More numbers, just for curiosity’s sake. Numbers don’t tell the real story.

I’ve made 23 story submissions in the past month and a half. When I first began sending out stories at the end of 2009, it took me more than 7 months to rack up 23 submissions. Even a year ago, 23 submissions was something like 3-4 months worth. The biggest difference, of course, is that I have more stories in the pipeline. It also helps that when I get a rejection now, I do everything I can to resubmit the rejected story the same day.

I recently had 16 stories in active circulation, an all-time high. One was just accepted, which knocks the total in circulation down to 15. Very excited about this acceptance, as I’m a big supporter and follower of the place it’s going to appear. Definitely looking forward to that story appearing in a month or two. Don’t worry, I’ll post lots of reminders and links to the story when the time comes. Most likely I’ll make everyone ill from hearing about it so much. 

My oldest pending submission is 295 days out. My newest is 0 days out, because I submitted it just before I started typing this.

My first publication (not counting the Mississippi Review thing in 93… not really relevant any more) was on 5/31/2011.

The most recent acceptance came on 5/31/2012. It appears 5/31 is a significant and possibly magical date in my still-young publishing career. I just hope the next good news comes earlier than 5/31/2013!

The Croning follows Don Miller, a genial yet seemingly addle-minded older gent whose career in geology has trailed off, along with his mental acuity. Don’s wife Michelle, though nearly the same age, continues jetting around the globe, exploring, conferencing, and occasionally vanishing in ways that seem both secretive and suspicious. Don keeps meaning to pin her down about mysterious past events — where she went, who she was with, what happened to him, what it was all about — but the gradual deterioration of his mental faculties means all such intentions to learn more about his wife, to understand what happened and why, eventually trail off and fade away.

The book begins with an altered and mood-shifted version of the Rumplestilskin fable, which takes place in some indeterminate distant past, and also connects to the later story of Don, Michelle and their families. From there, the story moves from the 1950s to the 1980s to the present day. Time is not merely linear and forward-moving, in fact the looping, repetitive and continuous nature of time is a matter of repeated focus here.

We encounter secret agents, corrupt police, weird rituals, and Barron’s oft-present bored, wealthy decadents messing with things they oughtn’t. The stories of Don, Michelle, their ancestors and the shadowy followers of Old Leach are full of dark mysteries, secrecy and possible betrayals. Don moves past these things, always affable and seemingly balanced despite the accumulated darkness trailing behind. He’s essentially an unreliable narrator, whose unreliability becomes clarified as elements of his obscured history are revealed, both to him and to the reader.

Much is made about the novella and novelette being the ideal length for tales of horror, the idea being that a short story is too brief to adequately develop a situation, yet a novel is too long to sustain tension for its full length. Recently, Laird Barron has done more with these mid-length forms than anyone else in the genres of weird fiction, horror and dark fantasy. He’s also expressed a preference for the novella as his “sweet spot.”

At the same time, it’s difficult for any writer to focus exclusively on short stories or novellas. Most readers are more interested in novels, which is the reason publishers want to see writers write them. It was inevitable that a writer as acclaimed and awarded as Barron would have everyone clamoring for him to write a novel. So how does he handle the larger canvas, hundreds of pages in length? And as a critic, even an informal one, do I compare The Croning against Barron’s masterful shorter works, or against contemporary novels of horror and weird fiction by other authors?

I’d say by any standard The Croning is a success. That’s not to say The Croning eclipses such masterworks as “The Forest,” “The Imago Sequence” or “Mysterium Tremendum” in craft, narrative impact or overall quality. Rather he equals the standard set by his own shorter works, and by doing so in the more widely accepted and commercially viable form of the novel, takes that necessary next step toward asserting a more general dominance over the horror/weird genre. Write a powerful novella, or collection of them, and you’ll impress the critics, awards panels, fellow writers, and that narrow segment of the reading community that follows shorter forms. Show yourself capable of writing a powerful novel, and the mainstream of genre fandom will take notice, along with publishers who might not have known what to do with a writer like Barron until now.

A few years ago, any mention of Laird Barron’s work invariably mentioned the word “Lovecraftian,” yet over time Barron’s work removed any question that his brand of cosmic horror had more going on than emulation of Lovecraft. Barron is in the process of establishing his own mythos with its own geography, including complex legends and interlocking structures of cause and effect. Readers familiar with his previous stories such as “The Men From Porlock” and others, will spot elements in The Croning which echo, either explicitly or implicitly, names, locations or events from earlier stories.

With The Croning, Laird Barron steps outside the short fiction arena and proves his style, combining the brisk energy of pulp storytelling with the dense richness of literary prose, translates well to novel length. This broader canvas allows Barron time to accumulate disorientation, build up a painful tension, and gradually lower the reader into cosmic, abyssal darkness. After reading the last page, I felt the need to reorient myself, the way a diver must decompress after delving into deep waters.

This is a powerful, affecting work of fiction, and the fact that it’s a first novel implies great things are ahead for Barron and his readers. This guy is doing work of the highest order, and any fan of weird fiction, horror or dark fantasy needs to check it out. If you’ve held off checking out Laird Barron because you don’t like short fiction, start with The Croning.

Lena and I visited her family in Indiana for Thanksgiving. Before we left, Lena was sick all week, but I managed to avoid catching it and for the most part she got over it before it was time to fly. Then we arrived to find all her family, from her mother on down to the littlest kids, were terribly sick. I kept trying to take good care of myself (aside from the all-nighter redeye flight to get there) and managed to avoid getting sick, at least until we returned. Now I feel deathly awful, but that’s how it goes. It’s probably too much to ask of my system, even if I’m a pretty healthy person, to fight off illness from so many different angles for such a long time.

So now I’m back to work, catching up with a big backlog of to-do stuff and several overflowing inboxes. For this reason, today’s blog entry will be of the “I’m back but there’s nothing too interesting to say beyond that” variety. Regular weekday morning bloggging should resume tomorrow.

Sometimes I finish a book and I want to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and maybe write a discursive and possibly self-indulgent response to it.

Other times I finish a book and smile and say, “Damn, that was fun! More like this, please.” Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was like that.

It’s a dirty, disturbing vision of a year 2044 when just about everyone has given up living in the real world in favor of a virtual realm called the OASIS. People are so caught up in this game-like way of life they scarcely notice what’s going on outside. OASIS creator James Halliday has just died, and though he is the world’s wealthiest man, he’s also a hermit who left behind no heirs. He left behind an elaborate contest within the OASIS in which anyone and everyone can search for a hidden easter egg, and whoever finds it will inherit his vast fortune as well as control of his company. Millions set off in search of the egg, and when the novel begins the search has been underway for about five years, and nobody has yet found even the first of three keys, which will open the three gates (also hidden) which are necessary to obtain the egg.

The above may sound like spoilers but this is basically the setup within the first few pages, and the story proceeds from there. We meet Wade Watts, a young “egg hunter,” and follow his interactions with others on the same quest.

The quest itself is entertaining, but the real thing going on here is that James Halliday, a child of the 1980s, has sprinkled throughout the message he left behind announcing the contest a large number of hints and red herrings all taken from 80s pop culture — dialog from John Hughes movies, lyrics from an Oingo Boingo song and more. There are a few cultural tidbits on focus here which are outside my own historical interest — never much of a Black Tiger player here — but far more elements I recognize from my own trip through the decade of my adolescence. Arcade games like Tempest, Pac Man, Joust and Battlezone, movies like Blade Runner and Monty Python’s Holy Grail… the music, the Dungeons and Dragons. Such a lot of fun here! This is one of those books I want to recommend to anybody and everybody within five years of my age (those born in the 60s), and it might even be fun for people outside that range.

All Ernest Cline seems to have done before this book was to write the screenplay for the film Fanboys, a sort of trial run for the sort of geek obsessions on display here. I can’t wait to see what he does next, and fully expect to read this book again. Highly recommended, unless the kind of cultural references listed above are totally uninteresting to you.

Last night was Halloween, in case you were wondering why all the kids in your neighborhood were dressing funny. Lena and I wanted to watch some classic horror on DVD but nothing too overtly Halloween-y, and neither of us had seen Scanners in the five-plus years we’ve been together. Not too long ago we watched the next film David Cronenberg directed after this, Videodrome, which in my opinion was his first “fully Cronenberg” film. Scanners is the next step in his evolution from the somewhat ordinary indie horror of The Brood or Rabid, and further explores The Brood’s body horror themes.

We both fully enjoyed this mid-budget 1980 Canadian release, which featured a young Michael Ironside (with most of his hair intact), a crusty-looking Patrick McGoohan in stereotypical bearded scientist mode, and a leading man with absolutely no acting chops whatsoever.

I’ve watched Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and Existenz over and over (this latter vastly underrated IMO), but this is my first visit to his pre-Videodrome work at least since the era of VHS. I’m interested in taking another look at The Brood soon as well. Cronenberg is a remarkably original filmmaker, even if his ideosyncrasies were not yet fully formed at this stage.

Sometimes stupid little problems get in the way of important activities.

For example, in the summer I find myself reluctant to go into the recording studio (where I also work on Hypnos CD cover designs) for no reason other than that it tends to get warm in that room.

A few months ago, I found myself skipping a couple of writing sessions not because I didn’t feel like writing, or because I was too tired to wake up early and do it, but because I was having technical problems with my bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

Two weeks ago at my day job, an task came up that I found myself procrastinating on, not because the work involved was too difficult, but just because I didn’t know the answer to a question and didn’t have any luck figuring out where to ask.

And lately, I’ve been blogging a lot less (though I still post on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ plenty) because my preferred blogging interface, Scribefire, was giving me a bit of difficulty. Specifically, Scribefire on Google Chrome was refusing to post my updates to one of my two blogs (I keep the same blog posts mirrored on both WordPress and Livejournal), and Scribefire on Firefox was giving me weird interface glitches.

So does it make sense that I completely avoid doing something important because something trivial got in the way? It may not make logical sense, but it does make sense if you understand human nature. Put an obstacle in front of somebody, and most often you’ll nudge them in a slightly different direction, even if the obstacle isn’t really insurmountable.

The more aware I am of this tendency in myself, the more I try to jump right onto solving any stupid little issue that may be blocking me from accomplishing something important, or even just finish a task that needs doing. The easier you can make it for yourself to do a certain task, the more likely you are to drift toward doing it. It’s just human nature to follow the path of least resistance, at least at first. Once you’ve been avoiding something for a while you may get mad at yourself and take another crack at it, and bash right through that obstacle. But it’s better yet if you can recognize earlier on that it’s happening and fix the little problem.

Many of the things that used to cause me lots of frustration and stress — such as keeping my email inbox clean, or always remembering to file certain reports or pay certain bills according to a schedule — became trivially easy once I realized the mental block that was causing the problem.

I suggest everybody take a few minutes to step back from your job or your creative work and make a list of aspects that you hate, or avoid doing, or that stress you out. Try to think of ways to make these things easier or less stressful. Look at ways that other people accomplish these same tasks, and consider adapting some of their approaches as your own. Eventually you may come up with your own unique way of handling things, and you might find something that really stressed you out before (for me it was the email inbox) becomes easy to manage.