The Quality of Descent

Oh, hey, I wrote a story and you can read it! "The Quality of Descent" is over at Lightspeed Magazine. It’s about a girl with wings, love, falling, theatrical lies by way of magic show, and faith. I actually love this story a whole lot, though it took me forever to write and kind of hurt along the way.

"The trick begins like this: The magician throws an egg up into the air, where it flies — small and white and full of import — up and up, high into the black reaches of the proscenium. We await the descent, holding our breaths, expecting at any moment the crash of slapstick hilarity, exploding like a bomb. But the egg simply vanishes."

They even made an audio version for their podcast. As a fan of audiobooks and radio plays and most situations that involve having a story read to me by someone with a nice voice, I’m over the moon about this. It’s the first time I’ve heard one of my stories read aloud by someone else and it makes me giddy.

The lovely Liz Argall also interviewed me about the story here.

stories (mine) of 2013

I've left this blog cold and unattended for a long while. A long while in which many things happened and I acquired a taste for the sort of panicked mania that is brought on by working on something with equal amounts of passion and fear. 

(More about this one day, maybe. Sharp & Fine put on a show that put me through the wringer and that I loved to pieces. It was called Queen of Knives and adapted from Neil Gaiman's poem of the same name. Pretty pictures HERE.)

So, 2013: the year of frequent passion and terror. And, somehow, also the first year I've ever had more than one story published. I had exactly one more than one--and for someone who finishes a story only rarely due to laziness and frequent distraction, having two come out in one year seems incredibly indulgent--and I am going to savor that fact for a little moment, feel very queenly and pleased with myself, before returning to the world of dance and passions and, hopefully, a bit less fear.

SHORT STORIES (MINE) OF 2013

The Manticore, the Mermaid, and Me (in Unnatural Creatures, ed. by Neil Gaiman and Maria Dahvana Headley, April 2013). A story about two young people who are very dear to each other, but who can't quite seem to see the same thing at the same time. Also, a story about a natural history museum, monsters, an overheated summer, and overheated hearts. Indulges my obsessions with rogue taxidermy and awkward transformations.

Because of this story, I have an email thread in which Neil asks whether I have a story he might like and to which I reply, in the wee hours of the morning, by calling Neil and Maria the cat's pajamas, making the unrelated declaration that "I HATE LOVE," and blaming all email typos on a slew of French 75s.

Eating the Pomegranate (Electric Velocipede, December 2013). A story about things that I don't normally write stories about: sisters, strange fixations on appetite, Persephone. Also, a story about the things I'm always writing about: ghosts, disasters, people leaving. The people in this story are mostly unhappy, the kind of people I'd find a drag to be around if they were real, but who somehow became bizarrely inescapable when I made them up. I told myself, very specifically, that I didn't want to write about Persephone (I mean, how annoying is she, with her whiff of piteous manipulation?), but, apparently, I couldn't help myself.

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This is what I look like after a year in which I have been very, very excited and equally nervous for a long time (and, it seems, incapable of scheduling a haircut). I think I am trying to look intense. My friend Lauren made a Marat/Sade comment. I have since made friends with my hairbrush again.

Cheers, 2013.

"The Manticore, the Mermaid, and Me"

Whenever I see Neil Gaiman, he asks me whether I've been writing. Most of the time, I mumble something about how I'm working on this project or that project, slowly, oh so slowly, but--my god!--dance just eats up all the time in the world and how will a story ever finish itself?

The answer is that it won't. Sometimes, this makes me feel guilty.

Sometimes, I throw myself into a chair (or, more likely, across a bed) and fling words on paper until the story is finished.

It's hard though. And since dance really does eat up all the time in my world, it's embarrassingly rare.

When Neil asks if you have a story that might fit into a book he is putting together, the answer is obviously yes, even if you are typing this out in a state of tipsiness and are not entirely sure whether or not you have such a story. The answer is still yes, even if you discover that the story you thought might fit is actually in a state of sad disrepair, an untouched and confusing first draft on a pile of papers festering at the bottom of a cardboard box. The answer remains yes all through the night and next day as you strip, cannibalize, and restring the story and discover, after many hours of labor, to your great surprise and delight, that it works.

So, I am ridiculously thrilled to say that a story of mine is in a fat, gorgeous book edited by Neil and Maria Dahvana Headley. Unnatural Creatures is a collection of sixteen stories about unlikely and impossible beasts. The other authors are ones who I admire like crazy, ones whose stories have made me cry, or made me happy, or given me terrible nightmares for weeks (see: E. Nesbit.) Sales of the book benefit 826 DC. The 826 organizations are amazing and magical, a force of marvelous good.

You can read Neil's post about the book HERE. You can read Maria's post about the book HERE.

My story is called "The Manticore, the Mermaid, and Me." Neil and Maria gave me this title. It makes me think of an old movie from the 1960s that doesn't exist and this makes me very happy.

"the night we drank cold wine"

I recently did edits on a story that I hadn't looked at in a very long time.

In 2009, I wrote a story that was supposed to be about fairy balls, wine, and dancing. In 2010, I sold it to Electric Velocipede, where it sat comfortably and lazily while EV went through some changes in their publishing situation and I slowly forgot about it. In October 2012, I received an email full of editorial comments for a story that felt like a distant, time-travelling cousin.

When I wrote "The Night We Drank Cold Wine," I felt terrible for one of the characters. You poor, dear girl, I would say to her in my head, how unlucky and foolish can you possibly be? I could, as a writer, understand her choices. I could not, as a person, quite get the feel for them.

Three years later, I get it.

This probably says something about my powers of clairvoyance or the salutary qualities of either fiction or three years of living.

"The Night We Drank Cold Wine" is, at long last, out in Electric Velocipede #25. You can read it HERE. If you do, I'd love to hear what you think. I am astonishingly nervous. This is only my second ever published story and I'm still a-quiver with the novelty and terror of the experience.

It starts like this:

Being late, Rhodes says, is just a symptom of bad luck. It doesn't have anything to do with the person waiting.

He tells me this so I can imagine all the unlucky things that keep him from where he wants to be: misplaced keys, traffic jams, a stopped clock, bad directions. Sometimes, Rhodes leaves without thinking about how to get where he's going. He wanders from his door, takes the circuitous route, and ends up somewhere else, having never paused to check the time. When he's really late, he calls.

a story ("the telescope")

It's funny. A terrible thing happens and I find myself twiddling my thumbs. There's so much waiting involved when someone you love dies and you are not there. We wait for conference calls to discuss autopsies and the catering of a funeral. We wait to hear from the church on whether the chosen day is taken by a wedding or a baptism. We wait to talk to an airline about whether a Christmas holiday, booked just last week, can be exchanged for a September funeral.

I wait for impact. It usually hits in the night. Days are long and guiltily empty. I read Anthony Lane's film reviews like they're breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Things strike me as inappropriately hilarious.

(The island of Kauai, my uncle tells me, does not have its own coroner. The coroner flies in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Otherwise, there's a part-time assistant coroner. I can't stop thinking about this hapless character. I imagine a weekly television comedy based on--his? her?--bumbled adventures, a sloppy procedural interrupted by the irresistibly irritating coroner proper, swooping in on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays.)

I dig in the boxes under my bed. I find old stories.

"The Telescope" is the only story of mine that my grandma ever read (apart from the books I used to make out of stapled-together pieces of paper with marker illustrations bleeding through all the pages and stories about talking animals in bland childhood scrawl). She told me that it was strange and that she was proud.

It was originally published in 2010 in Sybil's Garage. I ran across the file this morning while looking for things to delete and I thought it might be nice to put it up. So, I did.