Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

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I noticed several other contributors announcing the receipt of their copies of Ghosts: Recent Hauntings yesterday. I also know that all mail coming here has to pass through the city PO before it’s sent off to the outposts, which adds a day’s delay, so I was reasonably sure that my own copies were waiting for me at the PO Box today. Sure enough.

My story’s in here somewhere. Let’s see… Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Jeff Ford, Tim Powers, John Shirley, Peter Straub, Joe R. Lansdale, James Van Pelt, Nisi Shawl, Ekaterina Sedia, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanine Tem, Sarah Monette, Maureen McHugh, Margo Lanagan…ah! There it is, “The Plum Blossom Lantern.” Nestled safely(?) between John Langan and Stephen Jones. Paula Guran’s managed to collect quite a few talented people in here. Not sure how I managed to sneak in, but it’s too late to check tickets now.

Well, whether I deserve it or not, that story does. It’s one of my favorites of my own ghost stories, and I’ve written quite a few. See what ya’ll think. And you might as well read the rest of those guys while you’re in there. Just sayin’.

Well, Aren’t YOU Little Mr. Sunshine Today

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Thinking about a passage from THE JEWEL HINGED JAW by Samuel R. Delany (also one of my writing bibles in my wannabee stage). The subject was the truism that “Writing is one of those crafts where, the longer you practice it, the harder it gets.” That specifically applies to anyone who’s trying to improve. We all know of writers who find a good-selling niche and are content to stay there, and more power to them. Even staying in one place is hard work. But, as the Red Queen pointed out, “You want to go anywhere, you have to run twice this fast.” As with Theordore Sturgeon, Delany then asks the next question, and comes to the very logical but rather depressing conclusion that, sooner or later, you’re going to hit a wall you can’t climb, break through, or go around.

In short, Delany posits that all writers eventually hit the limit of where their talent, imagination, and energy will take them. Like the weightlifter who trains all his life and eventually manages 600 lbs, but will never lift 625 if he trains from then till Doomsday. The bones and muscles simply can’t bear it. What then? There are a few options, none of them very good. Repeating yourself is one. Silence is another, and it might be the most common. A lot of writers, and you can probably name a few, came on to the scene in a flash only to quietly disappear a few years later. Sure, sometimes it was simply that they didn’t sell enough books and no one would publish their next one. These days there are other options, but not everyone can bring themselves to go the self-publishing route. Yet be that as it may, not every writer who’s disappeared from the field has done so because of commercial failure. Maybe not even most. A good many of them were simply done.

That is, if you accept Delany’s reasoning. Personally, I’m going Zen in a riff off the Enlightened Master Douglas Adams: Linear Progress is an illusion. Linear Progress in the arts, doubly so.

And there is no wall.

Worry, Worry, and Wasting Time

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Idle musings while waiting for the storm bands of Isaac to swirl by overhead, and triggered by a question on another board. A writer (a new one, I hope) was fretting about his work having aspects of more than one genre, and how did he tell which category it fell into? Oh, the confusion! What was he to do?

My short, seemingly flippant but honest answer was “That’s not your problem. If a horror mag publishes it, it’s horror. If a fantasy mag, it’s fantasy.” Yes, I know that genre has taxonomic uses but as it is currently implemented, and as a strictly practical matter, genre is primarily a collection of marketing categories. When I was writing “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge” I knew very well that it had as much claim to being a mystery story as a fantasy. Didn’t care. I was reasonably sure that Shawna would buy it, and she did. But if she hadn’t, I might very well have sold it to a mystery magazine. Would that have changed the story in any way? The audience, perhaps, and perception, but the story? It is what it is, and when the time comes to market, then it’s “place your bets” time. Not before.

For another example—way back when Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine was being published, I submitted what I considered very appropriate fantasy stories to that magazine on a regular basis, and on an equally regular basis Marion Zimmer Bradley rejected each and every one of them. Now, I know very well that any given writer is not always going to connect with any given editor and I’ve talked about that before, but it was the reason she gave for rejecting those stories that caused me such bewilderment.

She said they were all horror.

This was something of a surprise to me, but for a reality check, no other editor ever thought so, at least for stories I hadn’t pegged as horror myself. And, even though I sold enough stories of the sort to qualify for membership in the Horror Writers Association, nobody ever labeled me a horror writer…except for MZB, and MZBFM didn’t accept horror. And there we were–the editor thought my fantasy stories were really horror stories (not to be confused with horrible stories, which is another problem altogether). I thought they were not horror, and frankly never understood how she was reading them that way, but the point remains that it was of course the editor’s opinion that decided the fate of those stories. (And, for the record, I never did manage to break into MZBFM.) In short, how your stories are classified is, for the most part, completely out of your hands. It’s a somewhat different story for novels, where your career plan and your publisher’s requirements both may dictate that you stick with work that can at least be reasonably classified in the same general area, which is one reason writers usually change bylines if they’re writing both, say, urban fantasy and space opera. For short stories, not so much. 

So as a general rule, wasting time worrying about what category your work falls in is, well, a waste of time.

Homo Sum: Humani Nil a Me Alienum Puto

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“I am human, and nothing human is strange(meaning: irrelevant) to me (puto = I consider).”

The quote’s been attributed to everyone from Martial to Maya Angelou, but Terentius probably said it first, in the context of a play where a character uses it as justification to butt in where he really doesn’t belong. So much for the clarity of context. Anything that survives in a proverbial form outside of its original context is no longer bound by it and takes on its own shades of interpretation. Today the proverb means just what it says: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

Anyone who writes books and stories set in cultures not their own (practically anyone who writes sf or fantasy) is eventually going to get this, and whether it’s from someone “well-meaning” or an internet troll, it amounts to the same thing: “How dare you?” As in: “How dare you write from a NA viewpoint or use NA mythology as a springboard because you’re not NA, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Thai, or Mayan, or Spanish, or Basque, or Masai…” That includes the legendary or mythological past and any syncretions and accretions thereunto. Sometimes they will grant that it’s okay for a Westerner to write about ancient Greece even though most of us 1) Are Not Greek and 2) Don’t know any more about the REAL ancient Greece than anyone else does.

It doesn’t matter who it comes from, it’s pure rubbish from start to finish. We’re all human, which is one thing we all share and why we’re more alike than different even when we’re very different indeed. Which is absolutely not the same thing as saying “people are all alike.” They are most emphatically not all alike. Anyone who’s done even basic reading for historical and cultural context can figure that out, and if that doesn’t work then all they have to do is take a good look around. If that simple fact still doesn’t sink in, then they need to take up a different avocation. Continue reading →

Stories So Nice, We Published Them Twice! (Or More)

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I’ve had recent news of a couple of reprint sales, so I thought I’d pass those along. “The Ghost of Shinoda Forest” will be reprinted in Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year 3. Should be out in a few months. Also, “Sanji’s Demon,” likewise first published in BCS, is going to be reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons (edited By Paula Guran. Sanji comes down on the demon side) in the UK, probably sometime next year. I’ll give out some firm dates once I have any.

I like reprints. It’s like being published the first time, only without having to write the story again. It also gives readers who missed the story the first time another chance to find it, so it’s all good.

While I’m here I probably should mention that The Heavenly Fox, which I believed out of print at the beginning of the month, is apprently back in print, or at least for a little while. Amazon had four at the original price this morning…though now they only have one. Regardless, the publisher found a few more somewhere. No idea how many or how long these will last.