Known Forms

This story about the lonely whale kills me.

I’m pretty sure there will be 20 children’s books pitched in the next month about The Loneliest Whale. They’ll probably have happy endings. Bastards!! While the real lonely whale is still out there singing in the North Sea to no one. Well, to a bunch of humans who don’t know how to sing back and who’d want a creepy 4-legged land-walking mammal who can’t really sing to show up anyway? Kind of a WTF moment for that whale. ‘Dude, thanks and everything, but that’s not what I ordered.’

That’s not what I meant to do. sigh. twitter hates me and the feeling is mutual.

@Gwenda’s ms is SOOOOOOOOOOO AWESOME that I am wasting precious letters to tweet it’s awesomeness with multiple Os. twitter hates me.

My Dad sent me a link to an amazing review of Patti Smith’s Just Kids that makes me want to buy Just Kids and pretty much everything Elizabeth Hand (the reviewer) has ever written.

@Gwenda also :p

Got the 2nd half of Gwenda’s unpub brill new novel. Most of me is all YAY!! I gets to read it! tiny jealous bit says f**k you for finishing!

I am not dead. Srsly. I have been in the hospital. long story short, don’t get a lumbar puncture. Only if you’re dying. Really. No complications they tell you, not a big deal…yeah, right. Whatever. Never trust an asshole in a lab coat. The lab coat takes off at least 40 IQ points. There’s a reason they feel the need to wear it. Because no one would listen to them otherwise.

Anyway, while I was out, my story was published on Hot Metal Bridge’s site. I don’t know how to describe my joy here without reverting to internet stupidisms, so please read the drunken and possibly naked dance of ‘I rock’ between the lines.

Also, the great and awesome Gwenda Bond posted about it on her masterful blog so more than three people may actually end up reading it! Gwenda also just penned a masterful smackdown of the anti-book yahoos on some site I can’t remember at the moment. Nervous Breakdown? Oh yeah, here it is. She. Rocks. The best part is that she, unlike so many who venture into these treacherous waters, doesn’t fall for the trap of arguing on their turf — the nutball religious turf. Instead she takes them to task for their stodgy, outdated, white guy canonfingering. Wait, that sounds dirty. Because it IS, people!

Today, I woke up to a rejection email that wasn’t, in fact, the rejection I was expecting. I had to read it twice and have my partner read it before I believed that it was actually an acceptance letter.

This was a story I had given up trying to place (although, obviously, I hadn’t quite given up on it or it would have never been submitted - take note struggling writers!). I wrote it five years ago and despite some really lovely and encouraging rejection letters from places as diverse as The Paris Review and Asimov’s, I’d begun to think that it was, like many of my stories, too scifi for litfic and too litfic for scifi. Doomed to wander the no-man’s land between for all eternity.

However, just like the best kind of fairy tale, the wonderful, heroic, and beautiful Hot Metal Bridge decided my little story was just right. So keep your eyes open for “Falling Bodies to Light” by yours truly in an upcoming edition.

The major stumbling block? The bio. Oh how we hates the bio. I think it may take me longer to write than the story itself. *sigh*

Ash, by Malinda Lo, is a fairy tale…I want to say ‘with a twist’, but that makes it sound like too many of the current titles out there that are ‘vampires with a twist’ or ‘Jane Austen with a zombie twist’ and it most certainly doesn’t fall into that category. Although it has elements that will remind you of other fairy tales, it departs from it/them in a way that is wonderfully satisfying. In fact, one of the really beautiful things about this book is the ‘fairy tales’ the characters tell each other and themselves that add to the larger narrative and overall worldbuilding.

I have to admit that I was prejudiced against this book and hadn’t even considered it because the author was an editor/writer for AfterEllen and although this is a site I check pretty much daily, I find it frustrating and downright infuriating at times. But that’s on me and it’s not at all fair because, hello! we all have to make a living. And Lo’s writing in Ash couldn’t be more different than her writing for AfterEllen. Actually, it was Nicola Griffith’s rec that got me to take another look at and ultimately buy it and I’m glad I did. It’s not without its faults — I found the pacing to be the most frustrating thing (the book takes a great deal of time setting up Ash’s story and her involvement with the fairy, Sidhaen, leaving not much time/room for Hunress’s story and the book’s ultimate resolution — I seriously kept checking the jacket with twenty pages to go thinking that the book could never resolve itself in the remaining pages and must have a sequel) — but I can say that I loved it (and seriously, I can find fault with anything I read — I’m a a grad student, that’s my job!). It was beautifully written and imagined and I can’t stop thinking about it. And even though I found it very enjoyable as an adult reader, I, like Nicola, wish that someone had given me a copy of this book when I was a teen or tween. It would have changed my life. And that’s no small thing.

I’m beginning to think the book isn’t broken. I think maybe it’s me that is broken.