Fans of Driftwood, rejoice: I finally got around to writing and revising and submitting a third story, which are usually the prerequisite steps to selling anything. Which is to say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought “Remembering Light.”
That’s three, which means Driftwood officially gets its own category in my site organization. I hope to have quite a few more than that in the long run, though.
One of the victims of me falling behind on e-mail has been this announcement: Scott Andrews, editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has released an anthology of the magazine!
The Best of BCS, Year One features such authors as Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, and 2009 Campbell Award finalists Tony Pi and Aliette de Bodard. It includes “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips, named to Locus’s 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Father’s Kill” by Christopher Green, winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story of 2009.
(My contribution is “Driftwood,” for those who are fans.)
If you’ve been meaning to sample the magazine, this is a good way to do it: a $2.99 ebook available in five different formats. Proceeds get funneled back into keeping the magazine going — and since BCS is that semi-rarity, a magazine that pays its authors more than a token amount, I’m all in favor of that! Table of contents and other details here.
I found something new to post, that didn’t require much jinking to make it web-ready: “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?”
This originally came out in Talebones, whose fourteen-year run came to an end last fall, much to my sadness. Patrick Swenson published three of my stories in total: this, “The Twa Corbies,” and “The Snow-White Heart,” which was in their final issue. (You can still buy back issues here.)
. . . you know, posting this has reminded me of something I forgot. Namely, that this story tried to turn into a ballad as I was writing it. You can see that in the style — this was the first real stylistic experiment I ever tried writing — the rhythm of the “But who shall lead the dance?” suggested the end of a ballad stanza to me, and everything else followed from there.
Maybe I’ll revisit that, and actually try to write it as lyrics, just for fun. No doubt I’ll fall on my nose; poetry and related forms are not something I’m good at. But hey, it’ll be good exercise. And the silly thing’s halfway there already.
Okay, fine, I was totally wrong about the remaining wordcount; you’re 7,410 words and obviously want to be a novelette since I know I rushed the ending. FINE. You can be a novelette.
You can be a novelette later, once I’ve mustered the will to revise you. But for now, “Mad Maudlin,” you are DONE. And that’s all I care about.
I go fall down now.
Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh I am thisclose to being able to finish “Mad Maudlin” (no, I didn’t get it done last month) and the end of it is driving me batty. (Which is a funny joke, given the subject matter.) I just need to figure out what message Maud gives Peter, and then how to make the next bit happen in a dramatic way, and somewhere work in Peter doing that thing he shouldn’t do (moreso than he’s done already), and then it’ll be the tag scene and I’m done. We’re at 5,698 words, and there can’t be more than a thousand left, and WHY IS THIS STORY NOT DONE ALREADY.
Because I haven’t threaded my way through the last few twists yet, that’s why. Come on, brain, help me out on this one, and then we can sack out and watch Dexter. But until you do, we’re not going anywhere other than this chair, except maybe the bed to roll around and stare at the ceiling and try to figure things out. Work with me, here. We’re almost done.
Updated with revelation: Duh. You promised yourself this was a hack draft. This is you getting the framework down on the page, so you can go back and have experts help you make it better. So all that crap you’re worrying about is stuff you can fiddle with later. You’ll run it by three or four people to get the research stuff right, and then once you have that you can apply writer-brain and make it more exciting, and then you can have your crit group look at it and tell you where it still needs improvement. Obsessing over the finer points now may even prove to be a waste of time, as your clever ideas might get cut on account of being Wrong.
So just write the end, and let it suck, and worry about it later.
I’ve said before that I’ve never been a regular subscriber to any magazines — “regular” in the sense of keeping up my subscription for more than a year. (I might have done for Paradox, but they folded.) That’s changed a bit lately, though. First via podcasting: a good deal of my short fiction consumption now comes in via my ears, as I listen to Podcastle (for fantasy) and Escape Pod (for SF), and I strongly suspect the addition of a narrator’s voice has led me to enjoy stories I might have skipped past on the page. Second, as I’ve mentioned before, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has turned out sit squarely in the middle of What I Like when it comes to fantasy, with the result that I’ve become a regular reader.
As a result, I’m discovering heretofore unknown pleasures, that come when you’re a dedicated follower of a particular magazine. It’s like the reverse of Cheers: rather than everybody knowing my name, I know theirs. Certain authors, whose work sits squarely in the middle of What The Editors Like, keep showing up, and so BCS becomes (among other things) “the place that brings me Aliette de Bodard’s stuff.” Since I very much like her work, I bounce a bit in glee when I see a new piece show up there. Sometimes it goes even further, not just an author but an author’s series: Escape Pod has Jeffrey R. DeRego’s Union Dues superhero stories, and BCS has so far published two of Richard Parks’ Heian-period Japanese fantasies, featuring the duo of Yamada and Kenji, the reprobate priest, with a third one on the way. Carried too far, this sort of thing can make a magazine stale — you get the feeling they only ever publish the same dozen people, over and over, and the assurance of a sale makes those dozen lazy in their work — but so far it’s been a source of familiarity and satisfaction for me.
Since I started this by talking about subscriptions, I should mention that both the podcasts and BCS are supported via donations; if you want to toss a few bucks their way, to help ensure they keep putting these stories out, the relevant places to do so are: Podcastle (right-hand sidebar), Escape Pod (ditto), and BCS. (I noted when catching up on stories this weekend that BCS has also added itself to the Kindle Store, in addition to the pdf, mobi, and epub formats of before, if you’re an e-reader type.)
Let’s close with a question: for those of you who are dedicated subscribers to one or more short story sources (print, web, or audio), are there particular authors or story series that are, for you, part of the appeal of that magazine? Conversely, are there any who show up a lot that you skip over automatically, because you know from past experience that they just aren’t your kind of thing?
“I want to make a map of Driftwood.”
Making Last cough up his wine wasn’t the only reason Tolyat said it, but he had to admit that was part of the appeal.
On the one hand, more Driftwood stories = good, since the most common response to either “Driftwood” or “A Heretic by Degrees” is “You should write more in this setting!” (I’m working on it.)
Also, this appears to be that desperately-needed creature, a lighthearted Driftwood story. Given the inherently nihilistic nature of the setting, if I’m ever going to do a collection (which I would, I confess, like to do someday), then it would be good to leaven it with stories like this, where Last has an actual friend and they do something that’s just fun.
On the other hand . . . I did not need to start a new story right now. Seriously, Brain, we’re trying to clear things OFF the slate here, not add to them!
But this, uh, may be what I’m doing today. Depending on how much the brain decides to cough up. It would be just like it to hand me an opening and then quit, but maybe we can prod it into actually being useful . . . .
. . . but it’s good while it lasts. I’ve spent a couple of weeks now bouncing between more narrative projects than I would have thought possible: the Victorian book, a Sekrit Projekt I can’t talk about, “Mad Maudlin” (not done; so close), the revision of “Remembering Light,” and my Scion game. It’s been a pleasant surprise, how much I’ve been able to gear-shift from one to another, but I feel like I’m nearing my limit: the brain can only be flexible for so long. Fortunately, the Sekrit Projekt thing pretty much just needs one more push from me, so if I can knock that and “Remembering Light” off the list I might have enough brainpower for “Mad Maudlin,” and then I’ll be down to two, the Victorian book and the Scion game.
Which is good, because both need a little more attention than I’ve been able to give them. I do want to get moving on another short story once “Mad Maudlin” is done, but I think it’s going to be a new draft of “On the Feast of the Firewife,” which will take less brainpower than a full-blown new story. I’ve figure out what I want to do with it; now it just wants doing.
One of the downsides to not writing short stories for a while was that I had nothing to sell to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Well, now I’ve fixed that: about three minutes after I woke up this morning, I got an e-mail saying they’re buying “And Blow Them at the Moon,” my Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story.
Which is also, I should mention, a novelette. In the space of the last couple of weeks, I’ve sold both of the novelettes I’ve ever written — not counting that thing I did back in fifth grade, which might be of roughly that length but will never see the light of day. Since there are a lot fewer potential homes for stories nine thousand words long, I’m very pleased to see both of them happily settled. Especially since Onyx Court stories, with their historical context, are probably never going to run short. 🙂
The only downside is that my list of stories in submission keeps shrinking. For all the right reasons, mind you — but it’s something to try and fix anyway. 🙂 (Ironically, I’m pretty sure the “revision of short story” mentioned at the end of that post refers to this story, which sold on its first trip out the door.)
First, I’ve been given the go-ahead to announce the sale of my novelette “La Molejera” to Paraspheres 2. Yay!
Second, I neglected to mention the other week that Newton Compton will be publishing Warror and Witch in Italian. Also yay!
Third, and unrelated to my own writing, Janni Lee Simner is running a really cool contest for her upcoming book Thief Eyes, based on the Icelandic Njal’s Saga. I thought it was nifty enough to demand a signal boost. 🙂 Janni read part of this at World Fantasy, and it sounds like it will be a great book.
Like werewolves? Want an anthology full of ’em? Over at calico_reaction‘s LJ, Ekaterina Sedia, editor of the upcoming Running with the Pack (table of contents here) is giving away an advance copy. This is, for those who are interested, the home of my Fake Werewolf Paper, aka “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes;” the rest of the contributors include some of the biggest names in the field of People What Grow Fur Under the Full Moon, Comma, Fiction Concerning. Should be a great antho, and this is your chance to snag a copy before anyone else.
Goal for today: finish “Mad Maudlin.”
In order to do this, I have to remind myself that this is a hack draft. Not the same thing as a bad draft, which is what I have of “Chrysalis”; the problem here is not suckage. It’s that the story needs to be run past several layers of expert consultants, who can tell me how to make the technical aspects go, and only when that’s done will I be able to address the matter of story craft. In theory it would be more efficient to get expert advice first, then write the story, but in practice that hasn’t worked; first I have to nail down my ideas in a form other people can understand. Otherwise my questions are all too vague and hypothetical, which makes getting useful answers hard. So I’m hacking out the general shape of the story, and once I have that I can get my experts to tell me where I’ve gotten their respective fields wrong. Their answers may well change the path the story takes to its destination, but by then I’ll have a firmer handle on what that destination is.
That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s gotten me farther through the draft than my original approach did. And if this works, there’s hope yet for Catherine’s unwritten story. It would be nice to get a few of these things off my list of unfinished ideas.
Mike Allen recruiting reviewers for the third Clockwork Phoenix anthology, containing (among other things) my story “The Gospel of Nachash”. Details here.
Dear Brain,
I recognize that you’re trying to be helpful and all, and I appreciate it. But it would be lovely if you could offer help with “Mad Maudlin” (which I’m trying to finish) or the Victorian book (which I’m about to start) or That Thing We Can’t Talk About (which I need to do), rather than the opening line for a sequel to a short story I haven’t sold yet.
Just saying.
Having said that, it is a pretty fun opening line.
Dear Cayce,
I know you’re tired of receiving Well-Intentioned Parental Advice, but there are a few things every young woman should know before she goes to Hell.
Back to the things we should be doing . . . .
Love,
Your Writer
I’ve gotten decidedly snippier with the queries I send to magazines when they’ve held my story for an unreasonably long time. These aren’t your everyday queries — “hey, Strange Horizons, you say to nudge you after 70 days, so I’m politely nudging” — this is the “hey you’ve had it for a year and I queried and you said you’d gone on hiatus (would have been nice if you told anyone that) but you’d have a response for me Real Soon Now but it’s been another three months since then” kind of query.
The really sad part is, I’m betting half the short story writers reading this post just thought, “I wonder if she’s talking about Market X,” where Market X could be one of a number of different ‘zines. I’ve actually sent out more than one of these queries lately. Which is a really depressing statement on the lack of professional behavior to be found in some corners of our field. I know that precious few editors out there actually do this as a job, and I cut very large amounts of slack for that; a market pretty much has to have a regular response time above six months before I’ll consider them “slow,” and all too often I let a year go by before I actually get annoyed. But when you do things like putting your magazine or anthology on hiatus without informing the people in your slush pile (or even announcing it anywhere other people might see), or ignoring polite queries for months on end, or continually promising results you don’t deliver . . . eventually, I do lose patience.
And it’s started to show up in those late-stage queries. I’m not rude — at least, I try not to be — but I’m less forgiving. I’ve been burned a little too much lately by editors jerking me around to cut anyone endless slack anymore. I’m confident enough in myself now to say I have better things to do than waste my time on this kind of crap.
Not confident enough that I haven’t second- and third-guessed my decision to post this, but hey. I haven’t named names, and I think we do need to occasionally remind ourselves that not everything is reasonable. When I start having to specify what year a story got submitted in, things have gone too far.
So I’ve been kicking myself lately about how few short stories I have in circulation. At my high point, Back In The Day, I think I had eighteen out at once — something like that, anyway. Enough that they were almost never all really out at once, because of the logistics of shuffling them around the first- and second-tier markets while accounting for what had already been where and what was closed right now and how long they took to respond. And certainly it is true that the drop owes a lot to a drop in how many short stories I’m producing. (You can’t sell what you haven’t written.)
But I was reminded, when looking at the file I use to log my submissions, that there’s another cause, one worthy of celebrating instead of bemoaning.
Since the beginning of 2008, I’ve put seven stories into circulation, and of those seven, four have sold to the first or second market I sent them to.
Three of the four — the ones that sold on their first try — were more or less written for the markets in question (two for Clockwork Phoenix and one for Running with the Pack). So they never even started on my usual list of places to submit, which includes markets like F&SF that I keep trying because hey why not even though I don’t actually expect they’re going to buy it. Still, the point holds true: over time, I’ve started selling stories faster. Which is exactly what one hopes for. I’ve become a better writer, with better credits to my name, and better judgment as to what I should send where. Result? My submissions queue gets shorter because things stay in it for much less time.
I bring this up because we often have metrics for success (whether it’s “success” in the sense of things not entirely within our control, like sales, or in the sense of goalposts of our own efforts), but sometimes they don’t measure what we think they do. The number of stories I’m sending around is partly a gauge of how much work I’ve been doing, but not precisely; I could be working my butt off and have only two stories out there. (I think this is more or less the state of jaylake, actually.) Likewise, I wrote only four things in 2008 — but two of them were novels, so that’s hardly a light year. So before I shake a reprimanding finger at myself, I need to think about what the numbers actually mean.
Having said that — back to the metrics of “pages of page proofs proofed,” and “pages of research book read,” and maybe “revision of short story” so that I can get something else out onto the market to hopefully sell really fast.
As it happens, last night’s revision on “And Blow Them at the Moon” (the replacement of two scenes) resulted in a net gain of about 800 words, for a total of 8800. Which is, strangely enough, a relief. If it had been 8200 or something, I would have been moving heaven and earth to try and chip out the overage so I could send it to markets that take things up to 8K. But at this point, it’s a lost cause. Cutting that much would hurt the story. So I can relax and concentrate on making sure it’s the best story it can be for the markets that take 9K and more.
. . . which isn’t very many. But look on the bright side: if I do manage to sell it, my odds of award nomination go up substantially, by the simple math of there being many fewer novelettes out there!
(Hey, I can hope.)
I was about ready to head off to bed at 3 a.m. last night (my usual time, for those not aware).
By the time I actually got there, it was nearly 5.
The reason? I was working on revising “And Blow Them at the Moon” last night, which requires at least two pieces of heavy lifting, completely replacing a pair of scenes. The first one was like pulling teeth, and I’m not sure what percentage of that was the difficulty of the scene, what percentage was me just not committing my brain to the task. But I finished it. And then, of all things, a Facebook application handed me some motivation: I was very close to regenerating enough stamina in this little monster-killing thing to go kill monsters one more time before going to bed, so I told myself that while I waited for that to be ready, I would poke at the second scene.
Then it was nearly 5 a.m. and I’d replaced both scenes.
And I think, more than anything, this is what I love about being a full-time writer. They say, and it’s true, that you can’t wait for the muse to strike if you want to have a career (full-time or otherwise) — but sometimes it does strike. When it does, having the freedom to say, “eh, I can just sleep in tomorrow” is a glorious thing. There was a point at which I knew I could kill monsters and go to bed, but I didn’t want to; I wanted to keep writing Magrat doing something very brave and rather stupid, and so I did. (Whoever knew Facebook could be good for productivity?)
Of course, that meant I slept until 1 p.m. today — which is still only eight hours, but some of them are at a time even I don’t consider to be reasonable for sleeping. So now I go eat something (god, I haven’t had food since about 9:30 last night), and trundle through the requisite 50 pages of my page proofs for Star, and then probably read more about the Underground.
And hope I can go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.
It doesn’t have the right ending, I don’t think, but right now I don’t care, because I’ve completed “The Wives of Paris” — three days after I came up with the idea.
Mind you, this doesn’t actually reduce the list of Stories What Need Finishing, but I’ll take it anyway. Especially because this, in conjunction with “Two Pretenders,” is the second short story this month, which I haven’t done since <checks the records> June 2006. Sure, they’re both pretty slim — 2900 words and 1800 words, respectively — but it’s a nice feeling of accomplishment anyway.
And as it’s taken me far too long to compose this post, I think that’s a sign my brain has shut down, and I should go to bed. Where I shall sleep the sleep of the virtuous.
Who in Greek mythology, besides Paris and Oedipus, was prophecied to cause trouble and therefore abandoned on a mountainside? (Or otherwise disposed of in a way that was intended to prevent the prophecy from coming true.)
I’m sure there’s at least one more, but my knowledge of mythology has sadly declined from its heyday.
ETA: hmmm, it deleted my first edit. I was going to say, Romulus and Remus appear to fit the bill, but I welcome other suggestions.
