The Stone 2

Writing today sucked, but the art compensated. Here's the basic image I started out with, compiled from three different photos. The goal is to create something simplified, more painterly, and more coherent in appearance. It needs to be reproducible through laser printing in black-and-white. So here we go...

And there it is -- the first Swillistration for issue six. I am not satisfied, but I am pleased, and I think the technique worth exploring. I start with a neutral gray background, and then render up and down in tone, developing the image simultaneously as highlights and shadows. Next art? A turtle. Plesiobaena antiqua, to be precise.

Yes Indeed, There Is A Plethora Of Swill-Related Posts

See, the thing about the way I work with Illustrator is that I think in ink. I can't fucking control a pen or a brush to save my fucking life -- but I've learned to use Photoshop and Illustrator in a way that gives pretty much exactly the kind of result I'd like to be able to execute in ink.

Which would make me feel terrible, and inadequate, if I didn't have to clean up brushes and pens and wind up with accidental tattoos all over my feet from dropping pens on them unlike the four or five Rapidograph dots I currently sport and rather than spending forty or fifty hours crouched over a drafting board to produce the above, which I cannot do with my back, I spent about twelve hours all told. Standing work, sitting work, walking around work. Good variety. If I can make this pay, it's a good job. Cool.

Swll Some More!

Deborah called me up yesterday and asked where we should go to sketch. I told her I needed to take photos and that I could use some inspiration for prints. She delivered, and here she is. Thanks, as usual, to a good pal.

Swillmore

Four down, three to go. Tomorrow? I hit the street.

Swillagain

And here's the linework... Now for interminable tone fiddling.

Swill Madnesss!

Swillistrate. Swillistrate, Oafboy! Sunday depends upon it!

The Back Cover

Here we go, folks, another preview of the upcoming Swill. Again, going with the hard-sell theme I'm working for this issue, we establish that a failure to purchase our magazine will make a noted authority sad and lonely. You don't want that to happen, right?

When I met Nick Mamatas at a book signing in San Francisco (I was there to meet some friends and, jesus I disgust myself, network), he signed my copy of Move Under Ground (a note-perfect Kerouac-does-Lovecraft I actually enjoyed more than some works of his models), I mentioned an interview he'd given the Oakland Trib where he'd named Swill as a sign of the thriving East Bay literary underground.

When I told him that he'd bought the only copy of Swill that sold in Berkeley, this is what he wrote. He's graciously allowed us to use it. Plus, ol' Rob gives us a typical dollop of soul-crushing filth, and I engage in some ritualistic chest-beating. Honestly, you'd at least have to leaf through the damned thing after reading this, right?

Swill 5: The Start of the Back Cover

There's a certain visual quality that I associate with photography, and one of the great pleasures of Photoshop is that it allows me to achieve that visual quality in other media. Mixed black-and-white inks, in this case. Honestly, I can't imagine doing visual art without the global color adjustments and layers of Photoshop.

It's Coming! Run for your lives!

I just sent Rob an email telling him that we needed a fucking blurb for the upper-left corner. Last issue sold two fucking copies over a year in the stores, and it was a beautiful art object. This time I'm catering to the ignorant swine and putting things like a price and a confession as to the nature of the contents on the front, and a blurb is just what we need, since my Girl Cooties logo was horrible to behold.

So I have finally cracked and entered the tunnel. I have begun the design and typesetting process, and soon there will be a new series of prints in the works. That's right, I'm starting production on the next issue of Swill. This year has been so overwhelming that I've been dragging my feet badly on this as well as many other fronts. I mean, it's not like I haven't been keeping busy.

But the time has come. Expect a lot of graphics-related posts in the next little while.

Chili con Carnage & Getting Nervous

Mmmmm...

Well, the main problem with this issue of Swill is that there are a hell of a lot of interior pages of illustration. Because of this particular mix of story lengths they're necessary to achieve a graceful interior composition. I asked Rob if I could use one of the interior pages to do a set of artist's notes but they were sadly lacking in that Swill touch of obnoxiousness. The following chili recipe is hopefully a bit closer to the mark... If not, I'll just have to try something else.

And I did some more investigation of the agent I want. (Or at least the first in the list of agents that look good to me.) Based on the experiences of the other tall bald guy with glasses in my Monday night writer's group, I assumed that I'd send a query, then if the response was positive I'd follow that up with the first fifty pages.

Instead, he wants a query, first three chapters, synopsis, and bio all at the same time. Sheeee-it. I'll have critiques through the third chapter from both groups by next Monday. Oh, man. I am within weeks of getting all that out to him. I'm not scared but I am... anxious.

Because, after all, if one of the top agents in the business -- to quote from his site, " every one of his authors has had and will have his/her books on the New York Times or Publisher's Weekly bestseller lists; or they are bestselling authors within their genre" -- doesn't immediately jump all over my first novel? I may as well give it up, he bleated plaintively.

But if I can't get this guy, I'll try Neil Gaiman's agent. And then so on down the line...

Anyway, here's my favorite chili recipe, the result of a process of experimentation that began when I was in my teens. These days I make one kind of chili for use on hot dogs that's based on recipes for Cincinnati chili; this one cuts things right down to the bare necessities, then adds just enough lily-gilding to produce perfection.

And let us not forget its miracle healing powers. My first editor, back when I was a cartoon scriptwriter, had a bad case of anemia. I gave her a few pounds of this chili; she startled her doctor by recovering within weeks. The chili got the credit.

From The Swill Kitchen — Chili con Carnage

There are two ways to look at it. Either all chili is good – canned chili, Texas chili, Cincinnati chili, chili size, vegetarian chili, white chili, even the kind your mom makes with hamburger and canned kidney beans – or there’s a right way to make chili. As it happens, I agree with both perspectives. I’ll eat just about any chili you throw at me but there’s only one fucking proper way to make chili. My way.

It takes about a year to make Chili con Carnage. That’s because it starts out as stock. I like my meat the way I like my women – tough and fatty. That kind of flesh needs to be cooked for a long time at low temperatures to be at its best, so when I’m in the mood for a pork shoulder or a chuck steak or the severed head of a local wino (Hey, everyone wave to Horizontal Mike!) I turn to the crock-pot.

But if you simmer meat in plain water you leach all the joy out of it. What I do is make a nice strong stock and then use it over and over again, freezing it between uses. I don’t season it, don’t add vegetables – if there are any off-flavors they tend to accumulate and concentrate and that ain’t no good. The result is stock that tastes more like meat than meat does, stock that adds flavor to whatever you cook in it.

After about a year of this the stock has accumulated enough gelatin to have the texture of vulcanized rubber at fridge temperatures. That’s when it’s time to make chili. Unlike its cousins, the various curries, chili requires the simplest of ingredients; meat, chilies, garlic, salt, and chocolate. Human flesh is best but it’s hard to find someone who needs killing and is worth eating, so you may as well use beef, maybe throw a bit of pork in there. As I said, the cuts you want have a good dose of fat and gristle in them. Chuck, shank, short ribs – that kind of thing. Oxtail is very nice. For chrissakes, don’t use any fucking hamburger. Jesus! If you throw a ham hock or some smoked neck bones in there you will not be weeping bitter tears of regret when you’re all done. I’d love to try mutton in this but where the fuck can you find mutton these days?

Brown your meat on every workable side in a cast iron skillet. Put it in the stock and cook it on Warm in the crock-pot overnight, then put it in the fridge to cool. Now go get some fucking chilies.

Get a good mix of fresh and dried peppers. For the dried ones you want mostly New Mexicos, for the fresh ones mostly Fresnos or Anaheims. But don’t be afraid to use just about every fucking kind of chili you can get your hands on. You know what you like. Get a bunch of red and orange bells for the sweetness. Get some habaneros or Scotch bonnets or Thai bird chilies for heat and fragrance. Get some Serranos, some red and green jalapeños, some chipotles. Go wild.

When you get home, pull the hardened fat off the top of the crock-pot and take out the meat and shred it into a great big heavy stockpot. Pull the stems off of the dried chilies and roast ‘em in the oven until some of ‘em have little black spots. Then simmer them in the stock until they’re soft.

While they simmer, cut the stems off the fresh peppers, get out your juicer, and juice them. Be ready to retreat when you’re running the habeneros through – sometimes they emit a corrosive mist. Pour the fresh juice into the meat. Then pour the stock and dried chilies through a sieve, put the stock in with the meat and pepper juice, and run the softened chilies through a food mill. Discard the stems and seeds – as if you fucking needed to be told that – and put the pulp in with the rest.

At this point the chili is going to resemble a soup. Now there are places in the world where they’d add masa harina to the mix in order to tighten it up. Fuck ‘em. Anyone who would do that is a goddamned pervert. What you do is put the chili at a low simmer and boil the excess moisture off.

While that’s going on, peel, chop, and add garlic until you just don’t feel like doing it anymore.

When the chili is nice and thick taste it and add salt. The chili will have a slightly bitter taste at this point. Add unsweetened chocolate until that bitter flavor becomes round and pleasant rather than spiky. Two, three blocks of baker’s chocolate usually does the trick. I know it sounds crazy but it works.

And there you go. Serve it with beans, greens, and cornbread, or frijoles, dirty rice, and a green salad. Three-bean salad goes nicely. It makes a spectacular burrito filling. If you’re feeling self-indulgent, use it to dress a hot dog. And if you made it properly, give some to the cops when they come by and wash the tub out with bleach. Nothin’ like home cooking.

Swill Time & The Suffering Of A Belletrist

I actually like the way I had to distort this piece to get it to fit in magazine format. It helps make the eye move around the picture properly. And note the subtlety of the fill in the Swillogo -- it's a wee bit transparent.

So at this point I've got a solid start on the next issue of Swill. I've got to fine-tune the typesetting and details on the interior, produce five more images, and prepare the interior illustrations. This morning I did this initial version of the cover and went to the store to fetch art supplies.

But I wound up being useless in the afternoon. I've been sleeping poorly (like this is news) and after lunch I wound up with my ass glued to the couch watching Mythbusters and Monsterquest. Bad oaf!

I'm not sure whether or not I'll try to do much work tomorrow, for that matter. We shall see; we shall see.

The novel has been a real... well, I'm not going to say drag. It's moving in the direction I want it to move in. But the revision that I thought was going to be easy-peasy is turning out to be a butt-wrenching nightmare of self-examination and 0h! my aching artistic soulenisma.

My pal Allison has been cracking the whip and as a result the book has started to take on a lot more depth, but it's been forcing me to ponder some of my personal issues in a way that's made me a real pain in the ass to deal with. I've been finding scenes that have been in place for literally years aren't doing what I need them to do.

One of the hardest tasks a writer has to face is going back and re-imagining scenes and characters -- taking parts of an organic whole and radically reworking them without having to rebuild the entire work from scratch.

And I'm facing a particular problem in this book. I have a great deal of impatience with our culture's obsession with backstory -- as an example, in the remake of Willy Wonka, they insisted on giving the audience details from his childhood that explained why he was so cruel to children. I mean, fuck that. That isn't what the story is about. Yeah, the story of Willy Wonka's life would be interesting -- but do we need it inserted into the story of Charlie Bucket?

But one of the criticisms of my novel that I've heard more than once is that people don't understand why the protagonist -- who is pretty much me -- acts and thinks the way he does. Well, that's a pretty fucking involved question. To answer it in full would be to write an entirely different book than the one I've been working on for the last four years.

Still, I obviously do need to provide more information on the protagonist's history than I have so far. My goal is to give a hint here and a hint there, enough to make his current behavior seem understandable.

But I feel that in a work of fiction, you don't see a character exhibit behavior and say, 'I don't buy that because I don't know why he or she is doing that.' As a reader, my reaction is, 'Huh. That was a weird thing to do,' and then to read the character from that point on as the kind of person who does that kind of thing.

Of course that probably has something to do with the fact that I regard people the same way in real life -- I have no idea what would compel someone to have children, buy a car, attend a sporting event, or watch American Idol. The behavior of the average human being mystifies me and all I can do is accept it.

But as a writer it is my job to make my characters convincing. Frankly, I don't care how well my characters are understood as long as they are believed -- but readers seem to feel differently about that. I'll tell you what, someday I'm going to say, "fuck a bunch of readers," and write something without worrying about how accessible it is.

I'll use the full range of my vocabulary and intellectual interests and hideous obsessions and obscure humor and cultural references and scientific terminology and obliquity and if someone doesn't understand that dark matter and dark energy are entirely separate phenomena, if they don't know what a Pristichampsus is, if they don't get the references to the Ramayana and the works of Tove Jansson and Li Po, if they can't make the connections between line twelve on page eight and line seven on page three hundred and sixteen, well, they will be perfectly welcome to go fuck themselves. Hell, I'll replace every comma with the word 'fuck,' so as to duplicate my own mode of speech. I'll produce something with bones and guts and sinew instead of the simple-minded monosyllabic pabulum I've produced thus far.

And then nobody will read it. Hey, it worked for Pynchon and Joyce.

Anyway, I'm hoping things will lighten up after I get the first couple of chapters nailed down and the book starts to become more plot-oriented. We shall see.

Some Trolls Guard Treasure

So I've had an interesting experience over the last couple of days. I've had my first run-in with a troll and it's proven to be very rewarding. I reacted to him, then blew him off, then found myself processing the interaction in a way that took me by surprise. He strikes me as the kind of person who'll interpret any kind of attention as a victory so I told Rob-the-editor that after our first exchange I'd just ignore him -- but I think this is interesting enough to justify giving him some satisfaction.

Here's what he wrote to Swill, the lit mag for which I'm partially responsible -- it came to Rob-the-editor and he passed it on to me.

> Date: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 5:51 PM
> What the piss is the pay for publication in your magazine?
> Most lit mags list it, why should I need to contact you
> about it? List it, Goddamn it! Do it NOW!! I write stories
> that make Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others of their ilk look
> like candy asses, suckling at their momma's tit. I
> don't have time to be coddling dirt dumb editors who
> can't even layout a guidelines page - wake the hell up!!
>
>
> Christopher Roberts

Now when I received this it was four in the morning and I'd been in a shitty mood for days so I rose to his bait like a trout to the fly.

This was my response.

And this was his.

Sean - So entirely wrong. You are not the first to have received my missive - not a hobby, but blood sport. I've had editors check themselves into asylums due to the abuse.

As to being an asshole, dickwad or jerk,(do people still use that tired "epithet" dickwad?) I can only give the standard reply I give other editors I victimize - never me, always you.

Whether you like Hemingway or Fitzgerald (Both of whom I've read - so there, wrong again) is immaterial. They are merely reference point - bloodless.

Fourth-grader, again, you not me.

"(I wonder if this is your problem – were you breast-fed? It is important to an infant's physical development and ability to resist disease. Perhaps you suffered an early fever or a diet deficient in protein?)" Need I say it? Not me, that's all your trip. It seems as though you were pissed-up (Cockney for drunk) when you wrote this bit of tiredness.

"Perhaps you should consider text messaging as your medium of choice." No, I'm a true writer - nominated for the Pushcart. Perhaps you might think of putting your magazine to sleep and hop behind the counter at 7-11 and get to work.

Interesting you mention the New Yorker. I have a reportage/essay on the 3:AM Magazine website entitled, "The New Yorker, Collusion and All That" in the nonfiction section. Read it. The ending is a killer and speaks to the nit- picking proper grammar editors (ever hear of Kerouac?) like you. Thus they deserve the fate I mete out to them, as do you, at the end of my piece.

PUNCH UP THE 3:AM MAGAZINE WEBSITE AND READ MY ARTICLE. DO IT RIGHT NOW!! HOP TO IT!!

Veni, vedi, vici, - no!

I fucking rule,

Chris Roberts

The whole interaction did get on my nerves. And so I had to analyze why I reacted the way I did. What it comes down to is that I come from Richmond. I learned early on that if you let people get away with disrespecting you, they will eat your fucking life one bite at a time because they know they can. So if anyone gives you shit the only functional reaction is to jump on them hard, fast, and continually until only one of you is capable of walking away.

This just doesn't work on the internet.

Letting go of things is difficult for me. I wanted to send this guy another email pointing out how everything he said in his second note was covered by things I'd said. I wanted to point out that his writing in the second note was still lame. I wanted to go read his article in order to tear it apart. I wanted to explain to him that if he wanted to really get to me there were ways of doing it that he hadn't even touched on. (Just to start with, my response to him was pompous and clumsy and in bad need of an edit.) I wanted to mock his self-importance. Etc, etc.

And of course what I really wanted to do was put my fingers in his eyes and dial his face like a rotary phone. But I knew that any response on my part was a victory for him. He decided what the game was, he started playing, and he's the one who gets to pick the winner.

What he wrote bugged me. It bugged me because I'm still the kid from Richmond who gets beat up every fucking day and that kid is going to be pissed-off and ready to react for the rest of his life. I've got a seething cauldron of anger in my chest that will keep boiling until I die -- and it'll probably be a big part of whatever kills me. It's not like yanking my chain is any kind of a challenge.

I've been working on a big novel for the last four years. (If you're curious, look under The Ghost Rockers in my labels list.) And today I wrote the climax of the first volume. (That's why I didn't post earlier.) Even after all the time and thought I've put into the work I was still surprised by the way I handled the ending. And my approach came about as a direct reaction to dealing with ol' Chris.

See, when I looked at the way I felt about what he'd written to Rob and then to me, I had to ask myself some big questions and in the end they boiled down to something direct and powerful.

What kind of person do I want to be?

How would that person deal with this situation?

And when I looked at it like that the ending to The Ghost Rockers came into clear focus. It was a real gift. And it lifted my anger in a way that took me by surprise. I'm kind of glowing right now.

And that's a lesson I'll keep learning over and over again. Anything that happens to you can be processed productively as long as you ask yourself those two questions, the questions that help this kid from Richmond to keep growing up.

What kind of person do I want to be?

What would that person do now?

Well, He Started It.

So Rob sent me this letter that was sent to Swill inquiring about our pay rates. I'm not going to print it here; you can probably figure out everything you need to know from my response. I am so going to hell for this.

Dear Mr. -------,

I’m not sure what the appropriate response to something like this would be. Part of me wonders if in your innocence you’ve gotten the impression that a display of brash vulgarity would impress us; part of me wonders if you’re as arrogant as your letter makes you seem, which would be unfortunate for both you and those around you.

If my first guess is true, please. No one responds positively to this kind of rudeness. If you aren’t an asshole don’t play one for effect; from the outside there is no difference between someone who pretends to be an insufferable dickwad and the genuine article. And unfortunately you simply are not gifted in your chosen arena -- this letter doesn’t just give the impression that it was written by a jerk; the incompetence with which it is riddled eliminates any strength of provocation you may have intended. Rather, it falls under the category of ‘irritainment,’ something simultaneously laughable and annoying. I love it because I hate it. Of course the appropriate response would be for me to ignore this but hey. It’s not often I get an opportunity to let someone know exactly what I think of their writing; thank you very much for the opportunity.

(Incidentally, when you say that your fiction is better than that of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald two thoughts immediately came to mind. One is that I dislike the work of both writers; the other is that I doubt you’ve read much by either. Or by ‘others of their ilk.’ Or anyone else. And I guarantee you that there are a lot of ‘candy asses’ in the world who are better writers than you are – and quite possibly better human beings.)

Allow me to make a few suggestions that might prove useful.

First, learn to swear properly. ‘What the piss’ is the kind of thing you hear from a child first experimenting with profanity – by starting out with this phrase I immediately pictured you as a strutting fourth-grader who’s just figured out how to give people the finger. ‘What the fuck,’ or ‘what the hell’ are, though timeworn, still sturdy expressions. To insert a random word into a familiar phrase is a gesture in the direction of creativity, I will grant you. Perhaps further study and experimentation may produce results – let me know if your research along these lines progresses usefully.

One suckles at his mother’s breast, one sucks at his momma’s tit. (I wonder if this is your problem – were you breast-fed? It is important to an infant’s physical development and ability to resist disease. Perhaps you suffered an early fever or a diet deficient in protein?)

And it’s interesting that you chose to capitalize Goddamn but not hell. Consistency is important; pick an approach and stick with it.

In the non-cuss category of errors there is the issue of exclamation points. Good writers use them sparingly. Some very good writers such as Joe R. Lansdale never use them at all. Your ratio of periods to exclamation points is one to four. And to use two exclamation points in conjunction with a word written all in capitals gives the impression that you were taught to write by one of those diseased imbeciles who write hateful anonymous messages on the Internet. I assure you, they are not good models for anyone with literary aspirations. Perhaps you should consider text messaging as your medium of choice.

‘Layout’ is a noun – you meant ‘lay out.’

And finally, when you say that ‘most lit mags’ list their pay rates in their submissions guidelines, well. That would be true for paying markets. The literary small press tends not to pay. It is either a calling or a hobby, depending on your perspective. I put a considerable amount of work into Swill and have not seen dime one nor do I expect to. I’m not sure if we break even on our sales. And that’s what it’s like for the little magazines such as ours.

If you want pay, I’d suggest submitting to magazines like Granta or The New Yorker. LET ME KNOW HOW YOU DO!!

Thank you very much for your letter; it was a real pleasure.

Yours,

Sean Craven

Swill Review!

Man, I wish I had an unflattened version of this image. I'd turn it into a print. It's all inkblots -- I want to do a show of this kind of imagery. I'm gonna call it Rorschach Dreams.

Amy F. Groggin published a pdf-format review of Swill on a site associated with Columbia University in Chicago. It's a collection of reviews of print-based literary magazines (the fact that I had to specify that gave me a little 'I'm living in the future' shiver -- scroll down a bit and you'll find her piece.

http://www.colum.edu/Academics/Fiction_Writing/Publishing_Lab/Market_Pages/Magazine_Reports.php

In my opinion she nailed it, aside from failing to notice that Delphine LeCompte is terrifyingly female. She really gets what we're trying to do. And she has an interview with Rob -- now I get to work for a celebrity!

Look at us! We're academically approved! If you read our magazine I bet you get credits.

Of course my art and writing get no mention whatsoever. I'm getting used to that, though, he said, and slunk off to drink a tall scotch-and-bitter-tears.

A Quick Progress Report

Just to start off, tomorrow night I'm going to the reception for the latest issue of the award-winning Milvia Street magazine. They used four or five pieces of mine, depending on whether they published one or both of the hyeanodon drawings. Here they are! I'm pretty sure they gave Bluehive a color page but we shall see.

This one actually turned out to be my first print sale. The missus's dad was staying with us and when he saw the large print of this he wanted to buy it. I'm letting her handle the financial side of things...

This is one of a series of drawings I did for my sister's aborted website. She wanted a retro look so I obliged.

So I decided that since the novel was going awry and it was getting harder and harder for me to do anything but visual art stuff it was high time for a little tough lovin'. The rule is now a thousand pages-I-mean-words a day. Every day. Creatively I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner, so this kind of rule is hard for me to stick to.

But I've been doing okay so far. I topped 70,000 words this morning -- for you non-writers, that's a respectable length for a novel, one of those big fat bestselling rat-smashers runs about 100,000 words -- and I can see the end from here. I can imagine being done with this draft inside of a month. We'll see, but it's possible.

As for short fiction. My tough guy dinosaur story for David Byron isn't talking to me -- I should have finished the damned thing in one go. Note to self -- knock out the rough draft to a short story in one sitting if at all possible.

But the story I'd planned to give to Milvia Street was three times longer than they'd publish. So I sent it off to Rob and it's going to be in Swill. This suits me fine -- it's one of the best things I've written and I really, really like the idea that Ellen Datlow, editor of horror half of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror will get a chance to read it. It's called Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! and it wasn't until I'd finished the second or third draft that I realized it was a deal with the Devil story. Instead of the usual approach where the point is to come up with a twist on the fulfilled wish (there is one of those but it's not the center of the story) I show how the devil-character, the Tribulator, is destroyed by culture shock. It also features very, very jaundiced views of both of my romantic relationships -- something I didn't know I was doing while I was writing it.

Oh, it is a mean little unit.

Which means the creepy/funny SF bar story I'd written for Swill is now free. I'll do a rewrite this weekend and get it of to Mr. Byron to compensate for the loss of the story I'd promised him before.

So I need to come up with something for Milvia Street and something for Monday Night. One piece is going to be about my first three clear memories -- bedwetting, agnosticism, and a doberman attack. The other? I'm hunting for inspiration.

I'm putting off scheduling a print day for my art until I'm done with the Anomalocaris canadensis piece. Yesterday I spent some time studying Illustrator techniques for handling color rendering. One that looks interesting is to use the gradient tool to lay in rough tones, then convert it to a gradient mesh and refine it. So that's the tack I'm taking. Soon as I get this posted it's gonna be time to pick some colors and start laying down gradients...

Attention! Any Writers Out there? Here's Your Big Chance!

Here's an early version of the cover for Issue Two. You've seen quite a bit of my work from Swill if you've been following the site -- having to illustrate the son of a bitch is the main reason I'm back in the visual arts.

Swill magazine is now eagerly awaiting your submissions. If you write fiction please give us your consideration. Swill is a feisty literary magazine and while it is small of press it is large of publication -- it's printed at magazine size and carries as much wordage as a decent-sized book.

There is no payment. I've been working on this thing for three years now and I haven't seen dime one and probably never will. That's not what the magazine's for...

Swill has received praise from both the literary and the genre fiction communities and is part of the permanent collection at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

We did get a bad review once but they complained about things like gratuitous violence (if someone could explain to me how something as inherently rewarding as violence could ever be gratuitous I'd be interested in hearing your position) and plot while another review said that while we published some genre fiction we were a "necessary corrective" to the current literary scene.

Here's what we're looking for. First and foremost we like stories. Stories with characters, plots, settings, themes, beginnings, middles, and ends. This is why we've been accused of genre-ism -- genre is the last true bastion of conventional fiction.

Look, the moment of quiet epiphany has its place. No doubt. But to see it dominate literary fiction to the degree that it has reminds me strongly of the stranglehold superheroes have in the comic book world -- and a lot of the time people invested in literary or academic fiction respond to a story driven by plot and character the way a lot of comic book fans respond to a work that doesn't feature steroid freaks and boob jobs wearing leotards.

And it's not as if that's all we publish. If we like your piece we'll publish it -- we've published experimental fiction and poetry quite cheerfully.

What do we like? Action isn't a bad thing. Make us laugh and you've won our hearts. Mean what you write. Transgression is always popular with me and Rob -- the best story in our first issue got in partially because it offended both of us, which is quite a trick.

If you're interested go to the site and check out the submission guidelines. (For some reason -- probably having to do with frames -- I can't link directly.) You might want to take a peek at the section labeled "Sean Speaks" as well. If you're a fiction writer it should confirm all your worst fears about what happens to your story once you put it in the mail...

And if you're a reader go wander around. I swear, Swill ain't half bad. I recently wrote to Rob and asked him why doing Swill has turned out to be one of the smartest things we've ever done.

He sent an internet sigh. "It's not like it has much competition."

Fair enough.

Oaf Fiction Now Available.

Here's the front cover to the current issue of Swill...

Right now I have two short stories up on the net. One is a straightforward piece of reminiscence called Montana Seafood. You can find it at...

http://www.mondaynightlit.com/read-craven3.html

The other is the closest thing to straight-up old-school science fiction that I've done. It's partially a tribute to the tradition of bar stories -- specifically, Lord Dunsany's Jorkens stories, the Gavagan's Bar series by L. Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt, and Tales of the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke.

It's also a salute to my favorite SF microscopic worlds, ranging from Fitz-James O'Brian's The Diamond Lens to Theodore Sturgeon's Microcosmic God to George R.R. Martin's Sandkings.

Go to It's The Little Things by Sean Craven at

http://www.swillmagazine.com/

I've got to admit I'd like to give both of these another run through the mill. As the Ramones would say, why is it always this way?

Those first tentative steps...

Right, so I'm a former toilet cleaner, ditch digger, and box hucker with a screwed-up back looking for a new career as a writer/artist. This isn't as ridiculous as it sounds on the surface; I've made money as a writer, actually supporting myself for a little more than a year before the web crash of 2001, and my art has appeared in everything from Artfuck magazine to the University of Bristol's DinoBase website.

Right now I'm back in school. I started out working toward an AA degree in creative writing with the intention of following that up with courses in editing and copywriting from the UC extension program.

Those plans were delayed when I was mugged by a novel. I found that classes that required a lot of writing were sucking out the juice I needed for the big project; this led to some spectacular emotional situations that forced me to drop a number of courses mid-semester.

While this was going on I was asked to work on a new small press magazine, Swill. (There's an old-fashioned SF story of mine on the site right now.) I write, assistant edit, design, and illustrate the damned thing.

http://swillmagazine.com/

I needed to take classes that would allow me to write while giving me creative stimulation. Until the novel's finished, anything that gets in the way has to go -- so since I was working on the visual aspect of Swill I started taking courses in art and graphics.

Then a teacher suggested I join the Digital Arts Club.

http://www.digitalartsclub.com/

I thought this would be a schmoozefest; instead it turned out to be a hardcore society dedicated to advancing the careers of its members. This led me to realize that I might be able to move my art into the gallery scene. So that's my current position. I'm working on the novel, writing short fiction for the small press, working on Swill, and developing my art in order to start getting gallery shows.

I suppose you're wondering what the novel's about...