Major thanks to Jeremy Zerfoss for his amazing covers and to Neil Clarke for doing our e-book interiors.

—Cheeky Frawg blog page
—Weightless Books Secret Lives offer

My wife Ann VanderMeer and I have finally, after a few delays, finalized the 2011 schedule for our e-books imprint Cheeky Frawg. We think it’s a potent mix of eclectic titles bound together by fierce imagination, great writing, and a love for fiction tending toward the fantastical. Some of the translations will be bringing new work to English-language readers, and e-books of nonfiction titles like the wonderful science exposes by John Grant just round out a great line-up. We also have several titles to add to the 2012 schedule, but can’t announce just yet. We hope you enjoy this preview of the cornucopia of delights to come. Website and videos coming soon. – Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

ALREADY PUBLISHED

Balzac’s War by Jeff VanderMeer
The Compass of his Bones by Jeff VanderMeer
The Infernal Desire Machines of Angela Carter by Jeff VanderMeer
Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2011

The Troika by Stepan Chapman —A joint Cheeky Frawg/Wyrm Publishing e-book of the PKD Award winning novel. A phantasmagorical look at the future that mixes vivid psychological portrayals of three wounded souls with glimpses of “advancements” at times reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. Three travelers are crossing a desert under the glare of three purple suns: Alex, who wants to be a machine; Naomi, a cryogenically frozen soldier now trapped in the body of a brontosaurus; and Eva, an old Mexican woman who has escaped being a sacrifice in an alternate reality. The novel follows their attempts to find out why they are now crossing a desert with no memory of how they got there, and delves into each character’s past in beautifully written flashbacks that feed back into solving the central mystery.

The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar—This beautifully written volume of short fictions and poems takes as its inspiration the author’s tasting of 28 different kinds of honey, one per day. Each tasting leads to a different literary creation, with each entry also describing the honey in terms that will make you crave it. The perfect gift book.

Women of the Supernatural: A Tartarus Press Sampler edited by Ray Russell—The first in a line of Tartarus Press samplers, partial TOC here, drawing on Tartarus Press’s exceptional record of publishing some of the best uncanny and supernatural fiction from the past and present.

The Toy Fixer by Yasumi Kobayashi—The first translation, by Gregor Hartmann, of this award-winning long story about a very stranger tinker…

Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Leena Krohn - The Finnish classic of Kafkaesque beauty. An unnamed narrator in a far-off city populated by talking insects. One of the best weird fictions of the 20th century, and a World Fantasy Award finalist.

Flying Fish “Prometheus”: A Fantasy of the Future by Vilhelm Bergsøe—Translation by Dwight Decker, with commentary, of a progressive Danish Steampunk novelette from the 1860s.

OCTOBER 2011

ODD? edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (full TOC here)—Neither strange nor weird, but simply odd, these stories exemplify the unclassifiable while asking the question “Is it odd or are you too normal?” Featuring Amos Tutuola, Karin Tidbeck, Leena Krohn, Hiromi Goto, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Caitlin R. Kiernan. A mix of previously unpublished material, reprints, obscure reprints, and new translations of classic stories. Look for the amazing animated vid by Gregory Bossert, featuring original music by Danny Fontaine. Not to mention the action figure based on the original Myster Odd character created by Jeremy Zerfoss!

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011

It Came From the North: Finnish Weird Fiction, vol. 1 edited by Jukka Halme and Tero Ykspetäjä —A sampler celebrating the great Finnish weird fiction, the first in a three-volume set.

Discarded Science: Ideas that Sounded Good at the Time; Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science; Bogus Science: Or, Some People Really Believe These Things by John Grant—The exclusive e-books of the critically acclaimed nonfiction series that’s at times disturbing, hilarious, and always important for the times in which we live. All three titles will be e-published simultaneously just in time for the holiday season.

Yes, you say, that’s all well and good, but what do we have to look forward to in 2012 from Cheeky Frawg? In addition to an as-yet-untitled collection from Amos Tutuola and a previously untranslated Leena Krohn novel, here’s a preview of just a few titles. We have a lot more surprises up our sleeves, though…

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Just about all writers have some kind of eccentricity to their work habits, I believe—some quirk that works for them. Mine is that I have to more or less fill up every surface of the folder holding the print-out of my novel-in-progress with words. In the photo above, it’s the folder for Borne, bowed under the weight and confusion of notes. There’s no logic to writing them down on the folder, except that there’s this mental construct in my mind. The work must be surrounded by related thoughts and ideas scrawled in a kind of protective spell. These words keep the work safe—keep bad influences out and let the work marinate and reach maturity under that protection of that binding. It makes no sense at all, but it’s the only magic I engage in, and a blank folder surface fills me with a feeling of unease.

So, tell me, writers reading this…what’re your eccentricities?

Just a little something Jeremy Zerfoss is working on for Shared Worlds teen writing camp this year. The students will get visits from guest writers Nnedi Okorafor, Minister Faust, Ekaterina Sedia, Will Hindmarch, and myself, along with editorial guest Ann VanderMeer.

Shh. Top secret.

(Contributors: you will have your copy in the next couple weeks, and an email next week about when to blog, etc.)

Next week is the official release of our new anthology, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities from HarperVoyager in North America. We’re bursting with pride over this one, as it turned into a showcase for the imaginations and storytelling talent for some of our most talented fantasy writers as well as a smorgasbord of amazing images from the likes of Mike Mignola, Jan Svankmajer, Yishan Li, Greg Broadmore, Rikki Ducornet, and more. It’s already made the LA Times’ recommended summer reading list and gotten raves from Bookgasm and from Paul Goat Allen at the Barnes & Noble book club.

The antho includes some great stuff from established writers like Holly Black, Naomi Novik, China Mieville, Alan Moore, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Garth Nix, Jeffrey Ford, Michael Moorcock, Carrie Vaughn, Lev Grossman, Cherie Priest, and more. But I also wanted to point out that we showcase the work of many amazing new writers, including Kelly Barnhill, Amal El-Mohtar, N.K. Jemisin, Reza Negarestani, and Charles Yu—not to mention the micro-fictions section in the back, which includes several first sales. My own contribution includes the introduction, developed with Ann, which weaves Lambshead into the history of the twentieth century.

The anthology has a special dedication page, for someone who had contributed to the first volume and planned to contribute to this one: “Dedicated to the memory of Kage Baker, a wonderful writer and a good friend of Dr. Lambshead. You are not forgotten.”

We’ve just received a couple of finished copies from HarperVoyager, and they’re absolutely beautiful, with the cover printed right on the boards.

I’ll have a whole week of blogging about this anthology next week, including some cool exclusives, but for now I’ve got a preview of some pages, along with a couple comparisons between the advance reader copy and the final. Many thanks to the cover designer James Iacobelli and interior designer Paula Russell Szafranski, along with John Coulthart, who served as an image consultant and provided interior images himself, including some amazing title pages…

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Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. Note: In the last Mountain entry, I’ve tweaked the description of the tech level of the world described below, necessary for the story going forward.

It has been five days since my last entry.

The lighthouse keeper is a woman named Marty, seemingly made of granite, with a square, open face and broad shoulders, who leans into every ill-wind that blew around that desolate place, who trudges from the well and back even in the middle of storms, a gale no more to her than a tickling breeze.

Of course I loved her as soon as I saw her, for she was like a mountain in some ways, just like me. I didn’t have straggly blonde hair like her, and I didn’t tend a garden—although I was a kind of garden—and I didn’t sometimes put on lipstick and go into the nearby village for a Friday dance. But I am quite sure that I could match her pint for pint at the local pub. A mountain can drink anyone under the table. Of course, a mountain can’t fit itself into a pub, so I had to content myself with the images and sound coming back from my moths hovering at the greasy windows.

Marty McBratney is her full name. Her brother, who visited once, called her “Bratty McBratty” but that just made her laugh, and made me envision a willful, powerful teenager striking out over moor and bracken, singing all the while of the injustice of the world. But I think I was just remembering a commercial I saw on a TV during one of the other surveillance missions.

Marty led a solitary life at the lighthouse, although she wasn’t dour. She had taken to her job with enthusiasm, and this was evident in her constant maintenance of the lighthouse and her diligence in making sure she properly guided ships safely to shore. From my research I would have said that in every particular she seemed an excellent lighthouse keeper. Except for one mystery.

Each of the past five days, at dusk, a figure had come out of the bushes behind the lighthouse and met Marty there. Three times a man, twice a woman.

Without words, without preamble, they would bring their mouths together for a long, deep, passionate kiss. Marty was so tall she would usually be leaning down for this ritual. In one ridiculous instance involving a short, wiry man, she bent her knees and, holding the man’s shoulders in a vice, practically pulled him off his feet so that the mouth-docking could occur.

Disengaging, the stranger would retreat into the bushes. Marty would run to the front of the lighthouse, and then clamber up the revolving stairwell to the very top, taking the metal steps two at a time and making the whole structure reverberate with the echo of her tread. As soon as she had reached the top, the beacon that had been merely glowing would burn with a white light, cutting through the gloom, almost as if powered by the energy of the kiss. A few minutes later, she would slowly descend and walk out onto the front steps, light a cigarette, take three puffs, drop it, and extinguish it with her shoe. She would look out into the darkness in these moments, as if searching for something, and I liked to imagined she was staring straight at me. She would then retreat to her rooms in the cottage next to the lighthouse.

In summary:

Stranger.
Kiss.
Run.
Frenzied climb.
Beam of light.
Leisurely descent.
Cigarette.

What did it mean? What could it possibly signify?

I felt more adrift in my observations of human behavior than ever before.

Weightless Books has just started carrying Cheeky Frawg’s titles, including my just-released e-book Secret Lives, which was previously only available as a signed, limited edition for $35. Now you can get it from Weightless for $2.99—and possibly win a copy of the original limited edition. You can find Secret Lives exclusively at Weightless this week, only appearing elsewhere in July.

Weightless is also carrying the rest of Cheeky Frawg’s current titles:

The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (cowritten with my wife Ann)

The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories

Balzac’s War

The Infernal Desire Machines of Angela Carter

And, coming soon, a Cheeky Frawg website to replace our, well, our placeholder here, and a full list of our titles for 2012.

(Pavlov’s House)

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

So I sat there with Sergeant Pavlov, defender of Pavlov’s House in the center of war-torn Stalingrad, drinking “homemade rot-gut” as he called it.

“Your accent is dog crap,” Pavlov said as he lit a cigarette. “Where do you come from?”

His lack of fear perplexed me; it worried at me so much I could not leave it alone.

“Have you seen my kind before?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he replied, downing a shot and grinning from the burn of it. “You’re not going to tell me where you come from.”

“Where did you see another of…me?”

He could not know that I wasn’t really a Komodo but merely a mountain made an avatar and then made a komodo, sent by angels. I downed my own shot. It stung for me too, but my new metabolism burned off the alcohol in a matter of seconds. I had another, which made Pavlov’s eyebrows rise for the first time.

Pavlov thought about my question for a second and, fixing me with his stare, said, “I will only tell you if I know I am not going to die tonight.”

“That I have no control over,” the green dragon said, “but if you do it won’t be by my hand.” Pavlov gave my razor-clawed paw with strange hooked thumb a rueful look. “You are safe from me,” I added, to be clear.

He nodded to show he understood, took another drag on his cigarette. “One night, I went to relieve a sentry…”

This was before he occupied Pavlov’s House. The Germans had cut off his platoon from the main force and they were so depleted that even sergeants stood watch. They’d taken up positions inside an abandoned hotel. The far wall from the sentry’s position had been shorn away by a bombing attack. Bombs had also blown off the roof above the sentry’s position.

“So I would be standing behind one wall, looking out through a puncture in the concrete from tank fire, and the far end of the corridor behind me ended in a doorway of snow, while snow fell on me from above.”

The sentry wasn’t there. He had vanished. Then what was falling began to seem dark, almost purple, and when he looked up, he saw the sentry’s body, head torn off, seeming to float in mid-air just over the lip of an exposed floor above. But the falling snow revealed a shape like a monstrous lizard head and reptilian arms holding the body as fangs tore into it.

“I didn’t think. I ran away and ordered my men out of the hotel.”
“Then why didn’t you run just now?”

Pavlov shrugged. “Where would I run to? I’ll live or die in this place. We are not to give up one inch of ground according to orders.” This time he took just a sip of the amber rot-gut. “Are you on their side?”
Meaning the Germans. I ignored him. “Do your men know…about creatures like me?”

“No.”

“Other officers?”

“Some. Maybe. We don’t talk about it. They probably want to think it’s dragons from myth or some witch’s curse, but as we all know there are no dragons or witches in the Soviet Union.”

Or alternative universes where Lenin was captured, put on trial by Tsar or Duma, and executed.

“As for whose side I’m on,” I said, “I have a deal for you.” I had no real experience with any of this, just mimicry of things I had seen while conducting surveillance.

Pavlov chuckled a bit at that, almost a sign of nervousness. “A deal? Why should I make deals with dragons when I spend day and night trying not be killed by a whole army of Germans?”

“Don’t you want to break the stalemate here? Don’t you want to be the one to break it?” In almost every scenario, the Germans lost eventually, but for Pavlov, in this month, this week, this moment, victory must look like a dim and distant thing.

The sergeant considered that for a moment. “So you are offering me something…in return for what?”

“I’ll perform reconnaissance for you and I will help you defend this place in return for the information I need.”

“Which is?”

“There is another…presence in the city besides my kind and besides you or the Germans. I want you to arrange for certain patrols throughout the city to be on the look-out for this presence, and to report on it.”

“And what are the characteristics of this…presence? What are we looking for?”

“Anything unusual,” I said.

This time Pavlov actually laughed, which made me feel out of my depth. “Anything unusual? We have starlings that sound like mortar fire. We have creatures like you biting the heads off of sentries. We recently found a clandestine mental hospital full of corpses and people’s ashes. Just last month, before more rations arrived, my men were making soup out of their belts and happy for it. You may need to be more specific.”

“I can give you a short list. Is it possible?”

“What would you do if I said it were impossible?”

“Are you going to say it is impossible?”

“No.”

We talked and drank for a few minutes more, and then Pavlov held out his hand with only slight hesitation. I took it as gently as I could in mine, his clammy palm lost in the heat of my scales and claws.

“Here is to…unusual events,” Pavlov said, and I could not help but laugh, startling myself, as even a quiet chuckle in a King Komodo very much mimics a man being noisily strangled.

Thus was the great Komodo-Soviet alliance born, known only to me and a future war hero.

The current issue of Harper’s has some great stuff in it, including an excerpt from Mark Kingwell’s introduction to The Wage Slave’s Glossary by Joshua Glenn, out next month from Biblioasis. Kingwell’s intro codifies certain things I believe about the world in general, particularly the idea of “collective delusions” that we almost all buy into, perhaps so the world won’t seem so scary or perhaps because it’s necessary to have a functioning society. Money clearly is becoming ever more of a collective delusion, especially in a dysfunctional U.S. system. There are also delusions that come over us temporarily like viruses, infected the majority and leaving the minority out in the cold: believe or you suck, basically. Luckily, these tend to be temporary or contained to certain subcultures or communities.

Kingwell talks about a number of delusions we buy into with regard to the workplace, chief among them the sanctity of work itself. A short excerpt:

The routine collection of credentials, promotions, and employee-of-the-month honors in exchange for company loyalty masks a deeper existential conundrum–which is precisely what it is meant to do. Consider: It is an axium of status anxiety that the competition for position has no end—save, temporarily, when a scapegoat is found. The scapegoat reaffirms everyone’s status, however uneven, because he is beneath all. Hence many work narratives are miniature blame-quests. We come together as a company to fix guilt on one of our number, who is then publicly shamed and expelled. Jones filed a report filled with errors! Smith placed an absurdly large order and the company is taking a bath! This makes us all feel better and enhances our sense of mission, even if it produces nothing other than its own spectacle.

Sounds like a few places I worked at before I became a full-time writer, one of which I wrote about in my novelette “The Situation,” which you can read here. (What’s the collective delusion of writers, you might ask? That this crazy career is sustainable indefinitely and that the right words matter…and sometimes buying into those delusions is enough.)

Interestingly he also name-checks three office novels: Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, and Ed Park’s Personal Days. Kingwell calls all three hilarious, but believes their humor is a sign of doom, not liberation. “Indeed, the laughs render the facts more palatable by mixing diversion into the scene of domination—a willing capitulation, consumed under the false sign of resistance.” That’s a pretty sick reading of the uses of satire, but point taken. Perhaps it takes a horror writer with the sensibilities of Kafka to make satire a tertiary purpose, since I find Thomas Ligotti’s office stories not a capitulation but a clear embodiment of doom in which humor occurs almost as part of a natural process, like steam off of the head of a just-benched football player in winter.

References to philosopher Harry Frankfurt and his use of the term “bullshit” satisfy on a very gleeful level. In the workplace, bullshit can be defined as “Jargon, slogans, euphemisms, and terms of art” used as weapons. Bullshit is an evasion of normativity that “produces a kind of ordure, a dissemination of garbage, the scattering of shit. This is why, Frankfurt argue, bullshit is far more threatening, and politically evil, than lying.” The bullshitter doesn’t oppose truth–s/he ignores it entirely. (Cue: footage of certain political candidates, bloggers on the internet, etc.)

The victory of work bullshit is that, in addition to having no regard for the truth, it passes itself off as innocuous or even beneficial. Especially in clever hands, the controlling elements of work are repackaged as liberatory, counter-cultural, subversive: you’re a skatepunk rebel because you work seventy hours a week beta-testing videogames. This, we might say, is meta-bullshit.

In writing, bullshit, meta and otherwise, manifests as cliches in its most basic form, but complex forms of writing-related bullshit manifest as precepts that wound a story before it is finished, an inability to closely observe and report on the details of the world, and, well, too many other ways to list here.

You could read Kingwell’s introduction as a discourse on corrupted narrative—like a story with no center that is nonetheless told in a clever or convincing way, the equivalent of the worst type of escapist fiction. If everything human-made around us, including our stories, once existed as an idea or thought from someone’s imagination, then Kingwell’s saying we need to be better storytellers, better dreamers, at both the micro and the macro level. Waking up like the guy in the first Matrix movie to find you’re just a pod dangling among a million other generic pods can be depressing, but at least it’s real…maybe. Or it might just be superior CGI. Perhaps bullshit has no hidden core. Perhaps collective delusions are the point.

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

It has been three days since I wrote in this journal. The incident with the damaged angel confused and disturbed me. I had seen Gabriel’s impassiveness in response to stimuli before, his seemingly innate distance from empathy. But the lack of concern for one of his own kind, especially an angel pushed to such an extremity of response, worried me. Somehow the angels’ reaction to the devouring of my avatar had been what I expected, but in this case Gabriel had surprised me. What then might move Gabriel to concern, sympathy, or comfort of another soul.

I had always told myself that our surveillance and our experiments served the cause of Order in the universes, that this required a kind of clinical detachment on the part of the angels. A smile is a cultural response, a learned behavior, I knew from my many hours of observing alt-Earths. It could mean many things. That it meant nothing sympathetic when Gabriel smiled did not hint at some sinister purpose. Yet his demeanor after the angel’s death I read as barely hiding some secret satisfaction that would otherwise burst out, envelop the world in sharp laughter. Why was such utter cruelty required?

I realized that much about the angels I had taken on face value, possibly because without them I would be totally alone on this planet—there is no other sentient life here—and with no real way to leave except by proxy, ejecting my seedlings and avatars into space. They told me they studied the alt-Earths because their instruments had caught the vibrations of a horrific catastrophe farther up the time stream, across all of the Earths, and that it would affect all other worlds as well. For this reason, they had set up outposts on the outside, as on my planet, and were engaged in surveillance and experimentation to reach a decision on what action to undertake.

Their experiments never involved human beings—the items brought back were either animal, plant, or mineral in nature, along with human-made artifacts. Even though I participated in the tests, I was a glorified lab assistant and didn’t truly understand the purpose of the experiments. Parts of the laboratory, too, were off-limits to me. Gabriel never told me I couldn’t go somewhere, but in certain areas my sensors simply didn’t work and if my avatar entered them, the avatar became stripped of all sensory perception. This, too, I had not thought to question…until now.

These are the thoughts that came to me as I settled uncomfortably into my new assignment, which I called “The Lighthouse” because I was to monitor the comings and goings from a lighthouse on the stormy coast of a country called Scotland, facing the North Sea. Not only was I spying on an alt-Earth where the industrial revolution had not taken hold with such abandon, but the essential borders of nations, and the nations themselves often deviated radically from the norm. Scotland, for example, encompassed all of the British Isles. On the mainland of Europe, what was Spain, France, and Italy in most alt-realities was ruled by the peoples the Spanish had called the Moors. Czechoslovakia sprawled across almost all of Eastern Europe, and so on. I was told that although the business at the lighthouse had regional significance politically, it also resonated in some way across the worlds. I was to surveil based on this context.

But I had decided to surveil on a slightly different basis: that the angels had not told me the full truth, and that studying the lighthouse might help reveal what they had hidden from me.

I admit, too, that my thoughts may have gone in this direction to avoid another direction: namely, wondering what had happened to my avatar.

In case you missed them, I had a couple of interviews posted on the Amazon book blog, both really interesting.

Mira Grant
“I try to approach characterization as honestly as possible. Sometimes I don’t like my own protagonists. They do things I don’t approve of, they make choices I wouldn’t make, they have beliefs I don’t share. And unless that would actively damage the story, I let them go their own way. They’re only going to be real to you if they’re also real to me. I write pages of dialog that no one ever sees, just to feel out the way different characters use words and phrases. It’s a fascinating exercise.”

A. Lee Martinez
“I usually consider humor to be secondary to the plot and characters. I know I have a reputation as a comic writer, but the humor elements usually fall into place naturally. In the end, I don’t think humor is the opposite of serious storytelling. We tend to think of humor as light and inconsequential, but great humor is often founded on observation and commentary.”

For space considerations a snippet from the new novel Mira Grant is working on got lopped off of the interview, so I’m reproducing it below.

The piece that follows is from a novel in progress, Ashes of Honor, writing under her real name, Seanan McGuire, and “finds Toby in a place she really doesn’t like being: the police station”…

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