Quarterly #4 is out (finally)

I finally managed the long-delayed publication of the M-Brane SF Quarterly #4, compiling in print form the fiction from the last of the electronic issues of M-Brane SF. It's a really nice book with a lot of interesting entries from a lot of really fine creators. It's up now on Amazon and should appear shortly on B&N, and it marks the conclusion of the zine's regular operations. Details still to come on future projects for M-Brane Press.

Speaking of B&N, I just noticed that a number of back-issues of the zine have materialized there as Nook ebooks, which struck me as quite odd since I had never created Nook versions of them. But evidently some of the print versions that I made available from Lulu back in the day were converted by Lulu. I vaguely recall being aware of them doing this some time ago and not responding one way or another on whether I wanted this done. I guess it explains why I still periodically receive very tiny little royalty payments from Lulu even though I haven't used their print-on-demand service for M-Brane projects in a very long time. I have no idea what these issues might look like or behave like in Nook form, but they are there.

Hopefully nobody would mind too much if I returned to this site periodically to just point out things or issue updates on stuff that is interesting or stuff that I am reading, like I used to do back in the day. In recent times, I have felt kind of isolated because I have so busy with my work life, and I miss saying stuff here and in my Live Journal. But things are calming down a bit at work, and I have no regular publication deadlines for a while, and I am doing a little bit of writing again, so I think I'd feel more "normal" if I posted stuff once in a while. So I'll try to do that more often.

New office, new color

Today Jeff and I repainted the room of our new home that I call alternately my office or my library, and which is the new M-Brane SF "World Headquarters." Previously it was, like most rooms in the place, a weird blueish gray that seemed to suck away all light and life. Gradually, Jeff has removed this color from the entire place, and today I assisted him with this room. It's a smaller room than the office in the old place, so all the book shelves don't fit into it, but there was plenty of room elsewhere in the place for some of them, and I think it's quite agreeably appointed and cozy now. These pics, taken a few minutes ago, show off my new room's lovely reddish glow:

I guess that's all I have to report right now!

Move completed; New story published!

I'll indulge in some bragging about the appearance of my short story "I Will Come Home"  in this month's issue of Crossed Genres. My pride in this publication comes not from satisfaction with my own work, but from the fact that Crossed Genres is such a fine publication and the fact that I appear alongside such talented people. As I have mentioned here before, I rarely finish any fiction and haven't gone so far as to submit any for a long time until this story, so it feels great to be back at it.

In other news: Jeff and I successfully completed our move to St. Louis Thursday afternoon. TV and internet was blessedly restored to us yesterday evening, and we are very happy with the new place. We do still, however, have a great deal of unpacking and setting up to do. This image will give you an idea of the current condition of the new M-Brane SF office.

J's dad

[The following post is of a personal nature, and therefore one that might normally appear instead on my Region Between page on Live Journal, but I think more people happen to look at this site and the topic is very important to Jeff and me.]

Ten years ago today Jeff’s father, Hal Lund, passed away suddenly from a brain aneurysm. Though I did know Jeff at the time, we weren’t quite yet a couple, so I hadn’t met his parents and therefore never had the chance to meet his father. His legacy, however, is with us all the time both in the essence of Jeff’s own character and talent and in the beautiful artwork that Hal left with his family.

Hal Lund had a very successful career as a commercial artist, but he was also an inspired fine artist who created a fantastic array of portraiture, still life, illustration, and other works in many media including oils, pastels, pen and ink, and acrylic. We are fortunate to have displayed in our home a number of his pieces, a couple of which we took pictures to show here.

This romantic oil painting hangs above the mantel in our living room. It has always been the centerpiece of every living room in which we have lived in our time together. I usually refer to it affectionately as “The Lion” because I used to see, under certain lighting conditions, the vague impression of a boy cradling a stuffed lion toy (but that’s not what it is, of course). The fruit still life below is the one that we sometimes call “The Funny Face,” because if you look at it the right way those apples seem like eyes sitting above a mischievous smile.  We have frequently joked that perhaps all of Hal’s paintings might contain subliminal images. Further evidence is found in a gorgeous painting hanging in the home of Jeff’s mom Karen. I wish I could show that one here. It’s an image of a woman in a long black dress with white cuffs. In the background is a bed with a large headboard, and window with a dead tree outside, and the only intense color in it is a colorful checkerboard quilt on the bed. Jeff says that he always saw embedded within the headboard the faint image of either a “gnome” or a “hippy.” Of course he pointed out that imagined image to me and now, when we are at Karen’s house, that’s what I see, too. It’s spectacular.

Jeff says that, as a child, he would sit quietly for hours watching his dad at work, drawing storyboards and painting pictures, his dad never complaining about it or sending him out of the room. Given Jeff’s serene demeanor as an adult and his quietly burning creative flame, I can easily imagine it.

[The images below are highlights from the pics above showing more clearly the "Lion" and the "Funny Face."]

The importance of one's workspace

[UPDATE: I've added a sequel to this post over at The Region Between. Also Luke Burrage has a new post about this same subject matter on his blog today. But read this one first.]

I found a link by way of Enter the Octopus to this Where I Write page from photographer Kyle Cassidy, which contains photos of writers in their workspaces. (You'll need to click that link and go there to understand most of this post.) One of my favorites of the set (copied here) is of Samuel Delany in his writing space. The small room in what looks to be an old building, piled high with stuffed bookshelves and a window by the desk really appeals to me. Also I like the paint colors. The green is very similar to the wall color of my kitchen, while the orange is the same as the color in my dining room. It's bit disheveled for my comfort level, and I'd love to straighten or put away those heaps of paper, but what a nice little room.

Others I like include Elizabeth Hull's room with the free-standing bookshelves, though that desk needs to be seriously tidied up. If I were to let mine get like that, I would become even more mentally unbalanced than I normally am (but J would make me clean it up long before it got that messy anyway). Swanwick and Datlow have nice rooms and, in both cases, they strike me as exactly the sort of spaces that I would picture them being in if I had never seen these pics. And check out the image of Fred Pohl. The room he is in is perhaps nothing too special, but look closely at the man himself. There's so much story in that face. It's a great photograph of a great figure of the sf genre.

But, of course, different people do differently in different spaces. Personally, I think Piers Anthony's room is tragic. It looks like he just moved in (though years ago) and never really unpacked or got set up. If J went into that room, he would immediately pull down and throw into the trash those vertical blinds. "And why's all this junk on the floor!" he would say. It's a neat pic of the author, though, despite the aesthetic problems that plague the space. Similarly, Harry Harrison's space is not the most attractive. It's a bit too spare and unlived-in like Anthony's, though it's tidier. And, again, a great image of the man himself. One room that's not quite to my taste but is well done is Ben Bova's. It's not really the way I'd want a workspace to look, but it's orderly. There's a lot of stuff in it, but it's not messy. Stacks are neat. It looks like he would know completely what is in that room and where to find it.

Some of you have seen little bits and pieces of my own workspace in images of me that have shown up here and there over the months. Considering how modest our home is (it's a somewhat smallish first floor of an old two-family house in one of OKC's few attractive neighborhoods), and how much I would like to move to another home in a different city someday soon, I very much like the room that I call the "library," and which would have just been a second bedroom in a more conventional family relationship. It's sunny most of the time, with a south-facing window. It has big, lovely houseplants in it (thanks, J!), and a lot of books. When we painted the place (we did every inch of every room because the existing scheme was uber-fugly), I chose a rather intense blue wall color (because I like it and also because we had already used yellow, red, green and orange elsewhere). Later, I heard that blue is supposedly a good color for a "creative" work space. Maybe there's something to it: we were living here for five months already before we had the money to buy paint, and I did no creative work to speak of. Since then, since the advent of the blue walls, I've done a lot of personal writing and founded M-Brane.

Secondary blog: THE REGION BETWEEN

I have commenced a second blog over on my previously-unused Live Journal page. It's purpose, as explained there, is basically to be a catch-all for stuff that I feel like I need to talk about but which may be off-topic for this page. I am calling it "The Region Between" (after the Harlan Ellison story) because it is a space somewhere between my M-Brane world and the world that exists in my private offline journal. Oh, and my real life, too. There will probably be M-Brane-relevant stuff over on that other page from time to time, but I will link to it from here when that happens, so readers of this blog who are interested in M-Brane affairs (but maybe not my other business so much) will not need to also follow me elsewhere.

Creeping crud update

Today, for me, began rather poorly. Then it improved and seemed fairly decent. Then it went to hell again. No rational explanation for any of these phases, nor the changes from one to the next, presents itself. It's just a symptom of this annoying depressive phase that I have been in lately. I have, however, started a project that I think will have some salutary use: I have decided to start keeping a private journal. I haven't done this on any kind of regular basis since I was in high school when I was a daily journal writer. But even that wasn't really a personal and private venue for my thoughts since those were periodically shown to my English teachers, and there was always the sense that I was writing it for someone else to read. My new journal, begun today, is purely private. I can say whatever I want in it and not even have to make it make sense. The concept is twofold: 1) to document my thoughts and observations (some of which may be usable for fiction writing someday--or not, it doesn't matter) and 2)  to expose myself to myself in a way that might help me dispose of my nonsense more efficiently. 

It's back! The creeping crud!

I hate to even bring this up here, but it's a comfortable place for me since people can read it or not and it will not be seen by anyone in my immediate vicinity (J has never read one post on this blog ever), which is sometimes for the best. About once every year or so, I find myself way down deep in some kind of morbid depression (as in much much worse than my normal everyday dim view of current circumstances). I've sensed it massing for a few days, and I spent all day today deliberately doing things that normally keep me cheerful in hopes I can push it away. It didn't work. I failed at each thing, even cooking dinner which is normally a guaranteed moment of success for me no matter how frakked up the rest of the day is. I never ruin dinner...but I did tonight. Just one symptom.

It would be so easy to just list objective things that seem to contribute to my foul state. Like the usual shit: I hate my day job, I hate this city that we stupidly moved to, and so on. But that's not it. All of that was just as true yesterday and last week and last month and six months ago and it didn't cause this feeling, this creeping crud that's almost a palpable and visible thing around me right now.

This despair happens, as I said, on a fairly annual basis. But this time, the timing could probably not be better. This is happening within days of the release of M-Brane #5. I am locked into that. It is happening on schedule no matter what. Last time I found myself in the crud was during the pre-M-Brane era. I didn't have the zine, this blog, Twitter, any email correspondence to speak of, no other hobbies or pastimes of any sort really--wasn't even seriously working on any fiction--so I was able to thoroughly wallow in my stupid self for days on end and do nothing else. That option is not available to me this year, and I'm so glad of it.

It's just a temporary (albeit recurring) neuro-chemical fuck-up, a mess of synapses not firing in the right way, the "wiring" between memory and current circumstances all dicked up somehow. It's easy to say (when you're not feeling it), "It's all in your head." But I guess that's literally true, isn't it? There is no palpable, visible crud other than what I imagine. I'm entirely sick of it and myself tonight, but I bet tomorrow will be better. I even think it will lift a bit when I hit "publish post" in a few seconds.

[Accompanying image represents the cleansing fire that I've been thinking I need tonight...not REALLY, but hmmm....]

Electric Brain Storm...Literally

I've been thinking about M-Brane writer and friend Brandon Bell (issues #1 and #5, upcoming) off and on all day, and I decided I'd like to show some solidarity with him and come out as a person who also has some sort of undiagnosed neurological situation.  Read Brandon's startling blog post about his recent event, my comment there about it, and then come back here for the rest of this post.  I'll wait for you.

I feel very lucky that the similar episodes that I have been through (the one at 18 being "Worst Episode Ever") have been 

few and have not recurred in full-on form since that last one half of my life ago. Reading Brandon's account of it brought back vividly the creeping fear of it, the near certainty that it will happen again someday. A few weeks ago, in fact, I felt it coming back. It started exactly like Worse Episode Ever. I started feeling nauseated, my vision seemed to darken and lose periphery, I felt some numbness and weird muscular twitches. Also, I lost the ability to speak properly (and that's a clumsy, dubious prospect for me anyway even under ideal conditions), both in the sense of my mouth not functioning correctly and also not being able to come up with words that make sense. I was sure that I was going to black out...but then it passed over me somehow, I stayed conscious, and after about an hour I was feeling reasonably normal again. And lucky.

So anyway, I feel a lot of sympathy for people who live with these kinds of seizure events all the time. It's horrifying to lose control of your body like that. And even though no there's no rational reason at all for this feeling, it made me feel humiliated and weak when it happened to me. And now that I said that out loud...I don't feel that way anymore. Amazing how that works!

The accompanying image is the first draft of the cover of M-Brane #5, leading off with Brandon's outstanding story "Abraham Discovers an Object Impenetrable to All Harm." I'll be announcing the issue's complete contents in a few days.

Where to live?/ Taboo

1) When Jeff and I moved to OKC, we decided we'd commit to it for a minimum of two years. The two-year point will be reached in September, so we've accepted that it's probably more like a three year period that we will live here. We had about five thousand bucks to move with when we came here and more than blew through it all before we had new income happening, so we figure we need at least 10K for the next move. So far, our savings stand at zero. That being said, I've decided it's not too soon to start researching our next home town--and, of course, the future home of the M-Brane Tower (pictured on left), the brane's world headquarters (I expect to hear solicitations from chambers of commerce any day now, don't you know...).  Moving back to St. Louis has not been taken off the table completely, but we're more than open to other options.

Our criteria for a fresh new city include: 1) a climate relatively free of winter weather, or at least no more than what we endure here; 2) a dense city center with goods and services, including our residence, within short distances; no suburbs need apply; 3) a reasonable cost of living because we're not likely to be rich any year soon; 4) sufficient ethnic/immigrant diversity to allow for ethnic grocery stores (we're cooks, and need that selection close at hand, and both STL and OKC have been great in that regard); 5) cultural/ religious/ political diversity, or at least a population that is not ninety percent right-wing fundamentalist Christian and feel that they need to tell me about Jesus every day. STL was fine in that regard, but OKC gets a D-minus for it. We understand that criteria 1 and 5 run into conflict often in this country, but I'm sure there are options for us.

2) Feel free to keep talking about the taboo subject (last post).  I'm still trying to think up a real hair-bleaching, paint-peeling, vapors-inducing shocker of a premise, and when I do, I'll post it in the comments (but y'all'll need to provide your own smelling salts).

Winter: Over with

Jeff and I have decreed the winter season, at least in this part of the country, to be ended for the year. The weather is nice enough today that we have gone ahead and gotten the patio furniture set back up and Jeff is starting to gear up for the spring gardening season. Though this past winter, now ended, was relatively mild with no serious ice storms or appreciable snow accumulation, it was characterized by what seemed to be endless stretches of unacceptably cold temperatures. We will accept no recurrence of such conditions until the onset of next winter.

Now that it's over, we are probably only a week or two away from the time when most of the native Okies start their long season of non-stop complaining about how hot it is. Not us, though: we welcome the heat of summer. I wanted to take a picture of the back patio as it is now with the table and chairs in place and post it here, but Jeff insists that I wait until he has filled the area with pots of plants.

The New Crop

Regular readers of this page may remember my 2/16 post "Hot Sauce!" in which I boasted of making hot sauce from our home-grown chiles, and also linked to a posting on the web of my hot sauce-inspired short story set in a habitat in cislunar space. We have a lot more chiles in the freezer and may make some more stuff this weekend. This photo, taken today, is the start of the next generation. That pot contains the new seedlings of our "mutant" strain.

HOT SAUCE!

Jeff and I had a lot of fun this last Saturday by finally turning at least some of our frozen hot chile crop from last season into some hot sauce.  We still have a LOT of peppers in the freezer, but we made three kinds of sauce: 1) a Tabasco-style vinegary sauce, 2) a green jalapeno-based Mexican-style sauce, and 3) a tremendous concoction of  roasted habeneros, garlic, onion and these incredible red chiles that we call "mutants."  A few years ago in St. Louis, Jeff grew some chiles in pots on his deck. One of the plants, which we were expecting to bear jalapenos, instead grew this unknown type of fruit which looked to us like a combination of a jalapeno and a cayenne. They ripened to red readily and were delicious. We suspected they were the result of a cross-pollination that we would likely never be able to repeat, so we dried some of the peppers, saved their seeds and successfully grew them again the next year. And so on, for several years now. We grew a fantastic supply of them last summer and fall.

Hot sauce-making was a fun way to pass an afternoon, and we have now broken the ice on the whole process of canning, a thing we had never experimented with before despite our combined  two centuries of kitchen experience.

You might be reading this and thinking, "Chris, this has got frak-all to do with science fiction."  Ah, but it does. Click here to go to Issuu and read a little M-Brane extra, a goofy little short story that I knocked out after the hot sauce project, complete with pictures!