Category: Writing

Upcoming Publication: “Grumbles”

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I’m thrilled to announce that my short story, Kzine15cover“Grumbles,” will appear in the May 2016 issue of Kzine, which will be published sometime around the end of May.

Kzine is a kindle only magazine featuring stories of crime, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. My story falls into the latter category, and once again deals with robots. More than being about sentience or robot souls though, “Grumbles” is about preserving memories, and choosing which memories to hold onto. More literally, it’s about a foul-mouthed robot companion arguing with his owner about what childhood memorabilia the owner should pack for his move out to the asteroid belt.

So … get hype? I think that’s the industry parlance.

Chapbook – [Unintelligible] and other works

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bottom-borders-smallest

As promised, here’s a PDF of the chapbook, containing two essays and a writing exercise. To be clear, it’s not a published chapbook, it’s a small compilation I made as the final project of a writing class.

The works contained within are “A Faulty Baseline,” “It Was Unbroken,” and of course “[Unintelligible].” And in case you’re wondering, the image on the cover is a portion of a map showing  the paths of every Atlantic hurricane from every hurricane season since 1851.

Riding NaNoWriMo Out

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Back Again
My route as generated by Google Maps, with major stops, arrival times, and layovers

I posted about the bus ride to Tallahassee, now here’s the bus ride back to Iowa City—as well as the final day of NaNoWriMo. This bus ride was only 28 hours, starting at 1:00 pm est on Saturday, and ending at 4:00 pm cst on Sunday. I did a lot more writing this time around, so this post is more focused on NaNoWriMo, and there are no pictures. It was mostly the same cities anyway, nothing new to see.

 

I started out at around thirty-three thousand words written—seventeen thousand to go.

1:19 pm est

We’re heading out of Tallahassee now. This bus isn’t too crowded, but there is someone next to me. Hopefully they’ll get off in Montgomery. And hopefully more people won’t get on. These are the hopes.

I’m going to write a bunch of Stuffed now.

 2:24 pm cst

We just stopped in Dothan, and I just wrote a shitload of Stuffed. I wasn’t sure whether or not I would, or if I even wanted to. Completing NaNoWriMo isn’t so much something I need to do to prove that I can, because I already know I can. The question really is, do I want to get this book done faster? So I decided that I don’t want to take months and months to finish books (even the shortest novel I’ve ever written took three months to write the first draft of—longer, including false starts and outlining.) I’m not going to do that when I’m a professional writer, so I’m not going to do it now. If I want to finish book one of Stuffed within two months (I do), finishing NaNoWriMo is a great way to reach that goal.

But really, I wrote so much because it was a lot of fun. The above thinking is only what got me to start writing.Read More »

A Mid-Month NaNoWriMo Update

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So far, I’ve been having a nice, lazy, NaNoWriMo. That was my exact plan, and why I decided to write a book about my stuffed animals instead of some horribly complicated time travel thing.

Well, it turns out that when you have a lazy NaNoWriMo, you fall behind! About 10,000 words behind. Who would’ve thought? I kind of did. It’s not so much that I’ve been lazy as it is that I’m prioritizing school work, and not writing much of Stuffed. And I expected that would be the case. The wonderful thing about NaNoWriMo being in November (for Americans, anyway) is that there’s a nice big Thanksgiving break near the end of it. There’s also Veteran’s Day, but UI didn’t give us the day off for it.

The point being, I planned for this. I knew that I would have a long Thanksgiving Break to get a lot of writing done, not to mention two long bus rides to and from Tallahassee. “Long” meaning about thirty hours. I’ll probably spend my time reading, writing, sleeping, drinking coffee, listening to podcasts, and doing various combinations of all those things at once. I may make a post about it, because it seems like it’ll be a fantastic adventure. The most time I’ve ever spent on the road was on the car trip up to Iowa City, and when I did that we stopped for a night in the middle. There’ll be stops on the bus ride, but none of them ten-hours long.

So, that’s where I’m at mid-month. I plan to get up to 20,000 words before my bus ride, but who knows. I have a 10-page paper due this week, so I may not write another word of Stuffed until I’m on the Greyhound. Whatever happens, I’m not worried. Comebacks are more fun anyway.

Did the Author Really Mean That?

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Today in my Dickens class, though in a roundabout way, the question was asked.

Did Dickens intentionally use all of the rhetorical devices that we analyze throughout his writing? (The actual question was how long it took Dickens to write his books, assuming that the more time he spent the more likely it was that his subtext was intentional.) This is a question I’ve heard in classes throughout my education—Did the author really mean that? Is it really possible that the author consciously layered in so much meta-textual meaning, or are we looking too hard? The paradox that jumps out at me most is the fact that a person can spend more time analyzing a sentence than the time it took to write the sentence—how do we reckon that?Read More »

Why Do I Keep Writing Science Fiction?

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This is a question that nags at me a lot. Why do I almost exclusively write fantasy and science fiction? I normally try to challenge myself, writing in a format or style or length I’ve never written in before—and yet, I continually steer clear of realistic fiction. It seems childish.

One theory is that I’ve hardly lived at all, so I have hardly anything real to write about, and to fill that cavity I have to shove in gods and phasers. That might be part of it.

It’s not as though I’m actively avoiding it. Whenever I come up with ideas for stories, it happens that the ones that excite me are the fantasy ones. I can’t help what excites me, can I?

And then I realized that speculative fiction is just like all fiction, except the world is made up too. Simple, obvious even—I know. It’s the implications of this that got me really thinking.

As far as content goes, there are three elements of a story. Plot, setting, and character. Of course that’s totally simplified BS, but for the purposes of what I’m getting at here, this is how it is. In realistic fiction (or “fiction” as bookstores group it) the plot and characters are invented, but the setting is the same. In science fiction and fantasy books, world, character, and plot are all invented. And this is why I write science fiction and fantasy. I like to make up the world as well as the characters and plot. Why then is this type of fiction labeled differently in bookstores, if it’s just one degree more of made-upness? Totally superficial reasons, which I don’t know enough about to discuss here.

But let’s look at the actual differences. Having a book set in the real world does make for a different book—it’s not completely superficial. It changes the frame of reference, the immediacy, the way a reader processes a book. But the problem is, this is the case for more than just setting.

Why doesn’t a series like Foundation by Isaac Asimov belong to it’s own genre? The characters and world are made up, but the story is roughly modeled on the fall of the Roman empire, which makes for a different reading experience than if it was totally made up.

And what about a book like  Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving, in which his own life and total fiction are mixed together in every element of the story? The way that reality and fiction interact in that story, and in the real world, definitely effected my comprehension and enjoyment of the book.

And what about my own writing? Although it feels like I’m always writing fantasy, when I look at my work this way, I’m really all over the place. In three of my latest stories, one had an invented setting/partially autobiographical character/invented plot, another a partially real-world setting/invented characters/invented plot, and another an invented setting/invented characters/invented plot.

But as far as I can tell, the division in bookstores is this: invented setting/x character/x plot is one genre, real setting/x character/x plot is another genre, and real setting/real character/real plot is a totally different section of the building. There are other books that are divided out based on specific types of plots (like mysteries) or types of settings (like westerns), which is even more obviously superficial than the division between fiction and fantasy. And even with all this division, there may be more variation between two Fantasy books than between a Sci-Fi novel and a Mystery (which, to niche in this whole other can of worms, kind of reminds me of this.)

Like I said, I don’t know the history of these superficial divisions very well. I’m not trying to explain them, or understand them. I’m just rejecting their ideas that I’d unintentionally internalized, and presenting a more dynamic (though still very simple) way of looking at differences in stories. I’m just telling you why I don’t care that I keep writing science fiction.

So About Next Month

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We’re coming up on a fun month for writers—November, National Novel Writing Month. I’ll be participating, writing fifty thousand words of Stuffed. Stuffed is a book concept I’ve toyed with but never seriously considered writing. It’s about stuffed animals. My stuffed animals, an ensemble of characters that I’ve held in my head ever since I first played with them. That’s why I never seriously considered writing it. I was afraid it would just be too self-serving, I’d spend too much time wallowing in nostalgia, and that the concept would be completely inaccessible to people who weren’t me. The whole idea also seems wildly unsalable, because the premise sounds like it’s meant for a chapter book, but I’m going to write it like any adult fantasy book.

My not taking it seriously is why I’m actually going through with it though. I have so much writing in the needs-to-be-edited pipeline right now (four books plus, actually), I need something that’ll just be easy. Something that won’t take much outlining. Something I won’t stress about editing. Something where I already know all the characters, and where whimsical discovery writing will fit the mood.

While I no longer fear the book will be too self-serving, I still worry about it being unsalable. But that just means I’ll release it in some alternate way. Maybe indie. Maybe totally free. Maybe a combination. I don’t know, but I’m certain writing it will be a blast.

So I’ll probably make a few NaNo posts throughout November. As a means of procrastinating from writing Stuffed, probably.

Everybody Submits (Except Whiners)

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I recently overheard a conversation between two writers (but were they really?) about how much submitting sucked, how much bias there was toward known authors, how brutal rejection was. I wanted to run to the opposite corner of the room and hide from the abundant stupidity of that conversation. I might’ve interjected, but they were too far away from me. So let me break this down.

I don’t know how much bias there really is toward known authors. I have very little experience on the other end of submissions, and I’ve heard editors claim they don’t even know who a submission is from when they get it, and therefore have no bias. And yet, I can’t imagine Asimov’s publishing a novella by someone completely unheard of, without the writing being positively godly. I don’t know if things are any better or worse in the literary community—my knowledge is confined to speculative fiction markets. No matter what though, unknown people do get published, especially in magazines. Names sell issues, of course, but magazines are different from books. They’re subscription based, and they have multiple authors per issue. So it’s not like a book where a reader is deciding whether or not to buy a copy, they’re probably already subscribed. And for the people who aren’t subscribed, they can pick up an issue with a cover story by Aliette de Bodard that also has a short story by Unknown McNeverpublished.

Is it harder for unknowns? Who gives a shit. I’d be more stressed by being a known, and wondering if the market was accepting subpar stories just because I had a recognizable name.

Whatever. Not that important. Second part now.

“Rejection, it’s brutal.” Those were the exact words. I don’t understand this. I love submitting. And, while I’d rather be accepted than rejected, I enjoy getting rejected too. It means I can submit again.

I think what I like about submitting, and receiving rejections, is that it gives me a feeling of legitimacy. I don’t have much in common with professional writers—not in payment, not in success, not in quality of writing—but something I do have in common with them is that we all submit stories, and we all get rejections. At least, those professional writers who write short fiction do. And that connection to professionals is a cool feeling. With each query letter I write, with each story I put into standard manuscript format, with each new list of markets to submit to that I make, I feel like I’m doing professional work. And I also get a little spike of serotonin thinking, Maybe this’ll be the magazine that accepts this story. Maybe this’ll be my first published piece of short fiction.

And it’s the same with getting a rejection. It gives me a sense of camaraderie, like I’m tapping into this universal vein of disappointment and perseverance and writerliness. I’m not insane, some rejections are painful—like form rejections from a market that normally gives feedback, or rejection after a story has been held for further consideration—but mostly they’re just a small, manageable sting. What was worse was getting no rejections. For a while I was working on a 150K-word novel, and had no short fiction to submit, and I missed submitting so much.

So what’s wrong with these chuckleheads complaining about submissions and rejections? I imagine that they don’t realize that professional writers have achieved success because of long hard work. These clowns probably believe that writers are just like them. That professional writers are people with luck, or people with good connections, or people with god-given talents, or anything other than just plain, old, skilled workers. And because they believe that professional writers are so like them, they ironically don’t feel any connection when they submit, and instead suppose their actual writing to be the connection between them and professional writers. This is valid in some ways, but every writer’s process is different, so I’ve always felt that this writing is more of a personal thing. I suppose it’s less personal if you ape the process of a famous writer, which is what many writing books suggest, and can be a trap for aspiring writers. So by supposing themselves and professionals to be equal, these goofballs debase the writers, and devalue that tenuous but very special connection made in submitting.

The worse for them. I love submitting, and I’ll do it relentlessly just like every writer worth a damn has ever done. And they whinge about submitting, and they’ll do it infrequently—and the poor slush readers will have a few less submissions to read. The better for the workers.

The Ins and Outs of Routines

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Back in the day, I was up at seven o’ clock every Saturday and Sunday.  I’d head to the kitchen and fix a cup of coffee, sit down at my Macintosh PowerPC, and I’d write until ten or eleven.  Then I’d make breakfast, and print out a chapter if I’d finished one.  I did that from sixth to eighth grade.  It was just the most intuitive way to do things—I had school during the week, so I wrote on the weekends.

Freshman year, I tweaked the routine a bit.  During the week I utilized class time in some of my duller periods to write story notes, while maintaining the weekend writing.

In sophomore year, things finally changed.  With classes I couldn’t just coast through, I had less time to outline stories.  Homework fluctuated from weekend to weekend and left no guarantee of a solid chunk of time to spend writing.  And when homework was on the weekdays, staying up late to finish it didn’t leave me inclined to get up at seven on a Saturday.  I managed NaNoWriMo, but I’ll get to that.  The rest of the year I bobbled in and out of my routine.  By the time it was summer, the system had been broken and I couldn’t get back into it.  I did try, but attempting to maintain the archaic holdover from middle school just meant I didn’t write on the weekdays, and wrote only a couple paragraphs on the weekends before getting distracted.

Trying to force that routine was bad.  But here’s where routines can be good.  When I did NaNoWriMo, I started a routine especially for it, and set out some rules.  Quoting directly from my journal, here they are:

“Every weekday, I will write one thousand words, starting today.  Every weekend or non-school day, I will write four thousand words.  During school I will outline the plots and characters of the episodes.  And school will always take backseat when the choice is between it and writing. ”

That last part was very helpful, and is part of why the NaNoWriMo system worked and my old routine didn’t.  But let me clear two things up.  First off, don’t worry about the math.  I was a bit behind at that point, so it does add up.  Secondly, I’m not advocating ditching school as a routine.  This was just for a month, so it was fine.

Now here’s my point.  Having a system in place, repeating a task day in and day out really helped me.  Each successive time I completed what I needed to do for the day, I could look back and have more and more productive days supporting me.  The routine was self-sustaining—or self-helping at least.  Obviously there were some bumps in the road, but NaNoWriMo’s  more fun like that anyway.

So what’s my opinion of routines?  I think they can be very beneficial.  But they can go obsolete, and if they do I have to step back and reaffirm that writing has nothing to do with circumstance.  I’ve written in houses, planes, buses, on a desk, a ping-pong table, my knees, with water, coffee, orange juice—and how productive I am is always up to me.

To put it as simply as I can, routines are only good when they give you a reason to write, not an excuse not to.

The Thirty-Forty

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Ladies and gentlemen, right in this blog post here I hold the answer to writer’s block.  As well, this answer will solve your troubles with the boogie man, and even cure a fatal case of the cooties.

For the nominal fee of continuing to read this post, you too can have the answer.

Alright, here it is—they don’t exist.  Writer’s block was invented by lazy writers who didn’t want to say they were just tired of writing.  It’s as ridiculous as that muse crap the Greeks believed in.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what’s even crazier than writer’s block—writers who say they never have any story ideas.  Crazy, because I have too many.  I have a word document full of unused ideas I’ve thought up over the years.  In addition, if I really do find myself in a situation where I’m not interested in any of my unused ideas and no new ones are coming to me, I have a fool proof way to generate some fresh, hot premises.

The Thirty-Forty; Thirty story ideas in forty minutes.  The name explains the concept, but there’s a little more to it.

One day in Geometry I was bored, with nothing to do, and about forty minutes left in class.  That part actually happened every day.  This next bit didn’t.  I decided that in those forty minutes I would write out thirty story ideas.  It passed the time pretty well, and it gave me some interesting concepts to work with.  I almost ran out of time, so idea number thirty is simply “A car is alive.”  But the other twenty-nine were more elaborate.  Granted, there were only about five good ideas , with another five that were crummy but had contained one or two intriguing factors.  But that’s really the key to a successful thirty-forty—write everything.  Don’t try to make any of them good, just write the first thing that comes to your mind, expand it a bit, and move on to the next idea.  If you write every the stupid, derivative, or downright bizarre idea you’re bound to put down some pretty interesting ones as well.  And of course, the number of stories and time limit is arbitrary—it’s just what I thought sounded nice, and seems to work pretty well for me.

If a thirty-forty doesn’t leave a writer flooded with ideas, they probably need to read more, get inspired.  Or plagiarize even, just do something.

Now, one last tip for writing a Thirty-Forty—do it in a dull setting with little to stimulate you.  I once did a thirty-forty at my  cluttered writing desk, and just kept wanting to write ideas about scotch tape and staplers.