My short story “Five Drinks in Siltown” has been published! It’s in issue 8 of Betwixt Magazine, which means it is free to be read online, and may also be purchased in electronic (Amazon and not-Amazon options!) or physical format.
Joy Crelin was great to deal with, and the magazine is lovely, and I am very pleased to be in it.
“Five Drinks in Siltown” is a post-apocalyptic short-short setting piece; again, it’s work-safe. It’s the second publication of any of my accepted stories, which is both very exciting and a bit stunning, since it’s coming within eight days of my first publication.
(I am given to understand this rate of acceptance is not typical. I am prepared for statistical norms to reassert themselves.)
I feel a bit odd saying this again so soon, but it’s true: I hope you like it.
(ETA: updated to link to story, as the current issue link has moved on. 🙂 Do highly recommend reading the magazine!)
Today, my short story “Palimpsest” is being published. Has been published, in fact. It’s up in the Summer 2015 issue of The Sockdolager, so it is both free to be read online, and may also be purchased for the exceedingly reasonable price of one dollar American. The editors have been great to deal with, and the magazine strikes me as quite beautiful, although I freely acknowledge I’m a bit light-headed about seeing my name on the cover.
(You can get it from Amazon! Also not from Amazon, if that’s your preference.)
“Palimpsest” is somewhere between pure secondary-world fantasy and straight-up horror. It’s work-safe, if a bit weird. It’s the first publication of any of my accepted stories.
I’ve been putting off writing about this for a while, but the extent to which I’ve been doing that has been getting ridiculous, so.
In the last month, I’ve gotten three acceptances for my stories. They came in over the course of a single fortnight.
It would be undignified to say I spent an unusual amount of time making stunned giggling noises, but I cannot exactly deny it. There was also a small part of me that couldn’t quite be convinced it wasn’t a mistake, and was having wild ideas about desperately insisting to editors that there could not be any takebacks. (Given some of the stories I’ve heard about people submitting their works[1], I suspect a lot of people have wild ideas along these lines. I think this is fine, as long as said wild ideas remain firmly in the realm of “and then the cat and I will go out to celebrate, and we will have drinks at the bar owned by Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud[2].”)
I think I’ve managed to sit back, breathe, and not make an ass of myself. I’ve gotten edits in on schedule, and although I was not as fast as I’d have liked, I still had them in before the deadlines. I’m pretty sure I haven’t been a prima donna about anything, although I suspect I’ll be second-guessing myself annoyingly about that for a few months yet[3].
It’s been odd. Part of me is genuinely startled that my stories were picked, because that part of me was expecting nothing but rejections for another two years. Or three. Or… however long it takes to get five hundred rejections[4], I guess, which I vaguely had in mind as a “you need to go home and rethink your life” pausing point.
But mostly I’m just really happy. And yes, details about the stories coming up tomorrow; right now I just wanted to get thoughts about acceptances out.
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[1] Everyone’s heard the one about an editor who was in the washroom at a con and had someone slide a manuscript under the stall door, right?
[2] Still one of the most glorious names I have run across in fiction.
[3] You know the kind of thing; I disagreed with an edit, and I explained why, and are you supposed to do that, and was I condescending oh god I hope I was not condescending, everyone has been so courteous and professional and I have no idea what I’m doing and everyone clearly knows it.
[4] One may find the explanation of centiBrads in an earlier post.
I gave this one five stars, which is what I give to books so good I believe you should read them even if they are not your genre at all. It’s also all free online, at Strong Female Protagonist.
I started reading it expecting… a kind of comedy of manners, I guess. Superhero dealing with university life! How wacky, yeah?
Twenty pages in, it hooked me. It got… well, it wasn’t ever un-smart, but it got pointed. Then there was the TV interview scene in issue 2, and issue 3 has a beautiful story arc with Feral. I really cannot summarize it, but you can read it! It’s free online! And it’s just…
I am not doing it justice, but it’s so damn thoughtful. The comic basically takes the statement “There are superheroes!” and answers it with “So what?” Not a dismissive so what, not a trite so what, a genuinely thoughtful and considerate examination of the question. And it’s beautiful.
(And my copy of the book has Feral and Menace hand-drawn on the signed frontispiece. You cannot imagine the squee.)
It is late, and everyone is discussing 2014. With my habit of getting bogged down in quantifiable minutiae, I am therefore posting about my reading and writing this year.
In 2014, I aimed for 80 books and finished 95, covering a total of 24421 pages.
I was also trying to aim for gender parity in my reading, and I failed. Overall the split was 38:14:43 (the numbers representing female authors:authors of non-binary or unspecified gender, or multi-authored works with a gender mix, or anthologies:male authors, respectively).
one was non-fiction. This low number isn’t surprising; I tend to dip in and out of non-fiction works, rather than read them end to end, and I don’t count RPG books as non-fiction. 1:0:0
eighteen were short standalones (stories or novellas); most were ebooks, although I did get four in print, including copies of Bob Leman’s “Instructions” and Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light. 9:1:8
sixteen were anthologies! Unsurprising, as anthologies are generally my favourite kind of book to pick up. 2:13:1; the first two were Two of the Deadliest and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, and the last one was The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack.
(I ran across two other Mythos anthologies this year which only featured male authors, earning Mythos anthologies the distinction of being the only genre of anthology I’ve learned I need to check when I’m tracking gender in my reading, as I clearly can’t assume they’ll actually have a gender mix. A++ Nyarlathotep, carry on. You jackass.)
fourteen were collections of stories by a single author (including one of the graphic novels, since the Jonah Hex collection felt more episodic than any of the others). 6:0:8
three were RPG sourcebooks. 0:0:3
five were game-related fiction: two Wasteland standalones, two Deadlands Noir standalones, and one Pinebox, Texas (now… re-mastered, I guess? as East Texas University) anthology. 0:1:4
eight were graphic novels. 0:0:8
Yes, really. And I thought Mythos anthologies were bad. If you count the writer and the artist as co-authors, that changes to 0:1:7, and my overall stats become 38:15:42
twenty-five were ebooks; I read more of these towards the end of the year, and suspect I will read more in 2015. Cheers for a tablet and a new ereader. 11:2:12
thirty-seven were novels. 20:0:17
Four of the books I read I five-starred on Goodreads, which is a rating a reserve for books that I think people should read even if they usually pass over that genre (The Last Unicorn, The Inheritance and Other Stories, Save Yourself, and Strong Female Protagonist). 2:0:2, or 2:1:1 if you count writer and artist as co-authors.
Four of them I two-starred, which means I did not hate them but pretty much stopped enjoying them and ground on to see if they would get better. If they had, I would have rated them higher.
And the oldest book I read this year was Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, first published in 1952.
I also submitted stories 34 times, and got 31 rejections (although one of those rejections came in for a story I submitted in 2013, so you can say I only got 30 2014 rejections. This does not mean I got four acceptances, but it does mean I am expecting at least four rejections next year. 😉 ) I am slightly embarrassed by how little I wrote; my yearly wordcount hit five digits, but not six.
I have had a long day in a few respects, so I am coping by accentuating the positive. Onwards!
After making plans, and waiting for several months (I mean, not many several months; the kind of several months that could also be a few months), I have gotten a tablet. It has a ten-inch-and-change screen, and I am really pleased with it. It occupies a niche closer to a smartphone than a laptop, for me; WiFi only, and not something I expect to do a lot of typing on.
That said, it is better for browsing on than a smartphone (due to the screen size), good for playing light games, and much better for reading on.
I’ve found that if I’m going to e-read (that is a verb, right?), I prefer relatively short pieces of fiction; magazines and anthologies work for me, as do standalone stories and individual issues of comics. Usually I’ve used my Kobo for this; it’s light and fairly durable, has great battery life, and it’s easy to read in direct sunlight. But the eInk screen has a regrettable tendency of freezing in -20C weather or lower (making waiting at bus stops extremely boring), the resolution is fairly low, it doesn’t handle images or zooming very well, and… well, not to be shallow, but it’s in greyscale.
There are certain aspects of the e-reading experience that are not well-served by 800 x 600 resolution in 16-level greyscale.
(By the way, I am kind of loving Cat Rambo’s stories, and her covers for same; I think my favourite so far is Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart, but since I am not sure how to pull that cover out of my Kindle app, I am tossing up the one for Jaco Tours.)
I need to be careful to stop using the tablet a while before I turn in (backlit screens before bed don’t improve my sleeping any), but it’s really made it a lot easier to get drawn into some of the stories I’ve been collecting. And since I have an upcoming trip (although not to Costa Rica, where Jaco Tours is set), I expect I will be getting a lot of reading in. I look forward to this.
Okay, here’s a question: I am looking for examples of fictional narrative in which the author and the reader both know and learn more about the world than the narrator/protagonist/viewpoint character(s).
Examples of what I am speaking of, off the top of my head:
“Petey” – TED Klein
“The Events at Poroth Farm” – TED Klein (I sense a theme)
“Fat Face” – Michael Shea
that story whose title I can’t remember from the New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird anthology in which the narrator assumes he’s observing the behaviour of crayfish
(The latter three are probably easier to pull off, in that the protagonists discover the facts they are ignorant of before the end of the story. “Petey”, on the other hand, remains a story that in this regard is so beautifully executed I am in awe every time I read it. I will probably be picking it up to look at it, but )
The important thing to note in these stories is that the truth of the fictional narrative is not the reader’s default reality (or, if one of these was set in Regency England or Ancient Egypt, their assumption of what a default reality should be). “Fat Face”, for example, involves shoggoths; assuredly cuddly, but generally not assumed to exist in real life. Contrast this with any one of three dozen narratives in which someone is running around the street seeing ordinary people as “demons”; I am really not hugely interested in examples of the latter, since they are generally a way to tell the reader about the narrator and not about the world.
Finally, I’m looking for text only. This means that things like the I Am Legend movie do not count. It is a wonderful example of how what the viewer can see is really going on (as displayed on film) does not match what the protagonist asserts is going on, but I really want to see how this is made to work in text.
I understand that there’s going to be an announcement about the Hugo voter packages very soon. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a coherent list of links to what’s available online, you could do a lot worse than check out John DeNardo’s roundup at SF Signal. It’s huge.
I saw The Last Unicorn tonight. On the big screen, with Peter S. Beagle in attendance and answering questions, and signing books afterwards (and taking pictures with people! I have a picture of myself with Peter S. Beagle now). And before I get any further I will note that tour dates are here and it would be lovely if you could pass that along to anyone you know of who’s interested.
I thought I might not cry this time, which is foolish. I never forget that I cry when I hear the theme song. But I always forget how sure it is, the tears coming up as smooth and sure as a stone drops down through water, and I thought that since I listened to the music last night as well the effect might be somewhat muted, and so I was sitting down to watch and thinking maybe this time I wouldn’t cry, and…
But yes. Peter S. Beagle was answering questions before the movie, and Connor Cochran[1] was… was maître d‘-ing or toastmastering or whatever the term is, and interjecting little anecdotes. And one of them was that when he first met Peter thirteen years ago, Peter thought he was a failure.
I… just hearing that was like the split-second of freefall confusion when our dog once yanked me off our front steps. Not the moment where I landed on the edge of the step and bruised myself purple-black for weeks. But the sudden absence of ground where there’d been that solid unquestioned presence only a second before.
Peter S. Beagle ever thought he was a failure.
Peter S. Beagle.
I would expect that sentiment no more from him than I would expect it from Ursula K. LeGuin.
I came home with more books than I went out with, and they are signed. And I am happy, and teary, and a little giddy, and so very very glad I got to tell him thank you for everything he’d written. And I’m sitting here, doing a little reading and being glad that things seem to be going better for him, and trying to wrap my head around how he could ever have believed…
I hope things keep getting better for him. I truly do.
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[1] I am 95% sure this is the man, but I checked with the light of my life, and he never gave his name, and I meant to ask. Actually I am 99.8% sure, and I would be surer except it takes me a while to learn people’s faces and I did not see him for long. But 99.8% sure is not bad, so I set it down.
A story I recently submitted got a lot further than I’d expected it to before coming back with a personal rejection. I’d submitted it very close to the deadline, and I told myself that when[1] it got rejected, I’d revise it one more time before sending it out again.
Now, though, I’m kind of unsure. It’s apparently a sounder story than I thought it was, and I’m wondering if more revisions are just procrastinating. (I’m not saying it’s perfect! I’m saying it might be as close to really good as I can get it, if you see the distinction.)
Therefore, on the horns of the dilemma of “do further revise an already good story” or “don’t revise a story which I felt needed more”, I am picking the obvious option. The only sensible option. The option which stands out as clearly as if spotlit from above with “Thus Spake Zarathustra” playing in the background.
To wit, “find an umbrella and go out for some form of fluffy beverage which incorporates both coffee and whipped cream.”
The rest can get sorted in a bit (possibly while keeping this in mind); right now it’s likely the warmest part of the day, and I always feel a bit odd if I don’t get outside at least once.
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[1] This is how I plan for such things.
