vampyrichamster

In the long, silent void since my last post, I have two writing things to announce. The first is that Nightmare Diaries: An Anthology of Horror has been released from Moonstruck Books (in print and e-book). It contains a short story I quite enjoyed writing and that I am personally fond of, Mother's Work, which combines homesteading, lilies and a dead infant. Best to get the anthology directly from the publisher via the link above, but it is also available on Amazon and Barnes & Nobles if these are your usual sources.

The second isn't quite yet something I am sure I can announce formally, though I can at least offer the broader strokes. Some of you may have been aware that I spent the past half year and change bashing my head against my keyboard at a fairly large writing project. Part of this upcoming work is based off a very old novella concept I had that I could never quite get into good form. The setting was a somewhat futuristic alternate world; the culture there ate the dead as part of their funerary rites and the whole thing happened one evening at a restaurant as a murder mystery. I won't lie--the concept was rather more ambitious than I could pull off at the time with my skills. Mid-last year, I was asked if I could put together something by a lovely editor. So I did, weaving together bones from that old idea and more recent influences into something I hope is at least coherent, perhaps, even something others might like to read. I like to think of it also as partly a reaction to the stupid world we currently live in. Not even a figurately stupid world, these daily headlines that make The Onion look sober clearly stem from decision making by tantrum-throwing toddlers supported by sociopaths.

I spent a good part of writing this project listening to the Violent Femmes (the album by the band). Frantic, twangy acoustic sounds worked oddly well with how desperate I was to get the thing done already. Altogether, I want to say there were about four months of actual writing. Four months of listening to waspy singing about a bad trip and irreparably angry ex-ing set to some amazing bass. This was also when I discovered my cat is amazingly tolerant of my music playing from my tablet while napping on my legs. He still hates me being at my desk though.

When I was done writing, I spent several weeks collapsed in a heap playing Rogue Trader (the Owlcat video game) and being frustrated at how comically theatrical they do the Heretic route. There is no subtle evildoing in the 41st Millenium A.D. But, but! Alongside stuff like the Noise Marines, surely someone was also plotting more quietly? Without the slaves hanging in cages as bedroom furniture? Just when I was about to open a hole into the warp in the middle of Dark Eldar territory after figuring out from disparate player chatter I had to go sacrifice a whole room of people to the dark gods first, my editor came back and I was into edits.

Oh, edits were painful. My editor was lovely, line editing was a breeze. It was just that I had to elaborate on prior scenes and add new ones, amounting to about two more months and change of bashing my head against the keyboard with over a week in Malaysia in the middle. I had hoped to write while abroad, but my trip was primarily about dealing with administrative chores. By the time I'd settle down at the end of the day, I was too tired. So when I finally got back to San Francisco, I was pretty much chasing an ever closer deadline on heavy jet lag. While in Kuala Lumpur, my parents tried to get me to listen to some guy called Dimash. I have no idea what the kids listen to these days, so I had no idea who they were talking about. He's apparently a classically-trained Kazakhstani fellow who looks like a pan-Asian idol with perfect pitch. Apparently, he got everyone's panties in knots when he showed up for concerts in KL. Listening to him, it's clear he can sing six octaves and the higher ones at that. To my ears, he sounds like a sort of shrieky Josh Groban.

While not my cup of tea, I was curious to know what the original version of one of his staple songs, S.O.S. d'un Terrien en détresse, was. This led me to Starmania, the weird sci-fi musical it came from--apparently famous in the Francophile world--and an amazing cast recording version by Norman Grouix from 1988. There is a majesty in the way his voice progresses upwards through the chorus that I found very fetching. Starmania itself is weird. I don't necessarily recommend it unless you're that curious. I thought the music was mostly banal pop with a heavy cabaret feel. Until you read the lyrics and realise that the whole space rock opera is meant to be very, very transgressive. The main love number is a woman singing her unrequited love for a gay man; there's a song about the joys of being a transvestite actually called Travesti; somewhere in this there's a plot to topple an anti-immigrant oligarch. In this, I regret my lack of understanding of French. Clearly, if I knew what the songs were saying as I was listening to them, they would have more effect. Not all transgressive music has to sound transgressive, obviously, but I don't have to really know Japanese to figure out Buck-Tick aren't singing about tea and biscuits when I listen to them. On second thought, they could probably still sing about tea and biscuits, and make it sound like a sin. But you get what I mean.

As for S.O.S., it's the distress monologue of an earthling mourning his humanity. It's great to listen to when your brain is fried trying to come up with conversation for a banquet while you hate yourself for making it an eight-course menu. It's somehow still great to listen to after two weeks on repeat even as you start to question your sanity a little bit listening to just one song decrying the meaninglessness of the human experience. Almost at the end of adding enough text for an extra third of my whole project, my frustration with understanding Starmania reminded me how much I liked Nouvelle Vague, incidentally also a French band, who specialise in soothing covers of very dark music. Quite a bit of that music is in English, so I am also able to get just how delightfully naughty it is immediately. I remembered I honestly preferred their version of Killing Moon over the original. This, still interspersed with S.O.S., was my last week of writing.

Last week, the publisher emailed to say the artist I chose is doing the cover and all I am thinking is, "Oh, dear. It's really happening isn't it?" It's exciting although mostly it is frightening. Are they sure they really wanted me to write for them; could they possibly have mistaken me for someone else; etc.