Author Archive

I managed to complete the latest short story today. It’s called “Recall” and is about an old soldier getting called back to war. My goals were to keep this one right at around 4.5k, because that’s the limit for the magazine I’m writing it for. I’ll put it through the editing mill tomorrow before sending it to a few folks for critiques, but for the most part I feel like this one is “in the can”.

I can’t imagine it needing too many changes. I’ll be starting the next one Monday. I might just manage to get back into the story a week habit.

Today my little girl is 8. There will be presents and fun this evening, but I’ll never be able to give to you what you’ve given to me.

I made excellent progress on the new story last night. This is a military science fiction. Very short. I’m aiming for 4500 words or fewer. I’m at around 2400 and just hitting the central event. This feels different for me. It’s a lot less organic than what I normally write, but the characters feel right for the story.

My goal has been to keep the story simple. The motivations should be clear, the world and how it works should be clear, and the overall character arcs should be clear as well. It should be as simple as a cure song, and hopefully just as enjoyable.

I’m also writing it relatively fast. The prose is a bit sparser than what I normally write, but it’s OK, because that seems to be what the specific magazine I’m writing for likes. It’ll be nice to see this one published.

I did a little more work on the site. I’m still not too terribly happy with it yet. I did at least manage to add links to my fellow CW graduates. I also seem to have lost my CW entrance submissions and biography, which is a bit of a shame. I’m hoping they’re on my older computer.

I think something in my internal story engine has clicked. It’s like a particular gear was out of place and mucking up the machine, because recently the story ideas I’ve been developing are far more complete. They actually have a beginning, middle, and end. What I thought was that I didn’t know how to do short story endings, but what I’ve learned is that I didn’t know how to do short story middles. The middle was killing me.

After reading a huge list of other short works and trying my best to sort of reverse engineer them, I’ve come to the conclusion that I write a particular type of story best. Knowing that will now let me leverage writing those type of stories to keep sales up and continue learning to write other types of stories. I mean, I’m hoping it will help me to keep sales up.

I’ve learned a few things from some recent efforts.  I should say failed efforts, because these are stories that aren’t going out the door; at least not in their current shape.  I’ll pull parts of them out and reuse them, but they won’t resemble the current stories much at all.  I’m OK with this.

I still feel a little like I’m in a place where I’m writing a lot, but publishing very little.  However, I think if something is fundamentally flawed, it has to go.  There is a school of thought that you write every story and send every story.  I guess that’s fine if you want pages and pages of publications.  I do agree that looking at someone with pages and pages of publications is impressive.  Maybe I’m on the brink of getting to a place where everything I write is publishable.

I’m just not that comfortable with what I’m writing yet.  I sort of ask myself after every writing session, “Is this something they might be willing to read on PRI’s Selected Shorts?”  I guess when the answer is closer to yes than “no fucking way”, I’ll be where I want to be.

The first failed effort was a story about a woman attempting to connect with her dead niece.  I liked some of the character work I did, a lot of the description and general writing was working well, and it’s one of the few first person stories I’ve ever written that I think could have stayed in first person.  However, it totally failed on the story front.  Motivations seemed very contrived and a bit unrealistic.  It was huge.  Way too long for the payoff—or lack thereof.

I learned these things from this story:

-Even a more literary work needs conflict (character goal + obstacles)
-It’s incredibly difficult to tell the story of someone offscreen. This is actually something I’ve attempted with a few stories.  I’ve not managed it very well so far, I think I’m going to give up trying for a while until I find a way to make it work.
-Literary pieces are often about the big event.  There must be a build up to this big event and there must be a leading down from the big event.  Not showing the big event and then attempting to just tell the post big event portion of the story doesn’t feel complete.  In fact, it doesn’t feel much like a story at that point.
-focus is important.  Again, this was a story where I tried to tell too many people’s stories in one place.  This should have been about two people, not six.  Six people collectively are a novel’s worth of characters.  Two people are a short story’s worth of characters.

The second recent failed attempt was the Strange Loop story.  I went a little weaker on the characters on this one and focused on plot.  However, it has many of the same issues as the first story.  Seems contrived and a lot of the character motivation doesn’t make sense.

I learned the following from this story:

-conflict wasn’t clearly defined (What was the goal?  What was the obstacle?)
-too many characters explored in one place
-misplaced big event
-focus was OK, but the message was muddled
-basic idea was good, but there was probably a better way to explore it

*(Funny side note on this story.  Another writer liked the concept so much he asked if he could use it to write his own version of the story—his is much better.  I hope he gets it published, because it’s a really great story.  So this didn’t complete go to pot.)

Yeah, there’s a pattern here.

I’m doing something new with the current WIP.  I’m taking extra time exploring character motivations.  In fact, it’s an entire story that explores motivation and lack of understanding between characters.  I’m not sure if this is making any difference, but it’s also not a speculative fiction piece.  This leads me to wonder if too many of my works are trying too hard to be speculative fiction pieces, because every time I bring in the speculative elements it seems to throw off the rest of the work.  It’s as though I’m building a nice sand castle and decide it really needs a wrench somewhere.

-this story is about the little girl and her mother.  There are other characters in this, but the focus is on that relationship.
-there is a clear goal (it’s the mother’s goal, but I think it works in this story for my POV character to not be the hero, but the person most hurt by the events).
-the big event is in the middle.  There is clear movement toward this event and clear movement from the event.  The little girl is deeply changed by the event.  The event is natural and all of the actions and reactions of the characters are believable.  So far, what I read, sounds like something that might be on Selected Shorts—so that’s cool.

That’s mostly what I worked on over the weekend.  I’ve been doing some revisions to a story about a house burning down, sort of a homage to the Ray Bradbury story “There Will Come Soft Rains”.  I think I finished those up last night.  I have the editor’s notes to go over against my changes today, but that should go quickly.  This means I’ll deliver it on time.  So I have another story getting published this year.

The goal for the next few weeks is to finish up the current WIP and quickly get started on two more.

Additionally, I like the way I’m writing the current WIP.  It might be that I’m moving into a new process.  It’s a bit different from the way I’ve written in the past, but it feels pretty good.

I like the results anyway—and really, that’s what matters, right?

like allowing a perfect stranger to measure your below-the-belt value.  I’m not sure what it is about the process, but even with incredibly clear instructions from the editors, I always feel like I might be leaving something out or forgetting some very important detail.  Perhaps it’s the newbie writer horror stories you constantly hear at workshops and conventions.  

I did manage to get one in the e-mail, so that’s my first submission of 2009.  Hopefully, the concept breeds like rabbits and I end up with a whole mess of stories out there looking for homes.  I’m working on revisions now for an editor.  Those should be done before the weekend.  I can hand deliver it Saturday, which I hope isn’t cutting it too close.  We shall see.

Speaking of the weekend, I’ll be working a little harder on the website here.  I have a lot of links and pages to add.

THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, TWENTY-SIXTH ANNUAL COLLECTION

Edited by Gardner Dozois

TURING’S APPLES, Stephen Baxter
FROM BABEL’S FALL’N GLORY WE FLED, Michael Swanwick
THE GAMBLER, Paolo Bacigalupi
BOOJUM, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE, Alastair Reynolds
N-WORDS, Ted Kosmatka
AN ELIGIBLE BOY, Ian McDonald
SHINING ARMOUR, Dominic Green
THE HERO, Karl Schroeder
EVIL ROBOT MONKEY, Mary Robinette Kowal
FIVE THRILLERS, Robert Reed
THE SKY THAT WRAPS THE WORLD ROUND, PAST THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK, Jay Lake
INCOMERS, Paul McAuley
CRYSTAL NIGHTS, Greg Egan
THE EGG MAN, Mary Rosenblum
HIS MASTER’S VOICE, Hannu Rajaniemi
THE POLITICAL PRISONER, Charles Coleman Finlay
BALANCING ACCOUNTS, James L. Cambias
SPECIAL ECONOMICS, Maureen McHugh
DAYS OF WONDER, Geoff Ryman
CITY OF THE DEAD, Paul McAuley
THE VOYAGE OUT, Gwyneth Jones
THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM, Daryl Gregory
G-MEN, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
THE ERDMANN NEXUS, Nancy Kress
OLD FRIENDS, Garth Nix
THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY, James Alan Gardner
LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER’S MOONS’ BLUES, Gord Sellar
BUTTERFLY, FALLING AT DAWN, Aliete de Bodard
THE TEAR, Ian McDonald

Original Link

Welcome to my new journal/blog.  2008 was an interesting year.  It saw my return to writing.  2009 looks to be a much more productive time.  Welcome those of you who are coming over from my old blog.  Honestly, it wasn’t that old, but Word Press just seems to have a lot more to offer.  

Over the next few months I’ll be making a few changes to this site so it resembles something much closer to an author’s website and not just a casual journal.

I have some big plans for the future.  There are a few authors I want to interview, a few books I want to review, and of course I want to continue  to talk about the process of writing fiction.

Here’s to a happy and productive New Year.