WIP: The Ghost Installers

Hugo nominations have opened and with that, an array of canvassing and promotion techniques have begun to be deployed, which will no doubt continue until the actual awards are awarded and everyone can briefly calm down before a new season begins.

The thing I’m not fond of, which has arisen in recent years, is the idea that one should vote according to one’s politics, and plunk down a vote for the “right” books without bothering to read them. Some people like to justify this by pointing to something that is undeniably true — the award is often less often the expression of the opinion of SF fans overall than that of a small subset of those fans and sometimes — perhaps even often — popularity, access to high-traffic websites, or other factors not related to quality of writing affects those results. In these cases, that’s usually used as a justification for throwing the votes in what’s perceived in the opposite direction.

And my reply is this: FFS, people, read stuff and vote for the stories you like, the stories which YOU find well-crafted and appealing. Go download the excellent Campbell sampler that Marc Blake has been putting together each year and take the time to read through it. Look at the ‘year’s best’ lists. Ask people what they liked that you might. Look at the five kerjillion “here’s what I have eligible this year” posts, particularly if you have a favorite author and want to make sure you don’t miss anything by them.

But read it and apply your standards to it and then vote for what you thought was the best story/novella/whatever. Anyone telling you to vote any other way, anyone offering their work and saying “you should vote for this because we belong to the same category” rather than “I hope you’ll vote for it if you like it” has an agenda that is not at all about quality of writing.

Yes, there are “taste-makers” — critics whose likes and dislikes are listened to, and often used for guidance. But those folks fall all over the spectrum and the answer, if you think there’s not someone representing your particular niche of opinion is to become one yourself, by putting your opinion out there articulately, clearly, and interestingly, which is the very same process by which those taste-makers got to that position.

You may well not agree with a particular award’s results. Opinions are like…well, you probably know how that saying goes. There’s plenty of room in a world this size for a vast array of opinions. But when a piece you didn’t like wins an award, saying that it did so because of politics comes off as soreheaded sour grapes more than anything else. Let’s face it, a shitty, badly-written piece has an awfully steep (but again, admittedly not impossible) hill to climb before accumulating the avalanche of votes something needs to win one of the major awards. But assuming that because you don’t like something no one else is justified in liking it is narcissistic egotism.

Want to see the stuff that you like on the ballots? Nominate it, vote for it, spread word about it on social media, through reviews, and via blog posts or other writings. Work at that, not trying to handicap the other candidates just so yours can limp home. And read stuff and decide for yourself, don’t just take the slate of predigested candidates someone has prepared so you don’t have to read any of that nasty conservative/liberal/whatever prose and actually think for yourself. Read all over the spectrum, not just one color. You’re shortchanging yourself of some good stuff otherwise.

This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.

Talking in the Night

It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.

After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.

“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”

“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”

He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.

Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.

One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.

He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.

It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.

But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.

She answered.

She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.

And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.

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In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

If you’re in Baltimore at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend, please stop by the SFWA booth and say hi!