“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

IGMS News

Turns out that IGMS will be available on Kindle. We've had numerous requests for it to be available there, and at first it looked like it wasn't going to work out. But where there's a will, there's a way, and our web designer has begun converting each issue for Kindle, starting with issue one (which should be available shortly). Between his (the designer's) wide variety of other projects, he will work through the back issues as time permits until each issue is ready and done. We'll then add the new issues as they are published. The main differences between the online version of the magazine and the Kindle version is that the cover art will be in black and white instead of color, and the audio stories will not be available (Kindle doesn't support that yet). Certain other bonuses will not be there (like the serialization of "Hotsleep" that we did in issue one, or the comic versions we've done of a few of OSC's stories), but all of the short stories, any interviews, etc. will be in the Kindle version for the same $2.50 we charge for the online version.

Speaking of serialization, we are going to serialize Orson's "Folk of the Fringe" over the next five issues. Frankly, it is my personal favorite of his books, and though it is still in print and available from Tor, they gave us permission to serialize it anyway. If you're not familiar with "Folk," it is a series of interconnected short stories and novellas set in a post-apocalyptic America. Minor characters from one story become major characters in the next, etc. "Folk" includes a novella titled "The Pageant Wagon," which, in my opinion, is one of the best novellas I've ever read. We'll run one story/novella per issue for the next five issues as an added bonus to the regular content.

Also, we're closer than ever now to having an annual membership or subscription option. There's a lot going on right now as far as implementing all of the changes/upgrades we're making, so I don't think that will come into effect until issue 13, but I'll keep you posted as we go along. This is something else that people have been asking for for a long time and I'm glad to announce that it is (almost) finally happening.

"Tekkai Exhales His Avatar" - by Tony Pi

Twenty-Four Hours in Pasadena

It might be hard to believe, but "Tekkai Exhales His Avatar" started with a polar bear.

The Writers of the Future workshop in Pasadena, August 2007 put us through a dreaded but exhilarating challenge: the 24-hour story. We'd each receive a random object, go interview a random stranger, and pull random books at the local library. Once we had those seeds, we had to write a complete short story within twenty-four hours. Three people's stories would be critiqued the next day by our peers as well as Tim Powers and Kathy Wentworth. Talk about pressure!

Kathy gave me my random object, a tiny polar bear on a red pole, likely from a toy carousel. The bear made me think I'd be writing an Inuit tale, so when I got to the library, I tracked down books on Inuit and Greenlandic mythology. I learned fascinating things on those topics, but I had also pulled a few volumes on Japanese myth by chance, and jotted down whatever nuggets of information that caught my eye.

That left the interview with a total stranger. We weren't supposed to tell anyone that we were writers, and simply talk to someone and pry their life stories out of them. Not so easy! I failed miserably trying to engage people in conversation, and only managed to ask a scruffy-looking guy what he did with the empty water bottles he was collecting.

When it came time to sit down and write, I had absolutely no idea how my different pieces of research would fit together, if at all!

But Tim's advice was to think at the keyboard, so that's what I did.

I mashed my ideas together, hard, and decided the fallout looked like a multiverse fantasy that would take an immortal hero from Greenlandic legend to feudal Japan. (Plot? No clue, yet.) But then it occurred to me that the universes in the story only seemed like fantasy, but were actually interconnected virtual worlds. They would be mimicstreams, artificial realities built from the world's collective sensory experiences, each with a basis on a world mythology.

I had my worlds, but who would be the main character, and what would he want? Well, suppose the man I met lived on the fringes of society. Maybe he had run-ins with the law, even spent time in jail. What if my hero was stuck in prison? (Correction: anti-hero.) Why would the government need his help, and what could they tempt him with?

Answer: they needed a hacker to help them catch someone. Not just any hacker, but one of the best. And they offered him freedom to see his son.

I ran with it. I cut out my intended prelude in the land of ice, since I had no time to show how he got caught. Instead, I focused on the Japanese angle.

Then came the frantic typing, rushing my characters blindly into the unknown. I remember a couple of caffeine runs, slapdash chicken sandwiches, and about five hours sleep somewhere in there. But I had no ending until two hours before the deadline, when something Tim said in class suddenly clicked into place. I managed a last surge of key-pounding and finished the story, with fifteen minutes to deadline.

As luck would have it, my story was among the ones selected for critique. It was nerve-wracking sitting in the hot seat, having my classmates and instructors pick apart the barely-edited piece -- but in the end, they all gave great insights that helped me revise the story. All that remains of that first polar bear story seed are the snow motif and the creatures of Japanese myth.

Overall, the 24-hour writing challenge was odd and exhausting, but also an invaluable teaching tool. The rapid-fire method creates quite a different work than if I took my time with the ideas. My experience writing this story has made it quite close to my heart.

One last thing: many thanks to the editors at Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show for allowing my cousin to illustrate "Tekkai Exhales His Avatar". I-Wei's art appeared in IGMS #1, and he also designs working steampunk robots. It was a blast collaborating with him on the artwork, leaving us nostalgic for the days when we were kids, inventing incredible stories and gluing magazine cuttings together to make them real.

And it's still fun.

Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 11, March 2009

*
Issue 11 is now live and ready to go. Table of Contents includes:

Cover story by Peter S. Beagle, "The Vanishing"
"The Sin Hypothesis" by Elizabeth Lustig
"Tekkai Exhales His Avatar" by Tony Pi
"The Urn of Ravalos" by Rebecca Day
Part Two of "The Absence of Stars" by Greg Siewert

Plus text and an audio reading by Orson Scott Card of "The Man in the Tree," from his forthcoming novel, "The Lost Gate"

"Free Seas," a Tale For The Young and Unafraid by David Lubar

And an Interview with Tanith Lee (by Darrell Schweitzer)
*

And Now For Something Completely Different

Well, maybe not completely different, but I’m a sucker for Monty Python sketches and I’ve never been able pass up on an opportunity to quote them. But times, they are a’changin’, and this InterGalactic Medicine Show is rollin’ along.

Have I mixed the metaphor sufficiently? Maybe I should just get to the point(s). I do have good news:


1) Effective immediately, IGMS will be released on a bi-monthly basis, publishing for January, March, May, July, September, and November.

2) The number of stories published in each issue will be reduced from 7 to 5; however, the total number of stories published each year will increase from 28 to 30.

3) Instead of writing a new story for each issue (which he was having a hard time keeping up with), from now on Orson Scott Card will record a story as an audio file for each issue. If you bought issue 9 or 10 with the expectation that there would be a new Orson Scott Card story in it, fear not; that commitment will still be met (and hopefully soon, now that the latest screenplay for the Ender’s Game movie has been completed). However, having an audio file takes advantage of things a print magazine cannot do, and also allows Orson to stay active in the magazine on a more timely basis, with a commitment that takes a few hours of his time instead of a few weeks. The audio story he records might be one of his own previously published stories; it might be a story by another author published in IGMS; or it might be something from a novel-in-progress, as will be the case with issue 11 when he reads an early chapter from The Lost Gate (to be published in the future by Del Rey). The story/chapter is titled "The Man in the Tree,” and the audio presentation will be accompanied by the full text.

4) There will still be an author interview in every issue, and the monthly columns will still be free. Each story will still come with its own custom illustration.


Issue 11 should be out the first of next week. In addition to the audio story by OSC that I already mentioned, the table of contents will include a great new story by Peter Beagle called "Vanishing," as well as "The Urn of Ravalos" by Rebecca Day, "The Sin Hypothesis" by Liz Lustig, "Tekkai Exhales His Avatar" by Tony Pi, and Part Two of the novelette, "The Absence of Stars," by Greg Siewert. You'll also find an interview with Tanith Lee, and a short essay by our own Orson Scott Card in response to a reader question.

Well, that’s what’s happening at IGMS. As much as I like to ramble on and on and on and on, I think that’s enough for you to digest in one sitting. If you have any thoughts or questions about any of this, please drop us a line via the contact page on our website or comment right here.


Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

P.S. As usual, I've collected essays from the authors in the upcoming issue and will post them here on Side Show Freaks. Feel free to drop by next week and catch The Story Behind The Stories, where the authors talk about the creation of their tales.

P.P.S. If you've a story submitted to IGMS, please give me a little extra time to get to it; with the changes we've made to the publication schedule, we should have already started work on issue 12, so I've got a bit of artificially created catching up to do. It's a good problem to have, but still one I have to prioritize.

Local TV and Not-So-Local Signing

I was interviewed on the local FOX affiliate here in Greensboro, NC, yesterday. It came out well enough that I'm not embarrassed to show it to you. I look a little disoriented in the very beginning because I didn't know I was on camera; the monitor overhead only showed a shot of my novel's cover and I thought the interviewer was doing a voice over. Once we got past that, I thought it went all right.

http://www.myfox8.com/news/morningnews/wghp-morning-meet-author-090225,0,6388255.story

On other notes, I'm doing a 90 minute workshop on the Business of Writing, followed by a reading and signing at the City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC (just west of Asheville). The bookstore called yesterday to say they've already got 35 people signed up, so it might be smidge crowded, but if you're in the area, please stop by.

Guest Post - Mur Lafferty and "New Media"

A few weeks ago I posted an essay about achieving success in the publishing industry that included a link to an article posted on Time Magazine's website. One of the people quoted in that Time article was a friend of mine named Mur Lafferty, a fiction and non-fiction author who has built her career on using new and open media. She can be found on Suicide Girls as a regular columnist, on Tor.com as a blogger, or on her home page, murverse.com. Her first novel, Playing For Keeps, is available via print and free audio podcast (and was reviewed on IGMS by James Maxey). She graciously agreed to write more about the subject of new media, for which I am grateful. I'll let her take it from here...




Edmund posted recently on this blog about podcasters getting publishing contracts. He then invited me to guest blog here, and I wanted to discuss this in more detail.

I am a podcaster who built an audience of over 40,000 via free giveaways of audio podcasts and PDF podcasts, so you can guess I'm rather gung-ho about new media. Podcasting my book led directly to it being picked up by a small press and released in print.

Yes, print publication, or "old media" is my ultimate goal. Giving work away for free is not a way to directly make money, obviously. But new media allowed me to connect to an audience, make them care about my work, and then ask them to help me with the marketing of the small press book. Many bought copies of the book for themselves and to give as gifts. I received one email from a woman who appreciated the free podcast so much that she promised to buy several copies for Christmas gifts. I'm never clear on what number makes a small press book a success, but I earned out my advance and had a strong showing on Amazon for several weeks after the release, so I'm pretty pleased with the sales numbers of a book that never hit the bookshelves.

New media is not a fad or a gimmick. It's not a pipe dream or a crazy idea. It's a way to connect directly to an audience in a way that just a website will not do. Established authors with existing audiences can afford to look down on new media, but new authors with no audience would do well to consider audio or ebook releases of their work.

The relationship with the community is what it's all about. What I've discovered from the listeners who hear my voice talking to them in intros and read me on blogs and Twitter, is that they want me to succeed. I'm not an author in an ivory tower to them, I'm a person trying to climb a pretty big mountain and can't do it alone. (Yeah. Sometimes I mix metaphors.) When these people see my book, they don't think, "Oh, a superhero novel by that author I heard of once." They think, "Mur's book came out! Awesome!"

I had a man approach me at DragonCon last year. The conversation went something like this:

HIM: You're giving your PDF book away for free?

ME: Yep.

HIM: The whole book?

ME: Yep.

HIM: I read ebooks exclusively. What's to stop me from downloading your book and putting it on my reader and never paying you?

ME: Nothing.

HIM: But I won't buy the print version. What are you getting out of this?

ME: Hopefully a new fan. And someone who will tell a friend, who does buy print books, that there's a new author they should check out.

I'm not the best advocate for Creative Commons or giving work away - if you want to read some fantastic arguments for this, check out this Cory Doctorow's essay - (or his collection of essays, Content, which is available in print and, yes, as a free ebook. ) I will say that I've experienced nothing but good things using new media, and I can personally vouch for everything that Cory mentions in his essays (that apply to me, of course.)

I'm only a small example of the power of new media. Scott Sigler hit the New York Times Bestseller list with his latest book, Contagious, this past January. Scott built his career on podcasting as well, and has vowed to always have a free version of his work available (usually audio podcast). His legions of fans are rabid and dedicated and do a lot of his marketing heavy lifting for him.

For me, new media is a key part of the foundation of my writing career. I am hopefully building an audience who will stay with me for years, evangelizing my work whether it's out for free or in print. "Old" media is not dead; it's vital if you want to feed your family on what you make as a novelist. But it's becoming more and more important for new authors to consider new media as a way to engage their audiences, build communities, and get that zealous fanbase. Marry the two, as it were.

How do you do it? Here is a small checklist, but it doesn't cover everything:

1) Contact other authors doing the same thing. My audience already knows about this whole "they give it to you in one form and hope you buy it in another" situation. They're also already built in to receive and appreciate audio podcasts.

2) Network, offer to play other podcasters' promos if they play yours or talk up your book.

3) Connect with your audience. Intro your book with a personal note. Doesn't matter what you talk about, just let them know who you are and what you want out of podcasting your book. If you want them to buy the print version, SAY SO. If you want them to tell others via blog, word of mouth, or Twitter, then SAY SO. When they email you, email them back. Thank them for listening. We've been completely honest with our audiences, telling them what our goals are, and hoping they can help us.

4) Get a Twitter account, announce the Twitter account on your podcast and ask your listeners to spread the word. Make sure you use it - whether to talk about your breakfast, liveTweet the Oscars, or talk about your latest book. Just don't use it solely as a way to shill your stuff. You're trying to make people get to know you; you're not using it as a bullhorn about your work.

5) Keep putting out content. This is the hardest one; we all have issues with time management, and managing new media is no relaxing hobby. But if you want to keep up with your podcast audience, just like your print audience, you need to keep putting out content.

6) Enjoy yourself. The thrill of getting fan mail that your book in someone's ears moved them to tears, or got them through a tough time, or just that they usually hate [insert your genre here] books, but they loved yours, is unparalleled. And it's been proven many times that it will increase sales, but you have to work your audience (go back and re-read #3.)

Thanks a lot to Edmund for letting me play on his blog about new media. If you want to ask questions or continue the conversation, comment below or email me at mightymur@gmail.com. You can find my many projects at http://www.murverse.com.