Author: Don

The Green Flash

The Green Flash and Other Tales of Horror, Suspense, and FantasyThe Green Flash and Other Tales of Horror, Suspense, and Fantasy by Joan Aiken
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I couldn’t believe my luck when I found this collection at a local used book store! It didn’t finish quite as strongly as it started, but there are pieces that were clinics on short-story writing. Here’s how I thought of each story…


“Mrs. Considine.” I don’t describe too many stories as “chilling,” but this story of a girl with a gift bonding with an older woman with another gift is just that. 5*

“Marmalade Wine.” The reason I snatched this collection from a used book store was this story, which was adapted as a segment for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. A decent straightfoward story about comeuppance. 4*

“Sonata for Harp and Bicycle.” The expository middle didn’t stop this from being a story of the most romantic exorcism I’ve ever read. 5*

“Follow My Fancy.” This is not a “science-fantasy” story. It’s both a scifi story and a fantasy story, rolled into one. 5*

“Smell.” Saw the ending coming a mile away. Hate when that happens. 3*

“Searching for Summer.” If you let yourself get too caught up thinking “What REALLY happened here?” you’ll miss the beauty of this story. 4*

“A View of the Heath.” 5* ‘cos who said a mystery story has to have anything to do with a dead body?

“Belle of the Ball.” If I’ve ever read a story that was very proto-Aimee Bender and the like (Sarah shun-lien Bynum, etc), this is it. 4*

“Summer by the Sea.” This calls to my mind Karen Joy Fowler’s Nebula Award-winning “What I Didn’t See.” You could argue that any sf/f/h genre element is non-existent, depending on how you read it. I will say that reading it one way makes this a better story. 5*

“Minette.” Not quite as chilling as “Mrs. Considine,” but it is another wonderful example of what happens when two supernatural forces meet. 5*

“Dead Language Master.” Very engaging at the sentence level. But to the other mechanics of the piece, my reaction was, “Just…no.” 3*

“The Windshield Weepers.” Some aspects of this story really seemed ahead of its time. The ending really didn’t do it forme though. 3*

“The Green Flash.” It pulled me along quite nicely at sentence level. Unfortunately it became obvious that this was 2 or 3 stories thrown together as soon as I gave the plot a second’s thought. 3*

View all my reviews

Confession (or, Sorry, M.)

I picked up the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction because it had M. Rickert’s new story “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece.”  I’ll buy anything with M. Rickert’s name on it.  I wish F&SF had a “Just the Issues with M. Rickert in It” subscription option.  I have every issue with her stories since 2006 (except for one I’ve misplaced somehow).  I have both her collections, Map of Dreams and Holiday, and copies of her stories in Ideomancer and Interfictions 2.  I’ve spoken about my love of her writing here, and other places.  Yes, on my list of Favorite Writers, she is #1.  The very top.

I say all this so that you can have of sense of just how much it really and truly pains me to say: I wasn’t that into “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece.”

Most of you know the standard I have for my short-story reading experience: That Aimee Bender quote I use all the time, “I want to be violated by insight.”  The thing is, unless I’m seriously romanticizing my relationship with Rickert’s writing, I can’t think of a single one of her stories that didn’t give me that feeling… before this one.

Make no mistake: in my usual 5* rating system, this one would get a 4, but only because I typically round off.  If I had to be accurate (as much as one can be with a subjective rating), I’d give this a 3.8.  It had every bit of the dark beauty I’ve come to love in Rickert’s stories.  The imagery at the end blew me away.  But I think my damage has to do with Rickert’s use of the third-person omniscient viewpoint. 

I’m grateful that she tries to shy away from old-school “one POV, section break, next POV” and attempt something a little different.  At the sentence level, Rickert really does a skillful job weaving in and out of each character’s thoughts.  But as a whole, it muddied the waters in two different ways for me.  It messed with my sense of time, for one.  And for another, I never knew for which characters to really concern myself by the end of it.

Not counting the corpses (C’mon, that’s not a spoiler.  Look at the title.  You knew there were going to be corpses in it.), the story had a cast of three: The Corpse Painter, the town sheriff, and the sheriff’s wife, and I was in one of their heads at various points of the story.  And while most of the story seemed to be about the relationship between the sheriff and the Corpse Painter, the real punch of the story came in the last scene between the sheriff and his wife.  The more I think about it, I’m wondering if Rickert putting me into the wife’s head was her way of attempting to connect a reader with the wife as an expedient way to set up the payoff at the end, while still maintaining most of the story’s focus on The Corpse Painter and the sheriff?

Who knows?  I’m clearly rambling at this point.  I’m just having trouble pinning down my exact feelings about this story.  To say “disappointed” or “let down” seems far too harsh.  Maybe this is a case where I just need to appreciate the attempt to do something different and be okay with the fact that maybe the clearest way to sum up my feelings is, “I just didn’t dig it.”  After all, Rickert is still my #1 favorite writer, I’ll still buy anything with her name on it, and if there was an “M. Rickert Only” F&SF subscription option, I’d snatch it up in a heartbeat.

Mabuhay ng Pilipinas, Motherf–kers!

Just three of the reasons I’m proud to be Filipino:

1
Toadies of Filipino martial arts practitioners talk the best smack…

2
We take Good Friday really fucking seriously…

3
We… uhh… apparently also take cosplay really fucking seriously…
(The video’s in Tagalog, but you’ll get the gist.)

Reminds me of what Dad always used to say: “Aba!”

“Something tells me I’m into something good…”

I’m not complaining, but I’m just stating the fact that 2011 hasn’t been a very productive year.  Oh, I’ve produced things.  I pulled off my first academic presentation and am still awaiting word of what could be a huge publication score.  I have things coming down the pike in the next couple of months.  But you know, I think part of my damage is that for a couple of years now, I’ve been writing “made-to-order” stuff.  I think I need to write something for me.  But what?

I don’t know a lot about the Brill Building.  I have a sense about its place in musical history.  I have a vague notion of what they talk about when they talk about the “Brill Building Sound” (and of the controversy behind that term).  I kinda know some of the big names involved.

But here’s the thing: I know is that it’s the place where I want to set my next short story. 

I first learned about the Brill Building as I was looking up a bit of background on songwriter Laura Nyro.  I always knew I was going to write something inspired by her or her music from the first time I really started really listening to it. But this idea of the Brill Building really grabbed me.  Something about this music factory, this place that was (arguably) just as much about commerce as it was about art, where people competed to get their songs heard by an executive, published, and made into a hit record is resonating with me somehow.

Apparently, it’s the subject of a documentary due out soon.  Tell me this doesn’t sound more or less like the racket we writers are involved in, huh?

Anyway, I have no idea what this story is going to be about, or how much of it will actually involve the Brill Building, Laura Nyro, or her music.  I do know that this is the story’s playlist so far (all by Nyro):

  • “The Confession”
  • “Billy’s Blues”
  • “Stoney End”
  • “And When I Die”
  • “He’s a Runner”
  • “Wedding Bell Blues”
  • “Lu”
  • “Eli’s Coming”
  • “Timer”
  • “Stoned Soul Picnic”

Rod Serling Conference 2011

Sorry for the unimaginative title, but it was taking me too long to come up with something other than “Submitted For Your Approval.”  Tell me that’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Rod Serling.  But aside from being lame, my presentation at the 2011 Rod Serling Conference last month** wasn’t about The Twilight Zone, but about Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.  Specifically, H.P. Lovecraft Adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

I pulled the presentation off, despite massive tech fail (thanks to help from the conference’s tech crew), but here’s the play by play of the shindig…

1
I feel I could’ve done better.  More rehearsal, certainly, but maybe not having fully recovered from a 4-day party + a 13 hour trip that should’ve taken 4 hours might’ve had something to do with my performance.

2
So I’m going to do a quick run-through of my plans and back-up plans, which totally and utterly failed:

Plan A – Run the OpenOffice Presentation on Ubuntu from my netbook.  First of all, I don’t know what possessed me to deviate from my original plan of using my laptop.  I plugged the netbook into the room’s AV system, and it utterly failed, probably because of the video drivers.  The tech crew figured that Ubuntu just wouldn’t have the necessary drivers.

Plan B – Run the OpenOffice Presentation on WinXP from my netbook.  Yeah, I thought I was covered.  Wrong.  The tech crew figured it was the netbook’s processor which just wasn’t powerful enough.

Plan C – Borrow a computer on which to run my OpenOffice presentation.  Previous experiences with the Conference showed me that they did possess computers with OpenOffice on them, as well as the VLC video player.  And the conference tech crew indeed had a computer at the ready and they could’ve sworn OpenOffice was loaded onto it.  It wasn’t.

Plan D – I wasn’t entirely flustered at this point, because I had my portableapps USB drive with dated versions of OpenOffice and VLC on it.  But I guess their WinXP computer wasn’t that fast.  Now, I’m flustered because at this point, I’m out of backup plans.

Luckily, I was able to work Plan E which was to use the tech manager’s Mac, install OpenOffice onto it, and run my presentation and videos from there.  Not ideal since the iPod Touch is the only Mac product I knew my way around.  But, it worked.

3

The keynote speaker, producer and screenwriter Bill D’Elia (Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, Judging Amy, &c.) didn’t give as flamboyant a speech as George Clayton Johnson’s from the last conference.  But it was no less fascinating.  He was a student of Serling’s at Ithaca College (that’s him in the picture on the screen in the striped jacket standing behind Serling).

4
It turned out that my presentation wasn’t the only one I’d give at the conference.  I won a lottery where the winner got to present his or her favorite Twilight Zone episode at the mini-marathon that’s held at the end of every Serling Conference.  I was as excited to talk about “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” as I was about my formal presentation.  Heck, just watching the episode from the remastered Blu-Ray on an $80,000 projection system would’ve been worth its weight in gold.

I whipped out this speech in an hour, though I deviated from it quite a bit…

I could be constructing this memory, but this could be the very first Twilight Zone episode I’d ever seen.  I was 10 or 12 years old, which was actually a few years after I’d heard of The Twilight Zone.  It’d been out of syndication for a few years, at least where I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.  And this was before you could get a videotape of it at Blockbuster, nevermind downloading from Hulu or Netflix.

This story had a huge impact on me as a writer, even though it’s not exactly the best Twilight Zone story.  It’s not “The Obsolete Man,” or “Death’s Head Revisited,” or “Time Enough at Last,” or “To Serve Man,” or “The Shelter,” or “Walking Distance,” or any of the other episodes considered the “greatest” and the topics for discussion at this conference.  It even makes the classic mistake of having an alien, who is able to pass himself off as human, but who still asks, “What’s… wet?”

But at age 12, it was magical.

Here’s the thing.  You know how Serling says “You’re entering another dimension?”  Well, I didn’t just enter it.  When I first saw this episode, Serling TOOK me on a 22-minute ride of suspicion, and suspense, and finally of being freaked out when the real Martian finally stood up.  And then to throw in another twist behind that one!

I didn’t know a writer could do that.  And that’s the sort of experience I’ve always looked for ever since, whether I’m reading a book or watching a good film or TV show.  More importantly, I want to be a writer who gives that experience to other people when I grow up.

So… Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?

5
I know I should probably put my presentation slides up.  I still haven’t finished composing the formal paper for the conference proceedings.  I should get on that (assuming it isn’t already too late).

6
And lastly, a few pics of some cool stuff, including local writer Nick Sagan (yes, Carl‘s boy) presenting the Conference’s screenwriting awards, and Serling’s 1961 Hugo Award which was on display.

**Yeah, I’ve given up on the notion of posting these in a timely manner, just as I’m sure most of you have given up expecting to see them in a timely manner.

Dragon*Con 2011

No, hell hasn’t frozen over. I’m still missing self-imposed blogging deadlines.  I’d intended to kill two birds with one stone and doing something for Speak Out With Your Geek Out.  And, what could possibly be more geeky than going to the 25th Dragon*Con?  So, rather than consider myself two weeks overdue, I can imagine I’m only two days. 😉

Anyway… William Shatner, Martin Landau, Sylvester McCoy, Mark Sheppard, celebrity run-ins, awesome costumes, and Jefferson Starship–yes, I had an absolute total fucking blast!!

1
Shout-outs to my roomies: Conni, Ben, and Dana, without whom there would’ve been any way on God’s green earth that I would’ve gotten there, to say nothing of being able to navigate through the con!

2
Shout-outs tot: Regan and Harley!  Harley, I’ve met before, but we didn’t get a picture last time, so she had plausible deniability.  Not this time!

Thanks especially to Regan, who drove us around like the Jason Statham in The Transporter for some Southern eats!  I can’t wait ’til I get to visit Mary Mac’s Tea Room again.  And the Breakfast BLT from the Highland Bakery… I still dream about it!  Let’s just say that it’s the culinary opposite of my (still beloved) Ithaca Bakery.

4
All right, the con itself.  I didn’t take a tenth of the pictures I could have taken.

The highlights include…

  • Pics and video Captain Kirk, Commander Koenig, and The Doctor (just gotta figure out the best way/place to post the vids)
  • My missed opportunity to get a DVD copy of Bloodsucking Freaks (linky is NSFW) signed by Lloyd Kaufman.
  • My favorite costumes: Ulquiorra, Black Canary, Orko, and The Ambiguously Gay Duo!
  • Some random asshat in a black pirate shirt :s

5
Also in that picture set are a couple of shots from the lit-track panel “New and Next Weird” with Lou Anders, Jeff VanderMeer, Stephen H. Segal, Ann VanderMeer, & Jean Marie Ward.  Jeff himself explained a lingering question I had about the link between Weird fiction and New Weird that I’d had ever since I read his and Ann’s The New Weird anthology.

6
So, all that was good, but the highlight of my Dragon*Con was seeing Jefferson-fucking-Starship, not once, but twice!!

They didn’t start until midnight both nights, but it was worth the line (I managed to get myself to be one of the first 20-25 people lined up ahead of time), the lack of sleep, and the temporary deafness to hear what the program described as, “Blade Runner Against the Empire, a science fiction/electronica/rock opera “mosh” of Hugo-nominated album Blows Against the Empire and the Vangelis score for the film Blade Runner” on the first night, and hits on the second night.  Just seeing singer Darby Gould in a classic Trek uniform was worth the price of admission.  Oh, and schooling an appreciative Goth girl on the individual members of the current Jefferson Starship and stories about why we would not seeing Grace Slick, hearing “We Built This City,” nor seeing Mickey Thomas (yeah, not with Donny Baldwin back in the band, we weren’t) was cool, too.

And on top of all that, I got nice and close to the stage, as you can see by the relatively decent pics taken from the crappy iPod Touch 4G camera.

I’m glad someone got a decent video of “Jane,” ‘cos I was too busy rocking out…

7
And, speaking of videos I was in where you’ll just have to take my word that I was actually there, I got to be in the audience as Episode 92 of NSFW was being recorded!  I hadn’t laughed so hard in such a long time!

8
Other things I learned/saw/remember…

  • Gareth David-Lloyd has a delightfully filthy mouth.
  • It’s possible to see the same celebrities (Sylvester McCoy, Mark Sheppard, Howard Hesseman) multiple times across all 5 con hotels (not counting panels) more often than you see your own roommates.  The same people in the same costumes, too.
  • It’s absolutely true what they say about becoming buddies with the people you stand in lines with at Dragon*Con.
  • I’m 90% sure I shared an elevator with someone from high school, but I was too stunned to say anything.
  • And I will never, ever complain about any line I stand in ever again.

I absolutely know I’m forgetting things, but the fact that I remembered this much two weeks later should show how fucking great of a time I had!

Day Late, Dollar Short

I know I know… it’s been months, now.  And since Readercon, I’ve been to Dragon*Con and have given my presentation at the 2011 Rod Serling Conference.  But this unfinished post has been in my queue forever and my brain just won’t let me move on until I’ve finished this one.

It’s the proverbial dollar short and day late, and it’s pretty long.  Here goes…

I’m only gonna do highlights from this point on, ‘cos at this point, I’m just trying to get this down.

1
“I could show you my Nook…”

A panel that ended up engaging me a lot more than I’d anticipated, “I’ve Fallen (Behind) and I Can’t Get (Caught) Up” with Michael Dirda, Jennifer Pelland, Craig Gidney, Don D’Amassa, and Rick Wilber.

It’s a problem a lot of folks have, especially writers (at least for several with whom I’m acquainted): How does one possibly read everything there is to read?  Obviously, you can’t.  But I liked how the panel dissected the issue.  My favorite bit: being called filthy by Jennifer Pelland when I said, “I could show you my Nook…” 🙂

2
Honorable Mention

There were a couple of other panels that I attended and even took notes for.  My lack of write-up doesn’t mean I enjoyed them any less.  But for the sake of time, let’s just say that I really enjoyed “There’s No Home Like Place” and “Reconsidering Anthologies.”

3
A Face Made for Radio

In case you’re not hooked up with my other social media outlets, here’s my first-ever reading.  This is the first bit of my story “Combat Stress Reaction” in Crossed Genres.

It was a bit of a nerve-wracking prospect in itself, to say nothing about the prospect of following Camille Alexa and having Claude Lalumière in the audience.  But, I survived, and I can’t thank Bart and Kay and Camille and Claude enough!

4
The Land of the Lost

Speaking of Claude, I was enthralled by his Lost Myths show!

5
Wold Newton

And to think the person who gathered all these literary idols of mine on the same stage is the same guy who stopped just short of walking into Au Bon Pain to ask where the Panera was… 🙂

Oh, the person who adjusted the camera to capture the literary and literal height of John Kessel?  Yes… it was yours, truly.

6
“Step aside, Butch.”

I high-tail it out of this one panel and then Carrie (who has a better write-up of the time I’m glossing over now) taps me on the shoulder to tell me, “You know you just brushed past Neil Gaiman, right?”

7
Monty Haul

This is why I went to “I’ve Fallen (Behind) and I Can’t Get (Caught) Up.” And why I needed a chiropractic adjustment when I got back home.

“I’ve been one poor correspondent, and I’ve been too, too hard to find…”

Once again, I’ve let the good and the not-so-good (okay, mostly not-so-good) pummel me into radio silence.  It’s all kept me from Tweeting, blogging, and yes, even writing.  And I have deadlines, too!  Anyway, if I owe you a tweet or an email or (gulp!) a story, it’s on its way. 

I’ve at least worked my way up to “fake it ’til you make it” mode.  One way or another, though, you all knew I couldn’t shut up for long. 🙂

1
It’s been busy enough as it is with the new dayjob.  I work in the same place as a paper-pusher, but it’s a higher level of paper I’m pushing and at a higher pay rate, to boot.  Today, I got this…

2
This song has been on loop for a few days now.  I’ve been using it’s Zen-inducing laid back groove to get me back into the swing of things.  I think it’s working.

3
I’m going to finish up my ReaderCon posts soon, I promise!  It’s only one or two more posts.  Maybe by Friday Definitely before I go to Dragon*Con!

4
Oh yeah… I’m going to Dragon*Con!

5
I’m thinking of taking my social-networking home base for my writing stuff out of Facebook and over to Google+.  Seems like the right thing to do; at least in theory it would make my life easier.

6
There is NO RULE 6. 

7
My upcoming fiction and non-fiction deadlines are freaking me out.  I guess I better get to it…

“I am dressed as the woman of the opposite sex”

The line’s from the BritCom ‘Allo ‘Allo, which was on my mind.  Anyway… wow, I’m way, way behind on these.  Well, two weeks, actually, since ReaderCon.  I’m skipping ahead to Saturday for now.  I’ll come back to Friday night after a few posts.

My first panel that day was “Daughters of the Female Man” with Elizabeth Hand, Chris Moriarty, Barbara Krasnoff, Gwendolyn Clare, and Matt Cheney.

I’d gotten there 15 minutes late because I was in line getting Claude to autograph some books for me.  Again, them’s the breaks of the arrangement of con panels.

Here’s what I took away (directly or indirectly)…

  • Sorry, but I couldn’t help but pat myself on the back when shout-outs were given to Maureen McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp, and folks in the audience were going, “Who?” and making the panelists repeat the names.
  • Discussed was, to my delight, another instance–a real live instance that didn’t take place back in the “Golden Age of Science Fiction”–where a speculative fiction writer was ahead of the curve.
  • A whole host of books I need to check out, which I tried to note for myself rather than, as one audience member sort of suggested, relying on the panelists to spoon-feed me an annotated bibliography.

And these are my notes…

 I make no guarantees that these will make sense. I make no guarantees against my faulty memory, sketchy hearing, or any kind of telepathic or machine-based manipulation of/interference with my senses. Anything I might’ve gotten wrong is purely unintentional.

Daughters of the Female Man
Hand, Moriarty, Krassnoff, Clare, Cheney

[15 minutes late]

GC: Dearth of female hard SF writers
* Better at: 2nd wave feminism (upper class whites) vs. PoC/lower class women. 3rd wave feminism tries to integrate race/class issues
**UK LeGuin was trying in the ’70s

MC: SHADOW MAN by Melissa Scott

EH: Discussioin @MFA program she saw. Poets, creative nonfic, fic, etc. re: spirituality and writing –> individual voices from other communities (e.g. Islamic, Native American), but not a lot of talk re: crossover to POV different from own. **Spec fic writer in audience raised this issue.** Rxn: different thing for “lit” writers to think about.

Do panelists have “moral responsibility” to tackle feminist issues?
*BK: part of being sf/f writer.
*GC: It’s a matter of realism. Would be uncomfortable to write stories non-relfective of ppl in real world.
** EH: are you appropriating? fear being accused of appropriating?
** Yes, danger of being accused. Should be more concerned about misrepresenting a minority than trying and being accused on the internet
* CM: cf. Virginia Wolfe. She was able to write about the full range of women’s experience.
** cf. Tiptree–reflects real complexity of world re: gender, orientation, etc.
** cf. Kage Baker, Lisa Moore, et al. — does not fit in “boxes.”
*BK: Need to write characters as INDIVIDUALS.
** “classifying is dangerous.” Otherwise, no longer human, let alone representative.
*CM: cf. Joanna Russ: “each generation of women writers has to reinvent the wheel”
** stuff is/was there, but the books went out of print. Hard to find Maureen McHugh’s books. Some stuff from Tiptree you still can’t find.

EH: re: reinventing the wheel–is it possible for woman writer to come up with something new?
* MC:
* GC: “final frontier” = gender neutrality
* EH: Delany’s TROUBLE ON TRITON one of the best depictions of society that’s incorporated gender, etc. in complex way

QUESTIONS
———
On CM’s pseudonym…
* CM: feedback from agents, et al.–like work, but urged different name. Big boxes: “cannot figure out how to stock it w/woman’s name on the cover”
* Most fan mail writers believe she’s male–often delighted to find she’s female!

Libraries/Bibliographies: Best way to keep those writers/books in circulation, ‘cos no one else is archiving.
*CM: access to university libraries
*BK: cf. Project Gutenberg

re: new/shocking–what about L. Timmel Duchamp, et al.
*EH: *HUGE* number of writers out there now, of every strip. So, these people need to be WRITTEN ABOUT. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is mediated in the Ivory Tower.
*BK:
*MC: the secret feminist cabal (merrick)
*CM: Aqueduct Press
*EH: blog about it!

re: HARD SF
*BK: isn’t really “science” fiction, but it is out there. More than just “guys shooting at each other.”