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design fantasy fiction short stories spec fic The Unexpected Thing

housecleaning

A good deal later, I have finally brought the designs portfolio up to date. Also reordered it in reverse-chronological order so you don’t have to scroll way down to see what’s new.

What’s new? Eleven books designed, laid out, and sent to press over the fall, winter, and into early spring. (There were twelve, actually, but one of ’em will remain unrepresented here for reasons private to the publisher and myself.) So go take a look at: Fog by Jeff Mann, The House of Wolves by Robert B. McDiarmid, Tales from the Den, edited by R. Jackson, Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living by Daniel M. Jaffe, Eat Your Heart Out by Dayna Ingram (the first BrazenHead novella), The Master of Seacliff by Max Pierce, Heiresses of Russ 2011, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft & Steve Berman, Purgatory by Jeff Mann, Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett (which I wrote up here, if you missed it), The Dirty Boys’ Club: The Soap Opera Murders by Simon Sheppard, and Beyond Binary, edited by Brit Mandelo.

Ten others are in my files at various stages of production—the majority fully laid out but not yet in print, including two sequels to Point of Hopes, my own You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, Steve Berman’s annual round up of the best gay speculative fiction, Wilde Stories 2012, and the second BrazenHead novella, Green Thumb by Tom Cardamone (whose surname I invariably mistype as Cardamom). So there’s those to look forward to. Maybe I’ll even get them posted timely.


What else is new? In March I managed (two weeks past self-imposed deadline) to complete an 11,000-word story begun nearly a year previously, “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens.” What it says on the tin. And then, in the face of an irresistable challenge, wrote from scratch “The Other Bridge,” a 5,600-word story of post-colonial brittleness. Which one reader has told me is among the best I’ve ever produced. My judgment is reserved.

April promises to be devoted largely to intensive revision of The Unexpected Thing. Joy.

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BrazenHead fiction novelette SF short stories spec fic The Abode of Bliss The New People The Unexpected Thing

the year that was

Well, it’s a tradition, I suppose, the year-end sum up, hardly subverted by being posted on the first day of the new year instead of the last of the old. So.

In 2011, I published two books, a marvel of unprecedented proportion.

The New People (and its companion-between-the-covers, Brandon Bell’s Elegant Threat) made little impression on the world that Google can discover. Sad but not surprising for a book from a micro press whose publisher’s real life (read: more-than-full-time job) seems to have swallowed him whole in the last six months and at least one of whose authors is pathologically averse to self promotion. But it’s out there.

The Abode of Bliss: Ten Stories for Adam did somewhat better. The first month’s excellent reviews are catalogued here. Since, the estimable Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews published George Seaton’s appreciation. Hilicia of Impressions…of a Reader, who reviewed Abode very thoughtfully back in August, named it as her favorite LGBT read of the year and among her three favorites in any genre, and I am immensely gratified. [edited to add: Novelist and critic Alan Chin calls Abode one of his five favorites of 2011.] The book’s publisher, in his own year-end sum up, lists it among the titles he’s most proud to have released in 2011.

I published four stories, a personal best as far as my inadequate records reveal.

“The Arab’s Prayer” appeared in January in the second-anniversary issue of Chris Fletcher’s ’zine M-Brane SF (#24) and the print M-Brane SF Quarterly (#2) in March, some months before his job swallowed him up and the ’zine went on hiatus. Chris has plans to revive M-Brane SF in different, probably less frequent than monthly, form in the near future. Its return will be welcomed. Meanwhile, “The Arab’s Prayer” has been selected as the lead story in Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction.

“Captain of the World,” a story I was hounded into writing, appeared in the anthology of inspirational stories for GLBT teens Speaking Out, edited by Steve Berman and released by Bold Strokes Books in September. There is some thought of expanding the story into a novel. We’ll see if anything comes of that.

“Liam and the Ordinary Boy,” second in an on-going series, appeared soon after in the fall issue (#10) of Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. First in the series, “Liam and the Wild Fairy,” previously appeared in Icarus #5 (Summer 2010). Whether Icarus will take the third, “Liam and His Dads,” or the contemplated but as yet unwritten fourth through seventh remains in question.

“Turning,” finally, a long magical-realist story, appeared in the first issue of Chelsea Station. Under an earlier title, “Like Spinning Stars, Like Flowers,” it was one of fourteen finalists selected by John Berendt for the annual short-fiction competition of the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival. Not one of the ten selected for the annual anthology, though. Just as well, perhaps: Chelsea Station’s editor, Jameson Currier, suggested several very productive changes.

I sold two long stories to appear before the midpoint of 2012. Both, coincidentally (they were written two years apart), tales of American teenagers on vacation in Europe. “Tattooed Love Boys,” written first, sold second, will appear on line at GigaNotoSaurus.org, probably in March. “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy” is scheduled for May, in Boys of Summer, Steve Berman and Bold Strokes Books’ follow up to Speaking Out.

I wrote three stories—not a record, but not bad. All, oddly or not, for projects edited by Steve Berman. The aforementioned “Captain of the World” in late winter and “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel…” in late summer/early fall. Between them, “Ban’s Dream of the Sea,” which may or may not appear in The Touch of the Sea, an anthology of marine fantasy scheduled for July publication.

I sold a collection of fantastical stories, tentatively titled You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, which Lethe Press has scheduled for July release, just in time for my mumblety-fifth birthday. The table of contents keeps changing but needs to be fixed soon, as production of Advance Reader Copies can’t be delayed much past February. But I have to write one more story….

As editor/designer/entrepreneur, I published the first BrazenHead novella, Dayna Ingram’s ferocious and delightsome Eat Your Heart Out, which garnered BrazenHead’s parent Lethe Press its first starred review in Publishers Weekly and, I’m told, is selling briskly. (More briskly than my books.) Any day now, I hope to see the revised MS of the novella I expect to release as BrazenHead #2. Submissions are always open to works of queer spec fic between thirty and sixty thousand words.

As designer, I laid out a bunch of handsome books, the last several months’ worth of which have not yet made an appearance in the gallery. Because I have been busy with other things. Later in the day, perhaps.

As novelist, I completed a draft of The Unexpected Thing, an immense novel that I love unreservedly. Whether anybody else will love it I have no notion: potential early readers have mostly begged off—“144,000 words? I don’t have time!” they cry. Reasonably enough, I suppose. (No, I don’t.) Anyway, one of these days soon I’ll pester my agent, who’s had a copy of the MS since May. One of these days soon I’ll come up with an all-consuming project to take its place in my head.

And that’s it. What, you expected a recount of my personal, everyday life and interactions with the real world? Not bloody likely. (Charlotte and Jane are both well.)

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The Unexpected Thing

oh happy day

Today, 8 May 2011, is the eighteenth birthday of my closest companion (bar the cats) of the last two years. Or would be if, you know, he were an actual person rather than an imagined construct, a character in a novel nobody but myself has yet read all the way through. As of today, Nathaniel Walker is enfranchised; some time in the next thirty days, when the post office is open, he’ll have to fill out one of those little cards to register with Selective Service; later this month he’ll be graduated from high school. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he resides, if it were a weekday, he could go to town hall for a marriage license without his parents’ consent…if his fiancé weren’t still seventeen for a few more months.

Actually, I’m not entirely certain of the legalities. Rustam Shirazi was legally emancipated in the fall of 2009: in the law’s eyes, he has no parents. Nevertheless, I expect they’d wait at least until Rusty turns eighteen on 2 August.

This year, in the United States and a number of other countries, today is also Mother’s Day. That Nate’s birthday would coincide, any year it fell on a Sunday, with that holiday was not intentional: I merely needed a Friday in early May of 2009. It irritated him when he noticed it—not especially gracious about sharing the spotlight. When I noticed it, I deliberately gave his boyfriend my own mother’s birthday. I’m not at all certain Lee Jeffers would appreciate the sentiment. She thoroughly disapproved of Mother’s Day, a commercial stratagem of the greeting card, floral, and candy industries, saying she was a mother every day of the year and her children had better not forget it.

Eleven years after her death, I have not forgotten. Nevertheless, though I share her cynicism about the holiday, I wish all mothers and their children who do like to celebrate it a happy Mother’s Day.

 

Lee Jeffers, 1926 - 1999 (portrait by Sam Manning ca mid-1950s, ineptly photographed by AJ)

Now I need to get back to that short story I started the other day.

Categories
fiction spec fic The Unexpected Thing work in progress YA

the unexpected draft

Today ought to be one for celebration, except I feel as though I’ve been run over by a truck. Massive, massive headache, nausea, compromised balance. Bleargh. Also I’m too broke to buy Champagne. Maybe when the income-tax refund appears in my bank account.

Around 7:30 (EDT) this morning I wrote the last line of the first draft of The Unexpected Thing. Though tempted, I did not append Fin: it’s not a work suited to that variety of preciosity.

It is, not unexpectedly, enormous. 144,000 words. Set up in fairly standard MS format (12-point type, double spaced, one-inch margins all around) in the typeface I prefer to work with (clean, artful, eccentric but highly legible on screen, and doesn’t make my eyes bleed): 423 pages, exluding title page, divided into sixty-two numbered chapters, themselves parceled out—somewhat unevenly—among thirteen titled parts.

But few computers will have Bouwsma Text installed, so when I start sending The Unexpected Thing around to beta readers I’ll have to reset the MS in old standby Times New Roman (a face I find far less readable than everybody likes to claim, and ugly besides, but which has the advantage of closely approximating, in standard MS format, the page count of a typeset book). In 12-point TNR: 477 pages.

But book editors, nostalgic for the days of typewritten MSs on paper, are said to prefer 12-point monospaced Courier (which does make my eyes bleed): an eyebrow-raising 643 pages.

There will be cuts! A lot of them. Ideally, from a marketing standpoint, I’d get the thing down to 100,000 words or shorter. I have some doubts about that—we’ll see what early readers say. The first order of business, however, is to find loose ends and either pull them out completely or stitch them up properly; reconcile inconsistencies; split up at least two chapters that got rather out of hand into more manageable pieces. Symbolic target date for a second draft fit to be shared: 8 May 2011, the narrator’s eighteenth birthday.

Would you like to be among the few, the proud, the beta readers? Drop me a line or leave a comment, and accept my thanks in advance.


But what’s it about, AX, you ask, what’s it about?

If I could tell you in five hundred words I wouldn’t have bothered with the other 143,500. Ha. Ha.

In all sobriety, the arts of the synopsis and the elevator pitch I have never mastered. Beta readers will be begged, please, to help.

The Unexpected Thing is about:

  • two lovely young men who fall in love;
  • their friends and families;
  • the entirely imaginary fifth-smallest sovereign European nation, an island in the Adriatic off the coasts of Montenegro and Albania;
  • the uneasy transition from rule by a divinely appointed aristocratic caste to some form of parliamentary democracy;
  • incursions by gods and other powers into the twenty-first and earlier centuries;
  • discovering yourself to be, unsuspected, a wizard with vast capabilities;
  • being beaten half to death by, first, a god and, second, your own dad and big brother;
  • friendship and enmity and reconciliation, discovery and loss, people and dogs, life and death and, yes, love;
  • Nate and Rusty’s summer vacation.

In other words, just about everything that matters. Except cats! I left out the cats! Jane and Charlotte are incensed* but me, I’m really pretty pleased with it.

* “That dog died almost a decade ago,” they grumble. “It was tragic at the time but get over it.”


Table of Contents

I Turn Sixteen

I Finish out the School Year, Maybe Fall in Love

My Boyfriend and I Have a Day for Ourselves

My Uncles and I Leave the Country, Reach the Island

I Have Impressions of the Town, Make Friends, Maybe an Enemy

I Am Not Myself

We Learn of Deaths in Far Places

We Retreat to the Sunset Villa

Terrible Events in the Commonwealth

I Am, We Are Addressed by Gods

Terrible Events in the Serene Principality

I Am Rescued, Comforted

We Are Happy Boys, All Things Considered