Patrick

Writing retreat, 2016 edition

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For the last week of July, I left my home and invad­ed our friends’ cab­in at Minnedosa. My goals were to get 10,000 new words writ­ten in Trans­la­tions, along with a week­end’s worth of a flash fic­tion sto­ry for a con­test, and try my hand at pho­tograph­ing the Milky Way. 

Great suc­cess. 

I man­aged to get the flash sto­ry done in the time allot­ted, and reviews in the forum are very pos­i­tive. One day I plan to try to sell it. 

I also man­aged to a aver­age about 2,000 words a day from Mon­day to Fri­day, usu­al­ly in two shifts of 1,000 words each. I wrote pret­ty much entire­ly on the deck. It was glorious. 

I did­n’t get the Milky Way. But I got this…

Aurora at Minnedosa
…so let’s call it even. 

Also, I indulged in some lake kayak­ing, swim­ming, and read The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, which I expect I’ll review lat­er, once I’ve digest­ed it a bit more. 

Good times. Same time next year, I hope.

Review: Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble

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Get in Trouble

Get in Trou­ble by Kel­ly Link
My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars

Kel­ly Link writes sto­ries like no oth­er. Every one is dif­fer­ent, but they’re all linked by a curi­ous mag­ic and a sense that you have no idea where you’re going, but it’s going to be worth the ride.

View all my reviews

OK, that’s the short ver­sion. I’ve had time to digest, and so here’s a bit more.

I sus­pect that Ms. Link is a pantser, like, say, Stephen King. (Edit: She evi­dent­ly is not.) She invents ful­ly-formed char­ac­ters, then sets them loose in set­tings as var­ied as the hollers of the south­ern US, a sleep­er ship on its way to Prox­i­ma Cen­tau­ri, a hotel host­ing two con­ven­tions, and an island wed­ding. Then she sits back—in a man­ner of speaking—to see what happens.

The open­ing sto­ry, “The Sum­mer Peo­ple”, was a beau­ti­ful thing. I’ve been work­ing my way through the last sea­son of Jus­ti­fied, and I kept imag­in­ing actors from the show in the roles of the two girls in the story.

“Secret Iden­ti­ty” is a long email writ­ten by a young woman (almost six­teen!) who almost got involved with a man near­ly twen­ty years her senior. It takes place at a hotel host­ing two con­ven­tions, one for den­tists, the oth­ers for superheroes.

“The Les­son” felt trag­ic and beau­ti­ful and creepy.

“Two Hous­es”, a col­lec­tion of ghost sto­ries on board a space­ship, was every bit as spooky and spacesuit‑y as you think, and it had echoes, as you’d expect, of Ray Bradbury.

Every sto­ry in this col­lec­tion is worth your time. Every sto­ry dumps you into a sit­u­a­tion that you don’t under­stand, that you can’t yet under­stand, and then feeds you the infor­ma­tion you need to make sense of what’s hap­pen­ing. (It took me quite some time, for exam­ple, to decide if the super­hero con­ven­tion was a cos­play con­ven­tion, or a gath­er­ing of hon­est-to-God super­be­ings. I’ll let you read it so you can decide for your­self.) Every sto­ry is a lay­ered trea­sure, unfold­ing slow­ly or quick­ly, till the gem at its heart is revealed.

Meet ‘n’ greet with Angela Misri

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Toron­to author Angela Mis­ri came to town on the TD Book Tour. She writes Sher­lock Holmes pas­tich­es, star­ring young detec­tive Por­tia Adams.

I was invit­ed by fel­low Bran­don author Craig Rus­sell to a meet ‘n’ greet with Angela, and so, with about ten oth­er local authors and artists, I heard about grow­ing up a writer in a fam­i­ly that expect­ed you to become a doc­tor or an engi­neer. (“Here is the plan. You will become a doc­tor, and you will write med­ical textbooks.”)

Some of the wis­dom I picked up:

  • For every rejec­tion let­ter, send out two new queries. Turn a neg­a­tive into a positive.
  • Get an agent.
  • Do your research.
  • Bet­ter still, have oth­er peo­ple do your research.

She has a very good tech­nique for get­ting peo­ple to help with her research: If a fan informs her that she’s let an error slip through (e.g., “Por­tia would­n’t wear trousers in the 1930s”), she’ll send that fan advance copies of the next nov­el, and ask that they tell her where she may have gone wrong. As she says, these peo­ple are the ones you want to keep happy.

Also, I now have a signed first edi­tion of Jew­el of the Thames, first of the Por­tia Adams mysteries.

Here in Cana­da, the Por­tia Adams nov­els are mar­ket­ed as Young Adult fic­tion, but in the USA they are appar­ent­ly on the grown-up shelves. I found this to be an echo of advice I received years ago from anoth­er Man­i­to­ba author/editor, Ani­ta Daher: “Write your sto­ry. Let the mar­ket­ing peo­ple wor­ry about where to shelve it.”

Goal Setting — May 2016

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Things I want to do this month:

  • at least 5,000 words in the Mar­t­ian story
  • find a suit­able title for the Mar­t­ian story
  • sub­mit “Me and the Bee” to more mar­kets (as needed)
  • update theme on this here website
  • pre­pare the IWL plu­g­in for sub­mis­sion to the WP repository

Word-o-Mat

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I just sent back the con­tract, “signed” elec­tron­i­cal­ly, so I guess I can say this now:

Six of my very short sto­ries (ones writ­ten ini­tial­ly on the now-defunct Ficlets.com) are going to be pub­lished in the inau­gur­al issue of Word-o-Mat. They’ll be print­ed on pages small enough to fit in a cig­a­rette box, and sold from a repur­posed vend­ing machine in Malmö, Swe­den. (Also you’ll be able to buy copies online.)

The sto­ries they’ll be pub­lish­ing are:

  1. The Wait
  2. Eat­ing Every­thing There Ever Was
  3. The Inver­sion
  4. The Trick
  5. Danc­ing
  6. The End of All Things

Check them out. They’re a fledg­ling mar­ket with an intrigu­ing gimmick.

Update: My copy of Vol­ume 1 has arrived.