...as in, shameless self-promotion. But I'm gonna do it anyway, because if I don't, who will?
I'm pleased to you all that I've come to a final agreement with LBF Books, a small-press operating out of Pittsburg, PA.
LBF will be publishing my novel, The Legend of Dreaming Creek, next summer, with an official launch date most likely in June or July. LBF is on Preditors & Editors list of recomended publishers and they use Baker & Taylor as their primary distributor. For a brief synopsis of TLoDC, you can visit my website: http://www.edmundrschubert.com/dreamingcreek.htm
Also, I am leaving this Thursday for World Fantasy in Austin TX. I'll be back early next week and will give you a full report then.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Saturday, October 28, 2006
More On Titles
Okay, then… before we were swarmed upon by the authors published in the latest issue of IGMS, we were talking about titles. Had a nice little chat about good titles, with the promise of then taking up the subject of bad titles, and it’s time to pick up that topic and run with it.
Honestly, I don’t see a lot of titles that I would describe as being outright terrible. The biggest problem is usually one-word titles that are completely lacking in distinction. Not bad, so much as feeble. Titles like:
“Judgment”
“Expectations”
“The Cure “
“The Talent”/“Talented”
I’ve seen multiple stories with these one-word titles, or else variations that are quite similar. Now, a bad title doesn’t automatically mean a bad story. One of the three – yes, three – stories submitted in the last six months with the title “Expectations” is going to be published in an up-coming issue of IGMS. It’s just not going to appear with that title (I’ll leave it to the author in question to decide if he or she wants to publicly confess to this title in the next installment if “Stories Behind The Stories,” but I’m not going to be the one to out him/her.) Heck, I’ll even admit to having a story with a working title of “Expectations;” I just made sure when it went out the door it had a better one.
The problem with these one-worders is that they don’t do anything to grab a reader. Titles are like first lines; you want them to grab the readers attention, raise a question in the reader’s mind, and compel them to read the story. At the very least they should convey something of what the story is about.
Occasionally I do get a few titles that are just plain old bad titles. Usually this happens when the author is trying to be cute, and let me tell you in no uncertain terms that cute is never going to score any points. With anybody. Ever.
Honestly, I don’t see a lot of titles that I would describe as being outright terrible. The biggest problem is usually one-word titles that are completely lacking in distinction. Not bad, so much as feeble. Titles like:
“Judgment”
“Expectations”
“The Cure “
“The Talent”/“Talented”
I’ve seen multiple stories with these one-word titles, or else variations that are quite similar. Now, a bad title doesn’t automatically mean a bad story. One of the three – yes, three – stories submitted in the last six months with the title “Expectations” is going to be published in an up-coming issue of IGMS. It’s just not going to appear with that title (I’ll leave it to the author in question to decide if he or she wants to publicly confess to this title in the next installment if “Stories Behind The Stories,” but I’m not going to be the one to out him/her.) Heck, I’ll even admit to having a story with a working title of “Expectations;” I just made sure when it went out the door it had a better one.
The problem with these one-worders is that they don’t do anything to grab a reader. Titles are like first lines; you want them to grab the readers attention, raise a question in the reader’s mind, and compel them to read the story. At the very least they should convey something of what the story is about.
Occasionally I do get a few titles that are just plain old bad titles. Usually this happens when the author is trying to be cute, and let me tell you in no uncertain terms that cute is never going to score any points. With anybody. Ever.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Stories - Dale
Oliver Dale
Xoco's Fire - Story behind the story
I didn't write a glamorous story, and I'm afraid the story behind the story
bears no more sparkle. It didn't strike me with a bolt of inspiration. It
didn't pop like a greek goddess fully-formed from my forehead. That's not
how stories ever work with me. And, between you and me, I hate writers that
have it so easy. Pure jealousy, you understand.
So let's see....
I like dark fantasy. I always have. And I like to write it even more. It
probably originates with me watching my mother read an early story of mine
(I haven't been doing this for so long -- perhaps they're all still early
stories) and cringing. Such a primal reaction. I mean, they're just words
on a piece of paper, people. Black specks of burned toner that stuck to a
pressed and bleached slice of tree carcass. Nothing magical. Yet by
looking at them, you can convey an entire mood, a feeling, a story, an
emotion. You can creep people out, make them giggle, scream, cry, have
nightmares. I love that. Don't you? And that's pretty much all I
ever aim for when I write a story. As it turns out, giving nightmares has
always been easier for me than being sentimental. Whenever I try, I end up
writing the evil lovechild of a Hallmark card and a Lifetime movie. So I
stick with the blood, and the guts, the smoke, the crushed desires, the
sacrilegious pain.
"Xoco's Fire" started like most of mine do. It was a single, incomplete
idea at first. I pictured fire from the sky -- an omen. I thought of a
daughter born of privilege, but that privilege came with a burden, one that
no one would ask for. Then, like many writers, I asked why. And why, and
why, and why? Until I had a character I liked. Until I had a story I
didn't hate, and a bad guy I really did.
When I finished, it was 900 words long. For those of you not familiar with
this sort of thing, 900 words is like a freakin' fortune cookie. It's
nothing. Just a wisp of a story. And it wasn't very good. So what did I
do? That's right, I submitted it. And it got rejected. Oh yes, my
friends. Your surprise matches my own. Of course I realized then that my
why questions all got boring answers and that I didn't ask enough of them.
So I started over, and suddenly 900 words became 9000.
It took a year to write. It took another year to sell. Then it took half a
year to get published. This ain't a business for the impatient or the
near-death.
And that's the process. Totally glamorous, right? I'll be in my trailer
getting powdered if you need me.
---
oliverdale22@gmail.com
Xoco's Fire - Story behind the story
I didn't write a glamorous story, and I'm afraid the story behind the story
bears no more sparkle. It didn't strike me with a bolt of inspiration. It
didn't pop like a greek goddess fully-formed from my forehead. That's not
how stories ever work with me. And, between you and me, I hate writers that
have it so easy. Pure jealousy, you understand.
So let's see....
I like dark fantasy. I always have. And I like to write it even more. It
probably originates with me watching my mother read an early story of mine
(I haven't been doing this for so long -- perhaps they're all still early
stories) and cringing. Such a primal reaction. I mean, they're just words
on a piece of paper, people. Black specks of burned toner that stuck to a
pressed and bleached slice of tree carcass. Nothing magical. Yet by
looking at them, you can convey an entire mood, a feeling, a story, an
emotion. You can creep people out, make them giggle, scream, cry, have
nightmares. I love that. Don't you? And that's pretty much all I
ever aim for when I write a story. As it turns out, giving nightmares has
always been easier for me than being sentimental. Whenever I try, I end up
writing the evil lovechild of a Hallmark card and a Lifetime movie. So I
stick with the blood, and the guts, the smoke, the crushed desires, the
sacrilegious pain.
"Xoco's Fire" started like most of mine do. It was a single, incomplete
idea at first. I pictured fire from the sky -- an omen. I thought of a
daughter born of privilege, but that privilege came with a burden, one that
no one would ask for. Then, like many writers, I asked why. And why, and
why, and why? Until I had a character I liked. Until I had a story I
didn't hate, and a bad guy I really did.
When I finished, it was 900 words long. For those of you not familiar with
this sort of thing, 900 words is like a freakin' fortune cookie. It's
nothing. Just a wisp of a story. And it wasn't very good. So what did I
do? That's right, I submitted it. And it got rejected. Oh yes, my
friends. Your surprise matches my own. Of course I realized then that my
why questions all got boring answers and that I didn't ask enough of them.
So I started over, and suddenly 900 words became 9000.
It took a year to write. It took another year to sell. Then it took half a
year to get published. This ain't a business for the impatient or the
near-death.
And that's the process. Totally glamorous, right? I'll be in my trailer
getting powdered if you need me.
---
oliverdale22@gmail.com
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Stories - Kontis
The Princess with Butterfly Wings
by Alethea Kontis
Do you ever play “Traceback”?
You’ve let your mind wander, and suddenly, you’re thinking about something totally bizarre and not at all what you were pondering in the first place. Or you’re having a conversation that takes an interesting turn…and you wonder just how you came around to that topic. So you stop and try to recall exactly what steps took you from hot-air balloons to Kevin Bacon.
I call it Traceback. It’s one of those games that people with busy brains play all the time. (The sad part is, we actually find it entertaining.)
Sometimes I play Traceback with my life, just to be perverse. How exactly did I get to where I am today? If I was making an Academy Award speech, who would I thank? The icing on my Destiny Cake is full of fingerprints: great teachers and horrible bosses, neighbors and enemies, co-workers and ex-boyfriends, distant relatives and friends closer than blood. Like every great production, my life wouldn’t be what it is without a countless number of people influencing it just the way they did, exactly when they did it.
The Butterfly Effect.
Traceback.
Now I know why many people at the Oscars thank their parents, and God.
I suppose if you’re going to start, it’s wise to start at the beginning.
One of the most popular interview questions asked is “When did you start writing?”
I have an answer to that question that reels to the surface a perfect memory of 8-year-old Alethea staring at a poem she had just written and smiling as the world clicked around her.
But the stories started with Casey.
My father, fairy tales, and Casey.
In a family steeped in oral tradition, my father is the consummate storyteller. He tells tales of our ancestors, his childhood, his friends, his trips around the world. So inevitably, the first stories I ever wrote in school were essays about my crazy life—or the crazy, magical life of the girl I could have been—but they were always about me.
Sometime around the age of eleven, I was moping around the house (as eleven-year-olds do). I slumped at my mother’s feet and whined, “Tell me what to write.”
“Go write me a fairy tale,” she said. “A new one.”
I suppose if I hadn’t been moping quite so loudly, I would have heard the world click again. Like it did later that year, when I met Casey.
She was a bit of a misfit, like me. She had thick glasses, a mouth full of braces, a mop of long, curly champagne blonde hair, and a soul like sunshine. She was affectionately called “Beaker” by the popular kids, but she would just smile at them and retreat back into her own little world…her own little world full of books and princesses and unicorns and notepads and pencils. A little world very much like my own. We didn’t pass notes in class—we passed a notebook. Whenever we got bored of one world, we’d just make up a new one.
She was my first heroine.
We started a novel, about the adventures of a silly blonde princess named Casey and a dark-haired Queen of Thieves. We spent days at my house on the dock writing paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene, each page switching between Casey’s fat, round scrawl and my neat and tiny letters. We spent nights at her house, playing Super Mario Brothers and eating pizza and lying on the trampoline and wishing on stars. I stayed up ‘til the wee hours one night teaching her how to count to ten in Greek (which she still doesn’t remember). I spent ages one morning painstakingly untangling the rats’ nest in the back of her head that had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night.
When my first love broke my heart and I cried myself hysterical, she brought me pansies unceremoniously ripped from the bed in her front garden. We got jobs at the same movie theatre and spent the hours between shows behind the concession stand composing ridiculous odes to popcorn. When I was lonely at college in South Carolina, she invited me up to UT Knoxville for the weekend and arranged a gathering with all her friends. When she got married she asked me to be a bridesmaid, and I wrote a rehearsal dinner speech that left the guests in happy tears.
I had a nervous breakdown and moved to Tennessee to work in a library.
Casey got her PhD in Victorian Literature and moved to Virginia to be a Professor of Women’s Studies at William and Mary.
When I attended Uncle Orson’s Literary Boot Camp in the summer of 2003, Casey went with me. Not in the physical sense, of course, but in the age of computers and cell phones anything is possible. Thank goodness, too.
Because I was scared.
I had warned her to be available at all hours of the day or night—especially when we were assigned the inevitable 24-hour story. I had never attempted anything so bold in my entire life. And I knew I would never be able to do it without Casey. I had her on speed dial.
My lifeline was available at the push of a button.
Our 24-hour story had to be based on one of the story notecards we had done for homework the night before. Like a dutiful student, I had completed all seven. I had a young woman who lived in the Black Forest region of Germany in World War Two, a Victorian Royal Society of Lady Etchers and an alchemist, a man with incredibly bad luck who took it out on his wife…right before she found a winning lottery ticket in his pocket while doing the laundry and decided not to share—and four other stories unremarkable enough to be similarly unmemorable.
The World War Two story was by far the best, but despite Mr. Stafford’s conscientious tutelage for two years in high school, my knowledge of both the world and the war was sketchy at best. The Bad Luck Man was fun, but cliché. The Lady Etchers were an interesting concept but the story was weak, and once again my disturbing lack of history reared its ugly head.
Which might have been a problem…for someone whose best friend didn’t have a PhD in Victorian Literature.
I pushed the button.
It was roughly 11pm on Tuesday night.
I felt like I was cheating…but I was too scared to care.
Casey and I stayed on the phone for at least three hours, hashing out the details of the story while I frantically scribbled down every bit of Victorian minutiae Casey deemed important.
The words “good-bye” that night were heavy with reluctance, and I forced myself to sleep.
When I got up the next morning, I didn’t leave the bed. I crossed my legs, pulled the laptop onto the pillow, and opened up a new document. I had a fascinating idea and a rich world…I just needed the perfect character.
Human instinct is to regress in times of great desperation.
Traceback.
So I started with my princess. My first heroine.
I started with Casey.
Only this time, her name was Minna.
by Alethea Kontis
Do you ever play “Traceback”?
You’ve let your mind wander, and suddenly, you’re thinking about something totally bizarre and not at all what you were pondering in the first place. Or you’re having a conversation that takes an interesting turn…and you wonder just how you came around to that topic. So you stop and try to recall exactly what steps took you from hot-air balloons to Kevin Bacon.
I call it Traceback. It’s one of those games that people with busy brains play all the time. (The sad part is, we actually find it entertaining.)
Sometimes I play Traceback with my life, just to be perverse. How exactly did I get to where I am today? If I was making an Academy Award speech, who would I thank? The icing on my Destiny Cake is full of fingerprints: great teachers and horrible bosses, neighbors and enemies, co-workers and ex-boyfriends, distant relatives and friends closer than blood. Like every great production, my life wouldn’t be what it is without a countless number of people influencing it just the way they did, exactly when they did it.
The Butterfly Effect.
Traceback.
Now I know why many people at the Oscars thank their parents, and God.
I suppose if you’re going to start, it’s wise to start at the beginning.
One of the most popular interview questions asked is “When did you start writing?”
I have an answer to that question that reels to the surface a perfect memory of 8-year-old Alethea staring at a poem she had just written and smiling as the world clicked around her.
But the stories started with Casey.
My father, fairy tales, and Casey.
In a family steeped in oral tradition, my father is the consummate storyteller. He tells tales of our ancestors, his childhood, his friends, his trips around the world. So inevitably, the first stories I ever wrote in school were essays about my crazy life—or the crazy, magical life of the girl I could have been—but they were always about me.
Sometime around the age of eleven, I was moping around the house (as eleven-year-olds do). I slumped at my mother’s feet and whined, “Tell me what to write.”
“Go write me a fairy tale,” she said. “A new one.”
I suppose if I hadn’t been moping quite so loudly, I would have heard the world click again. Like it did later that year, when I met Casey.
She was a bit of a misfit, like me. She had thick glasses, a mouth full of braces, a mop of long, curly champagne blonde hair, and a soul like sunshine. She was affectionately called “Beaker” by the popular kids, but she would just smile at them and retreat back into her own little world…her own little world full of books and princesses and unicorns and notepads and pencils. A little world very much like my own. We didn’t pass notes in class—we passed a notebook. Whenever we got bored of one world, we’d just make up a new one.
She was my first heroine.
We started a novel, about the adventures of a silly blonde princess named Casey and a dark-haired Queen of Thieves. We spent days at my house on the dock writing paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene, each page switching between Casey’s fat, round scrawl and my neat and tiny letters. We spent nights at her house, playing Super Mario Brothers and eating pizza and lying on the trampoline and wishing on stars. I stayed up ‘til the wee hours one night teaching her how to count to ten in Greek (which she still doesn’t remember). I spent ages one morning painstakingly untangling the rats’ nest in the back of her head that had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night.
When my first love broke my heart and I cried myself hysterical, she brought me pansies unceremoniously ripped from the bed in her front garden. We got jobs at the same movie theatre and spent the hours between shows behind the concession stand composing ridiculous odes to popcorn. When I was lonely at college in South Carolina, she invited me up to UT Knoxville for the weekend and arranged a gathering with all her friends. When she got married she asked me to be a bridesmaid, and I wrote a rehearsal dinner speech that left the guests in happy tears.
I had a nervous breakdown and moved to Tennessee to work in a library.
Casey got her PhD in Victorian Literature and moved to Virginia to be a Professor of Women’s Studies at William and Mary.
When I attended Uncle Orson’s Literary Boot Camp in the summer of 2003, Casey went with me. Not in the physical sense, of course, but in the age of computers and cell phones anything is possible. Thank goodness, too.
Because I was scared.
I had warned her to be available at all hours of the day or night—especially when we were assigned the inevitable 24-hour story. I had never attempted anything so bold in my entire life. And I knew I would never be able to do it without Casey. I had her on speed dial.
My lifeline was available at the push of a button.
Our 24-hour story had to be based on one of the story notecards we had done for homework the night before. Like a dutiful student, I had completed all seven. I had a young woman who lived in the Black Forest region of Germany in World War Two, a Victorian Royal Society of Lady Etchers and an alchemist, a man with incredibly bad luck who took it out on his wife…right before she found a winning lottery ticket in his pocket while doing the laundry and decided not to share—and four other stories unremarkable enough to be similarly unmemorable.
The World War Two story was by far the best, but despite Mr. Stafford’s conscientious tutelage for two years in high school, my knowledge of both the world and the war was sketchy at best. The Bad Luck Man was fun, but cliché. The Lady Etchers were an interesting concept but the story was weak, and once again my disturbing lack of history reared its ugly head.
Which might have been a problem…for someone whose best friend didn’t have a PhD in Victorian Literature.
I pushed the button.
It was roughly 11pm on Tuesday night.
I felt like I was cheating…but I was too scared to care.
Casey and I stayed on the phone for at least three hours, hashing out the details of the story while I frantically scribbled down every bit of Victorian minutiae Casey deemed important.
The words “good-bye” that night were heavy with reluctance, and I forced myself to sleep.
When I got up the next morning, I didn’t leave the bed. I crossed my legs, pulled the laptop onto the pillow, and opened up a new document. I had a fascinating idea and a rich world…I just needed the perfect character.
Human instinct is to regress in times of great desperation.
Traceback.
So I started with my princess. My first heroine.
I started with Casey.
Only this time, her name was Minna.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Stories - Maxey
Maxey - To Know All Things That Are In The Earth
Blog article: warning, it's long and full of spoilers.
Sometimes, writing involves a certain amount of time travel. My first
published novel, Nobody Gets the Girl, was the fourth novel I had
written. The next book I have coming out, Bitterwood, was the third novel I
wrote. So, my first novel is my fourth novel, my second novel is my
third novel, and, should I be fortunate enough to publish a third novel,
it will probably be my sixth. My career is a walking time paradox.
Similarly, when I wrote "To Know All Things That Are In The Earth," I
hadn't yet understood the life lesson that rests at the heart of the
story. I penned the first draft of this story last February, as part of
the Codexwriters.com "Codexian Idol" contest. It was an odd story
to write in some ways. Bluntly, I'm an atheist--anyone who has followed
my career to any extent at all has no doubt noticed a strong vein of
nihilism running though my stories. So, what am I doing writing about
the Rapture?
I confess: I miss the Rapture. I was raised a Christian and deeply
anticipated the rapture through much of my childhood. I spent many, many
hours imagining it. I could see it quite clearly in my childish
mind... the skies ripping open with an earth-shaking roar, heavenly light
flooding every shadow as angel bands poured down to gather the chosen. I
fervently prayed for the rapture to happen during tough times...
getting raptured up before gym glass would have been quite a relief to my
twelve-year-old self. Even after I stopped labeling myself a Christian, I
would find myself having little Rapture fantasies about what I'd do in
case I was wrong. I figured, in case of Rapture, I would run off into
the woods and hide for seven years to avoid the Mark of the Beast. My
dad had a good collection of hunting and fishing equipment. I felt
pretty sure I could make it. One night, when I was about 18, I was in bed
on a silent winter night. It was snowing. This was one of those dark,
introspective nights when newly minted atheists sometimes lie awake
contemplating the consequences of being wrong. It was about four in the
morning. Suddenly, the bed began to shudder. Then the whole house
shook as a terrible rumble broke the stillness. Bright lights cast shadows
on my wall as they approached the house. I sat up, sweat popping from
every pore. The Rapture! But, no, it was only a snowplow, getting an
early morning start on the roads.
So, I can trace specific moments of this story back two decades to my
close call with the Rapture. But, the central epiphany of the story is
something that I learned much more recently... after I wrote it.
When I wrote this story, my girlfriend Laura Herrmann was dying from
cancer. He had breast cancer that had spread to her lungs and liver; the
radiation reports described the tumors as "innumerable." And yet, it
was very difficult for me to understand what was killing her. The
tumors were tiny. They were tracking things two millimeters long and making
a big deal when they grew to three millimeters. Three millimeters
isn't very big. So why couldn't she breathe? I'm a science fiction geek,
I know a thing or two about biology, but I still found myself
completely at a loss to understand how she was dying. I never asked why. Why,
I knew. She had cancer. But, how was cancer killing her? Was there
anyway to fight it? Why wasn't surgery an option? What did it matter
if she had things smaller than houseflies growing in her lungs? Lungs
are big things right?
Wrong. On Labor Day weekend, four months after Laura passed away, I
went to the Atlanta Civic Center and saw "Bodies: The Exhibition." This
is a show where actual human cadavers have been treated with plastic to
preserve them. They are then flayed to various stages and posed to
reveal the inner workings of the body. It's a morbid idea, so, of course,
there was no way I could pass up a chance to see it. Finally, I saw an
actual human lung. The cadaver it was attached to was a woman whose
facial muscles were hauntingly similar to Laura's. It was easy to
imagine flesh over them once more. And, beneath the face and neck, I finally
saw the size of adult female lungs. They're not big at all. I
imagined them filling up all the space under the rib cage. In fact, they are
actually squashed up rather high in the chest. I could easily have
held them in one hand. Suddenly, the tiny tumors made more sense. There
isn't a lot of space to start with. This was further driven home when
I saw a lung actually riddled with cancer. While Laura struggled with
her disease, I would have given anything to have x-ray vision; I wanted
to know what was happening inside her. Here, I could see it. I had
been imagining the tumors as distinct objects, not really a part of her.
Instead, the preserved tumors looked like the bodies own tissues
knotting and knitting themselves. There isn't a clearly visible break
between the diseased cells and the healthy ones.
Finally, I saw a body where red plastic had been pumped into the
circulatory system, preserving it, before the rest of the body was dissolved
away. What remained was a ghost of blood. The shadows of the organs
were clearly visible in the highways of veins. Nowhere was more rich in
blood vessels than the lungs. Laura passed away from bleeding in these
tissues. Again, I suddenly understood how this was almost inevitable.
With all the blood passing through the lungs, it's understandable that
diseased cells will eventually damage the tiny network of delicate
threads.
When I left the exhibit, I felt as if the unanswered questions I'd had
about Laura's death had been answered. And, it occurred to me that,
I'd written about this moment months ago; the moment when being able to
answer "How?" provides a measure of comfort and relief that will forever
elude us if we only ask, "Why?"
I didn't consciously set down to write this story about losing Laura.
But, looking back, I identify with my protagonist strongly when, in his
frustration to understand, he plunges his hands inside the cherub's
corpse and begins to root around for answers. I wanted so badly to know
what was going on inside Laura; I think this is how those feelings made
it to the page.
jamesmaxey.blogspot.com
Blog article: warning, it's long and full of spoilers.
Sometimes, writing involves a certain amount of time travel. My first
published novel, Nobody Gets the Girl, was the fourth novel I had
written. The next book I have coming out, Bitterwood, was the third novel I
wrote. So, my first novel is my fourth novel, my second novel is my
third novel, and, should I be fortunate enough to publish a third novel,
it will probably be my sixth. My career is a walking time paradox.
Similarly, when I wrote "To Know All Things That Are In The Earth," I
hadn't yet understood the life lesson that rests at the heart of the
story. I penned the first draft of this story last February, as part of
the Codexwriters.com "Codexian Idol" contest. It was an odd story
to write in some ways. Bluntly, I'm an atheist--anyone who has followed
my career to any extent at all has no doubt noticed a strong vein of
nihilism running though my stories. So, what am I doing writing about
the Rapture?
I confess: I miss the Rapture. I was raised a Christian and deeply
anticipated the rapture through much of my childhood. I spent many, many
hours imagining it. I could see it quite clearly in my childish
mind... the skies ripping open with an earth-shaking roar, heavenly light
flooding every shadow as angel bands poured down to gather the chosen. I
fervently prayed for the rapture to happen during tough times...
getting raptured up before gym glass would have been quite a relief to my
twelve-year-old self. Even after I stopped labeling myself a Christian, I
would find myself having little Rapture fantasies about what I'd do in
case I was wrong. I figured, in case of Rapture, I would run off into
the woods and hide for seven years to avoid the Mark of the Beast. My
dad had a good collection of hunting and fishing equipment. I felt
pretty sure I could make it. One night, when I was about 18, I was in bed
on a silent winter night. It was snowing. This was one of those dark,
introspective nights when newly minted atheists sometimes lie awake
contemplating the consequences of being wrong. It was about four in the
morning. Suddenly, the bed began to shudder. Then the whole house
shook as a terrible rumble broke the stillness. Bright lights cast shadows
on my wall as they approached the house. I sat up, sweat popping from
every pore. The Rapture! But, no, it was only a snowplow, getting an
early morning start on the roads.
So, I can trace specific moments of this story back two decades to my
close call with the Rapture. But, the central epiphany of the story is
something that I learned much more recently... after I wrote it.
When I wrote this story, my girlfriend Laura Herrmann was dying from
cancer. He had breast cancer that had spread to her lungs and liver; the
radiation reports described the tumors as "innumerable." And yet, it
was very difficult for me to understand what was killing her. The
tumors were tiny. They were tracking things two millimeters long and making
a big deal when they grew to three millimeters. Three millimeters
isn't very big. So why couldn't she breathe? I'm a science fiction geek,
I know a thing or two about biology, but I still found myself
completely at a loss to understand how she was dying. I never asked why. Why,
I knew. She had cancer. But, how was cancer killing her? Was there
anyway to fight it? Why wasn't surgery an option? What did it matter
if she had things smaller than houseflies growing in her lungs? Lungs
are big things right?
Wrong. On Labor Day weekend, four months after Laura passed away, I
went to the Atlanta Civic Center and saw "Bodies: The Exhibition." This
is a show where actual human cadavers have been treated with plastic to
preserve them. They are then flayed to various stages and posed to
reveal the inner workings of the body. It's a morbid idea, so, of course,
there was no way I could pass up a chance to see it. Finally, I saw an
actual human lung. The cadaver it was attached to was a woman whose
facial muscles were hauntingly similar to Laura's. It was easy to
imagine flesh over them once more. And, beneath the face and neck, I finally
saw the size of adult female lungs. They're not big at all. I
imagined them filling up all the space under the rib cage. In fact, they are
actually squashed up rather high in the chest. I could easily have
held them in one hand. Suddenly, the tiny tumors made more sense. There
isn't a lot of space to start with. This was further driven home when
I saw a lung actually riddled with cancer. While Laura struggled with
her disease, I would have given anything to have x-ray vision; I wanted
to know what was happening inside her. Here, I could see it. I had
been imagining the tumors as distinct objects, not really a part of her.
Instead, the preserved tumors looked like the bodies own tissues
knotting and knitting themselves. There isn't a clearly visible break
between the diseased cells and the healthy ones.
Finally, I saw a body where red plastic had been pumped into the
circulatory system, preserving it, before the rest of the body was dissolved
away. What remained was a ghost of blood. The shadows of the organs
were clearly visible in the highways of veins. Nowhere was more rich in
blood vessels than the lungs. Laura passed away from bleeding in these
tissues. Again, I suddenly understood how this was almost inevitable.
With all the blood passing through the lungs, it's understandable that
diseased cells will eventually damage the tiny network of delicate
threads.
When I left the exhibit, I felt as if the unanswered questions I'd had
about Laura's death had been answered. And, it occurred to me that,
I'd written about this moment months ago; the moment when being able to
answer "How?" provides a measure of comfort and relief that will forever
elude us if we only ask, "Why?"
I didn't consciously set down to write this story about losing Laura.
But, looking back, I identify with my protagonist strongly when, in his
frustration to understand, he plunges his hands inside the cherub's
corpse and begins to root around for answers. I wanted so badly to know
what was going on inside Laura; I think this is how those feelings made
it to the page.
jamesmaxey.blogspot.com
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Stories - Dolton
Brian Dolton
The Box Of Beautiful Things:
1 - The Title
Titles come from all kinds of places. There's a Scottish singer-songwriter called Jackie Leven who has some really great song titles (and some really great songs, though the two don't always match up). On one of his albums is a song called "Burning The Box Of Beautiful Things", which I just thought was a great image. So I decided to write a story about the box. I just didn't quite know what the story was...
2 - The Story
On-line, I hang at a writing group called Liberty Hall, run by the wonderful Mike Munsil. There are weekly writing challenges; you get ninety minutes to write a story, kicked off by a trigger, which may be a word, a quote, a song lyric, a picture... anything. It's a great way to get butt in chair and actually produce stories. Back last year, the trigger was a picture of a doll, with a porcelain mask and a vivid purple robe. I looked at the trigger and, as I usually do, I just started writing; and what I started writing began "There was only beauty in the great box.." Under 90 minutes later, I had the story, and I sat back, and for once (and this is a very rare thing for me) I said to myself "I've just written something bloody good". Critiques by other members of the site helped me hone it down a little, but it really didn't get changed much. Mostly, it's there, just the way it was in that 90-minute period of intense inspiration.
3 - The Character
Heh. That's another story. Indeed, that's a lot of other stories. I'm really hopeful that everyone's going to be seeing a lot more of Yi Qin.
________________________________________________________________
There you go.
Brian
The Box Of Beautiful Things:
1 - The Title
Titles come from all kinds of places. There's a Scottish singer-songwriter called Jackie Leven who has some really great song titles (and some really great songs, though the two don't always match up). On one of his albums is a song called "Burning The Box Of Beautiful Things", which I just thought was a great image. So I decided to write a story about the box. I just didn't quite know what the story was...
2 - The Story
On-line, I hang at a writing group called Liberty Hall, run by the wonderful Mike Munsil. There are weekly writing challenges; you get ninety minutes to write a story, kicked off by a trigger, which may be a word, a quote, a song lyric, a picture... anything. It's a great way to get butt in chair and actually produce stories. Back last year, the trigger was a picture of a doll, with a porcelain mask and a vivid purple robe. I looked at the trigger and, as I usually do, I just started writing; and what I started writing began "There was only beauty in the great box.." Under 90 minutes later, I had the story, and I sat back, and for once (and this is a very rare thing for me) I said to myself "I've just written something bloody good". Critiques by other members of the site helped me hone it down a little, but it really didn't get changed much. Mostly, it's there, just the way it was in that 90-minute period of intense inspiration.
3 - The Character
Heh. That's another story. Indeed, that's a lot of other stories. I'm really hopeful that everyone's going to be seeing a lot more of Yi Qin.
________________________________________________________________
There you go.
Brian
Monday, October 09, 2006
Stories - Mojica
Jose Mojica
“Fat Town”
I was writing computer-programming books three years ago when I decided that I wanted to write the kind of books my mom, wife and kids could read, especially my kids. I found out about Uncle Orson's Boot Camp and I decided to attend to work on my craft. One of the assignments was to walk around town and get a story idea from looking at the surroundings. Almost every house I passed had kids' toys in the backyards and front lawns, but I never saw a single kid. My mind started generating ideas for where the kids could be. Then I walked by a school. Actually, I wasn't sure it was a school. It looked more like a prison. (I hope I don't offend anyone with this.) I thought, 'What if all the kids from town are actually being held captive by an evil school principal? She lets them out once a year and they get to choose their families for the summer. On the last day of school, parents stand by the sidewalk waving toys and candy...' I pictured people waving huge cakes, ice cream, donuts, etc, in an attempt to lure children into their homes. Luring kids with candy reminded me of Hansel and Gretel, and that's how Fat Town was born. The next day I read my story idea in class, Mr. Card was enthusiastic and helped me shape some of the characters. Then, I reread Hansel and Gretel before writing the story and made sure to sprinkle mine with a few details from the original. Some are pretty obvious but some aren't -- I hope people discover them as they read the story.
One of my favorite characters in the story is Fran. She's the older sister of the main character, Herb. Her whole goal in life was to be a cheerleader and to torment her younger brother. Originally I had meant for her to be there only to make Herb's life a living hell. But she surprised me at the end.
I like writing young adult fiction, because high school was one of the hardest times of my life. My family moved from Puerto Rico to Michigan when I started 9th grade. I didn't speak English, and I had never lived in weather below 70 degrees, and of course we moved in the middle of winter. It was very difficult, and when I write I gravitate towards that time in my life. Although to the best of my knowledge I don't remember my principal being a witch.
“Fat Town”
I was writing computer-programming books three years ago when I decided that I wanted to write the kind of books my mom, wife and kids could read, especially my kids. I found out about Uncle Orson's Boot Camp and I decided to attend to work on my craft. One of the assignments was to walk around town and get a story idea from looking at the surroundings. Almost every house I passed had kids' toys in the backyards and front lawns, but I never saw a single kid. My mind started generating ideas for where the kids could be. Then I walked by a school. Actually, I wasn't sure it was a school. It looked more like a prison. (I hope I don't offend anyone with this.) I thought, 'What if all the kids from town are actually being held captive by an evil school principal? She lets them out once a year and they get to choose their families for the summer. On the last day of school, parents stand by the sidewalk waving toys and candy...' I pictured people waving huge cakes, ice cream, donuts, etc, in an attempt to lure children into their homes. Luring kids with candy reminded me of Hansel and Gretel, and that's how Fat Town was born. The next day I read my story idea in class, Mr. Card was enthusiastic and helped me shape some of the characters. Then, I reread Hansel and Gretel before writing the story and made sure to sprinkle mine with a few details from the original. Some are pretty obvious but some aren't -- I hope people discover them as they read the story.
One of my favorite characters in the story is Fran. She's the older sister of the main character, Herb. Her whole goal in life was to be a cheerleader and to torment her younger brother. Originally I had meant for her to be there only to make Herb's life a living hell. But she surprised me at the end.
I like writing young adult fiction, because high school was one of the hardest times of my life. My family moved from Puerto Rico to Michigan when I started 9th grade. I didn't speak English, and I had never lived in weather below 70 degrees, and of course we moved in the middle of winter. It was very difficult, and when I write I gravitate towards that time in my life. Although to the best of my knowledge I don't remember my principal being a witch.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Stories - Continued - Novy
Continuing the stories behind the stories in issue three of IGMS, here's Rick Novy, author of "The Adjoa Gambit."
Rick:
I live in Arizona near Phoenix. There are three Indian reservations in the Phoenix metropolitan area: Fort McDowell, Salt River Maricopa, and Gila River. One day, I started thinking about how in many cases, the indigenous Americans were pushed out of their ancestral homes by invaders who intended to settle on their land. Then, they were given the crappiest land available--land that these people were ill-adapted to live on.
As a speculative fiction writer, I took that a step further. What if the entire earth were invaded, and we were all pushed off our land. Where would our reservation be? Obviously, the reservation had to go on the worst possible land on the planet, the only place we don't already live, Antarctica.
This story starts well after the reservation is up and running so I avoided all the problems with infrastructure. It already exists when the story begins. Some of that infrastructure is primitive, like the ice mines.
The three reservations in the Phoenix area all have something in common: casinos. In fact, "Casino" was the working title for this story. Taking the parallel one step further, I had envisioned humans buying luxuries with Proc money they made with casinos. For that to work, the casinos needed patrons, and thus was born the Proc penchant for gambling. It became part of who they are, a part of their culture, or at least the subculture stuck minding the store at ARIP.
I ended up eliminating the casinos, but kept the gambling as a Proc nuisance trait, but it's a trait that can be very dangerous to the unwary.
The main concept of the story, that of the Olympio family losing their dome, was easy to come up with. This falls back to the gambling. What is the worst thing you can lose in a harsh environment like the Antarctic? Your shelter.
The story was not the easiest to write. At this stage, I made a first stab, but only got as far as Shannon meeting the new family in the rations line, then I got stuck because I really didn't know where the story was going yet. Usually, I need to know the beginning and the end before I can write. The fun part for me is watching the characters figure out how to get from beginning to end. The problem here was that I didn't really know the end. I envisioned Shannon liberating the earth and owning the Procs with orbital casinos. That was far too ambitious for a short story, and probably not plausible anyway.
It was only after I started wondering who this strange family was that the true plot began to emerge. When I discovered that the still-unnamed eldest child was the only one that could communicate with Shannon, I knew she was going to be a major force in the story.
I wanted this family to be from somewhere remote and different from the western world, and became Africa. At the time, I had a co-worker from Togo, so I spent some time with him learning enough about the culture to write the story.
He also gave me a list of names. Koffi and Kossi you might recognize from the current leader of the U.N. For the women, he gave me a list, and I used the one I liked most for this pivotal girl, Adjoa.
As to the actual writing, it was fairly difficult to write. Several false starts dogged me, but I finally ended up with about the first half written in stolen moments on my little pocket PC, an HP iPAQ. The second half was written on my regular computer. I often move partials off my iPAQ to finish them more efficiently.
During the critique cycle, I had many suggestions. It left me unsure of the story, and so it sat on my hard drive for six months before I reread the story and decided to submit the story without revision.
There were two suggestions in particular that nagged at me, and they are inter-related. The first suggestion was to use Adjoa's point of view, the second was that Adjoa's taunting worked too well.
I ultimately decided to stay with Shannon's point of view because the story really is about her willingness to sacrifice herself to help others. To me, the climax of the story is her decision to wager her own dome to try winning back the dome the Olympio family lost. The blackjack game is really just a long denouement. While Adjoa's point of view would have made an interesting story, it would have been a completely different story.
Adjoa's taunting to win the blackjack hands is meant to indicate that this is not about the gambling at all. It's about power and intimidation, and Adjoa succeeds because she turns the Proc against himself. Would it work for her again? Probably not.
One interesting sidebar is that this story is one of the few I've written with very little male population. The Procs don't count because they're aliens. Larry, the preacher, is really just a token man. He fills an important role, but he also demonstrates that some men are in the reservation. Still, most of the male population at ARIP are children.
www.ricknovy.com
Rick:
I live in Arizona near Phoenix. There are three Indian reservations in the Phoenix metropolitan area: Fort McDowell, Salt River Maricopa, and Gila River. One day, I started thinking about how in many cases, the indigenous Americans were pushed out of their ancestral homes by invaders who intended to settle on their land. Then, they were given the crappiest land available--land that these people were ill-adapted to live on.
As a speculative fiction writer, I took that a step further. What if the entire earth were invaded, and we were all pushed off our land. Where would our reservation be? Obviously, the reservation had to go on the worst possible land on the planet, the only place we don't already live, Antarctica.
This story starts well after the reservation is up and running so I avoided all the problems with infrastructure. It already exists when the story begins. Some of that infrastructure is primitive, like the ice mines.
The three reservations in the Phoenix area all have something in common: casinos. In fact, "Casino" was the working title for this story. Taking the parallel one step further, I had envisioned humans buying luxuries with Proc money they made with casinos. For that to work, the casinos needed patrons, and thus was born the Proc penchant for gambling. It became part of who they are, a part of their culture, or at least the subculture stuck minding the store at ARIP.
I ended up eliminating the casinos, but kept the gambling as a Proc nuisance trait, but it's a trait that can be very dangerous to the unwary.
The main concept of the story, that of the Olympio family losing their dome, was easy to come up with. This falls back to the gambling. What is the worst thing you can lose in a harsh environment like the Antarctic? Your shelter.
The story was not the easiest to write. At this stage, I made a first stab, but only got as far as Shannon meeting the new family in the rations line, then I got stuck because I really didn't know where the story was going yet. Usually, I need to know the beginning and the end before I can write. The fun part for me is watching the characters figure out how to get from beginning to end. The problem here was that I didn't really know the end. I envisioned Shannon liberating the earth and owning the Procs with orbital casinos. That was far too ambitious for a short story, and probably not plausible anyway.
It was only after I started wondering who this strange family was that the true plot began to emerge. When I discovered that the still-unnamed eldest child was the only one that could communicate with Shannon, I knew she was going to be a major force in the story.
I wanted this family to be from somewhere remote and different from the western world, and became Africa. At the time, I had a co-worker from Togo, so I spent some time with him learning enough about the culture to write the story.
He also gave me a list of names. Koffi and Kossi you might recognize from the current leader of the U.N. For the women, he gave me a list, and I used the one I liked most for this pivotal girl, Adjoa.
As to the actual writing, it was fairly difficult to write. Several false starts dogged me, but I finally ended up with about the first half written in stolen moments on my little pocket PC, an HP iPAQ. The second half was written on my regular computer. I often move partials off my iPAQ to finish them more efficiently.
During the critique cycle, I had many suggestions. It left me unsure of the story, and so it sat on my hard drive for six months before I reread the story and decided to submit the story without revision.
There were two suggestions in particular that nagged at me, and they are inter-related. The first suggestion was to use Adjoa's point of view, the second was that Adjoa's taunting worked too well.
I ultimately decided to stay with Shannon's point of view because the story really is about her willingness to sacrifice herself to help others. To me, the climax of the story is her decision to wager her own dome to try winning back the dome the Olympio family lost. The blackjack game is really just a long denouement. While Adjoa's point of view would have made an interesting story, it would have been a completely different story.
Adjoa's taunting to win the blackjack hands is meant to indicate that this is not about the gambling at all. It's about power and intimidation, and Adjoa succeeds because she turns the Proc against himself. Would it work for her again? Probably not.
One interesting sidebar is that this story is one of the few I've written with very little male population. The Procs don't count because they're aliens. Larry, the preacher, is really just a token man. He fills an important role, but he also demonstrates that some men are in the reservation. Still, most of the male population at ARIP are children.
www.ricknovy.com
Monday, October 02, 2006
The Stories Behind The Stories - Tim Pratt
Introduction: The Story Behind the Stories
When it comes to short story collections, one of my all-time favorite authors has always been Isaac Asimov. Why? Not because he wrote such great stories (though he did write great ones); rather, it was because he took the time to write anywhere from a few lines to a few paragraphs about each story. The story behind the stories. Sometimes I’d go through his collections and read all introductions before I read any of the stories.
To get a glimpse into the author’s mind about what he was trying to accomplish, or how the story was born, or the assorted trials and tribulations the story caused or endured – that fascinated me. I think anyone who has ever uttered the phrase, “I would loved to have been a fly on the wall when…” can appreciate that. And given how much I love stories - long, short, printed, on the big screen, it doesn’t matter; I just love stories – the opportunity to be a fly on Isaac Asimov’s wall was a real treat. Maybe it was that secret part of my soul that, even then, longed to be a writer. On the other hand, maybe it was nothing more than that fundamental aspect in all of us, that thing in our basic human nature which simply relishes feeling like we’re “in” on someone’s secrets. Or maybe it was, C) all of the above. Didn’t much matter. I loved those introductions.
Well, for the next few weeks I'm going to be bringing you the stories behind the stories published in issue three of InterGalactic Medicine Show. I'll post two a week until all our authors have been heard from, and we'll kick it off with a few words from the author of our cover story:
Tim Pratt
"Dream Engine" is something of a hodgepodge story, combining various free-floating ideas I've had for years.
I've always liked weird cities -- from Edward Bryant's Cinnabar to M. John Harrison's Viriconium to China Miéville's New Crobuzon, and I've long wanted to create my own bizarre urban setting. I came up with the idea of a city at the center of a multiverse, a big messy organic sprawl built up on the spinning axis of the great wheel of the multiverse, with whole discrete universes whirling around it on all sides. Conceiving of such a place raised obvious questions. How would such a linchpin city be populated? How would they feed and shelter themselves, how would they trade, etc.? At some point, reading about the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I came across the word "Kleptocracy," to describe a state ruled by thieves. That seemed perfect. The denizens of my city -- which I called "Nexington-on-Axis" -- are magpies of the multiverse, snatching buildings, people, animals, and even hunks of land from passing planets, planes, and dimensions. I knew I'd hit upon a great setting, one where I could do almost anything. I wanted the city to have weirdly alien rulers and a Regent with a hidden agenda, and so I created them.
But a setting isn't a story.
The notion of a man who kills people in his dreams -- and the question of whether he would bear responsibility for those murders -- has fascinated me since high school, and I made a few attempts at writing that story over the years, without success. I realized how I could apply that old idea to my new setting, so I decided to give it a try. At that point, there was a setting, and something that could easily become a plot. All I needed was a protagonist.
I like detectives, from literary ones like Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Hercule Poirot to newer media detectives like Veronica Mars and Adrian Monk. (I'm also fond of fictional bounty hunters, assassins, and secret agents.) A weird city like Nexington-on-Axis would need some kind of detective/enforcer, and who better than Howlaa Moor, a shapeshifting rogue of no fixed gender, who serves the state because the only alternative is death or imprisonment? (The no-fixed-gender thing did provide an interesting challenge when it came to pronouns, so I chose to use one of the several invented gender-neutral sets of terms: "zim" instead of him or her; "zir" instead of "his" or "hers"; "zie" instead of "he" or "she," etc.)
I'm a big fan of sidekicks, so it seemed natural to give Howlaa zir own Dr. Watson, in this case, the bodiless tattletale know-it-all Wisp. They seemed like perfect foils -- Howlaa can transform into virtually any living shape, while Wisp has no physical body at all, just a charged field of floating motes.
Once I had setting, plot, and characters in mind, the story was remarkably easy to write, and it's a world I expect to explore further. Howlaa and Wisp have a lot more adventures in them, I think.
You can link to my blog at www.journalscape.com/tim
best, Tim
"Dream Engine" is now available at www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
When it comes to short story collections, one of my all-time favorite authors has always been Isaac Asimov. Why? Not because he wrote such great stories (though he did write great ones); rather, it was because he took the time to write anywhere from a few lines to a few paragraphs about each story. The story behind the stories. Sometimes I’d go through his collections and read all introductions before I read any of the stories.
To get a glimpse into the author’s mind about what he was trying to accomplish, or how the story was born, or the assorted trials and tribulations the story caused or endured – that fascinated me. I think anyone who has ever uttered the phrase, “I would loved to have been a fly on the wall when…” can appreciate that. And given how much I love stories - long, short, printed, on the big screen, it doesn’t matter; I just love stories – the opportunity to be a fly on Isaac Asimov’s wall was a real treat. Maybe it was that secret part of my soul that, even then, longed to be a writer. On the other hand, maybe it was nothing more than that fundamental aspect in all of us, that thing in our basic human nature which simply relishes feeling like we’re “in” on someone’s secrets. Or maybe it was, C) all of the above. Didn’t much matter. I loved those introductions.
Well, for the next few weeks I'm going to be bringing you the stories behind the stories published in issue three of InterGalactic Medicine Show. I'll post two a week until all our authors have been heard from, and we'll kick it off with a few words from the author of our cover story:
Tim Pratt
"Dream Engine" is something of a hodgepodge story, combining various free-floating ideas I've had for years.
I've always liked weird cities -- from Edward Bryant's Cinnabar to M. John Harrison's Viriconium to China Miéville's New Crobuzon, and I've long wanted to create my own bizarre urban setting. I came up with the idea of a city at the center of a multiverse, a big messy organic sprawl built up on the spinning axis of the great wheel of the multiverse, with whole discrete universes whirling around it on all sides. Conceiving of such a place raised obvious questions. How would such a linchpin city be populated? How would they feed and shelter themselves, how would they trade, etc.? At some point, reading about the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I came across the word "Kleptocracy," to describe a state ruled by thieves. That seemed perfect. The denizens of my city -- which I called "Nexington-on-Axis" -- are magpies of the multiverse, snatching buildings, people, animals, and even hunks of land from passing planets, planes, and dimensions. I knew I'd hit upon a great setting, one where I could do almost anything. I wanted the city to have weirdly alien rulers and a Regent with a hidden agenda, and so I created them.
But a setting isn't a story.
The notion of a man who kills people in his dreams -- and the question of whether he would bear responsibility for those murders -- has fascinated me since high school, and I made a few attempts at writing that story over the years, without success. I realized how I could apply that old idea to my new setting, so I decided to give it a try. At that point, there was a setting, and something that could easily become a plot. All I needed was a protagonist.
I like detectives, from literary ones like Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Hercule Poirot to newer media detectives like Veronica Mars and Adrian Monk. (I'm also fond of fictional bounty hunters, assassins, and secret agents.) A weird city like Nexington-on-Axis would need some kind of detective/enforcer, and who better than Howlaa Moor, a shapeshifting rogue of no fixed gender, who serves the state because the only alternative is death or imprisonment? (The no-fixed-gender thing did provide an interesting challenge when it came to pronouns, so I chose to use one of the several invented gender-neutral sets of terms: "zim" instead of him or her; "zir" instead of "his" or "hers"; "zie" instead of "he" or "she," etc.)
I'm a big fan of sidekicks, so it seemed natural to give Howlaa zir own Dr. Watson, in this case, the bodiless tattletale know-it-all Wisp. They seemed like perfect foils -- Howlaa can transform into virtually any living shape, while Wisp has no physical body at all, just a charged field of floating motes.
Once I had setting, plot, and characters in mind, the story was remarkably easy to write, and it's a world I expect to explore further. Howlaa and Wisp have a lot more adventures in them, I think.
You can link to my blog at www.journalscape.com/tim
best, Tim
"Dream Engine" is now available at www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
IGMS Issue Three Live
Issue three is live.
Congrats to all the writers.
We've actually been ready to go for a while now, except for some of the art work. We finally made the decision to go ahead anyway with what we had. All that missing at this point is the piece to accompany James Maxey's story (which the artist has promised us will be done very soon).
Obviously I'm very pleased. I hope when you read it you will be too.
www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
or
www.oscigms.com
Congrats to all the writers.
We've actually been ready to go for a while now, except for some of the art work. We finally made the decision to go ahead anyway with what we had. All that missing at this point is the piece to accompany James Maxey's story (which the artist has promised us will be done very soon).
Obviously I'm very pleased. I hope when you read it you will be too.
www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
or
www.oscigms.com
Sunday, October 01, 2006
HWA
My interview with author Steve Savile about the Horror Writers Association mentoring program (originally published in The Horror Library and recently reprinted in Dark Recesses) has been permanently added to the HWA website (http://www.horror.org/article-mentoring.htm),
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Story Titles
Story titles are frequent topics of conversation with readers and writers of all kinds, though I do think science ficiton and fantasy and horror lend themselves to more interesting titles. And readers and writers (and editors) ask a lot from titles; we want them to to convey some essense of what the story is about, to intrigue the reader (hopefully enough that they want to read the story), and to do so in a way that verges on the poetic. That's not easy.
Here is a short, randomly arranged list of titles I have seen lately in the IGMS submission pile. These are titles that I liked, or was at least intrigued by.
The Shadowman's Heir
When I Kissed The Learned Astronomer
A Congregation of Casseroles
Skyscraper Dance
The Frankenstein Diaries
Bonpo of Bees
Joe Halo
Mermaids Don't Drown
Dark Vegas
Tides of Moon and Bone
The Most Stubborn of Tears
That last one ("The Most Stubborn of Tears") is an interesting case. I thought "Tears" meant those salty things that flow from your eyes when you're sad, but reading the story made it clear the author meant "Tears" to be what happens to your shirt when it get caught on a fence and you keep going anyway or what you do to a piece of paper to turn it from one piece into two. Just goes to show that you have to pick your words carefully and use them in a context that makes it clear what you mean. I ultimately rejected that story, not because of the title, but I will say that having expectations of one kind get turned into something completely different doesn't help an author's cause either.
As a writer, the title that always got the best response was from one of the first stories I ever wrote. It was called "The Trouble With Eating Clouds." I still like that one; if I'm ever fortunate enough to publish a collection of my own short stories, that will be the title of the book, too.
On the other end of the spectrum are bad titles. I'll get into that next time.
Here is a short, randomly arranged list of titles I have seen lately in the IGMS submission pile. These are titles that I liked, or was at least intrigued by.
The Shadowman's Heir
When I Kissed The Learned Astronomer
A Congregation of Casseroles
Skyscraper Dance
The Frankenstein Diaries
Bonpo of Bees
Joe Halo
Mermaids Don't Drown
Dark Vegas
Tides of Moon and Bone
The Most Stubborn of Tears
That last one ("The Most Stubborn of Tears") is an interesting case. I thought "Tears" meant those salty things that flow from your eyes when you're sad, but reading the story made it clear the author meant "Tears" to be what happens to your shirt when it get caught on a fence and you keep going anyway or what you do to a piece of paper to turn it from one piece into two. Just goes to show that you have to pick your words carefully and use them in a context that makes it clear what you mean. I ultimately rejected that story, not because of the title, but I will say that having expectations of one kind get turned into something completely different doesn't help an author's cause either.
As a writer, the title that always got the best response was from one of the first stories I ever wrote. It was called "The Trouble With Eating Clouds." I still like that one; if I'm ever fortunate enough to publish a collection of my own short stories, that will be the title of the book, too.
On the other end of the spectrum are bad titles. I'll get into that next time.
Monday, September 25, 2006
General Update
The good news is that issue three of IGMS should - and I say should because you never know what last-minute glitches will rear their vile heads - should be out in the next week or so.
For those writers who are waiting on a reply to their submissions, that, unfortunately, is going to take a bit longer. I've just started putting the next issue of NC Career Network Magazine together, I've got a short story for an anthology due by the end of this month, I signed a contract to edit a non-fiction book, and I also took on a project to write the web-content for an advertising firm's client. Not as glamorouos as working on IGMS, but projects that all come with decent paychecks. Since I've yet to figure out how to eat the glamour associated with being an editor, I have to do these other things, too.
For those writers who are waiting on a reply to their submissions, that, unfortunately, is going to take a bit longer. I've just started putting the next issue of NC Career Network Magazine together, I've got a short story for an anthology due by the end of this month, I signed a contract to edit a non-fiction book, and I also took on a project to write the web-content for an advertising firm's client. Not as glamorouos as working on IGMS, but projects that all come with decent paychecks. Since I've yet to figure out how to eat the glamour associated with being an editor, I have to do these other things, too.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Apex Alert
If you love to read SF the way I do, you'll know why I say that I don't want to see any science fiction magazine fold. Unfortunately that's the possibility Apex Digest is now facing, which is why today I'm directing you to go here for details:
http://apexdigest.livejournal.com/4066.html
http://apexdigest.livejournal.com/4066.html
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Interview
I've noticed my last few posts have been getting a little on the long side, so this one will be brief. I just wanted to let you know that the interview I did with Mur Lafferty for her podcast "I Should Be Writing" is now live: it's her entry for September 14th. My sending you there is a something of a leap of faith, as technical difficulties have prevented me from hearing it myself. Someone drop me a note if I sound like too much of a fool...
http://shouldwrite.blogspot.com/
http://shouldwrite.blogspot.com/
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Rats
When Doug Cohen, assistant editor over at Realms of Fantasy, interviewed me a few months ago for his blog, he asked if I thought being editor of IGMS had helped my writing. I told him I absolutely thought that it had, primarily because it let me see how much good writing was out there, and that I now understood that “good” was no where near good enough. What I hadn’t yet realized was that this new perspective was a double-edged sword. I now also see all of my own writing through the eyes of an editor, and it makes writing anything a real challenge because it has to live up to a higher standard. And this "editor" thing that is growing in my brain is not shy about saying, Hey, you're going to have to do better than that.
That’s not a bad thing, mind you. Just a lot more work.
Take for instance the short story I’m working on right now (the one I mentioned in my last entry here (Thrusday). It’s called “The Rat Beneath the Ice" and it's due in thirteen days. I was chugging along pretty well until I came to the conclusion that the writing was okay, but the pacing was too slow. I was on page 12 or 13 before I finally showed the “creature” the story was about, so I boiled the opening down from six pages to one, thus moving the main action closer to the beginning.
But in rewriting my beginning I also lost my “hook,” so now I had to re-write the opening so there would be something to catch and hold the reader’s attention. Okay, so I did that and got back to work, writing, writing, writing.
Then, right before I went to bed last night, I re-read my story again, and came to the painful conclusion that although the pacing was better, I was relying too heavily on the curiosity factor without giving the story’s characters compelling reasons to do the things they were doing. And if there’s nothing compelling the characters to act, there’s usually also nothing compelling the reader to read.
So now I’ve devised what I believe will be significantly more compelling actions and motivations for the characters. And, again, the story will be better for the time and effort of yet another major revision.
But God help me, I hope that’s going to satisfy once and for all this fiend inside me called “editor,” because he is making it awfully difficult for me to get any writing done.
That’s not a bad thing, mind you. Just a lot more work.
Take for instance the short story I’m working on right now (the one I mentioned in my last entry here (Thrusday). It’s called “The Rat Beneath the Ice" and it's due in thirteen days. I was chugging along pretty well until I came to the conclusion that the writing was okay, but the pacing was too slow. I was on page 12 or 13 before I finally showed the “creature” the story was about, so I boiled the opening down from six pages to one, thus moving the main action closer to the beginning.
But in rewriting my beginning I also lost my “hook,” so now I had to re-write the opening so there would be something to catch and hold the reader’s attention. Okay, so I did that and got back to work, writing, writing, writing.
Then, right before I went to bed last night, I re-read my story again, and came to the painful conclusion that although the pacing was better, I was relying too heavily on the curiosity factor without giving the story’s characters compelling reasons to do the things they were doing. And if there’s nothing compelling the characters to act, there’s usually also nothing compelling the reader to read.
So now I’ve devised what I believe will be significantly more compelling actions and motivations for the characters. And, again, the story will be better for the time and effort of yet another major revision.
But God help me, I hope that’s going to satisfy once and for all this fiend inside me called “editor,” because he is making it awfully difficult for me to get any writing done.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Another Day, Another Deadline
I wish I had something new to report with IGMS, but we’re still waiting for the final pieces to be put in place, and still aiming for a release date around the end of this month.
I've also set my own novel aside for the moment. Several reason for that, mostly coming out of DragonCon. One is that I talked at DragonCon with an editor from Penguin and she told me that 'historical' pieces don't really sell that well, and even a genre story set in the 1930's would be considered historical fiction. So I'm trying to work out a way to make my new novel (working title: Waxing Human) contemporary. I have a few ideas, but need to do some more research before I start writing. No point in writing something a NY editor tells you ahead of time is going to be a tough sell.
Also, at DragonCon I got invited to submit a story for an anthology called Crypto-Critters. It's an anthology using creatures from cryptozoology, including mythological creatures like unicorns and mermaids, 'mystery' creatures like Nessie and Big Foot, and appearances of creatures thought long extinct. The first antho is out and is doing so well they're already working on the next one. I told the editor I had read and enjoyed Crypto I, and he told me he had an author cancel on him last minute for Crypto II and offered me a slot in the book. Only now I have to come up with a finished, polished story by the end of this month. It's supposed to be about 5,000 words long, and I'm up to almost half that now. I was further along, but then I realized the opening I had written was slow and could be boiled from six pages down to one. Doing so made the story read better, but it also set me back about 1,200 words. Such is the life of a writer, I suppose.
And lastly, I also just made a deal with someone to edit a non-fiction book for them before they send it to their agent. It's not an exciting or glamorous job, but the pay is decent and I'm going to have to get that done as quickly as possible, too.
So that's what happening in my world. What's new in yours?
I've also set my own novel aside for the moment. Several reason for that, mostly coming out of DragonCon. One is that I talked at DragonCon with an editor from Penguin and she told me that 'historical' pieces don't really sell that well, and even a genre story set in the 1930's would be considered historical fiction. So I'm trying to work out a way to make my new novel (working title: Waxing Human) contemporary. I have a few ideas, but need to do some more research before I start writing. No point in writing something a NY editor tells you ahead of time is going to be a tough sell.
Also, at DragonCon I got invited to submit a story for an anthology called Crypto-Critters. It's an anthology using creatures from cryptozoology, including mythological creatures like unicorns and mermaids, 'mystery' creatures like Nessie and Big Foot, and appearances of creatures thought long extinct. The first antho is out and is doing so well they're already working on the next one. I told the editor I had read and enjoyed Crypto I, and he told me he had an author cancel on him last minute for Crypto II and offered me a slot in the book. Only now I have to come up with a finished, polished story by the end of this month. It's supposed to be about 5,000 words long, and I'm up to almost half that now. I was further along, but then I realized the opening I had written was slow and could be boiled from six pages down to one. Doing so made the story read better, but it also set me back about 1,200 words. Such is the life of a writer, I suppose.
And lastly, I also just made a deal with someone to edit a non-fiction book for them before they send it to their agent. It's not an exciting or glamorous job, but the pay is decent and I'm going to have to get that done as quickly as possible, too.
So that's what happening in my world. What's new in yours?
Monday, September 11, 2006
My First Resume
Many folks today are talking about the events of 9/11/01, which is only natural, given that this is the 5th anniversary of those horrific events. But for better or for worse, I'm not going to. I grew up in New York, and although I moved away a long time ago, it will always be home. I have an old childhood friend who worked in one of the Towers who was supposed to get married two days after the attack. She got out alive, but too many others didn't. The wedding went on, but you can imagine what a somber event it was. Because of that (I suppose), the events of 9/11 are still too painful for me to confront head on. I have made a studious point of avoiding the TV today because I know it will be innundated with images from that day.
Instead (as with so very many things in my life), I'm going to go in the opposite direction from the masses; I'm going to tell you a little anecdote from my days in NYC. Folks have asked what path lead me to become an editor, so I'm sharing this bit of personal history. This was step one on my road to editorial fame and fortune:
My First Resume, or
(Good God, y’all – what is it good for…)
I’m not sure which yet, but the world is full of either poetic cosmic signs, or random, meaningless coincidences. Let’s assume for a moment that the poetic-cosmic-sign theory has some validity and I’ll tell you about the first thing I ever did with my resume. This story goes back nearly twenty years now, but I remember the details as vividly as if it happened only two decades ago. It’s one of my best drunken party stories, though, and it’s high time I committed it to paper.
I lived in New York at the time, and when I first began job hunting after graduation, I answered a help wanted ad in the New York Times that brought me to one of the multitude of employment agencies around Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street.
In the agency’s office, I took a seat, along with fourteen other Recent College Graduates, and waited breathlessly until the powers-that-be called me to meet my “career counselor,” who eventually told me I was not only qualified to interview for a human resources position they were trying to fill for the famed auction house Sotheby’s, but that she could get me into Sotheby’s for an interview that same day.
This, however, turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. The good news was that I had my resume with me: it was concise, impressive, type-set and printed on heavy, tan paper. The problem was that I had folded it up in quarters and stuck it in my jacket’s breast pocket. This, my counselor informed me, was no way to treat a document so sacred as a resume.
Determined to save the day, my career counselor so she photocopied a half dozen copies of my poor, abused resume and then sang Allah’s praises when the creases didn’t show.
With my resume now safely protected from further harm by a manila envelope, I made my way on foot through the streets of New York to my first-ever job interview. Unfortunately, the closer I got to Sotheby’s, the more it became clear if I didn’t find a restroom, and find one soon, I was going to have to skip the interview for reasons of personal hygiene.
Miraculously – and if you’ve ever looked for a public restroom in New York City, you know the order of magnitude of miracle we’re talking about here - I found a fast food restaurant with functioning facilities, went into a stall, threw my pants down around my ankles, and did what I had to do.
Close call averted.
It was only after my great relief that I became aware, with even greater dismay, that something vital was conspicuously absent.
There was not a shred of toilet paper. Anywhere. Not in my stall, not in the adjacent stall; not nowhere. I stood on tiptoe and peered over the divider, confirming with a growing sense of panic that there weren’t even paper towels in the dispenser next to the sink.
I was, if you’ll pardon an unpardonable pun, in deep do-do.
It was at this point that my eyes fell on the manila envelope with my photocopied resumes…
And it really wasn’t a tough decision to make.
I sat back, crumpled and uncrumpled the pages several times to make them as soft as possible - and ended up at my interview with a smile on my face that no one could figure out, and only one copy of my resume. It was folded neatly in quarters.
Did I get the job?
Are you kidding me?
Instead (as with so very many things in my life), I'm going to go in the opposite direction from the masses; I'm going to tell you a little anecdote from my days in NYC. Folks have asked what path lead me to become an editor, so I'm sharing this bit of personal history. This was step one on my road to editorial fame and fortune:
My First Resume, or
(Good God, y’all – what is it good for…)
I’m not sure which yet, but the world is full of either poetic cosmic signs, or random, meaningless coincidences. Let’s assume for a moment that the poetic-cosmic-sign theory has some validity and I’ll tell you about the first thing I ever did with my resume. This story goes back nearly twenty years now, but I remember the details as vividly as if it happened only two decades ago. It’s one of my best drunken party stories, though, and it’s high time I committed it to paper.
I lived in New York at the time, and when I first began job hunting after graduation, I answered a help wanted ad in the New York Times that brought me to one of the multitude of employment agencies around Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street.
In the agency’s office, I took a seat, along with fourteen other Recent College Graduates, and waited breathlessly until the powers-that-be called me to meet my “career counselor,” who eventually told me I was not only qualified to interview for a human resources position they were trying to fill for the famed auction house Sotheby’s, but that she could get me into Sotheby’s for an interview that same day.
This, however, turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. The good news was that I had my resume with me: it was concise, impressive, type-set and printed on heavy, tan paper. The problem was that I had folded it up in quarters and stuck it in my jacket’s breast pocket. This, my counselor informed me, was no way to treat a document so sacred as a resume.
Determined to save the day, my career counselor so she photocopied a half dozen copies of my poor, abused resume and then sang Allah’s praises when the creases didn’t show.
With my resume now safely protected from further harm by a manila envelope, I made my way on foot through the streets of New York to my first-ever job interview. Unfortunately, the closer I got to Sotheby’s, the more it became clear if I didn’t find a restroom, and find one soon, I was going to have to skip the interview for reasons of personal hygiene.
Miraculously – and if you’ve ever looked for a public restroom in New York City, you know the order of magnitude of miracle we’re talking about here - I found a fast food restaurant with functioning facilities, went into a stall, threw my pants down around my ankles, and did what I had to do.
Close call averted.
It was only after my great relief that I became aware, with even greater dismay, that something vital was conspicuously absent.
There was not a shred of toilet paper. Anywhere. Not in my stall, not in the adjacent stall; not nowhere. I stood on tiptoe and peered over the divider, confirming with a growing sense of panic that there weren’t even paper towels in the dispenser next to the sink.
I was, if you’ll pardon an unpardonable pun, in deep do-do.
It was at this point that my eyes fell on the manila envelope with my photocopied resumes…
And it really wasn’t a tough decision to make.
I sat back, crumpled and uncrumpled the pages several times to make them as soft as possible - and ended up at my interview with a smile on my face that no one could figure out, and only one copy of my resume. It was folded neatly in quarters.
Did I get the job?
Are you kidding me?
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Parting Plug
Returning to the subject of DragonCon, I do want to talk briefly about meeting Jason Sizemore, the editor in chief of Apex Digest, and Jetse de Vries, one of the editors of Interzone. They shared a table in one of the dealers’ rooms, so I bought a couple issues of their respective magazines, and got to chat with them.
I mainly talked with Jetse at the dealer’s table, and the big Dutchman is quite a character. Later I had several opportunities to talk with Jason (over lunch one day, and dinner another). Though both meals were with groups, I got to know Jason a bit better. I’m not going to go into detail about what we discussed, but suffice it to say that both Jason and Jetse impressed me as knowledgeable, passionate people, who love what they do and are committed to doing it very well. And their work reflects their commitment. Both magazines are excellent reads, and look gorgeous, too. If you haven’t tried one or the other, find a copy of Apex or Interzone; I promise you won’t be disappointed.
I mainly talked with Jetse at the dealer’s table, and the big Dutchman is quite a character. Later I had several opportunities to talk with Jason (over lunch one day, and dinner another). Though both meals were with groups, I got to know Jason a bit better. I’m not going to go into detail about what we discussed, but suffice it to say that both Jason and Jetse impressed me as knowledgeable, passionate people, who love what they do and are committed to doing it very well. And their work reflects their commitment. Both magazines are excellent reads, and look gorgeous, too. If you haven’t tried one or the other, find a copy of Apex or Interzone; I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Dragon On Home
And a good time was had by all.
Let's see... DragonCon 2006...
Got to plug InterGalactic Medicine Show here and there (which was kind of the point of going).
Got to hang out with a good group of writers.
Got to meet a few editors, including book editors from Tor and one from Penguin, as well as Jason Sizemore of Apex Digest and Jetse de Vries of Interzone.
Got to see some crazy people in crazy costumes (they tell me one woman was wearing a bikini made entirely of duct tape, though I never saw her myself). I did see somethings I could have lived without seeing, but they that one room full of 25 to 30 Princess Leia's in slave girl outfits more than made up for it.
Got interviewed for a podcast called "I Should Be Writing," produced by Mur Lafferty (I'll tell you when and where to find that as soon as I know myself).
Got invited to have a story in an upcoming anthology called Crypto-Critters II (I ran into the editor of the first Crypto-Critters antho (cryptozoology - the study of 'unknown' creatures, which, yeah, is really quite the oxymoron when you think about it)) and mentioned to said editor that I had read and enjoyed Crypto I. He told me it was such a success that he was doing another, but one of the writers had had to cancel out, so he gave me that guy's slot. That didn't suck.
What else...?
Here's a fun moment: I'm sitting in a dinner with a group of people, waiting for a table to open up. We've been waiting a while, so I start reading poetry to the group (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be sitting near by)(one of our group is in grad school and happened to have a bunch of poetry with her (this is why hanging out with writers is so much fun)(okay, okay, enough parenthetical enclosures already; on with the story...))) anyway... my cell phone rings. I see that it's from another one from our group, Alethea, who we've been trying to reach, so I answer the phone saying, "Ed's dinner and poetry reading corner, how may I help you?" Only it wasn't Alethea; it was Kevin J. Anderson (the Kevin J. Anderson who's written a gazillion books, you ask? The one whose next Dune novel is set to debut at #3 on the New York Best Sellers List when it comes out in a few weeks? Why yes, that's the one...) Apparently he had dinner with Alethea the night before and had her cell phone. It’s somewhat embarrassing to get your first call from someone like that and answer the phone that way, but embarrassing stories are the best ones, so the next time I see Alethea (and ask her if she'd gotten her cell phone back), I tell her this story. She tells me she's already heard it. Apparently Mr. Anderson was telling it, too. I haven’t decided yet if I’m amused or mortified (which, you’ll note does not prevent me from telling it again here).
I’m sure there’s more, but as I’ve said before, I despise con reports that go on for 20 pages. DragonCon was DragonCon (if you’ve ever been, you know what I mean; if you haven’t ever been, you’ll just have to go see for yourself). Special thanks to my con partners in crime, Alethea Kontis, Steve Saville, James Maxey, Eric James Stone, Jason Sizemore, Oliver Hanson (m-bop), Ada Brown, Gary Rinehart, Helena Bell, and Allen Moore, who made a good weekend great.
Let's see... DragonCon 2006...
Got to plug InterGalactic Medicine Show here and there (which was kind of the point of going).
Got to hang out with a good group of writers.
Got to meet a few editors, including book editors from Tor and one from Penguin, as well as Jason Sizemore of Apex Digest and Jetse de Vries of Interzone.
Got to see some crazy people in crazy costumes (they tell me one woman was wearing a bikini made entirely of duct tape, though I never saw her myself). I did see somethings I could have lived without seeing, but they that one room full of 25 to 30 Princess Leia's in slave girl outfits more than made up for it.
Got interviewed for a podcast called "I Should Be Writing," produced by Mur Lafferty (I'll tell you when and where to find that as soon as I know myself).
Got invited to have a story in an upcoming anthology called Crypto-Critters II (I ran into the editor of the first Crypto-Critters antho (cryptozoology - the study of 'unknown' creatures, which, yeah, is really quite the oxymoron when you think about it)) and mentioned to said editor that I had read and enjoyed Crypto I. He told me it was such a success that he was doing another, but one of the writers had had to cancel out, so he gave me that guy's slot. That didn't suck.
What else...?
Here's a fun moment: I'm sitting in a dinner with a group of people, waiting for a table to open up. We've been waiting a while, so I start reading poetry to the group (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be sitting near by)(one of our group is in grad school and happened to have a bunch of poetry with her (this is why hanging out with writers is so much fun)(okay, okay, enough parenthetical enclosures already; on with the story...))) anyway... my cell phone rings. I see that it's from another one from our group, Alethea, who we've been trying to reach, so I answer the phone saying, "Ed's dinner and poetry reading corner, how may I help you?" Only it wasn't Alethea; it was Kevin J. Anderson (the Kevin J. Anderson who's written a gazillion books, you ask? The one whose next Dune novel is set to debut at #3 on the New York Best Sellers List when it comes out in a few weeks? Why yes, that's the one...) Apparently he had dinner with Alethea the night before and had her cell phone. It’s somewhat embarrassing to get your first call from someone like that and answer the phone that way, but embarrassing stories are the best ones, so the next time I see Alethea (and ask her if she'd gotten her cell phone back), I tell her this story. She tells me she's already heard it. Apparently Mr. Anderson was telling it, too. I haven’t decided yet if I’m amused or mortified (which, you’ll note does not prevent me from telling it again here).
I’m sure there’s more, but as I’ve said before, I despise con reports that go on for 20 pages. DragonCon was DragonCon (if you’ve ever been, you know what I mean; if you haven’t ever been, you’ll just have to go see for yourself). Special thanks to my con partners in crime, Alethea Kontis, Steve Saville, James Maxey, Eric James Stone, Jason Sizemore, Oliver Hanson (m-bop), Ada Brown, Gary Rinehart, Helena Bell, and Allen Moore, who made a good weekend great.
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