“Siren” pushes Michael Merriam’s buttons at his livejournal.

Sky-Tinted Waters is available via Sam’s Dot Publishing.

Here are Michael Merriam’s thoughts on “Tutivillus” (which I still can’t spell without looking at it.)

Sky-Tinted Waters is available via Sam’s Dot Publishing.

With Sky-Tinted Waters, award winning small-press publisher Sam’s Dot Publishing and the 350+ member strong Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers follow up their successful Northern Lights: 20 MinnSpec Tales anthology with twenty new tales certain to thrill, entertain, and illuminate. Within these pages the reader will find exciting fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories featuring: 
…Rampaging steam-powered constructs 
…Bioengineered killer squirrels 
…Military serums filled with nanotech 
…A demon who pounces on mispronounced words 
…An invisible flying pony 
…The two worst friends in the world at the edge of space 
…And fourteen more tales of adventure, enchantment, humor, terror, magic and science gone wrong, the unexplained, and the unanticipated by twenty author ranging from debut talents to established professionals in the field of speculative fiction.

The Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers (a.k.a. MinnSpec) is a group of speculative fiction writers in Minnesota (go figure) who gatherr online and in person to talk shop, share critiques and opportunities, and generally have a good time. The angologies are the brainchild of member Michael Merriam, author of Last Car to Annwn Station, Shall We Drown in Feathered Sleep, and Horror at Cold Springs, among other things, who wanted a showcase for the remarkable work of our remarkable members.

How did I end up on comma duty? When Northern Lights came out, I reviewed it on Good Reads, saying something to the effect of, “I enjoyed the stories, but I wish they’d run it past a copy editor before publication, because the typos were killing me.” When the time came to plan Sky-Tinted Waters, Michael approached me and said, “Remember what you said in that review? Care to put your money where your mouth is?” Because I never pass up an opportunity to whip out the Red Pen of Doom, I was more than happy to oblige. I like to think I did my part to make this anthology as full of awesomeness as it could be.

Sky-Tinted Waters is available via Sam’s Dot Publishing. 

Sky-Tinted Waters

I may have mentioned a time or twenty that I have a story in, and also copy-edited, the new Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers’ anthology, Sky-Tinted Waters, now available from Sam’s Dot Press.

I’m delighted to announce that STW can now be ordered online via the Sam’s Dot website. Both print and e-versions are available.

In conjunction with the release, anthology editor Michael Merriam and I will highlight the anthology’s stories in a series of posts beginning this coming Monday, May 14. At his livejournal, Michael will talk about the selection process and why he just had to have the stories he chose for the anthology. I will be the Alistair Cookie Monster to his Monsterpiece Theatre, talking about my experiences copyediting the stories and offering general observations about the pieces and the process.

We’ll begin at the beginning, with Michael’s introduction to the anthology. Hope you’ll play along!

Never did I attribute dislike of a book to its merits or lack thereof. The message, delivered overtly or covertly, depending on the teacher, was that the canonical works were innoculated against anything as jejune as criticism based on aesthetic merit. Whether the underlying priniciple was that the books were good because they were in the canon (or in the canon because they were good) or that because they were in the canon, whether or not they were good was irrelevant, I learned the lesson well. Only as an adult, encountering some of these books on my own, have I started to realize that being considered part of the literary canon is no guarantee against a bad book.

Moby Dick, via Wikimedia Commons

I mention this because I just finished Moby Dick. This was a first read for me; somehow I’ve managed to miss it all this time. I should have kept missing it. I see what Melville was trying to do, but I don’t think he did it. And while I realize that novels were supposed to do different things in Melville’s time than are today’s novels, I adore some works from his contemporaries (I’m even a fan of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”) and feel Moby Dick falls short even by the literary standards of its own time. But I never would have felt comfortable saying that in my youth.

Roasting the sacred cows of your childhood: maybe that’s what being a grown-up is about.

M&C's Handfasting by Cara Fenton. Some rights reserved.

Freshwater Theatre has a script submission call up for “Better or Worse”, their fall production about the shifting landscape of marriage. Several members of my playwrights’ group are writing pieces for this or have submitted already and are encouraging the rest of us to do likewise. I want to do this. I have Strong Opinions about marriage; it seems right up my alley.

And yet I am stymied by the vastness of the subject. Marriage! That’s a huge, huge playground. Even the additional information I’ve gleaned about the sorts of things Freshwater may be most interested in almost makes the playing field bigger, because it opens up the whole of history. It’s like trying to pick up a sand dune with my fingers: every time I grasp at it, it slips away.

Several ideas have floated through my mind, each one more bizarre than the next. One keeps coming back. It is not, ironically enough, about same-sex marriage, the matrimony-related issue on pretty much every Minnesotan’s minds these days. Still, maybe it’s the teacup that will let me hold at least a bit of the ocean.

The constitutional deadline for legislative adjournment is Monday, May 21. But leadership, in their infinite wisdom, swore they would adjourn yesterday, April 30.

My team here at the day job was on call last night. Foreseeing a long, weary night ahead of us, we had agreed to come in at 11, rather than our usual 8:30, and we really weren’t surprised when our boss called Sunday evening and said, “They didn’t get much this weekend; better make it noon.” We slept in. We wore the comfiest clothes that still fulfilled office dress code. We filled our desk drawers with food, like mariners embarking on a three-year voyage.

And we seemed so vindicated when the house met for ten minutes and then recessed until 4:30. So vindicated when Representative Holberg placed the bonding bill on the day’s fiscal calendar. So vindicated when amendments flowed through our office like water.

“The Cut Man Cometh” is an episode of Sports Night in which the network plans an hour and a half of coverage around a boxing match and then feels punched out, itself, when the bout lasts a mere seven seconds.

Thus did we feel when both chambers adjourned by 6 p.m. We…we had food! We had comfy clothes! We came in 3 1/2 hours late–were we supposed to sit around all night?

Fortunately, owing to a late night on Friday, we had extra hours to offset, so we were able to split at 6:30. Which meant I was able to get to the Minnesota Threshold Network meeting after all. And I returned home at 9:30 Monday night, rather than some mind-boggling hour Tuesday morning. So that’s a win.

Still, it was not at all the way the day was supposed to go. This is not at all how the session is supposed to be going. Another missed deadline leaves egg on everyone’s face.

Always have a backup plan.

I grew up at the dawn of “faux activism”. People have long worn t-shirts that express their political and social leanings, but when I was coming of age, we seemed to enter an era where the t-shirt wasn’t just one more visible extension of the wearer’s activism; it was the wearer’s only activism–as though wearing a Live Aid or ACT UP shirt would end world hunger or AIDS without any further effort on the wearer’s part.

I think of these acts of pointless sartorial expression as the forerunners to today’s Internet petitions, where people add their names to long lists of names that are rarely seen and less often acted on by people with the power to do anything about the issues in question and then go back to playing Angry Birds, convinced they’ve done “their bit” for the environment or racial equality or the day’s other cause celebre.

Maybe my friend’s “Stop Plate Tectonics” shirt was only meant to be funny. But I always read it as a dig against the kind of complacency that choose to let a piece of cotton be its sole defense against the world’s maladies. I can think of few issues less likely to be impacted by “t-shirt activism” than continental drift. If that was the message, it took a very cynical view of human efforts to effect any of the other conditions heralded on other shirts. I choose to think we can make a difference in the world, if we really put our backs–t-shirt clad or otherwise–into the work.

Or maybe the t-shirt was just a reminder that, like the old saying goes, you can’t fight mantle convection–a lesson Pangaea learns in my newest “Restorying the Sacred” column, “The Last Days of Pangaea“.

If I were a worshipful sort, I might cast DNA in the role of deity. Largely ineffable beings who control the fate of life on our planet? (For certain values of “ineffable”.) Check. Created humankind? (For certain values of “created”.) Check. Follow–and by extension cause us to follow–a strict set of rules? Check.

But if DNA is a deity, it’s a Trickster. Think of mutations. Think of so-called “junk” DNA, whole sections of the genome that appear, to us, not to be doing anything. Think of transposons. Jumping genes, people. I can’t make this stuff up. Genetic modification notwithstanding, we’re pretty well at the mercy of DNA, and DNA likes to mess with us.

Fortunately, sometimes that’s to the good, as I explore in my newest “Restorying the Sacred” column. In it, I riff on the hypothesis that the actions transposable genetic elements may aid virus avoidance and may also account for much more than previously realized in terms of human personality differences.

Our genes build the foundation of who we are–especially when they’re doing the unexpected. That seems like a good lesson to carry through our often unexpected lives.

The Virus and the Jumping Gene

Dad and I are more fixed. We want to put down roots and really get to know a place. There was one vacation we took every year, the same week each year, to Bellaire, Michigan. That was the trip I loved, the one I looked forward to every year. I couldn’t wait to visit familiar places, to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. I relished the rhythm, the routine, the relationship to this place.

But what was the relationship I had to this place, after all? In places with high tourism volumes, especially during the warm months, “summer people” is often a perjorative the residents use to describe the hordes who descend and then depart each year. The scorn, I suspect, is not for the visitors in and of themselves but for the sense of entitlement they often carry with them. The feeling that, because they spend a few weeks or even a few months here every summer, that this is “their” place, that they have the same rights and relationship in regards to it as do those who make it their year-round home and know it in all its seasons and moods.

I think the truth is, as usual, somewhere in between. We should acknowledge that even people who only perch in a place for a few days, but who do so over and over, have some sort of relationship with that place, but we should be honest that it isn’t the same relationship as that of those who roost in that place permanently. Can we, perhaps, learn to harness what is best in both of those kinds of attachments for the good of the place that, after all, we all love?

A few things to perhaps ponder as you read my latest post at No Unsacred Place, On the Function of Time on the Magic of Place.