After a Moment of Panic...

...in which I thought my entire blog had disappeared, an am very happy to discover I'm wrong on that, it occurred to me that I haven't actually written anything in here for months. Here, therefore, is the 411:

I'm still working hard on wrapping up We Will All Go Down Together, hopefully for early December. Short story short--my kid got sick, I got sick, I'm STILL sick, it's a nightmare. But I'm very happy with the way things are going, an am determined to give my readers the very best possible Novel in Stories experience I can. That takes time, apparently. Who knew?

In other news, the Hexslinger Omnibus is almost upon us! Out in time for Christmas from the fine folks at CZP (natch), this e-book-only offer gets you all three books in one huge file, plus almost 50,000 words' worth of brand-new material! These latter stories--"Like a Bowl of Fire," "In Scarlet Town (Today)" and "Hexmas"--are set after the end of A Tree of Bones, and will hopefully tell you interesting things about (most of) your favourite Hexslinger Series characters. I am in the process of inquiring as to whether or not there will be a way to buy the new stories separately, but will keep you updated.

Aaaand...that's it. Thanks for hanging in there. All best.

So Now It Can Be Told: We Will All Go Down Together Edition

So...as we all know, I've been having a hell of a time with Experimental Film, and while I think I'm in a far better place than I was, some strategic decisions needed to be made about my ostensible October, 2013 deadline. I wasn't sure if I could talk about this yet, but as of last night I've been given the go-ahead, and here's how it's going to be:

Instead of delivering Experimental Film for October, I'm delivering a book called We Will All Go Down Together: A Novel in Stories About the Five-Family Coven...ie, CanCon gone very, very dark, somewhat like Alice Munroe, but with witches, magicians and the Fae. This collects many of the stories I've come to call my “Toronto the Weird” pieces and organizes them into a loose sort of narrative which highlights the fact that the same characters and touchstones show up in a surprising number of them.

The book will therefore package not only (for example) “The Narrow World,” probably the oldest entry in this roster (which first appeared in Queer Fear II and was reprinted in The Worm in Every Heart), but also all the subsequent Five-Family Coven-related stories which have appeared in various anthologies, magazines and what-have-you since then, most of which very few people aside from me have ever seen contextualized in terms of their shared universe—after which I'll add in on top five entirely new pieces, never before published, the latter three of which will (hopefully) bring closure to various ongoing sagas. I'm putting together the initial manuscript submission package right now, and I have to tell you, it's been really exciting to watch it take shape.

My work-schedule until October, therefore, will basically go like this—

Finish “In Scarlet Town (Today)”
Draft and write “Hexmas,” the final short story supplement for the upcoming Hexslinger Series Omnibus eBook, to be released in December, 2013
Finish “Furious Angels”
Finish “History's Crust”
Draft and write “Helpless”
Draft and write “Hungry Ghosts”
Draft and write “Under These Rocks and Stones”
Write various supplementals for We Will All Go Down Together (an introduction, an article about the Five-Family coven, a family tree, a timeline); integrate all material into manuscript.
Also: Write various other stuff, as needed. But this is the core, the stuff that has to happen. And it gives me such an amazing thrill to finally be embarked on it, especially after all the various fits and starts and contortions Experimental Film has been putting me through. Especially since, as it stands now, We Will All Go Down Together in its raw form is already up over 100,000 words.

Let me be clear, though: None of this means Experimental Film ISN'T going to happen, just that I need more time in order to do it the way it deserves to be done. And because of CZP being wonderful enough to let me substitute a project I was always going to do with them anyhow, everyone wins: a new Gemma Files book comes out next June/July, to be followed by the novel Experimental Film was always meant to be—the one I've been blundering towards all this time, but finally believe I've cracked, in terms of outlining/writing.

In other news, school just ended, and summer school starts on July 2nd. Got Cal all up my grill 'til then, and after, though in hopefully smaller doses.;)

Hey, all--

Well, it's a whole 'nother year...five months into one, in point of fact...and I've really let things go around here. A large part of that has to do with working on Experimental Film, which is frankly kicking my ass hard (as it should, I guess), but there are other factors at work as well: personal health issues, stress, fatigue, my son's ASD, etc. So I thought I would drop in with a few words about what I'm doing right now, and where to find me for the next little while.

I've been picking up a lot of reprint action, which is pleasant. My story "Kissing Carrion" will be reprinted in Dead North, an anthology of Canadian zombie fiction, in October, 2013. Ellen Datlow picked up my story "Spectral Evidence" for her Hauntings anthology, out right now. She also took my poems "Jar of Salts" and "Haruspicy" for Lovecraft's Monsters, due in 2014, and my story "Nanny Grey", from Solaris's Magic anthology, for Best Horror of the Year Volume 5. Very recently, Stephen Jones picked up my King in Yellow mythos story "Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars", from Miskatonic River Press's wonderful A Season in Carcosa, for the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 anthology. That makes twice in a row that he's featured something of mine, which makes me feel all tingly, like I'm Joe Hill (or Simon Stranzas).

In terms of new work, I'm still waiting on A Mountain Walked from Centipede Press, which will feature my Lovecraftian novella "[anasazi]", and is edited by S.T. Joshi. My very short story "One In The Morning, And One At Night" will appear in the next issue of The Three-Lobed Burning Eye, while my  Thomas Ligotti tribute "Oubliette" will close out Miskatonic River Press's The Grimscribe's Puppets, which looks absolutely amazing (Joe S. Pulver Snr. edits, as with Carcosa). And for fans of my work involving supremely effed-up QUILTBAG relationships between dudes with magical powers, may I guide you towards what I've been calling my "Hammer Pirates" cycle? Written in non-linear order, the middle instalment, "Trap-Weed", will appear in Mike Allen's Kickstarter-funded Clockwork Phoenix 4, while the origin-story, "Two Captains", is coming later this year from Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I just sold what was supposed to be the final movement, "The Salt Wedding", to Kaleidotrope, which will have it up early next year.

Okay, so...that's it, basically. I'll be at World Horror this year, and I'll also be at Readercon. I'm teaching my first online horror-writing course, in order to raise funds for the Shirley Jackson Awards. Everything is sort of coming up just around the corner, constantly hitting me in the face, and I'm moving from deadline to deadline. But this is frankly nothing new, so; there you go.

I'll try to make myself more available here, but do surf by the non-professsional TMI blog (my LJ) if you want more regular updates. All best.

The Next Big Thing

Having been tapped to do this meme by both James Cooper (http://www.jamescooperfiction.co.uk/thenextbigthing.htm) and Jonathan Oliver, I've decided to lead with it today, hoping it'll break me through that self-organizational wall I've been wrestling with. So:

What is the working title of your next book?

Experimental Film: A Novel. It's supposed to be my first full-length stand-alone, after finally finishing up the Hexslinger series, so that's its own very peculiar brand of performance anxiety, right there.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Much like my prospective main character, Lois Cairns, I was a film reviewer for eight years and taught Canadian film history for ten, which is an...interesting genre to try and get students excited about, especially Canadian ones. I basically had to cobble my own curriculum together from various sources, and was forced to think analytically about just why the Canadian system “works” the way it does, as well as why Canadians—English-speaking Canadians, in specific—seem drawn towards the types of films we produce. Short story short, a lot of it is about negative definition, ie wanting to distinguish ourselves from the States by making the exact opposite of what we perceive to be a “Hollywood”-type movie. Which may well be why one of the richest veins of Canadian film lies in the realm of explicitly non-narrative, incredibly artsy, experimental film.

But while this is a thematic itch I've wanted to scratch for almost forever, it's not exactly hook material. So let me hasten to add that there is a genuine plot at work, as well: After losing her job and falling into a depressive state, Lois accidentally stumbles across evidence that there may have been a hitherto-forgotten female filmmaker operating in Ontario around the same time as George Méiliès did in France, making similiarly fantastic-horrific films on highly flammable silver nitrate film. Naturally, she pursues this evidence, hoping to parlay it into a documentary and book that will establish her on the Canadian film history map. But what she discovers is that this woman was working out of her own obsessions, trying to create a film that would transfer one specific image she'd been literally haunted by all of her life into other people's heads...and as result, at least one of her films—the last, most effective, one, created just before she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances—is something no one should ever watch.

What genre does your book fall under?

Oh, horror, natch. Always horror. It's probably closest in structure as well as content to “each thing I show you is a piece of my death”, the Shirley Jackson award-nominated novelette I co-wrote with my husband, Stephen J. Barringer, which makes it a cross between M.R. James and The Blair Witch Project. But because it's a book, what I want is a nested documentarian presentation that juxtaposes subject interviews with a pseudo-CanCon prosefic/True Crime overall narrative voice that you only gradually realize belongs to a completely different yet equally real person, the journalist Gregg Polley.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm, well: Going CanCon, I'd like to cast my old schoolmate Megan Follows as Lois, because we're almost the same age and I want to see her onscreen again. For Lois's much put-upon student turned intern Safie Hewsen, I'd like to cast an explicitly Canadian-Armenian actress, though an American-Armenian actress of the right age (25 or so) would also be okay; if I had to cross-cast, though, I'd tap Agam Darshi, because she also needs to work more. Gregg Polley would be David Hewlett, while Colm Feore would be perfect for the smallish yet important part of Dr Guilden Abbott, head of the Freihoeven Institute for Psychic Research, through whom another lynchpin character I'd like to cast out of French Canada would be discovered, a very old man who we only get to “know” through interview footage. Jonathon Young would be perfect for the self-obsessed experimental filmmaker/former National Film Board of Canada employee Wrobert Barney, in whose sample-heavy movies Lois first discovers traces of the work of our lost female filmmaker, while the filmmaker herself...here I'd have to break ranks and cast Alice Krige, just 'cause. But then again, she was in Guy Maddin's Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, which makes her an honorary Canadian.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The elevator pitch is: “Martin Scorsese's Hugo meets John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns”, but this obviously works better if you've seen either of those movies, so...(Shrugs)

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It's due in September, 2013 to ChiZine Publications. If things go the way they have thus far, that means it may be out sometime in early 2014.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Again, if things go as they have thus far, I expect the first draft to be roughly on time, with edits done a month after that. This will hopefully be a shorter book than either of the Hexslinger sequels, given that it's a self-enclosed narrative.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

In a lot of ways, I think this is going to be my attempt to write something like Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, an outright creeper with a Jamesianly matter-of-fact antiquarian tone. But I also want it to have some of the impact of books by people like Kathe Koja (Skin) and Adam Nevill (The Ritual), which will be interesting to deal with, because I'm trying to write about the book's events from the outside-in rather than the inside-out. My CanCon prosefic models, OTOH, would be Lynn Crosbie, Michael Ondaatje, Susan Musgrave and Gwendolyn MacEwen biographer Rosemary Sullivan.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

See above, but: The notion of a haunted film has always provoked and fascinated me, probably because creating fear through the visual image is one of the hardest things imaginable. I also always wanted to write something which was specifically “Canadian”, perverse and outrageous and self-mythologizing, my very own version of a Telefilm-funded project that'd never, ever make it past the first few assessment rounds. Then again, I always have to remember that one of my old teachers, Paul Donovan, once wrote a satirical novel eviscerating the Telefilm experience, then got Telefilm to fund him to make a movie out of it.

What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

Well, it's a lot less of a sausage-fest than the Hexslinger books were, so that might be a draw or a drawback, depending on what you like: Female main character(s), female monster(s), female mythology, female-driven story. In a way, it's a nightmare fantasia about female creativity with sidebars about being the mother of a special-needs child, as well as the info-dumps about Canadian film history. But then again, hopefully, it'll just make you really uncomfortable to be reading it alone.;)

Let's Get It Started

“I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn’t exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.” 


—Caitlin R. Kiernan.

This is a pretty good quote to frame most things, IMNSHO, but definitely to frame my most recent piece of news: I finally have an official deadline for the first draft of my new book, Experimental Film: A Novel. Said deadline is September, 2013, which is...crazy, frankly. Still, I needed a good ass-kick to get me over the threshold with this project, and that certainly qualifies.

Without giving much away, Experimental Film is a story that's about as far removed from the Hexslinger-'verse as is humanly possible. It exists as an outgrowth of my “Toronto Dark” world, the one many of my short stories are set in, contemporary and urban and stand-alone. On the one hand, there's an M.R. Jamesian ghost story/mystery whose roots date back to the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of cinema; on the other, there's a character who's not quite me, other characters who aren't quite various figures from the Toronto experimental film scene, and a lot of the stuff about Canadian film history I used to inflict on my students. It's stuff I've touched on before, most recently in the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelette Steve and I wrote together (“each thing I show you is a piece of my death”), but since I've never had to spin it out for 80,000 to 100,000 words before, it's quite fairly terrifying to contemplate. But energizing.

In other news I should have been linking to this blog, I've been writing a bi-weekly column on...gee, let's call it “horror culture”, for ChiZine.com. The current one is “Softly Brutal: The Gialli of Pupi Avati”, but you should be able to link the the rest though this (http://www.chizine.com/pupi_avati.htm#.UFNQoY7FUfE). For those who are interested, I also now have a Tumblr, here (http://handful-ofdust.tumblr.com/), which I mainly use to file odd-ass visual stuff I find inspiring. You'll see some mood-building stuff for Experimental Film up there already, and can expect to see more.

Okay, back to it.;)

Readercon!

Leaving today, back on Sunday. Hope to see some of you there. If not, have fun.;)

Been A Long Time, Been A Lonely Lonely Time

Okay! So: A Tree of Bones has been officially out for over a month, prompting an interview in Rue Morgue and a good review in Publisher's Weekly, as well as two very nice reviews on Goodreads, though one seems impossible to find anymore. I'm also finally at the end of my short story/anthology-fill duties for this year, all of which have been accepted by their various venues. That's seven separate stories. I also did a fair amount of preliminary work on my next CZP book, Experimental Film: A Novel, and roughed out and/or began a few other projects, as well as writing nine poems (two of them placed thus far), three new instalments of Lackadaisy fanfic and five film columns for chizine.com. 

Next on the docket: “In Scarlet Town (Today)”, another post-Tree of Bones Hexslinger-'verse story, which will hopefully be packaged as an e-book along with “Like a Bowl of Fire”, which was originally supposed to be the supplement in the back of the Tree hardcover. I need to get it done by mid-July, which should be fun (since that's Readercon, essentially, which I go straight to from Polaris, the week before). And speaking of which, here's my schedule for both:

Polaris:
Fringe: There's More Than Two of Everything, Friday July 6, 7pm
Adults Should Read Adult Books, Friday July 6, 9pm
The Cabin in the Woods, Friday July 6, 10pm
Diana Wynne Jones: Her Works and Legacy, Saturday July 7 1pm
John Carter (of Mars), Saturday July 7, 5pm
Lost in the Middle Again, Sunday July 8, 4pm
The Cult of Cthulhu, Sunday July 8, 1pm
Reading: Sunday July 8, 2:30pm.

Readercon:
Thursday July 12
9:00 PM The Visual Generation. Gemma Files, Elizabeth Hand, Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Langan (leader), Lee Moyer. Last year's horror-related Readercon panels all brought in discussions of other media. Many of today's horror and dark fantasy writers were exposed to horror movies and television before ever picking up a horror novel. In a 2010 book review, horror critic Will Errickson wrote, "I can't imagine what it must have been like for authors such as Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Sheridan LeFanu, et. al., to write horror fiction without having horror film as an influence." Yet despite these undeniable changes in the field, readers often disparage horror writing when they feel it tries too hard to be "cinematic," or when an author openly admits to being inspired by visual media. Is it time for us to get over this stigma and accept that horror literature and visual media are in an ongoing two-way conversation? Or are we in danger of diluting the craft and consigning the genre's past masters to obscurity unless they've been adapted to film?
Friday July 13
11:00 AM Group Reading: Mythic Poetry. Mary Agner, Mike Allen, Erik Amundsen, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files, Gwynne Garfinkle, April Grant, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Shira Lipkin, Adrienne J. Odasso, Julia Rios, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe. Over the past decade, speculative poetry has increasingly turned toward the mythic in subject matter, with venues such as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Jabberwocky, and the now-defunct Journal of the Mythic Arts showcasing a new generation of poets who've redefined what this type of writing can do. Come to the reading and hear new and classic works from speculative poetry's trend-setters.
4:00 PM Wet Dreams and Nightmares. Samuel R. Delany, Gemma Files, Paula Guran (leader), Caitlín R. Kiernan, Sonya Taaffe. Writers such as Caitlín R. Kiernan, M. Christian, Cecilia Tan, and Paula Guran are well known in both speculative fiction and erotic fiction circles for creating what Kiernan calls "weird and transgressive" erotica. How does this subgenre use the tools and tropes of horror and dark fantasy to explore taboo aspects of sexuality and gender? How has it changed over the decades as sexual culture has evolved? And as the romance genre becomes more welcoming of both the erotic and the undead, how will weird erotica maintain its identity as something separate from paranormal porn?
Saturday July 14
11:00 AM Group Reading: ChiZine Press. Gemma Files, Nicholas Kaufmann, Nick Mamatas, Yves Meynard, Paul Tremblay. Authors published by ChiZine Press read from their works.
12:00 PM The Works of Caitlín R. Kiernan. Elizabeth Bear (leader), Gemma Files, John Langan, Sonya Taaffe. Since blazing onto the speculative fiction scene with the story "Persephone" in 1995 and the novel Silk in 1998, Caitlín R. Kiernan has consistently pushed the boundaries of the fantastic, often refusing to be classified and always delighting in transgression. Her work encompasses elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and erotica, to name just a few; she writes short and long fiction, comics and graphic novels, poetry, and song lyrics with equal facility. This panel will attempt an overview of her spectacularly diverse career.
3:00 PM Kaffleklatsch! (Newly added.)
7:30 PM Reading. Gemma Files. Gemma Files reads from A Tree of Bones: Volume 3 of the Hexslinger Series.
Sunday July 15
1:00 PM Autographs. Gemma Files, Jeff VanderMeer.
2:00 PM Queer/Were: Born This Way?. Samuel R. Delany, Gemma Files, Greer Gilman, Liz Gorinsky, Andrea Hairston, John Edward Lawson, Ruth Sternglantz (leader). In Marie de France's 12th century Anglo-Norman tale "Bisclavret," werewolf transformation can be read as a metaphor for homosexuality. In contemporary urban fantasy/paranormal fiction, the slippage between queerness and were-ness persists on several levels, even when the characters are nominally heterosexual. But what happens when a were isn't heterosexual? Ruth E. Sternglantz will look at how several authors of queer urban fantasy/paranormal construct the convergence of queer and were, and subsequent discussion will explore how authors of urban fantasy generally appropriate metaphors of queerness in the construction of their were characters.


So, yeah. Should be fun. And now, back to Hex City.