Flights of Foundry Schedule 2024

This weekend I'll be doing programming for Flights of Foundry! It's a lovely annual convention that takes place entirely online and welcomes people from the around the world. There is programming 24/7 so that no matter where you are, you'll log on and find something to do. I hope to see you there!

 

2023 Writing Contest Winners Showcase: Interview and Q&A

9/27/2024, 2:00-3:00 PM EDT

John Wiswell (m), Suzan Palumbo (m), Nkereuwem Albert, Fatima Abdullahi, Jessica Andrewartha

Come meet the 2023 Dream Foundry Emerging Writers Contest Winners! The contest judges will do a Q&A style interview with the winners and lead a discussion.

 

Chill-n-Chat with John Wiswell

9/28/2024, 2:00-3:00 PM EDT

Come meet and chat with author John Wiswell! John is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for ""Open House on Haunted Hill,"" and the Locus Award for Best Novelette for ""That Story Isn't The Story."" He has also been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. His debut novel, SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN, released from DAW Books in April 2024, and was named one of the best books of the year by Polygon, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. He would like to pet a shark. Preferably, he would like to pet many sharks.

 

Making Monsters

9/29/2024, 2:00-3:00 PM EDT

Marie Brennan (m), John Wiswell, A.Z. Louise, Samantha Mills

What makes a monster a monster? Can a truly monstrous monster still be relatable? How do we build monsters while still respecting the differences their monstrosities represent? And of course, what are some of our favorite monster in media new and old.

"Open House on Haunted Hill" is a Nebula and Locus Awards Finalist!

"Open House on Haunted Hill" is one of my favorite short stories that I've ever written. It follows a haunted house that has been lonely for years and just wants someone to live in it. It won't harm you. It won't trap you. It wants to keep you warm and safe as your family grows. But can anyone get over its creepy vibe and stay?

It turns out that the world likes this story, too. This week it was announced that it will appear in Paula Guran's Years Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. This handsome collection will be out from Pyr books later this year, and includes works the likes of Caitlin Kiernan, Kelley Armstrong, and Victor LaValle.

The story is also now a finalist for two major industry awards.

On Monday night, the Science Fiction Writers Association announced "Open House on Haunted Hill" is a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. It is in the top six candidates, and will be voted on by members of the association. The winner will be announced later this year.

Earlier, Locus Magazine placed "Open House on Haunted Hill" on their 2020 Recommended Reading List, making it a finalist for the Locus Award for Best Short Story. This award has open voting for anyone who signs up at Locus's site. If you've enjoyed the story, I'd be grateful if you'd give it a vote.

All these accolades are humbling. It's wonderful to see my stories touching so many people - every week I get tweets from new people who've just read it and want to thank me. My best way of showing my gratitude is to write you all many more stories. I'm working at it every day.

Thanks for sending me over the moon, everybody. It's a thrilling time!

Interviewed about Writing and Disability

I'm pleased to be a guest this month at Almost An Author, a site designed to help new writers shape their careers. Kathryn Johnson had me over there to discuss writing with disability, the writing life, and my peculiar health. If you ever wanted a glimpse at just what a diagnostic weirdo I am, the first question will fill you right up.

It's been a while since I've been interviewed in long form like this. It was a lot of fun - I think I laughed more than the average subject. Kathryn was also very considerate and made the chat fun. You can read the entire text here.

Stop Calling Fiction a Lie

What's the difference between lies and hyperbole? Lying is wrong, but hyperbole is the worst thing ever.

One pernicious hyperbole is that fiction is a lie. The truth is that fiction is untruth, and if that confuses you, welcome to my job. My grandfather believed fiction was a pack of lies, and even tried to talk me out writing the one time he drove me back home from Liberal Arts college. Over burned toast and runny eggs, he argued that someday society would recognize that novels and movies were feeding us falsehood and that we should only deal with facts and non-fiction.

That's what I hear when people joke about writers as high-paid liars. If anything, the lie is that most of us are paid very much. Lies and fiction are two kinds of untruth that are little alike.

Lies are non-consensual. You speak misinformation under the assumption the other person doesn't know better. Your kid doesn't know there isn't a Santa Claus, but you want to fool him, for fun, or to get his mind off a chronic illness. The IRS doesn't know how much money you've hidden under the table, and you want to deceive its agents to get away with paying less. A lie is your decision without the informed agency of the other person.

Kryptonite or Bad Writing: What's Superman's Real Weakness?

The more I hear people wishing Batman would take down Superman, the more I believe it comes from a greater hatred of power than of its abuse. The current popular iterations of Batman are of a tyrant building his kingdom, an autocrat ruling Gotham with an iron fist, an angry billionaire of unchecked privilege and brutality. Somehow Superman is the one labeled overpowered and unrelatable.

People keep saying he's invincible and therefore a bad character. But Superman's weakness isn't just Kryptonite. In the biggest comic event of all time, the mofo was straight-up beaten to death in a fist fight.


His weaknesses include magic, mind-control, various diseases, other Kryptonians, and the bajillion other aliens that are just as powerful, or more powerful, but are dicks about it. He's vulnerable to super-sharp weapons, the light of a red sun, pretty much every energy weapon I've ever seen. He can be out-smarted, caught by Green Lantern rings, or Black Lantern rings. And there are always nuclear weapons. If he has a greatest weakness, it's probably the emergencies of normal people who he constantly puts his own life on hold to assist. That's why I like him better than Batman. Increasingly, Batman is a fantasy of punishing someone, where Superman is a fantasy of helping someone.

Crediting the Idea Factory

Last night I was doubting my imagination. I'd just finished a new short story, which was the conclusion of a premise I came up with fifteen years ago. My last three short stories were ideas I'd had for decades. Weary from pain, I worried the only ideas I had left these days were the creations of my younger self.

In my malaise, I started backing up my computer so I could rebuild it this weekend. My writing folder was full of unfinished drafts that I had to open to recognize. They were tens of thousands of words of plots, many I'd created in the last couple months but had been so busy I'd forgotten I'd written.

The idea factory was still open. It just wasn't getting credit.

29 things a character might do at the end of a scene rather than faint (with affection, for Arkady Martine)

This will make very little sense to most readers, but sometimes it's good to review how a scene can end. While I was stuck in the doctor's office, I came up with as many ways to end a scene as I could before they came for my blood pressure.

1.      They are rendered unconscious by deliberate usage of an ironing board

2.      Their pings to the server drop and they disconnect from the cyberpunk dystopia

3.      Being a ghost, their visible form loses its connection with our corporeal plane

4.      Being a corporeal person, their astral presence loses its connection to the higher (or lower) plane

5.      They resolve a personal and/or plot goal, making both them and the reader a little more satisfied in their journey through this book

6.      They have to exit to prepare for an attempt at resolving a personal and/or plot goal

7.      They are about to resolve a personal and/or plot goal, but are interrupted by villains (bonus: they can resolve this wrinkle in the climax of a later scene)

8.      They discover their love in the arms of another and must leave, lest they are indiscreet

9.      They discover their love in the arms of another and join in the poly fun (fade to black ending for modesty)

10.  The torrid sex comes to a climax

11.  They pretend to pass out in order to avoid a conflict

12.  They turn around, and their companion has vanished! A cursory search does not reveal the companion's location, requiring investment in a new scene

13.  They are consensually teleported to another location (bonus: the setting of the next scene)

14.  They are non-consensually teleported to another location (bonus: the setting of the next scene; bonus ii: conflict!)

15.  They catch their sidekick, who has just fainted

16.  The family of slime molds tells them the coast is clear, and they should get some rest; the drama seems over for now

17.  There's a knock at the door, and they are distracted and tell the party to enter, only for the party to be someone of such awkwardness for the protagonist that they themselves are rendered most comfortable by leaving (bonus: social cowardice that they can overcome in resolving a climax to a later scene)

18.  They spend the scene in transit, and arrive at their destination too early; they must stop and wait

19.  They conclude a revelatory dialogue that is not at all cryptic or annoying, and does not leave the reader yelling at the book that two more sentences would have explained this whole thing

20.  They are interrupted by an invitation from a mysterious party to have an interlude that is not meant for sensitive ears

21.  They just barely fly the ship through the asteroid field, escaping and leaving the enemy fleet behind

22.  They are abruptly pursued by a bear (bonus: several scenes end in abrupt bear chases until resolving the bear subplot is the end of its own scene)

23.  The guy who could solve all of this and seemed like a would-be hero is publicly executed (bonus: you get a seven-book series of scenes out of this)

24.  Their seemingly unbreakable sword is shattered, and they are impaled to death (problem: POV switch probably necessary in following scene?)

25.  They arrive with the wrong wine and have to return to the vineyard through the moonless night

26.  They upload their mind to the mainframe of the space shuttle, making a scene-break tonally appropriate for the shift in perception

27.  Their schizophrenic episode reaches a close

28.  The surreal world-warping event reaches a close

29.  They jump to moon to avoid talking to their aunt (bonus: next scene gets to open with an explanation on how the hell they can do that)

If you're wondering, my blood pressure was below normal.

A Bibliography for 4th Street Fantasy 2015

Below is a bibliography of works discussed across the eleven panels at 4th Street Fantasy this year. It was taken mostly from the whiteboard postings, many of which were written by Tom Whitmore. If anyone has names of other whiteboard scribes, I'd like to include them.

Panel 8, on Playing The Cards You Weren't Dealt, was so author focused that I don't think we have a list for it, but if someone has one, I'd be happy to include it.

I've added author attribution to unattributed books where I could. In some cases only authors were named rather than works. These have been kept just as author names.

Panel 1: Does the Arc of Fantasy Bend Toward Justice

Colin Cotterill

Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover

Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Stover

A Thousand Perfect Things by Kay Kenyon

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Jo Walton's The Just City

Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs

K.J. Parker

The Pain of Special Needs in Mad Max: Fury Road (Some Spoilers)

For this discussion I'm going to use "special needs" to refer to people with an array of physical and mental problems. There is no term I'm wholly comfortable with that collects things so ranging. "Disability" doesn't even cover it for me, and is sometimes more uncomfortable. But know that preference of terminology changes from person to person. This is always easier talking person-to-person, where you can tailor to what makes individuals comfortable.



You probably don't know Nathan Jones. He was a professional wrestler who quit because, at 6'11" (2.1 meters), travel became incredibly painful. He didn't fit in an airplane seat or on any motel mattress, and good luck driving a rental car from town to town with legs that long. He quit WWE in 2003 and went into film. To date, I don't think I've seen him in a film that acknowledged his size could be a problem in life. He tends to play villains, because it's easier for average people to see giants as powerful and dangerous.

He plays Rictus Erectus in Max Mad: Fury Road. He lumbers through the movie with very few lines. When he speaks, it sounds like the character has a learning disorder. That's typical of giant villains.

Since he has no individual agency, always acting in obeisance to his murderous father (Immortan Joe), his only further characterization is a breathing apparatus strapped to his back and plugged to his nose. He chases heroes, overpowering any he gets his hands on because Dad told him to. Late in the movie, a hero finally manages to stab Jones's breathing machine. Jones crumples, possibly suffocating, and my whole theater laughed.

I mean, the whole theater laughed except me. But my lungs are probably what'll kill me, so I'm biased.

Guest Post: Peter Newman on Turning The Vagrant from Serial to Novel

Today I'm happy to present to you one of Friday Flash's original stars: Peter Newman. Peter is co-host of the lovely Tea & Jeopardy podcast, and author of The Vagrant, which was just released by Harper Voyager. While I was privileged with early glimpses of the story in its formative days as a serial, it's developed into something very different. Peter is a heck of a writer and has some insights to share from his journey into publishing. -John

The Vagrant turned up one day when I was trying to write some flash fiction. I didn’t really have much of an idea what was going to happen immediately but I went with it. It was slow going, excavating little ideas that were floating around in the darker parts of my brain.

I quickly began to realise that I wasn’t actually writing a piece of flash fiction, I was in fact writing a serial. Part One quickly became Part Two, Part Three… then Part Ten, and onwards. As the episodes went on, various things settled into place, like the fact it was going to be written in the present tense. At first I wrote it in the past tense but found myself drifting in and out by accident. As an inexperienced writer, I took that to mean that I wasn’t very good at writing consistently but I now see that I was trying to find the right way to tell the story and had to experiment for a while before getting comfortable.

Writing the Vagrant each week was a strange experience. I now had the primary character and the world was taking shape. I’d known from early on where the story was going but the path to get there always descended into the mists. I was writing the serial in thousand word chunks but those thousand words often took a long time to find.

It’s worth adding that at this time I had a lot of support from the Friday Flash community, and people took time out to comment on what I was doing. A lot of this was essentially cheerleading (which I needed then and I still need now) but there was also criticism in there too (positive and negative) and I came to cherish those comments.

Twenty five episodes later and I realised that I wasn’t writing a serial either. I was in fact writing a novel.

Transitioning from one to the other was an interesting process. There were some advantages. For example, a serial format keeps things punchy, with lots of cliff clangers and crisis points to keep the reader motivated. However, there were also drawbacks. I had no chapters! And the rhythms of a novel are different. Some scenes had to be reworked and sewn together, others expanded significantly. The other thing I found was that I still had to write slow. I continued writing in thousand word chunks. Any more, and the quality of the work suffered.

But for all of that, the core style didn’t change and the Vagrant carried on the same way he always had.

As I approached the end of the book, I realised that I wasn’t just writing a novel, I was writing a series. I’d always planned The Vagrant to be a stand-alone novel but as I moved into the closing chapters, ideas for a sequel began to blossom. That sequel is written and currently with my editor.

And now find I have ideas for a new book in that world. I very much hope I get the chance to plunge into the mists once again. And if I do, I’ll keep following the Vagrant for as long as he’s happy to lead me.

The point I want to make here is that sometimes (rarely!), you wake up with a story fully formed in your mind, or a killer concept that screams for you to start writing. Sometimes you just get a spark that needs to be followed. And sometimes, if you let it, the story will take care of itself.

with it. It was slow going, excavating little ideas that were floating around in the darker parts of my brain.

March Attacks!

I didn't know this picture was being taken.

March escaped a couple weeks ago, and I barely noticed. There was food poisoning, and a wedding to plan (not mine, I was a mere taskmaster). I was so wrapped up in editing thirteen different short stories for submission, and beta reading two novels and an additional three short stories, that if it weren't for #NaNoReMo, I wouldn't have noticed us spilling into April.

Then again, we got snow flurries on Easter. Yesterday when I stepped outside to grill, I saw my breath and the cold flashed my face with dry-burns. So maybe the world doesn't know it's April yet, either.

I've been criminally negligent on #NaNoReMo posts. I'd wanted to run two more about The Color Purple, and one on my disappointment with Siddhartha, but blogs got eaten in the avalanche. Let today serve as a tardy wrap-up.

Nuke ‘Em: Pacific Rim's Problem with Kaiju Heritage

There’s a lot I love about Pacific Rim, but its ending has bothered me since opening weekend. Spoilers, naturally, if you haven’t seen it. In the last year, I haven’t heard a single person mention the oddity of a film rooted in Kaiju lore that resolves its problems by nuking the enemy army.

To start: Pacific Rim owes its existence to Godzilla. It has copious allusions to the 1954 film, and that franchise popularized the Kaiju battles that Pacific Rim is built around. Godzilla was punching giant robots a full decade before Guillermo Del Toro started making movies. It’s easy to envision the Jaeger program building Mechagodzilla in the eventual crossover – and Del Toro publicly said he wanted a crossover even before Pacific Rim screened. The appropriation is deliberate and largely affectionate.

In the fun and camp of giant battles, it’s easy to forget that the 1954 Godzilla is rooted in the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that film, the beast is both an allegory for nuclear war, and is literally woken up by the usage of nuclear weapons. These themes ebb and flow in the ensuing franchise, but the beloved character was emblematic of a real national terror.

Pacific Rim solves its conflict by dropping a nuclear bomb into the rift. The characters are explicit that the Jaeger’s core is a nuclear reactor – that’s why it works when others can't, and it goes off like a nuclear bomb, not like a reactor in meltdown. The war isn’t resolved when the two Jaegers defeat the final Kaiju. It isn’t solved by Pentecost’s sacrifice. Humanity is only safe once we’ve A-bombed the bad guys.

I reveled in most of the movie. Kikuchi, Perlman, Day and Elba are delights, the soundtrack is pitch-perfect, and the overall film is greatly executed. Is the movie dumb? Yes, but it’s great at its dumbness. Even the bombing, with GLaDOS counting down and the heroes racing to safety, is exciting.

But even in IMAX, it was also troubling. We clearly hit a military installation, with no idea of how many civilians live on site. It’s like the lovably dumb movie suddenly committed another Hiroshima.

It’s one thing to not make the anti-nuclear message your core point, and it’s another to explicitly go against it. Was it intentional? I like to think not. No press I’ve read around the film suggests an enthusiasm for nuclear holocaust. And mistakes happen in art because when you’re juggling a dozen things in your mind, a thirteenth can always hit the floor. What hit the floor here is an incredibly sensitive item, from the genesis of kaiju films and one of the worst evils human beings have ever committed.

And the bombing isn’t indispensible to the plot. The rift could have been blown up rather than the people on the other side. In Newton Geiszler’s mind melds with Kaiju, a solution to closing all rifts could have been revealed. The Category 5 Kaiju could have been the lord and mother of them all, and its defeat the guarantee that no more could be created, or that the remainder would have no motive to continue attacking. Rewriting a few scenes, you could craft several different endings that wouldn’t require nuking the enemy.

It's still a surprisingly haunting moment.

Re-watching the 1954 Godzilla on Friday night brought this all to mind again. If it wasn’t the first, Kaiju film began there, and that film begins with a makeshift hospital laden with bodies, dead parents, irradiated children, and a narrator dazedly waking up in the wreckage. This is the fallout of a radioactive dinosaur, an impossibility that harkened to another impossibility – a mushroom of smoke changing the world.

That’s what any alien survivors of the end of Pacific Rim will wake up to. It feels spiritually wrong.

Don't Write This: Fiction in Danger Zones

Senility as wish fulfillment.

I've already written a full review of Jo Walton's My Real Children, but I want to talk about something not in my review, and in no review I've yet read. The novel follows Patricia Cowan as she suffers a peculiar senility, forgetting most of her life, and then seeming to recall two different lives in high detail. Late in the novel, we see how the onset of senility hits her in both lives, and in one her lover dies. Patricia immediately hopes her senility will make her forget the death happened. This excited me. 

For the last two years of his life, I called my grandfather every night to make sure he had at least a little daily contact with a family member. He hated living in an old folks home, and was very demented on top of that. Our nightly contact made him remember me more than the other grandchildren, though there were still calls when he mistook me for his son, friend, and on one night, his mother. Living that intensely with a disability can stifle the way you think about it. It's easier to default to a somber, anodyne mode, both in avoiding conflicts, and in taking your mind off of things. It takes a different mind to see something so painful and be creative with it.

In reading that paragraph of Walton's novel, I wasn't offended. It was enlivening to read someone subvert our default thoughts of dementia, and simultaneously, tap into those desires, because in moments of weakness we've all wanted to forget things. In the moment, I could only compare it to FX's Archer.

I'm probably the only person to parallel My Real Children and Archer, but one of Archer's great strengths is its anarchic sense of humor. People mistake the show as dark, but it features the lightest hearted graphic tiger mauling I've ever seen. The series uses the drug trade, asphyxia fetishes, eco-terrorism, homophobia and the Oedipal complex as fodder for amazing character humor. It is neither didactic nor cynical; it's creative enough with its deployment of highly flawed characters to avoid offense while depicting the people themselves as intensely offensive. This is great for some audiences (like me), but also stifles how others think about creativity in danger zones, making them think it has to be transgressive.

Archer is often transgressive, as is most comedy about touchy subjects, because that's the easy edge for a laugh. But take George Carlin's early performances of The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. For the first six he's juvenile and profane – and then he hits "fuck." It's the beginning of life, he says, and yet it's something we use to hurt each other. Very rare for George Carlin, he isn't sure about his footing on a topic, and only has one joke, before saying he'll try to make a full bit out of it next year. He did, and the later versions have never been as interesting to me. That he's vulnerable and unsure about something so touchy, after being so flippant about the other touchy subjects is a haunting deviation.

As I've aged, I've become increasingly attracted to artists who can remain creative in danger zones. It seems either the hardest thing to do (plausible) or so risky to market that it's avoided (also plausible). Certainly if you botch your attempt at a new angle on pedophilia then you can offend a wide audience. But if you try, you might get John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and that scene wherein the pedophile Hakan rents a child prostitute, but is then so disturbed by how the boy is treated that he tries to give him enough money to run away. This foreshadows the compassionate angle Lindqvist later casts over the vampire/familiar relationship. The compassion of a pedophile in an otherwise uncaring world was so unexpected that it gave me goosebumps, where most vampire stories give me boredom. 

A predator in need of companionship.

These deviations stir me up. In most art you can get a sense of how touchy subjects will be handled; Grimdark Fantasy will probably slouch into rape, and a children's cartoon will probably avoid or didactically instruct about disabilities. Predictable paths are not always wrong, and often writing from a place of reliable sensitivity can avoid opening wounds. But I don't accept the failure state of attempted creativity in a danger zone as loathsome. My general reaction is discomfort for an author who probably knows they screwed up on something meaningful. It reads like seeing someone fall when both of us thought they should have flown.

Maybe I'm so attracted to these because I haven't figured out their parameters yet. There's a strong attraction for some people mired in what we don't yet understand. But to remain flexible with in writing about topics as tender as senility and pedophilia is too much for most artists. It's why most won't touch it at all. That might be why the few that can do it, even for a paragraph are so precious.

Bathroom Monologue: End of the World Sale

My nephew forced me to buy the chair at a yard sale. The "End of the World Sale," the plywood sign called it, and the chair was propping up the left side of the sign. The chair had only been owned for a week, real leather on the arm rests, and real steel in the supports. Walnut brown with a red undertone and yellow stitching, not as elegant as black models, but distinct. My nephew said I'd use it in my new writing room. He said I had to get writing again, which was his way of saying I needed to get over my wife. Little did he know, little did I know.

See, the seat cushion sighed when I sat on it for the first time in the morning. The same sound as so many of Ruth's sighs, when she'd get in after double-shifts and plop beside me to boot up Netflix. And I have this habit of leaning to much to the left when I'm hesitating over a plot idea, and every time I did, something in the supports grunted. I swear, grunted, like when Ruth was upset at me, the minor upsets, like I'd forgotten the turn signal on a vacant road, or put the toilet paper in facing the wrong way. I figured the chair had sat on the grass too long and some dew had gotten into whatever gears a chair has.

Then there was this Wednesday night when I wrote. Really wrote, for the first time since I couldn't anymore. A whole short story in one sitting, and I was at least a third of the way into another one when I realized I'd been holding the same posture the whole time, my back never touching the chair. I rubbed my eyelids and reclined, and the chair…

Man, I know that noise. I'm the only person who ever made Ruth make that particular squeal. Me, and peppermint gelato.

I never got it to make that sound again. You know what nephew said? To oil the chair. With peppermint oil. And people ask why Ruth and I never wanted kids.

It's not haunted. I don't know if I believe in hauntings, but I know I don't believe in this one. It's that one time I got the wrong e-mail from my sister-in-law at the wrong time, and I sighed, and I know I sat forward, and air escaped the cushion at the same time, and it sounded like Ruth was sighing with me. And that never happened when she was alive, but I spent the next two hours imagining how it could've. Wishing it did. I slept downstairs instead of in the bed across from the office.

The urge is to write about this, or take it as a sign and write about Ruth. Except I can't start a paragraph about her without devolving into how much I fucked hate and don't understand what are aneurysms are, and I'd need to research them, and I can't enter that word into Google. I can't bear the sound the chair might make, or that it might not make a sound afterward. That it might go as quiet as a floor model.

Anyway, I'm writing again. Three terrible short stories, and now something that's inflating into a novella. The chair has sounded like she was giggling at three parts so far. It's about the things you might find at an end of the world sale.

Happy Birthday: In Defense of the Worst Year of My Adult Life

At the last hospital visit before my birthday, the nurse said I’d had a bad year. Nurses tend to be far more positive, so when she said that, it stirred me.  In the last couple months my mother, friends, fellow writers, and even acquaintances I didn’t know were following my story said this was a bad year for me. I don’t want to agree.

I turn 33 on Thursday. Last week I realized that will mean it’s been twenty years of this neuromuscular syndrome. For our anniversary, my body began rejecting medication, and the latest thing the doctor put me on only endows me with new and unwanted side-effects. Much of 2014 was waking up every two hours with muscle spasms, of being unable to think straight, and being so beat down I couldn’t even write anymore. Family begged me to take it easy on myself, to just take May easy. May slips so easily into June, especially when all you do is suffer.

Part of me knows I’ve done more than that. As my mind’s been bogged down by pain, I reach for oversimplifications more than I ever used to let myself. Depression is alleged to work like that. So I dwell:

The ideas we discard are not wasted

I've had this short story idea for over a month and have been gathering good lines, ideas and character moments. Today I finally had the strength to begin writing it. Five scenes in I realized two thirds of my existing material won't make it into the story. It wasn't a waste - it was a cocoon from which the fiction is emerging.

In related news: I'm writing again. I've written more in the last two weeks than in the previous two months. God willing, this short will be out to a market by the end of the month, and by then we'll be off to the races.

My Writing Process Blog Hop

Last week, both Richard Gibney and Tony Noland tagged me in the latest big blog game: #mywritingprocess. Like most popular writing games, I've missed it because I've been quite sick and quite deep into my own novel. Last week was also the first week in over five years I missed #fridayflash. It's been a tough time, so let's lighten it up with writing talk.

The basics of the game are familiar:
1) Post on a certain day (May 19th for me, May 26th for whom I tag)
2) Mention who tagged you.
3) Answer the four questions.
4) Pass it on.

Not too taxing, right? And the appeal is this exposes different processes of different writers. Even Richard and Tony have very different posts. They provided me four questions about my writing process, posed, for whatever reason, in the first person.

1) What am I working on?
Today I'm editing the second novel in a series, We Don't Always Drown. The first hasn't been published, but because I plan this series to run for quite a while, I wanted to do more of the construction in advance. At this point I'm certain it was the right idea as it's allowing me to alter the original to set up continuity for so many crazy payoffs later on. No spoilers, I promise, but lots of zany backstabbing.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
If you accept it as a Fantasy novel, it's not set in our world but isn't Medieval-centric either. I write in the Post-Post-Post-Apocalypse, after the dinosaurs have come back, and the machines rose against us, and sentient thunderstorms chased the machines in suspiciously theological patterns. The world is so splintered that we have magic but very few surviving systems of figuring out how it works, and so if you can keep an automobile running, you might as well stick with it. Triclopes, imps and humans have to negotiate to live together in pockets of mingled fascism and anarchy, because it's really hard to establish a neighborhood when another apocalypse might hit on Tuesday. Hopefully this tells you why I'm not like George R.R. Martin.

3) Why do I write what I do?
That changes wildly based on the project, doesn't it? Last House in the Sky and We Don't Always Drown come from a place of deviant Fantasy; we have enough fake Medieval Europes, and not enough cars chasing brachiosaur convoys. I'm as much a child of Akira Toriyama and Rumiko Takahashi as I am of Tolkien and Homer.

Yet there are other projects that resonated around strong unrests. The novel I wrote three years ago, The House That Nobody Built, was about questioning identity and the prison-industrial-complex-as-Ilium. Elements that get stuck in me tend to turn into stories. I've got several shorts on submission to market right now that came from solipsism and disablism, or my love of places that feel like they can judge you, or my unease with the Magical Girl genre (I stress that the unease is mine – it's a beautiful genre).

4) How does my writing process work?
I always begin with an element of an idea, and almost never with the full idea. The key elements in my writing are character, premise and style. If I get one, then I need to spin out the others from it; if I've got a super-creepy alien spy, then I spin up a premise for her to spy on, and a style that'll make the most of her adventure. Alligators by Twitter started as a stylistic riff on the Twitter conceit; character and premise came about sentences later.

I have a simple formula for composition. On novels, I aim to write scenes, letting actions play out as they do, for at least a thousand original words per day. I seldom give up at that line; it's just there to let me know I can if it's a tough day. It's similar to this for short stories; I go for the scenes that need to happen, caring even less about word count as they tend to be the product of bursts. In all cases my emphasis is to get the small things right and postpone the big things that would distract from composition.

I'm not in that zone right now, as I'm editing. I've broken the novel into eighteen chunks of chapters, about 18-25 pages each. The copy is covered in bolded text (prayers for my future self to re-read a questionable section) and suggestions that came to mind after I composed. "Wouldn't it be cooler if hadrosaurs chased him here?" "Remember that article on volcanic geology? It'd help this." That sort of stuff.

While my health as been poor, I do my best to knock off one chunk per day, and hope to have all the chunks done by June. There are four chapters that I'm considering scrapping and writing entirely new versions of, which would delay things, but a good book that's late remains good, while a bad book that's early sucks forever.

After I have a clean copy, I'll probably read the entire thing to check tonal and plot consistency. If it passes, then I have two wonderful alpha readers who will be happy to tear into it. Their job is to tell me if any emperors are missing clothes. After I dress all my emperors, I go to betas, who I'm blessed to know. They're kind enough to take a cheese-grater to my baby.

So there we have, and all that's left is passing it on.

First, I'm going to side-link to Lise Fracalossi, who has already done this, but was the first person who came to my mind. She's a fellow Viable Paradise grad and an author I expect a lot from in the coming years.

Next, I'm going to invite anyone who found this post useful or entertaining to play the game. Just link your blog post in the comments and I'll add you in here. I'd rather this sort of game be inclusive.

That invitation given, here are four more people whose writing is worth reading.

Ferrett Steinmetz recently sold his Fantasy novel, Flex, to Angry Robot Books. I'm pretty sure he blogs more in a year than I write novels, screenplays and short stories combined. I love reading him discuss writing, and so I'm hoping he'll play along.

Alex Haist doesn't blog terribly often and is presently deep in her own novel. Like Lise, her work is going to be very special to some people, but I'd rather she tell you about it. That is, again, if she plays along.

Peter Newman is a Fantasy novelist and what you might call a graduate of #fridayflash. His first book, The Vagrant, is due out with Voyager in 2015. He's also husband to the delightful and prolific Emma Newman, who I'd also be tagging if she wasn't recovering from ill health and maddeningly busy. I should also mention the two run a wicked podcast.

Lastly and furthest from least, Randall Nichols is one of the most diligent writing friends I've ever had. He will never hesitate to take a cheese-grater to a baby. He's written comics, screenplays, and is presently helping produce a card game. That last is elaborated upon in his latest blog post. I've seen the kingdoms he's cooked up and they're quite neat. Go ask him about Cyber Kong.

Ideally everyone plays along by posting on May 26th, a week from today. And ideally they will tag a few more people as well. But do we live in an ideal world? We'll find out in a week.

The Perfect Song - #fridayflash

The author finds the perfect song. The search is laborious, infinite, and instantly forgotten in a melody inspirational and nonintrusive. Whatever muse sprang these rhythms into our world gave them merit without demanding attention, and thus the author can work to it.

The author puts the perfect song on loop and begins to type what will surely be the greatest opening paragraph in the history of the novel.

The author’s web browser blinks with an IM. GChat is never truly closed in publishing. Or perhaps it’s a tweet, or a new Like on a half-clever Facebook post from a few hours ago, the last dying gasp of approval for memes past. The author checks the trivial interruption, which ought to take only a few seconds, and the end of the key sentence is still in his mind. Somehow, by no fault of his own, he has soon opened Tumblr, Reddit, and least defensibly, Youtube, chasing links that ask for so little of his time. All with that perfect song on loop in the background, reminding him to work. Eventually he may pause the perfect song to better hear the funny cat video his second college roommate posted, though he’ll unpause it out of guilt shortly later.

The author screws around for so long that, once he realizes his errors, his mind now associates the perfect song with screwing around. Perhaps it was never perfect. Perhaps he was never perfect, but that matters not, for the song is no longer the anthem of victorious words. It causes him only to dwell in how he let lunch time get here without meeting his morning word count.

And so the author opens his music folder and searches for another perfect song.

Rough Draft Done Two Days Early, Let's Go Read Books

At 1:10 last night, I wrote the final chapter of We Don't Always Drown. It's 60 chapters long, about 97,000 words, and as in dire need of editing as I am of a bath.

Like always, I'll post a breakdown of the entire process. Right now I have to make a run to the library - finishing writing means it's time to read.

But I wanted to share a sheet of paper I've kept floating around my desk since the end of February. It assisted my temporal reasoning with the dates when people might visit, or when I'd be traveling, which is a handy way to not rationalize against productivity. At the end of every writing day, I'd mark down the roundest version of my word count.

The 22nd is marked "Godot" because I'm headed off to NYC to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot. A pair of wonderful friends got me a ticket to go with them, and I'm equally excited about spending Saturday night with them. I've got something to celebrate now.

7 Chapters in 5 Days

Those pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. Wait, what?

After Thursday, the plan was to write eleven chapters in seven days.

After Friday, the plan was to write nine chapters in six days.

After Saturday, the plan was to write seven chapters in five days.

Thursday was a very difficult day physically, but I managed to make pace that took me through the weekend, and at the urging of friends, took Sunday off as a breather. That’s reasonable because I’m at pace and over the tricky denouement. The remaining seven chapters are mostly shorter and all the composition has gotten me into the groove where I’m terrifically excited to write them. Some of the best bits of the book are about to spill out of my fingertips.

On Saturday night I went out to celebrate by watching The Wind Rises. It’s a wonderful film and a very interesting piece of art if it’s truly Hayao Miyazaki’s last. It’s about the life of a boy who dreams of building airplanes, living myopically towards his goal which lands him a job in pre-World War II Japan. I couldn’t help wondering if I was projecting things onto it, knowing it might be the end of his career, with its ominous treatment of earthquakes, the frequent shots of exhausted engineers smoking to relieve stress, and the finality of so many elements, even the love story that is stricken by tuberculosis we seldom pretend we can beat. It’s certainly the only anime I’ve seen that’s referenced Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

Then, midway through the film, the engineer’s hero mentions that he’s retiring because an artist only ever has ten years in which he’s creative. That sort of line doesn’t make it into this sort of film by accident. Too funny after a career that touched five decades.

I was the only one in the cinema with a scrap of paper. As immersed as I was in The Wind Rises’s humanoid sound designs of planes and curious depiction of a country at war, I kept drifting back to my novel. Am I passed that ten year period already? I don’t know, but I kept having ideas for what I’d just written and what I’ll be writing next. I tainted my own mind by writing so close to seeing the movie, though it’s a testament to how much The Wind Rises gives that it still caught my attention every time I pocketed my scrap of paper.

Now it’s back to work for me. How’s everyone doing?