Dear Diary:

Today encountered 77th supposedly classic iteration of the formula in which, on the very last page, the supernatural makes its entrance on the wings of the following:

“Why, I was delighted to meet and have a splendid conversation with your mother/ father/ wife/ son/ daughter/ brother/ sister/ gardener/ plumber/ consierge/ frog the other day in that little abandoned room far from all the light fixtures!”

“What? Why, my mother/ father/ wife/ son/ daughter/ brother/ sister/ gardener/ plumber/ consierge/ frog has been dead for years!” (Or, “What? Why I have no mother/ father/ wife/ son/ daughter/ brother/ sister/ gardener/ plumber/ consierge/ frog and have lived alone for years!”)

Ann: “Jeff, some writers are underrated for a reason.”

Margaret Atwood came to Tallahassee last night to read and answer questions. I’ve written up an account for Omnivoracious.

I thought she was quite wonderful. In answering questions and talking about her books, she was happy to use terms like “speculative fiction” and refer to classics familiar within the genre like We. It became clear from her interactions with the audience that use or non-use of the term “science fiction” didn’t matter in the least. More importantly, given the environmental message of her last two novels, I can see why she would prefer not to use the term “science fiction”–it might seem somewhat limiting given that she seems committed to the idea of a sustainable future as much as she is to fiction. Regardless, it’s certainly her choice to self-define however the hell she wants to self-define.

I thought it interesting that she cites M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud as a major influence in her interview in the local paper, along with Weird Tales comics, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne.

I have to admit to being a little exhausted from all of the reading for weird. About time for a break.

But I did want to share a couple of wickedly funny things that I encountered, kind of peripheral to the weird reading. They’re funny in part because they’re also serious.

The first are these great opening and closing lines to Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write About Africa” from Granta:

Opening: Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkness” or “Safari” in your title. Subtitles may include the words “Zanzibar”, “Masai”, “Zulu”, “Zambezi”, “Congo”, “Nile”, “Big”, “Sky”, “Shadow”, “Drum”, “Sun” or “Bygone”. Also useful are words such as “Guerillas”, “Timeless”, “Primordial” and “Tribal”. Note that “People” means Africans who are not black, while “The People” means black Africans…Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

Closing: Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows and renaissances. Because you care.

Heh. I love that. The other thing that recently made me cackle was a re-read of Joanna Russ’s “The Cliches from Outer Space,” which I encountered a couple of years ago in the Jen Green & Sara LeFanu-edited Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind when Ann and I were putting together the first Steampunk antho (we wound up taking Mary Gentle’s story from that book).

The prelude in this satire involves Russ paying a visit on a female editor named Ermintrude who has incredibly strong forearms–”Editors develop these by screaming and tearing their hair a lot.” Ermintrude then shares with Russ the cause of her stress: the hundreds of cliched manuscripts she has to reject. I can’t reproduce the entire text, of course, but these are openings of the various cliches that Russ catalogs for the reader through Ermintrude:

The Weird-Ways-Of-Getting-Pregnant Story—”Eegh! Argh! Argh! Eegh! cried Sheila Sue Hateman in uncontrollable ecstasy as the giant alien male orchid arched over her, pollinating her every orifice. She–yes, she–she, Sheila Sue Hateman, who had always been frigid nasty and unresponsive! She remembered how at parties she had avoided men who were attracted by her bee-stung, pouting, red mouth, long, honey-colored hair, luscious behind and proud, up-thrusting breasts they were a nuisance, those breasts, they sometimes got so proud and thrust up so far that they knocked her in the chin. She always pushed them down again). How she hated and avoided men!…But this was different.

The Talking-About-It Story—”Oh my, how I do love to live in an equal society,” said Irving the physicist, looking with pride at the living-room of their conapt, which Adrienne, his wife, had decorated the interior of with her briliantly intuitive flair for interior decoration. Adrienne had been a plant geneticist, but had decided that what she really wanted was to stay at home, have eight children, interior decorate, garden, cook organically…It was her decision, so Irving respected it…[After which] Their Black maid, Glorietta, came in and announced…

The Noble Separatist Story—”Tell me, Mommy,” said Jeanie Joan, snuggling up to her beautiful, strong, powerful, gentle, wise, loving, eight-foot-tall Mommy who was President of the United States, “Why aren’t there Daddies any more?”

The Turnabout Story—Four ravaging, man-hating, vicious, hulking, Lesbian, sadistic, fetishistic Women’s Libbers motorcycled down the highway to where George was hiding behind a bush. Each was dressed in black leather, spike-heeled boots, and carried both a tommygun and a whip, as well as knives between their teeth. Some had cut off their breasts. Their names were Dirty Sandra, Hairy Harriet, Vicious Vivian, and Positively Ruthless Ruth. They dragged George (a litte sandy-haired fellow with spectacles, but with a keen mind and an iron will) from behind the bush he was hiding in. Then they beat him. Then they reduced him to flinders. Then they squashed the flinders to slime. Then they jumped up and down on the slime. “Women are better than men!” cried Dirty Sandra.

The whole thing is brilliant, I have to say.

PS–I just wrote a short review of Musgrove’s amazing The Late Fauna of Early North America over at Omnivoracious.

Me, I’m going to be flailing around at 9pm EST in Second life for a Copper Robot interview.

I’d also like to alert you to the publication of Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy, guest edited by Kevin Brockmeier. This is the third installment of the best-of anthology Ann and I founded with help from Sean Wallace. Underland Press is doing a lovely job publishing it, and Kevin, with the help of volume 3’s series editor Matthew Cheney, has found some amazing stories. BAF is the only series with revolving guest editors, allowing readers to get a different point of view on the field every year. Volume 4’s guest editor will be the remarkable Minister Faust. If you want to support eclectic and diverse views of the field, please buy this book. It needs your support.

Meanwhile, the TOC for BAF3 is below the cut.

Even more meanwhile, I’m buried in deadlines the rest of the week and unlikely to post more, so please do entertain me with stories of what you’ve been up to. Plug stuff. Tell me harrowing anecdotes. Ask silly questions. Whatever you like.

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Well, it’s been fun, but it’s almost over. As indicated in the previous post, our deadline for submissions to the Steampunk Reloaded anthology has come and gone. Ann and I are still looking through one last batch of submissions, but otherwise we’re done. And I never have to read another steampunk story again. This isn’t a complaint about steampunk so much as the fatigue you always get when mining out a particular subgenre. That said, I’m really excited about this anthology because we found so much great content, some of it very unexpected—both Ann and I think it’s an incredibly strong book. We even have some original fiction that more or less fell into our laps. There’s also original nonfiction and art, and the look of the book, under John Coulthart’s stewardship, will be much closer to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases than the first Steampunk volume.

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We didn’t really buy this book (at Chamblin’s Bookmine) because we thought it would be of use for our book of weird reading. We bought it because…how can you resist that cover art?

Little did we know the treasures we’d find inside.

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I’m finally getting a handle on my nonfiction collection, which I turn in about a week from now. The contents have begun to make some sense, thanks in large part to comments from Matt Cheney about the order. This isn’t final, but it’s getting close. All text that’s previously published has been edited and perfected, some of it radically. The idea of focusing on the theme of monsters and the monstrous has meant leaving out some worthy material but what’s gained by that is a more interesting focus. Some of the “monstrous” subtitles will be more subtle in the final, too.

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Ann and I had a wonderful weekend at St. George Island, much of which consisted of sitting at the Blue Parrot and sipping margaritas whilst reading for various projects, including the humungous book of weird fiction.

In reading the excellent Foundations of Fear edited by David Hartwell, we were curious to discover the presence of either the word “onion” or “opinions” in Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities”–and simultaneous with that impulse a guy asked us what we were reading, and it turned out in the 1960s and 1970s he’d known Damon Knight on the beaches of St. Petersburg. Right as my finger pointed to the word “onions” in Barker’s book. While the guy was telling us interesting stories about passing acquaintance with various writers–there being a kind of hidden connectivity to the world, and if you’re going to be reading books with titles like Black Water, more of it will come to the surface–I was thinking about Barker’s phone call to me a couple of years ago, after The New Weird came out. It was a gruff, deep voice, sounding oddly subterranean.

Barker: Jeff? Is this Jeff? This is Cliver Barker.

Jeff:

Barker: I just wanted to say I really liked The New Weird. A great anthology.

Jeff: Thanks. It’s kind of you to say.

Barker: There’s just one problem.

Jeff:

Barker: It’s “opinions” not “onions”.

Jeff: Pardon?!

Barker: On the last page of the story. It should be “opinions” not “onions”. Last breath and opinions. It’s a typo I’ve been hunting down for over sixteen years.

Jeff: We can correct it in any second edition.

Barker: That would be a relief. It keeps coming up. Thank you.

And, sure enough, in Foundations of Fear, the line reads, “After that, it was quick. The bones yellowing, the bones crumbling; soon, an empty space which he once filled with breath and onions,” rather than the correct “filled with breath and opinions.” An understandable mistake, I think.

Meanwhile, too, stories have been spilling out of me, including the semi-satirical, semi-serious untitled Lovecraft-Borges story I’ve been posting on facebook. (Note that I’ve locked myself out of facebook and am just remote posting the photos of story text from my phone’s email service.)

It appears I’ve finally moved past the intense process of creating Finch and Booklife simultaneously. And I think I was right to give myself permission not to write much fiction over the past year. Now, it feels natural, and several different stories and novels and coming up from the subconscious. One, “The Quickening,” will be the sole original story in my story collection The Third Bear. Another, “Borne,” will be either a long novella or short novel. A third, “Komodo” keeps opening up in my mind to the point that what was once perhaps a short story could possibly be two novels. Mostly, I’m just glad to be writing again. it keeps the bees buzzing in my head from getting too loud.

Reading also rejuvenates me marvelously well, and I’ve finally had time for the kind of sustained reading that replenishes the imagination. I credit Bolano’s 2666 with much of the restoration, but also lots and lots of Tove Jansson . Now, though, it’s the reading of countless short stories for our projects that has me excited; rediscovering or encountering for the first time so much interesting material has me (and Ann) really excited.

From time to time, I’ll post either TOCs or short reviews of some of the books we’ve read. Our ultimate goal is to read every fantastical, horrific, or science-fantasy story ever written because we’re looking, long-term, at developing several different projects. Part of accomplishing this impossible goal require repairing the schism created by the idea of genre versus mainstream. Which is to say, fantastical literature, as we know even though we don’t always remember this fact, exists outside of the label “genre” and outside of the genre subculture. As SF/fantasy/horror diversifies and also accepts influence from around the world, it’s important that this other wall gets broken down. It’s harmful to our understanding of what constitutes fantasy, and it’s a kind of a self-imposed blindfold, too.

Here’s the TOC to 17 From Everywhere, published in 1971 by Bantam Books and edited by Lee A. Jacobus. It contains mostly mimetic stories, which comment on and co-exist quite nicely with the few fantastical selections. A wonderful side effect of reading outside of genre-only sources is to be exposed to different approaches and traditions, of course. I’ve also included the opening lines of each story.

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Jewcy.com has run a cool little gallery feature on the Kosher Guide. They’ve used their own stock images, but run snippets of our text with it. Check it out–and buy early and often on this one.

And, for your mid-week entertainment, this piece by Rick Kleffel in the SA Current about New Weird, and the John Scalzi remix of the Finch insurgency poster (originally meant for my Big Idea piece on Whatever and created by Jeremy Tolbert)–in part as a way of introducing new readers to the Finch Reader’s Page, which has a bunch of cool stuff on it.

On the Amazon book blog, I just posted an interview Graham Sleight did with Farah Mendlesohn about a book she edited titled On Joanna Russ. It’s a fascinating book and an equally fascinating interview, and I highly recommend you check it out.

Among other things, Farah points out the potential problems of the old boys’ club as typified by guys hanging out with guys at cons. Inasmuch as conventions are business opportunities–work-related–she has a good point, although I wonder if this is more of a UK phenomenon? (Update: I may wonder this, but Farah says it’s something observed at US cons.) At least, I know Ann and I always meet with and hang out with a wide variety of creators and editors whenever we’re at a con–there’s absolutely no backroom, smoke-filled nudge-nudge, wink-wink. She also says that men should be more proactive about complaining about male-only panels at cons. I agree in theory, but in practice the decision-making process behind con panels tends to be muddled and disorganized across many different criteria. My hope would be two-fold: (1) that cons wouldn’t put us white males on panels in this position to begin with and (2) that cons would be more systematic and thoughtful about programming in general. (With the understanding that being in charge of programming, and dealing with writer egos generally is a really thankless job.) In any event, food for thought.

I also talk briefly in the premable to the feature about The Secret Feminist Cabal, which I hope to devote a blog post to late in the week, depending on other deadlines.