What's it about, Craig Gidney?

The first thing you'll come to when you begin paging through Say...have you heard this one? (after the TOC and traditional informative front matter, of course) is a story called "The Safety of Thorns." Writer Craig Gidney rings some changes on an old story when a young man in the American south considers a deal with, well, with a person who looks like this:

"His fingernails were black and slightly curved. He was crowned with a black silk top hat that boasted a white feather. There was no mistaking him. His skin was as black as tar, a color that glistened, but did not reflect."

Craig lives and works in Washington, DC. Previous stories by him have appeared in Riprap and Spoonfed. He keeps a LiveJournal called Treasure Hiding, helps illuminate the post industrial underground with music reviews at Heathen Harvest, and writes articles like this one about Tanith Lee.

As I did the other contributors to the 'zine, I asked Craig what his piece was about. He replied, "It's a story about love and loyalty. About rebellion and futility. It's an homage to Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, and Tanith Lee. It's about the safety of thorns."

Thanks, Craig Gidney!

To subscribe, please find the PayPal buttons to the right.

The Fountain Award

The second annual Fountain Award, given to a "speculative short story of exceptional quality" has been awarded by the Speculative Literature Foundation. This year's winner is Jeffrey Ford for his "The Annals of Eelin-Ok," a great story from last year's best anthology, The Faery Reel.

The jurors also published a short list of honorable mentions, and the list of stories, publications and writers included make up a pretty good snapshot of where the exciting work is in genre fiction these days, I think. Of special note on that short list is David J. Schwartz's "The Lethe Man" from the last issue of Say...

Congratulations to Jeff and Dave, and to all the other finalists. Go read all about it.

Saturday this 'n' thatz

• The lovely and talented Erin Keane has put up a page with all the details about the June edition of the InKY Reading Series, where I'll be a participant, along with Gwenda Bond and Mark Rudolph.

• Love your day job? I didn't think so. There's still time to scroll down to the next entry and play My Day Job Destroys My Will and Soul at a Faster Rate Than Your Day Job Destroys Yours! Looks like the first few entries are all by men. I guess that means any women who read this have enjoyed fair, supportive environments throughout their working lives, just like Anne Coulter always says.

• This morning has been a lot of fun, because digital printing is breezy easy and the internet always works. The super-cool and talented Melissa Mas, who designed the cover for Say... #5, managed to beat Adobe Illustrator into submission long enough to get her files burned onto a cd which was in turn couriered to us here at the Fortress of Words under cover of darkness.
  

Then it was a simple matter of typing a few commands and hey presto! Everything the printer will need to produce our stylish 'zine was on their computron machines down there in Tennessee. Yep, that's what happened. Nothing at all involving the downloading and discarding of four GUI ftp applications for OSX occurred. The printers servers couldn't possibly have a conflict with the OSX built-in ftp client, either, right? Surely nothing so complicated as uploading the files to the fortressofwords.com server hosted on the South Island of New Zealand could have been required, could it? A web bunny in Raleigh didn't have to be rousted out of bed to move the files from New Zealand first to a UNIX box in Charlotte then finally to the printer in Nashville, did he? Surely not!

It'll all be worth it, readers. I know you're tired of me reminding you about those "subscribe now" buttons at right, but it don't cost nothing to read me reminding, and it won't cost much to get to read this:

• 

It's time to play!

Hey everybody! It's time to play My Day Job Destroys My Will and Soul at a Faster Rate Than Your Day Job Destroys Yours!

The playing field is defined as the comments of this blog post. The big prize is a copy of the next issue of Say... if you're not a subscriber, and a one issue extension of your subscription if you are. Winner will seemingly be determined by a whim of the contest organizer. The little (indeed) prize is the knowledge that you have somehow found the strength to grimly soldier on.

(Um, this is for fun. If you work at an animal shelter or for a Republican administration or something, use your old job).

Entries should be formatted in a structure parallel to that of the first entry, unless you don't like that format, in which case entries must be formatted in a structure more clever than that of the first entry. If there are zero comments when you read this post, congratulations! That means you've been chosen to post the first entry.

Contest closes when contest administrator wakes up and checks the internet on Sunday morning, so get those entries in!

What's it about, Sonya Taaffe?

"White Shadows," Sonya Taaffe's tale of a mysterious girl named Fetch, begins on page 52 of Say...have you heard this one?

Sonya describes the story's central character:

"Her hair was white as flour, opaque as though powdered, and her skin had the solid pallor of chalk. Only her eyes had color; they consumed her face, vivid as a snowman's chunks of coal, and did not blink often. If she had been at all given to introspection, it might have made her smile: laquered ivory shadow, blanched past albino, and she never stood out in a crowd. She did not look inward..."

In her biographical notes, Sonya reminds us that she's been here before, as she's contributed to three earlier issues of Say... She's also seen work in Realms of Fantasy and Flytrap. She has two books forthcoming this year from Prime Books: Singing Innocence and Experience collects fiction, while Postcards from the Province of Hyphens offers many of the best poems of this Rhysling Award winning poet.

She keeps an online journal called Myth Happens, is a contributing editor to Not One of Us, and was recently interviewed by Geoffrey H. Goodwin at Bookslut.

I asked Sonya what her story was about, and she replied with this exchange from George Gershwin's Crazy for You.

"Look, I'm depressed."
"Oh, you're depressed? I'm just not myself today..."

Thanks, Sonya Taaffe!

See earlier entries here and here for subscription information, or find the PayPal links at right.

Pretty pretty

Hey, somebody's been refurbishing my blog. I like it. You'll like it too when I continue the series of posts I started last night highlighting individual contributors to the new issue of Say..., because I'll no longer have to paste in those PayPal buttons. It's all about the art from here on out, baby, and commercial concerns are relegated to the sidebar. Over to the right. Down towards the bottom. See? Right down there.

What's it about, Peg Duthie?

On page 21 of Say...have you heard this one?, you'll find a poem by Peg Duthie entitled "The nty-nth Coming." Here's a taste:


Now refusing to race toward revelations—
no longer eager, evidence having evaporated
faster than the foam of fragile faith—
no matter how tantalizing, how true-seeming—
we've heard it before, and it's hell to behold
this mane of absence mightier than Abaddon—

When I asked Peg for a biography, she wrote simply that she works as a calligrapher and copyeditor in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find out more at her professional website, NashPanache, or by reading her LiveJournal, chrysanthemum.

Peg's had several poems published at the No Tell Motel website; here's one called "Journey's End."

I asked Peg what "The nty-nth Coming" is about. Her answer?

"Slouching towards a slug of single malt Scotch."

You can read Peg's poem in its entirety, along with stories, book reviews, a comic and another poem, by subscribing to Say... today.

Despite what the buttons read, you don't have to have a PayPal account. Just click the button appropriate to your country of residence and you'll be able to use your credit card. Thanks readers, and thanks, Peg Duthie!

In the United States:





In Canada:





In the rest of the world:

Authentic Blog Entry!

This is the real deal, right here folks. I'm going to point to an entry on somebody else's blog, which itself consists of a link to and extracts from an article at still a third site, then add a pithy sentence designed to be the equivalent of me standing there nodding my head and saying "So true." With links!

So, check out this entry over at the Conversational Reading blog. Nothing in the article under discussion quite so quotable as Ben's observation that the literary world is shaking off "the long cold sleep of realism," but still pretty interesting.

Man, I am getting this stuff figured out.

PayPal:

Okay, after being mocked by a Canadian, I've decided to try to figure out if I can add little buttons so that interested folks can subscribe to Say... from this journal for now, until the fortressofwords.com site goes live anyway.

If I'm doing this right, this should be a button that lets domestic subscribers send ten bucks for a two issue subscription:

This should be a button that lets Canadians, even mocking Canadians, send eleven bucks for a two issue subscription:

And this last one is for people in the rest of the world who'll need to send twelve bucks for a two issue subscription. In all cases, I'm using "bucks" to mean "US dollars."

Theoretically there'll be a place for you to enter your address and all that stuff. Let me know if it doesn't work. If it does work then I suppose I'll know by getting messages from PayPal.

Once Gwenda is up and around I'll have her figure out how to put these buttons over on the side so they won't scroll down off the page as I continue my white hot pace of blog updating.

Happy Mother's Day!

SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Yes, it's all so crassly commercial, isn't it?

On the other hand, it's only ten bucks.

"Only ten bucks?" you say. "That sounds like a great deal! What are you talking about?"

See how the web of my viral marketing scheme so easily ensnares you!

Actually, this entry is just me telling all y'all about the new issue of Say..., the magazine I edit with Alan DeNiro and Gwenda Bond. Every issue is themed around a question and the stories, poems and comics that we publish aim to answer, deny, rebuke or otherwise address that question. This time around, the question was "have you heard this one?" and these fine people have answered it with your needs in mind.

Hannah Wolf Bowen
Stephanie Burgis
E. L. Chen
Peg Duthie
Craig Laurance Gidney
Larry Hammer
Karen M. Roberts
Sandra McDonald
Catherine M. Morrison
David J. Schwartz
Janni Lee Simner
Sonya Taaffe

Hey, slow down there, reader! I know you're already writing out that subscription check, but don't you want to know who to make it out to (Christopher Rowe and/or Gwenda Bond) and where to send it (PO Box 1304, Lexington, KY, 40588-1304, USA)? Don't you want to know what you get for your ten dollars (that's US $10 for a two issue domestic subscription, Canadians add US $1, rest of world add US $2 to cover shipping, we can only accept checks or money orders in US funds drawn on US banks, sorry, if that's a problem e-mail me and we'll explore the alternatives)? Don't you want to know if you can just order this single issue (sure, just make that US $5 with additions and provisos noted in previous parenthetical remark)? Folks who want to use credit cards and so on please follow this link.

So, in summary, Say...have you heard this one? will soon spring fully formed from the brow of a Xerox Docutech in Nashville, Tennessee. This 60 page, perfect (not to say perfectly) bound magazine features a full color wrap around cover, ten short stories, two poems, one comic and a review column penned by your favorite member of the LitBlog Co-op. It'll have a stylish debut on borrowed table space in the dealers room at WisCon 29 over Memorial Day weekend, but if you're a member of that portion of humanity who won't be in attendance at that grand event, then your best bet is to subscribe now!

Man, this is exhausting.

Two Things to Remember

One: if you happen to be at the Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin on the afternoon of Sunday, May 29th, you--you especially--are invited to attend this here:

Adequate Science Fiction (Readings)
Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. in Conference Room 2

Because frequently, adequate is more than enough. Featuring readings by: Christopher Rowe, Lauren Ann McLaughlin, Alan John "Call me AJ!" DeNiro, Richard "Call me Richard!" Butner.

----

Two: this is your reminder that even as we speak, smallish men with impenetrable accents are riding extraordinarily expensive bicycles made of space age materials real, real fast in the opening Prologue of the 88th Giro di Italia. If you have the OLN or Eurosport channels on your television machine, take a few minutes this afternoon to have a look. I've said this before--and if you're a new reader here you should be aware that I'll say it again--bicycle racing is one of the really great things people have come up with.

Today especially would be a good day to watch, because the organizers have asked the recently retired Mario Cipollini, surely one of the great sports personalities of the last twenty years, to take what's essentially a career victory lap by riding the course alone before the start of today's time trial. He deserves a few minutes of your attention for his extraordinary achievements. Plus, you never know what that cat is going to wear. See here and here and here.

Miss Gwenda...

...did not technically make me take this quiz and then post this graphic, but since that just means she hasn't gotten around to making me, I went ahead and got it over with. Did I intentionally skew my answers to get the result I wanted? Naturellement.

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

Congratulations

...to the writers of the last big Hobbit movie, of whom there are three, and to Lois McMaster Bujold and Walter Jon Williams, who have three names each, and most especially to Ellen and Eileen, for their Nebula wins this past weekend. Deserved, all.

The highlight of all of these conventions and so on we attend is always spending time with our friends. Beyond that, my two biggest moments were when Janis Ian (yes, Mama, that Janis Ian) came up to tell me how much she enjoyed a story I'd written and the once in a lifetime chance I had to be of some small service to Anne McCaffrey. I was genuinely surprised, by the way, at how starstruck Ms. McCaffrey left me.

In other news, I've been told by the editors of the Twenty Epics anthology (who would get my vote for the Nebula for Best Guidelines if there was one on offer) that they're going to be including a vignette of mine in their book. The piece is called "Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms" and it represents a closure of sorts to me. It's the last of the stories I wrote in the summer of 1996 for the Clarion West workshop to see publication, and while it's seen some changes since then, I've always liked it.

More to the point, it's very nearly my last piece of unpublished fiction period. So I suppose I should be typing into something besides my blog, eh?

Oh, one more thing, super-artist John Picacio writes to let me know that he's spotted my name on an updated list of Worldcon programming participants, which I take to mean I'll be participating in programming at Worldcon. See you there.

So far...

having a great time. Nebula Weekend in Chicago is proving rich with opportunities for good food and good conversation with good friends. The weekend started off great, when Andy and Sydney Duncan joined Robin, Clint and us for dinner last night at ye olde bar. The food was okay -- better than the food though, was the lucky coincidence of being streetside when Chicago's wonderfully organized, enthusiastic, and colorful Critical Mass rode by.

After dinner, there was a reception for SFWA's new grandmaster Anne McCaffrey. Nominees in attendance also received pins and certificates (well, those nominees in attendance except for Greg van Eekhout, who apparently had better things to do with his time than to be seen with the likes of us). At the beginning of the reception, Catherine Asaro called up Jack Williamson, who was celebrating his 97th birthday and the room sang Happy Birthday to him. Mr. Williamson's response was: "Thank you. Who is this?"

There was a late night full of conversation and laughter -- too many people to be listed, but among them were David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi, who gave me a bit of good news. I'll pass it along once I find out whether it's supposed to be public knowledge yet. It was also good to get to see Sean Stewart, whose Perfect Circle (which he's nominated for) was one of my favorite books last year.

As for this afternoon, as soon as G gets out of the shower, we're going in search of Chicago deep dish and then we're going to walk down to Chicago's new Millenium Park near the lakeshore, so we can check out their state-of-the-art three hundred space bicycle parking facility.

Bang! Bang!

My brother, for reasons of his own, always says "Bang! Bang!" whenever anyone says the word Chicago. I mention this so that I can have explanation points in the title of this post, enticing you to read further.

In an hour or two, we'll leave George Rowe the Dog to watch over the house for the weekend (since we're going out of town, we're letting him have houseguests). And then we'll drive the great boring diagonal across Indiana (well, the overpass at Columbus is kind of cool) to wind up in Chicago, where we'll see some friends and I, at least, will spend most of Saturday paralyzed with, what? Anticipation? Worry? General frazzledness? All this in anticipation of tomorrow night's Nebula Awards. And there's that.

There's also this. If you're someone who has read some science fiction and fantasy in the last year and would like to vote in the largest popular award in those fields you still have a couple of days left to participate in the Locus Award. Unlike the Nebula--which is voted on by members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America--and the Hugo--which is voted on by attendees of World Science Fiction Conventions--the Locus Award is voted on by readers at large. It's sponsored by Locus Magazine, which is kind of like Publisher's Weekly specifically for sf, fantasy and horror. Adding Locus Online to your list of periodically perused websites might be a good idea too.

I'll get back with y'all later.

Possible pen names?

Christopher Volan Rowe's Aliases

Your movie star name: Cheese Stanley

Your fashion designer name is Christopher Prague

Your socialite name is Hendricks Paris

Your fly girl / guy name is C Row

Your detective name is Dog Adair County High

Your barfly name is Tortilla Chips Bourbon

Your soap opera name is Volan Grant Lane

Your rock star name is Jellied Dark Chocolate Cheetah

Your star wars name is Chrgeo Rowgwe

Your punk rock band name is The Busy Postal Scale

The Amazing Meganame Generator

(Via Ms. Bond.)

So...

Did you make it? Good.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you somehow found this journal entry here at the blogger.com version of UnCommonwealth without having been directed here from my old digs over at Journalscape. To briefly recap, the mad genius rock stars who are designing the Fortress of Words website (which will house a site for Say..., along with personal sites for Ms. Bond and myself) have told me that it'll be easier to fold the Blogger interface into the new website than it would have been Journalscape.

I liked Journalscape and for awhile I'll try to remember to post there when I update here, or something like that. I know that there was a feature there that let folks "subscribe" to the journal, which essentially meant they received an e-mail whenever I made a new entry. Handy, that, and if you'd like to do the same here, just enter your e-mail address into the little box over to the right.

And now, for an actual entry, complete with content.

I've got lots of traveling coming up in the next few months. We'll be in Chicago next weekend for the Nebula Awards and then immediately have to return here to put the last touches on the next issue of Say... and get it to the printer. Why immediately? Because it's already time for Wiscon, where we'll be over Memorial Day weekend. Gwenda and I will both be doing readings of new work and G also has a panel or two, I believe.

On June 10th, we'll join Mark Rudolph, publisher of Full Unit Hookup, as featured readers at a special "Strange Fiction" edition of the indispensable InKY Reading Series. The InKY readings are held at The Rudyard Kipling, one of my all time favorite bars. Were you there when Average Life had their last show? At least of that lineup? Me too. I was the kid with the poseur skater haircut sporting elvish runes on my leather jacket. Good times.

The last week in June I'll be back at Wild Acres in the mountains near Asheville, NC, participating in this year's Sycamore Hill Writers Conference and maybe sneaking away for some cycling on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The organizers of Sycamore Hill scheduled the end of the conference so that participants will be able to get home in time for the start of Le Tour, though G and will probably be going to Raleigh for a couple of days afterwards, where we'll watch the Prologue and Stage One with two of our favorite people.

And finally, in August, if all goes well, we'll be flying to Glasgow for Interaction, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention. This will be the first WorldCon for either of us and the first time I'm up for a Hugo Award as well. Very exciting.

On the writing front, I'm mainly working on short stories at the moment, not least in an attempt to score some quick cash, 'cause friends, flying to Scottishland ain't cheap in these final days of petroleum.

I want this pencil

Actually, I just wanted to test out the functionality of the Blogger interface. But it is a cool pencil.

Armstrong in tour

Lance Armstrong is actually not my favorite professional cyclist--he's probably not even in the top ten--but I love what he's done to bring American attention to the sport and of course greatly respect all the charitable work he's done.

This morning when I checked the only news site I look at every day, I was thrilled to see that he's decided to go ahead and race in this year's Tour de France. I'm thrilled because it means at least one more year of extensive US media coverage of le Tour and of other races (he's also going to defend his title in the Tour of Georgia), which means there's one more year for Americans to learn about all the other great personalities in cycling, like Floyd Landis, the World's Fastest Mennonite. Which hopefully means I can still watch cycling on television after Armstrong's eventual retirement (sometime during the 2006 season, probably).

As most of you know, the novel I'm working on is about a bicycle race across Kentucky, so really, this is all research.

the real deal Nebula ballot

Wow. Well, "The Voluntary State" did, in fact, advance to the 2004 SFWA Nebula Awards Final Ballot. I think I'm supposed to put one of those R in a circle dealies after "Nebula Awards," but top internet people tell me that the reason my posts sometimes look screwy is that I'm a little free with the Mac specific keyboard characters. If you want to see the R in a circle, go look at the official final ballot on SFWA's website.

Now here's this. When I first started writing, I'd send a story off in the mail and then wait to hear back from an editor before I worked on anything else. Those of you who've played this game realize that in some cases that meant I was buying myself a year off for the cost of a few stamps. And I can't really do that anymore. I've got to write more stories, more of this novel, hell, even more UnCommmonwealth pieces.

And I'm going to do that now. In a minute.

With the preliminary nomination and the various reprints, I've posted too much about this story, probably, but since the chances of my actually winning this award are, let's be honest, pretty slim, I'm going to beg y'all's patience and indulge myself in one more post about "The Voluntary State." But it's not about me, it's about the people who did the real work on this story--it's the acceptance speech I would have given.

All the attendees of the 2003 edition of the Sycamore Hill workshop gave me sterling advice about the piece. It's probably impolitic to list just a few of them, but hell, since I'm being careful to name the only ones that actually know this journal exists then I should be okay.

Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Ford both identified a lot places for improvement to the, yes, pretty messy manuscript I turned in, as did my fellow nominee Andy Duncan and workshop co-runner John Kessel. I owe all those guys a lot.

And especially, I owe these three incomparable people; Richard Butner, Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler. There's more critical acumen in that one sentence than I could begin to describe to you. Not to mention character, grace, talent, generosity and kindness.

After the first round of post Syc Hill rewrites, I sent the story to Ellen Datlow, who agreed to publish it with the proviso that I clarify some things. Over the last few years, I've started making more and more demands of the people who read my fiction, and Ellen pointed out places where clarity had been sacrificed to my own bullheaded notions of art.

So I sent the story to Ted Chiang, one of the smartest writers. (I started to put some kind of clause on the end of that sentence like "...in the field" or "...I've ever met" but I think I should probably let it stand.) See, I was trying a runaround. I was going to prove, to myself at least, that the story could be "got" as it was. Ted expressed confusion over some passages. Friends, when Ted Chiang doesn't get something you've written, it's not because your readers aren't as clever as you are.

It went back to Ellen and it came back to me and it went back to Ellen and it came back to me. Ellen kept pushing me to get it closer and closer to what she thought it could be, and eventually I realized that what Ellen thought it could be is pretty much what it should be. Thanks, Ellen.

All of those people did all of that work for me and that story, and I thank them for it.

But of course, none of them did a damned thing compared to the person who essentially started the story in the first place, the person who said, in response to my whining that I didn't have anything to write about, "There's a car on top of a hill. The door's open. There's nobody in it. Now shut up."

Thanks so much, Gwenda. As a writer, what you think I could be is what I should be. As a human being, what I should be is with you.

Love and peace,

Christopher