Just a little thing I threw at the wall on Twitter which I’d like to remember (and not just because I’m very pleased with the seasonal screen-name I came up with):
Tag: writing
The Fruits of Contest Participation
Back at the beginning of a summer, I heard of a contest being run by Owl Canyon Press, for their 2018 Short Story Hackathon. It was open as far as genre went, and had a fairly interesting set up. The story could only be fifty paragraphs long, but the contestants could only write forty-eight. The first and last were provided, and were not to be amended in any way. To keep people from turning it into a very tall, slender flash fiction, there was also a requirement that paragraph be of a minimum number of words. I imagine that an urge to keep from padding that word count with “umm, well, you see, errr” led to the final restriction, which demanded that there be no directly quoted speech. One could write He began the opening oration from Shakespeare’s Henry V but He took a deep breath and said, “Oh, for a muse of fire…” would be a disqualification.
The prize was publication, and an invitation to attend a shindig… even in a small town with a somewhat mysterious name. Well, heck, I like shindigs and getting published, and there was no entry fee, so I joined something like nine hundred other writers in offering a story.
Guess what?
I did not win!
Given the size of the field, and the relative infrequency of any given writer impressing any given editor, this is not unexpected. I do not mourn, nor tend a bruised ego. Indeed, I built a silver lining into this whole affair. Even as I was writing the story, I resolved that if it failed to capture the prize, I would not put it into the submission carousel, but I would directly pass it along to the readers of this enterprise.
So, here we are. Prolonging the Inevitable is a bit of a frolic in the region of weird that butts up against both fantasy and horror. It is, ironically enough, a bit of contemplation on what the real nature of life’s defeats might be. Remember the old saying– every time a door closes, the things outside start wriggling down the chimney.
Soft Launch
Let me tell you a brief true story. In the fall of 2016, I had a story accepted by a long-running publication called AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. This was within a fortnight of “The Third Act” being taken up by Trigger Warning, so as you can imagine I was absolutely overwhelmed by a sense of artistic achievement.
But the world does not like too much joy in it. Thus, some grudge-bearing (I assume) terrestrial tetrapod did the hacking equivalent of putting a shotgun to the back of the head of AE‘s online facility. The site went down so soon after I sent back the edits that I thought I might have been to blame for it, and they weren’t able to even explain to the world what happened for weeks. That explanation was the beginning of a very long road to getting back online.
The return has been accomplished– a soft launch, at the moment, which I assume means “Sound the trumpets! Release the doves!” major official re-launch is in the near future… but I can’t wait for that because I’ve been waiting almost two years to say aloud that I have had a story published by AE!
As I did with my last external publication, I’m going to put a link in the sidebar for… a while… to make sure it’s accessible. I will also, as with the Pseudopod announcement last spring, express how amazed I am to find myself one of such a company of writers. There’s some very good writing there, and I urge anyone who goes there from here to linger, to wander through the stacks, and examine some of the other work, because your time will be rewarded with enrichment.
For my part, I’m going to have a long lie-down. All this jumping up and down, squealing with unalloyed glee, is rather tiring.
This is NOT an Anniversary Present
Today is my wedding anniversary (my wife’s as well, by happy coincidence!). It is purest chance that I’m putting forth a story today. Especially one that takes the theme of vengeance as its seed-crystal, once again at the suggestion of this guy who writes somewhat more than I do.
No, the anniversary present involves going out to a nice sushi restaurant, son in tow, and eating until we’ve all got That Innsmouth Look. This because we like sushi, we don’t have use for any more china (which is what “tradition” has as appropriate for this year) and watching my son eat “exotic” food gives me strange joy. But while we’re off doing that, there’s no reason that people who aren’t us can’t enjoy a short story about revenge, which is precisely what Dig Two Graves is about.
A small semi-spoiler of a note to go with it, which I will go down a couple of lines to reveal:
Almost…
OK. Here it is:
I am not specific about the offense at the bottom of the vendetta. I was intending to be less so, to the point that I chose the name “Felix” as being reasonably close in meaning to “Fortunato” without actually lifting from Poe. That I then give a sense that there is some actual reason behind the plot beyond a possibly-imaginary “thousand injuries” is probably a tacit admission that I’m perhaps not quite as good at this writing wheeze as was Poe… but you may also ponder just how culpable Felix is
It’s in the Trees!
That’s a line from Night of the Demon, the excellent 1957 film adaptation of M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” and I seriously recommend giving an evening over to watching it.
But that has nothing to do with this post. I ran into something on Twitter that gave me a spasm of creativity, and I thought I might as well preserve it here, for my own future amusement at least. First of all, here’s the triggering image:
And here’s what fell out of my head:
Exploring the Shallows of Space
I’m pursuing another of the fiction prompts thrown out by Chuck Wendig, and for purposes of editorial comment, I’ll quote some if his entry here:
It’s May the Fourth, c’mon.
So obviously the only choice of what to write is:
SPACE OPERA
SPACE OPERA
SPAAAAAACE
OPERAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa
So, get on that. Whatever it means, it means.
Length: ~1500 words
Which is neat… but there’s also a small contradiction. Space opera, after all, is big. Huge, sweeping works, filling thick books… and frequently more than one.
This is very hard to manage with 1500 words or less.
So, I’m not entirely convinced that Seeds of Empire qualifies. I’m also trying hard to convince myself that it’s not just a prologue for something that does.
Because I’ve got enough backlog in the Stuff I Want to Write folder without adding in a proper Space Opera. You hear me, brain? You drop that notion right now!
Oh, Me of Little Faith
Yesterday, I was concerned for having gotten people all stirred up about my upcoming story at Pseudopod, as there was apparently a delay.
It turns out the delay could have been, from the time of my posting, measured in minutes without being inconvenient to the measurer.
This morning, then, I sit in a state of radiant giddiness, having just listened to Free Balloons for All Good Children read by a rather good narrator, Rish Outfield. Not only that, host Alasdair Stuart said some things in the following notes which brought such a state of happiness to me that I can hardly breathe at the mere memory of them. The words “Lovecraft with all his ridiculous toxic nonsense stripped away” said in conjunction with something I’m responsible for…
Sorry. Had to go lie down for a moment. I suspect this state I’m in, feet well clear of the floor, will persist for some time.
This also brings about a rather unusual state of affairs in the sidebar; two Current Stories. I don’t think this will persist beyond the time that “Free Balloons for All Good Children” is the top of Pseudopod’s roll, because even as swollen as it currently is, my ego is still governable. But, for now, my Current Story is a two-headed freak.
And I love it, in all it’s alien wrongness.
Small Consolation
Well… it appears that I should have reserved the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT until Pseudopod updated. The schedule I was shown does, after all, have the word “tentative” in it. Even if it did agree very well with the past couple of months’ worth of released up to Episode 590, I accept that stuff beyond human intervention will throw itself in the way.
So, we wait until the events predicted in BA come to pass. It’s a delay, not (so far as I know, he said with a cringe and a glance toward a comforting contract) a cancellation. In the meantime, here’s a little flash fiction I ran up, once again at the prompting of a famous profession writer guy— the theme is heroism’s consequences, and the story is The Savior.
I place it under speculative fiction because the setting is, purposefully, obscure, all the way down to which end of the political spectrum is involved.
Fallout of Friday the 13th
This is not the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT I said would be coming this week. It is still coming. Never fear.
This is an announcement of merely average dimensions, to let you know that a new story has been added to the heap here. Lucky Day is an outcome of yet another of the Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Friday challenges, and since it fell on the 13th last week, the challenge was something to do with luck.
Luck was with me, and I finished briskly, so there will be the two announcements this week. Hopefully, you will feel that this is also a stroke of luck (“Oh, boy! Extra words, and all of them free!).
The challenge was not concerned with what flavour of luck was involved. I decided, because the world needs more of it, to go with good luck. Of course, me being me, there’s a particular slant to the interpretation of “good luck.”
Outright Theft
Something that troubled me in my tender years, when idea of writing as something I might do first surfaced, can be articulated thus: All the good titles have been used. Back then, I thought that the title was sacrosanct, and since H.G. Wells had used The Star then neither I nor any other person could title a story with those two words.
I then went back to pushing a small plastic Luke Skywalker around the floor in a Kenner-made Landspeeder while enjoying Saturday morning cartoons. My view of the world was a little naive for a very good reason.
I now know that this is not the case, and that the same title can grace diverse works of literature, and even films! Still, childhood notions are sticky, so I sometimes baulk at a title that I know hangs on something else. I’m hoping the latest flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig has burnt some of that idea out of me, because he’s instructed people to take a title from a Stephen King novel– just grab it and use it!
And so I have. My little tiny Bag of Bones has nothing whatever to do with King’s fat bundle of words, bar the fact that it has the same three words stuck to the front. I’ve slightly exceeded the word limit for flash, but since I’m on very good terms with the editor here, I’m not getting in trouble for it.
And while I’m here, I’m going to tease– stand by for a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT next week! I’m so giddy about it I could burst, but I’m also quite good at keeping secrets. See you then, I hope.
…ALSO also, I’ll also point out the newly-minted donation button, for those who incline that way, in the left side-bar, which looks rather like this one:
Dirck de Lint's Missives from the Living Skies 