Notes from New Sodom

... rantings, ravings and ramblings of strange fiction writer, THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

Saturday, January 08, 2011

The Boy Who Made Stars

Cool to see another sometime member of the GSFWC, Eliza Chan, getting a publication in Fantasy Magazine, with a great wee story, "The Boy Made Stars":

Motoki was fifteen when he accidentally created stars. Before this time, the night’s sky had always been ebony black, and the white glow of the moon had looked like a cheap spotlight left there by a film studio in liquidation. People rarely looked up because it reminded them of that void under the bed when you tuck your feet under you as a child for fear of the faceless blue monster. Everyone carried lanterns because shining a powerful torch every day was both a waste of electricity and like dropping a feather in a hedgehog farm. Lanterns at least were warm in a glow that mirrored babies’ cheeks and hot tea by the fireplace on snowy days.

Go read it. You know you want to.

And a huge congrats to Eliza. :D

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Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Happy New Year!

I'm currently faffing about, dealing with emails and stuff accrued while I was away for the annual Hogmanay Hootenanny in the wilds of interweb-free Scotland. Got a flat to be cleaned and work to be settled back into, so for now I'll just point you at an interesting post by Daniel Abraham, in part riffing off a conversation we had over dinner a couple of years back. For both of us, it seems, our thoughts have moved on a bit from where we were back then, in terms of the old "style versus content" debate. And there's some more thoughtful commentary from Ted Chiang and S.M. Stirling, so I figured it might be of interest to yez.

Anyways, it also reminds me of this post from a wee while back, in which I completely scrap the whole notion of signifiers/signifieds. I'm reminded of that post because this is basically where/how I see readers gleaning story from sentences that simply shouldn't work, where the stream of (con)notation might be better seen, I think, as the raw matter of an imaginative montage being actively shaped by a reader into "the import of import," as I describe it on Daniel's LJ.

So, yeah, have some elsewhere musings to chew over. I'll be back once the detritus of 2010 is properly cleared from the Helter Shelter, as I like to call my bachelor pad cum mad monastic's hovel.

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