I’ve been thinking a lot about the protocols of fiction in terms of story and novel beginnings, in part because of my own recent resurgence in writing fiction but also from reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (more on that later). Inherent in the idea of a beginning is a sense of what kind of story or mode of fiction you are about to enjoy (or hate). Some approaches to this riff off of the idea of formula, not necessarily in a bad way—it’s just as a shorthand to guide the reader to the right set of precepts for what the writer intends. Examples include prologues or first chapters of noir novels that contain certain elements—down-and-out detective, beginnings of a case—that create expectations. There will be a mystery. The main character will operate within certain constraints of opinions and options. Constraint can be a great way to write an amazing and original character, the original cliché become simply…original.

Other types of fiction require different approaches. A sloppy opening to a mystery still more or less serves the function of letting you know what you’re reading, whether the writer intends to support or subvert that expectation. But what if you’re not working off of a common pattern? For fiction that aggressively wrenches the reader out of existing patterns and modes it is even more important that the writer show the reader how to encounter the story. This is not to say that the writer is trying to straitjacket the reader, but that without an idea of the reading protocols, the reader may well feel adrift and the intended effect or effects of the story will not be part of the reader’s experience of the story. For example, take the beginning of “No Breather in the World But Thee,” a story I wrote recently and which is out in submission at the moment:

The cook didn’t like that the eyes of the dead fish shifted to stare at him as he cut their heads off. The cook’s assistant, who was also his lover, didn’t like that he woke to find just a sack of bloody bones on the bed beside him. “It’s starting again,” he gasped, just moments before a huge black birdlike creature carried him off, screaming. The child playing on the grounds outside the mansion did not at first know what she was seeing, but realized it was awful. “It’s just like last year,” she said to her imaginary friend, but her imaginary friend was dead. She ran for the front door, but the ghost of her imaginary friend, now large and ravenous and wormlike, swallowed her up before she had taken ten steps across the writhing grass.

What does this opening accomplish? Well, in some ways it may provoke whiplash in the reader, so there’s a risk involved in the approach, but in terms of an expectation set for readers it tells you that this is a story that will travel from point of view to point of view. Indeed the narrative then opens up after this paragraph into several connected set pieces from different perspectives, although at a more leisurely pace. The story is also telling you what it is and what it is not. It is a story of the weird, but it is not a traditional story of the weird. Giant birds, dead fish staring, imaginary friends, etc., all could be deployed in fairly conventional fashion in a story. Here they are not. Yet, you probably want to know what happens next.

In other cases, like my story “Komodo,” which will appear in the next issue of Arc magazine, the opening takes the opposite approach, in that the teaching to read will take place across the entire narrative:

Child, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the mariachi band plays out in the courtyard…I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me—they can, and they need to trust me, need to know I’m telling them this for a reason. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. So I hope you’ll stay awhile. It won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.

It starts in a strange place, I’ll admit, inside of a giant green plastic alien head. I was all dressed up. I was on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there not even because of looking forward to the party but to the after party. The after party is always where it’s at—if you can get an invite.

I use a whole two paragraphs from the opening of “Komodo” as an example because the story is constantly redefining itself, in part because the narrator is acutely aware that too much information too soon will only confuse the issue and erode suspension of disbelief in those she is telling the story to. Thus, she is constantly finding comfortable analogies or lies to feed said listener to contextualize the story she is telling in familiar elements. Her hope is that as the story becomes stranger and stranger this approach will serve to keep the listener from becoming confused. Perhaps sneakily, perhaps not sneakily at all, this approach also saves the reader from discomfort in terms of concepts and context—especially since not only did I want to write a story that was continually unpacking and redistributing its context but also use the idea of rich nodes of exposition as tiny but satisfying explosions of micro-story within the main narrative, all framed by an engaging and energetic narrator with a personal stake in the described events. Which is to say, a more conventional approach that simply gave the full context in the first couple of paragraphs of the story would, in this case, have made the story less accessible; it also would not at all support the central conflict nor the narrator’s role in it.

Despite the complexity of these various elements, “Komodo” is still focused on just a couple of effects repeated multiple times in an order that provides a hopefully pleasing and continually eureka-ing effect. But what if you are telling a story that wants to do several diverse things, achieve more than one effect? How do you establish reading protocols for the multi-various? The most effective technique almost seems like indecision: it requires not committing immediately to any one set of protocols, with the danger that the reader may find your story at first adrift, unfocused, even if the individual scenes are quite precise and effective. But it’s all about not creating the distinctive tell in the reader’s mind that this is a particular type of tale.

In this case, there has to be a compelling reason to continue to read even as you’re not quite sure what kind of story you’re reading…and here we come back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. It is an epic science fiction story on the one hand, a character story of the person Swan on the other. It is a love story between Swan and a man named Waltham, but also a tale of interplanetary intrigue. Robinson could have started with any of these things. He could have started with Waltham meeting Swan. He could have started with the first disastrous attack that sets off the intrigue. But he doesn’t. Instead, we start with Swan by herself, engaged in an interesting activity. From there, we are gradually are clued into the various elements of story and how they will work in combination. This serves the useful and obvious purpose, too, since it is an SF novel, of acclimating the reader to Robinson’s vision of the future. However, this inclination not to choose a position, so to speak, to foreground neither love story nor intrigue allows Robinson the space to privilege both strands, to make the novel somehow deeper and more real, less like fiction. The risk (slight in this case) is that a few readers may indeed be confused as to the point of the story for a few chapters, not to mention reviewers. At least one reviewer wrote all about the interplanetary plot and mentioned the relationships not at all, even though close to one-half the book may be said to be about Waltham and Swan. But this issue is irrelevant next to the more important point that 2312 is a better novel because of this approach.

This relates, too, to the ways in which writers sometimes destabilize their fiction to provide a more comfortable entry-point for the reader—you see these kinds of suggestions often from editors or agents, and they are not without validity; even the pushback against these ideas can provide interesting third options, or help strengthen other parts of a novel. To another writer reading such material, the destabilizations can read like deformities of structure or character; to many readers, it’s invisible and all they notice is that the launch-point into story is easy. Some would thus argue that the deformity is actually an enhancement and I’m not going to take issue with that here, in part because I think it also marks an ideological difference of opinion on what the beginning of a story is supposed to do. Some writers will argue that distortion is worth it if it provides a more efficient and readable delivery system for weirder/less conventional material embedded later on. (I personally find it irritating and disappointing more often than not.)

Sometimes the very genre creates an expectation that is more commercial—Alistair Reynolds’ early novels in particular are very, very strange, but the subgenre of space opera and the expectations the words “space opera” conjure up provide a smooth entry point for the reader, who once engaged finds themselves in marvelously weird territory indeed. So this smooth launch-point can come naturally as a function of the writer working within a recognizable and established genre, and thus it is an integrated element of the approach. I’m not arguing that the only difference between, say, China Mieville and Michael Cisco is the entry point, but if you look at Mieville’s beginnings as opposed to Cisco’s, you will note an easier time being had reading Mieville. There is no time to acclimate to Cisco. He’s not particularly interested in reader comfort levels and his idea of audience is probably very different from Mieville’s. (Yet, would Cisco’s novel The Narrator have reached more readers more easily with a different entry-point?)

I think about this issue more and more, in part because I’m working on so many different kinds of novels right now. This is nothing new for me. I had pieces of Veniss Underground and all three Ambergris novels done well before I completed them, and I can no longer tell where one started and another began. The new batch is accumulating much the same way, and in contemplating their effects, I need to think about beginnings, and where one approach makes more sense and where it doesn’t, where an easier way is a deformity as opposed to simply an enhancement, and so on and so forth. In all of it, too, you must think about what affects the reader and how, within the context of your idea of the ideal reader for the work. This is separate from the Reader that permeates the internet, the Reader that is generalized and for whom we are told all sorts of things that may or may not be true about their tastes, their wants, and what may or may not interest them.

Beginnings, then, are about levels of commitment—to the text, to the reader, to yourself. The possibilities are endless, and important.

Entry Points into Fiction: Text Shows You How to Read It originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 12, 2012.

HuffPo Posts Our List of 13 of The Weirdest originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 11, 2012.

This week our anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is officially on sale. All this week we’re posting original content over at Weirdfictionreview.com, including an exclusive interview with the son of Amos Tutuola, fiction from Tutuola, an interview with Kathe Koja, Georg Heym’s iconic poetic short-short “The Dissection” and an essay on Heym by Gio Clairval, among other features. However, ever since the site debuted in November, we’ve been posting content related to the anthology, so check out the archives.

How You Can Help!

If you like weird fiction and want to support huge honkin’ anthologies full of weird fiction, here are some of the things you can do to help. Note: The Weird is a May featured pick of Amazon, Kirkus, Powell’s, and io9!

—Buy the book. It’s currently selling for a good price for an oversized hardcover. Buy it for friends. Buy it for family. From your preferred seller:

Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Powell’sIndiebound

—Review the book. Blog, review site, or on a sandwich board in front of your local bookstore. Any mention, especially noting whatever you really liked about the book, helps immensely.

—Review it on Amazon. Go to the Amazon sales page for the book and tell other readers what you liked about it. A quick and easy way to help get the word out and create interest.

—Make sure local booksellers carry it. The anthology seems to have a strong presence in bookstores, but you can always encourage booksellers who aren’t stocking it. You can even tell them it’s by the same people that brought them the Steampunk anthologies.

—Request it from your local library. Making sure your local library knows about the anthology not only increases library orders but allows multiple people to enjoy the book.

—Spread the word through twitter and facebook. Tell people about the anthology through social media, using one of the links above to bookseller sites or link to one of these Weirdfictionreview.com posts:

The Weird’s table of contents
More information about The Weird
—Come to the events. Ann and I will be at BEA in June, I’ll be at Stonecoast in Maine and at ReaderCon in July, and we’ll also both be doing some events in the Carolinas in late July (to be announced). We’ll have details on the events shortly.

More Info on the Anthology

I think by now, if you’ve followed this blog, you know the idea behind The Weird, but in case you missed it…

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Tor Books (North American edition)
Foreword: Michael Moorcock
Introduction by the Editors
Afterword: China Mieville

Starred Reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist

Over one hundred years of weird fiction collected in a single volume of over 750,000 words, from around 1908 through 2010. Strands of The Weird represented include classic US/UK weird tales, the Belgian School of the Weird, Japanese weird, Latin American weird, Nigerian weird, weird SF, Feminist weird, weird ritual, general international weird, and offshoots of the weird originating with Surrealism, Symbolism, and the Decadent movement. The publishers believe this is the largest volume of weird fiction ever housed between the covers of one book.

‘The definitive collection of weird fiction… its success lies in its ability to lend coherence to a great number of stories that are so remarkable different and yet share the same theme’ TLS

‘Studded with literary gems, it’s a hefty, diligently assembled survey of a genre that manages to be at once unsettling, disorientating and bracing in its variety.’ James Lovegrove, Financial Times

‘It’s a tremendous experience to go through its 1,126 pages… there are so many delights in this that any reader will find something truly memorable’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Readers eager to explore a world beyond the ordinary need look no further’ Time Out

‘Massive…and indispensible.’ The Guardian

Release Week for The Weird Anthology: How You Can Help originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 10, 2012.

Mushroom expert Taylor F. Lockwood has new plans afoot…

Death Cap Ale…it only kills ye if you ye want it to…

Taylor F. Lockwood’s New Death Cap Ale originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 4, 2012.

Recently, we hiked the Lone Cone Trail up the mountain on Meares Island, near Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. You have to hire a boat to take you over to the island—on a wave-smashing ride—and it’s a very difficult trail, with a steep incline, and many times we didn’t even think we were on a trail—you couldn’t really tell trail from non-trail. It usually takes about five hours, but it took us over six due to the truly treacherous conditions—it was one muddy, aggressively ascending, tree-blocked, gully choked amazing experience. The craziest part is having to clamber up a ravine of huge fallen tree trunks and limbs…like, literally crawling up it over top of these fallen trees. We’ve hiked mountains in Australia and California but nothing like this.

I asked Ann what she learned from the experience and these were the top five things:

1—Little trees are my friends.

2—Rocks with green moss are not my friends.

3—Not all mud is squishy.

4—I can climb over a sh*tload of solid tree trunks on an extreme incline.

5—Jeff’s feet are bigger than mine, so I can follow in his footsteps.

More about the hike under the cut…

(Yep, that’s part of the trail…a more benign part.)

We got to within 15 minutes of the top when the weather changed and rain came gusting and all we could think of is the mud down below becoming impassable. Remarkably, our legs were still in good shape at the time we turned back, but it turned out we needed them to be in good shape, as the surfaces became slicker and certain obstacles on the way up that hadn’t been that big a deal were much worse climbing down.

There was an the abandoned village at the base, which was fun at first because we thought we’d entered a horror movie—taking one too many lefts and winding up back at the village, before finding the true trail head. There were also wild cattle and tadpole clusters and amazing cedar smell…and with the fungi and the moss and the light through the huge trees and the crazy proliferation of flowers and lichens and finches…and the thing in its den that snarled and spat at us twice, once on the way up and down…it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. Cell phones didn’t work during most of the trail, no one else was on it, and on difficult trails like that there’s an intensity of concentration you need that means we didn’t think to get a photo of the log-choked ravine, because we were too focused on getting the heck up it on our hands and knees.

Our reward, afterwards? An amazing meal at the Shelter Restaurant in Tofino: Their Tofino surf bowl (salmon, wild rice, bean sprouts, spicy yogurt, basil, fresh marinated carrots, water chestnuts, shredded cabbage, and more—delicious), island brie on homemade bread with garlic and apple, seared salmon on shrimp risotto, and goat cheese cheese cake with blackberry compote, along with great local beer…Good thing we were hiking a lot…

Later, when we returned to Victoria, and I led her onto this long narrow concrete pier with no guard rails, which left us both feeling dizzy, Ann say “You only seem happy when putting my life in danger.” Me: “I thought it would be short and simple!” Not narrow unrailed and high up with a plunge to an ocean below sprouting with jagged rocks that made us both want to get down on all fours and slink-crawl forward like our cat when we put tape on its back….

We also got to see orcas. Alpha males. Traveling pairs. Teenage males messing around. Dozens of ‘em, all around the boat. Jumping and cavorting. Belly roll with fin wave. Fluke flipper whatever smacking the water. Up periscope vertical eye spy with just head and front flipper exposed. Very near. An orca flipper (fin?) has very nearly the same bone structure as a human hand.

More on wildlife, meals, adventures, in a later post…

Hiking Lone Cone Trail: Ann’s Top Five Observations originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 3, 2012.

Ann and I are just back from a vacation on Vancouver Island, following the Victoria Steam Expo, at which we were guests. It was an amazing trip, with lots of hiking—including an epic seven-hour journey up a mountain on an island. At one point, crawling up a ravine choked with giant logs, I think I felt as far away from the human world as I’ve ever been, and it was glorious.

Now we’re slowly getting back up to speed, and I thought I’d share some updates. As you may have seen, The Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and Ann and I are finalists in the category of Best Editor for the Locus Award. In addition, The Weird is on Kirkus’s recent list of top May releases, and is a Barnes & Noble pick for May as well.

Expect a lot more media coverage, as well as special features on Weirdfictionreview.com, where next week we will post an incredible interview with Amos Tutuola’s son and excerpt from his work, among other cool stuff. (And don’t forget to check out the great stuff our managing editor Adam Mills’ put together the past two weeks, including a Kathe Koja interview.)

In terms of upcoming events, Ann and I will be at BEA in NYC in early June supporting The Weird, and I’ll be teaching at Stone Coast in Maine early in July, before heading over to the Shared Worlds teen writing camp. (In August, I may be taking on a new journalism secret mission that should be a lot of fun.)

As for fiction, I’ve been on kind of a tear lately. I’ve currently got a new short story, “No Breather in the World But Thee,” out and about, a reprint in both the forthcoming Fungi antho from Innsmouth Press and John Joseph Adams’ alt-worlds anthology. I also just sold a major novelette, “Komodo,” to the major new UK mag Arc, which will see print soon. Three other stories are in progress: “Death of a Mycologist,” “The Last Redoubt,” and “Madness, Mountains,” the latter a retelling of Lovecraft’s classic from the point of view of a blue collar female assistant not mentioned in the original story.

Novel-wise, I have made further progress on the Southern Reach series that began with Annihilation, the novel I completed last month. I’m now well into the next book in the series, Authority, which looks at things from the other side of the border. For those who missed my post about Annihilation, it’s about an expedition into a strange wilderness area called Area X, which 20 or 30 years before was the site of some kind of event which closed it off from the rest of the world, the invisible border only able to be breached in one place. The narrator is a biologist on the expedition. Authority is from three points of view—the main one being the new “Control” for the secret Southern Reach project, which is responsible for sending in the expeditions. The series is very personal to me, as it takes the wilderness of North Florida as it basic setting, and the characters are not the typical types.

I’m also making some progress on two other novels, Borne and The Book Murderer, while working on a couple of anthology projects with Ann. In general, Ann is doing more anthos herself while I re-focus on the fiction.

Nonfiction-wise, progress continues on the WONDERBOOK illustrated writing book project and I’ve turned in a long essay on fakes to the New Haven Review that I think will become a short book. Also expect my book reviews in the Guardian, LA Times, and B&N Review soonish.

As for our other publishing projects, expect announcements soon about Odd and Leviathan being somewhat delayed—mostly because of wanting to pay maximum attention to the feminist SF antho I posted about yesterday. Cheeky Frawg is also slowing somewhat as we transition from the publishing model we had intended to pursue—e-book only—to more of a hybrid that includes print books. We still plan to publish titles by Amos Tutuola, Karin Tidbeck, and Leena Krohn this year, for sure. We’re also clearly moving toward becoming a specialist in Finnish fiction, with some digressions into other areas—almost all of it to do with translations of some kind.

I plan to blog more often over the summer, but expect stops-and-starts, as I’m committed to my fiction at the moment. I have experienced a burst of rejuvenation like nothing I’ve ever known before.

Getting Up to Speed: Jackson and Locus Awards, New Work, The Weird originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 2, 2012.

We’re also aware there is no way to get this completely right, if that makes sense. But we hope to make an honest and comprehensive effort, and to use web supplements and other online resources to make the antho the focal point of attention for existing feminist anthos and the websites of individual writers of note.

Ann and I are intensely excited to re-read the work of so many writers we love and to put together something that’s of use.

Feminist SF Antho Kickstarter originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 1, 2012.

Just a reminder that Ann and I are guests of the Victoria Steampunk Expo this weekend, on Vancouver Island. Ann will be giving some insight into her new antho, Steampunk Revolution, and I’ll be giving some anecdotes about putting together the Steampunk Bible. You can find the full slate of guests, including the Foglios and Abney Park, on the event’s website.

Speaking of The Steampunk Bible, in addition to it being a Hugo Finalist, the book has just been named the nonfiction book of the year by Steampunk Chronicle.

Hope to see you in Victoria!

Victoria Steam Expo: Featuring Hugo Finalist Steampunk Bible and More! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on April 17, 2012.

Discuss.

***

Shrimp “(A) crevice, first a spron frey, then a shrimp, then a sprawn, and when it is large then called a crevice.” ASTACIDAE [U.K.] Randle Holme (ca. 1688), quoted by Phipson, 1883:435. [I was unable to find this quotation in Holme.]

“One of the courses was whole crevisses in a rich sauce….The guest of honor…muttered… ‘What do I do now?’ …[B]ecause I had struggled before with the same somewhat overrated delicacy…I winked at him and said, ‘Watch me.’ I picked up a shrimp between my left thumb and forefinger….” [France: Dijon] Fisher, 1943 (1954): 430 (Noble and Enough); and:

“The season for shrimps is short, and Madame Mossu paid well for all the boys and old men could find in their hundred icy streams.” [Switzerland: Chatel St Denis] Fisher, 1943 (1954):506 (I Remember Three Restaurants); and

“A light curry of shrimps or crayfish tails.” [Unspecified locality] Fisher, 1943 (1954):708 (W is for Wanton).

Fisher’s apparent lack of attention to her crayfish/shrimp food-stuffs is puzzling, considering she is (was) an important figure in gastronomy. In the first reference she speaks of ecrevisses and shrimps as if they are the same animal; in the second she is undoubtedly speaking of crayfishes that live in the streams of Switzerland; in the third she paradoxically distinguishes between shrimps and crayfishes. I suppose, like so many people, she just didn’t care. See also crawfish, crayfish and ecrevisse.

Where is Story? Story is…Everywhere originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on April 16, 2012.

So we’ve turned the site over to Morgan Dempsey and her great crew. They’ve given it a crisp new look–and I think you can look forward to great content there for some time to come. Go check it out!

Booklifenow.com–The Relaunch! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on April 11, 2012.