Winning the WSFA Small Press Award - by Greg Siewert

I found out I was a finalist for the WSFA small press award over the summer, but I didn’t hear that I’d won until two weeks before the ceremony. I’d made the decision not to go simply because I live in California and Washington D.C. is on the other side of the country. I’m a winemaker and when I got the call from Edmund Schubert, the editor for "InterGalactic Medicine Show," I was working for a consulting client who has a micro-winery; he makes Sauvignon Blanc in his converted car port. "I was wondering if you could write something else for me" Edmund said. I didn’t know what he meant and I figured he was talking about a bio or something. Then he told me it was an acceptance speech. I couldn’t believe it.

The journey of "The Absence of Stars" was a weird one. The request for a re-write came long after I’d submitted it and I’d totally forgotten I had anything in submission. It was also a time when I wasn’t very focused on writing. I’m sure any aspiring writer can sympathize with the notion that finding time to write is sometimes the hardest part of the craft. "The Absence of Stars" is a long story, which took me half a year to write. I made the usual circuit of magazine submissions and then put it on the shelf, what else can you do? To find out that the story still had life, and that it was being considered by a magazine owned by Orson Scott Card, was really exciting.

I made it through the re-write process and they accepted it. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that if I’m writing 6 months from now, that encouragement out of the blue had a lot to do with it.

The nomination, and then later finding out I was a finalist, was a very gratifying thing. Banging away at something at home can be a pretty isolated experience. There’s no more difficult task than critiquing your own writing, and when you’re in the heat of creating something, how do you know it’s any good? To know that someone read your story and liked it, is a big deal.

I consider myself a "young" writer, but I mean that not in a chronological sense, (turning 36 canned that for me) but in terms of how much I’ve written. I had this idea, as I started writing science fiction, that I wanted to do my "version" of some familiar science fiction sub-genres. My story "God Loves the Infantry" got third place in the "Writer’s of the Future" Contest and represented my take on the "post-apocalypse urban hell-scape" as I envisioned it taking place in California. My unpublished novella "Boneman" was my take on the popular "demon escapes from hell" story. In my version, the demon is the protagonist and is strongly influenced by the super-hero genre. Anyway, this is all to explain that one of the most well-tread topics in science fiction is the "object is heading toward Earth" story. I knew I wanted to write one, and that was: "The Absence of Stars."

I had a few goals in writing this story that I felt would make it my own. First, the idea that the object(s) could be a hailstorm of black holes seemed really exciting. Second, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t devote a single word to the consideration of who was and was not worthy of being evacuated. I’m not sure why I find that conversation so annoying and boring but I do. Third, the Earth doesn’t survive. So sad. Not the first story to take this approach but it was important to me. Finally, I’m an amateur physics buff and I wanted to use the story to explore some ideas and air out some opinions of mine about what relativity really means in terms of space exploration.

When I found out I won, I decided to make the trip and I have a confession to make; Capclave was my first science fiction convention. My friends Craig and Mary Beth live in D.C. and I decided that when it comes to writing, life doesn’t always give you a lot of opportunities so you should make the most of any that come along. I didn’t tell anybody that I’d won, not even my family or Craig and Mary Beth. I did this partially because I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, and partially because I thought it would be more fun to keep my friends in suspense!

Capclave was great. It was really oriented toward writers. Every hour they had seminars in the different rooms of the hotel. I saw one seminar about the future of the space program and also saw an interview with the Guest of Honor; Harry Turtledove.

My friend Craig joined me for the ceremony and--still not having been told that I won--he was terribly excited and surprised at the result. It was really fun accepting the award and taking photos with the other finalists. After, Edmund was kind enough to show me one of the parties in the hotel and I had a fantastic time. I met a bunch of interesting and creative people and It’s a neat feeling to be around people you share a common passion with.

It was quite a bit of travel for such a short stay, but I have no regrets. Like I said earlier, writing is a craft that doesn’t always provide you with much encouragement, and it’s important to take advantage of any positive feedback that you get. Whatever keeps us writing!

Greg

Welcome to Two New IGMS Assistant Editors

I'm very excited to announce the addition of two new assistant editors to the IGMS staff. My goal is to significantly improve the speed of the response times for all submissions, as well as increase our online/social networking presence. I also realized over this past summer (as I was recovering from surgery on my left shoulder) that things could get out of control pretty quickly, and with a second surgery coming up in a few weeks I wanted to make sure the magazine would keep moving forward even if I wasn't.

Toward that end, I have hired Scott Roberts for one of the assistant editor positions. His primary responsibilities will be setting up and maintaining an IGMS Facebook page, maintaining the IGMS blog, being active in the IGMS forum, and of course reading some of the submissions. Scott is a Writer's of the Future winner, having attended their workshop and been published in their annual anthology. He is also a graduate of Uncle Orson's Literary Boot Camp and has been published twice in our magazine (as well as the IGMS anthology released last year by Tor).

Assistant editor number two is Eric James Stone. If you read IGMS, you should know his name, becase his stories appear practically in every other issue. Eric is also a Writer's of the Future winner, also a graduate of OSC's Literary Boot Camp, and a graduate of the Odessey Writing Workshop as well. In addition to his IGMS publishing credits, he has also been published in various anthologies and multiple times in Analog. Eric will be taking on a healthy portion of the IGMS submissions.

I'm very excited to have both of these high quality people to work with. It's something I've wanted to put in place for quite a while now, and when I finally got the green light, I knew right away who my first choices would be. Now I've got them both, and I couldn't be happier.

Congrats, Scott and Eric, and welcome to the Show!

Free IGMS Reading

Another hearty congratulations to Greg Siewert, whose story, "The Absence of Stars" won this year's WSFA award for Best Story of 2008. "The Absence of Stars" is a novelette that was published in two parts, in issues 10 and 11.

Also, congratulations to James Maxey, whose story "Silent As Dust" from issue 7 was one of the other finalists for this year's award. James' story was also selected for inclusion in The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2009 edited by Rich Horton.

To celebrate, IGMS is making both of these stories free for everyone to read until the end of 2009. Dive in and enjoy! Just go to the IGMS homepage, click on the announcement at the top of that page, and get reading.

IGMS Story Wins WSFA Award for Best Short Story of 2008

Congratulations (again) to James Maxey, who got an Honorable Mention at the WSFA Small Press Awards for his story "Silent As Dust," and an extra-large congratulations to Greg Siewert, who was the winner for "The Absence of Stars - Part One." There was an ongoing humorous bit after the award was handed out, when people kept asking Greg when he was going to write part two. I say humorous, because the story was already complete; I sent the whole thing in to the committee when I nominated it. But because part one was published in the last issue of 2008 (the year being considered for the award) and part two was published in the first issue of 2009, the award was officially given to part one. After a while (a very short while, to tell the truth) we got tired of explaining it and started having fun with people, making silly stuff up. Greg was a great guy and it was a pleasure to meet him in person.

Personally, I was particularly happy with the win (even if all I got was a certificate, when last year they gave the author AND the editor an engraved crystal thingamabob for their efforts). Partly it was because John Joseph Adams had two stories nominated from an anthology he edited, and IGMS had two stories nominated, so we made up more than half of the finalists between us and had been ribbing each other on and off throughout the convention about who was and wasn't going to win. But mostly I was happy because it was the first outright win for an IGMS story. We've had stories nominated for awards before, but this was the first time one of my authors went home with some hardware (and a nice check, too). So a great big thanks to Greg for getting IGMS over that hump and into the winner's circle.

CapClave 2009

Heading up to Rockville, MD for CapClave; Oct. 16 - 18. It's a great literary SF convention -- no games, no costumes, no TV or movie stuff; just authors, editors, publishers, and the occasional agent. Also home of the WSFA's small press award ceremony, for which there are two IGMS stories on the list of finalists for best short story of 2008. For full convention details, see the CapClave website.

My own schedule is as follows:

Capclave 2009

Fri 7pm Plaza ‐ Alternate Dogcatchers

Participants: Jim Freund (m), Harry Turtledove, Tom Doyle, Michael Flynn, Edmund Schubert

What makes a good alternate history work and bad ones fail? What points of depature do you change?

How do you build a good alternate history? What alt histories aren't done that we would like to see?

Fri 8:30pm Twinbrook ‐ Reading: Edmund Schubert

Sat 12am Randolph ‐ Writers Workshop

Participants: Allen Wold (m), Davey Beauchamp, Edmund Schubert

Allen Wold and friends will help you become a better writer. Bring paper and a writing implement. All

else will be explained at the beginning of the session

Sat 1pm Randolph ‐ Writers Workshop

Participants: Allen Wold (m), Davey Beauchamp, Edmund Schubert

(part 2 of writers workshop)

Sat 3pm Montrose ‐ Save the Magazines!

Participants: Edmund Schubert (m), Scott Andrews, C. Alen Loewen, Karen Newton, George Scithers,

Shelia Williams

What can be done to save the magazines? Asimov's circulation, once 100,000 is down to 17,000 F&SF

even fewer. Is it worth saving? Are magazines doomed? Can Internet save the magazines? What will

replace them?

Book signing schedule

Saturday

10am Harry Turtledove and Shelia Williams

11am Ed Lerner and Michael Flynn

12pm Andrew Fox and C. Alan Loewan

1pm Dan Danvers and Michael Swanwick

2pm Mindy Klasky, A.C. Crispin, and James Morrow

3pm Alan Smale, Eric Choi, and James Maxey

4pm Lawrence Watt Evans, Catherine Asaro and Donald Walcott (after their concert)

5pm Diane Arrelle, Dr. Lawrence Schoen, and Edmund Schubert

Sat 9pm Plaza ‐ Small Press Award

Participants: WSFA and the nominees

Who will win the annual WSFA small press award? Come and see. Celebrate with cake.

Sun 11am Plaza ‐ Paranormal Versus Urban Fantasy

Participants: Scott Andrews (m), Catherine Asaro, Karen Newton, Edmund Schubert, Jean‐Marie Ward,

Diane Weinstein

Is paranormal romance just another name for urban fantasy? If not, what is the distinction? How do

writers determine the right balance between paranormal and romance? Is it just classic boy meets girl or

does a paranormal being make it different.

Sun 2pm Randolphh ‐ Online Fiction

Participants: Brenda Clough (m), Diane Arrelle, Edmund Schubert, J.J. Smith, Sean Wallace

Is the fiction published in online magazines different from that in the print magazines and if so, how?

What online fiction sources are the best? How do readers and writers find out about online sources?

Pretidigitation - by Philip Powell - IGMS issue 14 audio

Prestidigitation - A Tale of Stolen Fingers

Written by Philip Powell

Illustration by Tom Barker

Performed by Philip Powell, Tommy Trull, Melanie Wallace, Jim McKeny, Billy Christiansen, Tom Barker

Verse bored me. It was my dirty little secret. E-Gads! My snobby friends would have shunned me. By randomly quoting snippets of Moliere I avoided their suspicion. But internally, verse made my eyes roll.

Until, I read "Le Bete" by David Hirson, wonderful play written in the late 80's that had rhyming verse. What was different? It was a modern playwright who had written something for a modern audience. I had been fooled all those years when reading Shakespeare or similar. I thought it was the verse that I didn't care for. But come to find out, the problem was all the anachonistic language. It got in the way of my comprehending the text. Once I actually understood what was being said, verse and I became fast friends.

This piece started out as a script for a NYC 24 hour film contest. The story had to be about a clown, at a party…oh…and it had to be in rhyming verse. So, I ripped out a few verses…but we ultimately went in a different direction. There it sat on my desktop for two years. Until a tag line hit me out of the blue one day. “A tale of stolen fingers” I mused “who would have to the most to lose if his fingers were stolen?” A magician I suppose. Hmmm..that sounds a bit like that piece I started a few years back.” The rhyming verse was already in place so I just went with it.

I learned a lot during the process. The confines were good, as I had to think very carefully about what I was doing. Every word was precious. I had 12 syllables per line, all of their accents had to hit the beat, it had to rhyme…oh, and manage to be funny. Prose never seemed so liberating.

* * * *

Prestidigitation - A Tale of Stolen Fingers

Written by Philip Powell

Performed by Philip Powell, Tommy Trull, Melanie Wallace, Jim McKeny, Billy Christiansen, Tom Barker

is available now in issue 14 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

“For Want of Chocolate” - by J.F. Lewis - IGMS issue 14

***

Something is terribly wrong with Edmund. It’s a well known fact that I can’t sell a short story to save my life. Well. Known. Fact! And then Edmund goes and buys “For Want of Chocolate” putting me in this weird place where I have to stop saying that I’ve never sold a short story. Flat out cruelty. That’s what it is. And from a certain point of view cruelty is what the short story is all about.

Usually, I’m not a short story guy. Write a novel? Oh, yeah. For a short story, though, an idea has to explode into my head fully formed… and in general, I have to finish the thing in a week or it transforms into a novel. Take “For Want of Chocolate.” FWoC started as a blog post about how the vampires in my Void City series can’t eat and how that has driven them to participate in a sort of voyeuristic eating where they make humans dine on what they, the vampires, crave but cannot have. At the end of the post, I asked readers what food they’d miss the most if they became a vampire. Chocolate won hands down… which, given that I don’t really like chocolate, intrigued me.

Around the same time, I was invited to do a reading (I won’t say where) and *after* I accepted, the person in charge asked if I would please make sure to keep it clean. We’ve since laughed about it, but it seemed like a very odd (almost cruel) request at the time. My first novel, Staked, was the only book I had out, and to be frank, the main character is a veteran who runs a strip club and his language is… peppery at best. So, the week before the reading, I wrote the first draft of “For Want of Chocolate” as a vehicle for introducing the way my vampires work, with a fair dose of the humor folks have come (hopefully) to expect from the novels, but without the colorful expletives.

Obviously, the story became more than that… the characters became real and made their own choices and decisions, which is what I’m always shooting for when I write.

Haley, the main character in “For Want of Chocolate” is a newly turned vampire coming to the realization that she can’t eat chocolate anymore. Having her realize that simple fact while standing in front of a Godiva store is my little jab at the chocolate lovers out there and an attempt to awaken in chocolate lovers that craving which never completely goes away. The first time I read the story, people went out and bought chocolate. The second time I read it (at a convention) it was as part of a group reading and two of my fellow authors threatened to kill me if I ever again read the story in their presence when no chocolate was available… threats which made me glow inside, because that is exactly the reaction I wanted. Could the guy who doesn’t really like chocolate make people who do like it crave it? It worked on Edmund. Hopefully, it will work on you, too… and if all works as planned, you won’t have any chocolate at hand either.

Muhwahahaha!

If you enjoy “For Want of Chocolate,” you can check out more tales of Void City in Staked and its sequel ReVamped. A third book in the series and a proposal for a fourth are on my editor’s desk, so hopefully you won’t have long to wait for those either. If I have my way, Haley will have her own novel eventually too, in which the lack of chocolate will be the least of her worries.

* * * *

"For Want of Chocolate" by J.F. Lewis is available now in issue 14 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

"Shadow of Turning" by Joan Savage - IGMS, issue 14

I was stuck in a short story I was working on; so much so that I decided I needed to leave it for a while, give it a break. But it was the same with everything I had on the go. I’d open a file, stare at a story and the story would stare back, but that was it. I was stuck.

A change, I decided, was in order. I needed something new to work on, just for an afternoon, but I didn’t have any ideas for new projects either. Having been recently introduced to the concept of random plot generators I thought, I’ll have some fun, fool around, and then get back to work. So I found a website with a random plot generator and this is what it gave me: “The theme of this story: allegorical action. The main character: focused pedlar. The start of the story: reconciliation. The end of the story: revelation.”

Allegorical action didn’t interest me but reconciliation and revelation are loaded words, rich with connotations. The pedlar came easily—I’m fascinated by vagrant lifestyles and their hardships, and a suffering character always intrigues me. For reconciliation I grabbed the first thought that came to hand: the pedlar had an estranged son.

I began to write as the pedlar walked up to his son’s hut; a snake happened to slither past, just minding its own business and not intending to be part of any story at all. Then father met son and the pedlar began to speak backwards.

I was shocked.

Stories, I know, come from our subconscious, which always knows what it’s doing, but I often wish it would let the rest of my brain in on the process.

I wrote through to the end of their dialogue but then, because I really didn’t know what I was doing, the story stopped. I had had my fun and went back to my other projects. But there was something about the pedlar that intrigued me, something that kept me thinking about him and mulling over his story. He was a character I wanted to spend more time with.

So, after many months, I pulled the story out again and this time sat down in earnest to find out why the pedlar was looking for his son, why he was cursed, and why snakes kept turning up when I kept trying to get rid of them. The result is “Shadow of Turning.”

* * * *

"Shadow of Turning" by Joan Savage is available now in issue 14 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

"On Horizon's Shores" - by Aliette deBodard

"On Horizon's Shores" actually started as an earth-based story. I wanted to write something in the future, in a world where global warming had made the sea levels rise drastically, and where the depleted stocks of petrol were replaced with fuel culled from huge algae fields.

I ran into a snag at the research stage, though.

It turns out that the Earth is incredibly hard to flood: even supposing that both ice caps melt, the global sea level rise would be a few dozen meters--not really a spectacular flood, but more a gnawing-away of the coastlines. To be fair, it would still have meant catastrophes (there are, naturally, a lot of cities on the seashores), but nothing on the scale I wanted for the story. I brainstormed it a bit with my boyfriend, who doubles as my science consultant, but couldn't find any way to flood Earth that would feel realistic to me.

So I moved the story in space: the sea became that of another planet, and the protagonists expatriate Earthmen. Because I still wanted them to have been influenced by the sea-level rise, I had Thi Loan come from one of the flooded regions (the Mekong Delta, which is very low-altitude and would be one of the first massive tracts of land to go), and her husband Alex come from one of the safer areas--thus making him unable to understand in a visceral way the trauma of losing your home.

The aliens came from another story I had been sitting on for a while, one about language and how different physiologies would have different ways of expressing themselves. We use our vocal chords because that's the most practical way of communicating we have, but what if we could use some other signals, like the colours of our ruffs, or pheromones? That would imply a radically different way of thinking--in fact, it would make translation (already a chancy exercise from one human language to another) impossibly hard. In order to translate, you'd have to become the aliens.

The idea spoke a lot to me, as I'm always fascinated by people who have to stand on a boundary of some kind--most probably because as a half-French, half-Vietnamese who writes in English, I'm already standing on a lot of boundaries myself.

And, of course, you'll have spotted the trouble by now: I'd been piling up a lot of things in this story (and that's not even counting the galactic background, which has India spearheading the space race and Asia gradually ascending to take the place of the Western World).

When the time came to actually write an opening, I was juggling too many balls. The first attempt in media res left my first reader hopelessly baffled (I could tell by the number of question marks he left in the margins of the draft); the second attempt was good old-fashioned infodumping, several pages' worth of it. Fortunately, Edmund is a dab hand with the prose scissors: he cut away just the right amount of the opening, and devoted some of his awesome editing skills to the rest of my story until it all flowed much more smoothly.

* * * *

"On Horizon's Shores" by Aliette deBodard is available now in issue 14 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

To learn more about the author, visit her website at: http://aliettedebodard.com/

now available - IGMS, Issue 14

IGMS - Issue 14

On Horizon's Shores - by Aliette deBodard

Judgment of Sword and Souls - by Saladin Ahmed

Shadow of Turning - by Joan Savage

For Want of Chocolate - by J.F. Lewis

Hunting Lodge - by Jon Crusoe











Bonus Audio - Prestidigitation - by Philip Powell, adapted by Tom Barker

continuing the serialization of OSC's collection of interlinked short stories with "Fringe," from Folk of the Fringe






and Darrell Schweitzer's interview with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson about their latest release in the Dune saga

2009 WSFA Small Press Award – Two IGMS Finalists

Here's a nice bit of news I just got:

WSFA Small Press Award – Finalists for 2009

The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2009 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction. The WSFA is based in Washington DC and covers the capitol, as well as the greater Baltimore MD metro area.

The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction. The award showcases the best original short fiction (up to 17,500 words) published by small presses in the previous year (2008). An unusual feature of the selection process is that all voting is done with the identity of the author (and publisher) hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.

The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (www.wsfa.org) and will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held this year on October 16-18th in Rockville, Maryland.

Listed alphabetically (by story title), the seven finalists are:

“Drinking Problem” by K.D. Wentworth, published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams, Prime Books (August, 2008).

“Hard Rain at the Fortean Café” by Lavie Tidhar, published in issue 14 of Aeon Speculative Fiction Magazine, edited by Bridget McKenna.

“His Last Arrow” by Christopher Sequeira, published in Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Jeff Campbell and Charles Prepolec, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, (October, 2008).

“Silent as Dust” by James Maxey, published in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, edited by Edmund R. Schubert, Hatrack Publishing (January, 2008).

“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams, Prime Books (August, 2008)

“The Absence of Stars: Part 1” by Greg Siewert, published in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, edited by Edmund R. Schubert, Hatrack Publishing (December, 2008).

“The Toy Car” by Luisa Maria Garcia Velasco, (translated from Spanish by Ian Watson) published in April 2008 edition of Aberrant Dreams, edited by Joseph W. Dickerson.



Two for IGMS is, of course, great news, but the thing I like most about this particular award is that it really is about the story. With the judges not knowing who the author is or what publication it appeared in, there's nothing left but the story. That's the way it ought to be...

"The Hologram Bride" - by Jackie Gamber

Picture This…

By Jackie Gamber

What makes a woman consider spending the rest of her life with a man she’s never met? What makes a man think a woman could be happy with that kind of situation? Arranged marriage is a concept as old as time, and despite cultural advancements, it still goes on today, even in the U.S.

The particular germ that grew Hologram Bride for me as a writer came when I learned of the “Picture Bride” unions between Asian women and Japanese sugar plantation workers in Hawaii between 1908 and 1924. Because of immigration laws, marriages were arranged strictly by photographs. Can you imagine? They say a picture paints a thousand words, but for me, it’s still not enough of an introduction for a lifetime relationship.

But if one can define success of these unions by their population impact, then Picture Bride marriages were successful, indeed. By 1930, over 100,000 offspring were birthed. Now…if, say, in a future world setting, that sort of number meant the difference between the life of a culture and the death of it, or perhaps even a planet…could a union-by-hologram be a viable answer?

And that’s how I met Karla Jean Tremont, a strong-willed main character who finds the concept of interplanetary breeding “disgusting”; yet she’s forced there by a lack of options. And on the other side of things, there’s Ragin Dar’el, her husband-to-be and native to the planet Reisas, who has his own concerns about the arrangement.

Reisas has its complicated history of political and social ups and downs, and is in the throes of trying to recover from devastating failures. I attempted to do away with the “Star Trek” version of a planet, where all citizens wear the same haircut, buy from the same tailor, and hold the same sort of technology-based occupation. Rather, Reisas is technologically advanced, but has become aware of the harm that technology has caused. As a result, it’s a curious mixture of the primitive and advanced. And its citizens are intelligent, educated, sensitive—in varying degrees.

In fact, it may be Karla herself, a centuries-forward human, who is the least evolved here. She’s young and stubborn, and her ignorance of foreign culture makes her seem downright rude. She’s too willing to believe in stereotypes, too quick to judge…and yet her anger gives her an edge she’s certainly going to need.

In Hologram Bride, Karla lands on Reisas against her will; the last thing on her mind is becoming a solution to a planet’s survival. But in the end, she may just be the one for the job.

***

"Hologram Bride - Part 2" by Jackie Gamber is available now in issue 13 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show. Part 1 appears in issue 12.

"Beautiful Winter" - by Eugie Foster

My second story to appear in IGMS, "Beautiful Winter" is another fairy-tale re-imagining like "Beauty's Folly," this one inspired from the Russian "Morozko" tale (also known as "Father Winter" or "Jack Frost"). The parallel in titles is totally unintentional, I swear, although I now have an urge to write a story with a multiword title (longer than two, at least) that doesn't contain any variation on "beauty." Maybe something like "Dueling Ray Guns among the Unsightly Denizens of Betelgeuse V." Odds are it'd probably still end up as a fairy tale.

Jumping on the rich literary bandwagon of stories personifying winter — from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and C.S. Lewis's White Witch to the Japanese Yuki-onna and Norse Vetr — "Beautiful Winter" is one of several stories I've written which have as a central character winter anthropomorphized. It's a primal, visceral desire, very human, to control or otherwise understand that which is inexplicable and arbitrary: death and nature, both exemplified by winter. And I suspect my subconscious is trying to work through my unresolved issues with the cold.

I grew up in the Midwest, where the winters are long, bitter, and brutal. I moved to the South in part because I hate northern winters: the miserable, muscle-clenching stiffness; scraping windshields and shoveling driveways while blasted by subzero squalls; and hurrying over icy sidewalks, scourged between the contrary spurs of "must get inside before my face freezes off" and "must not slip on the ice, break both legs, and die of hypothermia."

But I remember one winter night as I was rushing home from the bus station, head down and shoulders hunched — both to shield myself from the gale and to watch for treacherous patches of black ice — when suddenly the wind died. I glanced up and was treated to a sight so indescribably lovely that I came to a standstill, my painfully numb fingers and toes forgotten. The park was awash in moonlight, the silver light glittering from frosted evergreen trees and spangled snow. I'm not sure how long I stood there, awestruck. And when the wind picked up and I resumed my trek home, my steps were leisurely instead of hurried. I remember craning my neck to admire icicles adorning branches like jewels and snow blanketing the world beneath a layer of soft, forgiving white.

So while I really, really hate winter, there's a part of me which is fascinated by it, in love with its cool splendor and innate dichotomy — the cruel and pitiless cold married with exquisite snowscapes, sparkling, silent, and achingly beautiful. Still, I never want to have to endure a Midwestern winter again.

For folks curious about my other winter-inspired stories:

• "The Snow Woman's Daughter" is a retelling of the Japanese Yuki-onna snow woman folktale, originally published in the Feb. 2007 issue of Cricket, podcast in Escape Pod in Sept. 2007, and reprinted in my short story collection, Returning My Sister's Face: And Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice (Norilana Books, 2009).
• "Honor is a Game Mortals Play" is my second treatment of the Japanese Yuki-onna folktale, originally published in the anthology Heroes in Training (DAW Books, 2007) and reprinted in my short story collection, Returning My Sister's Face. Yuki-onna is one of my favorite stories, and I didn't feel like I'd gotten it fully out of my system with "The Snow Woman's Daughter." Actually, I still don't feel like I'm done with it. Maybe a novel?
• "The Reign of the Wintergod" was written in reaction to the Andrea Yeats case, originally published in the horror anthology The Asylum Volume 3: The Quiet Ward (Prime Books, 2003) and then podcast in Pseudopod in April, 2009.

* * * *

"Beautiful Winter" by Eugie Foster is available now in issue 13 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

"Command Transfer" by Darren Egget - IGMS issue 13

Once in a while a writers group I associate with holds a Weekend Warrior contest. For five weekends in a row participants are given a story seed and have Saturday and Sunday to write a piece of flash fiction that's then turned in to the group and judged. I'd completed the first three weeks of the competition, but on the fourth weekend I was booked solid. I decided the best way to deal with the stress was to just skip the contest that weekend. So when the story seeds went out that Saturday morning, I glanced over them, but didn't think much about it.

Apparently no one told my subconscious.

An hour before the contest deadline, inspiration struck. I knew exactly who the protagonist was. I knew his situation and how he would deal with it. I couldn't choke off the idea -- it demanded to be written. So I booted up the laptop and jotted off the first draft of Command Transfer.

It did surprisingly well in the competition. Some of the comments I received, however, told me that the story was too long at 750 words; if I could trim it to 500 words, they said, I might really have something.

Keeping that criticism in mind, when I sat down to write the second draft I naturally wrote a two-thousand word story instead. Yes, it was longer, but it felt tighter. Extra background and detail added a lot to the character and the setting. I was much happier with it.

I'm absolutely thrilled that this little story, the one that twice refused to stay bottled up, is now my first pro-market publication.

* * * *

"Command Transfer" by Darren Egget is available now in issue 13 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

Like Diamond Tears From Emerald Eyes - by Eric James Stone

Here's the story behind the story:

Warning: Contains spoilers for the story.

I've been a member of the Codex Writers Forum since it was founded in early 2004. Codex has an annual Halloween story contest, and I've participated every year. Contestants are required to write a story based in part on a "seed" given by another contestant. Generally, the story should also have something Halloweenish about it.

Codexian Rick Novy (published in IGMS #3) gave me the following seed for the 2007 contest: Your character must keep his or her face concealed at all times because something about the face is horribly wrong.

A friend of mine told me he might be editing a sword and sorcery anthology and suggested that I should write a sword-and-sorcery story, although he couldn't guarantee he'd accept it. Being one Stone, I decided I could kill two birds by writing a sword-and-sorcery story for the Halloween contest.

Some of the ideas for the story came from taking usual genre conventions and twisting them. So the story has a short, smart warrior and a tall, dumb wizard. The story makes fun of the adventurers hanging out in the bar, which is where all too many stories begin.

As for the seed, I thought about what might be wrong with someone's face, and thought at first about having no face at all, just an emptiness. Then I came up with the idea that the face had been stolen by a wizard. Finally, I realized the face had been switched with a jeweled replica.

I wrote the story and entered it in the contest. It took second -- which thrilled me, because I had never placed in the Halloween contest before.

I'm currently writing another story about Jerton and Larindo, so hopefully you haven't seen the last of them.

"Like Diamond Tears From Emerald Eyes" by Eric James Stone is available now in issue 13 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

"Somewhere My Love" - by Stephen Mark Rainey

"Somewhere My Love" was one of those stories that started out as one thing and, in the process, became something else altogether. I needed to write a witch story for a specific anthology. I had a firm idea for its foundation: back in my elementary school days, there was one lady in town who all the kids said was a wicked witch. Just so happened she was our music teacher. She really did live in an old house that always appeared deserted. She usually wore black and had a very austere demeanor. I also thought that she was very sweet. Scary, but sweet.

For this story, I just knew that she had to be the witch.

I intended it to be a scary story. I mean, it was an anthology about wicked witches. But as I started writing, somehow the story stayed sweet. I kept waiting for something horrible to happen, but it just wouldn't. In the end, "Somewhere My Love" became an autobiographical account of events that never happened. Nothing like these things ever occurred in my life. However, the emotions I attempt to convey are very, very authentic. In fact, when I look at this tale now, it brings back the most vivid memories of being ten years old, even if the plot is fabricated. In some ways, it's probably the most honest story I've ever told. Whether it works for anyone else, I can't say, but evidently, when I wrote "Somewhere My Love," it was the tale I was truly meant to write.

***

"Somewhere My Love" by Stephen Mark Rainey is available now in issue 12 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

"Arriving at the Multiplicity" - By Matthew S. Rotundo

It was during the 2004 election season, I think, that I first became familiar with political blogs--and very quickly discovered the quiet war that raged among them. I was amazed at the depth and breadth of the silent bloodbath. Reading the entries and comments, one could easily be convinced that the fate of all civilization hung in the balance of these ideological battles.

I remember reading through a particular comment thread, wherein one obnoxious commenter was accused of being a twelve-year-old kid, trolling from his parents' computer. That accusation totally changed how I thought of the obnoxious person. It was probably pretty close to the truth, but what amazed me was how quickly the Internet enabled the alteration of my perception. What a weapon that could be, I thought.

The history of politics is replete with smears and distortions, of course. It's nothing new, and it's not limited to any particular party. Perception is reality; politicians ignore this fact at their peril. The most successful of them exploit it to their advantage. But just how malleable is reality? How much can you manipulate it before the manipulation becomes apparent?

It seems to me that the Internet has drastically moved the goalposts. Given its ability to rapidly disseminate disinformation, its ephemeral nature (websites vanish without a trace, individual articles/blog entries are quickly buried in an avalanche of fresh data and forgotten), and its facility for anonymous attacks, it has taken the political game to a strange and disturbing level.

Compounding the problem, the "mainstream media" seem unable to compete--although I think this is more a function of incompetence and cowardice on the part of those media, rather than any inherent superiority of political blogging.

So what does that leave us with? When will it end? How far can it go?

These are classic science fiction questions. "The Multiplicity Has Arrived" is one attempt at an answer.

Each story presents its own unique challenges, and "The Multiplicity" was no exception. The opening paragraph and subsequent interludes were tricky for me. I needed some way to familiarize readers with the workings of the Multiplicity without resorting to great chunks of tedious infodump. Then I got the idea to cast the interludes in the voice of a tent revival preacher. The idea delighted and terrified me at the same time; I don't usually play with voice. It was a stretch for me, but I'm happy with the way it turned out.

I struggled with excessive length on this one, too. Earlier drafts of the story were over 9,000 words. It was just too long. After much scrutiny--accompanied by wailing and gnashing of teeth--I found a scene that could be cut in its entirety. It did little more than reiterate information already established. And removing it required very little revision to other scenes--a sure sign that I didn't need it in the first place. Eureka!

Most troublesome, though, was the crisis of confidence that hit me while working on this story. At some point, I found myself struggling to believe what I was writing. And if I couldn't believe it, I would never be able to make readers buy it, either.

How did I get over that hump? Well, I have a confession to make: I'm not sure "The Multiplicity Has Arrived" is science fiction. It certainly walks and talks like SF, and dresses in SF clothing, but after much consideration, I think it has a bit of magic at its heart. It might actually be fantasy. This realization is what enabled me to regain my belief in the story, finish the rewrite, and send it into the world.

(But don't tell Edmund, OK? I think he thinks it's SF.)

I would be interested in knowing how readers would classify this one. Stop by my blog, or hunt me down at a con (I'll be at ConQuesT, OSFest, and WorldCon this year) and tell me what you think.

Can I get an amen?

***

Matt's story (science fiction or fantasy, you decide) "The Multiplicity Has Arrived" is available now in issue 12 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

"End-of-the-World Pool" - by Scott Roberts

Every year, the writer’s group, Codex (www.codexwriters.com), holds a Halloween short-story writing contest. "The End-of-the-World Pool" was my entry from 2008. I was given a story seed by the incomparable Laurel Amberdine (amberdine.com/) to start me off: “A place which remains in perpetual darkness, no matter what kind of illumination is attempted.”

When I was a kid, we lived for a couple months in a gated community called Hilltop Lakes in Texas. Every day, we’d go to the titular lake there, and go swimming. This wasn’t a tame beach; I don’t remember there being sand at all. There were gnarled tree roots dipping into the water all along the side; and periodically long water-weeds would bloom in the warmer sections of the water. I was just learning to swim, and after she was sure I was relatively buoyant, Mom let me splash around on my own while she sat on shore. The water in the lake was murky; when you put your toes down on the lake-bed, they squished through clay rather than sand. There was only one section of the lake we were allowed to play in—the one away from the tree roots. Mom told us that she was afraid that we’d get our feet caught in the roots and drown.

That idea stuck with me. I’d swim to the bottom, and open my eyes to see nothing at all. The darkness was vast. I could feel the slimy water weeds brushing against me, and I imagined the tree roots sneaking their way through them toward my legs, like some knobby, wicked fingers that would latch on and drag me down into the clay.

The translation from that memory to The End of the World Pool is obvious, and I can now forgive Mom for traumatizing me. See? Writing Horror can be therapeutic…

My older brother, John, was the one to take dares. He willingly jumped into ponds, swimming pools, and drainage ditches at which even a rat would turn up its nose. There always seemed to be some yahoo willing to say those three magical words that turn boys into heroes or emergency room cases: “I dare you…” As far as I know, John never met a pervy swimming pool mermaid there beneath the water. He did manage to impress a number of girls, though, which I suspect might have been the point of the whole exercise.

His willingness to take dares was the source for Grant and Evan’s birthday dare tradition.

I stumbled across Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, Annabel Lee, quite by accident. I was bored with writing, and went scratching around the internet for something to ignite my brain. I’m not a big fan of Poe, but I was writing a spooky story after all. There’s a certain gothic element to the man’s work. Maybe you’ve noticed… Anyway, I didn’t feel like committing to re-reading his short fiction, so I Googled Poe’s poetry, and spent an enjoyable afternoon grazing on what I found. When I read Annabel Lee—well.

“Serendipitous,” said Grant.

“Adventitious,” Evan added.

“I dare you to go play in the street,” I said.

* * *

"End-of-the-World Pool" by Scott Roberts is available now in issue 12 of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

IGMS Issue 12 is Live

Issue 12:

Table of Contents



"Over There"

by Tim Pratt

Art by Anselmo Alliegro


"The Multiplicity Has Arrived"

by Matthew S. Rotundo

Art by Jin Han


"Somewhere My Love"

by Stephen Mark Rainey

Art by Nick Greenwood


"The End-of-the-World Pool"

by Scott M. Roberts

Art by Anna Repp


"Hologram Bride: Part One"

by Jackie Gamber

Art by Julie Dillon



Folk of the Fringe Serialization: "West"

by Orson Scott Card

Art by Scott Altmann



Orson Scott Card Audio: "Somewhere My Love,"

by Stephen Mark Rainey

Read by Orson Scott Card

Art by Nick Greenwood


Tales for the Young and Unafraid by David Lubar

"The Crack"

by David Lubar

Art by Lance Card


InterGalactic Interview With Joe Haldeman

by Darrell Schweitzer


Essay: Story Subs like American Idol

by Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury

RavenCon, 2009 Richmond VA

Off to RavenCon tomorrow. Leaving early because I have a 3 1/2 hr. drive. Got a signing at 11am and a panel about blogging at 1pm. Editing Workshop Sunday afternoon from 1 to 3pm. All sorts of things going on, I'll give you details when I'm back next week.

In the mean time, here's a writing quote to keep you thinking positive thoughts:

If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov