Nothing’s Measured By What It Needs

Posted on May 5, 2013 by

Since my last post, I’ve been taking time, entire days on occasion, to think; about what it is  I want, what I need, who I am, who I’ve been, who I want to be.

Today’s been one of those days. Between periods of reading, I’ve been wandering listlessly through my apartment, staring at rain, staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing, really.

I can blame it on the book I’ve been reading (Lord of Light, which is beautiful and sad and funny and profound).

I can blame it becoming saturated with Woody Allen’s existentialist one-liners, which serve to haunt me at the oddest moments, where their absurd and pointillist nature mimic a lot of feelings I’ve been having lately.

I’m not gonna get into it because when I started this latest blog incarnation, I promised I’d stop posting the long, overly-detailed internal arguments I’m constantly having with myself about myself. Fiction is a better venue for that anyway, where at least we can all pretend that those arguments have a point, and that we can change as a result of them.

I’m trying. I really am. But it’s hard to shed the people we were.  As we get older, it  gets more complicated, as there are so many different versions of ourselves running around in our heads, including the best and the worst versions of us. As we get older, we see more of those edges of ourself. And we wonder which among those avatars, is the true reflection of who we are.

But that’s the wrong question. There is no one true version of ourselves. We are and always will be legion.

So we try to simplify – hoping to get at the root so as to kill the myriad weeds that keep emerging to choke us.

And the most we can hope for is to keep gathering data. Keep organizing it, looking for patterns of emotions, behaviors, reactions, so that we might try to change.

And perhaps that’s the only point of all of this – to understand that there is no end state, no nirvana of self that can be reached, where you will finally be happy and unhaunted.

I once asked someone I admired greatly if you achieve your dream, does the dreaming stop?

She told me it doesn’t. It just changes.

I was so afraid then. I was afraid of losing that sense of purpose. I was afraid of drifting, like I did for years during grad school before I decided to start writing again.

Drifting much like I am now. Unthethered, no longer in terms of what I wanted to do with  my life, but instead in terms of the person I want to be.

And so instead I’m trying to be okay with having no answers. With fighting tiny, ultimately pointless internal battles with myself in the hopes of achieving a state of happiness that’s as transient as everything ultimately is.

It’s a different tactic. And I suspect it will fail.

But one thing is certain: despite having been so many different things, there are pieces of those people we were that stick.

And I’ll always be a scientist at heart, so I’ll take all the data I can get.

Posted in Errata | 2 Comments

I’ll Be Fine in a Minute

Posted on April 6, 2013 by

I’ve not given myself much downtime lately. On the one hand, it’s great. My hours are packed with art and music and laughter and friends, and I’m lucky to have enough to fill every moment of every day with these things.

On the other hand, I’ve not been giving myself much time to just sit and think – to process, to filter and sort and categorize. I used to hoard hours of downtime to indulge my anti-social, introverted tendencies. Those hours were necessary for my mental health.

“Used to” is the operative phrase here.

And it’s hard to tell why I’m doing this – why I’m happy to be tired all the time, to find myself preoccupied with finding ways to fill those once idle hours.

To my benefit, it has been a boon for my productivity – I’m writing more, I’m thinking about new stories, fixing old stories. And the lack of time spent processing means it’s coming out more in my fiction – stories are bent towards the things I’ve been unable/unwilling to think/talk about, and I honestly feel like I’m moving into a new phase with my writing – one of honesty, hard-won lessons born from past and present pain, writing from the deepest places of myself, mixing those truths with fictions until I reach a happy medium where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

It’s hard to convey how exciting that’s been for me. Reading slush, and going back through older stories, I can see how we want to hold our stories away from our chests – to write from a place of intellectual honesty, as opposed to a place of emotional honesty. Write what you know, they say. But knowing and feeling are different. Feeling is so much more difficult than knowing. It changes over time, because of who we are. What we want. The people we are versus the people we want to be. It unites all of us.

And yet.

And yet.

I slept a lot today and fiddled with edits of a story I’ve been trying to rewrite since last year. But my mind kept wandering to things that have happened in the last few weeks – thoughts I’d been having and not having, feelings I’d been feeling, but not feeling. I’m struck by how loud it is in my head.

Usually when I feel this way, there’s a small voice in my head, barely able to be heard above the cacophony, that’s telling me the truth – mixed in with all of the fictions I spin about myself, my life, my choices. So I stopped trying to write after a while, put on some music and laid down on the living room floor to stare at the ceiling, and I asked myself over and over again what I’m doing.

Since I was eleven, there’s always been something I wanted, that I ached for with every inch of my existence: To play music. To be a criminal profiler. To be a scientist. To write. To be fitter. To be desired. To communicate. To connect. To love and be loved.

And as I lay on the floor, pushing away anything that was contributing to the noise, I kept coming back to the same thing:

I don’t know.

I don’t fucking know.

And I’m not sure if this is something that comes with getting older, or as we slowly pull ourselves in line with the person we want to be.

I feel unanchored. And maybe that’s why I’ve been filling my time; because looking at my life, I finally don’t know where I’m going to be in two years. In five. In ten. Will I be happy? Will my definition of happiness have changed?

For most of my twenties, I was terrified by the idea of knowing what the shape of my life was going to be – to see all of the steeples come and go as I dutifully leapt over them. And out of fear, I worked on becoming untethered. I erased all possible futures and focused on days. Moments. Seconds.

And I am happier than I’ve ever been. My life is as close as it’s ever been to the one I’ve always wanted.

But now as I slowly become consumed by that small voice in my head, I begin to wonder if I was right.

This post has given me no answers, but it is what it needs to be. I just wish I knew what that was.

Posted in Errata | 1 Comment

Brust, Zelazny, Skill, Taste and a very brief life update

Posted on March 15, 2013 by

I told myself I wouldn’t do anything productive tonight, out of respect for my poor brain (and knees – trail running is gorgeous, except for the wonky terrain, which my already fucked up knees didn’t appreciate). Sunday, I got back from another year at the Rainforest Writer’s Village Retreat (and visiting folks I miss DEARLY up in Seattle beforehand) and, along with submitting a new short story to an anthology at 2AM last night, my brain’s run out of any extra action potential. 

There are stories, but I’ll tell those later.

So due to the forced relaxation, I parked myself on the couch tonight, not really reading, not really paying attention to the Futurama episodes I put on because turning myself off lets my brain finally spin down and start to unpack. And there’s a lot to unpack since the last time I posted. A lot of it writing-related.

There are a couple (related) things I wanted to write about tonight, so I’ll start by posting something I just finished writing for my book club’s internal blog about a post on Roger Zelazny by Steve Brust. Here’s the post:

* * *

Steve Brust is working on a new book in his Vlad Taltos series (he’s one of those writers where knowing them personally gives their fiction so much more depth to me, like you can see the bits they’re writing for their friends as much as their readers), and so he’s blogging a bit more lately, and tonight he posted some thoughts on Roger Zelazny.

We’ve talked a bit in the past about Zelazny’s influence on the genre (not just limited to the discussions of This Immortal (and it’s place in the genre’s pulp tradition)) (whoo! double bracket asides!), but one thing that came up that I remember thinking about is that I knew a lot of awesome writers (Gaiman’s one among many) love Zelazny, and, not having read widely in either Zelazny OR much of anything from that era, I had a hard time empathizing with the genre’s idolization of him. So I wondered (and still do) what it is about Zelazny that’s so influential? I think I remember citing childhood influence and how it shapes our tastes and perceptions of story, and we develop a kind of nostalgia for them that’s scratched by other similar things (I mean, at least I think I did – if I didn’t, well, I was probably drunk).

Brust’s thoughts:

Anyone familiar with his work and mine knows that the term “influence” is a drastic understatement.  As I’ve said in other places, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I first read Lord of Light and realized that what I wanted more than anything was to make other people feel the way I felt when reading that book. (It just occurred to me that it was my friend David Dyer-Bennet who first suggested I read that one, and I’ve never said thanks. So, thanks.)

Once I got to sit around a small table in a bar at a World Fantasy Con with him and Neil Gaiman and we talked about writing for hours.  Oh my fucking god.  During that conversation, I asked him how to write a short story.  He got a mildly startled look on his face, and said, “Write the last chapter of a novel.”  I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do that, but it’s been going around in my head and generating little baby ideas ever since.

I love the way he used words–I can stop and reread a sentence of his  just for how the words make me feel.  I love his characters–I am willing to follow them around a book just to see what they’ll do.  I love his sense of structure–his story that feels balanced, that feels right even aside from how it resolves.  I love his touch for the bittersweet ending that left one feeling, “well, it was worth the struggle, but it didn’t come without a price.” I love his ability to humanize myth, and to mythologize humanity.

I am a process geek.  That is, I can think and talk about how writing works–and ought to work–for hours.  I love making generalizations about writing, and then testing them.  And I believe the source of that, or at least a huge part of the source, is reading Roger and saying to myself, over and over, “How does he do that?”  The fact that I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer has done nothing to alleviate my desire to try.  After all, I’ve only been at it thirty-five years or so.  Maybe in another ten I’ll get somewhere.

I’m so glad I knew him.  I’m so glad I can still read his work.  I miss him so much.

* * *

Amen, Steve. A-fucking-men.

I go on to talk about reading more Zelazny in the future (particularly because I’ve had Lord of Light in my to read pile since before I went to Viable Paradise, thanks to my friend Kendra for knowing me better than I know myself; but also because I want to read it for the first time with my friends in the book club (we’re all super-close friends from grad school, so the book club is actually an excuse to hang out online once a month and pretend like we don’t all live thousands of miles away from each other)) (dude – more double brackets).

Anyway, I wanted to cross post this here because it touches on some other points I wanted to expand on.

(Warning – a rant (with many asides; and semi-colons) is about to ensue – and it’s as much to sort out my own thoughts on this as it is to open up things for discussion).

I’ll acknowledge that in my post when I’m talking about Zelazny’s legacy on the field, I’m making broad generalizations because I’m still a newcomer to this field. Hell, I find it hard to keep up with everything that’s going on right now, let alone go back and try to read everything everyone ever mentions in conversation (oh, if only it were a perfect world…). But I think my last point about nostalgia is a valid one – about how we, particularly as artists, all have that one book or movie or album we can point back at and say, “That. That changed fucking EVERYTHING.”

When I was in sixth grade, I read Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, and it changed the way I related to fiction: it made me aware of the power stories had over me (I read a lot as a kid, but it was always stuff my dad handed me or stuff we already had around the house, or stuff with interesting covers at the library). I remember thinking after finishing that book that I knew what my taste was. Of course, my dad knew before I did, so he didn’t stop me from reading more Clive Barker (and I would soon find out that his books were not nearly as age-appropriate as The Thief of Always), and then buying me my first collection of Lovecraft short stories, and showing me more and more classic and modern horror movies, and handing me the complete collection of Poe.

Point being, that was the first book that changed me for having read it. I was officially in love with stories, even if the reason why wasn’t immediately apparent. So in my mad consumption of them, I began to figure out what things I liked and what things I didn’t, so that I could better search out more stories I could fall in love with. More importantly, though, I started to try and figure out why I did and didn’t like certain elements. And at first that had to do entirely with taste. But more and more I love stories also because of the skill taken in crafting them.

And this is where we get to something I want to go into a bit more: the differences between skill and taste, the weird gray space between the two and how sometimes our frustration gets us to forget about the skill part of things, specifically how that relates to short fiction.

For the sake of this rant, I’m gonna define skill as the effects of mindful practice and training on your particular art – in this case writing. It’s the thousands of hours of effort spent trying to get the stories in your head to come out on the page exactly the way you want them to.

Taste is the actual stuff we write about. The themes. The kinds of characters. The kind of plot. The setting and the tropes we send up or twist or honor in our stories. Zelazny was huge in shaping Brust’s taste.

But the weird grey area comes in on the effect taste has ON skill.

The latter is certainly dictated by the former. Say you want to write a hard boiled noir detective story because you’ve been feeling nostalgic lately for those rainy Sunday afternoons as a kid that you spent watching those old movies they kept referencing on Tiny Toons (I will always love you, Peter Lorre). But in order to write a story like that, you have to know the elements that define it’s style (cynical main characters, a dead body, a femme fatale), and how to execute those elements (how to write compelling, non-wooden dialogue, a good grasp of the elements of clear and compelling description, and realistic characterization of both characters so they can have that kind of dynamic). Only then will it replicates that awesome vision for the story you have in your head – the vision that lines up with your taste.

We can read a story that’s skillfully done and appreciate it for how it is put together, the process behind it, but still not like it because it’s not our “thing.” Alternately, we can compulsively consume art and media that is badly put together because it scratches an itch for something deep within ourselves (the desire to run away, the need to believe there’s something bigger than us and our problems, wish fulfillment, existentialist angst, human connection, to believe in happy endings, GIANT EXPLOSIONS AND AWESOME WEAPONS ARE COOL, etc.).

There are great stories out there that have incredible characters and no plot, just as there are amazing stories that have a ragingly good plot, but characters that would blow away in the first strong breeze. And there are also stories that might not have well constructed plot OR particularly engaging characters, but still manage to appeal to a wide variety of tastes by scratching archetypal itches.

It’s funny how you can also break those three things down into three general fiction stereotypes: “literary,” “genre,” and “commercial.”

I see a lot of other new writers (much like myself) trying to get their first professional publications and build a name for themselves, complaining about how it’s impossible to get short stories published. Which is fine, in and of itself. I still commune with my fellow writers every time I get a rejection, before sitting back down and trying to figure out what was wrong with it and how to fix it. But the basis of their complaint is not the quality of their own fiction, but the taste of the editor.

Now, this is a valid point – any editor is going to buy the stories that move them the most because they want to publish the best fiction they can. You may be the absolute best adventure short story writer out there today, but if you’re sending stories to a dark literary horror magazine, the editor is not going to buy it. That’s taste. You could even write a story that is absolutely packed with things they love, but because there are so many other stories s/he’s considering, they might go with the one that made them cry instead of the one that thrilled them. Because maybe they want to balance out a glut of thrilling stories they’re publishing soon (or because the editor read it at exactly the right time that it resonated with maximum effect); or maybe they just bought another equally awesome unicorn superhero story to yours a few months back, and they don’t want to become known as the “unicorn superhero” magazine.

Point being, when a writer gets to the kind of skill level where they’re able to take those tropes and kinds of characters and kinds of plot they enjoy down on the page and have it do exactly what they want it to do, there’s always going to be an element of luck. And sometimes it can also come down to whether or not your name might help move a few more issues or subscriptions so the magazine can keep going.

But that last editorial consideration is where folks tend to go off the rails a bit, bringing up “commercial” fiction, like Twilight or The DaVinci Code, saying that editors are buying crap anyway – implying that an editor’s taste is not based on skill, but instead on what’s marketable. So why should they even try?

(I realize, of course, that I’m setting up a theoretical straw man here. This isn’t based on one particular thing that someone said, but about things I’ve been thinking about lately – things based on lessons I’ve learned this past year I’ve spent slushing, and this past year I’ve spent writing, and conversations I’ve had with other writers and things that I get frustrated about. So yes, there are generalizations, and I’d love to explore them further in more complexity in the comments, since I would love to explore more aspects of the intersection of taste and skill and if there actually DOES exist some kind of sweet spot (Star Wars? Harry Potter?) between the two. Moving on.)

But that argument makes two assumptions: 1) that the people reading pro-rate genre short fiction are the same people that are buying millions of Twilight books and going to see the movies in the theaters; and 2) that an editor’s taste is based entirely on what can sell magazines.

I’m not even going to go into the first point because I honestly don’t know what the readership break downs are for genre short fiction markets (I know even less about literary magazines), though I would hypothesize that there aren’t a lot of copies of Asimov’s or F&SF on shelves next to the complete Twilight. And that’s not even to say that it’s because Asimov’s is “good” and Twilight is “bad,” but because the way short fiction in pro-market magazines is crafted, and the itches those scratch, are different than the way Twilight is crafted, and the itches those books scratch. Sure there are going to be people out there that have both of those itches, just like there are folks that prefer page-turners to info-dense character studies.

The second one comes from a place of frustration – that there’s no formula for a “pro-rate” story, even within the same market. That they only like to publish big name authors because why wouldn’t you pick a big name author over an unknown?

But we, as readers, like lots of different things. An editor is just a reader with a venue with which they can share the stories that really excite them. The reason a lot of authors keep appearing over and over again in the same magazines is because that writer’s squee profile lines up nicely with that editor’s squee profile – they love a lot of the same things in stories. And those loves will have developed out of completely different formative experiences.

For example, I love hard boiled noir (see previous rant-y bit), things that have Alice-in-Wonderland or Hitchhiker levels of absurdity, really well done survival horror (like Alien), emotionally manipulative camera lens gazes (Psycho), deep character studies (Moon), tightly structured stories with no gun left unfired (Attack the Block/Edgar Wright movies), one-liners (Woody Allen movies), etc. You can take any two of those things and write a story that, if well-crafted in terms of skill (characterization, pacing, grammar, etc.), would blow me away. And you could take any other two things and write another story that is completely different in terms of tone, style, tropes, etc., and still blow me away. I have no set formula for the things I like. I’ll know it when I see it.

And that’s where the gray area between skill and taste becomes important – where you know enough about the elements you like that you know the expectations a reader has with those elements; and maybe also what ways those expectations have already been played with if you’ve delved deeply enough into it; and then you play with them further, or parody them, or go in a completely different direction, or explore the overlapping region it could have if you mashed it up with an entirely different element with it’s own history of tradition.

There’s a difference between a story that includes the right elements (to appeal to a particular editor) and executing extremely well, just not in an original way, and a story that includes the same extremely well-executed elements, but in an original way. One tickles more than the other.

So that’s my rant. I guess the tl;dr version is that getting short fiction published (or any kind of art, really, in front of a wide audience) depends both on how many hours you’ve put your butt in the chair AND luck. But the odds on the latter get better if you’re submitting stories to the kinds of markets where the current editor has a track record of publishing stories you love.

And you read them again because you loved them so much. And then you sit down and start to try to figure out how they managed to do to ou what they did to you, so you might, at some point in the future, do that to someone else.

Because I mean, really. That’s the entire reason we submit ourselves to this frustration – to discover truth and to share that with others in the hopes you can change someone else for the better like your favorite author changed you.

Because we’re still grateful, all these years later, for the things they left behind.

[I know this is not exhaustive - it's not meant to be. But now I'm exhausted. So it's likely I dropped some discussion threads I was gonna come back to. But it's long enough as it is.]

Posted in Process Geekery, Writing | Leave a comment

Shake It Out

Posted on December 26, 2012 by

I have been REALLY good lately about dropping the ball. I’ve blown through deadlines (both external AND self-imposed) with a gleeful abandon, much like if I were doing a steeple chase with my arms thrust back like an airplane, sprinting forward with my eyes closed.

As such, I’ve been pissing myself off a lot more than usual. And when I get on an irresponsible tear as wide and non-productive as this one has been, I EXCEL at pissing myself off. It’s been so easy lately – particularly since I got my head back on straight – with so many new distractions, I’ve reached my threshold of pissed-ness.

Understandably, I’ve been starting to think about what I need to work on. I know how and why I’m broken, but I’ve been too scattered and lazy to bother fixing things. And since it’s getting to be that time of year again, where I start taking stock of the past year, and where I start thinking about the content and quality of the upcoming year, now’s the time I feel compelled to start pulling my shit together again.

At the beginning of this year I made a promise to myself to try and make 2012 better than 2011, and in that regard I’m declaring 2012 a massive success, despite my end-of-year-dithering. There were a lot of firsts for me. I wrote a bunch of new fiction, started slush reading for an awesome magazine, made new friends, caught up with old friends, got into the best shape of my life, and relearned how to be alone and happy. Twice. I went to Seattle for the first time and the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat, I went to Wiscon, Readercon, and Worldcon. I read a bunch of good fiction (though not as much as I would have liked). I sold a story and saw my very first story in (e-)print. I got to play music. On stage. With an audience. I was inspired, I was distraught, I was distracted and vulnerable and invincible and unstoppable and weak and broken and ecstatic, joyful, tearful, wistful, satisfied, disappointed and content.

2012 became the year of purposefully moving beyond beta. Sure, there was misery and self-doubt and the periodic flaring of neuroses I’ll always be carrying, but misery dilutes easily when stacked up against so much joy, so many things I thought, even one year ago, I would never do. And though, presently, I am angry with myself for falling so far behind on so many things that are important to me, I know this will pass and I will find my footing again. I know this because I’m giving myself the same invocation as last year:

I will make 2013 even more awesome than 2012 was. I will make new art; write new stories. I will record the first album with my band. I will meet new people. I will play more music. I will laugh long and hard. I will read new books. I will run farther and faster and delight in having worked hard on to be able to do so. I will be inspired, I will be distraught, I will be distracted and vulnerable and invincible and unstoppable and weak and broken and ecstatic, joyful, tearful, wistful, satisfied, disappointed and content. Because what is a year that doesn’t include at least that much?

I’m excited for what the new year will bring; for what new twists, joys and miseries await me. And I’m gonna run straight for them, head thrown back, eyes closed, arms straight out like I’m flying.

Why? Because fuck fear. That’s why.

Be fearless. Say yes. Go after the things you want. Be the person you want to be. Make the art you want to make. And when you fail, as we all do, you’ll be all the better for it because there is no growth without failure.

I hope your 2013 is exactly what you need it to be.

Posted in Errata | Leave a comment

The obligatory thanksgiving post

Posted on November 22, 2012 by

As it is a holiday, it stirs the retrospective junky in me. This has been a helluva year so far, for so many different reasons. So here are my thanks:

For my friends, new and old, who’ve helped me to laugh and cry with them, as appropriate; for those once near who are far, know I love you, even if I’m terrible at regular correspondence. My deepest thanks for all of your love and support. I couldn’t do any of this (and I mean any of this) without you guys.

For my family, who never stopped believing in me, despite me following whatever wind caught my fancy, and the resulting periods of severe self doubt that inevitably followed.

For my day job and my health; if it weren’t for the one, the other might have remained out of reach.

And finally for chaos. Sometimes I feel like I can see what the rest of my life is going to be like, but then chaos intervenes and changes everything. Changes me. And I wouldn’t trade this life, the ups and the downs and the valleys in between, for anything.

To all the agents of chaos out there (you know who you are),

All of my love and affection -

Kelly

Posted in Errata | 2 Comments

I’ve So Much Past Inside My Present

Posted on November 15, 2012 by

I’m home sick from work today with vertigo.

Vertigo sucks. I’ve had it once before – it started after I finished recovering from a particularly nasty bout with the flu a few years back, and it stuck around for a few days. I’m hoping since the precursor illness to this one wasn’t nearly as bad, this will clear up quickly. We’ll see. In the meantime, there will be no running, no yoga, no driving, and lots of alternating between sitting and lying down to stop the spins. It’s frustrating to not be able to trust yourself enough to even just walk across a room.

Anyway.

The big news is that my first short story, “How to Make a Triffid,” went live on the Tor.com website yesterday, and I’m absolutely thrilled. I blogged about the story behind this story a while back, so I’m not going to go into that again, but I did want to write a little bit about a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few weeks back, since it’s been on my mind lately, and hitting the Writer Landmark of first story publication, it’s apropos.

The question came up about how we expect we should feel after we cross these big artistic thresholds – how there should be this seachange after these goals we strive towards for so long are accomplished. I mean, we are objectively changed at that point, right? At least as far as objective categorization goes, and as far as the opinions of others outside of our field are concerned (this is particularly apt with so many of us facing down Thanksgiving dinners with family in the coming week). I mean, now I’m a Published Author, right? I’m magically in the club of the Writers with the capital W’s. It’s something I’ve been working towards for years now, so I should feel like everything has changed, right? Like I now have permission to pursue my art with abandon because of this validation?

But I don’t feel any different. I still struggle to put my butt in the chair – there’s been no discernable, lasting increase in my confidence in myself between selling this story last year and it being published. In fact, the act of writing has become harder simply because the standards I’m holding my writing to have risen. Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to have our standards exceed our skill level – this ensures that we’re always striving to improve our craft. But when the gap becomes too large, we risk artistic paralysis. Due to a number of personal reasons I’m not going to get into, I’ve been struggling with this lately.

It brings to mind one of the lessons we learned at VP about internal and external markers of success: how our landmarks should be the ones we have control over (like writing every day, finishing stories, etc) and not the ones we don’t (story sales, award nominations, etc.). That is the essence of art, after all – it’s something deeply personal, an expression of the world we carry within ourselves. Audience shouldn’t matter. Validation should come from within.

But I’m not fooling anyone when I say that someone telling you they liked your story doesn’t still feel really fucking good, and that someone telling you they hated it stings.

I dunno. It’s a weird thing, these landmarks. It’s like we think that the “striving” will suddenly become “doing”, and that there’s a difference between the two. But there’s not. And really all of this is because we’ve crossed the threshold of only showing our art to our friends and peers to showing it to complete strangers.

But is that really going to change your actual process and how you feel about it? If anything, it can make it harder, and that added difficulty is wrapped in layers of pointless anxiety and stress about controlling things that we can’t control.

Recently my (awesome, amazing, humbling, inspiring) writing group critiqued one of my trunk stories from a few years ago. It was enlightening. I could still remember how I had felt when I finished writing that story, the pride I had in it, how I had thought it was best thing I had written. But seeing it again, comparing it to how I write now, it’s not. There are mistakes in there I don’t make anymore (or at least that I make less frequently). I don’t even approach writing short stories in the same way anymore. I’ve gotten better at it.

That’s a difference I can feel. That’s the difference that matters.

On an somewhat related note: go read The Oatmeal’s latest post on making things. He speaks the truth.

Posted in Process Geekery, Viable Paradise, Writing | 2 Comments

The Next Big Thing

Posted on October 2, 2012 by

Wonka sees through all your fizzy lifting smoke and snozzberry-sheened mirrors

Fran Wilde tagged me in her Next Big Thing blog post, which means I have to talk about my WIP, then tag other authors and ask them to talk about their WIPs. I’ve had a certain work in progress for quite a while now, so I’ll be writing about that. I won’t be tagging anyone else, though, just because it seems like most of the people I would have asked have already done one of these. But don’t let that stop you from going back to Fran’s post and checking out the other authors she’s tagged. I’m in august company.

Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing

1. What is the title of your Work in Progress?  

Abaddon Abandon (working title)

2. Where did the idea come from for the book? 

I was lying in bed one night, frustrated with grad school. My mind was wandering around, not letting me sleep, so I started thinking about what would happen if humanity were to come to the end of scientific understanding as we know it. One thought led to another (as they’re wont to do) and I wound up coming up with the particular incarnation of the afterlife that’s the primary setting of Abaddon Abandon.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

I’m not sure. I’ve been really fond, lately, of mashing up fantasy and science fiction – taking fantasy tropes and bending them to fit in a system built out of scientific rigor. Kind of like Star Wars. With dead people. So Urban Science Fantasy?

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Noomi Rapace as Maura, Stand By Me-era Jerry O’Connoll as Fig, Gary Oldman as Gilbert, Donald Sutherland as Sam and some no-name up-and-comer as the main character, Ambrose.

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book? 

Ambrose, stuck in the afterlife after his purgatourist trip goes wrong, struggles between letting go and holding on when he discovers there may be a way to get his life back; but the only way out is through the heart of a war that’s been brewing between the Center and the Rend, a war in which Ambrose doesn’t yet know he plays a central part.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Once I finish this next round of revisions, I’ll be seeking representation.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

I wrote the very first draft over the course of three months when I first started writing again back in 2008. As my writing has improved since then, I decided to do a complete rewrite and completed the second draft between November 2011 and March 2012. I anticipate the next round of edits to take me until at least the end of the year.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?

I’m going to veer off the tracks on this one and say there are actually more apt movie comparisons for this one – it’s one part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one part Dark City.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Grad school, primarily. It’s an ode to how I felt for much of my 20′s – of feeling lost when you think you should have found yourself already, and the terror you feel when you look into the future and see nothing there.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I still get excited when I think about the world and the rules I’ve laid down for it. I’m not going to go into specifics, but one of my favorite things in the book is Sam’s library – it’s infinite and shifting, and is comprised of books without words and everything in his life he at one point had found meaning in.

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Fran Wilde tagged me. You should go check her out (especially her Cooking the Books interviews – they’re RAD), and also follow her on Twitter (@fran_wilde).

As I’m not tagging anyone, I’d like to instead give shout outs to my writer’s group (who are amazing and make me kick my own ass into gear, even when I’ve got the squirrel brain and dontwannas); my Viable Paradise teachers, staff and classmates (there was life before VP, and there was life after VP – and the sea change in my writing and habits and priorities and life has come about in small, incremental ways); and the crew at Apex Magazine for letting me slush for them (it’s made me a more thoughtful writer in a lot of different ways).

Posted in Viable Paradise, Writing | 7 Comments

Remember How We Used to Feel These Days Would Never End

Posted on September 16, 2012 by

Unexpected Exothermic Catalyst

Friday night the transformer connected to my apartment complex exploded. Not just through half-hearted puffs of smoke, but in a literal ball of flames. I was standing outside in my pajamas, watching the doomed transformer with my neighbors when it happened.

I had been planning on spending the night on my couch with some comfort movies when the power went out. I had already made plans, then broke them in favor of being alone, where I wouldn’t have to think, or speak, or do anything really, other than try to forget about all of the reasons why the day had turned out rotten, and all of the reasons why I thought that being alone would be the answer. And then I watched as those plans exploded. In a ball of flames.

So I rekindled my plans and went out with for dinner and drinks with Derek, then went to go see a late showing of ParaNorman (which was awesome, btw). I got back to my still-dark apartment complex after midnight to find my neighbors still out in the courtyard.

I’ve lived in cities all my life and never before have I lived in a complex where everyone knew everyone else, considered each other friends. Where when the power goes out (as it has before), they’re all content to hang around in the courtyard sharing cigarettes, warm beer, melting ice cream, and conversation. I stayed up chatting with them for another hour as the hazmat team finished their clean up, then crawled into bed in a vastly improved mood.

Sometimes I forget that what we want isn’t always what we need.

That’s a good summary of the summer, where I pushed past my ever-present preference to be alone with my thoughts in a dark, empty room, and chose to connect instead.

Here’s a run down, with highlights:

  • Trip to Chicago and Wiscon in May (highlights: Goth clubbing, going to the Zoo and the Art Institute, then roadtripping up to Madison with Liz Argall, meeting Lynne and Michael in person (best bosses ever), too much She-Hulk at the Chicks Dig Comics party, spontaneous ukulele sing-alongs, GENDERFLOOMP dance party, VP reunion tapas, dead dog at Great Dane), which was immediately followed by a two day trip to Disneyland (highlights: walking a marathon in two days, teacups, Haunted Mansion, fried green tomato sandwich, hitting all the rides. Twice.)
  • Turning 30 in June (highlights: Sapna doing spontaneous theater at me, Derek of the Dead, too much cheesecake, the singing mylar balloon that wouldn’t die, drunken pool, Hodad’s with Derek, Natalie and Matt)
  • Playing shows at Soda Bar and the Casbah (highlights: sexy-mom-grinding-type-opener, extra drink tickets, banjo-mic malfunction, Natalie’s farewell, finally getting to see The Local Strangers live)
  • Trip to New York, Philly and Boston for Readercon in July (highlights: getting soaked running two blocks in a sudden downpour, Sleep No More, seeing Adam, Angela and Pete again, atomic falafel, karaoke with Pedro, bagels, critiquing in repose with dog, brunch, Barcade, slushing on the train, Rock Band with Fran and family, roadtripping to Boston with Fran and the awesome AC Wise, disco naps, barcon, panels, music party on the gazebo, VP reunion!, Ramos Gin Fizzes, watching the dissection and consumption of lobsters, hanging out with Bear, Scott and Amanda and Giant Ridiculous Dog, awesome old houses and graveyards)
  • I sold my short story, “Something in the Blood” to the Coins of Chaos anthology (highlights: Vincent Price, Roger Corman Poe adaptations, Chicago circa 1994, Goudy Park, Astor Street, death and destruction)
  • I fell for a boy. Hard. But now it’s over. (highlights: e-mails and conversations, the way my heart would pound, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, vegan restaurants, the taste of limeade, board games, Terminator, the way his hand felt in mine, soft then suddenly pointy cats, Monk’s Cafe, bedsheets… pretty much all of it, up until the end)
  • Chicago and Worldcon over Labor Day weekend (highlights: Lynne and Michael!, Fran!, Lauren and Layne!, grilled cheese for dinner with Ann and my mom, Wizard of Oz in Oz Park with Jeff, barcon, Tavernitas, South Water Kitchen and Goose Island, crying on Michael’s shoulder, comforting hugs, Buffalito hangover cures, singing in the stairwells and outside the SFWA suite, readings, manning the Apex Books booth, drinking Jameson and watching friends win Hugos, Elise Matheson’s shiny party where she serenaded me on her uke, long walks and old thoughts, meeting awesome people who live three doors down from the apartment I grew up in, watching A Fish Called Wanda with my mom)

This summer was filled with so many firsts, so many new friends, so many thrumming nerves, so much laughter and joy. I’m so lucky to have these people in my life. My feelings of gratitude are overwhelming at times since I still can’t understand what I did to deserve all of this.

It makes me want to tell the me of five years ago — the girl who was so desperate for hope, who felt so alone even in the company of others, who wanted to do nothing more than run away from everything, who was so scared to go after what she wanted, who would have spent Friday night alone, moping by candlelight and sleeping as a way to make everything stop hurting for a little while — that everything turns out okay in the end. That there are people that care about her even when she doesn’t want to believe it. When I still don’t want to believe it. If I could have told her that, maybe then on a day like today, where I’m walking a thin emotional line, it would be easier to remember.

We’re all haunted by the people we once were, for better or worse. But it doesn’t mean we can’t change. Or that we haven’t changed. Sometimes it takes a transformer exploding to put that into perspective.

All my love to my friends, new and old alike.

Posted in Conventioneering, Errata | 5 Comments

Slouching toward Boston

Posted on July 13, 2012 by

Reblogged from ~ fran wilde ~:

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10 am Thursday - we hit the road.

For the record, should you have a chance to roadtrip with either Kelly Lagor or A.C. Wise, do it. Great fun.

We have discovered that Boston is magically 6 hours from everything. Except if you take the GW bridge. Then it's 8.

(the sign says Readercon or Bust, but this is what happens when you ask strangers to take photos.)

Read more… 91 more words

Fran is live blogging our Readercon experience while I struggle to wrestle my besotted alter ego back into the bottom of a bourbon bottle where she belongs
Posted in Errata | Leave a comment

Schrodinger’s Slush

Posted on May 6, 2012 by

A little while back, two of my VP classmates blogged about different aspects of short story submissions: Nicole wrote about when you should trunk a story following a few rounds of submissions and rejections, and Fran wrote about how a story is neither alive nor dead following submission – a Schrodinger’s story.

To complete the trifecta, I decided to address what it’s like to be the slush reader on the other side of the black hole – the poison to your story’s cat.

I’ve been slushing for the awesome dark SF magazine, Apex, since January. While that isn’t too long in the grand scheme of things, I’ve settled into a rhythm with it, so I’m more comfortable talking about what goes through my head when I’m reading a story.

Before I started slushing, I practiced rejectomancy – obsessing over the content of the rejection letter, checking response times on Duotrope and reading into what it meant if my story was being held longer or if I got the rejection faster than average. It’s understandable, doing this. You feel like if you can just tease out some meaning from the whole process, it’ll help you become a better writer, like drawing a critique from a stone.

After I started slushing, I realized the timing of a rejection means nothing. A lot of things dictate when I read slush. I’ve got my own writing I need to carve out time for. I’m in a band. I’m in a book club. I try to get to slushing as soon as I can, but sometimes life gets in the way. Duotrope says a bunch of form rejections went out in three days last week and yours has been out for seven? Maybe I really liked it and I’m chewing it over for a few days. Maybe I sent it up to the editor. Or maybe I was in Texas all week for a work meeting and was strong-armed into playing back-to-back games of drunken laser tag. Like I said: timing means nothing.

When I send out a form rejection, it means one of two things: it’s not a good fit for the magazine, or the story isn’t quite there yet. For the former, Apex is a dark SF magazine. Your story could be brilliant, but if it doesn’t have a dark element, I’m not passing it up. For the latter, there are a lot of reasons why a story doesn’t work.

Here are a few of the reasons I’ll pass on a story:

I get bored. This is a big one. When I get bored, I start skimming. Never once have I passed up a submission that made me start skimming. Does it take two or three pages for me to find out what your story’s about? Do the characters spend the first half of the story making oblique references to something really important, but I’m left completely in the dark about it? Is there no plot? No conflict? No choices? Is the main character just wandering from scene to scene with nothing driving them? If I can’t figure out why to care about what’s happening, I’m done.

The stories I pass up grab me early and hold on to me right through to the end. There’s believable characterization in the face of some kind of conflict. The characters make decisions that have consequences that lead up to

The end. There have been more than a few stories that I was thoroughly enjoying right up until the cutesy ending. I’m not a big fan of Twilight Zone-style twists. They’re predictable. That’s not to say I don’t like twists. If it’s done properly, being built up in the background in such a subtle way that when I get to the end, the entire story rewrites itself in my head – that’s fucking brilliant. But cutesy moral messages? Abrupt endings with no bearing on what happened in the story? Everyone lives happily ever after and walks away unscathed? Not so much.

The stories I pass up end in ways that leave me wrung out while still being inevitable. They add something to the story rather than just “The End.” Endings are messy, painful things. They change us. Or at least they should.

Which brings me to

Cliches. Has your story been written a hundred times over? Is it about vampires or zombies or werewolves or Nazis or serial killers? These things aren’t inherently bad, but they’ve been done in so many different ways, it’s hard to write something with a new spin.  I won’t immediately stop reading the story if it’s about one of these things. I will stop reading if it’s the same story I’ve already heard a thousand times.

But that’s the wonderful thing about writing. Give ten people the same story prompt and you’ll get ten completely different stories, because everyone has their own pool of experiences to pull from. You’ll get a zombie love story, a mad scientist tale, a Barker-style splatterpunk romp, or a quiet meditation on what it means to be alive. It is still possible to write a zombie story that’s unlike anything else, because you can write the zombie story that only you can write. If you let yourself.

But, please. No cannibals. I thought it was a bit of a joke when I started, but I soon found out it wasn’t. ::shudders::

Speaking of cannibals, there’s also the matter of

Taste. This is the most nebulous factor. I’ve passed up stories that weren’t personally my cup of tea but they were well-executed. I’ve passed up stories that were flawed but they pushed all of my buttons. I try to be a bit dispassionate about this aspect of it. My squicks and squees have been developed over a lifetime of good and bad experiences. I don’t like elements like frustration, chronic misunderstandings and ineffective communication in stories. But I love stories told from villain POVs, things with lots of (accurate) science, deep character studies, moments of surreal oddity. I’m aware of my buttons. If they’re pushed, great – I will love your story that much more. If they’re not, it’s not the end of the world.

I’ve been writing for long enough that I understand the elements that make up a good story. Taste is not an automatic deal-breaker if I can see what you’re going for.

But the biggest deal-breaker is

Bad mechanics. Are there a lot of typos in your story? Lots of semi-colons used incorrectly? Not sure how to use a comma? These are things that should be worked out before the story lands in my inbox.

Another unexpected factor has actually been

The cover letter. Now, most cover letters don’t make much of an impression on me. Name, contact info, story title, word count, and a short list of salient publications. Cool. Awesome. No problems there. We’re good.

But is it filled with typos? Run on sentences? Did you list all of the articles you wrote for you college newspaper? Did you address it to the wrong magazine? There have been a few cover letters that made me a bit excited to open a story (like publication credits in magazines I adore). But that’s really rare. Mostly, the only thing cover letters can do is make me skeptical.

* * *

So what can be done in increase your odds of having a story make it out of the slush? Come out of the gate punching, with characters that like doing the punching, and that spin down to an inevitable and satisfying ending. Hopefully the road the character takes is paved with your passions (and not littered with typos and bad grammar). Maybe it’ll push my buttons. Maybe it won’t. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the overall taste of the editor, and you can figure that out by reading the magazine.

Writing short fiction is hard. It’s insanely competitive, and the amount of work and pain and rejection involved in breaking in seems disproportionate to the effort. My best advice is, if you think there’s a problem with your story before you send it out, and you hope no one will notice, you’re wrong. It will be noticed. Write stories that push your buttons, and push them hard. And if you really just want to write novels, write novels. There’s no reason to suffer by doing something you don’t like. Choosing to write short fiction isn’t just writing practice, it’s an entirely different form.

But that’s a whole other blog post.

Go forth and be awesome.

Posted in Slushing, Writing | 10 Comments