[January 1st] And in the Spring I Shed my Skin

NB: I know it's far from spring, but these lyrics from "Rabbit Heart" by Florence + the Machine sum up how I feel about New Year. 

I’ve waited for January 1^st to write my End of 2011 post, because I needed to have this year behind me, if I am to discuss it. Of course, I missed on yesterday, because I prepared my short story “The Woman Who Wanted to Play Miss Havisham” for submission to Pandemonium: Stories of Smoke. I’m excited, because this will be the first proper SFF story with Bulgaria as setting I am sending out to do the submission rounds. It gives me a great thrill to have written it and include some social commentary on my own.

Most of all I have wanted to wait until January 1^st to include this cheeky picture, which does a splendid job at summing 2011 and my experience with it.

 I’m also playing Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” to emphasize how thrilled I am to say a very literal ‘Fuck you’ to the past year.

Theoretically, 2011 should have been a good year for me. I’ve landed a long term job position with all the right benefits and most importantly, steady income to help my family move along. I’m extremely grateful for finding a place in my current firm. The money ensured that we not only needn’t have wondered how to provide all the basic commodities and pay bills, but that I could contribute to paying off debts my family had for the better part of the last decade. We are not completely in the clear, yet, but I can’t stress how relieving it is not to fear the days in the calendar.

I’ve seen my wonderful, talented, loud-mouthed, wise-cracking, tough-as-nails sister through her toughest academic year, the high school entry exams, which in Bulgaria creates a shadow economy of private lessons. This is so because the education system fails to prepare pupils for the exams, which is why parents are forced to sent children to private lessons. Sometimes the monthly total exceeds what the minimum wage here is. Fortunately, my sister had teachers, who understood our situation and charged less. Now, I’m seeing my sister through her first year in the high school of her choice and I’m relieved that the next five years will be quiet in general.

Because I have steady income, I allowed myself the pleasure to plan and after years of intense wanton I realized my dream to visit a convention, which turned out to be the best experience in my life as a geek. I felt insane to be amidst all the talented people at Fantasy Con and give a handshake to the numerous people I have made acquaintances with over Twitter. It’s been madness for me and I’m immensely proud that I planned this trip on my own, executed it on my own and did not get fatally lost in the UK, which right there at the end constituted a real possibility.

As you can see, some of the big things in life are improving, yet, all of the above, I did alone. I had to work on a full work day, care for my sister [including all bureaucracy surrounding her exams, taking her to her lessons, jumping hoops, checking her homework and be for her in all her moments], work towards my Bachelor in Economics and in the meantime devote myself to the SFF community by reading, writing, reviewing and joining conversations. I still have to do all these things alone. My mother has been working on the other end of the country, while my father has disappeared completely from our lives upon the divorce. It’s my grandparents, my sister and I with me being the only adult within the age to do most of the bills and be the parent figure in my sister’s life.

Sometimes I feel trapped by all of this. Sometimes I feel remorse for feeling the first, because I have weathered a lot with my family as a unit. There are ties that run deep, strong and more powerful than I would wish them to be, because they make the possibility of a fresh start all the more complicated. Between running between these two absolutes, I have come to loathe the job that I have. I worked in the customer care department as a call centre operator and the stress led to health complications I never thought I’d be subjected to, one of them being quite the weight jump. I’ve bloated. Severely. Thankfully, I switched departments and now I’m in office heaven with so many funny, filthy-mouthed and dirty-minded peers. However, because 2011 had to be awful, a quick succession of small scale disasters happened, which I’m afraid almost broke whatever was in charge of sanity. I’m getting better, but I have never stopped asking whatever the fuck runs the show ‘haven’t you had enough’.

It comes to no surprise to say that my writing, reading and involvement in the SFF society has been minimal. I closed Temple Library Reviews, because I felt burdened by the whole thing. As always, I came to see myself as not one to fit in that mould for I set out to achieve goals, which could not be reached given the nature of my efforts. 2011 turned out to be a year of endings spring saw me part ways with Apex’s The Zombie Feed, where I worked for less than half a year. I’m extremely pleased with the results I had promoting Mark Allan Gunnells’ novella “Asylum” and Paul Jessup’s novella “Dead Stay Dead”. However, I did manage to become an assistant editor to Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s anthology project “Space Battles”, which comes out next April, and have engaged on a new editorial position, though I’m not at liberty to disclose the complete details as of yet.

On the writing front, I set out to edit “Crimson Cacophony” [now “Crimson Anatomy”] and I did to the point that it has been sent to beta readers and have critique to carry me out through a new round of edits. Other than this, I haven’t achieved anything worthwhile in terms of new words written. Projects have been started, projects have been finished [less often that I would like to], rejected or not edited to be sent out to venues, though I’m surprised I even did all of this. I even have two short stories accepted, which ought to be released some time this year. 

My reading has been disorganized and purposeless. I can’t even track the books I have done. Once I closed Temple Library Reviews, I announced it the year of Reading Unwisely and I think that this is perhaps the one goal that I realized to the fullest of its potential. I have, even so, reviewed for Innsmouth Free Press, The Portal, Rise Reviews, Pornokitsch, The World SF Blog and contributed non-fiction for Beyond Victoriana.

This past year gobbled me up, minced me with its teeth and spat me out. Given my crap track record, I have no reason to hope that 2012 will be any better, but I have my hopes, I have my plans and I’m a firm believer in the power of change. Even if it is only a principal change, I revel in the moment, when in less than a fraction of a second 2011 ceases to exist and then it’s a brand new year. I don’t live so much for the promise of the year being better as I do to bury the corpse of the last year.

All that shit above, hey, that was last year. The calendar is burning in the hearth, the evil has been exorcised, the bad is forgotten, the hard drive has been defragmented and the good has been backed up for the shitty days of the Blue Screen of Death. So I’m happy, fresh and the awfully archaic naïve and hopeful person, who has no place in this world, but here I am and at the moment, I feel like 2012 will be like this:      

     Art by Tsvetka aka Ink-Pot

[December 11th] From Reactive to Proactive Reading or How I changed My Reading Patterns

I'm sexy and I'm reading

In my preparation for the Weird Wednesday feature, whose launch date remains as January 4^th 2012, I have encountered something about my reading I have not paid much attention to and I assume is private due to the nature of my language situation. I know enough English to write, read and express myself on an above average level among my peers, who have had the same educational profile and have not studied English at university level. Reading books has never been challenging, apart from those written in an intentionally modified English [“The Color Purple”] or older books [“The Vampyre”]. Being a native benefits the reading experience in such cases, but otherwise I’m doing fine with literature.

Or so I would think. Until recently, I’ve been ignoring a trend in my reading, exemplifying an interest in quantity of reading rather than quality. Back in my school years, when I studied in a private group every weekend on top of my school studies, my teacher used to make us read everything and anything. Newspaper articles, magazine articles, book passage, passages from a more scientific text, from and outside our textbooks. Eventually we moved to books and we had to read a book over the summer, mark down all the new words and add those to our own vocabulary, so that when the time came to talk about the books, a barrier has been lifted and I understood more about the book. This continued during high school, where I studied typical US/UK classics such as The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Scarlet Letter, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Ayre. While I enjoyed all these books, I can’t say the same about the reading, notes with new words, bringing out the dictionary, spending afternoons writing the new words and pronouncing them and then returning to the text. This killed the joy in reading and at the time I had grown to be an avid, if a bit slow a reader.

You have to understand that for a teenager, studying causes an allergic reaction, which brings out chronic postponing of any kind of academic activities. At the time, I felt like studying will never end for me and I tried to avoid anything to do with studying. So when I graduated and took up reviewing, I took to reading for pleasure, which is to say that I only read. Never tried to engage with the text in another way. If there was something that I didn’t understand then I would use the context and go on with the story. Sometimes this helped me get through some books easier with minor communication breakdowns between me and the text. Other times I had lucked out and did need a dictionary to help me along the way. “A Book of Tongues” is a perfect example of how the prose acted against me, no matter how much I loved reading this twisted tale. This time around I did try to get out some of the words, translate, then assemble all the fragments of understanding and confusion into a coherent narrative, but seeing as how I fell behind on my schedule and diminished chances of reading more books, writing more of the self-serving reviews I did back then, fighting to come ahead the bloggers who read more and faster, I rushed the process and never returned to it.

It’s complicated to explain what I mean by ‘passive’ or ‘reactive’ reading, but it deals with a preoccupancy with number of books read, the act of having read something, stating that you have completed a novel everyone else has, modeling choices of books based on trends in the blogging circles [where the ‘new shiny’ rules, not that I have anything against it]. It’s easier to blame external forces for this behavior, but that’s not quite true, because I made all decisions when it came to my own reviews and blogging. Subsequently, I took stories with dragons and magic to be simple stories about magic and dragons without thinking further. A friend of mine once told me that SFF literature is the most potent of all kinds of genres, because it has layers upon layers to utilize and comment upon our own reality, better than other genres have. I’m quite proud to say that the man is a psychologist, erudite and has serious, always active views on everything.

Yesterday, as I started to read The Weird edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer I faced a rather winding and ornate foreword by Michael Moorcock. I had difficulties catching on to some of his thoughts and felt lost in the general purpose of the text. The language barrier rose high as it had back during my school years and I had a choice. Read it once and try to decipher it on my own in the privacy of the back of my mind or surrender, grab the dictionary and return to where I began all those years before in reading in English.

I grabbed the dictionary. Read the “Foreweird” by Michael Moorcock and the introduction by the VanderMeers, sat down with a journal for my thoughts, a notebook for the words that I did not know and Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English and studied. Contrary to what I expected, studying this time around brought immense pleasure. For obvious reasons, doing anything because you so choose is pleasing in itself as opposed to forced practice from any educational institution. But there is more than that. The fact that I chose to return to this text and re-read with the new words in my mind stimulated my thought process, pushed me to add something from myself into my opening post for the Weird Wednesday feature based on the words of Moorcock and the VanderMeers rather than summarize as I usually happen to do. I think that this is what pro-active reading is all about, opening to the text and working on how the words can influence me. Needless to say, this process for me has to be more conscious and I can’t say for certain if anyone can relate to me. Language is not a tough barrier to remove. You think you know it, but then it surprises you.  

In short, I’m leveling up, which is quite due, seeing as I’m in my twenties already and time is not waiting for anyone.

I think I went overboard with this post and I doubt anyone has hung long enough to make any comments, but I’d like to hear from you about your adventures in reading. How has your act of reading changed given any given circumstances?

[State of the Reader] Reading in Bulgarian

I'm not making the headway I wanted with the edits. I had a very busy weekend, which I spent in the company of other people [yeah, I'm surprised I did that as well] and had very little time to sit down and edit [naturally, the holes that I had filled up with official duty as a marketing maven]. I have nothing to report on that front, but I hope to make a difference this week.

As far as my reading goes, I manage to steal several pages in bus rides or when I decide that my of so worked fingers need to rest. The bizarre coincidence is that my main reads are both in Bulgarian and it's odd to read in my mother tongue. Since I review in English, I prefer to read my materials in English, because of the names. I'm terrible at names and when they are translated, the task grows a lot more complicated.

As is the case with "Game of Thrones". I'm reading this brick in Bulgarian and while the translation is adequate, there are god knows how many names being thrown right from the start. So yeah, I finally got around to working on that project [read GoT and compare it to the TV series as they air episode after episode]. I just hope that I manage to watch the series in order to make it happen, because let me tell you, watching things in Bulgaria is quite the challenge.

For pleasure [yes, I actually hope to read books that I won't have to review] I'm reading a super old edition of "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier. The translation is from 1983, which makes the book older than I am and the lineup is pretty bizarre, because I can't find all the stories, but that may have to do with the translation rather than anything else. I've watched the Hitchcock movie and now that I'm reading the original novelette, I'm surprised that there is almost no correlation between the text and the motion picture.

[State of the Reader] Riding the Anthology Wave

I’m fairly not used to talking about my reading habits in a sort of journal type. When I ran my review blog [though technically I still am, but it’s dying as you] I didn’t look at my reading and report what I read or any trends in my habits. However, I want to examine my reading a bit in a more personal light.

The past four months have seen me devour more short fiction than I could have imagined. I’m on a strong short fiction wave, which is evident from the review links that I posted last week. I think that the momentary satisfaction of experiencing a story in one gulp, swallow or bite is fairly personal for me. This is the defining theme I have in my relationship with food. I don’t do slow and I don’t do one thing for a long time, especially when I want to distract myself. Things from October till now are far from rosy [adapting to a new family dynamic rarely is a positive process], so the need for distraction reflected in my reading.

I’m figuring this out as I type, so I’m probably as fascinated as you are about why I’m on an anthology high.

On to the books, then.

During the weekend, I finished reading The Zombie Apocalypse edited by Stephen Jones, a UK Mammoth Book of Horror [477 p.] and enjoyed it tremendously. There is much merit in the interconnected eyewitness accounts that create a collective narrative, delivered through all the possible means to record information. I consider this a rebirth of the epistolary novel [unless the epistolary novel is alive and well, in which case long live the epistolary novel!], though in a sense it’s not a single narrative; a strength considering how the ones that survive can tell the whole story from start to finish, while here, the reader experiences the casualties.

Right now, I am enjoying The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels, a fairly light collection published by Chomu Press. I have not sampled the author before, but I can sense that he’s going to be a favorite. I’m gradually introducing myself to the weird genre and I like it. Paul Jessup has been the first weird writer I’ve read so far, but his stories function on dream logic [Glass Coffin Girls], while Samuel submerges reality into its altered state.

In the future, I have too many to pick. I have been commissioned to review Ventriloquism by Cat Valente, so that should be fun, but I hope to manage in Hellebore & Rue [an anthology about queer spellcasters] and The Girl with no Hands & Other Stories by Angela Slatter. I do have some novels in between, so let’s see how things work out.