Wanna Read A New Christmas Story? By Me? For Free?
I don’t often write Christmas flashfic. In fact, I never have. But then again, Barnes and Noble doesn’t generally ask me to write Christmas tales for them. When they ask me to do them a solid, I do.
And so what I have so quietly left beneath your Christmas tree is a micro-tale entited “A Clean Start For The Holidays” – a tiny fantasy tale of holiday spousal betrayal that, I promise, isn’t too depressing. If ya like it, share it, retweet it, do whatever you kids do with your happy places these days.
And while you’re over at Barnes and Noble, I’ll note that they’ve made the e-book version of my novel Flex only $2.99 for a couple more days. That’s half-off, so I might contemplate getting it cheaply while you can.
But even if not! One thousand words on the true meaning of Christmas await. Go check it out.
A Long-Overdue Review: Michelle Belanger's CONSPIRACY OF ANGELS
There are character books and there are worldbuilding books.
In the character books, you take an interesting character – Kvothe from The Name of the Wind, or Vlad Taltos from the Dragaeran series – and you follow them around to see what happens to them. Worldbuilding happens, naturally, but the main thrust is this person’s quest.
Then there’s worldbuilding books, where you take an elaborate magic system and throw some people in it. Brandon Sanderson’s books tend to be this, as is my ‘mancer series – the character’s goal is to, ultimately, explore as many ramifications of the magic as possible, and the book is designed so they run into as many weird complications of this magic as they can.
But the trick to a good worldbuilding series is that the characters still have to matter. Yeah, it’s all fine and well to have a fascinating magical system, but you have to like the people at the heart of the story. Too many worldbuilding books have this energetic swirl of “Ooh, you can do this with the magic!” and then it falls apart into an RPG supplement because what you care about is the magic, not the people.
Michelle Belanger’s A Conspiracy of Angels is a worldbuilding book. It’s got this monstrously complex and cool hierarchy behind it, where immortal angelic tribes war for supremacy over the Earth in plots that take centuries to come to fruition. There are tremendously creepy cacodaemons that wire themselves into dead men’s nervous systems, and a massive terror underneath Lake Erie that makes you wonder what Lake Erie ever did to Michelle, and a hero who can step into an alternate universe called The Shadowside and summon flaming double-swords from his palms.
Oh, and there’s ghost ferrets.
How am I not going to love a book with ghost ferrets.
Yet the people in the books are colorful, and Michelle skillfully juggles a large cast of characters and yet makes them all interesting. The six-foot-six scheming transsexual angel Salriel, her oft-reluctant supplicant Remiel, and the Lady of Beasts who was once married to Remiel and also is attracted to our hero Zachary, which is complicated because they’re brothers but I am getting a distinctly poly vibe as to where this relationship might be headed.
You know a book is good when it starts out with my least-favorite trope and yet I’m rooting for the characters by the end. And that’s what Michelle Belanger’s Conspiracy of Angels does; it takes a literal amnesiac waking up with only a handful of possessions and makes you like the guy. Yet the amnesia becomes a plot point, because Zachary has his own history – he’s centuries old, like all the other angels – and it’s implied heavily that he didn’t used to be a hero. He used to be a lot more direct and brutal. And his relatives, well, they don’t know whether to trust him or whether this amnesia is some weird-ass scheme someone else has tricked him into.
The worldbuilding here feels like she’s put a lot of thought into it, which makes the systems feel real. (The fact that Michelle is a real-life vampire who teaches classes on magic suggests that she may be channeling her own mojo here.) It gets complicated, and occasionally lost me at times, but the magic does have the sense that there’s a lot we don’t know, but the rabbit hole goes so deep that even the most ancient of powers haven’t quite sussed out all the angles in this world yet.
Plus, A Conspiracy of Angels takes place in Cleveland, and it gets Our Fair City Right – a little grungy, a little workaday, but ultimately full of fun places to take a hero. It’d a good introduction to what Cleveland is today if you’re not a resident, and if you are, well, there’s a lot of action scenes taking place at locations you’ve almost certainly been to.
So if you’re into fast-paced urban fantasy, this is a book (and an author) you’ll want to check out. It ends surprisingly well – not where I’d expected, but satisfying. Recommended.
Checkout.
The sheets are warm with the scent of your lover beside you. She’s entwined in your arms, snoring gently, as the first light of dawn pokes through the curtains.
You have three hours left.
Except it’s not even three hours, and that’s the unfairness of it; some of that time will be spent picking up the clothes you’ve tossed around the room, packing away all the bathroom supplies, showering and getting presentable for the ride home.
You’re in a long-distance relationship, and this brief and beautiful moment you could touch each other is now coming to an end. It was always was, you suppose, but on Friday night you barely felt the tick of that clock because it was subsumed in the joy of being reunited, and on Saturday you had a whole day with each other and spent it on grand adventures…
But now it’s a cold Sunday morning, and the end is shining down upon you.
You snuggle into your lover, burying your face in their shoulder, trying to stamp every aspect of them deep into your memory. Long months will pass before this happens again. You’ll text, you’ll Skype, you’ll phone, but nothing will replace that feel of her skin on yours, the taste of her kisses still on your lips, just watching her whenever you feel like.
You curl up for the ritual of The Last Lovemaking, which is always bittersweet; sometimes those final couplings are slow and languid, taking all the time in the world. Sometimes they’re brutal and ferocious, because you want to leave marks that will last all those months, a physical ache to mirror the one in your heart. Sometimes they’re headachy and painful because you stayed up too late last night and drank too much and if you had all the time in the world you’d wait until you were both more well-rested – but this is it, the last time, and you can’t pass it up even if you’re not ready.
But whatever happens, there comes that time when you pull away, and it feels like pulling away forever. Now comes the gruntwork of separating your lives, of packing away all the things that brought you together.
It’s like mourning before the funeral.
Worse, there’s no illusion that this cycle will never stop. Maybe you’ve got lives too distant to get together, children who ensure you’ll never live with each other. Maybe you’re polyamorous secondaries, and she has a husband and you have a wife to get home to, and it would be so rude to run off with them when your spouses have been so very generous to give you this moment. Maybe you realize that your relationship only functions in small doses, that moving in together would tear you apart…
But for whatever reason, this is all you’ll ever get. There will never be unlimited time to spend; there will always be snippets of time stolen from whatever satisfying life you have back home. And it is satisfying back home, in some distant way you know it’ll be good to return to your house and your pets and your food in your fridge, but…
You’ll always be on the clock with this person you love. You will never get to say, “Oh, we’ll get around to that whenever.” You have to plan your meetings, you make lists of Things You Want To Do, and there’s never enough time for all of them, never enough time.
The light streams through the window. None of this has happened. Yet. She’s still asleep next to you, tangled in the covers, still smiling from the intensity of the love you shared last night.
The clock is ticking. Checkout time is coming.
You hold her tight and try not to count the seconds.
Living In Your Own Space When It Isn't
When I moved up to Alaska, I moved in with my wife – who’d lived there for twenty years. Which I thought was awesome: I got a pre-made house, I got the good furniture, I got the kids.
The kids weren’t the problem.
The furniture was.
Gini was as kind as she possibly could be, but the house wasn’t mine. The TV wasn’t in the place I would have wanted it. We slept in a bedroom basement, which felt dank to me. The kitchen layout was – well, it wasn’t confusing, I could find everything, but I kept reaching for a knife and discovering it was in the wrong drawer.
We moved to Cleveland two years later, and arguments ensued. She wanted the television in the basement; I fought for the living room, and won. We debated where the bed should go. Compromises were made.
Our marriage got shortly better thereafter.
That improvement wasn’t entirely due to the move, of course – but it was a big part of it. When I was in Alaska, I was living in the results of a thousand choices I’d never had a vote in. That cabinet wasn’t to my tastes, the cereal was in a different shelf, the books were arranged wrong.
Added up, it gave me a weird and constant sense of alienation – this subliminal sensation that this was not my home, that I was intruding on someone else’s turf. And it wasn’t that Gini did anything wrong, she was perfectly happy to change stuff – but it felt silly, even trivial, fighting to shift the cereal to a new shelf when really, did that matter?
Except some of it did. Some of it felt like I was living in the aftermath of an election I’d never gotten to vote in. And it was a tiny feeling, but it was there all the time, like a prickling in the skin that never went away. And when we fought, I sometimes felt like I was on her home ground and what right did I have to face her down here?
And I’ve talked to other people who’ve moved in to long-existing houses, and they often felt that “someone else has marked this place with their scent” feeling. In the case of good relationships, that feeling eventually faded as, slowly, more choices were made together and the house became the result of shared decisions. In the case of bad relationships, well, their house was theirs.
And now I tell people who are moving into a place, or people who are having loved ones move in: Make some major changes right away, if you can. Give them a space that’s theirs, think of some shifting around you can do, give them some agency.
It makes a difference. It shouldn’t. But god damn if it doesn’t.
The 2015 Annual Greed List!
Alas, I am slightly late with my Annual Greed List – the large (and, yes, uncut) list of things I desire for Christmas. Why do I do this? If you’re really interested, here’s a brief history of the Greed List.
The briefer version, however, is that I think “What you want” is a reflection of “Who you are” at this moment – your music, your hobbies, your fandoms, help define who you are as a person. I find it fascinating as a history, watching how what I’ve desired has mutated – for example, the list used to be heavy on physical Things, which then changed slowly into digital objects as MP3s and iTunes became big, and this year thanks to the gigantic television we bought, I’m back to wanting Things again.
And while I guess I could just shove my Amazon Wishlist at you and run, why bother? I want you to know who I am in this moment, and so I not only list what I want, but explain why I want it.
So. Here’s what I’d like for this swirling happy holiday season.
Buy Flex or Flux or Promote Them Or Whatever.
So if somehow you didn’t notice, 2015 was a banner year for me – because it was the year I fulfilled my lifelong dream and became a published novelist. But those novels still need assistance! The more they sell, you know, the better for my writing career!
So if, for some reason, you wish to get me a Christmas gift and have not purchased Flex or The Flux yet (and the ebook for Flex is currently on sale for a mere $2.99 at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon), then you can do so! And if you have purchased them, then writing a review or a blog post or a Twitter status is always a nice thing to get an author.
And if you’ve bought the book and left a review, then you have done everything you can for me and I thank you. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a Killer Kwanzaa.
The Pyro Miniature Flamethrower. ($175)
Okay, this isn’t really a flamethrower. I’m not completely insane.
It just throws fireballs.
No, seriously! Check this shit out!
Basically, you load little bits of flash paper into a nozzle, which then shoots miniature fireballs out at will. You can’t really set the house on fire with this, because the flashes are so small – note the sample where the guy explodes one under his hand.
However, I will note that in every videogame RPG I’ve ever played, I play the guy who flings fireballs. Every time. And if I had this, I promise not to fling fireballs in your house, but I will be a legendary hoot at other people’s parties and oh god it’s probably not the best idea but just get it for me anyway.
A Dewar To Hold Liquid Nitrogen. ($249)
What’s that, you say? You don’t want me flinging bits of fire at random passerby? No problem.
How ’bout buying me a container to store toxically frigid fluids in?
See, liquid nitrogen is the funnest substance on earth. It’s so cold you can dip a rose in and bring out a rose icicle. Stir a cup or two into milk and stir, and you make instant ice cream. And if you like flinging it on people, well, it goes up in these great fwooshes of icy clouds, because your body is so hot that, comparatively, flinging little droplets of it at you has much the same effect as dropping water on a hot pan.
You’re the pan, comparatively speaking. You don’t get wet. You just have little droplets skitter off you. Unless you pour a lot of liquid nitrogen on you, at which point it freezes your skin gray and dead in an act of instant frostbite, but you probably shouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t.
Anyway, I want to store liquid nitrogen, which is actually pretty cheap! It’s like $3 a gallon. But storing it, well, glass would crack, plastic shatters, and the offgassing might cause a thermos to explode. So for my safety, I think you should spend $249 to put this crazily subzero fluid in so I don’t hurt myself.
No, seriously, I want this.
Walk On Earth A Stranger, by Rae Carson ($12)
This book is filled with poisonous cockroaches, which skitter out to –
No, seriously. It’s just a book. This is the first nonfatal item on this list, and it’s a bit of a letdown – except it isn’t! Because Rae Carson wrote the most awesome “Girl of Fire and Thorns” trilogy, which was like a princess Game of Thrones except the fat girl kicked ass in a thousand ways to Sunday, and she’s written another book I desire out of blind faith.
Holy Shit, Why Are All These Blu-Rays On Here?
This Christmas, Gini and I are only getting each other the smallest of gifts. Why?
Because we bought a 70″ Ultra-HD television that is a fucking monolith. And that was a large expenditure that was totally worth it, because with the HD we can see details that we never saw before. We watched the Blu-Ray of Star Wars and paused it occasionally to watch the soot on a door. A door.
So there’s a lot of DVDs this year, because there are movies I want to see in this glorious detail. We had a fuzzy projection screen for a long time, but this level of fine picture is amazing.
Stanley Kubrick Triple Feature: 2001 / The Shining / A Clockwork Orange ($49.99)
Gini hates Stanley Kubrick films. She finds them boring. They are.
What I find incredible is that the boringness is part of what makes them effective. He holds a shot for so long that you’re forced to look for more meaning in the scene, scouring for details – and you do, because he put them there. And so while I have these movies on regular DVD, I’d like to see them in the Ultra-HD quality picture shot of a restored version – one can only imagine how amazing the space-trip sequence of 2001 is.
Corner Gas: The Movie ($15)
The visuals on this film will not be amazing. In fact, I’m not even sure I need to see Brent Butt’s face in high definition. But Corner Gas is one of my all-time favorite sitcoms – a delightful little Canadian piece of absurdity set in a small town where quirky folks turn dull pasttimes into high-stakes confrontations. It’s like a live-action Simpsons that was smart enough to stop when it ran out of things to say. And I won’t say that this sitcom needed an ending, as it ran on negative continuity, but they gave it one, and so heck, here it is.
And I want to know what it is.
The Other Paris, By Luc Sante ($22)
Luc Sante wrote one of my favorite books of all time – Low Life, a look at what it was like to live in the slums of New York. And he spent years researching this low-level history of Paris – a city I don’t know much about, but I know Luc Sante will show me its underbelly in all the best of ways.
Crazy-Ass Star Wars Socks (???)
Seriously. Look at those socks. I mean, I love crazy socks, and these are great. So if anyone wants to buy me crazy socks, go ahead – thanks, Heather! – but crazy Star Wars socks are even better.
Just keep in mind we’re a Rebel faction here, sir. None of your Darth Vader or Boba Fett socks.
(Also, yes, crazy Hawaiian shirts are always happy gifts here at La Casa McJuddMetz, but the sizings are so weird on them it’s gone poorly in the past. I’m apparently a difficult kind of pudgy.)
Rocky: The Heavyweight Collection ($30)
Watching Creed this weekend, I was amazed at how absolutely perfect that movie was – it was not a sequel to Rocky, but effortlessly turned Rocky Balboa into a supporting player in someone else’s story. And the thing was, Creed was not Rocky Balboa – they gave him a great motivation that was unique.
But I grew up on Rocky, and I love the lunkhead. He was never bright. But he was complex, in his own way, and I loved the way each movie told a new part of his story, always treating his quiet heroism with respect. He was a dumb boxer, but he cared for his friends, and seeing his tail end help kickstart someone else’s tale was marvelous. And I’d like all six of the movies in this Blu-Ray box set, because four of them (Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, and – unbelievably – Rocky Balboa) are good.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe, by Thomas Ligotti ($14)
He’s supposedly one of the best horror short story writers since Clive Barker. (Clive Barker was good.) And people keep telling me I gotta read this guy, he’s insane, he does things with tone and structure that nobody else has –
All right, fine, I’ll put it on my list.
Whiplash ($15)
This is not a great visual movie, but was one of my favorite stories of 2014. I’m drawn to tales of people staking their sanity on outlandish trials (also see: Jiro Dreams of Sushi, The King of Kong), and Whiplash is an absolutely electrifying take on what happens when a sadistic-yet-skilled teacher finds a drummer who’s willing to do anything to be the best.
This got nominated for Oscars. It deserved every nomination, and then some.
Gone With The Wind Anniversary Edition ($14)
Remember when I said, “Whoah, that gigantic honkin’ screen makes everything look amazeballs?”
Now imagine the burning of Atlanta sequence in that kind of detail, and then imagine that magnificent camera pullback over the casualties of the war, and you’ll know why I want this Blu-Ray DVD.
Westworld ($15)
Yes, this is a cheesy 1970s science-fiction movie. I have a serious, serious love for these. And I have a serious, serious love for dystopias that go horribly wrong, and this one features Yul Brynner as someone who goes horribly wrong.
“Draw.”
Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection ($45)
You’ve got Vertigo. You’ve got Rear Window. You’ve got North by Northwest. You’ve got Psycho, and you’ve got The Birds. That’s five fucking awesome movies, in one bundle.