About ogresan

Richard Parks' stories have have appeared in Asimov's SF, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies, including several Year's Bests. His first story collection, THE OGRE'S WIFE, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is the author of the Yamada Monogatari series from Prime Books.

Zen and the Art of Beating Your Head Against a Wall: Who Am I This Week?

Posted on March 15, 2016 by ogresan

Most of this post will have nothing to do with the image above. It’s the likely final cover for the next Yamada book, due out in September. I saw a working image much sooner, but since the publisher (Prime Books) has officially put it up on their website, I’m showing it here for the first time. I am working furiously to make sure the book happens on schedule, but taking a few minutes to surface here because I feel bad about missing my post yesterday. I try to keep the posts themselves on schedule too, but you’re always doing battle with the day, and sometimes you don’t win. Yesterday I made my word quota on the book but the rest of the day was spent on an errand to New Hartford and a new air compressor for the next phase of trim work in the house. Soon: back to painting. The fun never stops on the quirky castle on the hill.

All that aside, a day or two ago I sold a reprint story to a new anthology(details TBA). Writers love reprints for a couple of obvious reasons. 1) It’s money for work we’ve already done and 2) Every appearance helps raise the profile and name recognition just a tad, non-trivial if you’re trying to build a readership, and what writer isn’t? Yet again, the post isn’t about that as such, nice though it is, but an event it triggered.

I have to provide a bio.

Yep, I’m here to fuss about bios again. Probably the one thing none of us should complain about is having to provide brief author biographies for whoever is publishing you. When I was just starting out I’d be thrilled at the idea, and struggle to keep the thing within the 100-200 words you’re generally allowed. Now if I can manage more than a couple of sentences it’s only a victory of the will. I went through a phase of just making stuff up, because that’s what I do anyway, but bios are supposed to be non-fiction, at least in theory. I finally judged it inappropriate to claim I had a side career teaching T’ai-Chi to polar bears, though stressed as the poor things are now, they can probably use it. So I generally end up writing something like this:

“Richard Parks’ work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Realms of Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several “Year’s Best” anthologies and has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. The fourth book in the Yamada Monogatari series, The Emperor in Shadow, is due out from Prime Books in September 2016. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3”, also known as: www.richard-parks.com”

Seriously, can you get any more boring than that? Possibly, but you’d really have to work at it. And they’re all variations on this one. Believe me, I take comfort in the knowledge that a lot of readers don’t even bother with them, and why should they? It’s the story that counts. The paradox is that I hope publishers keep asking me for them for a long, long time to come.

Spring? Almost? Really?

Posted on March 7, 2016 by ogresan

My guitars are up and my rug is down. Other than that, most of the last few weeks have gone by in a blur. Still haven’t been able to do anything about the ugly curtains in the library, mostly because they’re currently blocked by a bookcase which I can’t move until we know where it’s going, and room is cleared in that space for the going thereof. Wish I could keep it in here, but there’s no room. I’m planning a couple of low profile bookcases but otherwise, I have to work with what I have. Still too much stuff for the space. Can’t make more space, so the solution is painful, but obvious.

Part of the reason for the blur is that most of the mornings have been turned over to the book, which doesn’t leave a lot of energy in the afternoon for getting the house where we want it. Still a ton of stuff to do. On the plus side, we seem to have survived our first New York winter. I’m told this was a rather mild one (coldest night was a mere -19 F). Fine with us. We were hoping for a training winter, so I could develop my snow shoveling and salt spreading chops. Very different from the south. In Mississippi we were losing the concept of seasons. It was either Summer-like or Winter-ish, and Winter-ish was losing ground steadily. A lot of places don’t even have seasons anymore, at least not like they once did. Up here in Central NY, that’s not the case. At least for now.

Enough with the boring domestic details. I have a book to write, and that’s taking all the brainpower I have left. So in lieu of anything actually inciteful or interesting, snippet time:

“Yamada-sama, I was instructed to give this to you personally,” Hiroshi said.

He held out both hands palm up, and resting there was a small sheet of washi neatly folded into the form sometimes referred to as a “lover’s knot,” since it was nearly impossible to re-fold properly once opened, and so had the virtue of making it extremely difficult for anyone else to read the message without the intended recipient knowing that the communication had been compromised. I took the paper and unfolded it carefully to read:

“Autumn wind rushes past
An empty garden where once
The peony bloomed.”

After the poem, there was a simple message: “I would speak with you in private.” I dismissed Hiroshi then showed the paper to Kenji, who frowned.

“It seems you will be allowed an audience with the High Priestess of Ise,” he said.

“Allowed? It sounded rather more like a command.”

“It also sounded as if we—well, you—were expected. That poem….”

I nodded. “Yes. It’s a reference to the death of Princess Teiko. “Peony” was her nickname at court. She held it from at least the age of seven. Not just anyone would know that, especially now, but Princess Tagako is one who would. Without mentioning either of our names, it was clear the message was for me.”

My time at court had been so long ago that I sometimes forgot the way the mind of someone raised in the emperor’s circle tended to work. The message would have seemed innocuous enough to anyone else who discovered it, yet to the intended recipient—myself, in this case—there was far more to be read. Princess Tagako’s note reminded me of Teiko in more ways than simply the poem.

Kenji frowned. “Why would she bring up Teiko? That seems rather indelicate.”

It was more than indelicate. It was deliberate, implied far more than it said, and was aimed precisely at me.

“Indelicacy with a purpose, I think, though what that purpose is, I cannot fathom. I must go speak to the saiō.”

“You must also finish the tanka.”

I winced, but Kenji was right. The form of the poem required an answer, or rather, a shimo-no-ku, a lower phrase, which must also be in the proper form. Princess Teiko had always been somewhat amused at my attempts at poetry, but this occasion called for me to try. I sent for a portable writing table and quickly prepared the ink. First I copied Princess Tagako’s poem as best I could and, after many hesitations and false starts, wrote down this:

“Autumn yields to winter’s cloak,
In Spring, flowers bloom again.”

Kenji looked at what I had done. “Lord Yamada, for you that almost sounded hopeful.”

I sighed. “Yes. If I had more time…well, it still wouldn’t be any better.”

Going, Going…I lied. Already Gone

Posted on February 29, 2016 by ogresan

To the left is the cover of my third story collection, issued in 2010, On the Banks of the River of Heaven, which is the title cut. Not only was it the third collection in ten years, but it was my first hardcover collection. As of a week or so ago, it’s out of print. If you look on Amazon it will say that it’s “Temporarily Out of Stock,” but this isn’t so. There may or may not be a few stragglers with the publisher and a few more with me, some in the used market, but basically it’s gone. We’ve talked about that whole thing where publishing short stories is like “throwing rose petals in the Grand Canyon and listening for the thud.” It was definitely true here. I can’t complain too much, as the book sold well enough to finish out its run, which is something a lot of print books never do, but in five years it never got a single Amazon review. Things like that tend to make a writer feel unwanted. Whereas on GoodReads it had sixteen ratings and a score of 4.5 out of 5.0, and anyone on GoodReads knows what a tough crowd they are. It is a good book, and I’m not going to let the fact that I wrote it stop me from saying that, but its time on the physical plane is over. It will live on, possibly forever, in ebook form.

I have to keep it short today because I’m on deadline. I’ve almost never been on deadline in my entire writing life, but there are firsts for everything. Time to get back to Yamada, and today promises to be interesting. I have the strong feeling that an Imperial Princess is just about to tear Lord Yamada a new one. Is it wrong of me to say that I think I’m going to enjoy this?

Almost Normal, For Outlying Values of Normal

Posted on February 22, 2016 by ogresan

New Desk

After over four months working off of a folding card table, I finally have a new desk. Carol found it online, a discontinued model for a ridiculously low price, and I only had to argue with the instructions once while I was putting it together. While it’s not my normal style–I have a style? Sort of. I lean more toward Mission and Arts & Crafts–I’m frankly not that picky when push comes to pen. Give me a good working surface with a bit of storage and I’m happy. Plus I managed almost 2000 words on my first writing session on the new equipment. I score that both a good omen and a solid win. Just don’t expect the desk to continue looking this neat. When it comes to my work space and library, I don’t do neat.

Now all I have to do is get the rest of the boxes in my new library sorted, which is going to lead to more painful decisions, but you can’t fight physics. I know the shelf space I want doesn’t fit the shelf space I have. More books will have to go into the attic. Granted, these are mostly books I want to keep even though I know I won’t be reading them again anytime soon. I just have to decide which ones those are. I’ve already had to pack up most of my brag shelf, which stroked my ego a bit because there were so many, but stung it a bit in that I just can’t keep them all out and visible. But then, I was the only one looking at them and I already knew what they looked like. Priorities.

I can see most of my floor now. Once the remaining boxes are dealt with and the guitars on their wall hangers, I can put down a rug. Nothing says “you’re home” quite like your own area rug. That pretty much declares “space of your own.” Little things, but they do matter.

As for the book, it’s coming along, and for those who care, here’s a heads-up. Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow, is going to be a much more political book–Heian politics, I hasten to point out–than The War God’s Son. I sort of knew that before I even started writing it, but my previous writing session rather emphasized the fact. Just saying.

Day at the Museum

Posted on February 15, 2016 by ogresan

Herschell-Spillman Carousel-1915

For Valentine’s Day Carol and I decided to brave the 0 Degree weather and make a trip to the New York State Museum in Albany for a gem and mineral show. This took no small measure of courage on my part, because I’m a Mississippi boy still trying to wrap my head around the idea of No Degrees Whatsoever as a temperature reading. Never mind that it got to -17 F that night–I could sleep through that and pretend it didn’t happen. When you’re out in it? Not so much.

Regardless, we made it. The gem show, frankly, was nothing we hadn’t seen before. Nice, some cool pieces, but crowded and fairly typical of such things. We were still glad we came, but didn’t feel the need to add any new pieces. What drew my attention after awhile was the display of a Herchell-Spillman Carousel from 1915, shown in upper left.

I’ve talked about my serial obsessions before, how they come, dominate my (hah) free time for a while, then fade to the point I can move on to something else, but they never quite go away? Yeah. Wood carving was one of those, so naturally I had an interest in the late 19th, early 20th century carvers and companies that produced carousels and especially the carved horses and other creatures that stocked them. If you’re curious at all you can start Googling just about any starting point (Herschell-Spillman, Carousel Horses, etc) and probably find out a lot more than you’d ever want to know. I’m just going to talk about a few things that grabbed my notice.

First of all, the Herschell-Spillman company did not carve the animals on this carousel. They were all made earlier, and attributed to a company located in Brooklyn. When I say “earlier,” it was probably around the 1890’s, according to the museum’s information. Herschell-Spillman made the carousel frame and mechanism in 1915, and surviving animals from earlier rides were retro-fitted on to it. The horses were originally “standers,” meaning they didn’t go up and down (“jumper”), and part of the retro-fit was to convert some of them.

Closeup

Now, take a look at this detail shot. Very nice, but you’ll note that the horse is fairly simple and stylized, strongly built but without a great deal of detail. This is sometimes called the “Country Fair Style.” The idea was that the horses would be sturdy, relatively small, and easy to pack up and transport from one fair to another. (There were other styles as well, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog. I’ll just mention the Philadelphia Style and the Coney Island Style as two others with their own characteristics.) Even though Herschell-Spillman didn’t carve these horses, they did work a lot in that style. Horses that were designed as outside row horses for stationary carousels that would not be moved (in theory, though in practice they sometimes were) were far more elaborate and, well, I want to show you a Dentzel company carousel from about the same period.

Original Photograph-Kevin Burkett
http://www.flickr.com/people/kevinwburkett

This Dentzel company carousel is located in Logansport, Indiana. There is another one in Highland Park in Meridan, MS, near where I grew up and I got to ride it as a kid. I’d show you that one, only I haven’t been able to locate a good picture. This one will certainly do. As I said, this was not a later style or something that represented an evolution in the development of carousel animals. This carousel was built 15 years before the Herschell-Spillman example above, and was pretty typical of the Dentzel company’s work.

Detail From Spencer Park Dentzel Carousel – Kevin Burkett
http://www.flickr.com/people/kevinwburkett

The most elaborately carved horses/animals would naturally be on the outside row, as that was the first thing visitors would see and were often “standers,” as this magnificent example shows. If you look closely at its right hind leg, you can see the glue line where it was attached to the body. The body (carcass) would be built as a hollow box with enough thickness on the outside to carve the details, and the legs and head would be roughed out separately, then attached and the finish carving done. Some of the most famous carvers, like Gustav Dentzel and Daniel Muller (famous for carving standers with military trappings) and Salvatore Cerniglario were either German or Italian immigrants.

Muller Horse from Forest Park Carousel, Queens NY

By 1930 the so-called “Golden Age” of the carousel was waning. Out of the thousands made, only a couple hundred still survive, some in museums like the Herchell-Spillman, others like the Dentzel above and the one in Meridian, still in public parks, still on duty for rides as they have been for 100 years.

There. Assuming you got this far, probably still more than you wanted to know. As I said, the old interests never go away. Not completely.

Richard Parks

Author, Unrepentant Storyteller, "Relative Anomaly."

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