Dennis Danvers’ Web Site

I just finished Elizabeth Hand’s terrific novel, Generation Loss. What a wonderful writer she is! Her dark narrator is pitch perfect, her examination of the obsessive relationship between the artist and his art, unflinching and thought-provoking, and her evocation of place—a Maine island in winter—chillingly (in all senses) effective. It’s also a great page-turning read without car chases or stupid shoot-’em-ups to distract from the psychological horror of the tale. It’s not fantasy or sf, but manages to be other-worldly just the same. I highly recommend it.

The third Ravencon will be here in lovely springtime Richmond this weekend at its new, more convenient location. Check it out. The first two were exceptionally well-run small cons. I’ll be around quite a bit on Friday and Saturday. I’m scheduled for the following:

Writing Full Time, Friday, 4 pm, a panel about being chronically broke, uninsured, but happy.
Using a Pseudonym, Friday, 11 pm, a panel at 11 pm. Does anybody use their real name then? Robert Sydney will be doing this panel. Dennis Danvers is asleep at this hour.
Signing, Saturday, 6 pm, me sitting alone with some of my books, or, if I’m lucky, sitting next to someone else keeping their books company. I will sign anything. I’ve been working on my Robert Heinlein and Phil Dick signatures.

After eleven years of blissful togetherness, Sarah and I decided to marry. Issues like health insurance hung in the balance, and time was of the essence. For the record, Sarah proposed to me, and I accepted. I have some experience with marriage ceremonies. This was a decidedly odd experience.

Sarah and I first went to get our license, an event I hoped to photograph, forgetting that the courthouse bans cameras, so we had to dash over to Sarah’s office to ditch it. For some reason, marriage licenses are to be obtained in a federal courthouse who must be vigilant against terrorists taking pictures. Once you have the license you must go elsewhere to be hitched. In Virginia now one must have a marriage ceremony. You can’t just go to the courthouse and say “I wanna,” and that’s enough. Even queers could do that. No, there has to be a ceremony, by God. We were given a list of “celebrants” in two categories “religious” and “civil.” Now, you can guess which category a pair of atheists would pick. I called one of the names on the list, talked to this guy’s wife who set up a time. I explained we wanted it soon, with a minimum of ceremony. $50 if performed in their home, $100 anywhere else. Their home, it is.

It’s a house in an older burb. The guy fills out the paperwork while the wife regales us with stories of her grandson and his remote control car. Fair enough. Then the guy emerges with what could have been a Bible or prayer book in his hand, or maybe it was his daily planner. He never opened it. Anyway, he launches into the standard religious service beginning with marriage starting in the Garden of Eden, right down to God joining us together and no man putting asunder or whatever it is. I love the word “asunder,” but this is civil? I wonder what the religious ceremony would be like. I was afraid Sarah was going to bail on religious grounds, but she hung in there, though she did giggle a couple of times.

The high point was the rings. We didn’t have rings. We haven’t decided on the ring question, and we hadn’t had time to go gold shopping with other matters pressing. Not to be deterred, Civil Celebrant whips out two gold bands and hands them over. They’re not technically bands, since they’re split so that they’ll fit any finger hankering after the symbolism, though maybe no ring in that regard would be better than a cheapie broken one? He gave me permission to kiss the bride, and I did. We were so stunned by the whole experience, we almost forgot to give him his fifty bucks.

Then we went out and ate a meal we never would’ve bought any other day, costing about as much as a week’s groceries. We’re very happy now that we’ve made a meaningful commitment.

With this ring?…

The new issue of Intergalactic Medicine Show is online, and I’m in it. If you’ve never read an issue, now’s a good time to try it out. At a mere $2.50, it’s a real bargain. Here’s the table of contents for Issue no. 8:

From the Clay of His Heart
by John Brown

The Frankenstein Diaries
by Matt Rotundo

The Angel’s Touch
by Dennis Danvers

Accounting for Dragons
by Eric James Stone

End Time
by Scott Emerson Bull

Limbo
by Stephanie Dray

Horus Ascending
by Aliette de Bodard

Plus:

Tales for the Young and Unafraid by David Lubar

InterGalactic Interview With Zoran Zivkovic

IGMS editor, Edmund R. Schubert, asked me to write a few words for his blog about how I came to write the story, which I include below, along with Liz Clarke’s nifty illustration for the tale—

How I Came to Write “The Angel’s Touch”

Sarah and I were traveling. We turn into TV sluts when we have a hotel room and a remote control, cruising up and down all those channels. At home we wrestle with rabbit ears for everything we watch, a struggle with cosmic forces, not unlike Jacob’s tussle with an angel but with much less spectacular results.
I came out of the shower, and found Sarah watching some sappy tale of divine intervention nearing its predictable conclusion. You could tell by the music, the beatifically smiling faces. It made me nauseous.

“It’s one of those angel shows,” Sarah said. “The one on the left’s an angel. She saved them from suffering.”

“What suffering?”

“I missed that part.”

I groaned. “Anything else. Please.”

I knew I was running a great risk. Sarah has been known to land on a televangelist and stay put just to lure a bit of sacrilege out of me. It’s one of my more attractive traits, she claims.

The angel was still on the screen, being angelic. I grumbled, “If they wouldn’t always make angels so insipid, so goody-goody. I mean, the angels in the Bible aren’t exactly Care Bears with wings.”

Sarah finds it interesting that a non-believer like myself has read the Bible more than once. It’s a strange world. When I taught Bible in World Lit. classes at a Texas university, a student who claimed to believe every word of the Bible to be literally true, couldn’t remember what it was exactly Abraham had done. “Was he the guy with the ark?” he asked me. “No, he was the one who almost offed his kid because God told him to.”

“I think you should write an angel story,” Sarah said as the credits started to roll, and she resumed surfing.

“Right,” I said.

“I’m serious.”

What a ridiculous idea, I thought, and immediately started thinking about it. If God employs a tribe of assistants in the world, they would have to have a wide range of duties and personalities to match. Some of them might be a bit unnerving, even scary as shit. They are, after all, alien beings, and their duties might very well include the full range of divine prerogatives, which would include, well, everything. Even all the unpleasant bits. Like death and sin and suffering and disease and… You get the idea.

Maybe it was because there was an elevator in the hotel, but almost immediately I saw my scary angel packed rather uncomfortably into an elevator, riding in close quarters with my hapless protagonist. However unpleasant he might be, I did want him to be a real angel, that is, an agent carrying out the will of God, so that the result of his intervention in my protagonist’s life should plausibly represent the will of God, which, if you believe in an omnipotent God, would be, well, everything, so I didn’t see that as much of a plot impediment. I decided to make it a love story, since, speaking from experience, love offers so many opportunities for mortals to screw up.

In an early draft of the story, I blew everybody up, just to get it out of my system, I suppose—to flex my God muscles. I call that the Sodom and Gomorrah draft. Once I didn’t blow the lovers up, the story wrote itself. Since God is reportedly keen on the forgiveness of sins, I daresay he would approve of the results.

My neighborhood association each year asks me to read at the neighborhood Christmas gathering. Year before last I wrote a story, “R3,” especially for the occasion, which ended up appearing in Strange Horizons last December. This last year I read “The Angel’s Touch,” and got a terrific response. That is, they laughed in all the right places.

Actually, the story was dictated to me by an angel after every publication in heaven turned it down as insufficiently angelic. He’s letting me keep the money. Seems they don’t have money in heaven.

I’m pleased to announce a new story, “Here’s What I Know,” in the June issue of Realms of Fantasy. It should soon be available at booksellers everywhere, and John Howe’s lovely cover looks like this:

Buy yourself a copy, one for a friend as well. To get you started, here’s the opening paragraph of the highly autobiographical ghost story:

Here’s what I know: When Mom discovered she was pregnant with me, my parents had been separated for some time. Dad had left her for another woman in another town, and Mom had filed for divorce. I was conceived during a short-lived Christmas reunion. Dad wanted her to get an abortion. She refused. On the eve of the date when the divorce would’ve become final, Dad caught a train back to New York where Mom was living with my brother (four at the time) and begged her to take him back. She did. I was born September 2nd. Dad was at the hospital, 5:30 in the morning. They were married for the rest of their lives, both dying at seventy-two, a year apart. Dad first….

I’m once again teaching two courses at Virginia Commonwealth University this summer. They are both literature courses open to anyone who has successfully completed freshman English requirements. The first, Science Fiction, begins May 19th and runs through June 19th. Class meets 10:30 am—12:45 pm Monday through Thursday. We will read Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Films will be The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Dr. Strangelove, Alien, Starman, and The Children of Men.

The second class, Urban Fantasy, begins June 23rd and runs through July 24th. Class meets 10:30 am—12:45 pm Monday through Thursday. We will read Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle, Jeffrey Ford’s The Empire of Ice Cream, Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Films will be Edward Scissorhands, The Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, and Pan’s Labyrinth.

There’s plenty of room in both classes. I would love to have you!

After several folks encouraged me to attend, I finally went to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida last week. It may be my favorite conference in the field. It’s at an airport hotel in the heart of the geography of nowhere with little to walk to except other soulless airport hotels featuring overpriced high fat dining, but the conference itself was a delight. It was easily the most convivial gathering I’ve been to, a blend of academics and writers who went out of their way to make newcomers feel welcome. I went with friend and fellow Richmond writer Tom De Haven, and he was equally delighted.

I read an abridged version of a story, “The Angel’s Touch,” which will appear in the April issue of Intergalactic Medicine Show and was pleased with its reception. I attended many fine readings (so many I’m sure I’m forgetting someone). Elizabeth Hand read from a YA novel in progress called “Wonderwall.” She captured the voice of a young runaway perfectly, and I can’t wait to read the finished work. Brian Aldiss read his version of “Metamorphosis” in which a hapless cockroach awakens to find itself transformed into “Franz sodding Kafka!” What a marvelous reader he is! It was one of the most hilarious readings I’ve ever heard. Patrick O’Leary read “The Little Guy,” an incisive skewering of everyone’s favorite president. Andy Duncan read a story in progress, the title of which includes the word “cache.” Sorry, Andy, my notes are illegible. The excerpt, however, was funny and sexy. Peter Straub read from intriguing novel-in-progress Skylark. It was my pleasure to read in the same session with Vernor Vinge. His story about an extremely dry martini of vast proportions was a real charmer, as the man is himself. Perhaps my favorite reading was James Morrow’s novella in progress, “Shambling Toward Hiroshima,” a secret history of a WW II WMD later generations have come to know as Godzilla. The brilliant director of Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale, is one of a delightful cast of characters. The best of the academic papers I heard was easily Sydney Duncan’s illuminating analysis of Kelly Link’s stories.

It was my great pleasure to meet Joe and Gay Haldeman and hang out with them. Joe is an endlessly fascinating conversationalist, and they were wonderful company. Tom and I also joined John Clute and Elizabeth Hand for a brief trip to the Canaveral wildlife area where we were thrilled with alligator sightings. John’s as pleasant as he is intelligent—which is saying quite a lot. It was a special pleasure to get to know Liz whom I’d met years ago in Chicago. Tom and I both intend to return to the conference next year. It really lifted my spirits.

Yesterday, we had to have Alice put down. Dr. Neal Rose of Broad Street Veterinary Hospital, who has cared for her all her life, came to the house. His kindness and sensitivity were a great comfort. Her sufferings from progressive arthritis had become unbearable. I raised her from a puppy of five weeks, and I loved her with all my heart. She was a loving, playful, highly intelligent dog without a mean bone in her body. In the quarter of my life I’ve spent with her, I learned a good deal more from her than she ever learned from me. In her memory, I offer this song I wrote for her some years ago in her more active days. The black chow in the second verse was a neighborhood dog who was a favorite of hers. Alice always had a thing for chows.

Bag of Food

Bag of food, bag of food
Daddy’s gonna buy me a bag of food.
I like the munch, I like the crunch,
Like it for breakfast, and I like it for lunch
Damn, you know, that stuff it sure tastes good.
There ain’t nothin’ better than a bag of food.
Bag of food, bag of food,
Daddy’s gonna buy me a bag of food.

Black chow, black chow
Ooh, I like him, and how.
Walks himself, don’t wear no leash.
He’s always somewhere The Man can’t reach.
Ooh I’d like to love him, but I don’t know how.
Ooh I’d like to love him—black chow.
Bag of food, bag of food
Daddy’s gonna buy me a bag of food.

Frisbee flies, so do I—
Gonna get to heaven before I die.
What’s that there, up in the sky?
Ain’t no eagle: it is I.
When the frisbee’s whirling I’m a blur,
Soaring though the heavens like a bird with fur.
Bag of food, bag of food
Daddy’s gonna buy me a bag of food.

Going to the river, gonna jump right in,
Throw me a stick, and I’ll do it again.
Wade in the water just as far as I can:
Sure I can swim, but it’s not my plan.
Jumping rock to rock just like a frog,
That’s why they call me river dog.
Bag of food, bag of food
Daddy’s gonna buy me a bag of food.

Under the table, under the bed
Don’t need no pillow under my head.
While I’m waiting, might as well sleep,
Dream I’m barking, dream I leap
Over the rainbow where squirrels run slow
And there’s a bag of food wherever I go.
Bag of food, bag of food
Daddy’s gonna buy me a bag of food.

I like the munch, I like the crunch,
Like it for breakfast, and I like it for lunch
Damn, you know, that stuff it sure tastes good.
There ain’t nothin’ better than a bag of food.

Writer friend and teacher of writing, Susan Heroy (a wonderful poet), told me she referred her students to my site for writing advice. Oh my God! was my first reaction. I always hesitate to pass out advice fearing it will be taken as authoritative. Even the best writing teachers are best at teaching you to write like them. I know folks who teach writing who never hesitate to be prescriptive: always use an outline, write in the present tense, avoid using dialogue, science fiction cannot be serious literature, etc., etc. I’ve heard all these from various authorities of my acquaintance. Their opposites as well. So what’s a writer to do? Seek out lots of teachers, lots of advice. My advice for today is the next time you find yourself stuck because you’ve run afoul of some influential mentor’s dictum, break the rule and see what happens. (Sorry, Susan, if this mucks things up too much!)

As a character in my as-yet-unpublished novel, The Donut Man, laments, “I’ve read so many books on [writing fiction], they all make a stew in my brain. It’s like the Bible. I can always find somebody to endorse what I’m doing in my fiction, just as many shaking their heads sadly at the mistakes I’m making. Write what you know. Write what you don’t know. Trust the process. Always outline. Find your own voice. Pretend to be other people. Write down the bones bird by fucking bird. All of the above. Thanks a lot.”

My all time favorite advice, however, comes from Lee Smith: “Stick with it.”

Alice ages relentlessly, and she doesn’t have much energy, but she still enjoys her bath. Here’s her very first bath and her most recent. The latter was taken at Critter Town Bathhouse, one of Alice’s favorite destinations. She recommends the aloe shampoo.