I’ve had my head deep in a novel project this summer–my beloved white whale (or white elephant?) Pacifica–and so I’ve been away for a few weeks from this blog, as well as my garden, and hiking, and sometimes even meaningful human contact.
But! I love hearing from people about my latest novel, Exit Black, which came out in February. This screenshot, from my friend Bill in New York, is one of my favorites:
Yes, Exit Black is on the shelves in the New York Public Library!
For lots of reasons probably having to do with talent, I’m not the kind of writer who is ever going to win a Nebula or a Hugo, much less a PEN award or a Pulitzer. But someday I can tell my grandkids that their grandfather once had a book on the shelf of the New York Public Library. And, grandkids being grandkids, and the future being the future, there’s a good chance they will ask “what’s a library?” or, God forbid, “what’s a book?” Sic transit gloria mundi.
I used to write songs all the time. In fact, songwriting was the first literary genre I took seriously as writing for writing’s sake (as opposed to strings of words on paper that I would turn in for a grade at school like a monkey doing a trick for a banana with a big “A+” drawn on the peel. Or a banana with a “B-” on it–those bananas worked fine for me, too).
Back when I was a skinny, shaggy young slacker, I wrote songs for the first band I was in, The Missionaries. Then I wrote a lot more songs for the bands that followed (Leatherbound Shakespeares, The Ben Was, Hop on Pop). None of those songs were any good–seriously, the best thing about those bands (besides how amazing our hair was back then) were the band names. But the songs themselves? In retrospect, I can see that they were very early artistic efforts, much more earnest than skillful.
The artist earnestly trying on some kind of Roger Daltrey vibe, 1986 (?)
Come to think of it, though, I do believe a couple of songs I wrote for that last youthful band, Hop on Pop, were actually pretty good. I remember feeling proud of them when I was 20 years old because they were so far beyond anything I had written previously. In fact, I’d give a lot to hear those songs again, not the way I would play them today, but as we played them over thirty years ago, feeling brash and flip and like we were going to be whisked off at any minute to an as-yet-undetermined big city to become rock stars.
I’ve been playing music on and off (mostly off) since then, mostly for a band where I am the youngest and least technically adept player. This band has gone by a few names as well: Los Profes, then the Gravitropes, and now we’re trying on the name threejays (what do you think, dear reader? Should it be capitalized? All lower case? ALL UPPER CASE?!) In any case, the one thing I brought to the group historically–besides relative youth–is half-decent songwriting ability.
So it was with a little leap of inner joy when I found myself writing a song a couple of weeks ago–the first one I have written in at least 12 years or so. Will it be any good? Hard to say. As I tell my creative writing students all the time, you’ll write a lot of crappy poems (or stories, or songs) before you write a single good one. And then you’ll write a lot more crap before you start writing good stuff with any regularity. And no one I know writes good stuff all the time. So the odds are stacked against this song (with the working title “Necktie Rhetoric”) being a good one. But it feels great to come back to a genre I haven’t tried in a long time. Whoever you are out there, and whatever you do, I wish for you to feel the freedom to make something useless exactly the way you want to make it.
The artist declaiming…something…over a pleasant drone of guitars, 1991
I experienced a weird constellation of three events last week. First, my editor, my agent, and I hashed out the jacket copy for my upcoming novel, Exit Black. It was weird to realize that I was basically helping write ad copy for a book that I labored over for two years. Second, I sent out a query to a literary agent for the book I drafted after Exit Black, called Pacifica. (My current excellent and extant agent, Scott, works on film and TV projects, and Pacifica definitely isn’t movie material, so I am looking for a bookish agent as well).
And third, I was driving down Broadway in Portland when I saw this bumper sticker ahead of me:
Millennials and Zoomers–and their parents who might have watched Spongebob Squarepants with them twenty years ago–will recognize this as Squidward Tentacles’ self portrait, “Bold and Brash.” I was happily shocked to see it on a bumper sticker. And I realized when I saw it that this publication process I am experiencing with my books is drawing up all of my deeply Squidwardian impulses: my vanity, my hunger for approval, my inner conflict about how art intersects with commerce. Squidward, c’est moi.
If you need a blast from the past, or you somehow never saw the original, here is a clip of me Squidward from the episode “Artist Unknown:”
The author in the process of failing the subway test.
Without the gargantuan cave of Facebook to amplify my voice, I don’t know how many people will see my writing here. But it helps me to write here nonetheless.
Coming soon, I’ll reprint one of my favorite early stories in honor of its 10th anniversary. Keep watching the skies…
I’ve been meaning to post this note for a couple of weeks, but weariness at day’s end has constantly gotten the better of me lately. I’m excited to share that my story “Nonesuch” has come out in Britain’s great dark fantasy magazine Black Static. I’m quite taken by the layout, and the illustration is the best I’ve seen of my work.
“Nonesuch” is a very meaningful story for me. I set out to write a Bernard Malamud-ian, Marc Chagall-esque collage about my grandparents’ farm in Dayton, Oregon, and what I ended up with was both darker and more frightening than I had anticipated. I realize in retrospect that the story is a meditation on the loss of my brother, my father, and my grandfather, as well as a look at the theft and violence that lies at the root of all land ownership if you dig deeply enough into a family’s history. It was a hard story to write, but I can’t think of anything I’ve written that I feel more proud of. You can pick up the issue at the 800-pound Amazonian gorilla. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to give a reading of the story sometime.
I’ve been sojourning two years now in the blogosphere. And slowly, very slowly, I believe I’m getting the hang of it. “Getting the hang of it,” in my case, means writing more and more what interests me, on the schedule that interests me, rather than trying to use blogging to present myself to the world as some kind of up-and-coming writer, or as a hauntingly original voice about to break through, or some other kind of self-promotional folly.
I’m happy to be here, happy to be publishing a story every once in a while, happy to share insights when they come to me. Thanks for reading, friends.
I’m happy to pass along the news that one of my favorite stories, “Count Eszterházy’s Harmonium,” has come out in this quarter’s edition of Kaleidotrope. This was my first attempt at an epistolary story, and I think it turned out pretty well. I have written so little fiction about my time in Hungary, and I had a great time imagining the waning days of Hungary’s life as a world power in this piece. I invite you to read, and I hope you enjoy!
I got some good news last week: Trevor Quachri, the editor of the venerable Analog magazine, has decided to pick up my story “Proteus.” I’m not sure when it will be coming out, but it’s been wonderful to have a little run of acceptances after such a long dry spell of rejections last year. I’ll keep you posted when “Proteus” is due to come out, as well as when my story “Count Eszterhazy’s Harmonium” will appear in Kaleidotrope.
“Proteus” will be the 15th story I’ve published. In other words, I’ve published 1.66667 stories per year since I started writing science fiction in 2007. What seems like kind of a paltry rate of publication will still, eventually, yield a decent sized harvest of stories. If I’ve learned nothing else from writing, I’ve learned to be patient.
In other publication-related news, Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection is on the shelves now, as is Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition. My story “The Daughters of John Demetrius” shows up in both of them. It was a wonderful experience to stumble across the Dozois anthology on the “What’s Hot” shelf at Powell’s City of Books last week. Going to Powell’s is often a bit depressing for me: I often come away feeling overwhelmed by how many great books are out there, that feeling that there are way more good books to read than there are days in life to read them. Other times I go in and feel like I don’t amount to much as a writer as I stroll among the towers of great authors and literary hucksters and folks who just got lucky in the publishing game. It was a sweet moment to see that I too get lucky once in a while.
The author in his natural habitat. Photo by the lovely Carlyn Eames.
My two month-long radio silence from this blog has been a little sad-making for me. I have a lot to report about my writing; my incisive (to me) observations are piling up, waiting to be observed in this blog. But dang–work life and my dadly responsibilities have made blogging hard of late.
There’s more to come on The Subway Test: I am hopeful that the coming two months will be less bananas at work than the last two months have been. There are books I want to share with you, scientific discoveries I’d like to philosophize about, news about my own writing to share. I hope we’ll see each other here soon.
I had dinner with a friend a couple of weeks ago who mentioned how much she likes the blog posts I send her way. But, she said, she wasn’t sure who was the author of these posts. That was when I realized that perhaps I’ve been overly anonymous on this blog.
So, at last, the picture on the avatar is me (I was a methane molecule for Halloween last year). My name is on the title. To be honest, I feel a little uncomfortable with my name in little lights like that. But I suppose it’s fair, if I want people to read my work, to let people know who I am.
The Subway Test 