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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

audio time!

If you have more time for listening to stories than reading them — or if you just want to know how all those random names in “Driftwood” are pronounced* — you can now download the podcast. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it myself yet, but I was fairly pleased with “Kingspeaker,” so I expect this one turned out equally well.

*You should see the e-mails between me and the editor on this topic. I answered several of his queries with “uh, good luck?” There’s a downside to making up foreign words that maybe aren’t even supposed to be pronounceable by human tongues.

A mixed wiktory

“Remembering Light”

Man, I finish this thing before game, only to find out game’s been canceled. Curse you, zunger! <shakes fist>

Oh well. Thanks to that deadline, I managed to get a fourth story completed before the end of April (if only just barely). It’s a flailing mess in places, because I kept changing my mind on certain details, like how Noirin’s world is falling apart and what exactly Last was trying to get out of all of this, but that is, as we say, what revision’s for.

I now have four Driftwood stories, of which two have been published; the other is a little flash piece that doesn’t mean much unless you’re already familiar with Driftwood, hence not something I’m every going to try to sell. But that’s enough for me to legitimately feel like this constitutes a set — especially once I find the time to revise this thing and get it on the market.

But right now, we’re going to go put something on the Magic Picture Box and drool on ourselves for a while. Because cramming three thousand words of this thing out of my head and onto the screen in a couple of hours has left me more than a little brain-dead.

Almost . . . there . . .

“Remembering Light”

Nearly 2K more on this story, as of this afternoon. Can I finish it before it’s time to go to game tonight? Ergo, before the end of the month? Let’s find out . . . .

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Yes, folks, I’m doing it again. In fact, I’m doing it even more than in the past two years: I’ve decided to toss up, for free, on my website, all of my fiction published prior to the end of 2006.

Two things swayed me in this decision. One is the relative lack of value in the reprint rights. If anybody was going to put these in a Year’s Best anthology, they would have done so, well, years ago. I’m lazy about marketing the reprint rights to magazines, and (given the situation) my likely payoff on it is low anyway. And I’m not exactly at a point where anybody’s looking to put out a collection of my short fiction.

The other is that I’ve come across a couple of blog posts in the last year to the effect of, “here’s Marie Brennan’s website, she’s got some of her short fiction up there for free, and reading through it makes me want to buy her novels.” I gotta figure, that’s a good thing. And sure, that isn’t necessarily a reason to add more, but — see point #1 above.

So here you go, a (small) bonanza of my older stories:

The rest of the stories from that period are already available, either because I posted them in previous years, or because they’re still in the online archives of their respective magazines. The one exception is “White Shadow,” my first short story sale: since that’s in an anthology, I don’t feel I should post it with the rest.

Speaking of anthologies, though — I’ve submitted all of these pieces to AnthologyBuilder (which already has a couple of my stories), so as soon as those get processed, you should be able to have them printed in a POD collection of your own design. There isn’t quite enough yet to make an entire Marie Brennan collection, but it’s getting there. (Think of it like iTunes for stories, and you’ll have the general idea.)

For more technopeasantry, go here.

I might get this one done *before* the end of the month.

“Remembering Light”

I had about 700-800 of that already, from some work about a week ago; the rest is new. And this is, in fact, a new Driftwood story. I’m having fun riffing off the random idea I came up with for the world this one centers on, extrapolating the consequences of it. Yay for putting sunlight at the heart of a story.

Probably could finish this in two more days — possibly one — I just need to figure out how to steer the characters to the idea that got this story rolling in the first place. And decide whether I’m trying to stick that extra strand in there or not.

writing-ish things

Important one first: John Klima of Electric Velocipede is looking to move some stock and help out his finances to boot. Head on over there to see what’s on offer — back issues of EV, plus chapbooks. If you’re looking for my fiction, issue #13 is the one you want; that has “Selection,” which might very well be the oddest short story I’ve ever written. It also has Rachel Swirsky’s excellent “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth,” which I suspect some of you would really dig. (If you perked up at the word “post-human,” then yes, I mean you.)

Sillier, but very true: a rant against Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I’ve become more jaundiced about that book over time, so it’s good to see my jaundice backed up with some evidence.

And a distinct moment of oddity: someone on Amazon claims to be selling a copy of In Ashes Lie for the low, low price of $1,000 dollars. Yes, that’s a comma, not a decimal point (and yes, that’s American-style notation). No, I have no idea what’s up with that. Even if they’ve gotten ahold of an early copy, a thousand bucks??? WTF, mate.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled whatever you’ve been doing.

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?