"Raft of Conquistadors" at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly

My latest Carvajal story, "Raft of Conquistadors," is live at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. It takes place on Padre Island at an unspecified time before "Heart of Tashyas" and is a tasteful and historically accurate* account of the ill-fated Narváez expedition featuring ancient aliens and semiaquatic slug men.

In case you're confused, here's the chronology thus far:

• Raft of Conquistadors
• Pink Gneiss **
• Heart of Tashyas
• White Rainbow, Brown Devil
• I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds

Now go read "Raft of Conquistadors"!

* Not actually tasteful or historically accurate.
** Coming soon!

Poison and Cigarette Butts

When I paint, I begin with a vision of a thing to be represented, but I find, as I really get down to business, that I take the picture as a plane surface covered with pigment. My task, as a painter, is to make as beautiful a carpet of color and form as my skill permits. Forms from the natural world are admitted and retained, just as colors are, but both, and the ideas that inspired the painting in the first place, are subordinate to the unity of the final product.

I have something of the same approach to writing stories. Whatever material elements may go into it, in the end I'm just trying to make an interesting pattern with the things I have at my disposal. Sometimes the things I have at my disposal are ugly, like Jackson Pollock's cigarette butts; sometimes they're poisonous, like the arsenic-containing emerald green used by Van Gogh. Well, you're not supposed to eat a painting, are you? Something similar might be said of a story.

I never set out to make a point in a story. That's not to say the things I think about and argue about don't find their way in there. It's just that they're like Jackson's cigarette butts. I do think the pursuit of truth important. I just don't care to do it in stories. Sometimes I even find it fun to seem to make a case for the opposite of what I believe to be the truth. That bugs people these days, because they want to know where you stand on all the important issues before they decide to like your work. I guess that's only natural, what with the Internet being overrun by pitchfork-waving mobs of one stripe or another. But it's also terribly boring.

Being an autistic Puerto Rican Greek mathematician in small-town borderland Texas, I have a skewed view of things. At least, I'm led to conclude so when I have conversations with other people. I'm like one of those strange side characters in Dostoevsky, like Ippolit in The Idiot, or Kirillov in The Possessed. My view comes out in weird and (to me) unpredictable ways.

*

For a few years I've thinking about how "magical multiracial" fantasy (with elves and dwarves or whatever) reflects, distorts, or falsifies race issues in the real world. I mean, that type of fiction is read mainly by white people in the anglosphere, right? At its most commercial-generic, it represents a society consisting of discrete categories of beings that coexist without mixing, which reminds me of those modern celebrations of "diversity" that often amount to a kind of segregation.

The magical multirace paradigm was set by Tolkien, although Tolkien, to be fair, got it at least partially from the Poetic Edda and such things. There are various human races in Tolkien, such as the Easterlings and the Haradrim. Aside from Sam's musings, though, they're painted in broad strokes as scarcely-human hordes. There's much talk, too, of greater men intermarrying with lesser men, to the detriment of the former. Does Tolkien, within his own universe, think it a bad thing for higher races to mix with lower races? Given what he says elsewhere about the "sin" of the elves and the role of the hobbits, I'd be inclined to say that his view was nuanced, at the very least. Still, there's a lot to be looked into there, such as the fact that Tolkien came originally from South Africa, and that The Lord of the Rings was conceived and written during the first half of the twentieth century, when a lot of ugly ideas about race were coming to a head all over the world, not just in Germany.

I've mused a bit about half-breeds in fantasy literature, and half-breeds certainly figure in Tolkien, to an extent not often approached by writers of the commercial-generic fantasy that capitalizes on his work. He has mixtures of human races, such as the men and hobbits of Bree, but also, more memorably, mixtures of human and non-human races, such as the progeny of Beren and Luthien. Philosophically, those are a little different, as Tolkien makes it clear in his letters that the elves are not a distinct biological species, differing from men only in their spiritual constitution. It's interesting that such half-breeds are allowed to choose which race they'll belong to, a choice sadly denied to human half-breeds, who must inhabit both worlds, and therefore neither. The ill-favored squint-eyed Southerner at Bree, who appears to be part human, part orc, is not treated so sympathetically, and we are not told that he got a choice like Elrond Halfelven's. Actually, the way he's described reminds me of the descriptions of mulattoes and "Asiatic" half-breeds in some of G. K. Chesterton's more offensively racist stories, and I think a case could be made that Tolkien and the writers who came after him were merely transplanting those old fears of half-breeds into less overtly racist soil.

That said, it's only by being great writers that Tolkien and Chesterton have the capacity to offend. The most your standard commercial-generic writer can aspire to is to be slightly irritating. And I do find discrete categorizations of races, magical or otherwise, to be slightly irritating. You don't just see it in fantasy. You see it whenever members of "other" races are given character traits stemming from race alone, offset, in cleverer works, by superficial differences.

Scene from John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which I think is a sly
reference to what I'm talking about. (Is that Cuervo Jones at the wheel???)

In reaction to one of my Carvajal stories, a psychologist friend of mine, whose professional interests include evolutionary psychology, explained that, according to theory, it's natural (in the evolutionary sense) to have a mistrust of half-breeds, because it's unknown to whose tribe their loyalties belong. To that my reply was: perhaps it's natural or justifiable, perhaps not, but, as far as my story is concerned, I don't really care, because I'm not trying to make a point. My friend was trying to understand what I was getting at, but the truth is that I wasn't getting at anything at all. I was just making a pattern with things I've picked up here and there.

Religion makes an appearance in those Carvajal stories, too, though I'm not certain that the faith of Hispania corresponds to real-world Catholicism. Carvajal is, at any rate, an archetypal Bad Catholic, praying on the fishbone rosary mentioned somewhere by St. John of the Cross while doing his best to be a conquistador. Because I am myself Catholic, a faith it's increasingly hard to be proud of these days, I like to render the religion of the various tribes he encounters sympathetically, while I render his religion as worthy of contempt, incomprehension, or terror. The red demon-god at the end of "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" is based on the seraph that gave St. Francis of Assisi the stigmata, and the institutional church appears as a literary cigarette butt in one of my forthcoming stories. But, again, I'm not really making a point. I'm just letting things come in where they want to.

*

My professional and artistic and personal lives are beginning to converge in ways that I wouldn't have expected several years ago, and I feel the need to emphasize that my fiction really is art, that is, a set of patterns I've formed so as to make pleasing units, and not, say, a coded manifesto. That's not to say that my deeply-held beliefs and opinions wouldn't be offensive or incomprehensible to some of the people who might be interested in them. They're just not to be found in my stories or my rambling, contrarian blog posts.

That said, get ready for "Raft of Conquistadors," coming out in the November issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly!

Carload of Conquistadors

Life beyond art has become a perfect s**tstorm of late, which has left me some time and energy for said art, but none, alas, for blogging.

Just to give a fairly innocuous example, I took the fam on a two-week camping trip in June, only to collide with a majestic leaping bull elk in a national park, totaling our beloved Ordoñezmobile and leaving us (me, my wife, our three kids) stranded, first on the side of a mountain (with all our gear, the subjects of intense scrutiny by park police), then in a campsite, for days, with no way to get more food (fortunately we'd just stocked up), no rental car being available due to a massive hailstorm having struck the region, with black bears literally snuffling around our tents at night and leaving muddy paw prints on top of our bear box in the morning, in which we had thankfully thought to enclose our three-year-old's carseat, which is undoubtedly the most smellable thing we own, after all of which we were granted, not a minivan or an SUV as we had been promised by our insurance company, but, ironically, an Impala (another leaping ungulate!) in which we were amazingly able to fit our gear and dependents (as the Egyptians fit their blocks of stone into the pyramids) although we had to bestow our faithful roofbag upon a chance-met traveler at a hotel.

Of course we continued our trip after securing our distant rental car through a devious use of shuttle buses and a laconic and somewhat unreliable taxi driver, because we Ordoñeces aren't quitters, although we were put to the test when we discovered a subsequent campsite, which we'd reserved months before, to have been inundated by a flash flood which had deposited a smooth, foot-deep sheet of white badlands silt, out of which the picnic table rose like something from The Drowned World, which, in another dose of irony, I happened to be reading at the time; then, to take another page from The Drowned World, we arrived back at our home in south Texas, which this summer is like the point of heat focused by a magnifying lens, only to find our air conditioner broken.

And that was my vacation.

I am nevertheless happy to report that the newest installment in the Tashyas saga will grace the e-pages of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly this fall, in my story "Raft of Conquistadors," which relates the first fateful landfall of Francisco Carvajal y Lopez in what's now the Lone Star State. The action takes place on Padre Island, the bleak and strangely remote barrier island that has kept south Texas, from Corpus Christi to Brownsville, sparsely inhabited for generations. The story will be illustrated by me.

Although it may be of interest to no one but myself, these stories excite me because they let me evoke all the varied landscapes and climates that "Tashyas" has to offer; I've been making somewhat frequent trips to the Corpus Christi area since I was a little kid, when my dad would take me on collecting expeditions for his marine biology class. Right now I'm working on a Carvajal story set in central Texas, set in the vicinity of...no, I won't say it.

This summer I've also been working on the cover painting for Ark of the Hexaemeron, which is still in the process of being written, but which will, when complete, be the first heroic fantasy epic that I know of to feature three-dimensional manifold topology (sorry). I haven't done much else in the way of illustration or art-for-art's-sake lately, but I have been doing some mathematical sculptures for a little museum I've created at my college, inspired by the beautiful models and displays math departments used to curate around the year 1900, e.g., here and here.

Here, for instance, is the "dodecahedron family," printed on my 3D printer and subsequently painted:

Going from left to right, top to bottom, we have: the icosahedron, the dual icosahedron / dodecahedron, the triacontahedron (the convex hull of the dual pair, colored as the compound of five cubes), the dodecahedron, the icosidodecahedron (the quasiregular solid associated with the dual pair), the right-handed compound of five tetrahedra (colored as the triacontahedron), the compound of five cubes, and the skeletal compound of five tetrahedra.

While painting these I listened to Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes, an excellent noir set in a New Mexico town modeled partly on Santa Fe.

I have also been experimenting with paper-folding techniques. What especially interest me are the algebraic aspects; theoretically, origami is quite similar to the compass-and-straightedge constructions you did in high school. I've been doing origami for a long time, having been introduced to it as a kid by a Japanese friend of the family, though I don't pretend to be proficient. Just recently, though, I've discovered "kusudama" (a term that gets thrown around rather loosely) or modular origami.

Here, for instance, is the compound of five tetrahedra, assembled, without glue, from 10 sheets of square origami paper cut into thirty 1:3 rectangles, using the instructions found here.

Each strut is one 1:3 rectangle; three struts fit into one another at each point.

The five tetrahedra are not connected to one another in any way. The tricky part was getting them to intersect correctly while connecting the struts at the vertices.

There are some books on modular origami out there; the best I've found are by Ekaterina Lukasheva, who apparently has a math background. Here's one I've made according to her instructions:

It's assembled from 15 square sheets of origami paper cut into two 1:2 rectangles apiece. The 30 rectangles are all folded in exactly the same way and attached to one another without glue. The patterns are chosen according to the compound of five cubes, with six rectangles of each pattern, and one pattern for each of the five cubes. In the end, the piece is roughly the same as a triacontahedron.

Blogging will continue to be light, but I'll probably soon post some thoughts about the things I've been reading and watching.

"White Rainbow and Brown Devil" at HFQ

The vagabond conquistador Francisco Carvajal y Lopez continues his grim, rapacious, and not-terribly-successful trek across southwest Texas in the latest installment of his exploits, "White Rainbow and Brown Devil," a tale of high adventure and weird horror appearing in Issue 35 of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Published out of chronological order because of the awesome Triple Crossover Event that, as the perspicacious reader may have noticed, took place at HFQ last year, it falls between "Heart of Tashyas" and "I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds," being a sequel to the former but preceding the latter by an as-yet-undetermined-by-historians amount of time.

"White Rainbow and Brown Devil" takes place in a geographically telescoped version of what's now Val Verde County, following the Rio Grande and the route of U.S. 90, from Sycamore Creek in the east, past San Felipe Springs, across the Devil's River, and through Seminole Canyon, to the Pecos River in the west. As my bio states, I'm a circuit-riding professor; this is one of the circuits I ride. (In a pick-up truck, not a horse.) Past Del Rio, the country is desolate, torturously prickly, beautiful, and slightly sinister, with ruined stone buildings here and there, and abandoned bridges from the old highway paralleling the modern one. The bed of the Devil's River is under the Amistad Reservoir now; one wonders what other dark secrets those placid waters hide.

Fate Bell Shelter, Seminole Canyon

Seminole Canyon, which is named after Black Seminole Scouts posted there by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century, was first inhabited something like 10,000 years ago, with paintings in Panther Cave and the Fate Bell Shelter dating back some 8,000 years, among the oldest in North America.

Other items of note appearing in HFQ Issue 35 include stories "That Sleep of Death" by Mary-Jean Harris and "Things of Shreds and Patches" by Norman Doeg, and poems "Washer at the Ford" by James Byers and "Dragon Mountain" by Mary Soon Lee. The issue also contains HFQ's first foray into audio, with the poem "Fire Lover" written and narrated by Karen Bovenmeyer, who also narrates for the horror podcast Pseudopod. Please go check it out!

The picture that accompanies my own story is an original watercolor. You can read about it here.

Francisco Carvajal y Lopez: A (Self) Portrait

My story "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" is set to appear in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Issue #35 in February. It's a direct sequel to my first Carvajal story, "Heart of Tashyas," coming between it and "I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds," and takes place in the Southwest Texas border region, which is where I live, beginning at Sycamore Creek and traveling up the Rio Grande across Devil's River and Seminole Canyon to the Pecos crossing. (The geography is somewhat telescoped.)

The story will be accompanied by an original watercolor painting of its protagonist, the vagabond conquistador Francisco Carvajal y Lopez:

That is, essentially, a self portrait, except that I don't have long hair, I don't wear earrings, I don't encourage birds of the American subtropics to perch on my shoulder, and I don't go about armed to the teeth. Ultimately it's just a picture of the guy in my story, but to me it also asks the question To what extent do I identify with my protagonist? without really answering it. I looked to Frida Kahlo for inspiration.

Here's the slightly modified version that will accompany the story:

That's a green jay on his/my shoulder, incidentally. In the United States, green jays are found only in South Texas. The sewage treatment plant outside the town I live in is pretty much the northern limit of their range. I sometimes go there to bird-watch, and the jays are my favorite thing to see. A magnificent, lime green bird with a dark blue head. Much of the adjoining nature reserve occupies an old landfill covered with thickets of prickly pear; Carvajal's first adventure in "Heart of Tashyas" began at the foot of the small extinct volcano just across the highway, on a site now occupied by trailer homes and the ruins of a fort.

Here's the initial sketch:

The background is a prickly pear cactus wallpaper design of my own devising:

There are exactly seventeen types of wallpaper symmetry. My design is described by the group known as pg in the IUC (International Union of Crystallography) notation. I created it by drawing a single prickly pear image and copying it via translations and glide reflections.

I cast this wallpaper upon the Internet for noncommercial use, but I urge the reader to employ it in papering a room only with extreme caution.

World Fantasy Convention 2017

I attended the World Fantasy Convention last week. It was held in San Antonio, my hometown, which I still live not too far from. I didn't stay at the hotel, being too cheap/poor, but fortunately a good old friend of mine had a spare bedroom to offer in the next town over. He was out of town most of the time, but me and his house rabbit (he has a house rabbit) kept each other company.

The convention got off to a bad start for me when, like the moron I am, I saw the picture of the Lila Cockrell Theater on the web page and just assumed, without further inquiry, that the convention was thereabouts, that is, somewhere on the grounds of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. (Henry B. Gonzalez himself once visited my Cub Scout meeting once when I was a kid. When he was leaving, I shouted, "See you later, navigator!", having just seen Flight of the Navigator. Not that you wanted to know that.) Despite not having much common sense, I know downtown S.A. pretty well, and drove straight there and parked and wandered around the empty, enormous, terrifyingly silent corridors of the convention center like Keftu in the Tower of Bel before I figured out my mistake. Why do I always do stupid things like that? I hated to waste my parking fee, so I walked all the way across downtown to where the convention actually was, passing along the way the spot outside the Gunter Hotel where my grandpa had his picture taken when he ran away from home as a teenager. It was Dia de los Muertos, too. By that time I was all steamed up, because November in Texas.

I went to the convention with pretty low expectations, not because I thought the programming would be lacking (and it wasn't), but because I know people go to these things to network, and I'm not exactly good at that. However, although I expected (dreaded) something like the various conferences I've attended in academia, I was pleasantly surprised. The format was similar, sure, but the atmosphere was completely different. Constructive and collaborative rather than competitive. There were lots of writers of various stripes, both obscure people like me and Big Names, people I've rubbed elbows with on the Internet, artists and illustrators, scholars, librarians, and knowledgeable readers. Not a bad mix.

Because I'm vain, the first high point was running into Adrian Simmons in the dealers' room, and seeing the new Heroic Fantasy Quarterly anthology for sale, with two awesome illustrations by Yours Truly, including the following depiction of a naked warrior astride a giant lamprey, which I could imagine gracing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, if Michelangelo had painted naked warriors sitting astride giant lampreys.

From "The Worship of the Lord of the Estuary" by James Frederick William Rowe.

Actually, I was going for a "fannish" look when I drew this, having enjoyed pictures from some of the old fanzines I've seen floating around the Web. I also picked up a copy of Skelos #3, which has a cool story by my friend Scott Cupp, who stopped by my art show in September and encouraged me to go to the convention; he also has a story in Issue 1, a fact I'd somehow overlooked before now. Small world. The Robert E. Howard Foundation had a table, too, with copies of the good new REH biography Blood and Thunder by Mark Finn, who was also at the convention.

Panel discussions I especially enjoyed included ones about keeping Texas weird (and it is a very, very weird place, and not in the ways you might think if you only know it from afar), westerns and fantasy (which touched on many of the themes that have come up in my Tashyas stories), pulp-era influences (before now, how many times in my life have I heard someone who wasn't myself refer to A. E. van Vogt? answer: none), the writings of Lord Dunsany (with three excellent readings by professional narrators), and, best of all, the secret history of the Hyborian Age (secret from L. Sprague de Camp, that is).

Looking back on the convention, I kind of see two sort-of distinct populations. One includes people who game a little, read things like Black Gate, Skelos, and HFQ, and think Robert E. Howard is a masterful writer and aren't afraid to say it. The other, well, I won't go into detail because I don't want to seem like I'm throwing rocks. I went to panels across the spectrum, though, and I found that in some I was like, what are you people even talking about? Actually, it was kind of surprising that there were so many sessions on things I dig. Is that always the case at these?

There were also some really good art talks, the best of which was Gregory Manchess's account of his own long career in illustrating. He went into detail on technique, which I really appreciated. He's recently written and illustrated his own book, Above the Timberline. Another panel featured Manchess and a few other writer-illustrators who are experimenting with telling their own stories instead of illustrating others'. That put a few ideas in my head...

In the dealers' room I picked up an old copy of Philip K. Dick's Now Wait For Last Year. I read it a long time ago and somehow lost my copy. It's not Dick's most well-known novel but it's always stuck with me. It's got a kind of slow sad haplessness that I like, and a stomach-churningly awful marital relationship, and a flatulent dimension-spanning world dictator fighting a grudge-match against stuck-up humans from another solar system. A good book for bad times. I spent a lot of my free time reading it.

All in all I'm definitely glad I went. Let's end on a high note, with my other HFQ illustration (apologies to Gustave Dore).

From "Crown of Sorrows" by Sean Patrick Kelley

The Bone King at HFQ

There's a Far Side cartoon with a crowd of art patrons admiring a painting in a gallery. In the back, one old lady is whispering to another, "My boy made the frame." In that spirit, I announce the appearance of my illustration to "The Enemy's True Name" by Mark Silcox at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. That's right: I made the picture.

The Bone King: drawn in ink, digitally colored. Go check it out! And read the story, too!

As I've said, I've been toying with Photoshop workflow used by people in the comics industry. I've recently become interested in comics and in digital illustration in general. For me, it seems to work best when I begin with a hand-drawn picture with cross-hatched shading and build up a layer of flats, with highlights and shadows in separate layers. Not quite the same as painting, but it's exhilarating to actually be able to change things that need to be changed.

In other artsy news, I'm having an exhibition at a certain university out in Alpine, Texas, this August and September. More details to come. Stop by if you're in the area! I'm also still working on my Enoch and Carvajal stories – I've written several of the latter – but I've been too busy with school to blog regularly. Hopefully that will change once the semester is over.

Right now I'm wrapping up a graduate course on regular polytopes. My school recently purchased a large 3D printer which, for lack of a better place (and because of my shameless begging), is set up in my office, and I'm working on producing some of the interesting solids and compounds we explored this spring. I've also been composing a post on higher-dimensional geometry and genre fiction that I'll have to wrap up some time soon...

Deep in the "Heart of Tashyas"

My recentest story, "Heart of Tashyas," has gotten some positive reviews!

Going in reverse chronological order, let's begin with Fletcher Vredenburg of Stuff I Like fame, in a review over at Black Gate:

The landscape Ordoñez has painted is liminal — a place between cultures in conflict; between badlands and forested hills; between men and wild beasts; between the mundane and the magical. Carvajal, a man divided into parts himself, seems the perfect character to explore this region. While the lust for gold seems to be his driving force, his actions reveal a compassionate, empathetic side, making him not quite a hero, but at least a man of interesting nuance. 

And then there’s the action and adventure. Carvajal’s quest brings him up against were-coyotes, a dangerous wanderer with roots in the Old World, ancient mysteries, and a sinister being of great power. This is top-flight heroic fantasy with a strong sense of place and character. It’s also got a cool picture by Ordoñez.

Next, Tangent Online sums up the story as follows:

Francisco 'El Moreno' Lopez searches for gold no matter the cost in "Heart of the Tashyas" by Raphael Ordoñez. Set in Southwest North America, Lopez drives himself nearly to death performing deeds to impress the local natives enough to get information on any potential gold. Lopez is an excellent protagonist, full of character, action and personality. The characters of the Yacasole, Guerín, and Red Cloud all stand out. The Frenchman, Guerín, makes an excellent foil to Lopez and his madness is very nearly palpable. And the 'thing' at the end really punches the sense of wonder and adventure into a fantastic whole.

The name "Lopez," incidentally, was selected as the maiden name of my great-grandmother, who died (it is said) of a broken heart, and the name of my first cousin twice removed, Perry Lopez, whom I never met, but who starred in Chinatown, Kelly's Heroes, and "Shore Leave" (and numerous other things). The family story is that my great-grandfather, a railroad worker who liked to play the numbers, sent his nephew to California with his winnings. Whether that's true or not I have no idea. Anyway, "Carvajal" was chosen because I read about an eviller-than-usual conquistador named Carvajal, a.k.a., the Demon of the Andes, in a history book. I like to think that my own Carvajal aspires to that level of badness, though of course he doesn't quite reach it.

Finally, Charles Payseur of Quick Sip Reviews reflects on Carvajal's placelessness and the story's liminal genre placement:

This is a nicely drawn historical fantasy that does a great job of capturing the time period of early exploration into what would become North America, and follows Francisco Carvajal y Lopez on a quest for gold. The sole survivor of his expedition, Carvajal, called the Moreno, is an interesting character, first and most a survivor, not greedy exactly but drawn to gold for the status that it might buy, so that he might to rise above his mixed heritage and have a place for himself. Because as he is Carvajal has no real place, no real home. He's between these things, and as much as that keeps him alone and homeless, it also has taught him how to live tough and keep going. The world that he navigates is full of things that he doesn't quite understand but that he doesn't stop to argue. [...]

I also like how the story uses magic and how it goes from being a historical fantasy to being something…a little bit different, pulling on some different traditions to make this story more interesting and complex still. There's a darkness here but it's one that's really only a shadow of the real terror lurking at the edges of this world. The story is in some ways about maps and the danger of the unexplored places, because what lurks there could be anything at all. It's another story that moves at a fast pace and manages a number of scenes of violent action. It's thrilling and it's just the right amount of creepy and it's an excellent read.

I've also gotten some positive feedback from people who appreciated seeing an underrepresented milieu in a sword-and-sorcery story. Then again, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly has really been packing in the Precolumbian / Central American weirdness of late, so I'm actually a latecomer to the party. But my story is the first one set in Texas and featuring a Puerto Rican. (I think.)

In fact, as I've mentioned before, "Heart of Tashyas" is set in the town where I live, which happens to be one of the last places in America where you have to subscribe to a print newspaper to know what's going on (and, indeed, a man's life in these parts often depends on a mere scrap of information). My story uses a lot of old-timers' lore gleaned from its pages. I'm going to try to get them to do a story about my story; if I succeed, I'll post a copy of it here. If I don't succeed, I hope I'll at least get an interesting refusal. I'll post that, too.

Well, as always, I remain very thankful to anyone who takes the time to read and comment on my stuff, even if they don't like it. It's icing on the cake to connect with people who do like it. I have a few other Carvajal stories in the hopper, set here and there between the Red and the Rio Grande. I've been disgustingly busy lately (sigh), but I'm working on them, and on Ark of the Hexaemeron, and I'm sure they'll all eventually see the light of day!

"Heart of Tashyas" at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly

I'm excited to announce the appearance of my story "Heart of Tashyas" in the blood-spattered, slightly burnt e-pages of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly!

All my published fiction up to now has taken place in and around Enoch, the omega-city at the cosmic antipodes. "Heart of Tashyas," on the contrary, takes place in and around the site of the town where I reside, in the southwest Texas badlands, during the early years of an alternate-historical Spanish conquest.

The editors were kind enough to let me illustrate it myself...

...with a pen-and-ink drawing that I colored digitally. The colorization was an afterthought; I guess all those comic books got me inspired.

For some time I'd been wanting to write "ethnic" heroic fantasy (ethnofantasy?) that would be cool to read in its own right, rather than thinly veiled social commentary, set during the conquest of Mexico. But I also wanted it to have a strong local flavor, more than I could give it with my limited experiences south of the border. Fortunately for me, Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked on the Texas coast in 1528, wrote a detailed ethnographic account of his many adventures. I was also thinking about things like Heart of Darkness, Prescott's histories of Cortés and Pizarro, and Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, as well as bits and pieces of local lore gleaned from newspaper articles and historical records.

"Heart of Tashyas" will (I hope) be the first of many tales about Francisco Carvajal y Lopez, half-breed of Borinquen, vagabond of the Tashyan hinterlands, conquistador in his own mind.

It's Like A Whole Nother Country

Guess what? I'm going to have a table at my first comic con next month. What prestigious, world-famous convention am I going to be attending, you ask? Well, I'll tell you: it's the second annual Big Bend Comic Con, held in the bustling (pop. 5905) town of Alpine, Texas, where the tumbleweeds roll right through downtown and the university has its own cattle brand.

Alpine. One of my many pictures of run-down buildings.

From their Facebook page:

The Big Bend Mini Comic Con will promote literacy of comics and graphic novels and provide a sense of community with the cities across the Big Bend Region.

Okay, so it's a mini con, but you have to start somewhere. My writing and art are so highly in demand out there, they practically begged to me to come. (Actually, I work for the university hosting the con, and they can't keep me away.)

The university and town, an image from the school website.

Statistically speaking, it's pretty unlikely that any of my readers reside in the area. The Big Bend region, of which Alpine is the metropolitan hub, covers 12,000 square miles and encompasses approximately 12,000 people, setting the population density (if I'm doing the math correctly) at 1 human being per square mile. Plenty of elbow room. But, if you happen to be one of those 12,000 fortunate people – a resident of, say, Marathon, or Marfa, or Terlingua, or Presidio, or Fort Davis, or Balmorhea – I hope you'll come on over and say hello. I'll have a stack of my books to sell at a discounted price; I'll even autograph 'em for you.

Downtown Alpine. Did you think I was joking about the tumbleweeds?

Despite working for the university, I only visit the main campus once a year or so these days – I'm a circuit-rider, as my bio says – but my familiarity with the area goes back to when I was a kid, camping at the state and national parks and spending Thanksgivings at Indian Lodge. To me it's just about the most beautiful region on earth, especially in the fall.

In the nearby Davis Mountains, looking from the state park toward
McDonald Observatory.

And you could spend a week just seeing everything: McDonald Observatory, the Fort Davis NHS, the Chihuahuan Desert Visitor Center, the Museum of the Big Bend, the Marfa lights, Davis Mountains State Park, San Solomon Springs at Balmorhea State Park; and we haven't even gotten to Big Bend National Park and all there is to do down there. Alpine itself is a mighty fine town, with a good used bookstore that carries a number of Arkham House editions in excellent condition, and plenty of art galleries.

Note the beaming visage of Hoss Cartwright, an alumnus of our fine university.

Still, I reckon I'm more at home where I live, down on the border, in the humid subtropical Winter Garden region, amid cabbage fields and onion fields and vast tracts of guajillo savanna, where the bees make honey as clear as water.

Speaking of guajillo (spelled variously; pronounced wah-HEE-yah), my sword-and-santeria story, set in and around the site of the aforementioned Bee Capital of Texas, is slated to come out in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly next February. I'm really excited to be appearing in HFQ, given its staying power and the quality of the stories it's featured. This is a branching-out for me, and I hope it's the beginning of more good things to come. 

HUAJILLA. This is a very important honey-plant, or tree, rather, in Texas, for the dry arid portions where there is little or no irrigation, and where nothing, in fact, grows except mesquite, catclaw, sage-brush, and other desert plants. The fact that it does not depend on irrigation, and needs only a scanty amount of rain early in the season, makes it most valuable to the bee-keeper in those regions where it grows and yields large quantities of beautiful water clear honey. Indeed, it is the finest produced in Texas, and is so nearly water white as to be almost as clear as pure water. It is at its very best in the region of Uvalde, Texas. The leaves look like a small delicate fern, and partake somewhat of the nature of the sensitive plant, for when touched they immediately close. [The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture, A. I. Root & E. R. Root, 1910]

Since we're on the topic of local things, let me hasten to point out that my residence in Uvalde is not the only brush the town has had with fame and glory. Jerome-Napoleon Bonaparte II, the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, a graduate of West Point, resided here in the 1850s, when he was stationed at the fort that then guarded the San Antonio - El Paso Road. In the 1890s, Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid, settled here with his family, becoming friends with John Nance Garner, who went on to become vice president under Franklin Roosevelt. Ashmun Upson, the ghostwriter of Garrett's book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, is buried here.

(Can you tell I've been researching local history lately?)

Vice President Garner retired to Uvalde after leaving office, and his home is now the site of a museum; Harry S Truman once spent the night at the house next door to mine, which was then owned by the Briscoe family, most famous for Texas governor Dolph Briscoe. Dale Evans, the western singer/actress and wife of Roy Rogers, was a Uvalde native, and we're also the home of Los Palominos, a Grammy award-winning Tejano band.

The Bottle 'n Bag, Uvalde's one-stop shop. [source]
The first sight that greets you on the way into town.

Last but not least, we have Uvalde native Matthew McConaughey, whom you may remember from such films as Dazed and Confused and Angels in the Outfield. Mr. McConaughey apparently visits town incognito from time to time. Last year his disguise was blown when the ladies in the Chamber of Commerce building saw him taking pictures across the street. They begged him to come in, which he agreed to do, provided they lower the blinds and keep mum on social media until after his getaway. Of course it was front page news that Sunday. The event was touted as the crowning glory of the Chamber at the banquet last spring, which I happened to attend, competing with the keynote address by the amazing Bob Philips of Texas Country Reporter fame.

Well, maybe Mr. Philips will read this and do an episode about me.

A Grave in Brownwood

Well, I'm back. Back, that is, from another journey to the land of the in-laws. As I've mentioned, our established route happens to take us through Brownwood, Texas, where Robert E. Howard spent part of his life, went to school, and was ultimately buried. Today we timed our transit so as to attend evening mass at the local parish (coreligionists being scarce in this part of the state), but arrived twenty minutes early, and so decided to find Howard's grave in the interim.

As I now discover, the site lies almost within sight of our route, just off US 377, in Greenleaf Cemetery. A highway sign marks the cemetery entrance, which is on the south side of town, between Howard Payne University (the Baptist university where Howard took classes) and the big 3M and Kohler factories.

The Howard family grave is at the second right on the main road shown above. Thanks to a historical marker, it's very easy to find.

All three family members were buried together. "They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided."

And here is what the Texas Historical Commission has to say about the matter:

Yesterday was the eightieth anniversary of Howard's suicide, a fact that somehow did not occur to me until just now.

About twenty or thirty miles to the south on US 377, there's a picnic area marking the (approximate) geographical center of the state. So it's fair to say that the mortal remains of Robert E. Howard repose in the heart of Texas.

Bored? Intrigued? Peruse some of my other ruminations on "Two-Gun Bob" and my forays into the Cross Plains area:

• Post Oaks and Sand Roughs
• Dark Valley Destiny, Part I
• Was Robert E. Howard Autistic?
• Dark Valley Destiny, Part II

Hard at Work or...

Let's take a little break from our long-winded castigations of much-loved children's book authors to take a look at what I've been working on lately.

First exhibit, the cover of my upcoming book The King of Nightspore's Crown:

Ha ha ha, just kidding. (I probably had too much fun making that.) Here is the actual painting, in its current state of completion:

For your viewing pleasure, here's a close-up of the lovely mosses:

and here's the two dudes fighting:

As you can see, I've got some Oceanic and Central American influences going on here. Wouldn't this make a cool movie? I'd go see it. Maybe I'll try to interest Guillermo del Toro in optioning the series. If that works out, I'll probably insist that Doug Jones portray at least some of the abhuman characters.

I'm still leaning toward making the left-hand side of this image the front cover, which would maybe look something like this:

As I hope is abundantly clear, I'm still going for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy look. The design's a bit busy, perhaps, but that's kind of my trademark.

*

I've been listening to Joseph Conrad while painting, which seems fitting. I've also been re-listening to the Imaro books, in anticipation of acquiring the further volumes. Something about the Imaro stories reminds me of the freshness of the old pulps. No doubt this owes partly to the newness of the setting, but there's an earnest seriousness to Saunders' stories that puts me in mind of Robert E. Howard. I like the wilderness stories the best.

A reader objected the other day to attempts to "erase" authors from history. Regular readers of my blog know that, while I may get in a high dudgeon about this or that, I'm quite shameless when it comes to filling my own skull with garbage. I would also defend to the death (or some such rhetorical extremity) the right of the writer to depict the ugly side of life in an ambiguous way. And I don't apologize for reading and liking authors who hold opinions that I or others regard as morally repugnant.

But that doesn't mean that commenting on authors' viewpoints is off-limits, either. It's a free country!

So, suppose you get irritated by something that pervades an author's work – an author you happen to really like on the whole. You want to do something about it. There's a few things you can try. You can grouse about it on your blog, and see where that gets you. That's one approach. You can repudiate and utterly contemn the author's works and urge others to do so. We might call this the bonfire-of-the-vanities approach. Or you can just write your own awesome stories in the same genre, with a certain amount of subversion and subtle commentary.

Which seems like the most fun?

Inspired by such ruminations, I here announce the inception of an alternate-history sword-and-sorcery subgenre set during the time of the Spanish conquests. Of course my protagonist will hail from Puerto Rico. Of course he will be of mixed ancestry. And of course his adventures will take him across an alternate Texas in search of God, gold, and glory. Just like me!

After careful consideration, I propose "sword-and-santería" as a name for the subgenre, having briefly considered but ultimately rejected the "arquebus-and-sorcery" label. I've written one story so far, set in the location of the town where I live. From here I think he will wander out to the painted canyons of the west, to encounter cosmic weirdness and mete out sudden vengeance. No doubt his perambulations will eventually take him to all the really interesting places in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America. It's Conrad and Cather meet Howard and Lovecraft, Kane and Conan meet Coronado and Cortés. I wish my antihero luck in his morally dubious adventures.

Dark Valley Destiny, Part I

Last week my family and I left the South Texas town where we live and headed northward to visit my wife's relations near the Oklahoma state line. The journey takes us through Brady, reputedly the geographical Heart of Texas, and thence through the town of Brownwood, which happens to be the burial place of Robert E. Howard.

My thoughts are usually full of Howard and his writings when I'm in the area. He spent most of his adult life in nearby Cross Plains, which I had the opportunity to visit on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death several years ago while en route to a wedding in Eastland. (You can read my little photo essay here.)

Later on our Christmas odyssey I stopped by the excellent North Texas used bookstore I used to frequent in college, and there acquired a biography of Robert E. Howard, Dark Valley Destiny (1983), written by L. Sprague de Camp, his wife Catherine Crook de Camp, and psychology professor Jane Whittington Griffin, who grew up in Eastland. I'm about halfway through it now, but thought I'd take the time to jot down some of my reactions. Right now these mostly deal with his family history and environment; later on I'll comment on what I learn about his life as a writer.

The biography begins with an extensive account of the Howard family's ancestry and peregrinations. I'm struck by the similarity with my wife's family and by the many times their paths crossed, in space if not in time. My wife's family has resided in the state since the nineteenth century; she is, I believe, a sixth-generation Texan, a mixture of Irish, German, Dutch, French, and Native American. Her relations came here from Tennessee, Missouri, and other parts of the United States, and include preachers, odd-jobbers, ranchers, oil-field workers, and fiddlers; among her ancestors are the last victims of an Indian massacre in their county. Robert Howard's grandparents likewise entered the state in the late nineteenth century, when it was still a wild and largely lawless place. Howard's father, Dr. Isaac Howard, studied and practiced medicine in the counties where my wife's family resides.

Other geographical connections abound. The Howards at one time made regular trips to Crystal City, a small town (now something of a boom town, thanks to the Eagle Ford shale formation) not far from where we now live. Robert Howard wrote his poem "Cimmeria" in Fredericksburg, in the Texas Hill Country, a town I've visited many times; as a matter of fact, my parents' antique bedstead comes from a famous old hotel there.

The biography contains considerable background information. It's rather amusing to read the history and customs of Texas described from the point of view of an alien. There are of course many hasty generalizations and unfair remarks. The easy condemnation of the pre-Anglo culture and the ascription of Texan independence to the Protestant work ethic and the laziness of the Hispanos rankles now as it did when I was spoon-fed the state curriculum in grade school. (My ancestors have been Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox since they were converted from paganism, and I can't think of anyone who wasn't a hard worker.) It also makes the de Camps' lofty condemnations of Texan racism a bit less impressive. But when all is said and done these are quibbles. The background passages are well done.

Of course, Texas varies considerably from region to region, and I'm definitely an alien in my wife's ancestral homeland. I've been made to feel extremely uncomfortable there on several occasions, and once was threatened with physical violence at a rural gas station. The text mentions that, in Robert Howard's time, blacks were not allowed to spend the night in his county; similarly, my father-in-law has told me that he remembers a large sign on the way into his town expressing the same sentiments in somewhat forceful terms. (I'll not quote it for fear of what the search engines might bring.) And yet the people, Robert E. Howard included, didn't consider themselves racist.

There were also strong anti-Catholic sentiments in that part of the state, shared to some extent by Howard, and, as I know from personal experience, it's still extremely hard to find a Catholic church when you need one. I once had to go out of my way to attend mass at St. Mary's in Brownwood, across the street from Howard Paine University, two blocks from the street where Howard lived when he attended school there.

The text cites an interesting survey conducted by Texas A&M in five central Texas counties: in 1931, 50 percent of the households heated their homes with wood, and 90 percent used boiling water and a washboard to do the laundry; in a third of the households, the Bible was the only book. And yet 85 percent owned automobiles. That's Texas for you. As a matter of fact, my wife's grandparents still lacked running water in the fifties, when my father-in-law was a boy. But in 1931, Howard had only five years to live, and it's curious to think of him, a writer for pulp magazines read all over the country, isolated in the midst of such material poverty and (relative) illiteracy. He felt his isolation very keenly.

Howard came of age during the oil boom era. It's strange to read about gambling and whorehouses in the little towns around the area, which later became so puritanical. In reality, it would seem that the puritanism was in part a reaction against these incursions of vice. Many of the counties are still dry, and drinking is surrounded with strange taboos. Some readers might be surprised to discover that Howard himself had more in common with Solomon Kane than Conan the Cimmerian.

The text dwells on religion in the Howard household. To the outsider, religion in that part of the state is a mélange of Bible Christianity and idiosyncratic additions emphasizing emotional fervor, personal calls, external prohibitions, and readiness for the end times, more akin to an enthusiastic offshoot like Montanism or Catharism than to traditional Christianity. Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, though set in the Deep South, could just as well have taken place in the area.

Robert and his father, however, were both more or less agnostic, and never attended church regularly. Dr. Howard was read in pseudo-Oriental occultism and made use of "alternative" medical treatments like hypnotism, folk medicine, and magnetic healing in his practice. Robert seems to have read everything his father owned, and often speculated on the nature of the afterlife, the possibility of reincarnation, and the human soul. He remained unconvinced by his friend H. P. Lovecraft's arguments for atheistic materialism.

The text indulges in quite a bit of psychologizing, owing partly to the psychologist co-author, no doubt, but (one suspects) directed by L. Sprague himself. An attempted reconstruction of the subject's psyche is assuredly called for, but when the authors remind the reader of their theses on every page it strikes one as a bit much. Their two main theses are: (1) that Robert, raised in Texas, where the tall tale is an "art form" (their assertion), never developed the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality; and (2) that Robert's sexuality was repressed by his unhealthy attachment to his mother.

As to the first, it used to be common for child psychologists and educational theorists to warn of the supposed dangers of warping children's minds by telling them the wrong kinds of stories. I've heard of education professors teaching with the force of dogma that children's fantasy stories should take place only as dream sequences, and that the division between fantasy and reality should be clearly demarcated.

So, was Robert's mind warped by all those tall tales? Certainly he had a tenuous understanding of worldly reality at times. But how could someone who's not sure of what's real and what's not write fantasy stories? Isn't that the very profession in which you have to know the difference? Writers who can't differentiate write the kinds of speculative and theosophical texts that Dr. Howard was so fond of, not sword and sorcery tales. In addition, Howard wrote in a variety of genres, and ultimately decided to give up fantasy in favor of markets that would pay better. Is that the mark of someone trapped in a fantasy world?

As for Howard's mother, well, we have the great facts that he was afraid of women, never lived apart from his mother on a permanent basis, and committed suicide upon learning of her coming death. So some exploration of Oedipal fixations is certainly in order. But, as I said above, ominous pronouncements get a little old when they are repeated on every other page and related to virtually every sphere of the subject's life.

In addition, there are, I think, other constructions that could be put on the facts as we know them, rendering Howard's reliance on his parents an effect rather than a cause. Here's some data that come to mind:

• when he was a boy, Howard's play with other children consisted solely of scripted roles that he assigned and directed
• Howard was bullied in school, and his family's frequent moves had a seriously deleterious effect on his social development
• he was unable to play on a team and hated team sports, but enjoyed one-on-one sports like boxing
• he had a peculiar handshake
• he never had a girlfriend of any sort until fairly late in his twenties, and his fear of women was noted by his friends
• when Howard did first kiss a woman (as the result of a prank), he copied what he had seen in movies to such a ludicrous extent that the girl noticed it
• Howard was apparently unable to follow verbal instructions but did well with written instructions
• he prospered in a job only when working by himself
• his writing style bore no relation to his manner of speaking, so much so that a writer correspondent who visited him in Cross Plains left disillusioned and refused to answer his letters thenceforth
• he was frequently overcome with violent emotions but gave no sign of it in his facial expressions
• he was poor at reading the emotions of others and imagined himself surrounded by personal enemies
• he exhibited several obsessive-compulsive traits
• he dressed somewhat peculiarly and with a strange uniformity, and was noted for his inattention to personal appearance
• he was apparently unable to live on his own for more than just economic reasons
• his circle of friendships was limited in curious ways, and he could spend an hours-long bus ride talking the driver's ear off while ignoring his traveling companion
• when Howard read, he interpreted everything primarily in relation to himself
• he was regarded as an eccentric throughout his life

Allow me to indulge in a little of my own psychologizing. No doubt my own judgment is colored by my prejudices and experiences, but I begin to wonder if Robert E. Howard was, like me, saddled with an autism disorder. Not all high-functioning autistic persons are reclusive computer geniuses who wear argyle socks with their sandals, and Howard resembles some of the case studies I've read. It seems worth expanding on the idea in a separate post.

At any rate, I intend to continue jotting down my reactions to Dark Valley Destiny, which I'm greatly enjoying.

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.