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WIP: A Cavern Ripe With Dreams

Cover for A Seed on the Wind, painting by Mats Minnhagen
Tiny things floated through the air all around him. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed. Attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, to carry it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. So small. As it neared his eye, it became no longer brown, ridges and swirls marked its surface in grays and greens and reds that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.
I’m finishing up A Cavern Ripe with Dreams, the sequel to A Seed On the Wind. A version will undoubtedly go out to Patreon patrons before I start shopping the combined novellas around as a single entity.

This story owes a great deal to both William S. Burroughs’ Junky (indeed, the protagonist is named Bill in his honor) and Joe R. Lansdale’s Drive-In, a book I found immensely freeing and exhilarating in its sheer WTFery and bravura. If you’ve read A Querulous Flute of Bone, it’s the same world, that of the co-writing project The Fathomless Abyss.

From part of today’s writing:

Bill felt a rush of fear, but a kind that he had never experienced before, something like the fear you feel when someone tells you a frightening story that they believe is true. A terror that was convincing yet somehow dilute. A terror that was not his, somehow.

A fear that was enjoyable.

He realized that it was the creature. That he was feeling its emotions. That if he closed his eyes, he could still see the room like a ghostly overlay across the darkness behind his lids.

He wondered if it experienced the same phenomenon, this double life. He put his hand up and touched it with a fingertip, stroking along the coarse fur that was still damp with eggy fluid. It smelled like newly-split wood, rare and sharp. As he touched it, it shuddered but stayed still, like a woman whose innermost core had been touched, who feared and craved more. At the thought, he grew hard, and he felt it shudder again before it curled tighter around his neck.

He lay there with it around his neck, savoring the mental taste of it, dipping in and out of its perceptions. After a while, his bladder drove him into standing and using the chamber pot beneath his bed. As he pissed, he could feel the creature tasting his sensations in turn.

It made him curious. Settling back onto the bed, he took a syrette from the bedside table, already loaded with honeypain. He injected it in his wrist and lay back to feel the twofold sensation.

First it felt as though the back of his eyes had dissolved, only to be filled with a subtle warmth that flowed out from them, flowing through him until he was only a zone of temperature and sensation, as though he was warm water in a bath, only an outline. But always with that lurking presence perceiving him, keeping him whole. He had loved honeypain for its ability to take him outside himself, but now he realized that it was nothing compared to the creature.

He tried to think at it, to see if it would answer him, but all his thoughts were blurred by the honeypain. He could hear only his blood drumming in his veins, a hard and insistent beat that told him he was alive, as it had before, for sometimes when he was dipped deep in these reveries, he thought himself dead. Now he had that beat but more ““ the creature curled on his chest. Part of him but not part.

After a while he slept.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

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Recent Writing/Publishing Related Links, 4/11/2013

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony
One of my favorite pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony, late in their lives.
On some other boards I frequent, the question of how to make a publication more diverse has been coming up. Here’s a couple of pieces related to that. The editors of Tin House and Granta discuss how they worked to make their publications more diverse. Anne Finch talks about similar editorial practices. For a breakdown of what the gender ratio was of book reviewers and books reviewed, see the 2012 VIDA count.

For yet another explanation of why this might matter, here’s Deborah Copaken Kogan talking about her experiences as a female writer. And for those confused about why talking about what a woman does is more important than what she looks, here’s this.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the Night Shade Books convulsions. I wait to see what happens, as do a number of people with a lot more at stake.

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Falling

Falling
When I first began to fall through the floor, I didn't know what was happening...
More free fiction, this time a piece that originally appeared in Cream City Review, in an issue guest-edited by Frances Sherwood.

When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.

My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.

I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.

My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.

“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.

My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.

My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.

“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”

Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.

I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.

I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.

I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.

I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.

A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.

Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.

In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.

We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.

I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.

My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.

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