Blog

Rejection

Posted on by Patrick

This morn­ing, before break­fast, I checked my email. One of my short sto­ries, which made it into the sec­ond round at a pub­li­ca­tion (a rar­efied space that, accord­ing to their sta­tis­tics, only 10% of sub­mit­ted sto­ries ever enter), had been rejected.

So I moped for about five minutes—I’d had high hopes for this one, and now they’d been dashed—then had break­fast and prepped it for anoth­er mar­ket. (Always read the sub­mis­sion guide­lines: the sec­ond pub­lish­er wants all trace of the author’s name scrubbed from the sub­mis­sion, to allow blind judging.)

Moral: If you’re an author, get used to rejec­tion. But don’t let it get you down.

As ever, Kurt Von­negut’s sim­ple quote applies here: So it goes.

Fun times Friday

Posted on by Patrick

Here, have a ridicu­lous­ly toe-tap­py earworm:

When I went to see Les Clay­pool when he played Win­nipeg, I was pret­ty thrilled when he opened with this lit­tle dit­ty. It’s long been a favourite of mine. I hope you enjoy it too.

Shower Inspiration

Posted on by Patrick

In the show­er, I had a moment of insight, an epiphany, about the con­nec­tion between the sit­u­a­tion my main char­ac­ter faces at the end of the sto­ry and the sit­u­a­tion his sis­ter faces all the way along. It might even inspire the title of the third act, but let’s don’t be hasty.

Review: Fragment, by Craig Russell

Posted on by Patrick
Fragment, by Craig Russell

Fel­low Bran­don author Craig Rus­sell recent­ly had a new nov­el pub­lished, titled Frag­ment. I went to the book launch at McNal­ly Robin­son Book­sellers and bought myself a copy.

I fin­ished read­ing it last night, and I must say, I enjoyed it. It’s a short novel—not much over 200 pages—but it packs a lot into that space.

The Story

Thou­sands per­ish as ice over­runs a research/tourism base at the south end of the world. A mas­sive sheet of Antarc­tic ice—the Fragment—breaks free of the con­ti­nen­tal ice shelf and drifts into the ocean. Three sci­en­tists, sur­vivors from the destroyed base, must try to get the mes­sage out: This is a dis­as­ter. The Frag­ment threat­ens thou­sands, pos­si­bly mil­lions, of lives.

Stand­ing in their way is the cap­tain of the nuclear sub­ma­rine that res­cued them, under orders to run silent, run deep. Also, the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States isn’t thrilled about the sit­u­a­tion, since it looks like it’ll be bad for his polls in the run-up to re-election.

And Ring, a blue whale, tries to warn his peo­ple of the dan­gers pre­sent­ed by the Frag­ment. But he’s only one voice in the vast ocean.

The Good

The sto­ry is cap­ti­vat­ing. Rus­sell1 does a good job of flesh­ing out his cast of char­ac­ters, espe­cial­ly the ones we’re going to spend a lot of time with. Ring in par­tic­u­lar felt like a well-devel­oped per­son, who just hap­pened to be a whale.

The stakes start out high and get high­er all the time. I could­n’t stop turn­ing pages, espe­cial­ly in the last half of the book, which I read in a sin­gle sitting.

The “Needs Improvement”

The end­ing, while com­pelling, felt like it could be fleshed out some­what. Sev­er­al dis­as­ters involv­ing the Frag­men­t’s unstop­pable force vs. an island’s immov­able object were deliv­ered in a few para­graphs, and it felt rushed.

The Verdict

Buy it. Read it. It’s an eco-dis­as­ter nov­el with polit­i­cal over­tones, and it’s a first-con­tact nov­el, all in 200-and-a-bit effi­cient pages.

 

  1. Craig is a friend of mine, and it feels weird to call him by his last name, but that’s the way things are done. Right? ↩

I’m not made of stone

Posted on by Patrick

Of course I opened it.

Along with my col­lec­tion of six Very Short Sto­ries, these are the works in Word-o-Mat’s Edi­tion #1:

  • Three poems by Hen­ry King
  • “Help Want­ed” by Luke Hilton
  • Three poems by Diana Dupu
  • “North of Real­i­ty” by Uel Aramchek
  • “The Rental Heart” by Kirsty Logan

Infor­ma­tion about all the authors may be found on the Word-o-Mat website.