“The best tales are told at a certain hour—just as we are all here at table. No one ever told a story well standing up, or fasting.”
—Honoré de Balzac, “La Grande Bretêche,” as included in Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Phillip Wise.

“How like life itself a star is. It pulses. It struggles to maintain itself in a boundless ocean of cold despair. Every atom vibrates its little nucleus out, fighting the vampire night sucking its life. And the star fights knowing the struggle is hopeless, knowing that all it can do is die defiantly, going nova as its last grand gesture.”
-- Colonel Gneaus Julius Storm, from Glen Cook's SHADOWLINE: VOLUME ONE OF THE STARFISHERS TRILOGY.

"Now this—this is beautiful. St. Peter’s. The church, the square, marble everywhere, sunlight blinding you like the flashlight of God."
— from "Hit" by Bruce McAllister, appearing in By Blood We Live, coming this fall from Night Shade Books.

From the Wikipedia article: By the 1920s, Anna Jarvis had become soured on the commercialization of the holiday. She incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association, trademarked the phrases "second Sunday in May" and "Mother's Day", and was once arrested for disturbing the peace. She and her sister Ellsinore spent their family inheritance campaigning against the holiday. Both died in poverty. Jarvis, says her New York Times obituary, became embittered because too many people sent their mothers a printed greeting card. As she said, "A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A petty sentiment!"

"For about the first time in his orderly and prudent life he forgot to blow out the candle, and when he was called next morning at eight there was still a flicker in the socket and a sad mess of guttered grease on the top of the little table."

From "OH, WHISTLE, AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD" (1904) by M.R. James

"Sitting together, we were washed by the light flowing in every direction across the landscape. I held my arm around Vaughan as he slept, watching as the fountain pouring from the radiator grilles of the crashed cars twenty yards away gradually faded. A profound sense of calm presided over my body, composed partly of my love for Vaughan, and partly of my feelings of tenderness towards the metal bower in which we sat. When Vaughan woke, exhausted and still half asleep, he leaned his naked body against me. His face was pallid, exploring the contours of my arms and chest. Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside, and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die."
--J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), Crash

"The turnover in commercial, genre writing among readers is close to ninety percent in four years... in other words, studies have shown that ninety percent of people reading, say, Galaxy today, were not readers of the magazine four years ago. In this sense it means that for all but the few thousand collectors, enthusiasts and professionals the field literally has no history; destroying said history at the rate of two and a half times a decade, a rate that even the government of the United States could not equal.

"Because the turnover is so complete, because the field has no history, it means that virtually no given work or body of work will survive to succeeding generations of the readership, far less 'finish off' a given area. No matter what you do, ten years from now you (or your heirs) will be dealing with an audience that will act or react precisely as if you had not done it at all. This is reasonably discouraging. It functions as one explanation—there are many others—to why so many of our Big Names are ex-writers and drunks in the bargain."

Barry N. Malzberg, "Introduction to Running Around," The Best of Barry N. Malzberg (1976)

This morning's reading included Sarah Layden’s ”The You You've Wanted to Become”, which appears in the first Online Edition of Diet Soap, a literary ’zine edited by Doug Lain and M.K. Hobson. Ms. Layden’s tale of a doleful, workaday loser finding solace, perhaps even redemption, within the red leather embrace of a Japanese restaurant/Karaoke bar is expertly crafted, with a protagonist that engenders a reader’s sympathies, even as he drunkenly blunders along, pining for the woman who abandoned him along the way. Even as he watches the bar’s patrons performing, this sad-sack yearns for more: “Even if he could sing, standing on a stage in front of strangers seemed show-offy, a mark of desperation, foolish. A small part of him wished he had the guts to perform, but the feeling was like a painful splinter under a thumbnail: in need of removal.” While Layden’s story remains firmly grounded in a First World, non-fantastic setting, there is a hint of something larger, something perhaps even magical at play as it reaches towards its climax, intimating that true change, real transformation is about to occur.

In an attached interview, Layden states, “There’s something so heartbreakingly real and true about karaoke, which is basically the art of faking. The performers, by and large, are a bunch of amateurs, and they’re so vulnerable.” While I would agree with Layden’s assertion that karaoke singers are exposing their vulnerabilities (but what artist isn’t?), I can’t help but feel that she is off the mark in calling karaoke “the art of faking.” In fact, I would suggest that karaoke, at least as a fictional device, is a perfect metaphor for the magical, the fantastic, and the transformative, in a culture that has, for the most part, abandoned belief in the supernatural.

Karaoke, its name a portmanteau of the Japanese words for “empty” and “orchestra,” has, over the last thirty or so years, moved from hotel lounges and backwater bars to the forefront of Western attention. Several nights a week, you can turn on a television and watch note-perfect mimics warbling renditions of popular songs spanning the past forty years. Many fall short, but some are transformed, becoming kings and queens of popular culture at the whim and delight of an always-fickle public. Is this faking it, or a reward of self-transformation? And is the idiom of the popular song, through the influence of these amateur endeavors, evolving into something more? There are very few rituals in 21st Century Western culture, few transformative rites. Pop music is the only common book we have.

An early draft of Mark Anthony Carpenter’s (sadly unpublished) “Fall of the Karaoke King” puts it this way: “For anywhere between two and five minutes, you’re a star. For two to five minutes, you’ve got them eating out of your hand. Under the spotlight, sweat beading on your brow, your hand shaky on the microphone, you still exude a certain confidence. You might forget some of the words, but to the drunks, you’re Elvis. Presley or Costello, that’s your choice. […] The KJ calls your name, puts on your song, and you’re transformed. For the next two to five minutes, you’re Springsteen or Sinatra, David Bowie or Toni Basil.” For a society that dreams of, yearns for stardom, karaoke is transformation in action.

“Yes,” his companion said earnestly. “Tell me a story. Me would love to hear a story. Tell I a story of love and hate and death and tragedy and comedy and horror and joy and sarcasm, tell I about great deeds and tiny deeds and valiant people and hill people and huge giants and dwarfs, tell I about brave women and beautiful men and great sorcerorcerors … and about unenchanted swords and strange, archaic powers and horrible, sort of ghastly … things that, uhm … shouldn’t be living, and … ahm, funny diseases and general mishaps. Yeah, me like. Tell I. Me want.”

Mc9 was falling asleep again, having had not the slightest intention of telling his companion a story in the first place. The companion prodded him in the back.

“Hey!” He prodded harder. “Hey! The story! No go to sleep! What about the story?”

“Fornicate the story,” Mc9 said sleepily, not opening his eyes.


---From "Road of Skulls", by Iain M. Banks, as it appears in his collection The State of the Art.

Awake? Maybe. Spent last night wandering from party to party to party. Between the Australians, Broad Universe, and Zombies Need Brains, there was plenty of drinking and partying and fun. Somewhere along the line, I ended up with a lizard-shaped bottle opener. Strange.

"So, what do you write?" asks the girl.
"Naughty words, mostly," I say. "On walls."
"No, seriously," she says. "What do you write?"
I place my hands on my hips, superhero style. "Wrongs," I answer. "I right wrongs."

Maddie and I had a few errands to run this morning, and while we were out and about, we decided to drop by Our Best Friends. Maddie sniffed around outside, doing her usual thing of checking for unusual smells, then we headed in, only to be met by a bat-winged Hannah at the door.


“Trick or Treat,” insisted Hannah as we stepped inside.
“I think you’ve got that backwards,” I said. “We’re supposed to say ‘Trick or Treat.’”
“It’s my shop,” said Hannah, pressing her paw against my foot. “I’ll say ‘Trick or Treat’ whenever I want.”


“Cool wings,” said Maddie. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing much,” said Hannah. “Just hanging around. Get it? I’m a bat.”
Maddie rolled her eyes. “That’s silly. Say, what kind of Bat are you, Hannah? A bulldog bat? A fruit bat?”


“Pshaw,” said Hannah dismissively. “I’m a vampire bat. Blah!”
“Ooh,” said Maddie. “Like Lord Ruthven? That’s cool, we just read The Vampyre.”
Hannah shook her head. “No, more like Dracula,” she said. And then, in a Transylvanian accent, “‘Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make…’”
“That’s a pretty good Bela Lugosi impression, Hannah,” said Maddie.
“Thanks, can you do any movie vampire impressions?”
“Maybe,” said Maddie.
“Oh, who?”

( See Maddie's impression behind the cut... )

“Ever want to be a farmer, Bert?” Deseau asked.
“No, Frenchie,” Learoyd said.
Deseau shrugged. “Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Besides, I like shooting people.”
He laughed, but Huber wasn’t sure he was joking.

-from Paying the Piper, by David Drake, as included in The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Volume 3, coming soon from Night Shade Books.

Just back from walking Miss Maddie. It's raining. Lightly, but just enough to call it rain instead of mist (or, my favorite, "heavy marine air").

Oddly enough, the weather's managed to get Del Shannon's "Runaway" lodged in my head. Sing along, if you can: "I'm a-walkin' in the rain..."

"The night was a bedlam of whacks, hisscracks, and propellant flashes of red, orange, and yellow supplementing the powerguns’ saturated blue..."

...oh, man. I love this stuff.

Working from home today, dropping corrections into David Drake's The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Volume 3. Nothing says morning quite like hovertanks and powerguns with your coffee.

Maddie's still asleep. Once she wakes up, I'll take a break and we'll go for a walk.

"Science fiction is the only area of literature outside poetry that is symbolistic in its basic conception. Its stated aim is to represent the world without reproducing it. That is what dealing with worlds of possibilities and probabilities means." - Samuel R. Delany, "Faust and Archimedes," The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (197).