For my creative writing book for Abrams Image—a definitive illustrated guide to writing speculative fiction—I’d like a running column in one of the chapters of cliches. I can’t possibly list them all, so if you’d like the chance to contribute an attributed entry, please comment here. A couple of sentences describing the cliche followed by dash and your full name. In other words:

A man in a bar meets a mysterious woman. They go back to her place. She turns out to be a werewolf/vampire/serial killer. — Jeff VanderMeer

Yes, there are lists out there and I have my own list, but this is more fun.

Thanks! I’ll take them through this upcoming Thursday.

I’m in full-on inspiration mode on the writing book, so no time to blog today…so instead, a repost of the last Evil Monkey, and, for the first time, a question for the audience: What would you like to see Evil and alt-Jeff talk about next? You can post your reply anonymously. I don’t care.

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(Mormeck notes: brimming, overstuffed, ready to rock ‘n’ roll.)

It’s been relatively silent here at VanderBlawg Central as I ramp up on projects after finally having seen the last of THE WEIRD and turned the SHARED WORLDS teen writing book over to the designer. Over at Cheeky Frawg, we’re finalizing work on Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month (late Sept) and proofreading the ODD? anthology (Oct 1, with print release in December). We’re also in the planning stages for several new anthologies and getting ready to dive into final edits on our BESTIARY anthology.

I’ve also gotten back into The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, and should be posting new entries starting tomorrow.

In other news, I’m also now working on my creative writing book for Abrams Image, the one with 150 full-color images being designed by John Coulthart (with much of the art also by him). Below you’ll see part of the initial draft for the Beginnings chapter. I’m really excited about this one, and it’s going really well. The hope is to create a visual language for teaching creative writing, in the context of fantastical fiction.

Also, we’re having work done on a Cheeky Frawg website and beginning to organize the weirdfictionreview.com site, for launch in October. This in addition to making progress on the draft of my novel Borne and several other projects. Hard work, but largely fun, too.

That’s what I’m up to. What are you up to?

(Writing book draft! Yeah!)

Good post here by T.N. Tobias about likeable/unlikeable characters. I commented there, with this:

I would add that HH is trying in writing to make himself seem likeable and that Nabokov further does the seemingly impossible in the novel by making Lolita a real person despite HH’s distortion, which is an act of deep characterization. I don’t need or entirely want likeable characters, nor do I need them to share my belief systems. I do not need them to be an echo chamber and I am suspicious of readers who do need this because I think such readers tend to misread books—sometimes very badly misreading books…Readers who place value judgments on writers based on their characters—generally a huge mistake—are also more likely to be the ones who require likeable characters as well.

Want a signed copy of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities or The Steampunk Bible? With the help of a bookseller we now have a limited number of the Bible available and slightly more of Lambshead. For the Bible, I’ll throw in a drawing of an airship.

I also have the Murder by Death Soundtrack for my novel Finch, which I’ll happily inscribe with secret gray cap meanderings. I still have some first edition trade paperbacks of the US edition of Finch.

For United States readers only:

—$22 each for the Bible and Lambshead. Plus $5 shipping for one, $8 shipping if ordering both books.

–$14 for the US edition of Finch plus $4 shipping.

—$7 for the MBD soundtrack including shipping; only $5 if you order a book with it.

If you order one of all of these items, shipping is $10.

For larger orders, query at vanderworld@hotmail.com. Paypal to vanderworld@hotmail.com with address info and how you want them personalized. Checks also okay.

For foreign orders or for the complete list of our books for sale, including non-VanderMeer titles, query at vanderworld@hotmail.com. We’re in the opening stages of a cull, as the books are beginning to overwhelm the house…

Jeremy L.C. Jones has posted a longish profile of World Fantasy Award finalist Nnedi Okorafor on the Shared Worlds teen writing camp site—including some observations about her visit as the Amazon.com visiting writer this year. Go check it out.

In a few days we will announce our full line-up for 2012.

I’m currently working on a creative writing book for Abrams and writing the Beginnings chapter. I’ve got my own ideas about some of the best story or novel openings in the history of SF/Fantasy, but I’m curious about yours—and to make sure I don’t miss anything great.

So: opening sentence or sentences to a story or novel that you found particularly effective? Please include the quote and also tell us why you found it effective.

I’ll assume you don’t mind being quoted in the book if you comment.

For those of you wondering whatever happened to the Situation comic commissioned by Tor.com and based on my novelette of the same name…it’s inching closer to completion. Eric Orchard has finished revisions to some images and speech bubbles, and it’s gone on to the letterer. So we expect it will be ready fairly soon, and should go live on Tor.com by the end of the year or early next year, at the latest.

Here are a few screen captures from the almost-final PDF, without text of course.

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One cool thing about the drive home from DragonCon this past weekend was stopping to visit with a friend of ours who has acquired a used bookstore. As you can see from the photo above that means he has the (to us) amazingly pleasurable job of going through the inventory not already on the shelves. Lucky bastard!

Here are a few of the books we picked up. We’ve been focusing on anthologies and collections to flesh out our selection of short stories. At the moment, I think we have close to 1,500 anthos and story collections in the house.

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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.

Thanks to those loyal readers who have been keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I really appreciate your support and donations. Because of the slight lag in posting new entries—rectified starting tomorrow—I am posting below the entire text of the story thus far. I’m hoping this will intrigue new readers enough to join us in following the next installments. (If donations fall below a certain level, I will have to pull the plug on publicly posting the entries.)

I’m not too fussed about posting the entire thing here in terms of future readers for any book version, in part because this is rough draft. I am about 99 percent of the time typing right into a blog entry with little or no touch-up of the prose. I have a fairly good idea of the voice of Mormeck Mountain and the avatar. What comes next in the future drafts is structural, characterization changes, changing the order of things, adding sections, deleting sections, etc. The final published version will be very much different.

For example, it’s quite clear to me—and this is something that a writer can only usually figure out from the process of actual writing of the first draft—that Doctor Mormeck’s reason for starting the journal is because of his infatuation with Marty. Now, in the rough draft, that catalyst isn’t there. Marty comes in much later. However, that’s the kind of change you think about making in later drafts. In addition, I realize there’s a third kind of entry which is simply descriptions of the experiments the angels are conducting, with Mormeck’s help. And that these entries will come at regular intervals, more or less where the text is naturally transitioning into a new “section”. Right now, too, the ghost frogs aren’t exactly hardwired into the story, and the bit about the alien baby head also needs to either have more causal significance or be cut. In terms of Mormeck and Marty, I need at least one more scene of his observations of her, while probably cutting part of one of the “I know I’m going to have to talk to her” scenes. And so on and so forth. This is all good news in that it means the story is very much alive in my head.

Anyway, enjoy this huge-ass post with the text thus far, and I hope you will continue reading….

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