"Original Audrey" - by Tammy Brown

"Original Audrey" - by Tammy Brown

I was at OSC’s original Literary Boot Camp in 2000, and I was desperate for a story idea. To get into the class in the first place, I had submitted the first page to a story that I had never finished. Actually, I had never finished a story before.

I had some story ideas floating around in my head, but I didn’t have any idea as to how I could possibly write an entire story in a few days. Then, late one night, when I was trying to write a story that involved cloning, my mind started wandering. What if cloning really were possible? Would people clone their dead family members, themselves, who? It was at that point that I ran into a news story of the paparazzi going too far, and suddenly I knew what would happen.

The next step was to figure out who they would clone. It would be happening in the future, so it had to be someone with huge star power. Then the first line of the story, “Elvis Presley watched Audrey Hepburn eat her breakfast in front of the Tiffany’s window in the Caesar’s Palace Mall.” came into my head, and the rest wrote itself… almost.

Remember how I said that I had never finished a story before? It turned out I didn’t know how to, not effectively anyway. I worked at it most of the night, and finally, sleep deprived, I slapped on a very generic happy ending and turned the story in for critique.

The story received very high praise from almost everyone in the class, including OSC. At one point, he even guaranteed that with some small revisions it would one day be published, thus inflating my fragile writer’s ego for all time.

After boot camp, I immediately sent the story into F&SF, and it was almost as immediately rejected. The truth was that even though most people who read my story liked it well enough, it was ultimately unsatisfying. The slapped on ending didn’t provide any resolution or closure. I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to fix it.

Over the years since then, every time my writing skills would improve, I’d pull out the story and try a new ending. Each time, it got closer to what I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t quite there. Finally, after IGMS was announced, I dusted it off one more time and sent it in. Quite a while later, I got a response from Edmund saying that he liked the story, up until about page 14 and that the ending “felt like you had simply gotten tired of writing and thrown them together for the proverbial happy ending without any clues as to how either of them changed, grew, and developed into their new, true selves. It was rushed and incomplete.” Yikes! Yet, he also said that if I could fix these problems, he would consider including me in a future issue of IGMS.

He had called me on the carpet, and he was right. At the end of the story, even I as the writer, wasn’t sure about this couple. Had either of them changed? What would their future hold? If as the author, I didn’t know, how could I expect the reader to understand? So I sat down and gave myself an ultimatum, find the climax, find the resolution, or else. By now, I knew Audrey and Elvis like two intimate friends. I knew that Audrey need to break down her perfect façade, and that Elvis needed to be the person who did it. Then, as my mind began wandering, I saw Audrey, losing control in a dish of ice cream. I saw her face covered with tears and whipped topping and I saw Elvis, falling in love, for good.

The moral of the story? I should let my mind wander more often. That‘s when my ideas seem to come. In fact, while writing this essay, my mind started wandering again. I’ve started thinking about Audrey, and Elvis’s future. And you know what? I don’t think their story is over. In fact, I can guarantee that there are many adventures in store for them yet.

IGMS Now An SFWA Pro Market

I am very happy to announce that IGMS is now a SFWA Qualified Professional Market, and that all sales - retroactive to the very first issue - now count toward those authors' SFWA membership requirements.

A ton of credit has to go to Orson Scott Card for agreeing to remove the $500 cap and approving a new pay rate of 6 cents a word for the first 7,500 words and 5 cents a word for every word thereafter. IGMS already met all the other SFWA requirements and that was the last hurdle to be cleared.

Of course, I'll now have to be doubly selective of those stories I buy over the 10,000 word mark, but I don't see that being a major issue. I've only bought two so far.

Congratulations to everyone already (or soon to be) published in IGMS: you've now got one more SFWA pro sale to your credit.

"When I Wrote the Learned Astronomer" by Jamie Todd Rubin

"When I Wrote the Learned Astronomer"

by Jamie Todd Rubin

When I wrote The Learned Astronomer, I never thought I would work so hard, take so long, and end up with a sale. Up until the moment I started to write the story, my biggest literary success had been a glowing rejection letter from A.J. Budrys for a story about a reincarnated Jorge Luis Borges. It was also, perhaps, my biggest failure. Up to that point, the hardest I worked was scrubbing burned lasagna noodles of the sides of cooking pans in the dorm cafeteria. This made me think twice about becoming a student again, or working in any other profession that involved lasagna noodles (including chef), and which resulted in me concentrating on my far simple vocation at the time: software development.

Tracing back the events that led to my accidental story and sale, it boggles my mind to think that it might never have happened if I had not been listening to that particular program on that particular day. And to think that it all started with that title. Well, not quite...

#

It all started with a poem.

Sometime in 1995, I was driving into work through Topanga Canyon, listening to KNX-1070 news radio and trying to come up with an idea for a story. Winding my way around the canyon curves, Charles Osgood's, "The Osgood File" segment came on the radio. I've always liked Charles Osgood, but this segment was a particularly good one. He was talking about astronomy and humanity's fascination with the universe, something that I had been interested in since I was a little boy. At the end of the segment he quoted, in its entirety, Walt Whitman's famous poem, "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer". I had never heard this poem before, and while I am not the biggest fan of free-form verse, I absolutely loved the poem and the sentiment behind it. I thought to myself: a poem about an astronomer? There has to be a story in there somewhere?

I wracked my brain, only half paying attention to the canyon roads. But no ideas were coming. Then I tried a trick. I decided to run through permutations of the title and see if that would jar anything loose. I tried two or three silly versions, and then just as the Pacific Ocean came into view, I landed on "When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer." I just loved the sound of it. But it had something more: it had outer space, it had romance, it was perfect!

But I had no story, just a title.

#

I am a huge Isaac Asimov fan, and back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I felt that I could write just as effortlessly as he could. This is embarrassing to admit now, as you might imagine, but it is nevertheless true. And write effortlessly I could. But no matter how effortlessly I wrote, I simply couldn't put a story together. Over the space of three years, between 1995 and 1998, I must have made half a dozen "effortless" starts on "Learned Astronomer" each one worse than the one that preceded it. My best effort came sometime in 1999 when, sitting out on the porch, I took my laptop outside and hammered out 10 pages of what I thought was really funny material, but which still had no story to it, and which, in hindsight, was really pretty terrible stuff.

At the same time, I was trying to write another story that I was calling "A Ship That Passes Through the Night". I started to write this story after I read a Robert Zubrin science essay in the August 1994 issue of ANALOG called "How To Find A Starship". The essay talked about the science behind detecting an alien starship (and the descriptions of that science in "Learned Astronomer" owe a debt to this essay). The story I was attempting to write contemporaneously with "Learned Astronomer" was about an astronomer who detects an alien spaceship, and has what is essentially, concrete proof of its existence, and yet the ship is so far away from earth, traveling between two distant stars that there is never any chance of catching up to it. I was fascinated by the idea of discovering the existence of aliens, but never being able to communicate with them in any way. So I worked on "A Ship That Passes Through the Night" and that story went even worse than "Learned Astronomer".

#

Beginning about 1998 or 1999, I got very busy at work. It was the Dot Com boom and it was an exciting time in the software industry. I put in longer hours and focused more and more on my work, winning a series of promotions but bringing my writing to a virtual stop. Only once or twice a year would I fire up the word processor for something other than writing a Requirements Document or Statement of Work. I did write a few stories, and continued to send them out. And I began to notice that my stories were getting better and better. But nothing happened with "Learned Astronomer" or "Through the Night".

#

Fast-forward to April 5, 2004. I had been through a period where I was attempting to write darker stories, which was pretty unusual for me. I'd written three stories in a row, all of which had a darkness to them. I sent out the stories to various magazines and I was getting better feedback on the stories, which means that my rejection slips were no longer form letters. Instead, they started saying things like, "Nice writing, but..." I felt like I was improving but I was also sick of writing dark stories. I wanted to write something cheerful for a change.

I was never a huge fan of Robert Heinlein. That is to say, I haven't read every one of his books. I've read, perhaps 10 of his books, and the only ones that I really like are the older ones, like Double Star or The Puppet Masters or The Door Into Summer or Podkayne of Mars. What I did like about Heinlein's stories was the optimistic tone that he captured. As an exercise--a kind of challenge to myself--I decided to try to write a story that captured a Heinleinesque tone. But I had no ideas.

Then, on April 5, 2004, I remembered "Learned Astronomer" and "A Ship That Passes Through the Night". And I had a thought: what if I combined the two stories into one somehow? The notions I had for "Learned Astronomer" were images of romping across the moon for some reason or another. Clearly, there would be an astronomer involved. And, of course, an astronomer played a key role in "Through the Night". Maybe I could make it work. But there was still one problem. All along, with "Learned Astronomer", I was having trouble telling the story. Maybe it was because I wasn't sure what story I wanted to tell, but I happened to remember two pieces of advice that Isaac Asimov had said helped him in his own writing:

First, he said that John Campbell told him that if you are having a problem starting a story, you are almost always starting it too early. Pick a point later in the story and start there.

Second, know your ending. Think up a problem and a solution, and then make up the rest, but always working toward your resolution.

With those two pieces of advice in mind, I began to combine the two stories together. In my diary for that day, I noted that I wrote 8 pages. By April 8 I had 5,000 words written and I was hoping that the story would be finished soon. I was very happy with what I was writing. I finished the first draft on April 16. After struggling for nearly 10 years with the idea, I had written the entire story in just about 10 days.

Over the next few years, I sent the story to various magazines. It was rejected here and there, but always with favorable comments and suggestions for improvements. I tried to learn from those comments and each time, I'd take the suggestion and try to make the story better and then send it somewhere else. By the time I sent it to IGMS in 2006, I felt the story was just about as good as I could make it.

But it managed to get a little bit better.

#

When Edmund Schubert, editor of IGMS, got in touch with me about the story, he told me he liked it but there were parts of it that didn't work for him. He was then kind enough to take the time to point out what he thought were the flaws in the story--things which were inconsistent or made the story hard to believe. You couldn't ask for a gentler critique of a story, and you couldn’t ask for a more perceptive one either. In each case, I felt that Edmund was right. He asked me for some rewrites and I agreed to do them.

I then sweated more than I have ever sweated in my life over a piece of writing. Now I was writing for an Editor and I didn't want to let him down. I made the revisions over a period of two days and then got them back to Edmund. A short time later, he told me that the revisions were good and he would be taking the story. I had made my first sale!

Up until that point, I had three things on my List of Things I Must Do Before I Die. Number three was to get my pilots license, which I had done back in 2000. Number two was to fly in space and while it hasn't happened, I'm still hopeful. Number one was to sell a science fiction story. And while I think I had a pretty good story to begin with, it was with Edmund's help that I was able to push it over the top, and for that I will be forever grateful.

#

My favorite part of the story is the ending. I knew how it was going to end, with both Danny and Audrey parting ways, but of course, I didn't know exactly how that would all fall into place. As I was writing the end of the story, I recalled the Walt Whitman poem once more (which I had committed to memory almost as soon as I heard it back on that day in 1995) and realized that the ending was right there. Audrey had left for the outer solar system and she was "out among the stars". Danny stood in his back yard looking for her. He "looked up in perfect silence at the stars". Those familiar with the Walt Whitman poem know that is the final line of the verse. In a way, the story became a tribute to that poem and what it represents.

In another way, the story is a tribute to my grandfather, Paul Friedlander. Most of my friends who have read the story suspected that Danny, goofy as he seemed, was a thinly masked representation of me, goofy as I am. But that was not the case. When writing the story, I tried writing Danny to be what I thought what my Grandpa might have been like when he was Danny's age. My Grandpa passed away in November 2004, but not before he had a chance to read and enjoy this story.

#

When I wrote The Learned Astronomer, I never thought I would work so hard, take so long, and end up with a sale, but as Danny says, it's the things you don't expect that make life interesting. Writing this story was a lot of hard work, but it was also a lot of fun.

Writer Profile Project

Kelly Spitzer has been working for most of the year on something she calls the Writer Profile Project. She interviews all sorts of writers and editors and she interviewed me recently. The results can be found here:

http://www.kellyspitzer.com/2007/07/09/writer-and-editor-edmund-r-schubert-talks-with-the-writer-profile-project/#comments

*

"Under Janey's Garden" - by Margit Schmitt

"Under Janey's Garden"

By Margit Schmitt

I wrote "Under Janey's Garden" in the summer of 2006 while taking part in Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp (Providing devastatingly-accurate, always friendly critiques of your fiction -- with doughnuts). The assignment was to fill out five different note cards with story ideas from an assortment of sources, and after having chatted up the locals and admired the beautiful countryside, I was in the library, hoping to see something there that would spark enough creativity to fill out that last card. I found it in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“The Hare’s Bride” was not a story I’d read before. But it sparked an idea that tangled itself with everything I knew or had read about rabbits, weddings and brides, including a movie I’d once seen about Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland) called Dreamchild. The result was “Janey’s Garden.”

I think of the people in Boot Camp, only one liked my story right off, and she happened to be a fan of the pastoral style. Almost everyone else groaned and wrote things like “Is this for kids?” and “This is going to be precious!” in the margins. But thankfully, my readers discovered it wasn’t a fluffy bunny story after all.

I am a huge fan of gardens but I don’t have a green thumb. While I can admire the look and smell of a garden, I haven’t the first notion of how to go about encouraging one to actually thrive. If the landlord didn’t come and water my lawn on a regular basis, I’d be living in a dust bowl. But “Janey’s Garden” is the one I would grow if I could, full of flowers and vegetables and trees. A lazy, welcoming place for sunny afternoons – though my ideal would be without matrimonially-minded rabbits.

Margit

"Beauty's Folly" - by Eugie Foster

"Beauty's Folly"

By Eugie Foster

I've always loved fairy tales, starting from when I was a little girl. They continue to inspire me with their resonant themes and archetypes, and "Beauty and the Beast" is one of my favorites. It's such an elegant little tale, juxtaposing layers of stark contrast—the beautiful and the grotesque, savagery and civilization, sacrifice and selfishness, tenderness and brutality—to tell a sweet, coming-of-age story.

I also find Beauty to be an easy character to empathize with and admire. She's strong as well as beautiful, the embodiment of love and sacrifice—two potent themes that appear throughout the fairy tale. Gutsy and headstrong, she isn't the sort of heroine that just naps in her glass coffin or languishes in her tower, waiting for the prince to come and rescue her. On the contrary, she's prepared to give her life to protect those she loves, a young woman who dictates her own fate rather than consenting to the role of passive princess. And also, she possesses uncommon intelligence and depth, capable of seeing beyond surface appearances and transcending societal mores. How can someone not root for her?

There's also room for some interesting examination of Freudian symbolism*. Seen through the lens of Freud/Jung's Electra complex, the Beast is a metaphor for Beauty's burgeoning sexuality as she matures from a girl into a young woman. Beauty, in cleaving to her father with a little girl's devotion, sees all other men as beastly. It's only through growing up, by learning to love the Beast, and perhaps comprehending the human flaws and shortcomings of her father, that she triggers the Beast's metamorphoses into a prince, freeing them both.

Or not. It's also a romantic happily-ever-after, which I'm a total sucker for.

So I've been hankering to write a contemporary "Beauty and the Beast" story, but while it's been mulling as a free floating aspiration, I kept putting it off. I wanted to make it more than a rehash of the fairy tale; I wanted it to reflect updated themes and modern issues. Yet at the same time, I didn't want to sacrifice the integral charm and magic of the fairy tale to the gritty realism that often comes with current settings and issues.

I was doing research for another story, reading up on the plight of the homeless in America, and saw that the figures are now indicating that an estimated one-third of the homeless population suffers from untreated, severe, and persistent psychiatric illnesses—most of whom end up stigmatized and victimized, their plight misunderstood and overlooked by mainstream society who view them as distasteful and/or threatening. Then I got a note from Steve Berman asking if I had the time to write a re-told fairy tale for an anthology project he was pitching to Mirrorstone Books, the YA imprint of Wizards of the Coast/TSR.

With fairy tales at my forebrain and homelessness and mental illness at the back, my inner psychologist and my muse had a powwow. A person having to overcome preconceived notions of the impoverished and homeless brought to mind Beauty's circumstances after her family's dramatic turn in fortunes. What would a rich socialite have to confront in those circumstances? And what would a young woman able to overcome the tenets of her privileged upbringing be like? And what about one who would strike up a conversation with a panhandler in an alley rather than ignore or avoid him? And there I had my Beauty/Annabel. In keeping with the mental health theme, the Beast/Eloy became a gentle sociopath, and his "castle" transformed into a sort of a magical psychiatric ward. And I was off.

As it turns out, I ended up writing a different story for Steve's anthology, Magic in the Mirrorstone (slated for a Feb. 2008 release), but I owe him major snaps for sparking the idea for "Beauty's Folly."

*Disclaimer: I'm not a proponent of Freud's theories!

IGMS Issue 5 is Now Available

Table of Contents:

We Never Talk About My Brother
by Peter S. Beagle

Beauty's Folly
by Eugie Foster

Under Janey's Garden
by Margit Elland Schmitt

Rumspringa
by Jason Sanford

When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer
by Jamie Todd Rubin

The Polka Man
by William John Watkins

Original Audrey
by Tammy Brown

Plus:

From the Ender Saga: The Gold Bug
by Orson Scott Card

InterGalactic Interview with Peter S. Beagle
by Edmund R. Schubert

Who Is Snape?
by Orson Scott Card

Tales for the Young and Unafraid
by David Lubar

www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com

Worth a Thousand Words

...getting dropped off at the north end of the Skyline Drive, near Front Royal, Virginia.



The long and winding road...







The view...


By day three I'd finished all 105 miles of the Skyline Drive and was on the Blue Ridge Parkway. If you look closely you'll notice that the smile on my face is not quite as large as the one from the first day...




Top of the world, ma...





I don't have any pictures from my campsites along the way, but the first night I camped out a park ranger came along and told me to make sure I hoisted my gear - and especially my food - up into a tree because they had just chased four black bears out of the other end of the campground where I was staying (and one of them was toting a recently killed fawn in its mouth). And the next night I got rained on, so I gave up on taking pictures of my campsites.

OSC's Writing Essay

Having been out of town for the past ten days, you can imagine the pile of catching up I have to attend to. So I'll bore you with the details of my trip a little later. In the meantime, I wanted to direct your attention to an essay written by OSC. Since I've taken over here as editor of IGMS I've been posting essays by the authors of the stories we publish about the creation of those stories. I'm pleased to say that we'll also be including those kinds of essays in the anthology Tor is publishing next year. Well, as OSC was writing each of the essays to accompany his four stories in the antho, I guess he got into the spirit of the thing because he wrote a great essay about the creation of the Ender story we recently posted to issue four. It can be found in the magazine.

How One Story Can Give Birth to Another

The essay can be accessed for free, whether or not you've bought that issue. If you want to read the story and you've already bought issue four you can simply log in with the same password you already have. If not, individual issues are only $2.50, or you can buy gift subscriptions for multiple issues at a nice discount and use them to access any issue of your choice (past present, or future issues; you can even skip over issues if you want to, you're not locked in like with other magazines).

Happy reading.

Time To Hit The Road

I'm driving up to Maryland in a few hours to scope out the town of Cumberland while my wife interviews there for a job. She's the one with the full-time corporate gig that comes with such trivial things like medical and dental benefits and a 401(k). She got laid off about six months ago and it turns out we need those things after all. What are the odds?

This is her fifth interview with this company (three by phone and second in person), so it seems logical at this point for me to go with her and check out the area. On the way home she's going going to drop me and my bicycle off in Front Royal VA (the beginning of the Skyline Drive). I'll cycle the length of the Skyline Drive, part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and stop off at my parent's house near Bedford VA for a few days. I've already spent the past few days here (at my parent's house) helping out here because of some medical problems my dad is having and I promised them I'd stop off again on my way south. I'll be back in Bedford next Saturday or Sunday and will stay a few more days. I'll post an update then.

And for God's sake, if you see someone pedaling along the road for all they are worth, don't honk at them from behind. I'm begging you; it freaks us out.

P.S. Issue five is coming together nicely; mainly waiting on some of the artwork. Should be ready to go around the end of this month.

What The HECK Was That?

I'm not even sure I can do justice to the surreality (is that a word) of the experience I had this morning, but I'm going to give it a try. After all, I spent twenty minutes in the car with a friend and fifty times we must have said some variation of "That was just bizarre..."

Let me back this tale up and start somewhere near the beginning. My friend Dena and I are asked from time to time to speak to writing classes. It's mostly high schools and community colleges and such, and more often than not the one who's been invited will ask if it would be all right to bring the other. We have a good rapport and find it's more effective (and entertaining for the students) to play back and forth than to try to fill an hour or two by ourselves. We also have different areas of expertise and between us cover the full range of writing-related activities pretty well.

So it was no great surprise when I got an e-mail from Dena a few weeks ago saying that somebody at a community college near where she lives got her contact info and asked if she could come talk to a class, and was I free to go with her. What was a surprise, however, was that when we got there (about five minutes late; it took longer to get there than we expected)), the students were taking a test.

A test? Aren't tests usually scheduled in advance? Study chapters three and four because there's going to be a test on Friday...?

But Dena and I had been invited to talk for the full two hours. And when we walked into the room the instructor had this odd, Oh-you're-here tone in her greeting. As if she were mildly surprised to see us. She sounded like we had arrived an hour late, not five minutes.

The next thing I noticed was the big sign at the front of the room proclaiming this to be a class on public speaking. Public speaking? I just joined a group several months ago to to improve my own public speaking skills and suddenly I'm standing in front of 30 college kids who are expecting me to talk knowledgeably about that subject?

So Dena and I wing it as best we were able. Truthfully, I was the one who was winging it. It's not my area and I'll be the first to admit that. But Dena has lectured on the subject before and is even working on a book about public speaking, so she smoothly shifts gears and does a fine job of tying public speaking in with communications in general (largely, I think, so I could contribute something to the conversation). And overall it's going pretty smoothly. But within fifteen minutes or so the instructor starts inching closer and closer to Dena sending out this okay-it's-time-for-you-to-go-now vibe.

What else was there to do but wrap up and go? Which we did, saying the whole way back to Dena's house, "What the heck just happened here?"

I understand that miscommunication happens sometimes, but what we were lead to expect and what we were actually asked to deliver were as far apart as could possibly have been imagined. And I wouldn't have minded so much - it is good to get out of the house every now and then - if I hadn't had to drive so far for the privilege of having my time wasted. Between the drive to and from Dena's house and the drive to and from the college, I must have spent at least two and half hours in a car. That's time I could have spend rejecting people's stories... (which is why I won't be reading any IGMS stories today; I make it a point not to read when I'm in a bad mood).

It was just bizarre.

Antho Delivered, Reading and Riding Again

Much of the rest of Life got put on hold while assembling the final pieces of the IGMS anthology, but it's now been delivered to Tor and there's nothing left to do but wait the interminable wait until the book is on the shelves. We haven't been given a publication date yet, but I suspect it won't be before next Spring.

In the mean time it's back to reading again. And riding. Someone asked me at ConCarolinas if I was still training for my bike tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway. 22 miles yesterday; 24 miles the day before that; didn't ride on Sunday, but Saturday I did 35 (that took about two hours). I'm also back into the stories, reading things for the second and, in a few cases, third time. I've got around sixty stories still on my desk and am looking to fill about 15 spots (at the most). I plan to have that knocked out by the end of June/first week of July.

Issue five is getting the finishing touches and should be released sometime during the last week of June. A couple more weeks at most.

IGMS Anthology From Tor

It's officially official: the contracts are in from Tor and Vol. 1 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show is being assembled. All four of Scott's 'Ender Universe' stories will be in this anthology, as will tales from approximately a dozen other authors. These are all tales that originally appeared in issues one through four of the on-line version of the magazine, but I wouldn't quite call it a "Best of" anthology; more like a sampler. All four issues of the magazine are represented (roughly) equally and as I selected the stories I also did my best to keep a balanced proportion of SF and Fantasy.

The list of stories is still being finalized (there are one or two tales/authors that are on the fence), and the artists are being notified, too. Artists? Oh yes: each illustration that accompanied the story in the on-line version of IGMS will also be included in the book, as will the graphic novel (fancy way of saying 'comic book') version of OSC's story, "Fat Farm." In addition to being a pleasure to read, it's going to be a gorgeous book to look at.

I feel like a kid on the 22nd of December: I can't wait for the big day to get here. Well, it's more like being a kid on the 22nd of August; it's going to be a little while before Santa brings us any goodies. We have to behave a little longer. I actually don't have the release date yet, but as soon as I do you can be sure I'll tell you about it here first.

ConCarolinas Report

Charlotte, NC - ConCarolinas is a nice, small con. The guest list was a little bit light, so I ended up doing a lot of panels (five in a row at one point on Saturday). Not that I minded: that's why I go to these things. To see people, to meet peple, to talk to people; fans and writers alike. Plus, one of my favorite people in the world, Alethea Kontis, was there too and we hung out all weekend, including staying up way to late Saturday night watching the Geek Comedy Tour (very funnny bunch of young comedians who performed from 10:30 until almost midnight), and then staying for the Rocky Horror Picture Show afterwards. It was well after 2 a.m. before we finally called it a night.

Alethea and I also hung out quite a bit with friend James Maxey. James is an immensely talented writer whose second novel, Bitterwood, is coming out from Solaris Books next month. It's a novel full of dragons, but with a great twist (which I decline to ruin for you here; you'll just have to buy the book when it comes out). Unfortunately James had another commitment Saturday evening, so he missed out on the late-night lunacy.

I also had the good fortune to sit on several panels with GOH Barbara Hambly, who is a gracious, knowledgeable writer and I learned a lot by just sitting next to her and listening. I also enjoyed meeting Robert Buettner, who was a Special Guest at the con. I have to confess that I was not familiar with his work before, but he was kind enough to give a copy of his award-winning military SF novel, Orphange. I promise all of you that I won't read it until I'm caught up again on the IGMS submissions, but it will go at the top of my pile for when I'm done.

One particulary fun thing about this con was the wedding they held. It was actually listed on the program as a panel; two people who met at last year's ConCarolina tied the knot at this years con. They were a slightly older couple, dressed up in Renaissance attire, and the whole thing was terribly sweet. Sadly, I was on a panel at the time (about interesting ways to destroy the world - it was the tail end of my marathon session), so I only got to see a little bit of the actual event. But what a fun concept.

There were lots of other folks there (apologies to everyone else whose name I didn't drop), and a good time was had by all.

I had to cancel my trip to Nashville TN for Hypericon (June 15 - 17) for personal reasons, so my next con won't be until TrinocCon in Raleigh, NC (Aug. 3 - 5). I can't speak for the rest of you, but this news makes my wife and children very happy.

IGMS's Tim Pratt One in A Million

The storySouth 2007 Million Writers Award for Fiction

As many of you know, storySouth (http://www.storysouth.com), presents a list each year of what it considers to be the best short stories published on-line. A handful of preliminary judges pick the Notable Stories of the Year, and then the senior editors pick what they consider to be the top ten stories of the year. I was pleased when four stories published in 2006 in InterGalactic Medicine Show were named to the list of Notable Stories, so you can imagine my thoughts when I learned that Tim Pratt’s “Dream Engine” (the cover story for issue three), was named one of the top ten.

The entire list is as follows (yes, I put Tim’s at the top where it belongs (not that I’m biased)):

•"Dream Engine" by Tim Pratt (Intergalactic Medicine Show)

•"A Letter from Home" by E. C. Osondu (Agni)

•"Spectral Evidence" by Gemma Files (ChiZine)

•"Urchins, While Swimming" by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesword Magazine)

•"13 Halloweens" by Michael K. White (The Deepening)

•"All the Way to Grangeville" by A. Ray Norsworthy (Eclectica Magazine)

•"Burning Bush" by E.P.Chiew (In Posse Review)

•"Vertically Divided, Blue-Red-White" by Mark MacNamara (Southern Gothic Online)

•"Spinning Out" by Jamie Barras (Strange Horizons)

•"The Infinite Monkey Theorem" by Marshall Moore (Word Riot)

You may now proceed directly to storySouth's website to vote for Tim's story...

http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters/2007vote.html

ConCarolinas

I'm going to be in Chalotte NC this weekend for ConCarolinas. I won't be there Friday evening, but the organizers made up for it by booking me hard the rest of the con, especially Saturday. I've got:

Quick Write - 11 am

Getting Started As Writer - 12 noon (Magnolia Room)

Creating Believable Dialog - 1pm (Magnolia)

What Drives Editors Crazy - 2 pm (Magnolia)

How To Destroy The World - 3 pm (Azalea)

Sci -Fi Whose Line Is It Anyway - 5 pm (Main Salon)

The first three panels are all in the same room, so I'm going to stake my claim to a comfy chair and sit there for three hours. Alethea Kontis, dear girl, is going to be there too (we're even on the 2 pm panel together) and she has volunteered to bring me food during my marathon. And Sunday's schedule is much the same.

Publishing In All It's Forms - 11 am (Magnolia)

Sometime Shorter Is Better - 12 noon (Magnolia)

Writer's Roound Table - 1 pm (Main Salon)

etc. etc.

See what I mean about location of my panels? I own the Magnolia Room. All kiding aside, I'm sure it will be a fun weekend and I'm looking forward to it. GOH is Barbara Hambly. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood. I really do enjoy meeting and talking with fans (and writers) of SF and fantasy.

BaltiCon Report

BaltiCon is a four day convention, of which there are precious few that run quite so long. And now I remember why: four days is a lot of convention. I enjoyed myself, spent time with a lot of good folks, snuck out to a nearby theater and saw the third installment of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" (a monumental waste of time and money; it made me wish I were watching "Waterworld"), attended some parties and book launches, but good God, I was burned out by time all was said and done. That's why I'm writing this entry today instead of yesterday. Yesterday I got my bike out and pedaled 26+ miles and wallowed in the solitude. I needed time to decompress.

I think my best panel was Friday night's "How To Hook an Editor," co-starring Diane Weinstein, former art director and assistant editor at Weird Tales, and Joshua Bilmes, literary agent and founder of Jabberwocky literary agency. The panel morhped from "How To Hook an Editor" to "The Cold Hard Truths About the Publishing Industry" and not a punch was pulled. I think the audience appreciated that. Afterward Joshua and I went out to dinner and talked everything from publishing industry stuff to baseball (did you know he's a Toronto Blue Jays fan?). It was a very enjoyable evening.

Saturday morning I didn't have anything scheduled so I visited family in the area, then attended some panels (apparently not very memorable ones because I can't recall what they were), then had dinner with author Jana Oliver (whose novel Sojourn was one of this year's nominees for the Compton Crook Award) and a friend of Jana's, author Jean Marie Ward. Jana is someone I'm crossing paths with a lot lately and I always enjoy whatever time I can spend with her.

Sunday was probably my most enjoyable day at the con, despite the fact that the con organizers double-booked me and I ended up missing a panel I was really looking forward to ("Sky Finances," a panel about the future of commercial ventures in space). In fairness the organizers did give me the option of choosing which one I wanted to sit in on, but given that there were six people scheduled for "Sky Finances" and only three scheduled for "WebSite Workshop for SF Professionals," I told the organziers I would go where ever they needed me and their choice was pretty obvious.

And that reminds me what I did on Saturday and why I blocked it out: I was on a panel called "Managing Your Freelance Career" - a panel that had seven participants show up, including one charming man who told us that since the panel had been his idea he went and insisted the organizers include him in the panel even though they had not originally scheduled him to be on it. The next time I get to a room with more than five program participants I will forever more politely bow out. Seven people - no matter how quaified they all may be - is too many for any single panel.

Back to Sunday, despite the double-booking it was still my favorite day, largely because of time I got to spend with friends from an on-line writer's group called Codex. I'm not an active member there, though I have been in the group since 2004. It's full of a lot of talented, up-and-coming writers and I always enjoy time I can spend with any of them. Six of us went to lunch together on Sunday - Ruth Nestvold (who has collaborated with Jay Lake on a number of stories, as well as writing tons of her own), Elaine Isaak, who had several fantasy novels out through Eos Books, Andrew Cudgel and Scott Roberts, both published in the 2005 edition of Writers of The Future, (Scott was also published in the first issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show (back in the good old days when it was edited by Uncle Orson)), and Lawrence Schoen, also widely published in the short story world and now a publisher himself, being the brains, financial brawn, and co-editor behind a short story collection called Prime Codex. Prime Codex is an assemblage of stories written by members of Codex, stories that were orignally published in magazines like Asimovs and IGMS to name a few. It's a good read if I do say so myself, and I'm not even in the book :-( Lawrence had a book launch party Sunday afternoon. I was a little late because I donated blood at the drive set up my members of the local Robert Heinlein Society, but the launch somehow managed to proceed fine until I got there ;-)

Monday I did a couple more panels, but as soon as the last one was over (and I did a quick interview with a podcaster who worked with the organizers of last month's RavenCon), I was in my car and firing up a book-on-tape to entertain me during my six hour drive. I was ready to go home. As I said before, it was a long con.

And I've got another one next weekend... *sigh*

BaltiCon 2007

I'll be leaving first thing Friday morning for BaltiCon. Looking forward to the con, if not the drive. Cons are always lots of fun. The seven-plus hour drive up? Not so much. I've got a bunch of books on tape to keep me company though, which should be good. In a previous life I had a job that periodically required lots of driving, so I listened to loads of books on tape.

My schedule of panels is a bit light, but that just leaves more time for socializing and the dealer's room right? I've got:

How To Hook an Editor - Friday 7 pm (Belmont Room)

Managing a Freelance Career - Saturday 4 pm (Salon E)

Sky Finances - Sunday 5 pm (Derby Room) (This one is about the future of the space program, including possible commercial ventures. Looking forward to this one...)

Tony Ruggiero's Quick Write - Monday 11 am (Garden Room)

Come Ask The Author About Writing - Monday 1 pm (Chase Room)

That's about all for now. I'll give you a detailed report when I get home.

Read and Riding

Reading and riding. I tried to think of something "math-y" I've done lately so I could be clever and call this entry "Reading, Riding, and 'Rithmetic" but no such luck. In a nutshell, reading and riding make up the bulk of what I've been doing lately. The reading part is of story submissions for IGMS. As I mentined last week, now that we finally (fingers crossed) have the last of the scheduling issues resolved, I'm reading like mad to get caught up on the last of the stories I've been holding. I've got about 50 or so left and should have this done in the next ten days to two weeks. So if you've been holding your breath for several years waiting on a reply, know that the end is near.

The other thing I've been doing a lot more of lately is cycling. In preparation for my planned 300+ mile bike tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway next month (from roughly Bedford VA to Asheville NC), I've been increasing the distance and duration of my bike rides. Usually I ride 11 - 13 miles each time out, 3 or 4 days a week. By cycling standards that's a pretty light workout. Two weeks ago I upped it to between 15 and 20 miles each trip and have been riding 4 or 5 days a week; and yesterday I did a total of about 35 miles (24 on the morning ride and then a quick 11 in the afternoon). Considering that the shortest leg of my Parkway ride is set for 45 miles (and some are considerably longer), I've go a ways to go before I'll feel like I'm ready. Still, it's progress, eh? The legs are kind of achy today, but that's all right: Sunday is a day of rest.

In other news, I got a cryptic e-mail from the publisher of NCCNM on Friday saying that future issues of NCCNM have been cancelled, but that she wanted me to call her so we could talk about something else she has in mind. She didn't say what, only that she had 'something' else. This was a surprise considering that we just met a few weeks ago to discuss the Fall and Winter issues. She even talked during that meeting about the possibility of taking the magazine from regional publication to national in 2008. I'm curious to find out what she has in mind, but I got her e-mail too late on Friday to call her, so it will have to wait until Monday.

Hatrack Forums Restored

Minor item, but it looks as if all the Hatrack-related forums are up and running again. If anyone has any problems with them, feel free to let us know.

IGMS Announcement

I’ve got an official announcement, then a few follow-up details:


“Beginning with Issue 5, InterGalactic Medicine Show will be published on a quarterly basis with a new issue coming every three months. There will be a new Ender’s world story as part of each issue, but that story won’t necessarily be released in conjunction with the issue. For example, OSC’s story “Gold Bug” which was slated to go in Issue 4 was co-opted by Marvel Comics to become a bonus story in their Wyrms graphic novel. Therefore, OSC now has to write a new story for Issue 4. “Gold Bug” will eventually be one of the IGMS stories.

However, please rest assured that your payment for Issue 4 does include an Ender’s world story, and it will be added to that issue as soon as it is written.

Additionally, in order to keep our commitment to quarterly issues, when the time comes to post each new issue, if the Ender story is not ready, we’ll go online without it and add it as soon as it’s available.”


Ultimately what this amounts to is two main things: 1) The obvious: The magazine will be released quarterly, whether Scott’s story is ready or not. I believe that in the long run this is what’s in the best interests of the magazine.

2) The less obvious: This will simplify the lives of the writers submitting to IGMS.

Here’s why. Though I’m current on reading 95% of the submissions, there are still a handful of folks who have been waiting a looong time for a reply. However, if you have not heard from me and your story was submitted more than 100 days ago, take heart: all that means is that I like your story and have been waiting to sort some of these publishing/scheduling matters out.

The reason for the delay is precisely because we were having trouble publishing issues on a regular basis. Previously Scott didn’t want to go forward with a new issue until his Ender story was published in the most recent issue. His first priority has to be the novels, screenplays, and other projects that produce income. IGMS pays professional rates to both the artists and authors whose works appear in each issue, as well as paying the regular columnists whose work appears for free. And right now most of that money is coming out of Scott’s pocket, so his paying work has to come first. Unfortunately that results in him not having time to write the Ender stories as punctually as he’d prefer. It’s quite the Catch-22 (at least as far as IGMS is concerned).

Getting back to my original point, I have been hesitant to buy too many stories because if I bought a year’s worth of stories based on a quarterly publishing schedule, but we continued publishing two issues a year instead of four (which has been the case thus far) – well…, I think the problem is obvious. Authors could be waiting as long as two to three years to see their stories published, and I didn’t want to do that to anyone. So I made, for better or worse, a conscious choice to sit on a few things for six months (until this issue was resolved), rather than risk making some folks wait several years.

Now the matter is resolved though. Our target date for publication of issue 5 is mid-June, a new issue will be published every three months after that, and I now know exactly how many stories I need and can proceed accordingly.

Please feel free to join me as I breathe a deep sigh of relief…

Million Writers Award (x 4)

Each and every year StorySouth (http://www.storysouth.com/) lists, by way of its Million Writers Award, what it considers the best short stories published on-line that year. I'm tickled to announce that InterGalactic Medicine Show had four stories honored thus for 2006. :

"In the Eyes of the Empress's Cat" by Brad Beaulieu from issue 2, and

"Dream Engine" by Tim Pratt,

"Small Magics" by Alethea Kontis, and

"The Box of Beautiful Things" by Brian Dolton from issue 3.

IGMS tied for the third most stories on the list (with Strange Horizons, Baen's Universe, and a few others). Congratulations to the authors of these fine stories, whose work is notable indeed.

To see the full list visit StorySouth at:

http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters/2006notablestories.html

Hatrack Forums

What's going on with the recent inaccessibility of the Hatrack Website, and especially the forums? I've been asked that a bunch lately and finally have an answer. The short version is that someone, somehow, got into the Hatrack system and was using it to send copious amounts of spam, so the ISP that handles Hatrack's account shut them down.

OSC's web guru has been working seven days a week trying to remedy the situation and many of the key pages have been restored, but the forums (for technical reasons beyond my ken) remain problematic and it is possible that they may have to be rebuilt from scratch. Pray that that's not the case because if it comes to that then all of the old posts will be lost. I'll gladly continue to provide updates as I get new information myself, but at the moment that's what I can tell you.

You're A Real Writer If...

I had a glass of wine with dinner tonight and this list just started forming in me head...

You know you're a real writer if... you can answer 'yes' to at least 75% of these items:

1) One glass of wine is enough to start stupid ideas forming in your head that must be written down

2) You own a cat (minimum of one; maximum of three. A dog will do in a pinch. More than three animals of any kind and you're in a whole other category...)

3) Someone, most likely a 'friend,' has approached you and said, "I've got a great idea. I'll give you my idea, you write it, and we'll split the money."

5) Math is just not your thing

6) When you're supposed to be writing, laundry and vacuuming looks absolutely vital

7) When you're supposed to be doing laundry and vacuuming, writing is the most vital thing you can conceive of

8) When you are vacuuming and doing laundry, brilliant ideas flow like beer at frat house

9) When you're writing, brilliant ideas... uh, they uh...

8) Math is just not your thing

9) You have more rejections than you have rooms in your house/apartment

10) You could insulate at least one room of your house with books

11) (I can't think of one for #11, I have writers' block)

12) You've ever debated whether or not writers' block is 'real' or just in peoples' heads

Is speculative literature an endangered species?

After RavenCon I got Rob Sawyer's permission to reprint the post below. I'd be very interested to hear what other folks have to say about this issue, because I think it's an immensely important question to anyone who loves the genre.


Is speculative literature an endangered species?

By Rob Sawyer

I'm quoted in an article on that topic. Author Mike Collins quotes part of what I said in response to his email question; here's my full response:

I don't think there is a decline in reading per se; more people are reading more books than ever before -- all the stats show that. However, they're reading fewer different titles; everyone is looking for a sense of community in our fragmented world, and so wants to read the things that others are reading. There simply weren't runaway bestsellers like HARRY POTTER and THE DA VINCI CODE in an earlier era; those books shattered all previous sales records.

It's pointless to talk about the decline in reading "speculative" fiction, because there's no section in the bookstore labeled that -- and, after all, HARRY POTTER and THE DA VINCI CODE, along with Michael Crichton, Audrey Niffenegger, Neil Gaiman, and Christopher Paolini are all broadly "speculative," and they're all doing just fine, thank you very much.

What we're talking about is the decline of the commercial publishing category known as science fiction, and the fault for that, by and large, lies with the publishers and the authors. SF has become increasingly self-referential, smug, and inaccessible to newcomers. Without bringing new readers in, and keeping them, the field is being whittled away by natural attrition of its established readership base -- the trend is a straight line, down into the toilet, and it's going to be very, very hard to turn it around at this point.

(from Rob's blog: http://www.sfwriter.com/blog.htm)

RavenCon

A great con, RavenCon. Worth the trip to Richmond, VA and then some. Props to organizers Michael Pederson, Tony Ruggiero, and Tee Morris; the con's attendance increased by 50% over last year's event and I'm sure it's largely due to their top-notch work.

I also had the great fortune to have brunch Saturday morning with author GOH, Rob Sawyer. We talked about everything from IGMS, to his tenure as president of the SFWA, to the line of SF books he edits for a mid-sized Canadian publisher. It was a real treat to have him to myself for that long and I learned quite a lot. Later that evening I also got see first-hand the seriousness and professionalism with which he aproaches being GOH of at a con. When a larger group of us (including Rob) were making dinner plans, he insisted we eat in the hotel's restaraunt because he wanted to stay where the con was. Why? He wanted to be available for the people who attended. It's impossible not to respect that kind of dedication.

Rob's new novel, Rollback, was recently released and the first few chapters are available on his website (http://www.sfwriter.com/). Don't read the excerpt unless you're prepared to plunk down $25 for the hardback, because once you start reading, you'll have to own it.

Speaking of books, I also got a chance to see an Advance Review Copy of James Maxey's forthcoming novel, Bitterwood. Based on what I saw in the ARC and learned while talking to him, I'm really looking forward to its release in July of this year from Solaris Books. James' story "To Know All Things That Are In The Earth" appeared in issue three of IGMS and I think he's an incredibly talented writer.

Dennis Danvers was at RavenCon, too, and I got to hang out with him quite a bit. I met Dennis at CapClave last year and really enjoyed getting to know him better. At one point during the con we must have spent over half an hour discussing authors such as John Steinbeck and Milan Kundera. Not exactly standard fare at an SF con, but I enjoyed it immensely. One of the next novels I'll be reading is Dennis's The Watch, which he was kind enough to give me an autographed copy of.

And coming down from the DC area to RavenCon (for his first con ever) was Jamie Rubin. Jamie's story, "When I Kissed The Learned Astronomer", will appear in a future issue of IGMS. Though "Learned Astronomer" is Jamie's first published story, having met him myself I can say with confidence that it won't be his last; he's a sharp guy with a quick mind and a genuine love for the art of telling stories.

Speaking of telling stories, I could tell a bunch of stories about another author, David B. Coe (call him 'Dave' and he will punch your lights out). The only problem is that any "David stories" I could tell would also incriminate myself and we can't have that (can we?). Suffice to say that I don't recall ever having met another writer with whom I had so much in common or hit it off with so quickly. We had even more fun than we had alcohol, and the quantity of alcohol we consumed is another thing I'm not going to go into detail about. (I hear David had written a book or three, too...)(Actually between The LonTobyn Chronicle and Winds of the Forelands, I think he's up to nine of them (see: http://www.sff.net/people/davidbcoe/.))

I had a lot of fun working on a wokshop with with Allen Wold, Peter Prellwitz, and Mike Allen. Allen Wold has been running this particular workshop at SF cons for nearly twenty years now, where he give folks the basics of what makes an effective short story opening and then requires participants to write one - in ten minutes. It's actually very effective for getting the writing juices flowing and participants always comes up with something pretty good. I really believe that pressure is good for the creative process (up to a point). Once the story openings have been written, everyone takes turns reading theirs aloud and then the panelists give a brief critique. It's a real pleasure being able to help these (mostly) fledgling writers get pointed in the right direction.

I was also on a great panel with Kelly Lockhart, Stuart Jaffe and Tee Morris. The topic was the dangers of technology and it turned into one of those panels where two of us took one side and two took the other and we just went at it. But we went at it with a great blend of fervor and respect, which always makes for a fun, entertaining panel - both for the audience and the panelists. It was my last panel of the con and a great way to end things.

Next con: Balticon (May 25th - 28th).

Best of IGMS Vol. 1

I am excited to announce that Tor has agreed in principle to publish a Best of InterGalactic Medicine Show Vol. 1. The book will include stories from the first four issues of IGMS, including all four Ender stories by Orson Scott Card. (Yes, I know you're all still waiting for the Ender story to go into issue four, but I promise he's working on it. An announcement about that will be made shortly.)

Details regarding the timeframe of the book and the stories to be included will be released as they are finalized with Tor.

Good Night, Mr. Vonnegut

I'm sure it's no longer news to anyone that Kurt Vonnegut recently passed away. Someone recently pointed out a little gift that he left to writer's and would-be writers of the world:

Vonnegut's Eight Rules of Writing Fiction, from Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), p. 9-10:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Toasted

I recently joined Toastmasters, an inernational organization designed to help people improve their public-speaking skills. I mention the public speaking part right away because when I told a woman the other day that I had joined Toastmasters, she immediately started talking about an old episode of the TV show 'Frasier' and how Frasier and his brother Niles had joined a wine-tasting club and were vying to become 'toastmaster' of their club and the usual wacky highjinx ensued. So let me say up front that this is not a wine tasting club (I save my wine drinking for when I'm reading IGMS story submssions ;-) )

Okay, get back to the point, Edmund...

There was a point?

Yes, now get on with it.

Right.

Okay, so I joined Toastmasters. My role as editor of these two magazines has me in front of more and more people, and it seems to be happeneing more and more often. And while I'm not shy (no one will ever accuse me of that), I do find that it's one thing to be on a panel with other speakers or to speak with small groups, but it's quite another thing to be up in front of larger groups, delivering a prepared speech. That, frankly, is scary stuff. Scary stuff that I am now doing. And Toastmaster is, as I already mentioned, designed to help people be better at it. I gave my first prepared speech a few weeks ago (a four to six minute introduction to me, and I'll confess my hands were pretty clammy by time I was done). It wasn't much fun.

I'm looking forward to today though.

Today I am going to be Table Topics Master, which means I come up with a series of items of questions for people to talk about, and they have no idea what those topics are until I tell them. It's an exercise in thinking - and talking - on your feet, and my theme is 'moral dilemmas.' One of my 'dilemmas' (formed, I'm sure, in all that Polar reading I've been doing) is to designate someone the leader of a expedition to the North Pole that has gone terribly wrong. Half the party is dead from hypothermia and starvation is imminent. The only option for survival? Cannibalism. As leader of what's left of the expedition, what do you do? What do you tell your people?

God, I'm looking forward to this.

I wonder if they'll ever let me be able Topics Master again?

(BTW, what would you do?)

Chilling Writing

You probably know that I'm on a Polar kick right now, and I have a passage from the current book (Ninety Degrees North) that I wanted to share with you for a variety of reasons.

Here's the set-up: It's 1899 and an Italian Duke decides his country needs to throw its proverbial 'hat' into the Arctic ring, so he outfitts a massive expedition. Establishing a base in the Franz Josef achipelago, the Duke then sends a crew North, led by his second-in-command, Umberto Cagni.

On the way back from their new, record farthest-North of 86 34' (about 250 miles from the Pole) Cagni's health begins to fail, including frostbite in one finger, which is swollen to nearly the thickness of his wrist and black with gangrene. Trapped in their tent for two days because of a bad storm, Cagni decides it's time to attend to the finger. He wrote:

"I clear away all the black part with a lancet, which I hold in my left hand. As soon as I introduce the point of the blade into the flesh, an incredible quanitity of [liquid] matter issues forth, which gives me great relief. I strip away the covering of dead flesh, and there remains sticking out of the wound a piece of bone which has all the appearance of being dead. When I press the end, I feel a great pain in my whole arm. I realize that if I leave this useless projection, the smallest blow will cause me intense suffering and I therefore set about cutting it off. But I have only scissors and the little bone is very hard, so I suffer a great deal while taking the piece off. Over this little operation, which a doctor would have performed in three minutes, I spend fully two hours..."

Cagni allowed himself no time for recuperation and when the storm broke the next day they travelled another 18 miles on foot, his whole arm aching teribly. He did not, however, mention his discomfort to anyone because, as he wrote, 'it seems that yesterday's operation rather upset my comrades.'

Now, my first reaction to that was mixed. The first and obvious reaction was uugh, he cut off his own finger. That thought was immediately followed by a period of wondering if there were people left in this world who could even contemplate doing such a thing, much less travel so far afterwards.

At that point I remembered a story that was in the news not too long ago about a rock climber who cut off his entire hand with a pocket knife after a boulder fell on it, trapping him. So the answer was a resounding Yes, there are still people today who do these things and thank God I haven't had to find out whether or not I'm one of them.

After a little while though, I came to another realization. This section from the journal of a long-dead Italian is a perfect example of the kind of writing that I think is most powerful. It's not full of flowery or lengthy descriptions; it's not stylized to any degree; and it doesn't try too hard. If anything, its understatement is where much of its power comes from. It is a simple and direct presentation that is about the content, not the 'style'. And good Lord, is it powerful! I don't know about you, but I felt that passage in my gut.

If you want to know the kind of writing that gets me, look no further than Umberto Cagni, Italian Polar explorer...

More Reading

After finishing In The Land of White Death, I next read Resolute, a book centered around the search for the Northwest Passage (a supposed short-cut through the Arctic) that consumed so much, time, energy, and ultimately, lives in the early and middle ninteenth century. Much of the exploration done in that region was a by-product of rescue expeditions sent looking for Sir John Franklin, whose two ships, the Erebus and the Terror were lost there (most likely in 1846). Some were earnestly looking for Franklin, though some were undoubtedly only using Franklin as an excuse to raise the necessary funds to go exploring on their own.

Having completed the book Resolute, I have now started Ninety Degrees North, which, by happy coincidence, begins with the last of the so-called Frankin rescue expeditions and continues into the early twentieth century to cover men like Amundsen and Peary and the quest to become the first to the North Pole.

I find it interesting that there are variations in the details of the overlapping stories between the two books, though on reflection it is not at all surprising. Each expedition often resulted in the publication of journals written by several of the participants, and these journals were frequently at significant odds with each other. Who the historians chose to believe as they researched their own books goes a long way toward explaining the differences in the details (though not necessarily the differences in spelling of the names of some of the characters involved).

On the whole, these Polar explorers continue to fascinate me. They really were the astronauts of their day. And to echo what Rob Sawyer said on the way to dinner one night at ChattaCon, the research you do before writing a novel is not only necessary, it's a heck of a lot of fun.

In between Polar readings I am also doing some sporadic reading of a short story collection titled Beyond Armageddon. I will confess (take note, IGMS contributors) that I have a real penchant for post-apocalyptic stories, and this collection, published in 1985, contains many of the standards ("There Will Come Soft Rains" by Bradbury and "A Boy and His Dog" by Ellison), as well as a few that are new to me. I have to admit that part of the reason I picked it up was that it was assembled by Walter Miller Jr., author of the famous Canticle for Leibowitz. Unfortunately I found his lengthy introduction to the book, as well as his briefer introductions to the individual stories, to be rambling, preachy and obtuse. This, I suppose, explains why haven't dived more wholeheartedly into it, but only poke at it every now and then.

I've also been nibbling on a tome called Dear Scott, Dear Max, which is a collection of letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins. I've always been a big fan of Fitzgerald and read anything by or about him that I can find. But this collection of letters is also a fascinating insight into the mind of Perkins, who was not only Fitzgerald's editor, but also that of Ernest Hemingway, Thoman Wolfe, and several other major literary figures of that era. There are lots of books out there about/for writing, but not nearly as much about editing, so I am enjoying this book from both sides of the equation.

And speaking of reading and editing, I am also busy reading again for IGMS. For a variety of reason the slush reading had to be put on hold for a little while. I needed to get certain info and input from OSC, and was having a devil of a time catching up with him. But those matters have (finally) been resolved and it's full steam ahead again.

So what are you reading these days?

In The Land of White Death

I've always had a passing interest in literature about polar exploration, but when I had an idea for a novel set at the North Pole I started reading everything I could get my hands on regarding both Poles. A few have been mildly disappointing, but for the most part I have to say I am enjoying these books tremendously. Some of the best I've read so far are Ice Master, The Doomed 1913 Voyage of The Karluk by Jennifer Niven and In The Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov.

The latter I just finished today and it proved to be a most compelling story. Originally published in Russia in 1917 (Albanov was Russian), it is the firsthand account of Albanov's abandoment of the ship, Saint Anna, in 1914 along with 12 other crewman . The Saint Anna had been frozen in the Arctic almost due north of the Franz Josef archipelago for more than a year and a half, and Albanov and aproximately half the ship's crew decided they would rather take their chances on foot than waste another year hoping the shifting ice would spit the ship into open ocean before it crushed it (as happened so often to ships frozen in the ice - most famously with Shackleton's ship, Endurance, as well as the Karluk in the aforementioned book by by Niven)).

The main differences between Albanov's story and the others is that Shackleton eventually got all his men home alive, and the Karluk's captain, Robert Bartlett, got over half his men home alive, while Valerian Albanov, the navigator on the Saint Anna, was one of only two survivors of his expedition. Also, his book is told entirely in his words, as opposed to most other books of this kind which are told by historians after the fact. It does start out a little slowly, but by time I got to the end I found myself wishing someone would hurry up and a make a movie based on this book. It was an amazing tale, amazingly well told (especially when you consider who it was written by and under what circumstances). Albanov's descriptions are conscise and precise and created such a vivid picture of the scenery and events that I can still see it in my mind.

And the story behind the story (you know how I love those) is interesting too. The book was originally published in 1917, then translated into French in 1928. But that was as far as it ever went. It was overlooked, lost, forgotten. But in 1998 it was rediscovered and eventually published in English for the first (in 2000). So as familiar as some stories of polar exploration are, here is an amazing one that has been lost until just recently, and I would highly recommend it to any one.

In The Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov. Go read it. Now.

"Approaching Zero" - by Kelly Parks

I love Alternate History stories but it started bothering me the way they all focused on alternate outcomes for recent human history. All of human existence on Earth is a brief instant compared to the age of Earth itself. What about some alternate outcomes in the deep past? Wouldn’t the multiverse of all alternate histories consist mostly of those alternatives? Places where the Snowball Earth era never ended or where the collision with a Mars sized body (that created the moon and stripped the early Earth of most of its volatiles) never happened.

That line of thought lead me to the conclusion that alternate histories where the south won the civil war or Rome never fell might be very hard to find among the many alternate universes where humanity never evolved at all.

Kelly Parks

"Call Me Mr. Positive" - by Tom Barlow

Oops, missed one. (Sorry, Tom. Blame it on the jetlag...)


The title started as a bit of irony, since I'm definitely a half-empty-glass type of person, a half-empty glass that I suspect one of my cats has been repeatedly dunking her paw into when I wasn't paying attention.

The story itself probably harkens back to my first viewing of "2001: A Space Odyssey." I was struck, in the first scene where one of the astronauts is running laps around the outside wall of the space ship, by the loneliness of their situation. Death is always nearby in space travel (except perhaps for Keir Dullea), but death is a short-lived inconvenience. Loneliness is an every-day, every-moment pain.

Humans are pack animals, after all, and when we lose our pack we lose the context in which we are defined. In addition, with FTL travel, relativity takes away from the travelers the loved ones they leave behind on Earth. Therefore, the traveler's adopted pack shrinks to those with whom he explores.

Take even that away, and he is left with only himself as company. For some of us, especially we half-glassers, that prospect is more terrifying that any mere vacuum.

Rewrite Requests

I got the following question in my e-mail a little while back and thought it and the subsequent answer might be of interest:

Q: "I was curious about something...when you look at response times on various sites (such as Duotrope), one of the potential responses is "Rewrite request." I've never gotten one of those, even when the rejection included "We liked this, but..." and followed with a thing or two that would be relatively simple to fix. I'm not saying that I should have gotten such a request. There may have been more wrong with the story than I thought or they said. But I am curious -- what makes a story worth asking for changes in vs. just letting it go? How do you (as a writer) know if it's really a simple fix or the story has fatal flaws?"

My answer (now slightly edited and expanded) was:

There are two kinds of rewrites I deal with, one more serious than the other. The more serious of the two amounts to - Hey, I like this story, and if you will fix A, B and C to these specifications, then I'll buy the story. The other kind of rewrite request is more along the lines of - Hey, this has potential, and if you'd consider reworking these areas or developing this, that, or the other a bit more, I'd be willing to look at it again.

I try to make a point, also, of telling authors that any decision to rewrite is ultimately in their hands, and if they disagree with what I'm suggesting they should feel free to say "No thanks, I like my story the way it is." And there have been one or two stories that I probably would have bought anyway. In fact, I can think of one story where the author said "No thanks" and I did buy it anyway.

On the other hand, I can also think of one particular writer who kicked and screamed through the whole revision process, but he did it anyway. And when all was said and done he publicly acknowledged that the story was better for the work we did on it. My job is a delicate balancing act of trying to make every story I publish be the best that it can be, yet to do so without taking over or being heavy-handed about it. These aren't my stories; they belong to the people who created them.

Of course, I just realized that I haven't answered your original question about what makes a story worth asking for changes vs. just letting it go. And to be blunt, the answer probably isn't any more complicated than this (usually): the closer a story is to being publishable, the more likely I am to ask for a rewrite.

There are, of course, always exceptions. Every once and a while I'll see a story and happen to particularly like the voice that author has captured (which is one of the harder things to do well), and I'll work through several rounds of revision with them to bring the story up to par. That's a LOT of work though, so I'm pretty selective about when I do that.

On the other hand, there are some authors I have enough experience with that I know what they are capable of and trust them to do a good job. Eric James Stone and Brad Beaulieu are two who come to mind. I don't have to say more than: Can you give me a little bit more of X, or; Please refine Y a bit, and they've come back to me with levels of work far beyond what I thought I was asking for, so that makes it a lot easier for me to ask for revisions again in the future.

The bottom line is that a rewrite request is serious business. I won't waste an author's time or my own with one unless I believe it will result in publishable work that I will want to buy and IGMS readers will want to read.

But that's how I, as an editor, decide whether or not to ask for a rewrite. And the original question was how does a writer know if the story has fatal flaws or not. I'd say there you simply have to trust your own instincts. Robert Heinlein is famous for saying that you should never rewrite except to editorial order - from an editor who is prepared to buy the work. (All five of Heinlein's rules are available in a variety of places, including Rob Sawyer's web-site: http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm).

Personally speaking, several years ago I got the most scathing rejection I've ever received (from an editor I will refrain from naming) on a story I wrote titled, "Jeannie In A Bottle." The editor in question actually took the time to handwrite a note telling me the story was, among other things, "boring and predictable." I disagreed with him, so I stuck it in a new envelope and sent it to Gary Fry, editor of the British magazine Fusing Horizons. Same exact story. Didn't change a word. And Gary not only bought the story, he called it (forgive me if this sounds like bragging, but these are his exact words) "dazzlingly original, just the kind of thing I'm looking to publish." The point is, I believed it was a good story and trusted my instincts, and I'm (obviously) glad I did. It's vitally important to remember that all editors do not have the same tastes, interests, or needs.

Conversely, I've also had a few stories that were rejected several times and after I had enough distance from them, I was able to look at them objectively and say that they would never be published without major rewrites and so I abandoned them. So I guess the real answer is that if you do this long enough, you'll just know.

How's that for helpful?

"Tabloid Reporter To The Stars" - by Eric James Stone

(Ed's note - I saved this one until the end because (as Eric mentions) the essay contains spoilers and I wanted to give people as much of a chance as possible to read the story first. If you have not read the story yet, do yourself a favor and read it before you read this.)


Warning! Includes plot spoilers for "Tabloid Reporter to the Stars."

In early 2004 I sold a story called "The Man Who Moved the Moon." It was a combination of some fairly hard science fiction with a fairly ridiculous premise, and to this day it remains one of my favorites. So, having succeeded with that rather strange combination, I decided to try it again in time for the next Writers of the Future Contest deadline.

So I wrote a first contact story, using some speculative exobiology for the hard science parts. For the ridiculous premise, I dredged up an idle thought I'd had years before about Elvis appearing to aliens.

But what made the story work for me was the narrator. Less than a year before I wrote the story, reporter Jayson Blair was fired by the New York Times for having fabricated stories, and that's what gave me the idea of a disgraced reporter looking to redeem himself. The narrative voice allowed me to inject self-deprecating humor into the story.

Having finished the story, I titled it "The First Ambassador" and sent it off to WOTF.

I was extremely happy when it was rejected seven days later. (Happy? Yes! The reason they rejected it was that I had become ineligible for the contest because my previous submission had just won second place in its quarter.)

Without the pressure of the contest deadline, I submitted the story to some of my usual critiquers. The feedback I got was generally positive, but some people had a real problem with the ending. As originally written, the revelation of the first ambassador's identity came in the last line of the story, which made it feel like a punchline.

In order to set up the punchline a little more, I changed the title to "Tabloid Reporter to the Stars," but that wasn't enough. The story got rejected several times.

When Orson Scott Card asked me if I had anything I could submit for the new online magazine he was starting (and let me tell you, being asked was one of the biggest compliments of my writing career), this story was one of four I sent for his consideration, along with "Taint of Treason" (IGMS issue 1) and "Salt of Judas" (IGMS issue 2).

After Ed Schubert took over as IGMS editor, he read the story and asked if I would rewrite the ending to make it less like a punchline. We had a good discussion about the story when we met at Dragon*Con, and over the next few weeks I wrote a new ending that kept the Elvis element but added a resolution to the conflict between the scientists.

And that's the story behind the story.

Prodigal Son Returns

Apologies to all for disappearing like that. I went to London and then southern Italy for a while and assumed I would have access to a computer every so often. I won't bore you with details, but that proved to not to be the case (not that I really, really tried all that hard, mind you....).

I'll get the next Story Behind The Story up tomorrow and then share trip details later on. And speaking of trips, one of the eight million e-mails I came home to was an invitation to come to BaltiCon in May, which I will most likely attend. Hope to see you there.

"Wisteria" - by Ada Milenkovic Brown

People who don't write are always asking writers where we get our ideas. My personal writing process is this: Stuff happens. I look at the stuff from a weird spec fictional angle and it makes me think of a setting, a character, a situation. I write that down. When three or four things I wrote down look like they should be together, I figure out a story idea that incorporates them, write an outline, and fill in the gaps.

In this case the stuff that happened was:

1) I was thinking about how my husband is kind of like my own personal Green Man. He loves to garden and has taken the one and a half acres we live on and turned it from a lawn with two skinny saplings on it to this lush grove of sycamores, magnolias, pecan trees, fig bushes, and grapevines. I think of our yard as a personal metaphor of our life together.

2) A relative of ours felt guilty that she hadn't known how close to death her husband was in his last hours and had not stayed late enough at the care facility to be with him when he died.

3) I was driving through Grimesland, NC, and thought about the potential metaphor of setting a story about a gardener in a town named after dirt. (Actually, Grimes was a civil war general, but hey, this is fiction.)

My husband had recently put in a wisteria arbor in the yard, and I liked the Southern moodiness of the word wisteria, which conjures up other words like mysterious, hysteria, wistfulness, whispering. So I thought up a story idea about a woman married to a gardener, a woman who feels guilty that she wasn't with him when he died. She sees a Green Man sculpture and then begins to see her husband's face in the leaves of their wisteria gazebo.

Because I live in NC, I often write stories with Southern settings. The South has gothic and folklore elements that lend themselves well to fantasy. Since I was hoping to learn more about writing southern fantasy from Andy Duncan at Clarion West, I chose to write "Wisteria" his week, because it was my one southern idea. I got some additional feedback from Nisi Shawl, who was helping out at the workshop that week. She suggested using an African version of the Green Man in it, since I had made the protagonist African-American. She sent me reference materials on African agricultural deities.

Reading "Wisteria" made one of the other students at the workshop cry. I hoped that was a good sign.

And that's about it. Oh, one more thing. When I submitted the story to IGMS, the wisteria on our arbor bloomed for the first time, even though it was several months out of season. I wondered if that was an omen that Ed was going to publish the story. And what do you know? It was. I guess the Green Man is really out there.

"Miniature" - by Peter Friend

In 2005, Orson Scott Card came over to Wellington to run a two-day writing workshop immediately before iCon, the New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention, and I was lucky enough to attend. Our overnight writing exercise forced us out onto the streets to look for story ideas, and my writing partner and I found ourselves interviewing an elderly train enthusiast at the library. Oddly, he didn't seem all that interested in trains in general, yet at the same time clearly felt strong emotional links to trains he remembered.

As a science fiction writer, this struck me as a charmingly human foible, ideal to confuse any visiting alien anthropologists. As a model maker, the idea of model trains appealed - both more practical to write about than real trains, of which I knew little, and of course model trains are themselves symbols of real trains. Now I had a theme going. A story about symbols, miscommunication and misunderstanding. Perhaps a comedy.

But as I lay in bed that night, thinking about a possible plot (I do much of my best writing half-asleep at midnight), I realized I wanted more than two bewildered sentient creatures arguing with each other. Sure, we use things around us as symbols, as links to other things. But is that really so uniquely human? After all, Pavlov's famous dog understood perfectly well that a bell wasn't edible, merely a symbol of an expected actual meal. Why shouldn't aliens understand symbols too? Perhaps even better than we do.

By the time I woke up, I had a much deeper plot in mind - still with the alien anthropologist and the human interviewee, but now their misunderstandings were more subtle, and they had more in common than either realized. "Miniature" began there, as a hundred or so words scribbled on an index card during breakfast.

The synopsis was well received by the other workshop attendees, but wasn't yet a story. I knew Tom was an old man, using his model railway to remember his wife, but nothing else about him. Where did he live? What was his personality? What was the alien like? How did it communicate? What should each say out loud, and what should they actually mean? Would the story include other humans, other aliens? What was the relationship between humanity and the visiting aliens? Would the story take place over weeks, days, or just a few minutes? And oh, the historical research - what sort of trains rolled along New Zealand's railway tracks in the 1960s?

A dozen rewrites and many months later, I was finished. Naturally IGMS had to be my first choice of market.

Trivia note on the railway station names - "pumahara" is the Maori word for "memory", and "paenga kore" means "infinity". Not that either Tom or the alien know that, but I think they'd both appreciate the irony…