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I know a pen doesn’t make a writer – it’s been a lot more than a decade since I last wrote out an entire novella in longhand, after all – but dipping my feet into the waters of Fountain Pen Land has been a lot of fun.  My bright blue new Lamy Safari feels like a zippy little Japanese race car, and lays a nice thin line.  I know I need to work on my sales resistance, though, when the first thing I do after I get a new fountain pen (after trying it out, of course) is stare longingly at other fountain pens.

The internet, ladies and gentlemen.  The curse of Eris no longer applies to immortals only.

The trailer for Juan of the Dead, Cuba’s first horror film, just blew me away.

There are a couple teasers floating around youtube that play up the entrepreneurial “We kill your loved ones so you don’t have to” aspect of the plot: this one, for example.

Juan of the Dead, like Attack the Block, looks set to play with monster movie cinematic vocabulary using settings that are less comfortable, less upper-middle-class, and, frankly, less white than those of the traditional US-made horror film. I only slept for a handful of hours last night, which leaves me barely competent to write this sentence, let alone discuss the implications of these movies and the ways they’re embellishing, enlivening, and ennobling (what I often think are) tired genres – or to compare them with new American takes on similar material, like Zombieland and Super 8. Let’s just say that Juan of the Dead and Attack the Block have me more excited about horror films than I’ve been for at least a decade.

Somewhere in middle school, I got the idea that I should have long hair – hair down past my shoulders, gathered in a pony tail.  I should have long hair, and a long tan trenchcoat, and I should wear sunglasses when the opportunity presented itself.

Also, I wanted to carry a katana under my trenchcoat.  I never had a katana, though, to the general relief of the universe.

It’s important to note that I decided all of these things before I’d ever seen an episode of the show Highlander.  Nobody I knew even watched the show – it wasn’t popular in middle Tennessee.  So, I don’t know how the idea that Duncan MacLeod was the be-all and end-all of men’s fashion entered my system, but there it was.

I liked having long hair.  Long hair makes for easy maintenance, provided I didn’t much care how it looked.  I like hanging out in the shower, so the extra time required to wash was okay.  I kept that hair for about ten years, until, on my way back from China, I decided it was time to look sharper.  Job interviews loomed, and the workaday world still isn’t terribly pony-tail friendly.  So I went to a good stylist, and got my first short haircut in ten years.

The good surprise was that it looked excellent.  The bad surprise was that, with short hair, I need to visit the barber more than once every 10 years or so.  I still haven’t nailed this process down.  My general grooming strategy is to wait until it looks like I have a tribble growing on my head, then walk into the corner barber’s and say, “Help!”  Then, I walk out, humming “C’est moi” from Camelot, because there’s not much better to hum when you know you look awesome.

Nothing like a good haircut to make you feel like you’re ready for battle.  And there will be some battles this week, make no mistake.

It’s almost enough to make you want to carry a sword under your trenchcoat.

Last night at Club Passim, Stephanie, Dan, visiting Sylvia and I participated in a memorial concert for Dave Carter, an amazing folk singer and songwriter who died of an untimely heart attack, aged 49, in 2002.  ”Participated” I write, because I can’t write “saw,” or “listened to,” really — it wasn’t a passive kind of concert.  Watching, I gave myself to the performers gathered to remember someone I never knew save through music.

Dave Carter wrote and sang what Roger Zelazny might have called high mimetic folk music–songs in which the characters lived their daily lives in an epic context.  His song “The Power and Glory” belongs in the same breath as Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, bridging a world greater and older than our own with the common tale of a man seeking his fortune in Nashville.  ”236-6132,” a love song centered around the beloved’s phone number, dances through a complicated relationship with lyrics and driving guitar — a song a genius might sing to herself driving down the highway between gigs, when she wasn’t afraid anyone would hear:

236-6132 is the number of my love

Even though it’s been some time

Since he made fair to answer

‘Cause he feints and fades from view

Like a fighter ducks a glove

Though I play the highway kind

And he the China dancer

These songs are not embarrassed by their own intelligence or virtue; they do not shrink from challenging the listener, even as they invite her inside.  Wonderful as the lyrics are, though, they’re just a shadow of the full effect of the songs: Dave Carter worked together with the amazing Tracey Grammer, forming a brilliant folk duo replete with harmonic melodies, counterpoint, and solid fiddle-work.

I could go on about the music here for pages, and I’ve only ever heard one of their albums (though after yesterday’s concert I’ve downloaded two more, but my mp3 player has betrayed me and refuses to actually play the music (!!!!), so my teeth will be on edge until I make it home tonight), but as much as the music struck me I was blown away by the love and strength on display last night.  Tracey Grammer emceed the evening like patience on a monument, though smiling more in memory and celebration than in grief; guest artists played great sets, and musicians rose from the audience to sing and celebrate Dave’s songs.  One man delivered a wild, spoken-word version of Carter’s Snake Handlin’ Man, invoking the audience and the Spirit like a wandering preacher; a woman shaking with joy and nerves slammed out a heartfelt rendition of “Phantom Doll,” the last song Dave Carter wrote, the last song too that he ever played.

I know we live in a fallen world, I know you can’t trust what you see, and that the fairest face can hide something dark, but watching that show, watching Tracey, and hearing people talk about Dave Carter, about his love of songs and songwriting, his sharing spirit and his eager, good-natured jealousy of Townes Van Zandt for having truly written a song in his sleep, I can’t help but feel that he was the Real Thing: a Tzaddik of folk music, one of the 36 secret kings in each generation without which the world falls to pieces.  At the very least, he seems to have been that rarest of creatures, a brilliant man who was also good, or a good man who was also brilliant.

It was a pleasure to be a part of the concert yesterday, and I can’t wait to get home and put more of Dave and Tracey’s albums on the stereo.

Wedding planning is a joyous, often stressful process – but it’s also a fascinating opportunity to engage in social archaeology.  Planning a more-or-less traditional wedding, with all the bows and ribbons and little moving pieces, is the closest most modern folks will get to experiencing what it was like to be a member of the 19th century upper (or upwardly mobile) class.

All those things people do and wear for weddings that seem idiosyncratic at best and arcane at worst were standard elements of party planning a hundred and thirty years ago: printed or calligraphed invitations with expensive tissue inside, tuxedos, live bands and dancing, table assignments and cocktails and all the rest used to be de rigueur for parties no matter the occasion – think of the soiree at the beginning of War and Peace, one of many occurring on a random night for the nobles and well-bred of Moscow.  Invitations, balls, a presentation, a band, seats assigned to promote interesting conversation, and through it all the hostess whirling with an oil can to grease the wheels of conversation.

Tides of time wash over us and bear us away, but little piles of sand endure, even though they are eroded slowly down the centuries (a Mandarin collar instead of a standard lapel, blue ink in legible font rather than black in archaic script).  I at least, having spent perhaps too much of my life in books, am fascinated to enter that world if only to visit.  If nothing else, I hope to take from the experience a breath of the majesty that would have attended a well-run Victorian party – and maybe a greater appreciation for the immense amount of work required below-stairs to make those “effortless parties” happen.

China Mieville read from The City & The City at the Harvard Book Store last night. He was eloquent, impressive, and remarkably personable — one of the most social creative professionals I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

A couple of his points struck me as particularly meaningful: first, he cares a lot for the worlds and the people he creates. Someone in the Q&A asked him whether he would want to live in the worlds he wrote about, and his answer was a straight ‘yes’: “When Perdido Street Station came out, all the reviewers were saying things like, ‘unrelentingly dark,’ and ‘bleak fog-drenched dystopia,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Really? I thought it was rather cool.’ Also identified himself as the kid who always hoped he would jump through the one-time-only magical portal that opened in his closet, but was always a bit afraid that he wouldn’t if the chance came around; I was that kid too, and still am.

I asked him, in a very unformed way, how he managed to get books like King Rat, Perdido St. Station, etc. published despite their not fitting into any easy categories. His response: while taxonomy is fun, it’s important not to let it get in the way of your storytelling. Make a good book, then don’t worry about how to pigeonhole it; rather just tell the story. That’s the way to get people to read it.

Good advice; I’ll take it to heart when I come to my next round of queries.

Yesterday the Substrate blog got its start with my first post!  Go there and check it out; the redoubtable Lauren M. will be posting sometime later today.

Also, pre-orders for The Book of Exodi just went live!  Get it to read my story, “On Starlit Seas!”  On the publisher’s web site you can also read synopses of the other stories, as well as watch a (literally) rocking video ad.

That’s it for now; more news as it comes.

I came across this on a Chinese blog, and it really hit me. It’s Haruki Murakami’s speech on accepting the Jerusalem Prize for literature. I’ve been trying to articulate something like the conviction below in private conversation for a couple weeks now, and he nails it.  Whatever your feelings about the particular political events he mentions, the basic truth of the essay hit me in the stomach like a 50-lb bag of sand.

Always on the side of the egg

By Haruki Murakami

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies – which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true – the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.
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I’ve been sitting on this for a while, waiting for the web site to update, but as it’s taking a while, I wanted to throw this out to all of you: I’m a finalist in the Writers of the Future competition for 2008! Writers of the Future is the biggest competition out there for amateur speculative fiction writers; it’s judged by professionals writers (Neil Gaiman has been a judge, as have Tim Powers, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffery, and Roger Zelazney (!)), and has a good track record of helping people launch careers in the genre. There are thousands of entries every quarter, and I’m in the top eight for this time around. Now my story gets passed, along with the other 7, to a panel of expert judges, who will finish with the judging in late December/early January. Three stories of the 8 get prizes, expense-paid tickets to an award ceremony in LA, and publication in the Writers of the Future anthology. So I’ve got my fingers crossed. Even if I don’t get any further, though, being a finalist is an amazing honor out of a pool so large and competitive – definitely something to throw on the old query letter! Watch this space for updates! For now, positive thoughts!

A quick, sweet update on the writing life:

First, I just had a short story accepted for publication in The Book of Exodi, an anthology by scene newcomers Eposic Diversions. The theme was “mass exodus,” with a science-fictional bent; my story took that and twisted it on its head. With space vikings. To get to the marrow: come late spring 2009, you’ll all be able to purchase a book containing a Max Gladstone original!

More news on that as it arises. I’ve got a couple more submissions currently out, and I’ll keep you updated on the status of those. Also, the Genghis Khan novel is done, though not completely serialized yet, and I’m eating through the revisions on Raise My Head And Watch The Moon, my first novel-length foray into litfic.

While you’re waiting through the long cold months, check out some short fiction from last year:

The Mask on the Island – Criminal mastermind and devoted father Derek Gaspard faces his deadliest enemy yet: an assassin who could be anyone, even himself.

http://onthepremises.com/issue_03/story_03_1.html

Octopus Tanks – Love, Death, and Revenge on the Martian frontier

http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/62/

If you like either of these, pass them on!