The Boy Who Made Stars

Cool to see another sometime member of the GSFWC, Eliza Chan, getting a publication in Fantasy Magazine, with a great wee story, "The Boy Made Stars":

Motoki was fifteen when he accidentally created stars. Before this time, the night’s sky had always been ebony black, and the white glow of the moon had looked like a cheap spotlight left there by a film studio in liquidation. People rarely looked up because it reminded them of that void under the bed when you tuck your feet under you as a child for fear of the faceless blue monster. Everyone carried lanterns because shining a powerful torch every day was both a waste of electricity and like dropping a feather in a hedgehog farm. Lanterns at least were warm in a glow that mirrored babies’ cheeks and hot tea by the fireplace on snowy days.

Go read it. You know you want to.

And a huge congrats to Eliza. :D

Happy New Year!

I'm currently faffing about, dealing with emails and stuff accrued while I was away for the annual Hogmanay Hootenanny in the wilds of interweb-free Scotland. Got a flat to be cleaned and work to be settled back into, so for now I'll just point you at an interesting post by Daniel Abraham, in part riffing off a conversation we had over dinner a couple of years back. For both of us, it seems, our thoughts have moved on a bit from where we were back then, in terms of the old "style versus content" debate. And there's some more thoughtful commentary from Ted Chiang and S.M. Stirling, so I figured it might be of interest to yez.

Anyways, it also reminds me of this post from a wee while back, in which I completely scrap the whole notion of signifiers/signifieds. I'm reminded of that post because this is basically where/how I see readers gleaning story from sentences that simply shouldn't work, where the stream of (con)notation might be better seen, I think, as the raw matter of an imaginative montage being actively shaped by a reader into "the import of import," as I describe it on Daniel's LJ.

So, yeah, have some elsewhere musings to chew over. I'll be back once the detritus of 2010 is properly cleared from the Helter Shelter, as I like to call my bachelor pad cum mad monastic's hovel.