Recently I got into the habit of searching my photos for the day’s date, to clear out old pictures of parking spaces and hotel room doors, all the “stand in for my short term memory” stuff that clutters up the phone. Yesterday I came across this, from 2012.

I stared at it for a moment. What am I doing taking pictures of this random bookshelf in early October… twelve years… ago….

WELL.

Happy twelfth birthday, Craft Sequence. There you are, sandwiched between Zero History and the evil chicken, a very 2012 place to be. Congratulations on a full round of the Chinese zodiac. Tara Abernathy is a Dragon baby, turns out—which tracks. It’s been a wild ride. I have less hair now. And I bet I can land this series (at least in draft form) before it turns thirteen. That would feel appropriate.

Thank you all, always, for being on this adventure with me.

Recently I stayed up way to late finishing The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez. I have self-control issues around a good story.

Maybe it’s a sign of how out of certain genre conversations I’ve been, or how fragmented the genre-scape has become in the wake of Twitter’s self-immolation (and my own lack of time to dive into TikTok shenanigans1)—but I only heard about this book because a couple people I follow on Bluesky were jazzed about it and upset that it didn’t make more awards shortlists in ‘23. I picked it up a while back; the writing was dreamlike and there was a decent amount of second person and I set it on a shelf for when I was ready. I am so, so glad that I did.

This book! This book, y’all.

I’m at a loss for how to describe it. [Proceeds to go on for another 500 words.-ed] But really though. Because I loved it but/and what I felt while reading it wasn’t much like what I usually mean when I say I loved it—for me love of a book is so often an experience of unexpected recognition, of taking a straight shot through a heart that I know is there and is mine, a sort of sickos_yes.jpg of the soul.

What I felt instead, here, was transported. Induced, like a subject of hypnosis. (The prose has that consciousness-transforming rhythm, the lady in the tuxedo tells you to stare at her watch as it swings back…and forth….) This book shifts register and pace, at times rocket-propulsive, at times meditative and elegiac. It plays with layers of heightened and inverted reality, self-consciously (but never dermatillomaniacally) raising questions of why we tell stories, why we tell these kinds of stories, how they relate to history and where the line between myth and story and history might be, why are we all here anyway, while steering well clear of that self-serving pit in which an unexamined pure-vibes “power of story” ends up being the true secret power of the world even though, okay, maybe story is the true secret etc.—all while telling exactly the kind of story it’s examining. To dizzying effect. On some level this is an entire book of ekphrasis?! It’s all kinda your buddy telling you about this rad Fringe show he saw!?! (laudatory) And there is also a chase scene with a giant wolfman!!! And like twenty dudes get fuckin’ exploded at the end of the first chapter!!

It was a fantasy novel that felt neither self-consciously different from other girls nor sewn together out of common argot. It was worked through. Someone cooked here, man, and they cooked rich and simmered long. The technique is impeccable. When I say Jimenez created a new fantasy language for this book I don’t mean like, Elvish—I’m talking about an expansion of form, voice, and style. One quick example, which I think stands on its own: everyone in this story has a chance to tell their own tale. It’s the elegance of the effect that boggles me: in-line with third person description of, say, a big fantasy action scene, we get, in italics, a sentence or two from the POV of whichever side character we’re following. I felt myself dying, and I was afraid. (Or the good version of that.) It’s a clear, efficient technique that deploys the power and scope of the omniscient narrator yet locates us, denies the totalizing distance of omniscient viewpoint in favor of a choral aesthetic—all these background faces who might easily be paper cutouts or 3d-modeled extras, fireball fodder, become people. Even the bad guys. (Much as they are in a stage production—you can’t get away from the fact that someone cast that background dude.) It’s a fantasy rhetoric that aspires to a world where no one is disposable, nothing is lost—though everything changes—all the way down to sentence-by-sentence formal decision-making.

It also lacks, gloriously lacks, the vague sour aroma I’ve come to associate with “writing while looking over your shoulder at The Internet”—half trying to bulletproof the story against worst-faith readings, half trying to give “the people” what it sounds like they want. (I hope this tendency will recede as more minds flee the Twitter vortex. One good thing of Bluesky and other replacement communities being so much less useful on a business or promotional front, is that I hope they’ll be less of a tar pit for anxious artists. A guy can dream.)

This book is not trying to do what anyone else wants it to. (Which leaves me kind of in awe, not just of Jimenez but of Sarah Peed at Del Rey, the editor per the acknowledgements—while very much a fantasy novel this isn’t an “ordinary” fantasy novel in any sense, with so many moving pieces and nonstandard formal elements to consider and support, it must have been a singular editorial challenge.) It is its own weird beautiful thing, with its own weird beautiful style. It is brave and loving, and when I say I hope to read more books were like this, I do not in any sense mean I want to read books that are trying to be this one. No please, please no, sashay away from such a thought. I mean that that I hope to read more books written with the courage and care this one required, and with the curiosity about what might be accomplished if the writer’s voice and vision were stretched to their utmost, if the writer were not so much biting off more than they could chew, as writing to take a bite out of the godsdamn moon. It’s not a “beach read”, though I would happily read it on a beach; it’s not an anytime book. It’s a book to read when you’re ready to be induced. So find a copy, give it a glance, and if any slip of a sentence enchants you: keep it around. It won’t go stale. You’ll know when you need it. The time will come. The theater is always there beneath the world.

What I’m up to

• Writing something I can’t talk about.

• Writing something else I can’t talk about.

• Revising a third thing I can’t talk about.

• (So informative, this section!)

• Developing Craft Wars, Book 4.

• Revising Craft Wars, Book 3.

• Noodling on a podcast idea I don’t have time for.

• Preparing to be Principal Speaker at PhilCon in November - drop me a line if you’re going to be there!

Recent Reading / Playing

• Just in time for spooky season—if you are in an emotional place to channel spooky season, as opposed to America’s once-every-four-years festival of Uggggghtober—Allison Pottern’s Cryptid Car Rental is a delight.

• Tactical Breach Wizards was so much fun I wrote an entire other post about it but I’m going to let that one simmer for another week or so, because this is already very long.

• Yesterday I started my annual re-read of Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October. My kid’s now old enough to remember, vaguely, reading “the Snuff book” (are we not doing phrasing any more) out loud last year, and now gets it and is asking questions and making connections. (“I think that was the one who was following him last chapter!”) A rush. Join us!

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  And that’s all I have for this week. Take care of yourselves, all. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.