Arinn Dembo's Blog: Mill on the Inspiration River

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.

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.

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.

I am re-posting the text of this review today, although I wrote it many years ago, because today Ray Bradbury is dead.

It would probably take years to measure and to articulate all of the things that Bradbury's work has meant to me over the course of my life, the way his words shaped my mind and my soul, and the impact that he had on my own writing.

This review of Something Wicked This Way Comes was really nothing more than a cursory attempt to sum up the power of a single book; please keep in mind that he wrote many books just as good as this one.

And many short stories that were as rich in invention and impact as entire novels.

And that he told many stories which were not written down, but which he recounted to a camera years ago--stories that I have listened to, learned from, like a child at her grandfather's knee.

Goodbye, Mr. Electrico. Always, always, I will run toward the Lightning and away from the Dark.

Arinn Dembo
June 6, 2012

* * *

Every few years, I begin to feel it: the irresistible draw of the October Country. Somewhere inside me, where I keep the things that matter most, the wind and the leaves turn. The harvest moon rises, I smell the sweet perfume of bonfires at the Homecoming game, and I realize that the time is now; I need to go back to the place that sustains my soul.

That's when I go to the bookshelf and take down my copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I imagine it's some pale shadow of what the salmon feels in the deep ocean, on the morning that she turns on the tide to go back to the tiny stream where she was born...or a dim echo of the silent, unanimous decision that the starlings make, when hundreds of them turn in the evening sky and wing their way South. This book is a part of me; I need it to live. For me, reading it is part of being alive.

Of course, I've read and loved a great many books in my time; if I didn't love all books for their own sake, at least at some level, it would have made no sense to become a writer. But very few writers affect me the way Ray Bradbury does, and even Bradbury seldom affects me as he does with this novel. In a sense, Something Wicked is the apotheosis of Bradbury, for me, the apex of my experience with his work.

It almost seems a shame to tell you anything about the characters in this book. I want you to meet them yourself, to make your own introductions: to that best of boys-about-to-become men, Will Halloway, and his best friend Jim Nightshade; to that best of fathers, Charles Halloway, capable of sacrifices both superhuman and mundane; to Mr. Dark, who is nothing less than the danger of all our own selfish desires made flesh; to Mr. Dark's traveling menagerie of deadly specters and abominations, each of them hungering for human life; even to the lightning-rod salesman, a nameless hero traveling through the October Country for all eternity to warn the innocent of the coming of Dark.

I feel the same way about the small American town in which this story is set. Bradbury has given the town another name, but I will always think of it as Childhood in the Depression, Illinois. Rarely has there been a book which so perfectly captured the essence of a place, not just as geographical location but as a moment in history; and rarely has a writer picked a location and a moment in history which is so perfectly metaphorical of a certain time in our lives - that delicate year when we are no longer children, but have not yet become adults. In Bradbury's October Country, Will and Jim are eternally on the brink of lost innocence, just as many Americans were in the early 1930's.

I could tell you about the old cigar store Indian and the barber shop, the softly glowing window of the ice cream parlor and the clean fragrance of good books in the town library, but I don't want to. I want you to run through the town pell-mell with Jim and Will, just as I did, without knowing it beforehand. I want you to be surprised by the glory of the moon, and the big Midwestern wind sweeping over the rolling hills in the silver light. I want you to hear the whistle of lonely trains and to be dashed in the face by the sharp smoke of burning leaves.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a book about Good: not the sanctimonious, excluding-and-condemning virtue of organized religion, but the authentic Good that we find within ourselves when we hold our children, laugh without malice, and love life. And it's also about Evil: not the bombastic evils that inhabit our imaginary hells, but the real Evil that crawls inside us when we cherish a selfish dream, or deny the truth, or allow ourselves to be weak when we should be strong. This story is about the inevitability of death and the terror of growing old, the end of innocence and the value of friendship, the longing for what we cannot have, or have back again once it's lost.

I may have to read it again soon.

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 finished reading this novel last night, and I am still smiling. I can recommend it whole-heartedly to anyone who appreciates a fast-moving, tightly-written and intelligent urban fantasy novel. I can recommend it just as firmly to anyone who loves a solid police procedural. And I recommend it also to anyone familiar with the hard-edged trend of modern comics for adults, which includes a body of extremely impressive work from post-modern writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Kurt Busiek, Mark Waid, or Mark Millar.

More importantly, I can recommend it to anyone who appreciates the novel not only as a story, but as a craft.

Readers have been loving the work of Keith DeCandido since the late 1990's, although they seldom realize that he's the author of their favorite books. Over the years, he has written dozens of high-profile novels for famous franchise movies, television shows and games. If you bought a novelization some time after 1999 and found that it was actually well-written and entertaining, in other words, there's a fair chance that he wrote it--I'd say he was second only to Alan Dean Foster as a master of the form.

It's this amazing wealth of experience and skill that DeCandido brings to "SCPD: The Case of the Claw". This book is what DeCandido can do when he actually cuts loose and writes a book strictly for his own pleasure. The novel is set in a superheroic urban fantasy universe, and it is told from the point of view of the hard-working, long-suffering real cops who have to keep trying to make collars and cases in a world where crazy morons in long underwear are zipping, stomping, flying and flopping through the streets and skies. While the freakshows indulge in spectacularly destructive fisticuffs, the beat cops and homicide detectives are actually trying to work: investigating horrible cape-related crimes, throwing the wannabes and bunglers in the tank, eating awful cheap lunches and navigating the stormy waters of human relations with their parents, children, partners and friends.

There are echoes of many famous graphic novels in this little book. You can see the influence of Moore's "Watchmen" and his run of "Miracle Man", and of Busiek's "Marvels" in particular, as well as a hint of Bendis. There are certainly some pointed comments made in the course of the story about the events depicted in modern comics, and how they would look if they were witnessed by ordinary mortals who actually have to work for a living, not to mention uphold the legal system.

I'm not going to spoil a thing, because everyone deserves to read this book without having even the smallest part of it ruined. All I'm going to say is this: if writing a book can be compared to other forms of skilled labor, DeCandido is a master craftsman. Every join is clean, every surface is smoothly sanded, every line is a perfect parallel or perpendicular. It's no mystery why editors come back to him year after year, when they need the job done right.

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.

I had great fun with this novel, for a variety of reasons. For one, I was already a fan of Johnson's work. Incognegro was one of the best graphic novels of 2008 and I still recommend it friends who are willing to read anything other than long underwear comics. I've been spending a lot of time lately tracking down his other writing, both in and out of print.

I'm also a fan of Poe, however, and of his spiritual and literary descendants in the Weird Tales generation, in particular H.P. Lovecraft. And I recognize the problem that the corpus of work left behind by these Fine White Gentleman represents to modern readers and authors. (Let's just say that the acronym FWG allows you to replace "Gentlemen" with "Guys" and "Fine" with some other adjective that starts with F.) To put it bluntly, these FWG's are virulently racist bastards; they are sometimes virulently racist bastards in the midst of their finest work. Black people in particular take the worst of their foaming-rabies rhetoric and imagery. So if you are a writer of African-American descent--how do you respond?

There are a lot of answers to this question: Pym is one of them. In this novel, Johnson has taken one of Poe's most famous and influential works--The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a serialized novel which influenced both Jules Verne and Lovecraft to write works that were equally influential on succeeding generations--and he has eviscerated it with a posthumous collaboration. And please do not think for a moment that I choose the verb "eviscerate" lightly; in the opening pages of Chapter II, Mat Johnson spills old Edgar's guts on the floor, with a devastating summary of the plot, themes and imagery of the original novel which rips away every shred of doubt that the book is not only a monumentally racist screed, but also pretty badly and sloppily written.

It's a thoroughly punishing attack, and it is neither the first nor the last. Johnson is throwing brutal punches throughout this book, knocking out the FWG's so fast that you'd think his name was Jack.

"Garth pulled out this print of a painting, all scrolled up, and dropped it in my lap. I unraveled it and saw a syrupy sweet landscape of the Catskills, the kind of vista painted on how-to shows in half and hour. The kind of painting Garth adored, done by that artist he idolized.

'It's called Stock of the Woods,' he said. 'It's a Thomas Karvel Hudson Valley School Edition. A tribute to the painters they used to have here. I have an original signed print. That's part of my nest egg, and you're there laughing at it. Look at it. Really look at it, you need to. Don't it make you all peaceful just looking into that world?

'Looks like the view up a Care Bear's ass.'"

This laconic summary of the White Man's Contribution to World Art is not Johnson's final word, of course. There are several white characters in this book, and most of them serve in one way or another to expand on this theme. This early glimpse of the view up a Care Bear's ass will certainly not be our last; indeed, you might say that the second half of the novel represents an extended proctological expedition up the rainbow glitter rectum of the White Aesthetic, with Johnson in the boat beside you blasting away at the polyps on either shore.

If there is a downside to this novel, it's the fact that it genuinely IS funny, more often than not. Humor is often unkind, and this book is no exception. The few white characters in the novel, for example, including a stand-in for Poe himself, are not spared the lash. It's both deeply personal and wholly impersonal; none of these people are really human beings in any but the broadest sense of the word. What they are instead are caricatures of Whiteness in general, like the countless black characters in literature who are caricatures of Blackness in general. Their lines and actions serve to forward a general thesis and move the plot rather than to explore the humanity any real human being.

There is no aspect of Whiteness which is not open to ridicule in this book. White art, White literature, White power, White physicality, White cuisine, White marriage, inter-racial sex and love, the White ancestral climate--they all come under fire here. It's a barrage, and it can't even be said that the only people hurt when Whiteness is attacked are White. When any two peoples meet on hostile terms, the ones who are willing to enter the liminal zone and make a separate peace are always caught in the cross-fire, and soonest to be hurt.

In short, this book is what I call a "Turn-About Test", a reversal of standard procedure which lets you really see how far off-balance the system has been. The method usually works quite well with gender, and produces hilarious results; Johnson here proves that it can also be done effectively with race. He hasn't done anything for Whiteness in this book which hasn't been done to Blackness in countless books. It's a highly instructive read to see the dynamic reversed, to see Whiteness simultaneously made the epitome of the monstrous, the mad, the stupid, the weak, the ugly and the uncivilized. Quite frankly I'd recommend the book to anyone on that basis alone.

What puts the icing on the snack cake is that this is also a beautifully paced and well-written little novel. It bounces right along without any parts that drag, its images are clear and beautiful, it's always entertaining, and most of the major characters have at least a moment or two of genuine charm or sympathy in the course of the book. What's more, the novel is not so mean-spirited that you can't the joke.

I'd give it the full five stars, but I can't.

'Cause, you know.

The man called me a snow monkey.

Ganymede by Cherie Priest

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I did myself a small disservice when I read this book; I picked it up off the shelf at the public library and did not consider whether I should backtrack and read the earlier novels in the series first.

Accordingly, although I enjoyed the book and particularly got a kick out of its last third, which is where most of the real action takes place, I could probably have enjoyed it much more if I had done myself a favor and noted that this is NUMBER FOUR of a series in which a great many details of the characters and milieu were probably well established in earlier books.

That being said, as a stand-alone reading experience, Ganymede will still hold up reasonably well. I am not a fanatic for the genre, so a book cannot simply slide by my critical eye by giving me a few corsets and cogs; it takes engaging characters and some sort of intelligent approach to technology, politics, and social issues to make me willing to re-write the past.


I enjoyed the classic New Orleans characters of the books, the rebellious Free people of Colour who have dug in their heels to resist the occupation of their city by a pro-slavery South and a pro-Southern Republic of Texas. I am as willing as the next girl to indulge in the fantasy of air pirates as well, since I've always had a weakness for airships and those alternate universes where they are a dominant mode of transport.


As an archaeologist I was already quite familiar with the excavation and history associated with the H.L. Hunley, the Confederate-era submarine which was declared a historic site on the sea bottom in Charleston harbor in 1995. Naturally I had no problem with the submarine which gives the novel its name as a subject for a work of fiction; in fact I was delighted that Priest had used the submarine as a real-life inspiration for a steampunk novel.


For those readers who may have had difficulty visualizing the submarine, in particular its stated resemblance to an airship, perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words:







In any case, this book was a fun read and I appreciated the one or two strong female characters, despite the persistent wearing of corsets. The only flaws in the book probably derive from reading it out of sequence; I suspect that certain events might have had a greater emotional impact if I had been following the story for longer, in particular the scene in which one of the characters is revealed to be living under an assumed gender.

All in all, good clean fun. I shall have to see if I can get my hands on the first book in the series; research indicates that it has won many awards.



View all my reviews

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.