Kaaron Warren's Blog, page 17

Review: Mistification

Devin Jeyathurai, who received the prize for owning the first copy in Singapore of Mistification, has posted a wonderful review at his website, Living in SIN.

Nothing better than to hear this said about your novel:

"And then there are those books that are so rich and full, like a cup of espresso. Those can overwhelm you if you consume them too quickly, so I keep them at home, and sip from them, small sips, either early in the morning when it's quiet and still and nothing is moving, or late at night when I'm comfortably cocooned in bed.

Kaaron Warren's latest, Mistification is the latter."

 

 

Sparks: Lucy Sussex

My second-published short story, Skin Holes, appeared in Penguin anthology called Strange Fruit. I was thrilled beyond belief to make into this 'outre" book, edited by Paul Collins, not least because Lucy Sussex had a story in there and she was, and remains, one of my favourite writers. I'd read her collection My Lady Tongue and Other Stories twice or more, and was inspired by the bravery of her fiction, the outlandishness of it, the normality and the horror.

Here, Lucy talks about a number of sparks. Her short story collection Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies is just out from Ticonderoga Press, and Thief of Lives is out from Twelfth Planet Press. Both will be added to my library.

 

 

"Where do your crazy ideas come from?

 

It depends upon the genre. The best crime fiction tends to derive from real-life events. 'The Fountain of Justice' came from a conversation with someone I will only describe as working at the intersection of crime and justice. They just had to tell someone and it turned out to be me. I altered one major detail, and let faulty memory do the rest of the fictionalizing. That apart, it's all true…

 

When editors ask me to do something, that's a compliment, and I try to oblige. Susan Johnson asked me to write about sex. 'The Subject of O' was the result, but it came in after deadline and can't have suited the anthology. No matter. 'Thief of Lives' was originally for Ellen Datlow, topic: vampires. I said I'd write about writers as vampires, feeding off others to fuel their fictions. It proved a bugger to write—'Well, it would,' said Ian Mond. 'Because it would be reflexive, like biting yourself.' I had to go over sentence after sentence, knowing I was aiming for something but not knowing quite what. Pre-plotting would have helped, but I wasn't quite sure what the plot was. Having to rewrite and rewrite to get one story was hard work, but the result was actually worth it. Even if I look at the story and mutter: 'Never again'.

 

Stories can come out of writing-related work. I was editing a Lonely Planet book on Madagascar, and got so fascinated by the detail that I asked the author if I could use it fictionally. He said yes, and that is how 'Sagittaire' (the new story in Matilda) came about. 'Alchemy' came from reviewing a popular science book on chemistry, with the sort of juxtaposition I love: the first chemist known was a Babylonian woman called Tapputi; and the Book of Enoch claims demons taught women forbidden arts. The link between them was perfumery, a black art to Enoch, but Tapputi's profession. Then, as I was writing, another piece of information came to my attention: the US army had built a camp on part of Hammurabi's Babylon.  Sometimes it seems positively daemonic, how the universe throws you details just when you need them.

 

Or else you can just go out drinking the night someone has something they really want to get off their mind."

Sparks: Rob Hood

Robert Hood is the perfect example of my theory about horror writers, plumbers and butchers. They deal with blood, guts, shit and all kinds of nasty things in their jobs, yet they are the nicest people you'll find. I've never known a bad tempered plumber or butcher, and horror writers are usually very easy to get along with as well. Rob Hood is a delight to hang out with.

Rob Hood writes frightening, disturbing stories that give me nightmares. And he knows more about monsters, zombies and giant things than anyone else I know.

 

 

"What was the spark that inspired the story "Rotting Eggplant on the Bottom Shelf of a Fridge" (originally published in Eidolon #14, vol. 4, no. 2, April 1994 and reprinted in the collection Creeping in Reptile Flesh (Altair Australia 2008 and Morrigan Books 2011).

 

"Rotting Eggplant on the Bottom Shelf of a Fridge" is a story that turned out to be a lot weirder and more layered than I'd anticipated when I started it – and as a result I've always been extraordinarily fond of it. It actually took several "sparks" to get it going, but the initial inspiration was probably my misreading of a sign. While driving along the freeway west of Sydney I noticed an official RTA notice at the exit to Penrith that read (at first glance) "Museum on Fire". Odd, I thought, and looked again. Of course, the sign actually read "Museum of Fire" – referring to a historical and educational museum celebrating the work of firefighters. But the odd idea that a burning museum might be permanently signposted and the sense of a moment where reality had been distorted by an act of perception created not so much the narrative of the story but the ambiance of it. The plot itself arose from the title of a song by the 70s space-rock band Hawkwind. The song is "The Aubergine That Ate Rangoon" from their album Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music. When I put the sense of dislocation I'd felt and the more literal idea of a city-eating eggplant together the germ of the story was born – a tale in which the Western Suburbs of Sydney becomes even more surreal than it normally is when an ordinary couple come to believe that an eggplant left to rot in the back of their fridge is beginning to affect the environment beyond their kitchen, right into the heart of Sydney, as the buildings there (symbolically its social structure and their own sense of security) begin to decay. The third element that played into the story was that of synchronicity. Odd coincidences have always fascinated me (as they did the writer Charles Fort, who spent much of his life collecting reports of weird shit worldwide and believed that Reality was much stranger than we can possibly imagine). Coincidences and the idea of synchronicity existing between apparently unrelated objects separated in time and space also lie at the heart of "sympathetic magic", where a conduit is established between, say, a doll and a human being. What is done to one affects the other. Another interesting idea. At any rate all these things came together to form the "spark" of the story – one that treats symbolic connotations as literal narrative elements in a way that all fantastic fiction does to a degree, but here is taken to some sort of extreme. The story has a narrative through-line but one that only makes sense if the reader sees the meaning that lies on a level beyond plot and is willing to grant an intuitive "sense" to its essential absurdity. And that to me is what we do as artists and as human beings: strive to create temporary sense out of the world's basic senselessness.

 

Note that the collection Creeping in Reptile Flesh has just appeared in its second revised edition from Morrigan Books and is available for download in an e-version from Smashwords. A printed format version is to follow."

 

I love Robert's description of the mis-read sign. I have my own collection of mis-heard ("Next year, when I'm sick), and mis-read things.

Do others collect these as well?

Sparks: Angela Slatter

Angela Slatter's stories display a vision of the world which is a slight shift away from reality. I love that. Slatterworld is lyrical and full of imagery, but it's also harsh in its reality, and cruel, and disturbing. She's another powerful, original voice.

Her Sourdough and Other Stories collection is up for a World Fantasy Award. Here, she talks about the title story.

 

 

Sourdough sparks

My stories either start with a first line or an image in my head. "Sourdough" came to me with the first line 'My father did not know that my mother knew about his other wives, but she did.'

 

Hot on the heels of these word was the image of this woman in a kind of mixed Medieval/Victorian setting, her attention caught by all the kids in the city with a certain shade of bright red hair – the shade that said they were her husband's children. It was quite filmic, all these kids flashing in and out as they ran through the town square – almost like the flashes you see in koi ponds when the fish swim quickly, disappearing under lily pads and the like, then reappearing.

 

The story then wandered away from that first line and became the tale of Emmeline, the eldritch baker and daughter of the woman in the first line. Her thread was influenced by the idea in the old Grimm fairy tale "The Princess in Disguise" of putting jewellery into food. In that tale, it's a ring or necklace. Emmeline puts in a ring and something far less pleasant than in the fairy tale happens. I was thinking about how everyday activities might have magic in them and that kneading dough might be something that can create something powerful and strange. Fortuitously, the images in the story gave the fabulous writer and artist, Stephen J. Clark, the inspiration for the cover art for the book, Sourdough and Other Tales.

 

The spark for the city came after reading Margo Lanagan's "Wooden Bride". In the end my city is about the squares, it's all squares within squares, with the idea being that within this terribly ordered and well-organised city there is so much chaos.

Sparks: Ben Peek

Ben Peek writes distinctive fiction with his very strong voice. Here, he talks about the spark for Below, the novella he wrote for the Twelfth Planet Press flip book Above and Below.  Stephanie Campisi wrote the novella Above. Ben's attention to the detail of his people and place are what sold the book for me.

"Writing Below was always a little different to writing anything else,

because there was always Steph and Above to consider, to make sure

that we were creating a novel, that the high end concept of a society

in the sky, and a society on the ground, would work.

But, outside that, and for myself personally, I have always loved the

idea of a society fractured between those living in the sky and those

on the ground. There's lots of examples out there of it, but I think I

first saw the idea in an Aliens Vs Predator comic, written by Chris

Claremont, an author who pretty much defined the X-Men to be what they

are now, before the company fired him. Deadliest of the Species was a

series he wrote around that time, in which Earth is covered in aliens,

and people live in ships that sail through the sky. I remember liking

it well enough as a kid, and despite myself, I have always had a bit

of a weakness for those company properties–but what stuck with me

throughout was the idea of the physical division, of how you could

divide people by race, economy, and culture, and apply that to a

story.

In a very real way, Below (and Above) took its form from that latter

thought. Real world conflicts, like Israel and Palestine, as just an

example of one of sadly many, helped shape the way it developed

further, building a cultural conflict that has gone on for so long

that there is no clear reason for it anymore, and no clear solution.

You just have people living in it. People trying to be equal, trying

to be winners, or trying not to be losers. People trying to make sure

their family is okay. People trying to protect their culture. While I

was writing Below, I remember seeing a talk by Tariq Ali, in which he

talked about the futility of trying to create a lasting peace between

Israel and Palestine. If I remember rightly, he talked about how

separate states would not work, and that new thoughts had to be

considered, including the removal of both states and the creation of

one in shared power. He was talking about it in relation to American

politics, wherein he argued that Obama's administration was a

continuation of the Bush administration, which really just continued

Clinton, who just continued Bush Snr, and so on and so forth. That

idea, of course, is easy to see in Australia, too. Each new government

we have just continues the work of the previous one, with slight

changes. Our terrible deal with Malaysia for illegal arrivals is one

such example. And in Below, I wanted to work that in, to have these

people who were caught in a political war that no longer had a

start in sight, and definitely offered no end.

Which might make the story sound a lot more political than it is, to

be honest. I don't consider myself a political writer, though it has

been said about me; but I do consider myself a social one, in that one

of my interests in all my work is to engage with the reader, to form a

conversation between him or her and myself in relation to the world we

live in. Good fiction is not about switching your mind off, but rather

engaging and exciting it. One of the ways to do that, at least as far

as I'm concerned, is not just to give an engaging story, and work of

fiction, but to thread it with a conversation between myself and the

audience. It is very much about the back and forth that you develop,

the engagement with a person on a number of levels.

And, you know, I got to destroy a city and create a barbaric filtering

system that people surgically insert into their bodies to survive a

polluted world.

It can't be all cups of tea and polite discussions, after all."

Sparks: Jeffrey Ford

Here, Jeffrey Ford talks about his story "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening".  I heard Jeff read the opening in Cambridge last month and barely took a breath while he was reading. In the story, he perfectly captures the character and mood he describes here perfectly.

 

"Where Did Daddy Come From?

A recently published story, "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening," appeared in Ellen Datlow's anthology for St. Martins, Naked City. It's a pretty grim little piece but told with humor and in the style of an urban fairy tale in order to torque the grimness a bit. It's about a spider that crawls into a sleeping boy's ear, eats its way through to his brain and makes a nest for itself in the center of his thoughts. It restrings the boy's neural pathways with its own thread and then plays him like a zither. The kid goes through this horrific transformation into a creature that later comes to be known as Daddy Longlegs of the Evening. He winds up in the failing city of Grindly, and sets about draining the citizenry of their essential fluids, leaving behind corpses that the Grindly newspaper refers to as "old luggage." And then some more stuff happens.

The seed of the idea came to me when I went with my son and wife to a Salvador Dali retrospective, I think, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dali did a painting called, "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening — Hope." You know, everything in it is dripping and turning into other stuff. There's a spider in it you can find. I was struck by the title and thought it would also make a good title for a story. I dropped the Hope literally and figuratively. The last piece you saw in that museum show, on the way out, was a hologram that Dali made of Alice Cooper, sitting on a log or something. There was Alice, 3-D, made of green light and the size of a pack of cigarettes. It might have been the vibe from that last holographic vision that gave me the inclination to let the words of the painting's title give birth to a character and a story. While writing it, I was thinking about the old Fleischer Brothers cartoons — not for their anthropomorphic houses and clocks, but for their perpetual night, their grimy cities, and their crazy melodrama. Also, I was thinking of that part of the Fairy Tale world that's a dark and remorseless country. I remembered one I'd read years earlier where a woman had a spell put on her and was cursed to vomit up frogs and snakes for the rest of her life.

I tried to write the story once and got stuck, so I put what I had on my blog. Some people wrote to me and told me they liked it and to finish it, which inspired me. Still it took a while for me to start up on it again. Once I did, though, it came to me pretty fast."

 

 

Readercon

My very wordy Readercon report is up at my livejournal page. It appears I had a good time.

Sparks: Gary McMahon

Reading John Shirley's answer below inspired me to ask some of my favourite writers the same question: what was the spark that inspired the story?

I'll be posting responses over the next few months, as they come in.

I just received Gary McMahon's The Concrete Grove and the first page is already devastatingly good. Here, he talks about his short story "Diving Deep".

"My story DIVING DEEP (published in the anthology The End of the Line, by Solaris) is an attempt to marry the cosmic themes of H.P. Lovecraft with something intensely intimate. I'm always fascinated by the collision of internal and external forces and its effect on damaged characters, and I thought about what might happen if a personal with a void inside them came into contact with a vast emptiness from without. I'm also scared of enclosed spaces, and most of the story is taken up by an ice diver in the Arctic swimming through a tunnel in an iceberg that closes up behind him as he moves through it, so he can't go back – only forward. It's one of the few stories I've written that actually unnerved me while I was working, and that made me realise that the story was probably going to turn out okay…if you scare yourself, you must be onto something, right? Another huge imaginative spark for the story was the fabulous Werner Herzog documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which has our intrepid Teutonic auteur visiting remote parts of the Arctic to interview guitar-playing scientists living in isolated research stations, film insane landlocked penguins looking for the sea, and watch the idiotically brave ice divers enter supernaturally clear icy waters by means of small shafts bored through the ice cap…amazing stuff, truly astonishing."

 

 

John Shirley

I have a radio interview coming up with Stu Bryer for Norwich Radio Station WIXH 1310.

When preparing for this, I made a list, as I always do, of influential writers. My mind always goes blank when someone asks me, so I always have this emergency list close by when I think there's a chance I'll be asked the question.

One writer who is always on the list is John Shirley. I read his collection Heatseeker soon after it came out in 1989. I wasn't published then; in fact, I wasn't sure I could be a writer at all at that stage of my life. I'd written plenty, but I wasn't sure if the strange way I wrote, the awful things I wrote about, would find readers.

Reading Heatseeker, which is vicious, brilliant, brave and unrelenting in every story, inspired me to keep going. It made me realise I didn't have to write easy fiction.

So when I was offered the opportunity to ask John Shirley some questions, I realised I had only one. The answer Shirley gave inspired me all over again.

My question: I'm fascinated by the 'spark' that starts stories, and will sometimes try to pinpoint this in other people's stories.

The stories in 'Heatseeker', which I read during my formative years as a writer, have so much heart, guts and anger to them.

I'd love to know what the 'spark' was in these stories. What set them off? I'm particularly interested in the brilliant "What Cindy Saw", "Sleepwalkers" and "Six Kinds of Darkness".

 

John Shirley's answer:

I was always looking for a way to use allegory to express my feelings about the world, without being so allegorical it lost the reader. Sleepwalkers (there's an improved version of that in Living Shadows) was partly based on some experience with people using drugs–I wasn't using that one, but I was living with them–and partly with some experience of the street prostitution scene. It wasn't an organized prostitution thing, with pimps. It was about people surviving day to day. And people who endured working in it went into a kind of trance, almost, a compartmentalization, a sort of sleepwalking through it, so they could bear it. That seemed to me to be a real phenomenon and at the same time a metaphor for what people went through as they adapted to the realities of life–they learned to "sleepwalk" through life, to shut themselves down so they could bear it, more and more…in whatever walk of life they were in. Six Kinds of Darkness was literally a song I wrote, I used to perform, and it's very much about the feeling that we lose ourselves in media, and in desperate escapes. I was deliberately evoking a rocknroll energy and again the influence of the drug scene was there. (I don't take drugs now, not for many years, and I never took any *while* writing, but some of my stories were a bit influenced by some drug experiences). What Cindy Saw was a kind of mix of existential horror and surrealism, and also an attempt to take the reader into a radical state of esthetic experience. It was influenced by Dali's idea of the Paranoid Critical Method, the idea that if you see ordinary things as if you had never seen them before, jettisoning your associations, you get insights. So it's an attempt to get the reader to accept surreality as standard reality and vice versa. All of these stories were in fact reactions to the world–my struggle to find some kind of transcendant meaning despite the grim realities…John Shirley

His new collection, In Extremis, described as containing his most extreme stories. I'll be ordering it when I get back home.

Readercon

For those travelling to Readercon in Boston, here's my schedule:

Friday July 15

4:00 PM    G    Myth, Midrash, and Misappropriation. K. Tempest Bradford (leader), Marilyn "Mattie" Brahen, Jack M. Haringa, Claude Lalumire, Kaaron Warren. From Walter M. Miller and James Blish to Neil Gaiman, S.J. Day, and Greg Van Eekhout, writers have created fiction that draws inspiration from the characters, images, and stories of well-known religions. Of Victor Pelevin's Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Janet Chui wrote, "Now I know what a Buddhist modern fantasy novel looks like," and Kaaron Warren has said her debut horror novel, Slights, was inspired by pictures in a Hare Krishna text. What are the appeals and challenges of creating fiction from a religious source? Are there dangers of appropriation? Can adaptation start to look like fanfic? How do authors incorporate their own ideas and modernize ancient texts without offending readers of the faith?

6:00 PM    NH    Teeth group reading. Steve Berman, Suzy Charnas, Ellen Datlow, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Kaaron Warren. Contributors to Teeth, a YA vampire anthology, read selections from their work.

Saturday July 16

12:00 PM    E    Autographs. Claude Lalumire, Kaaron Warren.

1:00 PM    NH    Reading. Kaaron Warren. Warren reads "All You Can Do is Breathe" from Datlow's Blood and Other Cravings.

9:00 PM    ME    There's No Homelike Place. Debra Doyle, Theodora Goss, Victoria Janssen (leader), Tom Purdom, Kaaron Warren. Many portal quest fantasies function by exploiting anxieties surrounding the location of home: either home is to be found beyond the portal, where the nerd/outcast finds their true tribe, or home is to be returned to, enriched by the fantasy land left behind in its favor. However, given that our world is increasingly mobile and rootless, why do we seem to produce so few sympathetic narratives of adventurers who never find home–for whom home is less a destination than a journey? Among all the stories of nomads who extol the traveling life but then either settle down (Sharon Shinn's Samaria books) or are forced to stay in one place (Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet), why are there so few where wandering is the happy ending?

Sunday July 17

12:00 PM    RI    How I Wrote Walking the Tree. Kaaron Warren. Kaaron Warren discusses the writing of her novel about communities surrounding an enormous tree inhabited by ghosts.

I'll also be appearing at Bank Square Books in Mystic, CT from 3 – 4 on Wednesday, July 13, then speaking about writing at the Otis Library, Norwich, CT, from 6.30. Love to see you there!