A LITTLE HALLOWEEN TALE by SQT

So, I follow the ramblings and reviews of blogger SQT. The other day she posted a very short, just a couple of paragraphs, piece of flash fiction about what it would be like to live in a world where the political campaigning never ended.

I think that my favorite part has to be the sentiments about candidates over promising. Why do they promise everything? Their promises are too abundant in a world where we can’t know safety and stability from one day to the next.

Any presidential candidate, or any elected official for that matter, that I can truly stand behind, will have a clear vision of the future, but also a clear understanding of reality. He or She will need to be able to state clearly the sacrifices necessary to not only make the United States of America great again, but the world.

I got off topic. SQT’s story is spooky one. I would not want to live that world. I will be glad when the election is over.

SQT. A Little Halloween Tale. Fantasy & Sci-Fi Lovin' Blog. Tuesday, October 21, 2008

NAVY BRAT by Kay Kenyon

Religion is such a problem; or I guess, I should say, humanities desire to believe that there is something larger than themselves is nasty bug in our operating systems that I hope with be fixed with in couple generations of upgrades.

In this story, the reader is introduced to young female Navy Brat who struggles to adherer to the principals and regulations of the Navy. She knows the regulations and wearing a blue armband to honor the memoir of dead Admiral is not one of them. Her disobedience leads to her discharge.

The Navy creates a religion around the dead Admiral as if he were some kind of profit or god meant to lead them through the stars to the promise land. The intent is to blind the passengers of the galactic space ship to the fact that they are in orbit around a new habitable planet. The Navy does not want to loose control.

What is fascinating to me about this story is that religion has been long condemned as a dangerous social igniter that lead to the failure of the first few missions seeking new worlds. And then, the Navy purposely tries to use the conventions of religion to control and obfuscate the truth. I’m glad the heroine and truth win out in the end, but the story is sad in that Humanity has still not risen above the need to clamor after deities and empty spiritualities.

Kenyon’s writing is excellent. The story grabbed me from word one. The character’s are lively and rendered well. I wasn’t ready for the story to end when it did. It feels like it could be part of a longer more complicated work.

I highly recommend talking time to listen to this story.

Kenyon, Kay. Navy Brat. Escape Pod. 180, October 17, 2008

MEMOIRS OF A BOY DETECTIVE by David Marshall Chan

Last night I went to the celebratory reading of the 11th issue of Water-Stone Review: A Literary Annual published by Hamline University. A good event over all, but there is nothing like party to remind me that I’m a misanthrope and feel devastatingly awkward in any group situation with no structure.

I shared a couple of weak glances and head bobs with the few people that I know from the program. I even said hi to rising star David Oppegaard, author of the upcoming debut novel, The Suicide Collectors, available in December 2008 (check out my interview). Then I got the hell out there, but not before someone, someone whose name I didn’t bother to remember made a straight line for me. I did the chin-up, “What’s up,” and ran out the door.

Anyway, the highlight of the evening was hearing the two page novel excerpt by Chan about a boy who is a detective. The boy is on his way to help solve some case, but is called into an emergency by his friends, other fledgling detectives. They all go into a basement filled with regurgitated mice. They spend the night piecing the mice back together.

The story was engaging. I did not want Chan to stop reading. I wanted to know what other mysteries would become apart of this boy. I wanted to know why, after spending all that time on the bones, he would cough up mouse fur. I wanted to know what magic was at work here.

After hearing him read, I’m thinking that I might need to audit one of his classes as an alum of the program.

Chan, David Marshall. "Memoirs of a Boy Detective." Water-Stone Review: A Literary Annual. Ed. Mary Francois Rockcastle, et all. Vol. 11. St Paul: Hamline University, 2008 P. 193 - 194

FROM THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE CARE AND TRAINING OF THE WRITER IN YOUR LIFE by David Zeltser

I don't have much to say about this short, other than if you have time you should go and read it, about a 2 minute commitment. The fictional excerpt purposes that writers are kind of like selfish misunderstood pets. The more I think about it, the more I think that analogy is true.

Zeltser, David. FROM THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE CARE AND TRAINING OF THE WRITER IN YOUR LIFE. www.mcsweeneys.net

WHERE AWAY YOU FALL by Jason Sanford

I read this story yesterday while nervously waiting to defend my graduate thesis. As some of you, loyal readers and blog friends, might already know, I was finishing my Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at Hamline University. My defense was successful and my committee recommended to the Dean of the Graduate school of Liberal Studies that I receive the degree of MFA.

At long last, 5 plus years, I am finished.

Anyway, enough about me, on to Sanford’s story about what happens when destinies collide.

I’m not sure that I followed the entirety of the plot as I waited to present my work to my advisory committee. However, what it did keep me from thinking about what was coming. The main character was floating in what seemed to be described as a low orbiting shuttle like balloon on his way to repair an orbiting satellite.

The narrative is in the first person. If I recall, the reader never gets the narrator’s name, a typical trick to help the reader become more personally involved in the action, feeling almost like they are in the story. It worked for me. I was that repair guy who had been gone and seen the Brotherhood and received a destiny to reach into the stars. Who had been kicked out of NASA and deigned his dream, his destiny.

Then he had been given the opportunity for low orbit repair work, a bundle of cash for a one-time job: fix an orbiting satellite. Well, I would have taken the job too. However, someone with a polar destiny was using him. The satellite was really an orbiting missile silo with a faulty trigger switchboard. Once fixed, unknown to our narrator, the missile would destroy an space station creating too much debris for humanity to continue launching missions into space, low orbit would be too cluttered and too dangerous to fly through.

To find out what happens and which density is fulfilled, you’ll need to pick up a copy the December issue of Analog.

Sanford, Jason. “Where Away You Fall.” Analog. December 2008, Vol. CXXVIII, No. 12. P. 32 - 39

10 Ways to Use Chili Peppers

10 Ways to Use Chili Peppers is a post on Kathy Maister's Start Cooking and features one of my favorite dishes, 8. Stuffed Poblano Peppers, which was created by me.

Check out the rest of recipes for peppers by clicking here: 10 Ways to Use Chili Peppers.

What a great start to a Thursday, finding that my recipe has been included on Kathy Maister's Start Cooking. Thank you!

PERIODS by Florence Ann Marlowe

This is a great story. It will make it into my best of list for 2008. I was so disgusted at one point that I had to stop listening at one point and I considered not turning returning, but I’m so glad that I finished it.

This is a story that I’m sure will haunt any woman. I can’t completely understand the physicality of a woman’s monthly, as I am not a woman, but this story has brought me one step closer. The level of detail is completely disturbing, told from the first person the listener is drawn into Nancy’s world.

Nancy has been menstruating for more than 3 weeks. When the story opens she is a doctor’s office seeking help and advice. The doctor is a creepy guy. He keeps flaring his nostrils and is completely distant. Nancy can’t believe that she picked a male gynecologist. She knows he is laughing at her stories about going through 4 boxes of tampons in two weeks.

However, the doctor gives her some hormones and vitamins and sends her on her way, but he wants to see her again in 3 days.

In those three days, Nancy gets worse and worse and…we’ll if you’re interested in finding out what happens, you’ll just need to download the story and listen.

As for the writing, it was amazing, like I said; this will make my top five stories of 2008. The language is grounded in detail. The plot is sparse and seems to flow with ease in-between delicately horrifying moments of discomfort and character building.

Marlowe, Florence Ann. Periods. Pseudopod, 112, October 17, 2008

THE VOICES OF SNAKES by Karina Sumner-Smith

The last short story podcast that I found to listen to while trekking into the office was PodCastle, the fantasy podcast magazine. I’m getting to it kind of late. I listened to the story a few days ago, but I had to let it mull around in my head a little.

The Voices of Snakes is an odd story told from the perspective of, yeah, you guessed it, snakes. I did not really shine to the story. I did enjoy listening to the reader read it; it did keep me company while I walked. Still, the language devolved into a commercial for Hello Kitty, Hello Sunshine…and a list that went on way too long. The hello-structure was picked up again at a second point in the story. Now, I can believe that snakes might talk or think in this way, but it was very distracting.

As for the rest of the story, I like it okay. It felt like mythology of goddess and god’s abusive relationship unfolding into my ears. They seemed not so much snakes, but dragons, long lived, angry.

At the end, there is a touching moment that feels like an apology from the writer rather than an ending appropriate for the story; or perhaps that is just my cynical side.

Anyway, the story is short and well read. It is worth a listen.

Sumner-Smith, Karina. The Voices of Snakes. PodCastle. Miniature 015, October 13, 2008

DeadBooks.com a PantherRun Production

Okay, readers are you read for this one? I don’t think so. I sure wasn’t prepared for what I found.

DeadBooks.com is the ultimate novel experience that utilizes the full multimedia experience that only the web can provide. It is the brainchild of Hasso Wuerslin author of The Deadbooks.

What I find most amazing is scale of the project. It is huge, no bigger that huge, it is enormous. Here is quick summary from the press release:

The 10 hour, 1st season will feature 30 actors, and 40 musical groups from around the world. It will tell the story a mining scout ship, led by the gifted Shallen, who discovers an Earth void of human life... except for the memories of a long dead, Will Lant - memories so powerful that they posses Shallen, revealing to him Lant’s final days; days in which Lant was forced to live the lives of three alternate beings in a desperate attempt to rectify a terrible mistake. Now, like the spider, the ghost of Lant traps all passersby, in the hopes that one can achieve what he could not bring himself to do.

There is a demo that walks you through how it all works. So don’t take my word that this looks really cool. Go try it.

I really haven’t had the much time to take part in a chapter yet. I’m finishing up making dinner to eat while watching to night’s debate between Obama and McCain. After I’ve had more time with it, I’ll report back as to just how cool it all really is, but don’t wait for me.

ARTIES AREN’T STUPID by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m really enjoying this new thing that I’ve discovered. Again, I know, I’m way behind the curve. But in my defense, I’m also new to iTunes. I know that you don’t need iTunes to listen to podcasts, but it is how I learned about them.

Anyway, this go around, while walking to work this morning, I listened to the latest edition of Escape Pod, the science fiction short story podcast, EP179: Arties Aren’t Stupid by Jeremiah Tolbert.

This is a great story full of wonderful slang and a strange new world order in which the children are highly specialized. From what I could gather, the children fall into a couple groups, the ones the story deals with anyway, which are: Arties, Melodies, Smarties (my word), Tuffies (my word). I say, “my word” because I forget what they were really called in the story.

The story centers on a group of Arties, children who must create. They must make things and art or they physically suffer. Their hands twitch and they begin to feel ill. They don’t mingle with other groups with different specializations. Well, except for one.

This is a story that is fun to listen to and think about. Why would a civilization what children to grow up only every wanting, no needing to perform one kind of task. Where is the logic? Or is it logical?

Besides being able to listen to it on my walk in to work, what I really enjoyed was the dialogue. It was hard to listen to at first, but by the time the story was done, I felt like I was in the know, part of an entire different culture. I guess that is the risk when writing any jargon or slang into a story, a reader must trust that there is going to some kind of pay for learning it. And in this story it was nicely done!

Tolbert, Jeremiah. Arties Aren’t Stupid. Escape Pod. 179, October 11, 2008

Diablo III

I am so ready!

Interview with David Oppegaard, author of The Suicide Collectors

The Soulless Machine Review interviews David Oppegaard, author of the upcoming debut novel, The Suicide Collectors, available in December 2008.

Here are a few options for pre-ordering:

Powell’s Books: The Suicide Collectors
St. Martin's Press: The Suicide Collectors
Amazon: The Suicide Collectors

You can hear an audio clip of the novel by going to the official site: The Suicide Collectors.

Twin Cities Book Tour Dates:

12/12/08 - Hamline University

2/23/09 - Edina Community Library

I first meet David Oppegaard in Core, a first year MFA requirement for students at Hamline University. David stood out like a sore thumb in that class. He had the kind of passion and drive necessary to carry something like a novel through the writer’s hell of full-time automaton wage-slave, got-to-put-food-on-the-table days.

In celebration, I would like to pimp his book, which I have yet to read. I will buy a copy, just like everyone else, in the hope that I can add a few royalty pennies to his author jar.

If you have time after reading this, check out his personal blog: Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard

The Interview:

SMR: So, The Suicide Collectors will be your first published novel. If you had to sell it to me in 30 seconds, what would you tell me about it?

DO: The Suicide Collectors is a combination of horror, literary, and speculative fiction. Five years after suicide plague has culled 90% of the earth’s population, a man named Norman travels across a wild and dangerous America to find a cure.

SMR: I remember you saying you had written several practice novels. What is a practice novel, and how did they help you grow as a writer?

DO: I think you need to write a lot when you’re starting out as a fiction writer. At least, I did. Surgeons don’t start out operating on live patients; they use cadavers. Writing novels that I knew probably would never see the light of day was my way of honing my work until I had something living to work with.

SMR: Why an MFA in Writing?

DO: I got an MFA in Writing so that I could be part of a literary community and to also get more critical feedback of my work. It suited my purposes admirably.

SMR: What are your feelings about workshops?

DO: They’re exhausting. They can either be helpful, or make you never look at your story again. Eventually, as you develop your voice and your particular sensibility, you move beyond needing an entire group’s help and start leaning on only one or two voices to help you with your work, and that’s a good thing.

SMR: Why suicide? What are your thoughts about David Foster Wallace (and Kurt Cobain)?

DO: I set out to write an apocalyptic novel with a new twist, and I’d never heard of any book with a suicide plague before. DFW was a troubled and complex mind and he obviously got tired of dealing with the pain. I think Kurt Cobain might have been better off never becoming famous at all, which is the sort of paradox that boggles the fame-obsessed American mind. I was always more of a Soundgarden and Pearl Jam guy myself.

SMR: When you are breathing life into your characters, where do you pull from?

DO: Mostly from all the voices inside my head. They just won’t shut up.

SMR: Are you involved in any literary organizations? Local or otherwise?

DO: No. I just get The New Yorker.

SMR: When you write, do you read other books?

DO: Yes. I write almost every day, so if I never read when I write One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish would have been my last book.

SMR: I read on your blog that you read Ulysses over the summer. What, if anything, did you learn about fiction from reading it?

DO: I appreciated the book and all the intellectual fireworks, but the entire time I read it I got the feeling that Joyce was trying too hard to show how smart he was and the story suffered because of it. It was interesting to see so many point of view styles mashed into one book, however.

SMR: What’s next for David Oppegaard?

DO: I’m finishing up my second novel Wormwood, Nevada. It’s set in a small town in central Nevada where a meteor lands and shakes things up. It will also be released through St. Martin’s Press, either late in 2009 or early in 2010.

Simple Spoonful

Like Food? I like food. Check out this new site: Simple Spoonful. It is written by someone who I went to college with. She is very passionate about being vegetarian and food.

RADIODEMONOLOGY by John Medaille

I just discovered the joy of podcasts. I know. I’m just a little behind the curve. Anyway, while searching iTunes, I found a horror short story podcast called Pseudopod. I downloaded Pseudopod’s latest cast to listen to today while I walked downtown to the Twin Cities Book Festival hosted by Rain Taxi to pick up a copy of rock, paper, scissors, which contains one of my short stories, “The Methuselah Project.”

I really enjoy listening to stories read aloud while I walk around downtown Minneapolis. Downtown Minneapolis seems to me to be the perfect setting for fiction, especially horror stories that explore demonology and souls, as does Medaille’s story.

The main character is a radiologist that truly enjoys his work. He loves looking to people and seeing what is wrong with them. He gives the reader a good list of fatal things that he finds within the human body, each of which gives him a perverse sense of pleasure.

One day, as he is looking deep within someone, he spots a shadowy thing. It hides deep in the chest. It is a soul. His co-workers can’t see what he is looking at because they are soul-blind. He then becomes obsessed with finding each and every person’s soul and comparing them. Some souls are bigger than others, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to soul size. Some souls are harder to find than others.

Then a guy in his machine who has no soul, drive him to discover the existence of demons. He can’t believe it. Demons exist. He does research. He uncovers that about 10% of humanity is not human. So he has to know, does he have a soul?

I’ll stop there. You really need to down load this story and listen to it. It’s not that long and I know that you will really enjoy it.

Medaille, John. Radiodemonology. Pseudopod, 111, October 10, 2008

Naughty Monkey Womens Belly Up Bootie

Naughty Monkey Women's Belly Up Bootie by Naughty Monkey, as listed on www.amazon.com.

I like shoes. I enjoy shopping in stores and on line for shoes. I’m much more of a window-shopper than a hoarder. I only own four pair, work, running, everyday, and winter boots.

I admire the work that goes into shoes, all kinds of shoes. I like the way new leather smells and how fresh soles comfort the feet.

And because I window-shop on line for shoes, amazon.com thought that I would like to receive targeted emails about shoes. Well, I do want that email. And in the shoe email that I got yesterday was the pair that I have pictured here: Naughty Monkey Women's Belly Up Bootie by Naughty Monkey.

I love the name: Naughty Monkey Women's Belly Up Bootie. Here let’s say it again: Naughty Monkey Women's Belly Up Bootie.

Wow!

MOBY DIGITAL by Joe Schembrie

“Moby Digital” is an adventure about exploring the classic novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville in a VR world that has been invaded by preservation seeking intelligent virus called Pazuzu.

The story starts out in an office where a university is teleconferencing with the VR manufacturing company’s helpdesk. The university noticed the Pazuzu, a large data string, enter their network, and immediately shut down their next work simulation by simulation. However, they could not shut down the Moby Digital VR world where a professor and his students were experiencing what it was like to sales aboard the Pequod as the narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael.

An expert in VR is brought on to enter the simulation and attempt to retrieve the class. He quickly finds that Pazuzu has disabled all of the emergency exit protocols, including the secret over ride, “Karma Exit.” The answer to the puzzle is that the story must come to an end. Ahab must die. Pazuzu knows how the story ends and has taken on the VR character of Ahab. As Ahab, Pazuzu refuses to drown and end the simulation.

The danger that the students are in is real. They are in suits that help to simulates that is gong on around them through little fibrous springs that after extended use will fatigue and expand to their full dimensions crushing the humans that ware them.

What I really like about this story is how well it communicates the modern reader’s reaction to overt metaphor. One of the characters gets into a discussion of the visual surroundings, all of which suggest gloom, doom, and death. She is turned off by these overt attempts to have details of the physical world mirror and reflect the plot of the story. Her argument is strange one. She is talking this class because she wants to be a writer, but yet she dislikes one of the most powerful tools that a writer can employ to evoke emotional responses in readers.

Anyway, I’ m glad that I chose to keep my subscription to Analog. I enjoy the stories that are published in its pages and I’m always surprised at what I find.

Schembrie, Joe. “Moby Digital.” Analog. December 2008, Vol. CXXVIII, No. 12. P. 44 -61

THE SOULLESS MACHINE REVIEW September 2008

THE SHIPS LIKE CLOUDS, RISEN BY THEIR RAIN by Jason Sanford

Extra:
LOW MAN by T.J. Vargo
MOVE UNDER GROUND by Nick Mamatas

Wow! What a small issue. I will do better in October. If you want to know what I was up to in September that prevented reviews, check this out: Where are the Reviews?