S.J. Tucker’s “D&D” Music Video
This is so dorkily dear! My favorite part is the guy playing the battle ax. Oh, and when the bard gets it.
My Tim Prattathon at Podcastle and Other Cool Things
I had a quiet day at work, but blimey! I got a lot done!
While I hauled boxes, processed books, priced, et cetera — so long as customers weren’t in the bookstore — I listened to four stories right off of Podcastle’s website, starting with two by Tim Pratt.
The first one was called “Cup and Table”, which was (and here I quote the man who recommended it to me), “so kick-ass and so much fun and kind of unbelievable how much is crammed into that story.” It was very time-bendy (timey-wimey, as the denizens of Doctor Who might say), its edginess and moroseness always tinged with the tongue-in-cheek. And the end? Surprised a huge grin outta me. I very much recommend it.
The second, “Hart and Boot”, was less structurally complex but even more to my taste. It was like something my buddy Patty might write after we watched a few too many episodes of Deadwood and we were in a gun-slinging, hip-swinging mood. Its protagonist, Pearl Hart, made me want to put on a pair of cowboy boots and shoot my way across the west. (‘Specially if naked men sort of slurped up from the mud every time I thought on ’em hard enough. Yummy.)
What I liked best was that even with Pearl’s foul mouth, her conniving mind, her selfishness and brazenness and remorseless use of people (especially, perhaps, of the one human she actually loved), she still had moments of rough tenderness that just… got me. Boot was great too, but there’s only so much you can do with a character that tired all the time.
HECK YEAH TIM PRATT!
Welcome to Bordertown: Part the Third of a Brobdingnagian Review
Don’t you believe for a nanosecond that the reason I didn’t finish up this Welcome to Bordertown blog was because I didn’t finish the book. Not for the flicker of a fly’s eye!
The trouble is, as soon as I finished it, I had to go and read the other Bordertown books: Will Shetterley’s Elsewhere and NeverNever, followed by Emma Bull’s Finder. I even started The Essential Bordertown, and it is bliss! Bliss, I tell you! I even had a Long Lankin dream.
Don’t know what a Long Lankin is? Boy oh boy. Dark magic, that. Am I gonna tell you all about it? NO! You must read these books for your own sweet selves!
But now that I’m mostly done with my huge Bordertown stack o’ goodies and am calming down some, I figured I should probably wrap up this, for lack of a better word, “review,” the first two parts of which can be read here and here, for those of you whose patience stretches even unto eternity.
Gene Wolfe’s 80th Birthday Blog
Hey, lookit!
If you click through the link, you read:
“As some of you may be aware, Saturday 7 May will be the esteemed Mr. Gene Wolfe’s 8oth birthday. This blog has been created for friends, fans and admirers to express their good wishes to him and will be presented for his perusal before the end of his birthday. Please feel free to forward this to anyone that you think might be interested. And if you don’t know who Gene Wolfe is, it’s well past time you found out!”
Go put your two cents in! I sure did!
Blogging My Way to Bordertown: Part II
At work today, the Internet failed. A monstrous failure. A failure that neither Nancy the Techie from Never-Never or Nice Mike from St. Louis could fix for me. Something about reconfiguring a router. All sorts of passwords I didn’t have access to. Cords everywhere.
And I thought to myself, “I know why this is happening. It’s happening because I just read Cory Doctorow’s story ‘Shannon’s Law’ in Welcome to Bordertown.”
That too, was full of things I didn’t understand. Binary and BINGO, routers and nodes, carrier pigeons and calligraphy, systems and bytes and packets, oh my!
Now, I’m a reasonable creature. Last time it was gnomes. This time, the Internet crashes. I can deal. It’s all coincidence, right? Synchronicity?
Anyway, I really liked the Cory Doctorow story, despite feeling like an idiot while I read it. I’d never read one before — a Doctorow story, that is — although I have heard the Zeitgeist speak his name (about a bazillion times), and maybe read an article or three by him on Boing-Boing (which always gives me an almost knee-jerk reaction of BOINGyness).
Despite getting my dizzy on from all his techie terms (as I again did later in the day at work, during the good three hours I spent with tech support on the phone), what I did understand was that the protagonist dude Shannon is formidable and funny, the green-haired girl Jetfuel is uber-delish, and the Trueblood Synack is an unsolvable mystery. There is also a really great line about truthiness, “in the neighborhood of true,” which cracked me up.
A Round Robin of Witches: Black Gate Interviews the Creators of The Witches of Lublin
I think I first heard about The Witches of Lublin on Facebook.
You know me, I’m a sucker; you put the word “witches” in the title and I’m on it. So I grabbed up my broomstick, and flew over to Ellen Kushner’s FB page where she’d posted the link about it, and I said, “This looks incredibly cool!” (Or something to that effect.) “A radio play! I love radio plays!”
And then, about five seconds later, I had a little present in my email’s Inbox.
“Because you beg so prettily,” Ellen wrote.
And there is was, the not-quite-final-draft of Witches of Lublin. I sat down and read it in a gulp.
You can read a fuller synopsis about The Witches of Lublin story here, at the super bedazzling website created for the radio play, but basically it is about a family of women klezmer musicians in Poland of the late 18th century. They’re poor, proud and trying to make their way by making music, even though it is considered immodest for females to play in public. When word of their talent spreads beyond the little ghetto where they live and reaches the Count’s ears, things start to get dangerous — and magical.
Co-writer Yale Strom’s research uncovered the facts that there were women klezmer musicians, and that when klezmers would play for gentile nobility, their reward could sometimes be beatings, death or even kidnappings.
This history formed the springboard for this work of fiction by Strom, Schwartz and Kushner based on Jewish women’s lives in 18th Century Europe, klezmer music and feminist history, with a healthy dose of magical realism thrown in.
You can see how I might say, in the trembling wake of reading this: “Oh, Ellen, oh pretty please, DO let me interview you about Witches for Black Gate Magazine!”
To which Ellen replied, quintessentially and in so many words, “Here, kid. I’ll do you one better.”
All of a sudden, I was interviewing the entire team of The Witches of Lublin’s creators — playwrights, composer and director — in a sort of mad merry-go-round-robin of emails. Which I now present to you for your reading pleasure.
Welcome to Bordertown: What Would Eilonwy Do?
This morning on my walk to work, I spotted a man crossing a lawn. His arms were very full. Of garden gnomes.
You know, gnomes? With the blue coats and the red hats? The Rien Poortvliet kind?
“Morning!” I said.
“Morning,” he said. “I got a delivery. Gnome delivery.”
After we’d passed each other, and I’d spent a good while grinning, I thought to myself, “I know why that just happened. That happened because I started reading Welcome to Bordertown on the train today.”
(Hey! Heads up! If you follow the above link to the Bordertown website, then click through the fancy links there to Amazon to purchase any of the new books on that page, then Terri Windling’s Endicott Studio gets a small kick-back from Amazon.com. And all of that money is donated to a shelter for homeless kids. More info here.)
Now, I’m only half a story in — the first one. But half a story in means I’ve already read the two introductions, by Terri Windling and Holly Black respectively, and also the “Bordertown Basics” which is sort of like a mix of the Not for Tourists Guide to Chicago, and Wolfe and Gaiman’s wicked little chapbook, A Walking Tour of the Shambles. It includes a weekly advisory about gang movement, monster sightings, pickpockets and missing gargoyles.
This bit made me chortle:
“The Mock Avenue street association would like to apologize to everyone for fixing the church tower clock last week, which caused widespread confusion. It has now been restored to its usual wrong time.”
But let me back up a little. Reading the introductions, I started to get a strange feeling. Gene Wolfe described a poem once as giving him “that fairy tale feeling.” He may have been quoting someone famous, like Dunsany or something. He does that. This was like that feeling, but it was also another feeling mixed in. …
Nat’l Poetry Month… In GOBLINLAND!!!
What? Another issue of Goblin Fruit is LIVE??? Aw, heck! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?
Okay, okay. All kidding aside. Yes – the Spring 2011 Issue is out!
And you know what? It’s special.
And you know why? Because I’m in this one it’s Goblin Fruit’s FIFTH ANNIVERSARY!!!
Hurray! Yippee! Three cheers!
They’re doing all sorts of cool things here. Wick and El-Mohtar have their usual, hilarious Note from the Editors, they have a PRIZE DRAWING, and their featured poet, Catherynne M. Valente has put up Act I of a four-act colossus, A Silver Splendour, a Flame, which she says will be, if she does it right, her “Cantos.”
Cat blogged about it yesterday:
This is a Persephone poem. It is a very long Persephone poem. It, in fact, will not complete for one year. The “acts” will come out on the solstices and equinoxes for the next year, as is appropriate for Our Girl. It is a sprawling thing, with much experimentation and madness. It is Persephone as a Vaudeville show. It is difficult and it is thorny and it is, I hope, beautiful. I hope you like it. I hope you’ll all read it, whatever you think about poetry, and Persephone, and girls scribbling verse. Give it a chance.
I started reading it yesterday, thinking just to peek — it is, after all, quite long — and then I fell in. Into a pool of my own slobber. I mean, I can’t even, AAAUUGGGHH!
James Enge to do Morlock Trilogy: Tournament of Shadows
I can’t help it! I must speak, and I must speak now, for I just found out about it. John O’Neill will probably glare at me, because once he hears, he’ll immediately want to post about it, and then he’ll discovered that I already have!!!
*cue maniacal laughter, canned music of doom*
But! But! So, I was cruising LiveJournal, you know, like you do, and there was a James Enge post, so I stopped by (which I always must, compulsively strewing comments like candy wrappers, and then suffering a guilty conscience about the inevitable litter of exclamation points), and there it was…
THIS ANNOUNCEMENT!!!
I’ve signed with Lou Anders at Pyr to do three more Morlock books. The contracts were dated March 25–Fall of Sauron Day! Coincidence, or destiny?
This will actually be a trilogy, not three standalone books. Each book will have its own story (because I believe in plot resolution) but each book will depend on its predecessor(s) more than the three books of Morlock in exile did. It’s not a prequel trilogy, though. It’s an origin story. The trilogy as a whole is titled Tournament of Shadows. The first book, which should be out next year, is called A Guile of Dragons. Which is about as much as I should say, since I’m not done with it yet…
There. Did that not just make your day???
For those of you who don’t know, Morlock Ambrosius rocks my world, your world, the Sea of Worlds, and any other world you can think of. He is a Maker, a son of Merlin, a Crooked Man, a crow-talker, a sometime drunk, a dragonslayer, a friend to werewolves and the bane of things that want to kill him. Novels thus far featuring him? Why, they are Blood of Ambrose (nominated last year for the World Fantasy award), This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age.
All of which, may I add, are worthy of your time: at the cost of meals, sleep and possibly your dignity as you find yourself trawling Enge’s LiveJournal and leaving a slew of capital letters in your wake…
Delia Sherman’s The Wizard’s Apprentice at Podcastle
Traffic is slow today at the bookstore, which meant I got to listen to Delia Sherman’s “The Wizard’s Apprentice” over at Podcastle while I checked in box after box of dusty tomes. (I know, I know! It’s true! I have everybody’s dream job!)
It’s a quite short story, but very dear — it reminds me, actually, of Diana Wynne Jones’ The Lives of Christopher Chant — just a bit, and in the best way. It’s YA Fantasy, very easy on the ears, with magic and shape-shifting and cranky wizards and lost boys and oatmeal and impossible tasks.
I remember hearing Neil Gaiman say — or reading about him saying it — that children read Coraline with every confidence that she’ll come through all her troubles all right. But that adults read it, and they find it far more frightening an experience because they’re not at all sure she will. I had occasion to be reminded of this as well while listening to this story.
Luckily for me, soon there will be a novel of these two characters, evil Mr. Smallbone and doughty Nick Chanticleer, and I for one am looking forward to getting to know them a heckuva lot better! Go, Delia! Write your heart out!