The second Urgoth the Defiler story is now live, “Urgoth the Defiler: Deuce Ex Machina.” What’s a little flower theft among friends?

Having had a frustrating weekend as a result of my apartment, I got to imagining my dream house. It definitely does not take the form of a big-ass timber & drywall mansion. Maybe because I’ve lived in too many geriatric homes, like in the basement of a cockroach-infested Victorian-esque pile or the small farm house with a distinctly bowl-shaped second bedroom, but I don’t see bright, shiny new houses as they are. I always see them as they will be: decrepit, full of rotten wood and with a thousand niches opening up like so many vortices into an insect-filled plane, through which our six-legged enemies seep like water through stone.

Gross, in other words. And insects will always find a way into our homes. Hell, we like to live there, all warm and toasty and jammed with food so it makes perfect sense. But beyond building several thousands of inter dimensional highways into the Lairs of the Insect Lords, what repels me from standard construction is the sharp line between inside and outside. Even back when I struggled with the dynamics of figuring out why not to push on both bicycle pedals at once I felt a deep sense of longing after the day was through and I was hustled inside the house. Just like the toys that I’d pack up into my toybox, so I felt put away and dormant until I set foot out the door first thing in the morning. And unlike those toys, I didn’t even have a plastic, spring-loaded missile launcher molded onto my arm with which to entertain myself, just a whiny voice and an increasingly annoyed older brother.

So in the classic gambit of spending my adult life pursuing everything I ever wanted as a child (Hey Mom, guess what? I cook bacon at 2 in the morning just because I want some bacon.) I’ve been looking into homes that don’t come with the sharp black line of inside and outside so that I don’t have to put myself away at night, so I don’t have to “go inside when the streetlights turn on.” After scouring through architecture websites and magazines, I’ve also come to marry that desire with my emergent enviro-hippie attitude towards home building.

I’ve been researching low-impact homes, the sort so green that certain wavelengths are hurled away from them with such force that they make a tiny crunchy sound when they hit the cornea. I’ve stumbled upon earthbag housing (an article at Mother Earth News and a detailed book on the subject) which, although having some classic architectural elements (i.e. doors and windows) doesn’t make me think of being put away. Earthbag construction is just what it sounds like. The builders (i.e. me and anyone who can be lured with beer and pizza) stuff bags with dirt and build layers of them held together with strands of barbed wire, and put a plaster seal over the whole building, wall, or whatever they’re constructing. You’re living with the earth all around you and it also saves tons of pollutants from being produced. If you’re careful with construction you can even build the structure into a hill or create a living roof over it. Plus, you know, you get to play with dirt and fucking barbed wire.

Sure, it’s labor intensive and not everyone has the time to build them; and yes, there are still plenty of bugs surrounding the dwelling, but hell, at least I didn’t go out of my way to hasten the coming reign of the Insect Lords.

Added a new story: It Goes Like This. How can interesting contraptions be powered?

Passed the safety course for new motorcycle riders and I’m about as new as they come. I’d never spent even a stationary minute on the back of a motorcycle before and now I’ve got a nearly inconceivable 30 miles under my belt. For most of the class I rode a Honda Nighthawk 250 with neutral that was harder to find than a vegan vampire at a steakhouse. It’d be good to get a motorcycle before the cold weather hits in the midwest and I can’t start it up quickly enough to avoid being buried with my machine beneath a snowdrift.

Can you get a snowplow attachment for a motorcycle?

I heard rumbles about Stephen King’s new novella that he’s releasing for the Kindle 2.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/10/stephen-king-kindle-ur

I don’t want to bother with the phrase “ebook” – I was reasonably sure that marketers playing fast and loose with the “e” prefix had died long ago and marketing, as a profession, had moved down the vowel ladder to “i” (the precursor to both vowels being, of course, the indefinite article “a.”  Buy futures in “o” prefixes now because it’s going to be big!).  Is an ebook a novel?  When does “book” need an extra vowel?  Where is the line between medium and message?  “Songs” are called “songs” even on the e-internet.

Although, overall, it is rare for a person to use the term “novel.”  Outside of literary circles, an everyday person usually only uses the word “novel” while attending a party, their glass of spirits rapidly warming in their hands as they keep their ears open for a place to inject a pithy comment about the terribly literate NOVEL that is sitting, ignored but not forgotten, on their bedside table.  Novel and book are interchangeable to them.  But ask the other poor party-goers who find themselves on a forced march towards the land of intellectual braggadocio whether or not it’s a novel or a book that they’re being told about.  They’ll reply, It’s Just A Sodding Book – the sort of thing that you might toss into a bag for a plane ride or skim on the toilet instead of fuming at your choice of restaurant the night before.

Novels (and novellas, and stories) are nothing but abstract ideas and words.  Their medium gives them shape.  And thus ebooks take an ephemeral shape.

Books, though, are physical, tough things.  They’re sometimes sturdier than the ideas that produced them.  They’re small bricks of paper that have been used since their invention to prop things up.  Don’t tell me that a scrap of illuminated manuscript, discarded from official inclusion for an unfortunate, lewd misspelling was never folded up and slid under the leg of a monk’s chair.  Gutenberg himself* kept a brisk side business of selling people “magick shimmies” that were “divine fyxes for househoulde wobbles” made from cast-off proofs (note how we’ve shifted from the -e suffix to the e- prefix?).  I wager that a Kindle owner wouldn’t allow me to prop up a failing table with their widget.

Also, protip: don’t touch anyone else’s Kindle.  You know where it’s been, and that’s even before there’s any e-erotic fiction released for it.  Let alone when the DRM gets opened up and you can enjoy your porn in glorious, 16-shade grayscale.

None of this is to discount novels released as ebooks or as HTML formatted documents or audiobooks.  I’ve stories online, and plan to continue releasing them that way.  But to imagine that a device which costs over three hundred dollars will replace the book, able to be read as well as used as a magick shimmie, is foolish.

Stay tuned for an announcement concerning my upcoming obook! (I told you that you should’ve bought futures!)

*I’m a goddamned liar to whom you ought not listen.

Ran across this today on Tor’s website:
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=11183

Jon Evans discusses the relationship between authors and their interaction with their fans/audience. Here’s his conclusion:

It seems to me that delving into the personal life of a great writer, much less establishing any kind of personal relationship, is usually like unmasking the Wizard of Oz – you’re bound to be a bit disappointed.

Evans isn’t wrong – there’s something akin to a bursting bubble when you see any author outside of the context of his or her professional work. Here’s someone who’s taken you to enchanted lands full of noble (or dastardly) elves and dastardly (or noble) orcs, and you discover that his ass quacks as much as the keynote speaker at a duck convention. Or when you run into the the woman who’s inspired your own imagination with her intricate, so-real-you-can-feel-it alien worlds and her finger is buried in her nose up to the second knuckle. Or, more probably, they’re just quieter, louder, smaller, taller, more boring or more antsy than you expected them to be. It can happen whether you meet them and exchange a few words, see an interview, hear them speak, or notice that they’re in the next lane of traffic.

This phenomenon is especially beguiling when you first encounter the author’s books during your formative years and it feels like their writing has become a part of you.

But it’s all about our expectations – when I went to a Neil Gaiman reading a few years ago, I was super pumped to be there. It was exciting. But I’d read his blog enough to know that he would not make his stage appearance by floating out from behind the curtain, cross-legged, his head spinning around on his neck and issuing laser beams from his eyes. I was familiar with him as a person: he ate sushi, he got jet-lagged, he watched Dr. Who reruns.

Unfamiliarity breeds godhood. Neil Gaiman has, because of his blog, lost his status as a god. He is just a man who puts in the effort to write entertaining stories.

Who would want to be a god, anyway? Seems rather daft. Their lives are filled with capricious decisions and you often have to take weird, corporeal forms and, depending on your origin myth, bang your sister/brother/the earth/the sky/a fish.

Gross.

But there are those authors who simply don’t want to interact with their audience anymore than is required to practice their craft, i.e. releasing a book, or who feel that they’re putting their best foot forward if they only communicate through their fiction (which, if I recall correctly, is Neal Stephenson’s explanation for why he’s not more prolific in non-novel form). And that’s perfectly acceptable, it’s who they are as human beings.

But those authors don’t necessarily suffer from a lack of publicity. Reclusive writers sit at the intersection of mystique and eccentricity. Who wouldn’t want to bask in fame, the audience asks themselves. The author must have a good reason and we want to know what it is. This Recluse Effect is similar to what’s at work in suspenseful horror movies: don’t show the monster, only the shadows it casts. The shadow of the monster is, in this case, the author’s reclusivity, while the monster is the author’s reason to reject fame. This curiosity as to the author’s secret brings it’s own sort of attention – it may not be quite the same draw as having a blog and a twitter feed, but its attention all the same.

The more you talk, the more likely you are to offend, to make a jackass of yourself, to let a malformed opinion run wild. But nobody is forcing the audience to read the blog and let it inform their opinions of the author’s fiction. Let the rest of us be fascinated by what the author had for breakfast (apple-cinnamon oatmeal, by the way).

Even more than controversial or radical politics, being a jerkface is the biggest turn-off in pretty much any arena (except, I suppose, a jerkface competition. But good luck organizing one – the jerkfaces will never show up, just to make you mad). Exploring, learning, and discussing ideas is one of the greatest things about fiction writing and you can’t do that if you’re jerkfacin’ it up and repelling those who might talk to you. I have this blog because I like talking to people, not because I’m trying to convince them that their aunt Hortense will just love a second copy of my book(although a second copy is totally on her shopping list, and it’s almost her birthday!)

I equate an author talking to his or her audience as any kind of human communication: the rewards are intangible, unquantifiable and way better than money. Money can’t buy you love, just seven flat-screen TVs on your wall, all of them showing the first Jurassic Park movie where that cow gets eaten.