The Smell of the Earth - by Joan Savage

I started writing “The Smell of the Earth” one day when I needed a break from the novel I was working on. I had been exploring, in the novel, how music affects those who play it, as well as those who hear it. So the Jongleurs and their world and their history were already deeply engrained in me, and the problem of music was chasing itself around inside my head.

I had been working on something so large-scale, with such huge problems facing the characters, that I really wanted to play with something more intimate, where the character only had one dilemma to face, one problem to tackle. But the novel was still stuck in my head. I kept mulling over the danger of how music could make its listeners happy but how that power, in the wrong hands, could be turned and used for something quite the opposite of happiness. So I began to wonder. What if another Jongleur had the same musical power as the main character in my novel, but he didn’t have her level of commitment to something beyond himself? What would a fundamentally good but self-centered man do with a power he didn’t see as dangerous? And that was when the protagonist, the Jongleur of this story, stepped onto the stage, and I met him for the first time.

When I write, I feel like I meet characters, not like I create them. It’s as if they already exist without me, and it’s through the process of writing about them that I learn to know them. So this story really began, for me, when I met this Jongleur.

He was sitting in the bar, mourning his dead wife, and I just happened to overhear a wizard ask him what he wanted. Which was exactly the question I wanted to ask him, so I suppose the wizard was doing my work for me. And because I’m a musician I guess I can confess that the Jongleur’s longing for greatness was my longing, at one point in my life (though I’m happy to say it’s not any more!). And his fear is the greatest fear of most of my musician friends—the fear of losing the use of a hand, or a finger, and being unable to play. I think the fear is deeper than the loss of livelihood. I think it’s a fear of silence—the silence of being unable to say the things you need to say.

I wish I could say that, once I had the initial concept and had met the characters, the story wrote itself. (I wish I could say any of my stories wrote themselves!) I knew from the beginning that the farmer’s young wife had traded away the farmer’s favourite pig, but it took me a long time before I knew what she had traded the pig for. (I read somewhere—I’m sorry I don’t remember where—that you should always take the third or fourth answer to a question you ask the story—never take the first answer. I have long lists of possible answers to story questions from this story.) As I wrote, the farmer kept asserting himself and developing a life and problems of his own, until he became a much more important character, and much more interesting to me, than I had originally intended. His life in some ways began to mirror the life of the Jongleur—or at least enough that the Jongleur began to see it that way, and learn empathy.

I have to confess that the wizard and her motivations remained a mystery to me long after I thought the final draft of this story was done. I didn’t find her interesting and, I have to admit, didn’t spend as much time thinking about her as I should have. It wasn’t until someone pointed out to me that she needed a motivation more real than the stock motivation I had assigned her that I went back to the story and began to see the wizard as a three-dimensional character. So I sat down and asked her the questions—who are you and why are you doing this? And I not only learned her story, I also discovered that, if I ever go back to explore this historical period of the Jongleurs’ world, she is probably the character I would most like to follow around and write about.

The Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe - by Sharon Shinn

"The Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe" was one of those stories that just comes together for you when the disparate elements of ordinary life suddenly crystallize into a recognizable pattern. My sources were wildly different conversations and interactions I'd had over two or three months with a handful of different people. My friend Mark had been forwarding me junk emails with bizarrely lovely nonsense subject lines. (I quote actual emails in the story, as well as Mark's comments about poetry, which is why I named a character Mark). My friend Laurie had been complaining how her house steals objects from her (in one week, her cell phone charger, her iPod, and her checkbook). My brother Ray had explained how such thefts could be remotely possible, given what we know about quantum physics. I had been in a seminar where the ringtone on a stranger's cell phone was Pachelbel's "Canon." I had recently re-set my mother's engagement diamond into a filigreed white gold ring.

I so often write alternate-world fantasy that I don't get much chance to draw on the mundane details of everyday life when I'm putting together a story. Maybe I enjoyed writing this one so much because all the elements were so familiar. When I read it at the World Fantasy Convention in 2006, someone in the audience asked me if I'd just looked around my house to find the objects I'd described. I admit, I own boxed sets of the first couple seasons of "Moonlighting"…and a purple sweater…but no turtle…

"After This Life" by Janna Silverstein

The first germ of this story was planted when I saw a news piece about a prison inmate named Tommy Silverstein. He’s no relation of mine (though the fact of our identical surnames certainly drew my curiosity), but he is the longest held prisoner in total solitary confinement in America, possibly the world, maintained at a supermax prison in Colorado. I was fascinated and horrified by every angle of the story. It led me to try to learn more about him and other prisoners, to read the online diaries of solitarily confined and death row inmates, and to think deeply about how I felt about such treatment.

The second germ of this story came out of the fact that I am an unrepentant fan of Star Trek and have been interested in the idea of teleportation for years. I always wondered, among other things, where the developer of such technology would find human test subjects.

The last germ came from a challenge that writer Michael Heibert and I posed to each other, to write a story in which a coin played a prominent part. I wrote the first draft of this story with these three ideas in mind. I didn’t go into it with the idea that a parent-child relationship would play any role in the story at all. That theme, however, crops up again and again in my writing. I have learned to let it be, so once that element appeared, I knew it was there to stay.

It was science fiction writer Michael Burstein who led me to reading more thoroughly about the theory behind real teleportation. If I was going to write science fiction, he insisted (and quite wisely), the science had to be there. Part of me rebelled; I just wanted to write the story, dammit, and not bother myself with all that pesky research. He was right, of course. The reading was fascinating. In the end, the horror of what I discovered—that every teleportation would be a death—took me that last step toward making this story what it ultimately became when I submitted it to IGMS. Edmund’s insightful revision requests made me think about who would be willing to sacrifice lives to develop such technology.

Friends who read early drafts criticized my softening the details of prison life, suggested that I’d made Jake too smart, too sensitive, too sympathetic. But if I learned anything by reading all those inmate diaries, it’s that prisons are full of people who are intelligent, articulate, sensitive, and very sharp. It’s a frightening thing to consider: that people who share characteristics that we on the outside value highly are incarcerated for committing acts that we could never conceive of committing ourselves. This is the line between us, and it’s a fine one indeed. It wasn’t my intention to diminish the horror of what such people have done with their own hands. It was one of my goals, however, to find the animal commonality between us, to consider what it means to look into the abyss and the possibility of coming out the other side. To suggest that Hell may be what we create for ourselves rather than anything supernatural. If I haven’t dwelled on the details of prison life, if they don’t appear harsh enough, and if I haven’t espoused one position or the other on the question of capitol punishment, well, these issues aren’t really the point of the story.

I didn’t decide to deal with Louisa’s spirituality until very late in the writing process. By the second-to-last draft (and this story went through more drafts than almost anything else I’ve ever written), I found myself wondering if the story shouldn’t have been told from her point of view. Ultimately, she changes more than Jake does. On the other hand, I wanted very much to be inside Jake’s head when the teleportation started, when he faced his own end in the wake of the deaths he caused, to see where his thoughts might lead, to feel the process as it occurred.

If I hope readers come away with anything from “After This Life,” it’s that they find themselves wondering about the costs of technology to our own humanity. It’s also that they find an awareness of how fragile our lives are, how our choices rest on an edge fine and wicked as a paper cut, and ultimately to find some kind of compassion for the people around them, each one being faced with the same decisions moment by moment every single day.

The Braiding - by Pat Esden

I believe that in every profession there are moments when a person stops using logic, truly focuses on their work and acts automatically in a sort of hypnotic state--a state of magic.

It was with this notion in mind that I decided to write a series of fantasy tales about women artisans. Glassblowing, with its intrinsic beauty and connection to alchemy (and because it was an art I knew nothing about) felt like the perfect place to begin. Besides, I was quite sure there had to be more to the art form than sticking a blob of molten glass on a pipe and blowing.

Research is where I began my search for the details of setting and character that I needed to take my story seed and make it blossom. I knew nothing about the history of glass, but I quickly uncovered fascinating details that were beyond anything that I could have created out of thin air.

I don’t want to spoil the story, but I was totally unprepared for the similarity between the freedoms modern day women enjoy and those experienced by woman glassblowers during the early years of the Venetian Republic. Actually, I was shocked to discover women could become master glassblowers. The opportunities available to these women glassblowers (or women fortunate enough to belong to glass blowing families) exceeded those available to other women and most men. They could marry a man of any level of society--even royalty, they were more highly educated than most men . . . but these benefits and freedom came at a cost.

Because glass was the foundation of the Venetian Republic economy, no glassblower could ever leave the boundaries of the Venetian Republic or they would be assassinated out of fear that the secrets of working glass could fall into another country’s hands.

This research into glass working and Venice’s past gave me my main character: Iseau, a creative woman both liberated and imprisoned.

Now that I had the time period and the main character I moved on to learning about the art itself.

Armed with a newly learned and very basic idea of how glass is worked and a mental list of questions I wanted to ask, I drove to Waterbury Vermont where Ziemke Glassblowing Studio is located. By this time, I knew I wanted my main character to make a heart, so that was my first question. Can it actually be done? I also wanted to know things you can’t learn in books: what the furnace’s heat feels like, how much do the tools weigh, how balanced does the pipe feel in your hand? I wanted to watch the glass blower’s movements, see which muscles he used. How strong would Iseau have to be? Would she still appear feminine? Did the work require an assistant . . . little details that make a story come to life.

In my short visit to Ziemke Glassblowing I learned more than I ever could have ever hoped for.

Glassblower, Terry Pagel was working that day. He is not only an amazing artist, but also has a true love of his craft and is a vault of knowledge. He talked about the history of Venetian glassblowing from an insider’s point of view, about early alchemy used to create clear class and other early trade secrets. But beyond that, he gave me a glassblower’s perspective on how writers often misrepresent glassblowing to a laughable degree. Then he did the most amazing thing: he and his assistant created a heart from molten glass while I watched.

I left with my mind overflowing with ideas. Five minutes into my drive home, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and I wrote the glassblowing scene for “The Braiding”. Watching and talking to Terry Pagel put me into a writer’s “state of magic” and at the same time had allowed me to feel (as much as a non-glassblower can) like I was actually holding the tools and feeling the heat.

So if the history in “The Braiding” feels true and what happens when Iseau takes up her tools feels right, it’s because to a great extent they are accurate. And personally, I like to think that the magic in the story is nothing more than a magnification of what any person experiences when they focus on their chosen profession, relax and let their mind slip into a hypnotic state.

Here’s a link to Ziemke Glassblowing Studio—enjoy.

http://www.zglassblowing.com/glassblowing.htm

You can find another of my woman artisan tales, “Suck of Clay, Whir of Wheel,” at AnthologyBuilder

http://www.anthologybuilder.com/

Silent As Dust - by James Maxey

I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, in a little house on Courtland Road that was full of hidden rooms. Most adults probably wouldn't have been aware of these rooms; they were really just gaps and spaces leftover by architectural flourishes. For instance, above the front door of the house, there was a little gable in the roof with a window in it. The gable was purely decorative. But, in the attic, where the roof sloped down, there was a paneled wall about a yard high. If you pulled off one of the panels, there was a wedge-shaped crawlspace where my mother used to store Christmas decorations. If you wriggled inside onto the plywood floor, then crawled along it until the plywood ended, you could continue along the rafters until you reached the little gabled room with the window. It couldn't have been more than a yard wide and deep, maybe four feet tall at the midpoint. There were loose boards across the rafters that formed a place to sit. This tiny forgotten room was useless space for any adult, but for a young kid, it was a top-secret clubhouse.

This wasn't the only secret place. There was a pretty cool cave under the basement stairs. There was also the kitchen table with the drop down leaves. With those down and chairs at the ends of the table, it was a practically a fortress. I can still recall being able to crawl under beds, or climb inside kitchen cabinets. The world just offers more spaces for children than adults.

All these hidden spaces were in a little two bedroom house. I haven't been back as an adult, but, if you didn't count the basement and attic (which weren't heated), I'm guessing the whole house was maybe 900 square feet. Growing up, however, it felt like an enormous kingdom that was forever yielding some new secret. I remember digging in the dirt near the front porch and finding a little plastic army man. An archeologist pulling a golden cup out of the sands of Egypt couldn't have been as happy.

"Silent as Dust" has its origins in those childhood explorations. There's a mansion a mile away from me in Hillsborough called "Seven Hearths" that's reported to be haunted, so I loosely based "Seven Chimneys" upon it. And, like the town of Seven Chimneys in the story, Hillsborough is a city where a core of large houses downtown give way to old mobile homes and tin-roofed houses just a few blocks away. I myself live in the tin-roof and mobile home district, in a cinderblock house about 900 square feet in size. I actually have a conventional roof, with a decorative gable above the front door. In the attic, there's a panel that can be pulled aside, revealing the rafters beyond.

Alas, I've never ventured into that dark, narrow crawl space to discover if the tiny gable holds its own secret room. I'm 6'2" and some of the useful spaces of my childhood would be extremely uncomfortable to explore.

Still, I sometimes wonder about that space, and whether any children ever discovered it. If I were ever to crawl into it, I would discover some childhood treasure? Perhaps a green plastic army man, forever standing sentinel over a forgotten kingdom?

A Little Business

Working hard to get issue seven of IGMS out as soon as possible. It should be in the next week to ten days, but it really can't be soon enough for me; I'm really looking forward to getting this issue out there. It's got one of the strongest line-ups of stories we've published yet.

Here's a quick look at the TOC:

Cover story: "Silent As Dust," by James Maxey
"Unryhmed Couplets of The Universe" by Sharon Shinn
"The Braiding" by Pat Esden
"The Smell of The Earth" by Joan Savage
"After This Life" by Janna Silverstein
"Lost Soul" by Marie Brenan
and Part II (and the conclusion) of last issue's novelette:
"The Price of Love" by Alan Schoolcraft

And, as usual, new stories from Orson Scott Card and David Lubar.

And speaking of stories, let me mention a few points to the folks who already have or are thinking about submitting stories:

1) I'm heavily bought on fantasy of all kinds and long stories in both the SF and fantasy areas. My greatest need is for SF under 7,000 words. If you have something long or fantasy that you think is absolutely perfect for IGMS, go ahead and send it in; but know that your best chance of selling me something right now is with shorter SF.

2) I don't remember if I've mentioned this here before or not, but I am also now working as managing editor of a new nationally distributed women's magazine. It's a much better job for many reason than my old one (editing that regional business magazine, which, as you may recall, drove me insane at times). The first issue of that magazine is set to come out in April, but our publisher was recently invited by the NFL to come to Hawaii in February for the Pro Bowl and speak at a luncheon the NFL holds for the wives of the players. It's a fantastic opportunity, but it also means that we're all going to be working like crazy on putting together a smaller-sized sampler issue of our magazine for the publisher to take along with her. Basically that means my time for reading IGMS submissions is going to be severely limited until the end of January. Sorry; I hate making you wait as much as you hate waiting, but it's not everyday the NFL invites someone to speak and we have to make the most of this.

3) If I get a moment to write another of the "Five Things I've learned About Writing" before the next issue of IGMS comes out I will. If not, look for the "Stories Behind The Stories" in issue seven to start here as soon as the issue goes live, and then I'll get back to my "Five Things" when the SBTS have all run.

I hope everyone had a great holiday, whatever holiday it may be that you celebrate. Do make sure you catch the new issue of IGMS when it comes out. I don't say this lightly or often because I want you to take me seriously when I say it, but this is going to be one of the best overall issues we've ever had.

Metaphors, Similes, and Analogies, Oh My...

One of the (other) things I've learned about writing - especially in the area of non-fiction, is that a good writer will find ways to recycle a piece for more than one purpose. Applying that lesson to myself, I took one of the ideas I had for this blog (and the "5 Things I've Learned About Writing" series I'm supposed to be doing) and wrote a speech for my Toast Master's club about Metaphors, Similes, and Analogies. I mention this upfront because I'm sure you'll notice the voice of this piece is different from my usual posts. When I write a speech for Toast Masters it tends to sound much more like more normal speaking 'voice' than when I write for print.

Metaphors, Similes, and Analogies, Oh My…

I was reading an article in National Geographic this past summer abut the intelligence of swarms. It talked about how any large group - everything from bugs to birds to a herd of buffalo - can take on an intelligence much greater than that of the individual components of the group – and how scientists are applying some of the principals of swarms to solve human problems. Included in that story was an example of a trucking company that had developed a computer model for routing its trucks based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants, a species of ant known for laying trails by depositing pheromones.

Everybody get that? Let me repeat it: a trucking company developed a computer model for routing trucks based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants, a species known for laying trails by depositing pheromones.

Okay, I like to pretend I’m a reasonably intelligent guy, but my first reaction was, “What…?”

But here’s the thing: In the next paragraph, the writer of that article gave me something I could sink my teeth into. He gave me an analogy. He said that what the ants (and therefore the trucking company) were doing was like when someone goes into the forest to collect berries. Over time a path is worn in the ground to the best places to find berries.

Now that I understood. Algorithms and ant pheromones? Not so much. Berries in the woods? Now you’re talking my language. And that’s kind of ironic, really, because, the language we’re talking about is pictures. Word pictures.

Writers (and speakers) are all trying to communicate a message, and to do so as clearly and effectively as possible. So what I want to talk about today is the power of metaphors, similes, and analogies. I’m not going to bore you with dictionary definitions of these terms, but the essence of all three is that they describe something by comparing it to something else.

There are a lot of ways to do this, and a lot of reasons to do this. You might be trying to describe something unusual – Argentine ants and their pheromones, for instance - so you compare it to something people are more familiar with. This helps them understand what you’re saying.

On the other hand, you might be talking about something very basic, like writing, and want to jazz it up. Writing in and of itself isn’t terribly hard; you’ve all been doing it since the first or second grade. But you want to make it more interesting, to catch people’s attention, so you might describe it using cooking terms. You might say that writing a story is like cooking a meal, and that if all you give people is meat and potatoes, they certainly won’t go hungry, but nobody’s going to rave about your cooking, either.

If you want to present a meal that really satisfies, you’ve got to spice it up a little. You’ve got to throw is some oregano, some thyme, maybe a little parsley on the side. Well, okay, skip the side of parsley. Nobody likes that stuff. Using parsley as a garnish is like using clichés in your writing. Don’t waste people’s time.

You also have to be careful not to get carried away. If you noticed, I got kind of carried away with my analogy here and it turned from using cooking to describe writing, into using writing to describe cooking. As with herbs and spices in good cooking, you want to make sure you don’t over-do it. A little salt makes everything taste better, too much and it overpowers the meal. Everything in moderation.

Another advantage of using metaphors, similes, and analogies is this: they help people remember your keys points. By using one of these comparative devices, you are subliminally telling people (by placing extra emphasis on it) what your most important points are. That helps to reinforce those points in their minds.

Let’s say you’re writing a magazine article about gardening, and you’re trying to describe the perfect soil to plant rosemary in. And say the perfect soil for planting rosemary is rich but pale and very dry. Well, that’s not terribly evocative. But if you say it needs to be rich, pale, and very dry – kind of like Bill Gates… Hopefully you’ll get a laugh. But more importantly, you’ve reinforced your point, and made it one people won’t forget.

The last thing you want to remember is to make sure your metaphors and similes work with the subject matter you’re trying to describe. I remember one time a friend told me about someone who came to his writer’s group with a mystery story. And in this story the author had portrayed a particularly gruesome killing. He had the police at the crime scene trying to figure out ‘who done it,’ and suddenly the author describes the fingerprints the detective found like this: “Detective Spade studied the bloody print on the victim’s slashed throat and couldn’t help but notice how much the swirling pattern reminded him of the tiny whirlpool his toilet made when he flushed it.” That doesn’t add anything; in fact, it’s a terrible distraction. It’s counter-productive. You have to make sure your comparative descriptions fit with the tone of the subject matter.

Metaphors. Similes. Analogies. You can call them word pictures if that makes you happy. But I would say that more important than what you call them, or the differences between them, is remembering the power they have when used correctly. The power to clarify, the power to enliven, the power to reinforce. The power to make your writing really stand out – as if it were covered with Argentine ant pheromones.

Would You Stop?

Suppose you were an employee at a bank, and you knew that millions and millions of dollars were kept in that bank. The amount varied, but there was always at least a couple million on hand at all times. Now suppose you found out that not just one or two, but many, many employees were stealing from the bank - on a regular basis. Now take this insane hypothetical situation one step further and suppose you learned that anyone caught stealing from the bank, no matter how much they took, never got a worse penalty than being fired from the bank. They didn't have to serve time, they didn't have to pay back any of the millions they stole; they just couldn't work at the bank any more. And they had to get caught stealing at least three times before they were fired. Would you stop stealing from that bank? Ever?

If this situation sounds more familiar than it does bizarre, I know something about you: You are a baseball fan. Because the situation I just described is the way baseball is dealing with the issue of steroids, HGH, and other drugs banned by all reputable professional sports.

Now I know that most of the folks who read this blog are science fiction and fantasy fans (and/or writers), and baseball is probably the last thing you expect to hear about from me. But I'm interested in other things besides SF/F and baseball happens to be one of them. I'm a big baseball fan, and as such I'm thoroughly disgusted by the response (or lack thereof) from baseball clubs - and especially baseball players - to the Mitchell Report, which came out yesterday. Disgusted, but hardly surprised.

Those hypothetical bank employees I was talking about earlier are the baseball players of the past decade, and until someone (the commissioner, the owners, somebody) gets really - and I mean really - hammer-down, take-no-shit serious about this issue, it is not going to change. And in a further does of ugly reality, change is not going to occur until something hurts the owners or the players where they hurt the most - their bankbooks. And that will have to come from the fans, one ticket at a time. So the question I opened with - Would You Stop? - has as much to do with fan attendance of Major League Baseball games as it does to the players who are cheating to gain a competitive advantage. Because that's the only things that's going to make areal difference.

Are the fans or the players likely stop, or even cut back? I find it less likely than the bank robbery scenario I opened this blog entry with.

My (continued) condolences to true baseball fans.

__________________________

We now return you to your regularly scheduled SF programming...

First Peek At The IGMS Antho

Got this in the mail today; it's a sneak peek of the cover of the IGMS antho coming out next summer. It's like an early Christmas present, with the lone drawback that it makes me wish the actual book was coming out sooner. C'est la vie...

Write Because You Love To

I debated titling this post "A Harsh Dose of Reality," but that sounded scary and I didn't want to scare anyone off with the title. I thought I'd wait and do it with my first sentence. It's important to note that I'm not here to throw a bucket of ice water on anyone's dreams. It's important to chase your dreams - whatever they may be - with all the vigor and passion you can muster. But there are also certain realities that must to be faced. Arguing with them is like arguing with gravity; you can say as often as you like that you don't believe in gravity, but if you step off that third floor balcony without making the proper preparations, you will have some unpleasant consequences to deal with.

And the first dose of reality is this: publishing is a business. Notice, I didn't say writing is a business. Writing can be a business, but it can also be a lot of other things. That's why you need to know why you are writing. I'll come back to that in a minute.

Publishing, however, is always a business. And your short story or novel or essay or magazine article or whatever it is that you write is a bottle of ketchup to a publisher. It is a product to be marketed and moved and placed and, ultimately, consumed. And with writing, as with ketchup, the better quality the product, the better it is going to sell. So by all means, take all the time you need in order to create the highest quality piece of work you can. Baby that story, love it, agonize over its development.

And then send it out into the marketplace. Because unless you're going to spend your entire "career" writing for your Great Aunt Tilly, that is where your stories are going to have to go. And be prepared to deal with the accompanying realities of said harsh marketplace.

Now, I have a feeling at this point that you're struggling with a disconnect between the idea of stories going out into a harsh marketplace and the title of this post, "Write Because You Love To." Let me connect the dots for you as succinctly as possible, with a series of question and answers.

Do you need to produce the highest quality writing possible in order to get published? Of course.

Are you going to get rejected? Of course.

Are you going to put a lot of hours into writing, hours that could be spent with friends and family; watching TV or movies; hiking, biking, gardening, reading, or whatever else makes you happy? Of course (if you're serious).

Are you going to make a lot of money as a writer (even though you've make all these sacrifices)? Of course NOT.

And what one thing is going to see you through all of this? What one thing is going to ensure that you do produce the highest quality of writing you can? What one thing is going to make you get up tomorrow morning and do it all again? What one thing--

All right, enough already. I'm sure I've made my point.

The answer, of course, is Loving What You Do.

So hold on to that. It's what (I hope) got you started in the first place. The day you start writing only for the money, you're in trouble. I say "only" because there's nothing wrong with wanting to be paid for what you do. The epitome of success is getting paid for doing something you love. But you see, there's that word: Love. Getting paid for something you love requires the love.

And I've learned that you're much more likely to achieve it if you keep sight at all times on the reason you started writing in the first place.

I wish you nothing but success.

Five Things I've Learned About Writing

Here is the beginning of the series posts I promised regarding things I've learned about writing. As I mentioned earlier, after writing a series of excellent essays on this subject himself, James Maxey has issued a challenge to a handful of other writers to do the same.

The topics I've decided to cover are:


Write Because You Love To

Metaphors, Similes, And Analogies, Oh My

The Devil Is In The Details

Always Say Yes

The Best Way To Learn To Write



I'm not promising that I'll deliver them in that order, as this is a rough draft of my plan. But then, isn't the real work of writing in the rewriting. Hmm, maybe that should be on my list, too.

Oh, great. Now you've got me thinking, and that never turns out well...

New Freak Added To The Show

I’m very pleased to announce that starting in January of 2008,
IGMS’s monthly book reviews will be written by Tobias S.
Buckell. Tobias is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction
writer and  professional blogger who grew up in Grenada, the 
British Virgin  Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has
published over 30 short stories in various magazines and
anthologies. His first two novels are out from Tor in book-
stores near you, and his third, Sly Mongoose, is  due out in
2008. You can find him at www.TobiasBuckell.com.

Highly qualified, Tobias had previously written book reviews
for Kirkus and his grandmother on his father’s side. He
underwent a rigorous interview process, wherein I said, “Hey,
want to write some book reviews for us?” He replied with a
cagey, “Well…” I countered, saying, “We pay in fame, fortune,
and a player to be named later, but not much cash.” I knew I
had his attention. So we thumbwrestled for it (best of seven,
I took him in six tightly fought matches) and the rest is,
as they say, history.

Welcome, Tobias. We’ll be expecting freakishly great things
from you.

Whateverville

Wow, I can't believe it's been a whole month since I last posted anything on this blog. I was off-line for about a week because of my harddrive crash, and once I got back onto my computer I was so far behind, in so many areas, that I never got close to this blog. The good news is that I did manage to recover nearly everything. The bad news is that "nearly everything" isn't quite the same as "everything," and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason that what got lost and what did not.

I now have a new laptop and a new external harddrive and have become, at least for the moment, the mayor of Backup Town. Hopefully I won't ever need to be prepared for such an event again, but in case I do I now have a 250 GB insurance policy.

Issue seven of IGMS will be out in about four weeks and I'm pretty excited. I think it's one of the best issues we've ever published. If the cover story, "Silent As Dust," by James Maxey doesn't end up in a bunch of Year's Best anthologies, there's something wrong with the anthologists of the world. It's a ghost story unlike any you've ever read before. We also have "Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe," by Sharon Shinn, author of the mega-popular series of books, The Alleluia Chronicles, as well as the conclusion of the novelette begun last issue, "The Price of Love," by Alan Schoolcraft. Add in "The Braiding," by Pat Esden, "The Smell of the Earth," by Joan Savage, "After This Life," by Janna Silverstein, and "Lost Soul," by Marie Brennan, and you've got one heck of a pile of great stories.

Speaking of James Maxey, James has been writing some excellent posts over on his blog, Whateverville, about things he's learned about writing over the years. If you're a writer, or even someone with an interest in the writing process, do yourself a favor and pop over there to check them out. When you're done reading them, you'll notice that James has tagged me to write a series of my own essays on the same subject. In a brief but all-to-common flash of insanity I accepted his challenge and plan to have the first one posted here on Side-Show Freaks by the end of this week. Tune in then for some of my wisdom for the ages (and whole lot of other fertilizer that smells suspiciously like cow manure...)

Sorting Through The Wreckage

I'm back online for the first time in a week or so; last Tuesday my harddrive crashed and it took me until this past weekend to get online at all. I've got a tech guy working to see what can be salvaged off the old harddrive but the first thing he told me when I called him was to expect the worst (that was encouraging...). It happened while I was trying to back some documents up onto a flashdrive and the problem appears to have begun in the flashdrive and cascaded into the computer's hardrrive, taking down both in one fell swoop.

If you've submitted a story to IGMS that doesn't mean your story is lost, because we keep back-up copies of all stories on the managing editor's computer. But it does mean that some extra patience is going to be called for while I sort through them all, trying to remember which I rejected, which I haven't read yet, which I asked for rewrites on, etc etc.

Final drafts of the stories for the Winter Issue (number seven) had already been forwarded to the managing editor, so that issue will still come out on schedule, and I'm sure we have enough time before the Spring Issue (number eight) to get this all sorted out, so the delays should be limited to reply-times to writers who've submitted. My apologies to all affected.

I'll be up in Saratoga Springs, NY, for this year's World Fantasy Conference (that's this week, Nov. 1 - 4; I fly home on the 5th). Then I'll get back to sorting out this mess. Today's priority is getting though the thirteen finalists for Apex Digest's 3rd annual Halloween story contest, which are due back to editor Jason Sizemore by tomorrow (I think... Or was it Wed.?).

Thank God we have computers to simplify our lives...

Great Mother, Great Father - by William Saxton

Hurricane Katrina and the Weltangschauung

On Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The destruction was horrendous.

All that week, every news program focused on relief efforts. What was wrong? Was the government doing enough? But people weren't content merely to watch TV talking heads report; they wanted to help. Universities nationwide offered free tuition to displaced students. It seemed every web site I saw had at least one link: "Click here to help Katrina victims!" By Thursday the general discussion group at Hatrack (sister site to this one in a way -- they're both Orson Scott Card's contributions) had three threads sharing places to donate.

Then, Sunday, the New York Times published an editorial by famous novelist Anne Rice, decrying America's indifference to the suffering. "During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us 'Sin City,' and turned your backs."

The world she described certainly wasn't one I'd been seeing. What kind of world would it be, if her perception were accurate? (This question led directly to my story "Great Mother, Great Father," in which people truly do turn their backs on the weak and the suffering, and are proud of it.)

Imagine a world in which the nation could look at a city in terrible trouble, shrug, and say, "Why should I care?" As John Lennon would say, it isn't hard to do. We all, I believe, have selective areas of compassion and disregard: abortion, the death penalty, or the suffering of animals. But these days, most of us at least pretend to care when an innocent and articulate adult is in jeopardy of life or limb. (Hypocritical, sometimes, but hypocrisy isn't the worst thing: At least it shows you have standards.)

It didn't have to be this way. Consider the Maya. In their religion, one of the marks of wisdom was cultivating indifference to the suffering of others (and, to be fair, to one's own). The ancient Maya might well have shrugged at reports of hurricane-caused deprivation. When you've stood by and watched people being ritually mutilated, it shouldn't be a problem to hear that people are at risk of thirst or rioting.

Consider also the imperial Japanese. Brutality to the weak was not simply human failing; it was custom. If their treatment of Chinese forced laborers is any indication, they wouldn't have seen a point in getting clean water to the Astrodome.

Finally, consider the Nazis. They did support benevolence to their own kind (that is, ethnic Germans), but cultivated brutality toward others as a virtue. They would have been happy to have Katrina save them the trouble of killing non-Aryans.

Rice's op-ed to the contrary, our civilization looks good by comparison. Admittedly people often don't live up to their beliefs. Even if your world view says "love all mankind," you still might ignore the suffering of others, or even inflict it, as history has shown. But it could be worse: our society could urge us to stifle our compassion, to instead stick it to the loser and torture the helpless. Too farfetched? Remember the Vikings. For that matter, remember fourth grade.

Did we just luck out?

In a way, if you believe in luck. The view of right and wrong that has spread itself over most of the world came from a tiny corner of the Middle East. There, the only God whose opinion mattered kept telling his people to give to the poor and help the helpless. By our standards, the ancient Israelites were brutal -- but our standards came from their standards. Their moral competition came not from Mother Teresa or Up With People, but from the Canaanites, who burned their babies for the god Moloch. We can condemn Abraham and God in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac for even considering human sacrifice, but the big news then was that you could be totally devoted to your god and still not murder your family. I consider this progress.

We've made more progress since, and a good thing. But we made it by expanding and deepening this standard of humane treatment. Good thing we didn't expand and deepen the Assyrian view of the world. Then we wouldn't be angry about the Spanish Inquisition and witch-burning; we'd wonder why it had to stop just when it was getting good.

But in another sense, our current state of affairs wasn't luck at all. It's a fair bet that if a society condones some horrific practice (cannibalism, say, or sex with children), that society is a small tribe in a remote area. Something about such practices cause the societies that promote them not to prosper enough to spread themselves. By contrast, the world views that spread themselves and their societies the farthest have this in common: they accept the dignity of the individual. When people say, "All religions teach pretty much the same thing, so if we just adhered to that core..." I always want to say, "All the religions we think about today, you mean." There have been plenty of others.

We shouldn't be complacent: horrible world views may die out, but it's not inevitable and not instantaneous. Human sacrifice lasted for a long time. Slavery lasted millennia after that. If Hitler had gotten the bomb, today mercy to strangers might be merely a quaint custom in areas the Nazis hadn't gotten around to colonizing yet.

So let's be grateful to the giants whose shoulders we stand on, and determine to be giants ourselves. Somebody has to. We might have another hurricane.

The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race - by Cat Rambo

As part of my free-lancing existence, I write the occasional encyclopedia article, with topics that have included Technology and Science in the 80s, Lydia Pinkham, modern Christian philosophy, poetry, video games, Thenmuli Rajaratnaam, and Dean R. Koontz. I love the grab-bag quality of these assignments – the press sends me a huge list, I send back a much shorter list of perhaps a dozen of the things I'd be interested in writing about, and then I get assigned one or two.

No matter what I end up writing about, it's a chance to do some fine-tuned research of the kind that uncovers story ideas. Many of the articles focus on a period of history that fascinates me: late nineteenth century America. I love the era as a font to draw story ideas from – it's the collision of a number of social movements, including abolition, women's suffrage, spiritualism, free love, temperance – the list goes on and on. And characters abound there, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lucretia Mott, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. I've written several stories so far written in a fantasy-influenced version of that period and I have a rough idea for an alternative history novel centering on the figures of Victoria Woodhull and Lucy Stone somewhere down the line, in which Barnum may play a part as well.

I discovered Jumbo as the result of one such assignment, for an encyclopedia of historical events: a brief essay on the acquisition of the Ringling Brothers Circus by Barnum & Bailey. The more I researched circus history, the more interesting the stories became, until one in particular pushed at me to become fiction as well. The majority of the details are modeled from the oddities of real life history: Jumbo's end is true to life, as well as the details of what happened afterward. Barnum's telegram is taken in its entirety from one he sent, and Matthew Scott did raise the elephant from the sickly infant he rescued from a Parisian zoo. The original title was taken from Barnum's billing for Jumbo: "the towering monarch of his race, whose like the world will never see again," which Edmund made me cut in half.

Feelings about the rights of circus animals cover a wide range, and I tend to fall on the liberal side of the fence, but here I've presented Jumbo as one of the characters because the story is primarily his. At the time I wrote it, I didn't think that writing from an elephant's pov was particularly daring – I'd just seen a friend's story from the pov of an intelligent weapon published and received well. I make no pretense of knowing how an elephant thinks, but research for the elephant part included Temple Grandin's ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION and THE PIG THAT SANG TO THE MOON by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Some readers who've seen my work elsewhere may remember the picture painting elephant, Khwaam, in "Foam on the Water" – there will undoubtedly be more elephants in works to come, and I'm hoping to see another Barnum-related piece or two as well.

A SPEAR THROUGH THE HEART - By Cherith Baldry

The story takes place in an alternate history that I’ve used elsewhere. In 1511, Henry VIII of England and his wife Katherine of Aragon had a son, also named Henry, who died when he was only a few weeks old. I have tried to imagine what would have happened if this child had lived to grow up and succeed his father. With the succession secure, Henry would have had no need of a divorce; there would have been no break with the Roman Catholic Church. England – and later Britain – would have remained politically and culturally much closer to Europe. However, as the story indicates, some things would have remained the same…

The first version of this story focused much more on the relationship between Crispin and Lucas. I’d written about half of it, and was finding it heavy going, when my computer’s hard disc crashed. This story and one other – which had already been accepted for publication – were the only items not backed up. Clearly Version One was never meant to see the light of day. By the time I stopped complaining and settled down to write Version Two, I’d seen ways of opening up the story so that it took a much wider view of what might have been taking place in seventeenth century Oxford.

The story touches on several areas that I find interesting: history, art, alchemy and theology. The Oxford setting is close to my heart as I studied there, and important events in my life took place there. Cardinal College was the original name of Christ Church, founded by Cardinal Wolsey, who fell from power because of his failure to arrange Henry’s divorce. In this time-line Wolsey presumably retained his office and saw his college project to completion; I’ve assumed, however, that the college would have developed in a similar way and I’ve retained the bell, Old Tom, which hangs in the gatehouse and still rings 101 times each night to call each individual scholar home.

My main difficulty in writing Version Two was structural: where to begin, how to guide the reader through the various preliminaries – Crispin’s meeting with Stanford, his commission, his discovery of Stanford’s alchemy and meeting with Lucas – which had to be established before getting down to business with the Grand Inquisitor and the demon. The solution I came up with was to use the painting of the altarpiece as an introduction to the story and as punctuation throughout until the two time-lines come together at the death of Fr Alfonso. That enabled me to introduce danger at the very beginning and – I hope – make the reader curious about the reason for Stanford’s trial and its outcome.

The other thing I hoped to do as I wrote the story was to leave room for ambiguity. Is Lucas a demon, intent on destroying the good wherever he finds it? Did Crispin murder Fr Alfonso with his hatred channelled through the painting? Or was the death coincidental, no more than might be expected when an old man is placed under a lot of stress? Is Crispin a rather unstable young man with a vivid imagination? I’d like readers to make up their own minds.

When I wrote A Spear through the Heart I never intended it to have a sequel. But just recently I’ve started to wonder what Crispin was doing, starving in a garret in Oxford. He must have studied in the studio of an established artist, so presumably he left or was thrown out. Why? I have a few ideas, which I’m currently playing with and allowing to ‘compost’. Maybe some time they will emerge as another story.

The Price of Love - by Alan Schoolcraft

Edmund asked me to write a few words, an essay of sorts to let IGMS readers know what was going on in my head as I wrote The Price of Love, where I got my ideas, inspiration from… and I immediately panicked. Write about myself? Where I get my ideas? Heck, if I knew that, I’d set up a pail or some other large vessel to catch the steady drip-drip of ideas, and never turn a wrench at my day job again.

The genesis of this story is actually two stories that merged into one. One half came in the late summer of 2005. I had just finished what I hoped was the final rewrite of my second novel, Shifters, and I looked for a way to not lose my writing “steam.” I had always struggled with short stories, because my brain works so quickly when I get a new idea, that before I ever put pen to paper the little acorn has blossomed into the mighty oak of a novel.

I had just read a collection of science fiction short stories that I’d picked up at a local Dollar General for… yeah; you got me… a buck. It had some interesting things in it, by some famous authors, and some I’d never heard of. The theme of the collection though, is what inspired me to pick it up; fairy tales had inspired all of the stories.

What a marvelous idea, I thought. Surely, after getting an idea of how these writers did it, I could find a way to craft a decent short story. And since none of the stories contained within directly referenced Pinocchio, I would try my literary hand at reconfiguring that tale.

The other part of the story began not quite two years before, when I discovered that despite all my best intentions and better judgment, I had fallen in love with a woman (and she with me) whom I had been friends with for several months. Her situation at home closely paralleled that of Valerie Hinson in my story, and the relationship between her and I closely paralleled that of Valerie and Alvin. Unlike stories though, real life is much more complicated; there’s no author to magically whip up a deus ex machina to make everything okay and bring about a happy ending.

As we drew closer to what we both knew would be the logical parting of ways, I found I needed some kind of catharsis, some way convince my heart that level heads knew best, this time.

These two unrelated situations, coupled with that old writer’s maxim “Write what you know” collided like a supernova in my head. I worked through the loss of my best friend by trying to capture the spirit of what we had in this tale of becoming human, learning to live, to love, and learning what the true worth of love is. That it’s not always knowing when to hold on, but when to let go.

Night of The Falling Stars - by Steven Savile

It's never easy to talk about the genesis of an idea - especially  

when you are working toward creating something of *scope* that  

resonates with the reader while at the same time entertaining...  

because that is what it is all about, after all. Forget longevity and  

fame and all the rest, your reader chooses to lay down cash they  

could have spent on beer or cigarettes, movies, a nice chair or a  

latte down at the coffee shop, in other words anything that eats  

disposable income. They make that choice, your words over some other  

form of enjoyment, so it strikes me you owe it to them to make those  

words entertaining.

        Okay, rant over.

        So, about eighteen months ago I was on a nine hour drive back 

from a convention knowing I needed to come up with an original back- 

ground for this fantasy novel I wanted to write. I always thought it would  

be interesting to look at fantasy land where the hero hadn't crossed  

over in time to save the day - where he had refused the call to  

action and instead stayed home to grow old. What would have happened  

then to this fabled land of elves and dwarves and pretty maids?  

Nothing good, that's for sure... so that was the starting point, a  

world gone to hell because it's chosen one decided it wasn't worth  

the effort of saving them. Lee and I (my co-editor on Elemental for  

Tor) back and forthed ideas, having a blast simply creating. That's  

one of the drawbacks of doing stuff like Dr Who and Warhammer and all  

these other IPs, you get to exercise your writing muscles but your  

creativity ones begin to fester. The drive disappeared in a flurry of  

world building and by the end of it we'd essentially mapped out an  

entire world, elements of its past and future, and of the fall.

        Then like all good ideas it got to sit on a shelf for the best part  

of a year, building into something more.

        I wrote the first Thera story back in April, for Solaris' Book  

of Fantasy (The Song Her Heart Sang - It's a love story) and then a  

linked one for Meadowhawk Press' Touched By Wonder. When Ed asked 

me to do something for IMGS I knew I wanted to do something in Thera,  

giving one of the legends some life. Most stories tend to be written  

in coffee shops, this one was written on the plane to Croatia, in  

Dubrovnik and on a balcony in Markashka during a hurricane. Little  

bits of Bosnia (Mostar) and Dubrovnik snuck into the story in the  

architecture - which is always something I find difficult to do - I  

tend to just want to say it's a house, it's a place, it's a big shiny  

ball... and leave it at that, but surrounded by so many amazing  

constructs I knew I had to do the visual aspect justice this time.

        Late next year there's a mosaic novel coming out, The Machineries 

of Silence (Bad Moon Books) which will piece together more of the  

legends of Thera while I work on the first novel.

        All that remains is to thank Ed for his work on the piece, and my 

co-pilot on that long drive without whom the world would cease to be.

How Peacefully The Desert Sleeps - by Brad Beaulieu

When I’m writing a story, especially one set in an alternate world, I try to spend a good deal of time in determining the lay of the land: the cultures in play, their histories, their attitudes toward one another. This helps me to focus on what I really want to write about: the characters. In other words, I wasn’t so interested in exploring the conflict between the two peoples as I was individuals within the scope of that larger conflict. Well, wait... That’s not completely accurate. I like to create a world in which there is conflict present, and then I like focusing on characters so that you see how individuals can affect the society at large, and vice versa.

Many of my stories are written with the intention of capturing the flavor of a certain era while adding a twist of some sort, and this is how Desert truly began. I chose the milieu first and played with it until I had the speculative elements that felt right to me. The flavor in “How Peacefully the Desert Sleeps” is, of course, life along the American Frontier. I have strong interest in the Native American life and the way in which it was tragically altered by the introduction of the frontiersmen and their irrepressible thirst for land. Like in American history, the natives in Desert are being pushed ever harder by the pioneers, but they have a weapon the Native Americans did not: the dejda. The tribesmen, over the centuries, had used the dejda as little more than a domesticated animal, largely unaware of its ability to gain consciousness. Without them, the tribesman would have already gone the way of the Native Americans and eventually succumbed to the pressure of the pioneers, but the beetles gave them a distinct advantage that allowed them to create a stalemate along the frontier.

Kallie’s character was the first one that came to me, and she came fairly easily. I liked the notion of taking someone from the more powerful society, the settlers, and placing them in a situation where they were almost completely dependent upon the tribesmen’s generosity. Once I realized that the dejda provided not only protection but also the powers of healing, Kallie’s ailment came soon after, and her character started to form more fully from there.

I had known from the start that Kallie would be the main character, and that she would be the catalyst that would help propel the dejda into consciousness. What I didn’t know was what would happen when this came to pass. I had thought that the Ohokwa Queen, Wattoha, would be the primary foil to Kallie. But as the story unfolded Nilawi demanded more and more attention. Eventually Nilawi and Kallie became two polar opposites. Nilawi came to represent the status quo, the passing of the torch from mother to daughter with the dejda in the same role as they’ve always been, while Kallie represented a new and terrible possibility.

Paheka, much like Nilawi, demanded more page time as the story played itself out. At first, she was simply a crazy old medicine woman, but I realized later that she was acting as an extension of the old dejda queen. She mutated from a character who provided flavor to the primary catalyst for change in the story: the voice, essentially, of the dejda as they struggled to make sense of their expanding awareness that Kallie had triggered within them.

Some stories are gift stories--they come almost fully formed, and you hardly have to work at making them sing. Desert was not such a story. I had to remold it several times to get it into shape, but I’m quite proud of the results. And I didn’t do it alone, either; I would be remiss if I didn’t send my heartfelt thanks to Orson Scott Card and Edmund Schubert for helping to identify its weaknesses so that I could file away the burrs.

Bradley P. Beaulieu

Racine, WI

September, 2007