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Into the Library

Comma splice - image of books lying open

I love libraries.

When the pandemic has passed, I am going to spend so much time at the library.

Many moments that have stayed with me from stories I’ve loved are scenes about fictional libraries. There is, for example, the library of Bastian Balthazar Bux in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, that the child Bastian visits, where he finds the collected volumes of all the stories and dreams he has ever imagined but hasn’t written down – “and the walls were lined with tiers upon tiers of books.”

And there is Ultan’s Library, in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun:

“We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations – books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them. We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here – though I can no longer tell you where – no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other. All these I came to know, and I made safeguarding them my life’s devotion… In the library is a room reserved for children. In it are kept bright picture books such as children delight in, and a few simple tales of wonder and adventure. Many children come to this room, and as long as they remain within its confines, no interest is taken in them. From time to time, however, a librarian remarks a solitary child, still of tender years, who wanders from the children’s room … and at last deserts it entirely. Such a child eventually discovers, on some low but obscure shelf, The Book of Gold. Unless my memory betrays me, the cover is of black buckram, considerably faded at the spine. Several of the signatures are coming out, and certain of the plates have been taken. But it is a remarkably lovely book. I wish that I might find it again… The child, as I said, in time discovers The Book of Gold. Then the librarians come – like vampires, some say, though others say like fairy godparents at a christening. They speak to the child, and the child joins them. Henceforth he is in the library whenever he may be, and soon his parents know him no more.”

When I wrote Ansible: A Thousand Faces, I resolved to add a library of my own to the list of fictional, imagined archives. So I added the Memory Blossom. It is humanity’s last library, at the end of time, and as humanity is at risk of dying, those who battle for our descendants’ survival battle also to defend the library. Those words – DEFEND THE LIBRARY – are written in Arabic over the entrance. And the reader first encounters the library during a battle just inside the door:

“Two sentinels run up the steps, one passing me on my left, one on the right. One black and one white with a shock of red hair. A woman’s language or continent of origin does not matter to Lucia, only her willingness to defend humanity’s children. They take up positions at either side of the door, Saws ready. I climb to meet them, wiping blood from my brow, a thunder-beat of fury in my heart. Every tome in my library has a digital sister, written invisibly into the archives that live in the walls and cannot be burned or broken, but those books that died behind us in a blaze of bullets were crafted with great labor by human hands, by hands whose owners will never again speak or make, whose names may not even be remembered. And the books are but the smaller part of humanity’s memory. A glance back as I climb, and I see some of the bullets have passed across the rotunda into the Memory Blossom, long, stacked cases of bioglass that—when gazed into from the level above us—together resemble the shape of an unfolding rose, of memory unfolding at the touch of the love of the living, the way a rose unfolds at the touch of sunlight. The cases hold and preserve not books but other artifacts rescued from a dying earth, objects brought here by the wives and husbands and brothers and mothers of the beloved dead because these were objects the dead cherished—the dolls and pocketwatches and earmusic implants and squares of colorful fabric orphaned from lost quilts, thimbles and photographs and crucifixes and scraps of paper with Daoishi spells inked on them, and even a long-dead artificial heart. Bioglass does not shatter, but I can see the perfect circular punctures where the bullets penetrated. Inside one of the cases, a tiny sculpture of blown glass that someone—perhaps the craftsman’s child—carried lovingly across the forests of Persia or the deserts of the Sudan, all the way here, has shattered. Its shape, which was that of an elephant, is fragmented; it can’t ever be put back together. Leaning half against the violated case, a young woman lies dead, her face shattered as completely as the elephant. A death that should not have happened today.”

What is your favorite fictional library?

The Memory Blossom was a concept my readers and I developed together on Patreon, which I often treat as a workshop to cook up and test ideas that then work their way into the stories – because storytelling is a communal act. The idea was how might our descendants, after devastating global crisis and near extinction, preserve the memory and knowledge of their pasts – how might they do this as they grieve? And when one of my readers (the thoughtful and lovely Genevieve Bergman) reminded us that refugees carry memories of the past that are encoded in objects and relics and photographs of the lost, not only in texts, the Memory Blossom was planted. I like how it grew.That is the kind of conversation my readers and I have on Patreon, as each book takes shape. Come join us there – get all the ebooks, fun the books, and help me create a fictional library or a bizarre device or a dangerous new creature. You never know what delicious mischief we might get up to, together. You can join here:

https://www.patreon.com/stantlitore

I hope you will.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

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New Release from Stant Litore

Well, here we are. 2021. I think, looking back at the onslaught of the past year – and looking ahead at the hard work of the new year, my energy is very Yang Xiao Long (from RWBY): “Yeah, I’m scared…but I’m still standing here.”

If you need an escape after 2020 – and you want to see what I’ve been writing during the pandemic – here is a new book: Incursion. It’s the first book in a new series, The Dakotaraptor Riders!

From the back cover:

Looking for a thrilling tale with lesbian dakotaraptor riders, were-brachiosaurs, Slavic witches, triceratops cowboys, carnivorous cacti, and invaders with machine guns mounted on deathreaper tyrannosaurs?

If you’ve been looking for a series like that, Stant Litore has your back. In Incursion, join Sasha Nightwatcher and her wife Yekaterina on a wild dash across the violet prairie to save their alien homeworld.

You can pre-order here. The paperback edition will be available for order later this month.

Or back my work on Patreon and start reading it today with your membership.

A bit from the book:

Here’s a passage from the book that I feel keenly here at the end of one year and the start of another:

In my memory, I have just fallen from Ihira’s back at high speed and I am winded. Ihira stands nearby in the grass, waiting for me. Mom reaches her hand down, but I don’t take it. I can’t, Mother. I can’t.

Her voice is deep and melodic, a voice for braiding up the night with. Yes, you can.

I keep falling. It’s too hard.

Get up, daughter.

Just let me lie in the grass a moment, Mom.

She crouches beside me, hands between her knees. She looks at me. Her hair is black as night, her eyes gray as steam rising from the flanks of a ceratopsian herd. Her face and hands are wrinkled and strong and kind. She moves them, signing as she talks, as our people often do. You keep falling, do you?

Yes, Mom. Tears of shame burn against my eyelids.

You know what you have, Sasha?

I shake my head.

She takes my hand in hers, presses the smooth metal surface of the Founder’s book into my palm, closes my fingers over its pages. The book is still warm from her hand. You have a bruised hip, two bruised ribs, a cut lip, dirt on your cheek. And you have the Founder’s book and your mother’s stories and the blood of a nightwatcher in your body, and you have a whole lot of hope in your heart. You have hope, Sasha. That’s what you have. Hope. It’s the best thing that ever was or ever will be. Spun from stories, stronger than medicine, older than this world. Hope is what braids our lives together. Hope carried our people between planets and hope carries us through the red rain and hope will carry you. So will Ihira. Now get on your feet, daughter, and get in her saddle and ride.

REVIEWS:

“Straight for the heart and delightfully weird.” – Joseph Brassey, author of Skyfarer and Dragon Road

“Stant Litore’s Incursion brings a new and fantastic universe alive, packed with vivid characters and colossal beasts—yet amidst the story’s intense action and swirling dilemmas, he never loses sight of his raison d’être: the power of human connection.” – Richard Ellis Preston, Jr., author of Romulus Buckle and the City of the Founders

“In these dark days, we need reminders of what makes us human: community and song, collaboration, story and hope. The Dakotaraptor Riders gives us those reminders. Woven onto the warp and weft of a rich folklore that feels completely authentic, and yet contains threads that will make contemporary folklorists grin, this tale of clashing philosophies, racing dakotaraptors, and abiding love is a salve for a wounded soul. It reminds us not only that the fight can be won, but that the fight is worth waging against the forces of destruction, of cruelty and colonialism. This book is The Dark Is Rising for science fiction. Read it, and let it braid your frayed threads whole again.” – O.E. Tearmann, author of The Hands We’re Given (Aces High, Jokers Wild)

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New Book from Stant Litore: On The Other Side of the Night

New from Stant Litore: On the Other Side of the Night (How Science Fiction and Fantasy Can Help Us Through Our Dark Hour)

“We are enduring the long night. Our people are ill and dying of a new disease. Our societies, at home and abroad, are beset by fascism—a shadow that, like Sauron’s in Mordor, has found new opportunity to take shape and grow again. Climate change sends devastating heat waves, forest fires, and hurricanes to our shores. At every hour, faces on television and voices on Twitter are telling us to fear, fear, fear, like the drumbeat of our heart going too fast. Tragically, because death or extinction is too terrifying, because disease and ecological disaster are too frightful, we turn our fears on each other instead. Those others, they are what we must fear, our leaders and too many of our storytellers insist. We are being asked to accept small-minded stories that make our hearts smaller, when we are in most need of larger stories that make our hearts bigger.

“When this time passes, if we strive only to ‘go back’ to how things were, to the injustices and unsustainable complacency that constricted our society before the pandemic, then we will be the most pitiable of fools. This is a time to imagine better, improbable, impossible futures. How we make it through this long night together will be dependent on the stories we tell and the stories we are willing to hear, as we face each other across the fire with our backs to the long dark. There are gifts of hope tucked inside these tales like trinkets or treasures tucked inside nested Russian dolls. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Come closer to the fire. Let’s talk.”

Find the book here, in paperback and kindle editions: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HXBPTJG

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She-Ra, Cleaning the Couch, and a Day at House Litore

River, my ten-year-old, was cleaning under the couch and was getting frustrated, so I told her she’s doing a better job at it than the Princesses of Power and the Best Friends Squad would.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yep! Just think. Princess Plumeria would see the problems under that couch and be like, ‘I will plant potatoes and strawberries and GIANT PURPLE FLOWERS in this couch!’ Poof. Potatoes everywhere. And pretty flowers. But STILL a mess. And Mermista would be like, ‘Ugh, really, I’ve got this, I mean, if it has to be done, I guess,’ and would lift her arms like this and SPLASH, FLOOD THE COUCH with waves and dolphins and little wriggly jellyfish, but it would still be a mess, just a wet mess. And Frosta would be like, ‘Stand back, princesses!’ ZAP! and the couch would be FROZEN.”

River: “Oh no! It would freeze your BUTT if you sat on it!”

Me: “Yep. It sure would. Not a good solution. And Bow would shoot an arrow at the couch…”

River: “And the couch would be covered in green goo!”

Me: “Yep. And Glimmer would be like SPARKLE SPARKLE SPARKLE! TAKE THAT EVIL COUCH! AAAAA! SPARKLE SPARKLE!!!! and it would be the shiniest messy couch in the universe. Even the dirt would be shiny.”

River: “Ew! Shiny dirt!”

Me: “And Adora would swing her sword and shout FOR THE HONOR OF GRAYSKULL and she’d be like, I’m gonna SHE-RA HEAL THIS COUCH!!! except Chop, slash, chop, she’d cut the couch in two!”

River: “Then there’d be TWO dirty couches!”

Me: “Yep. And then Catra shows up and she’s like, ‘Heyyyy Adora,’ and she tries to take care of the couch but she goes Scratch, Scratch, Scratch, and now the couch is all cut up…”

River: “Hahahahaha!”

Me: “And Catra goes ‘ARRRRRGHHHHH THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING, here, Scorpia, you do it.’ And Scorpia is like, ‘Yes! I’m on it! I’ve got to do this for Catra! Clack! Clack! Wow, this is really hard when you’re a scorpion princess and you don’t have hands, clack! clack! Don’t worry, Catra, I’ve got this, anything for my Catra, clack! clack!'”

River: “Catra’s so mean.”

Me: “Yeah, she’s a REALLY bad friend.”

River: “But what about Entrapta? She has moving hair!”

Me: “Oh yeah, so Princess Entrapta designs a bunch of tiny robots that pick up all the crumpled papers and half-eaten cookies and then she hacks the code on the vacuum cleaner and names the vacuum cleaner Emily and it vacuums up all the dust while Entrapta hangs upside down from the ceiling watching and enjoys a plate of tiny food. And she monitors how long the job takes and correlates all the data and says things like, “For SCIENCE!” and is like, “Faaaaaaascinating.” And then the couch is clean and spotless and Entrapta’s already distracted and busy programming the fireplace to open portals to other planets. Entrapta’s got this. She’s a scientist. But you’re literally doing better with that couch than ANYone else on the Best Friends Squad.”

River: “Whoa.”

Me: “So. What did we learn from this?”

River: “Learn all the science!”

Me: “You got it, River-bear.”

________________________

Stant Litore writes fiction about gladiators on dinosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, and time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future, as well as books about ancient Greek and sacred texts. He also teaches intensive crash courses for writers on character development and worldbuilding. You can find all of that on this website.

Young River is awesomeness incarnate. She likes She-Ra, mathematics, mysteries, and rockclimbing.

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4 Stant Litore Omnibuses: So Much Story!

You can get four Stant Litore series now in four omnibus editions!

The Zombie Bible
Biblical tales retold as episodes in humanity’s long struggle against hunger … and the hungry dead. This omnibus includes Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, Strangers in the Land, No Lasting Burial, and I Will Hold My Death Close.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942458207
Direct store: https://stantlitore.itch.io/zombiebible

Ansible: A Thousand Faces
A hijabi shapeshifter and her band of time travelers stand between humanity and the long dark. This omnibus includes Ansible: Season One, Ansible: Season Two, and Ansible: Season Three, the complete saga.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732086982
Direct store: https://stantlitore.itch.io/ansible-omnibus

Colosseums for Dinosaurs
In a far future dystopia, gladiators compete on dinosaurback aboard orbital space colosseums. This omnibus includes The Running of the Tyrannosaurs, Nyota’s Tyrannosaur, and The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/173208694X
Direct store: https://stantlitore.itch.io/colosseums-for-dinosaurs

Dante’s Heart
Two linked novellas in which a monster hunter, a naiad, a geneticist, an immortal cyborg, a blind necromancer, and others embark on humanity’s last pilgrimage across a universe inhabited by marvels and torn by the violence of the past. This omnibus includes the duology Dante’s Heart and Dante’s Rose, with more than 20 full-color illustrations.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732086915
Direct store: https://stantlitore.itch.io/dantes-heart

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Ansible: Season 3 is Here!

Book Cover: Ansible Season 3

HERE AT LAST: ANSIBLE SEASON 3. I am excited to announce the arrival of my new novel and the thrilling conclusion to the Ansible Saga!

Available today in kindle and epub at my direct store

Or pre-order on Amazon

Or get it in paperback

Audiobook forthcoming

In a future where humanity is a refugee species, can refugees from the past save us?

The pneumavores (“soul eaters”) have taken the earth and have spread to every planet humanity has ever touched. Now a Syrian refugee, a thirteenth-century librarian, and a hijabi shapeshifter from the far future must travel across space and time to defend humanity from this intergalactic and devouring evil.

They’ll find allies: A wheelchair gunslinger from far-future Beijing. A legion of women soldiers wielding Spinning Saws that can slice through predators that only barely exist inside our universe. A strange child-empath who can hear all of humanity’s suffering at every instant in history. A firestarter-goddess from our prehistory. Together, they will face a species that travels across time and feeds on terror itself.

The battle for our future starts today.

Ansible Season Threehttps://stantlitore.itch.io/ansible-season-three

Get Season One here: https://stantlitore.itch.io/ansible-season-one

Get Season Two here: https://stantlitore.itch.io/ansible-season-two

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Thank You, Medical Professionals

I am not the President of the United States. If I were, I would probably be tweeting. And what I would be tweeting would be information and stories about how exhausted doctors in New York are working long hours and fighting for their patients’ lives. I’d be thanking the nurses who watch patient after patient die and retreat to cry in private. I’d be talking about the medical students who have graduated early to be drafted into Operation Kick Pandemic Ass. I’d be talking about more junior med students who are volunteering as gophers to run errands, provide childcare, deliver coffee and food, and otherwise take care of medical personnel who don’t even have time to sit down. I would tweet things that our medical personnel need to hear right now. I’d let them know we have their back. I’d let all those paramedics and RNs and LPNs know that they’re going to get affordable access to health insurance or student loan relief and all the PPE I can find for them because by God do they ever deserve the help right now. I’d give them a number to call if they’re feeling hopeless and suddenly alone in the dark because they just watched too many patients die, because I wouldn’t want to lose them to despair or suicide. I’d let them know we’re thinking about them and that their country thanks them for their service. If I regarded myself as a “wartime President,” I’d be thanking our “military” in scrubs profusely, and I’d be telling our people about who our heroes are. At 8 p.m. each night, I’d say, “LET’S GO HOWL FOR THE MEDICAL PEOPLE, AMERICANS!” and I’d post a video of me and my family howling. Because if I was going to be silly on Twitter, I’d be silly for a good purpose. That’s what I would do if I were President.

As a private citizen, I’ll say to the medical people who are among my contacts and whose time reading blogs or Facebook has been limited by how overwhelmed many of them are: Thank you for everything you’re doing. My family and I thank you for your service. We’re so glad we’ve got you. Thank you.

Stant Litore

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Gratitude

A candle for gratitude

Here are a few things I am thankful for right now. Just a few, I can list more later. Because gratitude is the enemy of despair and a curative for fear. And because my faith teaches me to unforget what I have been given, whether my community is experiencing sunlight or hailstorm.

I am grateful for a house full of books.

For this soft bed, when I am fatigued.

For friends who gather around us in a rough season.

For my strong wife, a fierce partner when there’s a crisis. And whose voice is soft and lovely this morning. I am thankful the house is quiet and she could sleep in.

I am grateful for my readers, who love the stories and have amazing and unexpected stories of their own.

I am grateful for my Patreon members, who keep this wild endeavor of mine funded and help keep the children fed and well.

I am grateful for the talent and skill of our local medical community. I am thinking especially of Inara’s doctors and providers.

I am grateful for Inara’s fierceness, Cirdan’s kindness, and River’s laughter.

I am thankful for this very warm blanket right now.

I am thankful for this bookmark, which reminds me where I left off and keeps me from falling into the barbarism of folding down the corners of pages. (Shudder.)

I am grateful we have clean water to drink.

I am grateful I get to tell all of you stories.

Stant

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

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Nitocris, the Babylonian Queen Who Doesn’t Have Time for Your Nonsense

The Gate of Babylon

The Queen of Babylon was sharp of wit, full of sass, and had exactly zero patience for the follies of men in power. Upon Nitocris’s death, at her orders her body was placed in a tomb directly over the main gate of the city, with the consequence that many kings chose to go around the back way rather than risk the ill luck of passing in all their panoply beneath a corpse. On the outside of her tomb was an inscription telling the kings that would rule after her time that a great treasure was laid within her tomb: “If any king of Babylon is short of cash, let him open up my tomb and take what he likes, but only at the most dire need. The treasure will do him no good if taken under other circumstances.” For a long time the tomb of Nitocris went undisturbed. At last, Darius had it broken open; he was irritated that he always had to enter the city by the back way like a man of lesser station, and it galled him that there was a treasure there just waiting to be taken. So he violated Nitocris’s tomb. Inside, he found not so much as a single coin. Just a corpse. And an inscription beside it:

If you hadn’t been such a greedy jerk, willing to grab money by any despicable means, you would never have violated the rest of the dead. —Nitocris.

The tale is from Herodotus, so it may or may not have actually happened; it isn’t always easy to corroborate Herodotus, a fact that he himself freely acknowledges. The “father of historians,” he had a way of collecting stories, including contradictory ones, presenting them each to the reader, and inviting the reader to consider which were likely and which were not. The tale of Nitocris is among my many favorites.

_______________________

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

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Now You Can Get the Ebooks Direct from the Author

Short version: you can now buy my science fiction and fantasy directly from me at https://stantlitore.itch.io. I’m really excited about that! Also, if you look up ‘Stant Litore’ on Kobo, Apple, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or the Kindle, you’ll find some great fiction to read!

Want to ride a tyrannosaur, travel across space and time to make first contact, or battle the hungry Bronze Age dead?

So, where can you find Litore’s stories?

1. ORDER FROM THE AUTHOR:

First, check out https://stantlitore.itch.io/ This is a cool indie site where creators can sell games, comics, and books, and it is where you can purchase my ebooks directly; 95% of the purchase goes straight to me. This is my main storefront; purchases here support me the most. I like this store because I can include bonus stories with your purchase if I want to, you can tip me extra if YOU want to, and I can show off the beautiful books more fully. When you buy the book, you get to download either a kindle or epub file (or both!) that you can then upload to your e-reader or open with most e-reader apps. Come take a look!

2. ORDER FROM AN EBOOK STORE OF YOUR CHOICE:

Second, my fiction is also listed now in many ebook stores, including Amazon Kindle, Google Play, Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, and (for my Australian readers) Angus & Robertson. Some of the books are listed on Mondadori, as well. To shop these stores, just use the links below:

For an omnibus of the dinosaur gladiator stories:
https://books2read.com/dinosaurs

For The Zombie Bible:
https://books2read.com/zombiebible

For Ansible Seasons 1 and 2:
https://books2read.com/ansible1
https://books2read.com/ansible2

For Dante’s Heart:
https://books2read.com/dantesheart

3. FOR LIBRARIES

Need an ebook copy for your library? Stay tuned – The books will be listed in Bibliotheca and Overdrive very soon! Librarians are my heroes, and I’m glad to be able to get them easier access to the books.

4. AUDIOBOOKS:

Want audiobooks? They’re not all released yet, but those that are, you can find them here:

What I’ll be working on next:

  • Finishing Ansible: Season 3
  • Finishing the Lives of Unforgetting audiobook
  • Working on the next dinosaur story
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What is a Comma Splice? (And Other Tales of Grammar and Cosmic Horror)

Comma splice - image of books lying open

What is a comma splice?

CW: Grammar and Gore

Like the mighty Dickens before me, I will use a comma splice if I judge the time right, if the stars are aligned and it is time to afflict grammarians with madness and woe as they gaze helplessly into the abyss of a cosmos that is uncaring of our punctuation and our futile attempts at order. However, I can never do so without also at that moment remembering the words of an English teacher who cautioned me and my fellow teaching assistants in an effort to prevent our venturing into such unwholesome magic.

This is what she said:

“I need to tell you what a comma splice is like. This is what it’s like. Picture a big ole snow slope and there’s a sled about to plummet down that slope like a greased piglet, and there’s this little child. The sled slips and the child reaches out and grabs hold of that sled and tries to stop it and you know what happens? I will TELL you what happens. That big ole sled just RIPS the child’s arm right off, and the sled careens on down the hill like a politician running from a scandal and the child’s arm is just flapping in the wind and spraying blood all over the snow, blood everywhere, just geysers of blood! Now imagine it had been a grown man on the hill instead and he reached out and grabbed hold of that ole sled and it stopped. It stopped because that man was strong enough to hold it, unlike the poor child bleeding out in the snow while his arm is off down the hill waving at the angels. See, that grown man is a semicolon and he could stop that independent clause dead in its tracks, but that poor child was just a comma. So every time you see a stray comma flapping in the breeze between two independent clauses where it has no earthly business being, you just remember that child’s arm spraying blood. That’s a comma splice. Now go teach your students that. They won’t forget it.”

Between the comma splice child, and the unclosed parenthesis just lurking around like a flasher in a trenchcoat bothering good people who just want to go about their sentences, and the sentence with passive voice that was like a lonely grad student who went camping and was expecting her boyfriend to meet her but a bear came first and ripped off half her face and took out one of her eyes and ate her, and after the mauling they found the body but not the bear, and nobody knew who or what had torn the poor grad student to pieces and cracked her bones for the marrow, because her sentence used the passive voice and only had a direct object and no subject, a body without any visible agent of its demise…

Well, between those things, I did not leave the assistantship unscathed. (My first published fiction was horror.)

The ways of punctuation proved dark and terrifying and fascinating and full of grim and grisly truth, like a Flannery O’Connor story, but for our teacher, proper punctuation was our line of defense, and our students’, against the otherwise inevitable predations of a lawless and hungry universe. I remain, as she predicted, both appalled and unforgetful.

Stant Litore

_______________________

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

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A First Read for the New Year

Cover: No Lasting Burial
Hi readers! If you loved Lives of Unforgetting, I’d like to suggest No Lasting Burial for your first read in the new year. It is my best book. It features a dying city. A lake where the fish have disappeared and the dead lurk underwater. A one-armed woodcarver in search of love. An outcast rebel with a cause, a battle-horn, and a scar for each of the dead he’s sent home. A widow fighting for the lives of her sons, who gave birth in a tomb so soldiers wouldn’t find her and the child. A disgraced priest, tormented by the night his people were attacked and he ran away. A fisherman-poet who dreams of the night he heard angels calling to each other across the hills. A homeless migrant who needs her voice back, if anyone will listen. And a traveling miracle-worker with dirt on his face and ears that hear every cry of pain and grief in every century, and who starts stirring everything that’s dead and unburied…
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8 Years of Storytelling!

October 5 will be here soon: the eighth anniversary of the publication of my first novel, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows. It is a very raw, emotional, visceral book about grief and justice, love and loss and endurance. I remain moved by it, many years later. Its thematic concerns are still the same questions that drive me. It was the first installment in The Zombie Bible, a retelling of the tale of Jeremiah.

Last year, I reflected on it while writing Lives of Unforgetting:

I have always found myself moved and troubled by Jeremiah’s story. Like Cassandra of Troy, cursed by the god Apollo to see the future but be believed by no one, Jeremiah walks the streets of ancient Jerusalem before its fall, pleading with the economically well-to-do, the religiously content, and the politically complacent. Look at our city, he demands. One child is sacrificed to the flames on the hill, while another starves in the street while just indoors, on the other side of a wall, an affluent woman with well-fed children bakes cakes to Astarte, and sings so that she will not hear the screams of another woman’s child.

“I set Jeremiah’s complaints against injustice and idolatry (which he saw as a root cause of injustice) to fiction in my novel Death has Come up into Our Windows. I wanted to try and put that prophet’s heart and his words of fire on the page for a modern reader.”

And in a note at the beginning of Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, I said this about the story’s genre and its thematic concerns:

“The crisis created by an outbreak of the walking dead offers a telling diagnostic of those flaws in the human condition that resurface, century upon century: our tendency to let problems fester untended until they become crises, our frequent inability to work together for a common good, our quickness to forget the lessons our grandparents learned at the cost of much sweat and blood, and the extent to which our privileged classes ignore and deny responsibility for the plight of the impoverished and the disinherited. Our ancestors often described the attacks of the hungry dead as acts of either divine retribution for human sins or divine abandonment in utter grief at human evil, and in at least one sense they may have been correct: the rapid rise of an outbreak is nearly always a consequence of our own failings.”

I think the story may be all the more timely and desperate now, even more than in 2011. Certainly when I wrote it, starting in the summer of 2009, I was thinking as much of our America as I was of Jeremiah’s ancient and dying city.

If you’ve never read the book, I hope you might. It is part nightmare, part cry of defiance in the dark, part love letter from me as a young writer with a heart on fire. It is here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012R7PFU8

In October, the book will be 8 years old. It has been a vigorous, exhausting, hopeful, exhilarating eight years. And it is still only the beginning. So many stories yet to tell.

Stant Litore

DHCW

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A Little Bit of Celebration for the Day

Look who is growing!

Diana1

It’s my Great Pyrenees puppy, Diana of Themyscira. She is known affectionately around the house, though, as Thunderfloof. She has been an enormous help to me in weathering the winter depression I get; with her, I managed to sail my raft over the surface of depression’s gray sea without sinking fully in, this winter.

She is beautiful and good-hearted:

Diana2

Look who else has been growing! Even more exciting – It’s my son, Círdan Leto, named for the Shipwright in The Lord of the Rings and for the Duke and the God Emperor in the Dune series. He is exploring. He is two now – how swiftly Lady Time leaps when children dance with her!

CirdanCirdan1

My daughters are also thriving. River is excelling at math and science, and Inara is now trying to learn to run – she’ll run a few steps, stumble, and try again, a few times a week. That is how much she thinks of the prediction she was once given that she would never stand or walk…

Thank you all for following my work! Whether you’re doing it on this blog, on Facebook, or on Patreon – where you can get the behind-the-scenes look at everything that’s getting created and help fund more of it. It means so much to me.

I hope you’ve been enjoying the books! The next up – working vigorously on it now – will be Ansible: Season Three.

Stant Litore

Books

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Reminder to Self

Reminder to Self: I am not writing for everyone.

That reader over there, in tears and a little overwhelmed with life, who tonight could really use the adrenaline rush of riding a tyrannosaur across an orbital space station, that’s who I’m writing for.

That reader over there who has just been bricked up behind an authoritarian wall of out-of-context biblical verses and can’t draw a good breath of air and who would really appreciate having that house-of-cards wall shattered and spun into a life-affirming, take-you-over-the-rainbow, blow-the-roof-off-the-church-and-come-to-Jesus whirlwind, that’s who I’m writing for.

And that boy in me, fighting giant invisible birds with a stick in the forest behind his farm, that’s who I’m writing for.

Can’t write for everyone. But I can write for them.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

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Here in the American West

Uranium

There is so much to love about this story. First, the couple involved have such great names for characters in a story: Stephen Jennings and Rachel Rivera. Second, the uranium and the rattlesnake were both legal in Oklahoma (the open bottle of Kentucky Deluxe, not so much). Third, the vehicle was stolen. Fourth, Rachel Rivera was a felon. Fifth, Jennings told the cops (jokingly, one assumes, but let’s not assume, because we’ve got us a story to tell) that with his pet snek and the jar of uranium, he figured he might make a super snake. Sixth, the poor guy got pulled over for … having expired tags. So there’s Jennings, backcountry rebel in his stolen ride with his felon Rachel in the passenger seat with her firearm ready, his deathkillsnake in the back, his jar of uranium, his bottle of Kentucky’s not-quite-finest firewater, all ready to rev it up and head straight across the American West to spread a trail of mayhem, carnage, and slithery wonder … and then he gets pulled over because the tags got too old. The best laid plans of snakes and men go oft awry, and bureaucracy is the grim reaper who comes for us all in the end.

And if that isn’t a quintessential American story, I don’t know what is.

Stant Litore

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I’m Not Here to Write You a Small World

Bookshelf of Stant Litore's fiction

tl;dr: Whether we’re comfortable or uncomfortable with “diverse characters” in fiction has everything to do with how we’ve defined our communities. I’m not adding anyone to the fictional world or “forcing” them into the story. I’m just refusing to subtract people who are already in the world we share together.

Let’s talk about “diverse characters” for a moment.

Every once in a while, a reader will object, with a tone of moral indignation, that they don’t like “PC” fiction (I think they mean “politically correct”; I don’t think they’re objecting to thriller novels about desktop computers) or that they don’t think I should be “forcing diversity” or writing “political fiction” or “ramming a message down their throat” or “rubbing a message in their face.” (About nonconsensual throat-ramming: It’s always weird to me when a reader describes a fictional story that contains elements they dislike using metaphors for bodily invasion or assault, but that’s a topic for another time.)

What I have been thinking about is why there is a seemingly fundamental disconnect between these particular readers and other readers (including myself) who I write for. I think it has to do with how we have defined our communities – in religious terms, with who we recognize as our neighbors.

When I tell a science fiction story with Muslim characters, or characters with various ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, levels of physical ability, etc., these objecting readers think I am “forcing” these elements on them because what they have defined as their community does not include or welcome people who are different from them in these ways, and the presence of people different from them is seen as an invasion or violation.

But I don’t write the characters I write because I have a “message.” Or to be “PC.” Or to ram a character “down someone’s throat.” I write the characters I write because people in my community, people I love, my family and friends and colleagues – they inspire and are reflected in the characters I write. My characters are influenced by people I’ve known.

There is a 150-year-old Chinese gunslinger in a wheelchair in my current work in progress not because I want to rub diversity in a reader’s face, but because my daughter is in a wheelchair and she is as fierce as a gunslinger, and because several of my dearest college friends were from China (Yi and I used to stay up all night playing Starcraft; I usually lost), and because I think in a future scifi novel, people might live to 150.

And I wrote into Ansible: Season Three a love story between two bi women not because I have a “political” message in mind but because some people very dear to me are bi. And they have love stories. When I write science fiction stories about people marooned in alien bodies in which they never felt at home … I know people who live that experience, though their bodies are not literally extraterrestrial. (That’s the scifi part.)

To me, the presence of these fictional characters is not an invasion of the reader or an authorial intrusion that I have jammed into the story; their presence is just a given. These are people. Readers who object often think that I am “adding” people into the fictional world that they don’t want there, and who they think I shouldn’t want there. Unwelcome people. But I’m not adding anyone to the fictional world. I’m just refusing to subtract people who are already in the world we share together.

If I write a hijabi bi superheroine, I didn’t write her because I want us to be “PC.” I wrote her because I wanted to tell her story. It would be utterly exhausting to censor my fiction and shrink my imagined worlds and their casts of characters merely in order to accommodate the bigotries or discomfort of some readers.

If your own world is small, then good stories might make you feel uncomfortable. And maybe they need to. Because good stories make our world bigger.

But if it is truly too uncomfortable, there are so many stories out there that are written with smaller worlds inside them. Readers can go read those stories and inhabit those smaller worlds if that is truly what they want. But I don’t have any obligation to my readers to write them a smaller world. That is not what I do.

Stant Litore

Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!

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For writers: Want to write characters who are very different from you? Find affordable books, resources, and classes on Writing the Other here.

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Something I Want to Say

I have been told a few times recently that I cannot love God or serve God faithfully without condemning my LGBTQ+ neighbors, or without supporting policies and actions that threaten their rights, their lives, or their wellbeing. A few of my siblings in the faith believe that.

And I answer, “I think you are confusing me with someone who worships a small god. My God is not a small god. My God does not care about outward appearances; my God cares about the heart. My God is less interested in whether you squat or stand when you pee than with whether you love. I say ‘my God’ but he is not ‘my’ anything; I am trying to be his. I would be ashamed of owning a god, especially a small one. The God I love never told me to sit in judgment over my neighbor. He told me to love my neighbor, recklessly and deeply and without conditions, as he does.”

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Stant Litore is a novelist. He writes about gladiators on tyrannosaurback, Old Testament prophets battling the hungry dead, geneticists growing biological starships, time-traveling hijabi bisexual defenders of humanity from the future. Explore his fiction here. And here is one of his toolkits for writers, and here’s another book where he nerds out about ancient languages and biblical (mis)translation. Enjoy!