You are born in 1965, in a suburb of Chicago. Sometime around third grade you read your first chapter book, the novelization of the movie Herbie the Love Bug, and you keep reading, so much so that your Southern relatives don’t know what to make of you, though every birthday they buy you more books. You are an only son, the middle child between two sisters. You go to church three times a week, which renders you incapable of reading a page of any book, even a Hardy Boys mystery, without seeing a Christ metaphor. You write a few proto stories that make little sense. You go to college and double major in English and theatre, which makes you twice as unemployable as the usual liberal arts major, and write a few more stories that make little sense. You get married and find a job teaching high school.
Then in 1988 your wife says, have you heard about this Clarion thing? You attend the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan, and suddenly the idea of writing fiction that might be published seems a little less like a pipe dream. You write a story about demons and drag racing, you send it to F&SF, and when you open that envelope to find a check you experience one of the top five moments in your life. You sell a couple more stories. You’re on your way!
Or maybe not. Life gets busier. You move around the country as your wife finishes her Ph.D., and you switch jobs a couple times. You have a daughter, then a son. Your wife is trying to get tenure. You decide to write a novel, and you promise yourself that, no matter what, you will work on it at least two hours every ... week. The results are predictable.
Ten years later you start over. Your children are older, your wife has tenure, and now you can carve out more time for writing. You throw out the novel (keeping some of the best bits for later). You write a story you’ve been thinking about, on and off, for ten years, and when Gordon van Gelder publishes it you think, okay, don’t blow this. Keep writing.
And you do. You keep writing every day (or almost every day). Then, a few years later, when Patrick Swenson asks you to write an author bio for the short story collection, you write it in second person, present tense—you know, as an homage to your own story?—but in the end it starts to feel so precious and courage fails you and you deliver the standard third-person summary, a form that from the dawn of publishing has allowed authors to brag about themselves from behind a veil of faux-objectivity:
In 2004 Daryl Gregory began to publish a string of stories that prompted Gary K. Wolfe to call him "amongst the most interesting of the newer writers to emerge in the past decade, and rapidly becoming one of the most unpredictable." The stories in this first collection, most of which originally appeared in F&SF and Asimov’s, have been reprinted in ten year’s best anthologies and have been translated into multiple languages. "Second Person, Present Tense" won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award and was a finalist for the Sturgeon and Speculative Literature Foundation awards.
In 2008 his first novel, Pandemonium, won the Crawford award for best fantasy by a new writer and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His second novel, The Devil’s Alphabet, was named one of the five best SF books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly, and was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His third novel, Raising Stony Mayhall, appeared from Del Rey Books in 2011. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania where he writes programming code, prose, and comics.
You fool no one.
Acknowledgements
I’m deeply indebted to the editors who not only first published these stories, but made them better. My thanks (in chronological order) to Ed Ferman, Gordon Van Gelder, Sheila Williams, Jonathan Strahan, Kristina Grifantini, and Lou Anders. My special thanks to Gordon and Sheila, who were so kind to this newcomer, and offered friendship and advice to a guy who was pretty clueless about the whole business.
My thanks as well to the editors who republished the stories in "best of" editions and foreign language anthologies, and brought my stories to a wider audience. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer in particular were early champions of these stories.
Before these stories saw print, however, there were many, many drafts, and many people who took the time to point out the flaws in the stories, or kept me from throwing out what worked. My thanks to my writing teachers, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Tim Powers, Lisa Goldstein, Samuel R. Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Francois Camoin. I am especially grateful to the many friends and colleagues—Clarion classmates, fellow writers in workshops, patient relatives, guys with improbable names like Jack Skillingstead—who critiqued one or more of these stories. Three of these people have read nearly every page I’ve written for the past twenty years, and given me invaluable feedback and encouragement; Gary Delafield, Andrew Tisbert, and Kathy Bieschke, I love you folks.
Finally, my thanks to several professionals who made this book happen. Martha Millard worked her usual agent magic. Antonello Silverini, the artist behind the cover of the Italian version of Pandemonium, created the beautiful cover you see. Nancy Kress offered to write the introduction to the book, and her kind words have stunned this self-effacing Midwesterner. Last, but certainly not least, Patrick Swenson gave these stories a permanent home. Thank you all so much.
Other titles from Fairwood/Darkwood Press
www.fairwoodpress.com
21528 104th Street Court East;
Bonney Lake, WA 98391
End of an Aeon
Bridget & Marti McKenna, eds
trade paper: $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-933846-26-2
Dragon Virus
by Laura Anne Gilman
limited hardcover: $25
ISBN: 978-1-933846-25-5
The Best of Talebones
edited by Patrick Swenson
trade paper: $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-933846-24-8
A Cup of Normal
by Devon Monk
trade paper: $16.99
ISBN: 978-0-9820730-9-4
The Radio Magician
by James Van Pelt
trade paper: $17.99
ISBN: 978-0-9820730-2-5
Boarding Instructions
by Ray Vukcevich
trade paper: $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-933846-3-1
Harbinger
by Jack Skillingstead
trade paper: $16.99
ISBN: 978-0-9820730-3-2
Dark Dimensions
by William F. Nolan
trade paper: $15.99
ISBN: 978-0-9820730-6-3
Table of Contents
Daryl Gregory: Facts and Obsessions
Second Person, Present Tense
Unpossible
Damascus
The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm
Gardening at Night
Petit Mal #1: Glass
What We Take When We Take What We Need
Petit Mal #2: Digital
Message from the Bubblegum Factory
Free, and Clear
Dead Horse Point
In the Wheels
Petit Mal #3: Persistence
The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy
Story Notes
About You
Acknowledgements
Other titles from Fairwood/Darkwood Press
Unpossible Page 31
