Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 183

From Ghoulies and Ghosties, Long-Leggitie Beasties...

.From Ghoulies and Ghosties, Long-Leggitie Beasties . . .(Part 1)
That year summer lasted halfway to forever.

Continued tomorrow.


And in for those who came in late . . .

 This is the first sentence of  a story that I'll be serializing, one sentence at a time, every day from now to Halloween.  When it's done, the framed typescript will be auctioned off on eBay with all the proceeds to go to the  Clarion West Writers Workshop, to help train the next generation of writers.


And meanwhile, in the outside world . . .

When I was a gonnabe writer, I went to all the SF conventions I could and attended as many panels as possible, because I was looking for the Secret Handshake -- the one bit of information that would turn me into a real writer.  In this I was wise.  I never did learn the Secret Handshake, but I managed to pick up an enormous amount of information that in combination with my constant scribbling, made me good enough to be published.

Nowadays, I only rarely attend panels I'm not on.  I'm afraid that I'll learn something that will undo everything I've painstakingly achieved to date.  But if I did attend panels, I'd definitely go to this one (waning: it's 77 minutes long; you may not want to start viewing it at work).  I've heard these stories before and they're still hilarious:



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A New Halloween Story -- Starting Tomorrow!

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Halloween is coming, and that’s the season for creepy stories!  So I’ve written a flash Halloween story for you.  It's called  From Ghoulies and Ghosties, Long-Leggetie Beasties . . .

Where can you read this and when?  Right here, starting tomorrow.  I'm going to serialize the story one sentence at a time, every day for thirty-seven days.  Which, you'll note, means that it will conclude on the Feast of Children and Dark Imaginings itself.
The very next day, All Saints Day, with the story complete, I'll be auctioning off the original typescript (printed single-spaced on a single sheet of 7" X 5" paper, signed and framed), on eBay.  All proceeds will go to the Clarion West Writers Workshop, to help train the next generation of writers.

That's the frame up above, in my garden, containing all of the story that's public as of today.

The fun starts tomorrow.

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The Brooklyn Book Festival

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I'm going to be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow and, if you're anywhere in the area, you should be too.  It's a festival!  About books!  Nuff said.

Okay, so there will be lots of lots of famous authors, over a hundred panels, and it's all free.  It's the largest free literary event in New York City and -- did I mention this already? -- it's all free.  You might need to know that too.

The festival info can be found here.

And I'll be at the Dell (the publisher of both Asimov's and Analog ) booth at 4 p.m., to chat with anybody who cares to show up.

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Hwaet!

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I took on an unpaid writing chore (which I'll tell you about when it comes to fruition) that has a short deadline and requires a lot of work from me.  So I almost forgot to blog today.

But I didn't.  Her, above, is Benjamin Bagbey in all his glory!  Bagbey specializes in the recreation of dead art forms.  Years ago I saw an ad for a show of Beowulf and went, only to discover that it was one man with a harp, on a bare stage, reciting a full half of the poem.  In the original Old English!

It could have been dire.  But it was magnificent.  If you ever get a chance to see him, by all means do.


And meanwhile, in the U.K.  . . .

Writer and journalist Molly Flatt blogs about writers' rooms . . . and because a good half of her blog is about Kyle Cassidy, there's a photo of me in my office.

You can find it here.


And on Monday . . .

I'll be announcing my new project.  Be there or be square!

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Rock On!

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Another rock and roll anthology, you ask?  No!  Believe it or not, Rock On is the very first anthology of rock and roll science fiction stories ever published.

Not that people didn't try.  I know some very talented anthologists who busted their humps in the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties trying to sell just this book.  Up and down the publishing houses of New York, the response was, "There's no market for stories about rock and roll."

Jesus wept.

Now, a mere sixty years or so after the birth of rock, Paula Guran has managed to sell the book that nobody else could.  I'm in it, of course, because way back in the day when I was starting out, a science fiction story about rock and roll was an extremely difficult sale.  I was lucky  that  Robert Silverberg was enough of a wildman to buy "The Feast of Saint Janis" for his New Dimensions series.  But Howard Waldrop's flat-out brilliant (you doubt me? it's in the book) "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll" languished for years while its partisans talked it up to editors who knew for a fact that rock and roll was just too weird for science fiction, until finally Gardner Dozois became editor of Asimov's and snatched it up.

I won't go into detail about this book.  It has most of the stories I would have chosen, and the mere titles of some of them carry me off to the long-lost Lyonesse of my youth.  Here's Lucius Shepard's "How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song . . ." which was the first hint I ever had, back when rock and roll ruled the earth, that there was corruption in its heart and winter was coming.  And here's . . .

But never mind that.  If rock and roll is your drug of choice, you'll never find a surer buy.  You want this book.

And soon, soon, soon . . .

I'll be announcing my secret project in only a few days.  Don't touch that dial!

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Researching Io

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Here's a message I received recently:


Where you got all the information and research for your short story "Pulse of the Machine" that dealt with the magnificent descriptions of Io. I would like to write a story about Io, but I can't find any of the background information you found for this story. Any help would be appreciated.
Thank youNate


As it chances, I was inspired to write "The Very Pulse of the Machine" by a remark by (I think) Geoff Landis, who told a mutual friend that he was baffled by the fact that NASA had spent billions of dollars exploring the Solar System and then put all the information they found up on the Web available for free -- and yet almost no SF writers were taking advantage of it.
So I chose Io because it seemed an interesting place to me and went to the NASA website to see what they had to say.  Initially I found synoptic general-public pages.  The more useful of these I printed out and placed in a cardboard box by my desk.  Then I branched out from there. doing searches on combinations of keywords until I started finding scientific papers based on the findings of various probes.  I printed them out, read them, underlined or highlighted the evocative bits, and placed them in the box.
I made various side-trips into related matters, particularly into volcanism and the chemical properties of sulfur, and the information I found I also printed, read, thought about, put in the box.
By the time the box was full, the data had given me a story.
None of the sources I used gave me a detailed overview of Io.  That was patched together from a hundred different sources.  And some of what I described -- anything that couldn't be seen by a fly-by probe -- was made up, based on those related searches into sulfur and volcanism.  In the story I didn't violate any known facts about Io.  But whatever wasn't known could be anything I wanted it to be.
I realize this rather sidesteps your question -- how to find these sources.  But I've had no formal training on running searches (when I was a student, my college had exactly one computer, an IBM mainframe), nor was I particularly ingenious in my research.  I just kept poking around, looking and finding until I had what I needed.
Go thou and do likewise.
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Libration

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This is just good.  A clear explanation of libration, set to music.  And how often do you have a piece of formal music vetted by NASA scientists?

As it says on the credits, music by Matthew Schickele; sung by Hai-Ting Chinn; with piano by Erika Switzer.


And . . . 

I've got some nifty stuff coming up soon.  Keep watching the Web!

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The Words

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I saw The Words this afternoon and despite some gaffes -- an inexplicable confusion between editor and agent, for example -- liked it quite a bit.  Yeah, it's a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, but nobody in the theater was ever confused as to exactly what was going on.  All the actors were good and Jeremy Irons, as the old man, was magnificent.  And the moment when the writer decides to publish the novel he found as his own was a beautifully set-up emotional mousetrap.

The one genuine accomplishment of the movie is in portraying writers as being, at their core, infinitely crushable.  The script manages to capture the insecurity that, I'm here to say, dwells at the heart of every serious writer I've ever met.

The one genuine failure is the lack of real women.  Yes, all the actresses are good and some of them are magnificent.  And my complaint isn't that they're uniformly beautiful -- the men are too, so that's not it.  My complaint is that they're all mirrors to the men:  wives and girlfriends.  They have no lives and thoughts independent of their men.  Which is not women as I have encountered them. 

I complain not because I have some politically-correct agenda.  I complain because . . . well, because The Words could have been twice the movie it is now.

Which, as I've mentioned, I quite enjoyed.

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The Spready Oak of Rising Sun

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It doesn't look like much, but this fallen oak in Rising Sun, Maryland, was a mute witness of history.  During the American Revolution, Lafayette's men camped by and under the Spready Oak, as it came to be called.  A cavalry camped under it during the Civil War. I stopped nearby it for lunch just the other day.

In the early 1980s, a windstorm blew over the Spready Oak.  It was estimated to be over 500 years old at the time.

Memento Mori -- "remember you must die."  Because if you haven't died, you haven't yet led a rich, full life.

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Today's Mystery Bird

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I took this shot at Oswingo Dam in Maryland yesterday.  Down below the dam is smorgasbord heaven for piscivores.  Fishermen line the shore.  Bald eagles soar overhead and occasionally deign to swoop like the wrath of God upon the Susquehanna and fly away with a glistening silvery fish in their talons.

So.  Care to guess what the above in-no-way-an-eagle bird is?

(Tick.  Tick.  Tick.  Tick.  Music here.  Tick.  Bing!)

No, it's not a crow nor is it a raven.  Look at that head.  You've got it -- it's a black vulture!

You didn't used to find black vultures in Maryland -- only turkey vultures.  But they've been moving north over the past decade.  This particular one was about twenty feet away from me and captured by a point-and-click at the extreme limits of its competence.

Black vultures are about two thirds the size of a bald eagle.  They can be identified by the white patches at the tips of the undersides of their wings (turkey vultures have white along the trailing edge of the undersides of their wings)and there are many dozens of them at Oswingo.  Along with an equal number of cormorants.  And, as I said, the occasional bald eagle.

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