Frock Coat Dreaming
The tale behind the tales
Somewhere between slapping the last plaster bandage on the naked skin of a complete stranger while I talked shop with her almost-husband, and the time the plaster bandages dried and we could peel her out of her full-body cast, I found I’d landed a new model.
I was doing a lot of fantasy art photography at the time, mostly for fun, sometimes for profit, and good models are hard to come by. Doing fine art isn’t like doing glamour shots or pin-ups—you don’t need some size 2 hot-young-thing, you need someone who is comfortable enough with the way they move that they will wear their skin like it’s a designer dress and move like they were born floating on the notes of a bassoon. And you need them to do it whether they’re in formal wear, or wielding a sword, or dressed only in paint, or wearing nothing at all, as the project demands. You get bonus points if the model herself is into costuming or theatrical staging.
This model had gobs of ideas, and so did her significant other, and the three of us got into quite the creative fugue as the plaster hardened. When the class was over, we parted ways with an appointment to do a test session where we could pilot some ideas and see if we wanted to work together on a bigger project.
Unfortunately, it never happened. A couple days before the scheduled meet, she sent a note saying that her planned house move had gone tits-up, and she didn’t know when she’d have the time to squeeze in even a pilot session, let alone a proper project. But by way of apology she invited me and my wing-woman out to an experimental archaeology event.
It was a great event, and a day in which I learned more about ceramics than I’ll likely ever need. I also learned quite a lot about how blast furnaces work that I have since used in building wood-fired heaters, forges, furnaces, and foundries. Best of all, I met a handful of people who became some of my best friends, and have been ever since.
That night, in a hot tub under the stars of the surprisingly-unclouded sky of California’s north coast, about a hundred feet from the beach, the day’s busy conversation finally hit a lull, and I heard the word “Steampunk” for the first time in my life. It was going to be the theme of the group’s next get-together, and I was invited, as long as I came in costume. My confusion over the term got me a crash course in the history of the kind of faux-Victorian science fiction that, a little while after, turned into quite the pop-culture fad.
That was the night that gave birth to my Clarke Lantham Mysteries series, my novel Down From Ten, and a string of short stories, most of which I sketched out in note form late that night overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Oh, and one of the great friends I made that night—the archaeologist who introduced me to Steampunk—was the woman who would eventually become the steampunk legend Gail Carriger.
In the years since I’ve gotten to travel here and there in steampunk and fantasy circles, and gotten to have some great fun with many of its notable figures, one of whom—Kristine Kathryn Rusch—was kind enough to invite me and several of my other friends (and more of my acquaintances) into a book bundle that’s wrapping up this week.
Normally that kind of thing would occasion some posts to Notes, Twitter/X, and Facebook, but there’s something about this one that got my juices flowing. It’s not just the range of tones in the stories on display (from warm and funny, to pulpy adventure, to contemplative, to dark-as-hell) or the authors whose work I know to be riveting all over, it’s got to to with the stories I’ve got in the bundle.
You see, some of those stories I sketched out that night at the beach house archaeology shindig eventually wound up in my short story volume Frock Coat Dreams, which is my entry into this bundle. And if you read those stories, you might just hear the echo of the waves, and smell the salt in the air, and feel the pensive sensation I got that night as I realized that I’d found a group of people I was going to care about for the rest of my life…which meant that, with every year that passed, I’d feel the impending loss that comes at the end of life creeping up on me.
It’s a strange kind of grief that comes when you love someone enough that their presence becomes part of how you understand your life. And it’s the kind of bittersweet joy that you’ll find in all the stories in Frock Coat Dreams.
It also shows that when a stranger takes her clothes off and asks you to wrap her in plaster bandages, you just might want to think twice. Sometimes, mummifying a stranger can change the course of your life.