Christopher Rowe

Move along!

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sun, 8 May 05 08:29:00 UT

Nothing to see here! Go over here to the new journal thingie!

But if you still can't manage the navigation, a quick summary shows that your correspondent recently:

* Did one of those quiz thingies and put a graphic from it up.
* Did a brief "we're off to Chicago" entry and managed to work in a none-to-subtle pitch for votes on the Locus Online survey.
* Reported live from the first day of Nebula weekend, mainly chatter about science fiction writers and bicycles--shocking new territory for him.
* Posted moderately classy congrats to the winners of the Nebulas from his fresh new loser-of-a-Nebula perspective, then brought it back around to himself with news about a story sale. Also, namedropped John Picacio.
* Did another one of those quiz thingies and put a graphic from it up.
* Begged for people to attend his reading at Wiscon and posted links about some Italian bicycle race and some Italian bicycle racer.
* Put up a long bit trying to convince people to subscribe to his zine.

And you've been over here missing all that.

(Oh, and at no point in all those entries did he refer to himself in the third person. Value add!)

Moving

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sat, 23 Apr 05 17:37:00 UT

Hey gang. The new place to read the UnCommonwealth journal of Christopher Rowe is at http://christopherrowe.blogspot.com

JournalScape has been great, but the folks putting together my new website say that they need a specific kind of interface in order to embed the journal. Or something like that. You'll still be able to have notices of new entries sent to you via e-mail and so on. I've already put up a new entry over there, which has has some news about upcoming travel and so on.

Thanks, Kenny and Jen!

The Ten Things Thing

cvrowe@gmail.com — Mon, 21 Feb 05 19:47:00 UT

The problem with coming up with ten things none of yâall have done, but that I have, is that I write these journal entries from the intersection of a weird Venn diagram of a readership.

Any farming background thing--like delivering a calf in a muddy field during a rain storm--can be matched (and bettered) by somebody from my family (hey Fred!). Any high school experience--like staying up all night playing Dungeons and Dragons in the house where Mark Twainâs parents were married--well, at least one person reading this has done that as well (hey Russ!). Writing stuff--having a story translated into a foreign language, say--lots of you have done (Ted and Kelly to name just two).

Iâm probably safe with bicycling stuff, since I donât think any of my cycling club friends read this, but none of the rest of you want me to list the different Kentucky county high points Iâve ridden my bike to, do you?

But letâs give it a go. I have:

(1) Gone swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea within the same calendar year.

(2) Met the current King of Morocco during his first visit to the White House as Head of State (heâd been before as a child, he told a story about playing with Amy Carter on the same lawn the welcoming ceremony took place on).

(3) Sat in the lap of the lead singer of the Oak Ridge Boys. I donât actually remember this, thank God. I was about two or three years old.

(4) Been questioned by the Secret Service after crashing my bicycle into the White House fence.

(5) Been pick pocketed in the Paris subway, but had a mysterious passerby recover my wallet and return it to me by throwing it through the window of the departing train.

(6) A few weeks later, been decked by the same pickpocket when I recognized him on another line and tried to prevent him from robbing someone else.

(7) Been named a member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels by two different governors.

(8) Married Gwenda Bond.

(9) Subverted the process.

Armstrong in Tour!

cvrowe@gmail.com — Wed, 16 Feb 05 09:21:00 UT

Lance Armstrong is actually not my favorite professional cyclist--he's probably not even in the top ten--but I love what he's done to bring American attention to the sport and of course greatly respect all the charitable work he's done.

This morning when I checked the only news site I look at every day, I was thrilled to see that he's decided to go ahead and race in this year's Tour de France. I'm thrilled because it means at least one more year of extensive US media coverage of le Tour and of other races (he's also going to defend his title in the Tour of Georgia), which means there's one more year for Americans to learn about all the other great personalities in cycling, like Floyd Landis, the World's Fastest Mennonite. Which hopefully means I can still watch cycling on television after Armstrong's eventual retirement (sometime during the 2006 season, probably).

As most of you know, the novel I'm working on is about a bicycle race across Kentucky, so really, this is all research.

The real deal Nebula ballot

cvrowe@gmail.com — Tue, 15 Feb 05 18:30:00 UT

Wow. Well, "The Voluntary State" did, in fact, advance to the 2004 SFWA Nebula Awards Final Ballot. I think I'm supposed to put one of those R in a circle dealies after "Nebula Awards," but top internet people tell me that the reason my posts sometimes look screwy is that I'm a little free with the Mac specific keyboard characters. If you want to see the R in a circle, go look at the official final ballot on SFWA's website.

Now here's this. When I first started writing, I'd send a story off in the mail and then wait to hear back from an editor before I worked on anything else. Those of you who've played this game realize that in some cases that meant I was buying myself a year off for the cost of a few stamps. And I can't really do that anymore. I've got to write more stories, more of this novel, hell, even more UnCommmonwealth pieces.

And I'm going to do that now. In a minute.

With the preliminary nomination and the various reprints, I've posted too much about this story, probably, but since the chances of my actually winning this award are, let's be honest, pretty slim, I'm going to beg y'all's patience and indulge myself in one more post about "The Voluntary State." But it's not about me, it's about the people who did the real work on this story--it's the acceptance speech I would have given.

All the attendees of the 2003 edition of the Sycamore Hill workshop gave me sterling advice about the piece. It's probably impolitic to list just a few of them, but hell, since I'm being careful to name the only ones that actually know this journal exists then I should be okay.

Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Ford both identified a lot places for improvement to the, yes, pretty messy manuscript I turned in, as did my fellow nominee Andy Duncan and workshop co-runner John Kessel. I owe all those guys a lot.

And especially, I owe these three incomparable people; Richard Butner, Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler. There's more critical acumen in that one sentence than I could begin to describe to you. Not to mention character, grace, talent, generosity and kindness.

After the first round of post Syc Hill rewrites, I sent the story to Ellen Datlow, who agreed to publish it with the proviso that I clarify some things. Over the last few years, I've started making more and more demands of the people who read my fiction, and Ellen pointed out places where clarity had been sacrificed to my own bullheaded notions of art.

So I sent the story to Ted Chiang, one of the smartest writers. (I started to put some kind of clause on the end of that sentence like "...in the field" or "...I've ever met" but I think I should probably let it stand.) See, I was trying a runaround. I was going to prove, to myself at least, that the story could be "got" as it was. Ted expressed confusion over some passages. Friends, when Ted Chiang doesn't get something you've written, it's not because your readers aren't as clever as you are.

It went back to Ellen and it came back to me and it went back to Ellen and it came back to me. Ellen kept pushing me to get it closer and closer to what she thought it could be, and eventually I realized that what Ellen thought it could be is pretty much what it should be. Thanks, Ellen.

All of those people did all of that work for me and that story, and I thank them for it.

But of course, none of them did a damned thing compared to the person who essentially started the story in the first place, the person who said, in response to my whining that I didn't have anything to write about, "There's a car on top of a hill. The door's open. There's nobody in it. Now shut up."

Thanks so much, Gwenda. As a writer, what you think I could be is what I should be. As a human being, what I should be is with you.

Love and peace,

Christopher

Keyboard Practice...

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sat, 29 Jan 05 10:12:00 UT

My favorite science fiction story of 2005--so far, obviously--is from the January issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Itâs by this guy, John G. McDaid, and the title (deep breath) is âKeyboard Practice, consisting of an Aria with diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with two manuals.â

F&SF editor Gordon van Gelder rightfully describes the piece as a virtuoso performance in his story notes, I think. âKeyboard Practice...â takes it structure and theme (in more than one sense of the word) from Bachâs Goldberg Variations, the dizzying, interlocked set of pieces famously recorded last century (twice) by Mutterinâ Glen Gould.

The story is revealed through thirty sections (explicitly labeled variations) between an intro (Aria) and conclusion (Aria da Capo). Itâs about music and obsession and talent and the links between those three. It has touches of old school cyberpunk, 90s hypertext fictions, and American Idol. Itâs about a music competition, itâs about an intelligent piano that may be playing instead of being played, itâs about a ghost.

Author McDaid provides a preview of the story on this web page. If Iâm reading this right, you can order the issue as a singleton here (magazine schedules being what they are, this January issue has already been succeeded by the February and March issues). 21st century wunderkind can download the issue directly into their brains from this page.

You wouldnât have to be doing all that clicking and downloading if you were already a subscriber to F&SF. Itâs a great magazine, and with a handful of other science fiction, fantasy, horror and mystery magazines represents the last, best place in the American magazine market that you can read thoughtful, entertaining short fiction thatâs both delightful and at the cutting edge. Seriously, you only think you donât like contemporary short fiction, because you havenât been looking in the right places.

Collected and Selected!

cvrowe@gmail.com — Thu, 20 Jan 05 18:10:00 UT

As I mentioned earlier, my "novelette," The Voluntary State has been selected for inclusion in a couple of very cool anthologies.

And cool cool, the hits keep coming. A couple of weeks ago I learned that Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois will be reprinting that story in an upcoming book tentatively titled Singularities (not, as a certain Ms. Link would have it, Singularicats!).

That was more than enough, but today, I learned that the story will also be collected in Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction, 22nd Annual Collection. Needless to say, since I've wanted to have a story in that series since I was fourteen years old, I'm deliriously happy.

"I do not love my new education."

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sun, 16 Jan 05 12:09:00 UT

I'm making an effort to be an educated Nebula voter by reading as many of the works on the preliminary ballot as I can, starting with the novels. I read Sean Stewart's fantastically good Perfect Circle literally within hours of its release, and last fall sometime made the slow, page by page study of The Knight that's pretty much always been what's required for me to access Gene Wolfe's demanding fiction (not a bad thing at all, that personal requirement, The Knight is a grand book, or at least a grand half of a book, having been artifically truncated from The Wizard by its publisher).

Over the last couple of days I've been reading Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold wins lots of awards and is apparently wildly popular, but I'd not actually ever read one of her books before. I'm happy to report that I liked this one a great deal and I'll try to get to its prequel soon (this is apparently the middle book in a loosely connected series).

The title of this post, by the way, is not meant to suggest that reading all of these works is a slog. It's my favorite line--and I think it's a wonderful line, in context or out--from Paladin of Souls.

Gwenda has a few of the books from the Philip K. Dick Award short list out of the library at the moment (she was wildly enthusiastic about my old teacher Geoff Ryman's Air) and I might hit some of those next. That ballot looks very strong.

After this flurry of award reading, I hope to get into a rotation of new book of fiction (brand new, I mean, published in 2005 new)/"great book"/older novel/non-fiction. I plan out my reading like that sometimes. Some years I pick an author and read everything published by that person, along with criticism and biographies and so on, but not this year. This year I want to read a lot of novels by a lot of different people from a lot of different countries written in a lot of different styles and genres.

But for now, as I said, the Nebula ballot. Next up, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (available as a free download, here) by Cory Doctorow.

Tim Powers among the English

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sat, 8 Jan 05 12:01:00 UT

If you're not a Tim Powers fan, then you've probably never read a Tim Powers book. If you've never read a Tim Powers book, then you are a lucky soul because now you get to start. I started on Powers twenty years ago with Dinner at Deviant's Palace when it came as a Science Fiction Book Club selection (still five books for a buck just like when I was a kid. How do they do that? I guess people still don't return that damned card.) You could start there, or with Declare or with Anubis Gates or with any of his books. Any and/or all of them will leave you a happier and less well adjusted person.

Anyway, being a Tim Powers fan, I was excited to see this message from Peter Crowther. Mr. Crowther's is the iron hand behind PS Publishing over there across the water in merry olde, which concern has been one of the real success stories in genre publishing over the last few years. The linked message outlines all of PS Publishing's plans for 2005, and the bit that hit my Powers button tells about an upcoming project "...currently comprising one enormous volume of out-takes, re-writes, forgotten essays and vignettes, drawings, illustrations and out-and-out doodles, guest articles, Introductions, Forewords and, Afterwords, plus a separate unpublished novel."

Lots of other interesting stuff on their schedule as well.

There, I can check "encourage others to read more Tim Powers books" off today's to do list. And since altruism makes me hungry, I'm off to lunch.

Nebula

cvrowe@gmail.com — Tue, 4 Jan 05 18:38:00 UT

The vocal minority of this journal's readership can skip the first couple of paragraphs of this entry, while I explain to the much beloved majority (consisting mostly of people I'm either related to, went to high school with, or both) exactly what a Nebula is in the context of, well, me.

Okay, there's this bunch of people, right? Called SFWA, right? Which is pronounced "sefhwah," okay? That stands for Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (don't ask why there's only one "F" in the acronym--it was before my time and apparently there were some people hospitalized over that very question back in the seventies).

Anyway, they give one of the big deal awards in science fiction (and fantasy) and I have NOT won one, nor even been nominated, and even if I won ELEVENTY-NINE of them there would be NO MONETARY COMPONENT TO THE PRIZE. It's called the Nebula and the rules for how one lands a piece of fiction on the ballot are only slightly less complicated than the Treaty of Versailles. Suffice it to say it's a two round elimination thing and I have placed a story in the equivalent of the semi-finals.

(Full readership of journal begin reading from this point)

So it comes out today that my story, "The Voluntary State," is one of the six "novelettes" (quiet down, brother Fred) that have made what's called the preliminary ballot. Sometime in early February, the membership of SFWA will vote on the Final Ballot and a total of five of those stories will move forward. Sometime later in the year, the membership votes again and whichever story wins will be awarded the 2004 (not 2005--Treaty of Versailles, remember?) Nebula Award for Best Novelette of the Year. Awards will also be given to the Best Novel, to the Best Novella, to the Best Short Story, and to the scriptwriters of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

It's an honor, as they say, just to be preliminarily recommended.

Many of you recall that the last time I was up for a big prize (Adair County High School Driver's Education Award, Boys Division, Class of '87), I was unfortunately unable to attend the ceremony owing to the fact that I was in the hospital following a car accident.

I'm as dazed now as I was then.

Oh Four

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sun, 2 Jan 05 10:35:00 UT

I'm going to resist making resolutions in public--or even in private (aloud or on paper anyway). Instead, here's 2004 through Rowe-colored lenses.

Personal Life Event Numero Uno: Married BondGirl. Life's not a contest--some kind kind of cosmic game with just one winner at the end. Which is a good thing for all y'all, because if it were, I just won.

Shelter Me: Hey! We got a house! We got a very cool old house that manages to combine our desires for a downtown location and high ceilings 'n' hardwood floors. Combine both of those things with being something we could afford, I mean. Oh, and a fenced in back yard for George, gotta love that.

Maybe I'll Break Hearts and Be as Fast as You: I got a sexy cool racing bicycle and rode it to glory in my very first cycling race. Keep in mind here that what you and I define as glory probably doesn't match up, exactly.

Tonight We'll Remake Tennessee: I have never, ever, "done as much writing as I should have," and I certainly didn't see as many stories published as I have in some years, but I've got to count 2004 as a good year career wise. The Voluntary State was published on Sci Fiction and a lot of very cool people seem to have liked it.

Words, Words, They're All We Have to Go On: I "didn't do as much reading as I should have," but I read some good books; some new and some just new to me. Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle and China MiÃ©ville's Iron Council stand out. I've been on a Ken MacLeod kick lately, and am just finishing up his Fall Revolution sequence, my favorite of which was The Stone Canal.

When people send you ARCs and other kinds of as yet unpublished novels, it's sometimes hard to keep up with whether books you read are actually out yet (that's why I can't say that Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club was my favorite book of the year--it was my favorite book of 2003). So I don't know whether you can buy all of these yet but I greatly dug the first two books in Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters series and his So Yesterday. Likewise Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness and most of all Gwenda Bond's Girl's Gang. (Oh, and this guy here is gonna be huge one day).

My favorite stories of the year were Richard Butner's House of the Future and Kelly Link's The Faery Handbag (which was in the great anthology, The Faery Reel.)

Pictures that Move: I "watched a lot more television than I should have this year." A lot of it on DVD, where I discovered Firefly, Gilmore Girls and Freaks and Geeks. We have one of those digital deals where you can make the tv record the shows you wanna watch and then you can watch them whenever. Shows I regularly watched whenever were House, Justice League Unlimited, Lost, and The Amazing Race (new to me--and I'm looking for a partner! I would dominate! Dominate!).

I was trying to think of movies last year that I really liked. I'm pretty sure I liked some a lot right after I saw them, but the only one that sticks in my memory now is Garden State.

Oh, the Places You'll Go: As usual, we went to Madison over Memorial Day weekend for Wiscon and had a great time. Unusually, we went to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and had a great time. (This year, Montreal.)

Wrap it Up: Lots of people and organizations are putting up "that was the year that was" type stuff on the web. My holiday season present to all of y'all is to point you to this one right here (that's a gallery, make sure and click through all 15 pictures).

Peace!

Christopher

Ye Olde Odes to Safecracking

cvrowe@gmail.com — Sun, 12 Dec 04 13:11:00 UT

Alan DeNiro, who keeps this satisfyingly strange journal, and who acts as tavern master and high poet mage-lord over this net based poetry resource, and who does many other things as well, is perhaps least known as the poetry editor for our zine, Say...

I publicized our new theme and the latest reading period a couple of days back, and now Alan has a couple of additions. First, a permanent change to the poetry guidelines: only one submission package per poet per issue (the maximum is five poems).

And on his vision for this next issue, themed "what's the combination?" Alan writes:

"[R]ather than receive dozens of "Ye Olde Odes to Safecracking", I thought it would be cool to making for this issue only a call for poems that are coded in some way.

E.g.,

Poems that utilize acrostics, abecedarians, anagrams, syllabics and other cryptographies."

I'll leave y'all to it, then.

Hard copies

cvrowe@gmail.com — Thu, 9 Dec 04 15:54:00 UT

Sure, sure, I'm all about the online. Go, Cory Doctorow, go, whatever. But I like books a lot better than websites. Books are made out of trees, and it's easy to make more trees. Computers are, ultimately, made out of oil--not so easy to make.

So, yes, I was very pleased when Infinite Matrix put up the story I wrote for Gwenda's birthday last year. But I was also pleased when Two Cranes Press contacted me and asked if they could use the same story as a jumping off point for
an anthology they wanted to put together of stories and poems about food. Plus recipes, presumably also about food.

I happily said yes, and the anthology is now available for order here. It costs more than nothing, but you can't beat the portability.

Say... News

cvrowe@gmail.com — Mon, 6 Dec 04 18:40:00 UT

The slightly delayed issue of Say... is coming together. Depending on the holiday crunched schedule of our printer, it looks like weâll be mailing #5, Say...have you heard this one? to subscribers, contributors, reviewers and retailers around the first of the year.

This latest issue has:

A comic by Elaine Chen.

Poems by Peg Duthie and David J. Schwartz.

Stories by Hannah Wolf Bowen, Stephanie Burgis, Craig Laurance Gidney, Larry Hammer, Sandra McDonald, Catherine M. Morrison, Karen M. Roberts, Jannie Lee Simner and Sonya Taaffe.

And with #5 being published that means itâs time to start getting ready for #6, about which thereâs this bit of news. The previously announced invitation only nonfiction issue, Say...are you from around here? has been pushed back to next fall owing to time constraints and in deference to the wishes of some of the contributors. Therefore, the next issue will be whatever passes for a âregularâ issue of Say...

Announcing, then, issue #6 of Say..., which will debut at Wiscon in Madison over Memorial Day Weekend, answering the question, âwhatâs the combination?â

The reading period will open on January 1st and close on April 15th (easy enough deadline for US citizens to remember). As usual, stories and comics that answer, explore, provoke, deny or defy the question should be sent to my attention via the post to PO Box 1304, Lexington KY, 40588-1304, USA. Poems doing the same should be sent via e-mail to Alan DeNiro (adeniro at rocketmail dot com). Unsolicited electronic submissions of anything other than poetry will be deleted unread.

Weâre going to tighten our focus down on the theme a little this time. We want to see work about keys and answers, and about unifications and joinings.

Send something, wonât you? If we like it, weâll give you ten bucks and your work will appear in a spiffy perfect bound zine with a full color cover. Tons of indie press street cred for all!

(If you want to read the next issue, or any of our issues, you should subscribe, which you can do here for now. Later, thereâll be another place you can do the same thing. Watch this space for details.)

Now Iâm off to find wherever the hell it is on the internet that indie comics creators hang out and tell them the same stuff.

The Madam at Number Nine

cvrowe@gmail.com — Tue, 23 Nov 04 14:35:00 UT

I think this is just fascinating. Here's a passage I read on my lunch break from Charles Gallenkamp's Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions, which is shaping up into a fascinating read.

"Andrews' guide [an English expatriate resident in 1909 Japan] had arranged for them to dine at the most famous of the Yoshiwara's establishments, known simply as Number Nine. [Yoshiwara, or "Street of Joy" was the red light district of Yokahama.] Number Nineâ¦boasted a lavish dÃ©cor, a spacious courtyard, and a garden filled with enormous chrysanthemumsâ¦.

Apart from its felicitous atmosphere, superb food, and alluring women, one of the establishment's major attractions was its enigmatic owner, whom everyone knew only as Mother Jesus. Although she ran Number Nine with ironhanded efficiency, she had endeared herself to a wide circle of regular customers for whom she acted as adviser and confidante. Her clientele included spies, soldiers of fortune, smugglers, world travelers, ships' officers, and highly placed individuals in government, the military, and business. Mother Jesus was a clearinghouse of information who picked up gossip before anybody else, and could accomplish the seemingly impossible--such things as locating missing relatives and friends or arranging passage on ships supposedly booked to capacity."

Wow! How Tales of the Gold Monkey is that?

Well, not very, I guess, but you take my meaning. Kind of makes all those crappy genre "club stories" seem even more banal than they already did, eh?