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Overall, 2010’s been a much better year than 2009, although it’s had its less pleasant moments, such as special assessment convulsions in my condo complex, my Grandmother’s death in November, and the usual array of rejections implicit in being a writer and sending stuff out. 🙂
On the bright side, my collection was a 2010 Endeavour Award finalist and I had fourteen stories published in 2010. Here’s the list, with a notable reprint and two podcasts to boot:
A dark story of data herds and contraband foods, edited by a fellow Codex writer.
An R-rated absurdist story telling of Belinda and Bingo’s love.
A reprint from the collection, which also appeared as a podcast on Podcastle. A slim little political fable.
Far flung tragedy of alien species interacting and sparking a doomed romance.
Who is V-man, what does he want, and why does he glow under certain conditions?
Graduate student and artist Maya is abducted by a strange alien light, leaving behind a fishbowl filled with desiccated fish and half-melted glass pebbles.
Contains a favorite line of mine, “Barbies who run with the wolves”.
This was originally written for the Apex magazine contest asking writers to combine urban legends with UFOs – it’s my version of the vanishing hitchhiker.
Flash fiction detailing events in a mythical location that I think of as vaguely French.
A Tabat story that originally appeared in the first Fantasy Magazine sampler and was later reprinted in my collection.
One of my Clarion West stories, the first set at the brothel The Little Teacup of the Soul.
2010 was a year for dark SF, and here’s another example of that.
Horror set in a small Mexican town.
Written during my grad student days at Indiana University.
Perhaps my favorite of the 2010 publications, this is my attempt to talk about some of the problems implicit in the steampunk genre. I -love- the accompanying artwork by Gregory Manchess.
A final dark story of a marriage between telepath and non-telepath to finish out the year.
In 2011, I have stories coming out from ABYSS & APEX (Bots d’Amor), BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES (Love, Resurrected), BULL SPEC (The Coffeemaker’s Passion), GIGANOTOSAURUS (Karaluvian Fale, which Armageddon players should note is set in Allanak), DAILY SCIENCE FICTION (Pippa’s Smiles), LIGHTSPEED (Long Enough And Just So Long), SHADOWS AND LIGHT II (Aquila’s Ring, another story that Armageddon players will be interested in, since it takes place in Allanak and Tuluk). Podcastle will be doing an audio version of my collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale.
I got a Kindle and discovered the joys of e-readers, and even converted my collection, EYES LIKE SKY AND COAL AND MOONLIGHT, into a Kindle version, as well as one for other e-readers.
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“Twin daughters,” Doctor Fantastik said. “That’s very sad. A friend of yours?”
“I bring him spices from the Southern Isles when I come up from there. Saves him on the merchanting mark-up.”
“And the duty, no doubt,” Doctor Fantastik said.
The sailor shrugged. “I’ll give you the address, and you tell ’em Cyril sent ya. They’ll see to my fee. They’re right desperate.”
“How so?”
“At least one of the girls been turned poltergeist,” Cyril said.
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When I’m teaching, I do bring some books to class in order to point students toward them. I don’t think books are a substitute for the act of writing, but they can help focus and direct your practice and give you a list of things to work on that might not otherwise occur to you. Here’s a list of my top ten for speculative fiction writers focusing on their craft. I was sad to find some not available on the Kindle, but where possible, I’ve pointed to the e-version.
2016 addendum! I still stand by all these, but here are five more:
Million Dollar Outlines
Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm
talk the Talk: A Dialogue Workshop for Scriptwriters by Penny Penniston
The Three Jaguars: A Comic about Art, Business, Life by M.C.A. Hogarth
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer. Worth it just for the pretty illustrations and marvelous charts produced by Jeremy Zerfoss in collaboration with VanderMeer, but also jam-packed with good and interesting writing advice that I have found best absorbed in small chunks, dipping into the book now and again for inspiration.
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(from the current story in progress, which is set in Tabat)
“This craze for exorcisms is a harmful fad,” Dr. Fantastik said to the man at his left. His tone was severe in a way that seemed at odds with the addressed man’s mien, for the lefthand man was wholely engaged in his newspaper, turning over the yellow sheets with an attention utterly untouched by Dr. Fantastik’s presence.
“A harmful fad!” Doctor Fantastik said, a trifle louder, and this time the man looked up, then left and right, as though trying to determine who the Doctor might be speaking to. Seeing an empty seat to his left and the Doctor to his right, he raised his eyebrows in a gently interrogatory fashion.
The Doctor nodded, and continued speaking as though the question of who his interlocutor was had never been in question. “It is a result of inflammatory and showy performers, whose “patients” are often accomplices and actors.”
This time the man outright shrugged. His attention dropped back to his newspaper, whose headline read (something clever to come).
Doctor Fantastik considered him. The Doctor himself was dressed in an out of heels velvet coat, of a style popular a decade or so ago. Although in neat repair, the hems were worn and shabby, and a darn spidered its way up one side. He wore ivory-framed spectacles that glinted in the tavern’s light. Like his vestments, his hair was neatly kept but had seen better days. Spots of wear shone on his scalp, uncloaked by the wisps of white hair that remained.
He seemed about to speak when his attention was caught by a young woman entering. He watched as she paused to cast an appraising glance over the clientele, which was sparse for an afternoon in Tabat, when most took to tea-shops and taverns to drink the spiced fish-tea that was the city’s favorite drink. Doctor Fantastik was not himself drinking such a thing; rather a mug of lemon and water sat before him as she picked her way across the uneven planking of the floor to sit down on his right side.
The newspaper man at first barely spared her a glance, but then he took her in more fully and began stealing admiring looks. She was worthy of such, her skin as fashionably pale as that of any upper-class maiden, her hair immaculate and well-brushed, shining as it fell over her slightly antiquated but quality silk clothes. Her doe-soft eyes were dark and lustrous, but they did not return the newspaper reader’s glance, but rather remained fixed upon Doctor Fantastik.
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I just sent my scheduler in to Bellevue College last week – I’ll be teaching the Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction class again this spring as well as the Blogging 101 class. I’ll post the dates for that when I have them in hand.
With both classes, I’ve gone through my notes, getting them together. With the blogging class I’ve been using a new online tool I saw mentioned during the great “Yahoo is getting rid of Delicious!” flak, Trailmeme.
WIth Trailmeme, the central metaphor is “trails” of links, which you can annotate. So I’ve used the outline from my Blogging class to collect my Delicious links on the topic. Here is the Blogging 101 “trail”. A cool feature of Trailmeme is the ability to discuss links – please feel free to make suggestions and/or forward the link to the trail along to people who might find it useful. I know a lot of those links are ones I’ve frequently referred to and often continue to use.
One of the reasons I’ve gone to that trouble is that I’m pushing a couple of consulting services next year, and one of them is a critique of your blog or website talking about its current structure and organization, its search ranking and strategy, how you might use it more effectively, how you might be using social networks, and directions you might want to take it in, based on what a student gets out of that class. For $100, you get a 500 word write-up. If you want to go more in-depth, contact me and I’ll give you an estimate.
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I was working on this a few months ago and set it aside for when I had more time, but thought people would find it amusing. My intent is to split it into a fiction and nonfiction version to point people at when applying for freelancing jobs.
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When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.
My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.
I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.
My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.
“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.
My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.
My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.
“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”
Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.
I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.
I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.
I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.
I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.
A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.
Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.
In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.
We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.
I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.
My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.
(originally appeared in The Cream City Review, selected by guest editor Frances Sherwood)
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Work goes forward on the novel. 1500 words so far, a little chunk that fits into the book early on, just after (sort of during) the riot at the gallery. Once the Redmond lunch-time traffic has died down, I’ll go reward myself with an Italian soda.
Here’s a teaser, still very rough:
She was a tall woman with gleaming gold hair, obscured beneath a dark cloak. She tried to shrug the woolen fabric more securely around her shoulders, but it caught on obstructions beneath, and half swung away to reveal feathers the same color as her hair.
“Lookie, lookie, look,” said a voice from behind her. She swung, almost dizzy with panic to see several figures step out towards her from the deeper darkness between two refuse heaps.
She stood between the dull red bricks of two enormous warehouses. Chalked scrawls, melting in the misty rain in luminous trails, marked the lower walls ““ political slogans rendered illegible by moisture. A strip of moonlight marked the middle, a narrow path barely large enough to contain Glyndia. Midnight edged the sides of her cloak.
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It was a muted day, fishscale colored, and the sea and the horizon merged seamlessly. No wind — the waves were innocent of foam, existing as a series of sullen gray swells.
Ever since stepping on the beach, she’d been catching kingfish: one cast, one fish, usually from just inside the sandbar. As the sun rose higher, its dazzle on the water intensified, until her eyes watered and her head ached from the relentless sparkle.
She reeled in a pair of six-inchers, one on each of the rig’s hooks, and freed them to put back in the water — too small to be worth cleaning on a day of such largesse.
She misjudged the next cast. It went out well past the sand bar, into the deeper, colder, darker water, The strike was swift, a yank that set the reel singing as it spun. How big was it? Twenty-pound nylon line — would it withstand the pull’s strength if she played the fish in right?
The fish leaped, as though in challenge. It was crimson, an enormous, yard-king fish as red as blood, with impossible, ornate fins of the kind seen in heraldry or on ornamental carp. As it splashed back into the water, it seemed to set the horizon aboil with color, blues and violets and emeralds at play beneath the meshed surface of the sea. She set her teeth and braced herself in the fluffy sand.
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So here’s the list of fiction(ish) drawing on comic book super-hero trophes, generated here.
Novels:
Short Stories:
Poetry:
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(science fiction, flash story) We have seen you come before. We have always resisted. We will always resist. The first aliens came as conquerors, ready to crush us, ready to destroy us. We went to ground, we hid. We fought. We picked away at them, bit by bit.
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