The past few days I’ve been obsessively keeping tabs on the search term “Robert Asprin” on Google blog search. (Which means I’ve now read the gag “He will be mythed” a whole lot of times.) Since I was a kid, it’s been a mystery to me why my favorite author suddenly stopped writing. Back then there was no internet, so there was really no way for me to find out any information about something like that. Once they got around to inventing the internet, I was able to turn up a few details — there were vague reports of writer’s block, personal problems, and disputes with the IRS. I guess I always figured that Asprin would get back to writing someday, so I didn’t obsess over it, but now that he’s gone I suddenly feel much more strongly a need to know what happened.

If you haven’t read the Myth series, the basic premise is that there’s a good-natured young magician’s apprentice named Skeeve who gets teamed up with a tough, cynical, fast-talking demon named Aahz, and the two of them keep getting into huge messes, but they always manage to scrape by, though not without the aid of an ever-growing cast of oddball allies. With Aahz as a manager/promoter, Skeeve eventually acquires a completely unearned reputation as the greatest magician anywhere, which only gets him into yet more trouble. That’s basically the arc of the first six books.

Then things change. In Book 7, M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, Skeeve starts acting like a jerk, and his friendship with Aahz disintegrates. (Even Gleep, Skeeve’s lovable pet dragon, is suddenly revealed to be vaguely sinister and actually kind of a dick.) In Book 8, Skeeve develops a drinking problem. In Book 10, Skeeve has sex (his first time) during an alcohol-fueled blackout. As a kid, I was aghast at these events, but Asprin had stated in his introduction to Book 7 that he wanted Skeeve to grow and develop, so it was possible for me to rationalize these events as part of an arc from which Skeeve would emerge older and wiser but still recognizably himself. Alas, no new Myth books came out for over a decade, which essentially ended the series for me. (In my mind, the series still ends with Book 8, which is pretty good despite being a departure from the earlier books.)

I just came across this remembrance of Robert Asprin that was posted by his ex-wife, Lynn Abbey. This piece really startled me, and it gives me a whole new and awfully depressing perspective on Skeeve’s downward spiral of alcohol problems and personal estrangement, and it makes those problems seem like less a part of a carefully planned-out character arc and more an act of personal need or desperation on the part of the author. Makes me sad. I don’t think that as a kid I ever really imagined authors as having lives in that kind of a way. Abbey’s piece also casts something of a melancholy pall over my heretofore lighthearted memories of the character Aahz — hard-drinking, miserly, and often reckless. (Aahz: “You got anything in this dump to drink?” Skeeve: “We have water.” Aahz: “I said something to drink, not wash in.” Skeeve: “Oh, yessir!” And later: Skeeve: “Will this [alcohol] give you back your powers?” Aahz: “No, but it might make me feel better.”)

It was also somewhat weird for me to randomly come across this blog entry, which reveals that the character Edvik (the cabbie on the dimension Perv who becomes Skeeve’s ally), a character I remember vividly from my childhood, is based on actual person Edd Vick, who won a charity auction to appear as a character in the book.

One last observation about the Myth books that occurred to me during my recent reread. In Book 2, Myth Conceptions, Aahz has bluffed his way into getting Skeeve hired as a court magician. Skeeve has been reluctant, but Aahz has promised that court magicians are just kept around for show and that no one will expect Skeeve to actually do anything. But Aahz is wrong. Skeeve soon learns that the kingdom is hiring a magician as a last-ditch effort to halt a massive invading army (a parody of the Roman army, right down to their supreme commander, “Big Julie”). This seems like a suicide mission, and Skeeve is all for taking the money and running, but Aahz, very uncharacteristically, disagrees. It turns out that there’s one thing that Aahz values above his own skin, and that’s magic itself. Aahz explains that while magicians may often squabble among themselves, that each of them owes a responsibility to magic — to see to it that magical knowledge is valued and disseminated. Aahz explains that, for better or worse, he and Skeeve have found themselves in the position of being the public face of magic, and that now it’s up to the two of them to win with magic or die trying. This may have simply been a plot device to explain why Aahz and Skeeve couldn’t just run away, but it seemed to me as I read it — having spent some years in the community of fantasy writers — that if you take that scene and replace the word “magic” with “fantasy” and the word “magicians” with “fantasy writers,” it all still holds true. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that’s how the scene struck me at the time, and that’s how it still strikes me.

YouTube Video: How to Introduce Your Atheist Partner to Your Evangelical Parents

This video isn’t really all that funny, but I still got a smile out of seeing that a video like this exists at all.

Today is Towel Day.

Robert Asprin died yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 61. Asprin’s work was a major part of my childhood, and when I was in grade school he was my absolute idol. I read all his books multiple times, many of them dozens of times, and my earliest (and so far last) serious attempt at a novel — when I was about 12 — was a Robert Asprin pastiche. As I’ve mentioned here before, in the days before the internet Asprin’s essays on how he developed his Myth and Thieves’ World series were among the few glimpses I ever got into the world of a working writer, and I studied those essays religiously. I gather that Asprin had been away from the writing world for a while, but had recently returned, and I’d figured I’d get to chance to meet him sooner or later. Damn it.

From my Bio page: “When I was in first grade, my best friend handed me a book and said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ The book was Myth Conceptions by Robert Asprin (Book 2 in his Myth series). As class began, I glanced at the opening line, which went: ‘Of all the various unpleasant ways to be aroused from a sound sleep, one of the worst is the noise of a dragon and a unicorn playing tag.’ I was captivated. The teacher yelled at me several times to put the book away, and finally threatened to confiscate it, so I had to wait the entire school day before I could run home and finish the book.”

I recently re-read my old collection of Myth books. I no longer find them to be the pinnacle of Western civilization the way I did when I was in grade school, but the books do have their virtues — instantly engaging, fast-paced, and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. There are also some sections of the later books that I still find pretty moving, such as Aahz on parenthood in Little Myth Marker or Skeeve learning about Aahz’s past in Myth-Nomers and Im-Perv-ections. The thing that really struck me on this reread that I’d never consciously noticed before is how resolutely the books are on the side of the misfits and outcasts. When I was a kid I just thought the heroes were all really cool, but as an adult I’m a lot more aware of how marginalized and mistrusted they are by the wider world, and how they find acceptance within their own tight-knit band.

When I was in grade school, my class divided into four tables in the lunchroom: The cool boys table, the cool girls table, the uncool girls table, and the uncool boys table. You can probably guess where I sat. Anyway, one day a new student named Sergio joined our class. His family had just moved from Mexico, and he spoke virtually no English. The first day at lunch he went and sat by himself. I tried to convince the kids at my table that we should invite him to sit with us. They were aghast at the thought that they would be seen as even more uncool if they associated with the weird foreign kid, but I was resolute, and finally they relented. I went over and invited Sergio to come join us, and you could just see on his face how happy and relieved he was. He eventually became my best friend for several years until his family moved back to Mexico. Reaching out to Sergio is one of the events in my life that I look back on and am really proud of. In the Myth books, over and over again characters who appear to be weird and different turn out to be people who’ll make great friends and allies if you’ll just give them a chance. Rereading the Myth books this past year, I thought of Sergio in the lunchroom, and I wondered how much my response to that situation had been conditioned by my favorite books at the time. It’s hard to say, but personally I think those books played a major role, which is about the best compliment to a literary work that I can think to give.

Chris McKitterick is soliciting input on authors who need to be added to the list “A Basic Science Fiction Library” put out by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas (see here and here).

I just put in a good word for William Sleator. I’ve been really surprised at how little notice Sleator seems to get within sf circles, I guess because his books are shelved as young adult, but man, he’s a phenomenal writer. Some of his novels, such as Interstellar Pig, Singularity, The Green Futures of Tycho, and The Duplicate are among the best books I’ve ever read — in or out of science fiction, in or out of young adult. These books are fast-paced and have great ideas and well-drawn characters.

Okay, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m maybe just a little bit addicted to my new scanner. My latest spree of scanner-mania? Adding a few photos to my website’s bio page.

<-- Will grow up to enjoy scanning things.

 

When I woke up this morning, I could hear a strange noise coming from somewhere nearby.

It sounded like someone was shooting baskets, but there are no hoops around here. I spent an hour waking up, checking email, checking the news online, and the whole time there was this sort of thumping sound. What was it? I wondered. Garbage men? Crews doing yardwork? Finally I got curious and paced around the house to locate the source of the noise.

Which is when I discovered a robin redbreast repeatedly hurling himself against the sliding glass door that opens onto the back patio.

Near the door there’s a three-foot-tall potted tree, and this bird would fly up to the peak of the tree, then leap toward the living room, then bounce off the glass and flutter to the ground. He would peck at the glass a few times, then jump back up onto the tree and repeat the process. And he had been at this for at least an hour already. I couldn’t believe it.

For a while I just stood there, transfixed with a sort of weird fascination. It’s not every day that you get to see a robin redbreast so close and so obviously off his gourd.

Finally it occurred to me that he might injure himself by repeatedly bouncing off the glass, so I opened the door and shooed him away.

… and as soon as my back was turned, he started right up again.

I wondered what was going through this bird’s mind. Why did he want to get into my house so badly? I was half-tempted to let him in, just to see what he would do next, but then I thought he might be one of those rabid and/or zombie birds — judging by his behavior — so I decided maybe I shouldn’t. I was also tempted to feed him, since I felt like he ought to get something for his trouble, but I was afraid that would only encourage him.

I decided that the most diplomatic way to handle the situation would be to just close the blinds. Surely then, I thought, he would give up on the idea of getting through the glass. So I closed the blinds.

And the bird kept right on bouncing off the window.

Then I thought: Maybe he’s not trying to get through the glass after all. Maybe he’s trying to mate with his reflection? I don’t know.

Anyway, he was starting to seriously scuff the window, so I went outside and yelled and waved a lacrosse stick at him. He retreated to the branch of a tree up the hillside.

And as soon as I went inside, he went right back to hurling himself against the window.

I went outside and chased him off again. I threw rocks in his general direction until he fled from view. Then I went in and took a shower.

I just got out of the shower and he’s back AGAIN. What the hell?

You always hear these stories about people who, after a loved one dies, take in some stray animal that shows up at the house, and these people think that somehow the animal is their reincarnated loved one. I always thought that was silly, but watching the bizarre behavior of this bird makes me more sympathetic toward those people. If I had a loved one who had recently died and who had lived at this house, and then this weird bird shows up trying desperately so to get inside, well … it would be eerie.

Update: A quick Google search resolves this mystery.

I recently got a note from Edmund R. Schubert, editor of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, letting me know that my story “Red Road” will be appearing in the magazine this summer, in an issue that will also feature a cover story by Peter S. Beagle (author of the The Last Unicorn, an old favorite of mine in both its novel and animated film incarnations, and one of the earliest books/movies I can remember reading/watching).

Speaking of Peter S. Beagle, I see that the long-awaited PodCastle fantasy fiction podcast has finally launched (from the folks who brought you the Escape Pod and Pseudopod podcasts, both of which have featured my fiction in the past), and that the first episode is Peter S. Beagle’s story “Come Lady Death.”

The anthology The Dragon Done It, which includes my short story “The Black Bird,” is now available. “Best-selling authors Eric Flint and Mike Resnick present a generous selection of stories from the intersection of mystery and magic by popular writers Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, David Drake, Harry Turtledove, Esther M. Freisner, and more, including brand-new novelettes by Flint and Resnick themselves. The Dragon Done It is an exciting cross-genre volume that both mystery fans and fantasy fans will enjoy.” This is the first time that one of my stories has appeared in a hardcover book.