men who interrupt you when you're reading

This post originally appeared on tumblr in 2015 (thus the unprofessional use of expletives) and racked up a lot of likes and reblogs, one of which was tumblr user one-thousand-wordsworth’s amazing cover for a book mentioned in the post. I loved it then and I love it now, so thank you very much for taking the time to make it.

There’s an article over at Jezebel about this eternally infuriating phenomenon, and the comments are about what you might expect. Because it’s Jez, the commenters going YES, THIS, PLEASE STOP DOING THIS outnumber the BUT I WAAAAAANT TO commenters, but it’s still subject to Lewis’s Law.  

One of the but whyyyyyy commenters raises the question “what if she’s reading in a bar.” I would like to address this particular situation with an example to support my argument, which goes “SHE’S STILL READING, YOU DELIBERATELY OBTUSE FUCK.” 

I read in bars. I read in bars because I read everywhere unless I’m with another person and talking to them. When I read, I am able to block out whatever is happening around me to a large extent, so reading while in a crowded noisy environment like a bar is relatively easy for me. When I am reading a book in a bar I am reading a book, and I don’t want you to interrupt me there any more than I want you to interrupt me in a library.

Example: Some years ago, I am sitting at a bar, drinking a beer and reading one of a stack of books I just got out of the science library. The titles of these books are along the lines of Archives of the Roentgen Ray, The History of Radiography, and a facsimile edition of Roentgen Rays and Electro-Therapeutics, with Chapters on Radium and Photo-Therapy. These books are old. These books are heavy. Some of them have gilt edging on the pages. They are full of amazing information and frankly terrifying practices and I am doing the internal equivalent of rolling around in them in gleeful delight, sort of like a cat in catnip. Cue a dude and his friends sitting down riiiiight next to me, closer than I would prefer. I can feel his eyeballs like tiresome little searchlights playing over me, and I just wait for it. I don’t have to wait long. 

Dude: Hey. 

Me: *reads*

Dude: *louder, leaning closer* Hey. Hey.

Me: *reads*

Dude: Hey, whatcha reading?

Me: *pauses, lifts book up and turns it so that he can see the cover and spine, holds it for a beat, returns to previous configuration, all without making eye contact*

At this point he and his buddies have seen that this encounter is not going as well as they might hope, so he switches over from just trying to get my attention to actively trying to get a rise out of me, complete with snickering and mutters.

Dude: What’s that mean? Is it good? Is it a good book? Do you like it?

Me: *still not looking up from my page, deadpan* No. It’s absolutely dreadful.

Dude: *not sure how to take that, goes for snickering some more* So, like, do you read a lot of books? Do you like reading books?

Me: *sighs, sits up, turns to face them, sufficiently irritated to unload* Yes, I do like reading, and I do read a lot. Right now I’m trying to read this book on the history of radiography. Did you know that in the early days of diagnostic radiography an x-ray exposure could take up to ninety minutes? And that in those days the apparatus relied on a spark gap run off either a Ruhmkorff coil or an electrostatic generator, and that the walls of the tube might fluoresce green when in use due to cathode rays hitting the glass? Imagine sitting perfectly still for an hour and a half while the tube glowed and the coil buzzed, or the discs turned, and the spark gap crackled, and the room smelled of ozone. Would you like me to draw you a diagram of a Crookes tube? *bright smile*

Dude: …ooooookaaaaaaaaay. *finally turns his attention elsewhere*

I shouldn’t have had to take the time to do that. He should have picked up on my lack of interest in the potential interaction around about the first non-response to his “Hey,” and definitely should have got the hint when I showed him the book title without speaking. 

It happens no matter what. I could be reading Fifty Shades of Dreck or whatever Jonathan Franzen is putting out and I’ll get the HEY HEY HEY WHAT ARE YOU READING IS IT GOOD DO YOU LIKE IT treatment; I could be reading Hiding the Bodies of Importunate Fuckheads–For Dummies! and I’ll get the same thing. Guys, I don’t know why you think this behavior is acceptable, or why a woman owes you her attention when she is clearly focusing it on something else, or why you can’t take a goddamn hint when it is doing the equivalent of jumping up and down in front of your face, but please could you try to internalize the idea that interrupting somebody when they are reading is rude as fuck?

How about this: If you wouldn’t do this to a dude – if you would not interrupt a dude in public and then get pissy when he doesn’t want to interact with you – do not do it to a lady. And don’t hide behind the I’m Bad At Picking Up On Social Cues thing either. You can pick up on social cues perfectly well in all other areas of your daily existence; you just don’t want to when it means you don’t get to demand a woman’s attention. 

Next time a dude interrupts my book to ask me what I am reading and whether it is good and whether or not I like it, I’m just going to turn to him with coldly offensive incomprehension and ask “what is it that you want me to say?” Then repeat whatever line he answers with, follow it up with “great, we can now consider this encounter concluded” and go back to what I was doing.  

Hiding the Bodies of Importunate Fuckheads for Dummies by tumblr user one-thousand-wordsworth, 2015

The new normal (or, "sell Christine time")

So anyone who’s familiar with me or my work knows how deeply important Stephen King has been to me as a writer and, secondarily, as a person. I learned to write by first reading and then writing (while continuing to read) and King, Gaiman, Pratchett, McKinley, and Dunnett — as the authors I devoured and re-devoured most often — have left clear marks on the storyteller I turned out to be.

Bear with me: this is going somewhere.

There are two things King does that resonate particularly sharply with me and those are creating character through voice and describing/explaining specific phenomena incredibly simply and completely. King can introduce you to a character and without lengthy description tell you everything you immediately need to know about them simply through their dialogue, and he has the widest range of voice I’ve ever read from a single author.

(I have some of that myself, but I can’t really yell about it: I got that one in the bag, the thing that makes you able to use dialogue alone to draw a picture. Probably it’s partly due to the fact that I gobbled up play scripts from a young age and spent a bunch of time in the theater: the idea of hanging an entire scene solely on the dialogue feels totally natural for me. I’m basically designed to be a scriptwriter, and it gives me huge amounts of pleasure to play with that.)

But what I want to talk about here is King’s way of describing and explaining a complex phenomenon or situation in the most accurate and memorable way imaginable. There’s two instances I’m going to highlight: a writing technique and a description of phases of existence.

The first is Can You? and the subsequent Misery’s Sister moment. In MISERY, King has his author protagonist considering how to make his story work. The protagonist, Paul Sheldon, remembers being a child and playing a game called Can You, wherein an untenable situation is described by the teacher and each child, sitting in a circle, has to try to figure out a way to save the hero, Careless Corrigan, from the peril he’s in. The teacher asks the rest of the group Did They? and if the majority of the class believes the student’s escape scenario, the onus passes to the next kid. Paul Sheldon has to play Can You with himself to save his life, and we get to see his logical sequence of ideas play out — and, crucially, we get to see the point where he has an idea and it clicks and suddenly he knows how the hell to get Careless to safety and the sheer fundamental glee of that moment comes across in the text so viscerally it makes me smile to think about. We get to see Sheldon realizing what if this other character was actually secretly RELATED TO MY PROTAGONIST AND THAT’S WHY SHE WAS BURIED ALIVE:

THE EVELYN-HYDE BABE IS MISERY’S SISTER! SHIT ON A SHINGLE! LOVE IT!

Anyone who’s ever been stuck on a plot point in the history of ever knows what that shit on a shingle moment feels like. It’s glorious. This is how I always describe my storytelling: there’s a horrible stretch of “I can’t win this Can You scenario” until suddenly there’s the Misery’s Sister flash of inspiration and off I go again.

So King can write about writing like no one else. He can also write about life.

In CHRISTINE, one of my perennial favorites, King describes the phases of a person’s existence. Forgive the lengthy quote: it illustrates my point.

“I remember reading somewhere — and I can’t remember who said it, or wrote it, for the life of me — that there are ‘times’ in human existence. That when it came to be ‘steam-engine time’ a dozen men invented steam engines. Maybe only one man got the patent, or the credit in the history books, but all at once there they were, all those people working on that one idea. How do you explain it? Just that it’s steam-engine time.”

LeBay took a drink of his soda and looked up at the sky.

“Come the Civil War and it’s ‘ironclad time.’ Then it’s ‘machine-gun time.’ Next thing you know it’s ‘electricity time’ and ‘wireless time’ and finally it’s ‘atom bomb time.’ As if those ideas all come not from individuals but from some great wave of intelligence that always keeps flowing…some wave of intelligence that is outside of humanity.”

He looked at me.

“That idea scares me if I think about it too much, Dennis. There seems to be something…well, distinctly unChristian about it.”

“And for your brother there was ‘sell Christine time’?”

“Perhaps. Ecclesiastes says there’s a season for everything — a time to sow, a time to reap, a time for war, a time for peace, a time to put away the sling, and a time to gather stones together. A negative for every positive. So if there was ‘Christine time’ in Rollie’s life, there might have come a time for him to put Christine away, as well.”

What does this have to do with me?

There have been several distinct phases of my life, some of them under my control and some decidedly not. Of the more recent phases — after college — most have been dull and endless and without a clear ending in sight. For the past decade and a half I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do in order to eat and sleep indoors: nine hours a day of doing something I didn’t want to do, in clothes I didn’t want to wear, working for a variety of people from truly lovely to extremely toxic, with no real hope of bettering my situation and no fall-back plan that would allow me to explore new options. I was stuck, and never anticipated being unstuck, and also — I thought mercifully — alone.

And then that changed. In the space of about a year and a half I signed with an agent, met an amazing woman, realized I was gay (36, folks, it can take a lifetime before you twig it), got a 3-book deal, got engaged, got optioned, had my fiancee move from Sweden to live with me, and realized that I didn’t have to be stuck. That maybe it was no longer business casual slacks from Goodwill and PayLess pumps time. That it could be a new time, or growing close to one.

And then my wife got a job in New Mexico, and I could — stop. I didn’t have to do the things I didn’t want to do. I could do what I wanted and still eat and sleep indoors. It was revelatory. We didn’t have to rely on my income to live. I didn’t have to have a 9 to 5 job. It’s the kind of luxury I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. I’d loved the Southwest since I was little — my family had spent several summer vacations in Utah and Arizona — and the idea of actually living there was astonishing after a lifetime spent in the muggy jungle of the eastern seaboard. I’d always found the stark, changeable, implacable beauty of the high desert to be wonderful. Granted, that had been a lot closer to sea level than Santa Fe, and I very quickly realized that I couldn’t do the kind of physical activity I’d been able to do in Maryland on account of there is significantly less air in the air at 7000+ feet than there is at sea level — but I adapted. Am adapting.

For me there has been live in the Northeast forever and ever and ever, drown in humidity, lush poison-green summers with fireflies rising out of the grass with the dusk, the sighing of cicadas everywhere time, and now there is live in the high desert where rain comes as a blessing and you cannot not run out into it and dance and laugh and smell the sweetness of the dry earth rising, every single storm time.

Ecclesiastes or King, Dylan or Roud #3, I am so very glad of it.

Branching out

One of the weird things about being in Writer World is how normal the remarkable becomes, and how quickly that phase change occurs. When you’re just starting out — thrilled and terrified about having finally been published for real — every little milestone feels like you’ll never forget it, that it will always be new and wondrous and passing strange. Someone wants you to blurb their book! Your opinion matters! And then you do it again. And again. And it becomes part of your new normal. Books always drop on Tuesdays and their titles are written in all caps and “in a good deal” in announcements means a certain cash range, and so on: all the things that were weird and new about this world are completely commonplace.

This one is special, though, at least for me: I’ve never been published in the Washington Post before. I was delighted to have this opportunity, and even more delighted that the book they wanted me to review, Lavie Tidhar’s BY FORCE ALONE, was so bloody good I kept yelling to my wife in the other room about it while I read. (I explain why in the review, but trust me, if you like retellings of well-known legends with the nicey-nice stripped off and the bones showing, go and buy this book.)

I deeply enjoy reviewing — I always have — and I think this milestone is going to go on the metaphorical mantelpiece for keeps: that time I was in the Post yelling about kung-fu knights and alien grails.

Also: those of you who follow my fic will be glad to know that we are at long last working on chapter 8 of all that you love will be carried away Part III: that may be found, if sought. SPACE BATTLES AHOY.

Spite: it's what's motivational!

So it’s been a minute since I did much with this website, largely because of plague but also because of lazy, and for that I do apologize: however, I’ve come up with some things to say.

Back when I was in undergrad, and much later in the MFA program, I had ~creative writing~ teachers who said — with the kind of unconscious condescension that comes from not knowing what the hell you’re talking about — that I should “really try to avoid genre.” Pronounced as if “genre” were synonymous with “genital warts.”

And I wasn’t alone in those classrooms. It wasn’t just me being told that genre was less than, was not serious literature, was unsophisticated and childish. There are people in writing classes all over the world being told that lie right now.

I want, so much, to be able to walk into those teachers’ classrooms and be like “hey, remember when you told me to avoid (shudder, patronize, sneer) genre? Suck my three-book contract. To begin with.” Partly for the looks on their faces, but mostly, if I’m being honest, for the students in the class: hey, guess what? You don’t have to write the next short story about people who don’t like each other not liking each other, or the next novel about middle-aged English professors contemplating adultery! You can write whatever you damn well please, and this kind of gatekeeping is unhelpful in the extreme.

Which brings me to spite as a motivational tool. I use it all the time, for myself and for my characters. A lot of my people are in situations where they are at a disadvantage, physically or mentally or strategically, and instead of going “well I can’t do this, not gonna try” their reaction is fuck you, watch me.

It’s a relative of “hold my beer,” but instead of “I can TOTALLY do something even stupider than that” it’s no, I will not let [task, situation, object] win, I am GOING to find a way to do this, goddamn it. Using this as a character trait allows for a lot of interesting situations to develop: people doing things they clearly should not do, that they are not suited to, that they are going to damn well do anyway because fuck you, watch me, and…doing those things. It’s bloody-mindedness; it’s also determination, and it can lead to unexpected solutions as your character finds a workaround to the impossible situation because they are not going to let some idiotic [whatever it is] win, dammit.

Fuck you, watch me is also a variant of one can always do what one must: it’s also related to failure is not an option. The latter two are divorced from spite, at least on the surface, but for my money it underlies all three. As a motivator spite is extremely efficient; it should not be the only motivator, but there’s nothing wrong with using it to fuel your creative drive. It’s a bit like a nice shot of nitromethane to the gas tank: you’re still driving the car, you want the car to go in this direction, only now you have a hell of a lot more power pushing you forward. Embrace the spite. Let it flow through you. And then go write something your old creative-writing prof would have given a C.

Perhaps a C-minus. Go nuts.

Next chapter update: my life

So I just moved across the country with my wife to live in the high desert one point three miles above sea level, and a lot of things have changed (this is largely why I have been radio silent except for sharing memes on Twitter, and will continue until we get the new house squared mostly away). It’s — difficult. Particularly the part where I slice open the next cardboard box and find parts of my and Arkady’s life shattered into tiny little pieces.

But I’ve been lucky. My favorite things have not been broken. Some have been chipped, but not destroyed — except one of a set of four Waterford martini glasses given to me by some of the kindest people I’ve ever met.

(Also I’ve found my two-part epoxy. When I was little it was called Araldite and it was brought out to mend mugs and bowls and important things, and we have two very important objects I need to use it on. So far.)

I’ll talk about what it means to me to ditch the place I’ve been lodged in, like a foreign object in a bronchus, for decades — but not right now. Right now is for telling you about these lovely, impossible strangers.

Where I used to live with my parents was a suburban development from the sixties south of Baltimore; our house was on a steep hill with split-level houses set like steps down the sides of it. Our house was a sort of mildew-sage green with a tin carport and a tree in the front yard that exploded because lightning hit it when I was standing approximately ten feet away behind the picture window. Across the street was an almost identical house in mirror image, with dark brown siding and white trim, and a gorgeous, scarlet, entirely pneumatic Firebird parked in its driveway. (Car people: remember the pregnant curves of the late 90s generation of the F body? That. Lovely, but bulbous.) There was also a colossal bright white crew-cab dually pickup parked out front with a boat on a trailer. There was very clearly money involved.

I have no idea how they and my parents made friends — only that they, I’ll call them Kate and Preston, came over to introduce themselves to me and ask if I’d be willing to watch their elderly cat and less-elderly Sheltie, and of course I said yes and went across the road to their house and — they had clove cigarettes, and were free with their beer, and their ancient cat and their very friendly dog were enormously companionable. Kate and Preston let me sleep in their enormous gel bed (think waterbed, but slower), drink their beer, smoke their Djarums, drive their scarlet Firebird, cook in their kitchen, and use their exercise equipment. Not only that — but they gave me some of the loveliest gifts I’ve ever had. A black jersey halter dress that channels Marilyn Monroe’s Seven-Year Itch outfit. High-heeled leather boots. A carved greenstone paperweight from Belize. Handblown glass ashtrays. And — as a housewarming present when I moved out of my parents’ into the Baltimore apartment — these martini glasses.

(Kate and Preston also gave me the microwave I used for fifteen years. It had been in this country for one year longer than I had — it was a 1986 model — and it was a fucking tank. I miss that thing. I always will.)

I loved their pets. The very, very elderly cat who was as sweet and engaging as any dog; the Sheltie and the second Sheltie who came along a little later, both of whom would hop up on the bed and try earnestly to lick my face when I was sad, with the determination of a nurse. I loved them as if they were mine, and it was always a pleasure to go over there and take care of them.

They helped me carry my shit up those godawful stairs. I will never, ever, ever forget their hospitality, their kindness, their generosity, their willingness to jump right in and help no matter what. I have treasured these glasses ever since as a beautiful, fragile, ephemeral record of these two humans who were kind to me when I very much needed it, and if the movers had to break one of them — as they have broken many of our things, so far, sigh — I appreciate that it was my least favorite of the four.

You can squint and see it as a metaphor for this entire move. The things I love best made it through, and the things I have loved less but still care about may have been foxed around the edges — but we are here, and (to quote Ruthven quoting Henry V) let us condole the knight; for, lambkins, we will live.

And settle in, and live, and love. Perhaps laugh, from time to time.

Twitter fic requests

Carey Snow @weelittlenut asked:

Victor Frankenstein and Nikola Tesla at university together, probably in a fraternity.

veefrank: dude r u still up that party was TIGHT

takemynameinvain: ugh no I am so not into your creepy anatomy porn shit but yes still up

veefrank: what u workin on bc i am liek THISCLOSE to conquering the hitherto inevitable fell hand of death also kegstands

veefrank: also that coleridge dude is here and he has some unbelievable shit you should come over

takemynameinvain: sorry too busy revolutionizing technology and inventing things that asshole marconi down the hall is totally gonna steal, get extra wasted for me

takemynameinvain: wait did you say something about conquering death or are you just fucked up

veefrank: WHO THE FUCK KNOWS g2g henry clerval is here sorry bro gotta try to hit that

takemynameinvain: tell him he’s too good for you, douchefuck

veefrank: lmao right back at you asshole also i ganked a bunch of your electrical experiment shit to use in this death conquering deal, hope that’s ok

takemynameinvain: WHAT DID YOU DO WITH MY ELECTROSTATIC GENERATORS AND THE MACHINE THAT GOES PING

veefrank: gotta wait & see ;D

On Google Street View, and maps, and why they matter

Some of my favorite books in all the world have, in their frontmatter, a map of the places described in the text. I hold out hope that maybe one day mine might do the same; it is a peculiar kind of intimacy, a visual understanding between author and reader — now you have this place in your head, as it is in mine, we share an awareness of place and landscape, of objects in space. Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy, Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastards series, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings — all of them preface the story with the setting.

Maps have a lot of psychological resonance: they represent a way for humans to describe their surroundings and, in doing so, to claim some kind of ownership and sovereignty. The arc of modern history can be seen in the successive changes in our maps of the world, through the movement of borders and the names that come and go. An alien civilization could piece together a very great deal about humanity by simply going through our maps.

I have said that I could not write the things I write without the enormous felicity of being able to see the places I am using to tell my story, without having to physically travel there. Google Maps allowed me to work out where my characters would be going and what routes they would take; Google Street View made it possible for me to see what they would be seeing on the way. With GSV I could see into the British Museum and the Palais Garnier in enormous depth and detail, all from the comfort of home. I didn’t even have to put on pants, let alone shell out huge sums for plane tickets and request access to parts of buildings that aren’t open to the public. When research is this easy and accessible, it seems irresponsible not to do it.

The number of hours I spent clicking my way through London and Paris and New York for the Greta series was not recorded, but it’s a lot, and perhaps a third of the information I racked up ever made it into the books themselves. There was one memorable sequence wherein I had to do a bunch of research to track down the actual location of a house I’d seen on an image search and find it on GSV, along with ancient gelatin-silver photographs of the interior from the Museum of the City of New York, which took most of an afternoon. Cross-referencing surface images of Paris with the old maps of the catacombs in order to find a plausible location for Corvin’s lair near enough to the Palais Garnier required some effort (and a lot of layering maps on top of one another via Photoshop). There is a whole chunk of text that never made it into Strange Practice explaining Stephen Halethorpe’s route through London’s sewers from Crouch End south toward the deep-level shelter, which was exhaustively researched via a) online “draining” forums for sewer exploration enthusiasts and b) a 1930s-era London Council map of the sewer system. I’m still proud of that one, even if it was very definitely Too Much Information.

After Strange Practice and Dreadful Company were finished, I went through and marked all the significant locations on two maps, one for each book, and because I want to give readers that shared sense of place and setting I have now uploaded these to my Administrative Ephemera page. I hope they give people as much pleasure as they gave me in the making. For Grave Importance — well, the map is rather larger and less precise, but I may do it anyway, because it is fun. And because it does, in fact, matter.

site housekeeping

The navigation bar was getting a little ridiculous, so I tidied it up and moved the various non-authorial sections into a new page, Art & Design. You can now access Varney recaps, art books that need to happen, logos for imaginary organizations, and photos all in one handy features section.

Coming soon: freelance editing services! Yes, I, that person, who has a goddamn fountain pen devoted to red ink and who carries a red sharpie at all times, can comb through your manuscript (and offer a variety of types of service including line edits, structural edits, proofreading, and formatting). You give me cash money, I edit you manuscript, at reasonable rates plus an introductory discount.

Also, if you liked the stuff I published this year, you can nominate me for the Campbell Award for Best New Author, and for Nebula and/or Hugo Awards for “The Utmost Bound” and DREADFUL COMPANY!

SO IT'S AWARDS SEASON (AND MY LAST YEAR OF CAMPBELL ELIGIBILITY)...

I’ve been writing books since I was eleven or so, but the first thing I ever had professionally published in my life was STRANGE PRACTICE, Greta Helsing 1, back in 2017. Which means I’m still eligible for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year, along with the Hugos and Nebulas.

2018 has been a dumpster fire of a year in terms of politics but not too shabby for me in terms of publication; my first-ever short story, “The Utmost Bound,” came out in Uncanny issue 20 and Greta Helsing 2, DREADFUL COMPANY, dropped at the end of July. I’m enormously proud of both of them, for quite different reasons.

“The Utmost Bound” is a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I got a good look at the Soviet Venera images (Don P. Mitchell’s website has all the information you could want; see also the stitched-together and colored versions of Venera-13 and -14’s images, giving you a horribly ordinary view of a landscape that is effectively hell). It’s also a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I read M.P. Shiel’s “The Dark Lot of One Saul,” a tale that impressed much-younger me with its enormous crushing inevitability, the narrator’s awareness that they were trapped by vast and implacable natural forces, that escape was utterly impossible, that it was only a matter of time — and, also, of course, a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I read Sturgeon’s “The Man who Lost the Sea.” That narrator’s dying cry and the imagined last words of my own doomed cosmonaut are vastly disparate, but there is an echo there which I so very much enjoyed exploring.

It was also an opportunity to write the kind of hard SF I particularly love to read, given how many times I’ve read and re-read Carrying the Fire and Liftoff and Last Man on the Moon and Apollo 13; I’m the kind of space nerd who was utterly gleeful at getting to include a reference to the CUVMS described by Michael Collins as “the official NASA-approved procedure for going potty in space.” I just really love the history of spaceflight, and getting to play with that and horror at the same time was a plain and simple joy.

I Here’s the opening of the story:

… and this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
—Tennyson

The check-in chime in his headset: on time, annoyingly on time, as usual, waking him as they came around the curve of Venus. “Aphrodite-1, this is Honolulu, do you read?”

Faint washes of static through the words, three months of interplanetary travel and a scant handful of minutes away by radio wave. Again: “Aphrodite-1, Honolulu, do you read? Over.”

“Hi, Hawaii,” said McBride, pushing the headset mike a little further from his mouth. He was used to the delay by now, the measured pauses in conversation while the signal made its way across twenty-five million miles of nothingness. At first it had been disconcerting; now he barely even noticed. “Weather okay down there?”

“Just dandy, since you ask, Commander, but it’s time for the morning report. How’s Little Buddy doing?”

McBride yawned and keyed up the monitors, one by one, waking them into life: you didn’t waste juice out here on instruments you weren’t actually using. The cabin lights dimmed slightly as the displays came on line. “Little Buddy’s reet and complete at last report,” he said, scanning the data, and typed in the downlink command to send Honolulu everything the rover had been up to since the previous infodump transmission. “There you go. Still trundling west over Lakshmi Planum as we speak. Temperature’s—let’s see—still holding at 469 C, pressure 93, no significant changes in atmospheric makeup. Yellow sky. Ugly as shit.”

Honolulu laughed, a tinny little sound, rasping with distance. “Keep your personal aesthetic impressions out of the record, Commander. Okay. We want you to go north today—there’s a couple of anomalies we’d like to get a closer look at. Stand by for transmission of coordinates.”

You can read the whole story here.

The second thing of mine that came out in 2018, DREADFUL COMPANY, was definitely the hardest of the Helsing trilogy to write, and that’s why I’m particularly proud of it: there was a lot of work and despair and horror and excitement and moments of inspiration that went into book two, and what it ended up being is something I am pleased with. The fact that it was so damn hard to write makes the achievement slightly more of a thing, in my mind, than it would have been had it come out smoothly in one go. I got to explore stories and locations I haven’t played with in twenty years: I spent two weeks in Paris at 18 on the student-exchange AP French trip and by the end of that time I was dreaming in French, which was both bizarre and exciting, and I fell desperately in love with the city itself. It was very satisfying to get to revisit the Palais Garnier via Google Street View, a thing 18-year-old me could not possibly have imagined.

You can read the first three chapters of DREADFUL COMPANY on the Orbit website — there are also links to the hard copy, audiobook, and ebook from various retailers.

If you like my stuff, you can nominate me for the Campbell Award for Best New Author, and for Nebula and/or Hugo Awards for “The Utmost Bound” and DREADFUL COMPANY.

Thanks as always for reading, and for your consideration!

"Van Horne! Pneumatic transit! I can't believe it's still here!", or In the NYC City Hall Subway Station At Long Last

So I’ve always loved the underground, even as a child: going down into the dark places in the earth and coming out again a slightly different person felt natural, felt correct. I loved mines and I loved subways and tunnels dug underneath water — and I have also always loved the abandoned. If I had any guts at all, and the potential consequences were not so dire, I would absolutely be urbexing all over the damn place; as it is I have to look longingly at derelict and fascinating structures and wonder what’s inside.

There are some places underground that are well-known to people like me as a kind of prize achievement, something longed-for, a wonderful addition to a collection. The deep-level shelters under certain London Underground stations, for example: I still hold out hope that just maybe I’ll be able to see inside one myself, after having spent so long writing about horrors hiding in those tunnels and shafts. It’s much, much easier to visit the Paris catacombs, and that I plan to do when I eventually make enough money and time to go back to France for a holiday. But the crown jewel of underground exploration in New York is the old City Hall subway station, and today I got to go down there and omg omg omg.

You can look up the history of City Hall at the New York Museum of Transit; ground was broken in 1900 and the city’s first subway train departed City Hall station in 1904. It was closed at the end of 1945 for several reasons, one of them being that the longer trains of the latter day had trouble navigating the tight radius of the City Hall loop. It’s still used as a turnaround for the 6, and while we were there several trains squealed and shrieked their way around the curve — some of them containing passengers staring in awe, or possibly just surprise.

The tour we took is arranged through the museum, and you have to sign up several months in advance and cross your fingers you got there before the list was full. It was fantastic. I’ve been on countless guided tours of various stately homes or ancient fortresses and this was one of the best I can remember; our guide was not only incredibly informative but also wry and funny and engaging, and obviously loved her job.

She told us all about the first underground attempt at people-moving, Alfred Beach’s Pneumatic Transit, which never got anywhere beyond a demonstration tunnel with a car shuttling back and forth — I’ve researched it myself, to some considerable extent, because I’ve been fascinated with the Beach project ever since I first encountered it in Ghostbusters II. Remember the abandoned Van Horne station Ray finds under the street, the one containing a river of shimmery pink psychomagnetheric slime? That’s a conflation of the Beach Pneumatic Transit and City Hall station, and the Ghostbusters fan in me as well as the underground history enthusiast was internally jumping up and down and yelling in glee.

I’ve put a few photos up of the station and the wonderful undulating arches of the City Hall entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge station, which is where we emerged. I fell in love with the city pretty much the first night I spent in it with my future wife, and I keep falling. Every time I come here it’s like being accepted into a huge, vast, incredibly complex living thing, a corpuscle in some unknowable circulatory system, and the more I see of it the more I love it. Visiting this station was an enormous gift, and I’m so grateful — and also still so goddamn stoked I GOT TO SEE THE GHOSTBUSTERS STATION AAAAH.

Nobody ever accused me of dignity, after all.

Unrelated to Varney the Vampire: Research Boner Time, Aviation Edition

So one of the things I love to do most in all the world, other than lie around reading books, is doing research for stuff I’m interested in. Right now I’m writing a novella about practical necromancy and air crash investigation, and therefore there is a lot of research being done at the moment.

And despite the ongoing dumpster fire that is reality — look around, look around, to see how lucky we are to be alive right now in a world where you can access practically any damn thing on the internet, at once, without even having to get up and go anywhere, or even put on pants. For example, I needed to know what route a fictional flight from Reagan National to Eppley Field in Omaha would take, and at first I started out going “welp, let’s find the navigational waypoints and imagine what route might be the most sensible between them,” before finding the most wonderful site I’ve encountered in ages, called iFlightPlanner. Which does what it says on the tin.

It shows you all the charts for the United States. There are a lot, and you have to look up how to read them, but that’s not difficult: the FAA has kindly provided a guide. The charts and the custom flight plan showed me all sorts of things I needed to know, such as roughly how long it would take from the point where the flight was handed off from one air traffic control center to its scheduled landing. If I’d needed to include the actual ATC transcript of the handoff I could have done that too, because there are lots of places around the internet where people ask questions about this and have answers provided. In this case it was reddit, but there are others.

And this is only one aspect of one project. The internet is an absolute treasure trove of information, readily available in incredibly useful ways (for the most part). When I was writing STRANGE PRACTICE and DREADFUL COMPANY, I used Google Street View heavily to give myself an accurate picture of what routes people would take to get from here to there, what landmarks they would encounter, what views they would see — because I can’t personally nip over to London or Paris for a fact-finding mission, lacking Ruthven’s cash flow. I could have worked out the routes with an ordinary map, but I wouldn’t have known what my characters would see on the way, and therefore wouldn’t be able to describe it, and I won’t write something I’m not pretty sure I can get right.

Which, of course, makes me That Person regarding other people’s research habits. It drives me nuts when people don’t bother to do any, and it almost drives me more nuts when the person has done a little bit of research but either completely misunderstood what they’ve read or failed to read any further, thus setting themselves up for great big glaring factual errors. The metric for this type of fail is the Dan Brown Scale of Did Not Do the Research, upon which Brown himself scores an eleven.

My point is that the internet is an enormous resource for writers — and because it’s such a vast repository of information and it is generally so easy to access, there is no excuse for not doing your due diligence. Back in the Cretaceous we had to rely on interlibrary loan and long hours in uncomfortable library carrels cramming information into our eyeballs: these days you can get very nearly anything you damn well please delivered directly.

Go forth and learn cool things!

(If you’re interested, here’s the flight plan and a closeup of the chart to give you an idea of what they look like. Ignore the groundspeed; I just needed to know the route.)