I don’t really know how to capture Kij Johnson’s short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees in words. Her writing here reminds me often of Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath, in its focus on ordinary people and everyday life in extraordinary circumstances.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees is a hefty volume—I read the ebook edition, so I can’t measure its spine, but it spans nearly Kij’s entire career, from 1989 to today, and although it doesn’t do so comprehensively, there’s still a lot of material to present.  Moreover, the stories display an impressive degree of thematic unity without ever seeming repetitive.

I have been thinking that writing like this asks me as a reader to slow down and take it on its own terms.  Johnson’s prose isn’t lush like Catherynne Valente’s or finely-wrought and occasionally oblique like Elizabeth Bear’s—most of the stories are written in good, transparent plain style, and anyone who has tried it will tell you it’s not as easy as it looks.  And the stories never seemed to me to drag—they always had purpose and direction.  But they pay close attention to their subjects, and I found it very rewarding to experience the stories at the narrative’s own pace.

This is one for me to reread and study, I think.

I’ve started submitting to literary markets (he says, as though he is admitting some sort of secret, deeply-held). One story of mine in particular has consistently received the feedback that it’s not speculative, so off it goes to magazines whose names end in “Review” and who publish handsome paperback volumes on thick, buttery paper.

I’m submitting to paying markets only, of course, and the pro-paying markets first, which might be all the paying markets — I don’t have hard data, but anecdotally there seems to be a double-handful of markets which pay better than any SF market save maybe Tor.com, and a wide field of markets (including such notables as the Harvard freaking Review) which don’t pay anything at all.  It’s about the publication credits on your CV which will help you get a faculty job, I suppose. Assuming you want a faculty job.

Since I was submitting to these literary magazines, and I’m lucky enough to have a local bookstore which stocks a selection of them, I picked up the latest issue each from half-a-dozen of the magazines on offer and have been slowly reading through them.  Despite the field’s overall reputation for slow response times, my reading speed was outpaced in several cases by the speed with which their rejections returned to me, but I’m in this for the long game, and sometimes I find gems which more than validate the exercise even if not for the excuse of market research.

The Fall 2013 issue of Ploughshares, produced by Emerson College here in Boston, is one such example.  Really the one story in it, “K Becomes K,” by V.V. Ganeshananthan, about a young woman’s experience as part of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, is worth the price of admission all by itself, raw and powerful. Robert Anthony Siegel’s essay about Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari is a nice finishing touch, and his discussion of the techniques Kawabata uses to depict his distant narrators has some relevance for my own writing.

Very much recommended.

(I’m pleased to discover that it’s on Kindle and Nook, in case you are not lucky enough to be a subscriber or to live near a bookstore which happens to stock it — which I would assume to be true of most of us, in 2013.)

Been a while since I did one of these. I haven’t read much to write about here. (Did I write about Jagannath? I should write about Jagannath.)

I know Maya as someone who is on Codex, an online writing workshop I’m a member of, though I don’t know her well through that, so you should take my recommendation of this book with as much salt as you feel you need. Codex was how I found out about Creature of Dreams — she posted about it there — and the cover and (mostly) the blurb got me to buy it, and then, well, I finished it in two big gulps, two evenings running. (I say evenings. This is evening for me, right now, 4 AM. I said the blurb grabbed me, didn’t I?) That was all the writing.

I identified with the characters, and Durham felt well-realized. I felt like the details were all well-chosen. This is a tightly-constructed book. Several of the sex scenes are serious I’ll-be-in-my-bunk material (and several are serious nightmare fuel). The characters are all wrestling with their histories, and that’s deftly handled. Nothing is too easy, not all the loose ends are tied up, but at the same time there’s a real sense of growth that I found… heartening, for lack of a better word.

The book’s got a deep understanding of the characters — what and how people who have had those experiences think, what responses they have ingrained, how they defend themselves. We defend ourselves.

It’s been a while since I did one of these.  Truth be told I haven’t been reading much (long-form fiction) lately.  Grinding to finish a couple projects.  So it goes.

I was bemoaning in previous posts that I had trouble finding comfort reading, and in my current state of overwork anything I read needed to be a break from everything else, so, well, here is some comfort fiction that I enjoyed.

(Warning, spoilers.)

Sunny Moraine is an author whose short work I’ve previously enjoyed, so when I heard that she had a novel out, together with another writer, I was interested.  When she described it as a “Big Gay Space Opera” I had to buy it.  And Line and Orbit pretty much lives up to that description.

You know the story.  Genetically-engineered boy gets kicked out of genetically-engineered society, meets Nomadic Space Burner boy, they fight but secretly like each other, eventually they meet cute.  Genetically-engineered society comes after genetically-engineered boy, genetically-engineered boy stands with Nomadic Space Burners to fight them, hilarity (and bloodshed) ensues.  (Really mostly bloodshed.)  And (spoilers) stuff turns out all right enough in the end.

The plot structure wouldn’t have been out of place in a fantasy novel, and it felt a bit paint-by-numbers at times.  At the same time, I like the colors they chose, and, like all these things, there’s more going on under the surface than that analogy gives it credit for.  I had some issues with details — some computer security, military tactical, and gay sex things which just didn’t add up.  But the plot kicked along at a fair enough clip that I could move past the flaws.

The world felt somewhat like the EVE Online world, for which I have fondness — the book is really what I wanted the EVE novels to be.  Also the writing is technically quite well-done — facile but with depth, good plain style, and capable of beauty without becoming overblown.  And ultimately I quite liked the characters and their relationships — both the main characters, Lock and Adam, and the supporting cast as well.  (Also, positive portrayal of transpeople go!)

So, you know.  If you like the colors implied by “Big Gay Space Opera” too, check it out.

Amazon