Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 30

BEA in New York City Next Week–Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Right, so I’ll make this short and sweet. Ann and I will be at BookExpo America in NYC next week promoting The Weird compendium from Tor Books. Media requests can be sent to our publicist at Tor, Alexis Nixon, or send ‘em to us at vanderworld at hotmail.com and we’ll forward them to Alexis.

Our schedule:

12:00pm, June 5, Tuesday—SF/F & The Mainstream Panel on the Uptown Stage, with John Scalzi and Walter Mosley (moderated by Ryan Britt)

11:30am to 12:30pm, June 6, Wednesday—Table 21, Main Autographing Area, autographing!

In addition, there’s a strong probability that we’re going to show up at both of the awesome events listed below. We’re not involved in them, but we’d like to support them…and given our limited time in New York City and other stuff we’ve got to do at BEA, it’ll be really the only time we can see friends. So join us, friends!

June 4, 7pm, Monday—Bookrageous BEA Bash with Brian Slattery, Lev Grossman, etc. Info here.

June 5, 7pm, Tuesday—NYRSF Reading with N.K. Jemisin and Ekaterina Sedia, guest curated by K. Tempest Bradford. Info here.

BEA in New York City Next Week–Ann and Jeff VanderMeer originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 31, 2012.

Bad, Bad Cover for Carnacki, Ghost-Finder

More than moderately bad….

Bad, Bad Cover for Carnacki, Ghost-Finder originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 29, 2012.

The Science of Difficult Topics

Athena Andreadis has an interesting and useful post about rape over on her blog, which also includes a re-posted Evolutionary Psychology bingo card that I found quite illuminating. I think my favorite one was “Believes women out-talk men but keeps talking nonstop” since I’ve seen that one in action many times before. (I’ve also been guilty of the over-talking myself.)

It’s just the latest post that’s gotten me to thinking about the issue of what we write about and how we write about it. I think every writer takes as a given that the imagination is a fluid and complex thing, and that it feels like we should have the freedom to write about anything. But the fact is, all writers have constraints that we don’t even think about, that we put in place ourselves. One of them for me concerns the issue of rape. I don’t write stories or novels that contain this element, although I have written fiction about the male gaze and about predatory men. But rape itself is really too horrifying for me personally to address in any useful way. In part this is because I truly believe that the writer must understand and inhabit the mindset of even the most heinous characters in their stories—recognize that these characters, like people in the real world, see themselves often as the heroes of their own stories. And I just cannot bring myself to inhabit the mind of such a character. Even as murder doesn’t phase me to that extent…possibly because murder, unlike rape, can have any number of justifications depending on context within a story.

Another way in which rape can come up is in the backstory of a character, and while it’s not out of the question that a future character of mine might be someone who has been raped, this seems to me such an invasion of self that it would have to be integral if brought up—in other words, I’m wary of fiction in which such invasive, violent acts are part of a character’s backstory but seem to be a kind of shorthand or paint-by-numbers way of giving us background on a character without actually giving us an individual.

But, as I say, every writer is different—and it’s important that some writers can deal with the issue in a sensitive and useful way because making it invisible isn’t a good thing, either.

So we all have our own constraints. We all, also, have our own skill-sets and viewpoints, and many times a failure on a sensitive subject occurs because a writer isn’t talented enough, for whatever reason, to tackle that subject. And while not being talented in, say, being able to convey realistic dialogue isn’t likely to result in anything worse than a mediocre book…getting something like this wrong is to my mind catastrophic. Frankly, too, I considered not writing this blog post because I think potentially talking about it in a way that isn’t useful is also horrible.

The Science of Difficult Topics originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 29, 2012.

Post Human Conditions: Arc 1.2 Now Available with Komodo

(Splash page for “Komodo” in Arc 1.2–art by Lydia Wong)

I posted here earlier about having had a novelette accepted by Arc Magazine, the awesome new glossy SF periodical being published by New Scientist in the UK. Well, it’s out now in Arc 1.2: Post Human Conditions–along with an amazing piece of art by Lydia Wong. Also in this issue of Arc, fiction by Nick Harkaway and features by Anne Gallaway, Frederick Pohl, and Regina Peldszus, among much other cool stuff. The first issue had fiction by Margaret Atwood and a lovely piece about China M. visiting squid and octopi at a marine lab. There’s ordering information here for electronic and print versions, and their blog entry about “Komodo” here.

I’m fairly excited about this story—it’s my longest published piece of fiction since my novel Finch came out in 2009–and I think Arc’s amazing look-and-feel is just what SF needs. It’s a stunningly beautiful magazine and I can’t wait to see what they get up to in the future. Always difficult to have the full sense of a magazine until you’ve read three or four issues.

Here’s the beginning of “Komodo”…

Child, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the mariachi band plays out in the courtyard…I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me—they can, and they need to trust me, need to know I’m telling them this for a reason. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. So I hope you’ll stay awhile. It won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.

It starts in a strange place, I’ll admit, inside of a giant green plastic alien head. I was all dressed up. I was on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there not even because of looking forward to the party but to the after party. The after party is always where it’s at—if you can get an invite.

Post Human Conditions: Arc 1.2 Now Available with Komodo originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 29, 2012.

The Southern Reach Novels: Annihilation

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been working on a new series of novels: The Southern Reach series. The first one, already completed, is entitled Annihilation and it’ll be sent around soon to publishers. Here’s a very rough draft description of the book: “Area X: mysterious, remote, and concealed by the government as an environmental disaster zone for more than 30 years. But strange forces are gathering in this pristine wilderness protected by an invisible, deadly border. The secret agency known as the Southern Reach has sent in eleven expeditions to discover the truth about Area X. Now, the twelfth will attempt to succeed where all others have failed…This is the story of that twelfth expedition, narrated by the biologist attached to the mission: a reticent, misanthropic woman who brings her secrets to Area X.”

Short excerpt below, which is somewhat atypical of the whole–don’t want to give away any spoilers! A flashback to her childhood.

***

My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up. My mother was an artist who achieved some success but was too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the hot-headed unemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing; neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. They did not have the will or inclination to clean the kidney-shaped pool, even though it was fairly small.

Soon after we moved in, the grass around its edges grew long. Sedge weeds and other towering plants became prevalent. The short bushes lining the fence around the pool lunged up to obscure the chain link. Moss grew up in the cracks in the tile path that circled it. The water level slowly rose, fed by the rain, and the surface became more and more brackish with algae. Dragonflies continually scouted the area. Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always present. Water gliders and aquatic beetles began to make the water their own. Rather than get rid of my freshwater aquarium, as my parents wanted, I dumped the fish into the pool, and some survived the shock of that. Local birds, like herons and egrets, began to appear by the pool, drawn by the frogs and fish and insects. By some miracle, too, small turtles began to live in the pool, although I had no idea how they had gotten there.

Within months of our arrival, the pool had become a functioning ecosystem. I would slowly enter through the creaking wooden gate and observe it all from a rusty lawn chair I had set up in a far corner. Inside the house, my parents might be arguing about money or each other, and I might even be able to hear, faintly, their shouting as the war of attrition I would eventually call the ten-year divorce ground on, but I could easily lose myself in the micro-world of the pool.

Inevitably, my focus netted from my creative parents—who thought both too much and too little—useless lectures of worry over my chronic introversion. I didn’t have enough (or any) friends, they reminded me. But when I told them that several times, like a reluctant ant lion, I had had to hide from bullies in the gravel pits that lay amid the abandoned fields beyond the school, they had no answers. Nor when one day for “no reason” I punched a fellow student in the face when she said hello to me in the lunch line.

So we proceeded, locked into our separate imperatives: my parents’ disintegration, which they only pretended not to enjoy the drama of, and my pretending to be a biologist. I kept notes in several journals. I knew each individual frog from the next, Old Flopper so much different from Ugly Leaper, and during which month I could expect the grass to teem with hopping juveniles. I knew which species of heron came back year-round and which were migrants. The beetles and dragonflies were harder to identify, harder to intuit their lifecycles, but I still diligently tried to understand them. In all of this, I eschewed books on ecology or biology. I wanted to discover information on my own first.

As far as I was concerned—an only child, and an expert in the uses of solitude—my observations of this miniature paradise could have continued forever. I even jury-rigged a water-proof light to a waterproof camera, and planned to submerge the contraption beneath the dark surface, to snap pictures using a long wire attached to the camera button. I have no idea if it would have worked, because suddenly I didn’t have the luxury of time. Our luck ran out, and we couldn’t afford the rent any more. We moved out, to a tiny apartment, stuffed full of my mother’s artwork, which all resembled wallpaper. One of the great traumas of my life was worrying about the pool. Would the new owners see the beauty and the importance of leaving it as-is, or would they raze it all down, perform an atrocity in honor of the pool’s real function?

I never found out—I couldn’t bear to go back, even if I also could never forget the richness of that simple overgrown swimming pool. All I could do is look forward, apply what I had learned from watching the denizens of the pool. And I never did look back, for better or worse. If funding for a project ran out, or the area we studied was suddenly bought for development, I never returned. There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to re-live, certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

As we descended into the tower, I felt again, for the first time in a long time, the flush of discovery I had first experienced as a child.

The Southern Reach Novels: Annihilation originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 20, 2012.

Entry Points into Fiction: Text Shows You How to Read It

This post was written in solidarity with Booklifenow, which has been publishing lots of wonderful and unique content—check it out!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the protocols of fiction in terms of story and novel beginnings, in part because of my own recent resurgence in writing fiction but also from reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (more on that later). Inherent in the idea of a beginning is a sense of what kind of story or mode of fiction you are about to enjoy (or hate). Some approaches to this riff off of the idea of formula, not necessarily in a bad way—it’s just as a shorthand to guide the reader to the right set of precepts for what the writer intends. Examples include prologues or first chapters of noir novels that contain certain elements—down-and-out detective, beginnings of a case—that create expectations. There will be a mystery. The main character will operate within certain constraints of opinions and options. Constraint can be a great way to write an amazing and original character, the original cliché become simply…original.

Other types of fiction require different approaches. A sloppy opening to a mystery still more or less serves the function of letting you know what you’re reading, whether the writer intends to support or subvert that expectation. But what if you’re not working off of a common pattern? For fiction that aggressively wrenches the reader out of existing patterns and modes it is even more important that the writer show the reader how to encounter the story. This is not to say that the writer is trying to straitjacket the reader, but that without an idea of the reading protocols, the reader may well feel adrift and the intended effect or effects of the story will not be part of the reader’s experience of the story. For example, take the beginning of “No Breather in the World But Thee,” a story I wrote recently and which is out in submission at the moment:

The cook didn’t like that the eyes of the dead fish shifted to stare at him as he cut their heads off. The cook’s assistant, who was also his lover, didn’t like that he woke to find just a sack of bloody bones on the bed beside him. “It’s starting again,” he gasped, just moments before a huge black birdlike creature carried him off, screaming. The child playing on the grounds outside the mansion did not at first know what she was seeing, but realized it was awful. “It’s just like last year,” she said to her imaginary friend, but her imaginary friend was dead. She ran for the front door, but the ghost of her imaginary friend, now large and ravenous and wormlike, swallowed her up before she had taken ten steps across the writhing grass.

What does this opening accomplish? Well, in some ways it may provoke whiplash in the reader, so there’s a risk involved in the approach, but in terms of an expectation set for readers it tells you that this is a story that will travel from point of view to point of view. Indeed the narrative then opens up after this paragraph into several connected set pieces from different perspectives, although at a more leisurely pace. The story is also telling you what it is and what it is not. It is a story of the weird, but it is not a traditional story of the weird. Giant birds, dead fish staring, imaginary friends, etc., all could be deployed in fairly conventional fashion in a story. Here they are not. Yet, you probably want to know what happens next.

In other cases, like my story “Komodo,” which will appear in the next issue of Arc magazine, the opening takes the opposite approach, in that the teaching to read will take place across the entire narrative:

Child, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the mariachi band plays out in the courtyard…I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me—they can, and they need to trust me, need to know I’m telling them this for a reason. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. So I hope you’ll stay awhile. It won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.

It starts in a strange place, I’ll admit, inside of a giant green plastic alien head. I was all dressed up. I was on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there not even because of looking forward to the party but to the after party. The after party is always where it’s at—if you can get an invite.

I use a whole two paragraphs from the opening of “Komodo” as an example because the story is constantly redefining itself, in part because the narrator is acutely aware that too much information too soon will only confuse the issue and erode suspension of disbelief in those she is telling the story to. Thus, she is constantly finding comfortable analogies or lies to feed said listener to contextualize the story she is telling in familiar elements. Her hope is that as the story becomes stranger and stranger this approach will serve to keep the listener from becoming confused. Perhaps sneakily, perhaps not sneakily at all, this approach also saves the reader from discomfort in terms of concepts and context—especially since not only did I want to write a story that was continually unpacking and redistributing its context but also use the idea of rich nodes of exposition as tiny but satisfying explosions of micro-story within the main narrative, all framed by an engaging and energetic narrator with a personal stake in the described events. Which is to say, a more conventional approach that simply gave the full context in the first couple of paragraphs of the story would, in this case, have made the story less accessible; it also would not at all support the central conflict nor the narrator’s role in it.

Despite the complexity of these various elements, “Komodo” is still focused on just a couple of effects repeated multiple times in an order that provides a hopefully pleasing and continually eureka-ing effect. But what if you are telling a story that wants to do several diverse things, achieve more than one effect? How do you establish reading protocols for the multi-various? The most effective technique almost seems like indecision: it requires not committing immediately to any one set of protocols, with the danger that the reader may find your story at first adrift, unfocused, even if the individual scenes are quite precise and effective. But it’s all about not creating the distinctive tell in the reader’s mind that this is a particular type of tale.

In this case, there has to be a compelling reason to continue to read even as you’re not quite sure what kind of story you’re reading…and here we come back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. It is an epic science fiction story on the one hand, a character story of the person Swan on the other. It is a love story between Swan and a man named Waltham, but also a tale of interplanetary intrigue. Robinson could have started with any of these things. He could have started with Waltham meeting Swan. He could have started with the first disastrous attack that sets off the intrigue. But he doesn’t. Instead, we start with Swan by herself, engaged in an interesting activity. From there, we are gradually are clued into the various elements of story and how they will work in combination. This serves the useful and obvious purpose, too, since it is an SF novel, of acclimating the reader to Robinson’s vision of the future. However, this inclination not to choose a position, so to speak, to foreground neither love story nor intrigue allows Robinson the space to privilege both strands, to make the novel somehow deeper and more real, less like fiction. The risk (slight in this case) is that a few readers may indeed be confused as to the point of the story for a few chapters, not to mention reviewers. At least one reviewer wrote all about the interplanetary plot and mentioned the relationships not at all, even though close to one-half the book may be said to be about Waltham and Swan. But this issue is irrelevant next to the more important point that 2312 is a better novel because of this approach.

This relates, too, to the ways in which writers sometimes destabilize their fiction to provide a more comfortable entry-point for the reader—you see these kinds of suggestions often from editors or agents, and they are not without validity; even the pushback against these ideas can provide interesting third options, or help strengthen other parts of a novel. To another writer reading such material, the destabilizations can read like deformities of structure or character; to many readers, it’s invisible and all they notice is that the launch-point into story is easy. Some would thus argue that the deformity is actually an enhancement and I’m not going to take issue with that here, in part because I think it also marks an ideological difference of opinion on what the beginning of a story is supposed to do. Some writers will argue that distortion is worth it if it provides a more efficient and readable delivery system for weirder/less conventional material embedded later on. (I personally find it irritating and disappointing more often than not.)

Sometimes the very genre creates an expectation that is more commercial—Alistair Reynolds’ early novels in particular are very, very strange, but the subgenre of space opera and the expectations the words “space opera” conjure up provide a smooth entry point for the reader, who once engaged finds themselves in marvelously weird territory indeed. So this smooth launch-point can come naturally as a function of the writer working within a recognizable and established genre, and thus it is an integrated element of the approach. I’m not arguing that the only difference between, say, China Mieville and Michael Cisco is the entry point, but if you look at Mieville’s beginnings as opposed to Cisco’s, you will note an easier time being had reading Mieville. There is no time to acclimate to Cisco. He’s not particularly interested in reader comfort levels and his idea of audience is probably very different from Mieville’s. (Yet, would Cisco’s novel The Narrator have reached more readers more easily with a different entry-point?)

I think about this issue more and more, in part because I’m working on so many different kinds of novels right now. This is nothing new for me. I had pieces of Veniss Underground and all three Ambergris novels done well before I completed them, and I can no longer tell where one started and another began. The new batch is accumulating much the same way, and in contemplating their effects, I need to think about beginnings, and where one approach makes more sense and where it doesn’t, where an easier way is a deformity as opposed to simply an enhancement, and so on and so forth. In all of it, too, you must think about what affects the reader and how, within the context of your idea of the ideal reader for the work. This is separate from the Reader that permeates the internet, the Reader that is generalized and for whom we are told all sorts of things that may or may not be true about their tastes, their wants, and what may or may not interest them.

Beginnings, then, are about levels of commitment—to the text, to the reader, to yourself. The possibilities are endless, and important.

Entry Points into Fiction: Text Shows You How to Read It originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 12, 2012.

HuffPo Posts Our List of 13 of The Weirdest

Just a note that the Huffington Post has run a slideshow featuring our list of 13 of the weirdest stories written in the past century, from our anthology The Weird. It’s an impossible task, but I think everything on the list, from Leena Krohn to Amos Tutuola, Kelly Link to Clive Barker…is pretty darn weird.

HuffPo Posts Our List of 13 of The Weirdest originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 11, 2012.

Release Week for The Weird Anthology: How You Can Help

This week our anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is officially on sale. All this week we’re posting original content over at Weirdfictionreview.com, including an exclusive interview with the son of Amos Tutuola, fiction from Tutuola, an interview with Kathe Koja, Georg Heym’s iconic poetic short-short “The Dissection” and an essay on Heym by Gio Clairval, among other features. However, ever since the site debuted in November, we’ve been posting content related to the anthology, so check out the archives.

How You Can Help!

If you like weird fiction and want to support huge honkin’ anthologies full of weird fiction, here are some of the things you can do to help. Note: The Weird is a May featured pick of Amazon, Kirkus, Powell’s, and io9!

—Buy the book. It’s currently selling for a good price for an oversized hardcover. Buy it for friends. Buy it for family. From your preferred seller:

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Powell’s Indiebound

—Review the book. Blog, review site, or on a sandwich board in front of your local bookstore. Any mention, especially noting whatever you really liked about the book, helps immensely.

—Review it on Amazon. Go to the Amazon sales page for the book and tell other readers what you liked about it. A quick and easy way to help get the word out and create interest.

—Make sure local booksellers carry it. The anthology seems to have a strong presence in bookstores, but you can always encourage booksellers who aren’t stocking it. You can even tell them it’s by the same people that brought them the Steampunk anthologies.

—Request it from your local library. Making sure your local library knows about the anthology not only increases library orders but allows multiple people to enjoy the book.

—Spread the word through twitter and facebook. Tell people about the anthology through social media, using one of the links above to bookseller sites or link to one of these Weirdfictionreview.com posts:

The Weird’s table of contents

More information about The Weird

—Come to the events. Ann and I will be at BEA in June, I’ll be at Stonecoast in Maine and at ReaderCon in July, and we’ll also both be doing some events in the Carolinas in late July (to be announced). We’ll have details on the events shortly.

More Info on the Anthology

I think by now, if you’ve followed this blog, you know the idea behind The Weird, but in case you missed it…

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Tor Books (North American edition)

Foreword: Michael Moorcock

Introduction by the Editors

Afterword: China Mieville

Starred Reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist

Over one hundred years of weird fiction collected in a single volume of over 750,000 words, from around 1908 through 2010. Strands of The Weird represented include classic US/UK weird tales, the Belgian School of the Weird, Japanese weird, Latin American weird, Nigerian weird, weird SF, Feminist weird, weird ritual, general international weird, and offshoots of the weird originating with Surrealism, Symbolism, and the Decadent movement. The publishers believe this is the largest volume of weird fiction ever housed between the covers of one book.

‘The definitive collection of weird fiction… its success lies in its ability to lend coherence to a great number of stories that are so remarkable different and yet share the same theme’ TLS

‘Studded with literary gems, it’s a hefty, diligently assembled survey of a genre that manages to be at once unsettling, disorientating and bracing in its variety.’ James Lovegrove, Financial Times

‘It’s a tremendous experience to go through its 1,126 pages… there are so many delights in this that any reader will find something truly memorable’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Readers eager to explore a world beyond the ordinary need look no further’ Time Out

‘Massive…and indispensible.’ The Guardian

Release Week for The Weird Anthology: How You Can Help originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 10, 2012.

Taylor F. Lockwood’s New Death Cap Ale

Mushroom expert Taylor F. Lockwood has new plans afoot…

Death Cap Ale…it only kills ye if you ye want it to…

Taylor F. Lockwood’s New Death Cap Ale originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 4, 2012.

Hiking Lone Cone Trail: Ann’s Top Five Observations

Recently, we hiked the Lone Cone Trail up the mountain on Meares Island, near Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. You have to hire a boat to take you over to the island—on a wave-smashing ride—and it’s a very difficult trail, with a steep incline, and many times we didn’t even think we were on a trail—you couldn’t really tell trail from non-trail. It usually takes about five hours, but it took us over six due to the truly treacherous conditions—it was one muddy, aggressively ascending, tree-blocked, gully choked amazing experience. The craziest part is having to clamber up a ravine of huge fallen tree trunks and limbs…like, literally crawling up it over top of these fallen trees. We’ve hiked mountains in Australia and California but nothing like this.

I asked Ann what she learned from the experience and these were the top five things:

1—Little trees are my friends.

2—Rocks with green moss are not my friends.

3—Not all mud is squishy.

4—I can climb over a sh*tload of solid tree trunks on an extreme incline.

5—Jeff’s feet are bigger than mine, so I can follow in his footsteps.

More about the hike under the cut…

(Yep, that’s part of the trail…a more benign part.)

We got to within 15 minutes of the top when the weather changed and rain came gusting and all we could think of is the mud down below becoming impassable. Remarkably, our legs were still in good shape at the time we turned back, but it turned out we needed them to be in good shape, as the surfaces became slicker and certain obstacles on the way up that hadn’t been that big a deal were much worse climbing down.

There was an the abandoned village at the base, which was fun at first because we thought we’d entered a horror movie—taking one too many lefts and winding up back at the village, before finding the true trail head. There were also wild cattle and tadpole clusters and amazing cedar smell…and with the fungi and the moss and the light through the huge trees and the crazy proliferation of flowers and lichens and finches…and the thing in its den that snarled and spat at us twice, once on the way up and down…it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. Cell phones didn’t work during most of the trail, no one else was on it, and on difficult trails like that there’s an intensity of concentration you need that means we didn’t think to get a photo of the log-choked ravine, because we were too focused on getting the heck up it on our hands and knees.

Our reward, afterwards? An amazing meal at the Shelter Restaurant in Tofino: Their Tofino surf bowl (salmon, wild rice, bean sprouts, spicy yogurt, basil, fresh marinated carrots, water chestnuts, shredded cabbage, and more—delicious), island brie on homemade bread with garlic and apple, seared salmon on shrimp risotto, and goat cheese cheese cake with blackberry compote, along with great local beer…Good thing we were hiking a lot…

Later, when we returned to Victoria, and I led her onto this long narrow concrete pier with no guard rails, which left us both feeling dizzy, Ann say “You only seem happy when putting my life in danger.” Me: “I thought it would be short and simple!” Not narrow unrailed and high up with a plunge to an ocean below sprouting with jagged rocks that made us both want to get down on all fours and slink-crawl forward like our cat when we put tape on its back….

We also got to see orcas. Alpha males. Traveling pairs. Teenage males messing around. Dozens of ‘em, all around the boat. Jumping and cavorting. Belly roll with fin wave. Fluke flipper whatever smacking the water. Up periscope vertical eye spy with just head and front flipper exposed. Very near. An orca flipper (fin?) has very nearly the same bone structure as a human hand.

More on wildlife, meals, adventures, in a later post…

Hiking Lone Cone Trail: Ann’s Top Five Observations originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on May 3, 2012.