Cecelia

Here is an excerpt from my own story in the upcoming sixth issue of Here Be Monsters. This is the introduction. We'll be posting excerpts of all 9 stories leading up to our launch on March 16th. Thank you for reading -- Alex

Why would I kill Cecelia?

That's what I asked myself after I got my new meta. It had been hooked up to me for all of three seconds before it made the call. It had been overly polite because it wasn't used to me yet.

Piotr, it had said, I regret to inform you that you are going to murder Cecelia Olyeander.

I had been so excited to get one of the new Blue Sky models, too. It wasn't making a good first impression though. What do metas know? I thought.

They apparently know to contact the police when they detect your so-called intent to kill their creator, because not long after this declaration, a cop came around to my apartment.

He was short, heavy, and dressed in a white dress shirt with a brown coat and pants: all of which made it clear he was kept on for his brain. “I'm Sergeant Sabinetti,” he said as he sized me up. I was standing in the doorway, instinctively blocking my apartment from view.

“Hello, sergeant. What's going on?”

He narrowed his clever eyes for a quick moment, probably trying to decide if I was a bad liar or just thick. “Mr. Malkis, you've been informed of criminal intent by your meta, that's correct? In this case, it's quite serious. You've been told you're going to commit murder.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “but I didn't think that it would call the police. I mean, you can't arrest me for what the meta said.”

“We should speak about this whole situation. May I come in?” He was feigning concern for me, the confused citizen accused of murder by a talking phone.

I am not merely a phone, Piotr.

You can call the police, so you're a phone to me.

We sat in my kitchen (or living room, depending on what you prioritized). “I'm not here to arrest you or even accuse you of murder,” said Sabinetti. “When we get a call from one of those,” he said, pointing at my head to signify the meta interface glued behind my ear, “we have to come as soon as we can. Most of the time, we're too late. Other times, we get there and the suspect confesses. I had assumed you'd be one of the latter cases, since you couldn't be murdering Cecelia Olyeander right now.”

“Why? Where is she?”

“She's doing a press conference -- for Blue Sky.” He looked surprised that I needed to be told this. It was the first genuine emotion I'd seen from him.

“Oh,” I said, “I hardly think about Cecelia anymore.” And I was trapped.

The Timely Demise of Entropy

What?! It isn't a Thursday or anywhere near the end of the week and we are posting... How did this happen?

Given that Issue 6 is launching and it contains 9 stories, we will be posting excerpts of the stories throughout each week (plus our usual weekly post) leading up to the launch.

I'm not sure if choosing an excerpt is an art form or something that would best be done with a mathematical formula.

Kim Goldberg's The Timely Demise of Entropy:

            i.b. noone was last seen tossing pebbles into the duck pond. The morning of the phone call, a small raft made from alder saplings had washed ashore near the footbridge. Its only passenger, a damp Tim Horton’s box stuffed with poems scrawled on sugary brown napkins. Their original sequence was unknown but also fairly irrelevant. It was, however, imperative that the poems be shared as soon as possible so that i.b.’s creative animus could be released from this realm and allowed to deconstruct the next. Jano’s replacement, a bouncy summer student majoring in Leisure Studies, told the pomopos the Bengal was free that very night.

           The mathematicians from the University (joined by a few theoretical physicists) were squabbling about a disqualified answer on quadratic equations and scarcely noticed the poets file in. The poets, catching fragments of disjunctive argument, assumed the mathematicians were out-of-town pomopos come to pay their respects.

  
BIO: Kim Goldberg is an award-winning poet, journalist and author. Her poetry and prose have appeared in  Literary Review of Canada, Geist, Tesseracts 11, Zahir Tales and many other magazines and anthologies. Her latest books are RED ZONE and Ride Backwards on Dragon. She practices the esoteric martial art of Liuhebafa and teaches Kung Fu For Writers on Vancouver Island. Visit www.pigsquashpress.com .

What kind of stories do you print?

That is a question that we get quite a bit from authors looking to submit and people that find out about us. For our first few issues, it was the three of us self-publishing, so even though the stories were different in genre, they all...worked together in their strangeness, their departure from the realistic. It's part of why we use the name Here Be Monsters -- our stories flirt with the edges of the map.
 
But, as it turns out, it's difficult to convey that feeling to other people. In our first calls for submissions, we asked for any genre, and HBM was referred to as an anthology of fiction. We spoke about what we liked in some places, and authors could look through the book to get a feel for what we did, but we weren't advertising ourselves as the place for weird stories, or stories of any particular kind. We did this both because we didn't have a succinct way of saying exactly what we were looking for, and because we wanted as many submissions as possible.

When we approached Issue 6, we tried to focus in a bit, and we started calling it a speculative fiction anthology. This term is (slightly) more common than "genre fiction", which we'd used occasionally before. But we also tried to be more up-front with what our anthology was about. Both here on the blog and in our calls for submissions to writing groups and publications. I don't know if we've yet gotten to the right balance though. I still think there is a nicer way to show what we do that we haven't found yet.

For me, this balance means the most in terms of the writers and readers we attract. If we were called a Sci-Fi/Fantasy anthology (which we've never really been, but we do publish a fair amount of those genres) would we scare away readers of more "serious" fiction? And would we still get stellar stories like Ben Lemieux's "Grace" or Molly Lynch's "USS Roosevelt"? And what if we went the other way and put ourselves out there as simply straight "fiction"? Would we receive bizarre and fantastic stories like "Hungry Hungry Ed" or "If the Mountain Won't Come to Mohammed"? I love the variety and quality that we've been able to get with this issue, so I feel like the other writers out there understood what we were akwardly trying to say about the kind of book that this is. I just hope we can maintain the balance and get better at expressing it to people that don't know about us.

You'd think dealing with words all the time would make me better at this, but there is a certain something (or combination of somethings) that just makes a story click with Here Be Monsters. It's hard to describe, but it is undeniable (and exciting) when we find one of those. It makes me very happy to print them and share them with people.

-- Alex

This Is It

The choice has been made.  Issue 6 is coming.  It will contain great things.

Lamiai, by Anna Avdeeva, will take us to ancient Greece (no, not to discuss a bailout plan, I said ancient) to meet a terrifying myth.

To our surprise, post-modern poets will actually change the world forever in The Timely Demise of Entropy, by KimGoldberg.

Tyler McFarlane will show us how persistent Hungry Hungry Ed can be.

Molly Lynch will tell us about decommissioned ship USS Roosevelt, and how it became a twenty-eight-citizen country.

IraNayman will explain how to control sentient objects or die, in If The Mountain Won't Come to Mohammed.

In Statues, Justin Joschko will chill you to the bone.

Ben Lemieux will tell us the strange story of Grace, and a very old café where extraordinary things used to happen, and will happen again.

As for the Here Be Monsters regulars, Alexander Newcombe will venture into the world of sci-fi murder mystery in Cecilia, and Vincent Mackay will tell us about a very important game of chess in One Move From Checkmate.  Duane Burry did produce another story full of genetic manipulations and mind viruses, but decided to take one for the team, and withdrew his own work to leave more room for submitters.  We thank him for that.

All that and more (amazing cover art by Annabelle Métayer, incredible inside design by Alana Newcombe, merciless editing by Samantha Leclair, and a wonderful printing job by Maison Kasini), in issue 6: Settler 26.

Publishing Is Like Playing Tetris

Publishing is like playing Tetris. You need the right pieces and elements to come together. They come at you fast and unless you are in a state of flow you get crushed as things pile up around you. You reach that flow-state in Tetris when you have been playing for two hours straight without a break – just dropping blocks.

I would like to imagine that after two years (not two hours), we have gotten close to achieving a flow state for publishing Here Be Monsters. Really we haven’t… but I believe in the power of positive thinking, visualisation and all that (please refrain from bringing up that reality doesn’t run on optimism… it runs on harshness).

Whether or not we have reached a state of flow, Issue 6 is materializing fast. The right pieces have landed, or can be seen coming at us from above. We are very busy maneuvering the pieces coming at us into place. Soon there will be lots of bleeping. That’s what happens in Tetris, right? Just like real life.

Specific information on the actual publication will come in the very near future. For now I can tell you that our Launch date is March 16 at le cagibi in Montréal, Quebec. It is located at 5490 St. Laurent, which is here. March 16 is a Friday.

Our launches are not standard book launches, as far as I am aware. We tried that… once… Ours are rowdier events, as far as book launches go. We like music, writing-improv and comedy. Sometimes we do readings like you would expect at most book launches. There will be drinking, eating and mingling. It’s “celebration”. Books are fun. Book launches should be too. Ours are amazing.  

Copies will be available. They will also be amazing.