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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

The ghost-prince story is still refusing to tell me what I should do with its newly-sprouted Significance, so I suspect that idea, which was going to be last month’s story, will get pushed back again in favor of something else.

We’re going to see today if that “something else” can be a new Driftwood story. Something about getting more direct fanmail/fancomments from readers for the eponymous work than for any three other stories I’ve published makes me enthusiastic about the prospect — I can’t imagine why. <g>

Time to dig out the various fragments and see if I can poke any of them into growing.

One of the oddities of short-story writing . . . .

. . . is that as I’m sitting here trying to whack another hundred words out of this piece, something in the back of my brain is pointing out that by doing so, I am in fact reducing my income.

Because I am, after all, paid by the word.

Of course, it’s a tradeoff. If that hundred words makes the difference between an editor buying or not buying, then I should go ahead. But does it?

Don’t ask these questions. That way madness lies.

Off to chop out some more words . . . .

Woot!

I’ve been looking forward to this. Today, “Driftwood” went live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as part of their fourteenth issue. This is in the same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees,” and it’s my hope that I’ll get another Driftwood story completed (I have several in various stages of started-ness) some time this year, preferably sooner rather than later.

Somewhere — I forget where — I came across a review of “Heretic” that said the reviewer would love to see me do a novel in the setting. I don’t think I could ever write one; it would run too strongly counter to the entire concept of Driftwood, which is about fragmentation. But a story collection? That, I could do. At least in theory. I need a lot more stories before I can think about it, though.

Maybe I’ll try to work on one today.

my kind of fiction

After being really busy and falling behind for a while, I’ve finally caught up with all the stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Can I just say how delightful it is to find a magazine that is reliably For Me? I’ve always been sporadic about subscribing to print mags, because I’ve yet to find one that hits my personal buttons consistently enough. I pick up free issues of F&SF at conventions, and a couple of years back there was one where every single story was at least decent, and some of them were fabulous . . . but that isn’t my usual success rate with F&SF. Generally I find maybe one story I like in each issue, which isn’t enough for me to keep up a subscription. (It is probably not coincidental that I’ve sent practically every short story I’ve ever written to them, and not sold a single one.)

Note that this isn’t me saying what they publish is bad. It just mostly isn’t to my taste.

But Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in thirteen issues (with two stories per issue, a couple of them serialized across two issues), has so far had almost a 100% success rate on that front. By which I mean that pretty much every story is at least the kind of thing I want to read, and many of them are both the right kind and good enough to entertain me.

What kind of thing are they publishing? A broad definition of “secondary world fantasy,” in that pretty much the only fantasy they don’t take is stuff set in the modern world. Invented settings are good; historical settings are good; alternate histories are good. But more than that, the editor has demonstrated a clear preference for secondary settings that are different, in exactly the way I appreciate. I think I decided I was really enjoying the magazine in issue #8, with Aliette de Bodard’s Mesoamerican fantasy “Beneath the Mask” and Megan Arkenberg’s creepy Enlightenment-era French fairy-tale piece “Winterblood”. They’ve also had fantasy westerns, Russian-tinged puppet magic, classical-myth arena fighting, and an alternate faerie English Civil War — yeah, that one got my attention. And something in an African-inspired setting! The magazine is already getting well away from the quasi-CelticNorseFeudal trifecta that’s fantasy’s standard; I’d love to see it explore more non-European settings, too. (Based on the evidence, I suspect they’re open to it, which probably means they haven’t gotten enough good submissions of that type. If you have such a story, send it to them!)

Of course, I’m going to be biased in favor of any magazine that keeps picking up my own work <g> — but not just in an ego-stroked way; if they’re buying what I write, they’re (obviously) buying the kinds of stories I’m interested in. Our priorities coincide. They also podcast some of their fiction, so if you’ve got a car commute that doesn’t allow you to read en route, you can give them a listen instead. If you, like me, enjoy rich and interesting settings for your fantasy, they’re definitely worth a try.

Wiktory!

On my way to bed, my imagination suggested that perhaps the Plan involved cross-dressing half-orcs, and, well, the story’s done now.

4,149 words.

But still no title, dammit.

One day left . . .

. . . in which to finish my March story. Will I make it?

Hard to say. The last line of tonight’s writing was “We have a Plan” — which is very nice for my characters, but I wish I knew what that plan is.

Total length estimate has been revised downward; it might even be shorter than that. Funny things often should not overstay their welcome.

They should, however, have titles. And I have no idea what to call this one. It isn’t allowed to be “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” and “Dear Mom and Dad” (the current filename, because it’s the first line of the text) is not a whole lot better, but everything I’m coming up with sounds too much like “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” (In other words, most of my possibilities start with the phrase “Letters From.”) Possibly we will have to go with something in the vein of “The Adventures of” and then figure out what to put after “of.”

I hate being this close to ending a story, and still having no title for it.

Anyway. Enough D&D-style silliness for one night. Bedtime, and maybe when I wake up tomorrow I’ll know what the characters think they’re going to do about their problem.

Speaking of short stories

The Story That Is Not Allowed to Call Itself “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” No Matter What It Thinks:

The Zokutou site is down. Sadness.

Anyway, this is not the story I thought I’d be writing this month. It was going to be the ghost-prince story. But that one has grown Significance that I’m not quite sure what to do with, so it’s composting a while longer, and in the meantime I’m writing something I forgot to include on the previous list: a piece that I think is my first attempt at a genuinely humorous story.

(Short form is, it’s a silly take on D&D-style fantasy. It has nothing to do with summer camp, but like “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” it belongs to the micro-genre of Distressing Letters From Your Wayward Offspring.)

(Oddly enough, the quickest way to make D&D-style fantasy funny is to take it seriously.)

I’m very much making this one up as it goes along. Though I should figure out soon what was up with the temple roof thing, and also where the rest of it is trying to go.

I have a week to figure it out.

I am surprised.

I honestly expected the two fairy-tale options in the poll to come in somewhere near the bottom — I figured people would look at them, shrug at Yet Another Fairy Tale Retelling, and vote for something else. But I woke up this morning to find them in the lead, and they’re still #1 and #3 as of this posting.

Which is encouraging, because my brain has been giving off hints that the ghost-princes story (which is currently leading by a good margin) is about the speed it’s up to this month. I was going to try and save the non-researchy stories for later in the year, but I think now might be a dandy time to relax with one.

In the meantime, today has been pretty thoroughly productive, and the last couple hours of it has involved (work-related) reading in front of the fire. It’s one of the few points on which I have no interest in being all Californian and environmentally conscious: I don’t care if burning wood is bad for the environment, I like doing it. Fake fires are not the same; you need the crackle and the conscientious tending of the fuel, or else it doesn’t count. I’m very happy to be living in a townhouse with a working fireplace, and really should have made use of it before tonight.

Tree bad. Fire pretty. ^_^

Poll time, short story edition

Okay, Internets. I’m trying to do a short story a month (February’s oversized endeavour being an exception), but I’m having trouble deciding what to commit to for March. I don’t promise to take the poll’s advice, but:

There are other possibilities, but the rest of them are too far away from being ready to go for me to consider them now.

briefly —

I’m about to run off to Potlatch again, but: Paradox has purchased a flash piece from me, “Salt Feels No Pain.” This is the same editor who previously published “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” so I’m very pleased to be working with him again.

But man, I really need to get some replacement pieces into my submission queue . . . .

Finit.

And that, ladies and gentlebugs, is 18,678 words of a very messy but (I think) not horribly broken draft of a novella currently titled “Deeds of Men.”

Not the most exciting title, but it’s the best we’ve got at the moment, and reasonably fitting for the story that follows it.

Oof. No more novellas for a while, ‘kay?

*Almost* there.

I stalled hard last night, not knowing what to do with the next scene. Having re-read the entire thing today, I ended up swapping the upcoming bit with the previous A-strand scene; the information the new one was going to convey really needed to go earlier in the story than where I was trying to put it. There’s a godawful Frankenstein seam thanks to the swapping — wow, is that earlier-now-later scene going to have to change — but I think it’s closer to working.

(No, I don’t expect that to mean anything to anybody, but it makes me feel better to type it out for posterity.)

1500 words tonight, two and a half scenes to go, but it’s bedtime for me, because I have to figure out how they’re going to mug this guy. Right now it’s more of a curb-stomping scenario than anything else; there’ll be no chance to do anything interesting with Our Heroes because their target will be a smear on the ground before they can say boo. Must stage it in non-obviously contrived way. But after that it’s pretty much just dual denouement time, so I think — I hope — I can finish this tomorrow.

<crosses fingers>

It may even have a title, though I wouldn’t be sure of that if I were me.

the remainder of the story

Four scenes left to write.

#4, I know what it will do and how it will do it.

#3, I pretty much know what it will do and how it will do it.

#2, I know what it will do, but have no freaking clue how it will do it.

#1, I don’t know anything about it except that the structure of this story demands its existence.

This is the downside to having a clear-cut pattern to the scenes — in this case, altering between two narrative timelines. I’ve spent over fourteen thousand words adhering to that pattern; skipping an A-strand scene at this late point would break the rhythm at the worst possible point. But filler would be just as bad, which means I need to think up one additional way for the A-strand to contribute to the B-strand, and it needs to be good.

And I need to do that before I can move forward, I’m afraid.

Hence spending the last half hour downstairs playing Canfield (with one hand of Bristol to soothe my annoyance at the piss-poor Canfield games I’d been having). I was hoping an idea would fall into my head, but it seems reluctant to do so.

Time to poke at my brain with sticks, I think.

That’s more like it.

2258 tonight — the end of one scene, and two complete others. It’s awkward, trying to pretend I’ve already set up who this guy is and why the characters can be confident in the conclusions they’ve just drawn, but for once I care more about finishing the draft than having it make sense. I’ve already backtracked enough to fix stuff that went awry on the first attempt, and I’m tired of it.

I am liking this story well enough, but I would like it far better if it would find a title already. <sigh>

We’re about 3K from the boundary between novelette and novella, with four scenes to go. You do the math.

Stupid neverending novellas. Worst of both worlds, I tell you.

things for revision: an open letter

Dear Brain,

Yeah, you know, that character, the one who’s really important to the reason why the dead guy is dead? The character we haven’t yet mentioned once in over eleven thousand words of story?

Yeah, him.

We’re going to have to find ways to work him into these scenes — along with hints of the Very Important Relationship he has to that other character, so it doesn’t come out of freaking left field the way it’s about to in the next thousand words. Because you’ve hung a key component of this story on that character and his Very Important Relationship, and the whole novela/ette is going to fall resoundingly on its face if that gets chucked in ex machina.

This is what you get for not bothering to figure out who he was until it was time to bring him in. How were we supposed to bring him in if we didn’t know who he WAS yet? This is how we end up eleven thousand words into the story and he’s still offstage. You brought this on yourself, you know.

Ah, well. That’s what revision is for.

Still miffed,
–Your Writer

Break’s over; back on your heads.

Saturday night, I was feeling very cranky and unproductive and generally not desirous of working on the Still Untitled Novelette/a of Doom. And I was sitting at the computer trying to flagellate myself into getting started (at about one-thirty in the morning, naturally), and then it occurred to me:

It’s Saturday. I don’t have to write.

This was, after all, the plan I laid down when I started thinking about the full-time writerly life. When not noveling, I can have weekends off. Provided, of course, I’ve done at least 500 words a day during the week — which I had, several times over. I can write on the weekend, if I feel inspired to. But I don’t have to.

Mind you, that rule should probably break down if it’s getting to the end of the month and I haven’t finished the story I’m working on. Astute minds will notice that is the case here; I’m going to have to haul tail pretty fast these next few days to get it done. But in my fiction-writing life (as well as other things), I’m addicted to the opposite of the all-nighter: I tend to drive myself halfway into the ground in order to make sure I finish before deadline. This is a habit I could benefit from breaking. Let’s recharge for a couple of days, before charging onward.

It’s a nice theory. We’ll see how it works out for me this week.

Hee!

From a review of my short story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual”:

“. . . has the feel of a counterfactual, but I Googled it and there is no such person.”

It wasn’t my explicit intent to present this story as some kind of alternate history, but the instant I read this line, I realized that was the general vibe I wanted it to have. So: wiktory! The reviewer calls the story “very elegant,” too, so a win all around.

***

Yesterday, while deleting “Tower in Moonlight” from my submissions tracker, I realized I have fewer than ten short stories out on the market. I don’t think that’s been true since spring of 2002, when I went on a big story-writing binge and knocked out six in eight weeks; my stubbornness about selling those early stories, plus other binges on later occasions, have kept my inventory pretty well stocked. But my recent short-fiction drought, coupled with the tendency of my newer pieces to sell faster (yes, Swan, you are getting better at this game), means I’m down to nine.

Which, y’know, isn’t a small number. But it keeps shrinking, and I keep not putting new stories on the market; other than “Once a Goddess,” — which sold three weeks after I finished the draft, not helping the problem — I haven’t put anything new into circulation for over a year.

I think that when I complete this current piece (and give the stupid thing a title), I’m going to make myself revise “On the Feast of the Firewife” before I start anything new. Or “Footsteps,” which last time I checked just needed a better last line or something. Or give “The Memories Rise to Hunt” to my new critique group and see if this time we can figure out what that story needs in order to work — a question I’ve been pondering for far too long now. Or even “Sciatha Reborn,” except what that one needs is for me to finish fixing its world, and that might be more work than I can really do right now.

<scrounges through list of completed stories for other things that ought to have gone out the door ages ago>

Righty. All of that is a good idea, but first, this stupid novelette-maybe-novella needs finishing. I’m pretty sure I have at least six scenes left, which means we’ve still got a ways to go.