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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

lengthy thoughts on fanfic

If you aren’t aware of the Great Cassandra Claire Fandom Implosion, I won’t inflict my own summary on you. This post will be sufficiently prefaced by saying that the million and one analyses and responses to that situation have sparked me to lay out my own thoughts on fanfiction. This will take a while, so you might want to get a snack first.

Point #1: Fanfic is illegal. Got that? This is the opinion of several people whose legal knowledge I trust, though I’m interested in learning about it for myself, and hope to sit in on a class this semester that will cover those kinds of topics. But you’re borrowing someone’s intellectual property when you write fanfic, and even if you don’t make money from doing so, it’s still against the law. This point is often missed by people who can’t be bothered to pay attention.

Point #2: Having said that, any number of writers (both in print and media) are okay with you writing fanfic. It may be illegal, but it isn’t worth anybody’s time and money to sue you; a cease & desist letter tends to suffice when someone gets upset. And frankly, fanfic is a way for readers/viewers to engage more deeply with a story, and can even serve as a kind of grass-roots publicity, so just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. This point is often missed by people who feel persecuted when you tell them how the law works.

Point #3: The only thing that differentiates what we call fanfic from works such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is intellectual property law. Stop and think about it for a moment: they are the same thing. They just fall on one side or the other of the legal divide. In both cases, one writer is taking someone else’s story and doing something with it. Maybe the story’s a fairy tale and doesn’t have a specific author; maybe it was written four hundred years ago and the author’s long dead. Doesn’t matter. You’re still engaging in the same activity. The difference is your legal right to do it. Nothing prevents a work of fanfic from being as clever and witty as R&GAD, but the world tends to pass moral judgment on the former, and not on the latter. This point is often missed by those who want to claim that all fanfic is trash, but Stoppard’s okay.

Point #4: Moving into the realm of opinion, I feel that it’s good manners to respect the creator’s wishes with regards to their intellectual property. If they don’t mind fanfic, go for it. If they do mind, then be polite and stay away. If they don’t mind fanfic but they object to certain kinds (frex, their underage characters having sex), then write about other things. Is there any force that can stop you from writing whatever you want? The same forces that can stop you from writing fanfic at all, which is to say that it probably won’t happen (see point #2). But just because the author is willing to let you climb the fence and swim in her backyard pool doesn’t mean you should pee in it.

Point #5: There is also a difference between fanfiction and plagiarism. The categories are fuzzy ones, of course, existing on a continuum. The small amount of fanfiction I ever wrote was generally of the sort where it took place in a world created by someone else, but involved my own original characters, perhaps with cameos by canon characters. I tended to be more interested in the possibilities of the setting than anything else. Other people write mostly about canon characters, perhaps with a Mary Sue or less irritating original addition. Maybe they cross one fandom with another, producing a Buffy/Highlander crossfic about the two groups of Watchers being the same. Maybe they allude to other fics. Maybe they even quote things. You hit the “plagiarism” line when you’re Cassandra Claire, lifting not just characters, not just quotes, but extensive lines and scenes from other sources and not attributing them (then basking in the praise of people who say your ideas are so original and you write so well). I haven’t followed that whole debate in full (I’m not sure any human being can, and I’ve not really tried, though I’m anthropologically fascinated by it), but what I have read included enough side-by-side textual analysis to persuade me that she did indeed rip off Pamela Dean and other writers far above and beyond what gets winked at in the illegal activity called fanfiction.

Point #6: If you’re writing fanfiction to improve your craft, it will help you — up to a point. You can refine your prose, dialogue, pacing, etc. as much in a fanfic story as anywhere else (provided, of course, that your dialogue isn’t stolen wholesale). But it won’t do much to help you develop characters, settings, and other large-scale elements of the craft. Its inherent intertextuality may get in the way of you learning to write a story that stands on its own. If your eventual goal is a writing career, there’s nothing wrong with fanfic in principle, but there will come a time when you’ll be better served devoting that time and energy to original work. And fanfic publication probably won’t help you sell your own work, with two exceptions: one being work-for-hire media properties (where it may indeed net you a contract, if that’s what you really want to do), and the other being (again) Cassandra Claire, who has landed a novel deal, apparently at least in part on the strength of her fanfic writing. (This, as you might guess, is a source of much of the brouhaha, and I fully expect to see the blogosphere descend on her first book like a pack of rabid weasels, waiting to catch her if she’s plagiarized again.)

Point #7: How do I feel about this relative to my own position? As I said, I used to write a little fanfic, but not much; mostly I wanted to chase my own ideas. I haven’t written any in years, though my mind will occasionally play with it for amusement. If Doppelganger fanfic or something based on a later book of mine starts appearing on the web, I will be flattered by the attention, and I’ll probably let it go unless somebody tries to make money off it. I will not, however, read it, partially because I could subsequently stir up trouble if I later wrote something that resembled said fic, and partially because it would weird me out, watching someone else write about my characters. (No offense to y’all, but you’d probably get them wrong, relative to what’s in my head. It’s the nature of the beast. We don’t see them the same way.)

Point #8: Hmmmm . . . I think I’ve hit everything I wanted to say for the moment, though I may return to this at a later date. Fanfic is a huge and complicated subject, with many byways I don’t find particularly intelligent or attractive, but I issue no blanket condemnations against it. Just the occasional specific one, against specific acts of idiocy.

Tuesdays are good

‘Twas on a Tuesday last month that Talebones bought “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?” from me, and behold: ’tis on another Tuesday, four weeks later, that Aberrant Dreams (who just published “Such as Dreams Are Made Of”) writes to me saying they’d like to buy “A Thousand Souls.” And both are me making a repeat sale to a market, which I take as an indicator of success.

I’m glad that story has found a home. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for it.

promotional news

I’ve been doing quite a bit of promotional work for Warrior and Witch recently. To begin with, there’s the somewhat unexpected venue of the Romantic Times Book Club; I discovered when they reviewed Doppelganger (and gave it a high rating!) that they apparently cover a far wider range of fiction than their name would suggest. I’ve been interviewed for their October issue, and they’ll also be running a short essay of mine on the website, regarding Warrior and Witch and my experiences writing it.

Separately from that, I’ve also been interviewed by one of the Culture Vultures at Sequential Tart; once again, I don’t fit into the mainstream of what they cover, but they’ve taken an interest in me nevertheless. That one really illustrated to me why Big Name Authors often have to turn down interview requests; answering the questions was a lengthy process, with me tackling a few, wandering away, coming back a few hours later and doing another one, etc. You have to think about, not just your answer, but how to make that answer interesting, and how to do so in a relatively concise manner. I imagine “interview answers” will prove to be its own micro-genre of writing, like “cover copy” and “author bio.”

Then there’s a bit of promotion I didn’t have to do the work for: a nice person named Joana Rodriguez has, with my permission, created a fanlisting for my writing. Fanlistings aren’t something I was aware of before, but they’re basically web-based networks of fans for particular writers/TV shows/whatever. Check out the above link to see the site she put together for it, and to sign up.

That’s it for the moment, I think, though I have a few other promotional schemes in the works. This is, I must admit, the part of the “being a writer” business I’m probably the worst at; I can get myself to conventions and on panels there, but aside from that, I’m not very good at pimping my work. I’m learning, but it’s a slow process.

Updates will, of course, be provided when the aforementioned interviews and such go live.

The Pretension Stick

Earlier today, Anima Mecanique quoted an excerpt from a review with Terry Goodkind that was truly mind-boggling. Copying her added emphasis:

Q: “What do you think distinguishes your books from all of the other fantasy books out there, and why should readers choose to read your series?”

TG: “There are several things. First of all, I don’t write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It’s either about magic or a world-building. I don’t do either.

And in most fantasy magic is a mystical element. In my books fantasy is a metaphysical reality that behaves according to its own laws of identity.

Because most fantasy is about world-building and magic, a lot of it is plotless and has no story. My primary interest is in telling stories that are fun to read and make people think. That puts my books in a genre all their own.

Wow. Just . . . wow.

I made a decision a while back to post recommendations for books on my website, instead of reviews. Partly it’s because I’d rather spend my time pushing people toward good books, instead of ranting about the bad ones, but politeness was another factor: if I might end up on a panel with someone at a con, I’d rather not be thinking, oh god, I hated your book and told the world about it. (And, for the record, I didn’t hate Wizard’s First Rule. I’m not saying that just to cover my ass; if I’d hated it, I wouldn’t have finished it. That doesn’t mean I particularly liked it — I didn’t go on and read the rest of the series — but it’s not on the list of Books Not Worth The Trees. Takes a lot to get on that list.)

But man . . . that quote makes me want to throw things. I hate hate hate every time I hear the equivalent of, “this isn’t fantasy, because it’s Good.” It bothered me when they said something along those lines about the LotR films, and it bothers me now. To throw around statements about “important human themes” and “metaphysical realities” as if nobody else in fantasy has ever thought about it that way, thus making you a Genre All Your Own — do you really have to step on all your shelf-mates to make yourself look good? Are we really that afflicted with plotless, story-less fantasy? Fantasy that conforms to standard plot outlines, perhaps, but that isn’t the same thing, and a certain saying about glass houses comes to mind besides.

Pretension gets up my nose like nobody’s business, and I say that in the full awareness that I went to Harvard and would probably count as pretentious myself in a lot of people’s eyes. Look at it this way: if it’s enough to bug me, it must be bad. And Anima Mecanique’s post reminded me of a gem from the recent Readercon panel writeups:

The New Weird renunciates hackneyed fantasy by taking its cliches and inverting, subverting, and converting them in order to return to the truly fantastic. It is secular and political, reacting against “religiose moralism and consolatory mythicism,” and hence feels real and messy. And it trusts the reader and the genre in two important ways: it avoids post-modern self-reference, and it avoids didacticism, instead letting meaning emerge naturally from metaphor.

Combination hookah and coffee maker! Also makes julienne fries!

I liked Readercon a lot, but the panel description that comes from was almost enough to make me swear off the New Weird forever. I mean, man, we’re all so very lucky to have them around to save our beloved genre from itself, because otherwise we’d be just doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU! (I found myself wondering what the writers who consider themselves New Weird made of that. I would have been embarrassed.)

Seriously, what’s with people being so ashamed of their own genre? I’m a fantasy writer and I’m proud of it. My writing draws on a variety of sources, all of which I’m more than happy to acknowledge; I don’t need to pretend I’ve invented a wheel unlike all wheels that have come before. Yes, fantasy has its cliches, but a) find me a form of artistic expression that doesn’t, and b) cliches are not inherently evil. Inept use of them may be, but inept use of anything, up to and including the poor abused English language herself, is not to be applauded, and you can achieve just as bad (or sometimes worse) of an effect by doing a poor job of iconoclasm as you can by flubbing your formulas. (I mean, at least the formulas have been proven to work.)

I won’t pretend the fantasy genre as a whole doesn’t have traits I consider problems, nor that I don’t make my own attempts to push at its boundaries or do something I think will be fresh and new. But if I ever start talking about my own work in a way that makes it sound like the Salvation of All Fantasy, then please, for the good of everyone involved, pull the Pretension Stick out of my ass and hit me with it until I stop.

raptor mode

If I’ve got one thing going for me in my writing life (or in the rest of my life, really, but the current context is writing), it’s not talent or great ideas or anything like that. It’s the way I react to things going wrong.

I’ve become aware enough of this that I even said it to the boy today. Having gotten some seriously discouraging news, I called him up to be mopey. I do this; I’m not going to pretend that I magically avoid the mopey stage. But when he asked whether I was okay, I said something along the lines of, “oh, I will be, once I get past this stage and move into predatory bird mode.”

My local friends have a tendency to tag people with animal descriptors, sometimes more than one. It’s generally agreed that I’m in the town’s feline populace, but I’ve also got an avian streak. Though I don’t think there’s any consensus on what kind of bird it is, it seems to be something predatory, because every so often I kick over into a mode that can best be described as circling high up in the clouds, marking out my prey, readying myself to drop from the sky like a taloned rock of death. I think the first time I really noticed myself doing it was a few years ago, when I came within spitting distance of selling Doppelganger to an editor, sent her something else next, then found out that she’d left the company for a different one, where I could no longer submit to her. That was massively depressing, and I shuffled around the house feeling more or less like I was never going to sell a novel — for maybe an hour or so. Then I sat down, wrote a synopsis for the novel I’d just finished revising, marshaled my list of editors, redesigned my game plan, and in short, stayed up until two a.m., fueled by adrenaline and raptor-like determination.

That’s what gets me through disappointment. Something gets in my way? Then I’m going to rip its scalp off with my talons, peck its eyes out, and feast on its entrails. Or something along those lines. No time for lazy cat-naps in the sun, at times like these. I’ve got me some prey to stoop on.

the best stories have alligators

I’m fascinated. In researching for an annotated bibliography on games and play theory, I came across an article about the development of storytelling skills in very young children. The major focus of it is the effect that props have on the stories; children tend to tell better stories when they have figures in their hands than without, likely because they think more about characters than event sequences. But the really interesting part was where the researchers tested the effects of different kinds of figures.

Given a set of an adult male, an adult female, a boy, a girl, a baby, and a dog, most of the children (who were four years of age) told rambling non-stories where nothing actually happened. In those few instances where something happened, it was a lack/lack liquidated dyad, having to do with a breach of the natural order (e.g. an abandoned baby wandering around looking for parents to care for it). That was the first half of the experiment.

In the second half of the experiment, they replaced the dog with an alligator.

And you know what? The stories got better.

Seriously. The stories became structurally more complex, by a significant amount; stuff happened, instead of the four-year-old simply naming off who each figure was. Probably not coincidentally, villainy/villainy nullified also popped up far more frequently as a narrative dyad. Basically, it seems that children tell more interesting stories about things that aren’t normal (including things like the abandoned baby). In other words, to display my fantasy-writer chauvinism for a moment, normalcy is boring. Alligators are cool.

(The girls also performed statistically better than the boys, in terms of length, content, and complexity. Interesting.)

So the moral we should all take away from this is that when you buy small children toys, be sure to purchase them alligators and space-men and flying horses and dinosaurs along with the Barbies and the G.I. Joes. Their cognitive development will thank you.

a very good evening

Just ran the second session of “A Conspiracy of Cartographers” in Memento, wherein I merrily threw out everything I didn’t like about the merfolk and kept the bits I did like. This made me happy. High Seas Adventure! Or in this case, Underseas Adventure! Then I came upstairs and found that Talebones wants to buy “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?,” which I’d really, really been crossing my fingers for. It’s my second sale to them, and one of those submissions where I had a gut feeling that this was the place to send it. So, all in all, a very good evening.

Dunnett Despair

I’m beginning to think I should impose a moratorium on my reading of Dorothy Dunnett’s novels. Some authors I can read and be inspired; she makes me despair for my ability to write at all. On every level I can think of, she induces a feeling of abject inferiority: her dialogue, her descriptions, her characters and her plotting . . . and hell, that’s just re-reading bits of The Game of Kings, also known as HER FIRST BLOODY NOVEL. I like Doppelganger and all, but it just doesn’t compare, and I know it.

It doesn’t even solve the problem to write some manner of fiction very different from hers. A first-person urban fantasy would sound odd indeed if written in her style, but that doesn’t quite let me shake the inescapable awareness that the awesomeness quotient of any given sentence isn’t up to snuff.

Sigh. I should go read some crappy fiction to get my spirits back up — but that wouldn’t be nearly so enjoyable in its own right, of course.

Christmas in June

My god, is it that time already? I came home from lunch today to find a box on my doorstep, full of Advance Reader Copies of Warrior and Witch. Book ain’t coming out for three months, but apparently the ARCs are already in circulation. I shall have to think of something to do with them.

Then, about five minutes later, the doorbell rang. Found a box waiting on the porch, and in it — EEEEEE!!!!!! My costume for the second Concordia game is here. I cannot wait for that game. To hell with the plot; I just want to show off the pretty. ^_^

In other news, since I’m now registered and everything, I should mention that I’m going to be at Readercon next weekend. At present I’m not on the program (having decided way too late to go), but I’m going to e-mail them and volunteer to fill any holes they might find themselves with. Regardless, come say hi to me if you’re there.

News!

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to announce the latest development in my writing career: I have sold two more books to the Hachette Book Group (formerly Warner Books).

Yay!

What two books are these, I hear you ask?

Search me.

<g> The deal is open-ended: two novels, title and content of said novels to be determined later. I have ideas for what I’d like to do, but none of that is settled yet. The contracts, however, are drawn up and on their way to me, so it’s official. I’ll make further announcements when I know just what I’m going to be writing.

I should have been doing this a month ago

Untitled Sequel to the De-Titled Urban Fantasy

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I’m way behind on the plan for this thing, but hey, I wrote tonight. Good for me. I think I’m at the stage where I need to pat myself on the back for that, and not beat myself up for the prior slacking.

Problem was that I just didn’t know how much I should be letting them talk about in this first scene. Problem was solved by letting Kim talk politics. Problem with that is that Kim’s apparently itching to become a rabid activist, about half a novel too soon. Must alter calculations accordingly.

alas-tastic surprise

Once again, we have a demonstration of the maxim that one should think, not twice, but seven or eight times, before deciding not to send a particular story to a particular market. It is the editor’s job to reject it, not yours; certainly you should not send it if it’s explicitly against their guidelines (your dragon-and-unicorn story to Analog, frex), but if you just think it’s a matter of taste, send it anyway. Case in point: the story I wasn’t sure was even worth submitting anywhere (“Selection,” the second-person thingy, for those who critiqued it) got past the slush reader at F&SF and garnered a nice alas-o-gram from GVG.

So I guess it doesn’t suck half so much as I had feared. Cool. ^_^

Four for four!

“The Moon and the Son”

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Even shorter than I thought it might be, which is both good (it means I was able to finish it today, despite stalling out Thursday and doing nothing Friday) and bad (it’s really more the skeleton of the story than the story itself). But hey, it’s done, and first drafts are allowed to suck. I think I wanted to be writing something else, but nothing suggested itself, and I wasn’t about to start something new with only a day to complete it.

So. Four short stories in four weeks; good for me. “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” “Waiting for Beauty,” “Degrees of Heresy,” and “The Moon and the Son.” (Hmmm — maybe “A Heretic by Degrees,” instead. Still not settled on a title for that one.) I realized, looking back at my records, that I needed this challenge more than I thought; in the fourteen months or so prior to starting it, I’d written a whopping three stories. (Marketable things; I’m not counting two very brief bits written for games.) Sure, there was a novel in there, but what about the months that weren’t spent on the novel? What about the days when I could write both at once? Three stories is beyond pathetic.

I don’t feel up to Jay Lake’s standard of a short story every week, without fail, but then again, the man also wrote a novel at a speed that makes even The Vengeance of Trees, my seven-week novel, look lazy. On the other hand, I can do better than three stories a year. I think I might try keeping to a standard of one a month. I can manage that, right? I think that if I just sit down with Peter Pan for a while, I can write “The Last Wendy,” and then I really want to come up with a Changing Sea short story for Clash of Steel‘s pirate issue. (Certain individuals I know might want to take note of that, too.) We’ll see if I can manage it, but really, I ought to be able to.

Now, however, I shall take a break, and try not to start mentally revising something already.

gender kerfuffle

“Kerfuffle” is such a great word.

I’ve said before that my usual mode of feminism is to wander blithely about doing whatever it is I feel like doing, happily oblivious to factors that are supposed to be oppressing me into not doing said thing. I won’t claim it’s the best mode in the world, but it works for me.

So apparently one of the things I’ve been oblivious to is a perception that F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for those not eyeball-deep in the field’s jargon) is unfriendly to women writers and/or readers. As in, they publish substantially more men than women (a verifiable statistical fact), and perhaps publish fiction of a more “masculine” type (an evaluation that’s being vigorously debated in many places). This all came to my attention through a pair of posts by Charlie Finlay.

The chain goes thusly: Fewer women send stories to F&SF than men. Fewer women are published in F&SF than men. (Side tangent on the chain: this may mean fewer women read F&SF than men.) This creates a perception that F&SF is not friendly to women. Therefore, fewer women send stories to F&SF than men.

Watch it go round and round.

Charlie’s suggestion to fix this is to schedule a day (August 18th) for a hundred women to send stories to F&SF. I haven’t waded through the morass of responses to his suggestion, but I did make a comment I decided I wanted to elaborate here, namely, that I have no particular interest in participating. Why? Because I send to F&SF all the time anyway. I have no fewer than thirty-four rejection half-sheets from them (some from JJA, some from GVG), and I’m expecting my thirty-fifth any day now. Some women may have given up on subbing there due to a perception that they aren’t welcome, but I’m not one of them. I could send in a story that day, but I don’t really see that it would constitute much of a message.

I’d be more interested if the campaign was to get a hundred women who have given up on sending stories there, or who never tried at all, to send something in. Reportedly both John and Gordon have said they would like to publish more women, but they don’t get enough subs from them. Provided they’re telling the truth (and I’m happy to grant them the benefit of that doubt), then we don’t need to be sending a message to F&SF. We need to be sending a message to the women who are avoiding it. (And, perhaps, F&SF needs to send out a message of its own — but that isn’t in my control.) Bombarding F&SF, not with women as a blanket category, but with voices they haven’t been hearing, strikes me as a more meaningful response to the situation.

One way or another, once “Selection” comes home, I’ll be polishing something up and adding to their slush pile once again. If I’ve felt unwelcome there (i.e. those thirty-four rejections), I’ve attributed it to my lack of writing skill, not my gender.

last story

Not a good idea to put off starting my fourth story until Thursday. It’s going to be a stretch, getting this one done in time.

And what is the story, you may ask? Is it “Kingspeaker,” as I said it might be? Or “The Unquiet Grave”? Or even, perhaps, “The Last Wendy,” which made a raid on my attention recently?

“The Moon and the Son”

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Of course not. That would make far too much sense.

Another low estimate for length; who knows if it’ll be at all accurate. I hope so, what with the late start and all. Not to mention that I’m going to have “Hijo de la Luna” on repeat the whole time; for the sake of me having any liking for that song by the time I’m done, I hope this doesn’t take long.

And then maybe I’ll write “The Last Wendy.” Not on a one-week deadline, mind you, especially as I have to read Peter Pan and let it compost first, but soon after. And maybe “Kingspeaker.” And “The Unquiet Grave.” Just because they got mugged by a baby-stealing celestial object doesn’t mean they don’t deserve some love, too.

Made it!

“Degrees of Heresy”

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“Everything comes to an end someday. That’s what this place is for. But it doesn’t make the end hurt any less.”

Speaking of ends, the last couple of lines sort of fall flat, but hey — this is a first draft. I can always fix that later.

Three short stories in three weeks, and I finished this one well in advance of the wedding I’m going to tonight. Yay me! Now I just need to figure out what I’m doing for the fourth and final week. “Kingspeaker”? “The Unquiet Grave”? Nothing involving research, and bonus points if it isn’t over 6K like this one was. We’ll see what comes to mind.

back to Driftwood

“Degrees of Heresy”

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Wrote about 400 more yesterday after the sale, then another 900 so far today. I’ve had to revise my length estimate back upward to my old default of 6K; I fear it may prove even longer than that. Things still have to go horribly wrong for Qoress, and then he has to make his decision. The title got changed, too; I realized that it isn’t really a question of heresy. It’s a lot of such questions. And Qoress is going to have to decide what degrees of heresy he’s willing to accept.

when pushiness pays off

Look, a post that has nothing to do with the Driftwood story!

I don’t know how I missed it when the notice went out, but Farah Mendlesohn is editing an anthology in response to a proposed British bill that would make illegal “the glorification of terrorism.” This sparks, of course, concerns about free speech, and how the government might use it to clamp down on political dissent (whether in artistic expression, history books, etc). So Farah’s anthology is called Glorifying Terrorism, and it’s chock-full of stories that challenge the restrictions of that proposed law.

Including mine.

As I said, I missed the initial call for stories, but I e-mailed Farah to ask if she was still considering submissions, and she said she might, if any of the ones she was waiting on edits from fell through. Long story short, she’s bought “Execution Morning.” The Kitsune is likely one of the only people reading this who’s familiar with it; it has the signal honor of being the first short story I wrote that didn’t profoundly suck. I’ve tinkered with it off and on in the years since, but as it’s a story about unpleasant and dubiously moral decisions in the face of terrorism, it’s met with extremely mixed reactions, ranging from the Kitsune’s awed silence when she first read it down to people telling me it’s a complete and utter failure as a story. (So that lack of profund suckage is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder.)

As per a recent discussion on Jim Hines’ journal, I’m not usually good at putting myself in an editor’s path like this; if Glorifying Terrorism hadn’t originally been an open-call anthology, I might not have tried. But hey, pushiness pays off: another sale for me, and that story finally has a home where it belongs.

And kudos to Farah for this move. She’s fronting the money for the antho herself, paying well more than a token fee for the stories, and publishing it through a political press. When I’m constantly seeing listings for anthos promising their authors “a share of the royalties” (which will translate to nothing), this makes a really stunning contrast.