Full ballot here.

Both the novel and collection categories are pure bliss, although I haven’t read the Kay. Everything else would’ve been on my own ballot. It’s a jump-for-joy ballot! (Would’ve only been more jump for joy of Avjaz and Michael Cisco could have joined them.) The Lord, Okorafor, and Jemisin were all on my own Amazon top 10 list for last year, and Beukes except for a pub date thing re the US would’ve been, too. The Joyce is amazing and would’ve been on my Amazon list if I’d read it soon enough.

In collection…wow, those are all extraordinary. For personal reasons and because it’s underrated, the Slatter collection gets my nod.

Best Novel
•Zoo City, Lauren Beukes (Jacana South Africa; Angry Robot)
•The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
•The Silent Land, Graham Joyce (Gollancz; Doubleday)
•Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc; Harper Voyager UK)
•Redemption In Indigo, Karen Lord (Small Beer)
•Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)

Best Story Collection
•What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer)•The Ammonite Violin & Others, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)
•Holiday, M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon)
•Sourdough and Other Stories, Angela Slatter (Tartarus)
•The Third Bear, Jeff VanderMeer (Tachyon)

It’s a great week two here at the Shared Worlds teen SF/F writing camp at Wofford College (Spartanburg, SC). We’ve got Ekaterina Sedia and Minister Faust as guest writers, along with my wife Ann VanderMeer. Over 40 students, building worlds and writing in them. The job here is intense and very satisfying, and it means I won’t be blogging much until next week.

Feel free to tell me what you’re up to in the comments thread—i.e., plug your latest project, book, or something recent you loved.

If you’re not my facebook friend, send me a friend request if you want to see photos and whatnot from Shared Worlds. I’m mini-blogging there since it isn’t as time-intensive as “real” blogging.

You’ll recall that Mo Ali did a great rendition of Mormeck, the living mountain (above) a couple of weeks ago. Now I’ve received two more awesome things: a great old-school interpretation of Doctor Mormeck by Noel Tanti and a cool version of Mormeck’s avatar, as komodo meeting with Pavlov, by Anne and Phil Barringer. Thanks very much! And keep them coming. It’s important that there be more art than less since in the process of writing I want to keep the characters in my mind’s eye fluid, not locked into any one particular expression of them. I’m flattered we already have three!

Mormeck entries will return next week, although expect them to be slow until after the Shared Worlds’ writing camp. I am coming up with new ideas, though, and scribbling them down.

This is just one of the coolest covers ever–Jeremy Zerfoss at Bull Spec editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn’s request doing something that’s a kind of cabinet of curiosities based on our books. Really thoughtful. It’s in support of the Bull Spec/Regulator Bookstore Cabinet of Curiosities event at Fullsteam Brewery in Raleigh-Durham July 30–with all kinds of special guests, including Ekaterina Sedia, Mur Lafferty, SJ Chambers, etc. (More info in a separate blog post soon.)

Larry Nolen did the equally thoughtful interview, which isn’t just in Q&A format. Layout is quite nice.

Many at the Shared Worlds teen SF/F writing camp here at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, know about Totoro but not as many know about the Moomins. So I have created this handy and totally arbitrary guide that compares and contrasts them. – JV

***

Totoro is a giant creature featured in the movie My Neighbor Totoro. It can fly but sometimes likes to just stand by a bus stop so it can use unusual forms of public transit.

…or sometimes it just is a person in a sweaty mascot outfit waiting for a real bus.

THIS…is wrong. Very wrong.

Meanwhile, the Moomins are a family of large hippo-like trolls created by author Tove Jansson and written about in comics and books.

People in Moomin costumes aren’t often seen waiting at bus stops.

Totoro seems to be happy enough to be around people, but that stare indicates Totoro would also be fine without them. Totoro seems to have friends, but not a whole lot of them.

Moomins have their family and friends and a lot of other people and animals that interact with them. If you sat down with a Moomin you might get a slice of berry pie. If you sat down with Totoro, he might give you a scary but exciting ride through the night sky….but you wouldn’t get any pie, just some stray acorns from between his toes. Totoro doesn’t appear to know how to cook…or care at all about cooking.

Moomin are deceptively cute…which means they tend to be very wise and if you are hoodwinked by their cute factor you might miss the wisdom. (Well, okay, sometimes Moominpappa isn’t so wise.) Honestly, I wouldn’t play cards with Moominmamma, either.

Sometimes, you get the sense that Totoro might be hiding a little bit of a temper…

Angry Moomins are rare, but because of that fact angering a Moomin doesn’t seem like a good idea. If you anger a Moomin, you would probably get punished within the confines of the law, and have a fair trial, because that’s what the Moomins would approve of. But that Moomin would make darn sure he or she had an iron-bound case against you and your ass would be in jail for a long time for whatever offense you had committed.

Many have wondered what would happen if Totoro and Moomins came into conflict. (Well, okay, just me.) These fingers found randomly on the internet indicate Moomins might at first be outnumbered.

This photo indicates that Totoro might spawn dozens of tasty Cupcake Totoros to infiltrate Moomin territory…

This might lead the Moomins, especially given Totoro’s superiority in the air, to temporarily retreat via boat to a remote island with a lighthouse.

But this photo reveals that the Moomins eventually would counter with an army of cardboard robots built out of hundreds of discarded whisky boxes.

The Moomins would also find a way to unleash their reluctant secret weapon The Groke…

…before inviting Totoro over for tea so that the Moomins could talk some sense into Totoro.

…or attempt to cook him (in a respectful way)….

…which would only infuriate Totoro and his allies and lead to more bad blood.

…like this propaganda film created by Totoro wishing ill-will toward Moomins, deliberately spelling their name wrong, too.

Regardless of how this conflict made up in my head turns out, one thing is for sure: they both look good on a t-shirt!

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

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.

I have become two detectives suddenly, over the past few days. One rigorously surveils Marty and her lighthouse, her daily meetings with strangers for a single kiss. The other surveils the angels who live in the laboratory atop my head. Neither detective is entirely satisfied with the arrangement, but for now it suffices, like a jury-rigged system that will break-down if isn’t fixed.

Nothing in my observations of Marty has done anything but intensified my sense of having found a…friend? A…what? There is an immense and ponderous sense of projection, of filling in the gaps caused by not being able to sit down and have a conversation with her. I know just about everything someone can know about another being, but somehow that is not the same. And mixed in with these thoughts are the growing feelings of shame at watching her at all, and of knowing that Mormeck Mountain is more “peeping tom” as the alt-Earths almost universally put it than friend to her.

As for the angels, they have grown sloppy in their trust of me, which isn’t surprising. For too long I have accepted everything they told me the way a child will accept what their parents say. But I’m a mountain, not a hill, and the time for that is past.

I continue to, one by one, access their documents and to piece together information from them, all the while pretending to Gabriel and the others that nothing has changed.

This one, for example, interests me. It has no attribution as to the source. But it suggests a possible vulnerability on the part of the angels…

“BATEMAN GLAND, THE – The bateman gland is a twenty-second century adaptation in several alt-universes that manifests as a hole in the left side of the human body, below the ribcage. It is an attempt by the human body to make the camera phone superfluous. Photos are developed in the small intestine and come out in curled form from the navel, through an ingenious re-plumbing effort. This is mostly due to the propensity in these alternative universes for humans to change their bodies to fit the common gestalt. Therefore, it took several million people earnestly wishing with all of their thoughts and prayers that their bodies could take photographs, thus making their camera phones irrelevant, before this adaptation could take place. Those without this ability were suddenly rendered pariahs and deleted in the great purges of 2252 (by AD of the old calendar). An unexpected effect of the bateman gland? It causes periods of intense crying jags as well as a nostalgia for a time before camera phones.

“In the trans-dimensional komodo dragon, the clicking of a bateman gland—the act of taking the photograph—causes a kind of existential rage that dulls upon repetition. Thus, the number of cases of young komodo dragons going insane in neighboring realities. And the scar tissue around the sides of older komodo dragons’ heads. The side effect of the side effect? Like a watermark, you can see the faint ghosting outline of komodo heads in most of the photos taken by bateman glands. The exact connection—the kind of extra-dimensional—residue—that causes this “ghost manifestation” is unclear. But rogue angels now use the communal power of this chaotic uncertainty, combined with extracts of komodo poison and komodo rage, to amplify their power to jump between universes. It also creates an incredible burst of endorphins or endorphin equivalent in the users.”

What to make of this account entire—are pieces of it fanciful? Is it both fiction and nonfiction—is hard for me to determine. But it has helped me to direct my subtle inquiries through the angel’s files in certain directions I had not thought of before.

More viscerally, this mention of “ghost manifestations” has a sudden personal aspect. Since yesterday, there have been sudden manifestations of ghost frogs on my lower flanks. They follow my presence down here to the jungle to write in my journal and watch me with their translucent throats throbbing in silent frog-song, in such numbers that the jungle floor is turned into an ectoplasmic surge of small bulbous bodies, their large eyes oddly more luminous and less ethereal than the rest of them, so near dusk their bodies seem to fade away entirely and it is just an army of glowing silver eyes advancing across the dark green. Thus, they become a kind of army that attends to my local avatar despite me wanting discretion when I come here. At least they stay at my flanks otherwise, and if the angels have noticed them, it seems not to cause them concern.

But I don’t know what it means, even as I feel vaguely responsible for them. The only reference I’ve found in the records to ghost frogs is that they serve sometimes as the sentinels of komodos. But I am not a komodo.

Regardless of this development, this new information, I remain caught in stasis. I must watch Marty. I must spy on the angels. I feel as if I am in a cage when all I want to do is burst out, to follow my instincts, to escape all of this and travel to a lighthouse by the sea.

Light blogging here for awhile, as I’m completely immersed in the Shared Worlds SF/F teen writing camp. Still, above is the cover art for the SW teen writing book and below a couple of photos. More soonish.

One great thing about limited TV access while teaching here at Shared Worlds (Wofford College) in Spartanburg, SC, is that I’m spending my evenings reading and watching movies on Netflix. I’ve decided to go a little esoteric and catch up on some flicks that aren’t exactly Hollywood blockbusters.

Case in point, Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, starring Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel. It’s got all of Roeg’s signatures: unusual use of montage, unusual ideas about how to cut, frame, and bookend scenes. In this case, rather than at the service of a horror story (Don’t Look Now) or a SF movie (The Man Who Fell to Earth), he uses these devices to film a script about a terribly mis-matched couple—Russell plays a kind of hedonistic soul who lives in the moment, and Garfunkel plays a psychologist who is attracted to Russell but is exasperated by her lack of commitment. The movie opens with Garfunkel accompanying Russell’s character to the hospital in an ambulance, and then cuts back and forth between the past and present, often doing so several times in a few minutes without ever being confusing.

So there’s the mystery of why Russell’s character is going to the hospital, the mystery of the complexities of their relationship, Garfunkel’s connection to the military, why Russell’s character keeps going over the border into Czechslovakia…and, really, it all revolves around their personal story no matter how the film tries to throw you off with the idea that it might become some kind of political thriller.

Some scenes are absolutely wonderful in the way they exemplify why mastery of technique can result in increased emotional resonance. When a detective examines the woman’s apartment after she’s in the hospital, Roeg cuts back and forth between the detective and a scene between Garfunkel and Russell months earlier. So the detective, for example, peers around the corner of a room and then Roeg cuts to Garfunkel staring out from the bed like he’s looking at the detective, but he’s looking at Russell. And so on. It might seem artificial, but in fact Roeg is basically just operating the way memory can work, and the pointing out the ways in which we interact even when we think we aren’t. The detective might not see the couple, but he can sense the ghosts of their arguments.

Cutting a scene like that jolts the viewer out of customary ways of seeing without seeming disjointed or random. The film editing here is very sophisticated and quite frankly made me want to weep thinking about your average run-of-the-mill Hollywood drama.

Bad Timing ironically enough runs out of steam the more provocative it becomes—which is to say there’s a kind of decadent-era inevitability to what happens. Throughout Garfunkel is more than adequate, but it’s really Russell who shines here. A couple of scenes in particular are painful to watch in the sense of seeing a person who seems genuinely wanting to break out of the kind of shackling roles people are sometimes made to play, in part because of the image of them in their friends’ or lovers’ heads.

It’s not Roeg’s best film, but it’s intelligent, finely acted, and thought-provoking.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

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.

I can feel something inside of my body, inside of my brain. It scritches just the tiniest bit. As if there is something wanting to get out. There are visions here that no one should have to see. There are dislocations and torques and spaces poking through.

I’ve come from Pavlov and a drinking contest. I told him everything I safely could, everything and yet nothing. I’m drunk now. It’s a kind of preservation mechanism. I’m raging up the side of broken bombed buildings in the moonlight, my claws half freezing off, brittle as icicles, and roaring and wanting to escape my skin, but even if I went back to being avatar in form, the Komodo’s too far inside me.

I look down and sometimes see huddled figures around pathetic fires or men hunched against walls in as much clothing as they can put on and I don’t feel removed from them. I see the cold eating into their features as if a sculptor were slowly etching them out of stone and I feel as if I am one of them, and the only difference is I have an escape plan of a kind. I see a soldier guarding a prisoner, one only marginally better off than the other, and I become both empathic and cynical, and want the image gone, cut out not just from my brain but from my optic nerve—to excise the entry point. As if that would solve anything at all.

The domed building awaits with its laughing skull obscured by ice, and I keep as far from it as I can. The dome’s there, waiting. I can feel it like a pressure against my eyes. I can sense it like a thick cloying smell that’s bitter and sweet and decaying. And I’ll have to go back there. I’m going to have to infiltrate that. With this sense of being spied on in my own skull. Why take a shot of vodka when you can drink the whole bottle and control the drip of it into your system, let each drop spread out or not as you wish. I control my body if not my fate.

I miss Mormeck Mountain. I miss myself. No amount of scuttling across the skyline of a mortally damaged city in the snow will solve the hurt of that. (And: is there a shelf-life for an avatar? Can an avatar too long cut-off from its host…go mad?)

There has been a complication.

There is a city hidden under the city.

There is a city hidden in frozen bodies.

There is something dead that is still alive.

There is a mapping going on that should not be going on. There is a knowing that is a form of death as soon as it occurs, the reveal an instance sentence.

I’d be less coy, less obscure, but I’d rather fool myself awhile, not acknowledge what I think I know. It’s easier that way, at least for now.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

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.

It’s been an interesting journey thus far, writing an online serial, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it feels much less public than I had expected, and not just because readers are being shy and not commenting much. Site stats reveal these entries are just as popular as the other stuff I post, so plenty of people are reading.) But something about the kind of tunnel aspect of posting here, of physically entering the material into a WordPress blog entry creates a weird sense of separation from audience I hadn’t expected. But I also find that when someone comments, like The Speculative Scotsman, it doesn’t interrupt my train of thought. On most projects, if I post an excerpt for example, I have trouble with outside comments and perspectives messing with my mind and getting in the way of continued writing. Not with Mormeck, and this would’ve held true if Spec Scot had said he hated it.

There’s also the inescapable fact that on days when I get donations from readers, I am more motivated and energized. I’m not writing this for the money in the usual sense. This isn’t a financial emergency; it’s more that as a full-time writer it’s a risk to do anything for free—you’re betting your future is going to be solvent, that future incomes will make up for the time spent. Yet at the same time, you are going to write it anyway; you can’t not write it, or anything else you do. It’s all in the context and the where and when.

Compartmentalization also works extremely well. When not traveling, I work on my novel Borne in long-hand at the coffee shop in the mornings and then after the break of lunch, I return home and I work immediately on Mormeck. That physical and spatial separation in the mental trick that allows me to work on both projects simultaneously without damage to either, or leakage.

As for the actual process of creating the Mormeck work, it starts out when a thought occurs to me, and usually that means something on a piece of paper so I don’t lose the idea.

If I’m at home, it goes right into this journal I bought in Amsterdam, and the scraps of paper with my scrawling—those words get transcribed into the journal so it’s all in one place.

When I first started out, I was sometimes writing full-on parts of scenes in the journal, so although technically the blog entries were rough drafts, parts of them were kinda second drafty.

But as the novella has progressed, it’s gotten more chaotic in the journal. I’m more or less just jotting down ideas, snippets of dialogue, and stage directions, and then letting the actors do their own thing when I sit down to write the entry. The journal is now all out of order in terms of the sequencing of the story itself.

There’s a Latin American writer whose name escapes me now—begins with an “A” and he specializes in short novels—and his process is to sit down and just let the narrative go where it will from chapter to chapter, without worrying about the overall form or whether it will all dovetail and make sense. He says this keeps the fiction alive for him. I’m more or less employing the same methodology. When I sit down to write, I have a few things in my head about the current scene, but no sense of all of the particulars or of the way the scene will end. I’m also not particularly worried about the form of the overall whole. I do, however, now have an ending in mind, which is very useful to me.

But when I started, I had no idea how it would end, or where it was going, and yet the explanations and information my brain has come up with on the fly so to speak has been no less or more logical than when I do a lot of thinking about such things ahead of time. In a sense, I’m finding that doesn’t really matter necessarily.

Anyway, here’s another recap of the story so far–you’ll find all 18,000 words of it below. I’ll have new installments next week.

***
(more…)