I think some of you folks might like this.

"Some nights I dream of an entirely anonymous library in which books have no title and boast no author, forming a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge, and all protagonists an all locations are unidentified, a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course.

"In such a library, the hero of __The Castle__ would embark on the __Pequod__ in search of the Holy Grail, land on a deserted island to rebuild society from fragments shored against his ruins, speak of the first centenary encounter with ice and recall, in excruciating detail, his early going to bed."

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, page 63.

I’m still knee-deep in stuff for my magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including licensing new cover art and finalizing our first audio fiction podcast. It was great at Capclave two weekends ago to see some F/SF editors I had met over the summer at ReaderCon and to meet several more.

Now if I could only find the time to write a bit myself….

Maize God trying forlornly to get used to his new winter abode on the window-bench above the Sandman comics.

This week I declared garden season officially over, so dug up and brought in some herbs: chives, parsley, rosemary, basil, and oregano. Maize God, Owl and Jasper came in too. Though the lemon thyme is still out there waiting. Ran out of potting medium. Amazingly, though there has been frost practically every night for the last couple of weeks, the sun gold tomato plant in the pot outside my front door still produces a new tomato every few days. Not the most delicious tomato ever, but I am impressed with its resilience.

We had a monster of a windstorm last night—one of those weird, last-gasp summer thunderstorms where the power goes out, the branches batter the window screens, and it’s 30 degrees warmer than it ought to be. Which is how I found myself sitting about drinking barleywine in the dark, flipping through precolombian art books by candlelight for pumpkin-carving inspiration, and taking low-light photos of my apartment to pass the time.

Look what popped up in my email this morning, thanks to my “mossy skull” Google alert:

Captain! The men have found something!




The VanDermeers were good enough to give me a copy of Fast Ships, Black Sails when they were in town for the Weird Tales event a week back. Featuring stories by Elizabeth Bear, Carrie Vaughn, Michael Moorcock, Garth Nix, Naomi Novik, and a host of others (including me with my very first sale!), it's been great subway reading. Some copies have already materialized on the "street".

My story, "Skillet & Saber" is kind of like an episode of Iron Chef as directed by Sam Peckinpah and featuring pirate cooks. How many uses can you find for an old mango pit? There's drugs, mayhem, and a recipe for eating your own boots. It's educational -- though rereading it now makes me squeamish 'cause it relies a bit too much on the "Texas aw'shucks" for its dramatic tension.

Let the festivities begin!

I just had a nice chuckle-shudder from my peripatetic companion Kristine Dikeman's shorty-short story, "All Flee the Vocab Quiz" over at Podcastle. It's less than four minutes long. You all should check it out!

This may or may not be my official pumpkin carving for the season. I have wild ambitions for something really complicated, a cylindrical frieze featuring the Mayan death god. But that will require several hours of dedicated free time, and considering how neglected this here blog has been of late, such time may never materialize.

So just in case I never get around to it: Happy Hallowe’en! Grab that fiddle and a jug of barley-wine and head down to the fields for a moon dance!

Cold Mountain water
the jade merchant’s daughter
Mountains of the Moon,
Elektra, bow and bend to me
Hi ho the Carrion Crow
Folderol-de-riddle
Hi Ho the Carrion Crow
Bow and bend to me

—Robert Hunter, “Mountains of the Moon”

I do live! According to recent reports, anyway. I've actually been trying to post this for a week, but am only just now getting to it. I have a lot of things to catch up on, and hopefully am getting to a portion of them this weekend.

The move, a high volume of chaos (and travel) that followed it, and then rocketing full bore into the new job have all conspired to eat my brain. Many things to catch up on, some of them sad, most of them happy. But since this is time-related, I'm posting that friend/editor/Homeless Moon co-conspirator scott_h_andrews's online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now live, with its first issue featuring work from Chris Willrich and David D. Levine. It's a beautiful issue, and the first line of Willrich's two-part story caught my attention in particular:

One storm-lashed sunset in the Eldshore’s antique capital, beneath Castle Astrolabe’s crumbling perch and near the Zodiac Coliseum’s bloody stones, Gaunt and Bone scaled Heaven’s Vault, there to make a hellish deposit.

A very pulpy but fun story.

David Levine's "Sun Magic, Earth Magic" is a complementary pairing, smooth and clean but distinctive. Check them out!

With these, sneaking in a few sale announcements that I've also been remiss on... "Stormchaser, Stormshaper", an Of Fire and Sea universe short story, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As others will tell you, Scott has very exacting tastes, so I was thrilled that he liked this story. After many exchanges, "Impress of the Hills" is officially sold to Spacesuits & Sixguns, and Mythic Delirium picked up "Beauty Sleep", a short poem/alternate perspective on a fairy tale you can probably guess.

I also twittered about this, but didn't mention it here, that "We the Gamers" went up on the Escapist last week. It picked up a mention on kotaku, and even got (so far) 617 diggs, though mostly, it seems, because of a single quote that was pulled out by one of the journalists along the way and got them thinking I was talking primarily about DRM. The subcultures of these places are interesting -- apparently "meatspace" is a word one does not use around digg folk. I wish I could even claim I'd been using it to be pretentious -- it's actually part of my common vocabulary, which, given where I work, isn't surprising, but possibly is sad depending on your perspective. ;) The comments vary, as they usually do, from RTFA-bait to insightful, but it does amaze me how many in the gaming community persistently dismiss anything having to do with MMOs. Obviously because of where I work I have a biased perspective on this, but at the moment I'm convinced that not only is the MMO, in one form or another, the dominant genre (with WoW's subscription figures alone there's little disputing this), it's simply the future of gaming, end of discussion. And yet clearly there's a talking-point dismissal of MMOs as subject matter in gaming circles, which leads me to believe that there is a market gap in a definitive news and discussion source for these millions who actually play online games (The Escapist, much as I love what they do, isn't it, by its demographics, and TerraNova is too riddled with academics [no slight on academics, I love them, I'm just limited in my maximum dosage]). But thoughts for another time...

This weekend will consist of book selling, samurai movies, and bread pudding.

Life is good.

Now that got your attention!

Gardner: Any dude whose skills as a writing teacher helped talents as diverse as Raymond Carver and Jeffrey Ford gets three Huzzahs from this palooka. I've read his non-fic (lots of grist for the mill), but what of his fiction would you fine folks recommend? Grendel? Sunlight Dialogues? Help me!

HWA: So, lots of talk about the HWA out there. Not much of it good. Some of it reminds me why I left. Still, curiosity remains. As a former affiliate member, I'd be interested if there are any good arguments to rejoin that current members can make. If so, fire them in the comments section. If not, cool.

JSR