There was a recent thread at the Graveside Tales forums wherein people in the know (as in, people not me) discussed a recent trend in spec fic magazines, in particular horror mags. Many of them seem to close down or, to save themselves and/or pay a really good rate to their authors, go online. Understandably, small magazines often can’t afford the production and postal costs, since they don’t get carried by book shops unless they’re local favorites. As someone who likes to curl up with my scary stories and read by candlelight fairly often (because I’m dramatic that way, I guess), I found this a little disheartening at first. But you know, the more I get into the world of the online short fiction, the more I find to love. And the more I think the genre is suited to the medium.

So I want to start putting up little blurbs and mini reviews of some of my favorites here on a regular basis. Mini online spec fic recs, I suppose. It’ll mostly run to horror or dark fantasy for obvious reasons, but regular fantasy and sci fi will doubtless crop up here and there. And let me know what your favorites are, so I can go and find more, and give myself something good to read when I’m avoiding work.

Gonna start out today with a short one that really stuck with me. I read Catherine J. Gardner’s Burying Sam on a link from the same Graveside Tales forums a month or two back. The thing has stuck with me ever since. It’s a horror flash piece that takes creepy to a whole new level. I don’t want to say too much, because it’s all balanced perfectly and I fear I’ll give something away. But this one hurt (so good! Sorry… I had to…)

Next, just to switch things up, a bit of urban fantasy from Meghan McCarron, The Magician’s House. I started reading it on a regular visit to Strange Horizons and became engrossed quickly. I think it has all the elements necessary in good short fantasy, and it’s quite beautifully told. Elemental magic, a relationship that’s horribly wrong (possibly offensive to some, be warned, since the heroine is clearly Not Legal, but that’s rather the point), and a Room Inside A Stove. Plus, you know, growing up. I’ve linked to the first part, but I’m pretty sure if you read it, you’ll go on to the second right away.

And just to prove that I can read stuff that isn’t necessarily genre and enjoy it—here’s an experimental little thing from Brett Rosenblatt. I went to Susurrus looking for something to disturb me, and came out with The Beat of Sorrow instead. It’s not the usual straightforward storytelling I’m about, but it has a fun literary bent. If it seems to take itself a little too seriously, well, it’s appropriate. It’s about a musician after all. (See what growing up with a bunch of them does to you? Jaded!)

Finally, for now, a little something from the awesome Southern Fried Weirdness: Barry Napier’s Grave Seasons. As the title of the ‘zine might imply, it’s a place for spec fic with a Southern storytelling slant. (Er, way too much alliteration. Sorry.) This particular story is fun for just that, Southern weirdness at its finest (and most disturbing.) Violence and black magic in the middle of nowhere. You know you want to.

So that it for this round. Let me know what else I should be reading, in case I’m not. We can’t have that.

[NOTE: If I mentioned you here and you’d rather I hadn’t, please email me and let me know—I’ll remove the reference immediately!]

-Katey

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Got some really exciting news last night (well, this morning technically, but I hadn’t been to bed yet so it counts as night… right?) My short story Poor Andrew Boyd will be in the new Graveside Tales anthology, Harvest Hill, edited by Douglas Hutcheson and Michael J. Hultquist!

The idea is awfully cool (which might explain why I was inspired in the first place). This from the duotrope.com blurb: “Harvest Hill, a little town in East Tennessee, seems like an idyllic place most of the year. But it is not always so, and especially not on Halloween–every Halloween. From just after midnight of Oct. 30 until midnight Oct. 31, horrors break loose both big and small. And this has been happening as far back as the 1500s.”

I picked 1781 as my Halloween of choice. American history meets creeptasticness meets Appalachia? How could I resist?

It looks like it’s going to be brilliant– the people at Graveside Tales are fantastic, and what I’ve read from the other authors in the Table of Contents (the ones I know so far!) is all above and beyond. I’m totally flattered and ecstatic and many other good adjectives to be there. So look for it around early October!

And I gotta send a shout out to Meghan Brunner and Jen St.Louis for the help on not just this one, but all of ‘em. Editors are pretty badass, if you hadn’t noticed.

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Summer is always busy in my family, which is to be expected when your parents are both teachers. They always want to drag their kids across the country to see long lost relatives, or just hang out on the beach, and god knows both pastimes were always met with approval by myself and my brother. (Particularly since our family is a trip, on both sides, and blessedly fun to be with. Seems like a rare thing, but hey, I’m a lucky girl.) Even now that I live six hours away from them and my brother has just graduated with his BA, we’re still caught up in the whirlpool now and then, leading to months like this past one.

Which has been great, but insane. Kind of sums up my family in general, though.

Due to the madness, I’ve been a little too distractible to deal with reading full-length novels. Between long car rides and visiting, short stories have been more my deal-appropriate since I’ve just finished the draft of the Audio File project, and am trying to let it cool by concentrating on writing shorts for the next few weeks. So it works out.

I finally got hold of Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, which was of course wonderful. It’s a bit like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without the profuse and distracting sidebars, really-bite size chunks of her fabulous world. I was extra happy to see Strange again, since he’s one of my favorite literary characters these days (along with, of course, Arabella), in the title story. It’s wonderful to visit Neil Gaiman’s Village of Wall again in The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse as well. But the “favorite” slot in this one is definitely reserved for Mr. Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower-which is the kind of thing I most like to read. A little dark, a lot of magic, and weirdly whimsical at the same time. She’s fabulous. It’s like Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen had an evil lovechild.

Er. Something to that effect, anyhow.

I really like the concept of redesigning the larger myth of a country into something codified. I know that’s what Tolkien was trying to do, create this entire mythos, and I know Clarke is after it as well. I really wonder what it would look like if someone managed it for America.

You know, apart from American Gods. Which is really as close as we can come, in some ways-but also more like the seminal book in a future/current country-wide attempt. The beginning of something brilliant, and all that.

To switch gears, I also got my copy of Barren Worlds, a Science Fiction anthology from Hadley Rille books. An old writing pal, Sue Penkivech, has a great story in it, so naturally I wanted to see the whole thing in all its radiant printed glory. When it comes to Sci-Fi, I love Herbert, Asimov, and a couple of other classics, and I’m a sucker for the genre in film, comics, and television, but I don’t usually get into reading it in novel form. Short stories, however, I will swallow in one delicious gulp.

Lots of good stuff in this anthology-a really wide spectrum of takes on the rather vague yet inspiring theme. Most of them leave you feeling kind of deflated and/or disturbed, but in that good and thoughtful way. (Maybe that’s why I can’t handle reading too much sci-fi at once-it always makes me thoughtful and I’m kind of a shallow dick? Short stories are the best!) But some of them are hopeful and weirdly uplifting. I’m getting a kick out of the varied emotions with which I come out of each story, and I’m super impressed with the way the editors purposefully chose and ordered them to get that effect. Difficult in any anthology, let alone one with so much material. Well done on all counts.

So of course, after all this I needed to go back to Vonnegut-who is pretty much Home Base for me when it comes to modern Science Fiction. When I was about 15, I had a teacher, Mrs. Paugh, who tried to talk me into reading Sci-Fi more seriously. She gave me this book of short stories she’d had in one of her college courses called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Of course, I had no idea who Vonnegut was at that age, we hadn’t gotten to Slaughterhouse Five, and I don’t think I would’ve absorbed it if we had. But the title story was, of course, his, and a lot of the others struck such a chord with me that I decided that Sci-Fi was definitely worth a go-at least in short form. (My brother won me over to the novel form with Dune about a year later.) Years later in college I had a bunch of friends who were all about the Vonnegut and went back to him, and realized that he is pretty much love.

Reading the Barren Worlds anthology made me dig out the short story collection of his I got a few years ago called Welcome to the Monkey House. If you want a serious recommendation for awesome short fiction, that’s my first. The man could do everything, and make it his. The surreal war-is-hell vibe he’s so famous for in All the King’s Horses, with its super tense human chess theme, and The Manned Missiles, Cold War emotion and release in letter format. His painfully truthful take on modern literary fiction in Miss Temptation and The Lie. That brilliant humor I love him for-cold and nonjudgmental, yet somehow almost accidentally sympathetic-talking about the delusional housewife in More Stately Mansions. And the perfect Sci Fi dystopian visions of Welcome to the Monkey House and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. And when I say perfect, I really mean it. Those are only just my favorites, but the whole collection is, and I do not say this lightly, totally rad.

This is fun stuff. This is what reading should be all about: having a good time and maybe saying something honest now and then. Tracks and connections that get you to here and there.

All that said, it’s nice to be able to sit down and read a full length novel again, now that I’m home and settled for a bit.

That and, of course, sit down and write something. Before I start twitching.

-Katey

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I’m almost finished reading Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis. While I hate to make any claims about it when I still have ten pages left… first let me say that I like Frank McCourt. I liked Angela’s Ashes very much, actually– he’s an excellent writer with a hell of a sense of humor about life’s awful disasters, and an amazing story to tell. What’s not to love? So I’m not trying to knock McCourt when I say that Tis isn’t really my thing. I mean just that– it’s not my thing. It’d be rad for most of my family, however, so I plan on reccing it anyhow.

In the meantime, I’ve just finished the first draft of the Audio File thing, which was huge. So now it’s down to getting a little more short fiction out there, which is going smashingly, thanks. I don’t like to say too much about my own writing here, but there is something small I wanted to bring up that I think is pretty awesome and important. I’ve had some badass advice– from experienced friends, from books, from agent and author blogs, from all over the place. But there was one piece I read the other day that struck me as so important I want to stand up and scream it all over the place. And I think this is the place for it.

Neil Gaiman’s blog is among the many I stalk daily. (Who you callin’ fangirl?) He does a lot of questions and answers from emails he gets, which is just another brilliant thing about Neil Gaiman. On father’s day someone was asking him how he was able to deal with all the rejection and pain and frustration of failure as a writer– I assume both in the past as an aspiring writer and now as a writer who probably doesn’t get to do quite everything he wants. And he had the best answer ever. “Write the next thing.”

It’s been a really strange couple of years for me since I ditched grad school and started on this madness in earnest– first supporting myself with any random job that’d give me free nights to write, and now going at it full time. Sometimes I feel like I’m popping the crazy pills, yeah. But that’s what keeps me (admittedly, questionably) sane, what he said.

Part of the fun of reading is seeing stuff you’ve always thought put into a pretty and articulate package by someone else, right? So this is my moment of Zen. I reckon loads of others will get it too.

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Oh the excitement. BUT, site update indeed! I added a page for the current draft-in-progress, The Audio File, which is my first ever not-dark-and-scary attempt. Still firmly in the realm of urban fantasy, though. Spec Fic all the way! I put an excerpt there that I think kinda represents the feeling of the whole book, and gives a little showing of what kind of magic/superpowers exist in that world– which, as we all know, is always the best part.

Also changed the page for the pet project, the vampire madness working-titled-ly called The Family. The first chapter used to be up there, but since I’m in the throes of hacking the whole book at the moment, and not actively searching for representation for it, I thought it would be better served with a shorter excerpt that just speaks to the tone of the whole thing. Which is kinda broody and dark and… Liam. (He does get better though. Sort of. Eventually. Hey, some people are just better human beings once they’re dead, you know? Sad thought, that killing people right and left might make someone more tolerable…)

Also did a few little clean-up things– making text easier to read and such. Hit me up via email, or right here, if you have any suggestions. (Apart from fixing the sidebar. Dammit, why won’t it…? Okay. I’ll stop now. Seriously.)

EDIT: Holy crap, and Becca re-did the whole site! Looks pretty damn sharp, huh? Go Team Becca! You’re the best, man.

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Hey Becca the Admin is back! Maybe she can fix my stupid sidebar that hates Firefox! Yes, I’m still griping about that. Gimme a break, will you? Keep refreshing, Firefox People, it’ll come back! Really!
In exciting news (I actually have a little of that these days!), the cover for Voices has been announced, and it looks way creepy and fun! Check it out here. Hmm that makes it all rather real, doesn’t it? Rockstar, man.

In way un-exciting news, I’ve been moving over the past week. No one likes to move, so I’ll leave it there (for once), but I will say that the muses have officially been rattling around unable to do anything for about two months now, between vacation, moving, brother’s graduation from college, etc., and it’s really starting to bug the hell out of me. Yes, I expected it, planned for it even, but it’s still hard on the brains. So please pray to your heathen gods that I get some of these stories unclogged/puked up this coming week. Or this won’t be pretty. It’s about head-‘splody* time around these parts.

Also, I haven’t read anything at all this week, which might be even worse. I do know some people who don’t need to read to write, but man. I like a little fuel on my fire, and the best fuel is reading a book by someone I want to be.

I’m so grouchy when my little life gets interrupted. Even if it’s all for good stuff.

*Yeah, I stole that from Jhonen Vasquez. It’s in homage, man!

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So the sidebar is still dropping down in Firefox. So sorry about that, I’m still trying to fix it, I swear. If you refresh a few times it usually hops back up… and it does work in IE. But yeah. Blech.

Anyhow, that isn’t my reason for posting here! Moving on!

As I repeatedly mention, I have my friends to thank if anything I write is polished enough to send off to an agent or publisher. I rely shamelessly on the kindness of, if not strangers, others. This is simply because I’ve never really been taught properly how to write (at least, not fiction) and so a lot of what I DO know comes from other people who’ve been kind enough to comment on something of mine, and sometimes become regular editors and critique partners. I’m singularly blessed with partners and friends of massive talent and knowledge. Thank god.

But I’m also blessed with friends who know a good fucking book when they see one, and a lot of my fiction reading list lately has been thanks to them. I’ve been on a long vacation recently, which was kind of an adventure, and I read so much awesome my head almost exploded. Thanks to them!

The forays into regency romance from Neuroscientist Reenie, for example. On a short visit to her up in NYC last week (we saw The Verve. Yes, weep in jealousy, for they were brilliant), she let me borrow some more Georgette Heyer, which I promptly swallowed whole on the travel adventure that followed. I read Sylvester on the train back to DC then the plane to Atlanta (long story, let’s just say I haven’t been in my own house for awhile), and then I read Venetia on the way back from Puerto Rico (which… is where I went after Atlanta. Like I say, long story.) Man, if you ever want some horribly clever vacation reading, go for Heyer. The woman is amazing. I love a romance where not only do they constantly mock romance novel convention (Mmm Austen fans of the world, unite and take over), but the female protagonist actually never utters the words “I love you.” I liked the former more than the latter, but that’s not saying anything bad about Venetia. She was awesome too. Sylvester is just kind of about two awful people, and it’s my kind of awful. And hilarious.

Then I re-read a bunch of Neil Gaiman, American Gods and Anansi Boys specifically. I’m sure anyone who knows me knows that he’s My Hero, so you can imagine how much fun it was for me. I forgot how funny Anansi Boys really is (Also: never noticed that he thanked PG Wodehouse in the credits before. I read it before I’d read any PG Wodehouse. My god, it’s all so clear.) And American Gods is one part Adventure, one part Black Humor, and two parts Weirdo Genius.

I also read a book my dad has been barking at me about for months now, Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Last Legion. Now, as a lover of both historical fiction and fantasy, you’d imagine this would be right up my tree. Reading the first page and seeing the name Ambrosius was a dead tipoff that not only is it two of my favorite genres, but it’s also Arthurian! However… it’s not that great, sadly. I wonder if a lot of it isn’t suffering in translation, since it’s Italian originally, really. But he’s one of those authors that kind of says, “Oh hey and she feels this way about him, by the way” and doesn’t really bother to show you how or why. He likes you to just take him at his word. But the Roman stuff was truly neat, and it’s a really cool example of how every country that touches the Arthurian Mythos wants to make itself an integral part. (Witness France and the disastrous fucking up of Guinevere. Thanks a lot, Lancelot, you jerk.) Not that Rome didn’t have anything to do with it, if we’re talking historically, just that it’s difficult to consider Arthur remotely Italian without a nudge in the right direction. Dude pulls it off. So it’s a good read, but not terribly well executed, is what I mean to say.

And now I have the awesome pleasure of re-reading the first two in Meghan Brunner’s Pendragon Trilogy (It’s hard not to love a story about Magick set in a Renn Faire. I mean, you get all the cool historical nerdery of the fest, plus the badass modern wit of an urban fantasy. And Ryna+Phoe=love.) So weeee, off to see the wizard, man.

Won’t be getting much writing done myself for the rest of the month, but that’s because I’m moving house in a week or two. After that, I suppose it’s time to buckle down, get Oubliette beaten into shape, finish the first draft of the other project I’m messing with right now (so close, but not close enough!), and hammer out some more short fiction ideas that have been rattling around in my skull for awhile now. Normally the delay would drive me nuts, but as long as I have good stuff to read, I can hold off my demons for a month, at least. Or so they’re letting me believe right now.

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And as usual, I mean “disturbing” in a good way.

The good people at Morrígan Books had this brilliant idea: an anthology of modern horror where every story takes place in a hotel room. How could I resist trying my damnedest to get in on that one? (Don’t let the pretty flower background mislead you. Becca the Webmaster only put it there to balance out my issues with blood and insanity, she tells me.) And wonder of wonders, my submission of short fiction, The Mirror, has been accepted into the fold, among a list of twelve incredibly talented (awfully scary) writers.

So what I’m telling you is that my first publication will be the September 2008 release of Voices, edited by edited by Mark S. Deniz and Amanda Pillar, from Morrígan Books. I’m obviously ridiculously excited about the project. The tentative lineup and announcements can be found here. [EDIT: Old LJ link went defunct, new link in place!] Looks like an awful lot of fun. Horrible, creepy, disturbing fun.

PS- Sincerest apologies for the bad behavior of the sidebar in Firefox. I’ve tried every trick in the book, but with Becca on hiatus I’m quite out of my depth. I’m not giving up though! In other news, it works perfectly in IE. *grumble*

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I’m the first to adhere to sensible advice– I crave it, I seek it out, I require advice. And one of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve ever seen or read anywhere has come from many, many sources, but it always sounds the same. That is that I should write naturally. As in, how I speak (within reason). Which means that every fifth word ends up “fuck”, and I have to edit a lot of it out, but in the end it does make things better that I was honest. Or as honest as I’m equipped to be– which is not very, but there’s a reason I want to tell long lies for a living when I grow up. I think that in many ways, this willingness to write the way we speak is a fairly new development in literature, in the last fifty years or so. (Seeing as before then, anything that honest would’ve been burned. People still said “bad” things, they just didn’t keep them for posterity. Or, if they did… well that’s another post altogether, and an interesting subject, but I’ll stop with the geek-out now.)

I bring this up because I had this impulse last week to walk to the book store and buy A Tale of Two Cities, which I hadn’t read in quite awhile. I graduated from high school ten years ago, and that was the last time I read it. I remembered really loving it then, and that it renewed my good opinion of Dickens, which had been recently crushed by several trips into his thickest and… let’s call them pointlessly complicated and wordy books. To be nice. But Meghan was talking about it in a comment on a former post here, and then NK Kingston and I just had a long discussion where it popped up, and I suddenly thought what the hell. Why not see if it was really that good.

So I literally got up out of my desk and walked there immediately, which takes about an hour one way; thankfully the weather in Virginia is finally awesome again. So I put my little four dollar copy down on the counter and the nice gentleman behind it smiles at me and says, “Good deal on a good book. It’s a little old-fashioned, but it’s a good book.”

I turned that over and over in my head on the walk home. Old-fashioned, but a good book.

I don’t like it. That qualifier bugs me, Old-fashioned, BUT still good, like that first part is diametrically opposed to the second, or that the two shouldn’t really be allowed to co-exist, but we’ll make a deal with the devil since it’s a good book and let it slip through.

I like Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk as much as the next chick, in their place. But come on, cut old Charles Dickens some slack. Sure he doesn’t say “fuck” every five words like some people with pitiful vocabularies. (Not naming names, but she’s writing this right now.) But Jesus H. Christ, that’s one of the best endings in the history of English literature, even when you know it’s coming. And it’s just a good fucking book, isn’t it? I know, I know, he wasn’t just talking about language, but about the heavy-handed description, the flat characterization (particularly in some cases), etc. Poor nice guy at the register, he meant well and was making very pleasant conversation with me. But I was annoyed anyhow.

That said, I’m fairly unwell right now. So maybe I’d be less grouchy about it if that were different, and I could put a coherent sentence together. (Which, as you might’ve noticed, is not coming easily today.) But still.

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So I’m on a historical fiction binge apparently—paused in the middle of The Baroque Cycle (I have like 4 other books waiting for me untouched before I go out and buy The System of the World, as much as I’ve loved it so far), and I’ve just finished this really, really cool historical romance, Georgette Heyer’sAn Infamous Army. (Another Xmas gift, but the last of them—I was saving it for a reason but that’s another story for another time. From Neuroscientist Reenie!)

I’ve never read a lot of romance (except Austen, obviously), but I think I should start. My friend Megan once told me back in our college days that it was like cleansing the literary palate to prepare you for the next main course, and I think that’s accurate in general. But when it comes to this specific romance novel, it’s a little heavier than that because she, pretty much action-for-action, describes the battle of Waterloo. Like… the whole thing. The plot is twisted up around the preparations for battle in Brussels, though they don’t know when or where it’ll be, the Duke of Wellington’s habits and “family”, and this love story between a Colonel on his staff and this crazy “bad girl” type. Which, seeing as most of what I know of Regency comes from Jane Austen, is pretty amazing to me.

And it’s stupid engaging. It’s so weird to have a book I can relax with in the bathtub during a soak that isn’t totally insipid and pointless. It’s an odd phenomenon, and I intend to read more. Why no one introduced me to this before, I don’t know, but I have Reenie’s family to thank for this, I’m sure.

Also, the last description of Waterloo I read was in the killer Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Where Strange keeps foisting magic off on Wellington and he’s getting all aggravated. So you know, cool to see the real deal (even if everything is more fun with magic—replacing that point of interest with the romantic hero, his bitter and useless rival, and their families and friends makes up for it.)

Apparently I’m on an actual historical binge too. I have a bunch of nonfiction that wants my attention, some of it for research but most of it just for fun this time around. I bought McCullough’s John Adams while in Philadelphia last month, because I kept seeing the ads for the miniseries and getting all excited (I bought 1776 on a trip to Mt. Vernon last summer and literally couldn’t put it down. Nerd alert.) For good reason apparently, since the first two installments last weekend were so badass I’m impatient for the next one this week.

But I defy anyone to resist the awesome of Abigail Adams.

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