I think I mentioned before that I'm juggling way too much shit. The sick thing is I sort of like it.
I finished story 120 almost three weeks back. I normally tell you guys the titles of the stories, but I'm on the fence about that now. I'm probably being stupid. It only matters if editors are reading this blog, but hell, no one is reading this blog. I could post my social security number here and it would be pretty safe. See, the thing is, if an editor is reading this blog and they see that the story I sent them was named here ten months ago, they can reasonably assume that I've already shopped it around to a couple of other places, therefore it's been rejected by other places and the current editor wasn't actually number one on my list. But openness is supposed to be the wave of the future isn't it? Transparent business and all that? The World Tree House. There. I said it.
You might have thought that I was going to be writing a story a week this year to achieve my 52 in 2010 goal. I probably thought the same thing as well. For about half a second anyway. What I've found though, is that if I crank out a story in one week, it's not terribly good. The main thing it lacks, in my opinion, is resonance, the bit that's going to stay with you after you walk away from it. To get the magic resonance, I need to write a first draft, then leave it alone for a while. Then I need to write a second draft and leave it alone for a while, and so on. My subconscious mind needs to chew on it and so when I sit down to rewrite, it gets considerably better. Where I really get cranking is in the final drafts where it's just tweaking and polishing. So what all of this means is I'm going to be doing all of my first drafts early in the year and all of my final drafts late in the year. I'll look like I was slacking for months and then had this incredible burst of productivity near the end of the year.
Right now, I've got one story completely done (see the second paragraph), I've got two first drafts done, I'm working on about ten other first drafts and I still need ideas for thirty-nine more stories. Insane? Hell, yeah! But this isn't really terribly different from how I normally work. I always have loads of stories in production at the same time and I jump from one to another as the mood strikes me. I've got a really short attention span, so this is what I do.
If you're fucked up, or outside of the norm (and we all are in one way or another) don't try to fix yourself, because you probably can't and you'll just drive yourself crazy on top of everything else. Instead, shift your life around so it works with your particular issue and ignore the rest of the planet. If you're a lefty, don't struggle to play a guitar like a righty. Turn that guitar the other way and play it like a lefty. Put your freak flag up, Jimi! That's my PSA for today.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Enjoy Free Stories, Donate For Earthquake Relief
Crossed Genres is hosting a fundraising effort for the survivors of the earthquake in Haiti. Lots of authors are posting stories for free and all that we ask is if you enjoy what you read, please consider donating. Links are on their site here: http://crossedgenres.com/haiti/
This is my contribution, based on a piece of flash fiction that first appeared on this blog a few years back. This much longer version has never seen publication and is exclusive to this post. If you like it, please link to this post and link to Crossed Genre's site. Thank you.
We raised artificial livestock on the farm where I grew up, selling and bartering mish-mash animals as pets or parts for tourists. Many of our brothers regarded our work as folk-art. Those cosmopolitan space/time-farers bought mass-produced modules by the millions. But the connoisseur module scavenger knew backwater planets held rough gems well worth the increase over factory price. A sleek and contoured heart designed by an engineer in a sterile lab seemed perfect in theory. A heart extracted from an animal raised from an evolved and proven line of biomechs, though it might look shabby and organic, had been tested in an actual being for years before hitting the marketplace. My mother made sure the offworld parts scrounger knew he’d discovered the find of a lifetime, doubtless worth a prince’s ransom. But, she admitted, simple people such as ourselves had little need for so much. The buyer always agreed to the deal, perhaps supposing he’d put something over on us. Her full-bodied rural beauty may have helped.
In the heat season when our white sun melted slow moving men where they lingered, the animals fed in the fields of plastic and carbon fibers which grew wild since my great-grandfather scattered their seeds across the land as a boy. Among our creatures lived a beaked thing we children dubbed Horus, too underdeveloped to be sold off in the earliest market day I could remember. At four years old I learned my first skills at solar collector repair when Horus began sputtering out in the yard. My older sister Doro came to me in tears with his quivering body in her arms.
“Please help him, Manny,” she begged. The little thing did look pathetic, a tattered runt that seemed close to death. Our hand, Roberto, fixed such things but that week he carried out his annual citizen service on Ointon. There he plugged into the Motherport along with nine-hundred and ninety-nine others. They held hopes of coming one step closer to the Überconstruct who would find true meaning in the Universe and purpose for us all.
From the shed, I dug up Roberto’s thinFingers and longEyes. I’d watched him work his technomagic a hundred times, wiling away cold season afternoons. I’d never made any repairs myself. Nothing in my experience led me to believe I could help poor Horus. Looking into Doro’s wet eyes, however, I had no choice but to try. Something happened to me when I ported in Roberto’s modules. Odd feelings of half-formed muscle memory that didn’t belong to me guided me through circuits I could never have understood by myself. I sat on Roberto’s cot beneath wisps of nylon cobwebs and saw a confusion of highways mere molecules wide stretching forever. My eyes took me to what must have been the most likely trouble spots. My new fingers, steady as the Western Moon with their pico shocks and gyros, traversed the destruction on those tiny fields and worked to repair them almost of their own accord. When I thought too hard, I made a mess of things. When I relaxed and did what felt right, I drew atoms from my own body to rebuild a thousand broken routes with simple elegance. My enhanced mind knew that Horus had fallen from a short height.
“You can’t play with Horus on the stone wall any longer,” I told Doro. I couldn’t see anything on her scale with my borrowed eyes but I felt her long silence and her tattered yellow frock brush against my knee.
“Okay,” she said, so quietly an older set of ears might not have heard. My older sister sounded, for the first time, like a little girl to me.
Through a long afternoon of limited trials and few errors, I gave life once more to Horus. My grandfather praised my young genius. So he didn’t know. He couldn’t have shared my skills. Maybe no one could. Other people’s modules, used with love and for the divine purpose they were built, held their memories, and these I could feel like no one else could.
Horus might have gone on to be slaughtered the following season and turned into a fine splayed ribcage module but by the time he matured, Doro and I had become so attached to him that we couldn’t let him go.
“It’s time to turn over the little thing, baby,” mother said to Doro one humid evening on our front porch. “I’ll make you a beautiful dress with the cloth we’ll afford.” Doro stood as if to gather Horus but instead broke into hysterics. She threw herself to the ground and pleaded for his life as if pleading for her child’s. Mother remained unmoved. She stepped toward Doro with one arm outstretched but I threw myself between them. I pulled Doro’s head to my small chest as if to protect her, though I imagine it looked as if I sought my own sanctuary in her shadow. I utilized every one of my mother’s sales tricks against her.
“Has my sister asked for a thing in her life?” I asked, bent and wide-eyed. “Not a dress, not a toy, not a scrap of food more than what she’s been given. Can’t we let her keep the only bit of joy she has out here, away from any friend?” I, of course, exaggerated my sister’s saintliness but even at this age I understood that people buy not from logic but from emotion. I blathered on, unrelenting; not for little Horus, but for Doro who tore my young heart out with each sob.
Mother stepped back with a stern lecture on the care and feeding of a pet as opposed to a farm animal. I don’t think the strength of my argument impressed her so much as my ability to apply what I’d picked up from her. Horus’ life had been spared. I attached a plastiflex nerve-skeleton to its one I/O port and we added any scrap module we could get our hands on to the poor thing’s body. Our pet became our pet project.
As I grew taller, time for my shed experiments shrank as the family needed every strong back to stay solvent. The days promised hours of blistering, module-damaging work. We hauled and ground up hundreds of pounds of feed blocks. We cleared trees whose rootwires crept beneath the house and scattered signals, or grew beneath the fields, squelching appetites. I often got stuck with the mind-numbing task of herd sculpting. I spent months stressing the animals’ more marketable organs for development. I bound limbs and pruned circuits to atrophy unwanted growths where generations of breeding fell short.
But the evenings of my youth brought time for cool relaxation. Mother would make us remove and clean our filth-caked parts in a trough of nanobeads on the back porch before allowing us inside. There, our spring coil muscles wound down after a farmer’s dinner of microbial assemblers and raw materials. Grandfather might tell tales of the Within Wars while grandmother stitched new tools together for Roberto, string by string. In the harsh, smoky light of the chemical fires, I would switch faces for fun with my little sister, Esme, the update in our latest edition of the family. I laughed whenever I put on Esme's face. Everything seemed so pinched up, like my whole head had eaten a lemon. My own face drooped from Esme like old howlerbug jowls.
The modules of our forefathers hung from the rafters in the common area of our home and we children would make up exotic stories about their uses and owners. A simple rakeHand would become the claws of an ancient modular druid king under my telling. Doro transformed the remains of a long dead uncle’s liverbox into the fused hearts of two tragic lovers and little Esme ate up every bit of it. The stories would go on like this until one of the family-proud adults overheard and forced fact upon us before sending us to bed. I slept hard in those days. Never again after that.
Late one morning about that time, I finished turning the old ground on the edge of the farm, wearing the tractorLegs and plowBottom of my late father when Grandfather walked out to check on my progress. He usually wouldn’t come out this far but I saw he used my own young legs and enjoyed the ride. After some small talk about the land, he said:
“That’s quite a game you play with your little sister there, Manny, trading faces. Gave me an idea, though. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if I were to borrow your mug sometime.”
“Um, sure. If you want.”
“It’s my eyes, you see. Ain’t what they used to be. I can still work okay, but a guy needs to get out and have a beer with his friends, you know what I mean? These eyes aren’t so good for driving at night.”
“It’s fine, Grampa,” I said. It never occurred to me to ask him why he didn’t just want my eyes. The next day I understood that the face as a unit made it easier to meet young women at bars. I should have told my grandmother, but the memories of a hundred kisses, painted and perfumed, would leave me drunk in the morning and addicted for life. The next few times he asked for my face, I handed it over eagerly.
Days after I first loaned out my face, I caught Doro washing her hands in the bathroom. Her hands sifted through the beads, her icy-pink polish unmistakable. But my grandmother’s face looked back at me in surprise from the mirror.
“Uh-oh,” I said. The good times had come to an end. Gram caught on without my telling. It made me sad to see my sister like that, her youth and beauty gone with none of the life lived in between the first face and this one. Her expression as she turned made me realize I must look much the same to her.
Grandmother met her husband at the bar that night wearing Doro’s face, it being an image-spitter for her own former countenance. After a few minutes of sputtering discomfort, my grandfather found a passion he’d thought long dead. As the cracks and fissures of her features had disappeared, so erased were the decades of love’s servitude under her ownership. For an evening he felt her a being to be pursued once again, a woman he had to live up to, rather than a permanent mortgage on a used-up product. All the years of resentment and dry-rotted love between them vanished. Withered fingertips caressed voluptuous lips. Third generation teeth tenderly chewed pliable young ears. They did things which two people with borrowed faces should never do.
With our original faces back in place, Doro and I could not look at one other the next day. The pains she took to avoid me made me suspect that my talent for module memory was not mine alone and this made me feel doubly ill. Not only knowing what I knew, but knowing anyone else, much less Doro, knew it too. I took my meals in my room. When I caught Grampa leering at Doro and when I saw my grandmother eye me in an ungrandmotherly way, those meals came back up.
Grampa came back to me that night after supper, begging again for the loan of my face. I’d been raised not to argue with my elders, so although I never wanted to loan him my face again, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. What might come next? My hands? Might my grandmother ask for my sister’s breasts?
Our grandparents borrowed our faces again that night and every night after. As mortified as Doro and I felt, we couldn’t disobey them. Each morning I cleansed my face until it burned raw and red. I went faceless in the privacy of my room. Esme asked to play our little game every so often. I refused and refused again until I yelled at the poor innocent and she bawled to shake the foundation of our home. Mother would get angry at me but Gram always intervened on my behalf.
By now Horus’ shape had become much more humanoid, his original form pared down and stuffed within the chest of his new body, the very ribcage that mother had once envisioned. As I grew more isolated from my own family, I added a cheap bootleg conversamodule from an antique infotainer to Horus’ growing brain. I plugged it into a dusty old voicebox that I found stored away in the attic. From beyond the reclamation heaps, my great- great Aunt Consuela’s voice spoke to me in my room about the advantages of using Huarte’s Brand FishSoap and hacking a man’s emoter to true devotion in seventeen easy steps.
Through my grandfather’s ears, I heard my grandparents one night in their room. They no longer bothered to leave the house. Why should they? I started drinking alcohol borrowed from the cabinet in the family room after everyone else retired for the night. I applied it externally in the morning to remove an odd and unpleasant taste from my lips that I wouldn’t identify until full adulthood.
My grandmother passed away eight months later, taken in her sleep when her smoker’s lungs finally stopped producing smoke. My grandfather called me to his bedroom door, his tears streaming down my face.
“She never asked for new modules,” he said. “She always said that if Fate Assembler had wanted us here longer, She would have supplied our parents with better parts. A foolish woman. A stupid, stupid woman.”
He handed Doro’s face to me and asked me to return with his wife’s. The exchange with the old man proved to be the most awkward of my life, but only because I hadn’t yet spoken to my sister. Doro looked as shocked to see me with her face in my hands as if I’d held out her menstrual module to her.
“Grandmother has died,” I offered as my explanation. Doro gasped and tore our grandmother’s visage from her head, throwing it to the floor. She stepped into her room and slammed the door. I picked up Gram’s face and left my sister’s in its place.
After the funeral, Doro left home in the middle of the night. I don’t think she wanted to be in the same house as the old man now that she found herself the sole owner of her beauty once more. I think too, sometimes, about what her face held for her when she put it back on. Did she feel grandmother’s death through it as I felt the remembered kisses that my grandfather received? If so, what must have it been like for a living person to feel death and then move on?
A lifetime lay ahead of me to forget everything that happened and the seasons rolled on regardless. I grew accustomed to Aunt Consuela’s voice and let Horus become Hora. She became my life’s work over the years, and I took to using only the finest offworld modules within my economic grasp to develop her. I could have altered her forever, but I had to stop. There comes a time in a non-born construct’s life, if she’s ever to become anything more than a mere bot, her maker must bring his work to a halt and give her a couple of undisturbed years. Time is needed for a consciousness to knit itself into existence from her constituent parts.
Doro and I never spoke, but through her needleblurbs to Esme, I learned that my older sister had gone east. She’d taken her knowledge of farm grown modular systems and parleyed it into a company known for its quality and innovations. Doro helped turn small time farming into big industry, putting some family farms in her part of the country out of business. Her work affected us as well to a lesser extent as demand for the old-fashioned went down. We let Roberto go as money got tighter.
Paolo, Esme’s school friend from the neighboring land, nudged his way into our lives at about that time. He wore his modules to scrap, doing his own chores in double-time most days, before coming to our place to lend his many hands. He found payment in suppers, sitting next to Esme in that strange silence the two of them shared. So young, and yet so much went unspoken.
I asked Hora for her hand in marriage. She had been my closest companion since childhood, closer than my own family members as I found deep relationships with them to be unbearable. Hora had her own mind now, as strong as mine, and didn’t care for some of the imported modules I’d installed. She didn’t closet her blonde hair; she sold it off.
“I don’t like standing out among everyone else,” she told me in tears when I nearly overloaded my voicebox in anger. And what could I do but tell her I loved her, whatever parts she used? Hora took her parts from local farms and vendors, eschewing peddlers with the latest offworld fashions. She traded her thin pale lips for a pair more full and dark. Her new cheeks were rounded and soft. Between the time I asked her to marry me and the time she said yes, her resemblance to my family had grown disturbing.
I didn’t see Doro again until Esme’s wedding, some fifteen years after she’d run away. Had our grandfather still been alive, I might not have seen her even then, but he’d given up on module replacements himself, after losing my grandmother’s love for a second time. Doro had become a woman with a grace both matured and refined, untouched by the stretch and relaxation that deforms those women hyper-aged by marriage and childbirth. We didn’t embrace at the shuttle pick-up. We barely spoke each other’s names as I led her porter disk to the bed of my old truck and we didn’t say another word after that.
Esme’s wedding was enchanting. My mother outdid herself, creating something white, golden and magical on our meager budget. My daughter sang like a dying nightangel for our joined families as Esme rode up the aisle on a snow-white steed formed by the fusing of some of our families’ combined livestock. The tables at the outdoor reception glowed by firefly lamps. Candied doves peeled themselves open for us with the help of their robotic exoskeletons. We danced to the music of our own squeezeboxLungs and bows drawn across vocalstring modules purchased for this day.
As the night wore on, I went into the house to replenish the drinks. We’d stocked up on carbonated oils for the occasion, flavored with orange, salmon, and alder. With an armload of bottles, I turned to find Doro in the pantry doorway, our uncle’s old liverbox hanging in silhouette behind her. She startled me and I looked straight into her eyes for the first time since childhood. Her look suggested everything that hadn’t been spoken between us for all those silent years.
Bottles smashed upon the dark wood floor. I walked through shards of dripping glass and I took her head in my hands. Letting our facial memories take over, we kissed like we had always kissed before. We kissed like we had never kissed before. In shame, I had long ago put the thoughts of those thick, firm lips from my mind. And too, the warm softness of her cheek; fine hairs invisible to a brother, taken for granted by a lover. She was mine for just this one heartbeat in eternity. The single moment declaring the end of the chase.
Doro left in the night, like she had so many years ago. I slipped into Hora’s fresh bed, she, sleeping off an early evening drunk. Her gentle snore warmed the room. I removed my face, and placed it in the sock drawer of my bedside table where, my friends tell me, it is the appropriate place for a married man’s pornography.
This is my contribution, based on a piece of flash fiction that first appeared on this blog a few years back. This much longer version has never seen publication and is exclusive to this post. If you like it, please link to this post and link to Crossed Genre's site. Thank you.
ABOUT FACE
A TALE OF THE MODULAR MEN)
by Matthew Sanborn Smith
A TALE OF THE MODULAR MEN)
by Matthew Sanborn Smith
We raised artificial livestock on the farm where I grew up, selling and bartering mish-mash animals as pets or parts for tourists. Many of our brothers regarded our work as folk-art. Those cosmopolitan space/time-farers bought mass-produced modules by the millions. But the connoisseur module scavenger knew backwater planets held rough gems well worth the increase over factory price. A sleek and contoured heart designed by an engineer in a sterile lab seemed perfect in theory. A heart extracted from an animal raised from an evolved and proven line of biomechs, though it might look shabby and organic, had been tested in an actual being for years before hitting the marketplace. My mother made sure the offworld parts scrounger knew he’d discovered the find of a lifetime, doubtless worth a prince’s ransom. But, she admitted, simple people such as ourselves had little need for so much. The buyer always agreed to the deal, perhaps supposing he’d put something over on us. Her full-bodied rural beauty may have helped.
In the heat season when our white sun melted slow moving men where they lingered, the animals fed in the fields of plastic and carbon fibers which grew wild since my great-grandfather scattered their seeds across the land as a boy. Among our creatures lived a beaked thing we children dubbed Horus, too underdeveloped to be sold off in the earliest market day I could remember. At four years old I learned my first skills at solar collector repair when Horus began sputtering out in the yard. My older sister Doro came to me in tears with his quivering body in her arms.
“Please help him, Manny,” she begged. The little thing did look pathetic, a tattered runt that seemed close to death. Our hand, Roberto, fixed such things but that week he carried out his annual citizen service on Ointon. There he plugged into the Motherport along with nine-hundred and ninety-nine others. They held hopes of coming one step closer to the Überconstruct who would find true meaning in the Universe and purpose for us all.
From the shed, I dug up Roberto’s thinFingers and longEyes. I’d watched him work his technomagic a hundred times, wiling away cold season afternoons. I’d never made any repairs myself. Nothing in my experience led me to believe I could help poor Horus. Looking into Doro’s wet eyes, however, I had no choice but to try. Something happened to me when I ported in Roberto’s modules. Odd feelings of half-formed muscle memory that didn’t belong to me guided me through circuits I could never have understood by myself. I sat on Roberto’s cot beneath wisps of nylon cobwebs and saw a confusion of highways mere molecules wide stretching forever. My eyes took me to what must have been the most likely trouble spots. My new fingers, steady as the Western Moon with their pico shocks and gyros, traversed the destruction on those tiny fields and worked to repair them almost of their own accord. When I thought too hard, I made a mess of things. When I relaxed and did what felt right, I drew atoms from my own body to rebuild a thousand broken routes with simple elegance. My enhanced mind knew that Horus had fallen from a short height.
“You can’t play with Horus on the stone wall any longer,” I told Doro. I couldn’t see anything on her scale with my borrowed eyes but I felt her long silence and her tattered yellow frock brush against my knee.
“Okay,” she said, so quietly an older set of ears might not have heard. My older sister sounded, for the first time, like a little girl to me.
Through a long afternoon of limited trials and few errors, I gave life once more to Horus. My grandfather praised my young genius. So he didn’t know. He couldn’t have shared my skills. Maybe no one could. Other people’s modules, used with love and for the divine purpose they were built, held their memories, and these I could feel like no one else could.
Horus might have gone on to be slaughtered the following season and turned into a fine splayed ribcage module but by the time he matured, Doro and I had become so attached to him that we couldn’t let him go.
“It’s time to turn over the little thing, baby,” mother said to Doro one humid evening on our front porch. “I’ll make you a beautiful dress with the cloth we’ll afford.” Doro stood as if to gather Horus but instead broke into hysterics. She threw herself to the ground and pleaded for his life as if pleading for her child’s. Mother remained unmoved. She stepped toward Doro with one arm outstretched but I threw myself between them. I pulled Doro’s head to my small chest as if to protect her, though I imagine it looked as if I sought my own sanctuary in her shadow. I utilized every one of my mother’s sales tricks against her.
“Has my sister asked for a thing in her life?” I asked, bent and wide-eyed. “Not a dress, not a toy, not a scrap of food more than what she’s been given. Can’t we let her keep the only bit of joy she has out here, away from any friend?” I, of course, exaggerated my sister’s saintliness but even at this age I understood that people buy not from logic but from emotion. I blathered on, unrelenting; not for little Horus, but for Doro who tore my young heart out with each sob.
Mother stepped back with a stern lecture on the care and feeding of a pet as opposed to a farm animal. I don’t think the strength of my argument impressed her so much as my ability to apply what I’d picked up from her. Horus’ life had been spared. I attached a plastiflex nerve-skeleton to its one I/O port and we added any scrap module we could get our hands on to the poor thing’s body. Our pet became our pet project.
As I grew taller, time for my shed experiments shrank as the family needed every strong back to stay solvent. The days promised hours of blistering, module-damaging work. We hauled and ground up hundreds of pounds of feed blocks. We cleared trees whose rootwires crept beneath the house and scattered signals, or grew beneath the fields, squelching appetites. I often got stuck with the mind-numbing task of herd sculpting. I spent months stressing the animals’ more marketable organs for development. I bound limbs and pruned circuits to atrophy unwanted growths where generations of breeding fell short.
But the evenings of my youth brought time for cool relaxation. Mother would make us remove and clean our filth-caked parts in a trough of nanobeads on the back porch before allowing us inside. There, our spring coil muscles wound down after a farmer’s dinner of microbial assemblers and raw materials. Grandfather might tell tales of the Within Wars while grandmother stitched new tools together for Roberto, string by string. In the harsh, smoky light of the chemical fires, I would switch faces for fun with my little sister, Esme, the update in our latest edition of the family. I laughed whenever I put on Esme's face. Everything seemed so pinched up, like my whole head had eaten a lemon. My own face drooped from Esme like old howlerbug jowls.
The modules of our forefathers hung from the rafters in the common area of our home and we children would make up exotic stories about their uses and owners. A simple rakeHand would become the claws of an ancient modular druid king under my telling. Doro transformed the remains of a long dead uncle’s liverbox into the fused hearts of two tragic lovers and little Esme ate up every bit of it. The stories would go on like this until one of the family-proud adults overheard and forced fact upon us before sending us to bed. I slept hard in those days. Never again after that.
Late one morning about that time, I finished turning the old ground on the edge of the farm, wearing the tractorLegs and plowBottom of my late father when Grandfather walked out to check on my progress. He usually wouldn’t come out this far but I saw he used my own young legs and enjoyed the ride. After some small talk about the land, he said:
“That’s quite a game you play with your little sister there, Manny, trading faces. Gave me an idea, though. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if I were to borrow your mug sometime.”
“Um, sure. If you want.”
“It’s my eyes, you see. Ain’t what they used to be. I can still work okay, but a guy needs to get out and have a beer with his friends, you know what I mean? These eyes aren’t so good for driving at night.”
“It’s fine, Grampa,” I said. It never occurred to me to ask him why he didn’t just want my eyes. The next day I understood that the face as a unit made it easier to meet young women at bars. I should have told my grandmother, but the memories of a hundred kisses, painted and perfumed, would leave me drunk in the morning and addicted for life. The next few times he asked for my face, I handed it over eagerly.
Days after I first loaned out my face, I caught Doro washing her hands in the bathroom. Her hands sifted through the beads, her icy-pink polish unmistakable. But my grandmother’s face looked back at me in surprise from the mirror.
“Uh-oh,” I said. The good times had come to an end. Gram caught on without my telling. It made me sad to see my sister like that, her youth and beauty gone with none of the life lived in between the first face and this one. Her expression as she turned made me realize I must look much the same to her.
Grandmother met her husband at the bar that night wearing Doro’s face, it being an image-spitter for her own former countenance. After a few minutes of sputtering discomfort, my grandfather found a passion he’d thought long dead. As the cracks and fissures of her features had disappeared, so erased were the decades of love’s servitude under her ownership. For an evening he felt her a being to be pursued once again, a woman he had to live up to, rather than a permanent mortgage on a used-up product. All the years of resentment and dry-rotted love between them vanished. Withered fingertips caressed voluptuous lips. Third generation teeth tenderly chewed pliable young ears. They did things which two people with borrowed faces should never do.
With our original faces back in place, Doro and I could not look at one other the next day. The pains she took to avoid me made me suspect that my talent for module memory was not mine alone and this made me feel doubly ill. Not only knowing what I knew, but knowing anyone else, much less Doro, knew it too. I took my meals in my room. When I caught Grampa leering at Doro and when I saw my grandmother eye me in an ungrandmotherly way, those meals came back up.
Grampa came back to me that night after supper, begging again for the loan of my face. I’d been raised not to argue with my elders, so although I never wanted to loan him my face again, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. What might come next? My hands? Might my grandmother ask for my sister’s breasts?
Our grandparents borrowed our faces again that night and every night after. As mortified as Doro and I felt, we couldn’t disobey them. Each morning I cleansed my face until it burned raw and red. I went faceless in the privacy of my room. Esme asked to play our little game every so often. I refused and refused again until I yelled at the poor innocent and she bawled to shake the foundation of our home. Mother would get angry at me but Gram always intervened on my behalf.
By now Horus’ shape had become much more humanoid, his original form pared down and stuffed within the chest of his new body, the very ribcage that mother had once envisioned. As I grew more isolated from my own family, I added a cheap bootleg conversamodule from an antique infotainer to Horus’ growing brain. I plugged it into a dusty old voicebox that I found stored away in the attic. From beyond the reclamation heaps, my great- great Aunt Consuela’s voice spoke to me in my room about the advantages of using Huarte’s Brand FishSoap and hacking a man’s emoter to true devotion in seventeen easy steps.
Through my grandfather’s ears, I heard my grandparents one night in their room. They no longer bothered to leave the house. Why should they? I started drinking alcohol borrowed from the cabinet in the family room after everyone else retired for the night. I applied it externally in the morning to remove an odd and unpleasant taste from my lips that I wouldn’t identify until full adulthood.
My grandmother passed away eight months later, taken in her sleep when her smoker’s lungs finally stopped producing smoke. My grandfather called me to his bedroom door, his tears streaming down my face.
“She never asked for new modules,” he said. “She always said that if Fate Assembler had wanted us here longer, She would have supplied our parents with better parts. A foolish woman. A stupid, stupid woman.”
He handed Doro’s face to me and asked me to return with his wife’s. The exchange with the old man proved to be the most awkward of my life, but only because I hadn’t yet spoken to my sister. Doro looked as shocked to see me with her face in my hands as if I’d held out her menstrual module to her.
“Grandmother has died,” I offered as my explanation. Doro gasped and tore our grandmother’s visage from her head, throwing it to the floor. She stepped into her room and slammed the door. I picked up Gram’s face and left my sister’s in its place.
After the funeral, Doro left home in the middle of the night. I don’t think she wanted to be in the same house as the old man now that she found herself the sole owner of her beauty once more. I think too, sometimes, about what her face held for her when she put it back on. Did she feel grandmother’s death through it as I felt the remembered kisses that my grandfather received? If so, what must have it been like for a living person to feel death and then move on?
A lifetime lay ahead of me to forget everything that happened and the seasons rolled on regardless. I grew accustomed to Aunt Consuela’s voice and let Horus become Hora. She became my life’s work over the years, and I took to using only the finest offworld modules within my economic grasp to develop her. I could have altered her forever, but I had to stop. There comes a time in a non-born construct’s life, if she’s ever to become anything more than a mere bot, her maker must bring his work to a halt and give her a couple of undisturbed years. Time is needed for a consciousness to knit itself into existence from her constituent parts.
Doro and I never spoke, but through her needleblurbs to Esme, I learned that my older sister had gone east. She’d taken her knowledge of farm grown modular systems and parleyed it into a company known for its quality and innovations. Doro helped turn small time farming into big industry, putting some family farms in her part of the country out of business. Her work affected us as well to a lesser extent as demand for the old-fashioned went down. We let Roberto go as money got tighter.
Paolo, Esme’s school friend from the neighboring land, nudged his way into our lives at about that time. He wore his modules to scrap, doing his own chores in double-time most days, before coming to our place to lend his many hands. He found payment in suppers, sitting next to Esme in that strange silence the two of them shared. So young, and yet so much went unspoken.
I asked Hora for her hand in marriage. She had been my closest companion since childhood, closer than my own family members as I found deep relationships with them to be unbearable. Hora had her own mind now, as strong as mine, and didn’t care for some of the imported modules I’d installed. She didn’t closet her blonde hair; she sold it off.
“I don’t like standing out among everyone else,” she told me in tears when I nearly overloaded my voicebox in anger. And what could I do but tell her I loved her, whatever parts she used? Hora took her parts from local farms and vendors, eschewing peddlers with the latest offworld fashions. She traded her thin pale lips for a pair more full and dark. Her new cheeks were rounded and soft. Between the time I asked her to marry me and the time she said yes, her resemblance to my family had grown disturbing.
I didn’t see Doro again until Esme’s wedding, some fifteen years after she’d run away. Had our grandfather still been alive, I might not have seen her even then, but he’d given up on module replacements himself, after losing my grandmother’s love for a second time. Doro had become a woman with a grace both matured and refined, untouched by the stretch and relaxation that deforms those women hyper-aged by marriage and childbirth. We didn’t embrace at the shuttle pick-up. We barely spoke each other’s names as I led her porter disk to the bed of my old truck and we didn’t say another word after that.
Esme’s wedding was enchanting. My mother outdid herself, creating something white, golden and magical on our meager budget. My daughter sang like a dying nightangel for our joined families as Esme rode up the aisle on a snow-white steed formed by the fusing of some of our families’ combined livestock. The tables at the outdoor reception glowed by firefly lamps. Candied doves peeled themselves open for us with the help of their robotic exoskeletons. We danced to the music of our own squeezeboxLungs and bows drawn across vocalstring modules purchased for this day.
As the night wore on, I went into the house to replenish the drinks. We’d stocked up on carbonated oils for the occasion, flavored with orange, salmon, and alder. With an armload of bottles, I turned to find Doro in the pantry doorway, our uncle’s old liverbox hanging in silhouette behind her. She startled me and I looked straight into her eyes for the first time since childhood. Her look suggested everything that hadn’t been spoken between us for all those silent years.
Bottles smashed upon the dark wood floor. I walked through shards of dripping glass and I took her head in my hands. Letting our facial memories take over, we kissed like we had always kissed before. We kissed like we had never kissed before. In shame, I had long ago put the thoughts of those thick, firm lips from my mind. And too, the warm softness of her cheek; fine hairs invisible to a brother, taken for granted by a lover. She was mine for just this one heartbeat in eternity. The single moment declaring the end of the chase.
Doro left in the night, like she had so many years ago. I slipped into Hora’s fresh bed, she, sleeping off an early evening drunk. Her gentle snore warmed the room. I removed my face, and placed it in the sock drawer of my bedside table where, my friends tell me, it is the appropriate place for a married man’s pornography.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Did I Say Write?
What I meant was complete. In my 52 in 2010 post (I'd link to it here, but shit, just scroll down!) I said my goal was to write 52 stories in 2010. What I meant was complete 52 stories. Because I'll gladly pick up half finished things from months and years gone by, rework them and send them out. I'm not changing my goal, I just misstated my goal. I knew what I meant, if no one else did.
So, we're one week in, how's it going so far? Not as well as I'd hoped. I submitted one story yesterday and haven't quite finished my first story of the year, even though it was one of those three-quarters finished stories from last year. Oh, well. We fight on. It'll be done within twenty-four hours. I also have to figure out what I'm going to write next. I've taken on way too much stuff. Not the goal, but the goal plus everything else, meaning other writing things I've sort of promised to do. But it's cool. What the hell else was I doing with my life anyway?
Hey, the Sofa rocks! First off, the winners of this year's Sofanaut Awards have been announced. I'm actually lifting this from the always excellent SF Signal because it was actually written there and only on audio at the Sofa itself.
On top of all that, StarShipSofa has a really cool show out this week with Amy talking about Trollope (Who shares a birthday with me) and a story by one of my favorite authors, Paul Di Filippo
So, we're one week in, how's it going so far? Not as well as I'd hoped. I submitted one story yesterday and haven't quite finished my first story of the year, even though it was one of those three-quarters finished stories from last year. Oh, well. We fight on. It'll be done within twenty-four hours. I also have to figure out what I'm going to write next. I've taken on way too much stuff. Not the goal, but the goal plus everything else, meaning other writing things I've sort of promised to do. But it's cool. What the hell else was I doing with my life anyway?
Hey, the Sofa rocks! First off, the winners of this year's Sofanaut Awards have been announced. I'm actually lifting this from the always excellent SF Signal because it was actually written there and only on audio at the Sofa itself.
- Best Main Fiction: "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (ep #66)
- Best Flash & Short Fiction: "Then, Just a Dream" by Lawerence Santoro (ep #84)
- Best Poetry or Song Contributor: Neil Gaiman
- Best Narrator: (Tie) Lawrence Santoro and Spider Robinson
- Best Fact Article Contributor: Jim Campanella (Science News)
- Best Artwork: StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1 - Skeet
On top of all that, StarShipSofa has a really cool show out this week with Amy talking about Trollope (Who shares a birthday with me) and a story by one of my favorite authors, Paul Di Filippo
Aural Delights No 115 Paul Di Filippo
Editorial: Lord Dicken’s Final Tally by Tony C Smith 04:00
Fact Article: Looking Back At SF History by Amy H Sturgis 16:20
Main Fiction: iCity by Paul Di Filippo 30:00
Fact Article: The Winners: The Sofanaut Awards 57:30
Narrator: Jeff Lane
Lastly, I haven't yet read Kick-Ass (though a friend is loaning me his issues in a couple of days (Thank you, Jim)), but this trailer wowed me. It's not to be watched when the kids are around. Even if the kids are in their mid-thirties. Saw this on SF Signal as well. Maybe you should just go over there. I can't post the damned thing here, but go see for yourself:
Friday, January 01, 2010
Fluff And Buttons On Cossmass Infinities
2010 is off to an awesome start for me! My story Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range now lives as an audio production on the brand new podcast, Cossmass Infinities. Go listen to it here (The audio is at the bottom of the page):
http://cossmass.co.uk/infinities/1
The story's read by Paul W. Campbell who narrated my story Brothers and Sisters All on the StarShipSofa podcast. Now you can imagine my bears in little kilts. Celebrate your new year with the horrible destruction of cute stuffed animals!
http://cossmass.co.uk/infinities/1
The story's read by Paul W. Campbell who narrated my story Brothers and Sisters All on the StarShipSofa podcast. Now you can imagine my bears in little kilts. Celebrate your new year with the horrible destruction of cute stuffed animals!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
New Mango!
I don't talk about every new episode here, but you've waited so long I feel I should mention this one. Episode 22 - Today's Special!
http://bewarethehairymango.com/episode-22-todays-special/
http://bewarethehairymango.com/episode-22-todays-special/
52 in 2010!
Welcome, new follower Larry! He's the guy I told you about yesterday. Click on his furry face to learn more about him.
Thanks to all of you who bought a copy of Larry's and Skeet's e-book for Spider and Jeanne Robinson and to those of you who helped to spread the word. You guys are incredible! Tony is very happy with the numbers and we'll get the official total on our good works in the first Aural Delights episode of 2010, which I'm sure I'll mention all over the place.
If this link works, there might still be time to help! http://www.starshipsofa.com/shop/lord-dickenss-declaration/
In other news: Happy Old Year's Night!
2009 sucked! 2009 brought me divorce, a nosedive in my credit rating, the loss of my father and a burgled home now less one MacBook, PSP and iPod. As the wise Grant Stone says, "See ya in hell, 2009!" The shittiness took its toll on my writing. Looking back at the 2008 year in review I wanted to write 90 stories and a novel in 2009. What the fuck was I thinking? I also wanted to make 200 submissions. What I actually did was write a paltry 29 stories (many of them twit-fic and flash fiction) and made 81 submissions. Admittedly, it was one of my better years. One thing that tripped me up was a regular writing and abandoning of supposedly unfixable stories.
However some good things came out of the writing year. I finally won my years-long battle with Process Five and put his tale down in a story called Three Kingdoms. My twit-fic made its way out to people via @thaumatrope, @nanoism and @outshine. I started my own podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango (and I know some of you are asking, "Why are you writing this Matt, and not recording a new episode?"). And I wrote some stories I'm really happy with including Thank You, Mr. Goldman; A Body is for Driving and The Empire State Building Strikes Back! The soon to be happening podcast, Cossmass Infinities bought my story Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range, so in 2010 we'll be able to hear those bears speak (maybe with Scottish accents!). I sold a few stories to Everyday Weirdness, and sold stories to Fusion Fragment and, I'm very excited to say, GUD magazine (Look for it in Issue #6). My story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat was published by Blood, Blade and Thruster, and then almost immediately picked up for the main fiction spot by StarShipSofa's Aural Delights.
"So stop bitching!" you say. Well, bitching is my nature.
The goal for 2010 is to write 52 stories. This is doable if I can control myself. I figure I can produce 4,000 words of polished, final draft in eight hours. Double that for fucking-around time, so If I can give 16 hours a week to my short stories, I'll have it. Submissions? We'll say 200 again.
There we go. That's it for goals. Yes, I want to do a couple of other things, lose a few pounds, watch Wagner's Ring Cycle (just DVD, nothing fancy) and keep the house cleaner (Cleaner is easy. Clean is hard.), but these are all peripheral things. The writing is what merits the concerted effort.
I hope every one of you has a wondrous and happy 2010! Make it happen!
Thanks to all of you who bought a copy of Larry's and Skeet's e-book for Spider and Jeanne Robinson and to those of you who helped to spread the word. You guys are incredible! Tony is very happy with the numbers and we'll get the official total on our good works in the first Aural Delights episode of 2010, which I'm sure I'll mention all over the place.
If this link works, there might still be time to help! http://www.starshipsofa.com/shop/lord-dickenss-declaration/
In other news: Happy Old Year's Night!
2009 sucked! 2009 brought me divorce, a nosedive in my credit rating, the loss of my father and a burgled home now less one MacBook, PSP and iPod. As the wise Grant Stone says, "See ya in hell, 2009!" The shittiness took its toll on my writing. Looking back at the 2008 year in review I wanted to write 90 stories and a novel in 2009. What the fuck was I thinking? I also wanted to make 200 submissions. What I actually did was write a paltry 29 stories (many of them twit-fic and flash fiction) and made 81 submissions. Admittedly, it was one of my better years. One thing that tripped me up was a regular writing and abandoning of supposedly unfixable stories.
However some good things came out of the writing year. I finally won my years-long battle with Process Five and put his tale down in a story called Three Kingdoms. My twit-fic made its way out to people via @thaumatrope, @nanoism and @outshine. I started my own podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango (and I know some of you are asking, "Why are you writing this Matt, and not recording a new episode?"). And I wrote some stories I'm really happy with including Thank You, Mr. Goldman; A Body is for Driving and The Empire State Building Strikes Back! The soon to be happening podcast, Cossmass Infinities bought my story Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range, so in 2010 we'll be able to hear those bears speak (maybe with Scottish accents!). I sold a few stories to Everyday Weirdness, and sold stories to Fusion Fragment and, I'm very excited to say, GUD magazine (Look for it in Issue #6). My story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat was published by Blood, Blade and Thruster, and then almost immediately picked up for the main fiction spot by StarShipSofa's Aural Delights.
"So stop bitching!" you say. Well, bitching is my nature.
The goal for 2010 is to write 52 stories. This is doable if I can control myself. I figure I can produce 4,000 words of polished, final draft in eight hours. Double that for fucking-around time, so If I can give 16 hours a week to my short stories, I'll have it. Submissions? We'll say 200 again.
There we go. That's it for goals. Yes, I want to do a couple of other things, lose a few pounds, watch Wagner's Ring Cycle (just DVD, nothing fancy) and keep the house cleaner (Cleaner is easy. Clean is hard.), but these are all peripheral things. The writing is what merits the concerted effort.
I hope every one of you has a wondrous and happy 2010! Make it happen!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
StarShipSofa's Spider Robinson Fundraiser!
UPDATE: I feel like The World's Most Gigantic Ass for not mentioning that Larry's E-book is illustrated by the wonderful Skeet Scienski! http://www.skeetland-art.com/Home_Page.php Sorry Skeet!
Click here to help Spider and Jeanne Robinson!Today's the big day! I hope that all of you are out there blogging about StarShipSofa's fundraiser for Spider and Jeanne Robinson. We had a fantastic response on Twitter yesterday. Thanks to all of you who tweeted and re-tweeted. I saw something like two-hundred tweets about the fundraiser. That's fantastic. I got a couple of notes during the day from Tony at the Sofa saying how he could see donation traffic picking up yesterday. I'm hoping we'll see even more traffic today.
Why? Because if people are actually blogging about it today, like we've asked, the message will reach people that it didn't reach on Twitter. We'll reach science fiction fans who don't use Twitter and we'll reach non-science fiction fans as well.
Why should you donate?
THE SHORT VERSION
1) It's a good cause, you big silly!
2) It only costs about $5.00, American.
3) You get an awesome e-book!
THE SLIGHTLY LONGER VERSION
1) From Spider's Blog: Earlier his year a brilliant surgeon, Dr. Andresz Busczowski, helped Jeanne Robinson beat back a rare and virulent form of biliary cancer. But it’s so rare even he can’t say how much time he‘s bought her, how soon it might recur—and her latest blood tests have been so discouraging they’ve now decided she needs to start chemotherapy as soon as possible. Besides the prescription drugs to counteract the chemotherapy, she needs special therapies and supplements, counseling, and extensive diet and lifestyle changes, to reduce her stress level and the strain on her liver to as close to zero as possible. All those things are expensive...and like many artists today the Robinsons were already running on fumes financially.
2) ONLY FIVE BUCKS! (More if you want to give more!)
3) You get Larry Santoro's excellent e-book novella, Lord Dickens's Declaration. Listen folks, a lot of you don't know Larry Santoro's work. In fact, most of us Sofanauts hadn't even heard of him until his stories began appearing on StarShipSofa's Aural Delights podcast. But let me tell you . . .
Wow.
That's Larry's work in a nutshell. I didn't know this guy from Adam a couple of years ago and now he's one of my favorite writers. He's been hiding out in the theater world and in Horrorland, sharpening his pen and now he can slice atoms with it. Larry controls his words, they don't control him, and at the same time he feeds them out like ten-thousand feet of kite string to play in the sky. They think they're running free, they don't know. All the while he knows where every one of them runs and what they're going to do next.
And Lord Dickens's Declaration is an absolute blast. Alternate history, steampunky, put-your-brain-in-a-box-and-don't-stop-shaking-it cool. The story features a world in which historians are the big guns and a computer which stretches across hundreds of acres (sometimes), called The Beast, sends those historians back in time. And let me ask you, have you ever known historians to put things back where they found them? Me neither. And that's what drives this mad world. It's 1902 in a world where Jesus ran the Roman Empire and a ninety-something Edgar Allen Poe runs North America. Occam is the man and who the hell is Charles Darwin?
Buy this book. Read this book. Enjoy, enjoy this book. Rest the rest of the righteously smug, knowing that your pleasure is also a Karmic write-off, all 100% of your electronic money is helping good people who are seeing a rough time.
And then tell all of your big-hearted friends to pick up a copy as well. Thanks!
Monday, December 28, 2009
Catching Up
I had the official list of my completed One-Thousand stories on my laptop (which is gone now, in case you're just joining us). I spent the last couple of days piecing the list together again and realized that I hadn't mentioned my last three stories.
117: The Girl with the Halo
118: Introduction to Olfaction (Page One)
119: The Empire State Building Strikes Back!
The first two were done back in August, the third just ten days ago.
117: The Girl with the Halo
118: Introduction to Olfaction (Page One)
119: The Empire State Building Strikes Back!
The first two were done back in August, the third just ten days ago.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Dec. 30th Blog Rally for the Robinsons
UPDATE: I feel like The World's Most Gigantic Ass for not mentioning that Larry's E-book is illustrated by the wonderful Skeet Scienski! http://www.skeetland-art.com/Home_Page.php Sorry Skeet!
I need your help.
Quickly: Science Fiction author Spider Robinson's wife Jeanne is fighting cancer and they're both fighting to pay the bills. 100% of any money used to purchase Larry Santoro's excellent e-book, "Lord Dickens's Declaration," will go directly to the Robinsons. Here's the link:
http://www.starshipsofa.com/shop/lord-dickenss-declaration/
Dec 31st is the last day that people can buy Larry's story. I'd like to end the fundraiser with a bang. Let's get the word out all over the web to let people know on December 30th, there's only one day left to help. Why December 30th? Because if there's only one day left people won't put it off and say, "I'll do it later. I still have time." Make sure you link to the purchase page!
If you've got a blog, please use it. Tell your friends that are into speculative fiction ahead of time and ask them to blog as well. And let's ask the big boys to mention it, like BoingBoing, Gaiman, Scalzi, VanderMeer and whomever else you can think of. One last big push to help some good people in a bad situation.
Please tell me what you've done here, even if it's just sending some e-mails or tweets. Or post a link here to your blogpost. And if you happen to get a confirmation from someone like Cory Doctorow, then the rest of us won't all be bothering him for the same thing.
A few minutes of your time is all I ask and it could make a huge difference for the Robinsons. Thanks!
I need your help.
Quickly: Science Fiction author Spider Robinson's wife Jeanne is fighting cancer and they're both fighting to pay the bills. 100% of any money used to purchase Larry Santoro's excellent e-book, "Lord Dickens's Declaration," will go directly to the Robinsons. Here's the link:
http://www.starshipsofa.com/shop/lord-dickenss-declaration/
Dec 31st is the last day that people can buy Larry's story. I'd like to end the fundraiser with a bang. Let's get the word out all over the web to let people know on December 30th, there's only one day left to help. Why December 30th? Because if there's only one day left people won't put it off and say, "I'll do it later. I still have time." Make sure you link to the purchase page!
If you've got a blog, please use it. Tell your friends that are into speculative fiction ahead of time and ask them to blog as well. And let's ask the big boys to mention it, like BoingBoing, Gaiman, Scalzi, VanderMeer and whomever else you can think of. One last big push to help some good people in a bad situation.
Please tell me what you've done here, even if it's just sending some e-mails or tweets. Or post a link here to your blogpost. And if you happen to get a confirmation from someone like Cory Doctorow, then the rest of us won't all be bothering him for the same thing.
A few minutes of your time is all I ask and it could make a huge difference for the Robinsons. Thanks!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Please Help Spider And Jeanne Robinson!
This week StarShipSofa is proud to announce Aural Delights no. 111, Part I of Lord Dickens's Declaration by our own Larry Santoro. Lord Dickens's Declaration is also available for purchase as a limited edition e-book only for the month of December and all proceeds will go to Spider and Jeanne Robinson to help with their expenses due to Jeane's illness. The Sofa appreciates whatever you can do to help spread the word. Blast off!
Aural Delights No 111 Lawrence Santoro Pt 1
Lord Dickens’s Declaration is a novella by Lawrence Santoro which is an accompanying piece to StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1.The story will be podcast free in three parts starting today but
to help the Robinson’s you can….
Purchase the ebook
You can purchase the ebook via PayPal or a credit card starting at £2.99,
ranging up to £100 if you would like to contribute more to Spider and Jeanne.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Thanks And The Sofa
Hey, you guys, It's time once again to nominate your favorite contributors to StarShipSofa's wonderful Aural Delights show for The Sofanaut Awards. These are nominations so you can pick as many favorites as you like. I'm eligible in three categories. Just sayin'.
Best Main Fiction: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat
Best Flash/Short Fiction: A Hard Rain and Brothers and Sisters All
Best Fact Article Contributor: Fiction Crawler, Movie Talk Special - Watchmen
Thanks a bunch for listening! You can vote here:
http://sofanauts2010.questionpro.com/
Next, I want to wish all you Americans and ex-pats out there a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow and you know, I've had a shit year (debt, divorce and death, among other plagues), but I still have a lot to be thankful for. Family and friends like you guys, chief among them. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Lastly, I have totally sucked at plugging the Sofa lately, so let's remedy that right now:
Best Main Fiction: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat
Best Flash/Short Fiction: A Hard Rain and Brothers and Sisters All
Best Fact Article Contributor: Fiction Crawler, Movie Talk Special - Watchmen
Thanks a bunch for listening! You can vote here:
http://sofanauts2010.questionpro.com/
Next, I want to wish all you Americans and ex-pats out there a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow and you know, I've had a shit year (debt, divorce and death, among other plagues), but I still have a lot to be thankful for. Family and friends like you guys, chief among them. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Lastly, I have totally sucked at plugging the Sofa lately, so let's remedy that right now:
Aural Delights No 110 Cory Doctorow
Editorial: by StarShipSofa Stories by Sean Keough
Fact Article: The Sofanaut Awards by Mark Bormann
Fact Article: With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
Main Fiction: To Go Boldly by Cory Doctorow
Fact: Film Talk by Rod Barnett
New Titles by Tony C Smith
Narrators: JJ Campanella, Paul Caggige
Art Cover by Skeet
The Sofanauts Awards 2010 VOTE NOW!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
More Night Music
Here's another performance from Night Music that I love and remember. This time it's Debbie Harry. Hiram Bullock is over there singing and guitaring next to her and David Sanborn is wailing. What a fantastic show this was. It's a shame it was canceled after only two seasons and shit like Full House went on for what? Like a decade or more?
The song is Calmarie from Debbie's Def Dumb and Blonde album. The songwriters are two people named Toledo and Vasconcelos. Is it Portuguese? Sounds like it, but what do I know? I'm only half Portuguese.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_klppfz2gk
The song is Calmarie from Debbie's Def Dumb and Blonde album. The songwriters are two people named Toledo and Vasconcelos. Is it Portuguese? Sounds like it, but what do I know? I'm only half Portuguese.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_klppfz2gk
I Wanna Be Good
Have I mentioned I love youtube? I saw this performance a few times back in the eighties on the awesome Night Music show, which I absolutely loved, even more than youtube. I've been looking for the song for two decades and just found the video tonight. Happy Happy! It features Karen Mantler and Her Cat Arnold doing a song called "I Wanna Be Good." The band is introduced by host David Sanborn (Yay, Sanborn!) and pianist Carla Bley (whose ex-husband hangs at my store and most of us think acts like a dick). Karen Mantler is Carla's daughter and David Sanborn's son is the group's bass player. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUYBW11GCiY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUYBW11GCiY
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