August 2008 Archives

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Almost a century later, executive staff minutes for November 13, 1958, recorded: "Discussed dresses and pants for next summer. Dr. Hoerster said we are short of funds and we could get some material of cheaper qualities such as seersucker or denim."

Finally it was Rog and me alone, late at night in the quiet, the way it had been all summer. Still I would not cry, because I wouldn't let him hear sorrow. I spent all my own endearments-my little friend-and sat till four o'clock. When I'd kissed his forehead I could still smell the freshness of the shampoo. I called Sam at four and said I was ready to leave, and we talked awhile about whether I needed to be there for the actual moment. I didn't, I don't know why. I clipped a lock of his hair, which got lost in the chaos of the following day. I slipped off his father's sapphire ring, which the nurse had taped to his finger. I said what half good-bye I could. You're the best, I whispered as I walked out the door, what I always said when I left his room at night.

I drove home trying to beat the dawn and knew it would not even start until morning. Waking teaches you pain. The parents were in the front bedroom, so I took a Dalmane and curled up in Roger's bed, where I still sleep every night because he is nearer there than anywhere else in the house. When the phone rang at six I drifted out of bed and went into the darkened study. Bernice was standing in the hallway door, and we held each other as the machine answered the phone. After the beep, a voice said: "This is UCLA Medical Center calling. Mr. Roger Horwitz died at 5:42 A.M. this morning, October twenty-second." Bernice and I hugged each other briefly, without a word, and I swam back to bed for the end of the night, trying to stay under the Dalmane. Putting off for as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone-this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do.

Paul Monette,
Borrowed Time

I've decided on some potential new homes for One Sunday in Kentucky: Atomjack, Daikaijuzine, Hub Magazine, Silverthought, and possibly Doorways, but I'm not sure it'd be a good fit there, so I'm still considering that one. Of those five, I'd most like to see it get into Daikaijuzine, but they're all fine venues full of good things to read, so do check them out.

But! What I'm most excited about is a possible home for The Test. It's a brand new market. If you read Expanded Horizons'  mission statement, you'll find that two of the editorial staff's objectives are:

• Increasing the number of gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual people in speculative fiction
• Increasing the number of transgender, transsexual, intersex and genderqueer⁄fluid people in speculative fiction

Now, given the subject matter of The Test, I think that it would be a fine fit. Their first issue is going to include a tale by Joe Haldeman, and I'd be more than pleased to have any of my piffling words end up near his. The submission deadline for this inaugural issue is September 15, so I'd better get cracking.

The only minor hiccup is that The Test is one of those stories that's been through six revisions and still isn't quite right, but I haven't looked at it in awhile so I'm hoping that it's percolated long enough for me to have a series of "Of course! Here's how to fix this, that, and that other thing!" moments.

To me, the basic technology is the word, I mean that's not technology, that is a fruit of technology. The clue with technology is the 'logy' bit - technology means writing about a body of knowledge. The word is the mother technology, all technologies are based upon the word, the word is the primal technology. Dealing with language, dealing with being a writer, you're gonna be dealing with language. If it's comics, then that will involve a pictorial element, but a lot of the basic things are the same. If you want to learn how to write, be analytical, and that probably means when you're starting, be reductionist. It's too big a problem to grasp the whole thing at once, at least at the start of your career. Break it down. Start thinking about the different components of a story.

What things should a story have? It should have a plot, although this doesn't have to be the most important thing. The plot is the skeleton. Sometimes a beautiful and elegant plot is what a whole story's about, and that's great, but sometimes a plot need only be a string of events that takes you from point A to point B or D or whatever.

Now, there should also be what the story is about, which is not the same thing as the plot. What the story is about - what are you trying to say? What kind of shape or impression are you hoping to leave upon the reader? In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain. What kind of shape, what kind of indentation, what kind of lasting scar do you want to leave upon your reader? You design the missile accordingly. What are you trying to convey to them? It's going to be some kind of information. Now that can be factual information, emotional information, psychological information...it's gonna be some sort of information...it might be non-linear, it might be more like noise than information...sort of like James Joyce, because actually it's the noise that holds the most information.

Pure signal is like Janet and John - yes, you can understand everything on the page, but there's nothing much there worth understanding. Noise - or something approaching noise - is like a page of James Joyce, a page of Ian Sinclair - where there is such a density of information that it almost becomes incoherent, but it is full of information. So, it's the ways of getting that information across - plot, the story has to be about something, it has to have a purpose, it has to have a shape. It has to have a structure. If you're going to be really clever, you can maybe get the structure the plot and the theme all to reflect each other in some way - but that's just being clever.

Watchmen was kind of clever - I was going through one of my clever periods - probably emotional insecurity, I thought: "People will laugh at me 'cos I'm doing superhero comics. I'd better make 'em really clever, then no-one will laugh."

Read the rest of Daniel Whiston's extensive interview with Alan Moore here. And if you haven't read Watchmen yet, what's wrong with you? For god's sake do so before the movie comes out.

If you want to read more about the man, see this article in the Telegraph. It's quite good. My favorite words from it:

Alan Moore on...

HIS WORK: "People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, to keep out the scum."

LOVE: "I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography [project] together. I think they'll find it works wonders."

Welp, One Sunday in Kentucky didn't make it in to Clarkesworld. Which I expected...they only publish twelve stories a year, and with odds like that you can't really count on editorial need intersecting with your material. Also, there is always the possibility of The Suck.

So: this weekend, it goes somewhere else. After, of course, a brief re-read during which I will wrestle with the notion of making changes.

Onwards!

There's a difference between writer's block and not writing. The former is intention without executive capability; the latter is executive capability without intention. I don't get writer's block. That's not a boast--it's true. Whenever I want to write, I can (so far). Sometimes I think I'd rather have writer's block than these...creative pauses, I suppose, is what best describes them. Writer's block implies contention! A lone and valiant struggle against an implacable, invisible foe, fueled by gin and long-suffering nights beneath the eaves with quill in hand until hair and beard grow wild with dawn's peeking sun. What I've got is just a big old meh in the face of entropy.

In her essay The Life of the Letter (Georgia Review, Fall/Winter 2006), Judith Kitchen quotes from a letter she received at some unspecified point in her writing career:

You say your writing is at a standstill right now because you don't know who or where you are at the moment. You must know this isn't a good enough excuse; there is no excuse for not working and one needs no excuse not to work, but this is probably just the time you should be working. If, as you say, writing is the only certainty you have, you are subjecting yourself to uncertainty by not writing.

I find this particularly relevant because I've long held that writing is the only thing for which I actually have any distinct talent, thus making it my only certainty; and also because uncertainty is tantamount to anxiety, which populates my head and chest with thrums and buzzes on a regular basis.

Furthermore, Kitchen's unnamed correspondent compounds his or her perception with excellent advice: this is probably the time I should be working. After a long hiatus, the first time I set finger to keyboard in any focused way fiction-wise was in late December of 2006 when I was, to put it a bluntly, an utter disaster. So I wrote a story about a fellow who was also an utter disaster. For completely different reasons, of course. The method is to take my situation, toss it up into the air, assemble the shattered pieces into something that contains certain recognizable shapes of my reality, then flip it around and blow it up into something that still has that truth at its core but lacks, hopefully, any of the maudlin, confessional overtones that cripple so many would-be stories. If I can write from a place of disaster and fully inhabit a character, then that character will possess the verisimilitude required for a reader to think, "Oh! I have been in that place," without being able to see me as Author backstage.

I don't know whether I accomplished that...the story, titled Deflecting Lives in Flight, is over at Wheelhouse, and as a submission it's still a few weeks shy of being ripe enough for a follow-up query. And, really, even publication won't necessarily be enough to convince me that I've managed to fulfill my ambitions for the tale. I need readers for that, not just editors.

What's interesting--to me, anyway--is that I've got a story on deck that I started at the end of June, and that tale has a protagonist who, as it happens, would benefit from the aforementioned toss-flip-and-blow-up method of reality sculpting. He's not me. He's not much like me, being, as he is, a mildly schizophrenic dreadlocked barfly poet in some distant future. But bits of his mind are in the same place as mine, and those commonalities are the sparkly portions that might lift the narrative into the proper place. It's not about knowing who or where I am at the moment; it's about knowing who and where he is.

Which is, I believe, one of the more important aspects of telling a tale, second only to having your big ideas serve the story, rather than vice versa.

And, obviously, both of those tidbits are subordinate to actually sitting down and writing the words, but I'll just tiptoe past that on my way out the door, here.

Quite awhile back--so it seems, anyway--I wrote a bit about a year-long workshop, the purpose of which was to produce a novel entire; that is, a polished manuscript ready for shopping around. Long story short: yes, I got in, no, I didn't sign up.

Lynn was very positive about the 30 pages I'd sent, in a genuine way that didn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that I would have been paying her money to go through this workshop (although, of course, it flatters me to believe that). That's something you've got to be careful of: there are lots of editors/publishers/agents and what-have-yous out there who will tell you that you'll get published if you just give them x amount of dollars and take their course or workshop and maybe watch their cat while they're in Tahoe.

But that's not what Lynn was about; she was much more concerned that I get this book out of my head and onto paper in any way I could, whether that involved her particular workshop or not. Complimentary words were spoken about my chops that didn't involve much in the way of rectal smoke.

But in the end, there were financial considerations, and, much more importantly, the sense that the project (and, more likely, its author) isn't a good fit for this particular methodology. Finished in a year? Maybe. But if, in the middle of chapter twenty, I have a smashing idea for a short story, I need to feel free to run off and spend four weeks on that at the expense of chapter twenty-one. It's not so much a matter of not being committed to the novel as it is being committed to whatever strikes me as worth doing at any particular moment, whether that's a book, a short, a poem, or copy for a packet of chips.

Still, it was nice to get such a positive response to those 30 pages. I'm not much for pats on the head: that nebulous, "I really liked the way you use language" sort of criticism that does absolutely nothing to help anyone further their craft and is often, in crit groups or workshops, offered with the hidden expectation of reciprocation. It's fine to hear that something's decent, but I need to know where The Suck is. If something's good it doesn't need to be fixed--at least, not right away--so I don't care much about it.

That said, what strikes me as worth doing in this particular moment apparently isn't much of anything at all, which is another way of saying "uncommitted," and that makes me a lump and a terrible person who needs to be beaten about the head with the hardcover edition of W.T. Johnson's Stop Being a Prat and Write You Slothful Puking Dilettante.

As I've mentioned before, I refuse to turn this venue into a detailed portrait of my psychology. Writing, like all acts of creation, requires a healthy amount of outward-directed energy, and in certain states of mind such energy is damnably hard to come by.

Nonetheless: I've got an unfinished story mewling over there by the wardrobe, a half-made bloody mess, and it's cruel of me to leave it cold and alone and blind in its naked lack.

I've blogged before, see. Had a veritable empire. Branded shirts and coffee mugs, you dig? I sold them. Had one of my 'toons translated into German. Got shown at psychiatric conferences in France, too. Not huge. Not entirely small.

This space is different. It's supposed to be focused. All about the words, see. So if the words aren't flowing in the non-pixellated space offline, then nothing shows up here. Not going to bother turning this into a screaming portrait of the bad wiring in my head.

So forgive the silence, here. When the words pick up offline, the online words will follow with somewhat greater frequency.

"Clocks, Nyluuund!" It was a not-too rare moment of idleness on the floor and the Superior was demonstrating to Nylund the finer points of haberdashery his own person embodied. At his moment he had his trouser leg raised to reveal a blue-grey sock with a white and gold seal woven just above the ankle. A black strap was clipped on to the sock and ran out to garter at the man's thin, shiny white shin. With a wag of his heel the Superior let his thin blue-grey pantleg fall back into place. He settled on his feet, dragged his legs together, clicked his gleaming heels, and, like a Marine, took a half step forward before wheeling to turn to Nylund his back. He stuck an index finger in either side of his jacket to pull it taut. "Vents!" He swung back around, heels clicking, and stopped with his two hands pointing at the floor to show the straight lines of his jacket and a hint of cuff covering the tops of his hands. "Cuffs," he barked, grinning, enjoying his display too much to maintain the proper rigor. Then, bending his elbows like Carmen Miranda, he crowed, "Links!" Leaning in close to Nylund, who was himself resting against a thickly polished endtable, he shoved his throat up into Nylund's line of sight. Minute gold and purple diamonds paved its swellings and withdrawals. "Knot! Study it! It is too difficult for you, but I am here as an example, even for unattainable goals."

Joyelle McSweeney
Nylund, the Sarcophager

Hey there, folks and folkettes: the August edition of Underground Voices is out now. You can read my assemblage of words, Anchovies, right here.

Do read the rest of the issue as well...I'm partial to Joseph Hirsch's Blood From A Steel Turnip myself, mainly because I am all about the freaky cybernetic future holocaust, but check out Jared Ward's Dog Eat Dog for some Ballard-meets-Palahniuk and Sequoia Namagatsu's Shadows of Wonder for some moody half-seen things.

I'm not talking about the one barstool that's empty at 2AM on the second-to-last night of the conference where you get symmetrical earfuls about how it's all going to hell and I was the guy who turned down Da Vinci Code.

It's that gap that your story falls into when the editor of the market you've sent it to leaves.

Agh!

I sent One Sunday in Kentucky off to Clarkesworld at the end of May, waited the requisite 50 days for a response (72, to be precise) and discovered upon my query that Senior Editor Nick Mamatas had split the scene effective July 1. I don't know whether Sean Wallace is his replacement, because the submission guidelines back in May directed all submissions to Nick, so I didn't check the masthead. Maybe Sean was always there. Clarkesworld is is now temporarily closed to unsolicited submissions.

Which means that my piece is most likely In The Queue. It might have been read. It might not have been read. Maybe Nick read it. Maybe Sean is about to. I don't know.

All of which teaches me to be a bit more active with my submissions, instead of just sending them out and waiting. Not that I necessarily would have been able to do anything had I known that the editor I submitted to was leaving, but I wouldn't have been caught unawares, which would have made me feel clever and on top of things instead of cold and afraid in the dark waiting for them to break through the gates and eat my eyeballs.

Huh. No idea where that came from.

Anyway. I learn, too, that I really ought be to be reading the markets I submit to on a much more regular basis, because if I don't, I miss things, and that's not good for anyone, is it? Clarkesworld is one of those pro-payscale non-simultaneous submission style venues, so if I want Sunday to have a shot I'll just have to sit here quietly. I did query Sean as to status, which will either result in reminding him about that awesome story by that guy in California or a rejection of Ragnarokian ferocity.

Or, perhaps, something somewhere in between those two possibilities, but it's best to be Manichean about these things.


AND THEN:

The middle thing happened!

Neil Clarke (as in, the Publisher of Clarkesworld) writes:

Caught your post thanks to a Google Alert.

My apologies. Your story is still in the queue. We hope to be completely caught up with the slush Nick left us with by the end of the month.

Sean has been with Clarkesworld from the beginning. He handles the "by invitation" submissions and Nick handled the slush. You can expect an announcement about that vacant editor position sometime in the next week, two at tops.

In the meantime, anyone who wishes to pull their story from consideration can drop me an email at books(at)clarkesworld.com. Given how long some people have been waiting, I'd consider that perfectly understandable.

See, now that's how you do things, being all plugged in to what's going on and so forth. Neil commented here about half an hour after I posted this.