R.R. Angell's Blog

Gargoyle Magazine Online #10

Ready for a summertime ghost story? If you can write Hello in the sweat of a beer glass you just might get lucky. Gargoyle Online #10 has dropped and I have a sweaty little story on the menu. So grab a cold one and a seat and, well, cheers!

I See Right Through You <== Click there

There are so many great stories, poems, art, and essays in this issue, and I’m honored to be included. I urge you to go browsing through the table of contents and pick a few at random, or devour the whole thing. Here is a link to the TOC (That’s Table of Contents for those in the know).

The Dreaded Pink Death of Sourdough

Well, it happened and I guess I was warned. I fed the sourdough starter a few days ago and it looked a little off, not the uniform ivory color that it usually expresses. Initially, I thought it might be due to my kickstarting it with a little rye flour a few weeks back to give it a bit more vim and vigor as the goo seemed to languish. Last night, there was a certain faint smell in the kitchen and I refrained from feeding it, thinking that some things are inevitable and it would only be a waste of good all-purpose flour if things were to turn bad.

Things are inevitable. Things do turn bad. But not always. Always there is hope. As a species, or maybe it is a personality type, we hope a slight bit of legerdemain will magically fix things while we sleep. And sometimes it does! Luck really is the intersection where preparation meets opportunity. If you are looking for magic, you are looking in the wrong direction most of the time.

Yep. The pink death descended in the night and covered my starter. It wasn’t the original one from early covid days. Actually, it was; I’d somehow saved a batch of discard in the refrigerator and was able to get it going again last year or whenever it happened before. This time, I don’t have a backup, so it all went into the trash.  Sorry that I didn’t take a photo to share, but you have a good imagination and can guess what bubbly pink brownish slime looks like.

Oh well. Maybe I will take a break from making all my own sandwich bread? Maybe I will try to make a new starter from scratch? I don’t know, a break sounds nice. And there are quite a few lovely looking loaves out there in the world.

 

 

Gargoyle Magazine Online #4

Gargoyle Magazine Online #4 has dropped and I have a story nestled in among all the other stories, poems, art, and essays. Here is a link to the story.

For some fantastic reads, here is a link to the Table of Contents where you can access the entire issue!

Nancy Hightower’s mirror image photo of New York City

Link fix: Gay & Lesbian Review, December 8, 2020 essay

Somehow, I never got the link set up on the FREE STORIES! tab or mad it easy for you to find it. There are a bunch of other links like that, and I’ll be fixing them as I get around to it. Putting up posts here isn’t a priority of mine as I do have lots of other things I am supposed to be doing, like writing! And not little blog posts.

You can find my obscure blog post on this site that contains the link to the essay here.

You can go directly to the G&LR essay How It All Changed here, 

The link to the Free Stories!section is here.

The link to Selected Bibliography is here.

Why you might want to read the essay. Well, the 1993 March on Washington is LGBTQ history that is worth knowing about, back in the day when it was just LGB. It isn’t just that this particular date or this particular march happened, but the reasons it happened (society and all of the institutionalized oppression and fears that existed then and still exist today in many ways and places) and the effect all of it had on our lives was significant and costly – emotionally, creatively, monetarily, and in so many other ways.

How did this happen?

Not long ago I was getting a collection of linked short stories together to format and send out because that’s what you are supposed to do as a writer. One of the first things the recipients will ask is, “Have any of these been published previously and, if so, where where they published?”

Wow. Yes, well, ahem, all the info should be right there. Yes. The publication info for the ones that have seen the light of day _should_ be right there, but where did it go? Lost in bad version control?

I’m afraid that, and the location of my missing sock, may forever be a mystery. Well, not really. It is due, in a sense, to bad version control relating to multiple computers over several decades each with their own slightly incomplete file directory trees. So, over thirty years or so every time something would get published or finished or polished up I’d stash the information in the logical-at-the-time spot.

Yikes!

Solution? I designed a standard directory tree file structure that intrinsically captures dates where that’s important, and sets up flexible prioritized directory areas based on my current working whims. Furthermore, all the redundancy across all my devices and the cloud backup storage, have been merged and deduped.

Of course, one never gets everything perfectly sorted out so I am resolved to correct and organize as I encounter errors and those interesting rabbit holes of past files and memories as I stumble upon them.

Now that I have better bibliographical data, I can now put that data in the proper spot, and also post them when they lead to things online you might be interested in seeing.

That will lead me to the next post. The link to a piece I had in the Gay & Lesbian Review a while back which never really got a post here, and the link never made it to the proper spot in these pages. Guess I get distracted from time to time.

Gargoyle 74 is out. And I’m in!

GARGOYLE 74 is on the shelves and I’m lucky enough to be in there! Isn’t it beautiful! You will find my short story, “Stick Out Your Thumb,” on page 261 among so many other wonderful stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces. I’m excited and honored to be included. Get a copy and read it cover-to-cover!

 

You can find it at https://gargoylemagazine.com/74-3/

Capclave is this weekend!

Capclave is live and in-person this weekend in Rockville, Maryland (yes, I have a membership) so grab your vaccination cards if you are “in” because you can’t get there without verification. And masks are required. That’s a great thing. With Covid 19 Delta out there we need to do everything we can to prevent it from having hosts to help it mutate into something worse. 

Here’s the link to the website:  https://www.capclave.org/capclave/capclave21/

Here’s the link to programming:https://www.capclave.org/capclave/capclave21/programming.php

Be safe. Get vaccinated. Wear a mask. Be kind.

Rainbow Space Magic 2.0 Conference 2021

Are you interested in queer genre literature? If so, you will want to check out the Rainbow Space Magic Virtual Conference this weekend: Friday, March 12th through Sunday, March 14th. Registration is free and attendance is by Zoom and Discord. You can find both registration and the schedule of panels and readings by some of your new favorite authors at https://www.rainbowspacemagic.org

You can find me on Saturday, March 13th, at noon (EST) for a panel on Aging in Queer Spec Fic

Description: So often, it’s all about the young ‘uns – the teenagers who suddenly discover they’re the Chosen One or the Last Hope of the Galaxy. In this panel, we discuss good examples of older characters in queer spec fic and what advantages age gives them in the story.

SaturdayPT 9:00am / MT 10:00am /CT 11:00am / ET 12:00pm / UK 5:00pm
My fellow panelists are Lloyd A. Meeker, Blaine D. Arden, and Catherine Lundoff

I hope to see you there!

My Arisia Conference Schedule & a flash piece

My Prose Poem on The Broadkill Review (very quick read)

With all the crazy distractions lately, I completely forgot that I had a short prose poem go up on The Broadkill Review. It’s one of the many linked short stories in my collection about growing up gay last century.

https://www.broadkillreview.com/a-walk-in-the-park-by-bob-angell

Arisia Con – January 15 – 18, 2021

I’ll be a panelist next weekend at Arisia Con, New England’s Largest, Most Diverse Sci-Fi & Fantasy Convention. Guests of Honor are: Suzanne Palmer (writer, Finder series), Hannibal King (artist), and Kat Tanaka Okopnik (fan GoH) The lineup looks great so why don’t you join us?

Here is my schedule:

Saturday, January 16th at 4:00 PM – Reading

Three readings from Anne E.G. Nydam, Daniel P. Dern, and Robert R Angell. I’ll be reading from a new work.

Sunday, January 17th at 1:00 PM – Introduction to Birding

Description For people who like birds and want to learn more about observing them. Where and when can I see cool birds in my home area or while traveling? How can I identify them, by sight or by sound? Do I need binoculars or can I just watch? What do I need to know if I want to feed wild birds in my yard? If I find out that a bird I just saw was rare, how can I report it–and are there reasons I should be cautious about reporting? How can I connect with others who are interested in birds?

Sunday, January 17th at 2:30 PM – Gender Diversity in Speculative Fiction

Description Speculative fiction, with its focus on expanding what’s possible, has been exploring the far-from-final frontiers of gender identity for decades. From classics like Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness to Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, join in our discussion of fiction by and/or about genderqueer and genderfluid characters.

You can find the entire conference schedule here: https://www.arisia.org/Publications#Schedule

You live, you learn, and someone writes it down in the history books.

I woke up this morning (December 9th) and found out over coffee that The Gay & Lesbian Review had published my essay, How It All Changed. Wow. That was fast. It wasn’t like I didn’t know it was coming. They had accepted it last week and said it would go up a week or two after I sent them photos, etc. Well, those things got sent yesterday, and here we are. 

The essay is particularly important to me because I was able to work out a lot of disparate moments in my life and see how they wove through our evolving LGBTQ history timeline. It surprised me to discover events that were coincidental when looked at by date but that I never mentally connected. Memory is a fascinating thing. It seems to create pockets of isolated events and moments that exist like snow globes one takes out and shakes up from time to time. 

I’ve been doing a lot of that, shaking things up as I look back. In some cases getting shaken up while examining the life lived, searching for meaning within the interconnection of so many things: family, culture, schooling, social mores. This web of experiences, many of them tiny little memories, or snippets of memories are composed of images, teachings, things overheard, rules, restrictions, ecstasy, surprise, fear, all the moments of life that create a personal landscape. What does one do with all that? What does a writer do with all of those memories?

Well, it’s complicated. I have always been introspective, possibly because being queer put me at odds with just about everything growing up so I had to withdraw and think about it. Or not think about it. To be able to look back and examine what you’ve experienced and think about why and how such and such a thing happened takes time and courage and just a little bit of obsession. I’ve been exploring and writing about many of those examinations in a series of linked short stories. Several have been published over the last twenty-seven years. There are a few more stories coming out next year that are also from this collection. 

The structure of the work was part of the overall story concept. A composition of linked stories that would read a bit like an experimental novel. As it stands, there are eighteen flash pieces that separate eighteen short stories. The Flash pieces run backwards in time and the short stories run forward in time. The idea was for a reader to get to know my main character, Steven, through a mosaic of lenses all centered around liminal moments in his life. My life. A fictionalized memoire of sorts.  

The collection is finished. It is back from beta readers and an editor but I don’t think I am going to shop it around. Why, you ask?

First off, Steven dies. I can’t tell you how many panels I’ve been on at conferences discussing the evolution of GLBTQ literature where the early requirement was for the main character to die. The publishing world demanded it because, they said, society couldn’t bear to have a happy homosexual running around happily ever aftering. In the last century, homosexuality was the shorthand way of saying “this is the bad guy.” So you had works by Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), Ian Flemming (Diamonds are Forever – Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd did burst into flames, however, in the movie), where the gay characters died. Even early gay romance author Gordon Merrick (whose gay characters were the good guys) killed his main characters at the end of his novels. And these were mid century classics. According to wikipedia, it wasn’t until 1948 when Gore Vidal wrote The City and the PIllar that a main sympathetic character was homosexual and wasn’t killed off at the end. It should be noted that Gore Vidal was queer and that E. M. Forster (also queer) beat him to a more or less happy ending in the late 1930s with Maurice. 

I grew up in that era. I was steeped in and molded by a homophobic society, and I’ll be damned if I will let it subconsciously undermine myself. Poor Steven! He and I deserve better!

Second, it’s depressing. Even though there are wonderful and bright moments in Steven’s life, the societal and familial crap that was the norm in the mid to late 1900s makes for rough reading at times. Face it, growing up gay in the second half of last century was not easy and, in times complicated by AIDS, one was lucky to make it through Y2K alive. Writing some of these stories was the best therapy I could have ever gotten. My whole outlook has changed as a result. 

This means I’m not ready to move forward with the collection as originally designed. It could simply be that I’ve found a really huge new procrastination project and may never finish! I’ve broken the collection apart, reshuffled the stories chronologically and pitched a bunch of them so that now I have an overall story arc and it is going to end on a very happy note. 

Anyway, here’s that Gay & Lesbian Review essay. Thanks for reading. https://glreview.org/how-it-all-changed/