Tag Archives: short stories

10.11.08 [Monday]
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books, vancouver, writing

free as in oatmeal stout

After a meh sort of meeting at school today, I stopped off for ice cream and beer, both of which were sorely lacking in my part of the fridge. I’m walking up my street, bag with ice cream in one hand, box of beer in the other, and as I was approaching a skinny woman probably in her 20s, she said “Hey, how’s it going?” I think that’s what she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me. I glanced at her, and she was wearing big sunglasses and clothes that rode that thrift-store-hipster/actual-hobo line pretty well. She had been talking to me, and she eyed my box of beer.

“Hey, umm, would I be able to trade you a pack of smokes for one of your beers? ‘Cause I’m really hung-over and you’d just be saving my life,” she said. I stopped, and kind of made my “I don’t think so” face as I formulated the sentence about me not needing a pack of cigarettes.

“Please,” she continued. “I just need something to drink. I’m so hung over.”

That’s what convinced me. The fact that she felt that her being hung over was a reason that’d convince me to trade beer with her. It just seemed so illogical there was no way I could not reward it. This might seem to contradict completely my denial of Halloween candy to that kid for not having a costume last week, but he didn’t even try to convince me. His heart wasn’t in it. This woman really wanted a beer, and this was her form of legitimate reasoning. She was so convinced it would work, she said it twice. I had to respect that.

So I opened my box of beer and gave her a bottle. She was rummaging for smokes and I told her not to worry about it. She told me karma would smile on me and I told her to have a good afternoon.

And then when I got home I found, not five dollars, but my copies of Machine of Death waiting for me. I’ve only read a couple of stories so far, and I think I’m going to wait till December to really sink into it. I’ve got the electronic version ready to go on my reader so it’ll be good travelling material. If you want to buy a copy, now that the “Let’s Be an Amazon Bestseller for a Day!” push is over, I’d probably get it from Topatoco, where you can buy loads of other books/T-shirts/gewgaws made by other indie creators I’m proud to be, however tangentially, associated with.

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10.10.22 [Friday]
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books, vancouver, writing

darwin’s bastards @ the writers festival

This morning I went to the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival for an event. Zsuszi Gartner was hosting three of the writers from Darwin’s Bastards. With four writers reading from their work, there wasn’t as much conversation as I might have enjoyed, but it was entertaining. The split between the bigger writers (William Gibson & Yann Martel) and the smaller writers (Adam Lewis Schroeder & Anosh Irani) was something that could have been more interesting to explore. There was a question from the audience about whether they write for an audience or think about their works as marketable items, which is a fundamentally different question when you’ve written a “big” book like Life of Pi, vs created a genre, vs are a playwright no one has ever heard of.

I think my favourite part of the panel was watching the writers listen to each other reading. Martel seemed very contemplative, inwardly focused while Gibson listened carefully and openly loved the funny bits. Also, he did his “imaginative fiction being every kind of fiction” thing which I do appreciate when people try to pigeon-hole sf. The way Irani read his story was much less flippant than the voice that was in my head, but that seriousness made the black comedy of that womb-creature even more stark. Schroeder also sang a song, in a Feist-like way. He was pretty fun, very much the dramatizer of his tale.

After the discussion I stood in line to get my copy of Darwin’s Bastards signed by the four of them. And it’s funny, but when I’ve been talking about this book to people in person, I’ve tended to tell them about the Schroeder story first. I told him that, and he seemed to appreciate it. I didn’t mention that William Gibson is the first author in the collection I mention.

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10.10.20 [Wednesday]
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books, writing

the machine of death has arrived

Machine of Death Day is October 26, 2010So a few years ago I wrote a story for an awesome sounding SF anthology edited by webcomic people I really like (Ryan North, David Malki !, and Matthew Bennardo who I’m not really aware of outside of this context) called The Machine of Death. It’s available now on Amazon, but if you’re interested in buying it, it’d be great if you could do it on October 26 (from Amazon.com). If you want more information about the history behind the anthology and why we’d like you to buy it that day (hint: it has to do with being an indie publisher trying to make a splash), this post should explain things a bit.

But, you might be saying, what is this anthology about? Well, the concept is that they’re stories from a world where the Machine of Death exists. The Machine tells you how you will die. It is infallible, but can be cryptic. So the stories are funny or poignant or generally awesome. My story, Firing Squad, is about a traveller in a rebellious mountain country whose benevolence has consequences. The book has 30 or so stories, and each of them is also illustrated by cool people from webcomics. It’s kind of awesome.

So it would be great if you considered buying it (or telling someone else to buy it for you) on Amazon.com on October 26, 2010. It is Creative Commons licensed and will be available electronically for free, but actual sales are good things to encourage this kind of effort in the future. Thanks.
Machine of Death Day is October 26, 2010

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10.10.15 [Friday]
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books, vancouver

postquake

I went to see after the quake, a play based on two Haruki Murakami short stories from the collection of the same name, with a classmate yesterday. The two stories mashed together were Superfrog Saves Tokyo and Honey Pie (the latter of which is among my favourite Murakami stories). I really liked it. The production got at the internality of Murakami stories by having a narrator and letting the characters narrate themselves. So you got the impression of being told the story more than it being strictly dramatized. The stories were integrated well, with Superfrog being a story Junpei was working on. It all came together in that non-traditional structure that Murakami stories tend to have.

The portrayal of Froggy was very urbane, as Jessie noted, much moreso than you’d get from the story itself. I enjoyed how he was portrayed, introduced in green light, but merging into the narrator as it went on. Frog’s urbanity borrowed a lot from that singing and dancing Looney Tunes frog, I felt. The sets and lights were used really well, and for one small incident the music was Norwegian Wood. I smiled.

Another thing, making me realize I’m in Vancouver, is that I actually recognized actors. Frog/Narrator was played by Alessandro Juliani, the guy who was Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica. I had to look up Hiro Kanagawa to know where I recognized him from and it turns out he’s been in loads of things, including the X-Files many years ago. So that was also kind of neat.

Tomorrow I’m going to volunteer at CanZine West at the Discorder Magazine booth. Maybe go to the Antiquarian Book Fair before that. Fun fun.

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09.07.28 [Tuesday]
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books

book review: rite

I hadn’t read any Tad Williams (though Ivy’s recommended him) until Dave lent me this collection of short stories, Rite. Evidently he’s more of a fantasy author than SciFi which doesn’t bother me. I think my problem with this book was the introductions to each story. I found them annoying and filled with “Aren’t I so clever” type stuff. Which kind of put me off the stories. Also I found that almost every story was just way too long for what it did. Williams talked in one of the introductions about loving language and that’s why he writes, which is fine, but few of the stories really felt like they’d been pruned down to the necessary.

That’s not to say I didn’t like anything about it. The Dark Destructor story was good. I kind of liked the airplane story, it had a good Twilight Zone feel to it. The unicorn story was good. But the Otherland story annoyed me with its fake swearing; the Elric stories weren’t as funny as he thought they were; and the vampire story was too long and he shouldn’t have told the readers it was supposed to be French crusaders because you could see the hasty paint-over job done to make them 13th century Arabs (and it was too long).

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09.06.09 [Tuesday]
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books

book review: axiomatic

Another book I grabbed at the CBC Calgary Book Sale last month, Axiomatic is a collection of short stories by Greg Egan. The first time I read this book was when Reyn and I were in Turkey. I’d never heard of Greg Egan and then these stories of jewels in brains and designer viruses and belief attractor zones were so intensely weird. Now, after reading a small pile of Greg Egan novels, I realize these stories are actually the more accessible chunk of his work.

There are two stories that are very similar in the collection. Both are about runners going into a disaster zone. Both involve describing these weird landscapes formed by the anomalous event. This was the only part of the book I wasn’t a big fan of, feeling like I’d already read that. It sort of highlighted the “ideas man” aspect of his writing. Apart from that one near repeat, the book was as good as I remembered it, and I’m super glad I own it now, since it’s long out-of-print.

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