(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.

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.

The Third Bear, my story collection from 2010, is up for a Shirley Jackson Award. “The Quickening” is an original, new story included in the book. The story was posted as a PDF on the Largehearted Boy music site, but kind of got lost in the shuffle there…so I’ve posted it below for your enjoyment. As always, if you’re expecting some center-genre bullcrap, best not read. Cheers.

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Mysterodd-short

Above you’ll find a snippet from Danny Fontaine’s awesome theme song for our ODD? anthology and the character featured on its cover, Myster Odd. Gregory Bossert is working on a video for the song, which will include Myster Odd, a creation of artist Jeremy Zerfoss. You can hear complete songs by Danny, along with his comrades the Horns of Fury here or here.

As for the release date for ODD?, we’re contemplating a trade paperback edition along with the e-book. This trade paperback book would include all the same authors, but because of rights issues one of the stories might change. But the trade paperback requires a shift in the publication schedule, probably to September/October. We’re going to release the full Cheeky Frawg schedule in the next fortnight or so, and will finalize ODD?’s pub date by then.

ODD? Table of Contents, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

“Is it odd or are you too normal?”

Amos Tutuola – “The Dead Babies”

Gustave Le Rouge – “The War of the Vampires” (new translation by Brian Evenson and David Beus)

Jeffrey Ford – “Weiroot”

Leopoldo Lugones – “The Bloat Toad” (new translation by Larry Nolen)

Mark Samuels – “Apt 205″

Michael Cisco – “Modern Cities Exist Only to Be Destroyed” (published only in a limited edition previously)

Nalo Hopkinson – “Slow Cold Chick”

Sumanth Prabhaker – “A Hard Truth About Waste Management”

Hiromi Goto – “Stinky Girl”

Eric Basso – “Logues”

Edward Morris – “Lotophagi”

Karin Tidbeck – “The Aunts” (new story; previously unpublished)

Jeffrey Thomas – “The Fork”

Rikki Ducornet – “The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi”

Leena Krohn – “The Night of the Normal Distribution Curve” (new story; previously unpublished, translation by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela)

Amanda le Bas de Plumetot – “Unmaking” (new story; previously unpublished)

Karl Hans Strobl – “The Head” (new translation by Gio Clairval)

Caitlin R. Kiernan – “A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills”

Stacey Levine – “Sausage”

Phase 1 of the Steampunk Bible book tour wraps up in the next week or so, with two awesome events. Phase 2 will consist of my coauthor S.J. Chambers’ events in England and France. Phase 3 in the late summer will include DragonCon. Here’s the info on the two final events of part 1.

Richmond, VA – June 2 (Thurs–tonight!), Fountain Bookstore, 6:30pm – Signing and discussion with coauthor S.J. Chambers. Fountain Bookstore is awesome, and I’m sure Chambers would love a great turn-out for her last event. She’ll also be interviewed by 97.3 WRIR, Richmond Indie Radio, for a bit that’ll air Friday, June 10.

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…

(Art bought at a street market, and a book of cool stickers.)

Our trip to New York City was very bad for our financial health, in that we wound up finding certain books irresistible. Here are a few highlights, not including books gifted to us by Lawrence Schimel, and the book accompanying the Alexander McQueen fashion exhibit. I’ll be covering those in two separate posts…

Which of these doesn’t go with the others? The one on the right is an Archipelago book, btw—they do awesome editions.

—My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose
—The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard
—Story of the Eye by Georges Battaille

Both of these books look fascinating. I’d heard of Ice, but not the other one, which seems to fall into a kind of pseudo-surreal mode. With guinea pigs!

—The Guinea Pigs by Ludvik Vaculik
—Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin

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(NYC B&N Event, photo by novelist Myke Cole)

We had a great time at the event in NYC at B&N last night. A packed house, and great contributions from Jaymee Goh, Liz Gorinsky, Dexter Palmer, Ekaterina Sedia, Aleks Sennwald, Ay-leen the Peacemaker. S.J. Chambers, my coauthor, is now a seasoned book tour veteran and an excellent co-host for the event. The audience even did a shout-out for our poor left-behind Steampunk Bible blogger Mecha Underwood.

(Photo by writer Laszlo Xalieri)

We met a lot of people and we had a great time hanging out at the Dead Poet pub nearby afterwards—highly recommend that place. BUT, the tour continues!

Philadelphia, PA – May 28, Between Books (Delaware, 25 min from downtown Philly), 6:30pm. Now S.J. Chambers is headed on to Between Books, which is just outside of Philly, for an event featuring her, live music from the Absinthe Drinkers, Ekaterina Sedia, and more. I can’t recommend Between Books highly enough—it’s just one of the best SF/F bookstores I’ve ever been privileged enough to explore. So go for the Steampunk Bible presentation, but make sure you get there early enough to browse, because you’re going to want to buy books. Greg Schauer, the owner, is an awesome guy, too, and extremely knowledgeable. If you’re anywhere in the area, you really don’t want to miss this one.

Washington, D.C. — May 31, Library of Congress, 12 pm. S.J. Chambers will be giving a lecture entitled “Edgar Allan Poe: SF’s Founding Father,” followed by Q&A and signing. This is a wonderful and prestigious lecture series, and definitely worth attending.

Richmond, VA – June 2 (Thurs), Fountain Bookstore, 6:30pm.. Signing and discussion with coauthor S.J. Chambers. Kelly Justice and her Fountain Bookstore…well, there’s a potent combination. The bookstore’s awesome and so is Kelly, along with her crew of ultra-experienced, friendly staff. Another event you don’t want to miss. It’s in downtown Richmond, so there’s plenty to do nearby after the event, too. You’ll love this bookstore if you haven’t been before, and Kelly is one of those dynamic, always-on-the-ball booksellers who are keeping people energized and enthusiastic about books.

While Ann and I were at the Steampunk Bible B&N event last night, Lawrence Schimel was at the Lambda Award, also held here in NYC. He was kind enough to file the report below. For those unfamiliar with Schimel, he has twice won a Lammy, for his books PoMoSEXUALS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER AND SEXUALITY (with Carol Queen; Cleis) and FIRST PERSON QUEER (with Richard Labonté; Arsenal Pulp), and has also been a finalist on 14 other occasions.

23rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards report
by Lawrence Schimel

The “Lammies” have, in the past, tended to drag on. I was quite amused when one winner, David Lennon, quipped in his acceptance speech: “The nice thing about self publishing is that you don’t have to thank a lot of people.”

But thanks to tight organization by Executive Director Tony Valenzuela and lots of coaching of the presenters beforehand, the Awards ceremony, hosted by comedienne Lea DeLaria, moved at a good clip, especially considering they had to present awards in 24 categories, plus the two pioneer awards, a special recognition award to the University of Wisconsin Press, and a slideshow remembering queer writers who’ve passed away in 2010-2011 (where, incidentally, it would’ve been nice to have seen Joanna Russ represented).

But genre work was not overlooked throughout the evening. It was nice to see a queer speculative fiction novel win in an “open” category: Amber Dawn’s SUB ROSA (Arsenal Pulp), which won the Betty Burzon Debut Fiction Award, a special prize which also comes with a $1000 check. Curiously, this title wasn’t also a finalist in the SF category, which was presented by SF grand master Samuel R. Delany.

It was also nice to see comics accepted in different categories, competing with other prose books–and even winning, as is the case of TELENY AND CAMILLE by Jon Macy (Northwest Press), which won for Gay Erotica.

This year was the first in which there were enough titles submitted to create separate Transgender Fiction and Nonfiction categories.

Playwright Edward Albee and mystery/thriller writer Val McDermid were both honored with Pioneer Awards.

Susan Stinson and Alex Sanchez were awarded the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists Award. Each received $5000, supported by a gift from Jim Duggins.

The presenters of the awards (a mix of authors, actresses, and even Miss New York 2010) included: Emma Donoghue, Jack Halberstam, Katherine V. Forrest, Kevin Sessums, and Stefanie Powers, among others.

The winners of the 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards:

Lesbian Fiction: INFERNO (A POET’S NOVEL) by Eileen Myles (OR Books)

Gay Fiction: UNION ATLANTIC by Adam Haslett (Doubleday)

Lesbian Debut Fiction: SUB ROSA by Amber Dawn (Arsenal Pulp)

Gay Debut Fiction: BOB THE BOOK by David Pratt (Chelsea Station Editions)

Lesbian Poetry: THE NIGHTS ALSO by Anna Swanson (Tightrope)

Gay Poetry: PLEASURE by Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press)

Lesbian Mystery: FEVER OF THE BONE by Val McDermid (HarperCollins)

Gay Mystery: ECHOES by David Lennon (Blue Spike Publishing)

LGBT SF: DIANA COMET by Sandra McDonald (Lethe)

Lesbian Romance: RIVER WALKER by Cate Culpepper (Bold Strokes)

Gay Romance: NORMAL MIGUEL by Erik Orrantia (Cheyenne Publishing)

LGBT Children’s/Young Adult: WILDTHORN by Jane Eagland (Houghton Mifflin)

LGBT Drama: OEDIPUS AT PALM SPRINGS: A FIVE LESBIAN BROTHERS PLAY by Maureen Angelos, Dominique Dibbell, Pega Healey, and Lisa Kron (Samuel French)

LGBT Anthologies: GENDER OUTLAWS: THE NEXT GENERATION by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman (Seal)

LGBT Nonfiction: KING KONG THEORY by Virginie Despentes (The Feminist Press)

LGBT Studies: (tie) ANOTHER COUNTRY: QUEER ANTI-URBANISM by Scott Herring (NYU Press) and ASSUMING A BODY: TRANSGENDER AND RHETORICS OF MATERIALITY by Gayle Salamon (Columbia University Press)

Bisexual Nonfiction: BORDER SEXUALITIES, BORDER FAMILIES IN SCHOOLS by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli (Rowan &Littlefield)

Bisexual Fiction: THE LUNATIC, THE LOVER, AND THE POET by Myrlin A. Hermes (HarperPerennial)

Lesbian Erotica: SOMETIMES SHE LETS ME: BEST BUTCH/FEMME EROTICA, edited by Tristan Taormino (Cleis)

Gay Erotica: TELENY AND CAMILLY by Jon Macy (Northwest Press)
Lesbian Memoir/Biography: (tie) HAMMER! MAKING MOVIES OUT OF SEX AND LIFE by Barbara Hammer (The Feminist Press) and WISHBONE: A MEMOIR IN FRACURES by Julie Marie Wade (Colgate University Press)

Gay Memoir/Biography: SECRET HISTORIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAMUEL STEWARD, PROFESSOR, TATTOO ARTIST AND SEXUAL RENEGADE by Justin Spring (FSG)

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Schimel lives in Spain, where he writes in both Spanish and English. His most recent book, ¡VAMOS A VER A PAPÁ! (Ekaré) has been translated by Elisa Amado and is forthcoming this fall from Groundwood, as LET’S GO SEE PAPÁ! He can be found on facebook or or on twitter as @lawrenceschimel

This coming Monday anyone in the Boston area should really check out this exciting event at Porter Square Books:

Cambridge, MA – May 23 (Mon), Porter Square Books, 7pm – Coauthor S.J. Chambers with contributors Jake von Slatt, Mike Libby, Jess Nevins, and Aleks Sennwald for book discussion, demonstration of mechanical beetles, and more.

These are all fabulous creators and it should be a really wonderful evening, led by ring-leader S.J. Chambers.

If you haven’t noticed, Nick Mamatas, whose new, highly recommended book Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horrors of the Writing Life is now out, has been guest blogging at Booklifenow. In fact, he’s not just been guest blogging, he’s been blowing sh*t up.

The fact is, we all need a reality check every now and again. We also need to push back against received ideas and so-called commonsense advice. So here’s Mamatas with a series of Against posts that should shake you up and make you really think about your writing and your career. You may disagree with some of it, but that’s part of defining yourself as a writer, too. He’ll be posting at least one more this coming week.

Some snippets:

Against Professionalism
“Professionalism is a complex of supposedly mandatory and proscribed behaviors that makes a writer “professional” regardless of their ability to write interesting material. Recently, at a science fiction convention I met a former student of mine, and he was very concerned about…his blog. Which he does not have. He was told, however, that today professional writers must all blog, but that these blogs must not offer up controversial political opinions, or negative reviews of popular books, or “ruffle feathers.” Everything must be “politically correct” he believed—to use that famously meaningless term I try so hard to get my students to stop using.”

Against Craft
“Writing is a balance between art and craft, but there is enough suspicion of art—it suggests snobbery, laziness, and even homosexuality in some of the more idiotically conservative quarters—that the stick must be bent in the other direction. Craft is a matter of artisanship, and artisanship is a matter of mastering a relatively small tool kit in order to solve a number of practical problems. These practical problems also allow for aesthetic flourishes to be added. You can thus have a basket with an interesting weave, for example, but you can’t have the weave by itself, without the basket.”

Against Story
“What do people want? ‘A good story.’ How do we know? People can barely say anything else. When editors describe the sort of material they’re looking to acquire, they want “a good story.” Readers are always on the hunt for “a good story.” Good stories are also useful for shutting down a variety of discussions. Are there not enough women being published, or people of color? Who cares who the author is, so long as he or she writes a good story? Can writers do different things with their stories—create new points of view, structure words on the page differently, work to achieve certain effects not easily accessible with more common presentations? Why bother—a good story is the only important thing.”