, which I haven’t published, and which makes the sequel composition seem slightly dubious. Yet I’ve invented a very big world and have at least five novels in store for this cast – in addition to thirteen more ideas that might require their own novellas and novels later. The first book was such a hit with test readers that I’m tempted to rush it out, but because this is the beginning of a long undertaking, I want to make sure the limb holds. There’s no sin equally contemptible as retconning all the important bits in after a book’s been out.

December went well. I managed to finish drafts of all four target stories, and submitted three in earnest. If you don’t know, both Strange Horizons and F&SF opened to digital submissions a short while ago. One straggling short story needs a little more time in the pressure cooker; I’ll probably straighten it out in the spring after this novel is drafted. Most importantly, that old Magical Girl story is out the door and making the rounds in what feels like a truly finished form. Six years of haunting, finally exorcised. It’s striking how draining what ultimately turns out to be so few words can be.

Awful author selfie?
Okay. Now it's a blog post.

My 2014 convention schedule is almost set. I have to make Boskone in February to see my old VP peeps, and am currently trying to figure out how to fit both ReaderCon and NASFiC into the same week this summer. My room is already booked for World Fantasy in D.C. Who will I see there?

To the general reader public: #NaNoReMo is coming back, but as you guessed, it won’t be in January. We had some folks request it be moved forward a bit, and so we’ve settled on March. Silly as I may be, February is Black History month, the only official month of anything that I actually respect and refuse to compete against. So you’ve got two months to pick out that classic book you’ve been putting off for two long. There ought to be a blog post about that soon. I love #NaNoReMo after last year’s intimate weeks plumbing Middlemarch, which is still challenging my view of how fiction operates.

So how was your December, everyone? And how’s January opening up?

He'll Be Back

first-ever cyborg

felt winter's chill, laid back down,

and switched himself off.

Best Reads 2013 is Live

This weekend and into New Years, we're celebrating Best Reads 2013. The rules are simple: list up your favorite books that you read for the first time this year, and write them up however best shares what moved you about them. I'll evangelize Middlemarch in a moment, but first: the #bestreads2013 master list:

1. Mary Garber

2. Mark Kerstetter

3. Katherine Nabity

4. Beth Matthews

5. Melanie Schulz

6. Cindy Vaskova
7. Elephant's Child
8. Ross Dillon
9. Katherine Hajer
10. Sonia Lal
11. Alexia
12. Margit Sage
13. Beverly Fox 

If you've blogged about it yourself, comment below and I'll add you. If you don't have a space to write about it, you're welcome to just post your list in the comments.

Now, as far my favorites...
George Eliot’s Middlemarch
My pick for #NaNoReMo in February just about ruined long Fantasy novels for me. My copy was a scant 1,000 pages and needed every page, something not many books can claim. It starts so simply, with a feminist joke of a woman at a dinner party who’s afraid she might have to start thinking for herself. But her wealthy suitor doesn’t want a wife who thinks or remembers what she reads to him; only one who reads clearly and doesn’t interrupt. There’s another man who might be better for her, but he’s too preoccupied with trying to introduce scientific medicine to the town. That science seems blasphemous to many local political figures, who attempt to prevent his entry, or court him if they’ll help him with something.

 Middlemarch keeps adding points of view and dares head-hop, sometimes multiple times within a paragraph, to show the myriad ways we conflict with each other. It’s a painstaking novel about mishearing out of fear, paying selective attention, hiding things capriciously or for reasons you don’t even know are pointless. It’s the anatomy of conflict, often embarrassing, sometimes funny, and all too often, utterly damning to the rationalizations I’m guilty of every day – but it’s expanded beyond a character, or her family, and out into an entire community.

It needs every page it gets to cover its ground. I’m not the sort who believes in the Best Novel of All Time, but for the first time in years, I understood why people would think that sort of nonsense.

Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Stars
The novel that restored by faith in long Fantasy. After the existential crisis that Middlemarch caused, I had several failed runs reading Epic Fantasies that were not nearly complex enough to need their page space. There was one particularly bad experience with a Fantasy about farm hands striving to rescue kidnapped children that, after six hundred pages, couldn’t even resolve the God-damned kidnapping. I briefly wondered if I wasn’t in the wrong genre. And then Kay released River of Stars.

Elegance is a big part of it. The emperor sees himself as kind even though his actions are highly proud and capricious; a young female poet defies the social order of her world by getting an education reserved for men; a dashing outlaw raids convoys that the government won’t even miss. And yet there’s a government official who falls in love with the charm of the outlaw, and the poet’s father cherishes her in oblique ways, such that not everyone is the center of their own world, but everyone has a distinct and dynamic life. The country is so vast, with so many walks of life that even when it’s brought to war with the country to the north, not everyone experiences it the same way. It challenges the notion of a large body having a mono-culture or a shared value, for what’s universal if thousands of people can die in a war and there are citizens who don’t even know it’s happening? The various players keep interacting in novel ways, enriched by brilliant themes of how history is made and remembered. It’s not just what a war hero means to himself in the moment, or the troops around him, or the family he left at home that can’t know what he’s going through, but also what his sacrifices amount to in the next battle, and after the war. There’s a terrible permanence that pings all the way to the last page.

Tom Holt’s Blonde Bombshell
The funniest Science Fiction I’ve read in years, and easily the best novel that could ever have been published with such a title. It references one of the protagonists: a sentient bomb that has second thoughts about destroying earth. Holt has thought out bomb psychology very thoroughly, including why, among all machines, they’re the only atheists (a bomb only needs the satisfaction of a job well done). The bomb winds up taking humanoid form to explore our planet with some zany culture clash, but we’re also treated to a female Steve Jobs who’s afraid she’d being haunted by unicorns and, well, very quickly I realized I needed to buy this as birthday presents for several people.

Takako Shimura’s Wandering Son
The second Middle Grade comic to ever show up on my lists, and a series that feels destined to become one of my favorite works of sequential art of all time. There are plenty of good books, a surprising number of great books, but few things make me think that if everyone read them the world would be a better place. Wandering Son is on that extremely short list. It is the tender story of a kindergartener who wishes he was a girl and begins experimenting in trans* - at first in secret, just touching or trying on a dress, and then seeing if he’s noticed when he goes out in public. It’s not about prurience. It’s about not understand why everyone expects you to behave a certain way, and even as a cis-gendered guy, it touched on several questions I had at seven years old but figured were stupid because no one else ever brought them up and gender policing was so strict. This is a beautiful series that opens up the conversation in a way kids can understand. It probably would have made me a more tolerant kid.

Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal
The other manga on my list, and one of my all-time favorite Historical Fantasies. It’s a series that keeps me coming back and pacing out its entries so that there will always be more for future years. This year I read volumes 15-18, which covered most of the incredibly disturbing turn into Body Horror, as the immortal Manji was abducted and the subject of experiments for what happened if parts of his body were transplanted to others. It’s only because Samura is so good at storytelling and pacing that I stuck around for two straight volumes of incredibly disturbing imagery. Typically I want such stories to suck, so that I can dismiss them and walk away. It’s so much harder when a story is well-written and has hooks, like the slipping psychology of the physician who can’t keep patients alive, and I’m forced to admit I’m fascinated.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos
I don’t think I’ve ever read another novel where the central point of interest was the identity of the narrator. Who the hell is telling this story? Sometimes it references being present, but it also references a future where humans are hunted by killer whales, and seems to have introspective knowledge of multiple characters in multiple continents. Is it a god watching use evolve? Is an alien anthropologist? Is it a time traveler checking out what went on back when humans still had legs? The stranding of the voyagers and the ominous tones of impending doom on humanity-as-we-know-it are interesting plot points, but the whole thing works because Vonnegut decided to make the storyteller ambiguous. The result is my favorite Vonnegut novel I’ve ever read.

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl
An annoying number of Horror movies ask the question, “Is the hero haunted or crazy?”

The Drowning Girl has the genius idea of answering, “Both.”

Kiernan has crafted a masterpiece of dark fiction, focusing on a first person narrator who is struggling to become and stay reliable. Her schizophrenia complicates her ability to keep track of the people she’s really met, and the feelings she’s really had, while she encounters people who may well be ghosts that can’t help but drive people mad. While Kiernan resists labeling the novel “Horror,” the section where our narrator goes off her meds for several pages is as harrowing a piece of prose as I can remember reading.

And the great trick to The Drowning Girl isn’t figuring out if her lover was dead all along, or who really put the weird painting somewhere, but to opening yourself to empathizing with people who are can’t help but hurt.

And if you don’t like that, well, there’s Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story
The fricking mother of all ghost stories. I was blown back by how many elements I recognized from the novels of Stephen King, the movies of John Carpenter and Wes Craven, and pretty much every spooky videogame I’ve ever played, all of which came after this novel. It was like coming home to the house I didn’t know I’d grown up in.

Here is a small club of storytellers who love to share ghost stories. A member died several years ago, seemingly in terror of an empty room. Ever since they’ve had inexplicable moments that inspire more stories: a woman turning into a home wrecker out of nowhere, or being stalked by wind, or the thing that was in one of their stories years ago being reported as slaughtering the local cows. What’s haunting them isn’t a conventional ghost, but almost a zeitgeist of the stories they can’t leave alone. Often creepy, often eccentric, it keeps building until it pays off in one of the most satisfying conclusions of any Horror novel I’ve ever read. And I haven’t even been stalked by anything from the book since.


Steven Strogatz’s Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
Confession time: it took me four years to read this book. I don’t understand people who can read this thing in a weekend unless they live and breathe science. I would pick the book up, read half a page about why bridges sway in rhythms under foot traffic, or how body temperature commands sleep rhythms, or how a room temperature liquid can move through a solid, and need to digest it, or run to Youtube to see evidence of the claim. There are pages in this book that I read two dozen times, trying to wrap my head around room temperature super conductors and the nanoscopic traits of lasers. It’s all interesting, but furthermore, it all amounts to a staggering hypothesis: despite entropy, the universe is full of a highly suspicious amount of spontaneous order.

My only non-fiction book on the list. Most of my non-fiction diet is from blogs, websites and magazines, but this is some of the best science writing I’ve ever read. Strogatz tackles the bizarre theory of complexity and spontaneous order. In a universe that seems bound by entropy, we still see complex order emerging in almost every major system, not only star systems that immediately lapse into gravitational patterns, but inside your own body, inside biological societies, and even on trafficked bridges and inside super-heated beakers. While the book doesn’t claim to know why order emerges so rapidly, it pushes at the boundaries of how we understand the laws of the universe.

Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni
The only book I stayed up until 2:00 AM reading this year, and in this case, two nights in a row. What a debut novel, audaciously mixing the Genre and the Literary into a hauntingly introspective set of narratives. We follow a newly created golem and an ancient jinni as they are stranded in New York City, circa 1899, and following the Melting Pot into ethnic ghettos. There’s the poignancy of a golem, built out of Jewish tradition, failing to appreciate the teachings of the rabbi who shelters her, as well as the thrills of the jinni trying to get drunk and party with locals.

We anticipate a love story whenever these two finally discover they’re not alone in the sea of humanity, but the novel holds a much bigger payload. Its ending is the least binary of any novel I’ve read since Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, because as the golem is hunted by her creator and the tools to re-enslaving the jinni emerge, there are so many ways it could close. It’s not about beating Voldemort or rescuing the princess anymore. It’s about hearts that could change, and people who could disappear off the streets forever. A heck of a debut novel.