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First, just a reminder that Lydia Millet will be reading tonight at McNally Robinson in Manhattan in support of her new novel How the Dead Dream, which is very much worth reading. I'm planning on being there, though will probably arrive a few minutes late.

Second, there are suddenly a bunch of free books available for download via their publishers and authors:

• As many people have noted, Tor Books is giving away a free ebook each week to people who register with them. The current book is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, which I happen to know is a book Lydia Millet is a fan of...
  
• Nightshade Books has a few downloads available, including Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird, which looks like it could be marvelous.
  
• Wired.com's Geekdad blog has an interview with Jeff & Ann VanderMeer from which you can download Jeff's novella The Situation (coming soon from PS Publishing).

John Klima is having everyone who contributed to his anthology Logorrhea write up a little something about why they chose the Spelling Bee word they did, and then also post the section of Jeff VanderMeer's all-encompassing "Appogiatura" story that corresponds with the word. Also, there is a podcast of each section of "Appogiatura". And John is going to chronicle it all via this blog post.

First, about my own word and story...

Elegiacal Origins of "The Last Elegy"

It was the only possible word for me. What stories have I written that couldn't, in some way or another, be described as elegiacal? Sorrow for the past -- that is, it seems, one of the few things my imagination is willing to fixate on for fictional ideas. Often, too, the novels and stories that most appeal to me as a reader are ones with at least a hint of the elegiacal in them, partly because memory and time fascinate me with their twinned ability to haunt us with the ghosts of all we have lost.

Also, two books had captured my mind: Man Into Woman, which is the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery; and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, a novel where spare and very straightforward prose rises to a form of lyricism that I have seldom encountered elsewhere, and where a wandering, often mysterious narrative became, for me, far more enthralling than most novels with strong plots. I knew I wanted to write a story to work through some ideas the books had brought to me, but I didn't know what sort of story I wanted to write.

And then I saw the word "elegiacal", and I knew that would provide the solution. Immediately, a character sprang into mind: a professional elegist, someone who gained great fame from writing elegies, a popular poet in the mold of Edgar Guest. I imagined that at first the fame and money would be pleasing, but then a trap, as he was known only for one thing, and the public only wanted that one thing from him.

How, though, would this story fit in with the other that I wanted to write -- something related to Lili Elbe that also gave me an opportunity to try out some of the rhythms and style of Jean Rhys? What if the elegist fled his fame, and then had to face one last request for a poem, a request he could neither honor nor ignore...

I decided to stay as true to the story and words of Lili Elbe as possible, and I wanted to evoke pre-war Germany less through specific details and more through style (hence, the place is never named; I'm perfectly happy if readers imagine different places for it). It should, I thought, feel like a story of the time -- a bit stilted, a bit melodramatic. I included some of Lili Elbe's own words and phrases, as well as some from Jean Rhys (since Good Morning, Midnight was published in 1939, only six years after the first edition of Man Into Woman came out in Germany). I didn't steal very much, and never without some tweaking, but just enough, I hoped, for flavor and a certain sort of truth. My favorite theft was a cause of death I pillaged from Man Into Woman: "paralysis of the heart", a phrase I hoped would leave itself open to many interpretations. I tried, too, to replicate the ostensibly plain prose of Jean Rhys, knowing that I lacked her skill, but hoping the exercise would, at least, prove fruitful -- what I love about Rhys is not the plainness of the style, but the way it lures the reader in, then presents gaps and ambiguities, creating beauty through absence. She gets compared to Hemingway now and then, but I think she's closer to Pinter. (Looking back on "The Last Elegy" now, in fact, I think I didn't leave enough out.)

Finally, because elegies are about not just memory, but time, I played around with the tense of the story, creating a structure and then breaking it, hoping such gymnastics might provide some subtle clues to readers, knowing full well the feat might simply be distracting.

And now, you'll see, Mr. VanderMeer was rather differently inspired by the word:

ELEGIACAL
by Jeff VanderMeer

Brown dust across a grey sky, with mountains in the distance. A metallic smell and taste. A burning.

Abdul Ahad and his sister Parveen were searching for a coin she'd lost. They stood by a wall of what was otherwise a rubble of stone and wood. A frayed length of red carpet wound its way through the debris.

"It has to be here somewhere," Parveen said. It had been a present from her uncle, a merchant who was the only one in their family to travel outside the country.

Her uncle had pressed it into her hand when she was eight and said, "This is an old coin from Smaragdine. There, everything is green."

The coin was heavy. On the front was a man in a helmet and on the back letters in a strange language, like something from another world. For weeks, she had held it, smooth and cool, in her right hand-to school, during lunch, back at their house, during dinner. She loved the color of it; there was no green like that here. Everything was brown or grey or yellow or black, except for the rugs, which were red. But this green-she didn't even need a photograph. She could see Smaragdine in her mind just from the texture and color of the coin.

"I don't see it," Abdul Ahad said, his voice flat and strange.

"We should keep looking."

"I think we should stop." Abdul Ahad had a sharp gash across his forehead. Parveen's clothes had ash on them. Her elbows and the back of her arms were lacerated from where she had tried to protect herself from the bomb blasts.

"We should keep looking," Parveen said. She had to keep swallowing; her throat hurt badly. She heard her brother's words through a sighing roar.

Now the muddled sound of sirens.

A harsh wind roiled down the brown street, carrying sand and specks of dirt.

Abdul Ahad sat down heavily on the broken rock.

Now Parveen could hear the screams and wails of people farther down the block. Flickers of flame three houses down, red-orange through the shadows of stones.

Their father had been dead for a year. Now their mother lay under the rubble. They'd seen a leg, bloodied and twisted. Had pulled away rocks, revealing an unseeing gaze, a face coated with dust.

Her brother had checked her pulse.

Now they were searching for the coin. Or Parveen was. She knew why her brother didn't want to. Because he thought it wouldn't make a difference. But Parveen felt that, somehow, if she found it, if she held it again, everything would be normal again. She had only survived the air strikebecause she was holding the coin at the time, she was sure of it, and Abdul Ahad had only survived because he had been standing next to her.

"You don't have to look, Ahad," she said, giving him a hug. "You should sit there for awhile, and I'll find it."

He nodded, gaze lost on the mountains in the distance.

Parveen walked away from him, kneeled in the dirt. She stuck her arm into a gap between jagged blocks of stone, grasping through dust and gravel, looking for something smooth and cool and far away. In a moment, she knew she'd have it.

Too many writers have fantastical stories that get stuck in the genre divide: too literary for the mainstream science fiction magazines and too spacey for the literary magazines.

Last year I interviewed novelist Jeff VanderMeer (who blogs at Ecstatic Days) about other places where he looks for support for his genre bending fiction, and he gave me a list as long as my arm:

"The key Internet publications and outlets based in the U.S. include...Locus Online, the SF Site, Emerald City, Science Fiction Weekly, and Sci Fi Wire on the genre side, and Salon, Book Slut, and Rain Taxi on the mainstream literary side."  If you want to read more writing advice from VanderMeer, click here for the complete interview.

Even better, over at Strange Horizons, The Mumpsimus blogger Matthew Cheney has a great new essay entitled "The Discerning Reader of Fantastic Literature's Guide to Literary Journals," updating the list we received from VanderMeer. It's required reading for anybody with a little bit of fantasy, science fiction, or dreamy influences in their prose.

Where should writers live?

The question is so so so important. I nearly starved to death during my first year in New York, living on a book clerk's salary and paying nasty Manhattan rent. It was a terrible financial and writing decision--I'd go to Brooklyn or any other city in the whole world before I'd do that again.

Today the MFA Blog is exploring that question with a little more detail, helping writers find "a community with a strong literary scene, in terms of events, workshops, etc, where the cost of living is reasonable, aka, not NYC." Add your city to the mix! 

Sometimes it feels like you will never finish your book, but you need to remember you are not alone. Jeff VanderMeer has a new feature called Conversations with the Bookless, talking to published writers struggling to finish their first novels. Rachel Swirsky opens this fine new feature.

Got a head? Chop it off and write about it. Hot Metal Bridge is taking final submissions for the headless issue. Details here:

"Please send us your poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on the theme of headless ... Whatever your interpretation, be sure to stun us. We’ll know it’s good when we feel, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, as if the tops of our heads were taken off."

So you've carried your characters through hundreds of pages of adventures. Maybe you are sick of them. Maybe you feel like you are losing your best friends. How do you end your novel?

Professional ghostwriter Laura J. College wrote a helpful short essay on the topic, but the resources are scarce. Today, you can practice your ending skills...

Jeff VanderMeer, one of our guests at The Publishing Spot, is furious with the endings of one of his favorite book series, The Bourne Ultimatum. He felt like he had read to the end of this spy trilogy, hoping, praying for a slam-bang pay-off. 

Frustrated with the ending, he decided to hold a contest. Let's jump in:

"Entertain me, dear readers. Bourne makes it to the place where he’ll find out “the truth”. Give me an alternate ending. What’s the real truth behind Jason Bourne? What does he *really* find out? Contest ends Friday at noon EST and the winner receives a copy of Best American Fantasy and the trade paper of Shriek: An Afterword."

Can you imagine if we had chatroom transcripts of the beat poets hashing out their poetics with their fans and critics?   

Novelist Jeff VanderMeer--one of the patron saints of this site-- pointed out a fascinating set of links arranged by Kathryn Cramer. Cramer has archived a sprawling set of web posts where different readers and writers debate the meaning of the much oft-debated experimental genre, the New Weird.

I'm not going to spend any time trying to define the genre, I'll just let this discussion thread introduce you to the sprawling topic:

"The New Weird grabs everything, and so genre-mixing is part of it, but not the leading role. 

The New Weird is secular, and very politically informed. Questions of morality are posed. Even the politics, though, is secondary to this sub-genre’s most important theme: detail. 

The details are jewel-bright, hallucinatory, carefully described...Vivacity, vitality, detail; that’s what it’s about. Trappings of Space Opera or Fantasy may be irrelevant when the Light is turned on."

No matter what you think about the classification of these literary works, you have to admit that's a gorgeous, inspiring tradition to join. If you want to read more, Jeff & Anne VanderMeer have edited an upcoming anthology of the writers in the genre. 

Which famous literary movements do you wish we could study on such a molecular level?

Why is freelancing like prison? Jeff VanderMeer has the answer.

VanderMeer was one of our first Five Easy Questions guests, and his freelancing advice still stands the test of time--get plenty of exercise to cope with the stress and isolation of the writing life.

The Work-in-progress blog of novelist Leslie Pietrzyk offers some tough-love advice for writers. How To Tell When To Stop Writing Your Novel. Just listen to this: "Many years after getting my MFA, I returned to my alma mater as a returning 'visiting writer,' and I shocked a huge room of MFA students (and some profs) by announcing that my thesis was crap and that I was happy now it hadn’t been published." (Thanks, Maud Newton)

Steve Bryant riffs off the Sopranos finale, exploring how television has changed the way we remember stories: "In dramatically cutting the action mid-scene, David Chase created modern television's first un-Tivo-able moment. There is nothing -- literally nothing -- to see." When you finish reading his essay, go dig on the Top Five Pulp Fiction Endings to remember how people told stories before Tivo...