4000 words today, and I think I’ve mostly worked out the endgame of The Shadow Crusade now. The primary antagonist is not a particularly complicated man, but his puppeteer has a lot going on. Someone made the wrong choice.
Writing
Writing about writing.
Writing retreat
Sure, we’ll call it that.
I’ve taken a week’s vacation, packed my laptop, my camera, and a change of clothes, and rented a friend’s cabin on a nearby lake. Writing, exploring, and cycling by day; attempting some astrophotography by night.
Current status: happy.
As rejection letters go…
…it’s a pretty good one.
I submitted a short-story proposal for a forthcoming anthology in honour of Sir Terry Pratchett. I knew going in that it was a long shot — they’re looking for humorous writing, and the story I proposed is about a 9‑year-old child dealing with his father’s cancer diagnosis — so I wasn’t terribly1 surprised.
From the rejection letter2 itself:
The reason we didn’t select your work on this occasion was that
- It didn’t quite have the humorous characteristics we’re looking for.
The sample was occasionally a little confusing.3
We both enjoyed your story, and it was a close call as far as submissions went.
Please don’t judo us for the rejection, and best of luck in your future writing projects.
Please understand that while your material does not fit the bill for our current project, we encourage you to continue writing, and wish you the best of luck in future.
So… I will continue with this little tale, and find a new market for it. (Anyone interested? It’s about the collision of fantasy worlds and real-life pain.)
Short fantasies
There’s an article in The Guardian by one Natasha Pulley which posits that proper fantasy world-building can’t be accomplished in a short story, and that’s why so many fantasy novels these days are a) hefty and b) continued in multi-volume series.
I offer the following counterpoints:
-
the short fantasies of Michael Swanwick (for example, “The Dragon Line” or “Radio Waves”)
-
the very existence of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
-
…and Beneath Ceaseless Skies
-
…and Fantasy Faction
-
…and so forth.
Action scenes
Earlier this week I read an article on io9 about why you shouldn’t write action scenes, an article aimed at screenwriters, especially those making big-budget action movies. Then this afternoon, I went to see one of the biggest action films currently in theatres: Avengers: Age of Ultron.
From the article:
You don’t do an action sequence for the sake of doing a damn action sequence — you do an action sequence because it’s a new or more effective way to advance your character or story.
Ultron featured a lot — a lot — of action sequences. The bulk of them, to my eye, were action for the sake of action. A few of them — the mass fight at the start, for example — featured some character building. Among other things, it established the team as an actual, cohesive team, and it showed the start of the Widow/Hulk storyline. But a lot of the later action sequences were there, it seemed, to Make Things Explode. More than once I found myself wondering when they were going to get back to the story. (That, or trying to calculate just how much money Stark’s rebuilding fund must burn through in a year. It’s got to be a lot.)
This is not to say I didn’t enjoy the movie. I liked it. It was a pleasant diversion. For a big stupid fun movie, it was decently smart (though the whole plot hinged on a couple of supergenius scientists making some pretty boneheaded decisions).
Once more, quoting from the article:
Don’t write action sequences. Write suspense sequences that require action to resolve.
We’ll call Ultron a partial success there. Here’s hoping that the next film I see — slated to be Mad Max: Fury Road1 — does as well or better.
Update: I watched Mad Max: Fury Road on the holiday Monday. Even though the movie is one protracted action scene (or maybe it’s more like a dozen or so action scenes, linked together with brief pauses so the audience can catch their collective breath), it had more character development and sense of story than Avengers: Age of Ultron. So that’s a win.
Daily SF: “Person to Person”
Update: Well, today’s the day. “Person to Person” is now up on DSF’s site.
On May 18th, my short story “Person to Person” will appear in Daily Science Fiction. When it’s posted, I’ll be sure to add a link to his post.
Here’s a teaser:
Jake called from Heaven again.
That’s the first line, and it just came to me, a gift from on high1, and I knew I had to use it. I spent some time deciding whether I meant it literally or not; once that was settled, the story essentially wrote itself (which is in itself another gift).
- cf. “Resurrection Radio” and the long-gestating Everything that Never Happened. ↩
Miyazaki on writing
I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live — if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.
— Hayao Miyazaki (source)
Celebrate Short Fiction Day
On the shortest day of the Northern year, take some time to enjoy some short fiction.
You can thank Pixel Hall Press for the idea.
Here’s some of my short fiction, free every day for you, but highlighted today as the solstice approaches:
Some of these stories feature strong language and adult situations.
- City Kid, a brief amuse-bouche to get you into the swing of some really short fiction.
- Resurrection Radio, my first published fantasy tale. (Originally published in On Spec, 2004)
- Heat Death — at the end of it all, a beginning. (Originally published in Tesseracts Fourteen, 2010)
- Seven Very Short Stories — what it says on the tin, as they say. Stories in 1024 characters or less. My personal favourite is “The Trick”; a lot of people seem to like “The Wait”.
- And in closing, something amusing — Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One — never published, though not for lack of trying.
Amazon v. English Punctuation
Apparently Amazon.com is not a fan of hyphens (note to those with an F‑bomb sensitivity: the linked article contains a few). This is ludicrous for a lot of reasons:
- Hyphens are absolutely necessary in some situations (there’s the “one nightstand” vs. “one-night stand” that the referenced post brings up, and phrases like “twenty-year lease”, “hundred-dollar bill”, “the whole good-versus-evil trope” all use them).
- Hyphens1 are used in English for various reasons, and anyone who’s read most any book that doesn’t have more pictures than words — what my nephews charmingly refer to as “chapter books” — has encountered them, and puzzled out how they work. A practiced reader’s eye will simply skip over them. They’re a nearly invisible piece of punctuation, their function in any given situation transparent.
- If hundreds or thousands of people have read a book without any troubles, then it should take more than one complaint to suddenly make Amazon (or any algorithm with an iota of fairness coded into it) decide to even flag a book for trouble, let alone remove it from circulation.
I haven’t read the book in question; I hadn’t heard of this particular author before I read a post in the Fiction Writers’ group on Facebook regarding this particular post.
Checking out the preview of his novel, here are the first few hyphen/dash uses I came across:
- “…a tall, grey-haired man…”
- “…Mac-10…”
- “…Mid-thirties…”
- “…drug-fuelled sex act…”
- “…Not the sort of mental image you want of your mother-in-law…”
They all look correct, in my studied opinion. I suppose you could replace mother-in-law with mother in law, but even that looks better to my eye with the dashes. (I’d spell it fueled, and I suspect the weapon in question is a MAC-10, but the nitpicks there don’t involve the dashes.)
As presented, this is a ludicrous situation, one that I surely hope Amazon will correct.
(It might be nice, though, to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with some punctuation. Actually, no; I can’t envision a punctuation system that would ever make The Road a nice read. Not even scratch-‘n’-sniff daisies and smiley faces on every page.)
- Fine, hyphens and various species of dash. Typographers know the differences, and can lecture you at length about them. For the sake of brevity I’m lumping them all — utterly incorrectly — under the “hyphen” banner. Mea culpa. ↩
Rebutting Yann Martel
This past weekend I spent 2½ all-too-short hours with ten other Manitoba writers in a roundtable with Man Booker-prize winning author Yann Martel. There was a great deal said about writing: the whys and wherefores, the hows, the fact that no one really writes for money. (Money’s nice, but you write to write. To exorcise demons, to entertain, to process the world — all these come long before money, assuming that money ever comes.)
There were at least three genre writers there, and the discussion came up of literature vs. genre. I was pleased that Yann wasn’t the snobby type that gazes down his nose at the apparent ghetto of genre. (In fact, I may be snobbier — he read The Da Vinci Code to its end, whereas I gave up on it at about page 60.)
One point that he made, however, kind of stuck in my craw. He claimed that literature can wring emotion from a reader far more effectively than SF, or fantasy, or mystery ever can. He posited that in 100 years’ time, Stephen King will be largely forgotten, but Dickens will live on, because the reader connects on a deeper, more emotional level. He said he can’t think of a single SF novel that’s made someone cry.
Well, here are two novel that succeeded in making me tear up:
- Circuit of Heaven, by Dennis Danvers — It’s Romeo & Juliet for the mind-uploading set, in essence. Star-crossed lovers, separated by the life that may come after death.
- The Dark Tower, by Stephen King. The chapter that did it for me is “In This Haze of Green & Gold”. If you’ve read the saga, you know why. (Also, “ ‘Olan” kind of got me, too.)