Ten Roses, Red and Black

February 15

There's a lot of talk lately about the current Movement or lack thereof -- the Next Wave, the Amorphous Blobs, the Notorious Style Monkeys, and what-have-you. Is there a movement? Maybe. Depends on how you define your terms. Mostly I look around, and see my friends and acquaintances doing amazing work -- fictional, poetical, critical, and editorial -- and feel the warm glow of inclusion. If we are a movement, we are a movement of beer, chicken wings, pretensions, ambitions, dancing, small press, big ideas, talent, contention, snobbishness, sparkles, black leather jackets with zippers, online exhortations, grumbles, impatience, dismissiveness, butterfly hair clips, stylistic excesses, bizarre cross-breedings and -fertilizations, unkempt hair, too much coffee too late at night, sitting in hallways, colonizing the darkest corners of bars, and working our asses off. Kinda hard to make into a catchphrase with a "punk" suffix. Which is just the way I like it.

***

Valentine's Day was nice -- the nighttime bits, with dear Heather, anyway. She gave me a lovely book of erotic photography, and a delightful handmade card (actually a little wordless book, which she narrated; the stylized story of the origin of our relationship), and I gave her flowers and Shaun Tan's The Red Tree, with the inscription: "You are my red tree." Much happiness.

And, yes, V-Day is a Hallmark holiday, driven by advertising, and who needs a special day to love your lover, etc. Agreed. But any excuse for a celebration, hmm? And sometimes a reminder to pay special attention to the one(s) you love is a good thing. Or to have bitterly convivial parties. Whichever.

***

Wednesday night I wrote a poem about Ts'its'tsi'nako, Spider Woman, the creatrix from Laguna mythology. Lots of spider imagery in it, of course. Thursday I found a black widow in the kitchen; she'd climbed in through the open window, we assume, as she was near the sill. Widows make me nervous, what with the agonizingly painful, possibly-fatal bites they're capable of giving (though I know they aren't aggressive) so I killed her rather than repatriating her to the outdoors. I felt bad about doing that for the rest of the night. Later that evening Heather and I watched a not-terribly-good movie called Highway, which featured a character having an enormous picture of a black widow drawn on his face with red and black marker. Last night, as part of our Valentine's celebration, Heather and I were watching some porn she'd brought home from work, and one of the actresses had a tattoo of a spider on her ass.

I know the universe isn't trying to tell me anything; the universe doesn't do that. But I certainly have spiders on the brain, as a consequence.

***

Thoughts on the unMovement by people more thoughtful and articulate than I am: Try Susan's comments board. Try Gabe Chouinard's journal, and Nick's. Read Alan de Niro's (who I would be tempted to point to as the pre-eminent theorist of the movement, if we had a movement) essay, "The Dream of the Unified Field". I could keep going -- at length -- but those'll get you started.

Oh, and more importantly, read Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Singularity (once it goes live), and Full Unit Hook-Up. The places where the work is, in other words. There are more places, natch -- the big magazines are even increasingly publishing the people who get mentioned as part of the unMovement.

***

My mom is planning on going to the Nebula weekend. Her reasons are sound; she hasn't seen me in almost two years, and Philly is only a 5 or 6 hour drive from where she lives -- we're unlikely to be much closer together than that anytime soon. On the one hand, I love my mom, and miss her, and want to see her very much; on the other hand, it's the Nebulas, and in a very real sense, it's not a vacation for me -- it's work. I'm not much for schmoozing -- I lack both the skills and the desire -- but I'm going to be spending most of my time talking to people, introducing myself, trying to be charming and visible and etc. Not a lot of time to hang out with my mom -- I'm only there for two nights! So I wrote her a longish e-mail explaining all this, and told her that we could hang out for a few hours on Saturday, since I'd be unlikely to go to panels anyway, but that otherwise I'd be busy. She hasn't written back yet. I'm afraid I hurt her feelings, but really, I was trying to insure that I didn't hurt her feelings, worse, later. I wish I could afford to visit her in N.C. and spend some time with her that way, without other demands on my time (and other things on my mind!).

***

I've started a Reviews page, to compile all the mean, nice, and mixed things reviewers have said about my work. Feel free to send e-mail and let me know about any reviews you come across that mention my stuff (even the bad ones!). Formal reviews only, though -- somebody casually saying "Tim Pratt's last story sucked" in their blog isn't what I'm looking for, though journalistas/bloggers/whatever who review stuff on their sites (a la Little Behemoth or Bluejack) are welcome.

***

Stuff I've been reading: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, which'll be out in, I think, May. His second Discworld YA -- marvelous stuff! It's even a Witches book, sort of! Though mostly about the small, blue, violent pictsies known as the Nac Mac Feegle. I like it even better than The Amazing Maurice. I had to write to Pratchett about something for work, and at the end I mentioned how much I liked Wee Free, to which he replied: "Crivens!" Hee hee hee.

Currently into Pattern Recognition, which is good Gibson. Also in the middle of K.J. Bishop's The Etched City, which I shall soon finish and review. Also reading the Hellblazer collections, trying not to wince at the frequent use of my last name as an epithet...

***

Speculon is no more, which is a shame. My publications there helped get me into HWA, my brief tenure as poetry editor helped me get my gig as Star*Line editor, they published the first review I ever wrote, they were a paying market that provided a home for good work... losing such a 'zine is always sad, and the fact that I had a falling-out with the management doesn't lessen that sadness. While I am not immune to schadenfreude, I truly don't feel it in this case.

***

The Dare is not going especially well for me. I've been fighting a cold all week; I would've called in sick at least once, but the issue goes in on Tuesday, our executive editor and editor-in-chief are both out of town, we haven't hired a replacement for the wandering kestrel yet, and it's busy. So in the evenings I've been drinking the throat-soothement of choice (Bailey's), laying around moaning, and going to bed at midnight or even earlier. So not a lot of time or inclination for writing. That said, I wrote two good Bestiary poems (the aforementioned Spider Woman poem, and one about Nidhigg, the corpse-tearer from Norse myth) and another 1200 words or so on the Sigmund story, which is wicked-cool. It will be a novelette. I hope to finish it this weekend, and thus keep up with my Dare goal of two stories or one novelette each week...

***

Since my story got the Nebula nomination, congratulations have been pouring in, and I thank you all. I've tried to respond individually, but I may well have missed some, so, if I did: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 5,300

Words written since last entry:
1,700. This is not good. I need to get serious.

Stories written this month:

• "Living with the Harpy"
• The Train Story (tentatively "Helljack"), with Mike Jasper