Arinn Dembo's Blog: Mill on the Inspiration River - Posts Tagged "arinn-dembo"

The first ever Goodreads Giveaway from Kthonia Press is now over! I am actually pleasantly surprised with the results. We offered 10 free copies of the book in trade paperback, to readers in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. 599 people applied for the give-away, and the winners are fairly evenly distributed throughout Canada and the USA.

All ten of the winners will be receiving a signed copy of the book from Kthonia Press. Congratulations and many thanks to all the winners--I hope you enjoy the novel. :)

For those who have requested a review copy in electronic format, please send your queries to the publisher at kthonia@gmail.com. The book is available in .pdf, .epub and .mobi formats.

Thank you all for your support!

Recently I was invited to make a guest post to the the group blog of "Oh Get a Grip!", a cabal of six erotica writers who have contributed to many anthologies, including "Best Fantastic Erotica", the anthology in which my prize-winning short story "Monsoon" first appeared.

The subject of the blog lately has been "Colours", and since my next book is titled "Seeing Red", I decided to write up a little mini-essay on the subject of Red, and why it is a good thing to be able to perceive red.

I was so happy with the result that I decided to use it as an Author's Foreword for the upcoming book. Text is below.






All human languages have a word for “black” and “white”. In the beginning, quite literally, the Word divides the day from the night, the bright from the dark. But when those two words have been spoken, the first born child of creation and the first true color that will be named by humankind...is always Red.

Red is the color that blossoms at the moment that heat evolves into light. It is the color of the eldest stars in our galaxy, suns that linger for billions of years, wreathed in a corona of fitful flame. Red dwarves are the most frequently occurring stars in the universe, over seventy percent of all the solar masses that exist. Glowing softly in the void, the vast majority are invisible to the human eye and cannot be detected by any but the most advanced telescopes. Millions of them are scattered in the heavens above us, hidden like rubies in the room without light.

The human eye has evolved to see red. It is a gift of our lineage, a trick that lets us find the bright flush of the one ripe fruit in a cluster of unripe green, and distinguish the tender newly-sprouted red leaves from their less nutritious elders. In the same stroke, the enhanced primate eye unmasks the tiger and the leopard, and every other creature that depends on mere patterns of light and shadow to conceal itself from view.

Seeing red is an ancient and very useful trick--but not all of us can do it. 7-8% of all human males are unable to distinguish red from green. Without help they are doomed to bite into the bitter fruit and miserably chew the leathery green leaves of life. Perhaps this is one of many reasons that women are the dominant gatherers, in cultures all over the world; carrying two copies of the X chromosome, they are less likely to carry the chromosomal defect that makes every berry bush and cluster of leaves a potentially fatal guessing game.

You cannot give red to a person who lacks the equipment to perceive it. I have often compared the knowledge of red to other types of perception that cannot be shared, explained or gifted to another. You cannot put the taste of the food you are chewing into another human being’s mouth. You can only say “I love cherries”, even when your friend demands to know how you can bear to eat something that looks like so many dark clots of blood. In much the same way, you can only say “I love women” when someone demands to know how you can stand making love to them.

You cannot give another person your sensual joys and desires; you also cannot give them your pain and your rage. You can try, of course. You can describe that shocking splash of pain that comes when hard knuckles crash into tender lips. You can try to convey the explosion of salt and copper that follows when flesh splits on the unyielding stone of your own teeth. But no matter what you say and how well you say it, the pain and the rage will still be yours. And some people will never understand the way you feel.

They cannot grok violence. They cannot see red.

Red is the herald of new life and the harbinger of mortality. She is the handmaiden of fire and the high priestess of passion. Red is what we are inside, and quite rightly afraid to let out. Red is the secret that serial killers search for, bent over the ruptured bodies of their victims and peering into the carnage like the ancient haruspex, trying to read the liver of his sacrificial lamb.

They are looking for a truth that they’ve just chased away. The living blood goes cold and black, loses its red and thus its magic. They penetrate with the wrong instrument, and the mystery of life flees from them screaming. In the end they are none the wiser; they cannot see red for what it is.

And above them the heavens are filled with invisible stars, hiding their red hearts like rubies in the black night of eternity.

Just a quick little note to say thank you to all of the people who requested a free advance copy of "Monsoon and Other Stories". The books are on their way to those winners, and I hope they will let me know how they liked the collection when they finish reading.

Once again that magic time of year is here: high summer, time for the Clarion West Writer's Workshop. (In less than 20 days in fact! The Workshop begins on June 18th this year!)

What is the Clarion West Workshop? An annual summer bootcamp for new and unpublished writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror. For six weeks every summer, a group of students receives intensive instruction and critique from a group of their peers and a series of six seasoned professionals in the field of speculative fiction.

Typically the instructors are five authors and one editor (the mix varies). Students attending this year, for example, will be receiving instruction from Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, Connie Willis, Mary Rosenblum, Stephen Graham Jones, George R.R. Martin ("Game of Thrones") and Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk.

Why do we care? Well, the fact that the Clarion West Workshop is coming also means that the Clarion West Write-a-thon is also coming.

The Write-a-thon is the annual charity fundraiser for professional writers and graduates of the workshop. It runs concurrently with the Workshop, so that while the new kids are in the boot camp, writing their guts out and suffering from sleep deprivation and caffeine poisoning, the alumni are out in the field, raising money.

We do whatever we can to keep the workshop in printer paper and staples--and of course to provide scholarships for those students who might not be able to attend without a little help.

Like last year and the year before, I will be doing my part as a participating pro. So if you like my writing, and you'd like to be among the first people in the world to read SIX brand new short stories (never-before-read-by-anyone) in science fiction, fantasy and horror genres this summer...all you have to do is sponsor my Write-a-thon with a donation of $5 or more.

As a thank you for your support, I will email you a free .pdf at the end of each week of the Workshop, with the text of a brand new story. And your donation, I would add, is completely tax deductible! :)

If you mention that you are a Goodreads reader, I would also be happy to throw in a .pdf, .epub or .mobi copy of either of the two books which has been the subject of a Goodreads giveaway this year. My novel The Deacon's Tale and my short story collection Monsoon and Other Stories are both eligible for this Charity Giveaway--so if you'd like to grab a digital copy because you didn't end up getting the free print copy, I'd be happy to hook you up.

For those of you who wonder why you should support Clarion West in general? Well, if you love SF, fantasy and horror, the answer is pretty easy.

I myself graduated from Clarion West in 1990, and the workshop played a large part in boosting me from amateur status to a working professional. It has done the same for a lot of other great writers, editors, game designers, reviewers and publishers over the years. The contribution of Clarion West to the field of speculative literature and art is just one of many reasons that I participate in the Write-a-thon, trying to raise as much money as I can to help pay for quality instructors and to provide scholarships for students who might not otherwise be able to attend.

Those of you who choose to support the future of SF and chuck in a few bucks for a worthy cause? Please put a note in the comment section of your Donation to let me know if you saw my post on Goodreads. And thank you for helping to foster the literature of the future.

Every donation is tax deductible, every donation helps, and you get free stuff. You can't lose. :)

Just had the chance to read a lovely review of my collection, Monsoon and Other Stories, on SF Site. It's been a very good summer for support from the reading community, in many ways.

Mario Guslandi had many kind words about my short stories, and even a few about my poetry. I don't believe I've ever been compared to Bob Dylan before! That is definitely a first.

Just a quick note here to say that my book "Monsoon and Other Stories" will be available this weekend for free on Amazon.

Download it for free from September 1 to September 3, 2012.

Have a very happy Labor Day, folks.

The second half of 2012 was a catastrophically busy time, and the majority of 2013 looks to be equally busy. One of my resolutions for the coming year was to be more careful to make my leisure time count--when I don't have a lot of time to re-charge, I have to try and re-charge efficiently.

The vast majority of my work time and a significant portion of my play time is spent on a computer or at a desk, stringing words together. When I need to genuinely unwind, I find that what works best are reading and exercise. Making some kind of art or craft also works. Over the years I've made quilts, jewelry, furniture--all sorts of things.

What's interesting is that nowadays, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I can now combine one or two of these re-charge activities at the same time. Audiobooks allow me to read and exercise, or read and work with my hands, all at the same time!

Over the Christmas break this winter I decided to dip my toe into the waters, and try a few e-books. My daughter has always been a big fan of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels, and I discovered that the audiobook versions were going to be read by James Marsters (who played "Spike" on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel). Win-win!

I downloaded the first and thoroughly enjoyed Marsters reading the first-person narrator of Butcher's books. It was excellent! And I'm now on my third audiobook in the series, genuinely enjoying the quiet, reflective moments when I sit painting figurines and terrain pieces, sewing or sketching, and listening to a story spin out on my iPad.

Harry Dresden is an interesting character. The style and format Butcher has chosen inevitably recall Laurell Hamilton, just as Hamilton herself inevitably recalls the first-person hardboiled detective novels and romance novels that serve as an antecedent to her own work. Butcher has not stinted on his world-building, and he has created not only a consistent magical system, but a consistent system of ethics, law and justice to go along with it--an important component of any fictional universe which contains Very Special People.

In general I find Harry a sympathetic character, but I think I was somehow on the fence about him until a critical scene in the third novel, Grave Peril. That was when Butcher genuinely surprised me, and shocked a hard, loud bark of disbelieving laughter out of me--which is hard to do, believe me.

The man who fought a demon in the howling rain dressed in nothing but the suds he hadn't washed off in the shower?

The man who threw himself out of a moving car to blast a truck full of werewolves with a blast of eldritch power?

Him, I could take or leave. Action heroes, however bumbling, are a dime a dozen.

But the guy who showed up at the Vampire Masquerade Ball dressed in a cheesy Halloween vampire costume, complete with a moth-eaten cape, plastic fangs and fake blood...

...that's a man I could love.

I like a guy who makes me laugh.