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How people change—but you were never like the others
At the end of a long, exhausting, and frankly demoralizing day, the mail brought me my contributor's copy of Wilde Stories 2015: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman. It is a very elegant hardcover and I am honored to have "The True Alchemist" reprinted alongside stories by Chaz Brenchley, Craig Laurence Gidney, Alex Jeffers, Sunny Moraine, and other people I should read more of. I dreamed one night in December 2013 that I was writing a story for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ashlyme, so like a reasonable person I stayed up the next night and wrote it. The title comes from a line in Mattie's "A Portrait in Rust," one of the best autumnal stories I have read in recent years—appropriately, both stories were eventually published in Not One of Us #51. This is the second time "The True Alchemist" has been reprinted this year and I am delighted. Seriously, check this collection out. There is a lot of lovely weirdness in it. Tom Cardamome's "The Love of the Emperor Is Divine" is another one for the classics list.
I am in the middle of reading George Gissing's Born in Exile (1892), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), and Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), so that's how I'm doing.
[edit] Speaking of emperors: the director of I, Claudius (1976) has died. Herbert Wise. I hope someone deifies him.
ashlyme, so like a reasonable person I stayed up the next night and wrote it. The title comes from a line in Mattie's "A Portrait in Rust," one of the best autumnal stories I have read in recent years—appropriately, both stories were eventually published in Not One of Us #51. This is the second time "The True Alchemist" has been reprinted this year and I am delighted. Seriously, check this collection out. There is a lot of lovely weirdness in it. Tom Cardamome's "The Love of the Emperor Is Divine" is another one for the classics list.I am in the middle of reading George Gissing's Born in Exile (1892), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), and Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), so that's how I'm doing.
[edit] Speaking of emperors: the director of I, Claudius (1976) has died. Herbert Wise. I hope someone deifies him.
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I am so far enjoying Born in Exile, which has one of the most amazingly self-inflicted narrators I've encountered in a long time: the novel is sympathetic to him, but also knows he's behaving like the intellectual equivalent of one of those Romantic heroes who swoon at the sight of storms or great art. Considering that the protagonist is considered to be a version of Gissing himself, or at least to share some of his traits, I think it shows an admirable degree of self-awareness. I have no idea what his other novels are like.