Archives: Entry #3, Entry #2 and Entry #1.

Who can blame anyone for mistaking them for angels, these people I work for, these people who have taken me in? Who can blame anyone for creating the myth of angels, or the “angels” for using it?

On this outpost, “this backwater planet at the end of nowhere,” as the bear-sentinel Seether calls it, the arrival of the angels from far-flung missions can be as dramatic as a sunrise or as stealthy as turning to discover a person sitting in a chair empty the moment before.

But it’s for the dramatics that I love them, although I know it’s a weakness. They dare to take chances, and so instead of riddling their way through the Rips to come home—really all the way home, safe—some of them will enter in the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it will take for their incredibly strong wings to burn up, and coming hurtling down, on fire, like fiery jewels. And I send the skein of my senses rushing up to meet them, to experience their fall. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careen down in droves at times, coordinating their descents.

Most of the time, they guess correctly, and make it to the laboratory grounds, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar but having performed almost like parachutes. The wings will grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.

The ones not so lucky smash screaming into the lawns and smolder there until the medics come. I hear the impact above me, reverberating through my skull, and I send out my tendrils to investigate. They lie there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that’s not just pain. They look like heaps of smoking, quivering tar but smell like honeysuckle. These cases take longer to heal, but their misfortune isn’t seen as frivolous by the others. When you’re almost immortal, your idea of play isn’t the same as for other beings. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions you cross galaxies, decades, and dimensions to carry out.

Stationary mountain-sized monster that I am, I revel in their joy, their mobility, their risk-taking. I forgive everything because of it. They are so beautiful I might even be able to forgive the slaughter of hundreds, of thousands, for love of them. At least for a little while.

What is Steampunk?

Why do you write about squid?

Why do you write about mushrooms?

Why aren’t there airplanes in Ambergris?

Why are you so anti-fungi?

Why is your writing so weird?

Why are you so mean to your characters?

What are you wearing?

Archives: Entry #2 and Entry #1.

I’ve forgotten what I wanted to relate, because I’m drunk, or “pissed” as one of the angels, the humans, says. It takes a lot to get a monster as big as a mountain drunk. It takes my rooting filaments tapping into sweet hallucinogenic sap of other plants. It takes my fellow observers pouring pint after pint of rotgut down a throat I created just for the purpose. But it can be done! Gloriously, riotously done!

I’m a happy drunk for the most part. I see sunbeams and novas. I relax and think everything across the universes is wonderful. I contain multitudes, but durnk, I am but one person, no different than my fellow experimenters, no different in my bleary rants and affirmations of solidarity. I’m not a monster at all. I’m your best friend, your confidante.

And yet…part of me is still sealed off from all of that. Part of me is monitoring information lightyears away, brought from luna moths and komodo dragons and from bears that rip open to reveal doors and much more horrific things that don’t need thinking about, and which, luckily, you don’t think about when durnk. No, durnk is a state of bliss when considering things like geo-political social situations across multiple alt-worlds. Or wars between species thought of as angels and demons but all too…human?…humanoid?

But that’s too sad to bear thinking about. Time for another drink poured down the artificial throat. I think this one’s a screwdriver! I think! The screwdriver to beat all screwdrivers!

Yes, I’m one of them. Finally. Forever. or until the morning hangover.

Big as a mountain. Small as mouse. Drunk as a louse.

(Critics who use in-progress process posts as proof of anything in finished books are jerks and will not be tolerated.)

Avast! When you return to a novel you last looked at a few months before and you’re like me—which is to say, there might be three typewritten alternative drafts and two explorations in handwriting—it takes a bit to get up to speed. Is this me complaining about my own work habits? Hell no. The whole point of my process is inefficiency. Getting too quickly to where you want to go, getting there too smoothly, is antithetical to thinking through complex issues. You want roadblocks, confusion, chaos, and doubt. Unexpected, wonderful things come out of this approach, too.

But I have indeed spent the whole day sorting through variations and looking at the structure of the 25,000 words I’ve got on the page. One thing that just kept annoying me beyond belief was the amount of really cool exposition I needed to cut to keep the foregrounded story moving forward. This is pretty basic stuff, but sometimes your description is doing a lot of other things, like deepening character. Other stuff just needs to go or be rearranged.

What I did find is that rethinking the structure of Borne helped a lot. I had thought of the book as being in two parts, and the sort of book where you get a lot of context up front. As I was looking over scenes with the title character, I realized I should experiment with a three-part structure, and suddenly the whole idea of what scenes had to go where changed drastically, as well as what kind of approach this novel needs in terms of context and divulging certain kinds of information.

First off, thinking of the novel in three parts, roughly corresponding to stages in Borne’s development, meant that scenes involving other characters could now be spread out across all three sections. Before, I’d been thinking in terms of the narrator’s story arc, but that’s not going to be the structural determinant for the novel, as it turns out. Unspooling Borne-related stuff also allows this other spreading-out noted above. It also, for some reason, now means setting context will be situated more node-like at regular intervals along the way. This means the first place I go into extended description is much shorter, and the space created fills up with more of the emotional lives of the characters. And I can relax into that knowing the rest of what I need is coming later, and isn’t needed for reader understanding due to the new pacing and the new ways in which the past and present communicate with one another in the text.

It doesn’t even really matter if I wind up actually dividing the book into three sections, or I just hold that in my head as a construct and do chapters 1 through 20 without any section breaks. The point is, the re-think has allowed for better, more useful ways to distribute scenes and info, while also revealing what material isn’t needed at all. Something about visualizing the novel as a two-parter was also obscuring unintended repetition and wastefulness in what was on the page.

This is all a very dry way of saying that structure isn’t actually an abstract thing. It’s also not always an organic thing, in that you try out different approaches mechanically in aid of getting to a place where everything in the text becomes effortless and organic.

As a kind of side note, I’ve also had a great time on more of a sentence level applying lessons learned from Steve Erickson’s (author of Zeroville) edits to the excerpt of Borne appearing in Black Clock magazine. In the context of finalizing the piece for his mag, I thought of the edits as regular copy-edits, but in the context of revising and moving forward on new sections of Borne at novel-length, I now interpret them as character-related instead. Which is to say, most of the deletions and changes affect how the reader perceives the main character. What is understated by the cuts emphasizes different elements. What is now brought to the front also creates different emphasis. This in effect makes subtle but important changes to the character…and in charting why I think these changes were made, I have gained a much better understanding about the person I’m writing about, and this also now radiates out into my editing of the rest of the draft as it stands.

The good news, from my standpoint, is that because several scenes now bleed into part two, I am much farther along on the novel than I thought. It means I have new scenes to write in part one, but that’s preferable to being more adrift in the middle. This, too, is the advantage of thinking about the structure differently: I no longer have concerns about sag in the middle because of the redistribution of previously front-loaded scenes into that section. The third act is crystal clear in my head, so that was really the last challenge in terms of how to present the material.

Especially in a short novel, like Borne will no doubt be, getting it all right on this kind of technical level is key to the emotional resonance for readers. Pacing, correct development, managing progression aren’t issues of craft—they’re issues intrinsic to success at deeper, more psychological levels. Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land is a perfect example—if Joyce’s craft weren’t brilliant, his insight into human relationships would be useless, because it would be deployed within a malformed novel.

And so instead of a post on the movie Carlos or another Doctor Mormeck entry, you have this, my little weirdlings. I hope you find it interesting. Or maybe I don’t hope anything. Mostly, I’m just happy to be writing.

Sometimes goop gets in the way. Working through my novel Borne, I’m exasperated by some of the exposition that feels inert even though it may not be—it may just need to be recontextualized, broken up, or made to do more work through half-scene. So, goop below. I keep coming up with new combinations, new entry points, to make this stuff work. And sometimes, you just have to throw almost all of it away. Even posting the stuff here is a way of getting a clearer view of it–different font, different location can equal a new way of seeing it.

(BTW–not all of my blog entries are posting to facebook, so don’t rely on facebook for updates.)

(more…)

The Amazon book blog asked if I’d write a short piece about my NYT Book Review column on SF and fantasy, so I did: “This is work for a jeweler or a miniaturist, because it’s difficult to convey summary and analysis in such a short space. For this reason, I spend many hours just crafting the approach and tailoring the sentences so there’s plenty of specific detail and the proper level of context.”

Also, a nice shout-out for The Steampunk Bible over at the B&N Review, and a great review at Bleeding Cool.

Not related, but still interesting: Some thoughts on a crappy story from David Moles.

And finally, jerks can write good fiction? Say it ain’t so!

Archive: Entry #1

Before swooping down to the forest floor to write again, I pondered for awhile about what I should write first, what second, what third. The possibilities opening up before me seemed to contain multitudes. It was overwhelming, if I’m honest. A journal can include everything and nothing, and I am no expert at confessionals. But then I thought about someone finding the book, buried in a box in the dirt, possibly hundreds of years from now…and even though I’m writing it in a dead language, and for myself, there was a kind of tingle of anticipation of that far-future reader, an acknowledgment that some day I will have a reader.

And that reader will need to know who I am, because although raised by what might be termed “humans,” I am not human. Indeed, there are no others like me anywhere nearby.

I came here, to this planet, this doorway, as the shooting seed of an adult of my species, and I might have originated galaxies away and centuries ago. Who knows? I don’t.

I started polyp-small, and discovered by those who were here first, I was tended to in a laboratory devoted to experiments across time and space. None of them had seen anything like me, either. It soon became clear I was sentient, and growing. That is when they decided to truly take me in and make me one of them. That is when I gained a “father” and a “mother,” although these terms have a different meaning to my species.

At first, I was like some cross between lab assistant and lab pet—it was difficult for them to choose how to treat me, and I don’t blame them. I did not know my own capabilities, so how could I expect them to? But I continued to grow, and continued to learn, at a prodigious rate. It became clear I was their peer, and then, to some extent, meant to be their leader. Why not? I had no allegiance to my own species, and no aversion to theirs. Besides, their mission appealed to me, for so many reasons.

Yet I am vast, and no laboratory could contain me, ultimately. Now, as an adult, I look like a mountain, but also like a monster from the nightmares of humans. My four legs are enormously thick and rise some hundred feet, where they intersect at the base of what in a human would be my torso; each leg ends in a huge round foot, from which tendrils root into the ground. My torso is also my head and rises another hundred feet, with moth-like feelers protruding out in a feathery profusion. Each tendril is wider than a human being and stretches out a good fifty to seventy-five feet. I can elongate them as necessary.

Atop my head perches the laboratory and some outer buildings, and I have stood here still for so long that a small forest has grown up around the lab. I have no need to move, because from the eyeless crennelated sides of my “face”—my tendrils are my eyes—I can send out a winged probe that, alighting beside the lab, morphs into a vaguely humanoid remote replica. This replica interacts with my fellow researchers, some of whom are, with my blessing, devoted to studying me. This is also how I secretly come to the planet’s surface to write these entries.

As I’ve said, I am the only one of my kind, but in accepting the mission of my fellow researchers, I also hope to one day discover another of me. We must exist, just so widely dispersed that the finding is the difficult part. And in the meantime, every week, from deep inside my body, self-fertilized polyps emerge, and—shot with incredible force, protected by vacuum-sealed pods—make their way out into space. I could keep some of them with me, I suppose, but instinctually I know they would die without their exposure to space. I would be killing my offspring just to have someone similar to talk to. And someday those I send out may come back.

So I talk to the people here, and cooperate with their mission. I monitor the surveillance transmissions from a hundred thousand worlds spread out across a a wide expanse of alternate universes. Earth and its duplicates, its mutants, are our primary concern for now, but not our only one. Some day Earth may fade from our awareness entirely, once the war there has been won.

In the meantime, for all of my size, I am afraid of what is unfolding in the sensory apparatus of the luna moths and our other spy-creatures, across all the Earths, and because that scares me, so too, more and more, my human colleagues scare me.

Although I have not been truly honest about these colleagues of mine. Nominally, they are human. Luminously, they are angels.

And that is enough writing for today. It takes a great effort to write any of these words, especially through a remote probe. Everything about the forest floor distracts me. I have too many senses to remain numb to…anything.

You’ve probably seen this on SF Signal, but just in case…

GeekDad has reviewed The Steampunk Bible, saying it should be on every reader’s nightstand: “The book shines as reference material, but can really be considered a collectible in itself.”

As an added Monday pick-me-up, Gareth Branwyn of Make magazine, mentioned the book on facebook, writing, “It’s really gorgeously produced and thoughtfully written. I think this is probably the best book that could be produced right now on the genre, a worthy encapsulation of what first-decade 21st century steampunk is/was.”

And tonight, the University Bookstore in Seattle hosts a special event with contributors to the book…

Seattle – June 6, University Bookstore, 7pm – Signing and discussion with Cherie Priest (writer), Jay Lake (writer), and Libby Bulloff (photographer), major contributors to the Steampunk Bible. I particularly wish I could be at this event because the great and knowledgeable bookseller Duane Wilkins will be presiding, and because in addition to it being a great bookstore and the entertainment value of Cherie and Jay, I’d love to hear a photographer’s perspective on the book. Libby contributed more images than anyone else. Great stuff.

To buy now while there’s still money, just click on the image…

For the entire serial, please go here. If you like it, please consider a paypal donation to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Any donation over $21 will entitle you to a copy of any antho the story first appears in or stand-alone book if that turns out to be the first official publication.

As the experiments continue across dimensions and across time, even I cannot escape the inevitable recognition that we are all animals, and in acquiring reason we paradoxically seem determined to continually undermine reason—destabilization as a coping mechanism because our brains really aren’t ready for all of this yet. Systems we construct must therefore by definition fail. Their failure is a relief perversely. We willingly revert.

(What’s not a relief or comforting is that no permutation of any humanoid sentient species yet discovered can be said to be any less self-destructive. Is a certain type of intelligence a kind of disease? Are opposable thumbs a harbinger of disaster?)

I was listening to the transmission from a luna moth in the Southern Hemisphere of Earth 2.7.5 yesterday and it’s not as if this fact isn’t understood in every-day life, for leaking through the banal conversation outside at dusk at a cafe or coffee house, caught up in our surveillance because of the key words “angels” and “other worlds,” came this snippet rendered originally by a male voice, in Spanish: “If you notice how illogical, inconsistent, subjectively, just plan odd and off we all seem to act individually and collectively, how ideologies–which are usually a form of disease–infect us until we spout the most ridiculous generalities (whether those ideologies are on left or right), it sometimes seems Earth was created by gods or aliens to house billions of insane sentients.”

I commandeered a passing fly to settle on this man’s shoulder. He sat with a group of about ten people, middle class, clearly professionals of some sort. I listened in for a good five minutes, but the conversation turned away from the implications of what this man had said.

What I found unsettling is that the man, retreating to the bathroom to use a urinal, murmured “did you catch all of that?” at one point, and for a second I thought he somehow knew the fly camouflaged by his dark shirt was recording him…but, no, pulling out to diagnostic surveil I found he was himself “bugged” with a wire under his shirt, and clearly spying for someone’s secret service. Who he was with, or why they should be of interest counted as merely regional politics—strategically unimportant. But it amused me to discover that he watched others as I watched him.

However, it also made me paranoid. Are we all watching each other? And if so, who is watching me?

So I shall, in the secret part of each night—or what functions as night here—begin to record, in the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper, how I came to be here and the results of our experiments. I shall use English, that most out-dated of languages, as a further impediment to interception. I will number but not date these entries. (Dates are a laughable proposition anyway, knowing what I know.)

It’s possible that even though I am taking these precautions that I will be found out. I’m accepting of that possibility. The truth is, I am surrounded by people, and yet I have no confessor, no one with which I can share the inner-most thoughts that gather around me with a kind of flapping, glittery darkness. I trust no one, and they don’t, I think, trust me.

It’s not that kind of operation. I am not that kind of monster.