mr_earbrass

I hate going to the post office, and I live in a shoe box. Thus, if I'm going to the PO anyway I damn well better make it worth my time, and since I can't buy any new books until I clear some room on my over-taxed shelves, it's time to give away some of my few remaining author copies. Contest time! Two copies of the UK edition and one copy of the US edition of The Folly of the World are on the block.

I obviously have a fondness for slang, cant, proverbs, and other such semi-ciphered language, with Folly perhaps taking the cake in this regard--it wasn't on a whim that I referenced Brueghel's Netherlandish Proverbs/The Blue Cloak so often in the text:



All you've got to do to win a free copy of the novel, then, is:

1) Leave a comment on this blog entry (either on my website or the LJ cross-post) naming a favorite proverb, idiom, or bit of slang/cant. It can be anything, really, from a brief but profound kōan to a bawdy euphemism.

2) That's it. I would also very, very much appreciate it if anyone who receives a copy of the novel agreed to review it once they were done (it takes all of a minute to set yourself up to review books on amazon, for example)--I'm only able to sell my work to publishers as long as people keep buying them, and maybe a brief review here or there will sway prospective readers (hopefully in the right direction!)...

At noon PST on Thursday I'll choose three winners through some peculiar system, solicit the addresses from these lucky ducks, and drop the books in the mail Friday morning. Everyone wins! Except for those who don't, but at the very least maybe we'll all pick up some new expressions to annoy our friends and family with.

Cheers!

[Cross-posted to my website]

• I made a soundtrack for the novel on Spotify while I was doing my final revisions, so if you're inclined: The Folly of the World Soundtrack.
• I'll be doing a reading at the Tattered Cover Bookstore on Colfax at 07:30 PM on Wednesday, February 6th.
• I'll be taking part in a group reading with Stephen Graham Jones, Molly Tanzer, Mike Hance, and J.L. Benet on Friday, March 8th at the Broadway Book Mall. More details as it comes together!

2012 rolled in like a hoop snake and crawled out like a tatzelwurm, if you follow me, a real cryptozoological clusterfuck. I'm glad to be shy of it, frankly, but that's not to say nothing of personal interest or import went down. With no further ado, then, this was 2012, or at least the bits I care to talk about:

• I read quite a few good books, many of which I've talked about here. I took part in Strange Horizons' reviewer year in review round robin and briefly covered my favorite reads of 2012 (or at least the works that bubbled up to the top of my brain at the time).


• My plans to attend Readercon and World Fantasy fell through, but I took part in paneling at several local cons, including Starfest and Mile Hi Con. The best part of these, as always, was meeting new people and seeing old friends. And talking shit in the bar, of course.


• The Enterprise of Death was shortlisted for a Kitschie Red Tentacle Award, which was rather exciting. Better even than the mega ego-boost to find myself nominated alongside China Miéville, Lavie Tidhar, Jane Rogers, and the ultimately triumphant Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd was getting to know judges Anne Perry, Justin Shurin, and Lauren Beukes after the awards were concluded. All three are marvelous, brilliant, funny people, and I'm glad to have met them.


• Two of the films I've been most looking forward to since, uh, ever came out! I talked about Prometheus here, because it was at least amusingly bad, but haven't been able to bring myself to talk about The Hobbit. I love Peter Jackson, have ever since I watched Bad Taste as a young creep, and love all three of his Lord of the Rings pictures. The Hobbit, though, was an unmitigated disaster of style over substance--gone were my beloved small scale conflicts and moral shades of grey, replaced with a LotR scale, gravitas, and black and white morality that I want no part of in my Hobbitses. So it goes.


• The Man with the Iron Fists, on the other hand, was everything you could possibly want from a Rza-directed kung-fu movie. Dopey and problematic, but a lot of fun!


• I was recently reminded of this gorgeous collection of (primarily erotic, NSFW) bookplates:


• I've been primarily laboring on this and that longer project, but also had a couple of short stories come out last year, and sold a few more which will be dropping this year.


• The first of the two pieces published last year was "HISTORYBOT Saves the Future," which appeared in Zombies vs Robots: This Means War! and is quite possibly the best short story I've ever written.


• The second story published in 2012 was a collaboration with Molly Tanzer called "Tubby McMungus, Fat from Fungus," which appeared in Fungi and is quite possibly the weirdest short story I've ever (co-)written.


• Some of the stories that I sold last year which should come out in 2013 are "Saturday's Children" (about NYC photographer Weegee teaming up with a local mambo to solve a rash of child abductions), "Porn Enough at Last" (gender-neutral erotica about a post-apocalyptic entrepreneur restoring the pornographic details to censored hentai), and "The Fox and the Quantum Physicist" (a modern fable).

• Jeremy L.C. Jones interviewed me at Clarkesworld.


• I did a "Writer's Read" column at The Campaign for the American Reader.


• And also a "Page 69 Test" column for the same folks.


• I missed it before, but HTMLGiant listed the book as one of their Holiday Shopping Guide Recommendations. (Thanks, Chris!)


• I also realize I neglected to post to any reviews the first time around, so here are some choice ones:


• Publisher's Weekly says, "Every page is saturated with wickedness and mischief." (Thanks PW!)


• Romantic Times gives it 4 1/2 stars and says, "(it) will keep you guessing at every turn. The language here is lyrical, bawdy and constantly challenging." (Thanks, Elise!)


• FantasyLiterature.com describes it as my best work to date, and says it is "filled with sexual tension, unwelcome surprises, and short lifespans, all of it weaved with masterful wordplay and dark humor." (Thanks Justin!)


• And UK review site The Bookbag says, "this dark and memorable novel, complete with its dark and memorable characters, is among the more distinctive and classifiable reads around." (Thanks John!)

Today marks the fruition of over three years of concentrated effort, my third novel, that shaggy sheep that started life under the title Hook and Cod and is now available at finer booksellers everywhere as The Folly of the World. I love it, and hope that you do, too. If you don't, well, there are plenty of Netherlandish proverbs that could be applied, but then there always are...

Here then are some salient facts and links for your perusal.

1. The marvelous Lauren Panepinto and Zelda Devon did the cover, which also underwent some changes along the way. Here's the final beast in all its beauty:

2. I'm greatly indebted to my editor Tim, my agent Sally, and my besties Raech and Molly for both helping me get this project where it needed to be and for putting up with my constant whinging about it. Hell, thanks to everyone who put up with over the last few years, period--this work took over my life, and I really, really appreciate the collective patience of everyone I know!

3. If you're the look before you leap sort, Orbit has posted the prologue and first chapter of the novel.

4. This really is my favorite thing I've ever written. It certainly took the most work of anything I've yet done, and was the most emotionally draining writing experience I've ever had. If you enjoy the book, please feel free to sing its praises from the rooftops, read it aloud at libraries and orphanages, and/or review it online somewhere.

5. Holland is so cool. Thanks, Holland!

6. Link Party:

• The book was picked by Flavorwire as one of their 10 Must-reads for December and the LA Times Holiday Gift Guide.
• Molly held a cocktail contest to promote the book, and just posted the results.
• I've got a "Thoughtful Thursday" column up at Fantasy Literature, and they're giving away a copy of the book in the comments section.
• I've got a guest blog at SFSignal called "Reality and the Folly of the World," which is about, uh, reality and the folly of the world/The Folly of the World.
• I've got another guest blog, this one at Orbit which is basically a top ten list of movies that somehow relate to the novel.
• Orbit also posted a short chapter that got cut from the final draft, as a sort-of deleted scene/teaser thing.

Molly Tanzer and I go way back, being friends, neighbors, collaborators, rivals, etc., so I'm happy to announce that her brilliant, weirdass debut, A Pretty Mouth, just dropped from Lazy Fascist Press last week. For serious, if you have any interest in fiction that is positively iconoclastic, pick up this tome ASAP--it'll be utterly unlike anything else you read this year, guaranteed. As I wrote in my Amazon review, for fans of historical fiction, Victorian pornography, Mythos horror, Tom Jones, sword-and-sandal epics, Jeeves and Wooster, the poetry of John Wilmot, and/or boys' school romps, this is the book you've been waiting for!

When I read her initial draft of the project I was gobsmacked by the manifest quality of the specimen, and so seeing it evolve into an even sleeker, stranger, more complex beast has been most exciting...and lest you find my recommendation to be of dubious worth, everyone from Caitlín R. Kiernan to Laird Barron to Nick Mamatas to Stephen Graham Jones has been singing its praises.

Without (much) further ado, here's the Q&A I put to Molly regarding her Pretty Mouth (I warned her that would happen, by the by). For those who use Spotify, you can cue up the soundtrack she made for the book as you read the interview:


1) A Pretty Mouth, which is something like the illegitimate offspring of a novel and a short story collection, grew out of your original story "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins." In expanding the genealogy and universe of the Calipash line, did you find yourself referring to “Infernal History” as the canon that all the other material had to conform to, or did you take a more free-form approach, where each epoch existed independently of the others?

Uh … both? Is that possible?

I knew in a general sense that each pair of twins would have their own set of personalities, environments, and concerns, because I really wanted to avoid being boring and repetitious when attempting a generational work. (Whether I am successful in avoiding such is up to my readers.) But certainly “Infernal History,” as the foundational piece, determined certain major elements used in the rest of the stories, those elements being evil twins, hammy stage villainy, the use of pastiche or leitmotif appropriate to whatever time period I was writing about, and, I dunno … aristocratic flakiness.

It’s funny, when I first started thinking about the project, I never meant for Lovecraftian/Mythos elements to appear in all the stories. Certainly in “Infernal History” and its direct sequel “The Hour of the Tortoise” that stuff was supposed to play a major part, but it was only after my editor at Lazy Fascist commented on something he saw as being Lovecraftian in “A Spotted Trouble at Dolor-on-the-Downs” (I hadn’t really thought about it that way) did I really, you know, go for that as an overarching thematic element.

[Cross-posted to my website]

Horror is tough, maybe even tougher than it's closest cousin, comedy.That line between the unsettling and the silly is so damn fine, so subjective, and a groan instead of a giggle at an off joke can be easier on the ego than a snort instead of a shiver at an attempted scare. For me, at least--I like to jumble horror and comedy together, taking the trappings of the former but applying a lighter, more absurd tone and atmosphere of the latter, which of course makes all the difference. Horror, like comedy, is more than the basic skeleton of components, it's everything that comes after, which brings us to the hardest aspect of writing either--sustaining a mood over the course of many pages. No doubt this explains why most of my favorite horror texts and films (Ravenous, for example) take a subversive and shifting tone, rather than attempting to hit one note and have it not only carry but deepen over the course of its action. Which brings me to two novels I recently read, Laird Barron's The Croning and Riley Michael Parker's A Plague of Wolves and Women.

I'll start with The Croning, as I'd been anticipating it for some time. It's no secret that Laird Barron is one of the greatest living writers of short horror fiction, and so I was slavering as soon as I caught wind of the project. Obviously skill in the short form by no means assures skill in the long, but a few wee missteps notwithstanding, I felt that Barron's first novel was a grand success. It's a continuation and expansion on the primarily Pacific NW-set mythos Barron established in short stories like the excellent "Mysterium Tremendum" and "The Men from Porlock"--it's by no means necessary to read Barron's short fiction prior to embarking on the novel, but those familiar with the relevant pieces will be rewarded with a knowing shudder or chuckle from time to time.

One of the aspects which caught me off-guard was the slyly humorous tone which opens up the novel. I'm the sort of horror fan who often enjoys the historical back-story that is inevitably flashed back to even more than the contemporary action, but the meat of the novel is good enough to hold its own against its arch, fairy tale-esque opening. The tonal shift between this opening chapter and the remainder of the story proved to be indicative of the see-sawing atmosphere of the novel, where the horror of the unknown and the amusement of the absurd mostly balance one another, with frequent, stomach-dropping dips in uncertain directions. Barron understands the importance of occasionally breaking up the tension with wry humor, and while the vast majority of the time I thought he did a brilliant job of juggling the two, there were a couple of moments where something chilling was undercut by an aside that seemed to unnecessarily lighten the load. Over all, though, it's a very fine, fun, and wonderfully sinister trip to the knobbly knee of Uncle Leech, and one not to be missed by fans of modern horror with a classic, Lovecraftian bent.

Polymath Alex Jeffers has done some very attractive book designs over the years (such as Livia Llewellyn's Engines of Desire), so it's not surprising that You Will Meet a Stranger Far From Home, his debut collection from Lethe Press, sports a lovely layout and cover. As with Llewellyn's aforementioned book, the contents here are more than worthy of the tidy edition that houses them, and fans of rich, decadent prose will find much to appreciate here. Jeffers' tales run the gamut from the familiar to the alien, from real world settings to far-flung fantasy lands, but even with the most reality-bound entries the word mundane never applies--in these fictions, the Aegean Sea holds just as much magic as the unnamed worlds Jeffers conjures up.

As with the best collections, the stories in this volume feed off of and bleed into one another, offering a wide range of experiences rather than hitting the same notes over and over again. The book's two hottest stories (look, I fumbled around with words like erotic and sensual, but while they are certainly erotic, sensual, lush, etc., hot really is the operative word here) bookend the rest, with the opener "Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Blood for Sorrow, Salt for Joy" giving a friendly pinch of magical realism to the story of a young man crushing on a Turkish deckhand, while the concluding story, "Tattooed Love Boys," amps up both the fantastical content and the sexuality--the two stories mirror one another nicely without at all feeling repetitious, despite similar motifs. Throughout the work, stories pair with one another in a charming fashion that only occasionally is the result of a direct relation, such as the Arabian Night-styled "Firooz and his Brother" and the even more adventurous follow-up, "Haider and His Dog," but for the most part arises from a thematic or stylistic connection.

Kickstarter is pretty great. I've only backed one or two projects to date due to a wallet moth infestation, but I like the format, as well as the seeming security of the platform--a year or three back I plonked down some cash to pre-order a small press anthology that was in the red (Wheatland Press's Polyphony 7), as they needed x pre-orders or else they wouldn't make it to print, and I never received a book, a refund, or even a response to my "uh, wheres my dollars?" emails, so yeah, Kickstarter seems to be an improvement just as a secure pre-order system, to say nothing of all the other perks. It's been neat to see projects flourish via this specific brand of crowd-funding, be they novels, films, anthologies, board games, whatevs, and it'll be interesting to see the long-term impact of the approach. One thing that would be classy as hell would be if one of these potential fiction anthologies or magazines, assuming they planned on holding open submissions, had a bold-faced "if you fund us, we cannot consider your fiction for inclusion" policy, but I'm not going to wait underwater on that one.

Right, so the reason I got on the subject is that the publisher Stone Skin Press has launched a Kickstarter, because of course they have--like I said, it's a great way of setting up pre-orders, getting pre-release attention, etc. Stone Skin has four fiction anthologies in the wings, which you can read more about at the Kickstarter, and I've got stories in two of'em, both of which I've mentioned around here before: my hardboiled Weegee-and-conjurewoman story "Saturday's Children" will appear in The New Hero II, and my fable "The Fox and the Quantum Physicist" will appear in The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables. I'm especially chuffed about the latter, as it was the source for one of the book's interior illustrations by the brilliant Rachel Kahn--they've posted said illustration at the bottom of the Kickstarter page, as well as the one for Julia Ellingboe's story, and I'm honored to have had my scribblings inspire such a delightful work of art. The Kickstarter has already reached its funding goal, by the by, but there are still a few weeks left to contribute, and the rewards seem pretty nifty (including prints of the illustrations), hence my mentioning it here. Stone Skin seems off to a promising start, just to go on the caliber of the writers they've lined up (full ToCs at the bottom of the Kickstarter page--I'm in crazy good company), the artists they've solicited, and and my own experiences working with them, so here's hoping all prosper from their crowd-funded approach...

[cross-posted to my website]