Meditations in an Emergency

Moving Day

2007-01-21T18:37:00.000-05:00

Well, I think I'm ready to move this blog over to my new website. I'm not sure if I'll be transferring the blogs I posted here into the new blog, or if I'll leave this blog here as its own record of who I've been and what I've been doing, at least partially, for the past four or five years. So...from now on you can find out more about what I'm doing at my new website. And do let me know what you think of it...what's working well, what could use improvement, or what might be added that I haven't thought about yet.

Okay, see you at the new place real soon.

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

2007-01-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

Since Senator Clinton has announced her run for the White House, I wrote her a letter today. I have no faith that it will ever reach her, so I've decided to place it here as well. I have no clue who will win the Democratic nomination for President, but my feelings are that Senators Clinton and Obama are the two with the best chances.

Dear Hillary,

I'm a young thirty-something from Youngstown, Ohio. You may have heard of us here because we're both a Democratic stronghold in Ohio and also because we are emblematic of the failure of the American Dream.

Years ago, in the seventies and eighties, when I was still too young to understand the extremity and consequences of the situation, the steel industry abandoned my community, which had worked so hard for that economic sector of our country through difficult years of toil and suffering, and the owners of those industries left us absolutely nothing, no resource from which we could draw sustenance and grow as a "nest egg" for the community afterwards. What once was one of the fastest growing cities in America was left to rot and disintegrate. No one cared, and no one stepped in to help us. Our once burgeoning economic climate and population of over 180,000 people is now in 2007 reduced to 80,000 and a flatline on the heart monitor of the economy.

Despite this region of Ohio becoming a virtual land of the living dead, we have held strong to the belief that the Democratic party, if given the chance to lead, would do something to help our ruined community revive. In recent years we have given up this hope because it is now the new millennium, nearly four decades have passed since the steel industry abandoned us to face the void on our own, and we have learned not to rely on our government for help. We've begun to do what we can for our community with our own meager abilities and funds. Most of our citizens still feel nothing can be done to save us. Perhaps in the end they are right, and this community, my city, should be allowed to breathe its last breath and go back to nature. Perhaps there is a kind of logic to that.

But I can't give up on us yet. I didn't grow up in Youngstown, Ohio. I grew up on a small farm about forty-five minutes outside of the city, in a rural town called Kinsman, where we have a small history of citizens of the United States who are called to leave the countryside and go out into the greater world to try, at the very least, to make it better. Clarence Darrow is one such person from that community, who also began his law practice in Youngstown, the city that provided him with a platform from which a small village boy could go on to defend the freedoms of teachers in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trials. It seems long ago now, but the older I get the more I understand how not so far away from us that point in our shared history is. I myself have struggled throughout my life to be someone who fights for a better community in whatever way I can. This year I will see the publication of my first novel from a major publishing house and I promise there will be more to come. I've dedicated myself to being a voice for a community that has not had a voice for the past forty years. But I understand why others from my community often fail to be able to start their own ignitions, so to speak.

Without an urban base with a strong economy to allow people to become their better selves in this world, it is not just the city of Youngstown that suffers, but the region that spreads out from it as well. We have been growing generations of newcomers to this world, children, who have no hope for a future for the past forty years. This is not America, according to the text books. And it's not an America I can sit by and accept.

My hope, Senator Clinton, is that, if given the chance, as we've hoped of many Democratic presidents in the past, you and your administration will find a way to help our dying community before it is finally too late for us. The only way I can think of to reach your ears is to write you this letter, and plead for the sake of my family and friends and all of the anonymous family and friends that make up a community. It costs us very little to beg in our current circumstances. We are a strong base of supporters for your candidacy and hopeful you will be able to win the presidency. We will work hard for you before the election, during, and afterwards as well.

Will you work hard for us in return? Will you help us, Senator Clinton? We do so desperately need someone of your abilities and stature to help us believe that America still exists, that being a part of this nation means that we are as valuable as any other community. Will you help bring us back into the family of man?

Sincerely yours,
Christopher Barzak

Rookie of the Year

2007-01-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

Over at Fantasybookspot.com, Jay Tomio has made a list of his picks from the speculative fiction books coming out in 2007, including me as his bet for Rookie of the Year with One for Sorrow. It's a funny roundup, very tongue in cheek, so go read and enjoy the whole article.

A Change of Space

2007-01-18T05:24:00.000-05:00

I've changed my mind about Wordpress. After playing around in its system for a while tonight, I've started to get the hang of it and will eventually be making a site there that will serve as my author's website as well as my online journal. It's going to take me a while to make the new space look nice, so for now I'll continue to write here, and when it's ready in the near future, I'll make a note of that here as well.

It's thoroughly late here, beyond late really, so I will now take myself to bed.

Thanks In Advance

2007-01-17T23:48:00.001-05:00

I think I'm going to look for a new online journal service. As I wrote in the previous entry, I'm not feeling like Blogger is offering me everything I need. I checked out Wordpress tonight and played around with its interface, but I'm not sure if I like it any better to be honest. It has some interesting features in theory, but it feels awkward to use and you don't really have any idea of what things are going to come out looking like until you press the publish button, and well, I'm not sure if it's for me either. Is Typepad any good? Or is there another online journal service someone could recommend? I'd really appreciate any help. What I really would like is for Blogger to allow me to upgrade to their new service, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

The Weather at Work

2007-01-17T14:59:00.000-05:00

Greg Van Eekhout asked people to post pictures from their workplaces. His was decidedly warm and sunny. I am jealous because this is my workplace right now.

I slid through an intersection on the way to work yesterday. It seems in the two years I spent without snow in Japan, I have forgotten how to drive on snowy roads. Well, at least I forgot for a moment. I have re-installed those skills since the sliding incident. Hopefully I will be involved in nothing of the sort again.

Welcome to Northeastern Ohio.

On a side note, I am getting really frustrated because blogger won't allow me to switch to the new version. Apparently I have either a blog that is too large, or else one that they created when they first showed up on the online journal scene and none of their information on their website is very clear about whether or not they're going to eventually include blogs like mine in being able to use the new version of blogger's fun-seeming features. I hate creating and disposing of blogs, and really wish this would just resolve itself soon, but if not, I may have to change after all. Please, please, please, blogger people, let me switch over too!

New Zealanders Get It.

2007-01-16T16:04:00.000-05:00

This was one of the most funny videos online I've seen in a long time. Thanks to Dave Schwartz for the link. Funny, but also I think indicative of both many American's frustration with the choices their government has been making in recent years, and also indicative of what I'm sure many other country's think of us.

We aren't what we used to be, and maybe we never were, but we're certainly becoming a jaded culture in the face of the horrendous mistakes our leaders have been making. I allowed myself a modicum of hope when the nation voted Democrats into power for the Senate and House this Fall, and I still am allowing myself a tiny reserve of that modicum of hope, but it's easy to see the Democrats, despite being in power, are pretty helpless because they can't figure out how to interrupt the President's plans without potentially looking like the bad guys come time for election in 2008.

History will remember George W. Bush as the worst president ever. Hopefully even a certain amount of U.S. citizens will learn from his failure not to vote based on values and morals. You can't legislate morality and values. You can't vote to make everyone believe the same things you believe. Differences should be honored and celebrated together. An attempt to flatten out a society so that everyone feels and thinks and lives the same way--and is considered less than human otherwise--will only bring a nation to its knees.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Nebulas and Reading

2007-01-13T14:50:00.000-05:00

The Nebula Preliminary ballot is long in some categories this year, and short in others. The novel category, in particular, is really long. And the novelette category, where my story "The Language of Moths" is hanging out, is pretty long as well. The novellas are unfortunately few. The short story category looks...healthy enough. It looks like there was more nominating of works this past year, which is a good sign that writers are taking a more active role in the award process. If you're a SFWA member and want to read some of the work that we'll be voting on for the short list ballot, remember to check out the private SFWA list of online links to stories and pdf files of novels like Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain, etc. Richard Bowes, author of From the Files of the Time Rangers is offering free copies of his novel to SFWA members who would like the chance to read it in time for the vote as well. You can find his email on that page. Make sure to take a look at what's on the list and decided for yourself what the best work of the past year has been in the speculative fiction genre. Like anything where voting takes place, it's important to represent.

I'm off to read some things I missed this year right now. I hope everyone's New Year got off to a good start. Mine has been hurried, but productive.

Oh, and also, here's the cover for Ellen Datlow's and Terri Windling's next anthology, Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, which includes my story, "Realer Than You". It looks like it's going to be a good one!

Never Enough Time

2007-01-09T04:06:00.000-05:00

Spring semester at the university begins next week. My holidays are over and this week I'm busy catching up with everything I let go over the past couple of weeks. So much work! So, apologies to anyone if I'm late in replying to emails etc. Hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll be all caught up and ready to start 2007, which is already the beginning of a good year because my first novel will be appearing this Fall, and also my story, "The Language of Moths" is on the preliminary Nebula ballot. Things are good. I hope they keep on getting even better. I'm looking forward to all kinds of things.

Happy New Year to everyone!

New Year

2006-12-29T21:30:00.000-05:00

I've been home seven months. I really can't believe it. It feels more like two years have gone by. I haven't really written in this space in a personal way more than once or twice since I left Japan. I've looked back on those entries in this journal several times since returning home and read them sometimes as if they had happened to somebody else, some other me that I met for a brief moment somehow, as if the walls of imperception between this world and the multiple dimensions of time and space that could exist had been torn away for a moment in my own piece of life here on earth. It all still feels incredibly real to me, and yet it also feels dreamlike more as time passes. I get caught up in the America around me, but then suddenly I can turn a corner and see the rice fields of Edosaki on either side of the road and the sweaty faces of the farmers wearing their straw hats and cloths hooding their heads away from the sun. Or I can get off the subway in New York and come up out onto a neon street in Tokyo, like I did this summer.

I suppose I haven't written much about my daily life since I've come home because, in a way, though I've gotten used to being back, I feel slightly disconnected from everything around me. I felt this way in Japan, but because I was a foreigner. I feel this way now, here at home, and I think it, too, is because I'm a bit of a foreigner. It feels that way sometimes at least. But I think I've always felt that way since I can remember. After all, we're all born into this incredibly amazingly weird world and into a life that we know fairly early on is going to end without any certainty of what's going to happen after that, and we have consciousness and live with animals in our houses and wow--let's not even get started on this language capability thing we developed. Frankly, I don't understand why more people aren't more agape and in awe of existence than there seem to be. But in any case, I think culture shock is something that develops more over time after returning home after living abroad rather than right at first. At least that's how it seems to be for me.

When I was first home I think I must have unconsciously felt as if coming home was just another trip, and it's after that feeling of being a traveler that you develop as an expatriot slowly fades as you stay in one place again for a while when the real culture shock has a chance to begin. When you've stabilized enough to look around and take in the place you've returned to, knowing finally that you're not going to leave it again anytime soon. I feel sometimes like I have the memories for two different lives co-existing inside me. My life in America and my life in Japan. Sometimes I don't know how me, some kid from a small farm in the middle of nowhere grew up to be educated and have published stories and have a novel being published and have lived in Japan and, well, lots of things. I don't know how I got to be me sometimes, is all. All those choices we make in life when we're young and aren't necessarily able to have a real concept of how choices make our future because we're just too young and inexperienced to understand that concept yet. I'm glad about the choices I've made in life. But it's still an odd feeling knowing at so many junctures it could have become something other than it is. I'm at a point in my life where I feel like I can look back on my younger self and see him, too, like that other me in Japan, almost as if I was watching someone else.

I've gone through a lot of adjustments and changes since coming back. I didn't realize how much I'd have to do that, how much energy it would actually take to figure out how to live here again. I think I just tried to ignore it for a while and pretend as if I could just slip back into a life here without thinking about it. Like I might be able to just pretend to be smooth at living, a polished person, like it seems so many people are able to do. I can put on a good poker face. It's one of my talents. But it's not really a good talent in the end, because it always leaves things I really do have to engage with--including things that have to be engaged with in the company of others, not just alone--unattended for long periods. And then at some point I get focused and dive headfirst into all that I've been trying to contain. I suppose that's what I'm doing now, lately.

One thing I thought about the other day was how, when I first came back, there were certain ways of being that I'd forgotten the codes and manners of after a long absence from their environments. The time that stands out in my mind about this sort of thing was going to Wiscon, where I was insanely happy to see many of my old friends, but where I was also just a bit disoriented and at a loss when it came to "being an author". Writers go to conventions and read from their books, talk on panels to audiences about their books and other people's books, chat with fans in hallways about their books and other people's books, and sign their books for others, and talk shop with one another, and there's a certain lingo to it all, and a range of stances that people seem to take, approaches to doing this, I mean. And I don't think it's a conscious thing for most of them, but probably a conscious thing for a few of them, and I realize this now because at some point when I was much younger, in my early twenties, just starting to enter the writing world and convention circuit, I can look back now and see I was learning a kind of language and dance at these functions, that it wasn't always instinctive, and that I had gotten "the hang of it" at some point too and not thought anything about it much afterwards.

But then I went to Japan. And though I was a writer in Japan, I did not have the sense of being an author. I realize now that, for me, I have two very different definitions for these words, and one is about the act itself and the other is about a sort of social identity that comes with certain already in place cultural assumptions attached to it. And that its is authors, not writers, who are mostly in attendence at writing conventions. And I felt at loss because I had forgotten how to do it, to be that. I gave a reading that possibly went fine but throughout it all I felt nervous and uncomfortable, not sure of myself at all. I then participated in a panel that I had signed up for, foolishly, on a whim while I was still in Japan because it was a funny idea, The Death of the Panel, which I didn't think anyone would actually take seriously. And I thought that would be a good panel for me to be on because it wasn't really going to be a real one in my mind, I think. And I was right for the first five minutes of that panel, it was just a joke. And then a woman in the audience, a bit angry it seemed, raised her hand and demanded if all we were going to do was have a bit of fun or were we really going to talk about the Death of the Panel on this panel, and then Hal Duncan came in with beers because apparently that's how panels are done in England, and then the next moment suddenly the panelists were trying to actually throw together an actual serious panel about The Death of the Panel, and Scott Westerfeld was nudging me to say something, you know, serious about the Death of the Panel, and I thought to myself, this is ridiculous, you can't have a panel about the Death of the Panel unless it's a joke, and I'm not going to let some audience member bully me into taking it seriously. I have absolutely nothing serious to add to a discussion about something that just isn't going to happen, I thought. Later I mentioned my uncomfortability about being on panels now, which wasn't the case in the past as much, to John Scalzi, and I remember saying how I didn't feel like I had any ideas of interest for panels, and he said he'd read my blog and knew I had interesting ideas and opinions, and I corrected myself and said okay, well maybe I just don't think in the way you have to think to be a good panelist at a convention. I don't like to think in front of other people, I guess you can say. I didn't grow up in a family that bounced ideas around and were thoughtful philosophers, where arguing was done civilly and sometimes just as an intellectual exercise. I learned how to do all that later in college with friends I made there who had grown up in such families.

But something that occurred to me the other night, seven months later, was that I actually do have an idea for the Death of the Panel that could be quite serious, and which I didn't hear mentioned really that day, so I offer it now. There cannot be a death of the panel without replacing them with some other form of social engagement between sf readers and writers, or without the death of conventions themselves. SF has something that no other form of writing, from what I can see, has as part of its cultural makeup: a real sense of community. And one of the things that makes that community possible are conventions, where readers and writers and editors all converge and chat intelligibly about this form of writing that they love, where they sometimes make lifelong friends, fall in love, or receive inspiration for their next story or novel and sit down to begin writing it in the hallway by the elevator as my dear friend Amber Van Dyk did at Wiscon on the last day this past year. One of the things that makes this possible are the panels. Without them, where do the readers and writers go to interact, what other event can give shape and form to this exchange for three or four days steadily, allowing hundreds of people all in the same building to engage with one another, but in plenty of different rooms listening and talking about a variety of topics? If panels die, conventions die, at least how they're conceived of at this moment in sf history. So really, I was right in thinking The Death of the Panel panel was just a joke in a way, because how can it not be? But I was wrong in thinking I didn't have any real ideas about it.

Seven months home and I'm still not so sure if I'll ever be able to be an author when I go to conventions, if I'll ever really get used to it again like I had in my mid-twenties, nor am I sure if I'll ever get back to living in America again without being keenly aware that I'm doing just that. But I'm not sure either if I don't prefer how I feel about my relationship to these things now than previously.

I think for a long time my life is going to feel like Before Japan, and After. Other than that, I'm pretty certain the the next few months and probably the next year or two are going to feel as eventful--emotionally, experientially, intellectually, and spiritually--as life was while I was living in Japan. And because of that, despite some of the disorientation of returning home, I'm looking forward to 2007.

Despite the smallness of my life here on earth and the smallness of my voice amongst all the others, I wish good things for all of us in the new year.

Surfacing

2006-12-28T21:16:00.000-05:00

My fever has broken and I'm feeling a little bit better. I think it must be one of those 24 hour flus going around right now. I finally got some sleep but didn't get my day started until very late because of it. Now I'm eating Chinese takeout because I didn't feel energetic enough to cook for myself. Thank you, Chinese delivery man.

Also, I wanted to point out a myspace page I made for Adam McCormick, the fifteen year old narrator of my novel One for Sorrow, coming out this Fall. If you use myspace, add him to your list of friends. As it draws nearer to publication time, I'll be posting news bulletins about the book, readings, signings, reviews, and also I'll be posting small bits of the book in the blog section of Adam's page. The prologue of the book has been posted in Adam's blog already, so if you'd like a sneak peek at the opening, take a look.

Too Sick and Tired to Title

2006-12-28T06:34:00.001-05:00

Earlier this month, I helped my friend Ron move his grandparents to a new place. It was just the two of us really, and a cold wet day of moving heavy furniture. By the time the day ended, I was coming down with a cold. It was a terrible one, too, and I could just barely make it to school to teach. I was very glad when it ended.

Tonight I started to feel another cold coming on. I'm doing that sleepless, achey tossing and turning in bed, shivering a bit then getting too hot. Oh wait, now that I think of it, maybe it's the flu if I'm getting chills. Ugh. I hate feeling worn down and exhausted.

So now I am teleporting about on the internet at 6:30 in the morning, still sleepless but oh so wanting to sleep, and doing silly online entertainment activities such as this one:

I always say a kiss on the hand might feel very good, but a Christopher lasts forever.

Which movie was this quote from?

Now, having perhaps exhausted myself by being out of bed, I might be able to go back and actually sleep.

Let's hope.

A Reading

2006-12-27T20:14:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be giving a reading from my work a few days after the New Year. If you'll be in the Cleveland area and can make it, by all means come out and join me and the other readers. It should be a good time.

Where: Cleveland Heights, OH
When: Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 07:00 PM
Who with: Alan Deniro and Sean Thomas Dougherty
Where at: Mac’s Backs

Ta-Dah!

2006-12-26T22:42:00.000-05:00

My mom gave me the Scissor Sisters' new cd "Ta-Dah" for Christmas. It's really good. It's more sedate than their first album, but still really energetic and inventive, because, well, you know, it's the Scissor Sisters, and "sedate" for them is still pretty manic for us regular people.

Yes, I referred to myself as a regular person.

This is not up for debate.

I still feel pretty happy from the holidays. I can't wait for the New Year. It feels good to feel that way again.

Review

2006-12-24T12:27:00.000-05:00

Niall Harrison has written a review of my story, "The Guardian of the Egg", from Salon Fantastique. He's been reviewing a story a day from the book, and, to be honest, I was expecting a less receptive view of mine as Niall, as he says in the review, was one of the two or three people online last year who didn't care for my 2005 story, "The Language of Moths". He sees superficial similarites in the two stories, but differences that show more restraint in the new one. It's true that I went through a period of time where I wrote about families and particularly brothers and sisters (I think I was curious about what it must feel like to have a sister, as I only have older brothers) and its true that "The Language of Moths" has a lot more "sentiment" in it than "The Guardian of the Egg", though none I can still remember not finding out of place or "earned" through the writing. But I'm glad that "The Guardian of the Egg" could still win over someone who hadn't much cared for one of my stories that came before it, whose reviews I also really enjoy.

Also, one last time, Happy Holidays! I'm off to my folks' place in wilds of Ohio now. I hope everyone has a good one.

This is just to say...

2006-12-20T01:30:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry. I am behind on so many things right now. The play is finally over though (and it went really really well--lots of laughs, and lots of calls for next year to have it performed two or three nights instead of one, and it also sold out twice-over), and I'm slowly but surely finishing my Christmas shopping. Things are hectic, too, because I'm house-sitting and so I'm doing a lot of running back and forth between my apartment and the house, and I'm trying to get some writing done as well, and and and...hopefully after Christmas everything will start to settle down. If I owe you an email, please forgive me. I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

If I don't get a chance to say it before they're over, happy holidays. I hope you have a good one.

Listening to Kurt Vonnegut

2006-12-18T02:04:00.000-05:00

While searching through the archives at Bookworm, my favorite radio show, I found this wonderful interview with Kurt Vonnegut from April 2006. Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cat's Cradle" are two of my favorite books of all time. He's one of the first authors I came across that could make me laugh and make me cry in the same book, sometimes in the same line. In his eighties now, he's still writing and thinking and engaging with the world in such a deeply felt way that just listening to him makes me feel the way I do when reading his novels--I laugh at what he says one moment then cry the very next. He's the sort of person who makes me believe in those characters so well-known in science fiction and fantasy novels who function as an old wise man or woman, seer, visionary. Listening to him makes me feel hopeful.

An Interview

2006-12-17T08:46:00.000-05:00

A really good interview done by Matt Cheney with my editor for One for Sorrow, Juliet Ulman, can be read here, courtesy of Fantasy Magazine's blog. She's really intelligent not only about books, but about what it takes to be a good editor. I'm glad she's mine!

More blogging

2006-12-14T16:16:00.000-05:00

My new side job is writing blog entries for BloggingOhio.com as their Youngstown correspondent. My first entry is up now. All of the bloggers from different Ohio cities has a different style and are interested in different sorts of things about their regions in Ohio. I think for my own part, I'll mainly be focusing on civic and economic subject matter in the Youngstown/Warren area of the state, as well as community events and history. It should be a fun gig.

Where I've Been, What I'm Doing

2006-12-12T22:33:00.000-05:00

Well, I am finally over the bronchitis I've had for the past week and a half. Also, today I turned in my grades for my students, so I am done done done with the Fall semester. This week is full of rehearsals for Saturday's play that I'm in, but other than that, I can sit back and enjoy a couple of weeks of December before going back to work in January, both at the university and also as a blogger for an Ohio website, which I'll say more about when I begin that work. Working as a part time instructor and a freelance writer can sometimes be nerve-wracking, particularly when it comes to paying rent and bills and trying to maintain a certain amount of enjoyable activities in one's life. There's no secure paycheck coming every two weeks, and sometimes not even every month. But I can arrange my work week based mostly on my own scheduling preferences, and there's a freedom in that which my personality type apparently requires from living. Hopefully a day will come when I don't have to plan my budget as strictly. For now, though, I'm doing decent enough, and definitely doing better than I was a few years ago, so I can't complain too much. :-)

Youngstown is all Christmased up, and looking rather shiny. I came across this article in the New York Times from several days ago, which I missed when it first appeared (thanks for the lead, Brookey) and was pleased to see my little rust belt city making news outside of its own newspapers once again. And this time not a negative image of the city so much, but a hopeful one, so what I've seen happening since coming home from Japan has been confirmed. I hope more and more light will shine down on this forgotten valley of America in the days to come.

Now, in yet another attempt to ignore the waning amount of shopping days left before Christmas, I have a date with several dvds and a large chocolate bar, so I'm off.

A Reminder

2006-12-06T16:36:00.000-05:00

Don't forget to submit to Rabid Transit if you haven't already. The deadline is coming up soon.

Trendy or Political? Maybe Both

2006-12-04T22:59:00.000-05:00

This was a cool article in the New York Times about heterosexual couples who refuse to marry until gay people can too. My only criticism of it would be that it's been placed in the Fashion and Style section of the magazine, as if it's just a trendy piece of apparel to put on, rather than in the Politics section. After all, what is politics if it isn't people giving voice to injustices and demanding change in the policies we live by?

What a drag

2006-12-03T20:09:00.000-05:00

"How the Drag Queen Stole Christmas" will be performed at the Oakland Center for the Arts, in downtown Youngstown on December 16th at 8:00 pm. I believe tickets are 15$, as this is a benefit. There will be a Chinese auction after the show. This is the very cool show advertisement my friend Rob made, though this image of it is without the cast names and day and time and price information. I'm off to rehearsal right now actually, so more on this as the day draws nearer. Come if you can! It should be a lot of fun!

A Question For Writers

2006-12-01T00:42:00.000-05:00

I've noticed, now that I'm working on a third novel, that something that happens each time I'm writing a novel is I find myself reading or watching or listening to very particular kinds of books or movies or music. When I was writing One for Sorrow, I gravitated to watching a lot of alienated smart kid rebel coming of age films, and read a lot of voice-oriented novels. When I was writing The Love We Share Without Knowing, I was reading a lot of novels by Japanese authors, and Japanese poetry and manga as well, and listening to both contemporary and traditional Japanese music, and watching a lot of contemporary Japanese film including tons of anime, along with books written by expatriate authors. I also was reading a lot of Japanese mythology and Buddhist thought. Now that I'm writing this third novel, which I'm tentatively calling, Yesterday's Child, I find myself reading a lot of philosophy and watching a lot of political documentaries. The fiction I'm reading also tends, like the books I read while writing One for Sorrow, to be voice-oriented and wide-reaching, all-encompassing narrative voices, the sort that widen and expand then narrow to ribbons like the course of a river. The philosopher whose work I'm most caught up with at the moment is Hannah Arendt. I've read "Between Past and Future", and "The Human Condition" and am now beginning, "The Life of the Mind". I can't get enough of her ideas as well as the way she expresses them in language almost like a poet most of the time. There's a sort of mathematical or musical precision to the way she guides a reader's mind through her narrative thought experiments that almost convinces you in and of itself that whatever she says is the truth. Her mind is seething, bubbling like a cauldron with life. It's so invigorating to read work of this nature that tells a story of the life of what it means to be human in a language that is neither fiction nor poetry, math nor scientific formula. At this juncture of my life, philosophical texts seem to go straight to my gut, which they haven't always done in the past to be honest. I wonder sometimes what it means when suddenly a particular form of writing becomes a direction to walk in for learning and growing in some way. What does it signify when particular kinds of engagements with language and thought shift to a different code, like from fiction to poetry, or poetry to algebra, or chaos theory to essay, or from journalism to philosophy, etc.? Isn't what we're most receptive to as a mode of communication and narrative engagement at any given time indicative or something about us at that moment? Maybe I'm overthinking things, but I'd rather overthink than underthink, so I'm not going to feel bad if that's the case.

Anyway, my main question for those of you who write: Do you find yourself reading/watching/listening to any particular kinds of media while writing a book? What sorts of things? Any ideas why? Answers both public in this blog or private in an email to me are welcome. I'm interested to know more about this question from those of you who are out there reading the words I'm putting down in this space.

Way cool

2006-11-30T00:51:00.000-05:00

This is so cool...it makes me feel like a kid again. Like watching the X-Men 3 film with fellow Wiscon friends and then going on and on about the comic narratives with Dave Schwartz afterwards. That's how cool this is!

Two Reminders

2006-11-28T18:34:00.000-05:00

Reminder #1:

Buy M. Rickert's book Map of Dreams. I got my copy of it yesterday, and it's even more beautiful in person than I thought from just the online images of the cover. I think it's maybe the most gorgeous Golden Gryphon book I've seen so far. The other Golden Gryphon book that I thought had a fabulous cover was Richard Bowes' mosaic novel "From the Files of the Time Rangers".

Reminder #2:

Buy The Best New Fantasy, edited by Sean Wallace at Prime. This book, too, is really pleasing to look at. I love the cover and the short introduction to the book, as well as the concept of an anthology collecting stories published by the best "new" or "up and coming" writers publishing each year. I received my copies of this book yesterday, and was impressed with it.

Local news

2006-11-26T01:47:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the Open Stage at the Oakland Theater, which my friend Brooke organizes. Brooke is a force here in Youngstown. She brings together so many different kinds of people from the various branches of the arts, and has, in my opinion, been the main reason why Youngstown's arts scene has begun to cross-pollinize over the past few years, bringing about a rebirth in the downtown, which now has so much more to offer the citizens of this cold steel town. It's so nice to be able to have something like the Open Stage Night at the Oakland because there's something for everyone, and all the local talents can showcase themselves for each other. Tonight we had a spontaneous artist painting throughout the show, and there were fiction readings from people like myself, and poetry and standup comedy acts, and bands, and singer/songwriters, and storytellers, and monologues and odd science projects. I heard the most amazing songs written by a young woman who only recently put together a band by the name of The Crissie McCree Band, and it was like hearing Neko Case, only to be honest, in my opinion, at least three times better. After the show, I went up to her and told her how much I loved the songs her band played and asked if they had a myspace page or somewhere online where I could keep track of when they might have dates to play in or around town, and Crissie said she enjoyed my reading as well, so we exchanged information and can now keep track of each other much more easily in order to enjoy further projects we're doing in the future. An event like the Open Stage Night at the Oakland Theater just didn't really exist a few years ago. And wouldn't have been well attended like it has been the past few months here, so I take it as only one of the many good signs that life is stirring in this town that for decades has been in the process of disintegration.

The Open Stage is one aspect of one of the changes I've been experiencing since returning from Japan. I find that I'm being more active in the arts scene here in town, perhaps only because there's one that's more consistent and has more serious artists working in it since I can remember. In December, on the 16th, I'm also going to try my hand at acting for the first time. My friend Rob has written a Christmas musical and asked me to be in it. It's called, "How the Drag Queen Stole Christmas". Rob works in the Oakland Theater and also makes a lot of the costumes for local drag queens, and also makes dresses for former Mrs. Americas and beauty pageant type women. He also writes funny plays. When he asked me to play a role in "How the Drag Queen Stole Christmas", I was a little surprised and confused. I'm not an actor, though I've always secretly wanted to try it. Then I found out he wants me to play the main character's flashback 17 year old shy, nervous, sad self before he becomes a drag queen (no, I will not be wearing women's clothes for this role), and also before the character has a surgery to seperate the conjoined twin from his head (I'm not kidding). He said, "It's a flashback modeled off the Ghost of Christmas Past scene from Dickens. You'd be the main drag queen character's younger, slimmer self, before she had the surgery to remove her conjoined twin from her head, and you'd have to be sad and shy. That's not a stretch." Yes, I know most of my readers would not consider me sad and shy, though I once was sad and shy, but sometimes I still can be. Anyhow, I went to the first read-through for the play last week and it was a lot of fun, so I'm excited to see how things go on December 16th. Who knows? If I like being on stage, I may occasionally try to find ways to help out in the local theater.

It's odd for me to think about my life in Youngstown now and what it was before I went to Japan. My life here is different now than how I lived it before I went to Japan. I like what I'm doing, and who I'm around, so much. And I like becoming more involved in the arts scene here that's developed while I was away. I still think about Japan often, though, and think of my life there, of my apartment and the roads in town I ran every day after school, and the schools where I worked, and the children and my co-workers, and my friends and neighbors, and well...everything that was a part of my life there. I think of Japan and my life there almost every day. I still speak to myself in Japanese every day throughout the day, still study the language and listen to the music my adopted mom in Sapporo sends me, trying my best to hold on to that part of my life, that other country, this other self of mine which I found while I was there. It's odd to be home and to feel like another part of me is away from home, and I'm still not sure if that feeling will ever change.

A Two Year Wait for Turkey

2006-11-24T13:06:00.000-05:00

Happy Belated Thanksgiving to anyone who celebrates it. I spent the night before Thanksgiving with my family and then got up already smelling the turkey and pies my mother was making. I haven't had a Thanksgiving dinner in two years, so this was just the most incredible scent for me. Turkey isn't a popular bird to eat in Japan, so I don't think I ate it the entire time I was there. God how I missed stuffing and sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows, which if you ask me is the only way to eat sweet potatoes. It was good to finally celebrate a holiday with my family again for the first time in a couple of years. Living in Japan and celebrating the holidays there with friends or alone was an experience I'll never forget, and actually really did love for a different set of reasons, but it's nice to sit with my mom and dad and brothers and sisters in law and their kids and my grandparents and spend the holidays together again. My grandma hadn't seen my beard and mustache yet. She thinks I look like Abraham Lincoln. I laughed a lot, trying to picture myself with Abraham Lincoln's head on my short little body.

Later on I had a second Thanksgiving dinner with friends in Youngstown, and afterwards played board games and made fun of each other for various challenges we had to do while playing Cranium. After that we watched several episodes of "Strangers with Candy" and laughed and laughed. I love Amy Sedaris heaps.

My apartment is already looking very Christmas-y. The tree is up, and various other decorations. I'm so excited for the holidays. I love the lights, the music, the Christmas movies, the decorations all over downtown and in the shopping plazas, the people hurrying around so that they can get all the presents they want to give to others. I think Christmas trees and lights should be permanent, year-round decorations.

I've been working on my third novel the past few months. It's going well, and I'm well into it: around 40,000 words so far. I hope to finish a first draft by the end of May, or if I get busy with other writerly or teacherly duties, then by the end of next August.

Also, I forgot to mention my story "A Thousand Tails" will appear in Firebirds 3, edited by Sharyn November. It's one of the stories I wrote while living in Japan, and shares a character in common with my story "Realer Than You" which will appear in Coyote Road, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this Summer.

Lots more going on, as usual. School is winding down into the last couple of weeks of the semester. Soon I'll be neck-high in final essays that need to be graded. But I look forward to the Christmas and New Year season afterwards. I may throw a New Year's Party for friends. That, too, I look forward to doing. I can't remember the last time I threw a party. I mean, other than the karaoke parties Alan and Kristin and I throw at Wiscon for everyone.

Lots of fun coming up over the next month or so. I hope everyone has a good holiday season. I know I'm going to do my best to have the most fun possible.

This coming Saturday

2006-11-19T13:37:00.000-05:00

Come down to the Oakland Theater if you're local, or even if you're passing through. The Stage is *the* most fun monthly event in Youngstown, at least for me. I'm going to read a story. Come and read one of your own, or bring a guitar and sing a song, or act out a skit, or do a dance routine; whatever talent you may have, put it on stage and show us what you've got.

Why We Fight

2006-11-16T23:15:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already seen the 2005 documentary, "Why We Fight", you must rent it now. It's an amazing documentary that pulls together a story of America that most Americans have no narrative for: why America is a militaristic country with a standing army, which even the first president warned would be a sign that empire was forming to overtake true democracy. It's scary, it'll have you in tears, and many viewers won't come back to the America they left when they started watching this film.

Got Reading Skills?

2006-11-13T10:58:00.000-05:00

Maybe someday your kids won't. Or not in the same way that we read at any rate.

Zadie Smith

2006-11-10T00:58:00.000-05:00

This interview with Zadie Smith is gorgeous. The sort that makes me want to have a chance to sit down and talk with her myself someday.

Happy as a Pirate, but with Reservations...

2006-11-09T23:44:00.000-05:00

Okay, I *am* happy about the turnover in the election to the Democrats, but I am a little hesitant to think this will make all the woes of American culture go away. Why? Well, writing an email to a friend tonight, I found myself bringing some of this up, and will just cut and paste that part to explain myself a little further:

"Yes, this election was really weird. I woke up with a new Democratic Senator and lots of Democratic Representatives and a new Democratic Governor, which we haven't had in years and years here, which all automatically made me feel safer, until I thought about all the anti-gay marriage amendments that passed on the same day, and how the new Democratic governor of Pennsylvania is anti-abortion rights and anti-gay marriage rights as well, and yet he's somehow a Democrat, right? And shouldn't I feel safer? But why all of a sudden do I not, because really there seems to be no difference between the people the Democrats had to run with the conservative messages they had to carry in order to get back into power to begin with and the Republicans they've displaced. I'm hoping the Dems were just doing what they had to in order to get back into power and that eventually they'll move people towards the line of liberal thinking as they seemed to be doing in the nineties, after edging them there for a while slowly, so that the masses don't go into shock about allowing other people the rights to their own lives. I don't know. All I do know is that if in a couple of years I don't see some of this homophobia and right to life issues the politicians are using so deliberately to manipulate the public into voting for them, I'm possibly going to leave the country again in a fit of despair over the staggeringly fearful and ignorant state the culture is in at the moment.

"Today at school I went into the Dean of Arts and Sciences office to ask if they had any applications for admission to YSU for prospective students. The girl working the front desk, always students who work part time at the university, which I did myself for several years, furrowed her brows and said, "The who?" I said, "For people who want to go to school here," and she said, "Oh," and looked very relieved and said, "No, I don't think we have anything like that here." Then she picked her magazine back up and started reading again. I know that's not representative of the entire population, but some days it certainly feels like it."

Life as a Pirate

2006-11-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

I'm so happy about the elections, all I can do is keep taking pictures of my generally happy life as a pirate...

While Waiting for Election Results...

2006-11-07T21:59:00.000-05:00

Some pictures from fall on YSU's campus.

Election Day

2006-11-06T12:40:00.000-05:00

American Readers, don't forget tomorrow is an election day. Get out there and vote.

Nothing New to Say

2006-11-04T03:36:00.000-05:00

I am at the point where things like this can only make me snort and shake my head.

I'm pretty exhausted by politics and religion at this point. Neither have anything new to say, and neither have a core of people who truly are trying to change things for the better. It's sad, because people are looking for direction, and there are so few choices at this point, at least viable choices. No wonder there is so much affectlessness afflicting the American public. We have no one who can really lead anyone anywhere worth anything.

If you can point me in a direction of hope, by all means, point me towards it.

More Good Times from October

2006-11-03T16:52:00.000-05:00

Another pic from Mill Creek Park. This bridge appeared in my story "Born on the Edge of an Adjective". It's one of my favorite places in the world.

Went to a wedding with Tony and Nicole mid-October. It was the first time I wore a suit since teaching in Japan, so it was fun to dress up a little.

After the wedding reception, we decided to keep the good times going and went dancing. I changed clothes. Tony and Nicole stayed spiffy.

And still there are more pics to post. Little by little, October will appear.

Pictures from a Busy October

2006-11-02T19:23:00.000-05:00

Elva's birthday party at the country bar where the deer sings karaoke.

Mill Creek Park is one of Youngstown's best kept secrets.

Next entry, weddings and afterparties and Halloween.

When Fantasy Moves Into History

2006-10-24T23:17:00.000-04:00

If I were still a grad student or given to writing essays on literary trends, I think right now I'd be interested in looking at the infestation of dragons and faeries into historical narratives and period dramas. It feels like that's what's occuring in Naomi Novik's and Susanna Clarke's fiction when I read them. What other authors are working this vein? I understand the commercial interest of it of course, but think it would make for an interesting cultural studies or literary essay as well. Sadly, though, I think someone else will have to write it.

Reading Hannah Arendt's "Between Past and Future"

2006-10-24T01:02:00.000-04:00

"In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience from historical consciousness--by no means restricted to marx in particular, or even to pragmatism in general--we can easily detect the age-old attempt to escape from the frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making. What distinguishes Marx's own theory from all others in which the notion of 'making history' has found a place is only that he alone realized that if one takes history to be the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must come a moment when this 'object' is completed, and that if one imagines that one can 'make history,' one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history. Whenever we hear of grandiose aims in politics, such as establishing a new society in which justice will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to make the whole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind of thinking."

"It is obvious that these reflections and descriptions are based on the conviction of the importance of making distinctions. To stress such a conviction seems to be a gratuitous truism in view of the fact that, at least as far as I know, nobody has yet openly stated that distinctions are nonsense. There exists, however, a silent agreement in most discussions among political and social scientists that we can ignore distinctions and proceed on the assumption that everything can eventually be called anything else, and that distinctions are meaningful only to the extent that each of us has the right 'to define his terms.' Yet does not this curious right, which we have come to grant as soon as we deal with matters of importance--as though it were actually the same as the right to one's own opinion--already indicate that such terms as 'tyranny,' 'authority,' 'totalitarianism' have simply lost their common meaning, or that we have ceased to live in a common world where the words we have in common possess an unquestionable meaningfulness, so that, short of being condemned to live verbally in an altogether meaningless world, we grant each other the right to retreat into our own worlds of meaning, and demand only that each of us remain consistent within his own private terminology? If, in these circumstances, we assure ourselves that we still understand each other, we do not mean that together we understand a world common to us all, but that we understand the consistency of arguing and reasoning, of the process of argumentation in its sheer formality."

Published in 1961, but still feels like it's hot off the press.

Failure of the Imagination

2006-10-23T15:03:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been thinking off and on about literary scandals. This past year or so, there have been several. James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" was revealed to be highly fictionalized, though marketed as memoir. JT LeRoy's mysterious identity was unveiled to be a complete and utter lie altogether--"he" was a "she" and the woman who made public appearances as LeRoy wasn't even the woman who was actually writing the books under LeRoy's name. Then there was the upset over Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel, "How Opal Metha Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" when it was discovered to have a great many passages of plagiarized material from other authors' novels making up parts of the book. There was a backlash on the authors and their publishers for all of these novels, and perhaps that backlash was deserved. I don't know for sure if it was, and really I don't think it's something I feel a need to judge. What I do sometimes feel about these events, beyond a "How Stupid Could You Be?" reaction to the authors and publishers who knew what they were doing was a straight up con job, is a deep disappointment also in the public readership, a readership that places so much emphasis on the importance of "real life" stories that it has affected the world of, for lack of a better word at the moment, commercial narratives in such a way that publishers and authors are fictionalizing identities to present to those readers in order to sell books.

Now of course you can take the noble road and choose not to go this way at all. Practice humble, honest representation and hope your book sells even if your private life isn't as interesting as the books you write. Really it should be about the books and not the author, but in a world where "Reality TV" has spread a viral need among consumers to believe what they are viewing or reading is "real", how can we be surprised when authors spend more time inventing themselves than their books? Even though representations of anything cannot truly be "real"--are forged in some way through the process of the imagination and an individual creator's shaping intelligence, changing any story in the process--whether the story occurred in the public world or in the private realm of the imagination alone, audiences clamor for authenticity, and that demand has created an interesting sphere in the world of books where an author's identity has taken a place of importance over the work they've created. There are plenty of examples of this that have occurred in the past--Hemingway is the author who most easily comes to mind--but never with such a scathing reprimand by the public for giving them what they want in the first place: someone whose story is larger than life. And when the illusion is discovered, you're now scourged publicly by Oprah on an international television show. It all feels a bit...oh, I don't know, carnivalesque.

I feel what happened in the case of Viswanathan's novel was more reprehensible than what took place in the LeRoy and Frey cases. In Viswanathan's case, it feels more like a failure of the imagination for her to have written a book and taken shortcuts through other author's language and character and plots rather than developing her own. There's been some speculation that she might have been influenced by individuals in her publishing company and guided, in some ways, to do this, and if that's the case, it's even sadder, because a young person who might have had a career doing something she wants to do was taken advantage of. I don't know what happened to cause her to make the choice to plagiarize, so that ends my take on her.

In the LeRoy and Frey cases, though, I wonder if the failure of the imagination isn't with the general reading populace. (I'm not saying *everybody*, of course, just a general trend sort of assessment). Here you have two authors who created alter egos under which their work was presented in order to sell their books. And it worked for a good amount of time, particularly in the case of LeRoy, who stayed out of the limelight as much as possible and made reclusivity part of his/her identity. Frey, on the other hand, was boastful and arrogant, which is always a sort of challenge that others will pick up in order to humble a braggart or poser. Despite how or why their alternate identities were defrauded, there still remains a question in my mind concerning the audience, the reading public. Weren't their books loved and adored by many before they were discovered to be fictionalized accounts? Why, afterwards, were they so publicly shamed for delivering stories that people enjoyed, whose lives in some cases were changed by their invented lives? Have we lost the ability to learn from our imaginations? When did fiction become substandard to "reality" books? Or should we call it "Reality Fiction" and at least put an acknowledgement of what's really occuring in the non-fiction section of the bookstore in more books than those by these authors? Why can't we admit that we seek a suspense of disbelief in every story we read? Why must those stories have "actually occurred" in the public world in order to have any credence? Aren't the lives we live in our imaginations as important? Don't those affect us just as well, and as powerfully? If a book like Frey's can change the lives of drug abusers and alcoholics, whether it's fiction or not shouldn't matter. If JT LeRoy is a person invented by American culture's mythologies, why can't he serve as a functional symbol as any "real" person might? People responded to these figures in the first place. Aren't we cutting ourselves off, then, if we retract any of the responses we had to them before we knew they'd been invented? That is the crux of the problem for me. Not whether or not I was lied to. I pick books up, both fiction and non-fiction, expecting to be lied to. Hopefully in a way that will be both entertaining and insightful, thought provoking at the very least. Why is the imagination considered substandard to the life that exists in front of our eyes every day?

I can't say I have any answers to what I'm thinking about here. I'm still thinking. But I do worry sometimes that the human imagination is atrophying in a particular way, that we have become "reality consumers" because we have no reality to our own lives anymore. Because perhaps just maybe the most human thing about us originally was our ability to imagine, to have an inner life that not only was affected by our outer lives but also aided us in shaping our outer lives. I consider that a characteristic that is perhaps more pragmatic than any other aspect of being human. If we can no longer acknowledge the reality and importance of the imagined, how will we eventually come to live in this world, which in the end is created by all of us, our cultures and social structures and even the daily routines of our small lives dictated and limited only by what we're able to conceive in our imaginations?

Two Items

2006-10-22T16:27:00.000-04:00

Saw "The Prestige" last night. It's really well made and beautiful in many sections, weird imagery, and poetic in some ways about a rivalry between nineteenth century magicians. I loved it. Want to see it again. In fact, want to see it again at the theater, which is a rarity for me.

Also, Kristin forwarded this review of our latest edition of Rabid Transit to me, and I thought it was amazing, the work that's gone into creating a review page for an issue of Rabid Transit, with a whole sort of history of links to various people involved with our project, the editors as well as writers from past issues, etc. Take a look at this review and sort of be amazed at how thorough it is. I was really impressed.

Map of Dreams

2006-10-20T13:19:00.000-04:00

I am soooooo excited about M. Rickert's first story collection, Map of Dreams, finally being published. Mary asked me a while back to write the introduction for the book, and I was both amazingly excited to do so, because from the publication of her very first story, "The Girl Who Ate Butterflies", in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I've been in love with her writing, and since the time she and I both attended The Blue Heaven Novel Workshop together, she's come to be one of my closest and most treasured friends. While I was in Japan, I often heard from Mary through email and once through a large box of wonderful books that she'd sent me, and through our emails I shared quite a bit of my experiences in Japan, the way I was feeling at various times, that I never wrote about in this journal. I think I didn't realize it as I was doing it, but Mary had become one of my most important confidantes over that time. When I got back from Japan, though everything looked and felt familiar, I was bewildered in a really odd way, too, not sure of why I was home again. I think I spent the first month in a sort of shock, not really emotionally engaged with the world around me so much. And then I went to Wiscon, and as I was checking in at the front desk of the hotel, Mary saw me and walked up to me, and me, carrying about five huge bags I'd traveled with, dropped them all on the floor around me and hugged her for about five minutes and found myself crying without knowing why. It was the first time I'd actually cried since coming home. I think seeing Mary, who is someone who defines what home is for me, finally woke me up from disorienting dreams of coming back to a country that had become a stranger to me while I was away from it. Each time I read one of Mary's stories, the same thing happens. I come home all over again.

You should definitely, above all else, get this book as soon as possible. (The cover image on the Amazon.com and Powells.com pages are different from the one shown here. But the cover image I've posted is the one you'll get when you order this gorgeous book.)

Eventually You Will Have to Submit

2006-10-17T22:53:00.000-04:00

Rabid Transit will soon be accepting submissions for Rabid Transit #6.

Submission time period and other notes: November 1-December 15. All submissions received before or after this time period will be discarded unread. Additionally, please only send one submission–that means (a) no multiple attachments of stories in a single submission and (b) only one story during the reading period.

Finally, we’re not looking for stories from people who have already published in Rabid Transit. Though, seriously, we love you all.

Length: 7,500 words and less.

What we’re looking for: The best way to figure out what we’re interested in publishing is to read a copy or two of our back issues.You can order copies directly from the Rabid Transit web site or from ProjectPulp.

There isn’t one particular type of story that we’re looking for–we’ve published stories that are completely gonzo and experimental, and stories that are more or less traditional. Most have included fantastic or speculative elements–but not all of them. What the stories HAVE shared is an attentiveness to the way that language shapes the reading experience–whatever the parameters of that experience might be. If you have a story that has just been too weird or off-kilter for other magazines, we just might like to see it.

Payment: $20 (on publication) for first North American serial rights.The issue will debut at Wiscon 31, May 2007, so expect to hear about your submission some time in the winter/early spring.

How to send the stories: Please send a story in Rich Text Format (RTF)to: rabidtransit@gmail.com. Please include in the subject line of youremail your full name and the title of the story.

Please email rabidtransit@gmail.com if you have any questions!

Jenny Diski

2006-10-11T10:29:00.001-04:00

Jenny Diski is so smart and honest. I only found her blog recently. Her most recent entry is about awards in publishing, and publishing practices in general. Not fun for writers to read, I think. But good to read nonetheless. Even if only in a sort of bucket of cold water over the head sort of way.

Anticipation

2006-10-11T01:29:00.000-04:00

I read Christopher Priest's novel, "The Prestige" ages ago, it seems. I'm so excited to see the movie version of it. I hope they do it justice. I like the trailers, at least, but trailers are supposed to make you want to see the film, of course.

I also heard Peter Jackson is directing "The Lovely Bones". I'm sure he'll do a great job. Apparently he's writing the script too. I hope he changes the way Suzie Salmon disposes of her murderer, which was just too easy and convenient in the book, in my opinion.

Farewell

2006-10-07T18:09:00.000-04:00

Usually October is my favorite month of the year, but this October is going to be an exception. This morning my oldest friend Ron's father died. Ron and I have been friends since we were fifteen years old. We weren't immediately the best of friends. Actually, at first, we really didn't like each other at all. For a time he and his father lived on the road where I grew up and where my family still lives and during that time we'd ride the same bus home from school. I can still remember the first day we met. He was arguing with some kids in the bus a few seats back from mine and was using all kinds of false logic and misinformation to get at a point--it was a good point, I remember, but I didn't approve of the false logic and misinformation to get at it--so I turned around in my seat and corrected him in front of all the other kids. This, I realized much later, wasn't a really nice thing to do, as he was the new kid at school, but still, he wasn't doing himself any favors by starting arguments with his new classmates. For the time that he lived in our school's district, he often got into fights with other people, mostly the type that got him suspended from school. Somehow over that period of time, though, even after our first few bitchy encounters with each other, we became friends. I came to see that anytime he fought with people, he was usually actually defending some other kid from being bullied, or standing up for some other sort of injustice. He saw at a very early age the injustices certain people who stand on the outside of the circle of normal suffer. His father was a peculiar man. He was an ex-biker who had done prison time. After they lost the house on the street where I grew up, they moved to the other side of the lake that divided our town, into a rundown trailer that didn't really look livable. There was always rusting vehicles outside of it, and inside the meanest Doberman Pincher I'd ever met, until you were introduced to her as friend, and then she was nothing but a lover. This was all a very exotic world to me. It felt full of danger and like anything could happen at any minute, and often it did. It's why Ron understood a lot of things about the world at too young an age. His father, despite his dubious background, was one of the most generous and caring men I've ever known. Ron and I have been through a rollercoaster ride over the years in our relationship, sometimes inseparable, other times not speaking to one another for various reasons. Even at the times when Ron and I have had difficult times with each other, though, his father, whom everyone called "Crusher", his old biker nickname, was always there for me, not just his son. For a while Ron and I lived together in a falling down house that made the house in the Fight Club movie look posh. There came a time when I had to go my separate way from Ron and when I left that house, I moved into my first apartment and was going to live alone--without a friend or roommate or significant other--for the first time in my life. Even though Ron and I weren't getting along at the time, his father went out and found me all the furniture I needed for my living room and showed up on my doorstep with it. He said moving out on your own for the first time is hard enough, so he thought I might need some help fixing my place up. He had a bad knee and back, but he insisted on helping me carry everything up the three flights of stairs to my old attic apartment on the North Side of Youngstown anyway. After we got the couch and chairs and coffee table and bookshelves arranged, we sat down together and talked about ordinary things. And then eventually after a silence he told me, "You and Ron are having some problems right now, but you do know that this is temporary? You two love each other, and sometimes even people who love each other have problems, but because they really care about each other it won't be forever. You two just need some time to figure yourselves out." Sometimes it was odd for me to hear things like this from a scary looking ex-biker but by then I'd had years to not only just get used to Ron's dad but come to love him like a family member, so I nodded and agreed, but mostly didn't know what to say. It was a big problem we were having, and we had a long period of time ahead of us to live through on our own without really talking to each other much. Years, really. It wasn't until I got back from Japan that, after hearing from numerous people who knew us both how much Ron missed our friendship and regretted our problems in the past, that I decided to finally go and see him during this summer. After we'd talked and apologized to each other and caught up on each other's lives, he told me that his father had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and that he didn't have much time. We thought we'd have him till around Christmas, but he wasn't able to make it that long, and that's probably a good thing because he was in a lot of pain and wasn't able to eat and had lost so much weight it hurt to look at him. With my other oldest and best friend, Regina, I drove out to the hospital last night and we were able to say goodbye to him. He was still lucid, somehow. And then this morning he was gone. I've spent most of the day with Ron and his family and am home now for a shower and a rest before I go back to Ron's dad's place to help him pack up his father's life. Before I left for Japan, Regina's father died suddenly, and now, though it wasn't sudden, Ron's. I never would have guessed years ago that the more people you love in your life also makes you susceptible to so much loss. But the older I get, the clearer that fact of living becomes. Ron's going to take his father's ashes out to Farmington, a little farm town where he grew up, and spread them in the woods he hunted in as a boy, where he had his happiest memories. I'll miss him, but right now, even though there was a long period of time when I didn't see Crusher while I was in Japan, he still feels like he's right here with us. I'm glad more than anything that, before he left us, he was able to see me again and know that what he told me years ago was true.

Over Downtown Y-town

2006-10-04T00:46:00.000-04:00

You can't take that away from me.

Walk Out

2006-10-01T12:32:00.000-04:00

Display the above image on your blog if you agree that the passage of the new Torture & Detention Without Trial BILL has seriously undermined American principles and taken us a few more steps down the road to Nazi Germany. Now the president has the ability to detain anyone without trial, without charging them with anything, and to torture them while they are in custody. You know, if we had someone in charge in this country who was intelligent and honest, this bill would still be an outrage. Consider the administration's batting average with detaining the right people -- the fact that the large majority of detainees at Abu Graib and Gitmo were never convicted of ever having done anything wrong, and things start to get a little chilly. As Ivins points out in her article -- that's 10 out of 700 at Gitmo. This is as much a cover your ass bill for future law suits against government officials as anything else. Despicable. Molly Ivins on the subject. Walk Out On the Bush Regime October 5th. And Slate on the subject.

Thanks to Jeff Ford for all the links and actually, all of the concise and quotable words above.

Autumn

2006-09-29T17:17:00.000-04:00

I'm no longer living in the country, but I went to visit my folks the other day and on the way back to Youngstown, I couldn't help stopping to take some pictures out there now that it's fall, my favorite season.

What John Says

2006-09-29T17:14:00.000-04:00

John pretty much says it all over here. I'd only add that I'm also tired of the largely indifferent masses of ordinary citizens who do have the power to change things but just don't give a damn.

Get him, Bill!

2006-09-24T14:46:00.000-04:00

Did anyone see this clip of Bill Clinton tearing up the floor with Chris Wallace on Fox News? I know Clinton's done some stupid things and made some idioticly huge political and personal mistakes, but I so did enjoy him calling out the media thugs the right wing employs.

Salon Fantastique

2006-09-23T17:20:00.000-04:00

The anthology Salon Fantastique, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, is now available to be purchased online and in bookstores. The anthology is getting great reviews, so I can't wait to read all the stories. I haven't received my contributor's copies yet (my story "The Guardian of the Egg" is included in the contents) but I can't wait to because the cover looks fantastic from what I can see. Check it out.

Home on the Range, Where the Deer...

2006-09-17T03:33:00.000-04:00

I was taken out tonight by friends to a place in the foggy noman's land of Newton Falls, Ohio where karaoke is sung on Saturday nights in a countryside bar with a mounted deerhead that sings karaoke along with the singer. Unprepared for the mounted deer to sing alongside me, my immediate response was:

Did someone put something in my drink?????

Verrrrrrry scary!

But I plan to venture out there at least once more, if only to capture the singing mounted deerhead on video.

And they say Japan is strange.

Fabulous Disintegration

2006-09-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

After talking with my friend Graham about Youngstown and what the area around here is like, he sent me this link to a really gorgeous site called "The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit". So many of these pictures could have been taken here too. And though they're portraits of the American Dream gone to rust and waste, they really are gorgeous, as I said. But I find disintegration interesting in general.

Laboring After Labor Day

2006-09-06T15:46:00.000-04:00

Despite the long weekend, I feel behind and am trying to catch up with the courses I'm teaching, my writing schedule, starting back at a new gym I finally switched to, and trying to read and spend time with friends recreationally.

Today I turned in my short story collection, "Everything You Need", to my agent. I'm also preparing the first fifty or so pages of my third novel for him to have on file too. Hopefully by week's end, I'll have that accomplished as well.

September will be spent mostly on getting used to a schedule. For the past four months I didn't have one and now I do. Gym time, school time, writing time, recreating with friends and loved ones time, reading for myself time, and sleeping and lazing about time thrown in here and there as well. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have my time in balance again.

If you haven't read it already, go to Strange Horizons and read Ben Rosenbaum's "The House Beyond Your Sky". It's really good.

First Day of School

2006-08-28T16:20:00.000-04:00

God I forgot how hard this gig actually is. In my memory, teaching composition at the university was something I could do blind-folded, and though I did in many ways slide back into my teaching demeanor, it was not a day without some nerve-wracking events.

I spent an hour printing out syllabi and course schedules before having to teach, and luckily had my friend Brooke's help in stapling everything together in time to go get some coffee and chat with her. When she asked for a copy of my Writing 2 course schedule so she could get some ideas from it, I realized I'd copied the original schedule instead of the one I revised over the weekend with heavy changes, and had to throw tons of paper into the recycle bin. Blah. Then I headed over to my first class to teach. Luckily it was not their schedule I screwed up on copying.

My first class was a Writing 1 course, which went well, and the students all seemed cool with how I explained my course would run and I told them enough about myself and how I like the classroom atmosphere to be that they could decide whether or not to drop my course and try out some other professor. First class done and things were still going well.

Then I go back to the department, print out the right schedules for my next two classes, staple most of them together until I run out of time and staples, then go down to the first floor to teach. But as I'm taking roll, I realize none of the students are on my list. I check to see if I have the wrong list and start calling names from my other Writing two class. Still no names. I check my schedule again. I'm in the right room, but an hour early. What's more confusing is the instructor who is supposed to be there isn't. I tell the students to wait for who is supposed to be teaching them, as there's always a bit of confusion on the first day, and then I hightail it over to the building I'm supposed to be in.

Luckily in that building, which is a block away, my students are all waiting in the hallway outside our classroom because the door is locked and they can't get in. Pure luck. I get someone to open it for us and start class about fifteen minutes late, but we get through everything and I like the vibe of the students in there.

Then I go back to the English department and staple the remaining schedules for the next Writing 2 class, which is down in the room I had gone to first the previous hour. I find the instructor who was supposed to be in that room waiting there now, thinking she has this class. She looks at her schedule and realizes her mistake too. She quickly packs her things and I assure her that her students will forgive her and be back on Wednesday, ready to roll. This class seems like it'll be fine too, though I saw a few faces in the classroom seem resistant or not really wanting to be there. I always address this issue in my classes because these courses are required and lots of students don't want to be there, don't want to read, don't want to write. Don't really want to be in college actually, but they think it's their magical ticket to a better life and job. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. I tell them I understand if they don't like composition courses, but there are lots of hoops in life you have to jump through, so it's better to just jump than resist. It'll be easier for everyone. I had to do it with math courses in college, at which I sucked. They liked hearing this. Making yourself human to your students is important, I think.

As I introduce my course and how it's run, during the first week I like to pretend to be a bit more formal than usual. I figure this scares away the students who want some majorly easy going teacher who will let them get away with doing nothing. They often drop the class when they think I'm a way serious fellow and I figure I'm left with the students who aren't afraid to actually do work. Unfortunately, my "way serious" act fell through in my last class as my cell phone went off, blaring Beyonce's "Crazy in Love", revealing, in fact, that I'm *not* way serious and have a Beyonce ringtone. Great. Looking forward to teaching *that* class the rest of the semester.

Hopefully Wednesday's classes will be less nerve-wracking.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful

2006-08-26T02:22:00.001-04:00

Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

2006-08-23T18:05:00.000-04:00

My contributor's copies of Jonathan Strahan's "Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005" arrived the other day, and I've just got to say it's a really eclectic, interesting selection of stories. I look forward to the Year's Best anthology he'll edit for Nightshade Books next year as well. But definitely take a look at this one if you haven't done so already.

What We Know

2006-08-22T11:41:00.000-04:00

I was informed last night that my story, "What We Know About The Lost Families of -- House" will be appearing in the Interfictions anthology, edited by Theodora Goss and Delia Sherman. I'm really excited to have made it into the table of contents for that anthology, which will appear in 2007.

Secret Thought!

2006-08-22T06:04:00.000-04:00

I love my life so much sometimes I think everyone in the world should be jealous!

2006-08-21T15:03:00.000-04:00

bush blair endless love

Again from my friend Naoko in Tokyo, another Youtube hit.

Back in Business

2006-08-14T13:36:00.000-04:00

Well, things are starting to get back into order a bit. I just got reconnected to the internet in my apartment today, and everything but the platform bed I ordered for my futon has been moved into the new place. The platform should arrive today as well, so soon the move shall finally be declared over. The one unfortunate thing about this move is that it coincided with Diversicon, so instead of riding up to Minneapolis with Gavin and Kelly, I was moving furniture and putting pots and pans into my new cupboards.

Last Friday, turned in my second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, to my agent. Now I've begun to gather a short story collection together, tentatively titling it, Everything You Need. After I've finished with that, it'll be time for university courses to start up, so I'll be busy on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays teaching in the afternoons, but I'll have lots of time to begin writing something new. I'm still up in the air about what to work on next. This summer has been all about revising novels and stories for the collection. I have several novel ideas I could choose from for the next project, or I could begin writing a memoir of my time spent living and teaching in Japan. I think I'll wait till after I'm done with all the revising of things before I commit myself to whatever I move on to next. Something, perhaps none of the ideas I already have, will eventually assert itself as the next thing. It always does.

I'm catching up finally on emails also, so if I owe anyone a reply, it will be coming soon, I assure you.

Busy August

2006-08-06T22:49:00.000-04:00

Right now = busy. I've finally found an apartment, a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful apartment in possibly the best location I've ever had when living in an apartment ever. I'm just beginning to move things from my folks' place out in the country into Youngstown now, so I'm going to be majorly busy this entire week, and then this entire month, because I need to go to the university and look through textbooks I can choose to use in my classes and decide what exactly I'm going to have my students read and discuss this fall semester. So lots of work to do to prepare for teaching again as well. It's been a while since I taught college, a couple of years, so I really need to get ready to do that again, as it's a different thing altogether from teaching English in Japanese elementary and junior high schools. In some ways, I feel all I had to do to make teaching English as a second language easy was to learn Japanese. But to make teaching college English easy for me, I need to prepare and organize even more, it feels. I have no idea why I would think it's easier to learn another language than organize English classes for college students who are mostly all native speakers, but for some reason I do think just that.

Anyway, I'll have spotty internet access until I can have it hooked up in my new apartment, so if I'm slow to respond to emails, please be patient and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

My Ohio

2006-07-30T07:58:00.000-04:00

Readercon

2006-07-28T01:01:00.000-04:00

Belated but no longer non-existent: pics from my trip to Readercon.

At a silly rainforest-simulated cafe in a mall, where a mutant frog sneaks up behind me.

Also at the rainforest cafe, Alan Deniro and an angry alligator. Now they're turning up in malls in Massachusetts, I see.

Unsuspecting Kristin Livdahl and Matt Cheney before the giant snake coiled about them a moment later.

Lauren McLaughlin is not fooled by someone professing they are not mafia.

Matt Cheney, apparently frightened by the possibility of being surrounded by mafia members.

Rick Bowes and Jeff Ford, telling stories in the bar as usual.

Streetcar Dreams

2006-07-27T15:42:00.000-04:00

Lots of really great short story collections are being released this year, but one you should take time to get a copy of and read is Streetcar Dreams, by Richard Bowes. This collection has some of the best contemporary fantasy and horror stories I've read in years inside its pages. Rick Bowes writes stories that are at once totally gritty realism and out and out fantastical in nature. It's a harder blend of two different styles of writing to merge than it seems sometimes, but I don't think anyone does it quite so well as Rick does. So check out this collection. It'll be well worth your time and money.

I am so sorry...

2006-07-22T23:15:00.000-04:00

...for running behind on emails, packages, and other things I am behind on this week. I've been searching for an apartment, getting lesson plans ready for a fall syllabus, writing, working out, celebrating best friend's birthday this past Monday, celebrated my own last night, and babysitting niece and nephew here and there as well. I'm going to try and catch up with email this week. Till then, thank you all who wished me happy birthday or sent gifts. I had a great day with friends Regina, Mario, Brooke, Angela and Dan, drinking a variety of martinis at Imbibe, the very cool martini bar in downtown Youngstown with the bestest bartenders Chris and Carolyn, and then playing pool badly and dancing at Utopia afterwards. Too. Much. Fun. Tomorrow I'm seeing Lady in the Water with a friend. I'm hoping that the Washington Post review is the correct one. Again, I'll be in touch as soon as I can!

More of New York

2006-07-15T10:40:00.000-04:00

Trying to catch up from my week in New York and at Readercon, which was a wonderful week indeed. While in New York I found a most amazing Japanese izakaya (traditional pub) where I was able to enjoy chu-hai and shochu and sake as well as all my old favorite Japanese foods as well. All of the staff were from various parts of Japan and it was so good to hear the woman who seated people call out to the other servers, "ni nin me sama!" Two honorable guests! And for the cooks and servers to call out thank you in Japanese as we left. For friends in Japan who may not believe a real izakaya can exist outside of Japan, I've taken pictures to prove it! It was the real deal!

I also took some pictures of a couple of my favorite places in New York, Times Square and Washington Square Park:

More pictures to come from Readercon. That's all for today. I have a date with the second and third episode of Tipping the Velvet, which is proving to be as exciting and racy as the novel. I already know what happens but can't wait to see it actually played out. I wish I could write big, thrilling, lesbian historicals like Sarah Waters!

Twenty Epics

2006-07-12T20:09:00.000-04:00

Twenty Epics, an anthology of short stories attempting to capture the essence of epic narrative in as few words as possible, has finally been released! I've been waiting for this anthology to be available for a long time. My story, "The Creation of Birds" appears in its pages, which are really beautifully edited by David Moles and Susan Groppi, and graced with the wonderful cover art of Lara Wells.

To celebrate the release of the anthology, many of the writers who have stories in it are blogging and journaling about the book, as well as the stories we wrote for it. As for my story, I wrote "The Creation of Birds" around the time I was twenty-five years old. It's part of a triptych of stories inspired by women painters who had been part of the surrealist movement in the early half of the twentieth century. (The second story in the tiptrych will be published in the anthology Salon Fantastique this September). This particular story is inspired by the art of Remedios Varo.

Twenty Epics is full of so many different kinds of takes on the epic story that, if you purchase it, it's nearly impossible to be disappointed by the book because of its varied themes and settings and styles. Well worth your while. So by all means, get yourself a copy and enjoy twenty epics told in under ten thousand words each. If you do happen to read it, please leave a review of the book at Amazon and/or David Moles' journal and tell us what you think!

In New York

2006-07-04T11:53:00.001-04:00

First night, the most wonderful Indian food I've had in years. Then Amy Sedaris' new movie "Strangers With Candy". It was either this or Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". I bit my nails, deciding, because I felt I *should* go see the documentary. But I was tired from traveling and decided the Sedaris movie would be better at that moment. Which turned out to be a great choice. That movie is soooo funny. I haven't laughed till my stomach hurt in the movie theater for a while.

There is Japanese written in so many places in New York. From restaurants with signs in their windows in Japanese saying they're hiring waiters and waitresses, to buildings where Japanese residents must live because there are reminders in Japanese on the doors for them to lock the place up as they leave. If I lived here, I could still use what I learned in Japan almost every day.

Happy Fourth of July. Now on to lunch...

2006-06-29T03:28:00.000-04:00

Hime (?) - Ukina [PV]

There's a subgroup of younger people in Japan who have adopted rap and hip hop personas to their identity. Hime is an interesting example, though she doesn't seem to have gone as far as some in adopting hip hop culture. There are some kids, mostly girls, who tan and tan until they look as dark as possible and call themselves kokujin, black people. There's a character in my second novel that is one of them. I can see her very easily attending one of Hime's concerts.

I actually can understand her rap better than a lot of male rappers for some reason.

2006-06-29T03:23:00.000-04:00

NITRO MICROPHONE UNDERGROUND - ????

The Nitro Microphone Underground was the first Japanese rap group I ever heard. My Japanese friends who speak English say they can't understand English in rap songs, and I can only pick out phrases here and there in Japanese rap, too, so it's a mutual gap, I guess.

2006-06-29T03:17:00.000-04:00

Shimajiro Toilet Training

And then I go from all that reading of books and sharing of thoughts to finding this Japanese toilet training video online and laughing until my stomach hurt.

A Book Report

2006-06-28T22:51:00.000-04:00

I have been having a bit of a reading fest since returning home. Well I've been reading a lot more than I usually had time to do for the past couple of years. A full time job teaching, along with learning another language and writing a novel and some short stories along the way, as well as taking trips to Thailand and other various places in Japan and also just regular recreational time with friends gave me a really full schedule, so I was reduced to reading maybe a book a month when I lived overseas. But in the past two months I've read five books! I feel like I'm in heaven, having read so many. Five books in two months!! Incredible! I used to read a book or two a week at one time in my life, but I really did nothing but read and write and study at that time. I have other things to do now, but I'm still going to try to work myself back up to fitting four books into my monthly readings.

All of these books were really good for varying reasons. First up, I loved Hal Duncan's "Vellum", and was thrilled to find an SF book with credible gay male characters in it that live and breathe and love and have sex and are--well, gasp!-- human! And who figure into the actual plot importantly! I'm psyched to read the sequel, Ink.

Francesca Lia Block's "Necklace of Kisses" was a very pretty book, though it felt slighter than her previous Weetzie Bat books, and though I love Blocks' prose and details, her poetic imagery and her genius for describing things in the realm of the senses, I do feel like her all grown-up Weetzie was a bit of a passive character, not doing much of anything for herself to earn her happy ending. Most of the time she sat in a ritzy hotel and ate Japanese food and allowed other people to compliment her and make her feel better about her middle aged self. It's true, as Holly Black brought up in conversation at Wiscon, that Weetzie has always been a character who loves everyone she comes into contact with, so it would feel good for her to be reciprocated this unconditional love as well, but narratively this reciprocation had no tension. I still liked the writing though.

Theodora Goss' collection, "In the Forest of Forgetting" was full of beautiful prose as well, and beautiful stories. It's always a pleasure to read Dora's writing. This book in particular was a treat as I hadn't had a chance to read any of the stories that repetitively feature a character known as Miss Grey, a witch who intervenes in the lives of central characters and attempts to aid them in some way. I would love to see a full length Miss Grey novel. I really liked that character quite a bit.

Reading Alan Deniro's collection "Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead" was more of a re-reading for me because I'd read all but one of the stories either as a critiquer for Alan sometime in the past, or when they first appeared in a journal or magazine or anthology. I really love Alan's stories because no one in the world writes like him or could, and there's an authentic original sort of thinking being done in his stories. He never takes easy ways out of narrative problems, and I admire his fiction for its depth and breadth. I can't wait to read his new novel, which I hope sells to some lucky publisher soon.

Justina Robson's "Living Next Door to the God of Love" made me absolutely jealous. It's the sort of book I wish I could write. It's the sort of book I had to sit up with late at night and read and read and read until I finished. I ran through this book so fast that when I was done with it I couldn't believe it was over. It's a big book too! Around 450 pages, I believe, and if anyone knows my readerly tics, one is that I'm suspicious of novels that grow beyond four hundred pages. I have less of a suspicion about that now that I've written two novels and know that even the space of a novel sometimes feels limited, but it's a tic of mine that exists nonetheless. In any case, this is a far future novel of ideas, and I do mean Ideas, with a big I, because it really does have a narrative tjat explores the philosophy of Eros in our lives, not just in the far future, that is rigorous and honest and uncomfortable, which is to say, full of truth. What was even better about this book is that it was told with such clarity and with characters so compelling and real that I disappeared into it the way I did as a teenager while reading a book, trying to find a place for myself in its pages. I cannot recommend this book enough, and am about to go seek out Justina Robson's previous novels and look forward to her new series of novels that are beginning to be published first in England before hopefully making their way into print here in the States as well.

That's it for me. Book report over.

Still and still and still...

2006-06-27T03:04:00.000-04:00

I don't know why it's taken so long for the Boston Globe to talk about the disappearing of thousands and thousands and thousands of votes in the 2004 election, but apparently now they find it worthwhile to call for an investigation of the election. If the media in our country had any notion of honesty, this would have been something they all called for immediately after it was reported that a couple hundred thousand people in Ohio were blocked from voting or disqualified for no apparent reason. Not to mention the faulty voting machine strategically placed in particular areas of this state. I'd like to hope that more op-eds and other voices like it could shake Americans out of their affectlessness, but I think it's going to take something much bigger than words to change the hearts of our culture. At this point, it will most likely have to be something tragic on a stellar scale. And even then I'm sure the avaricious creatures that run our country at this point, both in the government and the media, will find a way to turn it to their own advantage. They have that history.

Link found at the Kool Aid Underground.

First Review

2006-06-25T03:03:00.000-04:00

The new Rabid Transit has got a great review by E. Sedia at Tangent Online. Read it and then if you still haven't ordered it (or our past issues) go here and get one.

2006-06-20T13:06:00.000-04:00

Infra-red

Mmm, Placebo's new album is lovely. Brian Molko's short hair is cute, but I sort of miss his long girly hair.

2006-06-20T12:37:00.000-04:00

English Lesson 0 Matrix in Japanese accent

My friend Naoko just sent me this. It's had me laughing all morning. Aah, brings back memories.

2006-06-20T12:19:00.000-04:00

utada hikaru this is love

My friend Tadashi let me know Utada Hikaru's new Japanese album just came out. I'm sooo excited to hear all of the songs on it. This is the lead song on "Ultra Blue" the new cd. This is true blue J-Pop. I love it!

If you meant to but forgot...

2006-06-18T22:32:00.000-04:00

The 2006 edition of Rabid Transit has been published and debuted at Wiscon last month. It's a really amazing collection of stories we gathered this year, and I hope you'll take a look at it. You can order it here. Or, if you've never experienced reading the Ratbastard chapbooks before, you can order all of them at a cheaper price than it is to order individual issues. Give them a try. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Also I've been meaning to get the word out that the new issue of Flytrap is out as well, also debuting at Wiscon last month. It has a great cover photo that Heather Shaw took on her and Tim Pratt's honeymoon in Hawaii, and is full of really good stories from Haddayr Copley-Woods, Barth Anderson, Meghan McCarron, Ruth Nestvold, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and David Ira Cleary. My story, "Learning to Leave" is also in this issue. Erin Donahoe is the featured poet, and there are nonfiction samplings by Nick Mamatas and Erin as well. You can buy a copy of it here.

Lots of good stuff is out there right now. Go get it!

Two more from around town

2006-06-18T03:46:00.000-04:00

A close up of my favorite house in town...

and the little farm across the road from it.

So True

2006-06-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

Find your own pose!

Yes, I've been reduced to taking silly internet quizzes. Other than that, I've been writing and working out and karaokeing (Tuesday nights!) and reading a lot (thank you, English language publishers) and thinking about the next book (or two or three) that I'd like to write after I'm finished making the second novel I wrote in Japan ready for submission to publishers and getting ready to visit New York and Boston the first week of July (if you'll be there between the 3rd and the 10th, give me an email, maybe we can have lunch or go to karaoke or something) and occasionally shopping, being hard sold skin care products by overly flirtatious Italians named Giovanni and Moriah in the mall (totally scary and sexy at the same time).

Other than these things, mostly I've been thinking about Japan, how quickly it's become a far place in my life, which makes me sad. People always ask me how the culture shock of returning home is, and often I don't know how to answer. I expected to come home and find many things changed in two years, and that I'd have to do a lot to catch up with the life I'd left behind here, but not much has changed, and I feel like I've slipped into something of a routine here already. And culture shock doesn't seem like the right word to use, now that I'm back. Culture daze feels more appropriate. Everything feels familiar but just a little strange at the same time. I have a hard time not referring to Japan or things Japanese during conversations, which annoys me so it must annoy other people, but at the same time, that's been my life for the past couple of years and all of my reference points are going to lead back to that life until enough of one is made here again.

There's a part of me constantly wandering back to Japan though. I make myself remember as much as I can sometimes, recalling my daily life there, the faces of my coworkers and students and friends, the smell of my favorite restaurants and the flowers that bloom in the spring in summer there, I have conversations with myself in Japanese and watch Japanese movies and listen to Japanese music, I recall conversations I had there, climbing Mt. Fuji with Katie during a Typhoon, taking the bullet train to see Tadashi in Nagoya, the view from Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, Jody's house out in the countryside where I spent my last month, being hit by the semi truck inside a mountain tunnel after getting my driver's license finally, running with the track team after school and Ryu drawing the kanji for friend in the dirt for me. I feel like a piece of myself is missing. Or maybe it's a piece of myself that doesn't feel at home here in a different way than I've ever felt before, because the home it's longing for is thousands of miles away.

2006-06-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

Utada Hikaru - Dareka

I lied. One more video. This is Utada Hikaru's "Dareka no Negai ga Kanua Goro" which means "When Someone's Wish Comes True" which sounds sort of Disney-ish, but it's really a sad song, the title is only the first of half of the whole lyric, which continues on to say, "someone else will be crying," because not everyone's wish can come true at the same time. I used to listen to Utada's music a lot when I was first learning Japanese, because she sings really clearly and sometimes her lyrics are simpler and so it was encouraging to listen to her and begin understanding songs in Japanese. She's mostly a balladic type love song singer, with lots of pop thrown in as well, but I still have a soft spot for her. But I don't like her English language music. She loses something special, not because she's not a good singer in English, but because her songs just have a feeling of sameness and poppiness that isn't very original. Her lyrics in Japanese are at least really sincere and can at times be really emotionally raw.

2006-06-12T23:27:00.000-04:00

The Brilliant Green - Ai No Ai No Hoshi

The last video I'll post tonight. Youtube.com is wonderful. This is the Brilliant Green's "Ai No Ai No Hoshi", which means, "Planet of Love" or my preference for translation's sake, "The Star of Love". I love the lead singer, Tommy. She also sings beautifully in English.

2006-06-12T23:23:00.000-04:00

clammbon - kimi ha boku no mono

One of my other favorite Japanese groups--Clammbon. This one is called "Kimi wa Boku no Mono" which means "You're mine".

It's so good to hear Japanese, even if it's only in music or movies, right now.

2006-06-12T22:45:00.000-04:00

Asian Kung-Fu Generation - ?????

If you haven't listened to the Asian Kung Fu Generation before, watch this video. I love this song. It's called "Kimi to iu Hana" which means "A Flower Called You". Actually a literal translation might be "A Flower Named You" but I prefer "called" in this case.

I miss Japanese karaoke. I was learning this song when I left. If I find the Asian Kung Fu song that was part of my Japanese repetoire, I'll post it.

Oh, and if you do watch this video, watch till at least a little halfway through, as there is the cutest scene with the small dancer and the band members on the narrow pier. I love it.

Coming Home

2006-06-04T16:11:00.000-04:00

Since the pages of this journal have been dedicated for so long to my time living in Japan, I have been a bit at a loss for what to put here since returning home. I don't feel much like writing about how it feels to be home again, actually; my emotions are disjointed, my impressions foggy. I don't feel so much re-entry culture shock so much as culture haze. Too much is familiar, and the most disappointing thing is that not enough has changed. So instead of writing about that, I've decided to occasionally journal about the America to which I've returned home, the same way I'd been journaling my time in Japan. It seems only fair that my friends in Japan and abroad (and hey, even any Americans reading this) see where I'm living and what I'm doing and who I'm hanging out with here in the States. My culture is as rich and strange as Japan's. Sometimes I think we Americans forget to look around at our own oddities.

So for this first entry, I give you some pictures of where I'm living, the roads I'm driving, and a couple of the first friends and loved pets I saw upon my return.

Coming home from Niles, the nearest sort of city, more of a suburb really, like where I was living in Japan, this is the road that leads home for me once the housing developments and malls and superstores disappear and the farmland begins to take over.

On either side of the road, fields and more fields, and my favorite farmhouse in the distance, behind the line of trees in the first photo. There's beautiful garden up there, with a rose trellis, and benches to sit under. A big family lived there when I was a kid, and I used to want to live there. I've always developed crushes on big families for some reason; I suppose perhaps it's because my own brothers and I are far apart in years; by the time I was even in fifth grade my oldest brother was already moved out and living on his own. I always wanted a big rollicking family in a big rollicking house, where we all fought but got over it and loved each other intensely. Those families seemed like they had it made.

A corner of my uncle and aunt's place at the other end of the road where my mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and brothers and their families and now I, too, live.

My friend Brooke

My Cat Hobbes (and his bear)

Wiscon Photos

2006-06-02T04:27:00.000-04:00

I'm still too tired to write a con report, but I did get a Flicker account and upload my photos, which you can view here. Perhaps an actual con report will come soon. Puh-leeze forgive my laziness. I am trying to get back into my normal writing and working out routine. On top of this, my horrid laptop is once again in the shop. I want to just break down because I've only been able to use it maybe three days since I've come back from Japan. I'm about to go out and buy me an Ibook and say to hell with the old one, which should still have years of life left in it. So mad making. Arrgh. Anyway, photos, enjoy.

Where is the Love? It's at Wiscon, is Where.

2006-05-30T18:05:00.000-04:00

I am home. I am so happy. Wiscon was a total blast. I miss you guys already. I want to do it again real soon (okay not as much drinking, though that was fun too!) and so many good books and so many good karaoke performances, and and and. But the best part of all was seeing all of my dear friends for the first time in two years again, and meeting and making new ones, and I have some great pictures, but I'm not going to download and upload and put them on here just yet, because I have a certain someone I've been missing for the past week that I need to visit. So if you are not adept at reading between the lines, I will be away and not posting a con report and pictures for like, you know, a couple of days. Muah, all my love.

Off to Wisconsin

2006-05-24T03:40:00.000-04:00

I'm off to Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow evening for the next six days. I can't wait to see all of my friends. It's been two years this month since I saw most of them. I may just possibly spontaneously combust after running into three or four of them. Remember if you're going to Wiscon this weekend to hit the Ratbastard's Karaoke and Dance Party Extravaganza, which is going to be rocking. I'm on a panel called "Death of the Panel" too. And on Sunday myself, Theodora Goss, Alan Deniro and M. Rickert will give a reading of our work together, themed: Strange Journeys. I'll be reading something from my second novel, set in Japan. Hope to see you all there.

Rabid Transit

2006-05-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

The newest edition of Rabid Transit, which Kristin Livdahl so lovingly designed again this year, has been sent to the printers. I'm really excited about this year's group of stories that Alan and Kristin and I selected. They are wild, weird, and wonderful. I hope everyone who buys this year's book loves them as much as we did.

Dead Boy Found in Japanese

2006-05-15T21:28:00.000-04:00

My adopted mother in Sapporo sent me this picture today. It's of the page where my story "Dead Boy Found" begins in the new issue of Hayakawa SF. She also sent a picture of the cover of the magazine too, and it seems like it's a YA oriented issue, including stories by Tim Pratt, Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link as well. I can't wait to hold the issue in my hands and read something I wrote in Japanese for the first time.

Hot Pink Is My Power Color. Tell Me Something I Didn't Already Know.

2006-05-11T23:53:00.000-04:00

Your Birthdate: July 21

You're a restless rebel with an unpredictable nature.
Bright but unbridled, you tend to seek out wild experiences over new ideas.
People are frustrated by your great potential, but you love your unconventional life.
You're a heartbreaker. People get attached to you, and then you're gone.

Your strength: Your thirst for adventure

Your weakness: Not taking time for slow pleasures

Your power color: Hot pink

Your power symbol: Figure eight

Your power month: March

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Nebulas

2006-05-07T13:05:00.000-04:00

Nebula winners have been announced. Congratulations all around. It was a particularly special ceremony as Kelly Link won *two* awards, Best Short Story and Best Novelette. There was some fear she wouldn't make it to the ceremony, but you can see from this photo that she was able to get there in time after quickly finishing her spot in the latest Mary J. Blige video.

Sorry, Kelly, couldn't resist. That jacket is SWANK, baby, SWANK!

(Picture borrowed from Locus)

This Week

2006-05-06T18:58:00.000-04:00

Wednesday night I went with Brooke to a Japanese restaurant that opened while I was away in Japan. I was skeptical, but once I saw the menu and after I tasted the sushi, I was a believer. Good Japanese can actually be had in Youngstown. Who knew? And not only do they make sushi, but katsudon bowls and tonkatsu and lots of other stuff that became my favorite foods in Japan. I will probably keep that restaurant in business all by myself.

Friday was surprise visited by Ben Rosenbaum and family, who were en route to a relative's birthday party in Cleveland. Was nice to catch up a bit and see how big the kids have got in such a short time. Later I went out to Cancun, my favorite Mexican restaurant, with Angela and her friend Mandy. Had wonderful margaritas and afterwards went dancing at the club where George, another old grad school friend, is now DJing.

The mystery gift giver was revealed to be my editor Juliet, who was thoughtful and sweet and knew of my Totoro addiction so sent it to me to welcome me home and welcome me to Bantam. The company forgot to put her message in the box. But luckily they didn't forget the music box!

My laptop is in Texas being fixed. I probably won't have it for another week or so. All of my Miyazaki films were downloaded onto its hard drive. I'm fiending to watch them, so I am probably going to go to the store in a few minutes and throw down some cash to get my fix.

Somehow phrases like "throw down some cash" and "get my fix" and "fiending" have already started to work their way back into my vocabulary, which changed to some extent while in Japan. Whenever I taught or tutored or spoke with a Japanese friend who was learning English, I would try not to use slang or metaphorical language (unless they were at a level where they had learned a bunch already, or had spent time overseas and learned a lot of this type of language, etc.) and I noticed it happening while I was there and wondered if I would stop using these sorts of expressions in general, lose the sense of them and the playfulness and invention of talking in metaphor or slang, but apparently after only a couple of weeks immersed in English again with no one to speak Japanese with, they are returning to my vocabulary quickly. This is fine, but I do worry about losing what Japanese I learned, too. Now I stand in line at the bank and translate what the bank teller is saying to her customer into Japanese, or what Oprah is saying to her audience while I'm running at the gym. This is really strange and distancing though. I'd rather have an actual conversation partner instead of changing other people's words into Japanese without them knowing.

Some days I feel like I never left the states and that my time in Japan was a dream I had, because so many things here seem to have stayed the same. This is a terrible feeling. Hopefully it won't continue to occur very often. I know dream is just the underside of memory, or vice versa, but I prefer my time in Japan to feel like memories, not dreams.

Mystery Gift

2006-05-04T12:04:00.000-04:00

Someone has sent me the coolest Totoro and Catbus musicbox, but the packaged arrived without a note to let me know who it's from. It came from Japan, and was sent by a company called J-List, which has all the coolest Japanese imports a person could want. I know of one or two other people who use this service and am wondering if it was sent by one of them, but it may not be one of them, so if you are the mystery gift giver, email me so I can adequately shower you with love, because it's wonderful, and I love it.

Welcome Back

2006-05-02T19:39:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, I went to the Oakland Theatre in Youngstown to see my friends Brooke and Elissa, who I went to graduate school with. They are two great ladies who I missed a whole bunch while I was in Japan. The reason why we went to the Oakland Theatre was because the theatre was holding a fundraiser, and Brooke is an actress (among many other things) and often acts at the Oakland, and was compelled by the directors to be there selling raffle tickets and also to help be the sound engineer for the fundraiser show. The fundraiser show was a drag queen show. As Brooke said that night, there's really no other way to be welcomed back to Youngstown than with drag queens.

The show was quite funny. I'd seen most of the queens years ago when I lived in Youngstown, so it was both fun to see them perform again, and also a bit unnerving. Like so many other things, I've noticed that not too many things have changed here in the past two years. For a lot of people, I think the unchanging quality of this area of the states is comforting. But for me, a life without change is equal to living death, zombification. My mother and father are fond of routines. I find routines are useful only for things that need to be done on a mostly daily or weekly basis. Everything else should be changeable. In any case, the drag show *was* a lot of fun, even if there was a bit of strangeness to see the same queens I'd seen years ago still performing. At least they do good performances.

Afterwards the audience members could meet the queens in a lounge and take pictures and talk with them, etc. As much as it was a fundraiser for the theatre, it was also aimed at educating the audience about drag queens and topics related to drag queens. Elissa and I had to wait for Brooke near the lounge because she still had many duties to do before she could leave, and at one point while we were waiting, someone shouted, "Make way for the queens!" and then the queens filed out of the changing rooms through the hall where Elissa and I waited. One of them stopped mid-walk as she passed me, put her hand on my chest and said, "Oh my, where did *you* come from?" She then also said a few more sentences that are a bit too embarrassing to write here, mostly about how sexy she found me, so I will leave that to your imagination. Drag queens are notoriously sharp-witted, and this particular queen definitely had the gift of flirting, though it was *really* forward. So forward, in fact, that I literally wilted at her comments about me and most likely turned red and laughed with embarrassment because I didn't know what to say back.

This is the real dilemma. Two years ago, I would have had a snappy comeback that would have made that drag queen take two steps back, both impressed and weary, but now I find myself hiding my mouth with my hand and giggling because I'm so embarrassed. Somehow my inner diva has been replaced with a delicate Japanese flower. My worry: how will I flourish in this brash American soil?!

And though brash as it was, it *was* a fitting welcome back to not just Youngstown, but America. I mean, really! Foul-mouthed drag queens! You don't run across that in Japan very often.

Two Good Things

2006-05-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

Today I heard Neko Case's album "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" for the first time and had an immediate sense of calm and centering, like a cone of light had switched on and seperated me from the hustle and bustle of the store I was standing in. And Neko's music is something you can't get anywhere but here in the states, so this was good to hear and be reminded of things here I love too.

The second good thing of the day was reading the first issue of the new literary journal, A Public Space, which has a new story by the lovely Kelly Link in it, and also a section of interviews with Japanese writers and translators talking about America and Japan, comparing and contrasting. The interviews were so insightful. Go read this journal! It's wonderful! And it was nice to have some reading material that bridged my two homes.

I'm still really behind with emails, though. Sorry!