THE WEREWOLF. A third monster. It is possible that he may not appear in our story. In fact, as far as we know he has never appeared anywhere, but one never knows. He might suddenly appear from one moment to the next, and then how foolish we should look for not having mentioned him.
Posted 5486 days ago.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so, when we speak about “my sexuality” or “my gender,” as we do and as we must, we nevertheless mean something complicated that is partially concealed by our usage. As a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another.
Posted 5489 days ago.
The chalkboard reads “Seating is first come first served… be considerate of those waiting for tables.” No one seems to notice that the trio in the corner have been there for at least two hours eating biscuits and arguing in languid frustrating loops now picking at the remains of breakfast, the man who holds his leg out stiff frowning mildly at the young woman sitting in front of him, short blond hair with black dye clinging stubbornly here and there. She is still chasing bits of ham through slippery gravy picking up biscuit crumbs as she goes. Beside the man another young woman with a bow-shaped mouth who looks as if she’d rather be outside with the smokers shakes glossy black curls from her face. “What is with this douche anyway?” says Ysabel.
“What douche?” says Jo.
“The guy with the giant NPR glasses. He won’t stop staring at me.”
The Duke glances past Jo’s shoulder, fingering the rough hawk at the top of his cane. “Just another hipster. My demesne crawls with them. They are the cross I bear, I fear.”
“Not one of yours, though?” she says. “Like me, not like you?”
“Like you and not like you, Gallowglas,” agrees the Duke. Jo takes a turn at frowning and returns to chasing bits of ham.
“Aren’t they a little old for hipsters?” says Ysabel. “I just wish he’d stop staring.” She begins twisting her napkin. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Now the girl is staring, too.”
“You sure these aren’t yours? Is this something I need to worry about?” says Jo. She turns around, butter-colored leather coat squeaking on wood.
Behind them are the two staring hipsters male and female. He has an oddly rectangular head with a wide vista of a forehead hair cut like his grandfather must once have worn it if the barber had forgotten to clip the top. He wears large black-framed glasses that belonged on a nuclear physicist from the 50s, or that NPR guy, what’s his name. Ira something. The woman will have serious lines framing her mouth within the decade and wears black eyeliner and lipstick like her grandmother must have once applied and hair carefully made up to look like she’d forgotten to comb it. They are both staring in a way they obviously think is surreptitious and scribbling in notebooks. “No, they’re not yours,” says Jo. “Let’s get out of here anyway. They make me nervous.”
Jo quickly forgets about the hipsters. There are too many in this city, especially that part of the city, to distinguish them from other hipsters, even aging hipsters. Sometimes in the rare moments when she is alone on the streets she hears people say things like, “Have you read it?” before bursting into giggles. When she and Ysabel are with the Duke a stranger makes a remark about his cane: “You put a bird on it!” The Duke rolls his eyes but does not explain and for once Jo does not ask.
Afterward, she is in the apartment with Ysabel. Ysabel is asleep and Jo cannot sleep and so she turns on her TV with its illegal cable strung from an obliging neighbor’s apartment.
There are the aging hipsters.
They are in Portland. They are putting birds on things, and pretending to be bikers with giant earlobe plugs, and to be overly discriminating locavores. And then they are sitting in the corner at the biscuit place. He is dressed in rusts and plays with a distinctive cane. Her hair is short and blonde and patchy with black. They look like hipsters. They ignore a long line of people standing waiting for their table. The fake Duke and fake Jo look bored and amuse themselves deriding the patient crowd around them as hipsters. The real Jo considers throwing the remote at the screen but doesn’t want to wake up Ysabel. She settles for “Seriously? Die in a fire, asshole hipsters.”
And then the aging hipsters are dancing and singing before a phalanx of freaks and hipsters and bellydancers, the Gay Men’s Chorus, firebreathers and tall bike riders that stream behind them on the Esplanade near the river, the day framing them a blue so brilliant, so unlike Portland that Jo wonders whether it’s computer-generated. And where are the homeless people? The aging hipsters are singing that the dream is alive in Portland.
“You have no idea,” says Jo to the hipsters on the TV. “No. Idea. At all.”
Posted 5495 days ago.
This lovely dish of poisson was prepared by MeiLin Miranda, whose Scryer’s Gulch and Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom are hereby commended to your attention. I myself whipped up something set in Maine, for Cassandra Stryffe’s delightful Zombie Diapers. —The master list of the day’s tomfooleries.
I’m in a giddy mood; there’s 8,000 moderately decent words in the hopper and that’s past the halfway point: not comfortably enough time left perhaps for the usual spit and polish, but then, we thrive on deadline pressure, don’t we? Eat it for breakfast with butter and jam? Isn’t that the theory?
Of no. 13, then, “Changel,” it can be said with some confidence that it will premiere on paper at the eighth annual Stumptown Comics Fest, Saturday, April 16th – Sunday April 17th. Online serialization will begin the following Monday, April 18th, and installments will appear Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through the 29th.
(For those keeping track, this is by far the least amount of time between episodes. It has been a ride. And oh but “Mayhem” is next—)
Posted 5498 days ago.
You’ve already seen the cover for “Innocency,” which begins in just over (eep!) a week; if you follow the Twitter, you’ve seen the following in their raw and (mostly) naked form. —Here they are then, done up in their livery and waiting in the wings each in turn for its cue, the next four chapters in our mad dash:
No. 13: Changel
No. 14: Mayhem
No. 15: Frail
No. 16: Plenty
Now all I need to learn’s what Dazzle is about…
Posted 5536 days ago.
Endings are overrated; they are often the point when the writer bows to convention, and there is a lot more to a story than who gets the girl, or who dies. When I write fiction or drama, I know that my liking for a character is shown by my giving her a lot of page time and vivid scenes, however I may dispose of her by the end.
Posted 5538 days ago.
So far, so good: Monday, February 28th will see the online première of no. 12, “Innocency,” with installments appearing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday through March 11th. The paper zine will premiere at some point during the fortnight, with no actual celebration going on anywhere to mark its (long-delayed) arrival. Pre-orders should be available in a week or two? Keep your eyes peeled.
“Changel” is next, and all too soon. —What am I in for, here?
Posted 5541 days ago.
Whenever I’m out by that side of the airport, I like to stop by Michaels and pick up a silk rose or two. I mean they aren’t really silk.
So as feared we only hit fifty percent of our announced targets in 2010: only three chapters completed, rather than the proposed six. —However, as only two chapters had been completed in 2009, this represents a fifty percent year-over-year increase in output (and 2009 itself represented a one-hundred percent increase). On the whole, we feel confident in once again proposing a target for 2011 of six chapters written and released, moving us considerably closer to our projected end-game.
To that end we should like to break with tradition and just this once point to the wall before shouldering our bat and taking up our stance to knock the leather clean off that mother. Herewith, then:
With the proviso that a plan is that which does not survive contact with the enemy; that this offer is not valid with any other discounts or special offers and is void where prohibited; that all rights are reserved, including but not limited to that of changing our ever-lovin’ et cetera—but real editors ship, dammit, and that I am not an editor nor do I even work with one matters not a whit.
In addition to the above I hope perhaps to announce some additional formats such as ebooks and audiobooks and suchlike, but: story comes first; the rest, as they say, is marketing, and alternate distribution channels.
Posted 5567 days ago.
Yr. humble correspondent having rather famously a dislike bordering nigh upon contempt for definitions (to say nothing of systems or processes) has nonetheless come as close as he might dare to laying out some of the particulars (neither necessary nor sufficient) that might well make up one view or aspect of the genre urban fantasy, with all applicable rights, privileges, and prerogatives reserved, including but most assuredly not limited to that of changing his ever-lovin’ mind at the slightest whim or pretext.
Posted 5587 days ago.
Gaddis
Well, this interior monologue you speak of is just too easy, obvious, boring, lazy, and I would agree right up to the last; I always cringe at the word behaviorism. But again it is very much this notion of what the reader is obliged to supply. We go back to McLuhan and his talk about hot and cool media. Television is the hot medium, to which one contributes nothing except a blank state, and the next day you say, What was that show we saw last night on television? It disappears because you put nothing into it. So nothing remains, as Gibbs remarks in JR. In this case it was my hope—for many readers it worked, for others it did not—that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth. It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read and be swept along—to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way.
Interviewer
But if they read along like that, they may miss a lot.
Gaddis
This is a risk I take, but isn’t that what life is, after all? Missing something that’s right there before you?
— “William Gaddis, the Art of Fiction no. 101”
Posted 5629 days ago.
