Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 7

New Essay at Nightmare Magazine

The "People of Horror" and Me.

ooof

Kazzie dream.

Coming Up For Air

Hey all, over at BullSpec, I review the new H. P. Lovecraft biography In the Mountains of Madness: The Life, Death, and Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft. It reads, in part:


“Yes, but…” or “No, what about…” or “But didn’t you just say…”, “Haven’t you considered…”, and sometimes, “Who cares?”

If you leave a comment on the review, you have a chance to win one of five copies of I Am Providence!

Worldcon Report

A great way to handle Worldcon is to be a dealer, spend much of the day behind the table, have some low-key dinner with friends, swan through a party or two, and then retire to the room by 10:30 or 11pm. No panels, no Hugos, no super-late nights of bellowing nerds, no nothing. A couple of strange conversations happened anyway, including one with a guy dressed like a bird who came up to the Haikasoru table, performed a bird call, and shouted, "Guess what bird I am!" I gave up. He was a red-tailed hawk. (He had a different bird costume on every day.)

We did have a small print edition of our new mini-anthology Saiensu Fikushon as an exclusive, and people liked it. Five bucks, and small enough that the objections over luggage and shelf space were handily defeated.



We did a lot of business over the weekend. It looks like Kansas City, MO has no real bookstores—indeed, even the airport didn't have one. Lots of locals with Saturday or Sunday passes were thrilled to get their hands on real books they would not have otherwise encountered.

In BBQ news I went to Arthur Bryant and Jack Stack and really enjoyed them both. The little City Market area also had good non-BBQ places, and was a jaunty walk. Molly Tanzer and I bought our Mixed Up! contributor Maurice Broaddus a cocktail.



In other book news, both Dreamhaven and Larry Smith carried I Am Providence; Dreamhaven sold out on Thursday (!) and Smith was down to one when last I checked on Saturday. (There was also a brief IAP-themed interview with me here at Qwillery.) Bullettime hit the free table and I also signed a bunch of copies of Starve Better from Apex. I was thrilled to hear that Apex sold more than thirty copies of Erica Satifka's Stay Crazy (see this Q/A) as well during the con.

I even stood on a long line to get a signed Charlaine Harris book for Olivia.



No real care for the Hugos: the only interesting potential result was whether Chuck Tingle, whose writers spent months ingratiating themselves with Worldcon by rightly mocking Theodore Beale, would beat out No Award in the short story category. T(he)y did not.

And I did manage one Mamatas Lift, of Jason Sizemore, who recorded it selfie-style from three feet off the floor:



See you in...San Jose?

Another cheap thrill

Got five bucks? Download Saiensu Fikushon 2016, a new e-first mini-anthology of Japanese science fiction from my day job.

We'll have hard copies exclusively at Worldcon later this week. See you in the dealers room!

Two tendencies in reviews of I AM PROVIDENCE.

So I Am Providence has been out for a few weeks, and the reviews from both reviewers and readers have generally been positive, with a few unusual twists (e.g., the paperback smells like crayons), and some complaints.

A couple of things I noticed: women reviewers and readers are much more likely to accept the depiction of organized fandom and convention culture as a given, while there is a slight tendency for men reviewers to complain that the depiction isn't quite fair. Umbrage has been taken.

There's a stronger split between horror/mystery reviewers and science fiction reviewers. Fangoria called it a a wacky summer beach read, and the first of two Hellnotes.com reviews recommended it for lovers of Lovecraft, laughs, mystery, and silliness. The second of two Tor.com reviews, on the other hand, denounced the book a novel of horridness [that is a] miserable, meandering thing. (The first, by a woman more interested in horror, was uniformly positive.)

Can conclusions be drawn? Men are awfully fragile and science fiction fans are at sea when they're not being pandered to It is too soon to tell, but you can check out the book and see what kind of person you are.

Get Crazy, Be Crazy, Stay Crazy—A Chat with Erica L. Satifka

I was thrilled, almost exactly ten years ago, to find an amazing story in the Clarkesworld slush, by an author with no prior publications except for one piece in a small convention-based journal. "Automatic", by Erica Satifka, was so exciting to me that I nearly called her to accept the story, rather than send an email. It was two o'clock in the morning though, and saner heads prevailed. I did end up calling her some weeks later, after she didn't respond to my one editorial comment via email. The poor thing called future currency "credits"; we quickly settled on "skins." Since then, Erica has published short fiction regularly, if not frequently, and I decided to follow her on social media. She still has her blog reflected here on LJ as themachinestops . I found that terrible things were happening—someone in some writing group had told her to stop writing, and she did. Thankfully, she started up again. About a year and a half ago, Erica made some gnomic remarks about a novel she was working on and the problems with it: it was too short, too weird, too everything. As a lover of short, weird, novels, I was intrigued, and encouraged Erica to submit it to Apex Publications, during its open submission period last year. (Disclosure: Apex is the publisher of my own Starve Better.) And out of the hundreds of submissions, something emerged...




After a breakdown at college landed Emmeline Kalberg in a mental hospital, she’s struggling to get her life on track. She’s back in her hometown and everyone knows she’s crazy, but the twelve pills she takes every day keep her anxiety and paranoia in check. So when a voice that calls itself Escodex begins talking to Em from a box of frozen chick nuggets, she’s sure that it’s real and not another hallucination. Well…pretty sure.

An evil entity is taking over the employees of Savertown USA, sucking out their energy so it can break into Escodex’s dimension. Escodex needs Em’s help to save his dimension and to keep hers from collapsing. But Em isn’t certain she wants to help Escodex. She has other things to worry about, like staying off the Savertown USA bowling team, busting her sister’s chops about her new found religion, and getting out of Clear Falls, PA.

When her coworkers start mysteriously dying, Em realizes that she may be the only one who can stop things from getting worse. Now she must convince her therapist she’s not having a relapse and keep her boss from firing her. All while getting her coworker Roger to help enact the plans Escodex conveys to her though the RFID chips in the Savertown USA products. It’s enough to make anyone Stay Crazy.

I was not surprised at all when Apex announced the publication of Stay Crazy—about a young woman with mental problems and a dead-end job at a big box store dealing with an alien invasion—and I was pleased to blurb it, writing:

"Had Philip K. Dick lived through riot grrrl and the collapse of the America's industrial economy, Stay Crazy would be his memoir. Erica Satifka is a prophet."

With the release of the book imminent, with pre-orders direct from the publisher at $12.95 and the usual full-price early release from Amazon, I decided to see what Erica was up to with the book, her short fiction, why she isn't an ableist shitlord, and how LJ saved her life! Stay Crazy will launch officially at The 74th Worldcon, MidAmericaCon 2 next week, and I encourage all attendees to check it out.

NM: So, how does a nice kid like you end up writing science fiction, especially science fiction influenced by Philip K. Dick and Cordwainer Smith?

ES: I didn't read a lot of science fiction growing up, and the stuff I did read was what I could find in the school library, so it was a lot of Vonnegut, Bradbury, Wells. and various themed short story anthologies. This was in the nineties, before YA was really a thing, and my high school was kind of crappy anyway so they could only afford the old standards (but not the old pulp standards). I watched almost no SF shows or movies besides The Twilight Zone, and I was only vaguely aware that science fiction was a distinct genre. It was all just books, and some books were weirder than other books, and I liked those books better but I didn't really understand why. I also read a little bit of horror, mostly Stephen King. It was small town Pennsylvania before the Internet, there weren't that many options! I read what I could get.

Over the course of high school and college I wrote several dozen stories, and the majority of them dealt with things like alternate dimensions, paranoia, corrupt governments, and dream worlds, because I was a strange kid and was pretty much allowed to be strange. I didn't set out to write science fiction, but it invariably came out that way because a story about parallel worlds is SF by default. I discovered Philip K. Dick right before I graduated college and no lie, it kind of changed my life, probably a lot like finding Lovecraft was for you. Because all the things I was trying to write about, he'd already explored. I'd never felt that much in tune with another writer before, and I didn't care that his characters were nothing like me, because they thought like me and that's what counted. And then I moved to the big city of Pittsburgh and had access to any books I wanted and found out that my themes weren't that unique, but maybe my spin on them could be.

So I've always been writing science fiction, I just didn't know what I was doing. I do feel weird that I didn't enter SF through the normal fandom route, because a lot of shared cultural moments are lost on me. Like, I didn't see Star Wars until I was 21. There was really no chance I'd be a "normal" science fiction writer, given that. It was unlikely enough that I became a writer at all!

NM: There are two kinds of strange kids who are allowed to be strange: the children of bohemian types who cultivate eccentricity in their kids as a form of their own creative expression, and the offspring of working-class parents who leave kids to their own devices or give up on them for any number of reasons. Which are you?

ES: The latter! They didn't give up on me, but I didn't get a lot of creative "nurturing" for lack of a better term. But at the same time, I also wasn't squashed, I was just left alone. Which is the best way to do it; without any real-life creative guides or gurus I could develop my own kind of eccentricity and not worry about pleasing anyone.

NM: What is your background? Why did you read books instead of play Game Boy? How did you end up involved in zine culture when you're ten years too young for it?

ES: I'm not sure? I've never been interested in video games, with a few exceptions the whole concept of them just slides right past me. Which is odd considering how short my attention span is, but I can't bring myself to care. I grew up in a house where the television never went silent, so I think part of my retreat into books was a reaction to that. Kids who are never allowed to watch TV wind up becoming addicted to it, kids exposed to constant TV rebel by reading books. I never cared about learning or school and other kids instinctively shied away from me, so it's not as if I had friends to play with either, I mostly stayed in my room all the time. Whether it's brain chemistry or rebellion or some combination of the two, reading has always been the way I prefer to take my entertainment.

As for the zines, I think there are some people who would fight you on that, and there was an active post-riot grrrl zine culture from the mid-90s up until the end of the last decade. I got into that because I'd somehow found out about the band Sleater-Kinney (not sure how—maybe a reference in Spin magazine, which I sometimes read at the mall bookstore) and inside their CD case was a little mini-catalog of other bands on the same label, and I sent off envelopes full of money to order them, and some of the liner notes on those CDs referenced zines and I was like, "huh, what is that?" And then in my senior year of high school we finally got the Internet and I found out what zines were and that there were other people like me. (I appreciate the irony of being someone who didn't know what zines were until they got the Internet.) I learned the term feminism and that it defined a lot of concepts I'd been thinking over, I discovered the word queer and realized that described me too. I'd say that the Internet communities that sprang up around the zine culture of the early aughts were more important to my development than zines themselves.

I really can't overstate enough how much of a cultural wasteland the area I grew up in was before the Internet. My mother is terrified of cities; I didn't even go to Pittsburgh until I was in college. I can't drive so that compounded the problem. Most of the time I was just in a fantasy world. But I turned out mostly okay, so score one for benign neglect!

NM: Did zines get you into writing? I know you got an MA from Seton Hill—what was that all about?

ES: No, reading books got me into writing, zines only got me into writing zines which actually slowed down my fiction output for a few years (but I don't regret it because of the way it shaped my politics and identity). I wrote my first short story at the age of four; it was about a gorilla who was made intelligent by scientists and is really sad about that and sulks in his cage all day. (There was also a drawing of the gorilla. I should get my mom to scan this for me because I don't think anyone believes I was such a dour child.) I've never not been writing, except when I fall into slumps like I did six years ago. It's a compulsion. If I could do something else I would be doing that other thing instead because of how miserable the writing/publishing industry often makes me, although I'm not sure it's worse than any other field.

I got the MA mostly because my college adviser said I should get a Master's degree, and I had a little bit of money from my grandmother, and everyone around me thought it was a good idea although I think they were also surprised that I wanted to do more school (I had to be forced into college). If I had it to do over again I don't know if I'd get the MA, I'd probably have tried to get into Clarion instead. But I was in such a fog all the time back then, I actually remember very little about being in either college or grad school. That's not on them, it's on me. The main benefit of Seton Hill is that it hooked me up with people who helped me move to Pittsburgh, where my real life began.

NM: Pittsburgh, land of dreams! What happened?

ES: I was living with someone in this tiny town in PA and things were going pretty south. I'd been fired from the job that inspired Stay Crazy and my parents were pressuring me to move back in with them. I made a lot of posts on Livejournal (which was a thriving social network at the time, believe it or not!) that were alarming to my Seton Hill writer friends and instead of calling an ambulance, they read through the lines and sourced a roommate for me. This might be the one time in history where being emo on Livejournal led to a positive, concrete sea change in someone's life.

NM: So Stay Crazy is your first novel and I loved it and I also know you struggled with it—is it too short at 65,000 words; will the title cause troubles in these days of sensitivities about ableism; isn't this basically just a story about working in Wal-Mart, etc etc.? Just a week or so away from the official release: how's it going?


ES: There's a lot of things working against this book, mostly the length and the fact that it's not part of a doorstopper series, which is why it's being published by a small press. I'm a little worried because I haven't read many reviews, although this one kept me going for at least a week. "Well, that's different," tends to be the reaction among people I talk to about the plot. It's the kind of book that people who really like this kind of thing will like, it's not a book for "everyone" and it's not intended to be. The problem (with any book, but especially a small press book) is how to get the word out there, how to let people who might be interested in a book about department store aliens and mental illness and alternate dimensions know that the book exists. Which is why I've been such a pest on Twitter and Facebook recently! Self-promotion is terrible but it works.

As for the title being ableist, I actually take a lot of offense to that as someone with mental health issues of my own. If I want to use the word "crazy" to describe myself or my characters, then shouldn't I have that right? (Especially since the book's treatment of mental illness isn't cloying or demonizing, but just treats it as something "there.") Luckily nobody has told me to my face that I'm an ableist shitlord.

NM: You've published a lot of short fiction, which is probably the only thing less commercial than a 65,000-word science fiction novel about Wal-Mart. And one gets the sense that you write short fiction for its own sake, as opposed to a way to "get your name out there" for a career in novels. So: what's wrong with you?

ES: So many, many things.

NM: Top three (regarding actually liking short fiction)?

ES: I like how short stories take a premise all the way to its logical conclusion, you can be more "extreme" in your ideas and not have to worry about the world of the story making all that much sense. By the time it falls apart, it's over! Short stories also aren't as strictly punishing about genre or category as novels, genre-bending is actually in your favor for a lot of markets. But mostly I like them because I get less bored with the process of writing them; I've abandoned novels before I even wrote a word because I knew it would be a slog and I didn't even want to try. It's easier to justify the time put into a short story, if that makes any sense at all.

NM: Did you feel pressure to write a novel?

ES: Not this one, no. When I first came up with the idea for Stay Crazy, I wasn't even aware of the writing business or that the general path went from short stories to novels. I wrote this as a novel because it had to be a (short) novel. My undergrad classes weren't very much help when it came to actually planning a writing career; we didn't go into how to actually be published at all. I wrote Stay Crazy without thinking about or even knowing about the market, it was a pure passion project.

I actually feel pretty limited in my ability to decide on what writing projects to focus on; it's a big problem for me. The second I feel pressured into writing something specific I lose all interest in it and want to burn everything to the ground. I just completed the first draft of another novel and the only way I could finish it was to forget about genre categories or what anyone else is doing. This is not a blueprint for success.

NM: Well, do you care about success? What is your writerly dream?

ES: I care about success, but the kind of success where I get there writing exactly what I want to write without catering to any specific audience, which is the most unlikely kind of success ever. I don't believe that I will ever be able to quit my day job even if I did happen to make a pile of money with my writing, although I could just be thinking that because to a working-class person, a day job is an inescapable fact of life. Regardless, doing the things I would need to do in order to be a typical success story—get a pen name! give the reader what they want!—would turn it into another form of a day job, but worse in a way, because it would be taking something I like doing and making it something I hate doing. I don't blame anyone else for doing these things because money is awesome and anyone who tells you it doesn't matter is a liar, and some people do genuinely just want to write and don't care what they write about as long as it sells. But I'm defective, I have to love what I'm writing or I might as well just put all the time I spend on my fiction into something more stable, like accounting.

Someone on a writing forum recently paraphrased a quote from Harlan Ellison where he talked about building a body of work like a mountain range, that stands on its own with peaks and valleys. I'd like to look back on my writing career and say, "yeah, I did what I could do in the time I had to do it in, and maybe I didn't do everything I wanted to do, but I did something different and fresh and true to myself." Of course, now I sound like one of those bohemian types who don't care about money. (I care a lot! Call me, Hollywood!)

NM: You're aiming for a peak with a launch for Stay Crazy at World Con next week. Let's wrap up with the details: give us the Ws and that one H.

ES: There'll be a launch party on Friday night (August 19th), and my editor/publisher Jason Sizemore will be behind the Apex table most of the time, ready to sell you your very own copy! I'll probably be trying to avoid people around the edges of the con so it will be easy to corner me for an autograph. The book will also be available on the Apex site, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Powell's in a little while.

Last Day of Haikasoru Story Bundle

My dayjob Story Bundle ends in eleven hours! Five or ten ebooks, name your price (floors of $5 or $15). Includes two Locus Award-nominated anthologies (The Future is Japanese and Hanzai Japan), Philip K. Dick Award Citation winner (Harmony by Project Itoh), near-future positive science fiction (Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii), and more!

We had 1872 bundles sold as of this morning. Any chance of hitting 2000 by the end of the run? Consider it!

Back

Been incommunicado—well, except for massive tweeting and FBing, since they are phone-friendly. I Am Providence came out, after a fashion. Hard copies started flowing from Amazon a bit early, and the ebook launched yesterday. I was also The Big Idea at scalzi 's blog. The street date of the book is still August 9th. Reviews have been good, and high-profile, such as this one from NPR Books, and business doing well. Other than that, it was a very humid week in Florida. Sadly, when we rolled in a few minutes ago, Opie (who had been out East for nearly three weeks) asked where Kazzie was.

More later. Body thinks it's 3am.

Do Three Things Still Make a Post?

I Am Providence is shipping now from Amazon. People have copies in hand. Get yours.

What to say about the major party conventions this year, except to note the large number of people upset that the conventions are where factions are convening rather than carefully stage-managed coronations without a trace of factionalism. Ain't that what democracy looks like?


I have been listening to this endlessly. YouTube trash rap is my new favorite genre: