Caught Awry

"It’s not like I’m suicidal or nothing, I just felt crappy and sort of felt like getting hit a lot might kinda knock it out of me. So I paid each of ‘em thirty bucks to do it, and the thing is the one guy probably would have done it for free. I mean he was that sledge-head type and all. I don’t mean to stereotype him just ‘cause he was really big. And had that dumb goatee and breathed through his mouth..."

Another very short one (about 2,000 words). This one is a modern riff on a classic literary character, perhaps with his prime trait amplified a bit and a healthy dose of my own mindset during college mixed in. And yes, it is supposed to be one, single paragraph.

Read Caught Awry online, or download it as a nicely formatted PDF.

The Strange Case of Mr. Hedford's House

"The idea struck Mr. Hedford one night while watching the evening news over a bowl of buttered rice. Eric Schettino, the actor and late-in-life wetlands activist, had died. He was seventy-two. The idea came over Mr. Hedford--Harold--so gently it wasn’t until the blaring commercial break that he resumed chewing. He looked up at the walls of his bedroom, at the leaning curtain rod, the crack in the ceiling--and things were never the same..."

Here is a fun little short-short (about 1,200 words) about a guy who realizes he can use his one talent to make a mark in the world. I wrote this at the same time I was writing Graying Sea, but the two stories couldn't be more different.

Read The Strange Case of Mr. Hedford's House online, or as a nicely formatted PDF.

Sheila Williams Remembers Who The Hell I Am!

I'm just wrapping up the last of my MBA classwork, after two painful years of not writing a single bit of fiction, so I've got to say it was really uplifting to see that Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's, talked about Under the Graying Sea front and center in her editorial this month.

The piece is about the economy and its effect on science fiction. Sea was set just after a global economic boom that allowed the construction of the artificial wormhole.

It's nice to know I haven't been forgotten in my two years away!

Spider, Spider

"It was a bad rain. Like knitting needles stabbing you in place. Insect collector needles. Days since the streetlights slept. It came down dull and mad. Straight and muttering. It stabbed at me, so I ran. At the corner of Crost and Lake I slipped on the worn concrete and fell hard against the sidewalk, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even slow down..."

An agoraphobe, a stripper, a double amputee, a street musician, and a laundromat owner are a group of misfit friends. Holding them all together is William, a kind, one-armed, photographer with great aspirations. But when a freak storm leads to weeks of dreary, incessant rain, the group's little island of solace begins to crack, and someone--or something--starts stalking William.

12,000 words, noir-ish speculative fiction. Read Spider, Spider online, or as a nicely formatted PDF.

Shaytandokht

"The bitter wind plummets down the Vakhan mountains of Afghanistan and tears into the clothing of two men. One man wears muddied jeans and a coat of dull, synthetic, western fabrics. The other, wrapped in layers of threadbare wool jackets, leans close to the doorway of a large clay mound that serves as a house. Respectfully, he does not pull aside the ram skin there, but yells toward it, louder than the wind. An aged man’s face emerges, squinting against the cold, white beard already catching the few flakes of snow. He is angry at being disturbed. His family is cold inside. The westerner watches as the two Afghan men argue above the howl. The old man seems dismissive, makes moves to turn away.“Shaytandokht!” shouts the younger Afghan, and the old man halts..."

The greatest evil in the world lies in Afghanistan. But not the way you think.

Shaytandokht is a very short, non-science story. Read it online, or as a nicely formatted PDF.

Under the Graying Sea

"Ignition.

Tessa’s head snapped back into its cradle and her lips slid away from her teeth. The shock slapped the fog off the inside of her helmet and misted her face. Behind her, Loránd groaned as he pressed into his own seat. And behind him, past two hundred pounding meters of metal and deuterium, the largest protospike engine in history opened its mouth and screamed at the stars. Nothing went wrong. Not at first..."

"This is science fiction. Hard science fiction — the Real Stuff, not the so-called “hard SF” that’s nothing more than galactic adventures and thrilling space battles, in which a futuristic veneer overlays the fantastic core. Here, the wormhole is the only concession to unreality. Very rarely do we see this kind of fiction these days, and more rarely still do we see it done this well." - Internet Review of Science Fiction

12,000 words long, heavily physics-oriented science fiction, first published in Asimov's Science Fiction in February 2006.

Under the Graying Sea is available as an online page here, in a nicely formatted PDF file here, and as an audiobook, read by Mur Lafferty, here.

Additional reviews can be found here.

Making your characters ignore themselves

Someone wrote me a note asking me to expand on something I said at one of the Astronomicon panels, and it made sense to post the quickie response here.

If you get a chance, I'm interested in a summary of your ideas on writing character and staying in character. You talked about liking to write a character that has inner resources s/he doesn't know s/he has that s/he is able to access later in the story. How do you set that up for the reader (while keeping the character in the dark) and make the act, when it comes, seem "in character" when the person has been shown as weak and perceives his/her self as weak?

The first thing that pops to mind about how to make a character reveal something new that still seems in character is: Make the character ignore that trait on purpose. If Jane is faced with the choice of throwing Grandma off a roof to save humanity, make her refuse to consider the Grandma question altogether. Make her fight to save humanity every other way, but let her avoid considering the Grandma issue every time it ought to come up. I've found I can make my characters more realistic by making them not say things. After a while, I think, the reader understands that Jane really is considering tossing Grandma, but hates herself for even thinking it. I think that helps make the conflict something so deep that the character herself isn't even fully aware of it. When you hit the climax that forces Jane to make her choice and she turns around and looks at Grandma for the first time, the reader yells, "Oh shit!"

So maybe the concise way of saying the above, is: One way to reveal a new side of a character is to make the character suppress that side (consciously or unconsciously), and the story forces the character to dig deep and re-evaluate that decision. The result is an about-face that was really there all along, but was brought out by the travails of the story.

To Use the Muse

If you don't already know the old joke about where writers get their ideas, the standard reaction to the question is "a newsletter from Poughkeepsie."

I've heard of people actually taking the response seriously, like asking for the address. The reason it's an inside joke is because we rarely know where ideas come from. Or rather, we might know, but the process is a such a convolution of inspiration and perspiration that it's often impossible to retrace the steps to origin of the idea.

I once got into a fierce argument with a writer friend who insisted that her ideas (and all the artistic expression that goes into every sentence) came from "outside" of her. She attributed all her inspiration to a muse that existed separately from her, which she merely channeled. That drove me nuts. Frankly, she was an overly artsy-fartsy writer who liked thinking of herself as a mystical artist more than actually writing.

But... every now and then I get hit with an idea I can't trace to anything no matter how hard I try. Writing (I believe) is about doing on a conscious and unconscious level something that we humans are particularly good at all around; pattern identification. It's why we see faces in clouds and why wind in trees sometimes sounds like a moaning person and creeps us out. It's the root of two cornerstones of fiction; metaphor and meaning derived from events that seem meaningless in other light.

When we write, we show readers patterns they're familiar with in situations they wouldn't have expected to feel any kind of connection to. Nobody has the experience of living as a giant ape on Skull Island and falling in love with some skinny white chick from New York, but we all relate to feeling like we belong nowhere, like we just want one person to be nice to us, and that we're the victims of powers beyond our control. The art is in finding the connections between the two. Sometimes those connections are the result of deliberate work, and sometimes they're the result of your subconscious finding the patterns automatically.

As writers, we learn to listen hard to our subconscious pattern-machine.

And sometimes it comes from who-the-hell-knows-where. I'm writing this post because this morning I woke up with my brain screaming this sentence: "If a character in your dream says something and you don't hear him, does he make a sound?"

Wide awake, I'm lying there, staring at the ceiling as my brain goes nuts with this sentence. In seconds, 90% of a story fell together right there. As I got out of bed to start hammering the keys, my two-year old woke up and demanded attention, and the morning was lost. Fortunately, I managed to write down the entire idea, but I can't help but marvel that some part of my brain that I'm barely connected to was cranking away even in my sleep. I don't believe in the mystical Muse, but man, sometimes you've gotta wonder what is going on in your head when you're not paying attention.

Distant Summer Nights

This morning I had to wake my wife up at the ungodly hour of 3am so she could go to work early. I couldn't get back to sleep afterward, and lay there in the brilliant light of a full moon, listening to crickets.

My daughter had knocked her ear pretty badly on the playground yesterday, and asked me to sleep with her so she wouldn't roll over on it in the night. How can you say no? And why would you anyway? Her bed is pushed up to her window in such a way that when you lie there, your head is right next to the sill and the breeze can just glide over you.

So at 3am I'm lying there, listening to crickets I rarely hear anymore these days because I'm usually head-bent busy on whatever the day is demanding of me, right up until bedtime when I fall asleep in about ten minutes flat. No time for crickets and moonlit breezes.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the moon. Not just in the "gee that's a purty light" kind of way, but in that way that us science fiction geeks loved it. It was another planet, sort of. You'd forget that when you'd look at the cool covers of science fiction novels with their giant moons setting over hazy horizons, but we SF kids knew that with only a quick push of the will, we could dismiss the moon of poetry and remember that right there was this giant honker of a celestial orb hanging right there! No other planet has such a huge moon relative to it's own size - okay, Pluto and Charon, but they don't count for a bunch of reasons. Right there was an entire world so big and so close that with binoculars you could pick out individual craters, and yet you could still see the entire thing, edge-to-edge, and get a feel for how small and alone it is hanging there in the big void. It's a completely separate world, and it's right there.

I was born barely a year before men walked on the moon, so as I grew up in the post-Apollo era I was convinced, like most boys, that I was going to be an astronaut and would at least visit, if not live on, the moon. In late summer, when the weather was warm but the sun set early, I would as likely as not be outside exploring the woods around my house, surrounded by crickets and moonlight. They were long years of magical boyhood that Bradbury and Wells could depict and cater to so well.

And lying there this morning, watching the moon in the empty sky, listening to the rustle of tree leaves hissing in the occasional sigh of air, I realized how far I've fallen from that life of wonder and mystery. Summer is deliniated by calendar grids. Evening is the time to get the children to sleep and get to sleep yourself in the hopes of not being dog-tired in the morning. Books are for information or occasional entertainment.

But so much of the moment is gone.

Those days when you had so much time alone with your thoughts that you could think well through all the things you need to think of, and could dwell on the moment you were in, and the weird twists your imagination was taking you, and unconsciously revel in things as simple and common as moonlight, hissing leaves and crickets - those things get pressed out of you when you "grow up." I often think of our ancestors a mere 30,000 years ago, who were completely like us and yet had so few responsibilities beyond providing for their basic needs. There are estimates that they may have spent only 20 hours a week "working." And the rest? Not watching TV. Not driving to soccer practice. Not worrying about tomorrow's spreadsheet errors. They'd be sitting under the stars, being with their families, their friends, perhaps around a fire - they'd exist in their moments the way kids do.

In some ways it seems we've grown up as a society in the way we grow up into adults. I thought about my own daughter, lying there with her swollen ear, and wondering if she were imagining the same things about the other white world that spun overhead each night. What would she remember of these days?

You might be wondering where this is headed. Not really anywhere. I lay there for an hour until my alarm rang at 4:00, and got up to leave Luna and her chorus to my daughter's window. I have things to do before I go to work, and it may be months, or years, before I get some glimpse of my boyhood crouched in long, dark grasses again. But I know this is why I write. I want to recapture the wonder of the world I had when I was a kid. In some ways it works. And just possibly, one of my stories will be read by another boy or girl, twenty years from now, and it'll fire their imagination into the dark hours of a long summer.

Spits Day

I can't believe I missed Spits Day. June 28th has become sort of my "writing birthday," and I take a few moments to jot down my thoughts in my journal about another year of writing.

About 15 years ago, on June 28th, I rode my motorcycle down a stretch of road out in the countryside, found a nice roadside hill, parked the bike and went up the hill with a notebook in hand. After a childhood full of writing, I hadn't written anything in about five years. It was partially due to the distractions of late-teen/early-twenties angst, but it was also because a number of writing setbacks, including a narrow-minded professor, had sucked the wind out of my sails.

On that June 28th, I was in the death throes of a relationship that was comically dramatic in that young-twenties way, but it yeilded one good thing. She was a writer, and she rekindled my love of writing.

So on that day I parked my motorcycle, climbed up the hill, and opened a fresh new notebook and started writing.

I was writing flash fiction, which wasn't called flash fiction back then. It didn't have a name. Fiction didn't come in 500-word bits back then (or rather, it wasn't cool to do it back then). Some of the pieces weren't fiction, but more journalesque, and most were lacking in plot but heavy on emotion. I still remember the shortest piece I wrote. One whole page was taken up for the story, "Headaches." The piece read, "Headaches float."

I didn't know what I was doing with this notebook, but I wrote flash fiction bits into it nearly every day. I knew this notebook and what I was doing was important (to me), but it was also blessedly aimless. I came to call the things I was writing, "spits," because they were just my brain spitting things out onto the page. It wasn't journalling, and it wasn't structured fiction, and since the moniker of flash fiction wasn't coined yet, I didn't know what to call it. So I called them spits, and wrote them into my spits notebook.

The notebook lasted exactly a year, and on June 28th of the following year, I wrote on the last page. I realized it had been a watershed year for me. I realized that for some reason writing was part of who I was, like a limp or a bad liver, and I just had to deal with it. So every June 28th, I celebrate the revolution and reflect on what it means to be writer.

That said, I can definitely say that last year's Spits Day was a lot better than this year's. Last year, I'd just sold my first piece of fiction to a professional market. A year later, despite having written several pieces that I believe are superior, I haven't sold a damn thing. I've organized a faboo writing group, am in the midst of starting a genuine writers organization in Rochester, NY, and I've been writing quite consistently, and though none of that has resulted in a single sale, I really can't complain. I'm changing my writing a bit to be more commerically acceptable - not because all I care about is getting published, but because getting established will allow me more freedom to write the good stuff later.

As for the coming year? I will publish. I will qualify for SFWA. I will organize the writers of my city into an undead army to shake the foundations of God's own home (or at least get some respect for spec fic writers), and as always, keep chin up and learn to accept the affliction of having to turn every conversation, every bit of interesting info, every emotional response, and every conceptual idea into the basis of a story. That's just the way it is. Pahtooey!