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…

"The Moon-Eyed Stud" - by Justin Stanchfield

The seeds for the Moon-Eyed Stud struck me, not surprisingly, on horseback. Actually, a lot of the things I write come to me while riding. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the hooves or creaking leather that lulls the mind off to that place where ideas pile up, waiting to be born. Or maybe it’s simply being outside, away from the clutter and clamor of modern life, that frees the sub-conscious enough to let random thoughts flow into a more coherent form. Or, most likely, being in the saddle is just a good place to daydream.

For the record, I raise cattle for a living. Writing is just another of those bad habits I’ve picked up along the way. Part of my job - the best part, by far - is gathering the cattle in October and bringing them home from the high pastures along the Continental Divide where they summer. The day this story came to me was in the middle of a typical Montana autumn, cold enough in the morning that I wished I had worn a heavier coat, so hot by afternoon that a flannel shirt felt too warm. I was riding with a friend named Ron Russell, one of that dying breed that shows Hollywood cowboys up as the patent forgeries they are, a man who has spent the better part of his life working stock throughout the western states. The cattle we were after, half a dozen stragglers holding out above the snow line, had given a pretty good fight, leading us down some of the steepest, nastiest real estate in Beaverhead County, (Yes, I really do live in a county called Beaverhead) but by the time we reached the river bottom all involved, horses, cattle and humans alike, were thoroughly worn out. We stopped to tie our coats behind our saddles, and Ron pulled a folded bag of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers from his vest.

“Hang on second,” he said. “I’m going to twist a smoke.”

I must have had a strange look on my face, because he went on to explain that when he was a young man in Wyoming, some of the old timers referred to making cigarettes as ‘twisting a smoke.’ At that moment I was hit by the image of John Garret leaning against the wall of an abandoned livery stable, rolling Bull Durham tobacco with cold fingers in a place he thought of as Hell.

Of course, Garret didn’t have name at point, and the plot was more sketch than portrait, but the basic story was there. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of fate, that we are given certain tasks or lessons to face and if we avoid them in this life they might well hound us into the next. I knew this story would be about a man obsessed with breaking the horse that killed him, a feral stud with a pale blue eye. I also knew it would be about coming to terms with the fact that sometimes the hardest thing in the world is admitting you can’t do it alone. And, I knew it would be about friendship. Beyond that, things were nebulous. Some of the plot fell into place easily, while some of it came harder, much of the story not finished until the day it was accepted. (Thanks, Edmund, for the help with the final revisions!)

And, in the end I suppose, I wanted a chance to write about the afterlife. It’s always intrigued me that Heaven - or Hell - is not just some shining city in the clouds or a lake of fire, but something more personal, something tailored to the individual. I think all of us have wondered at one time or another what, if anything, lies beyond death. And I also think most of us have given at least some thought to their own vision of Heaven. Mine just happens to look like Montana.

“Beats of Seven” - by Peter Orullian

The genesis of “Beats of Seven” is easy: It was an assignment.

A few years ago, I attended a writing workshop on the Oregon Coast—Lincoln City to be exact. One of the themes of the entire two-week boot camp was: Write fast and get out of your own way. The idea here, is that too many writers allow their critical voice to impede their creative voice, the result being greatly diminished productivity.

To that end, many of our assignments were given late in the day with an early next-morning deadline. Now, what I learned is that most writers can do in the area of 1000 words an hour. So, do the math. In three months, you should be able to write a novel. And that’s if you write just an hour a day, and you’re slow.

Anyway, on this particular short story assignment, I was also asked to do two things: use a sleepy, costal town like Lincoln City as my setting (part of the uber-assignment given to everyone); and work on “voice” (an exercise for me, in particular).

Each of the attending writers scurried out into the town to consider locations, gather details, look for inspiration. I hadn’t needed to do so; I’d seen my setting already.

A music store.

Which was perfect, since it got me to the second part of the story assignment: voice. For me, the easiest way into voice was to go straight to music. I’m a musician, and for those of you who are too, you’ve no need of an explanation here. For the rest of you, I’ll paraphrase by saying it involves things like timbre, phrasing, dynamics, note selection. All of which should be internalized and forgotten before you try to perform; just like studying the craft of writing, internalizing it, then allowing it to come out (subconsciously) through your fingers as you pound the keyboard.

Back to the music store. There is this great place in Lincoln City, right on Highway 1, that captured my imagination. I’d thought to myself on first seeing it: How does a music store thrive in such a small community? In point of fact, the place didn’t appear to be thriving much. Closer investigation led me to wonder if it was still in business at all. But amazingly, it had this whole large, dusty, neglected room of old pianos.

I was in heaven thinking of the possibilities for stories out of this corner of the world.

The other thing I should mention is that I’m taken with odd time signatures in music. It ain’t easy to dance to something written in 7/8 or 11/8, but I don’t dance much anyway.

All these things coalesced for me, as I imagined a sound engineer doing cheesy ocean-wave recordings (you see these in spas and new age shops all the time) because he can’t get another gig and is tired of the over-commercialization (and dilution) of Jazz music—think Kenny G.

Now, I just needed to write it all down.

I rushed to my room, which I simply must tell you about. This workshop on the coast was held in something of a writers warren. My room was about 7x10, and completely lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves (packed—no spaces—with books) save the door into the room and a door out the back of the large house.

No windows.

I loved it.

I imagined the worlds that rear door opened upon. That closed portal proved a wonderful leap point for stories as I sat in the dark, huddled over my laptop, typing like mad.

In about 3 hours I’d finished my story; it’s really rather short. But it felt complete, as it had allowed me to get to the heart of a few things. I was happy with the cadence and the character voices, too. Plus, I’d managed to underscore my own feelings about the power of music.

This second thing mostly came to me when I read the story back. And I recalled a conversation I had with David Morrell at World Horror 2000 in Denver years before. He and I spoke about the degree to which most writing is autobiographical in some sense. I can’t recount it all here, but since that conversation, I’ve been interested to look back on my writing (once its complete) and consider it anew.

The last bit of the back-story on “Beats of Seven” goes something like this. One of the writing instructors, Kris Rusch, at the two-week workshop read my story, and wrote simply at the top: Mail this!

I did no such thing, breaking one of Heinlein’s rules of writing—not to mention ignoring the advice of a successful fiction writer.

Then I happened to be interviewing Scott Card at E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) a while back. We got talking about writing, he mentioned his new digital magazine, and I dug up “Beats” and sent it in.

The day before my birthday, I got a note from Edmund expressing interest in the story. Made my day!

IGMS Issue Four Is Live

Now available: Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue Four, featuring -

"Tabloid Reporter To The Stars" - by Eric James Stone
"Call Me Mr. Positive" - by Tom Barlow
"Wisteria" - by Ada Milenkovic Brown
"Beats Of Seven" - By Peter Orullian
"Moon-Eyed Stud" - by Justin Stanchfield
"Miniature" - by Peter Friend
"Approaching Zero" - by Kelly Parks
new YA stories by David Lubar
and, as always, a new Ender's Universe Story (in progress)

www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

Next post here: more Stories Behind The Stories - Essays by authors in this issue about their story.

From The POV Of An Elephant

After all the hullabaloo over my friend's blog entry about reading submissions last week, it gives me immense pleasure to tell you that the story written partially from the POV of an elephant (the whole story isn't written that way) is going to appear in issue six of IGMS. Apparently the reader read the entire story, judged it on its merits, and liked it enough to pass along to me. I agreed that it was an excellent story and am going to publish it. It's actually a very touching story.

So you see, it's possible to find humor in a concept and still be professional enough to judge a story on its merits.

I love a happy ending.

(And before anyone reads too much into that last statement, I also consider and publish stories that don't have happy endings, so don't get hung up on that... ;-) )