The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated Awards Process

Here’s a bit from the story I’m trying to finish up today, a young adult piece tentatively entitled “The Ghost Installers.” It actually came out of a dream that I had – a good reason to be keeping a dream journal.

We talked about that recently in a class – the need to listen to your unconscious mind, to pay attention to dreams and serendipitous slips of the tongue. To nourish it with a variety of arts and make sure its senses are satisfied. To give it space in which to express itself. Sometimes when I’m drawing, that’s when a story that’s mentally knotted begins to untwist itself and show me what my mind is trying to do with it.

The dream was just a moment, an image/situation that I won’t describe for fear of spoilers. Talking to Wayne about it the next morning, I found a story idea emerging, which we batted back and forth, applying the classic try/fail, try/fail, try/succeed algorithm, until it was fleshed out to the point that I jotted down a 250 word outline. Now I’m working through that from scene one till the end, but I think if I get stuck along the way, I might try moving to the ending and writing it, advice from this excellent post about writing process by Kameron Hurley that I wanted to point to.

Here’s a bit from the beginning. Penny and her dad have just moved into their new house, so new that pieces of it are still being worked on. It’s two in the morning, and she’s just snuck in after hanging out with her friends in a nearby park.

She had a penlight in her pocket, although the battery was almost out from using it in the park. She crept towards the attic stairs. The solidity of the little light wrapped in her fingers reassured her, although it could hardly be used as a weapon.

Maybe some animal that wandered in? A raccoon or something. Maybe a cat?

She held her breath, as she crept up the stairs. Was that”¦voices?

“Goddammit, Mysa, hand me the calipers, this one’s a bitch,” someone said.

“Keep your voice down, Brian! There’s a family sleeping downstairs.”

“Who futzed up the schedule? These are supposed to go in before anyone arrives.”

“That’s why this one’s high-priority. They moved in three days ago.”

A mutter of Irritation. “Everything’s high priority.”

Penny swallowed down the lump of fear in her throat. Who are these people and what are they doing here? They sounded like the sort of people who’d been working on the house all along, but why were they installing something at two in the morning? She hesitated, then progressed upward a few more steps. A few more and she’d be able to see what they were doing. Speculations raced through her head, but she couldn’t figure out anything that would fit. This was all too weird.

But the pair, once she could glimpse them, seemed ordinary enough. They wore black coveralls and matching black stocking caps. The taller one was fiddling with something attached to the highest point of the roof. And then she noticed what wasn’t ordinary at all. His feet hung in the air. Unsupported, dangling just enough to show that he wasn’t standing on something that she couldn’t see.

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I’ve read some great stuff in the last month or so, and wanted to point to some books that I thought people would particularly enjoy. Most of these were read on the Kindle, and I will usually link to that version if it’s available.

I loved Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City and The Bone Palace. Her work reminded me a lot of Martha Wells’ richly textured fantasy, and I thought Savedra was the best of any trans character I’ve encountered so far in fantasy. In grabbing links for this blog post, I realized there’s a third, Kingdoms of Dust, so that’s getting snagged right now.

Gemma Files’ fantasy western, A Book Of Tongues, was awesome and features a great character in the form of Chess, a saucy red-headed ex-whore and hexslinger who’s following his lover Rook and the rest of his outlaw band. I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Rope of Thorns, to the point where I am saving it for sometime when I can sit down and happily devour the book in a single setting.

I finally finished up the Hunger Games trilogy with Mockingjay. It’s a good, solid trilogy, but the first remains my favorite.

Joselle Vanderhoof was kind enough to give me a copy of Sleeping Beauty Indeed & Other Lesbian Fairytales while I was at ArmadilloCon. I got very tired of retold fairy tales while working with Fantasy Magazine, but there’s plenty in here doing something interesting rather than just regurgitating the tale.

I went back and reread Barry Hughart’s The Story of the Stone since I discovered it on Kindle, and knew I wanted something good for a plane trip. I first ran across the series in ancient days and still think it’s a lovely piece of fantasy and I wish there were more than just a few books about Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

The same trip was good for reading Masked, edited by Lou Anders, an anthology of superhero stories which is a nice addition to that field and has some stories

Rereads included E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, which I re-read every few years as comfort food, and just love. They take place in early 20th century small English towns and feature village life at its most intensely gossipy and social. I must admit, I read a lot of books with the thought “boy, a fantasy version of this would be great” lurking in the back of my head, and this is one I’d love to see translated, although I think it’d take some major talent to pull it off.