Looking back at the discussions of last year’s stories, these guys don’t pull any punches, so I’m not expecting a love-fest.  But I am delighted to get this type of critical attention, and I’m eager to see what they have to say.

And by some weird coincidence, discussion of my story will commence on November 17, which is also my birthday…

The schedule of stories is here on Torque Control, Vector’s blog.

It was a lot of fun.  Jeremy L. C. Jones emailed us the questions and we shared them as a Google doc.  This let each of us answer them while reacting to everyone else’s responses, and the final effect is very much like we were sitting around a table kibbitzing in real time.

Although I make wise and insightful comments all throughout the interview, I’m probably at my most articulate when I say, “Urgh…”

The interview is here:  “Even the Best Stories Have Flaws: Inside Altered Fluid.”

Here’s the blurb:

Where can you find a television that sees five minutes into the future? Where can you find dragons trapped in a jar and an illness which turns people into glass? Where might you find families who sell their brainpower to corporations for penny wages, or dead relatives that sit down for family meals?

Why, in the pages of Sybil’s Garage No. 7, of course.

In this seventh issue of the highly acclaimed series, you will find twenty-seven original works of fiction and poetry from today’s top talent, with suggested musical accompaniment, our trademark design aesthetic, and much more. But be sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs on your way into Sybil’s Garage, or you may not find your way out.

6″x9″, 206pp
ISBN: 978-0-9796246-1-2

Available from Senses Five Press, Amazon.com, BarnesAnd Noble.com and other fine bookstores.

For more information click here.

Table of Contents:

Fiction

“By Some Illusion” — Kathryn E. Baker
“Suicide Club” — Amy Sisson
“The Noise” — Richard Larson
“A History of Worms” — Amelia Shackelford
“Thinking Woman’s Crop of Fools” — Tom Crosshill
“The Unbeing of Once-Leela” — Swapna Kishore
“How the Future Got Better” — Eric Schaller
“The Telescope” — Megan Kurashige
“Under the Leaves” — A.C. Wise
“The Ferryman’s Toll” — Sam Ferree
“The Tale of the Six Monkeys’ Tails” — Hal Duncan
“The Poincaré Sutra” — Anil Menon
“Kid Despair in Love” — M.K. Hobson
“My Father’s Eyes” — E.C. Myers
“An Orange Tree Framed Your Body” — Alex Dally MacFarlane
“The Watcher Thorn” — Cheryl Barkauskas
“Other Things” — Terence Kuch
“The Dead Boy’s Last Poem” — Kelly Barnhill

Poetry

“Seven League”s — Lyn C. A. Gardner
“One October Night in Baltimore” — Jaqueline West
“Indian Delight” — Alexandra Seidel
“Candle for the Tetragrammaton” — Sonya Taaffe
“Emigrant” — Linsdey Duncan
“Schehirrazade” — Amal El-Mohtar
“The Hyacinth Girl” — Adrienne J. Odasso
“Pathways Marked in Silver” — Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
“Rain ” — Juliet Gillies

Non-Fiction

“Glourious Homage: Quentin Tarantino’s Love Letter to Cinema” — Avi Kotzer

Fantasy Magazine has published an Author Spotlight interview to accompany “Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory.”  I discuss writing the story, and also attempt to describe what makes a successful writing group.

The story has already gotten some feedback.  In an absurdly flattering review in Locus, Rich Horton writes:

And speaking of writers beginning to attract attention, I was impressed last year by Paul M. Berger’s Interzone piece “Home Again”.  Now he contributes a brilliant story to Fantasy, one of the stories of the year so far, “Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of her Glory”

I guess that kidney I gave him really paid off.

A couple of different things came together to inspire this story.  The first was a trip.  Last spring I was in India on business for the Day Job.  I’ve done a fair amount of traveling, but everything people had been telling me about India turned out to be true, and I’ve never been anywhere that challenged me or inspired me so much in such a short time. I was cooped up in offices and hotels for most of my stay, but I managed to steal some time for myself and get out and look around.

The Gray Fort in my story is modeled after complexes built by Mughal emperors in the 1500’s and 1600’s.  They’re called “forts” today, but they’re the size of towns, surrounded by moats and immense walls, and they contain military garrisons, palaces, audience halls and mosques, all in various states of renovation and ruin.

The same people built the Taj Mahal, which is right down the road from Agra Fort (and to my surprise, the Taj Mahal surpassed all the hype I’d heard about its beauty).

For a few dollars I hired a guide for a day.  He was a high school History teacher who moonlighted on weekends (and probably made more this way than from his regular salary).  He had a master’s degree and spoke five languages well enough to conduct day-long tours in them, including Japanese, which he had taught himself.  He had given his spiel so many times that he compacted every list of architectural features and souvenirs for sale into one long, sing-song word.  It was a surprise to him that I didn’t want him to carry my camera and take snapshots of the scenery for me.  (He would occasionally lead me through areas crowded with hawkers, and each time he would instruct me beforehand that although he would appear to be encouraging me to buy from them, that was just because he had to interact with them on every tour, and I should under no circumstances give them any money.)  Whether he intended it or not, every time he spoke he drew my attention to the fact that here was a talented, dignified man, from a culture that had achieved marvelous things, but the only way he could support his family was to show rich foreign idiots around the remnants of the era when his home town was a seat of power.

In my story, the humans’ relationship to the old fortress, and to the greatness they’ve lost, and to the colonial powers that rule them, all stem from this impression.

The part about the stereogram came to me in a dream that involved a stereoscope – a Victorian-era parlor gadget with lenses that show the viewer two similar photographs at once, creating the combined effect of a single three-dimensional image. In my dream though, a different person was looking through each lens, and somehow they both understood the combined picture.  I worked backward from there to shape a relationship that would allow that to happen.

I’m proud to say my short story “Small Burdens” just went up on the wonderful speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons.  You can read it here.

This piece began as my first Clarion story, written during the week our workshop was led by Kelly Link.

A bit of spoiler — It’s a fairy story, and I knew next to nothing about fairy lore when I started it, but the piece grew out of the question: When fairies steal human children, why do they bother to leave changelings in their place?  It seems like a lot of work, and they’re eventually found out sooner or later.  Do fairies just have cruel senses of humor, or do the changelings serve some purpose that humans never see?  I tried to answer that, working from the premise that fairies were a bit too alien to relate to humans, and that the changeling had to be doing something that would help them abduct or raise a human baby.

I’ve been a big fan of Strange Horizons for years (and it was co-founded by another one of my Clarion instructors, Mary Anne Mohanraj), so I’m delighted this story found a good home there.

The ballot is here, and “Home Again” is in the short story category, about halfway down the page.  You don’t need to be a subscriber or a member, and you can vote for 5 pieces in each category.  Thanks!

I’m a little stunned to see my name appear with so many people I’m in awe of.  There are several with whom I never would have expected to share a list any more specific than “Beings That Appreciate Oxygen” –  conspicuous among these are four of my Clarion instructors: Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly, Geoff Ryman, and Neil Gaiman.

Wow.

Once or twice a year for the last three years or so, my writing group, Altered Fluid, has visited Jim Freund’s speculative fiction-themed radio show on WBAI, Hour of the Wolf.  The topic of these shows is writing groups and how they function.

After the banter and self-introductions are out of the way, one of us reads the first draft of a new short story.  Then we conduct a regular workshopping session – we go around the room, and each member critiques the story, speaking for a carefully timed two and a half minutes.  The writer can’t respond during this time, but after everyone has had their turn, we open it into a free discussion.  After that, since this is a live radio show, we take calls from listeners.

Perhaps because the show airs from 5 to 7 A.M. on Saturday mornings, Jim has to stay on top of the calls to ensure they are on-topic.  Often they are, and we get insightful feedback.  Sometimes we get snippets of whatever’s on the mind of people who happen to already be up and about at dawn on a Saturday.  Our favorite comment was the heavily accented guy who called in after a hard-sf story about dark matter aliens and said, “I didn’t like it — It needs more trolls.”

Today was my turn at the microphone, and I think it went pretty well.  I read a sf story about three men stuck in a time machine with a sleeping dinosaur, which is not my usual stuff, but its pace and humor made it a good selection for a reading (my thoughts on stegosauruses are here.)  The feedback was kind, and where people saw faults, they had some exciting ideas I could apply towards fixing them.  They got my jokes, mostly.  And we had some great callers: one who had a full crit prepared; one who verified my references to elephants based on personal experience; and one heavily accented guy who said what I thought at the time was, “We all want to have peace in Chechen,” but which actually turned out to be, “We all want a hot beef injection.”  Good thing Jim cut him off quick, or I might have said something like, “As do we all, caller.”  (Now that I think about it, this may have been the same guy who wanted more trolls.)

Here’s the mp3 of the whole two-hour show.

WBAI is on FM 99.5 in the New York area.

Here’s some of what we’re looking for:

Sybil’s Garage publishes a wide variety of speculative fiction, including traditional science fiction, fantasy and horror as well as more atmospheric/slipstream stories. For issue no. 7 we seek to cast a wider net and encourage contributors to send us both atmospheric/slipstream stories as well as those with traditionally strong plots and characters.

We also will look at stories with little or no speculative element, but with speculative tendencies (e.g. weird but not-necessarily supernatural.)

Here’s a few things reviewers said about previous issues:

“Sybil’s Garage [is] one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…”
- Stephen Eley, Editor, Escape Pod

“This issue, a salon of gorgeous language and music, has something for everyone and is well worth exploring for an afternoon, curled up in your favorite chair.”
- The Fix, Rae Bryant

“Sybil’s Garage is a strange little magazine with old-fashioned illustrations accompanying the text. If you like some tales out of the ordinary, then this is for you… The stories all got a Very Good from me.”
- SFRevu, Sam Tomaino

“Sybil’s Garage No. 4 is an alienating thing—a saturation tank of isolation and the sublime. Like its first three predecessors, Issue 4 aligns the quietly bizarre and the slightly uncanny with nineteenth-century design. That’s not to say that Sybil’s Garage is easily classifiable, either in form or content. Victorian woodcuts share pagespace with postmodern silhouettes and modernist sketches. Fragments of polyglottal marginalia pepper Sybil’s pages—appearing everywhere like cryptic typesetter’s notes. From the first glimpse of the Bladerunneresque cover to the final, stunning woodcut, this issue is its own work of slipstream art.”
- Behind the Wainscot, Darin Bradley

The full guidelines are here.  There’s a nifty on-line submission system, and our response time is usually just a matter of weeks.  If you’ve got speculative fiction or poetry that you’re proud of, we’d love to see it!