Category: fiction

Categories
fiction short stories

ssshhhh

I had an irresistible notion. And researched and wrote a story around it in four days. (Four days during which I also put together an entire book, interior and cover layouts, and input the author’s corrections to another.) Quite a short story, possibly the shortest I’ve written in living memory, but still. Submitted it. Revised it to the editor’s satisfaction. Sold it.

And may not talk about it in public until after it’s published next year under an inside-joke pen name. State secrets.

But I felt it deserved a post since, if I’m calculating correctly, it’s the seventh story I’ve completed in calendar year 2012. I remember (not fondly) years when it was a major accomplishment to finish one. Of the seven, only two have not definitively sold yet (one already published)—and one of those two is kinda sorta half sold, just not to the point the deal can be announced.

It is also a wonder to me that I have, a month before year’s end, four stories already scheduled for first publication in 2013, plus one in 2014.

  • [obscured and unacknowledged story, some month or other, I’m not telling]
  • “A Man Not of Canaan,” GigaNotoSaurus, April or May
  • “You Deserve,” Bad Seeds (Prime Books), July
  • “The Hyena’s Blessing,” Zombies (Prime Books), August
  • “The Oily Man,” Handsome Devil (Prime Books), February 2014

And two reprints, which I haven’t mentioned previously though I’ve known about them for a while. My 2012 American-teens-on-vacay-in-Europe stories “Tattooed Love Boys” and “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy” will reappear in, respectively, Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (July) and Best Gay Stories 2013 (August). Yay.

Categories
awards Deprivation fiction

oblique comment

…Ben sincerely believed he was not competitive. He did his best, true, had done his best in such traditionally competitive arenas as academics and athletics. Yet while it was pleasant to sink the winning goal on the soccer field (he had played forward), it was also pleasant simply to attempt sinking that goal. When your team ran a streak, you were buoyed by your teammates’ elation yet your own satisfaction derived not of triumph but of camaraderie, earned exhaustion, and the exercise of skill. You couldn’t be first rate if you believed first to be an arbitrary distinction: if you denied the validity of hierarchies. You could, however, be good. Ben had always wanted to be good. He simply had a hard time with the comparative and the superlative: from better and best you inferred absolute values, from absolutes you were led, however you protested, to absolutism. It had seemed to Ben, in high school, that in a team sport like soccer one needn’t be competitive if one aimed solely to be good, whereas if you went solo (whether one-on-one in tennis or against other singletons swimming) you won or lost. An adequate swimmer and tennis player, he avoided the issue by not trying out for the teams.

The journey not the arrival matters, the act not the result, the means more than the end. Unless you lived in a fascist society or participated in a capitalist economy—they added up to the same thing. You would be bent, you would be broken. Distressed, depressed, Ben took the last drag off his cigarette and threw it away. If you bothered to think you were bound to fetch up against unpleasant conclusions, among them your own innocent hypocrisy. For he wished both to prosper and to excel—if on his own terms—and believed saintliness as a goal or a strategy not so much impracticable or misguided as fundamentally dangerous: a form of absolutism, the silvering of a mirror that reflected intolerance, bigotry, dogma. After best or first came right and soon enough only.

—from Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy

Categories
Deprivation fiction Tales from the Subcontinent

oneiromantic praise

A first blurb for Deprivation, from a writer I (and many others) respect and admire very much so I am thrilled to bits.

An amazing book. Gorgeous conceit, perfectly carried through—brilliant and hallucinatory and sharply real. I wanted to race through it, but also to go slowly and savor the scenes. Truly fantastic, in every sense of the word.

—Melissa Scott, multiple Lambda Literary Award-winning author of
Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and the Books of Astreiant

Also of note, a very early and kind review, although Amos Lassen is mistaken in believing the book is out this year. Really you’ll have to wait till February.

In other writing news, I’m making manful attempts to complete at least a draft of the fourth tale from the subcontinent by/before Sunday, in honor of somebody’s birthday. (He knows who he is.) I keep feeling “The Cat in the Moon” has got out of hand, though. That it barely addresses the theme of the anthology I intend to submit it to pretty much goes without saying.

On another hand…walking home from the post office just now, I had an idea that might meet that theme better. Arrgh.

Categories
Deprivation fiction magical realism

oneiromancy

This is rather sudden. Twenty years after it was written, my second full-length novel, Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy, is to be published.

Second in publication order, following Safe as Houses. Second in order of completion as well, following an enormous botch of a science-fiction novel of which we will not speak. Deprivation was written in 1992-93, between drafts of Safe as Houses, which took a very long time to find its proper shape. Also between cities: the handwritten manuscript beginnings were composed on board the MBTA commuter train between Providence, RI, and Boston.

Second also in my affections, if for many years first. (The Unexpected Thing has overtaken it.) It was a joy to write and remains a joy to reread. It will be a significant joy to hold it in my hands. In February of next year.

Categories
fantasy fiction novelette Tales from the Subcontinent

further news from the subcontinent

Actually news from Aveng, a small country on the far tropical southeastern coast of the great continent from Fejz—birthplace of the mother of “Two Dead Men”’s narrator and the site of his decade’s exile.

Last evening I wrote the last line of a draft of “The Oily Man.” My third subcontinental tale turned out somewhat longer and quite a bit stranger than I had envisioned when I set out in response to an invitation: stories of incubi for a forthcoming themed anthology. That was in May, when I began. Four months. Four months.

At any rate, I completed the draft and e-mailed it off with grave misgivings to the editor who had said he wanted it by early July. I expected him to say the first two thirds were bloated, the conclusion unexpected, unjustified, inconclusive, ambiguous, and odd, the whole probably salvageable with a good deal of work.

Next thing I knew I was downloading a contract.

Ha-hrrm. Well. Shows how well I judge my own work. A few little bits he wants expanded—he objects to late-Regency/early-Victorian euphemisms (he’s correct, too; if the story’s a period piece the period is at least two centuries earlier)—wouldn’t bleach be anachronistic? (yes)—if I can get it up from 9,100 words to an even 10,000 he’ll be just as pleased. But I’m meant to understand “The Oily Man” will appear in a volume working-titled Handsome Devil due from Prime Books late next year. Steve tells me Handsome Devil will also include a fine tale by Tanith Lee, who gave You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home such a spectacular blurb.

The narrator of “The Oily Man” is the disappointing youngest son of a merchant family of Trebt. In the latter years of that world’s Age of Discovery, Trebt is one of the subcontinental states to have established trade concessions with the queen on the Jade Stool of Aveng. After a scandal, the narrator is packed off on a seven-month voyage to the Avengi port of Folau. An elder sister he hasn’t seen for a decade is already established in Folau, married into a local family.

Within a month of arrival, the young man finds himself surrounded by incomprehensible political maneuvering. The merchant-adventurers resident in the subcontinental enclave at Folau are friendly rivals but rivals nonetheless. Offshore in quarantine are representatives of subcontinental superpower Sjolussa, late to the southeastern sea trade and jealous of the smaller nations’ privileges. (It’s not a spoiler to note that Sjolussa will annex Aveng and its neighbor states about a century later.) The queen in the capital three weeks’ trip away bestows her favors capriciously. Adherents of the throne-sponsored religion quarrel with followers of enigmatic philosopher-saint the Kandadal.

Then our narrator is surprised in his bed by an amorous demon, who may have been set upon him by an enemy. Or a friend.

Also there’s a duel. A courtesan of ambiguous gender who knows things. A shipwreck.

The theme song of “The Oily Man” is this track from Ivri Lider’s Mishehu Paam, a song that gives me the shivers.

Now back to work on the fourth tale from the subcontinent…. Oh. Wait. A collection of stories to lay out and two novel MSs to copyedit. Dammit.

No. Wait. Time for bed.

Categories
BrazenHead fiction novella SF spec fic

Time Is! Proclaims the Head of Brass

A welcome: BrazenHead’s second title, the deceptively simple, intensely peculiar post-apocalyptic fantasia Green Thumb by Tom Cardamone, is now available in print, soon in e-book.

To whet your appetite, three reviews:

Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2012

Benito Corral Reviews, 27 June 2012

Out in Print Queer Book Reviews, 30 July 2012

Further praise from luminaries including Kathe Koja, Gemma Files, W.H. Pugmire, and BrazenHead’s own Dayna Ingram on Green Thumb’s dedicated page. Go. Read. Buy.

Categories
design fantasy fiction Lethe Press short stories spec fic You Will Meet a Stranger…

to print, to print

Although not officially on sale until the 14th, You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home has gone to press. Primarily so that publisher Steve Berman can schlep printed copies north from New Jersey next week for display on the Lethe Press table at Readercon in Burlington, Mass. (Sell many copies to discerning con-goers, little book!) And drop a few off with the author in Rhode Island along the way.

Just under the wire to appear on the flyleaf, capricious and brilliant author of Lambda Literary Award-winning Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories Sandra McDonald offered up a gobsmacking blurb:

These ten stories transport us in smart, dazzling, and sometimes brutal ways into worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar, near at hand and far over the horizon.  Alex Jeffers writes like a man with a thousand years of stories to share. Each is like a prism held up to the sun, refracting hard but rewarding truths unlikely to be found in any other place but these beautiful pages.

Tangentially related to You Will Meet a Stranger: At Out in Print Queer Book Reviews this morning, Jerry L. Wheeler posted a review of Steve Berman’s marine anthology The Touch of the Sea, saying extremely flattering things about my “Ban’s Dream of the Sea,” reprinted in the collection.

Also sent early to press today so Steve can promote them at Readercon, two anthologies. Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Himself and with fantastic cover art by Ben Baldwin, should be generally available around 1 August.

Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Charles A. Tan, cover artwork/design by Maxie Wei, is scheduled to go on sale 15 August.

Categories
fantasy fiction historical fantasy novelette spec fic

out of the bronze age

I am very pleased to report my second sale to that estimable online ’zine dedicated to spec-fic stories of awkward lengths, GigaNotoSaurus. What an excellent message to find when I surfaced from an eighteen-hour bout of copyediting. Editor Ann Leckie has requested small but consequential revisions to the MS but is confident enough of my competence to get them right to project publication next spring, April or May. So, a bit over a year after “Tattooed Love Boys.”

Originally drafted nearly two years ago under a different title and set in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, “A Man Not of Canaan” is a tale of, among other subjects, BDSM and Lovecraftian Elder Gods. But not, I think, a horror story. I’ve never written a horror story, I don’t think, nor wished to.

Categories
BrazenHead fiction short stories spec fic work in progress You Will Meet a Stranger…

notice

Publishers Weekly, trade journal of the US book publishing industry, reviewed You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home in the 14 May issue. Nice review, much appreciated. Although I can’t figure out how the reviewer got the impression all the stories were linked in any manner other than being written by the same guy.

(The same issue of PW also reviews Melissa Scott’s novella Point of Knives, second {in internal chronology} of the Books of Astreiant, about which I raved back in February.)

I’ll belatedly add that I have a very nice blurb for You Will Meet a Stranger from my friend Agnes Bushell, whose too few and too hard to track down novels you should make an effort to find.

What a cornucopia! Each story is a world, and each is more amazing than the one before it. The book is a like a jewel-case filled with these glittering, gorgeous, but very dangerous brooches! The pins are sharp! Barbed at times. And the writing is perfection.

Oh, and, Lethe Press has posted a freely downloadable PDF copy of “Firooz and His Brother” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2008), which will reappear in You Will Meet a Stranger.

Yet more: genial and handsome Canadian short-story writer ’Nathan Burgoine, with whom I share two recent tables of contents but whose work I don’t yet know well enough, has declared May short story month. To celebrate which, he embarked on the project of reviewing one story a day from both of those TOCs on his RedRoom.com blog. ’Nathan’s reviews of Boys of Summer begin here (he looks at my “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy” here), and The Touch of the Sea here (I expect him to post his look at my “Ban’s Dream of the Sea” on Wednesday, 16 May {edited to add link on 20 May}). My only disappointment in this project is that ’Nathan skips over his own stories, “Leap” in Boys of Summer and “Time and Tide” in The Touch of the Sea, both of which I enjoyed a good deal. While I have yet to see any reviews of The Touch of the Sea, our blessed lord the internet has coughed up several of Boys of Summer:

Edited to add two more encountered today, 20 May:

Edited to add one more, posted today, 4 June:

In newer news about an older title, Speaking Out: LGBT Youth Stand Up (edited, like Boys of Summer and The Touch of the Sea, by Steve Berman, and in which my story “Captain of the World” appears) is one of three finalists in the Teen: Fiction category of the Independent Book Publishers Association’s 2012 Benjamin Franklin Awards. So that’s pretty neat. The awards will be presented early next month, I believe.

More? Oh, all right. I wrote my third story of 2012 last month. “Two Dead Men” (5,900 words) takes place in the same secondary world as 2012’s second story, “The Other Bridge” (announced at the bottom of this page), although they are otherwise unrelated. Inspired by the recent twenty-year anniversary of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, particularly the sieges of Sarajevo and Mostar.

Story #4, “The Oily Man,” in the works, is also set in that world. I don’t have a name for it—probably should, but its inhabitants just call it the world. Don’t have a map, despite my propensity for maps. Haven’t even named the continents and am not entirely clear on the locations of the nations and cities I have named. Placeholder collective title for the on-going group, Tales of the Subcontinent, refers to the secondary world’s analogue of Europe. “The Other Bridge” and “Two Dead Men” take place respectively in the subcontinental cities of Sjolussa (a former colonial power) and Fejz—with flashbacks to the tropical nation of Aveng—during the equivalent of our high-tech, post-colonial twenty-first century…but with, you know, magic and supernatural beings and incarnated gods.

Whereas “The Oily Man” is set centuries earlier during the messy period between the subcontinent’s Age of Discovery and its Age of Colonialism, the narrator a native of subcontinental mercantile city Trebt exiled to distant Aveng. This one’s intended for a 2013 anthology that hasn’t been announced yet (I have friends) but whose editor has expressed approval of the 3,000 or so words of first draft I’ve come up with so far.

Will I complete it this month? Up in the air. I have a terrifying pile of freelance copyediting I ought to be doing instead….

Finally, although I’m not ready to make a formal announcement, the third BrazenHead novella, a gripping dark fantasy, has been tentatively scheduled for publication in early November. But first we have to get Tom Cardamone’s brilliantly peculiar Green Thumb into your hands or downloaded onto your e-reader. August. Watch for it.

Categories
design fantasy fiction short stories spec fic YA

Steve Berman day at s&p.com

Every day is actually Daulton and Steve day, of course.

Unsilent partner in all SB's endeavors.

But above and beyond all that, today saw receipt of contributor copies of Steve’s new anthology of stories for gay teens (and teens at heart, and gays at heart), Boys of Summer, available any week now—or RIGHT NOW direct from the publisher.

My contribution is “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy,” a long tale (even longer than the title) of a summer sailboat cruise off the Aegean coast of Turkey, in which young Luke becomes enmeshed in multiple strands of multiple variations of the Adonis story.

And also! Originally scheduled for last September, then pushed forward to this July, now rushed into print because why not: The Touch of the Sea, a seaweed garland of fantastical tales of men and the life-giving and -taking ocean. Should be available in print in a week or so, in e-formats not much later.

Besides the cover and interior design (which all the other writers seem to like, yay), my contribution is “Ban’s Dream of the Sea,” a story of a mysteriously ancient city in the sea, its uncanny original inhabitants, and the interlopers from across the ocean who have claimed it as their colonial capital.

And…and…this evening I’ll be attempting to add more sentences and paragraphs to a new story intended for another Steve Berman anthology about which I’m not yet permitted to speak.