For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

The award goes to Molly Ringle, an actual writer who writes actual, non-terrible, novels. Bravo.

Lapsed Cannibal splits his time between working on his perpetual stillness machine and looking for the end of Pi — where, he is given to understand, there are leprechauns. Sometimes he says the word “gastroenterologist” to himself, over and over again, because he very much enjoys the way it sounds. Occasionally he writes stories. This is one of them.

Or:

Lapsed Cannibal abandoned the sex-and-drug-addled life of a professional kazoo player to become a computer programmer, and has never looked back. He has taught himself to travel through time — but only forward through time, at normal speed. Sometimes he writes stories. This is one of them.

Or:

There is presumably some version of Lapsed Cannibal who enjoys alligator wrestling, blindfolded hand gliding, and small-island-nation-conquering, but this is not that version. This version did once put some uncomfortably spicy hot sauce on a taco, which he ate all of, but he doesn’t like to brag. He’s also written some stories about a bumbling wizard and his familiar, an invisible chair named Door. This is one of those stories.

Or:

Lapsed Cannibal recently became Dictator of English, and in that capacity will soon abolish the words “utilize”, “incentivize”, and “productize”, and then unbanish both split infinitives and sentences that end in prepositions (victims of the pitiless hegemony of Dictator Strunkenwhite). He will also introduce a new pronoun, “glubmar”, to fill the gender-neutral gulf between “him” and “her”. As in: “Hmmm, I wonder if glubmar is a boy or a girl?” He realizes that this is an ungainly pronoun, but he is Dictator, and can do what he wants. This is a story he wrote.

I could also write something accurate about myself, but my god that would be boring.

Update: Ok, I’m going to write something accurate and boring. Sigh.

This is my third Epidapheles story. I started writing these things a long time ago, and they tend to arrive at the blistering pace of one every two years. The installment right before this one appeared, very unexpectedly, around the fifth week of Clarion, muscling aside a terrible case of writer’s block and introducing me to a valuable writerly strategy: jot down the most ridiculous title you can think of, and then write a story under it. It’s not a technique I’ve seen recommended in many writing books, which tend to emphasize things like “character development” and “plot structure” and “emotional honesty”, or whatever. I think ridiculous-title-based story construction is the wave of the future.

F&SF was the first magazine I ever submitted anything to, way back in the dark ages of 2003. Gordon van Gelder, the editor, sent me a very nice note explaining why that story wasn’t ready for prime time. It was my first real rejection, and I remember being very grateful to him for softening the blow.

It’s seven years later now, and I find myself grateful all over again.

I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening — really listening — to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and — if you can manage to get anybody’s attention — get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you’ll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they’ll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

I agree with all this, of course, with one caveat: it does kind of help to use an editor that deals with plain old ASCII. The locked-down, prettied-up file formats that word processors force on us are prisons. Using plain text ensures that, if you do decide to atone for old sins by switching to edlin, it’ll be a painless transition into that pit of infinite pain.

When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Years, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going in their minds. He’d decided that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no thoughts of past or future, living purely in the moment, and that thus it was worse for them. Because they could neither look forward to the end of the pain, nor remember times when they had chased rabbits across meadows.

Quicksilver did a lot of blowing-me-away, actually. Yes, it’s ridiculously long, pathologically digressive, endlessly peripatetic (both literally and thematically), and, quite often, absolutely exhausting. Reading it sometimes felt like being beaten about the head and shoulders with velvet nunchucks made of raw awesome.

But it’s also completely worth it. This book contains worlds. Passages like the one above live alongside stretches of fantastic prose, hilarious dialog, long (unboring!) disquisitions on alchemy/monetary policy/physics/pirates, quirky, genuinely likable characters, and lovingly re-imagined historical figures doing fascinating and more or less historically accurate things.

I wish I could go back and read it for the first time again.

It’s part of the magazine’s Growing Up Poe feature, in which a bunch of us write about what Poe meant to us when we were kids. Here’s Cherie Priest’s excellent contribution.

“Cranks are noble,” Pierce says, “because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.” It’s like the difference between kitsch and dreck–people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better–they’re in it for the money and the power and the fame.

I really really love this kind of semantic hair-splitting. This is where vocabulary really gets interesting: at the shifting hairs-width border between not-quite-synonyms. Our relentlessly Darwinian culture tends to pound the crap out of this kind of “extraneous” nuance — the difference between “less” and “fewer”, for example, is quickly disappearing, and the farther/further distinction is just an annoyance these days. Lots of dictionary definitions seem more like quaint archaeological artifacts that pertinent, present-day concerns.

Still. English is a borderless country on an infinite plane of possibility, and it will gladly absorb anything you dump into it. So there are always new gems to find, if you’re willing to dig.

The SF community runs on love, not money, and we sometimes forget how much of themselves so many people have to give to keep everything going.

I’ve never heard it said better.

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have put together an anthology with a simple premise: ask a lot of talented writers to write the first thing that pops into their head when they hear the phrase “last drink bird head”. Anything goes. This has led, as you can imagine, to an explosive cacophony of awesomeness. It’s called Last Drink Bird Head:

“Viewed from the side he looked normal but from the front it was clear his head was less than an inch wide across, as if he’d been slammed from both sides by a steam-hammer.” – Steve Aylett

“Last Drink Bird Head didn’t fit in at school. When the others were candles, she was lemons. When doors closed she was on the wrong side. She hated the flavour of milk and cellophane. When she jumped rope she was a merry-go-round horse with an orange face.” – K.J. Bish

“Last Drink Bird Head lifts her iron beak from the dry-dust lakebed that lies white as parchment under the waning moon. She lifts her head, the long chain rattling, and looks at the moon; the moon looks back at the pitted earth and sees nothing but an iron figure bowing amidst a frozen iron crowd. She bows, lone and lonely, and the chain rasps down, its rattling sigh the only sound besides the dry-joint groans of Last Drink Bird Head herself. She bows, she bows.” – Holly Phillips

The list of contributors reads like a who’s who of luminaries in the field of speculative fiction: Gene Wolf, Peter Straub, Bruce Holland Rogers, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Stephen Donaldson, and many more. There are also a bunch of newcomers to the field, including me and several writers from my Clarion class — Desirina Boskovich, Catherine Cheek, Caleb Wilson, Kari O’Connor, and Drew White — all of whom are (I know firsthand) fantastic writers.

And it’s for a good cause. All profits go to ProLiteracy, an organization that “champions the power of literacy to improve the lives of adults and their families, communities, and societies.”

So what’s not to like? You can pre-order the book here, at a $5 discount. It will be officially launched, by Jeff and Ann themselves, on October 29th, at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego.

Update: Just found out that Kari and Drew are in the anthology too!