The money shot, looking east from the top of Temple IV. The scenes for the rebel base on the forest planet in the first Star Wars movie were shot here. Just imagine a couple of x-wings taking off out of the jungle.

Tikal is the second major Maya site I’ve visited, after Chichén Itzá. It was founded before 300 BC, reached its peak around 600 – 800 AD, and was abandoned by 1100. In between, it was conquered, razed and rebuilt at least three different times. You can tell. The faces of the kings on all these altars and stelae and statues have been chiseled off by the conquerors–like this dude, my Facebook dopplegaanger:

Tikal went down around the same time as the rest of the great lowland Maya city-states, and presumably for the same reasons: conspiracy theories and over-sanguine academic speculations aside, because they overpopulated, overtaxed their resources and consequently starved themselves out of power. In the 900 years since the Maya collapse, Tikal, El Mirador, Uaxactun and the dozens of other Maya sites that occupy the misty lowland region of Northern Guatemala known as El Peten have all been completely covered over with full-on, mature rainforest. As a result, I never really experienced that eerie sense of connectedness and presence I met with among the ruins of Yucatan. Instead, Tikal filled me with an awareness of time. 900 years. The trees–like the colossal ceiba just outside the gate–are as awe-inspiring as the temples: trunks seven feet across with root systems big enough to get lost in, canopies dotted with epiphytes, toucans and spider monkeys hundreds of feet overhead. The mist comes down in constant curtains. The stone steps of the temples are treacherous, slick with rain. Howler monkeys shriek past unseen in the distance at dusk, with all the deliberate, unstoppable pacing, the intensity and elemental inexorability of a thunderstorm. Moss covers everything–skulls included–and it doesn’t restrain itself to making them look all epic and cool. It devours them. Nature, in El Peten, gave humanity its chance. Then it came and took everything back.

The temples are still there, huge and steep and imposing, as are the stelae and the altars, the aqueducts, the limestone causeways running miles through the woods. But the artwork, the stucco reliefs and stone carvings that were so gloriously and spine-tinglingly evident at Chichén Itzá and Tulum–the ones that hadn’t already been defaced by the vicissitudes of war, anyway–have almost all been wiped away by rain, time, and the gods.

Temple V. Back in AD 700, at its construction, all that gray mush of rubble above the doorway was a super-complicated monolithic frieze depicting masks of kings, the gods of sun and rain.

If you zoom in on this photo (click on it), you can see on the far left the top of the rickety-ass, near-vertical, 180-foot wooden scaffolding you have to climb to get to the top (here–the wikipedia photo shows it better). This was fricking terrifying. The steps were all covered with rain and mud, slippery as hell. This dude who was there on his honeymoon climbed up maybe 20 steps before his wife made him give up and come down. Wisely, I left my wife at home. At the top, there’s maybe three feet of crumbling stone to stand on. While I was up there, this one lady made it up, took one step away from the ladder and collapsed into a ball of whimper until her people had to physically help her back down. I, on the other hand, was totally unfazed, and walked all the way around to the right side of the platform, where there was only a foot and a half of space between myself and death by rainforest canopy laceration, to take this:

Yes, I am indeed wicked tough. Thank you for noticing.

As you might guess, I have way more pictures. Maybe I’ll share some more of them a little later on.

My story “Keeli’s Ordeal” is now live at Crossed Genres magazine, in issue 15. Here’s the direct link.

The magazine looks quite nice! In addition to online text, it’s also available in paper format and in several ebook file formats–visit their web-store for all the options.

I’m sharing the TOC of this issue with Barbara Krasnoff, a good short story writer I met at ReaderCon last year, and my Homeless Moon cohort Jay Ridler. If you check out my story, be sure and check out theirs as well.

Here be a tale of hard luck kids and a magic automaton that plays chess, looks creepy, and has eerie powers!

http://crossedgenres.com/archives/015/the-turk-in-the-basement-by-jason-s-ridler/

Thanks to CG for buying the story, my second sale to them.

And I forgot to mention, it also features my bud Scott Andrews and his deadly story Keeli's Ordeal. Great to share a TOC with a fellow Homeless Moon pal. Check it out!:

http://crossedgenres.com/archives/015/keelis-ordeal-by-scott-h-andrews

Now, I'm off to start a new novel. What kind? Let's just say I'm reading Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, a bio of Winston Churchill, a memoir of life in Thunder Bay, and watching some Robotech. More than that, I cannot say.

Onward,

JSR

Of course it isn’t. It lives on in television infomercial hosts, wrestling announcers and multi-level marketing gurus. But I’m talking about the real thing–the carnival barker, the frontier snake oil salesman, the witch hunter. I didn’t think that was something you could see anymore in a public setting: a silver-tongued philanthropic capitalist addressing a preferably credulous public in order to convince them at length and in grand style to buy whatever it is. In Guatemala I was astonished and really very happy to find that tradition thriving. These people are serious storytellers, doing it to survive.

I took a series of chickenbuses to Chichcastenango, a highland maya town on a hilly plateau at about 6,000 feet where they have a big market on Thursdays and Sundays. It was windy and cold and the thin air made it hard to walk uphill. At one end of town, there’s a pastel-colored graveyard on a cliff, at the other, a stark white church built in 1600 on whose steps the local adherents of the maya religion make their offerings of flowers, tobacco and copal.

Five steps into the market I met a lady selling packets of medicine to kill stomach parasites, ringworm and the like. Four pills for four days. She had a collection of specimens–actual stomach parasites preserved in alcohol in baby food jars. She picked them up one at a time as she lectured. “Look at the size of this one,” she’d say. “This demon came out of the belly of a twelve year old girl.”

Chichicastenango, you’ll recall from my earlier ranting about it, is the town where the Popol Vuh was hidden away for 250 years before Friar Ximenez found it in 1701, transcribed it and copied it into Spanish. I went to the museum in Chicago where that copy now resides; they wouldn’t let me see it, but the whole manuscript’s been scanned online anyway. Anyhow. I went to the monastery courtyard where Ximenez would have sat to make the translation. It’s right in the middle of the market, and it was packed with people resting from the ordeal of shopping. A man by the fountain was telling a story to a crowd of a hundred mostly boys, teenagers and young men. The story consisted of a long series of ad-libbed episodes illustrating how the magic elixir of strength he was offering–in clear plastic vacuum bags with straws like those juice packs you drank in junior high–had caused hilarious awesomeness to spring out wherever it fell. He’d puncture a bag of elixir and use it as a visual aid to demonstrate peeing, a pregnant lady giving milk, a guy spitting at a joke, some more peeing, wine being turned to water, water to blood, hooch being drunk, rain. The resourcefulness of it was impressive, despite the lowbrowness perhaps of the humor. And I stood there and listened for 15 minutes, trying to figure out if there was some underlying thread I’d missed or wasn’t picking up, or if this was just how the story went. Everybody was having a good time, anyhow. And when I left, he still hadn’t tried to sell anybody anything.

Now there’s a storyteller.

A bridge in Chichi. Note the depiction of quetzalcoatl above the arch. (That’s El Nubo in the backpack–my intrepid guide.)

On the long bus ride back from Chichi, a twelve year-old kid got on for the leg from Chimaltenango to Jocotenango with a shoebox full of glue sticks–paste glue in a blue lipstick tube, like I used in 2nd grade. He handed two glue sticks out to every person. He clambered to the middle of the bus, gave a three minute lecture on the proper use and benefits of these glue sticks–great for arts and crafts, a great gift for the niños, easy to use, no mess. He named a price. Then he walked back around collecting up most of the sticks he’d handed out and some money from people who wanted to keep theirs. He got off in Joco, replenished his supply from a bigger box guarded by a girl a couple years younger, and climbed back onto the return bus to present his spiel again.

Then there were the “saved” men. Usually with scars or an arm missing from the civil war. Booming preacher voices, a summary of their path from loneliness and sin to oneness with Dios. They are performing a public service, providing a lesson with a clear moral. They ask for donations.

One of my new year’s resolutions, as urged on me (not really) by Al Gore and the repoweramerica.org mailing list I signed up for sometime in December, was to move my various internet assets to a carbon-neutral hosting provider. So I did a lot of research into green web hosts, and I settled on Green Geeks–they’re among the highest rated “green” hosts, despite the fact that they pay for carbon offsets rather than actually running their servers on wind or sunlight, because they offset three times as much carbon as they produce and are talented and reliable too. It’s only been a couple weeks, but I’ve certainly found that to be so.

So now The Mossy Skull and The Homeless Moon and various other internet projects of mine are carbon-positive. You, gentle reader, need not bother about that so much, except perhaps in that you can feel slightly less guilty as you read. Sadly, I haven’t gained much benefit on that account myself–it still feels like too little, too late. I need to do more. But them’s my personal neuroses, gentle reader, and they need not concern you.

There has, however, been one more substantial change that may require your brief attention. The Mossy Skull has moved–it used to be at the slightly unwieldy, mildly counterintuitive http://mjd.joskinandlob.com/wordpress/, and now it’s at the the satisfyingly clean and transparent http://mossyskull.com/. If you would be so kind, please change your bookmarks accordingly. Those of you following via RSS, make sure you’re syndicating http://feeds.feedburner.com/themossyskull and you should be all right.

And thanks for reading!

The audio podcast of my story “Excision,” which appeared in Weird Tales a few years ago, is out now from Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine. You can check it out here.

Audio fiction podcasts I believe are one of the most exciting areas of F/SF short fiction these days. They have a growing audience, something that print short fiction hasn’t had for over twenty years, and they’re a perfect match for current technology in portable music players and internet audio distribution.

The folks at Dunesteef were great to work with. They had me tape a segment of author’s notes explaining the genesis of the story, which you can hear at the end of their reading performance. And they have this very cool cover art for the story! I love its vibe of medical-ness and blood.

Check out their podcast, and let me (and them) know how you liked it!

Patchwork farmland west of Antigua.

Everybody should visit a third world country at least once, if only so they can come to a more round understanding of that term. I don’t know how I ever got on without having been to one.

Prior to visiting Guatemala, I had operated under the not-entirely-inaccurate assumption that “third world” referred to a region of the planet whose human inhabitants suffered, in varying degrees of severity, reduced access to economic infrastructure including but not limited to sewer systems, utilities, clean water, health care, education, technology, and/or rule of law. As compared to the status of said amenities here in the “first world”. I understood, if only on an abstract, liberal-educated, political-correctness level, that the term “third world” was to be considered flawed in its one-sidedness, its inherent superiority, and its general lack of empathy.

What I didn’t understand until I went there was that none of the above in any way impedes the daily functioning of a society.

I didn’t encounter a single traffic light anywhere in Guatemala outside the capital city, and I traveled a lot. Shockingly, traffic doesn’t screech to a halt at every intersection for lack of a traffic light. Drivers tap their horns three or four times in quick succession, as a warning or a greeting, rather than leaning on them uselessly for minutes at a time like we do here. Then they go with the flow.

Wrecked cars and buses are a common occurrence on the sides of highways; trash is more common–heaps of it, collecting in corners shielded from the wind. Most people’s houses are of flaking stucco: a few low rooms, inadequately windowed, with a sheet of corrugated tin for a roof and rainwater running freely over the floor. Nobody has a lawn. Even the locals can’t drink the water from the taps without boiling or filtering it first, because it contains e. coli bacteria, the result of poor waste management and inadequate sewage systems.

Nobody seems fazed by any of this.

And–after a day or two–I’m not fazed by it either. Clean water running from the tap isn’t such a hard thing to live without. Lots of people have rainwater collectors on their roofs. Lots more have big, terracotta water filters in their kitchens, like Brita filters, only you don’t have to keep buying more of them, and they serve an actual health purpose. Seatbelts–can’t say I really miss those. Have you ever noticed how people, not just in this country, but in Canada, Britain, Europe–pretty much everywhere I’ve been in the “first” world–are afraid to touch each other? On subways, the Tube, public buses, passing in the street, waiting in line. God forbid you give me your cooties. That taboo doesn’t seem exist in Guatemala. One time I spent an hour on a really ridiculously packed chicken bus between Dos Encuentros and Chimaltenango, standing just behind the driver, hanging onto the luggage rack for dear life as we careened around mountain turns, my huge backpack pressed against the shoulders of a dude sitting on a bucket in the aisle, my legs completely enclosed to the point of immobility by the knees and calves and hips and packages of six mayan ladies on their way home from market all crammed into the first row. A little baby napping in her abuela’s lap kept kicking me adorably in the shins. I kept glancing back over the sea of faces in the rows behind me, and every time I did, I found a different kid staring at me with big, brown, liquid eyes, breaking into a huge, shy smile when I caught her gaze. And when it was over, when the dude on the bucket got off and I got to sit down for a minute before we finally made it to my stop, the mayan ladies all started chattering about what a good sport this big galumphing gringo boy had been, standing up all that time on those sharp mountain turns, and how sorry they were they couldn’t have made more room. When I got off, I was pretty much in love with those ladies.

A chicken bus outside Ciudad Vieja, with volcanoes.

There are stray dogs everywhere in Guatemala–not in any sort of evil, ravening pack mentality kind of way–they’re dirty and fleabitten and bone-skinny, and nobody tells them what to do or where to go, but they don’t beg constantly, and they only bark and howl and run around like hooting hordes of ancestor ghosts in the dark of night, in the distance. They’re much more patient, more respectful, than you’d expect any horde of stray dogs to be. Mostly, they just seem tired. For me, it was somehow uncanny to see a long-faced brown mongrel with eight full dugs swinging and ribs standing out against her sides ambling past me down a dusty cobbled street, like the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. And after the fact, I’m actually more unsettled that I could have become sufficiently detached from reality that the sight of a pregnant dog could come across as something so alien.

The cheap beer, in this third world country? It’s not cheap beer at all–it’s good beer, cheap! The national brew, Gallo, is a thirst-quenching, medium-bodied amber lager with a fine refreshing fruitiness. Gallo makes Corona cry. And I can’t even begin to articulate how badly it beats the tar out of ye great American workingman’s brew. And you know what really blows me about it? They reuse every single bottle they ship out. They don’t throw away their glass. They don’t recycle it. They don’t have to. Every morning, the Gallo truck shows up outside the cantina, drops off full bottles, picks up empties, and takes them back to the plant to be cleaned and refilled. Where the $*%& are we on that, first world?

Also, as far as I experienced it, the entire nation of Guatemala has already switched over from incandescent to CFL bulbs. I didn’t see an incandescent bulb while I was there. And they did it without needing a massive PR campaign or even a giant self-stroking internet site where people can congratulate themselves for accomplishing some kind of change.

All in all, it’s kind of refreshing to see that, yes, life actually can and does go on in the absence of antibacterial cream, small claims courts, individually-wrapped sanitary towelettes, subsidized insurance coverage for antidepressants, styrofoam coffee cups, laws regulating windshield cracks, twenty-four hour news networks, the grocery store, or even a ratio of at least two branded napkins to each food or beverage item purchased. You don’t need any of that stuff to live, or even to be happy. You don’t need phones or the internet or TV either.

All that being said, having been back safe and coddled in the states for a week, with the Haiti earthquake heavily in the news, I am painfully aware that my envy for the lifestyle of the average Guatemalan is at best problematic, and seriously flawed. I went down there with money. They hadn’t just suffered an earthquake, nor were they engaged in civil war. If they had been, I’d have been much more aware of the absence of hospitals and clean water, and the danger of those mountain roads. And I’d have been a hell of a lot more scared of all those dudes with guns.

But the main point, I think, still holds: there’s no third world and no first world. There’s the world. What we do affects them, what they do affects us. More importantly, there, but for the grace of a giant, complicated mess of circumstance and stuff, go we. And vice versa.

I don’t know that it’s a sentiment I can fully convey, without just telling you to go there and see. But okay, how about this? Have you ever had one of those conversations with a dedicated doer of recreational drugs, ecstasy or lsd or mushrooms or even weed, wherein said day tripper gushes about how all the world’s problems would be solved if only the leaders of the world could be introduced to the recreational drug in question?

That’s how I feel about going to Guatemala.

Trouble is, all those world leaders I want to teach a little empathy (or a lot) have probably already been there.

Today I learned about this blog called Fuck Yeah Dioramas! Actually it's called FuckYeah Dioramas! but the whole concept of "Fuck Yeah" is repugnant enough that I cling to the space between the words in order to preserve some sense of decency. (And yeah, I tried to watch Team America: World Police and thought it was a lame-ass boring piece of shit. Fuck yeah.)

Anyways, there's tons of cool stuff at that blog such as the work of Su Blackwell who did that piece pictured above.

Despite all blogular evidence to the contrary, I am merely buried, not dead -- and nearly emerged. Since last we met, there was Thanksgiving (driving to San Diego), Christmas (see "Thanksgiving"), my father's 70th birthday (flying to San Diego), three Escapist articles, a two-month-long still-in-action sinus infection ("chronic sinusitis") with accompanying horse-pill-sized antibiotics, a game careening toward launch, and assorted press wrangling -- I did mention that I was appointed to the Board of Directors of the IGDA in November, right? Maybe not. Pop my name into google "news" and you'll find a bit of what's been eating my brain the last couple of weeks. And -- I'm two thirds of the way through the novel, pushing toward a March deadline.

You read (well, a lot of you did) the ever-inflammatory "Why Your Game Idea Sucks" -- joining it in controversy is "Riot Grrrls Wanted", which I will have more to say about later -- much more, once I shake off this blog rust, but for now will just say it's very peculiar how threatened boy gamers are when you say women should be making more games. A bit before that, the slightly less controversial "Ditching the V-Word", discussing why the word 'virtual' is dead and should be stomped on until it stops moving. Today, the (I think) entirely non-controversial but hopefully equally (or more) interesting "When the Stars Align", a piece on the development of the completely fascinating 1986 multi-platform Starflight -- Greg's first game. One of the many reasons I took this job was the opportunity to learn from, I now feel confident in saying, one of the most unique and excellent game designers alive today, and in studying his work (in order to understand his design aesthetic better so as to be better at my job as well as learn) I discovered how shockingly underappreciated and under-remembered Starflight is. So this is my attempt to share a small piece of what I'm fortunate to have access to.

In fiction: the good folk at Electric Velocipede were kind enough to select "Darkest Amber" for this issue's web fiction, so take a gander while you can. This story was the product of a writing challenge from jsridler and justinhowe, and is cyberpunk set in a world I hope to do quite a bit more writing in in the future. It has a talking baseball bat and Greek philosophy -- what have you got to lose?

In poetry: I am told that "Oneness" will be appearing in the latest Not One of Us special collection, called Hidden. It is yay.

...I think those are all the updates. At least the topline, anyway. I do not promise to bring no IGDA/Rockstar troublemaking over here, all things considered, though I expect the flurry to remain mostly on Gamasutra. And this is assuming I don't think better of my rather aggressive current opinion.

Hope that you all are doing well!