Do you love reading short stories? What about dark tales with a demonically-possessed X-Box, a skinwalker or a haunted forest?

In Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas, a dozen horror authors and game designers have gotten together to write tales set in Pinebox, Texas. This sleepy little East Texas town definitely has a lot more going on than the occasional bar fight.

The e-book version of Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas is available now at DriveThruHorror.com and the paperback version is available through Amazon.com.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present a preview of a few stories in this horror anthology.

Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas Preview at Flames Rising.

This preview features fiction by David Wellington, Shane Lacy Hensley and Ed Wetterman.

Amazon finally has copies of Unplugged: The Web's Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy in stock, but it looks like they've already sold all but two copies.

Our reader forum is now live.  Come say hi, why not?  For those reading this message on the website, just scroll over to "ROF COMMUNITY" on the nav bar at the top and click on "ROF FORUM."

Happy Holidays, all!

One of the things I love about fandom is that, at its best, it's a potlatch society. It's one of the last few places in the Western world where a person's social status and the respect in which they are held is determined by the quality and magnanimity and effort involved in what they give away.

I've been involved in Criminal Minds fandom and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. fandom and SFF fandom, and I used to tell people I wasn't a real fan, because I didn't contribute enough to the communities. But I guess I do bring something, and I should value that.

I think of Yuletide, for example, or the people who write fic and turn it loose in the world for other people to read and enjoy, or the people who write meta and reviews and amazing critical analysis, and the people who run conventions, and the people who organize fan fundraisers, and the people who read carefully and comment and maintain rec lists, and the people who critique and educate about social issues, and the people who maintain lending libraries of out-of-print works, all for the joy of sharing something they love and feel strongly about.

Giving stuff away--and I don't mean obligatory gifts, the oh my god I have to find something for my mother in law that costs at least seventy-five bucks gifts--is a small human act of heroism. When we give time, or kindness, or something we know somebody else will love (or needs), we are reflecting, for a moment, our best selves. And in the act, we receive, as well: giving benefits the giver. Not in gratitude, but in oxytocin; the elevation that comes from community, from purpose. The love hormone, they call it, but what it really is is the social bonding hormone.

It's the thing that makes us a tribe. And the Internet makes that tribe world-wide.

I remember one time when I was so sad. I had walking pneumonia and a broken heart, and I was taking the bus home from work in a howling nor'easter and I had a mile to walk with no sidewalk from the bus stop to my door. And as I was getting off the bus, a pretty girl smiled at me. Just the gift of a smile, no reason. Maybe I looked as sad as I felt.

I still remember her, and that smile was in 1995.

As I've gotten older, this has become more and more clear to me. All I am, all I do in the world, the only value any of it has is where it benefits the world around me.

We all die. No, really. We strut our little time upon the--well, you know it. Trying never to die is futile and sad; but the prospect of that inevitability, I think, can be comforting. When we look at our own impermanence (as individuals, as cultures, as a species) then it starts to come plain that the moral value that brings the most good into the world is compassion.

Compassion is hard and scary. It means putting ourselves at risk and really listening to other people, even when we disagree with them. Even when they want to destroy us, or are completely oblivious to our needs. It does not preclude self-defense or anger, of course. And it does not mean that we have to martyr ourselves to the cruelty of others.

But it does mean that maybe, when it costs us nothing to give something away, we can do it. We can fold that neglected laundry we pull out of the dryer in the communal laundry room of life. That's a gift, after all.

Somehow, we've gotten this idea that giving is about stuff. And all that stuff we collect can make us more comfortable, but our enduring legacy is the attention we pay. The good stuff is the ways we help the world, the little pleasures we bring to others, the trees we plant, and the houses we build.

And so many of the things we can give away cost us nothing. Nothing we need, anyway. A little self-importance, a little of our self-image as Important Busy People Who Own The Road.

I like to let people into traffic. You know, I'm almost never in that much of a hurry to get somewhere. And the surprised and relieved looks they give me through the driver's side window are so very gratifying.

We are so small, and the night is so large. If we don't hold the light for each other, who will?

So this is just to say thank you to everybody who's let me into traffic over the years. For all the little kindnesses and efforts on my behalf, or just generous gestures broadcast. For all the aha moments, and the belly laughs or snickers, the things that made me go huh I'm not sure that's right.

Thanks for all the comments and arguments and small generousities. Thanks to everybody who's given me the gift of their attention, either here or to my published work: even if you hated what I had to say, you listened. (and thank you to asciikitty and coffeeem, as there is !fiber! in my mailbox today to go with my shiny new spindle.)

I'll do my best to pass it along where I can.

Happy sun return. Happy new year.

Welcome back, Lab Girl Ilsa!!!

(Wallpapers downloadable HERE.)

Speaking of Los Angeles Magazine, my article on the fetishization of beautiful female victims is finally online.

2009 is winding down fast. Winding down, wrapping up, whichever. And a strange year it has been. Every year, the years grow shorter— at least when viewed from my subjective personal perspective —shorter and more bizarre. Every year, I feel a greater degree of cognitive disconnect between NOW and THEN, and find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the past with the present; the future, somehow, seems more solid than the present.

No writing yesterday. I did send "The Jetsam of Disremembered Mechanics" to subpress, but it would be a lie to say that was work. Yesterday earns an L, as it was a lost day. However, were I to try to explain why, I'd only get myself into a mood that would make working today extremely unlikely. So, let's just say nothing was written.

The most peculiar thing about "The Jetsam of Disremembered Mechanics" is that it contains no contractions. Not a single one. It was a conscious nod to the style employed by Silverberg when he wrote Nightwings. And it yielded an oddly formal, and oddly innocent, voice. Nothing I would likely ever do again, but it worked for this story.

Yesterday, I had a long hot bath. I napped. Day before yesterday, I finished reading the paper on Tethyshadros and began reading "A new basal sauropodomorph dinosaur from the upper Elliot Formation [Lower Jurassic] of South Africa."

There's a photo behind the cut that I took on Monday, of a rather daunting ice/snow formation hanging from the roof of the house next door:

( An Accident Waiting )

Hm. There's a "Takaal" on Twitter (not me). Also a "Takaal" on deviantArt (not me). And on Myspace (not me).

For a name I made up (seriously, although I later found out it's a - Cree? - word for "corn silk"), it sure is running around a lot. Found a couple of gamers with the name... and one possible person of Mid-Asian origin (Indian, mayhap?).

And a Dreamwith reference that *does* appear to be me - it tags back to this journal, at any rate, but I don't remember getting one.

For the Dreamwidth users, does having other people "has access to" give you an account? (see here)

I don't remember if I requested an invite from anyone (if I did, and you gave me one, please let me know). I also FOUND this error in a Google search for "Takaal".

Help?

Today, God willing, we will see genet and roho! Yay, visitors!

Word of the Day
scintilla, n : a spark or trace
From the Latin for spark (a literal one, as from a burning ember), and related to scintillare, "to sparkle."

Baby at 27 Months
Today while making breakfast I looked over and found her lying on her stomach on the floor with one of her toy dinosaurs.

"DAI-no-SAHR," she proclaimed. "ehs REEDENG!"

I came to the gate and peered over it. "The dinosaur is reading?"

"REEDENG!" she repeated.

"What's he reading?" I squinted. "Oh, I see! Your book about God! How wonderful for the dinosaur!"

She went back to playing and I walked away and... I'm sorry to say, my readers, that when I turned my back I had to struggle not to laugh. What a juxtaposition...!

Current Plans
Hooray for the One Card Draw being done! And thank you for your patience. While for obvious reasons I am rather busy (if I bake another cookie, argh...!), I am still plucking away at my outline for the Bright Spots collection... and preparing for the annual Three Kings Day Sale, which commences on the 26th and will feature sales of originals, prints, postcards, bookmarks and books.

I am, however, way behind on email... if you haven't heard from me, it's because I don't want to shoot you a 'read this, kthnx' response. I'm working on it...!

Elsewhere
• Virgin Oceanic to Tour the Bottom of the Sea. I guess they figured, "We're doing space, why not the ocean?" I approve of these high ambitions. From dracosphynx.
• Nursing Corset. For my fashion-lovers, a fascinating design for a corset for a nursing mother. Pretty and practical!


Stardancer Home.

• 13:04 NYC Tweeps: Time Warner Cable may stop carrying Fox and FX Jan.1. Go here and make your voice heard: www.keepfoxon.com/fox #
• 13:17 Need to finish wrapping Christmas Gifts to bring to Long Island tomorrow. #
• 14:46 #twitterfail #
• 15:02 I love Christmas! I'm heading out of town tomorrow afternoon; won't be back 'til Sunday! #
• 16:08 BLANKET OF WHITE makes a great Christmas Gift: www.crimsonscreams.com/collection.htm #
• 17:25 The UPS Man just delived PATIENT ZERO! Can't wait to dive in tomorrow! #
• 17:41 Hoarding Mai Drugs...amygrech.livejournal.com/172632.html #
• 17:56 Believe in magic... #
• 18:28 BLANKET OF WHITE on Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/book/show/6803306-blanket-of-white #
• 19:41 Had to get up @ 6:30AM today; I'm starting to run out of steam... :( #
• 21:16 Tried to update a client website, but the server isn't responding. Too much Egg Nog? #
• 21:32 I got it up!! The website, that is! Get your mind out of the gutter!!! #
• 06:54 Something isn't sitting quite right with you now. Even if you ... More for Leo twittascope.com/twittascope/?sign=5 #

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Time for another caption contest voting poll in celebration of my New Adventures in Cancer.

My sister took this photo of me and calendula_witch in the hospital, shortly after my nacho-ectomy.



© 2009 M. Lake, all rights reserved. Used with permission.

garyomaha felt that this was a natural for a caption contest. The usual comment madness ensued: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]

I have now converted it to a voting poll. Unfortunately, some of the longer witticisms at my expense are truncated by the poll code, so take the time to pop over to those links and look them over before you vote! Usual rules apply. Prize after the voting poll will be an inscribed ARC of Pinion, plus a bonus book. Plus garyomaha will also get a special prize for his role in inciting this idiocy.

Voting poll is here. Encourage all your friends!

On the job this morning, working on The Steles of the Sky and The White City and drinking rose congou tea until it's time to go help fetch ashacat and Naveen home from the hospital. Then, go climb, come home, and work some more. How on earth did it already get to be Wednesday?

Temperature with wind chill this morning, four degrees. It's cold in this house this morning. Need more toast!

Slept pretty well last night, something close to normal in terms of both quality of sleep and duration. Woke up pain free, though that didn't last long.

Every now and then the reality of my current situation hits me from a fresh angle. As I've observed before, when your life is such that metastatic colon cancer is good news, you're pretty deep into the Twilight Zone. (And I'm thinking Golden Earring here as much as Rod Serling.) I mean, I used to think the word "metastasis" meant "the grenade's gone off, kiss your kids good-bye". And maybe it does for me, too, though I continue to retain my fundamental optimism about all this.

Likewise chemotherapy. When I think, really think about what's going to happen to me in slightly over two weeks, it scares me spitless. I mean, this is raw, nasty stuff. Heavy metal poisoning. Impotence. Cognitive impairment. Immune system failures. Chronic, persistent nausea. Carcinogenic chemicals flooding my bloodstream. Forty eight hours on an infusion pump. I'm going from an asymptomatic disease to weapons-grade pharmaceuticals. Still, the only way forward is to walk into the fire. So walk into it I shall.

Really, chemotherapy is kind of like eating mushrooms. When I really think about the biology of fungii, I can't touch them. When I just think, oh, a mushroom, they're delicious. Chemo's the same way for me, it seems. Don't think, just act.

The marvel and miracle of it all is that I still go to bed, i still sleep, I still wake up, I still exercise, I still hang out with the_child, I still live, love, laugh, eat, crack wise, write stories, get confused by literary contracts, go to work, do laundry. Spoons or no spoons, I get things done. I live.

So the dread and fear is there. The sheer enormity of it all could overwhelm if I let it. I am well loved, well cared for, and have good insurance. That and a bit of non-neurotic compartmentalization is what it takes. Because the stark, raving truth of this is hell.

---

Also, I wanted to note that the responses in comments to yesterday's post about why I talk about cancwr so much [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] are varied and moving. Well worth the read, if you're interested in such. Most of the action is on the LiveJournal side, so start there.

While I may have writing news in the near future, and Ive been doing things with my photography now (see the website, or my FlickR site), this e-mail is not about any of those things. Its about my annual Christmas story. I hope you enjoy.

I hope youre all doing well and that the New Year will be fantastic.

~~~~~~~~~~

One snowflake said to another, I call dibs on that house.

And indeed, it was a marvelous house, the perfect size, with exactly the right amount of lawn and porch and roof, and not a single speck of snow resting upon it. Smoke drifted from the chimney, children laughed and played inside, someone sipped hot chocolate. A snowflake can sense all these things, can hear the songs and wishes, sometimes even the prayers when its appropriate for a snowflake to hear.

The other snowflake said, But I want that one. And then it dove.

Snowflakes love to drift. They love to float and flutter and flit. Theyre pre-eminent dancers, from whom mankind originally learned rhythm. (Yes, of course, there are raindrops who insist they were more responsible, but this time of year, no one takes the raindrops seriously.) Snowflakes dont generally move with all that much speed.

The first snowflake, determined to make that house its own, also dove, and the race was on.

Snowflakes, generally, dont gather in large audience to watch a race, and rarely do they support a favorite. Rather, they join the fray, they jostle for the first spot, they get caught up in the furious flurry. Only one can win. Only one can claim being first on that perfect house with its perfect inhabitants.

The winner reached the chimney first. First is important. First makes the house yours, if youre a snowflake.

The snowflake danced and jigged and laughed at its brothers and sisters, but they couldnt stop. By the dozen, the hundred, the thousand, other snowflakes fell upon the rooftop, the porch, the lawn, and the two who had begun the race.

Ah, well, the first snowflake said, as though such words were not inevitable, theres plenty of room for all!

Later in the night, as the perfect home-dwellers slept in their perfect rooms, while even the first two snowflakes rested peacefully, when nothing could be seen of the lawn or the porch or the rooftop but a white blanket of snow, another snowflake, falling high above, said to another, I want that house.

Its a good house, the other snowflake agreed. It is getting rather crowded, though.

Thats okay. Theres plenty of room. They joined the piles, the drifts, and the heaps.

By dawn, Christmas morning, a million snowflakes, united in sparkling celebration, had settled quite comfortably and, mostly, fallen into slumber.

Before running downstairs to see what Santa mightve brought, the children pressed their faces to their bedroom windows, and one said, quite smugly, I told you Santa would bring us a white Christmas.

Atop the chimney, two of the one million snowflakes giggled quietly.

Originally published at DarkFluidity.

And so, sitting here at the desk, having fed the cats, drinking my coffee, waiting to pull up the file and start writing, I end up filling two sheets with handwritten scrawls about a new story (short story, please gods) about choices and responsibility and the intermingling of guilt and conscience...

And I'm writing this when exactly, brain?

Your Wednesday moment of zen.



Derelict El Camino in Hunters, WA. © 2006, 2009 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Pinion cover is made public — It's lovely. I am terribly pleased.

matociquala commits glory — Go read. It's only a few sentences long.

Why handwriting is history — The handwritten scoring on the SATs would have sunk me as a kid. I routinely placed in 99.9th percentile, but my handwriting is so atrocious...

Santa awing — A funny classic photo from x-planes.

The capitol subway, 1915 — Speaking of funny, classic photos. This one from Shorpy.

A solstice sunrise — APOD with one of those images that just suckers me in. The solstice sun, rising behind the Temple of Poseidon.

Titan's Lakes, An Exoplanet's Seas — More from Centauri Dreams. Money shot: If mapping the continents on planets around other stars doesn't rouse your interest, you may not be paying attention

The Oral Tradition — Phil Nugent with a fascinating take on Oral Roberts, televangelism and the American Right. (Snurched from The Edge of the American West.)

?otD: Is it beginning to look a lot like Festivus?

---

12/23/2009
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 7.0
This morning's weigh-in: 226.2
Currently reading: Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Gray morning out there in the morning, the sky just rimming apricot around a vault of faintly luminous slate. You wouldn't know the sky was up there if you weren't looking at the stark claws of naked trees against it.

The sky is so much brighter when there's snow across the ground.

Out in the street, the garbage trucks are grumbling from driveway to driveway, grim flat-nosed workaday goblins. Pragmatic and unsentimental. I wonder what they make of the fairy lights that drape every house on my block.

I think I need to throw on a sweater and take the dog for a walk before the sun comes up.

This is where I live.