On Sunday, five other contributors (authors John Remy, Kaolin Imago Fire, Lucia Starkey, Pete Alberti and artist Galen Dara) and I gathered at Burbank’s Dark Delicacies bookstore for another Rigor Amortis signing. This was the final stop in what I have been jokingly calling my November “book tour.” As you can see, we had a blast.
(L to R) Galen, Pete (standing), John, Kaolin, Lucia, me. (Note Galen's amazing art!)
Thanks to all of you who came out to support us and the book. Thanks to Del and Sue for hosting us. Thanks to Kaolin, Lucia, Pete, John, and Galen for traveling various distances to be there. Let’s do it again sometime, shall we?
Whew–busy week! But before we roll into the weekend, I wanted to mention a couple of things:
Andy & Galen at the Booth (photo courtesy John Remy)
I had a fantastic time at Tucson Comic Con on Saturday. @Johnremy and I met up with @galendara and Rigor Amortishad a great showing. Lots of interest in the book and Galen’s awesome scary-sexy art. Thanks to organizers Mike and Henry for a great show. On Sunday, John, Galen, and I did a reading at Revolutionary Grounds Coffee. It was a little daunting to get up and read my NC-17 rated story again, but after practice at WFC last week, it wasn’t too bad. Thanks again to Joy for hosting us. The Tucson Weekly recorded some of the reading (thanks Dan!). You can find that here (but it’s pretty NSFW, you have been warned).
This Sunday at 2pm the three of us will be reuniting, along with other Rigor Amortis contributors @kaolinfire, Lucia Starkey, and Pete Alberti for a signing at Dark Delicacies in Burbank, CA. Hope you’ll come out and say “hi!”
For those of you popping in to see if there’s a Cocktail Friday update — stay tuned. I’m working getting one out in time for the weekend…
This weekend, I attended the World Fantasy Convention for the first time. I had an amazing time, though it flew past in a blur!
The best thing about cons is seeing friends you’ve made in real life and online. Several folks from my Clarion West class were there this year (hope to see the rest of them next time), and it was fantastic to see them again. In the last year I’ve gotten to know a lot people on Twitter and Facebook and finally met many of them “in the flesh” this weekend. Good times. I can’t wait to see you all again.
I didn’t have time to make it to all the panels and readings that I wanted to, but then I suspect that’s always the case whether you’ve been to a con one time or twenty.
Rather than try and detail everything, I’ll just mention a few highlights:
some of the Rigor Amortis Crew (photo courtesy of John Remy)
Rigor Amortis: Not only did our little book of zombie romance & erotica have a showing at the mass-autograph session (my first book-signing, whee!) but Edge/AXP invited us to read several stories at their Saturday afternoon reading, too. A few minutes before, I went someplace quiet and read my story aloud. I have to admit, I was a little nervous–and I became more so when I rediscovered all the explicit bits in my tale. And I was going to read in front of strangers!
Happy to say, it went really well, and I think people really enjoyed it. Thanks to all who came out to hear — special thanks to Brian and Anita Hades and Janice Shoults of Edge for hosting us. VERY special thanks to my fellow contributors Sarah Goslee, John Remy, Steven Scearce, and Jacob Ruby for their awesome reading and friendship. EXTRA special thanks to editors Erika Holt and Jaym Gates without whom such an amazing project would still just be an ephemeral joke on Twitter.
Reading "Take it Off" (photo courtesy John Remy)
Finally, thanks to John Anealio of the Functional Nerds podcast, who performed the world premiere of “An Undead Love Song,” co-written by another awesome Rigor Amortis contributor R.S. Devin (who couldn’t be at WFC unfortunately–hope to meet you next time). I’m still humming along!
Panels: My favorite panel this year was on the Argentinian writer Jose Luis Borges and how he’s influenced speculative fiction with his amazing body of work. (Okay, the topic was really on what modern spec fiction writers have swiped from Borges…) But all that swiping was well deserved. Kudos to Jeffrey Ford, Ted Chiang, Darryl Schweitzer, John Kessel, and Theodora Goss for a great discussion on how Borges has influenced them.
I don’t write stories like Borges did, but his fiction has been a huge influence on me. For one, I love how he makes ideas the main protagonists of his stories. As Ted Chiang said: “…his work is the distillation of pure ideas.” Bingo. How else could you make an infinite universe-sized library a character? Borges creates sometimes impossible places that are bewildering to visit, but I like to go back again and again.
Conversations: Yeah, this kinda goes back to what I was saying about all the friends I met at WFC, but so what! I had many wonderful conversations with so many people that I can’t do justice to them all here. Sometimes the chat was on obscure and exciting topics like mythology, or Borges, or how to write a novel. At other times the conversation turned to our obsessions with food and drink or TV shows.
Sometimes, especially late at night (er, early morning), there were just sleepy silences and comfortable chats with old friends.
Rigor Amortis, an anthology of zombie romance, erotica, and horror from Absolute XPress, debuts on Friday. I’m very pleased to have a story appearing in the collection.
A good friend of mine asked me recently what attracted to me to zombies. Why did I write about them? I recoiled in horror. “I’m not attracted to them at all,” I insisted.
Frankly, zombies have never been my thing–I prefer (non-sparkly) vampires and werewolves, ghosts and unspeakable horrors from beyond. We all know how zombie stories end: we are consumed or we live to be consumed another day. Hey, just like real life.
Of course, in recent years, there’s a new breed of zombies shuffling down the block. Zombies in games like Left for Dead and films like Zombieland pursue their prey rather…vigorously.
Back to my friend’s question. Obviously my kneejerk answer isn’t fully honest. I mean, I wrote a story about a zombie stripper, so I have to find them at least a little compelling, right?
I got to thinking about society’s fascination with the undead, how these monsters mirror the angst of the culture they inhabit. You can’t get a much better encapsulation of the Victorian psyche than the modern vampire. They are pale (almost consumptive), with unearthly beauty and a disdain for the rigid social and sexual mores of the late 19th century. In the 1950s, we start to see undead who are mindless, shuffling masses, or slaves to sinister masters with nefarious plans for wholesome young Americans. The zombie mythology was already firmly established, but I can’t help wonder if fears of the “Communist Horde” didn’t influence the way zombies were portrayed back then.
21st century zombies are brutal predators. No longer content to amble up to the brain-pan for a nosh, they leap out of the shadows and devour us with flashing teeth in explosions of blood and gore. We, the ultimate consumers, are just so much chum to be eaten.
There’s always something sexy about predators in the stories we tell ourselves, isn’t there? And Power is a potent aphrodisiac. Compare the Victorian vampire versus the 21st Century Zombie. What does it say about our cultural state of mind when we invite these monsters to share the most intimate of embraces?
I’m looking forward to seeing what my fellow contributors say about that come Friday.
I’d love to hear your own thoughts in the meantime.
