I’m not sure about this, but I’ve got Oblique Strategies loaded into the Twitter Bluesky feed, and this afternoon when I happened to look up it was saying “Give the game away.” So.
When we first moved to Portland we lived in a house up on Northeast Killingsworth and we had no money. So we did various things. Barry and Sarah transcribed the voicemail messages people left about shoes. The Spouse cleaned newly built houses that were subsequently condemned. I—well, I managed a phone bank. (That’s not the game. Be patient.) Charles delivered pizzas. And at one time or another most of us sold plasma.
Barry and the Spouse went multiple times, to raise money for Photoshop and a wedding dress. I only ever went the once. It was a place in Old Town on the bus mall, back when the Pearl District was nothing but redrawn maps and marketing collateral: a jackleg clinic tucked behind an empty storefront with dingy windows and a sunfaded logo: Alpha Therapeutics. (I may be extemporizing some color in that. It was a whiles ago, after all, and we all have our Romantic tendencies. —I also remember bright fluorescent lights and gleaming clean silvery steel implements, but this is the furniture my mind supplies when I think of “clinic,” and is as well untrustworthy. Some middle ground, perhaps?)
You went inside and checked in and filled out paperwork and attested to various things about your medical history and were given a jug and led through the plasmapharesis room to the first available nice brown couch with a complicatedly comfortable headrest and long padded armrests. The jug was—was it plastic? Glass? Pyrex? I don’t remember it being heavy on the way in, but I do remember worrying about dropping it and breaking it on the way out, but I wasn’t exactly in my right mind then. But I do recall it was hashed down the side with lines denoting milliliters and such.
They helped you lie down on the nice brown couch and get that complicated headrest right enough so you could watch the movie that was playing on the TV screens that hung from the ceiling without lifting your head and then they stuck a silver needle in your arm that was attached to a clear plastic tube that went through some pump apparatus and then they hooked the other end of the tube into the neck of the jug. And then your blood is pumped out of your arm through the tube into the apparatus—but what’s pumped into the jug isn’t blood-colored at all. It’s just water and various proteins. Your blood cells are sent back into your arm.
I didn’t really watch that part. I watched the movie. Jim Carrey. The Mask. I remember wondering just how they managed to get Cameron Diaz’ skirt so short. CGI, I figured.
They tell you you really shouldn’t feel anything, but I got colder as it went on.
They had to tell me I was done. The gauze was already on my arm and the movie was something else. I got up off the couch and nearly fell over. They gave me the jug and it was—warm. And I walked out of the plasmapharesis room and up to the front counter with this jug full of something that had been inside me, that had been me, that was still warmed by heat leeched out of me, and I put the jug on the front counter, and I got a good look at it—
“Straw-colored” is the common epithet. Milky white. Thinly viscous. Frothy at the top, slicked with tiny oily bubbles. A hint of warm yellow gold.
And they gave me an envelope full of cash and took the jug away into the back room and I shivered all the way home on the bus. —In some respects it was the most honest job I’ve ever had. You could go back up to twice a week, I think, but I never did.
Now the thing about Schenectady is there’s a post office box. You write to it, the price is still two bucks (content, the king, is cheap), and you remember your SASE, and you get back an idea neatly typed up on a single page of onionskin paper. But the thing about Schenectady is this: it was a couple of years after that trip to Alpha before I ever started wandering about the city at all hours figuring out how the first glimmers of this and that bit of the City of Roses I’d found typed up on that single sheet of onionskin would work. And it was a couple of years after that before I ever started writing the story down for reals. And it was a couple of years after that, over a year or so ago, in the fallow period between nos. 5 and 6, when I found myself thinking of, heck, remembering that weird trip to Alpha for the first time in a very long time, and the weight of that jug of myself—and that’s when I figured out where that one part of the idea’d really come from—
See, Schenectady cheats.
(And it was only a few months ago—I never said I was the sharpest knife in the drawer—that I figured out the implications of why it is the plasma’s the color that it is, what’s there, and what isn’t, and when I sussed it all out I started to laugh. Schenectady cheats, but you always get your money’s worth.)
Posted 6009 days ago.
Christ but that took a while. Quarter to two this morning in Wilsonville and I look up and say, that’s it?
Apparently it was.
Paper copies of chapter No. 7: “Gin-soaked,” debut today, right here: the Portland Zine Symposium at PSU’s Smith Memorial Ballroom. I’ll have the full run of chapbooks, naturally enough, plus photo prints and some nifty little buttons so you can show which fifth of Portland you happen to’ve fallen into. (All thanks to the Spouse for which.) Look for the table with the roses. —If you can’t make it to downtown Portland, order it here and I’ll put it in the mail for you. Or you could always wait until August 3rd when it’ll begin to appear online.
This one’s an odd one. I usually have no idea if something works right after I’m done with it, but I have no idea if I’ll ever have an idea whether this one worked. Ah, well! Up and on to the next.
Posted 6017 days ago.
Bear in mind as you write that the subject of the novel is what happens between people’s faces when they talk to one another.
Posted 6048 days ago.
Podcastle has posted Tim Pratt’s “Bottom Feeding,” which I haven’t linked to until now because I had to help the Spouse rip everything out of our kitchen and then pack and then sleep for a couple of hours and then get on an airplane with a cranky seven-month-old (who was on her best behavior, which is rather sterling, but still: exhausting) and fly to New Jersey where we walked out to the Shore and ate spicy shrimp and drank margaritas with cousins and second cousins and a couple of matriarchs and a whole gaggle of pre-school girls.
So I slept in this morning. I imagine I’ll be sleeping in tomorrow morning, as well.
And I’d be getting some writing done, only if I sit right here on this couch and hold the laptop up a little I can just cadge the free wireless signal from across the street.
Posted 6067 days ago.
Just wanted to point out that if you were a member of the City of Roses Facebook group, it’d be easier to find certain special surprises and treats, is all.
Posted 6071 days ago.
Thaumatrope is a—a Twitterzine? “A magazine for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror fiction under 140 characters, available on your mobile phone via Twitter,” to quote their tag line. The 140-character restriction intrigued me—not so much tennis-with-a-net as tennis-in-your-pocket. (Um.) —I’m a big fan of negative space, of what isn’t said, perhaps because I’m so adamant about tucking exposition away out of sight where you don’t notice it exposing itself; 140 characters leaves a lot of room not to say something. So I’ve written a couple for them, and the one appeared back in March, and I was keeping my eye out for it but somehow I missed it, and anyway, here it is. —The other is slated for December 10, so help me remember that, okay?
Also, I read a story for Podcastle—“The Fantasy Fiction Podcast,” part of the Escape Artists along with Escape Pod and Pseudopod—called “Bottom Feeding,” written by Tim Pratt. It’s a chilly little phantastick, a riff on all those stories about Fionn mac Cumhail or was it Taliesin or maybe Gwion Bach and that dam’ salmon, only it isn’t a salmon this time, and Georgia ain’t Ireland. —Rachel asked Barry if he knew anybody who could read well with a Southern accent, and Barry, bless his heart, suggested me, despite the fact that despite the fact I was born in Alabama and spent most of my childhood south of the Mason-Dixon, I can’t “do” Southern to save my life. —Anyway, it’s slated to post on June 2, which is oh Christ Tuesday. So listen, if you like, then if you like discuss.
And I’ll be wandering around MoCCA again this year, which isn’t in the Puck Building but is at the 69th Regiment Armory instead, which I’ve never been to. Anyway, my beard’s bushier than last year and I’ll probably have a seven-month-old girl strapped to my chest, in case you want to say hi. —But I won’t have no. 7 done by then, as I’d hoped. (Yes. I am working on it. And no. 8, too. They come slowly, but they do come.) —For that, I’m afraid, you’ll have to wait until the Zine Symposium, knock wood and come hell or high water.
So that’s some of what I’ve been up to. How’ve you been?
Posted 6074 days ago.
Oh, hey, is it Stumptown already? —We aren’t trying to herd any of those cats ourselves this year (herding a small child is chore enough), but we will be there, and by “we” I mean that Dylan Meconis and the Spouse have their usual table, and I’m as usual putting some roses out on a small corner of it. #120, apparently, which is toward the back of the room, but on a corner, behind Periscope Alley, beneath some sort of blood-spattered banner; swing by Saturday or Sunday (10 – 6; $6 either day, $10 both days) and I might just have a sip or two of gin for you. (A sip, mind. Not the full bottle. Not quite yet. Sigh.)
Posted 6115 days ago.
A recent Google search that washed up hereabouts:
naked woman sitting on a masonic compass
Provocatively specific, no? —I should probably mention I’m at Potlatch this weekend, but it’s mostly so the Spouse can talk about comics and SF and SF in comics, and can we take the bit where I mutter ingenuously about how bad I am at self-promotion as read and move on? Thanks.
(Yes, I am. No, not yet. I’ll let you know, honest. If I say April and it isn’t April I’ll just end up disappointing everyone, so I won’t say April. Nor August neither, but fuck me running if it is.)
Posted 6164 days ago.
It wouldn’t do to have one of these taken and replaced in the middle of the night, now, would it?
—Her birth is one of the reasons why it’s been so quiet hereabouts, and certainly the greatest or at least easiest to blame; the other of course being that we’re currently between fits. —No. 6 having come to an end, there’s naught to do but wait for no. 7, and while I’d like to say I’m busy writing it, well: I’m also busy changing diapers, painting walls, going back to work, and anyway, writing no. 7 right now still looks a lot like staring at the monitor. (It’s gonna be a complicated one. I’ve actually had to prepare an outline.)
While we’re waiting: Nick wants to know whether “the sentence-level prose is somehow optimized for an episodic format.” —Well, says I, not to speak overly of why the words that got written got written and not some other words, but: the sentence-level prose (I stop a moment to ask with only a little lilt: is there any other kind? —But we know what he means) is jiggered to reflect the experience of watching something happen. To the extent, then, that when we watch something happen the resulting narrative is optimized for an episodic format: yeah. (Maybe.) (The fine folks at Shadow Unit had much the same end in mind, but look! How our means have diverged!)
Other words, seen at sentence-level:
To their right, a long building roofed with felt.
Hardly enough to get a grip on anything at all, but still: I wanted to scratch at the translation with my red pencil:
To the right a long building roofed with felt.
Rude, perhaps, to want to tinker so with someone else’s words—much less someone else’s idea of yet another person’s words in a language one doesn’t know—but it is an occupational hazard, and if you’re going to do that to expository description, why not do it up all the way?
I’m willing to allow as how maybe it’s mostly just me.
—I’m also curious now to read and see if Stasiuk has as much contempt for his story as Esposito seems to think; I hope not. You ellipticate like this—you loop the lupine, as Algis Budrys or maybe it was Philip José Farmer once said about Gene Wolfe—not when you’re telling a dull tale whose details you find not terribly interesting or original (though that is a loaded term, here), but precisely because you’ve started to realize you love what you’re writing not wisely but too well.
Also? I do sometimes regret that I decided to go ahead and use quotation marks. (Honest. I do.) —Then, I am trying to be maximally accessible. Right? Aren’t I?
Posted 6246 days ago.
Let’s see: I got to attend Michael and Margo’s special day, where I threw a punch at a rival cultural studies professor; Taran needs about a month more basting before she’s done; the walls are coming down around our ears (so that the stairs might go up); and I thought I’d post the covers for the next two fits of City of Roses, since I’ve got them done:
No. 7: Gin-soaked
No. 8: Beauty
Now I just have to finish writing the dam’ things. —Oh, and I turned on comments. Poke about; say what you’d like where you like. Except the older stuff. Maybe I’ll flip them later.
Posted 6316 days ago.
