Ode to the Makers

Ode to the Makers

O you beautiful transmigrants!

Sewn to words like a deleterious cloth.

A wild, swaying passion seizes the mind

and the pen scribbles rampant.

O you beautiful transmigrants!

Effigies of former ages cast

in quantum flesh.

Your busts will loom o'er

the atom-blasted waste.

O you beautiful transmigrants!

Flare in worship sufficient

to sunder and remake the soul.

Dark chasms are yours,

and the inhabitants therein.

O sweet poetry! The curving rhyme

laps up the tail's singularity

and all is distraught

buffeted by the winds of Apollo.

O sweet suit of skin

a humming carapace of molecules

to execute animacy.

The act of every hand

and the word of every tongue

are preserved in the poet's eye.

O darling transmigrants!

The madmen raving at anthropomorphic marble

the magician hot with stave and will

the wail of Grecian harps

regurgitating up the throat of time.

Great Pan calls, and I must answer.

O you beautiful transmigrants,

Drunk on strange wine

and fed on queer dishes

gorged on the weird milk

of the Muse –

O darling transmigrants!

Let thy flow be my pulse.

Old Man, recede into your shell

and stopper up that bastion well.

Cram your ears with lumps of dirt

and hide from all that serves to hurt.

Hear not the scream of wind and rain

nor heed the rising swell of pain

that overtakes all living things

(tho Change is what this agony brings).

The guard, the day, the aeon absurd

will alter as surely as the Word!

Reflections, Work, Rock and Change

Big day over here in the States. Awoke to sudden marriage equality; currently there's a sense of simmering elation, a strange sudden understanding that alteration (CHANGE) is in play, will eternally be in play. We've constructed innumerable shackles for our minds, spirits and bodies over the millennia, primarily via the construction of societal norms...but reality is as mutable as we allow it to be. Right now there are thousands of fuming xtian fundamentalists writhing on the hook of that which they detest. I don't doubt that there will be innumerable further hurdles (there are always hurdles; without them change can't effect its eternal flux) but tonight is a brief moment of triumph. Of course one can argue about the institution of marriage as a whole; of course we can question this deep-seated assumption that our contemporary definitions of family and society are graven in stone when these conventions are also (gasp!) subject to change. The ideal family of ancient Greece is a dramatically different thing than the ideal family of Babylon or Rome or Imperial China; one can only assume (hope) that a thousand years down the road we will have arrived at an entirely new means of interacting with our human brethren as whole, to make no mention of mating conventions. But at this moment in the United States anyone can get married that wants to. The big picture yields to the little in some cases, especially when there's an occasion for frantic celebration.

Haven't posted on here for a while. And what mischief have I been up to in the last month? Working, traveling. I took a trip up to Michigan for a bit, connecting with family and friends. Enjoyed the stay, but it's always a pleasure to return to my peculiar little box in the dry lands. The first draft of The Curse of Roc-Thalian is nearing completion; I admit I'm a little behind schedule, but then I've always flourished in environments of looming deadlines. I set out to write this book without a definite idea of where the characters would go, trusting them to lead me in the right direction, and I haven't been disappointed. Now there's just a few hundred gallons of elbow grease required. Lots of work (long hours, contemplation, revision, despair and renewal of purpose) go into writing a book, at least any book worth reading. I'm hoping that all my blood and tears and other bodily fluids are evinced in the final text.

I'm currently in the midst of reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. My first Butler, and amazing; the capitalization of CHANGE above is owing to her influence. I'm enamored of her concept of a new faith/religion (Earthseed) arising to displace the outmoded spiritual systems of old. Butler's concept of revering change as the one constant, as the true face of God, is definitely the direction (or at least one of the directions) I feel we need to embrace. We need to learn from our past, not just record it and then fetishize it endlessly (WWII 'documentaries', I'm looking at you). We loathe change congenitally; we flourish on familiarity, to the extent that the smell of baking bread can waft us back to the forgotten demesne of childhood. But childhood does end, both for individuals and for races. The human species is poised on the brink of our own destruction/revelation, and CHANGE is the key. We must alter, shed the past while simultaneously revering it; we owe it to god/the gods to concoct new faces for the divine, instead of wallowing in age-old systems awash in entropy. That said, I encourage any and all fans of sci-fi, fantasy, or actual thought the read Butler immediately. Her vision of the near future is both chilling and beguiling.

So who am I? What am I? Am I a fantasist, a metaphysician, a crank, a magician, an alchemist, a writer, a fool? I'd argue all of these things. I certainly own the label 'Fool,' and savor the sensation of peering into the sun while my foot dangles precariously over the cliff. I decry labels, especially the labels of genre; we've become too cluttered, too post-modern, to convinced of our mastery of trope and narrative, while losing our ability to tell meaningful stories. I am definitely a writer, and will take that self-definition to the grave. But my interests are far-ranging. To me the hideous and grotesque are bedfellows with Beauty, that utter principal that needs no justification beyond itself. I do not seek perfection, but esteem the act of creation as the utmost human pursuit and purpose. I love my fellow-beings, even as they drive me to distraction; humanity is my palate, my materia, my definition and my drive. I can be no clearer than this. What I do decry is humanity's endless preference for locking itself in cul-de-sacs. CHANGE comes, whether or not we are prepared; indeed, change is our birthright. There is a general preference for stagnation amongst humans (thus our eternal craving for an unending Utopia) but natural processes (us included) just don't work that way. Change is coming, you better run. Or mutate.

My other primary influence is rock music. I haven't talked about it much on here, but my books are littered with little references. The House of the Setting Sun at the beginning of Tamrel is a homage to Swedish metal band Lake of Tears. Niblon the Black, the constellation Nuir sees on her ceiling in the house of Madame Heretia, is a call-out to T. Rex. There are other references, though none so direct as Douglas Adams quoting a bunch of Beatles songs in the beginning of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I intend to write an entire post on this in the near future, but suffice to say music has been my guiding principal every bit as much as the written word. If you are making real music it's impossible to lie. As far as I can tell Art is the one thing that cannot lie, and so to me it is the highest purpose. Of course art can be twisted into propaganda, but then it ceases to be art; true ART is true purpose, a difficult pill for a materialist world to swallow (despite the fact that it's far from bitter). More on this later as well.

Well, I guess that wraps things up for the moment. Listening to 'Swimming Song' by Loudon Wainwright III. "Hold your breath, kick your feet and move your arms around." Blessings to all on this day of triumph.

I know the Unknown and the Unknown knows me

Noble species fallen

pull yourself up by your glands!

On Fantasy (And Other Things)

A very happy May Day to you all!

April sped by in a haze of work, some of which was actual Work (The Curse of Roc-Thalian is chugging along, the first draft just topping 80,000 words). I've also been hacking away at Duncan, revising a decade-old manuscript the contents of which I barely remember. This has yielded some unexpected pleasure, insofar as the writing is fairly good, often funny, and consistently surprising. I don't have a set date on the project as of yet, but barring the amputation of all my limbs (hmmm...perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate?) The Curse of Roc-Thalian will be available sometime around Halloween. Perhaps even on Halloween; the contents certainly warrant such a juxtaposition.

I've been reading a lot. This isn't uncommon, but I recently had a barrage of really intense input from three sources. First, I finally read the Castle Brass books by Michael Moorcock, effectively resolving the 21-book saga of the Eternal Champion (no spoilers, but the end was both magnificent and maddening). I then hopped into Destination: Void by Frank Herbert, which is one of the most bewildering and enlightening hard-sf books I've ever read. Essentially the entire text is made up of four people attempting to gestate an artificial intelligence while having recursive metaphysical debates on the nature of consciousness, all while their spacecraft crumbles about them. It's the first Herbert book I've read that actually surpasses Dune (humble opinions abound, of course), and I strongly recommend it, though the diligent reader is advised to keep a bottle of ibuprofen at hand. The third and most recent book, which I'm almost done with, is Dragons of an Hourglass Mage by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It's a Dragonlance book, the second-to-last produced by Wizards of the Coast before they pulled the plug, and I find myself enjoying it immensely.

Now, I haven't said much about Dragonlance on here. It has been, at various points, a somewhat shameful secret that I read over 75 of the mass-produced TSR tomes in my youth, speeding away from Ursula LeGuin (whose Earthsea books were the first true fantasy I read; I consider myself very fortunate in this) at a comet's pace, embroiling myself in a half-nonsense world of high fantasy shenanigans. At the core of this obsession was the writing of Mrs. Weis and Mr. Hickman, who (though they are perpetually clumsy stylists who feel the recurrent need to infect their writing with high-vaudevillian scenarios) are very, very adept at creating characters. This is a truism I've fully reabsorbed while reading Hourglass Mage; though it is written by a somewhat faded duo, they still have the uncanny ability to bring people to life.

During the Dragonlance period I was aeons away from weird fiction and early fantasy, both now active obsessions for me. I tried some of the older stuff as a kid, but Dragonlance seemed somehow more refined, more fast-paced - and it is. It is a spectacle that could only have been produced at the height of high fantasy's reign, and is an amalgamation, a transmutation of all the fantasy genres and tropes that went before (moreover, it goes without saying that any fictional universe produced by a company to make a profit should damn well entertain). However, in my latter years (personally I wish I'd hopped to it a decade ago) I've been more and more drawn to the phantasmogoric, the elegant, the eucatastrophic, and the perverse. Just today I finally stumbled across a collection of stories by Clark Ashton Smith (one of the three major players in the Lovecraft circle); I've flipped through it, and find his language to be dense and beautiful, the elegant blossom of a corpse-flower. And yet, here I am still reading Dragonlance, still pining for one more journey through the sweet-smelling airs of Krynn.

Now, much of this obsession centers on the duo of Raistlin and Caramon. Without revealing too terribly much, they are twins born of a vision-seeing mother and a woodcutter father in the backwater town of Solace. Caramon is strong and robust, even in infancy; he will become a great but (seemingly) slow-witted warrior. His brother Raistlin, sickly by disposition and powerful of mind and will, has the gift of the magic. Over a series of books (pulling them all together I think there are twelve novels, plus some short stories) we get to experience the brother's pained, agitated relationship: Caramon, overweening and protective, subject to his brother's will; Raistlin, weak and powerful simultaneously, envious of his brother's charm and physical strength. It sounds like the perfect recipe for codependence, and it is, save that the brothers truly love each other. Oh, it's a twisted, fractious love, a love that ultimately drives both of them to make unbelievable sacrifices, but it remains one of the most inexplicably vital fictional relationships I've ever encountered, in or out of the realm of the fantastic. Of course there are other characters and others stories: Tanis Half-Elven remains quite loved, Flint and Tasslehoff's endless bickering still brings an oafish smile to my face. But it is Raistlin and Caramon who (for me) remain at the heart of Dragonlance.

It was years before I read Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Indeed, I actually saw Peter Jackson's Fellowship movie before reading either, though I grew up obsessively watching the Rankin-Bass animated adaptations of The Hobbit and The Return of the King. It's only been in the last half-decade that I've branched out, delved back into LeGuin with gusto and begun exploring the work of the pulp-era fantasists and sci-fi prophets. I've read Philip K. Dick (did you know Dick and LeGuin graduated from the same Oregonian high school? It's true, though they didn't know each other), Lord Dunsany, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, James branch Cabell, Lovecraft (very extensively), Frank Herbert and Michael Moorcock (also quite extensively), among a plenitude of others. I find myself suddenly a student, albeit an eager, voracious student; I've yet to read any Mervyn Peake, E.R Eddison, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce, the aforementioned Mr. Smith and, again, a plenitude of others. The road promises to be long and nourishing, but every so often I find I have to wander back to the Inn of the Last Home for a mug of ale and a plate of Otik's spiced potatoes.

Machen, Blackwood, and the Curse of Roc-Thalian

So, I've been reading up on my authors of strange, grim, and otherwise cosmically disturbing fiction, and stumbled into H.P. Lovecraft's intense devotion to two authors outside my ken. Their names (respectively) are Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. Blackwood, it seems, was an isolate bachelor, schooled in various modes of esoteric thought, who pioneered a new avenue of 'awe fiction' that encompassed the perfection of the post-gothic ghost story. Machen was a man of many tastes, an occultist and fantasist who is famous for many things, notably his debut novel The Great God Pan (oh, how I yearn for a copy of this). So, freshly informed and inflamed, I went looking around at local used bookstores for any traces of these heretofore unknown masters of the weird. I scoured and I quested and I dug in many a moldering corner (ended up finding an omnibus edition of Ambrose Bierce's writing in the process, which was a major joy), but nothing could I find of Blackwood or Machen.

Saddened, I wandered into one final shadowed corner (there's always one more) before going home, and discovered (drumroll) an original 1924 edition of Dog and Duck by Arthur Machen. A weathered copy, with some considerable discoloring, but definitely a Machen book. Amusing bit is, Dog and Duck is far out in the Machen esoterica, a collection of droll essays about how strange it is to be British. It seems to have little relation to his many fantastical works (none of which I've yet experienced), but in reading it I've caught glimpses of the glory of which he's capable. Of course (funds allowing) I'll probably have to resort to Amazon to settle my cravings, especially for Blackwood (who seems as scarce as a heavy, consistent rainfall in these parts). In the meanwhile I'll indulge in the whimsical abstractions of Dog and Duck, reflecting on the finer peculiarities of life all-the-while.

Also, wanted to announce that the name for the upcoming Kelrob and Jacobson book has been changed. Due to fluctuations in the plot that I hope will sincerely amuse, the story has warped into a slightly larger framework (oh, is this how Robert Jordan first talked of the growthlike swell of his series?). Kelrob and Jacobson have the adventure that finally pulls them together lock stock and barrel, all the while hurtling towards a much broader, stranger, indeterminate fate. The new name for the book is The Curse of Roc-Thalian, to be followed in relatively short order by The Quest of the Aleph.

That is all for now. Want to thank everybody who is tuned in to my microscopic-macroscopic broadcast.

Report from the Pulp Mines of Septimus 7-A

Well well well. What can I say on this most auspicious day of pi?

I'm sitting in a trailer in the depths of the desert listening to Gaucho by Steely Dan. Loved the band for years, but somehow I was daunted by Aja, and stopped there for an inordinately long time. Very pleased to have this new unplumbed album to explore...and here come those Santa Ana winds again. I've been reading extensively about the developing drought conditions in the Southwest (particularly California - New Mexico actually graduated out of a few layers of drought in the last year, owing to a surprising amount of rainfall). To summarize, there is officially one year of water remaining to the most populous state. Alteration, change, mutation and entropy are the dishes of the day - or perhaps I should say century. The species is definitely plunging into a reality heretofore theoretical, predicted by mystics and science-fiction prophets for decades (or millennia, in the case of the mystics). I stand in awe before the changing of the guard.

As for personal projects...writing continues unabated. I've dug up an old piece of pseudo-juvenilia, a massive comedic fantasy novel I completed back in 2002 while still preparing to go to college. The story concerns Duncan Qweegmire, a backwater farmer who has been determined by the gods to be the single least important person on the planet. Due to his immense unimportance, he's the ideal candidate to try and foil the diabolic machinations of the archwizard Raltishar, who has challenged the gods for supremacy of heaven and hell. The book was lost for many many years, but recent excavations of an old hard drive revealed the work in its entirety. I've started revising it, with the intent of releasing it in 15,000-20,000 word segments over roughly a year. There is currently a major uptick in people's appreciation of serialized narrative; indeed, it appears to be the way of the future for self-publishing. This excites me, as much of my favorite writing was produced in the pulp-mines of the early-to-mid twentieth century, not to mention the Victorian penchant for releasing massive (and massively influential) novels over a period of months or years. Thus, Duncan is rocketing into full production. I hope to have the first five segments completed in a month or so, with subsequent segments released on a bi-weekly or monthly basis (NOTE 1/28/16: Project long-abandoned due to unexpectedly sheer demands of revision. Good ideas tied together by longwinded youthful rambling, needing much work to cohere...something might still come it, but not in the foreseeable future).

As for Kelrob and Jacobson, their adventure is hurtling forward in many bewildering and delightful ways. I've received quite a few inquiries from friends and readers, wondering when Quest of the Aleph will be completed, and can only tentatively announce a release this autumn. It's been a very interesting experiment thus far: though Mask of Tamrel and Heretia were written completely fresh, without any reference to previous drafts, the story had existed in various permutations for nearly a decade. Writing from a blank slate has proven both daunting and enlivening. Expect familial drama, vampire hunts, and wanderings into strange misbegotten landscapes. The quest (as always) is on.


2015 is, truly, the Future. I'm hoping to get out at least two books this year, thus riding the crest of the wave rather than being subsumed; one way lies madness, the other revelation. Personally I'm fond of both. As Judee Sill stated so elegantly: "Bless the ridge rider, the ridge he's ridin' is mighty thin."