Do any of you know of a word that means "put back together"?  I can think of things like "join" and "mend", but I want it to specifically refer to putting something together (like a puzzle or a broken bowl) in a physical way.  Something like "click together" but as a single word.  The thesaurus is failing me... 

I'm pleased to be able to say that my story "my mother, the ghost" has been accepted by Fantasy Magazine! 

Fantasy Magazine is having a poll to find out their readers' favorite story of 2008.  You can vote for three stories, which is nice because there's a lot of great stories to choose from.  And, if you leave a comment on one of the stories you'll be entered into a drawing for a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com!

1. With the exception of Doctor Strange, it seems like in comic books/superhero stories someone who is a Doctor is definitely evil and Professors are good, no? 

2. I haven't gotten the chance to read any of their stories yet, but I love the idea of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine:

The weather today makes me want to write a story about a supervillain plotting to destroy winter forever. *mwa ha ha*

Fantasy Magazine's Author Spotlight this week features me! 

I definitely feel a little bit self-conscious, so be nice. 

I've been reading a lot of short stories online the past couple of weeks.  Here are the ones that stand out most in my memory:

The Frozen One by Tim Pratt

I love the mix of humor and darkness in this story, and the way it plays with tropes. 

Angry Rose's Lament by Cat Rambo

In this story, I liked the recovering addict protagonist, the fictional drug Stardrift, and the intriguing alien race. 

Up in the Air by Richard Larson

Personally, I almost always find zombies to be dreadfully boring.  But the way this story uses them is great!  And I've definitely got a soft spot for queer fiction.  (Another excellent, innovative zombie story is "The Horlak" by Kelly Link.) 

Until Forgiveness Comes by K. Tempest Bradford

At the beginning of this story, I thought the use of the style and format of a public radio show was clever and interesting.  By the end, I was very moved.

Sea Changes by Erica L. Satifka

I want to spend more time in the world of this story. 

And one story I read in a physical book:

"The Boy Who Didn't Yearn" by Margo Lanagan, from White Time

I'm sure some of you know this already, but Paul Jessup is having a contest to give away an advanced review copy of his upcoming book Open Your Eyes.  It's a fun contest, with eight writers (including me) having contributed paragraphs describing strange planets.  You can read about these bizarre worlds here, and then vote on the one you like best. 

The Fix Online reviews my latest story:
Also, check out what they have to say about selfavowedgeek 's “The Nest Building Habits of Children Inclined to Ornithomancy and Other Such Auguries”:

I just read an interesting and very insightful blog post by Judith Berman.  Here's a quote from it:

Kingspeaker by Marie Brennan
Architectural Constants by Yoon Ha Lee

The Stone-Hearted Queen by Kelly Barnhill, from Issue 3 of Weird Tales which you can download here.

My story Scatter and Return, the Eyes of the Princess has just been published by Fantasy Magazine!  Check it out! 

I'm reading this amazing book called The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson.  I may post more about it soon, but for now I just want to share a quote with you:

I get to present this really exciting workshop in a few weeks!  I know most of my friends list is nowhere near Michigan, but I'm going to share the info with you anyway because I'm excited and on the off chance that you know local people who'd be interested (if so, feel free to pass the info on.) 

Sculpting the Chaos of Trauma into Narratives of Change
a workshop presented by Willow Aerin Fagan

2pm, November 23rd
Kalamazoo Peace Center

First presented at the 2007 Allied Media Conference, this workshop will offer a supportive, confidential space in which participants can reflect on their own experiences of trauma and oppression and on the power of narratives in creating change. The workshop will have several different stages. First, the presenter will use a collage of quotes and excerpts from stories to simultaneously provide a framework of understanding and to illustrate the community of survivors, thinkers and storytellers who stand behind us and with us in this work. Trauma will be approached as a disruption of the narrative flow from past to present to future. From there, the role of discovering / creating / reconstructing narrative in healing and creating change will be explored. The connections between individual experiences of trauma and broader social forces/systemic structures will be emphasized.
( Read more... )

My experimental fiction piece Some Notes on the Eisenberg Estate has just gone live in the latest issue of Behind the Wainscot!  I'd love to hear what you think of it.

I was really happy and excited to read this, in Rich Horton's summary of Fantasy Magazine for this year:

Oh, Livejournal, how woefully I have neglected you! In recompense, I offer this list of three fantastical things I'm excited about:

1) I just finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin's Voices. Her writing is so clean and elegant, and her imaginary worlds so anthropological, so precise. There's something about her style of writing that I find very refreshing and inspiring, but it seems to me that my own talents and style are pretty different, and better suited to other kinds of stories. I can't wait to read the next book in the trilogy, Powers, but it looks like I will have to because there are a few other people ahead of me with holds at the library. I'm glad that other people are reading the series too though!

2) Benjamin Rosenbaum has released the entirety of The Ant King and Other Stories under a Creative Commons License which allows you to make derivative works! I've only read the first two stories of the collection so far (via the free PDFs available for download), and they were both excellent and very different from each other. I'm excited about this because it's a small step towards the kind of collaborative, free-flowing creative culture that I'd like to see more of. I think that Rosenbaum's allowing derivative works will benefit everyone; he'll get more publicity, his stories will be strengthened and deepened and changed by other hands; other creative people will have the opportunity to play and participate in the kind of conversation that is arguably the lifeblood of art itself.

3) Becca De La Rosa has a new story out in Fantasy Magazine (okay, new as of a week ago). A couple weeks ago, I was thinking that I hadn't seen anything by her in a while and wondering what she was up to, so I was glad to see "Nora".  I think the first story I read by her (and fell in love with!) was "This is the Train the Queen Rides On", which is similar to "Nora" in some ways; both of them are sort of more like landscapes than traditional stories--they're less focused on what we so often think of as the heart and bones of stories--the plot, the sequence of events--and more focused on describing fascinating characters and places and situations.  In a sense, both stories seem to be centered on the edges and outskirts of "the story", allowing the central structure to remain mysterious and unvisited.  And yet, for me, they work quite well.  I love the ways "Nora" blends fairy tales and the modern world and a surrealism that is both humorous and poetic and sweetly and mysteriously sad.  I think part of what makes it work is the dreamlike logic, the sense that it all fits together, even if it's not clear how.

My piece "Some Notes on the Eisenberg Estate" has been accepted by Behind the Wainscot.  I'm really happy about this--I think Behind the Wainscot is the perfect home for this strange story-in-fragments.  

I'm going what we in Michigan refer to as "up North".  I get to spend the next three days at my friend's cabin on an island!  So I won't be online during that time.  If you make a post that you want me to see, just drop a link in the comments.  Don't get into too much trouble while I'm gone.

I meant to post about this yesterday, so just pretend it's still Monday while you're reading this. ; )

I like Mondays because they mean new stories at Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons.  I thought both stories this week were good.  I'm going to talk about them in more detail, which means *spoilers*.

The central image of "Gods of the Spiderhole" (by J.M. McDermott) is a kind of living collage, a sea of images cut from magazines by ants and beetles and frequently moved around by said bugs to illustrate what one of the characters says.  This concept is vivid and super cool and usually described quite well.  The story would be worth reading for it alone, in my opinion.  But of course there's more to the story than that.  Boiled down to one sentence, the story is about a white anthropologist who ventures into the camp of some Mexican immigrants who are living in spider holes that are essentially invisible to the white suburbanites almost right next to them.  McDermott says in the Puppet Strings Author Spotlight that he wanted to write a political story without having it be preachy and heavy handed, so he carefully took out all the overt politicizing.  One of the effects of this, for me, is that I wasn't sure what the message of the story was (which isn't necessarily a bad thing!)  I may say more about the politics of the story later, but I want to read McDermott's accompanying essay first.

Towards the beginning of "The Emerald King" (by J. Kenneth Sargeant) some of the exposition felt clumsy, and a few of the Oz references seemed forced.  But then the story sucked me in with the uncertainty about whose version of reality to trust--the narrator-protagonist's or the psychiatrist's--and the total coolness of the idea of a drug that causes other people to share your delusions.  I also loved that the Emerald King is a bitter divorcee, and his ex-wife is both the Rose Queen and the witch, which seems like a great way of expressing his ambivalence--is she under an evil spell or is she evil herself?  And the ending is chilling--the Emerald King's plan to use his agents to splash "water" on his ex-wife's face is fascinatingly twisted, and it seems like the protagonist knows the truth, on some level, but is going to do it anyway.  The more I think about that, the more disturbing it becomes.  Which seems like one mark of a good story. 

Also, in reference to my earlier discussion of stories from the latest Abyss and Abex issue, I finally read the other story, "Praxitales" by Nye Joell Hardy.  I'm really glad that I did.  The story was interesting, well drawn and surprisingly moving--the ending almost made me cry.  I may write more about it later.