Equilibrium

Seeing as today is my birthday, I figure a progress report is in order.

Teaching continues unparalleled—four classes and about a hundred English Composition students.  Writing time has taken a hit the last three months, what with the hours of lecturing, grading, and planning.  I have a great time as a professor, and, for the most part, I’ve grown fond of my students this semester (there are a few navel-gazers, however…)  My students consistently surprise and entertain me.  Always sad to see them move on.

But good God man, is it ever time for the semester to end.

Work continues on short stories to pack my collection.  A number (the ones originally in my master’s thesis) are “finished” and out to markets, some are in various stages of near completion, and a couple still need to be written.  I’ve presses and agents in mind.

The novel is slow going because I’m one-third in, where paths fork and losing one’s way becomes a valid fear.  I have a plan.  An interesting part of the process is, some of my extraneous short work is being pulled into the event horizon of this fractured world.  Come midway, we’ll see.

According to those in the know, waking up early to write is the Blessed Way.  Also my bane.  Once over the initial hump (my-eyes-keep-closing-by-themselves), few things could be better than bitter coffee on a rickety porch, drizzling rain, a quota of hard-won fiction, morning sunlight.  Suppose I’ll try again tomorrow, since I’m reminded.

The application process for MFA programs begins again.  Ack.

And then there’s this review of Broken Time Blues.  The author, Lillian Cohen-Moore, offers blush-worthy praise for my story, Chickadee:

“…Chickadee deserves mention because it may be the weirdest story I have read in the past few years. I say this having survived college writing workshops and over a year as a slush reader for two different publishing houses. Ard does a lovely job of making a dark tale of foibles, family and greed absolutely fucking surreal with his choice of speculative element.” 

I owe so many of you letters and emails.  Promise to write as soon as the semester grinds to an end.  Great things afoot.

“Chickadee” Illustration Sneak Peak

Illustrator Evan Jensen posted on his website two interior illustrations that will appear in the anthology Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s, set to be released in early August.  One of those (you can guess which) depicts the protagonist from my short “Chickadee,” a brotherly story set in New Orleans during prohibition.  Evan’s illustration of Chickadee is, in a word, awesome.  Check it out.

Home Again, Home Again

This week, a special thing happened to eighteen writers in this world.  Each year, the Clarion West Writers Workshop invites a couple handful of fiction writers to Seattle, Washington to eat, sleep, dream, bicker, steep, and stew in writing.  No doubt, the most important aspect of this ritual isn’t the writer’s seclusion (most times, seclusion is good for the writer), it is the community.  Despite all portents as an intensive boot camp, Clarion West is a support group, each class a bizarre, or maybe normal, family with their own vices and customs and lingo and oddities and over-the-top personalities.  Many come to the Clarion West house with little, if any, semblance of a support group specifically for their art, their talent, the blood and tears they wonder if anyone will ever, ever see.  To come into a group who will become the writer’s closest allies on this road, to come into this lucky meld on this week of all weeks of all the year, to have this social net suddenly available for forty-two odd, long-and-short days, changes the writer.

The growth is all of a sudden, and the change is irrevocable.

A year ago, this was my story.  I was one of the Clarion West chosen.  And afterward my writing has never been stronger.  The process has never been more difficult.  Life after Clarion has a tendency to chip away at your bones.  You may be seized with death or disorientation or divorce or love or ocean dreams or a chaotic desire to run into the wilderness, never to return.  Writing makes nomads of us all, and Clarion steeps us so that all we can know is the thrill of exploration, stepping whatever chance we get into unknowing, for we have been there.  We’ve been to the edge of the world, glimpsed the shore.  You find yourself staring at the cobalt walls, remembering six weeks of freedom and imagination and ideology resolved with a constant supply of tea, coffee, square meals.  And sure, there were rough seas to weather in that house, as with any domestic situation, but the waves weren’t those back home.  You’ll wonder if back home is home and if home is always somewhere else.  Those times in the Clarion house, the brilliant and the dark, those are the testing ground.  Because of that, you just might stand on your own two feet in this world.

You will stir in your bed in the fog of night and morning.  In the blur between sleep and awake, you will see that house, those people you shared it with, and you will laugh with them and you will fight with them and you will say what you meant to say when there wasn’t enough time to say it.

It was me stepping into that house a year ago.  This will become someone else’s story now.  For the Clarion West class of 2011: your episode begins.  It will be a breathless six weeks.  And you may not sleep again for your waking dreams of that house in Seattle.

Outer Alliance Interview

Recently, I was interviewed, along with Brandon Bell of Fantastique Unfettered, by The Outer Alliance, a group working for the advocacy of LGBT issues in literature.  The interview is now up via podcast here: http://blog.outeralliance.org/archives/755.

I’ve only just found out about this group by way of this interview, but I can say that I wholeheartedly support their efforts.  Here’s a quote from their website: “Made up of individuals of all walks of life, our goal is to educate, support, and celebrate LGBT contributions in the science-fiction and fantasy genres.”  Noble goals.

The podcast also features Nora Olsen, who talks about her book, The End: Five Queer Kids Save the World. Nora reads from her book, and Julia Rios reads a sample of my story “Small Fish in the Deep Blue Sea,” which appears in the first issue of Fantastique Unfettered.  Julia does a wonderful job of it, too–even Harold’s cowboy emulator!

Also, there’s the fact that I definitely sound like I’m from Alabama.  I had no idea my accent is so thick.  If nothing else entertains, there’s that.

Fantastique Unfettered Issue One Download

I’ve just been made aware that the first issue of Fantastique Unfettered is now available as a free, shareable PDF over at Issuu.  The issue features my short story “Small Fish in the Deep Blue Sea,” The Story that Could, which garnered a Writers of the Future Honorable Mention and was my Clarion West application story.  Here’s the tagline from Brandon Bell, editor of Fantastique Unfettered: “Herein refugees from the sea, sky, and a place called home…”

I think that’s just about perfect.

Here’s the link to download: http://issuu.com/nithska/docs/fu-issue-one

In addition to downloading the file as a PDF, you can also read the entire issue fullscreen directly on the Issuu site.  Pretty spiffy.

“Chickadee” Accepted for Publication

My short story “Chickadee” has been accepted for 20Spec: An Anthology of 1920′s-Era Speculative Fiction (that’s a working title as of right now), edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt.  The story is an adventure about bootlegging and brothers, and is dedicated to my brother, Paul, who passed away last year.  It’s rough-and-tumble, just like my brother; I think it’d be his kind of story.

20Spec is to be published by the award winning Canadian press, Absolute XPress, sister to Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing/Tesseract Books.

The collection will be out in the coming few months.  Stay tuned.