Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Keep me writing it—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 may or may 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 a compilation of the full story through the entry before this one can be found here.

When you are born from a Mountain, no matter how Mormeckian, no matter how bipedal an avatar of that mountain, you carry that ponderousness with you, always. You learn to accept your new-found agility and separate personhood, but your legs still seem sometimes made of pendulous iron and your thoughts switch from quicksilver to quicksand from minute to minute. There are advantages to being an old soul in a new body, but mostly you are two things at once, which can be wearying.

Transforming myself into a King Komodo lifted much of the Mountain from me. My new body, invisible to humans, was a wonder of engineering that could stop quick as thought and reverse itself, flow across a courtyard like water, but also rippled with muscles. Every part of me was muscle, and I had a control as I ran that satisfied on an aesthetic and aerodynamic level. My senses too were enhanced so that I could hear a mouse fart underground from a hundred yards. I could see across far distances, but if I allowed a membrane to close across my eye, I suddenly saw heat signatures, too. My sense of smell was exceptional as well, and changed in this body so that nothing smelled bad, not even rotting bodies. Snow smelled fresh no matter how dirty. The pads of my feet were picked up minute vibrations and allowed me to triangulate the source of sounds. They also conveyed more than texture, but something more than I cannot articulate because it constituted some sixth sense. Those pads also allowed me, along with my rock-climber’s claws, to run across any surface, even upside down. My scales, meanwhile, responded to my thoughts: I could be invisible, translucent, or drop these disguises and manifest with my scales in their natural color, a sea-green shade. I could even ripple colors across my body like a squid.

(more…)

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Keep me writing it—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 may or may 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.

Thanks for reading and for your paypal donations that keep the engine running. I’ve compiled the story thus far in one handy post below for those who haven’t read it yet or would like to revisit it. So far, the story already clocks in at 7,400 words, which means we’re definitely headed toward novella length at the very least. I’ll return with a new entry over the weekend. And, if you’re an artist, send me a sketch of what you think Mormeck looks like, emailed to vanderworld at hotmail.com and I’ll do a post featuring all of them.

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Our rather awesome nephew Pioneer Winter has put together “42: A Stonewall Perspective” with Jared Sharon. Pioneer is an amazing dancer and if you’re in Miami June 28th, check it out.

From the description: “The mindset of many gays and lesbians turned away from oppression and toward freedom of expression [as a result of Stonewall]. Winter and Sharon’s art honors progressive predecessors who broke the ground on which the artists are building.

(Pioneer during a prior performance.)

Tomorrow I’m going to post one blog entry that has the entire text of The Journals of Mormeck, my serialized story project, to date, before picking up the story on Saturday.

It’s been an interesting experience, and I can’t even really tell you where I got the idea for Mormeck, except that I’d been wanting to use the name for awhile and a still-born story with a character named that had gone nowhere. But suddenly I was looking at some random notes for a new fictional universe and I remembered the name Mormeck and then this Japanese comics character popped into my brain and I knew Mormeck was a huge, mountain-large creature with a laboratory resting atop his head. On a distant planet. Observing a hundred or more alt-Earths.

How I got it into my head to post the entries here, I’m not sure, but the diary form has been instrumental to doing it as a rough draft serial on my blog. It creates a kind of closed-vessel situation where even though I know the parts have to fit together, I can just concentrate on what’s right in front of me, compartmentalize the task at hand.

(more…)

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.

On the third day after my avatar’s departure, my last luna moth winked out of existence. I was blind. I had observed my Outpost regenerate and transform into a King Komodo and go scuttling invisible away, but not much more. It felt like a severing of a connection. As much as I had begun to dislike my avatar, he had still been me, and being blind to his journey left a strange wound. I resented being concerned. I resented feeling this sense of loss that I hadn’t expected. Gabriel tried to comfort me by reminding me that my Outpost had the coordinates for the return portal, the return bear, but this did not much soothe me.

“There’s nothing you can do until he returns,” Gabriel told me. “We can try to bring other surveillance into play, but it may not work. It may not be advisable to do so. It might just expose your avatar’s position even more.”

I agreed that he was right and asked for two things: to be put on another assignment to take my mind off of my avatar, and if I could talk to one of the angels that had returned insane from the winter city: resurrected from ashes only to succumb to some horror or some trauma it could barely articulate. He agreed to both, although only reluctantly to the second.

I do not know why I asked to see the insane angel. I don’t know what I expected to find out, except that this angel had been in the city my avatar now roamed. We sat there in the white room with the angel sitting on a white chair and my emissary standing in front of him. His wings hadn’t come back right; they were twisty and thatched in a way that suggested the chrysalis-wet wings of an emerging butterfly. He twitched regularly, could not stop himself, and his gaze could not alight on any one place, even though there was little enough to look at. His eyes were utterly black and without reflection. His mouth did not lilt upward in the half-smile chiseled into the other angels’ faces. He smelled like ashes, as was only proper, I suppose.

“What happened to you in the city?” I asked.

“They asked that already,” he replied.

He had a voice like pieces of ice splintering against each other. It made me not want to ever hear that voice again, but I persevered: “Tell me again.”

“The things came. They knew us. They took us. They unmade us…after a time.”

“The King Komodos.”

“No.”

“The humans.”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“The things,” the angel replied. And then, unexpectedly, “They did not find funny what we found funny.” And I thought of the angels laughing as my avatar was torn apart by the bear Seether.

“And for this they…unmade…you?”

“No,” the angel said. “They unmade us because we had unmade something first.”

I started to ask what the angels had unmade but some shiver in the ice-crunch of his voice made me stop and become wary. There was no reason why Gabriel or the others couldn’t listen in, and something in the implication of “unmade something first” frightened me. I know it may be difficult to believe a Mountain like me could be afraid, but in that blindingly white room talking to the mad angel with the black eyes I began to experience something that might even be known as terror. I could suddenly feel, all of the foot-treads of the angels upon my surface and feel the hot breath of Seether and in a kind of wrenching dislocation everything living on me was suddenly alien, so alien that I wanted to just shake and shake until I’d shaken it all off of me. It took an act of supreme will not to give in to the impulse.

When I’d mastered it, I asked the angel, “How would you describe these…things?”

Now the mad angel stared right at my avatar with those strange eyes, opened his mouth, and out came an avalanche of a roar, like a glacier suddenly shuddering and exploding into the water, like something gigantic and half-crazed being slaughtered by thousands. Eventually, it deformed his face. Eventually, ashes like flecks of snow poured out of his mouth. Eventually, his eyes turned white. Eventually, I stood in front of a dead husk toppled over in front of me like an offering.

Gabriel came up behind me. “I should have warned you not to ask that,” he said. “That’s happened to two others.”

He was grinning ear-to-ear as he said it.

Apollocon is this weekend in Houston! Martha Wells is the writer guest of honor and my wife Ann VanderMeer, editor of Weird Tales, is the editor guest of honor. She’ll be participating in panels, doing a visual presentation on her current projects, and no doubt having a lot of fun. She’ll also be getting a tour of NASA, which is way cool. If you’re in the area, consider stopping by—you can buy memberships at the door.

Can you afford to missing seeing Ann in fierce mode?

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.

Komodo dragons have a strange history across the universe. They exist in two basic forms. The first is the seemingly normal large-sized lizard version found across most alt-Earths. This version is actually a trans-dimensional creature that exists in several places at once. A gland that imbues its saliva with a slow-acting toxin also provides the creature with its ability to populate so many realities simultaneously. The saliva can be used to travel across dimensions by anyone, but your travel will only last a few weeks, and then you will die unless you have the exceedingly rare antidote. As you lie in paralysis somewhere far from where you originated, the komodo will catch up to you and feast upon you. And you will wonder why you thought you could outrun what no one can outrun.

The komodos that found me taking shelter by leaning against a supporting wall in an abandoned, roofless warehouse were not this first variety. The normal variety isn’t intelligent. The normal variety is somewhat ponderous and stupid, and operates by instinct alone. But the second kind, the King Komodos as they’re called by some, are intelligent, and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time, although with a somewhat more chaotic agenda than the angels. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might someone living in a cabin. You don’t take it personally.

But I took it personally. King Komodos are huge and like their distant cousins they too exist many places simultaneously. Unlike those cousins, the King Komodos are invisible due to an incredibly sophisticated camouflage feature. So at first I thought they were just the beginnings of a storm, except that the waves of invisibility that surged across where the ceiling should have been became too regular, rippled too closely to a reptilian shape. Clearly, in many other realities, this warehouse had a ceiling; they weren’t flying across air. Soon, the half-dozen King Komodos roiling around the warehouse became more visible to me—like long, wave-wide quick-silver tongues of water flashing through the air, with a hint of scales at times, a quick flash of claw, a suggestion of a curious and brazen eye. I could hear the sound of their scuttling gallop, which unnerved me more than anything. They sounded like they were the size of small elephants, with the sticky toes of geckoes. There was a kind of clean heat of a stink, too—it was odd and full of spice but it needled through your nostrils and was gone before returning a few minutes later.

I stayed there, leaning against the wall, pretending not to notice them, because if I had been truly human, I wouldn’t have sensed them at all, unless they’d chosen to manifest. But something about my very ability to sense them drew them to me, made the Komodos realize I wasn’t human. A horrific breath scalded the side of my face and a scaly transparent snout as big as a battering ram smashed against me, make me fall to the floor. The snout again, flinging me to the center of the warehouse. I was dazed, scared for the first time since coming to the winter city.

A circle of translucent lizard flesh roiled and seethed around me like a whirlpool, and in the language of the angels they used for my benefit I began to hear their guttural yet sibbilant cursing.

It’s with the angels.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It thinks we can’t see it, that we don’t know what it is.”

“But we know what it is, don’t we?”

“A thing of the angels.”

“An angel-thing. Angel filth.”

“Angel-fucker. Angel-shitter. Angel-pisser.”

I panicked—I tried to run out of the circle, but it was like trying to run through a wall of pure muscle that smelled like spice. I fell back, bruised, and heard the weird huffing-chuckle that is the King Komodo’s most bloodthirsty expression of humor.

It wasn’t long after that. That circle spasmed close and closer and the great green-gold eyes became visible all around me and the snouts opened and the fangs pierced and I dampened my pain centers and the King Komodos lovingly rendered me down to bits of thrown-about and fought over flesh-and-blood. It didn’t take long. I might as well have jumped into the center of a half-dozen buzz saws.

When they were done, they quickly became distracted by something in another reality, and scuttle-galloped off, hissing and cursing.

Leaving me as just a foot in a shoe, with a little bit of ankle.

This was getting to be a habit.

…Except they did not know the true measure of me, Mormeck Outpost, whose every cell contains all of him. Who can regrow a body from a mote in god’s eye.

…Except their ungentle touch had left me knowing how to take on the form of a King Komodo.

Our Cheeky Frawg e-book imprint is teaming up with Tartarus Press to bring you Women of the Supernatural: A Tartarus Press Sampler edited by Ray Russell (founder of Tartarus). With any luck, this will be the first of a series of Tartarus samplers around some specific organizing principle—some general and some more specific. This isn’t the final TOC as we’re still working on some permissions, but gives you a sneak peek.

“The Painter of Dead Women” by Edna Underwood
“Sister Sister” by Angela Slatter
“Afterward” by Edith Wharton
“What the Eye Remembers” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman
“Terminus” by Nina Allen
“Mr Manpferdit” by Tina Rath
“A Were-Wolf of the Campagna” by Mrs Hugh Fraser
“The Cook’s Story” by Rosalie Parker
“A Mystery of the Campagna” by Anne Von Degen

(Copyright Business & Heritage Clarkesville)

To be honest, one thing about doing a book—any book—is that you get tired of talking about it and tired of the book itself real fast, especially if you’re involved in creating other projects. And at various times, I know I’ve confessed to Steampunk fatigue, as have we all, I think.

But I have to share this article about Steampunk as a hands-on college class at Austin Peay, using the Steampunk Bible as the textbook. It’s an awesome example of a book having a real-world, concrete impact.

This does happen more often than you might think. Over the years, many of the books I’ve been involved with have an impact. We’re told so often that books don’t matter anymore, but in addition to the fiction I write inspiring creators to riff and explore—and vice versa—The New Weird and our Steampunk anthologies (all edited with my wife Ann) have had impact in unexpected places at unexpected times, creating debate and inspiring creators, and even, in some cases of translation, sparking hybrid movements and books. That’s always a great feeling—when you can have a positive impact on others.