A sun symbol made of light and blood

Some massive jellyfish had washed up at St Cyrus when we took Floof for a scamper on Sunday. The sight sparked a fragment, which isn’t much, but it’s nice to have produced something new. I suspect this belongs in the same world as the unpublished (but prone to receiving good personal rejections), genderqueer Swimming Lessons for Girls.

Jelly

It always started with the jellies. There were occasional rafts of them in all seasons, globular forms flattening like griddle cakes on the white sand without the supporting embrace of the ocean. The children would come running, screaming, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” and the old men puffed their pipes and squinted over the heather at the tideline, then settled back against the daubed walls of their houses, eyes glittering like winter sun on chop. Those were the small ones, no bigger than a forearm’s length across, innards forming patterns passed on as jumping games for eons. They baked in the sun until they were the same colour as the sand, and then the tide took them back.

But when the big ones came, crystalline orbs driven up onto the sand by waves big enough to crack rocks, the men got off their benches and put out their pipes. They went to the burn and filled their waxed pails, ensured the wet peat was banked high above the strandline and all the rooves were sodden.

Because when the big ones came, the ocean-goers, the deep swimmers, crashing ashore in storms that brought mass strandings of silver, flung birds bent, broken and bloody against the dunes, and turned unwary seals to carrion, those Others were not far behind.

Kelpie spotting

It’s a common misconception that kelpies of Scottish myth were horses. They are always horses in popular media. Those shapeshifters emerging black-maned from rivers and lochs to lure unwary humans to a nightmarish end being devoured amongst the weeds in the dark depths.

The Bard himself said:

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin icy boord
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction
An’ nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.

But kelpies weren’t always horses. They could be any animal that might founder in a way that would bring the unwary human to the water. If you can’t catch a man by inducing him to ride you, then why not be more antlion about it and get him to come to you?

Calves, sheep, goats.

Deer.

Kelpie

At about 20s you can see where the fins used for swimming turn back into legs. I filmed this standing next to my significant other and our very excitable derpwolf, but this “deer” seems quite nonchalant about it. When I looked down, I found a line of hoofprints leading into the water.

I wonder if they were noticeably deeper than the ones the animal made on the way out.

MONCH

Today, this cropped up in my facebook memories from four years ago:

TFW your dog finds a dead starling in someone’s garden in the village and eats it,
while you yell at her “DROP IT!” and she’s like,
noheckinway you starve me to DETH,
and you turn round at the sound of a window closing
to find the woman across the street has been watching.
Watching your ridiculous floofmonster munch a dead bird,
crunchy bones and feet all up between her shiny teeth,
a look on her face like she’s one meal away from treating humans as dinner.
That feeling.

Close-up of husky lying half asleep, nose to camera

She hasn’t eaten any starlings, dead or otherwise, in quite some time. Thankfully. And she’s getting a bit too long in the tooth for chasing rabbits, but that doesn’t stop her trying.

In Our Masks, The Shadows

The Reinvented Heart - Tales of Futuristic Relationships, edited by Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek, with stories by Jane Yolen, Lisa Morton, Premee Mohamed, Seanan McGuire, Mercedes M. Yardley, Naomi Kritzer, and more
I’m thrilled to announce that my story In Our Masks, the Shadows is now available in The Reinvented Heart edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek. It’s a story about finding love, or at least a meaningful relationship, while trying to navigate layers of arbitrary social expectations and superficial significance. Currently only the e-book has been published, and US readers can click on that first link to find some places to buy it, but UK readers will have to wait for the physical version, which will be here soon. You can pre-order it from Amazon or Blackwells.

There are a series of author interviews being released. You can check out the available ones on Cat’s YouTube channel, starting with Beth Cato. Aimee Ogden, Jane Yolen, AnaMaria Curtis and Lyda Morehouse are up there too.

hELlo. I lOvE yOu. CaN I tOuCh yOu?

AI generated woman's smiling face in front of a humanoid shape with smashed-up featuresI discovered This Person Does Not Exist recently. It’s a fascinating project, in which two competing and opposing systems form a GAN – a Generative Adversial Network for machine learning. In short, while some machine learning attempts to minimise the distance to a specific image, a GAN has a system generating images in an attempt to fool another system which is there to identify fakes. Most of the images are impressive in how boring they are, but every so often the AI throws up an image that attempts to give the main subject a friend.

It almost never works. And every single one of these aberrations hits the low topography of the Uncanny Valley.

Maybe it’s because I watched a lot of Johnny Morris as a child, but I find it impossible to resist inventing conversations between these… Beings? Creatures? Whatever. Between them and their human companions.

 

A young boy looks direct to camera, smiling slightly. To his right is a misshapen head with one ear sticking out like a cup handle.When Barry was told his family was going to play host to one of the aliens as they attempted to learn about humans, he was initially delighted. It took a while to get used to Blogfert’s attempts to pass as human, not to mention his belief he should appear in every single photo Barry’s mum took, especially when Barry was the subject.


A smiling man looks direct at camera. What appears to be a fist with an eye looks over his right shoulder.“Friend Gok! Look! If I put an eye onto a fist, I can check myself for errant wood-based orifice cleansing material after exiting the emanation facility! I have the BEST ideas.”

 


A young girl looks directly at the camera, smiling. A fleshy appendage is close to her chin.“If you do not smile, I will rest my soft appendage upon your person. Your previous sonic emanations lead me to the supposition this does not delight you.”


A serious woman looks directly at the camera. There are flaws in the rendering of her face that look like artificial material showing through.“Thank you for agreeing to a date night, designated owner. It is my happiness to entertain you. Please excuse me for the mishap rendering my outward demeanour only 72.7% aligned with your preference. I did not expect making salted caramel to be so violent. Do not worry, HOOMANS [TM] will service my flesh skin under warranty.”


A bearded man looks to the right with a bemused expression. Something that resembles a hand with many fingers curled into a loose fist strokes his right cheek.“Mate, I know you THINK that looks just like a human hand, but no.”
“You cannot tell me that I have failed to replicate your appendage, friend Jeremy. Observe! The texture is identical.”
“Largog, mate, did we ever establish whether your species could actually count?”
“I can have no limbs or many, friend Jeremy. We count in base 23. This is an approximation, and, if I say so myself, a pretty darn good one.”
“Oh mate, no. Just no.”


A small boy looks directly at the camera with a self-satisfied smile. Something very strange that looks like it is made of flesh, teeth and hair is on his right.“Hey, psst. Charlie. Did I ever tell you about the time I had to squeeze into a bottle to hide from Mrs Gilfencamp, but I’d just been showing Sheniah that I could have hairy armpits if I wanted to? Here. Turn round. This is what it looked like.”
“Yes, Flimgon, you told me last week. Shut up. I’m thinking about the expression on my big sister’s face when she finds out I’ve left one of your disgusting shapeshift boogers in her Fluevogs.”


A man wearing glasses looks aghast to the left while some sort of fleshy appendage strikes his face.“HEY. Do NOT insult Friend Jeremy! I strike you in your monomorphic mandible!”


I suspect lockdown is starting to get to me.

My thanks to all the wonderful peeps on my facebook thread for supplying me with some of these images, and to Phil Wang at the University of Michigan for the prompt machine.

The Shape of Noise

We live in a noisy world. Synaesthesia means that ambient sound has a profound effect on my physical comfort and mental well-being. When a loud, sharp noise, such as a firework or someone hitting something with a hammer, has an effect like being smacked round the head with a baseball bat — it can be physically painful — then it’s vital to curate your ambient sound. The shape of noise around me is as important as my chair or my screen or the pen I’m using.

Sound affects my writing. Sometimes I need to have a particular playlist for my work, and it’s not “sounds of the 80s” or something that might be described as incidental music if it were a TV show. It’s a certain shape and texture of sound. I wrote Ludwig listening to Deeper Inside A Cave Near A Rushing Waterfall. More often, however, I deploy a variety of ambient soundscapes to block out, or at least filter, intrusions from the world outside. I have a long list of 12 hour ambient YouTube mixes, such as this one of the Mariana Trench, or this 6 hour International Space Station. For a more customised ambience, I also have A Soft Murmur, which is great for evocative soundscapes, and which I enjoy so much I paid for it.

Podcasts don’t generally appeal to me, because I don’t really enjoy listening to people talking about things unless it’s Radio 4 and I’m cooking, but this morning I discovered Field Recordings, and was hooked. There’s an article about the creator, London-based radio producer Eleanor McDowall, at The Guardian. She developed it after a year in which a relationship broke down, and she began to suffer burn-out at work. “It felt like something that would give me a bit of space and respite,” she says.

I understand exactly what she means.

Some of it doesn’t work for me, being too urban or too full of people, but I’ve found some treasures in their back catalogue. Currently, I have the pleasure of sitting inside a hollow tree in Sergiyev Posad, Russia. It almost sounds like being on an old square rigged sailing ship, with the ropes and lines creaking as the sails catch the wind. Most of the recordings are less than 5 minutes in length, which makes them less useful for ambient filtering purposes, but still. If you’ve ever wondered what it sounds like to sit and listen to summer rain, distant thunder in Old Leighlin, Ireland, or if you always had a hankering to listen to Barred Owls in White Rock, British Columbia, then head over there to see — and hear — what’s on offer.

Publications now available

I finally got around to updating my list of published stories to point any interested readers in the direction of where to find Ludwig, which has been out for a while (utterly shameful of me not to have updated sooner). I’d probably be quicker about these things if I weren’t so obsessive about providing lots of purchase options and trying to find ways to buy the physical copy that don’t involve amazon.

I’m also really excited by the special illustrated editions of Not All Monsters, which are now available from Rooster Republic.

These editions are only available from Rooster Republic, and will never be available anywhere else. The hardcover edition is 6×9 and has a page count of 306. This edition comes with a gloss dust jacket. The paperback is 5×8 and has a page count of 416, sporting a matte finish for the cover.

The jacket is phenomenal:

Not All Monsters dustjacket

I hope my copy turns up soon so I can admire it for a while. It is destined for my mum’s library – she is more invested in my brag shelf than I am (!!) – but with the current lockdown I won’t be seeing her any time soon.

The music of water

I listened to a fascinating programme on Radio 4 yesterday about what was lost under Kielder Water when the dam was built. The landscapes, the communities, the culture. I learned Kathryn Tickell played the last music ever to be heard in the buildings swallowed by the water, mere hours before the flood came. Today, I am listening to her exquisite pipe playing on Spotify, but I thoroughly recommend this programme if you are at all interested in British folk music or liminal spaces.

Mad Scientist Journal interview

If you didn’t see my post on facebook or twitter, Dawn Vogel interviewed me for Mad Scientist Journal about my story Ludwig, which is forthcoming in the MSJ anthology I Didn’t Break The Lamp. I talk about felt presence, synaesthesia, and — of course! — imaginary friends.

Thanks to Dawn and Jeremy Zimmerman for letting me ramble on at length about some of my favourite topics.

WorldCon Schedule

I’ll be heading over to Dublin for WorldCon 2019 tomorrow. It’s my first WorldCon, so it’s pretty exciting!

I’m honoured to have been offered three panels and a Kaffeklatsch, so if you want to chat with me about imaginary friends, synaesthesia, fountain pens, inks with MONSTER SHEEN, hypergraphia, or anything else that takes your fancy, here’s where to find me:

Kaffeklatsch
16 Aug 2019, Friday 10:00 – 10:50, Level 3 Foyer (KK/LB) (CCD)

Representation of marginalised people in games.
16 Aug 2019, Friday 16:00 – 16:50, ECOCEM Room (CCD)

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about representation of women in games, but issues of representation and experience still need greater attention across the industry. How diverse and inclusive is gaming today? What should we know and what can we do?

Laser Malena-Webber (The Doubleclicks), Sam Fleming, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Tanya DePass (I Need Diverse Games)(M)

Science and politics of water
17 Aug 2019, Saturday 19:00 – 19:50, Wicklow Hall-1 (CCD)

Water is life. Twisting a line from Frank Herbert: ‘He who controls the water controls the universe.’ Our planet is covered by 70% water, our bodies comprise 70% water, and most plants contain 90% water. What other roles does water play in our technologically savvy world? How has water shaped our political landscape, in a time of rising tides and warming oceans? What can we do to protect our most precious resource?

Sam Fleming (M), Darcie Little Badger, Dr Tad Daley (Citizens for Global Solutions), Paolo Bacigalupi

Older characters and older authors
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 13:00 – 13:50, Wicklow Room-3 (CCD)

A decade ago, the media would label an author of 50 as ‘older’. Today, more writers are beginning their careers in their 60s and 70s. Do these older writers write and champion older characters, or is there still pressure to appeal to a younger demographic with equally young protagonists? What are the advantages and disadvantages of becoming a full-time writer at an older age?

Kari Sperring (M), Wendy Metcalfe, Sam Fleming, Faith Hunter (Penguin Random House and Bella Rosa Books and Lore Seekers Press)

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