Dispatches from the Land of the Steroid-Eaters, Day 3

Shorn of circadian regularity, my hypothalamus now bobs upon the gentle breezes of synaptic backwash (i.e. the jasmine in my mind). Times passes. Events occur. The two phenomena even seem to somehow eerily correlate.

Piratical Agenda

The cover to my very firstest book of all time -- Quirk Books' The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook -- is now up on Amazon. Color me stoked. It's giving me some much-needed fuel to push through and finish this novel manuscript for Quirk that's due at the end of January. My first novel... When that cover finally gets unleashed, I'll probably just fucking pass out.

Hey Hey, We're The Solipsists

A minute ago I dropped the remote on the floor and, lo and behold, that sage little device decided I needed to be watching The Monkees. And it was right. It's been far too long... How could I possibly measure the effect this show had on my when I was a kid in the '70s? I had no idea what the fourth wall was when I was five, but I knew something was getting broken. For sheer absurdist subversion, I rank The Monkees right up with Captain Beefheart. Or maybe even this guy.

Digesting the insides of clocks* (and other pastimes)

Procrastination isn't laziness, mismanagement of resources, or a deficit of attention. It's an eating disorder. Touch, if you will, my stomach. Feel how it trembles inside?* It isn't my stomach at all. It's my brain. And all those tubes and loops of purple-gray membrane are intestines -- plumbing through which is pushed and flushed the chewed-up pulp of stopwatches and chronology. Some time comes in incontinent trickles, others as fibrous clumps of roughage. Ticking off seconds like grams of carbs, we consume our recommended daily allowances of hours in an attempt to maximize mouthfeel and minimize absorption. Failing that, we binge and purge and binge and purge and binge and purge -- until time, late for its own demise, passes.


*Apologies to WSB and PRN.

Clash of Scatology

The seventh and latest issue of the British speculative-fiction magazine Polluto has just been loosed upon the world. Within its pages squirms a short story of mine titled "The Feast of the Night-Soil Man." What secrets lurk in the shit of the gods? Find out now.

Tenured, Ten-Armed Shucker

My lengthy A.V. Club interview with master cartoonist Jim Woodring just got picked up by Boing Boing. Says Woodring of the feature: "The A.V. Club pried all kinds of words out of my unwilling mouth with the skill of a tenured, ten-armed shucker." In other news: I'm putting "tenured, ten-armed shucker" on my business card.

Purple Bitch

Grimace: rectal-tumor-turned-milkshake-salesman or the giggly personification of early onset diabetes?

Sold: "The Feast of the Night-Soil Man"

Earlier this year I wrote a short story called "The Feast of the Night-Soil Man." It was my first completed piece after quite a long break, and I was pretty proud of it. Then I started submitting it to magazines. The reactions I got were, um, rather confused. It seems that a post-pandemic eco-folktale about a servant of the gods who eats their shit wasn't exactly what most editors were looking for.

I'm glad to say, though, that "Feast" finally found a home. And a hell of a home, at that: Polluto, one of England's raddest, oddest, edgiest speculative-fiction magazines, has accepted my coprophagiac allegory for their upcoming seventh issue. It's great to know there are some other weirdos besides myself dwelling in the fringes of the genre -- and not afraid to own it. Here's a teaser:

I was forbidden to gaze upon Yu-in in the full light of the day, so it was only Ith I came to know. Sometimes at dawn in Yu-in's cavernous chamber He mistook me for some long-dead lover, reaching toward my manhood with languid, clanking fingers. He smelled of iron and vanilla--that is, after I had finished my work with Him. With rag and shovel I scrubbed and scraped at the thick slime and barnacle-like shingles that collected around His vast and nautiloid anus. After flushing the waste down the cracks of the mountain's glacier as I had been instructed, I would return to anoint Him with a perfume of ambergris and afterbirth, spices and sperm, that Yu-in deposited in a bedside urn daily for this purpose.

But earlier--that is, when I would climb to the slumbering, snowbound Gods in the hours just after star-rise--the smell was far less ambrosial. Like a tomb cracked open and left to fester, Yu-in leaked a black and brackish feculence that stunk of rot and waste. They wallowed in their filth, tossing and turning until even Their single, blank face--for Yu-in seemed to be possessed by none of its constituent deities as it slept--was slathered in that rank muck.

To this day I shudder to think of the dreams Yu-in must have had. Ith told me once; it was morning, and I was still wiping away the last festoons of stool that clung to Yu-in's massive hindquarters. Ith awoke in a panic and told me of a nightmare He and the Others had been having.

The mack daddy of all zapguns

China Mieville has had more than just a profound influence over the SF/fantasy of the millennium -- his books happen to, quite simply, kick ass. Interviewing him for The A.V. Club was a sheer thrill, especially when he started geeking out over Star Trek phasers (a prop in his new novel, Kraken) and Pop Will Eat Itself. Following the interview is a lively comments section wherein A.V. Club readers passionately attack and defend Mieville's work. As convivial as he is to speak with, he's a pretty divisive writer. The great ones usually are.

Flannel and chrome

My latest installment of Frequency Rotation -- a poking and prodding of Neil Young's bizarrely Kraftwerk-like "Sample and Hold" -- is up at Tor.com. Here's a link to it (as well as to all my installments of FR so far). Bookmarking is your friend.