4 Pi Con, A Convention Report

What? It's Thursday already? There was a convention this past weekend? Who knew?

4 Pi Con is one of my favorite conventions. It's a small, local convention that takes place every year in Western Massachusetts and offers a great deal of programming for the small total headcount. Pi Con is about geekery -- part geek lifestyle convention, part science fiction, fantasy, horror, and gaming convention. Whatever Pi Con is, it caters to people like me, who hit every overlapping demographic in the geek Venn diagram.

Instead of a lengthy description of the con, I'll just say, "Go." You'll see geeks of all stripes and denominations, cosplay people, LARP people, board game people, sweaty, stinky people playing way too much Rock Band, Joss Whedon worship, polyamorists, belly dancers, and techno-nerds. It's one of the only conventions around where you'll have to decide between watching a BDSM demonstration or a live-actor Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. This year, they did Repo! the genetic opera.

I took notes during some of the panels. Here they are.

August 21, 6 pm: Question Gender
Recommended reading list: The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin), Middlesex (Eugenides), Orlando (Woolf), the Lois McMaster Bujold "Miles Vorkosigan" series, Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg), Transgender Warriors (Feinberg), Body Alchemy (Cameron), Self Made Man (Vincent), She's Not There (Boylan), Trans-sister Radio (Bojalian), The Sand Child (Tahar Ben Jelloun and Alan Sheridan), Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods (Howey), S/he (Pratt), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Erdrich). And we all agreed that following the bouncing ball using Amazon.com's "if you liked this book, you'll also like ..." is a good way to find more books on topic.

August 21, 9 pm: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (a reading of the work)
We read parts of the book aloud (mostly the bits with the pictures). There were bad accents. Pantomime. Nerf props. Enthusiasm and vigor, and lots of laughter from the studio audence. Hopefully, we'll do it again next year.

August 22, 4 pm: Gender in SF/F/H
You'd have thought I would have taken notes on this panel. Sorry. I'll do better next time.

August 22, 8 pm: Tech Tools for Writers
We talked about YWriter, Scrivener, Writer's Cafe, Storybook, Dramatica's Writer's Dreamkit, Plotbuilder, Storyview, Letex, and Page 4. There was large-scale geekery and excitement. We talked about notecards, random Wikipedia hits, the speed-loader for a revolver, cats, and migraines. The cool Ubuntu guy was there. I hope he says hello in my comment thread. Hi, cool Ubuntu guy. Next year, if you hated Mary Doria Russell's book, The Sparrow, I really WILL buy it back from you. If you'll read it to me while I eat Oreo cookies. Like your typical American girl, I find UK accents (any UK accent) really sexy.

August 23, 10 am: Reading (with Yvonne Carts-Powell)
Yvonne read from her really cool book The Science of Heroes. It's a nicely written pop science book that relies on the television series Heroes for its premise. During the reading, I said, "Wow," several times, because the book is THAT cool. I read the first half of "Black Annis," from the Stoker Award Winning anthology Unspeakable Horror. People seemed to like it. It may just have been my enthusiasm and vigor, though.

August 23, 12 pm: Genre Bending in Fiction
Mary Doria Russell was on this panel, so I spent the whole time paying close attention instead of taking notes, and not only to make up for not noticing that she checked me into the convention. I was so worried about getting my badge and my schedule, that I didn't even see her sitting there. When she autographed my copy of the The Sparrow, she wrote, "I forgive you for not noticing me at registration. Sniff."

August 23, 2 pm: 10 Ways to Polish Your Writing
This was probably the most fun I had at the whole convention. Together, we thought up 10 ways to (get this) polish your writing! Surprise! We stayed on topic. Here are the 10 things we came up with:

1) Have someone proofread your manuscript. You can do it yourself a million times and still not notice an embarrassing mistake.

2) Read books about technique. Some proposed works: 20 Problems of the Fiction Writer (Gallishaw), Character and Viewpoint (Card), and some books by Pat Cadigan. I would add Writing Fiction (Burroway), and Writing the Novel (Block). It doesn't matter what or who you read. Just read, find the common threads, practice the techniques and then figure out for yourself what's the best way to write.

3) Use proper manuscript formatting. Read the submission guidelines and adhere to them or don't bother submitting.

4) Learn how to get your point across with grace and subtlety, not with a hammer.

5) Be aware that story structure is an important element in writing everything from poems, to short stories, to novels. It's as important as characterization, mastery of the language, world-building, or plot crafting.

6) Learn from critiquing other people's work. Learn how to use other people's critiques of your own work. Develop a thick skin and seek out readers who will be ferocious with your work, but not cruel. Life's too short to put up with assholes.

7) Learn mastery of the language. Learn how to make the language do exactly what you want it to do. Understand where you are on the language learning curve: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, unconscious competence, conscious competence. Strive to improve.

8) Tell the right story. If your story lacks fire, or meanders, or has other problems, it may be that you're not telling the right story. Consider that your story might be improved if you ask yourself, "Is this the most significant moment in this character's life? If it isn't, why aren't I writing about that?"

9) Push your boundaries. To give your writing an edge, you may need to write about something that makes you uncomfortable, and thus has special meaning to you. Learn to write complex villains, even though it means you'll necessarily have to get into their heads to do so. Take risks.

10) Let your conscience be your guide. Ask yourself what effect you intend to have on the reader, and ask yourself, "How would one act if one believed what my story says?" Read Berthold Brecht's "The Doubter."

That said, it's time to make plans for Arisia.

P.S. A special nod to old friends and new: my dear Scott and Nicole (who bravely schlepped the two rambunctious kids out for the weekend, Jim Cambias (who read his short story "Murder in Messidor" from the collection, "Of Dice and Pen", Jennifer Williams (the Pi Con Goddess), Trish Wooldridge (www.anovelfriend.com), Morven Westfield, Yvonne Carts-Powell, Aradia from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst University Store, the cool Ubuntu guy (call me!), a really nice carpenter playwright guy named Tim, and his son Eli (really great anime hair and my favorite brand of vamp teeth). Eli's friend gets a nod for dressing like a bright blue bunny rabbit, with bright blue body paint, and bunny ears, and a long, pokemon-like tail. That's the spirit.

Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. 1

Jason Sizemore sent me a message the other day with a handy link for the purchase of Descended From Darkness, which features my 2005 World Horror Dark Fiction Award-winning story, "A Night at the Empire."

According to Jason, I receive 40% of the retail price of the anthology, if you click through and order via the above link. Once again: the link is: Descended From Darkness

Times are tough, my wallet is thin, and unemployment insurance is covering the bills (so far), but convention funds are low. If you are interested in supporting my work, please consider ordering a copy of Descended From Darkness and I promise that the proceeds will be put toward my 2009 convention schedule, where hopefully I can shake your hand and thank you in person.

Aside from helping me get to 4 Pi-Con in August, Descended From Darkness features the following works from previous issues of Apex Magazine:

"Post Apocalypse” – James Walton Langolf
“These Days” – Katherine Sparrow
“In the Seams” – Andrew C. Porter
“The Nature of Blood” – George Mann
“Scenting the Dark” – Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Limb Knitter” – Steven Francis Murphy
“I Know an Old Lady” – Nathan Rosen
“Blakenjel” – Lavie Tidhar
“Behold: Skowt!” – Jason Heller
“A Splash of Color” – William T. Vandemark
“A Night at the Empire” – Joy Marchand
“Organ Nell” – Jennifer Pelland
“Starter House” – Jason Palmer
“On the Shadow Side of the Beast” – Ruth Nestvold
“Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” – Gord Sellar
“Dark Planet” – Lavie Tidhar
“The Puma” – Theodora Goss
“Mind of a Pig” – Ekaterina Sedia
“Waiting for Jakie” – Barbara Krasnoff
“Hindsight, In Neon” – Jamie Todd Rubin
“Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens” – Peter M. Ball
“Hideki and the Gnomes” – Mark Lee Pearson
“Plebiscite AV3X” – Jason Fischer
“Shaded Streams Run Clearest” – Geoffrey W. Cole

Cover art by Vitaly S. Alexius
Cover design by Justin Stewart

4 Pi-Con, Springfield MA

I have made my hotel reservations for 4 Pi-Con in Springfield, MA. The author guest of honor is Mary Doria Russell, whose book The Sparrow is a particular favorite of mine. It's a beautifully written near-future science fiction story that explores gender, sexuality, faith, and fear, in a story about a Jesuit discovery and exploration of an alien culture... on another planet. Masterful storytelling had me up late at night, sleepless and worrying what would be revealed as the story unfolded back and forth in time.

Pi-Con is one of my favorite conventions because it's small but well programmed, and it's local, so I can reconnect with old friends in the area, as well as make new ones. It's always a delight to become acquainted with a local writer whom you have a chance of actually seeing more than once a year!

If you will be at 4 Pi-Con, please leave a comment, so I can keep an eye out for you and say hello.

Here is my panel schedule:

August 21, 6 pm: Question Gender
August 21, 9 pm: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (a reading of the work)
August 22, 4 pm: Gender in SF/F/H
August 22, 8 pm: Tech Tools for Writers
August 23, 10 am: Reading (with Yvonne Carts-Powell)
August 23, 12 pm: Genre Bending in Fiction
August 23, 2 pm: 10 Ways to Polish Your Writing

I'm also angling for a spot in which to read my own work, hopefully not against the Mary Doria Russell interview.

Hope to see you there.

Duett at the Loeb Experimental Theater

Tonight is the final performance of "Duett" in the EX at the Loeb Experimental Theater in Cambridge. I'm going to guess that no one who reads Particles of Light has been to the show yet; when I went, only 10 of the 40+ seats were occupied. Which is tragic, because the show was fantastic. I went to see it on 12 June because my daughter is in it, as one of the unnamed, bow-tie sporting on-stage props people. I fervently hope there will be a full house tonight, because by golly, I want my daughter to be appreciated for her dedication to elegantly pouring fake blood all over Catrin Lloyd-Bollad's foundation garment.

Backing up now.

Duett, written by Amy Stebbins, is inspired by Heiner Muller's "Quartet" (in turn, inspired by Choderlos de Laclos's novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Soren Kierkegaard's "Either/Or." I don't know if Amy Stebbins's production owes anything to Robert Wilson's, which is the subject of the review I've linked to, in order to give some background on Quartet, but I figured it was better to link to a review than nothing. All of this to say that the show was a dialogue on hedonism and ethics, discussed by the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil (you may have seen them portrayed by John Malkovich and Glen Close in the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons). That's all I can say that the show is "about" because in order to analyze the show and provide my own reading, I'd have to see it several more times, and as I've mentioned, the last show is tonight.

What I can say, in addition, is that the show has great original music composed by Mike Einziger, the guitarist for the band Incubus. Catrin Lloyd-Bollard (the Marquise) and Dan Pecci (the Vicomte) are brilliant actors, singers, and dancers. Separately, they are excellent, and together, electric. They are funny, frightening, clearly fiercely intelligent, and I wish every house had been packed to see them interacting so cleverly and emotionally with the images projected on the enormous screen/giant egg downstage. They taunted each other, lusted after one another, tore each other apart. They enacted and reenacted a particular dialogue from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, singing, sitting in a projected drawing room (cleverly propped against the screen in seated posture), shrieking, fighting, and inevitably, dying. All the while, two bow-tied servants attended to them, filming them, setting up their props, re-setting them physically after scenes (one, two, three, hoist!), and inevitably, killing them. Some scenes were difficult to watch. Some scenes were especially difficult to watch my daughter filming with a handheld camera. I kept thinking, what on earth have I given her permission to do?

But I recognize art when I see it, and this was art. Plastic bottles of blood and all.

Watch the trailer:

Highly recommended.

"A Night at the Empire" in Descended From Darkness

The Apex Book Company has announced the table of contents for their upcoming anthology, Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine, Vol. 1. I am proud to announce that my story, "A Night at the Empire" is included.

See the announcement and the whole table of contents here.

Unspeakable Horror Reviewed by Monster Librarian

From Michele Lee at Monster Librarian, on Unspeakable Horror featuring my short story, "Black Annis."

“Unspeakable Horror is a standout anthology with a unique focus on queer-themed horror tales. There's a lot to recommend, from tales where horror takes a back seat to the characters and musing tales of their challenges, to stories starring vampires, zombies, ghosts, evil faeries, doppelgangers, and more who complicate already conflicted lives. These tales do not isolate or exclude, but rather put readers in the heads of those who feel lost, struggling with ideas of society, sexuality and themselves.”

Read the full review here.

Unspeakable Horror Named Stoker Award Finalist

Dark Scribe Press reports that its debut title, UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET, featuring my short story, "Black Annis," has been named a finalist in the 2008 Bram Stoker Awards. Each year, the Horror Writer’s Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror work, Dracula. The Stoker Awards were instituted immediately after the organization’s incorporation in 1987.

Read the full Stoker Award nomination announcement here.

Unspeakable Horror Reviewed by FearZone

The anthology Unspeakable Horror by Dark Scribe Press has been reviewed by Derek Clendening at FearZone.

2009 Million Writers Award

Posted a little late, but better late than never, right? "A Night at the Empire" has been nominated by Jason Sizemore at Apex Magazine for the storySouth 2009 Million Writers Award.

A list of the top ten electronically published stories of the year will be released on May 15th, at which time the public vote for the top story will begin. For updates on the award process, please see the blog and website of Jason Sanford, who runs the award.

2009 Rhysling Awards

My poem, "The Midwife's Progress," published by Goblin Fruit in 2008, has been nominated for a Rhysling Award and will appear in the 2009 Rhysling Anthology. Last year at Readercon, I hoped one day I'd have a poem in this anthology, so I'm very pleased indeed. It's an honor.

Bookshelf: More on Maps & Legends

A passage from Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends leapt out at me that reminded me of an earlier post, wherein I expressed both a tendency and a fear to use real life experiences in my writing.

Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written. Even if I assume that readers will be charitable enough to absolve me from personally having done or thought such things--itself a dubious assumption, given my own reprehensible tendency as a reader to see authobiography in the purest of fictions--the mere fact that I could even imagine someone's having done or thought them, whispers my fear, is damning in itself.

The skeletal fingers of a hundred literary transgressions I've already made climbed up my spine upon reading this. I've published some damned disturbing stories full of damned disturbing people. I try not to think about the stories after they leave me (although I'll admit to self-Googling for reviews as much as the next Digital Age writer). I try to imagine them running in fields of alfalfa, chasing rabbits, free to be what they are. Free of authorship. Free of my life's baggage. I've never been a drug addict, a murderer, a woman in a coma, a male nurse in love with a woman in a coma, a rapist, a thug, a gay teenaged boy consumed by thoughts of vengeance, a centuries-old hag with a taste for flesh. I've never been any of those things, but I can imagine being those things well enough to write about them. I'm the perfect audience for a quiet horror film where the mayhem takes place offscreen, because I can supply the mayhem myself more effectively than a special effects team ever could.

There's a pocket of darkness in me from which dark things spring, but I try not to think about the stories once they leave home. I try not to worry that my parents might think I'm psychopath. I try not to worry that my loved ones might think I'm capable of infidelity, substance abuse, suicide. I try to remember that other people have this kind of intuitive understanding of darker human nature--criminal profilers, psychologists, palm readers. Just because you can *see* doesn't mean you can (or would) *do* the things you see.

I write nightmares, but what I write both is and isn't me. If I think about the stories after they leave home, I worry about them. I fear the exposure. What will they think of me (sick freak, you wouldn't believe, how could she, I wonder if that really happened...) but the worry isn't enough for me to keep the damning stories in a shoebox under the bed.

It's better to let them run free, chasing rabbits. Safer for all of us. Really.

Bookshelf: Maps and Legends

Michael Chabon has my gratitude forever. I know I sounded a bit snarly in my last post; change is difficult, and it makes even the most harmless person want to bite something and shake it. Listening to a reaction from a loved-one about yesterday's post, I realized I may have come across as anti-genre, but that's definitely not the case. Despite my vehemence, I'm not anti-genre, and I'm not anti-entertainment. I'm reading Michael Chabon's book Maps and Legends right now, and in the first essay, "Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story," he explains things better than I did yesterday. I'd say "better than I ever could," but I don't feel like giving up on this rough ride before I've been in the saddle for a while longer. I'm going to hang in there, and borrow Chabon's words until I can wrap my brain around this topic a little bit better on my own. He says:

"...I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain.... Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.

Here is a sample, chosen at random from my career as a reader, of encounters that would be covered under my new definition of entertainment: the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazon riverboat; or in Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in Nabokov and Neil Gaiman's Sandman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page of Proust (vol. 3); a duel to the death with broadswords on the seacoast of ancient Zingara; the outrageousness of whale slaughter or human slaughter in Melville or McCarthy; the outrageousness of Dr. Charles Bovary's clubfoot-correcting device; the outrageousness of outrage in a page of Philip Roth; words written in smoke across the sky of London on a day in June 1923; a momentary gain in one's own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-heated glee; the recounting of a portentous birth, a disastrous wedding, or a midnight deathwatch on the Neva."

Yes, yes, and yes. Chabon is an omnivore. He reads *all kinds of good stuff.* He's a wanderer, an adventurer, an insatiable, curious intellect. Later in the essay, he argues the existence of genre as a marketing tool, more eloquently than I did yesterday, by comparing Mrs. Dalloway to Moby Dick wondering just how different two books have to be before it's impossible to shelve them together. He rather brilliantly points out the formulas for literary fiction, "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." I have to admit that my jaw dropped on the floor at this last part, and I blushed, though there wasn't anyone around to see me do it. I hadn't realized until reading this bit what the unifying thing was that I liked about a story; it's this moment-of-truth thing. Without it, I find a story dull, but I've never been able to put my finger on it before. The thing is, I find a story dull without that moment-of-truth regardless of the premise. Give me a good gothic romance or pirate story with a contemporary, quotidian, plotless moment of truth, and I'm yours. I'm not anti-genre, and anti-formula, I just prefer the formula of so-called literary fiction, but imbued with the gloss of the fabulous. I prefer stories that take a little from each paint pot, a little of this, a little of that--mundane fabulism, as it were.

Chabon goes on to talk about the tricksters in mythology--Hermes, Loki, Coyote, Eshu, Krishna, Satan, etc. "Trickster is always associated with borders, no man's lands, with crossroads and intersections. Trickster is the conveyor of souls across ultimate boundaries, the transgressor of heaven, the reconciler of opposites. He operates through inversion of laws and regulations, presiding over carnivals and feasts of fools. He is a hermaphrodite; he is at once hero and villain, scourge and benefactor." He says, "Trickster is also the god of the marketplace, of the city as intersection of converging roads and destinies, as transfer point.... Trickster goes where where the action is, and the action is in the borders between things."

This is a nice setup for a discussion about interstitial fiction, without calling it interstitial fiction. Chabon talks about Borges, Calvino, Fowles, Millhauser, Pychon, Vonnegut, John Crowley, A.S. Byatt, and Cormac McCarthy--writers who have "plied their trade in the spaces between genres, in the no man's land. These great writers have not written science fiction of fantasy, horror or westerns--you can tell that by the book jackets [from an earlier discussion where he says authors who escape the "genre" ghetto get subtler, more elegant book jackets]. But they have drawn immense power from and provided considerable pleasure for readers through play, through the peculiar commingling of mockery and tribute, invocation and analysis, considered rejection and passionate embrace, which are the hallmarks of our Trickster literature in this time of unending crossroads. Some of them have even found themselves straddling the most confounding and mysterious border of all: the one that lies between wild commercial success and unreserved critical acclaim."

Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore.

And that's where I want to go. Those are the places I want to haunt. Neither here nor there, this or that. I want to be delighted, to smear the lines. I'm willing to write things that belong nowhere in the hopes of discovering something wonderful. I'm not sure I want wild commercial success (though honestly, I wouldn't turn it down) but I know I want to be Trickster, dancing in the borderlands. I want to learn the magic formula of the quintessential entertaining story [well, a story that entertains *me*], absorb it, transform it, and play.