My Little Shoggoth: Evolution of an Eldritch Horror

“At The Mountains of Madness” Astounding Stories (serialization), 1936.

Say you want to put a little Lovecraftian horror into your life. Let’s take a moment to consider the shoggoth, and how it has evolved in cultural perception.

The shoggoth, in all its glory, is described in Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”:

… a plastic column of fetid black iridescence… a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light.

Readers, shall we see whether 82 years has domesticated the shoggoth? I think we shall… (My latest post is up at Apex Publications for their month of The Weird – check it out!)

Some Funny News:

Over the weekend, when I wasn’t slipping on banana peels at the local coffee shop, I learned that the UFO2 anthology has accepted my story, “How to Feed Your Pyrokinetic Toddler”.

So, despite all of my best attempts at becoming a stodgy stuffed shirt, someone thinks I’m funny. Or at least they think one of my stories is. I’m delighted because this story is completely inappropriate, highly pear-shaped, and was a lot of fun to write.

UFO2 is, like its predecessor, Unidentified Funny Objects, a collection of humorous science fiction and fantasy stories. UFO2 will feature Robert Silverberg, Esther Freisner, Mike Resnick, Ken Liu, Tim Pratt, Jody Lynn Nye, Jim Hines, me, and many more*.

Hey, do you write funny? *Because you could be in this anthology too. The open reading period is May 1 – 31 and submission guidelines are here.

UFO2 is a kickstarter-funded anthology. I’m not going to tell you that you should help back it, because I’m obviously biased. But if you like backing highly entertaining and suspiciously funny anthologies, I’d say this is a good place to start. Plus, then you’ll get to read about the care and feeding of pyrokinetic toddlers. You know, in case that should ever become a thing.

The Sneaky Lathe of Poetry

Lathe: n. A machine in which work is rotated about a horizontal axis and shaped by a fixed tool.

Reblogged from my monthly column at Apex Publishing.

If you are not the sort who enjoys poetry, you might think April (being National Poetry Month) is the season for eye-rolling over enforced rhyme schemes and cringing at public displays of meter.

But even if you skip town for the month, poetic voice still shapes your experience in sneaky ways. The results will catch you unawares.

Take some of your favorite titles, as one example.

Don’t look at the stories (or poems), yet. Just the titles. The ones that carve meaning and sound into the smallest of spaces. Swirsky’s “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” (Apex Magazine), and Valentine’s “A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones” (Clarkesworld). Go back further: Ellison’s ”I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.”

Now look deeper. Look at structure. Poetic forms are reshaping fiction, from the brevity of flash to the use of sectioned prose.

Poetry broke from its restraints a long time ago. (Continue reading…)

Gratitude: Ghost

Now and then, I interrupt the digital media nattering, writing how-tos, and food-in-fiction posts for some old-fashioned gratitude. It’s that time again.

The mobile of my childhood is 34 feet long and weighs 225 lbs. It spins irreverent between medieval tapestries and Saint-Gauden’s sculpture of Diana, itself originally conceived as a weathervane.

Wind. Movement. Change. Even indoors, Alexander Calder’s Ghost rings the changes each second.

To see it properly, you have to stand beneath it, then run up the stairs, then catch it from the balcony. Ghost requires you to change perspective, even as it changes. The Philadelphia Art Museum guards will not take kindly to your running, but do it anyway.

On its own, Ghost is engineering, and balance. It is wing and wind.

In its current context, Ghost is whimsy and defiance. It interacts, where other art is still.

I am grateful to know it. And grateful to see it from many perspectives – as a child, as an adult, and somewhere on the steps in between.

Apex Books Blog & SF Signal Mind Meld

Last week, on SF Signal’s Mind Meld on food in science fiction and fantasy, I joined authors Laura Ann Gilman, Sherwood Smith, A.M. Dellamonica, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Bradley Beaulieu, Leah Peterson, Kat Howard, Joanne Anderton, Aliette de Bodard, Rose Fox, Linda Nagata, Michael Martinez, and Judith Tarr in answering the following question: “Food and Drink in science fiction sometimes seems limited to replicator requests for Earl Grey tea and Soylent green discs. Why doesn’t do as much food as Fantasy? Does Fantasy lend itself more to food than Science fiction? Why?” It’s great fun, everyone is brilliant, and the list of new reads is epic.

This Wednesday, I’ll join the blog crew at Apex Books. I’m very excited to be part of this project – Publisher Jason Sizemore has put together a great group of writers, and fantastic monthly themes.

The first topic? Noir. Problem: I don’t know anything about Noir. So I bribed Gregory Frost and Jonathan McGoran, both Philly writers well steeped in Noir, to help me fill in my knowledge gaps. Tune in Wednesday to see how we did.

PS: my friend A.C. Wise is also going to be making appearances at Apex Books’ Blog. Very exciting!

Trains of Thought

So I’m setting out on another adventure this morning, mostly by train. By the time this trip is finished, if all works out as planned, I’ll have cover art to talk about, I’ll have attended some excellent con panels, seen many friends, and I will have flown in a wind tunnel.

You read that last one right.

Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest… – do you need them all?

A question to the floor:
What social media tools do you use and for what purposes? We could talk all day about Facebook (or on Facebook) – where many writers have fan pages, or post most updates – but let’s go a bit further afield too.

• Pinterest – Launched in 2010 as a ‘virtual pinboard,’ Pinterest can be used for research (putting photos in buckets), inspiration, and conversation. Check out some really well-curated pinboards for examples: Arin Dembo, Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Jenny Lawson, Sara Mueller, and Craig Engler. Mine’s a bit sloppy, but I’ve found it a useful place to store things in buckets, so I know where to find them. Broadcast type: public.
• Tumblr - Founded in 2007, but rising in visibility recently. The tumblr technique is called short-form blogging by the company. I’m new to this one (which is the reason for this post). In some ways, Tumblr is also a pin-board, though its visual interface is linear where Pinterest’s is more of

211,508

• In color coding, 211508 is a slightly reddish black. Closest web-safe color is #330000 – which will read as flat black on any PC, and a somewhat more nuanced black on a Mac.
• In Washington, DC – Rule 21-1508 governs illegal dumping and wastewater treatment.
• If you add all the digits of the integer 211508 together, you’ll get 17, which is a prime number. If you add those, you’ll get 8, which isn’t.
• For me, 211,508 is the number of words I wrote (or will, by Monday, have written) in 2012. That includes a 50k revision on novel 1, a 50k start on novel 2 and the 92k re-envisioning, four 5k stories or drafts, one 1k story, and two stories that total 500 words. It doesn’t include interviews and things I forgot to write on my count (I’ll be better about the daily notation next year, after seeing Holly Black’s amazing ‘how I wrote’ posts.)
• 211,508 works out to 594 words a day*, and while I didn’t write every day, I wrote most of them. (*and because I’ve been averaging 2k on weekdays, I suspect I’m missing some words in my count. Will try to be better next year.)
• Included in that 211,508 is my first print sale, half my first novel, and all of my second.
• I’m going to let myself be pleased with that number for a few more days. Then I’m shooting for more words, and better ones, lined up in more pleasing patterns, for 2013.

Gratitude: friends & monsters

Writing and freelancing can be lonely territory.  It gets very quiet.

Quiet is the kind of monster that wants to keep me with it and feed me junk food.

Then a ‘ping’ on chat, a text, or a random postcard breaks the quiet. Sometimes there’s a box packed with lip balm and a new book about the origins of monsters. They come into the quiet and they remind me to look up, look out, connect. The quiet fades away.

I went out in the world earlier this week to help the friend who sent the monster book prepare for a big move. I didn’t do a lot. Mostly I lifted halves of boxes that were too big to lift alone.  I spent some time practicing a different kind of quiet, and getting better at it. The kind where you listen for what a friend needs, and try to do it without too much trouble.

The trip got me thinking, about friends and the monsters we make for ourselves. I’m so grateful for my friends. And I’m grateful for the quiet too. Both the kind that allows me to listen, and the kind that is there to be broken.

Think I’ll go send a couple random postcards.

Turning the Lights Back On

Before I get to the business of November…

Our power went back on Tuesday afternoon, and we cleared the remnants of the storm from our front yard that same day. Many people aren’t so lucky. I donated to the Red Cross from my phone when the power came back. The storm is past, but the need remains. If you want to help, visit Red Cross.

Ok. November. Some things to keep your eyes open for here this month, and into December:

• Cooking the Books interviews with Steven Brust and Aliette de Bodard
• Strange Horizons will host the first Cooking the Books roundtable later this month, featuring Elizabeth Bear, Gregory Frost, Scott Lynch, and Nalo Hopkinson. You are wise to stock up on antacid before that time.
• and I’ll be at Philcon – my home con. I’ll post my schedule as soon as I can.

Meantime, I’m working on edits for the book, and several short stories. What are you working on?