Well, I am back in the Great White North but will soon return to my lady in the Pacific. Much has happened, but the most pressing are two events.

First, I thoroughly enjoyed the Context convention in Columbus, Ohio. Gary Braunbeck's workshop was first rate and the class was a great bunch. Lots of good feedback and I hope everyone got some use out of my crits. Erin's story got mucho and well deserved praise. It was a stunning piece and you should all keep your eyes out for it. Thanks to everyone for making it such an engaging con, including all the new friends who laughed  with us that last night. Great to meet you all and do stay in touch.

Second, my story "Blue Harvest" has been accepted for publication at Nossa Morte. I'm thrilled about this sale. It is an important story for me and a great venue for it (Nossa Morte has also published Mike Kelly, so you know they're damn good). It will be in their anniversary issue, so keep your eyes peeled.

Now on to article writing. Thanks to everyone we met in Ohio, but if I ever have to sit in the Columbus airport again I will implode.

JSR

Sorry about the paucity of updates over the last month. I’m still here, slogging away. In the last month I’ve received three rejections from head editors at pro mags and written over 200 for my own magazine. I’ve rewritten one story of my own and sent about ten rewrite requests. My new fantasy mag Beneath Ceaseless Skies launches nine days from today, so in addition to all the regular slush reading, there’s the big final push to get tons of things ready.  So Issue #1 may be my next update for a while–look for it Thursday-week, Oct. 9.

I was walking around the grounds of my apartment complex today (yes, it has real estate holdings sufficient, I think, to be referred to as “grounds”…not maybe in the pastoral landed class sense, but substantial, with lawns and communal gardens and all) when I came across a possum. An o-possum. Like a big gray rat with a white face and pink lips. I believe they are marsupials, and I am pretty sure they’re supposed to be nocturnal. This one was out in the middle of the day in plain sight on the lawn. Even weirder, it wasn’t doing anything—just standing there, all four paws on the ground, staring at, well, nothing.

I stopped and watched it for awhile, trying to figure out what its deal was. Had my camera with me, and I thought about taking a picture—but in the end, possums just aren’t very photogenic. Especially this one.

I wasn’t any more than ten feet away from it, and it didn’t even acknowledge me. I had a stick with me, as I usually do, and I banged it against a tree to make some noise. I shouted at it. No reaction from the possum. It just stood there, staring at whatever it was staring at it. And twitching. And there were flies. A whole bunch of flies.

It was at this point that I started to get the sick feeling I had experienced this moment before: in zombie films, where the soon-to-be-dead idiot approaches his girlfriend who has been hunched over in front of the sink since he got home, puts a hand on her shoulder asking what’s wrong, turns her around, and….

Yeah.

I left the undead possum to go about its business of communing with the ancestor god or the hive mind or whatever, and went to report the incident to the ladies at the leasing office.

I think they called animal control. I haven’t heard anything since. I did see some people standing around outside waiting for the bus. They didn’t look like zombies. I dunno. The wife isn’t home yet.

It's time to cook the books.

Things sure do look pretty grim.

Work keeps having these emergency safety drills: evacuations, power management drills; all at the behest of various city administrative organizations. And as I sit in the dark, listening to the warbling hum from out of the server room (no lights, but we can keep the computer on), I figure here we are, the rolling blackouts have begun. But, at least we can take comfort in the fact that when the shit hits the fan and we're all cannibalized by our neighbors, who then proceed to brutishly bludgeon each other to death.

After all that happens, and there's no one left, nature will come back and cover over everything. At that point things will be beautiful.

Full photo set here.

Like everything else, 90% of horror fiction is crap but that last 10% is pure gold. But some of the best horror fiction out there won't be found in the horror section. Granted, I have a broader definition of horror than most. I don't think you need supernatural elements or the usual tropes to write a powerful horror story. I don't think horror fiction has one emotional effect (fear) at its heart, but a wealth of other powerful emotional touchstones to explore. (grief, guilt, redemption, hedonism).  As such, I would consider the work of Jim Thompson as much akin to the best horror fiction out there today, even though their are no monsters besides the human animal let loose in his stories.

Tom Piccirilli wrote horror fiction for years before his work started to be shelved in a bunch of different bookstore locations, including mystery and westerns. He's won awards in almost all of the fields he's played in, showing that, if you work your arse off, you can cut it as a writer of many genres. Recently, crime fiction has been his most popular and successful genre work. I started reading The Dead Letters in Austin, Texas, while my lady was attending and participating in a video game conference (and she did an amazing job).

Damn. It may be in the mystery section, but this novel is as much a horror novel as one of crime. Its as if Piccirilli took the best things he learned about horror writing (and he wrote some great horror-labled stuff, including The Night Class which I also enjoyed) and shoved it into a literary crime novel.

Such an example proves a few things. Cross genre writers can make it if they work like hell and play it smart, and, if they are like Piccirilli, use what they've learned in each genre to make for more interesting, compelling, and innovative fiction in another genre.

Huzzah, I say. Huzzah.

JSR

This is going to be one of those long, rambly posts that touches everything. So you might as well go get a cup of tea. And maybe not come back. I leave that to you.

My first encounter with the myth of Johnny Appleseed was a big white hardcover picturebook which I swear was called The Joy of Giving, but which I can’t find anywhere on the eeenternets, so maybe I imagined the whole thing. It told the life of Johnny Appleseed in the simplest, most sanguine terms, with cuted-up illustrations and a talking inanimate object sidekick (a shovel, I think). He wore a pot for a hat, dressed in muddy overalls, and hiked barefoot, with a big walking stick and two cloth bags slung over his shoulder: apple seeds and oatmeal. He walked until he was tired, ate supper out of his hat, built an orchard, then started walking again. And now we have apples everywhere, in pies and cider and the American dream.

It doesn’t get simpler than that. And when I turned six or seven and graduated from Mac and Tab Are Friends to that, believe me, I was sold. If I could figure out what the heck that story was actually called it would go on my Jay Ridler Top 100 books lickety split. Along with all the rest of the sappy picture book biographies in that series (each one of which had its own unique variety of inanimate object sidekick).

Sappy and cheeseball though it is, it occurs to me that the talking inanimate sidekick thing–at least as used in that series–is actually a magic realist trope. Everything else about the story dealt in a more or less accurate—albeit syrupy-sweet—manner with the real life of some inspiring historical figure. Madam Curie talked to X-Rays, as I recall, and Louis Pasteur talked to germs. It was awesome. And Will Rogers talked to his lariat. No, really. It’s just taking one element of a story and blowing it up to magical stature via hyperbole in order to grab the fancy of a reader who might otherwise be less than interested. This is why magic realists get accused of pandering and their readers of exoticism. But why the hell else would I have cared what happened to the boring old whitebeard Louis Pasteur if he hadn’t been fighting these big germs that looked like Napoleonic soldiers with bayonets?

It’s apple-picking season. In a couple weeks I will drop off several five-gallon glass carboys at my local orchard to be filled with fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider. The big Mac tree behind my apartment has been producing apace since August; I’ve been eating at least one a day since then and am now physically invincible. As my affair with the cliff the other day clearly demonstrates. Today, I ate three different varieties of wild apple: a kind of Golden Delicious/Macoun hybrid from the tree outside my work at lunchtime, a hard, mild Spy variety from the edge of a field in Graves Farm Sanctuary at the beginning of my evening hike, and a spicy Macintosh variety from the same field at the end.

Mulling over the last one as I meandered back to the car, I thought of Appleseed. His position in the American myth is unique, closest perhaps to Thoreau (at least among its real, breathing representatives, as opposed say to Longfellow’s Hiawatha) in terms both of pacifism and unabashed love and appreciation for nature. Appleseed has a magnanimity towards the human race that, to my mind at least, the other great naturalists lack. On the the other hand, he is completely un-unique as an unconcerned, if well-intentioned, spreader of colonialism.

Still, I don’t think I can deny being deeply influenced by that spirit–and by Appleseed as a hero–even if there is a bit of hypocrisy involved. Little kids are impressionable, I know. As a six year old I was probably equally enthralled with the story of Helen Keller and her talking water pump or whatever. But not nearly to the degree that her legend can rear up out of a country breeze and hijack my head for a couple of hours.

This is where the dangling spider-threads of my newly adopted fake religion, pseudopagan pantheism, make themselves felt. I am irrevocably a creature of New England. If I ever leave here, I’ll still be that. Which means, because of the legacy of Appleseed and those like him in the oblivious colonialist sense, that as deep as my druidy roots ever reach, they will always have been founded upon a tamed and friendly Nature. I can wander around like an idiot falling off cliffs and getting lost in thickets in the dark without a lot of fear of retribution. No wolves, only the occasional wee black bear to go “aww cute” and scare off, and no place to get lost or horribly crippled where a mere half-mile of excruciating crawling won’t get me to a friendly human dwelling with phones and hot running water. Whenever I meet a serious wilderness enthusiast from west of the Mississippi, I seem to end up getting the same gentle ribbing about being so irrevocably enamored of the nurturing-yet-pansy green hills of my home, even to the point of disregard for real wild things like the Rockies, Yosemite, Olympia. And they’re not wrong. But I can’t help it.

I can’t stand new development. I get very angry when trees get cut down and old farmland gets paved to make way for giant box stores I will never enter and couldn’t even dent with a shoulder-fired missile. And yet at the same time I feel, a bit guiltily, that I owe a lot to Johnny Appleseed. He (or his myth) made what remains of the Western Massachusetts wilderness into the Eden that it is, where I can wander around ignoring trail signs and topography, picking apples and taking meticulous photographs of mushrooms with no regard for life or limb. I could probably live for weeks in the woods this time of year just on apples. Presuming I didn’t get gunned down by hunters. Without him, or the spirit of agricultural imperialism he exemplified, that wouldn’t be possible. My whole philosophy of existence pretty much wouldn’t be possible.

If only I were Erin Hoffman, I could distill all this verbosity down into a heartwrenching 20-line poem that cuts to the quick, sell it, and maybe put it out of my head.

Instead I’ll spend the next year or so mulling over the tragic extinction of the American tall tale, how the sterilization of popular culture into malls and box stores and wax-coated, nasty, gas-chamber megamart apples has utterly exterminated any earnest belief in the old kinds of myths, and the only way to resurrect them is in clinical laboratory examinations such as this. And maybe, If I’m really lucky, six months after that, I’ll have written a story that touches on these sad notions briefly in passing and ultimately fails to do them justice.

Hey sweet thing, what do you say you and me ditch this planet and go for a ride in my rocketship?

(Save vs. magic for half damage?)

This hiking staff was handmade for me as a gift more than ten years ago by my friend Michael Purpura. It was sturdy, springy and surprisingly lightweight. There was a half-inch bolt screwed onto the business end to prevent it from splitting, which over time and heavy use buried itself deeper and deeper into the wood. Near the head was an etching of dragon taken from the frontispiece of one of the books in Weis and Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle. (Can’t remember which—Dragon Wing? Hand of Chaos? And yes, I was indeed a big ole serial fantasy junkie once upon a time. You were surprised?).

This staff has traveled with me over countless country miles. It has gotten me many weird looks from passersby. As related in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of Weird Tales, it once helped me scare the scare the living bejeezus out of a little old lady. Yesterday, it saved my life.

Or at least it saved me some broken bones.

I was hiking part of the Robert Frost trail south through Mt. Toby Reservation just before sunset. I wanted to get back to the road before dark, so with my usual disregard for rationality, I detoured west down the face of a steep cliff. I made it about halfway before an earthy ledge I was standing on gave out underneath me. I fell fifteen feet and landed in a thorn bush. If it weren’t for the staff, which I shoved into the fork of a tree as I fell past it in an attempt to break my fall, I would probably have plowed right through the thorn bush and kept on going. As it was, I survived with only a bunch of stinging red cuts and scratches all over my knees, back and forearms.

Thank you, stick. You served me well. Now go on to a better place.

Once I saw off the splintered parts, I’ll turn the rest into stakes for the garden.

Somewhere between the top of the subway stairs and the bottom I accumulate this two-inch strand of cold pink "mucus" on the palm of my hand. No idea what it could be, and I am glancing around for a place to wipe it. I wipe it on the edge of the stairs, then board my train and step in gum. Whenever I move, I trail these little strands. Twenty minutes later the train pulls into my station. I’m beside the wrong flight of stairs. To avoid the onrushing passengers I have to dodge aside -- stepping into the middle of a nice rust and soot colored puddle.