Category: quick picks

daily living, feelings and mental health, quick picks, recommendations

he’s an angry bird: “the mad eyes of the heron king,” and other things

ray brantley
words writtenthing(s) enjoyedstuff accomplished
TODAY: 91/277This incredible blackwater aquascape!Mostly managing my mental health!
TOTAL: 19,437/100,000PseudoPod 717: “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. DanskyPacking. Lots, and lots, and lots of packing.
Fell just short of my NaNoWriMo goal last month, but that’s all right. Keep trucking along, as someone somewhere probably said at some point. Right?

Watching the retrograde advance of his erstwhile conversational partner, Leonard did not think, “I could have died.” Nor did he think, “I must be dreaming,” or “That’s impossible,” or even “It talked.”

Rather, he held one thought and one thought only to his feverish mind, and held it close with a secret glee: “It talked to me.”

“The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. Dansky

Richard has written a story that’s brimming with a little bit of everything that I love: lush, gorgeous prose; dialogue full of fabulist, atmospheric whimsy; all the dramatic irony of knowing that, while something truly terrible is approaching, the protagonist won’t spot the danger until it’s far too late. And birds. Tall, stately, predatory birds, who know very well who is their equal, and who is prey.

Poor Leonard.

“Fuck all this moving nonsense,” said Jasper sourly with only his eyes.

Literally everything else in my life is up in the air at the moment, and I expect that’s unlikely to change until at least the first week or so of September. Husband and I are spending our last week in our apartment packing up as many of our worldly possessions as we can cram into the cardboard boxes that now compose most of our interior decor. Then next week we close on our condo, and properly move in a few days later. We’re going to be home owners.

I can’t accurately describe how surreal this whole experience is for me, but I will give it a shot.

Six years ago I arrived in this country from Alabama with two cats and only as many personal belongings as I could safely cram into the trunk of my car, in graduate student loan debt to the tune of $70k USD, and unable to afford a place to live in the city of Toronto that would cost me more than $500 CAD/month.

I spent my first winter in an apartment where my roommates and I couldn’t risk running our space heaters at the same time without tripping all the breakers, and my first spring being told by our landlord that we couldn’t use the water for more than five minute increments at a time without risking the integrity of all the pipes in the house. I was miserable. I didn’t know anyone, no one knew me, and there was no way for me to know whether this grad school gamble would pay off–or if I would find myself limping back home two years later. But that didn’t happen, not only because of the support network I managed to create for myself here over the last six years, but because I put in the work to grow those relationships, to succeed at my degree program, and to secure a job that would do the miraculous: let me pay down my debt, and put 20% of each paycheque in savings. Six years later, that figure is half of what it was in 2014.

And, as I discovered recently, I managed to accomplish all of those things with misdiagnosed Celiac’s disease, and ADHD.

Wild, right?

I don’t say all of these things to puff myself up with unearned pride, or to diminish the support I did receive from my father while I was getting my feet under me here in Canada. My dad was, is, and always will be my rock, and he knows it. I say these things because too often I don’t look at the obstacles I surmounted to get to where I am right now, and don’t give myself credit for my successes. I am committed to owning those accomplishments now, even the ones that might look only like partial successes to others–because when you’re going through life like a car trying to speed off in six different with a brick dropped on the accelerator, it is a win to recognize that you’re going no where, and to make the conscious decision to stop. It is a win to ask yourself, “What am I feeling, right now? And what do I need to feel better?” And it’s a triumph to start down the path towards answering either of those questions.

So, for certain values of “describe why buying a condo is so surreal for you right now,” I suppose the rambling words above qualify, right?

quick picks, recommendations

just my two cents: “vincent’s penny,” by chris barnham

ray brantley

(see what I did there? /finger guns)

Listen at Podcastle 628: Vincent’s Penny, May 26, 2020. Audio recording by Escape Artists Inc. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again.

“You can let me go. Who will ever know?”

“Why would we do that?”

“If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?”

The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops.

The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room.

I know I will never leave this place.

famous last words

Anyway, in summary:

What’s it about?
Sebastian is a boy plucked from a life of poverty and abuse by Vincent, a mysterious and powerful stranger, and is groomed for the sort of greatness that powerful men seek to pass on to their proteges. (Greatness in this context comes in such exciting flavours as ‘murder with impunity,’ ‘body-snatching,’ and ‘immortality.’) Over the centuries, Sebastian reaps the rewards of being within Vincent’s inner circle, but cannot escape his own conscience. A confrontation as well as a reckoning is inevitable.

What’s so good about it?
You know what “they” say about bad pennies, but what is Chris Barnham saying about them? Possibly that there’s more than one, and whether or not that penny is ‘bad’ or or ‘good’ or bound to turn up again is entirely up to the reader. Sebastian is the lens through which we experience both the horror of a child’s abuse by his father, his serendipitous rescue by a stranger, and his gradual transformation into a man with more in common with his monstrous mentor than he is prepared to admit to himself.

I enjoy any story that makes me struggle to find an appropriate genre label for it. This one spans genres, being equal parts historical fiction and fantasy (hence its appearance on PodCastle), but I’d stretch it further and categorize it as a piece of horror fiction, too. The horror is slow to approach, and subtly written, but it will slam into you like a freight train if you pick the story up for a second time and re-read it from the beginning.

Where can I find it?
You can find the full text of “Vincent’s Penny” over here at PodCastle, and I would strongly recommend reading along with the story as you listen to Matt Dovey’s A+ narration. It’s well worth your time.

Happy listening!

quick picks, recommendations

recommendation: robin husen’s “half-men of the night marie”

ray brantley
Listen at PseudoPod 691: Half-Men of the Night Marie, February 28, 2020. Audio recording by Escape Artists Inc. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Three half-men in a lifeboat drifted on the methane sea.  Her ship’s name, Night Marie, was written on the stern like a tombstone.  The ship, along with the rest of her crew, had sunk thirty hours before sunset. Sparks, the ship’s half-boy, crouched in the bows, his ears still ringing with the sound of screams, though the sea had long since swallowed them up.  Hobb, the mate, lit the lanterns.  Beyond their circle of light, the darkness was total, as though they sat inside a bubble in a well of ink.

“Well,” Hobb said, at length. “We shouldn’t have thrown old Creeping Jack overboard, that’s what I say.”

There are people in this haunting nautical nightmare who should have been thrown overboard, of course, but their presence is inferred rather than overt. The company, and the company men, who built the bodies the half-men wear and designed them to be disposable. Consumable.

But of course they’re absent until it doesn’t matter anymore, because their presence would shatter our suspension of belief. Why would they be present to witness the brutal consequences of their mindless pursuit of profit?

Yesterday’s poem from Dim But Bright Poetry seems apt, somehow.

Dim But Bright Poetry, “Cracked Skull.” 3/2/2020.

Doesn’t matter the material composition of the skull, or whether the skin was yours through birth or artificial construction, or whether the thoughts course through circuits or synapses. Some things are yours, and are not capital, no matter what a shareholder says.

Scrap metal lived in the belly of the company ship. Sparks lay strewn about and shuddered by engines.  He felt like a star in the dark.

I trust you’ll burn them all to ashes one day, Sparks. That’s what stars do.

quick picks, recommendations

quick pick: “hello, ello,” by seanan mcguire, _huntsvillain_, by john o’brien

ray brantley

Truthfully I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to write in-depth commentary on all the stuff that has snagged my interest, and I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that my tiny cohort of readers also don’t have the time or bandwidth to devote to one blogger’s commentary. But I want to write about stuff I like! And the stuff I like is pretty cool.

Hence, new category: quick picks.

“Hello, Hello,” by Seanan McGuire

What is it?
A podcast version of the short story “Hello, Hello,” originally published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft.
What’s it about?
Language, communication, parenthood–and birds. A computational linguist is befuddled by the speech, appearance, and uncanny behaviour of an unknown woman’s avatar on the neural network system she uses to communicate with her sister, Tasha.
What’s so good about it?
Beautiful authorial voice and exploration of both animal and human behaviour.
Where can I find it? Lightspeed Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine.

Huntsvillain, by John O’Brien

What is it?
An extremely well-researched and outrageously funny history blog about the state of Alabama.
What’s it about?
In the author’s own words, “short bursts of hilarity from Alabama’s otherwise miserable history.”
What’s so good about it?
In addition to being written by a very good friend, Huntsvillain is an honest and unapologetic look at the history of my home town and home state. It will gift you with more knowledge than you ever realized you wanted about what marriage and divorce looked like during the 1800s, and a scholarly examination of just what lead John B. Haynes to rip apart a local silversmith’s cabin, log by log, with his bare hands.
Where can I find it? Right here–> Huntsvillain

Office friends to hold me accountable. maybe.