With Iron and Fire

For several years I’ve been a member of an alternate history discussion board, mainly writing and posting stories but also discussing current events and playing a bit of Dungeons and Dragons.

Several years ago, I was approached by another member, David Wostyn, who was looking for folks to contribute to a timeline he’d been developing. This setting saw the history of China change in 1912, with consequences including the carving-off of a Siberian satellite state during the Russian Revolution, avoidance of the Warlord Era, and a fairly different Second World War. I was intrigued and honored; other writers on the board had already contributed stories based in this setting, and some of them were really damned good.

After a bit of thinking, it was decided that I’d take advantage of the altered history to re-do that world’s diamond industry. Thus was born Rock of Ages, my longest (at 28,000 words) piece of fiction to date. The novella begins with a chance encounter between Siberian peasant Afanasy Khristoforov and a gold prospector, and explores the consequences this meeting has on Afanasy, his family, and his country over the better part of the twentieth century.

The story was well-received by readers on the board, but I figured that would be as far as it went. Alternate history’s a bit of a niche thing, and the size of Rock of Ages is excessive in size for most anthologies.

But last year, a couple of members of this same discussion board set up a new small e-press to focus on alternate history. Sealion Press started releasing some of the best alternate history timelines and novels I’ve seen, and in the fall, approached David about pubishing his timeline. David, in turn, approached myself and some of the other contributors to his timeline about including our stories in the book.

I’m happy to report that the end result is With Iron and Fire, now available on Amazon.

 

Tess

Short stories don’t earn their authors staggering amounts of money, even when sold at professional rates.  At a very solid $0.05 per word, a typical short story in the 3,000 to 5,000 word range is generating $150 to $250.  Semi-pro rates (~$0.03 per word) or token payments ($0.01 per word or less) will obviously net less.

And that’s fine.  While the remuneration is a nice recognition of my effort and my contribution to a publisher’s enterprise, I have no expectation of getting rich or living comfortably based on writing income.

When I made my first sale, the question arose:  What exactly were we going to do with the $100+ earned from Lonesome Charlie Johnstone’s Strange Boon?   It was a milestone for me, so pitching it into our general account for groceries and bills seemed a bit out of place.  Spending it on some fun seemed more appropriate, and so part of the money went towards attendance at CAN-CON in the fall.

But that still left around $50 and so we decided that it would be money that kept on giving.  How?  We bought an apple tree.

And after selling Dead Air and The Shining Path, we decided to continue that trend of contributing to our farm.  The payment and royalties from these stories went towards soft fruits – strawberries and raspberries, mostly.

Now while payment for the sale of Black Sheep to Tesseracts 19:  Superhero Universe is a little while away, I think you can see what sort of farm-related purchase we might make in response.  When the opportunity arose this past week, we took a drive and came back with a Katahdin ewe named (obviously) Tess.

2016: Up, Up, Up, Can Only Go Up From Here…

Baby 2016 is curled up and sleeping soundly, so let’s take a few minutes to discuss goals for the coming year before the little fellow wakes up and starts screaming.

My word count has slipped from 58,000 in 2013 to around 5,000 last year. Let’s see if I can get back to 58,000 once again. If we assign 21,000 of those words to a novella (see below), that leaves around 37,000 words, or about one 3,000-ish word story a month. That’s a good length for submissions these days.

My completion rate target of 50% seems not-insane, so I’ll aim for that again and maybe even achieve it. Once again, multiple takes on the same idea will count as a single story for this target, because I do that sometimes and almost certainly will again.

I still like the idea that I can and will write different genres as the whim strikes me. Last year, at one point, I’d accepted a challenge from my wife to write a romance story. Not surprisingly, given how 2015 went, this did not come to pass. So this year’s objective is to write one romance story (with whatever other genre elements may be appropriate) plus stuff from two of sci-fi, alternate history, fantasy, or horror.

At the moment, I don’t think a novel or antho is in the cards, but I will act on a different challenge from my wife: To self-publish a novella. I have a piece in mind; it’s got about 9,000 words thus far and could go to maybe three times that. Having edited a different novella for an anthology during the fall, I’m curious to see how the experiences compare when it’s all said and done.

I’ll stick with the objective of one learning event per year. It will probably be CAN-CON next fall, since it’s both a good event and a close/inexpensive event. However, I know of other conferences for writers in Kingston and Toronto, and may give one of those a shot as well.

What are your goals, writing, reading or otherwise, for the year?

 

2015 in Review: …yeah.

It’s coming to an end, so let’s see what goals were achieved in 2015 and which were not…

I had set the target of 58,000 words this year, and while I don’t have an exact total at hand, there’s little doubt I was way off. Like, maybe an order of magnitude off. Black Sheep was, I believe, around 3,000 words, there were about 500 words in October, and around 1,500 last week.

The targeted completion rate of 50% was also not met, given that I completed only one of the three stories started.

I wanted a story in each of the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy genres. Technically, my three projects were all kind of modern fantasy pieces, although one would’ve had elements of horror if I’d gotten further with it.

I didn’t outline a novel or build an anthology, so boo me.

I…did go to a learning event this year. Holy crap, people, I did it! I met a goal! I went to CAN-CON! Wooooooooooo! On to 2016!

 

Hello Again!

Thanks for sticking around. It’s been a while, eh? I’ll confess that while gardening, family visits, renovations, and another mad month at work didn’t completely chew up my free time, I was rarely in a mood to actually write these past six months. Now that the month of madness at work is over, I’m finding myself switching mental gears once more.

So what’s new in terms of things that are writing and writing related?

Well, Tesseracts 19: Superhero Universe is now available for pre-order on Amazon. com. Check out the nifty retro cover, hey? We’re only a few months away from publication and I expect there will be some news on promotional events. I’m looking forward to seeing Black Sheep in print.

Meanwhile, an old side project is going to see daylight. I’d written a story set in an alternate history timeline a few years back, and a new alternate history small press is going to publish a volume with parts of that timeline and a few short stories set within it. This will include Rock of Ages, about a Siberian peasant who ends up founding a major diamond mining company in the interwar era. I believe the publisher is looking to have it out for Christmas, though only in digital format.

The majority of new writing of late has been two mediocre pages whipped out at 2:30 in the morning, one day in September. It was one of those cases where I woke up from a dream and thought, “Holy crap, that was cool” but in this particular case I blah-blahed out an introduction and then fell asleep again before I could get anywhere interesting. I think it’ll be back.

I saw three movies over the summer and fall.

Mad Max: Fury Road was pretty good; fresh. Some men and women kicked ass, and kicked ass, and kicked some more ass, and then went driving around until they find some additional unkicked ass. I’d read beforehand about a reviewer’s mother commenting that the movie showed senior citizens in a respectful way and that had confounded me until I saw the film. I hadn’t even realized there would be senior citizens in the film; nor could I really see how any would fit into a two hour car chase. But darned if the reviewer’s mother wasn’t right.

Jurassic World was okay, I guess. We had the requisite male/female lead romance-under-pressure, which felt rather stale given that I’d just seen Max and Furiosa spend two hours blowing shit up without going all googly-eyed at each other. The Claire character was okay, and the actress made the high heels work, but the high heels still seemed kind of dumb. The Owen character was a pretty bland alpha male who didn’t seem to evolve any over the screen time. I did appreciate how Jurassic-World-the-place was shown to operate; it felt suitably crass and touristy.

Big problem for me, I think, is that the big bad new dinosaur really didn’t seem particularly special in anyway. It was, for the most part, just a big T-Rex with elements of other critters tossed in to suit plot requirements. It was not easy to tell it apart from the T-Rex during the finale, and the nature of its demise was telegraphed well in advance.

American Ultra was okay. I candidly admit that watching drug usage turns me off, but the film had enjoyable moments. It did manage to get my back up at the end when one of the supporting characters did something that seemed really, really at odds with everything said and done previously.

I’ve heard quiet indications of a possible Star Wars movie coming out this month (*check your sarcasm detector now, please). I don’t know whether I’ll see it or not. The folks involved in the Star Trek reboot are behind this as well, and while the first of those films was pleasant, I really disliked Into Darkness.

So what’s new with you?

 

 

Huzzah!

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll have a story appearing in Tesseracts 19:  Superhero Universe – coming to a bookshelf near you in early 2016.

The twenty-five contributors were announced yesterday by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.  There are some previous contributors to Masked Mosaic and a couple of writers with local connections, so that’s pretty cool.

Can’t say much more about it at this point, but there will be a cover art unveiling in the summer and a Table of Contents announcement come fall – I’ll keep you posted!

Writing on the Job

I’ve been writing this last while – but not for fun.

The writing in question is what people in government call a Memorandum to Cabinet. Basically, it’s a proposal to undertake a major program, usually with an attached budget, and ultimately requires approval by (you guessed it) the federal Cabinet in order to go ahead. The process for approving such a document normally takes about five months, but our particular file is on a fast-track and so we’re maybe looking at five weeks.

I was involved in such a process a few years back and found it quite challenging. This time, it’s not so bad. When I thought about it, I could see several areas where my growth as a fiction writer is influencing my ability to write the work documents.

The first thing I noticed came before I even started writing. Rather than launch into it right away, I sat back, asked myself what exactly I needed to put into this document, and then outlined the proposal, the background, the considerations, and the various other bits that would be required. I ordered everything so that the flow made sense and led to the conclusions and recommendations I wanted to make.

Then I started writing. Being government stuff, I’ll admit that certain parts of the document were more of a slog than others. Rather than let myself get hung up on specific paragraphs that wouldn’t come, I knew – thanks to my outline – the generalities of what that paragraph would contain and skipped ahead, maintaining momentum by writing other parts of the doc. It was simple enough to come back to the unwritten bits later, after I’d let the subject matter roll over in my head a few days, and deal with them then.

I found myself editing on the go. This included the obvious correction of spelling errors but also whittling down over-long phrases or replacing complicated lingo with simpler terms. This had a couple of advantages: First, it helped ensure I was staying within my page limit (because there was one, and people often struggle with it). Second, it meant that as soon as somebody higher up the food chain wanted to have a gander, I could immediately give them something that wasn’t a super-rough draft.

I’ve also discovered that I’m doing better at accepting edits, including edits I don’t agree with or think are particularly useful. That’s an ongoing thing when there’s several layers of management between me the writer and the folks in Cabinet – everybody has their view of what should be included, excluded, and different. Often times, changes requested by one layer of management will be contravened by a higher layer. But it’s all good. I’m accustomed to receiving critiques back on my stories and I don’t take it personally. I make the edits and I move on.

So there you: Writing fiction is helpful in writing non-fiction.

I have managed to spend a bit of recreational time on editing some stories. There was an extensive edit of One Last Dance to bring it from 6,000 words to under 5,000 for a market – I was surprised to be able to do that without losing much substance. I’ve also started editing a larger story called Into Exile, which is an Arab Spring-inspired adventure piece. It’s over 8,000 words and while I think it has some promise, there are sections of the story that really need some work.

Couple other things have come up, but I’ll post on them soon enough.  Happy Victoria Day!

Spring has Sprung

Hey folks,

I hope Spring has found you in good spirits, all motivated by the arrival (or anticipated arrival) of warm weather, sunshine, and the end of snow. Personally, I’m loving it. After a second long, cold winter in a row, it’s nice to put away the long johns, stop worrying about frozen pipes, and not feel like I’m going to freeze solid while doing farm chores. It’s not just me, either – the farm critters are enjoying the milder climes too. Chickens are laying more, and the lambs can come out of the barn and bounce around the bale feeder while the ewes eat.

On the creative front, I’ve spent most of the past few weeks editing rather than writing. It’s a part of the over all story-crafting process that doesn’t get as much attention as writing. Less glamorous. If you see a writer on a big screen, he or she is staring at a blank screen, willing words to emerge. He or she is most certainly not staring at a full screen of text, contemplating what to delete. Writing is fun, writing creates, writing brings forth. Editing is deletion or tedium; “killing your darlings” as I think Stephen King put it.

But I’m not good enough to write perfect stories on the first take, so I have to edit.

Most of the recent work went into a version of One Last Dance. A market had appeared, but had a hard cap of 5,000 words. The story had 6,000. Thematically, the market was a good enough fit that I thought it was worth seeing if I could take out 17% of the story’s words without losing anything in the story.

My first pass-through got me half way there. There were a lot of cases where I could replace passive verbs with active verbs (“had been ___” to “___ed”) or merge actions and dialogue tags (“…He said. He stood.” to “…He said, standing”). It was no more than one or two words at a time but it added up. I cut out some “Um” and “Er” filler that served to demonstrate hesitation on a speaker’s part but otherwise just inflated word count. Occasionally, a line of redundant description or dialogue would get the axe as well.

Subsequent pass-throughs were more difficult once I’d edited the low-hanging fruit. A paragraph describing the protagonist’s armor was much condensed. A conversation got trimmed. In some cases I was okay with these deletions, but others had little bits I liked, so whacking them wasn’t easy. Hence Stephen King’s quote from earlier.

By the end of it all, though, I’d shaved the story down to 4,995 words and felt that little of actual value had been lost. Certainly the core story wasn’t changed. I sent it in to the market almost two months ago, but their deadline isn’t until the end of April. It’ll be another long wait.

Meanwhile, an apocalypse-themed antho opened up, so I took another pass through Sponges. I’d already edited the crap out of that a few times, so there was little language-wise to adjust. The big thing this time was that I’d written the first draft around 2011, setting it in the near-future with a scene mentioning NATO in Afghanistan. But with NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan now having ended as of last year, the scene now served to explicitly place the story in the past. That didn’t make a lot of sense because I think we’d all agree there was not sponge-related apocalypse in our recent past. Yes?

I contemplated updating the scene to ISIL and Syria, but that again seemed to date things too specifically. In the end, I adjusted it to be Pakistan fighting AQ in northern Pakistan, as this seems to be an open-ended conflict.

I fired Sponges in to its target market in late March, so along with One Last Dance and Black Sheep, I’ve got three stories out there right now.

What’s new in your neck of the woods?

Hush

An quick update and then some thoughts on monsters on this not-as-frigid-as-it-could-be Saturday morning; note that there are a few movie-related spoilers.

Update:  Having submitted two stories to the Tesseracts anthology, I learned on the 11th that Piano Girl had been rejected. As of this morning, however, Black Sheep has not. I’m taking the lack of news on that front as a positive thing. I’ll admit I get a little nervous checking my email now – I’d really like to make that sale and hold my breath just a bit as I scan the new messages.

Now, let’s talk monsters.

I was critiquing a story for my group a little while back and encountered a bit of a…well, pet peeve, I suppose. The story – otherwise a pretty well done, creepy horror tale – featured a paranormal entity. It was clear from the narrative that it was “alien”, yet as the protagonists interacted with it, we readers could discern its motivations and the rules the author had it operating under. It was a cool twist on an old idea.

And then it spoke.

See, I’m generally of the view that talking monsters are less frightening than non-talking monsters. This is partly due to the fact that my own imagination generates a pre-conceived notion of what a monster might sound like – so even if the author does a good job of voicing the monster, it’ll clash with my preconception and knock me out of the story. More importantly, as soon as the monster speaks, it ceases to be a monster. It becomes a character. I no longer have to guess at its motivations and feel unease about not knowing, because the monster generally tells me: Eat/kill/destroy/whatever.

Let’s look to the recent Tolkien movies for examples. In Return of the King and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, we see protagonists attacked by big-arsed spiders. In the former, Frodo gets stung/impaled by the giant Shelob, cocooned, and tucked away for later eating. In the latter, Bilbo’s disoriented dwarven colleagues are set upon by spiders in the Mirkwood, cocooned, and tucked way for later eating. So far so good. But while Shelob continues to be a big, freaky spider until Sam saves Frodo’s hide (again), the Mirkwood spiders are ruined when Bilbo puts the One Ring on his finger; now he, and we, can understand these spiders. Their chittering turns into cartoonish-sounding, “I’m hungry! Can we eats it?” dialogue. That didn’t scare me. That made me laugh.

Okay, another comparison – the fiery balrog from The Fellowship of the Ring and Smaug the dragon from The Desolation of Smaug. Once again, both are huge, monstrous things and are set up to be scary because everybody who sees them or knows of them acts scared*. When the balrog shows up, it never utters anything remotely similar to human speech. It’s left to us to decide why it’s pissy at the heroes as it attacks. Smaug, on the other hand, wakes up and starts talking, and talking, and talking. I had that initial moment of, “Hey…isn’t that the guy who played new-Khan?” and then found myself kind of waiting for Smaug to just shut up already.

Anyway, I ended up recommending to my fellow writer that he eliminate his monster’s lines. Don’t know if he chose to go through with it.

But all that to say, dragons appear to be popular this year. I’ve already seen three dragon-theme anthologies announced the past few months. It seems logical, then, to try to cash in…er…see if I’m inspired to craft something for artistic reasons. I have an idea in mind, and it requires the dragon to be a big, scary thing. But it also has to communicate with the protagonist.

That poses a bit of a conundrum, doesn’t it?

I’m looking to The Purge: Anarchy for a possible course of action. If you’ve seen it – you probably haven’t – it’s a future where America suspends rule of law one night a year and basically everybody acts out their worst urges while they can get away with it. One of the villains is a tall, lean guy wearing a creepy mask and waving a machete. For most of the movie, he doesn’t say anything. He and his equally creepy buddies show up in their creepy cube van to chase the protagonists around. When they finally catch the protagonists, cuff them, and chuck them into the van, one of the protagonists starts yelling and taunting him. The camera cuts to the impassive villain, at which point I assumed my pet peeve was about to happen yet again.  I was like, “Noooo!  Hush!”

Sure enough, the guy takes off his mask and talks. But he’s not a grizzled killer. He’s a fresh-faced kid. And he isn’t all “Rawr! We’re gonna torture you with stuff until you beg to die.” Instead, he says, matter-of-factly, something to the effect that some rich people are paying good money for live captives to chase around and murder. He and his buddies are making ends meet by making it happen. Awesome! The dialogue didn’t make him more relatable – it made him less relatable and showed us how corruptive the entire concept of the Purge was.

I think that’ll be my approach. The dragon will speak/communicate, but its dialogue will be less, “RAWR! Gold good! Kill theives!” and more, “You can survive this if my interests are met.” Or something. Gimme a break, I’m still working on it.

So anywho – who did you find scarier: Shelob or Mirkwood spiders? Balrog or Smaug?

*We’ll come back to this another time.

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

Holy cow, we’re into February.

The month/year got off to a slow start, to be honest. I was aiming to have a new story for the superhero-themed Tesseracts 19 and started having that problem I’ve had before: Not being sure what perspective to tell the story from.   Took a while to sort that out, but I went with the one that provided a bit more “meat”.

Still, I was struggling and eventually realized that although I’d created a character with awesome powers, I hadn’t shown them in action.   So I built in a new beginning to the story that illustrated the powers being used in one way – and that led me to conclude the story with the powers being used in a very different way.

That spurred me on; I ended up at 4,600 words, ran it past my dear wife for a basic “Is this okay/Is there anything really awful?” review, and fired it in slightly before midnight.  Ended up calling it Black Sheep, which isn’t terribly exciting but will do until I think of something better.  I also submitted Piano Girl, which I’ve mentioned of late, as it’s got superhero content.  We’ll see whether the editors care for either of them.

Now I seem to have a bit of momentum, so it’s on to another project. This time, it’s dragons – there’s a themed antho closing at the end of February, so I’ll see if I can squeeze ths out. I’ve already started it…three different ways. Yup, another of those. I’ll let you know if/how it turns out.

Note:  I’ve edited this post as it was spoiler-ific.  Sorry!