Author: Kelley

Where the hell is Matt?

The first in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

Sometimes I just love human beings, and being human. Sometimes we just do the most amazing things. I’m going to be looking for more of those things to share here, because they please me. They give me a sense of being connected to everyone… and that’s a rare and valuable thing, hard to hold onto in the daily grinder where we all bump up against each other a little too hard sometimes.

So thanks, Matthew Harding, for making me feel like I belong to people I’ve never met, and they belong to me.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Dark Knight, Joker’s wild

The Dark Knight. July 18.

And here’s another kind of madness — what I expect will be a brilliant and masterful and lunatic tour-de-force performance from Heath Ledger, who Rolling Stone calls “mad-crazy-blazing brilliant,” and who by all accounts gave himself over to his work the way we all hope to, the way that burns. I only wish he could be here to see how people will respond.

I am looking forward to this movie like… I dunno. Like dancing to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Like a southern summer storm, where the electricity gets right under your skin. Movies can put me straight into the heart of story, and this kind of story is where I’m living right now — big feelings, big choices, identity, exhaustion, the bright spots and shadows of the self. I am in a mood right now to see people ride their own bow wave, to see people walk their own edge, to be in the company of those who reach and reach and reach.

Exploding like spiders across the stars

…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
— Jack Kerouac from On The Road

I don’t even know where to start about this except to shake my head with wonder at words that do so well what I would like to do — that riff, that rolling rhythmic jazz that can make my heart beat every bit as hard as music sometimes with the way it makes me feel so much bigger inside. I wish all my words could do that.

This isn’t how I see my everyday self — there’s plenty about me and those I love that is commonplace, and sometimes there is nothing finer than to put my feet up with a bottle of beer and talk about the rain. That’s good. But these words go like a bolt of electricity straight into my writer’s soul, into the part of me that always burns this way even, I think, in my sleep.

All artists are a little mad. I used to think that was hyperbole at best and melodrama at worst, but these days I think it is nothing but the truth. And the madness is in the burning, in the drive to be one with the work and with all the self that is underneath, and that is stronger sometimes than anything else, especially common sense. And so we burn ourselves up.

Interview at Enter the Octopus

Matt Staggs at Enter the Octopus is running interviews with the short fiction writers mentioned in Jeff VanderMeer’s recent list of favorites.

Here’s my interview with Matt.

Enjoy. And be sure and check out the rest of the interviews, it’s a very interesting collection of responses. Matt, thanks for supporting all of us this way — I really appreciate it.

Short love

Jeff VanderMeer is kind enough to include me on this list of his favorite underappreciated (ETA: see Jeff’s comment to learn that I misread him, so much for words being my business…) short storytellers. I am certainly always open to more appreciation (grin). Be sure to check out the other writers on the list — Jeff’s got great taste, although I would say that, wouldn’t I? (now it’s a wicked grin…)

I am always delighted to get this kind of notice, not just because it’s nice for me, but because it’s nice for short stories to get some love. They are like dragonflies, these little packets of words — such beauty, such fierceness, such swooping dizzying aerobatics, and then phht, gone down to dust often before anyone has noticed. So thanks, Jeff, for noticing. Because if a novel is a long beautiful day, a fabulous short story is the moment when the moon breaks through the clouds and lights a path to somewhere mysterious and slightly shadowed and piercingly beautiful. The short story is a cliff from which we may be persuaded to willingly leap, if the view out there is enticing enough…

I like to leap.

Asimov’s SF reviews Dangerous Space

A lovely review of Dangerous Space from Paul di Filippo at Asimov’s SF, who also had many wonderful things to say about Nicola’s memoir.

In her much-anticipated debut collection, Dangerous Space, Kelley Eskridge can sound like Samuel Delany, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, or Joanna Russ, while still maintaining her own unique throaty, modulated voice. A non-trivial accomplishment indeed. These seven stories cover a wide territory stylistically and venue-wise, while all adhering to the same authorial POV that regards the world as a dangerous, delightful place, where extending oneself to others and opening oneself up to experience necessarily entails the possibility of suffering. “Strings” presents a future where music has been robbed of improvisation. “And Salome Danced” gives us an actor with some uncanny supernatural abilities. A “dust-devil” bag lady holds some startling secrets in “City Life.” Postmodern sword and sorcery is the motif in “Eye of the Storm,” while a cyberpunkish vision appertains to “Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road.” Original to this collection, the long title story is a mimetic rendition of the pop musician’s life. And finally, “Alien Jane” brings us inside a cruel mental asylum where the title character undergoes a lab-animal existence narrated by a fellow patient who might be her only friend. Eskridge’s output accretes only slowly–”the oldest story here dates from 1990–”but like well-aged wine, these tales decant superbly.
— Asimov’s SF, July 2008

Twenty years

Twenty years ago today, I met Nicola Griffith. Since then, we have drunk a hundred thousand beers, a million cups of tea, never run out of conversation, made excellent friends, had excellent adventures. Twenty years of helping each other do her best work, live her best life, be her best self. Today we celebrate.

Nicola & Kelley 2007

Honey, this one’s for you: Crystal – Fleetwood Mac

Do you always trust your first initial feeling?
Special knowledge holds true, bears believing.
 
I turned around
And the water was closing all around like a glove.
Like the love that had finally finally found me.
Then I knew.
And the crystalline knowledge of you
Drove me through the mountain.
Through the crystal-like clear water fountain.
Drove me like a magnet
To the sea.
 
How the faces of love have changed,
Turning the pages.
And I have changed
Oh, but you, you remain ageless.
 
I turned around
And the water was closing all around like a glove.
Like the love that had finally finally found me.
Then I knew
In the crystalline knowledge of you.
Drove me through the mountain.
Through the crystal-like clear water fountain.
Drove me like a magnet
To the sea.
 
“Crystal” – written by Stevie Nicks, performed by Fleetwood Mac

What Stephen King says…

…goes double for me.
 

I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive… I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the EJECT button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness bullshit about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a peach.”
 
— Stephen King, from the Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007

Sad week

Although I have a number of cheerful little posts lined up and almost ready to go, it seems wrong not to acknowledge that there is something going on underneath it all, and that’s why I’ve been away from the blog for so long. We did a hard thing, and now we are doing the hard time afterwards. I can’t talk about it right now, but Nicola has.

I’ll talk about it later.

But if posts are a little scrambled for a while, or something feels off, well, there you go. That’s how grief works.

Where are the plumbers in SF?

Kelley,

I just wanted to say I enjoyed Solitaire. It was gripping reading. It annoyed me that I had to put it down to deal with the plumber 😉

Astrid

 

I’m glad you enjoyed it. Heck, maybe the plumber would like it too. Except she wouldn’t find herself very well represented…

Have you ever wondered why there aren’t more skilled tradespeople in science fiction? You can find a fair number of blacksmiths, etc. in fantasy if you poke around the spaces between the royal folks and the peasants, but there just aren’t that many plumbers and electricians in science fiction.

Okay, I’m being a bit disingenuous, I know — but really, science fiction is all about the übercompetent spacefaring folk, or the übercompetent computer folk, or the übercompetent military folk…. either the on-the-outside individual or someone who is part of a large system. There’s not much middle class on any level of SF these days. I suppose the Fringe or the Sprawl or the Hegemony are much more science fiction’s natural turf, at last in novels — all that irresistible world-building. Short fiction is much more of a playground for other kinds of jobs/competencies/categories…

Solitaire isn’t much of an exception, although at the time it was published there wasn’t a lot of SF out there that posited corporate expertise as the core competency of the hero. Still, Jackal is one of the übercompetent, and she goes from high to low with nary a pause in the middle. So there I am, smack in the mainstream of SF in one way, at least (grin).