I may have found my prompt for Geist’s Can’t Lit contest:
A possibly-unintentional stand-in for the author visits a dilapidated farmhouse on the Prairies in a one room cabin but is also a robot.
Blog
Review: Kelly Link’s 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.
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
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
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
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:
- The Wait
- Eating Everything There Ever Was
- The Inversion
- The Trick
- Dancing
- The End of All Things
Check them out. They’re a fledgling market with an intriguing gimmick.
Anomalisa
I went last night to the Evans Theatre to check out Anomalisa, which was an Oscar nominee in the Animated Feature category.
I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect what I got. The story is pretty simple, in a way, but trippily complex in another way. The way it’s told leaves it up to the viewer to figure out certain things, which I prefer to hand-holding and spoon-feeding. The puppetry / animation was amazing; sometimes it was solidly in the uncanny valley, other times it was so lifelike that I forgot these were puppets.
If you’re looking for a movie that makes you think, that makes you wonder, check it out. If you’re looking for the feel-good hit of the summer, this may not be for you. (I’ve seen it called “hilarious” and “laugh-out-loud funny”; I don’t agree. I did find some amusement in it, but mostly in the small details (“Try the chili!”, for instance), not in the broader story.)
You can never go home
Can you?
Prairie Girl has a couple cartoons on the matter, and they’re particularly poignant to me, because the ghost town she left is the little city that I’ve made my home.
(Clicking the image will take you to the whole story.)
I grew up in a much smaller town—pop. ~1200—and now it’s home only to my father. I didn’t even attend my 25-year high school reunion last summer (though, to be fair, I had my reasons, which included a scheduling conflict).
Movie time
Tonight I watched about half of Man of Steel and all of WALL•E. I had never seen the former; I saw the latter at the cinema.
The end credits of WALL•E are a better movie than Man of Steel, IMHO.
Robert J. Sawyer reading
Tonight I went to Winnipeg to the book launch for Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, Quantum Night. The reading was great, and the Q&A session afterwards with Struan Sinclair was great. Eye-opening and packed with little tidbits about the craft and the art of writing, tidbits that I’ll be mulling over for a while yet. Once I’ve had some time to process things—and sleep—I’ll return with a longer post.
For now, enjoy this photo of the author at work.
Relevant to my current work-in-progress
Why would [Shakespeare] write in a ghost unless it had details to deliver?
—Patti Grayson, Ghost Most Foul
Some sage advice from a YA novel I just finished reading. In fact the whole second half of the book has a fair amount of connection to my current novella(?).