The open submissions period for Fungi (an anthology I am editing with Orrin Grey) is fast approaching (January 15-February 15) and I wanted to talk about mushrooms and size.
We generally think of mushrooms as small because we are used to seeing little white caps growing on the ground. We do not imagine them as large, but some of the largest organisms on earth are fungus. One species, Armillaria solidipes (formerly Armillaria ostoyae), known as the honey mushroom, was found in Oregon a few years ago. It has been growing for some 2,400 years and covers 3.4 square miles. Now let Alice chew on that!
To make things more difficult, some mushrooms don’t look like mushrooms at all. The Annulohypoxylon thouarsianum resembles a lump of coal. It’s inedible. Not that you’d like to sauté that thing.
Then there are the mushrooms that glow in the dark, members of the Mycena family. It doesn’t get any groovier than these babies.
In conclusion, when considering possible ideas for Fungi think of all the fungal variety surrounding us. Oh, and do check my list of things I’d like to see in the slush. Enjoy the mushrooms.
This is not a love song. Meche could not stand most love songs. Especially the sappy ballads of the 80s, so cheesy you could choke on them.
Mexico City, 2009
Meche folded the magazine and finally decided to look out the window. The Federal District lay below, a great beast that seemed to have no beginning and no end, towers and buildings rising and dotting the valley. The roads were twisted snakes criss-crossing its surface, the cars tiny ants raising to their anthill. Twenty million people all gathered together – smashed against each other in the subway, crammed into the buses – with the Angel of Independence saluting them from above its pedestal.
It was eighteen years since she’d seen the city. Twenty since she’d last seen her father.
Now he was dead.
He had been pickling his liver for three decades and smoking since he turned twelve, but she’d thought him immortal.
Meche rubbed the bridge of her nose.
She didn’t even have a black dress. She knew her dad would have said to wear whatever the hell she wanted: dead is dead. But her mother would expect black. The whole nine days of mourning. The food they’d feed the guests. The nightly prayers.
If it had been up to Meche she would have cremated him and tossed his ashes in the Gulf of California, like he wanted. But her mother had insisted on the casket, the funeral, the prayers to follow.
She collected her bags and pulled the luggage, trying to find the familiar face among the sea of strangers.
So it begins. Revisions for Sound Fidelity, my novel split between two time periods: a group of teenagers in Mexico City in 1988 and one of those teenagers returning home many years later. What is worse than writing 75,000 words of a novel? Revising those words. I have no idea how one is supposed to do that, though I have a little notebook and a red pen for corrections. Well, plus the printed pages of the manuscript. I plan to be done in a couple of weeks.
If you’re interested in reading the revised copy when I’m done, let me know. I need a Beta Reader before I start shipping it out.
I spent a lot of time listening to the songs below when I was writing. Hell, I spent a lot of time listening to music because the novel deals heavily with records from the era.
Keane, Somewhere Only We Know (This not from the 80s)
Miguel Bose, Aire Soy (This is the 80s. Can’t you tell?)
In 2011 I won an award (Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize, sponsored by Gloria Vanderbilt and Exile Quarterly) and was a finalist for another (Manchester Fiction Prize). I got to see Toronto thanks to Exile, so that was pretty awesome.
After a couple of false starts, I finished a novel. Sound Fidelity is done! Yes, it needs to be revised but it exists and will go out to meet the world and its literary agents in 2012.
I co-edited three anthologies with Paula R. Stiles and released them through my micro-publishing business, Innsmouth Free Press. The most successful one, for a number of reasons is Future Lovecraft. Historical Lovecraft did OK and Gothic is not hot, as proven by Candle in the Attic Window. I had fun with all of them and next year I’m working on Fungi with Orrin Grey.
I also published a number of stories:
- Flash Frame (December 2010. Reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu, September 2011. Originally in Cthulhurotica)
- At the Edge (Space and Time, January 2011)
- The Death Collector (AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review, February 2011)
- Shade of the Ceibra Tree (Kaleidotrope, May 2011)
- Scales As Pale as Moonlight (Carter V.Cooper Anthology and the Canadian literary journal Exile Quarterly, May 2011)
- A Handful of Earth (Expanded Horizons, July 2011)
- This Strange Way of Dying (GigaNotoSaurus, August 2011. Audio recording from Podcastle, November 2011)
- A Puddle of Blood (EVOLVE Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, August 2011)
- The English Cemetery (Coffinmouth, September 2011)
- The Gan Wait (AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review, November 2011)
- Memory (Expanded Horizons, December 2011)
That’s about it! For 2012 I hope to write more non-fiction, work on more short stories, release the mushroom anthology and actually sell a novel. Unless the world ends tonight. In which case, we had a good run.
- We had an Ahuizotl in our Historical Lovecraft anthology. Because who says you can’t?
Nnedi Okorafor has an interesting post today in which she talks about the issue of Lovecraft and racism. She talks about the fact that the World Fantasy Award statuette is shaped like a Lovecraft head and Lovecraft was a racist (hating on African Americans and a number of other minorities alike), which can leave a sour flavour in the mouths of minorities.
There are some suggestions on Facebook that the bust should be changed to reflect another writer (Borges was brought up) or into another shape (please, not a phallic rocket ship or sword, oh lord). While I’m not against modifying the statuette (and hell, I’m Latin America and a minority, so Borges would be kind of neat), I want to talk a bit about Lovecraft and racism.
Lovecrat was a racist. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has read about him. He was also a knot of contradictions (not only because he married a Jewish woman after railing against Jewish people), which is no excuse, it’s just fact. I won’t even bother with the product-of-his-time thing because he was, and yeah. Lovecraft’s fears about everything (and boy, he had a number of fears) were channeled into his stories, so that it becomes pretty obvious that he didn’t like people who looked like me (“Red Hook” anyone?).
But just because Lovecraft was one way it doesn’t mean we have to be the same way. This is the mantra behind Innsmouth Free Press, where we’ve had a multi-cultural issue (Ekaterina Sedia, Charles R. Saunders and others contributed to it) and now two anthologies (Historical Lovecrat and Future Lovecraft) with writers from more than a dozen countries, some of them translated into English. The latest anthology, for example, has contributors from places like Nigeria, the Philippines and Germany. And the stories and poems are not about polite gentlemen from New England. “Tloque Nahuaque,” translated from the Spanish by me and penned by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas, puts the Higgs boson debate in a decidedly Mexican context (Tloque Nahuaque refers to a Prehispanic deity).
When Paula R. Stiles and I read slush, we still find a lot of stories that try to emulate Lovecraft by placing the tales in New England, with upper-crust white men as protagonists. During our Historical Lovecraft submissions period we got a big wave of the Victorian white gentleman, which caused me to blog about this and request more stories that veered from that narrow location and era because, hell, who wants to read an anthology called Historical Lovecraft and find out all we are representing is Boston 1880 to 1910? Instead, we managed to obtain some colonial Mexico and a bit of Egypt, among other things.
So what I don’t want to see with this debate is minority writers saying “shucks, I’ll never write a Lovecraft story because he was a racist asshole.” Because Lovecraft does raise interesting points and you can construct a refreshing dialogue by taking his settings, characters, idea or the like, and adapting them to your needs. If we don’t go there and start creating our own stories upon those Lovecraftian shores, nobody else will.
I think talking Lovecraft, having a dialogue about the statuette, all that is pretty cool, but I hope writers don’t dismiss Lovecraftian fiction in general as an exclusionary zone we must keep out of. There are no fences here, folks. I hope you join us al lado de Cthulhu. There are cookies and tamales.
This illustration by Oliver Wetter will be the cover for the anthology.
Guidelines for the Fungi anthology have gone up. I am co-editing this with Orrin Grey, so he will likely have more to say about his taste over at his blog, but here are some things I am looking for:
- Locales and protagonists from outside the United States. Why? Because we get a lot of stories with people from the US so I know I will have no problem finding stories set in New York or Los Angeles. Taiwan and South Africa? That may be more of a stretch.
- Stories from authors who do not hail from the United States. Because, once again, we’ll have no problems getting stories from authors in the United States, but other countries become more difficult. And it is often the international writers who utilize international locales, so it becomes crucial for me to get a large enough pool of authors from around the world so I can get a variety of settings and protagonists.
- Bizarre stories. Mess with my mind.
- Stories without plots. Stories that are not third-person POV. Hero’s journey? Not my cup of tea.
- Stories of body horror.
- Stories with good science. Show me you know your mushrooms.
- Stories that straddle genres. Steamfungus? Sword & Fungi?
- Stories in Spanish. Or, let me say it this way: Acepto cuentos en español. Cualquier corte fantastico (terror, realismo mágico). Favor de incluir una biografía.
Please don’t angst if you are a writer from Kansas writing about mushrooms in Topeka with a third-person POV. I will not know what I want until I see it, but this is a large, malleable wishlist. I will blog periodically about the slush once the submissions period opens.
In other news, we are having a Future Lovecraft Tweet-a-thon with a chance to win prizes this Thursday from 6 pm to 9 pm PST. Follow the tag #futurelovecraft.
