What I'm Working On: Summer 2019

Most of these will look familiar. I still have a thing for angels, apparently.

"The Ten Thousand Houses of Irene Domovika" (Started: August 2018) - Fresh from her bath, Irene Domovika lounges on a Louis XVI settee in the spacious ballroom of her house on South King Street. Her damp hair lays coiled over one shoulder like a streak of white paint. The sofa is short and square, its back and arms all of a height, the moss-colored upholstery two shades darker than her silk robe. In that white, cavernous space, the upholstery and the silk are the only soft things.

“Rampion" (Started: March 2017) – Never mind how I came to B----. It’s a small tourist town in the Canadian Rockies. My previous experience of mountains had been the Ozarks, the Blue Ridge of Tennessee--nothing on so grand a scale. I signed the book as Crowchild, as I’d planned to since I saw the name on a street sign out of the airport. “Laurence,” said the woman at the front desk, “that’s an odd name for a woman.”

“The Devil’s Verse” (Started: August 2016) – I’m thinking it’s finished. I'm driving north through the toy city of Sausalito, houses perched on the hills like doll's cottages just out of reach, and my hands on the steering wheel look like someone else's, nails too long and knuckles blue with tension. My tattoos strike me, as they often do, as if they belonged to a stranger. Her book is open on the passenger seat beside me, one of those novels where something terrible happens in the middle.

“Rockettown: A Haunting” (Started: 2014) – For the rest of September, into October, the skies were empty: bare slates of dry blue, untouched by a shred of cloud. The silence gave my mother headaches.

“The Resurrection Dogs” (Started: 2013) – When I took the job in S-------berg, it had been eighteen months since my father died, and six months since Rainer kicked me out of our shared apartment.

“The Shadow of Thy Perfect Bliss” (Started: 2013) – The gamblers show up around midnight, pestering Theophile to take the angel out of its cage.

“Waxwidow and Tallowbride” (Started: 2012/2015) – It was a sailors’ story first. Come back from a year and a half at sea, come back to your wife or your lover or the bosom friend at your hearth, and find that something is amiss.

“Hail Horrors, Hail Infernal World” [alt. title: "That Dismal Clime"] (Started: 2012) – Deborah Milton wakes to find the angel reading her papers. Deborah is not the daughter of the poet, although perhaps if she didn't share his name and her name she would not be where she is now, at a large research university in the middle of a small rural town, stalled on a dissertation about Paradise Lost. Maybe she would be working for the phone company like her mother, who does not share her name with a poet. In any case, she would not be staring now into the mouth of the angel, at the black throat behind its double rows of teeth.

“Hollow Engines” (Started: 2012) – The exorcist is sweating blood on the church’s front steps. Pinkish semicircles of damp blossom beneath her arms and her white tee-shirt clings to her spine in a blade-like triangle of rust. Tendrils of indeterminately dark hair plaster themselves to her forehead. She is looking out over the valley, past the red dust road, the clear snowmelt creek and the train tracks, down into the sea of yellow birch and alder trees and wispy clouds curling up like smoke. The angel Baraquiel rolls slowly through the mountains, a thundercloud with blue lightning at its heart.

"The Maiden Without Hands" (Started: 2011) – No first line yet. The Seven Years' War, with Nephilim.

“The Dead Women of Bajos Court” (Started: 2010) – Four dead women live in the white houses at the end of Bajos Court. The stucco in their walls is old and dry, lifting away from the cool brick underneath, and the fountain in the middle of the courtyard leaks through its fresh coat of blue tile and cement. If you were to look down at the court, the leaking fountain and the flaking stucco, you might find it hard to imagine that you stood only a dozen feet away from dance clubs with blacklights and saltwater aquariums, music pulsing until four in the morning, when the first trace of sunlight is glinting over the Mediterranean. The whole city is like this: Old and new abutting. Creatures nesting wherever they can find room.

“The Unbinding of Artemis O.” (Started: 2010) – No first line yet. A magician, her apprentice, and the escape artist she's married to conduct an unorthodox experiment.

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Tuesday, June 18, 2019

first lines, the writer in its natural habitat

January 2018 (O the mind, mind has mountains)

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing your answer to the question What did I do this month? is required in order to justify your consumption of oxygen (or perhaps your carbon footprint) over the previous thirty days. It's not.

That being said, here's what I did in January 2018.

1. Revamped my Introduction to Literature course at UC Davis to emphasize analysis over argument. Graded the first set of papers for said course.
2. Completed a draft of my paper for INCS 2018, "Plotting the Brain: Arthur Machen's 'Unbroken Material Succession." Submitted an abstract for RSVP 2018.
3. Completed and submitted "A Nearly Beautiful Thing" (previously titled "Ninshubar")
4. Completed drafts of "The Oracle and the Sea," "It Is Not So, It Was Not So," and "Frankincense and Myrrh" 
5. Completed outlines of "Swallow (The Captured City)" and "Hunger Lake" [working title]
6. Read an excerpt of "It Is Not So, It Was Not So" with Fig + Axle at the Avid Reader
7. Reformatted www.meganarkenberg.com to fix broken links and put fewer mouse clicks between you and my short stories
8. Sent out seven reprint submissions and queried two publishers about forthcoming publications
9. Reopened Mirror Dance to poetry submissions

I'm spending less time on Facebook and Twitter these days. I can't say I regret how much effort I poured into social media throughout 2017; the sense of community support, or at least mutual outrage, kept me going when nothing else could. But eventually your feet hit the seafloor again and you can loosen your grip on the life preserver. I hope that's where I am.

Also, since the last year and change has been a raging pit of despair a bit difficult, I failed to report on a new publication: "But Thou, Prosperpina, Sleep," a story about Swinburne and Nyarlathotep, in A Breath from the Sky: Unusual Stories of Possession. If you've liked anything I've written before - because it's queer, because it has strong liquor preferences, because it's a little too obsessed with poetry or Great Lakes geography - you'll like this one.

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Wednesday, January 31, 2018

academia, the writer in its natural habitat, website

And then, the first line meme

Hello, beautiful people. How are you? I hope you're well. Let's pretend I never left.

I’m getting back in the fiction-writing saddle with another attempt at NaNoWriMo. Thirty days: 50,000 words: as many short stories as it takes to get there. Here’s the grand list of Works-in-Progress, with the approximate dates I began writing them and the first lines of the current draft.

“The Devil’s Verse” (Started: August 2016) – I’m thinking it’s all over with, that it’s ended here--me driving north through the toy city of Sausalito, my hands sweating on the wheel, my tattoos striking me, as they often do, as if they belonged to a stranger. One of her books is open on the passenger seat beside me, one of those novels where something terrible happens in the middle.

“The Oracle and the Sea” (Started: 2010) – Kashmai hates the sea. For a long time, she thought it was the only thing she hated.

“It Is Not So, It Was Not So” (Started: February 2017) – When she was twenty-one, Mrs. Voss visited a Tarot reader at one of the festivals they used to hold at the lakefront on weekends in early summer. It had been a hot day, tremendously hot for the season: she can’t remember the future but she remembers the heat, the sleeveless aubergine blouse she wore and how the sweat plastered it to her spine, how the cards stuck to the Tarot reader’s wide, brown, ring-heavy fingers. 

“The Night Princes” (Started: 2012) – “I’m going to tell you a story,” she says, "and when the story is finished, this will all be over.”

“All in Green Went My Love Riding” (Started: 2015) – All of this happened that summer we played the love games.

“Waxwidow and Tallowbride” (Started: 2012/2015) – It was a sailors’ story first.

“Resurrection Dogs” (Started: 2013) – From the German border, I took a decommissioned school bus—pale powder blue, like the ones I had ridden every morning in primary school—up a freshly-paved road through nearly forty miles of empty field.

“Rockettown: A Haunting” (Started: 2014) – For the rest of September, into October, the skies were empty: bare slates of dry blue, untouched by a shred of cloud. The silence gave my mother headaches.

“The Dead Women of Bajos Court” (Started: 2010) – Four dead women live in four white houses at the end of Bajos Court.

“The Unbinding of Artemis K.” (Started: 2010) – Between the sagging tents and peeling sideshow posters, past the rainwater sheeting down the carousel canopy and the Big Wheel gondolas creaking in the heavy air, the black umbrella wound its way. NB: This sentence will die a well-deserved death as soon as I figure whose POV this story belongs in.

"The Improbable Library of Asmodeus Foster" (Started: 2010) – Rosamund found the body in a footnote on page 217.

“Hollow Engines” (Started: 2012) – The exorcist is sweating blood on the church’s front steps.

"The Maiden Without Hands" (Started: 2011) – No first line yet, but an epigraph from M. R. James: "The other interested himself in questions to which Providence, as I hold, designs no answer to be given us in this state: he would ask me, for example, what place I believed those beings now to hold in the scheme of creation which by some are thought neither to have stood fast when the rebel angels fell, nor to have joined with them to the full pitch of their transgression."

“The Shadow of Thy Perfect Bliss” (Started: 2013) – The gamblers show up around midnight, pestering Theophile to take the angel out of its cage.

“Hail Horrors, Hail Infernal World” [working title] (Started: 2012) – Deborah Milton woke to find the angel reading her father’s papers. NB: I still like this opening, but I don’t think this story is about Deborah Milton anymore.

“Dorian” [working title] (Started: March 2017)  –  The next morning, I woke to hear her rummaging through her backpack for a lighter and a box of cigarettes. Something cold and damp and heavy lay on the sheets between us, stinking like blood and shit. “You’re not much of a monster,” she muttered—at me, presumably, although I hadn’t opened my eyes.

“Ninshubar” [working title] (Started: August 2017) – When you asked, it sounded like a simple request: “Don’t leave me with the dead.”

“A Life, Together” (Started: September 2017) – Valerie sits on the ottoman in my living room, jingling her car keys from hand to hand. She’s said she should go ten, fifteen times already—taken the keys, ornamented with a tiny plush elephant, from the compartment at the front of her backpack, tossed them between her hands, then tossed them back in the bag.

"Three Dangerous Tales" [working title] (Started: October 2017) – The first one begins on a beach, with a king and the man who loves him.

Telling Statistics
Serial killers: 5
Angels: 4
Fairytales: 4
Deities: 3
Charismatic cult leaders: 3
Midwestern settings: 1.5
Californian settings: 3.5
Gay AF: 5
Queer AF: 19 –Yes, that's all of them.
Self-loathing first person narrators: 10
Haunted or otherwise unheimleich houses: 10

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Wednesday, November 01, 2017

first lines, the writer in its natural habitat

Mirror Dance re-opens to submissions

That's the big news for today. See the guidelines here, and note that we have a new address for e-mail submissions.

"Palingenesis" has garnered some nice words from Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews (a new favorite review blog, by the way: Payseur's comments are generous, attentive, and lyrically written) and Maria Haskins, who recommends it along with eight other "intriguing" speculative stories from around the web. I won't be linking to the review at Tangent, which misgenders a non-binary character in a way that strikes me as deeply dismissive, if not intentionally malicious. In fact, I'll link to this instead: American Dialect Society, "2015 Word of the Year is singular 'they'."

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Friday, January 15, 2016

Mirror Dance, reviews, the writer in its natural habitat

Palingenesis, or Thirteen Ways of Looking at a White Moose

My new story "Palingenesis" appears in Shimmer today. I promised I'd have something to say about it: turns out, I have a lot to say about it. The following can be read before or after the story. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you for reading. 

Dream Net at the Museum of Wisconsin Art

1. 

The inspiration: Tom Uttech, Dream Net (1987).

“Uttech's paintings are distinguished from those of most contemporary landscape artists in that he does no drawings, studies or photographs while on these [nature] excursions,” the Milwaukee Art Museum explains. “His paintings are studio inventions based entirely on memory and improvisation. Uttech's landscapes have been described as ‘pure fantasy and, at the same time, absolutely true to nature.’ His use of high-key colors and his depictions of seemingly airless environments give his work a surreal quality.”

2. 

This story deserves an introduction. I guess most stories deserve an introduction, but I’m a lazy writer: I want to shove those little bastards out the door, into the waiting hands of editors and copy-editors and publicity interns, and only pipe up about them when asked a direct question. “How did this story come about?” “What’s with the epigraph, what’s with the title?” I’m pretty good at those. Introductions, though—those are a pain in the neck. Especially for a story like this.

Hence: This. Blog post. Commonplace book. Blatant rip-off of Wallace Stevens and everyone who’s ripped him off before me. If you enjoy reading this kind of thing, let me tell you: you’re going to love “Palingenesis.”

3. 

Rudyard Kipling, “The Way through the Woods” (1910).

(They fear not men in the woods, 
Because they see so few.)

4. 

It doesn’t happen often, but on occasion, my fiction and my academic work cross-pollinate. There’s a notebook on my desk this morning, opened to a handwritten draft of a conference abstract titled “(En)gendering Evolutionary Monstrosity.” I’ve gone back and forth on the title, disliking the modish parenthesis, but not willing to sacrifice the extra semantic mileage it gives me. Never mind the title, I should really be worried about the first sentence: “The monstrous Helen Vaughn expires at the climax of Machen’s ‘Great God Pan’ in a horrific vision of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.” Say that ten times fast.

5. 

A case of convergent evolution: Nebelung, “Mittwinter” (2014).

6. 

I grew up in the Kettle Moraine. When I was a kid, I always misheard “kettle” as the teapot, which bequeathed a certain coziness to the whole geological formation. It's retained the coziness, although over the years, it's also acquired something else.

Last summer, a friend and I went hiking in Kettle Moraine State Forest, despite a persistent drizzle and a layer of the thin, cold fog that can crop up in the middle of a Wisconsin August. We climbed to the top of Powder Hill and I snapped a picture on my cell phone, trying to capture a sense of all the wet green miles between us and the horizon. It came out looking flat, like a quilt on a bed, each ridge a separate line of fabric—the purple prairie clover in the foreground, the black treetops just over the edge of the kame, and then the green hills, growing bluer and bluer as they curved out of sight. “No one in California is going to believe me when I tell them how far we walked,” I said.

But that’s the thing about glacial landscapes: they’re deceptive. You’ll never be able to see everything that’s out there.

7. 

Arthur Machen, “The White People” (1904). 

“It was a wild, lonely country; but you know what it was like by her description, though of course you will understand that the colours have been heightened. A child's imagination always makes the heights higher and the depths deeper than they really are; and she had, unfortunately for herself, something more than imagination. One might say, perhaps, that the picture in her mind which she succeeded in a measure in putting into words, was the scene as it would have appeared to an imaginative artist. But it is a strange, desolate land.”

8. 

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is the root of a lot of lazy thinking. We trace a pattern in an individual act, and want that pattern to apply to a longer period of time. Maybe a whole career. “When do I get out of the rough draft of my writing career?” I’ve asked more than once. But it’s the wrong question, of course, and if you’re going to ask the wrong questions, you can do better than that. For instance: “Why does my writing career look like a chicken?” or “When does my writing career develop a tail?” Point being, you never get out of the rough draft stage. You never start anywhere but the beginning.

But the rough drafts do become more interesting. Perhaps a little more monstrous.

9. 

Sir Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex (1890). 

“The males live at a loss, are more katabolic—disruptive changes tending to preponderate in the sum of changes in their living matter or protoplasm. The females, on the other hand, live at a profit, are more anabolic—constructive processes predominating in their life, whence indeed the capacity of bearing offspring.”

10. 

It’s been a year or two since I last finished a poem. I’ve started to cannibalize them in their infancy, steal my own best lines for my short stories. I think that’s how “Palingenesis” started: as an aborted poem. Every city has an explanation.

Considering what I was reading at the time, I guess we should be grateful I didn’t say “an ontogeny.”

11. 

From a contemporary review of Geddes and Thompson (1890): “The essential nature of sex-character has the greatest practical bearing on human affairs, and its thorough comprehension cannot fail to be of great utility to society. In fact, such knowledge is the one thing needful to regulate the unbridled fancies of the uneducated mind which attempts to deal with the subject, and which has produced innumerable absurdities since the human imagination began to be active.”

12. 

I wrote “Palingenesis” in order. Well, somewhat in order; there are two or three sections towards the end that I kept popping out of their settings, switching forwards and backwards, splitting in half or sticking together. But mostly in order—from the city, to the museum, to the woods.

I mention this because there’s a part at the beginning that looks like it slipped in later, after a first or second or even a third draft—like an apologia pro apologus suum, an arse-covering move from a writer whose story had gotten away from her. But that part was there before there even was a first draft. I knew from the beginning that none of these pieces were going to fit together neatly.

Still. All of them are part of the story.

13. 

Dante Alighieri, Inferno (c. 1308).

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straight-forward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough and stern
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

(Ask Kipling: "But there is no road through the woods.")

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Tuesday, January 05, 2016

the writer in its natural habitat

August: writing, Mirror Dance, new publications

I'm back in California after a relaxing beer-and-sausage-filled trip back to Wisconsin, and my timing could not be more perfect. I missed the worst of the wildfires and arrived in time to enjoy a stretch of unusually temperate days: the breeze stirring the loose pages on my desk is a mere 88 degrees. The sunflowers are blooming in the fields alongside the freeway. This is the weather that makes people want to move to California.  

So what am I up to now that I'm back? Well, I'm spending nearly every waking hour reading for my upcoming prelim exams. My progress on short fiction this summer can be measured in inches, although I'm wrapping up a flash piece for the next volume of Rhonda Parrish's alphabet anthology series, C is for Chimera. (So what is L for? You'll have to wait and see!). I'm also poking at a Bluebeard story that I started ages and ages ago. It was missing a vital piece in the main character's motivation, but I think I've figured it out as of last month. 

The Autumn 2015 issue of Mirror Dance is ready to go for September 1st. While our Autumn issues aren't themed, there's a general focus on vocations and professions in the short stories this time around. On the other hand, I've been seeing a noticeable uptick in mermaid and selkie stories in the slush pile. Hypotheses? I'd blame it on the drought, but we see submissions from all over the globe.

I have two new stories out this month: "Love in the Time of Markov Processes" in Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists (Lethe Press) and "And This is the Song it Sings" in Nightmare. The first is about alternate universes, Tam Lin, whale falls, and unrequited love; the second is about ghost stories and hitchhiking. Also serial killers, symbiosis, and Rilke (maybe). I talk about that in the Author Spotlight. 

And now: back to reading.

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Monday, August 24, 2015

Mirror Dance, short fiction, the writer in its natural habitat, updates

In which I complain about people who write about twins

Sometimes, the only proper response is withering sarcasm.

Or: Stop Twin Nonsense 2K15!

A couple of years ago, my sister and I came up with what I’m going to call Leda’s Law.* It goes like this: in a fictional family with more than four children, two of the children will be a pair of twins. Try it out for a second. The Weasleys in Harry Potter? Check. The Stantons in The Dark is Rising? Check. George R. R. Martin managed to avoid this with the Starks, but that’s probably because he already had a pair of twins on the board. I don’t know for a fact that Leda’s Law is more prevalent in science fiction and fantasy than in other genres, but I do know it’s prevalent enough to be irritating.

Here’s the thing. Like most tropes, Leda’s Law exists because it is convenient for writers, and like most tropes that are convenient for writers, the reason for its convenience is pretty gross. Writers decide that they want a particular family to have a mystically significant number of children—say, seven. But they don’t want to go through the effort of devising seven distinct characters. They think the solution to this problem is to write in a pair of twins who are, for all narrative intents and purposes, the same character.

Writing seven physical descriptions? Now you only have to write six! Coming up with seven mystical powers? Now you only need six! Killing off seven people in a series of contrived coincidences? Now you only need to contrive six!

I wish I were kidding.

I ran into Leda’s Law yesterday while reading a short story in the archives of a popular online SF magazine. I’m not going to name and shame, but I will say that the structure of the story entailed one section dedicated to the death of each of five siblings. Well, each of four siblings, because of Leda’s Law—the twins had to share a section. From a narrative point of view, the twins were the same character.

Writers, from the very bottom of my heart, I am begging you: Please stop doing this. It is gross.

Please stop writing stories, scenes, and sentences in which twins function as a single character. Please stop writing sentences like “Castor and Pollux went to CVS because they had run out of cotton balls.” (Both of them coincidentally ran out of cotton balls at the same time? Or do you think they share a bag of cotton balls?) Please stop writing things like “Linda and the twins were waiting in the car.” (Linda gets a name but the other two people in the car don’t? Why is that?) Please, please, please stop writing bullshit like “The serial killer had six victims—seven, if you count the Smith twins.” (People who do this—do you honestly think one of the victims was going to stand still while the serial killer was going after their sibling? The day a serial killer tries to take on a pair of twins at once is the day that serial killer is going down, IMHO.)

I’m one hundred per cent sure that the people who write this kind of nonsense don’t bear any animosity towards twins. They probably even know twins in real life. (I assume most people know twins in real life? It’s hard to tell, since everyone who knows me knows a twin.) They’re just…I don’t know. Lazy? Unobservant? They think no one is going to care?

Speaking as a twin: I care. I care a lot. When I was eight, I cried when I read books with twins in them because fiction kept screwing us up. I’m a bit past crying now, but I have definitely cursed at my computer screen. I’m sure fictional representations of twins don’t have a major impact on my quality of life. But they are responsible for a lot of minor annoyances, and you know what? They make me feel terrible. I'm betting they make a lot of twins feel terrible. 

Maybe people have somehow gone through several decades of life without realizing that talking about individuals as though they were not individuals is insulting. If this is you, consider this your wake-up call. Stop writing about twins as though they were a single character. Stop publishing stories that do this. Stop reading stories that do this and letting it pass without comment. It’s a very minor thing. It’s a very gross thing.

Please, stop doing it.

And don't even get me started on people who write about twins as though they were the same constellation. 

*Ironically, one place where Leda’s Law doesn’t seem to apply is Greek mythology, where large groups of siblings (the Perseides, the Muses) are all singletons and the twins tend not to have other siblings (Artemis and Apollo)—or if they do have other siblings, those siblings are also twins (Helen and Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux). Of course, if you're siblings in Greek mythology, you probably already share a collective name and a catasterism, so your desire for individuality was probably doomed from the beginning. 

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Sunday, June 28, 2015

the writer in its natural habitat, twin nonsense, writing

Five Things of various shapes and sizes

Looking at the archive of this blog, there seems to be a pattern: in January, I resolve to work harder on my internet presence, and there are a fair number of blog entries; then the winter quarter catches up with me, and between teaching, research, and writing, I fall off the internet-planet until something happens that demands to be blogged about. The question of whether this particular post fits the pattern or not if left open as an exercise to the reader.

1. Reprints! "Final Exam" is being reprinted in John Joseph Adams' Wastelands 2. Read an interview with me (and other interviews with the other fabulous contributors) here. "The Minotaur's Wife" appeared in Pantheon's Persephone issue at the end of January, and "All the King's Monsters" will appear in Airships & Automatons at the beginning of next month.

2. The Spring 2015 issue of Mirror Dance is all ready to go! I'm also getting a lot of awesome submissions for the summer "Animals and Humans" - more so than usual. Just an especially popular theme? Or is everyone getting a lot of writing done now that they're cooped up for the winter?

3. I finished a story! Yes, that is important enough to get its own bullet point. Horror stories are easy to start and hard to finish, in my experience, so I'm giving myself credit on this.

4. I am not at all caught up on reading. However, as a reward for myself for achieving something like a word-work balance (like a work-life balance, but for people who do two different kinds of work), I bought a copy of Caitlin Kiernan's The Red Tree and re-devoured it in one sitting.

5. And finally, speaking of horror: I am going to the nonfiction editor for Nightmare's Queers Destroy Horror! special issue! Ridiculously excited about this. More news as it comes.

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Saturday, February 14, 2015

horror, Mirror Dance, queer fiction, the writer in its natural habitat

2014 Fiction?

So, as I have alluded more than once, 2014 was a terrible year for me reading-wise. I've put out a plea on Twitter:

I fell so far behind on reading short fiction in 2014. Anyone have favorites I probably missed? (Self-promo totally acceptable!)
— Megan Arkenberg (@meganarkenberg) January 26, 2015

Have any recommendations? Please share them there or here!

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Sunday, January 25, 2015

reading, the writer in its natural habitat

On Twitter!

As I continue to ease my way into the second decade of the twenty-first century, I've finally signed up for Twitter. You can follow me at @meganarkenberg. Feel free to let me know who else I should be following!

In other news, my sister has a story up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Sunny Moraine released a new novel on Tuesday. The Kickstarter for Lightspeed's Queers Destroy Science Fiction is in full swing, and you should definitely be reading the personal essays by An Owomoyela and others.

My students have their midterm next Monday. I cannot believe how fast time flies on the quarter system.

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Thursday, January 22, 2015

Lightspeed, queer fiction, recommendations, the writer in its natural habitat, Twitter

Out of Hibernation

I've been back in California for two weeks now, after spending the holidays in Wisconsin. Due to poor planning--or constitutional incapacity to meet deadlines--I wound up bringing the drafts of three overdue short stories home with me. Frustratingly, coming back to short fiction after a hectic academic quarter feels less refreshing than I wanted it too. I have lighter teaching responsibilities this quarter, and more time to dedicate to writing, but I feel like I haven't been able to get a through-line on any of my stories-in-progress. I can tell you what they're about, but putting down one scene after another has been absolutely draining. I second-guess myself after every paragraph, if not every sentence. Maybe I'm just out-of-practice.

On a less serious note, I'm starting the new year with a new website. The switch was mostly prompted by the realization that it's no longer 2009, and I should really have my own domain name. But it was also an excuse to play around with free stock images from Unsplash and Little Visuals, especially on my Browse by Genre page. This kind of digital tinkering satisfies the same region of my soul that constantly rearranges the art on the walls and shelves in my office.

I'm also catching up on recently published short fiction. Well, "catching up" makes the last week sound much milder than it's actually been: I mean I've been binging on short fiction, plowing through the last three months of Shimmer, Apex, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Kaleidotrope. On that note, I want to get better about recommending stories I love, so here are two off the top of my head:

1. "The Salt Wedding" by Gemma Files, in the winter issue of Kaleidotrope - This story is a lot of things and I'm terrible at summarizing, but you'll love it if you like alternate history, magicians, pirates, female leads, queer characters, strangely sweet relationships or utterly perverse ones, and/or distinctive narrative voices. Files is one of my horror heroes, and this story (and its companions in Beneath Ceaseless Skies) might make her my historical fantasy hero, too.

2. "Caretaker" by Carlie St. George, in Shimmer #22 - I just read this flash fiction this morning. It walks the delicate line between dark fantasy and fantastic horror, in that it will give you a chill but ends on a melancholy (rather than terrifying) note. Again, I'm terrible at summarizing, but this one has ghosts, suicides, and a main character with a unique calling. This is my introduction to St. George's writing, and I will definitely be seeking out her other stories. ETA: I lied! This wasn't my introduction to St. George--I also enjoyed her humorous-yet-melancholy (there's that word again) superhero story "This Villain You Must Create" in Lightspeed a couple summers ago.

There are many more where those come from (seriously, three months of six magazines), and if I need to take a break from the two short stories currently sitting on my desk, I'll post more later.

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Sunday, January 18, 2015

recommendations, the writer in its natural habitat, website

Archived Stories

Just a heads-up that I am, once again, cleaning up the links on my bibliography page, which means that a number of old (old, old) short stories are being added to the archive on this blog. Caveat emptor, always check the sell-by date, etc.

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Monday, August 11, 2014

archives, public service announcement, the writer in its natural habitat

Bridges and Iron and Bone

As I continue the at times surprisingly slow process of moving from one state to another, I'm discovering drafts of stories that changed direction so radically that when their offspring finally saw the light of day, they didn't even look like the same species as their parents. "Bridges of Iron and Bone," from the notebook I carried between September and December 2009, is an early version of "The Suicide's Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition." It didn't satisfy me for some reason. It's a story that I wouldn't write now, or if I did, I would write it very differently. Be that as it may, it struck me, as I reread it this last week, as a story that wanted to be shared.

* * *

Bridges of Iron and Bone

The first thing you learn in Pandemonium is that you cannot stop an angel who truly wants to fall.

His bed faces south, towards the black struts that gape like a dragon’s ribcage and the sun and the low red clouds. This is hard-won victory on her part. There are so many patients, so many broken bones and minds and pinions snapped like flower stems with red and marrow-sweet sap, and why should he have the south window, he who cannot see it? The other nurses with their crisp white uniforms and fangs and perfume of myrrh and grave dust look at her with anger, smirk with derision. It is not their place to care that he feels the sunlight on his face, or that his legs are shattered from the fall like a favorite teacup, or that the doctors snap their pointed tails and hiss that he will never see again.

But after everything, she is still human, and she cares.

He came on a Friday evening, folded into a stretcher of yellow rags like an envelope bearing news of a death. Blood matted his hair and sheeted over the empty black eye sockets. His mouth was beautiful and raw as a wound. She found an empty bed for him and pushed it into the sunlight that fell like jaundice through the scarlet sky.

On Sunday morning, when she opened his lips for a sip of milk, she heard him whisper. “You cannot stop an angel who truly wants to fall.” The words became a gray vapor in the air, smelling of salt.


She stroked his forehead, and felt the pinprick scars of his Fall like blind letters beneath her fingertips.

*

There is only one bridge in Pandemonium. It is taller than the tallest tower and the city crouches in its shadow, black and silent. Like the world serpent, it swallows its own tail, enclosing the earth that bore it without beginning or end. The river beneath it is black and hard as concrete. It smells like sulfur, like funeral flowers, like a slaughterhouse, like rot. It smells like a suicide's perfume. The water runs as thin as the backing on a paste diamond, or as deep as a mother's sorrow. It doesn't matter. Skulls, wings, hearts, promises - everything breaks when it hits the river.

On Monday, he fingers the bandages above his eyes. They are clean and hard and white, like bones stripped by crows. He pushes against them as though he is trying to reach the emptiness underneath, the horrible scar of his sanity, for it is only the mad who keep their vision here. If he could see the things around him, twisted and terrible and beautiful, perhaps he would know his blindness for a blessing.

But then, he cannot see her. 

His broken lips twist but he does not make a sound. Slowly, he trails his fingers down across his hollow cheeks, his skeletal chest, his hips, until he finds the place where his legs are nothing but skin and fragments of bone. 

"It was a long fall," she says. "No one could have survived it."

He begins to whimper. Blood soaks his bandages instead of tears.

*

The bridge over Pandemonium is built of iron and bone. They weave together like a net, like a thousand crosses, and the tarmac road beneath is as smooth and oily as skin. The road is narrow, the gaps in the skeleton so large, it would be perilously easy to fall by accident. But no one ever does.

On Tuesday he refuses to eat. He lies in bed as though it is his coffin, perfectly still, until the sun finds his southern window and forces its way in. Then he tents the musty blankets over his face.

At dinner time, she tries to force a spoonful of soup between his teeth. He clenches his jaw and turns his face away from her. But when she stands to go, he catches her hand in his fist. She stops still, her pulse hammering, but he says nothing. Only rolls the tiny bones between his fingers like rosary beads.

*

There is also a bridge in the town where we grew up. The road beneath it is local limestone, green and white with lichen, and its frame is orange steel. She loved to stand barefoot on the limestone curb, bracing herself against the blood-orange bones, and watch the green river come tumbling over the jagged rocks below. The water ran fast, like madness, like a nightmare, and in the cool evening it looked as smooth and soft and inviting as silk.

On Wednesday, he begins to speak. The doctors listen for a moment, shaking their horned heads, and the other nurses rush past with impatient frowns. he sits on the low chair beside him and strokes his forehead, ever so lightly, and feels the words like nails in her palms.

"She hid it well at first," he says, "but it began to break through her conversation, little mice nibbling through a stone wall. She'd mentioned siblings she never had, jobs she'd never held. Just little slips, so easy to dismiss, so difficult to ignore."

She breathes deeply. His words smell like sweat and lithium.

"Then there were the accusations. She said that I was drugging her food. She thought the medicines were poisoning her, the psychiatrists and therapists were rapists and torturers. I pleaded with her, I argued. I thought about grinding her pills to powder and sneaking them into her tea, but I knew she'd never forgive me for it. That still mattered to me, then."

Of course it did, she thinks. You were still human.

"So I watched sanity leave her," he says. "I watched her welcome the madness."

Drops of blood blossom on the bandages over his eyes, and she strokes his forehead, and she weeps. She wants to tell him that she forgives him, that you cannot stop an angel who truly wants to fall, that he was only human, that none of it matters. But he is so broken, so blind, and she sees the sun passing the window in its veil of blood, and she keeps her silence.

*

We used to stand in the river beneath the bridge and listen to the cars as they rumbled overhead. It was dark and cool and it smelled like rain, like damp earth and open graves. Children and drunks had painted things in bright colors on the limestone, but we didn't. We never intended to leave a mark. All we wanted was the silence, the peace, the river at our feet, the bridge as high as heaven above our heads.

On Thursday the words come like vomit, spilling out of his bloodied mouth with the smell of brimstone and ash. "I didn't want her to jump," he says, again and again, clutching her hand, grinding the bones together. "I never wanted her to jump. I thought about what a relief it would be, to stop watching her, to stop worrying.  To stop spending every moment on guard against sleeping pills and brandy and nooses and knives.She was so clever. It didn't have to be poison or a slash to the wrist. She could turn the gas on while we were sleeping. She could slit an artery in her thigh and hide it beneath her stockings and I'd never know she was bleeding to death while we danced. I wanted the fear to stop. But that didn't mean I wanted her to jump."

She kisses his mouth and feels his words pouring into her, the blood and the fear and the guilt, the smell of brimstone and ashes, the taste of iron and bone. "I know," she says, and he swallows her forgiveness, choking.

*

She fell like an angel. Her back arched, her hair streaming around her, her eyes wide and unseeing. She fell, and I saw her blood flowing redblack over the limestone, and I stood on a bridge of steel and skin, iron and bone. And I flung myself after her, I threw myself into her shadow, because I was overcome with relief, because I didn't see the black river below me, because even though I've known forever that you cannot catch an angel who wants to fall, still, still, you have to try.

On Friday he sits up in bed and screams, screams until blood spills over his chin. The other nurses look away as she takes him in her arms and rocks him like a child, rocks him to the beat of the pain that pulses through her ruined skull. She remembers the orange bridge and the bridge of bone.  She remembers the way he watched her as she fell, his eyes black and whole, and he screamed her name futilely, as she will scream his name, endlessly in this hospital below the bridge that goes on forever--futilely, because the first thing you learn in Pandemonium, the first truth that is the hardest to swallow, that sticks in your throat like bone, is that you cannot save an angel who truly wants to fall.

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Saturday, January 11, 2014

revising, short story, the writer in its natural habitat, writing

TSFAQ (Time-Sensitive Frequently Asked Questions)

Hey Megan, where are you right now?
Glad you asked! Right now, on this fifth of September 2013 at nine hours post-meridiem, I am in my hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska.

What on earth are you going there? Don’t you live in Milwaukee or some place?
Well, until this morning, I did live in Milwaukee. I'm now in the process of moving to Davis, California, and Lincoln is the first stop on my itinerary. I'll be arriving in Davis on Sunday evening.

Why are you moving? Was it the weather? I bet it was the weather.
It was not the weather. I'm entering the Ph.D. in English Literature program at UC Davis. In the unlikely event that you know me personally and this is the first you're hearing of it...well, surprise!

Grad school, huh? What are your research interests?
Victorian literature (especially ghost stories and works with supernatural elements), Gothic literature, and Queer Theory.

Okay, that sounds cool, I guess. How's the writing going?
Much better than it was going last semester. I'm aiming to have five new stories in submission by the end of this quarter. At one time, that would have been a modest goal, but considering the approximately fifty thousand things that have complicated my life over the last year, it now seems positively ambitious.

Oh, and "Sister Philomela Heard the Voices of Angels" placed third in the short poem category in this year's Rhysling Awards, which was pretty cool. So writing is going well.

How's the editing?
Mirror Dance is going well - we just put out a new issue on Sunday. We also have Facebook Page now because all the cool kids are doing it. Watch for updates about Lacuna in early October. (Read: Lacuna is still in e-zine limbo.)

Hey, what did you do to your website?
Sorry, still playing with the formatting. I'm trying to find a template where the main column is wide enough to hold a full line of text in my bibliography, but not so wide that story excerpts become hard to read. I also realize that I never finished my biography page, so that should happen once I finish moving.

Anything else you should update us on?
I got nothing. But check out the the brilliant theme for an upcoming special issue of Lightspeed magazine!

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Thursday, September 05, 2013

editing, grad school, Lightspeed, Mirror Dance, my English major is showing, preaching to the invisible choir, Rhysling, the writer in its natural habitat, travel, updates, writing

Of Flying Time

This is something in the character of a memo-to-self, so please excuse my self-indulgence.

I thought no longer of kind mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on evening air; and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be saying ‘How clear Betton bell sounds tonight after the rain!’; but instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly contents below, and of flying Time and all it had taken out of my life.

From M. R. James, "A Neighbor's Landmark." So far as I can recall, this is the only time one of James's characters experiences anything like a tragic past. And, okay, a brief sentence in one short story hardly counts as a past, but no where else does a Jamesian protagonist's encounter with the supernatural make him think about anything in his life. Graves and spiders and rot and dust, yes, but not all that Time takes--friendship, companions, lovers. This passage starts out being too cliche to be effectively terrifying, but then that last phrase--"of flying Time and all that it had taken out of my life"--that's Terror with a capital T.

Well done, Mr. James. Well done indeed.

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Sunday, November 13, 2011

ghost story, horror, M. R. James, the writer in its natural habitat

The Summer King

The Summer King is now live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Hooray for my longest published story! Not the longest I've written, alas, as there were...incidents...when I was a sophomore in high school. They are still available online. You are warned.

Anyway...How this story came about. In January 2009, I'm sitting on the chair in front of the TV and I see an advertisement for the oh-my-god-that-can't-be-but-it-really-is-a-modern-reimagining-of-King-David-squee! TV show Kings. Now, the show didn't quite live up to my expectations, but it had some lovely moments, and that is all completely beside the point, because the show hadn't even begun in January 2009. All I knew about it was the title and the huge orange banner with a butterfly on it.

And I was thinking about how simply epic that title was. I jotted it down in my little idea-notebook: The ______ King. After all, I thought, who doesn't like kings?

Two answers in quick succession. 1) The French, circa 1789. 2) The Americans, circa anytime. But, because I was in American History Class (R) that semester, the specific Americans I thought of were...ward bosses.

WTF? I know. See, I had misunderstood bosses a little bit. Okay, a lot of bit. I was picturing Robin Hood instead of Boss Tweed's machinery. So the whole gig sounded pretty cool--ruling the city from the streets up. As opposed to a king, ruling from the palace down. Throw in a National Convention--I've mentioned my obsession with French Revolutionary politics, yes?--and there's the political situation of "The Summer King."

I don't know where "summer" came from, incidentally. It was January. I was probably just longing for green grass and strawberries.

So now I had a title and a political situation. My main character, Boss Livy, showed up quite unexpectedly from American Literature Class (R), where I was reading (okay, suffering through) the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, I'm not Twain's biggest fan, but I like what he does with voice. (This shouldn't be a surprise--my favorite book series is Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths, where Mildmay 'speaks' in gorgeous vernacular.) And I guess it rubbed off, because all of a sudden, I was hearing something like a female Huck Finn with better grammar and a lot more profanity. (The profanity is probably courtesy of Monette's Mildmay, who did more than any other character to increase my comfort with swearing in fiction.)

So now I had a title and a political situation and a viewpoint character. And I just started writing. And writing. And writing. I had no idea where this thing was going to end.

Where it did end, finally, was with me in a bathrobe at the foot of my bed, frantically scribbling through the climax and the closing paragraph, while my impeccably dressed significant other waited for me to put on my gosh-dang dress so we could go out to eat already.

The writer's life is one of unparalleled grace and elegance.

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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, first person POV, preaching to the invisible choir, the writer in its natural habitat, writing