Metapost 2017

The year 2017 has come and gone. Time for a year-end retrospective metapost!

First, and most importantly to me, the list of books I read in 2017, in reverse chronological order:

• The Aztecs: People of the Sun by Alfonso Caso
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
• Story of a Soul by Therese of Lisieux *
• The Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour
• The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren by Nelson Algren
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson *
• Now Wait For Last Year by Philip K. Dick
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll *
• Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane
• Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson
• The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien *
• The Big Kill by Mickey Spillane
• The Godwhale by T. J. Bass
• One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane
• Half Past Human by T. J. Bass
• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
• Count Zero by William Gibson
• King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by Siobhan Roberts
• The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 3 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien *
• The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft
• Vulcan's Glory by D. C. Fontana
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
• Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance
• The Preparation of the Child for Science by Mary EverestBoole
• The Russia House by John le Carré
• The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien *
• Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest by Earle R. Forrest
• The Summer Stargazer by Robert Claiborne
• Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist
• The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Regular Polytopes by H. S. M. Coxeter
• A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison
• The Pastel City by M. John Harrison
• The Pueblo Revolt by David Roberts
• Pueblo Gods and Myths by Hamilton A. Tyler
• The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard
• Life in the Pueblos by Ruth Underhill
• Hell House by Richard Matheson
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin *
• Vengeance is Mine! by Mickey Spillane

Isn't it sad how I only read old stuff? What's the matter with me? I do actually have a few newer things on my list of to-reads; my immanent venture into the world of e-books will hopefully help with that. (I'm not a complete luddite, just ten years behind the times. I do have a cell phone now. That is, my wife does.)

Asterixes denote works read aloud to my children. I read aloud to them for half an hour to an hour every night. Because they begged me to, I read them The Lord of the Rings this year. I'd been reluctant, thinking them a bit young (seven and nine) and reflecting that, after all, you can only read a book for the first time once. But they were starting to read it without me, so I figured I'd better take the opportunity while I still had it.

It was a long project: we went in something like real time, from Frodo's departure from Bag End to his awakening on the Field of Cormallen, and decided that we'd have to start it on September 22 next time around. This is my third time to read LOTR aloud, but...I still cry at certain parts. I'm not ashamed, dammit.

My literary high point for the year is probably my completion of The Gulag Archipelago. My low point would be those four Mickey Spillane novels, none of which I can clearly remember now, although I do seem to recall one whose resolution involved a baby blowing a woman's brains out with a handgun. I began Kiss Me, Deadly while standing in line at Wal-Mart, waiting to score a Super NES Classic when it became available at midnight of its release date, if that gives you any idea of the luridness of my daily life.

But here's an amusing Mickey Spillane story I heard at Thanksgiving. My godfather, who, like Spillane, lived in South Carolina, used to know a bar or some such place also frequented by Spillane. He went out one night with someone from out of town, and they saw Spillane. "Hey, want to meet Mickey Spillane?" my godfather asked. They went over and, like an old buddy, my godfather said, "Mickey, I'd like you to meet so-and-so." Spillane gave them both a hearty handshake and hello. It isn't known whether he realized he'd never met either of the two.

My 2017 reading completion rate is a bit of a falling-off from previous years, but in my defense I should list the works I'm in the middle of:

• History of the Conquest of Mexico by William H. Prescott
• The Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor
• Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas

Not exactly light reading! There are also bits and pieces by writers like Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, Descartes, Nietzsche, and others. I've also read a bunch of comic books graphic novels and manga, including four superman comics, the first omnibus edition of Wonder Woman comics by George Perez, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Akira. I meant to write a post about Wonder Woman comics, but seeing the movie (which everyone seemed to like so much but which I found depressingly stupid) sort of took the wind out of my sails. Sometime soon, perhaps.

As for stuff I produced this year, I had two Carvajal novelettes appear in the august e-pages of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Heart of Tashyas, HFQ #31

I've got a couple more sitting in the trunk, to be produced in the future if there seems to be interest in more. One day I'd like to see a collection of Carvajal stories published in some way, shape, or form.

I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, HFQ #33

The third installment of my Carvajal narrative will appear in HFQ next month. Here's the sketch for the accompanying illustration:

That's based on a self-portrait, incidentally, though I don't have a pirate earring, and I don't let my hair grow that long these days. (I do like to go around with a sword in each hand, however.) The prickly pear wallpaper pattern, which is of type pg, is my own invention. I'll include the pattern itself in a future post.

All of which reminds me: one high point of 2017 was my attendance at the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio, where I got to meet assorted heroes, villains, and rogues of the fantasy publication world in person, and had the heady experience of encountering some of my very own writing and illustration in the dealers' room.

I also showed my art in a one-man exhibition on the Sul Ross State University campus in Alpine, Texas. I sold a few pieces, gave a talk about art, math, and writing, ate some tasty snacks, and in general had a good time.

Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to get any pictures during the closing reception. Some of the pictures will be familiar to readers of my books.

Speaking of Alpine, Nelson Algren, an author I discovered this year, has an interesting connection to Sul Ross. A college-educated would-be journalist from Chicago, he wound up in Alpine as a drifter / hobo during the Great Depression, where he began working on a novel on a typewriter at Sul Ross, which was then just a normal college. Upon leaving town by train, he decided to take the typewriter with him. The authorities caught up with him further down the line. He was arrested and thrown into the Brewster County jail, where he languished for months until a judge was in the area to hear his case. His lawyer compared him with Jean Valjean during the trial; although convicted, he was released and given twenty-four hours to leave the state. His imprisonment was a harrowing experience that colored his fiction for the rest of his life. He was a proletarian writer whose work petered out in the forties or fifties, though one of his best stories appeared in Playboy in the seventies. I encountered him in Flannery O'Connor's correspondence; O'Connor didn't have a high opinion of his work.

But back to me. I also showed some painting, drawings, and mathematical sculptures at a gallery in the town where I live. The 120-cell sections and net in the foreground are mine; the painting in the background is not.

My sections and net of the 24-cell were also on display, though not shown in this picture. I'll dedicate a post to them in the near future.

Lately I've mostly been working on Ark of the Hexaemeron, the third installment in my Enoch series. One of my 2018 resolutions is to get it finished and published this year. For various reasons my work speed has slowed down somewhat of late, which is why my blogging continues to be light. But I do plan to continue with reviewing noir films; the next one on my list is, I believe, The Killers.

The Coming of the White Worm

This year I'm also going to continue tinkering with techniques for digital illustration, as I'd really like to tell a story in pictures some day. I think of my various HFQ illustrations as playful exercises. I've played with doing colors solely on the computer, mainly because it's so difficult to ensure accurate color transitions from watercolor to digital files. In the end I suspect I'll try to compromise somehow.

Well, that about wraps it up. Let's send 2017 off on a high note!

Metapost: 2016

Ah, 2016! To be known to future historians as the Year from Hell. You know what I mean.

On the positive side, 2016 saw the release of my novelette "Salt and Sorcery," which takes place in a salt pan and appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in August, as well as my novel The King of Nightspore's Crown, the second installment in my Enoch series (reviewed here), which also came out in August. I wrote several other stories, one of which is to appear next month, and am at work on the third Enoch novel.

I also wrote quite a bit on my blog, whose name changed from Alone with Alone to Cosmic Antipodes. Some of my favorite posts from 2016 include:

• Was Robert E Howard Autistic?
• Ghosts, Personal and Otherwise
• A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art
• Land of Enchantment and Atom Bombs
• A Bit More Burroughs Art
• D.O.A.
• The Eladogran Cosmogony
• Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions
• Release the Kraken! Eighties Fantasy Schlock
• Keftu Dissected

These aren't necessarily the most popular posts as measured by clicks, but they're the ones I like the best. I also wrote a really nifty glossary, some form of which will accompany future editions of my Enoch books.

Now, most importantly (for me, at any rate), the list of stuff I read in 2016, arranged in reverse chronological order:

• The Histories by Herodotus
• My Gun is Quick by Mickey Spillane
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Smiley's People by John le Carré
• I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane
• The Gulag Archipelago, I - II by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• VALIS by Philip K. Dick
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• Linguistic Material from the Tribes of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico by John Swanton
• The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
• The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
• The Shining by Stephen King
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré
• Regular Polytopes by H. S. M. Coxeter
• The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila
• Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit
• Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick
• The Pnume by Jack Vance
• The Dirdir by Jack Vance
• The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
• Servants of the Wankh by Jack Vance
• City of the Chasch by Jack Vance
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Chimayo Valley Traditions by Elizabeth Kay
• The Gambler / Bobok / A Nasty Story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest by Earle R. Forrest
• A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• In a Glass Darkly by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
• The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush by Charles Saunders
• The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
• Bhagavad Gita
• Imaro by Charles Saunders
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers by L. Sprague de Camp
• King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
• Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library)
• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
• Howliday Inn by James Howe
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
• The Bloody Crown of Conan by Robert E. Howard
• The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin
• A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle
• Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp, et al.
• "Gaudium et Spes"
• The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake 

There are sixty-four entries in all. Some came in the form of audiobooks, which I listen to while painting, as it relieves the extreme anxiety I typically experience while working on art. But I rarely listen to an audiobook if I haven't already read the book in print -- it's too easy to miss important details. Right now I'm listening to the Parallel Lives of Plutarch, which will probably carry me through a corner of my current painting project. Maybe two corners.

True "literary" novelists on my list include Austen, Conrad, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Nothing new there! I read quite a few ghost/horror stories, by the likes of Sheridan le Fanu, Oliver Onions, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Edith Wharton, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King. I also read a number of books having to do with the Soviet Union and the Cold War, including several spy novels by John le Carré and the first two parts of The Gulag Archipelago.

Several entries were read as research for a cycle of sword-and-sorcery stories set in an alternate sixteenth-century Texas and New Mexico. I've completed two, the first of which is due to appear in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly next month, with an illustration by yours truly. Charles Saunders' Imaro stories are a big inspiration for these, as are Robert E. Howard's tales of Solomon Kane. I'm currently in the planning stages of a third, which will be set in the Santa Fe area.

A number of the entries on my list were read-alouds to my kids, currently aged six and eight, including A Wind in the Door, Bunnicula, Howliday Inn, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, My Side of the Mountain, The Hobbit, Five Children and It, The Last Unicorn, The Book of Three, and A Princess of Mars. When asked to select their top three, they both included A Princess of Mars and The Hobbit, naturally. (I should mention that I sometimes "translated" Burroughs' sentences as I read; being a bit of a hack, he never uses a short Saxon word when a convoluted phrase full of polysyllabic Latin words will do. In contrast, Tolkien, who was a master linguist, writes simply and directly. Reading to kids has made me a lot more sensitive to this.) We also read numerous selections from Andrew Lang's collections of many colors, The Arabian Nights Entertainments, and Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table, as well as Edith Hamilton's Mythology and the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series.

2016 also saw our first cautious forays into the world of RPGs. We began by (slowly) playing through Final Fantasy IV together. (We're still not done yet, but we've gotten to the Lunar Subterrane at last.) My kids liked it so much that I decided to start moving toward Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or something along those lines. We began with Dungeon!, an extremely cool, simple-enough-for-young-kids board-game dungeon crawl that first came out in 1975. Now we've moved up to Wrath of Ashardalon, which is considerably more challenging. However, we successfully completed our first quest together last week. I'll blog about it once we play a bit more.

I also read a few comic books graphic novels in 2016, including:

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• The Dark Knight Returns
• Batman: Year One
• Batman: The Killing Joke
• Batman: The Long Halloween
• Batman: Hush
• Superman: Birthright 

The first entry is the long-running manga by Hayao Miyazaki, the first parts of which became the animated film of the same name. I'll come right out and say that finding Nausicaä this year was a major event in the life of my imagination. I'll most likely blog about it once I've had a chance to reread the manga. I got a few more Superman comics with Christmas money, so those are next on my list. This is something of a departure from my usual reading habits. Before 2016, the last comic book graphic novel I'd looked into was The Death of Superman, which I read soon after it came out in, um, 1992.

So there's my 2016 in stories and pictures. All in all, not a bad year. Here's to an even better 2017.

The Library of Enoch

If you're a reader of my novels, you might want to check out my Library of Enoch page. I use a mix of Greek and Hebrew terms in translating from the nephelic tongue (the sole language spoken in Uradon of the cosmic antipodes), together with various coinages, many of which apply to the Paleozoic plants and animals that inhabit it. The books are intended to be read without specialized knowledge, of course, but some might find it helpful to read explicit definitions and see pictures of the wildlife. It's a work in progress, so don't be surprised if it changes from day to day.

And if you're not a reader (yet!), both volumes available from Amazon, in print and e-book form:

Buy it at Amazon

Buy it at Amazon

They're enrolled in the Kindle MatchBook program, so the purchase of a print copy will get you the e-book for free.

Related posts:

• The Eladogran Cosmogony
• Rites of Spring
• The Libraries of Faerie, Babel, and Urth
• The Universe, Otherwise Known as the Library

Garbage-Can Literature

Found this response to a charming fan letter from the 14-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman drifting around on the web today:

See Ackerman's letter here. "All you speak of is real to me."

Despite a few misspellings, I'm struck by how readable it is. Not many college students could write a letter like that these days. How depressing.

In other news, it seems my somewhat processy post on epic fantasy was linked to by the Castalia House blog: many thanks to them, and a hearty welcome to all you hordes of visitors. You came here to read my thoughts on unity in fantasy; now stay to read my rambling and often irrelevant posts on art, dollhouses, chickens, and cosmogony.

New Label, Same Great Flavor!

I've changed my blog's name and banner, because I was bored of the old ones, and decided something less depressing would be nice. But not to worry: I'll continue to provide the incisive commentary and hard-hitting, around-the-clock coverage that you've come to know and love.

In my writing, I like to consider the cosmos as "tending" toward real projective space, or possibly some other spherical 3-manifold, and set my stories at the antipodes of the universe, much as The Divine Comedy portrays Jerusalem and Purgatory as standing diametrically opposite one another on the earth's surface. Hence the new title.

(There, I worked both topology and Dante into my metapost. I couldn't just announce the name change, could I?)

Raphael Ordoñez on Adult Diagnosis

There's a post by your humble blogger over at The Mighty today. I submitted it in response to a prompt for stories by people diagnosed with autism as adults.

If you happen to be a visitor from The Mighty, welcome! Please peruse my blog and enjoy all the extremely important and relevant things I've written about fantasy, logic, beauty, autism, and chickens. You can read my awesome short stories through the sidebar; if you like those, check out my novel Dragonfly through the links at the top of the page.

Metapost: 2015

Another year, another retrospective metapost.

Let's see. I suppose the most significant event in my authorial career in 2015 would be the publication of my novel Dragonfly by Hythloday House, a small but discerning publishing company.

Joking aside, Dragonfly is a self-published novel. It's self-published for what I assume are the usual reasons. Perhaps I might have eventually found someone to take it, if I had waited long enough. But all that time I was waiting, I could not be moving on to other projects. I make something like $2.50 on each copy I sell, electronic or paperback. At this point I've more than recovered the cost of production (due mainly to the large number of sample copies I ordered to get the cover just right), but sales have never really taken off. Which is unsurprising, as I don't go out of my way to promote it (or myself). Some people are very good at that sort of thing. I am not. My promotional method is to go on making new things in relative obscurity.

That said, a number of people have taken the trouble to buy my novel and read it, and I have gotten some positive feedback (see here and here, for instance), for which I cannot begin to express my gratitude. It's made me feel that I'm not wasting my time, artistically speaking, even if my audience remains relatively small. And my audience will surely continue to grow as I bring my series to completion.

So much of my energy in 2015 went toward the writing of a sequel, which I completed late in December, under the title The King of Nightspore's Crown. As it currently stands it's slightly longer than the first installment. Taking place against a truly amazing number of backdrops, it's the most significant juxtaposition of neolithic cultures with space-age technology since Yor, the Hunter from the Future. I hope to have it out sometime around the middle of 2016.

In other publication news, two of my stories, "Day of the Dragonfly" and "The Scale-Tree," appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. My story "At the Edge of the Sea" appeared in the Best of 2014 anthology. Another story of mine, "Salt and Sorcery," was accepted for publication sometime later this year. It seems only fair to mention that I make far more money selling short stories than copies of my novel, so, if you like what I do around here and wish to support me and people like me, I hope you will consider supporting BCS through the purchase of subscriptions or anthologies.

I managed to do some art in 2015, despite being extremely busy. A number of paintings and drawings were directly related to my writing endeavors, but I also did some illustrations of local history. My favorite item was probably my map, shown to the left. I'm looking forward to doing a more extensive map for The King of Nightspore's Crown, though I'm not certain how it's going to work yet.

In August I had a one-man exhibition in Del Rio. It featured a sort of shrine to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and to vintage mass-market paperback art in general. Unfortunately I am quite isolated in my predilections here. I did, however, share the front page news with Donald Trump, which is something, I guess. An interview about my art appeared over at greydogtales in December.

The main complicating factor this year was the birth of my daughter. A joyous occasion, to be sure. But, in this vale of tears, joy is seldom unalloyed with grief.

Longtime readers will no doubt recall my adopted rooster, Pappagallo, who literally dropped into my yard out of a stormy April sky. I noted the last time I wrote of him that, while seemingly intelligent, he lacked the street smarts that the neighborhood feral chickens need to survive. Despite this, he managed to thrash the alpha male of the resident flock, an event he celebrated with an obstreperous hours-long crowing session.

But why, you ask, not without some trepidation, am I speaking of him in the past tense? Alas, while we were off having our baby, and a neighbor was watching our animals, Pappagallo vanished, never to be seen again.

The unseasonably warm weather at the time ended with a cold snap after we returned from the hospital. I observed the hatchling brood of a feral hen shrink from seven chicks to a single one over the course of several days. Burdened as I was with the grief of Pappagallo's presumed demise, it was too much to watch those little peeping fuzz balls vanish one at a time. So I captured the last of them, bought some chick feed, and began raising it in a box in my kitchen.

Over the next few weeks our chick (named Lucky by my children) grew and grew. One evening as she saw me passing by she began cheeping most piteously and insistently. I finally rolled back the mesh covering her box, and, much to my surprise, she flew up to my shoulder and perched there. After that it became a settled routine for Lucky to emerge each evening and sit on my shoulder while I washed the dishes. She was very affectionate, and liked to nestle down in a warm spot and pick at the loose threads on my clothing and tug at my hair with her beak, or walk back and forth from shoulder to shoulder across the nape of my neck.

Eventually our little hen moved to the back porch, after which she was released into the yard. She steadfastly refuses to join the feral flock that brought her into the world and remains very tame. Sometimes she still allows me to handle her. She comes into the house when coaxed, and flies up on my shoulder, which drives my wife crazy. Every day I go out the front door to find her waiting for me. She eagerly runs at my heels to receive her dish of feed out back.

In just a few weeks both Lucky and my daughter will be one year old. How the time flies!

An account of my doings this year would be incomplete without the list of books that I read; actually, the reason I started doing these retrospectives was to keep my lists written down somewhere. So here it is, my 2015 reading list, not including works in progress:

• Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson
• Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Stuart Little by E. B. White
• The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
• The Book of Genesis
• The Book of Tobit
• Geometry: Euclid and Beyond by Robin Hartshorne
• The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen
• Quest for the Future by A. E. van Vogt
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The African Queen by C. S. Forester
• The Spiritual Canticle by St. John of the Cross
• Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush by Charles Saunders
• Imaro by Charles Saunders
• The Moon of Skulls by Robert E. Howard
• Two Hundred Million A.D. by A. E. van Vogt
• The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard
• The Life of the White Ant by Maurice Maeterlinck
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• History of the Conquest of Peru by William H. Prescott
• Fourier Series and Orthogonal Functions by Harry F. Davis
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
• The Last Hieroglyph by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron
• The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Maze of the Enchanter by Clark Ashton Smith
• Crime Stories and Other Writings by Dashiell Hammett
• Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Playback by Raymond Chandler
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
• No Holidays for Honeybees by Mervyn Kaufman
• The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald
• The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake by G. E. Bentley, Jr.
• The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

Quite a few of these are read-alouds with my older kids, who are five and seven. Their favorite was A Wrinkle in Time, which we read twice. In my own reading, I note numerous jungle stories and histories. Many, perhaps most, of the books I read this year were things I'd read before but, for one reason or another, wanted to revisit.

Most of the time I find reading to be its own reward. This year my reading paid off in the form of a raffle through the town library's summer reading program for adults. However, the coveted prize consisted of dinner for two at the local country club, of which I am (somewhat pointedly) not a member. A zoning board meeting gone bad (me vs. my filthy rich neighbors' contractor over an eight-foot-high security/velociraptor fence along our mutual property line) made me even less enthusiastic about hobnobbing with the upper crust of my little South Texas town.

As a result, I waited until the expiration date, which was December 31, to use my gift certificate. I took my five-year-old daughter as my dining companion. She was a perfect lady. I wish I could say the same of the woman who stopped by our table to introduce herself to my daughter (though not to me!) and kept insistently asking her name, despite the fact that my daughter had just taken a bite, and was requesting (with a demure smile and graciously upheld little hand) a moment in which to swallow. The lady's husband proceeded to ask my daughter if I was her "grandpa." My daughter's correction of this bizarre misapprehension (I'm in my mid-thirties and haven't a wrinkle or gray hair) produced an odd reaction, a mixture of surprise, suspicion, and/or condescension. I'm not too good at reading people, but these little incidents can occur only so many times before you start noticing a pattern. Here I suspect I committed the faux pas of being a hirsute Puerto Rican dining with a fair-skinned, red-haired little girl in the very place where some people go to see local categories preserved and distinctions maintained.

But let us not dwell on such anachronistic unpleasantness. The management was extremely hospitable, and overall it was a pleasant way to end the year. Of course we toasted (she with her sparkling cider and I with my whisky sour) Francisco Pizarro and William H. Prescott, to whom we owed our dinner.

Raphael Ordoñez on Art and Hissing Cockroaches

There's an interview about my art and writing up over at greydogtales today. Our attention was first drawn to greydogtales (currently devoted to "weird fiction, weird art and even weirder lurchers") by their William Hope Hodgson festival in October. You can check out the interview here.

And, if you happen to be a visitor from greydogtales, welcome! Please peruse my blog and enjoy all the extremely important and relevant things I've written about art, fantasy, logic, and chickens. Here's a link to my art; my short fiction can be accessed through the sidebar, and you can purchase my novel Dragonfly here.

Battle-Off at Grimdark

In other news, I've entered an excerpt from Dragonfly in the Grimdark Magazine Battle-Off. I don't exactly consider myself a specialist in grim, martial literature, but I do enjoy terse yet vivid action scenes. Perhaps it's a bit impertinent of me to submit my piece alongside those of people who focus on such things, but, as they say, no publicity is bad publicity! I'll enjoy taking a look at the other entries, at any rate.

Really good out-and-out battle scenes are very hard to write. If I were to write a full account of the clash of two (human) armies, I think I'd feel safest hewing close battles I've studied, e.g., those of ancient Greece. I remember my dad, who went through the U. S. Army War College, spending hours upon hours and days upon days reading books and writing papers on the art of waging war. It gave me a lively appreciation for the intricacies of the subject. Of course, the goal is to convince the average reader, not an expert on maneuvers.

As an avid reader of classic fantasy, I find Tolkien's battles thrilling and uniquely satisfying, Robert E. Howard's battles sometimes quite good and sometimes very dull and unreal, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' battles a bit silly but delightful nonetheless. E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, otherwise so meticulous in its description of martial feats (and accoutrements), is curiously reticent when it comes to battles, resorting to a number of subterfuges to avoid them. I wonder if he tried his hand at them but found the results wanting?

So anyway, I see that my battle (involving cyclopes) has garnered nine votes as of now. Alas, the links at Grimdark aren't being generated quite right at this point, and the URL refers to my novel as Firefly, a very different kind of insect, but have no fear, my Dragonfly excerpt is near, a mere two clicks away. You just might have to hunt around a bit.

Albrect Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529.

I WON! I WON! I WON!

What did I win, you ask? One month ago, I posted that I was entering a reading contest with the county library. Several days ago, I posted that the reading period was over, but that the drawing hadn't taken place yet. Well, the drawing has now taken place, and...

[drumroll]

I WON DINNER FOR TWO AT THE LOCAL COUNTRY CLUB!!!

[dull roar of cheering crowds]

Yes, I, homely homebody Raphael C. Ordoñez (my pen name doesn't have a middle initial but I added one in there for dramatic effect), will get to rub elbows with the high society of the remote Texas county in which I live. I may even meet my neighbors, those Toads of Toad Hall, those proud proprietors (scroll to the bottom) of Ascot Park, whose ongoing construction project has expanded to include extra tree-felling, driveway-jackhammering, brick-sawing, road-gouging, and geothermal drilling.

Ahem. But you see why they think nothing of grinding us bohemian intellectual types into formless pulps of misery. They can always resort to the country club! And, for one happy night, I, Raphael C. Ordoñez, will be one of them.

My only points of concern are (a) whether I can get a good steak there, cooked just as I like it, tender and slightly pink in the middle, and (b) whether they'll let me buy a drink. As to point (b), my wife has eaten there for a ladies' club she belongs to, and they wouldn't serve non-members alcohol. So I'm filled with trepidation.

I case you were wondering, here's what ended up on my reading log:

• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith (Night Shade Books)
• The Last Hieroglyph by Clark Ashton Smith (Night Shade Books)
• History of the Conquest of Peru by William H. Prescott
• Fourier Series and Orthogonal Functions by Harry F. Davis

I received one ticket for every three hours read, for a total of eleven tickets (the first three hours just count toward a certificate). I didn't count reading to my kids, because they counted that on their logs, and it seemed like cheating somehow.

Well, that's all for now. I need to go compose my acceptance speech.

Dragonfly at Black Gate

Fletcher Vredenburgh, who, in my humble opinion, does an inestimable service to Sword & Sorcery as a genre by reviewing online S&S short stories from the perspective of someone who actually appreciates and enjoys such things, has reviewed my most recent endeavor, "Day of the Dragonfly," over at Black Gate. I'm getting plenty o' hits from Black Gate and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, so I'd like to offer everyone visiting my site a big howdy from the armpit of Texas.

Howdy! Please take a minute to peruse all the interesting, amusing, irrelevant, and downright embarrassing things I've posted over the last few years.

Metapost: 2014

Another year has passed and I'm still here. Time for some reminiscence and reflection.

Let's see, let's see. Last January I decided to keep a list of all the books I read in 2014. Here they are, in reverse chronological order:

• "Farmer Giles of Ham" by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• A Vintage from Atlantis by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
• Exodus from the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Caldé of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe
• The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" by William Hope Hodgson
• The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
• The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" by C. S. Lewis
• Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
• The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
• Pedagogical Sketchbook by Paul Klee
• Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
• For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming
• God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell
• The Way of Perfection by St. Teresa of Avila
• Thunderball by Ian Fleming
• The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
• Politics, Books I-IV, Aristotle
• The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
• Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
• She by H. Rider Haggard
• "Ill Met in Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Vanishing Tower by Michael Moorcock
• The Pawns of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
• VALIS by Philip K. Dick
• Slan by A. E. van Vogt
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
• Imaginary Worlds by Lin Carter
• Shapes, Space, and Symmetry by Alan Holden
• How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Euclid - The Creation of Mathematics by Benno Artmann
• The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
• The Weird of the White Wolf by Michael Moorcock
• Paul Klee on Modern Art by Paul Klee
• The Life of the Ant by Maurice Maeterlinck
• The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett
• Lake of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Nightside of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
• The Swordsman of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline
• Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright
• The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt

Some stats seem in order. I count 54 entries, which comes out to approximately one book per week, not a bad rate. I read parts of other things, mostly stuff from the Great Books collection, as well as books on art practice, theory, and history, and a number of essays from E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful. I have a deplorably short attention span, and my list leaves off numerous things I began but then set aside. At the beginning of the year I also had a "Books I'm Reading Now" list, but its length became too embarrassing to keep up, and I eventually deleted it. Eight of these items were read to my kids, in addition to a bunch of fairy tales from Andrew Lang's collection of many colors, and two were read to my wife. Several I listened to as audiobooks while painting late at night.

My focus this year was obviously on vintage fantasy and science fiction, as I've been incorporating various elements of these into my writing. The most recent work I read was Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright (2009),which completes the Null-A saga begun by A. E. van Vogt in the forties; aside from this, the most recent novel was Gene Wolfe's Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The oldest work of fiction I read was The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (1872), and that to my children; the second oldest was She by H. Rider Haggard (1887). Gene Wolfe wins the coveted award of Author with Most Books Read by Me in 2014, with Philip K. Dick coming in second.

Remarkably, there is only one item of "literature" on my list: Milton's Paradise Lost, which I'd already read many times. Three items were devoted to the craft of writing, two to mathematics, two to politics, two to art, one to the contemplative life, and one to ants. The rest were novels and novellas.

 

I note that only four items on my list were written by women. Should I be concerned? A lot of people out there would say, most emphatically, yes, you should be. Hm. In my defense, I'll point out that it's actually rather unusual for me, considering that I count Jane Austen, Willa Cather, and Flannery O'Connor as three of my favorite authors. I was reading mostly vintage pulp so there wasn't much to choose from. Only one of my fantasy reads was by a woman (Leigh Brackett), but I sought it out deliberately; I did read a few of C. L. Moore's Jirel stories that aren't written down here, as they seemed too short to be worth recording, and I started something by Ursula K. LeGuin. In addition, the single most substantial book on my list is by a woman: The Way of Perfection by St. Teresa of Jesus, who happens to be a Doctor of the Church. It was assigned reading for my formation as a Carmelite Secular, and I studied it slowly and reflectively over several months.*

I saw several movies in the theater, including The Lego Movie (awesome), Godzilla (pretty good in some ways, quite stupid in others), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (not bad), Guardians of the Galaxy (awesome, despite being a Marvel property, which I tend to avoid), and Nightcrawler (meh). I also began a project of watching and blogging about seventies sci-fi, e.g.:

• Soylent Green
• Going Ape for Apes
• Three from the Seventies
• Logan's Run
• The Man Who Fell to Earth

For some reason these posts get lots of hits.

Other notable events in my 2014 life:

• I had my first public art exhibition at a real live gallery that charged a commission on sales, and sold about ten pieces, mostly to locals. I also completed five paintings in oil and watercolor, including a groovy book cover, and wrote a multi-part post musing about art.
• I saw two stories published, a third accepted for publication, and a previously published story anthologized.
• I had my solution to a Star Trek logic puzzle featured at a major mainstream venue.
• I made my first promises as a Carmelite Secular, but continue to be conflicted about belonging to the Order.
• I adopted a stray leghorn rooster that literally fell from the sky during a thunderstorm and began following me around like a lost kitten. He's lived in my yard for about eight months now. His name is Pappagallo, after the idealistic leader in The Road Warrior. He's very smart and likes me to go out and talk to him, but despite his enormous size he's too afraid to stand up to the feral rooster that comes in our yard (that would be The Lord Humungus, I guess), and I'm always having to defend his food and his new feral hen-girlfriend (Chickie).
• The house next door, built originally for the former Governor's mother, was bought by a branch of the local gentry, who proceeded to chop down all the trees along our property. They're expanding the house in a major construction project, their model being Gormenghast Castle, with the goal of hosting arena football tournaments in their bedroom. So I've gathered, at any rate. I've been told they're spending one and a half million dollars.
• I applied for tenure, was elected president of our faculty senate, represented the university at the system office in Capital City (the Windy Apple itself), where I had some excellent Indian food beside a natural artesian well in a downtown basement, and other boring things like that.

While this about describes my general state of mind in 2014.

My goal this year is to try to get my novel in a publishable form, cover, map and all. (I've finished my map, and will get around to posting a raw scan and blathering about it in a day or two.) I've also been invited to show my art at a public gallery in a border town about an hour away, with a stipend for travel and lodging, and I'm working on producing a few new things for that. Right now I'm reading The Return of Tarzan, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novel, The Princess and Curdie (to my kids), and G. E. Bentley's biography of William Blake. And then there's the baby coming next month, and the new graduate program I'm working on developing.

So, all in all, 2015 seems off to a good start.


* I will also mention that my wife read practically nothing BUT novels by female authors, e.g., George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Willa Cather, in 2014. The Mill on the Floss, ugh. But at any rate, we balance each other out.

Logical Self-Congratulation

Hey! My solution to the "extremely difficult" Star Trek puzzle I posted last week is reprinted today at io9 with my permission (scroll way down).

I worked the puzzle out while watching my students take a final exam. I was interested in it mainly because I teach a course on discrete math, covering things like formal logic, relations, and graph theory, and I'm always looking for interesting new problems. But as a mathemagician, I'm more interested in how to create puzzles like this than in how to solve them. I wonder how Professor Finkel did it? Perhaps he added one statement at a time until his program gave him a single solution. From a logical point of view, it was much simpler than it need have been, given that only one statement connected the two "parts" of the puzzle.

Robbie Gonzalez, the column's author, says this about the puzzle:

I'm going to come right out and say it: This puzzle is, in fact, "extremely difficult." It is not so much one puzzle as it is several logic puzzles. Some of those puzzles are nested, such that certain conclusions cannot be made until one has accurately arrived at some other conclusion or conclusions. This kind of puzzle can get very complicated very quickly, and solving it typically involves the use of a spreadsheet or some kind of table to keep track of all the relationships in play. 

It's also the kind of puzzle that begs for a programmatic approach. And, in fact, that's exactly how Finkel [the professor who created the puzzle] solves it himself. "This admission may come as a surprise," he writes me by email, "but I have no idea how to attack this puzzle with pen and paper!"

Well, now he and the rest of the Internet know. And maybe, because of that knowledge, the world is just a tiny bit less dark, a tiny bit less confusing. Maybe someone, somewhere, will go to sleep easier tonight, knowing which Enterprise NCC-1701-D crew member outranks which at Fizzbin. Just maybe. And that makes it all worthwhile.

Arts of the Beautiful: The Complete Set

Here, for convenience, are links to all of my award-winning* Arts of the Beautiful posts, collected into one handy list:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

And here is a link to my earlier Arts of the Ugly post, which is thematically related.


* Not actually award-winning.

An Observation

There is something terrifying and depressing about putting your art out there for people to see.

As long as you're holding something back, you can always say to yourself, I have this in reserve, and can pull it out when I really need to impress. But once it's out there in the cold, clear light of day, you can at last see it from every side, and realize how very small and inadequate it is, and how flawed. Every person who views the work is a curved mirror, and in them you scrutinize your naked self from a million different angles, and are petrified as by the gorgon's head.

It takes a certain humility to strive for any type of greatness, for if you fail then people will see it. It calls for magnanimity, for strict attention to the work itself, for forgetfulness of self. Pusillanimity is secretly tied to pride, the pride that would say to God, I went and buried my talent for I know that you are a hard master, thus flinging his gifts in his teeth.

That is all.

Tell it Slant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

— Emily Dickinson

Brown Study

There's something melancholy about sitting by an open window late at night, writing, listening to a train whistle on the edge of town. I often hear them in the hours after midnight. When I see them during the day they're always full of gravel. There are big strip mines in the desert west of the city, beyond the river, which is perennially dry. Lately a forest of wind generators has cropped up on the desolate hills where once a mad Frenchman lorded it over the native tribes, back when this was part of Spain. It's strange, how the same people who decry strip mining seemingly don't mind filling the earth with these symbols of progress which, once the subsidies stop coming in, will surely be allowed to fall to pieces. As long as it isn't within sight of Aspen or Park City, I suppose.

But I digress. I was writing about the sad sound of the train, which I can still hear humming up at the north end of town. I have the window open, and the lace curtains keep blowing against me. It rained earlier and the air is cool now.

There's a scene at the end of David Lean's Doctor Zhivago that often comes to my mind. It's the one where Yuri is staying with Lara and her daughter at Varykino, which has stood long empty, sealed off by the government, surrounded by vast empty fields of snow, encased in ice. At one point Lara wakes up, hears the wolves howling. "This is an awful time to be alive," she says. "No," Yuri replies, with warmth and certainty. And it's there that he writes his greatest poetry.

I've never read the book. But for me the meaning of the film is that life must go on—will go on—no matter what happens in the world. Poets will keep straining for beauty. If the world hinders them, well, they'll do it in spite of the world. The more harried and oppressed they are, the more pure and refined will be the fruits of their hearts and minds.

I hear another train whistle.

One Cheer for Misfits

My predilections for reading in fantasy tend toward the "antiquarian." Give me some battered old Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks and perhaps a few other volumes here and there, and I’ll be happy. It isn’t that I haven’t read more recent work. I just find that much of it lacks the substance, the freshness, the vigor, and the strangeness of works like The Worm Ouroboros or The Time Machine or A Voyage to Arcturus or "The Tower of the Elephant." So much of it consists of trite and over-clever recombinations of things that have been done to death, the precise opposite of what fantasy should be.

Many of the writers I revere would never get published today. Publishing is simply too monolithic, too uniform; there is no room for drolleries or grotesques. Then again, even in their own time, writers like E. R. Eddison had to go through small publishers, and sold perhaps a few thousand copies at most. So perhaps the advent of indie publishing and contemporary small presses and online magazines and the leveling of the playing field through outlets like Amazon.com are the contemporary answer to the eccentric and the grotesque.

Let the reader decide if he wants to read my stories. That’s what I say.

First Post

This is my first post on my first attempt at a blog. Beginning things is always a little awkward, and starting a blog is especially so. Here I am, writing something in public space for others to view, when I know very well that I’m completely unknown and that no one will ever view it. So, then, why am I starting a blog? There are two very simple reasons.

The first is that I’ve been writing fantasy, and hope soon to be published. In my opinion, readers buy authors rather than books or stories. So I’m starting a blog where I can speak freely about what interests me, so that prospective readers can decide whether I’m right for them.

The second reason is that, while some people think to write, I write to think. It’s my hope that having a blog will motivate me to discipline my random musings and keep me intellectually and artistically honest. So, as far as that goes, it doesn’t matter if no one ever comes here. All I need is the remote possibility.