kurt vonnegut

As mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (hello new readers coming from there!) last year, I came up with a new class, “Punk U: The Whys and Wherefores of Writing -punk Fiction“, which attempted to explore some of the -punk subgenres, starting with cyberpunk and progressing through steampunk, dieselpunk, nanopunk, solarpunk, afropunk, monkpunk, mannerpunk, and a dozen others. Of all of them, the most fascinating to me — and the one that’s had the greatest influence on my recent fiction, is hopepunk.

What is hopepunk? The term was first coined by Alexandra Rowland as the antithesis of “grimdark,” a speculative genre featuring fatalistic nihilism and a tooth vs. claw environment. She wrote:

“The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “˜The glass is half empty. “˜Hopepunk says, “˜No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half full.’ Yeah, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and kind. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”

She wrote more about hopepunk in a follow-up essay, “One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives and expands on the idea of kindness as a political act further in this great essay:

Just the amount that I have seen people get more politically active in the last year has been amazing. I want to point out that kindness doesn’t necessarily mean softness. Kindness can mean standing up for someone who’s being bullied. If someone has a gun to your friend’s head, punching the guy with the gun is an act of kindness because you’re saving someone through that. So kindness is not always soft.

Kindness is not necessarily passive. Kindness is something that you can go out and fight for. Going to a protest, if you frame it in a particular way, is an act of kindness because you’re doing something for the future. You’re contributing to the future. You’re putting more good in the world is I think how I would define doing kindness. If you see someone being shouted at by a bigot on the subway, just standing up for them and having their back is an act of kindness.

And being kind also is something that requires so much bravery sometimes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – Vonnegut is the best of the best, and I don’t just say that because he’s a fellow Hoosier. Welcome to the Monkey House is a great collection to start with and one that I read over and over in high school, but I’m also fond of Look At the Birdie, published posthumously.

Carol Emshwiller – Also amazing, also doing things so skillfully that plain language manages to become part of such a lovely construction that the grain of the words seems ornamental as well as story material. I just love Emshwiller, and getting to publish one of her short stories during my time at Fantasy Magazine was a highlight. I particularly recommend I Live With You and Report to The Men’s Club.

We started by talking about what makes a story and the idea of character(s) involved in a conflict with rising tension that moves to a resolution at the end. It’s a pretty classic model and Vonnegut says some useful things about it here. Everyone brought a two line description of the story they’d like to write, and we listened to those and talked about which would work as is for stories and which need some narrowing down.

In discussing how we know when a story will be good, we looked at the first few paragraphs of stories by Carol Emshwiller, Joe Hill, and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked you to, in the coming week, look particularly at how people begin stories, and for Week 2, people will be bringing in a story beginning by someone else that knocks their socks. I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments): Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. One of the things I mentioned is that reading other people’s short fiction, particularly good stuff, is important: you’ll find more story ideas coming to you, you’ll learn new tricks from them, and you’ll become familiar with the markets you hope to sell to.

We also spent some time on writing process and the idea of timed writings, as taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and did some in class. Feel free to post yours here if you like it. I urged you to spend some time this week thinking about your writing process and perhaps trying to change it up a little: writing by hand instead of the keyboard, or in a place you don’t normally write.

Feminism
Laura Hudson discusses The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their ‘Liberated Sexuality’ at Comics Alliance.
Melissa McEwan discusses The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck for Shakesville.

Politics
The Elizabeth Warren Quote every American needs to see.
Bill CLinton says GOP Climate Change denial affects America’s image abroad
Kung Fu Monkey talks about why he misses Republicans

Technology
This is a really cool project based here in Seattle, Health Month. It’s making a game out of achieving your goals, getting so many points for each one met. It connects with the Fitbit, which I have and love, which also uses geeky addiction to numbers as motivation to get fit.
A tool that I’m still exploring, ifttt. Basically use if/then statements to create actions triggered by web events that come from channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instragram, e-mail, the weather, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg appeared at the Facebook developers conference to discuss Timeline, which supplies a new appearance for Facebook.
Samuel L. Ipsum is a lively alternative to the traditional filler text, Lorem Ipsum.

Writing
Are you a spec-fic editor that needs slush readers? Drop me info in the comments so I can add you to the list I’m compiling here on Google+.
Kurt Vonnegut’s advice for short story writers