Goblin Mercantile Exchange

The Gamebook/the Interactive Novel: Fables of the Construction

Of late I’ve been exploring and trying to fetter out online what in 80s parlance would be called a gamebook: a novel with choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) plot branching but also with more of an RPG element as well–usually with a character with attributes and chanced to impact the story through combat and chance. Some of the best known series from that era are Fighting Fantasy (which I did not play growing up) and Lone Wolf (which I did).

Although I’m not intimately familiar with the publishing vagrancies of the genre, it had seemed like the form went into something of a decline in the 90s, but lately there have been some interesting applications of the gamebook online–which might be the natural home for such a storytelling medium after all. There are two particular examples online that I found striking–one a new, rather wild creation that pushed a lot of my “fiction buttons”, and another a “port” from a rather remarkable older series.

Age of Fable

Age of Fable by James Hutchings is quite literally the trip, a metafictional romp through all sorts of storytelling conventions. The art–usually gathered from paintings from the surreal to the macabre to the whimsical–adds to the sense of story-as-emblem (which might not get at exactly what’s going on here). It’s extremely fast and loose, but it works. There are twelve attributes to your character, and this panoply of various ability scores adds to the fierce sense of play to the work, especially when traversing the land with a randomly generated character named: Be-Steadfast Owl-Waits-For-The-Moon, an assassin.

Yes sometimes the puns don’t quite work, and the recursiveness of some of the quests becomes repetitive, but on the whole Age of Fable succeeds resoundingly as a new way to approach storytelling; it has that sense of a concocted world that one can only see small but bright glimpses of when playing.

The Fabled Lands

The Fabled Lands is a far sturdier proposition, one with more traditional high-fantasy underpinnings, but no less exciting and with even more depth of play. The interface was obviously created with a great deal of passion and care. It’s truly the greatest example of a “sandbox novel” that I’ve ever seen. One can literally traverse between the six novels–represented by different geographic areas–and in the downloadable App version, this is done seamlessly. Much like Age of Fable, there is no real overarching quest–although there are many quests to be had–but the level of what one can “do” in the novel is far deeper: there’s exploration, of course, but also trade, owning property in cities, sailing, and much more. It’s truly a lived-in experience, one in which the second person POV is given a panoply of sensations–perhaps most importantly, the sense that one really doesn’t know what’s behind any unknown corner.

If one of the purposes of a gamebook (or any work of interactive fiction, really) is to increase the player/reader’s agency, then these two projects are some of the strongest and most interesting examples around of giving authorship to the reader, in a way that is entirely different yet as utterly beguiling as the best of parser-based interactive fiction.

Signing at Uncle Hugo’s

Hi folks, for those in town, I’ll be signing (and chatting and the like) at Uncle Hugo’s in Minneapolis, this Saturday from 1-2 p.m. The last week, I know, has been full of these little semaphores as there’s been much busyness and much afoot, but I hope to get back in the blogging swing of things very soon!

Radio (again) and reading

I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants this week, but wanted to let everyone know that I’m going to be on KFAI in the Twin Cities, on the Write On radio show that runs from 11-12 am Central (not sure when exactly I’ll be on during the show). You can listen live right at kfai.org, or the show will be archived there as well (I’ll come up with the more specific link when I have it available). That’s 90.3 Minneapolis and 106.7 in St. Paul if you are in town.

Also! the book release reading is tonight at Common Good Books (Selby and Western), St. Paul 7:30 p.m. You’ll need a passport from either the Empire of the Agreeable Lands or the Scythian Confederation to attend but if you don’t have one on your person, one will be provided for you. A reception and signing follows. Please come by!

Radio appearance today

Really brief notice, but today I’m going to be on the radio show Fictional Frontiers (5 pm EST), WNJC-1360 AM in Philadelphia. I’ll be on at 5:20 or thereabouts, but it looks like a fantastic show all-around! You can listen live via their webstream, or catch it on their podcast site later on.

Total Oblivion, More or Less released today + Announcement

Well, at the end of a long day, two dogs sacked out next to me and our oldest cat somewhat skittishly on the arm of my couch, I have to look back at it and really try to take stock of it. The book came out today, and I did, in fact, see it “in the wild” on a shelf (well, on a dolly waiting to be shelved), which was needless to say very exciting. It also is kind of odd that there’s a calmness to this excitement, mixed with a large part of gratitude and introspection regarding all the people who helped bring this book into being. I’ve come to realize that, with any production of writing into a public medium (a book, online, wherever), there are a whole host of people who helped it along its way. We take this for granted with movies–that it’s never one person’s work that springs from his or her forehead, but with novels–when it makes the transferrence from writing into a book (if that makes sense), I think the culture kind of assumes that it’s that singular person carving a block of wood into a statue in the middle of the woods. OK, weird metaphor, but I think you see the point. The point is, there are a ton of “producers” and “editors” and “set designers” that bring a book into being. It’s truly a collaborative effort. What’s going to be interesting, I suspect, in the next ten years is how these interrelationships are going to change with the advent of more fully digital book distribution. But that is another blog post…

So if you get the book and you read it and want to drop me a line, feel free to. Would love it. Even if you don’t like the book or have mixed feelings about it–that’s okay; no one is forced to like everything.

Also, if you can’t buy the book, libraries are truly awesome and your friends! Request the book at your friendly local library. That way, you can think of it as regifting it for someone else who might stumble upon it on the shelf…

FINALLY, I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how the writing we do intersects with the political realities we are faced with in our current day. Some of my latest stories (such as the one in Interfictions 2–speaking of a great assemblage of collaborative energy!) and of course Total Oblivion delve into these issues as part of their fictional underpinnings. But if there’s the opportunities for something more, even in a small way–the tiniest platforms that our writing affords us–then we should do our best to seize them.

And in particular, regarding families around the world who are uprooted as refugees, in dangerous, frightening situations — this is something that isn’t a fictional abstraction, but something that happens every day.

Mercy Corps is a charity that I really believe in, and have for years. They do amazing work with refugee and displacement crises, among a host of other complex issues. I’ve set up an online fundraising page for them. I do hope that, if you’re passionate about these social justice issues (and I know you are!), you’ll make a donation to Mercy Corps here. Even a small amount would be absolutely superb.

But wait, there’s more! In order to provide a more direct engagement with the book, if you make a donation on this page, drop me a quick note (adeniroATgmail.com) and I’ll send you something extra: a one-of-a-kind paragraph of ephemera and apocrypha set in the world of the novel, made just for you! It could be a snippet of a travelogue from a city unwritten about along the Mississippi, an Imperial naturalist’s description of strange flora and fauna of Middle America, a postcard from a soldier in the Bemidji Irregulars back home to mom. Anything and more. And I can send it by post or email. I’m easy. (River transport of mail post is forthcoming.) Just let me know which you’d prefer and I’ll get it out to you in about a week. So hopefully we can, in some small way, assist others in making an impactful change.

Because the most important piece of the puzzle I described above, in terms of a novel as a collaborative effort, is the reader. Without the reader, the work doesn’t live and breathe. And perhaps this is a way we can together make the work live and breathe in a real-life way.

And thanks out there. For everything.

Starred Booklist Review for Total Oblivion, More or Less + Locus review

It’s a bit belated, but Total Oblivion, More or Less received a starred review from Booklist:

TOTAL OBLIVION, MORE OR LESS by Alan DeNiro:

For 16-year-old Macy, the whole world has gone crazy, quite literally. Barbarians from antiquity have invaded America, while bizarre plagues and impossibly shifting landscapes ravage her Minnesota homeland. Together with her parents, sister, brother, and a possibly evil dog, Macy sets out down the Mississippi on an adventure that takes her into the smoldering ruins of St. Louis, aboard a wooden submarine that’s bigger on the inside than outside, and finally into the stone-skyscraper capital of Nueva Roma. All the while she dodges oil-men turned slavers, plague-instigating wasps, an albino bounty hunter, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, her scheming younger brother. DeNiro (who flaunted a knack for offhand SF oddness in Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, 2006) makes sure never to do anything as dull as explaining what the heck is going on—we simply accept that the world has become a surreal, historical landscape come to life and move on. He drops in so many tantalizingly inspired touches—the new (old?) empire considers Post-it notes a precious natural resource—that leaving his inside-out America at the end is almost painful. There aren’t many writers who take weirdness as seriously as DeNiro does, and fewer still who can extract so much grounded emotion, gut-dropping humor, and rousing adventure from it. A dizzying display of often brilliant, always strange, and definitely unique storytelling. — Ian Chipman

There was also a strong review by Faren Miller of the book in the most recent issue of Locus. Some parts:

Their journey south…sometimes resembles a stressed-out teenage Ballard’s take on an American classic like Huckleberry Finn: hallucinatory madness laced with more blatant social satire…but also with scenes of genuine poignancy. Total Oblivion offers more than just an antic apocalypse or a non-SF writer’s sidelong approach to dystopia. Like the people who survive its trying times and the river tha runs through it, beneath all the madness there’s something to be gained, something that endures.

More later!

20 Favorite Albums of the Decade

Your mileage may vary highly, and the rankings especially at the top are more or less arbitrary. If you want that “descending/ascending” order variation, you might want to start at the bottom.

1 Discovery, Daft Punk (2001)

A perfect amalgamation of 1983 and the 23rd century–which, come to think of it, is the blueprint for much contemporary music (see Justice, below) and our culture in general. France, they say, is dying (it isn’t, but people talk)…but what Daft Punk have figured out is that we are all in the same boat. We are all in Gallic decline. We’re trying to figure out how to mediate our bodies with technology, trying to make it as un-deadening as possible. Science fiction has punctured the present, and the future is bleeding out of us. It’s the quicksilver blood pooling on the floor of our living rooms, inside houses that we don’t leave. It’s the blood in the ears that our iPods are attached to. Daft Punk discovered this in 2001. This is our world. The past and the future can’t be easily negotiated by the present anymore. So what’s left to do? Hope, and dance, and make our own past and future, and make our present from that.

2 Fishscale, Ghostface Killah (2006)

Opalescent hip-hop and storytelling of the highest order, Fishscale ranks with GZA’s Liquid Swords as the greatest of Wu Tang solo projects. Noir of utter specificity, and yet allowing the goofiness of underwater dreams and the terror of childhood beatings and bedwettings too. One of the heirs of Edgar Allen Poe’s crime fiction, with killer beats.

3 Missundaztood, Pink (2001)

So one of my favorite songs of the year is “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus, and it hit me that so much of pop’s greatness of late can be ascribed to this one album. Think about the landscape in 2001–the last dregs of boy bands and commercial radio domination. And, ironically, during the crumbling of that domination, pop found its voice again. This album blended rock, hip hop, singer-songwriter confessionalism, dance…no palette was out of bounds. She used everything, and made everything her own. Without this album, there would be none of Christina’s experimentations, and none of Justin’s future funk, and no Lily Allen making it big on American shores, and certainly not MILEY FREAKING CYRUS putting out brilliant songs and not mailing it in before she ever got started. But that’s why Pink is the greatest pop star of her generation. Thanks, Pink!

4 Sol-Fa, Asian Kung Fu Generation (2004)

I have to thank Mr. Barzak for bringing this back for me upon his return from Japan. Otherwise it’s doubtful I would have been privy to one of the greatest power-pop albums ever made. Every chord is strong, utterly unexpected, and yet perfect. If you can get a hold of this, do it!

5. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Of Montreal (2007)

Yes. Yes, the hissing venus fly trap of this album could very well be the destroyer! The alchemical transformation midway through this album is nothing short of miraculous. Glam as elegy. But an elegy for what? The Norway of Exile of our dear narrator of this album (a chimerical twin of Anniemal, come to think of it), and while he emerges from the chyrsalis, well, not quite a butterfly–it’s still something truly beautiful and strange. And danceable.

6 Fiestas + Fiascos, Lifter Puller (2000)

I still feel that, in 2000, Lifter Puller were quite possibly the greatest band in the country. I’m still trying to find the Minneapolis in this album. And those guitars–no mercy with them. But Craig Finn’s lyrics, in those fragmented narratives of Nightclub Dwight etc. etc., show us to a world in which there is mercy and redemption possible in the club-caves and the desolations that reside at 15th and Franklin.

7 Lucy Ford: The Atmosphere EPs, Atmosphere (2001)

Slug goes slacker Frank O’Hara on us, and while Ant has probably done better albums than this one, Slug is at his absolute finest here–self-deprecating without being coy, love-sick and trying not to show it, and wielding subject matters so diverse that he is making the infernal map of life for all of us, and daring us to follow it.

8 Feed the Animals, Girl Talk (2008)

What’s your idea of fun? Fun, natural fun! (And “Genius of Love”, it feels like, is the only song NOT sampled on this album.) [late edit: haha, of course–of course!–I find out later that “Genius of Love” by the Tom Tom Club is, in fact, sampled on this album. As well as not an insignificant sample of the albums on this list. So there, Alan.)

9 Miss E…So Addictive, Missy Elliot (2001)

Stupid guest spot by Ludacris on what, otherwise, is a stone cold classic (”One Minute Man”) probably drops this a bit. But, fuck, what an album. Hip-hop and electronica bleed into each other and slither around. Okay, that’s a gross metaphor. But my ears are still trying to catch up to what’s going on here. And no better guide to the carnival than Missy.

10 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco (2001-2002)

I am trying to give this album the retroactive benefit of the doubt, because their last 3 albums since this in my opinion have been, er, dung-y. And Summerteeth, in the final reckoning, is better. But with that said, everything else you’ve heard about this album is true.

Secret Floating Signifier Album
Phrenology, The Roots (2002)

Named after a discredited pseudoscience, beginning with radio, then pure punk, and then neo-soul, and then (90 other things), and then Amiri Baraka, and then even more. You know how some albums have a song that is the title of the previous album? (Zep’s Houses of the Holy) In spirit, this is the reverse. Their previous album was Things Fall Apart, and things do that here, in this album. But how gloriously.

11 Kala, MIA (2007)

“Bird Flu” sounds like it, and then she shoots us in the heart with “Paper Planes.” There’s no pity, but neither is there a absence of joy.

12 Original Pirate Material, The Streets (2002)

“Just some guy” is always more than just some guy.

13 Anniemal, Annie (2004)

See, I keep railing against twee, and yet you might wonder why albums such as this example of wispy Norweigan electropop appears on this list. Well, yes, perhaps an anxiety of influence. But pop (pop-pop or indie-pop) doesn’t have to be precious. More than that–the surfaces here are deceiving. There is real anguish here. Not to mention I would heartily recommend “Chewing Gum,” conversely, as the bubblegum/jawbreaker pop song of the decade.

14 One Beat, Sleater-Kinney (2002)

This album still has one of the best, most visceral post-9/11 songs ever recorded–and yet there are horns as well; playfulness. And a coyote. It’s all universal and it all hits hard.

15 The Life Pursuit, Belle and Sebastian (2006)

For a decade I was an unrepentant haterader with B&S; couldn’t stand the twee. Whether it’s more me or them, who knows, but this album has soul…and a bite. The loveliness is still there, though. P.S. I still can’t really stand Stephen Merritt

16 Cross, Justice (2007)

Fables of the (electronica) reconstruction.

17 Funeral, Arcade Fire (2004)

Feeling stuff is cool.

18 Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne (2008)

Utterly profane, full of weirdness and crazy shit around every brilliant corner. Aside from his eclecticism, his genius is in his improvisational composition techniques–and in this, he is truly the carrier of the torch of the native art form of his home town, New Orleans. The descendant of giants.

19 SpeakerBoxx/The Love Below, Outkast (2003)

“White Album-ness” as a condition is thrown around a lot with albums, but this is the real deal: a gemini tag team of epic proportions. And yet, though the two sides of Outkast are seperate (mostly), they continually reflect upon each other. Greater than the sum of its divisions.

20 The Magic Numbers, The Magic Numbers (2005)

Gallant, heartbreaking, sly, just hard-edged enough when it wants to be, this album hits all the melancholic (yet bright) notes without ever wallowing.

World Fantasy 2009 guest-blogging

Oh…oh hi! Anyway, I’m in San Jose for World Fantasy and am guest blogging at BSCreview. So feel free to swing by there!

Infernokrusher Awards Watch: Short Fiction-ey Edition

I think my goal for “awards season” in the genre is to make sure “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs” by Leonard Richardson wins the Hugo, the Nebula, the Sturgeon, the Malkovich…

OK, I made that last award up. But it really should win it all the same. I’ve been trying to write a woeful Infernokrusher 2.0 essay, but really, stories like this take theory and poetics and disintegrate them into molten flames.

(I still like poetics, though.)

Who’s with me?

this is the baseline,

…or as good as any, to start any discussion about the political efficacy and/or value of any artistic project (something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and which I hope to blog about more in the near future):

1. We must think steadily, honestly, and realistically about what it is that our works might reasonably do.

2. The fact that they probably won’t spur the immediate resolution of age-old antimonies and contradictions doesn’t mean that they are totally useless.

3. But getting #1 wrong will likely lead them to be useless, yes. Getting #1 right will likely lead to marginal usefulness, and marginal usefulness is better than no usefulness at all.

4. The cultural sphere still is the place where decisions collective and individual are made about who we are, where we’re headed, and what we should do. The base and superstructure are codeterminant. Intervention in culture is still very valuable.

5. You just have to think about which levers you can pull from where you’re standing. And make sure they are the right levers.

(source)

I think this is what Gernsback did, precisely, with his little radio magazines. And what people in the field have been trying to figure out since…

Reviews Afoot of Total Oblivion, More or Less

From Publishers Weekly:

As this peculiar but entertaining first novel begins, geography and cosmology have shifted. Natural laws work unpredictably. The U.S. government has disappeared and plundering bands of Goths and Scythians roam the Midwest. Sea serpents close the shipping lanes, and oil companies convert their tankers into slave ships that cruise the Mississippi. Clear-eyed, tough-minded teen Macy Palmer flees St. Paul with her family for the illusory safety of an island in the Gulf of Mexico. As they travel through a wavering postapocalyptic landscape, her relatives undergo upsetting personal metamorphoses. DeNiro has attracted attention for his short fiction (especially the Small Beer Press collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead), and this longer story’s energy ebbs a bit as Macy gets some of the oddness under control. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive debut from a promising writer.

And Kirkus Reviews:

After Minnesota is overrun by ancient Scythians and a wasp-borne plague, 16-year-old Macy and her family embark on adventures of ever-escalating weirdness as they make their way down the Mississippi toward safety that no longer exists.

DeNiro (stories: Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, 2006) opens his debut novel in semi-comic register, as the family struggles to adjust to a weird new order involving soldier-looters in Lakers jerseys, the shuttering of all non–fast-food businesses, SUV chassis towed by mules and a scar-faced guard at the family’s riverside internment camp who sends Macy a looted necklace via her younger brother Ciaran. “I had a disfigured stalker with a sword,” she wisecracks. “This made going stag to junior prom look like a joke.” The mood grows steadily darker and grimmer. First Ciaran gets involved in intrigues among factions of the anachronistic warriors who have overrun the entire country and are battling for turf from coast to coast. The family manages to escape on a boat that limps south toward St. Louis, where Macy’s father, an astronomer, keeps insisting that a university job awaits him. Along the way both Macy and her mother are stricken with the plague; Macy’s sister runs off and is sold into indenture; they encounter elephants and giraffes, a wooden submarine and a talking dog. Eventually Ciaran is captured and sent south to Nueva Roma for trial and execution. Their father, now thriving in the former St. Louis as an astrologer, dispatches the recovered Macy to the grand delta capital to see if anything can be done to help her brother.

A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson, with the latter winning out—to the benefit of those reading for plot and perhaps the disappointment of those looking for literary ambition.

Gog of Pennsylvania (Chapter 1)

I’ve decided to post the first chapter of the long poem I’ve been working on of late. This is very provisional; even though Chapter 1 feels more “set” than anything else so far, who knows what will happen in the future. After all the title has changed thrice in a triad of weeks (”replace all” being one of my favorite experimental techniques in a poem). Take it for what you will. I’m only about 30 pages in and Gog, our hero, is only beginning to make an appearance, if that gives you any idea of the arc I’m going for. (Although maybe I’ll move him up a bit).

Chapter 1: The Homecoming


One day the count nailed everything he could think of. He stormed to his study
overlooking the River of Winter. He undid his collar. He wore golden shoes
overlooking the warm floor. He kept track of the red floes and the white floes.
He saw There were tracks in the mist above the water.
There were white deer There were suns opening holes
trying to cross the river. There were men in deer costumes trying to throw
their belongings and support groups across the river. They kept their antlers and And
biding their own business. They were there along the river, along with the front
of the argument and the back of the argument, and the hot bonfire of rats
and the spent bonfire of rats, and the servants’
sons and daughters and the accomplices of his sons and daughters. He saw
The march
was not getting them anywhere.
They kept thinking of what their neighbors were thinking:
fountain click-click, argot gee-gaw

They were all on the other side of the river
which could be viewed from the study
which could not be viewed from inside the river
which inhabited the count’s raptor coronet


I reflected on this and held fast trying to get attention without getting nailed.
Even the nails were getting nailed, joining roofs to walls
and signs to trees. There were In time
the rust affixed to everything. There were
I lost track
As the palace sailed,
I hid under the porch
and ate a green peach, nailed. I read a newspaper in the dirt that said:


(Tears are not supposed to harm small animals.
Did he learn that at least?


And how long are we supposed to wait around again?


If your gray area of love is too small, you may lose this war. What?)
And kept losing track.
Anyway, he kept writing or had others writing for him throughout
the shotgun palaces attached
to the study. The walls kept writing. The ceiling The fan kept writing. The floor kept
writing. The earrings in the mousetrap kept writing. The white moments
kept writing and the off-white moments kept writing and the cuffs kept writing.
The bruised moments kept writing. cuffing, cuffing The fallow fields in the kitchen
kept writing. The darts kept The Quack of Gulls kept writing. The lost face
and the regular old face kept writing. The collect calls inside the
river kept writing. Hello, Everyone was writing and no one was pointing anything
out. But the point of nailing didn’t have any indicators, only ties to be broken,
and armor to be spared, and runaways
who kept trying to call home, but the paws wouldn’t dial the right numbers,
and besides there were only like five payphones all along the
neighboring shores, so what were they going to do.
There was no writing in the newspaper. Moving forward, no one was
backward, no one was pointing
anything out untimely.


No books. No games. Only crawlspaces.

The count smears cold soy over the antlers in the study
while overlooking the headwaters that appear further along,
over the Labor Day weekend. It turned out that ever since the count was born
he had dreamed of pulling out the nails and putting
them back in again. And then it was done.

He licks his lips. The sun His concentration breaks for an instant
by an H.G. Wells novel that has turned into a dog.
The dog is–is on the shelf!
The dog starts eating the nails holding the shelf together. Otherwise the
shelf would fall apart.
The count has no choice
but to burn the dog. This is not Pennsylvania. In fact no one
in the palace has ever heard of such a thing.
This is the Czechoslovakia of smoke
and one day, he says (though everyone is thinking it), this will
be the Ephesus of the branches and not the Rome,
the one point where horses cross the mountains
to graze in the riverly beneath.

Let’s go do something else, he says.

Intraplanetary Orders for Under in the Mere

At last, international preorders for Cat Valente’s Under in the Mere are now available from Rabid Transit Press, with deeply discounted shipping, wherever you may be on the globe. We’re still working on interplanetary orders, so hang tight…

The Literary Magazine, of the Future

Bruce Sterling’s essay on design, the potential of design, and the design of fiction, is something that anyone interested in those issues should read–moving away from the tired arguments of why science fiction is dying, why it’s not dying…anyway, I tend to get those two things confused. Of course the pulp era has left its imprint on where the field is today, and how it sees itself, in ways that most people take for granted (still!). The more telling question resides in the use of experiential technologies:

What truly interests me here is the limits of the imaginable. Clearly, the pulp infrastructure limited what its artists were able to think about. They wore blinders that they could not see and therefore could not transcend.

The typewriter limited writers. Magazine word counts limited writers. Even the implicit cultural bargain between author and reader introduced constraints on what could be thought, said, and understood in public. Those mechanisms of interaction-the letter columns, the fan mail, the bookstore appearances, the conventions-they were poorly understood as interaction. They were all emergent practices rather than designed experiences.

I would also argue that most literary magazines, collegiately based or otherwise, also fail basic marks on design. But that’s another story.

After reading this, I thought it would be interesting to do a thought experiment on what a new “magazine” design might look like. I use the word magazine very tenatively, because not only would the cross-fertilization come from the content of fiction (if we take the assumption that genre distinction are, at heart, arbitrary) but also the use of various technological platforms. To perhaps build something from the ground up that can itself augment and shape the reading experience of the fiction.

Premise: using a wiki-like and custom social networking platform, allow for the collaboration between various writers who are invited to the site for one-month stints as “fellows.”

Hope: that the “fiction research” premise leads to greater experimentation and surprise during the duration of a group of writers’ stay.

Features:

1. The typography must be strong. It can’t be jokey, white text on black background, or shoddy.

2. The application process for a group of fellows for a particular month must be open to anyone; with any luck there is a good mix of older and newer writers.

3. The magazine must not be non-fiction (and theory) adverse. Whether this comes from blogging/microblogging tools embedded in the site, digressions and discussions, or whatever–there shouldn’t be a high wall between various forms of prose.

4. Serialization, as a nod to one of the hallmarks of the pulp era, will be encouraged. This might involve a mini-episodic arc of fiction within a given month, taking the reins of previous serializations from months past, and working with other writers to create shared worlds in unexpected ways.

5. Alumni of the magazine will be encouraged to participate in future months as readers, continuers of previous conversations, etc.

6. At the same time, the readership will be given all the necessary tools to find out how they would like to read the magazine–and by extension, how the magazine as an ongoing work should be written.

____

This is a first draft; any other suggestions would be appreciated. Of course, this is a thought experiment–I don’t really have the time of late to really implement this! Maybe some day.

Keepin’ It Real with 15,000 muses of the Missouri Review

So I got my latest issue of Literary Tiger Beat (aka Poets and Writers) and lo, on page 1, is an ad from the Missouri Review with the headline “Your 15,000 Muses Just Arrived”, with an etching of a muse-like women looking down at a down at a dreamy-eyed writer. And–here’s the clever part, see–she’s throwing money in the air like she just don’t care. She’s making it rain!

The body copy of the ad goes onto say:

The adage goes that nothing spurs creativity like a deadline. To that we add, “…and the prospect of $15,000 in cash prizes!”

Smashing! Well at least they are cutting out the crap about artistic integrity, quality and any of that other b.s.

It’s good to know that literary magazines are going all car-salesperson on an unsuspecting public, 99.9% of whom will never see the light of day with any of their jackpots. But that kind of money is something to keep them dreaming and musing, is it not? And by musing, I mean of course, writing $20 checks to the Missouri Review.

Bling bling!

Do You Have Trouble Finishing Poems? (Y/N)

Y!!!!

Part of this is dwelling in novel-land…feeling like I have a permanent visa there.

However, something more curious is going on that I’m interested in. Because I don’t really feel blocked at all. But the field in which the lines live remains uncentered. This could be considered the kinesis of the poem, what animates it from start to finish. And it has tended to be wobbly. Attempts at narrative in poems have become too discursive, and the discursions have tended to fall flat.

Finally, I do think there is something else positive in this. For a long time I relied on what could be generously be considered jokey lines…puns, wordplay, the clever baubles of language. I don’t really feel excited about the very use of those anymore. The poem is something more difficult (which doesn’t mean it still can’t be fun) to delineate. The axes that I had written oppositional lines for so long against–taking a place/seat in the avant garde tradition of disassociation and dispersion of language–now feels pointless. The formal techniques, what are they tied to? Having poems “accepted”? This isn’t to say that poetry, the right poetry, is powerless…far from it. It’s just that I see so much of the dissociative techniques being used in the field of the field, so to speak. That is to say, poems as extremely conscious chits in the occupational realm of poetry. Which is one reason that contemporary poems about poetry, as a general rule (though there are certain exceptions) drive me fucking crazy.

I suspect that maybe some of this also has to do with the fact that relatively recently I finished a 165 page fucking poem. Maybe? There is the very real, no looming possibility that I will never write a poem as good as that ever again. And when I say good I mean, good for me. It did me good and made me/helped me change the way I think about myself and the place in the world. It’s a much different proposition than in a novel, and as I try to squirm around in the vast oceanic space of the novel’s potential and try not to drown, I have to remind myself that it’s all a matter of scale. Of the field. The white space of the style. Perhaps this is all at last moving away from the final imitative stages of a long tutelage. But I am speechless. What can I possibly say?

Final Cover

Really very happy with the way it’s turned out. Many thanks to the art department at my publisher.

Sometimes Alternate History writes itself

Well, not really, but you know what I mean.

“There were other plots to rescue Napoleon from captivity including one from Texas, where exiled soldiers from the Grande Armée wanted a resurrection of the Napoleonic Empire in America. There was even a plan to rescue him with a primitive submarine.”

Total Oblivion, More or Less (Twitter & otherwise)

Hey folks, the novel — eek, the novel! It’s coming out in November, which is, like a blink. So things are continuing apace in preparation of its release. I’ve set up a Twitter “news” feed set in the world of the novel. Highly apocryphal, but would you expect anything less from Jack Anubis Enterprises? Anything you want to know on the upper Mississippi — troop movements, festivals, strange sightings, etc. — go ahead and follow.

And another blurb!

“Wow! This is a wonderfully weird, fun, touching, heartfelt and memorable novel. Imagine if Huck Finn had been living in post-apocalypse America, and Terry Pratchett had been promoted to God, with George Saunders as his avenging angel. The world of this book is a little like that. In this case, the role of Huck is played by a sixteen-year-old-girl named Macy, whose smart, mordant, utterly convincing voice grounds our journey through this crazy landscape. Macy reminds us that no matter how surreal things get, there is still resilience and hope in the human spirit. Alan DeNiro has created a hilarious and terrifying dream world, but his real genius is that he’s peopled it with characters we come to love.”

–Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply, You Remind Me of Me, and National Book Award finalist Among the Missing.

Much more sooner rather than later!

Under in the Mere by Catherynne M. Valente

Really, really thrilled about this. Rabid Transit Press is pleased to announce the publication of Under in the Mere, a novella by Catherynne M. Valente, in the December of 2009.

What damosel is this? What damosel is this?

Perhaps I am nothing but a white arm. Perhaps the body which is me diffuses at the water’s surface into nothing but light, light and wetness and blue. Maybe I am nothing but samite, pregnant with silver, and out of those sleeves come endless swords, dropping like lakelight from my hems. Will you come down to me and discover if my body continues below the rippling?

I thought not.

With full interior illustrations from renowned fantasy artist James Owen and Jeremy Owen.

This is really going to be special, and to celebrate that specialness, we’re offering a preorder special: $10 with free shipping.

(U.S. only. International orders, please contact electrumeditors@gmail.com.)

Go forth and (pre)order!