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Spin the wheel and I'm a king reborn
For the last few weeks, I have not been dreaming at all. Or I have been waking up with a sense of absent time, but no intervening memories, which I find more disconcerting than nightmares. But a few nights ago, I dreamed I was up in the mountains at a cross between a university and a sort of scientists' commune with an older person of completely indeterminable gender—whichever they dressed as, they looked more like the opposite; both or neither, I never asked—and a soldier named Lev who did not use to be human. He made me think sometimes of a fisher; he looked as though he should have been crouching among pine branches when he was only folding his arms on a concrete-walled overlook. Whatever he reminded me of, it was lithe and untrusting and tightly wound, faintly amused at his own tension. I never asked him, either. I remember a ski lift over an autumn forest, children below with a dog that looked more like a dire wolf. As soon as I woke up, I felt a lot better about my brain. (This even after I realized it had probably just presented me with a sleep-deprived mashup of Skin Horse and X-Men.) Then the night before last, I dreamed of a boy named Alexandria. We were not in Ostia Naye; ostensibly it was the sixth century CE, except there were too many computers. I can recapture none of the plot, but the mise-en-scène was grainfields and a kind of dome-and-ziggurat skyline, books like old ivy in the dry stones of a wall. An illuminated manuscript version of The Gammage Cup is not the weirdest object I have ever dreamed about, but it's certainly memorable. And last night, I dreamed about disaster sites and choristers like professional mourners and a girl who was posing as one of the dead. This may be brain-static, but it makes me much more comfortable than night after night with a dead-black screen. Also, I have a better chance of getting fiction out of it.
On that note: copies of Sybil's Garage #6, containing my poem "Σκιαδάς" and a shout-out to Consonant, are now available! I have not yet received one myself, but the table of contents is a thing of great promise. I like the scarecrow at the subway station, too. I'm a little surprised one of those has never showed up in my dreams.
On that note: copies of Sybil's Garage #6, containing my poem "Σκιαδάς" and a shout-out to Consonant, are now available! I have not yet received one myself, but the table of contents is a thing of great promise. I like the scarecrow at the subway station, too. I'm a little surprised one of those has never showed up in my dreams.
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Mostly I like how absolutely unprepossessing the Outlaw-Heroes of Slipper-on-the-Water look until their names are revealed, at which point Glocken gets a bad case of cognitive dissonance; I don't remember much else about the plot. But The Firelings is terrific.
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A delightful fantasy for the middle-school crowd; unique and clever, this story deals with the nature of friendship, faith, and standing up for oneself.
A frightening tale of child abuse, human sacrifice, and blind adherence to authority.
I always wonder how hard it was to talk the publisher into a book with illustrations in the middle of the text.
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Hee. Yeah. And I love the casual folklore, not just the myths about Belcher's fall and hunger that drive the plot:
At its appointed time, the sun bobbed out of the Swollen Sea and brought to life the Scars of Cherrychoke that stood in the nest of Belcher's collarbone high above the village. One by one, like a procession of elders, the angular shafts of rock cast their shadows against Belcher's right shoulder: Old Crank and Wotkin; then Ashlar with the long-tailed rat on his head; obsequious Sadiron bowing and scraping to Toplady; several minor figures known as dworkins; and last of all and most important, Skopple Guy of the Hand. It was said that as long as Skopple Guy extended his arm above the pillow, so long would Firelings endure.
In fact, the stones serve their legendary function precisely—when the earth shakes so violently that the rocks topple down and their storytelling shadows disappear, it is time for the Firelings either to resign themselves to lava or find somewhere less geothermal to live—but what I have always loved is that these are figures are not explained and they are vivid all the same. You have the sense of stories behind them, like the festival mask-dances, and simply because the reader never learns them does not mean they are not important. That kind of layered world makes me happy.
I always wonder how hard it was to talk the publisher into a book with illustrations in the middle of the text.
I doubt much more difficult than small inset illustrations. They are critical to the plot, so it was either request sweeping rewrites or figure out how to work the page layout.
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