Free fiction, from my Secret Life collection, 2004…

THE COMPASS OF HIS BONES

In the summer of 1615, Captain Gaspar de Sotelo, arm of the Viceroyalty in Peru, watches as the last Incan Emperor, Tupac Amaru, burns to death after first accepting Christ and renouncing all land claims. The Emperor burns slowly and his blood turns black as it catches fire and seeps out beneath the branches heaped around him. The Emperor does not scream as once he screamed while being tortured in a tower high above Vilcapampa. Instead, silent, the Emperor stares at Gaspar with a hollow gaze. Gaspar cannot look away. The Emperor takes a long time to die. Gaspar burns as if he were back in the rainforests waiting for the insects to devour him.

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Well, for one, you find Ann’s old t-shirt from the 70s. You also find photos from either the first or second World Horror Convention, in Nashville (1991?). David Niall Wilson with Amy Mann (Ann’s original partner on The Silver Web); Robert Bloch; me and Wayne Allen Sallee on a panel; Ann and me in front of the Silver Web booth; our cat Pretty Ugly; Erin as a kid with two relatives; Alan M. Clark doing his thing, again at WHC. Hard to believe that was almost 20 years ago…

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It’s always nice to see the good ones get some attention–and I can tell you from personal experience that Victoria Blake at Underland and Jacob Weisman at Tachyon are two of the good ones. I’ve rarely been as stress-free in working with publishers as I have been with the two of them. Why? Both of them are organized, structured, and get things done.

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So I found this old notebook that I used from around my junior year of high school through first year of college. It’s full of crappy poetry and drafts of things never completed, along with fragments of early published stories like “Mahout” (Asimov’s) and “So The Dead Walk Slowly” (Fear Magazine).

But if I’d lost it and someone had found it, they’d have found little evidence this person was ever gonna publish a book or two…

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I think for now the book cover postings are going to be on an irregular schedule, while I’m working on deadlines. So here’s some stuff in my house for your review, mostly new books received but then a few overburdened shelves of less current material.

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Part of cleaning the house meant cleaning the electronic house, and I found a lot of emails about the House of 87 Cabinets project, a draft of which was completed on the Night Shade message boards. It included contributions from a host of writers, including Liz Williams, K.J. Bishop, Michael Cisco, Steve Rasnic Tem, Rhys Hughes, Ben Peek, Tamar Yellin, Jay Lake, Minsoo Kang, Laird Barron, and too many more to name. With some editing, it might make a nice little anthology someday…

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I found these odd drawings while cleaning up the house–we’re doing a vigorous spring cleaning, early.

I have a vague memory of my mom drawing them–her vision of me, I guess, as some kind of pouchy frog forest spirit. I cannot remember the exact context.

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I’ve now reached the end of the first series of Penguin Great Ideas books. You can find the breakdown of the last week in my latest Amazon post on the Omnivoracious blog. You can read all of the 60-in-60 pieces here.

For those of you tuning in late, this project started because I wanted to force myself to focus on books I felt I should have read before now. It coincided with my return to blogging after a break to finish my novel, Finch. So, to give myself a little challenge, I wrote to my friend Colin Brush at Penguin Books UK and said, “If you’ll send me the 60 books in your Great Ideas series, I’ll review one a day for 60 days.” Colin replied that he liked the idea and sent me the books. So for the past three weeks I’ve started in on what has been called by at least one friend “foolish” and by another “the endeavor of a madman.” Penguin’s own blog questioned my sanity. Yet, I have persevered to the end of the third week, and my audacity has been rewarded by attention from, among others, the Guardian (as book site of the week) and the Harvard University Press, which urged its readers to emulate my craziness.

As for my reading thus far, few of these books have bored me, fewer still have I disliked, even when I’ve had problems with either their execution or their contents. Many of them I plan to return to, in their full, unabridged form at a later date. Every last one has given me something interesting to think about, sometimes well after reading and blogging about them.

However, reading a book each night, although often energizing, began to wear on me by the time I came to Schopenhauer. Ruskin and Darwin revived me greatly, and Nietzsche entertained in his way, but by Woolf and Freud I was, I have to admit, a little exhausted (it didn’t help that these readings occurred during the New Year’s holiday). Freud, in particular, suffered from my own suffering, and I hope to return to him after my sojourn to a sanitarium sometime in March.* (Your well-wishes are most appreciated.)

One expected result of reading these books back-to-back was that they tended to communicate with each other, and I could sometimes see the ghosts of previous books in the current ones. An unexpected consequence of the order was a difficulty on my part to adjust when a book diverged wildly in tone from the previous selections. For example, it’s possible that if I had read Nietzsche directly after Swift, or some other more lively stylist, Nietzsche would not have seemed so over the top. This is something I will take into account going forward.

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Why I Write
by George Orwell

Memorable Line
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

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Larry Nolen (aka Larry “the Novel” Nolen) has performed a nice service to the blogosphere by posting links to a series of blogger year’s best lists. Two posts, thus far, here and here.