Infinology is the Web hosting company that carries Piker Press. More than a week ago, Piker Press stopped working. Since then the editors over there have tried through various channels to get help. Nothing. Zip. Nada. No one is answering the phones, no one is responding to the help tickets. This would to my untrained eye make the claims they make on their Web site downright fradulent.
So, to summarize: Infinology sucks. They are liars as well as bad Web hosts. Don’t even think of using them.
I mentioned recently that I got three rejections in a single day. Those were from literary agents, and were all the quick-glance sort of rejections. When one sends out queries in batches, one should expect that the rejections from agencies that are not grabbed by the cover letter will come back in batches as well. So, while it was disappointing that three came back that way in the same day, it was not entirely unexpected.
Meanwhile, I’ve been checking the steps up to my door eagerly every day because I was waiting to hear back from a major magazine about a story I really like. Today, there was not a SASE waiting there, but a small package. I assumed it was from my folks, but on inspection it proved to be from the magazine to which I had submitted the story. I mentioned previously that one gets a feel for when a rejection is in the envelope, and this was clearly an outlier. Eagerly I tore open the package.
Inside was a copy of Esli, the Russian sister of F&SF. The editor thought I would enjoy having a copy of the Russian edition with my story Memory of a Thing that Never Was in it. He was right; I think that’s pretty damn cool. (Illustrated, even!) I’m curious now whether there are any reviews of the Russian version. In the US, most reviews said “Good writing, the reader has to fill in the gaps.” For some reviewers that was a good thing, for others not so much. I wonder how eastern Europeans will react to it; one of the big criticisms of American literature over here is that too much is explained, and that stories always come to pat conclusions. With that in mind, Memory might appeal even more to Eastern sensibilities.
I’m not sure, but I think the Russian magazine picks and chooses stories from a variety of sources, which makes it a little more special that they chose mine. I could be wrong about that, though. I wonder if the translation is any good.
I can also say now that I have been published in multiple languages. That’s pretty cool.
There were two notes in the package with the magazine. The first said something like, “thought you might get a kick out of seeing the Russian edition. I have a story of yours I’ll try to look at this weekend.” The second note said, “too much unexplained.” That’s a paraphrase, the note was by far the most comprehensive critique to come with a rejection. The editor took some valuable time to give me his opinion. He also said the piece felt like part of a larger story. Mere days ago I said that I liked stories like that.
Sigh. This was a story I’d actually revised to make things clearer, so the reader didn’t have to work so hard. Still, I have to admit that the prose is dense and can be demanding if you let it be, and there are some things that I don’t come out and explain directly. I thought some of the things the editor cited were pretty obvious by the end of the story, though. Then again, I’m not really the guy to judge that.
I think I also have to accept that what these guys really want are what I consider my second-best stories — stories that are more stylistically straightforward and don’t have multiple layers of interpretation. I write a lot of those, and I enjoy them, but generally I don’t deem them ‘worthy’ of the big magazines. This despite people around me, even readers of these pages, telling me they also like (and sometimes even prefer) those stories.
As an experiment I think I’ll loosen up the style a bit, add more explanation, and see if it still sounds good to my ear. I get paid by the word, after all. At the same time I’ll see if a more literary venue might be interested in it. Perhaps I just need to find a market for speculative fiction for people who like to be challenged. (To be fair, Fantasy and Science Fiction does sometimes publish more challenging work, but it is the exception, and it’s not mine.)
Who knows? Maybe in Russia…
Our story so far: Allison is an American high-school student who has transferred to a private prep school in Japan. Her first day was disorienting; she was delayed getting to class by a mysterious stranger, and then the entire class flew into a frenzy when the oblivious teacher uttered the phrase “transfer student”. Half the class dove for cover, while the other half fought to be the first to befriend her. She is sitting between Ruchia, a pretty, friendly girl, and Seiji, a brooding boy with a penetrating gaze, who says a lot of dramatically mysterious things. Seiji believes Allison is a demon, not a killer robot as his friends theorize.
If you would like to read from the beginning, the entire story is here.
Allison climbed out of bed, still groggy. She dressed and gathered her resolve for the ordeal of breakfast. Finally she went into the kitchen. “Good morning!” she said, trying to sound cheerful. The effort was wasted. Her “uncle” sat at the table, silently reading the newspaper, his eyes invisible behind the reflections of the fluorescent lights in his glasses. Her “aunt” was moving about the kitchen, timid as a mouse, afraid to break the silence imposed by her husband. Allison had been there three weeks now, and she didn’t think she would ever get used to living in that place.
“Thank you for the food,” she said when her aunt set breakfast in front of her. She ate in silence, reading one of her textbooks. Before she was finished her uncle rose abruptly and left the kitchen. From the next room she could hear the chatter of a keyboard, punctuated by mouse clicks.
“I wonder if he even has a voice,” Allison muttered. Her aunt looked at her sharply, but said nothing. Allison was only too happy to leave early for school. It was an ordeal of a different sort, but at least people spoke there. The other students seemed suspicious of her — wary, even — but she had read that the Japanese were slow to accept outsiders, and a few of her classmates were very friendly.
This morning Allison heard the skateboard wheels approaching in time to dodge Daisuke. He sailed on past. Allison wondered once more if he was trying to run her over. He certainly made no effort to avoid a collision.
She kept an eye out for the mysterious stranger who had helped her that first morning, but she had not seen him since. Oh, well. There were enough other mysteries to keep her mind spinning.
“Well, if it isn’t little Miss Transfer Student.”
The blonde girl stood, blocking her path, flanked by a pair of dark-haired girls Allison assumed to be identical twins. “Hello, Kano,” Allison said. “Hello, uh…” she wondered if the other two girls even had names.
“Hello yourself. I demand to know what you are doing here.”
“Yes, that’s right!” the twins said, their voices sharp and birdlike. “Kano is right!”
Allison wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. She had been getting hostile looks from Kano ever since her first day. “I’m just here to study.”
“Ho! Study! That’s a good one!” The other girls laughed. “Now listen. I’m the most popular girl here. I can bury you.”
“Kano’s right! She can bury you!”
“I don’t understand…”
A bookish girl that Allison saw in class every day appeared at her elbow. “You broke her record.” The girl opened her journal with ceremonial dignity. “Four nosebleeds when you walked into class, one of them a gusher. Kano got three, and one of those was borderline. The record before that was two, more than fifteen years ago.”
Kano glared at the other girl. “You can’t count the one when Rei dove under his desk. He probably just hit his nose on something.”
“Doesn’t matter, you know that; a nosebleed is a nosebleed. Allison caused it.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Kano’s right! That’s ridiculous!” the chorus chimed in.
Kano turned back to Allison. “Just remember your place, Miss Transfer Student, and we will get along just fine.” She spun in a pretty little huff and walked away.
The other girl was closing her journal with reverence. “Yomiko,” she said. “My name’s Yomiko.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Yomiko.”
“It might have been five.”
“Five what?”
“Nosebleeds. Things were confusing; I couldn’t confirm Shinta’s.” Yomiko thought for a moment. “It would be better if Kano accepted the inevitable.”
“What inevitable?”
“That you’re going to be more popular than she is. If she keeps acting like that she’ll turn into a cow or something.”
“Yomiko, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Am I having some sort of bizarre dream? Am I in a coma somewhere, hallucinating?”
Yomiko looked at her carefully. “I hadn’t considered that possibility.” She opened her journal and made a note in it. Coma? Check hospitals. She hesitated and added, Check morgues also.
They were almost to the academy when Yomiko broke the silence. “It’s going to be an interesting year,” she said.
It was still a few minutes before the start of class. Seiji was huddled with some of the other boys, but Allison could feel him watching her. She shuddered. Then Ruchia was there, smiles and sunshine, and Tasuki with her happy-go-lucky energy, and Allison relaxed. Just another day at school.
“Have you decided what club you’re going to join?” asked Tasuki. “You should join the tennis club, with me.”
“No, you should join the drama club,” Ruchia said. “You’d be great!”
“Well, actually, I thought it might be fun to try the fencing club.”
“Fencing! Do you know how?”
“No, but it seems like it would be fun to learn.”
“Fencing?” asked Seiji as he took his seat. “You can’t be serious.”
“Well, I am.” Allison said defensively.
Seiji’s reply was sarcastic, but there was something else there as well, probing. “Are you expecting to get into sword battles?”
“An interesting choice,” said a girl Allison had not met yet, “requiring discipline and dedication. Yes, that resonates well with you.” It was the girl who had decided where Allison should sit. She stood now, tall and thin, but there was something feline about her posture, a jungle beast always ready to spring, even when sleeping. Her eyes were steady and cold.
Allison remembered to bow rather than offer her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. My name is Allison.”
“Yes. Arrislawr Crlensharwl,” she imitated the teacher’s pronunciation perfectly. “My name is Hitomi.”
“Are you in the fencing club?”
“No, I prefer different weapons, but perhaps we can drill together.” Was that a fleeting smile? Allison wasn’t sure; it was gone almost before it arrived. “I think you will find the leader of the fencing club to be… interesting. Please be sure to do your best.”
“I’ll do anything if it will keep me out of my house for a while.”
“Is it that bad?” asked Ruchia with concern.
“They never say a word. He spends every moment on his computer, and she brings him food.”
Ruchia and Tasuki exchanged glances. “White Shadow” whispered Ruchia, then said, “Oh, well, hey, maybe you should come over to the old monastery tonight. We can have dinner and study together.”
“Really? That would be great!”
Seiji made a slight choking noise.
Hitomi nodded. “You would be most welcome.”
“You live there too?”
Allison looked up and noticed that the lecture had started. She shook her head, wondering if she was going to learn anything at all.
The Emergency Committee convened for their daily briefing. As usual, Kouta took charge.
“So, Seiji, have you gotten a look at her teeth yet?”
“No.”
Shinta nudged him playfully. “Maybe you should try being nice to her, dude. She’s a lot more likely to smile, then.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking. She’s pretty, and she’s nice, but…”
“I think Seiji’s got a crush on her!”
“Are you crazy?! She’s a Transfer Student!”
Bando nodded solemnly. “Methinks he protests too much.”
Kaneda spoke for the first time. “Listen, Seiji, if you’re not going to be nice to her, then it’s up to one of us to step up. For the safety of the school, I hereby volunteer to make friends with Allison and make her smile.”
“Hey! I was going to volunteer!” Yoshiki said.
“This is not a job for those who hesitate at the critical moment, Yoshiki. You hesitated, and I stepped up. This is a job for Kaneda, the master of love.”
“You?”, said Yoshiki, “Master of love? Don’t make me laugh.”
“You sure you don’t mind, Seiji?” Kaneda asked.
“Why should I care?”
Kouta nodded. “All right, then, it’s settled. Kaneda will be nice to the transfer student.”
It’s late. I climbed the steps to my rooms and as always scanned ahead for letters. They wait for me on the steps. Tonight as I ascended I caught the flash of white, and I rushed forward. There was an envelope there, artfully stamped. I didn’t have to pick it up to know that a rejection lay within. You get a feeling for that.
The Czechs are a precise people; when there is a lot of bad news they stack it carefully, so at first glance you might mistake disaster for misfortune. There was not just one envelope waiting for me, but three. I haven’t opened any of them yet, but I know what’s inside.
Back when I played in band, the director passed out very simple arrangements of Bach and guys like that for us to warm up on. They were designed for the purpose, with long sustained notes so that those who were into that kind of thing could check their intonation. Nevertheless, despite their simplicity, when played well they sounded pretty nice.
My hard drive has a directory called “scribbles” cluttered with bits like that, things I wrote to get myself into a certain mood or just to explore a single moment or sketch a character. No big twists or surprises, no character development, just a few paragraphs that develop a feeling. Most of these derelicts aren’t terribly interesting, but now and then I write one that I put in the “slightly better” section of the junk drawer. I think now I’ll take those slightly better bits and put them here instead. Heck, I’m writing them anyway, I may as well get a blog episode out of them once in a while.
For example, here’s one from yesterday. Keep in mind that a polished final work is not the goal of the exercise.
Jillian had been waiting for this moment, tired of fighting through all the well-intentioned are-you-sure?’s and sympathetic smiles. She was sure — sure she didn’t want to be around any of those people anymore. People who pretended to understand but didn’t have the slightest clue, with their advice and empty assurances, people who couldn’t just shut the fuck up for a moment. Couldn’t they feel anything at all, these people? Couldn’t they see that she just needed some time to think?
She would be leaving soon. The only question was how far she would go. How far would the petty noise of all those people follow her, how far could their voices reach? There was one voice she could never escape, no matter how far she went, the voice she would never hear again.
She took another step into the room. The ash tray on the coffee table was overflowing, around it were empty beer bottles, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes. How many arguments had the clutter caused in the last two years? Two years! How had they not killed each other in that time?
Two years, and two secrets. Horrible, dark things, lurking, waiting to destroy. Jillian looked at the mess. Had Carla’s secret been written here all along, spelled out in alcohol and days on the sofa? Had she been slowly dissolving herself right before Jillian’s eyes, until the final act of dissolution was just another step in a long progression? Had Jillian ever truly heard her roommate’s voice, or had she drowned it out with her own?
Now there was only one secret. One secret, with nowhere to go, stripped of meaning, but heavier than ever. How many times had she tried to tell Carla, how many hints and clues had she left, telling her roommate that she loved her? How many nights had she jumped up from the sofa while they shared a blanket, watching a movie and munching popcorn, afraid of what she might do if she stayed? How many nights had she cried alone?
Had Carla been crying, too, on those lonely nights?
Due to an administrative error, some votes in the current poll were misdirected to adjacent candidates. There really should be a Florida joke here, but none of them turned out funny. I will use my own voting powers over the next few days to restore the votes that were lost when I fixed things. It’s not like there were that many. In the meantime, you, the faithful electorate are encouraged to continue in the best ballot-stuffing tradition.
As long as I’m doing one of these programming note thingies, I may as well mention the new section over there in the sidebar. It turns out these days that actual strangers and folks we don’t know happen by, and I figured a little orientation might help them get a feel for the place. Plus, a friend and fellow writer recently mentioned that I should brag more, after he read “Serpent”. He said a lot of nice things about that story. So, I’m bragging more, or at least giving people a shot at reading my stuff, as long as it’s out there.
And Hey golly! That’s what the poll is about! I could have sworn I wrote some funny things for Piker Press, but the five candidates in the poll were the best I could come up with. One of those ought to go in the favorites list, just to give perusers a change of pace. But which one? You be the judge!
I am sitting at the Budvar Bar, basking in the glow of writing what might be a really good story. It might not be — a review and edit a few days from now will determine that — but right now I feel good about it. I’m not supposed to be working on short stories right now, but there are going to be days like this.
On the television is the Czech version of Miss America. The Czechs, still being old school, have no problem with the fact that being sexy is an important qualification. They know that people are tuning in to see hot women in small clothes. With that in mind, I considered the Miss America pageant. Its television ratings, apparently, are plummeting, and the event is caught in a hard place where they used to sell it with sex but they’re not allowed to do that anymore. Judging women by their physical appearance is now only done shamefully, in secret. By everyone.
It occurred to me that while the Miss America contest is getting less and less sexy, the US Congress is getting better looking every election. So while we cringe at giving some woman an ultimately meaningless title on the basis of her looks, we will not give a man or woman the power to declare war on another nation unless they look like a professional athlete or a model. It’s not that I care much about the idea of Miss America, I just wish we’d apply that same queasy skepticism where it really mattered.
I was invited to a party tonight. It promises to be a good one; it’s the 30th birthday of a friend who has been around for a while, and who as a result has plenty of people to invite to a shindig like this one. It’s at a shiny, popular bar somewhere in the center of the city.
I’m not going to go. It’s just not the right day for alcohol, noise, and forced gaiety. As the appointed hour approaches, I find myself sliding in the opposite direction, toward quiet introspection and the gentle melancholy that sometimes heralds better writing. Already I have a short warm-up mood piece I quite like.
Me blowing off a party is hardly noteworthy, but I’m pretty proud of the way I weaseled out of this one. I sent the hostess a message saying, “Would you forgive me for not coming to your party if I bought you lunch next week?” I explained that I was in a write-sad-things sort of groove.
“Perfectly understandable,” she wrote back.
So now I’m off the hook for tonight and I’m meeting a pretty woman for lunch on Monday. That worked out pretty well, I think.
O2 is my internet service provider. It used to be České Telecom, and back when I was dealing with a Czech company, things were working fine. (Note that this is contrary to all logic as we know it.) Now that ČT has been sucked into a giant pan-European company, my service has gone steadily downhill. Most of the time I’m still connected, but there is no DNS. If I happened to know the IP addresses of all the sites I wanted to visit, I’d be fine. (DNS is like a giant automatic phone book that takes text like jerssoftwarehut.com/ and looks up the string of numbers that identifies the correct machine on the Internet.)
In my setup I can enter an alternate IP address for DNS. I’d like to try that to see if it helps, but I’m not sure what to put there. Any of you techno-geek people know the IP of a reliable DNS?
Now if I could only post this…
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to share with you the first whacked-out muddled invention of 2007.
My little apartment is heated with radiators; there is a unit hanging on the wall in the bathroom that heats water using natural gas, which it then circulates using an electric pump. The pump is starting to make a lot of noise; it’s only a matter of time before it gives out. While pondering the pump it occurred to me that it was too bad there was no way to use the pressure in the water main to circulate the hot water through the radiators.
In fact, it would be easy to do that, but you would wind up pouring a lot of water down the drain. I had just reinvented the water wheel.
But wait a minute, I thought as I stood in the shower, I already send a lot of water down the drain. Why can’t I make it do a little work for me first?
The easiest thing would be to put a little turbine and generator in the water main, so that it would turn every time I ran water. The downside is that the water pressure for the whole place would be reduced. But we don’t always need the water to be at full pressure — that’s why faucets have variable valves. So what if your faucet had a variable-resistance generator instead of a valve? You would adjust the rate of flow from the faucet by changing the resistance of the generator. You’d get the same control over water flow you do now, but you would be getting a little bit of electrical bonus every time you use water. Woo hoo!
My electro-faucet isn’t quite ready to market yet — I’m still working on the catchy name.
As I pay more attention to where visitors are coming from (Have the Campbell Award judges come by? Have the Campbell Award judges come by?) I am once again bemused by the wide variety of odd searches that people type into Google and Yahoo, only to end up here. Go figure.
In the past I have obfuscated key words in these entries, in order to avoid misdirecting the search engines to here, rather than to the original page. This time, though, I’m just too lazy.
Notable also is that in the last two weeks there has been a surge of searches for suicidal squirrels. The searchers are in Western Europe, mostly Germany but also France and Italy. The trend seems to be spreading to Eastern Europe as well. The crack team of Squirrel Watchers at Muddled University will continue to monitor this trend very carefully.
I went to bed early last night. I just hit a point where I didn’t want to start anything, and the book I picked up was boring. So I punted on the whole idea of being conscious, put on some gentle tunes, and drifted off to the Land of Nod.
Naturally, since I went to bed early, I also woke up early. I thought about all the things I could do; a few last changes to the upcoming release of Jer’s Novel Writer, a way to iron out a part in Dark War, odds and ends like that. I also realized I was thirsty. I got up, drank a bunch of water, then made my way back through the darkness to my still-warm bed. I went back to sleep. Take that, to-do list!
So it was that I didn’t get up until some thirteen hours after I went to sleep, with only a brief interruption.
I feel good.
During my supplemental slumber I had a dream. It seems like an allegory, but it was only a dream. In this dream I was in a little workshop where an old man and a middle-aged woman were weaving a rug. They were at opposite ends of the loom; the old man was in charge of working the yarn, while the woman was singing a song. In the song were the instructions for making the rug, the pattern was determined by the music. “Ah, yes,” I remembered, “Native American cultures used songs to memorize the complex patterns of their rugs.”
She finished her song, but the rug was incomplete. There was a big section right in the middle still unwoven. Neither the woman nor the old man seemed terribly bothered by this; the old man seemed unaware that there was a problem, while the woman just looked things over and nodded. “I know what I can do,” she said, but I never learned what that was.
He didn’t trust love songs.
They seemed nothing more than packaging — shiny boxes, painted with pretty girls and handsome boys clinging to their microphones and their machines of music, their faces contorted with emotion that threatened to crush their souls, to erase their very beings, performance after performance.
Empty boxes, empty of love, empty of life.
What could fit in such a small place? Certainly not love. Certainly nothing of depth, nothing with the size and overwhelming complexity of love.
Unless…
In dark times he would go to the places love songs could be found. They seemed harmless, these puffs of air, these confections of smoke and light, following each other in aimless circles. He listened, waiting for the mask to slip, waiting to glimpse the darker truth that lay behind the emptiness. Each love song is like the one before, but with each he feels closer to something.
Together, all the love songs, all the nothings, add up to a larger zero. The sum of all the boxes with their happy ribbons and and shiny walls is large enough to hold love, but there is something else there instead, the dread secret, the beast waiting to devour his soul. Some nights he could almost hear the demon whipering in the amplifier hiss, he could feel it watching him from flashing video screens.
There is no love; it is gone, lost, as if it never was.
He didn’t trust love songs.
It also turns out that it doesn’t take much to be eligible, and unless the judges really, really like Memory of a Thing That Never Was (good reviews notwithstanding), my eligibility doesn’t mean much. Still, as the editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction pointed out when he suggested I throw my hat in the ring, it never hurts to get your name out there.
The Campbell award is to recognize the best new writer in the Science Fiction market. I’m eligible to win for two years, which means it really kind of sucks I haven’t worked harder to get more work in higher-profile places since my initial success. Still, I have my own little space at Writeropia.com with a link to thise who are in the running for the big prize this year. I’m working on the bio over there (derivitave of my piker bio), and I’m adding links to some of the stories published at Piker Press that a judge might particularly like. Any suggestions of stories you liked are welcome; you can see the whole Piker list here.
So, it’s exciting, I guess, in a not very sort of way, that I’m in contention for this big prize. More important is what I do with this next year, as after that I won’t be ‘new’ any more.
