"Anywhere There's a Game" sold

Writing-wise, it's been a good week. I made a lot of progress on the current project (which I'm not calling a story or a novel, but rather "this thing I been typing on"), and I just found out I sold my story (or suite of short-shorts or flash fiction or story grenades or narrative peanut clusters) "Anywhere There's a Game" to Realms of Fantasy.

This is actually the second time I've sold this one. It was going to be my second appearance in Amazing Stories, but, alas, the magazine folded before publishing it. So, I'm really, really happy to have found it a second home. Good timing, too. The story's about NBA basketball, and the NBA season is just about to start. I could buy good lower-level seats to a Suns game with the story payment and still have enough left over for a hot dog and beer. Probably, though, I'll spend it on something else. The beer at America West Arena sucks.

Grenades and pie

I object slightly to the use of the term coffee shop to mean a place like Starbucks or independent equivalent which primarily serves coffee beverages. I would call such a place a coffee house. A coffee shop, on the other hand, is to me a place where your order is taken by a waitress, usually wearing a uniform of some kind. She's got a little pad on which to write down your order, and your order sheet gets clipped on a little carousel to be retrieved by the cook. You should be able to sit at the counter or at a booth. Ideally, there's a blue plate special. There's something on the menu with mashed potatoes. There's bacon and eggs any time of day. And there's a pie case suspended over the back counter with an angled mirror such that the pies are displayed in slanted reflection. Being from Los Angeles, I see googie architecture is a crucial signifier of such a place, but I recognize this as a regional bias. I'm not anal about this sort of thing, but words have meaning, and it would be nice if people used them in the same way I do to mean the same things I mean. Please adjust your behavior accordingly. Thank you.

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Too much comment spam in this blog. Clearing it out went from being a mild, occasional annoyance to a recurring chore, so I've made word verification necessary to post comments. I apologize for the inconvenience. I hope it doesn't discourage people from chiming in, because I do value the chiming, I really do.

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I wish there were a better term for flash fiction. "Flash" implies something that appears suddenly and then fades quickly, leaving little impact, and I think impact on readers is unrelated to length. Many great poems are 100 words or less. Why shouldn't we expect or even demand great stories of that length? Pieces of so-called flash fiction can be as profound as a sacred prayer and as devastating as a grenade.

Story grenades. That's what I'm calling the form from now on. Again, please adjust your lives accordingly.

Pod jobs

Escape Pod was featured on BoingBoing today, which no doubt is driving their traffic up dramatically, but as long as their servers don't go kablooie, it's a really great thing. This week's flash podcast is Wetting the Bed by Heather Shaw, a charmingly strange and strangely charming story about survival after an apocalyptic deluge. Next month, probably, they'll feature "Robots and Falling Hearts" by Tim Pratt and yours truly, and I just found out today they're buying Show and Tell, which was in Strange Horizons a couple of years ago.

The audience for short fiction is pretty small. Calling it a niche market might be generous. Stories want to be told, many times and to many people, so it's crucial to seek out reprint appearances and opportunities to have one's work presented in other media. Escape Pod is making a solid contribution to the industry and the art.

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I like this Jane Smiley quote from an LA Times article:

"The novel," Smiley points out, "is essentially a form in which the interior of one person's mind comes into the interior of another person's mind. When I read Dickens or Jane Austen, word by word they're showing me the idiosyncratic nature of their minds. It's as if they were inside me. There's no novel that doesn't unfold the author's sensibility. So the more novels I read, the more sensibilities I have in my head, and the greater my sense of empathy."

I read to pass the time, I read for comfort, I read to be transported, I read to explore the world, I read to feel joy, I read to soothe pain, I read to find out what others think and what others feel, I read to find out what I think and what I feel. I write for the very same reasons. Smiley captures a part of it.

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Booked my flights to World Fantasy Con. It's never cheap to fly from Phoenix to Madison, Wisconsin, so I will definitely be taking advantage of the free hooch in the Governor's Club. Catch me in the GC and I'll pretend to buy you a drink.

Words, words, and more words

Some people might recall that a few months ago I posted a bunch of short-shorts in my journalScape journal inspired by words that people sent me. I'm thinking of maybe putting them in a holiday chapbook, not the sort of thing one sells, but something to send out in lieu of holiday cards, which I seldom get around to sending. It would just be a simple saddle stitch thing, but I was wondering if anyone already had an MS-Word template they might send me to reduce the amount of fussing I'd have to do with pagenation?

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Strange Horizons is one of my favorite speculative fiction markets, and they're holding their Fall fund drive. Every week, they publish good fiction, good articles, and good poetry. They are a force for good. Being published by them has certainly enhanced my career, and their presence contributes a great deal to the field. They don't charge for subscriptions, they don't run ads, and they don't spam anybody. They just discreetly ask for donations a few times a year, and now is one of those times. If you've got a few extra dollars, maybe consider donating some of them to Strange Horizons. You might even land a cool thank-you prize. More info.

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I went over the 10,000-word mark on my current work in progress today. I don't get to brag until the piece is done, but still, it's a nice milestone.

Crime spree

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane turned out to be pretty much what I was looking for when I asked people to recommend some good crime fiction. I got to walk through dark human interiors and cinematically depicted exeteriors, and there was a murder to be solved and deep tragedy and a good-but-flawed cop and complicated and not unsympathetic bad guys, and the coffee was stale and the food was greasy and everyone looked bad under harsh yellow lights. Very well done. But, man, I don't think I could handle a steady diet of this sort of thing because it was grim as a glass eye, grim like a fly on your pancakes, grim like a kid with a telethon disease.

I also read Stephen King's The Colorado Kid, his release from new hard-boiled crime publisher Hard Case Crime. So, put the clues together: publisher whose mission is to bring out old-fashioned pulpy crime paperbacks of the type traveling salesman used to buy at bus depots, and a book with a cover like such



and you might expect, you know, hard-boiled crime. What King gives us instead is a cozy, rambling, homey tale of two old, inoffensive New England newspaper men initiating their young, pretty, Midwestern and inoffensive college intern on the nature of unsolved mysteries. It's really exciting, ayuh. They drink Cokes from bottles while they sit and talk. They eat lobster rolls and talk some more. That's what they do in this book. They sit and talk. I'm not saying it's a bad book. King is a master storyteller and all that, and his voice in this one is the engaging Uncle With the Amusing Anecdote, and I'm not saying I didn't enjoy some things about it, but it has no business coming in a package that promises blood, boobs, and bourbon.

Last night I started on Best American Short Stories 2005, which includes Tim Pratt's utterly nifty, strange western, "Hart and Boot", as well as representation from Cory Doctorow and Kelly Link. I've only read the first couple of stories so far, including the Dennis Lehane short "Until Gwen", which starts off comic and then just gets darker and darker and grim as rain in an open grave, grim as a black toe nail, grim as rust on a pie fork. Grim business, crime.

Losing the tone

This morning, I lost complete control of my tone. I don't mind if my writing is leavened with some humor, some whimsy, even some silliness. But today the scene became slapstick, and that's not what I wanted. I've been writing for a while now, and I've run into this problem with some frequency, and I'm seldom happy with the results. I'm not a fan of slapstick. So, I'm not a fan of the sort of thing I wrote this morning.

Writing colleagues, does this happen to you, that your tone veers off in unplanned and unwanted trajectories? It's slapstick when you want sardonic, or grim when you want airy, or whatever? What do you do? Ride it out? See where it goes? Accept it as your subconscious telling you that it has better plans for your story than does your conscious mind? Or do you nip it in the bud? Stop typing? Select and delete, and try to wrestle the train back on the tracks?

Gag reflex

So, in kenpo class we're supposed to wear mouthguards when we fight, presumably to guard our mouths against injury. These are the same kinds of mouthguards you wear to play soccer or basketball, only I've never played organized soccer at all, and only some recess basketball, so I've never had cause to wear a mouthguard. These are form-fit mouthguards, so you boil them in water to soften them up, then put them in your mouth and press them against your teeth to custom fit them, and then they're supposed to be comfortable and fit well. Which I believe mine does. But still. The damn thing makes me gag. It's not pressing on my gums or on the roof of my mouth. It just slips nicely over my upper teeth. It doesn't taste bad. But the gagging, every time. So, I sit here at my computer, wearing the mouthguard in an effort to get used to it, focusing on not gagging. A new martial arts challenge. Sitting without gagging.

Confidence

One kind of confidence builder is getting teamed up with a black belt and getting to do techniques on him over and over without him ever getting to do techniques on you. I toppled him and crumpled him and compressed him and took him out at the knees and put him in choke holds until he had to tap out. Without trying to hurt him, I allowed myself to pretend I could actually do this stuff to him without requiring his full cooperation. Of course, if I needed a reality check I could just take note of the fact that I was absolutely drenched in sweat by the end of class while my "victim" was bone dry.

On the flip side of confidence, a few entries ago I mentioned interviewing for a job that I didn't really want, and I guess it's good I didn't really want it, because I didn't get called for a second interview when I'd been assured that I very likely would. I thought not wanting the job might lend me a certain air of confidence. Instead, I think it lent me a certain air of not wanting the job. Possibly a lesson there for whenever I start seriously interviewing. Or possibly just one of those things from which one shouldn't try too hard to draw a lesson.

On the other flip side of confidence (which, for those losing track, puts us back in the zone of confidence), yesterday I managed to write more coherent words of fiction than I have in ages and ages. That felt good.

And, finally, forgive me for being cryptic, but yesterday I went through an experience that I had been dreading with considerable dread, but it really wasn't all that bad, and by the time it was over I was actually a little bit sorry it was over, and while I'm not exactly looking forward to doing it again, I recognize that it may well be a good thing to do, so I shall be doing it again.

And, no, it wasn't an enema. Don't be gross.

Brief Serenity note (no spoilers)

Just to say I liked it very much. And the best part wasn't the plot, the characters, the acting, the dialogue, none of that. No, as is evident to anyone with taste, the best component of the movie was Brian Tatosky's digital compositing.

That was just some kick ass compositing, Brian.

First lines meme

Some first bits from works in progress:

Hermod's Ride (short story)

Hermod once had a wife. Her name was Marguerite, and they lived in Santa Monica in a rented cottage with a clay tile roof and buganvilia climbing up the sides of the house. In the third and final year of their marriage, Hermod told Marguerite what he was, and that it meant she would grow old and die and he would live without aging until something big and nasty enough came along to cut him down.

In their little kitchen, with the salmon light of dawn coming through the windows, Marguerite moved fried eggs around on her plate. She taught painting at Santa Monica College. Hermod watched her paint-flecked hands remain deliberately steady. Cadmium orange. Indian yellow. An unfinished sunrise sat on the little easel near the kitchen door.

She asked Hermod to explain how death worked. He told her death meant going somewhere else. There were nine worlds. Santa Monica and Kansas and Japan and the Leaning Tower of Pisa all existed in Midgard. The gods dwelt in Asgard. That was where Hermod belonged. And there was Hel, ruled by the half-rotted queen of the same name. Mortals who died of illness or old age went there.

Marguerite asked if it was bad there. Hermod wouldn't lie to her. She asked if, after she died, he would come get her and bring her back to the living lands. He told her would not.

Flotsam (a book, maybe)

The beach wasn't what I thought it'd be. I'd been promised bikini girls. The bikini girls would be playing volleyball, or sunning themselves with their tops undone, because they were concerned about tan lines. Their bellies would be flat and brown, and when I said hello to them, the bikini girls would smile at and maybe they'd ask for help putting on suntan lotion, or at least we'd drink Coke together. Television promised me all this.

Playa de las Huesas Municipal Beach offered me no bikini girls. Instead, there was kelp. Great mounds of seaweed clotted the shore, attracting clouds of flies. Driftwood lay scattered in the sand like the bones of a gigantic sea creature. Trudging down the beach, I felt as if I was creeping through an aquatic burial ground.

Wedding

Well, Heather's and Tim's wedding was really just wonderful. The setting was a lovely wooded park up in the hills, the ceremony was touching and personal, there were many happy family and friends of the couple to witness it, the groom was dashing, and the bride was extraordinarily beautiful. And the cake utterly kicked ass. Congratulations to the awesome couple.