Gamble and Rose

One last lone rose.

Well, it’s not the last rose, but it was the one I stopped to take a whiff of before the rains moved in. You can see the heat damage on the petals, but I think that makes it all the more beautiful.

I finished the zero draft of Gamble yesterday, in a blaze of…something, I hesitate to call it glory. The draft is a mess, full of holes and brackets, but it’s done and the pole-dancing scene gets to stay in because the structure shifted to accommodate it. (Or it was always meant to be structured that way and I couldn’t see as much, being head-down in the oubliette.)

The weekend will no doubt be spent catching up with all the things I put aside once this book decided to leap for the finish, and then I get to let the zero rest while I slot another book into that working spot. It’ll need at least a week of sitting and marinating before I can get even a fraction of the required distance in order to revise it.

But that’s a problem for another day. Right now there’s coffee, and one last rose.

Happy Friday the 13th. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Rhythm and Assignment

Summer’s long fever has finally, irretrievably broken. It’s grey and quite a reasonable temperature, which means it’s time for serious work again. Not so much on the page–I am most productive when it’s raining, and the sky hasn’t seen fit to grace us with that yet–but with fiddly stuff like copyedits and proofs and sales and home repair and a new walking route for Boxnoggin and easy, gentle runs and and and…

Yeah. Speaking of sales, Spring’s Arcana is $2.99 in ebook from now until Sept 24th. (There are more discounts and fun things on the Monthly Sales page; mind you check the dates!)

I spent half the weekend finishing Riversinger and Minnowsharp copyedits. (That’s Black Land’s Bane 2, for those counting.) I’ve been very lucky in the last two rounds of CEs, blessed with copyeditors who both caught the rhythm and understood the assignment. I shall be very vocal in appreciation, and in asking that they be assigned to future work of mine.

It may seem like I’m too appreciative, but I like to tell people when they’ve done well. And when I feel down or blue, nothing is better than telling other people how awesome they are. Perks one right up, it does. It might be selfish, but if I have to game myself into proper behavior with selfishness, that’s how I’ll do it.

Today is for the new walkies route, a gentle run, the monthly newsletter–which I put off for a few days because of the blasted CEs and also so I could highlight this particular sale–and starting the proofs for Sons of Ymre 2, which is still slated for November release. And I’m sure there’s something else on the to-do list I’ve forgotten, because there always is. If not for the damn lists and post-its I’d never get anything done.

I’m also poking around trying to make Cain’s Wife settle inside my head. It feels like a trilogy; I just have to figure out whether I want to do it in first-person or third. Or first-person with interludes of third, since I don’t want to head-hop in first. Peter Beagle could do that in Innkeeper’s Song because he’s Peter-effin-Beagle, but I am a far lesser creature.

Anyway, there’s damp drizzle hanging between the fir trees. Boxnoggin is very excited because I’ve even been on the phone this morning, and phone calls are rare and exciting things. If he hears me using Phone Voice he immediately trots into the room, tail and ears up, ready to be absently patted while I talk into the small glowing brick. Sometimes I wonder what he thinks I’m doing, or if he consigns the entire thing to Mysteries of the Humans Who Fill His Food Bowl. I’ve often thought dogs might regard us the way Tolkien’s humans see elves.

But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post, it is. I’d best get some toast swallowed and get my engines underway. There’s a quarter-cup of coffee left and dear gods, I brewed it strong–which is good, because I suspect I’ll need it today.

Excelsior, and all that…

Harrison’s Biggest Fan

I have had occasion this morning to think about the creative writing “teacher” (my community college days were few but wild, y’all) who hated everything I attempted because–and he literally said this in class as well as wrote variations on returned assignments–he believed Jim Harrison was the perfect writer, that everyone should write just like Jim Harrison, and anyone who didn’t write like Jim Harrison was wrong, evil, and deserved endless mockery so that they never wrote again.

Lest this sound like hyperbole, rest assured I am actually underplaying the bizarre nature of this man’s…beliefs? I suppose is the word?

Harrison was no doubt a reasonable human being and a serious writer; I am certain he was completely unaware he had such a stan. This was relatively pre-internet–AOL chatrooms were just getting started, and I don’t think this particular “teacher” was on IRC either. (At least, gods have mercy, I hope he wasn’t.) I am fairly certain Mr Creative Writing “Teacher” wrote snail-mail love letters to Harrison though, and with the clarity of time have come to realize he was probably banging his very young (she and I were both in Running Start, albeit from different high schools) quasi-TA and star student as well.

All in all, that man probably damaged hundreds of nascent and emerging writers. A real prize.

In those days I was more concerned about the evangelical nutcase in the political science class whose entire raison d’être was trying to shout down the poor professor, who had escaped Communist Bulgaria in a literal potato truck and was clearly doing his best to keep a shiny vision of America as the land of opportunity while dealing with a loud mustachio’d Limbaugh-dittohead bigot. As I’ve gone onward in my life, though, sometimes I think about Jim Harrison’s Biggest Fan, teaching a 101 Creative Writing course and being That Fucking Guy before the internet arrived to give that variety of dickbag an even bigger platform.

Fun times, fun times. No wonder I’m an autodidact.

I rented Legends of the Fall at Blockbuster (and that piece of information dates me, yes indeed) that quarter because everyone was gaga over Brad Pitt but I was a diehard Aidan Quinn fan, and also because I was curious about who this goddamn Jim Harrison actually was. I ended up checking the book out at the library as well, along with Dalva, and neither made much an impression. I thought Larry McMurtry and Leslie Marmon Silko did everything better, and even somewhat enjoyed suggesting that Mr Writing “Teacher” perhaps read Ceremony, which I’d done a few papers on in high school.

I already had one foot out the door by that point, and was practicing a brand of “helpful” shitposting (as well as my own variety of malicious compliance) long before the internet. My very last act in that class was to write a satire of Tristan and Susannah from Legends boning desperately in a barn, based on a piece of anthology erotica I’d read a short while before, which involved Casablanca, cold cream, and Rick doing some very ungentlemanly but no doubt fulfilling things to Ilsa while searchlights pierced the sky.

Now, I cannot tell you with certainty what the “teacher” thought of my swan song, because I never went back to pick up the graded hardcopy. But I like to think that he realized what I was lampooning.

Got an F on that course, but the satisfaction lingers. And every once in a while I think about that “teacher”, and how he would just simply hate that by pure spite and endurance I have a career actually being published, which he never managed. (Yes, I checked a few years ago. Because sometimes I am that petty.) Of course he’d sniff that I’m just a hack doing filthy genre things, not a Big Literary Writer like his holy Saint Harrison. But the money has fed my kids as well as no few dogs and cats, and also paid the bills for a while now.

I’m sure that “teacher” never thought of me at all afterward, while I still have no desire to ever pick up another Harrison book. (It’s not the author’s fault.) And my view of writing classes/courses as well as critique groups never recovered from that early experience.

I do hope that political science teacher made it, though.

Predawn, Gatsby

It’s a pretty perfect predawn. While Boxnoggin was snuffling around rabbit-trails in the yard I could stand and breathe, smelling the turn of the season without any promise of awful heat or sickness getting in the way. Being laid out for nearly a week with what might have been plague (public health in the US has been betrayed to a point well past insanity or satire) certainly makes one appreciate being able to simply inhale, let alone let one’s nose work as it should.

For some reason the Muse wanted a reread of The Great Gatsby to finish off the illness. Not that it had any prophylactic or even beneficial effect, mind you; I rather suspect the current historical moment had more to do with the Muse’s insistence than anything else. The excess, the greed, the anomie–all very now indeed. Fitzgerald agreed with Faulkner that the past ain’t dead, and ain’t even past.

The towering achievement of Gatsby is the fact that every single character is utterly loathsome. Even little Pammy, who has every expectation of innocence as she’s well under five years old, is no doubt slated to grow up just as careless and vapid as her mother. I did have a moment of feeling for the gentleman in owl-eyed glasses until I remembered the auto accident in Gatsby’s driveway he was a part of–true, he wasn’t driving, but he certainly didn’t make it any better. And Myrtle’s sister, while she holds her tongue, might have been doing it as a result of a payoff from Tom or the idea that an inadvisable word might somehow interrupt whatever she’s got going on. The overt loathsomeness of Tom is well matched by the shallow, decorated faux-helplessness of Daisy, and Jordan doesn’t have the courage to be even 50% That Bitch, though she’s aiming for it. And our faithful narrator Nick Carraway is a weak, craven little jackass who’s perfectly willing to pat himself on the back for shouting a single compliment in Jay’s direction after vehicular murder, and arranging a funeral in order to salve his own anemic conscience.

Carraway is not an unreliable narrator, by the way. His self-serving attempts at obfuscation and covering his own ass are entirely reliable.

Gatsby’s utterly terrible in his own way, and I suppose it’s Fitzgerald’s genius to make the reader complicit since, after all, Jay’s the only one in the book with the courage of his damn convictions, fruitless and grasping as they are. If Wilson didn’t shoot him one gets the idea Meyer might at some later point; it could even be a mercy that the poor boy made some variety of good ends up dying while still, in strictest fact, bootlegger rich.

Anyway, it takes skill and style to write a book where even a toddler is a nasty piece of work (or will grow into one, I suppose I might be a shade too hard on little Pammy). And the dialogue is an utter joy at every turn. Ol’ F. Scott was a rather nasty piece of stuffing himself and I shall never forgive what he did to poor Zelda; I suppose write what you know is one of the surest routes to genius.

Since we’re in the throes of another Gilded Age (at least economically, the crash is going to be something indeed) it’s interesting–for a certain value of the word–to see some of the same human behavior repeating itself, right down to the pandemic triggering waves of dancing and excess. It makes me wonder what’s being created now that will distill our present into its hideous essence. Of course, whoever writes it will probably die penniless, worn out by heatstroke and exhaustion in an Amazon warehouse.

And so, we are borne ceaselessly back into the past. You’d think we’d learn something eventually, but humanity seems determined not to.

Ah well. Time to finish my coffee and get back to work.

Ambling Strum

I am vertical (sort of) and blinking blearily at the world. Whatever this respiratory bug is, it hit hard indeed; I was laid out for most of the the long weekend, too weak to do much but hydrate, toss fitfully amid fever-drenched sheets, and read whenever I could muster the strength to lift a page. It worked out all right, since I got the copyedits out the door in time, but I could have used a little less coughing.

Perhaps in honor of Labour Day, I surfaced before dawn with Centralia, 1989 playing in my head. (For the curious, it’s about Wesley Everest.) The walking strum reminds me of Guthrie (both père et fils), which is no doubt deliberate. I hadn’t realized Dos Passos mentioned him in the USA Trilogy; I also read a bit of Bukowski over the weekend–sometimes, when one has a certain type of fever, only Hank Chinaski will do–and he liked Dos Passos’s stuff early on. At least, I seem to recall that being mentioned in Ham on Rye.

Speaking of which, I’ve finished my Great Elric Read too. Last night I knocked off the final pages of The White Wolf. I like very much how Moorcock said, “eff it, I’m writing whatever the fuck I want”, and I enjoyed the metaphysics. I can see why so many people imprinted so hard on the last emperor of Melniboné (look, another diacritical, I must be feeling better), and can also see how many of them took exactly the wrong lesson from the adventures.

Anyway, even if physically miserable the engines still throb under the floorboards of a writer’s conscious self. I suppose my body was in full-on revolt against the pace I’ve been driving us both at and has enforced some rest the only way it knows how. Figures I’d land in a meatsuit as stubborn as the rest of me. Can’t really blame it, poor thing has to be a bit pigheaded to keep up.

Today is for dealing with the multiple five-alarms going in my inbox–though fortunately the long weekend meant there’s not as many as usual–and some back cover copy, then getting wordcount on the two usual projects. I was going to add a third, but problems elsewhere mean I’d best hold off on that for the moment. If all goes well I can steal some time after dinner to write on a particular fever-dream that’s been burning a hole in me. It would be nice to get the itch scratched so that story leaves me alone for a while. I have no place to put it, but that’s never stopped the Muse before.

If she didn’t push me so hard…then again, I have no-one to blame, since I force myself at twice the pace. However, today will be an amble at best. Boxnoggin has been very understanding of the extremely short walks taken with a coughing, snot-filled human at the other end of his leash, but I don’t want to press my luck. And I could see my breath this morning when we ventured backyard-ward for his first loo break of the day.

The season has firmly turned and settled in its new track. It’s about damn time.

RELEASE DAY: The Salt-Black Tree

It’s official–the second and last book of The Dead God’s Heart is now out in the world!


The Salt-Black Tree

Nat Drozdova has crossed half the continent in search of the stolen Dead God’s Heart, the only thing powerful enough to trade for her beautiful, voracious, dying mother’s life. Yet now she knows the secret of her own birth―and that she’s been lied to all her young life.

The road to the Heart ends at the Salt-Black Tree, but to find it Nat must pay a deadly price. Pursued by mouthless shadows hungry for the blood of new divinity as well as the razor-wielding god of thieves, Nat is on her own. Her journey leads through a wilderness of gods old and new, across a country as restless as its mortal inhabitants, and it’s too late to back out now.

Blood may not always prevail. Magic might not always work. And the young Drozdova is faced with an impossible choice: Save her mother’s very existence…

…or accept the consequences of her own.

Now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and independent bookstores

The soundtrack for the series is available here.


It’s…odd, to see this book come out. I’m four stories down the road–publishing is a delayed gratification game, always–and a lot of this duology was bound up with pandemic lockdown. It feels utterly weird to see it come to fruition. I was genuinely unsure if I would survive to see Nat’s story reach the world.

Yet here I am. Very, very strange indeed.

I’ll be taking most of the day off to hyperventilate in a corner, as is usual on release days. You’d think I’d get used to them, or that they’d become ho-hum. Nope, I will never become used to this, and they will never be ho-hum. I have to hope that despite some early review bombing, the books will get to the readers who need them.

Despite everything, Spring is on her way. And I’m content to have it so.

Soundtrack Monday: Carnival

The release of Salt-Black Tree is inching closer, and things are so busy I’m almost escaping the usual nerves.

Almost.

The soundtrack for the duology skews heavily to classic rock, with a few lighter touches. And of course, since Nat is lost in a new world–her wonder and fear are the reader’s, to a certain degree and as usual–I had to dig up Natalie Merchant’s Carnival. It was a perfect song for the drive up 101 to the land of great dripping cedars, and also while she stands on a balcony in the French Quarter watching a fantastical procession wend its way past.

Have I been wrong to shut my eyes and play along? Any one of us might wonder as much, especially while watching the great pageant of humanity pass on a city street. There’s a certain feeling–not quite nostalgia, I should call it joy with a sharpened edge–that arises in such moments, especially if one’s been reading the Upanishads lately. (Guilty as charged, my friends.) The idea that we’re all playing roles, that we’re spending an amusement-park holiday on this rocky little planet, that even the pain and death and degradation is part of a pattern that will be made whole and comprehensible at some point, whether it’s when we shrug off individual flesh or when the universe finishes its expansion and begins to contract to a single point, waiting for another Big Bang…

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s felt that, far from. And the song seems to capture its nuances with near-perfection.

Well. Maybe I’m a little more nervous than I thought. At least I’m getting some indications now that the first book is getting to the readers who need it, and I can only hope the second one follows suit.

The show goes on, everywhere and nowhere at once. And so does the music.