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The Perils of Timely Fiction

About two years ago, I was flying with my family and I noticed that, when we landed, all I could hear was the sound of everyone’s cell phone booting up.

A month later, I had a 9000-word short-story about airport security. Taking place about 50 years in the future, it’s about a man traveling to Los Angeles to see his daughter and the rigmarole he has to go through.

It has yet to sell. I’ve cut down the word count, I’ve revised several times, I’ve sent it to a couple dozen publications… and no dice. No one seems to want it. (It almost made it to the top at Andromeda Spaceways, and the readers gave me good feedback, but they didn’t publish it.) I’m pretty sure it’s not getting bought because nothing actually happens — a man flies to Los Angeles to see his daughter – and editors I guess want stories where there’s action.

But that’s neither here nor there. Not at the moment.

Last Monday, as I sat at my desk at work watching post after post about security theater pass by on Tweetdeck, I felt a little spark of hope that my story might soon find a home.

Unfortunately, it often takes months for stories to get from the slush pile to the editorial desk.

I understand that. I really do. And I’m very patient – I follow the submission guidelines to the best of my ability, I never bother editors unless the official response time has passed by more than a full week, and I don’t complain about form rejections. The reality of writing is that there’s a metric buttload of us and a relatively small number of editors and markets.

Still, now that I’ve exhausted most of the long-story markets, it’s going to be harder for me to find a home for my story. I predict a long couple of nights of rewriting, followed by sending out the story… and waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

Just like every other burgeoning author.

Thing is, by the time my story gets to the top of the slush pile, the timeliness of it will probably be moot. All this hullabaloo about scanners that don’t detect bombs in body cavities, scanners that show screeners your naked body, fines being levied against people who refuse to be body-scanned and don’t want your hands on their junk… it’ll all be over in three, six, nine, or 12 months (or whenever the story eventually is read by an editor who wants it). Then it’ll be another three to 18 months until it actually sees print. At that point, we’ll have moved onto another cause celebre. Twitter will be complaining about the next Apple tablet that doesn’t do That One Thing Everyone Likes, or a politician who said That One Thing Everyone Thought Was Idiotic, or the fact that people without That One Smartphone are technological luddites who don’t deserve to pray at the altars of their mighty cellphone providers.

I’m okay with that. I really am. But it makes me wonder if I should mention in my cover letter that I wrote the story in response to airline security woes. Usually my cover letters are very simple: here is my story, I hope you like it and choose to publish it, thank you. (Soon they will include the location of my first professional publication, but until I have a contract in hand I’m not revealing it to a wider audience.) Would saying why I wrote a story help much? Would it give the slush reader the impetus to nudge it a little higher in the “stories for the editor to read” pile (provided the slush reader likes it enough to pass it on, of course)?

I don’t know. I’m not an editor. But I do know this: regardless of what happens with the story I’ve just been blogging about, I’m going to keep writing timely fiction, and if it gets published too late… well, I don’t think I’ll care, because it will get published.

Eventually.

Closed to Submissions for December

Hey Folks,

Quick programming note: Escape Pod will be closed to submissions for the month of December. This is partly to get though a slight backlog of stories in the system now and also because as we get closer to the end of the pro-rate experiment we’ve got some things to figure out.

I never know how to end these things, so I’ll steal from Mur and—

Be Mighty,
–Bill

Review: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

While I do not read romances, and I have not read a book by Jane Austen since high school, I nevertheless decided to pick up Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal. She is a brilliant writer, and I trusted her to write something I could endure. As it turned out, enduring the book wasn’t a problem — the hard part was putting it down.

The choice of detail in Shades of Milk and Honey is exquisite. Everything is described in spare, precise language. I can still see the glass cherries, the nymph’s face hidden in the tree, the dark and stormy bedroom of a heartsick girl. There is not a single wasted word or padded scene. That makes Shades of Milk and Honey a quick read. There is very little action until the dramatic ending, but that does not slow the narrative down. The majority of the book is concerned with interactions between people — with word and gesture, thought and response. I found it enthralling.

I believe the plot will be familiar to readers of romance. Two sisters named Jane and Melody try to walk the narrow path that society has marked for them, with the threat of scandal and ruin pressing in on both sides. Mary Robinette Kowal does not pull her punches in her portrayal of traditional marriage as an economic arrangement between families. As the sisters cannot inherit, they must either marry well or fall into poverty when their father dies. Romance in this setting is a matter of survival. Melody, who is beautiful, has no shortage of suitors. Jane, on the other hand, is cursed with a big nose and brown hair, and believes that she will never find a husband.

The aspect of the book that has gotten the most attention is its magic. Mary Robinette Kowal has made her book’s magic small and subtle, to avoid breaking history. This was not an easy task, and she has spoken at length about it elsewhere. The magic is called Glamour. It is the art of folding the ether to produce small illusions — a dress on a mannequin, a piece of ambient music to liven a party, or an elaborate “glamural” that turns a room into a forest glade. Jane has a particular talent for glamour, which gets her into trouble before it gets her out of it.

Just as the magic has been carefully constructed so as to allow the Regency period to proceed more or less as it did in the real world, the language in Shades of Milk and Honey has been chosen to fit the period. Modern readers will notice obvious examples of archaic English, such as “shew,” but the overall effect is wonderfully subtle, making the book feel right without distracting the reader. Shades of Milk and Honey is a deceptively simple book resting on a foundation of solid research.

I am told that there are plans for another book, which will involve swashbuckling. I can’t wait. I had my doubts about this book at first, but I’m glad I gave it a chance, and I am looking forward to the sequel.

The story is king

A friend pointed out to me on Twitter just the other day that as of this week, it is exactly one year since I picked up my first Stephen King book and started reading. That book was Under the Dome, which came out in November 2009, and I was utterly enthralled from beginning to end. As soon as I had finished I set myself the task of reading all of his work, in publication order. A year later and I have only reached The Stand – hey, it was a busy year – but I’m still loving every single word.

As a genre reader and writer, it might sound surprising that I came so late to King’s work. While his career has had high points and low, he is generally considered a master of science fiction, horror, and just plain writing, ably treading the line between vast commercial success and quality content.

But the reason I only came to his gigantic body of work with his latest novel is that prior to this, I was a King snob. Commercial success on such a scale usually meant – so I thought – very poor writing. This is often the case, but it was that foray Under the Dome last November that taught me a very good lesson indeed, one that is second only to the pants* rule.

It’s slightly oblique but I’ll try to explain. That lesson was: everything is about ‘the story’.

Okay? Hold tight. Here we go.

Currently we are continually bombarded with bad news about the publishing industry – about how publishing is on a downward slide, book sales are floundering while editors at the big houses flap to catch the next big trend or play it safe with unadventurous, unoriginal content. The industry is being shaken up by digital publishing and ebooks, while opportunities for new writers trying to get a break are shrinking more and more.

It would be easy, with all of this, to take a very bleak view, and certainly I’m not suggesting that the bad news is not true. If you were of a pessimistic nature you could lament the death of books and of writing as you sob into your cocoa in front of the TV. But there is one thing to remember amid this doom and gloom.

Writing and “the story”, to use some quasi-mystical catch-all, is all around us. Take a look at what you do during the day – strip out the day job (unless you actually make a living writing), the chores, the laundry, brushing your teeth, and look at what you do for entertainment, and what entertains you. I’m willing to bet that most of it, maybe 90%, is “the story”. And “the story” means writing.

There are more TV shows and films now than ever, and certainly in recent years a stonkingly good selection of exceptionally high-quality ones. It’s all “the story” – fiction, written by writers. And everything that surrounds it – special effects, marketing and merchandising, even the actors, producers, directors, crew, etc – are all there to deliver “the story” to us. The world of books is just one tiny facet – there are comics, television programmes, films, and games (video or otherwise). It’s all writing. It’s all “the story”.

Two things really crystalized this for me. Firstly, a couple of years ago I went to a comic convention which featured a host of writers and artists from DC Comics, including their commander-in-chief, Dan DiDio. During a weekend of panels and discussions, one thing became very clear. The DC universe is one giant story, a tale so big and sprawling that it literally covers the walls of several offices in New York. The job of DC is to deliver this to us, and to continue its development before passing the baton to the next batch of creators and producers. The same can be said of Marvel, or Image, or 2000AD, or any comic publisher or endeavour. The scale of it was quite frankly mind-blowing, and I came away from that con with my first suspicions about “the story” and how it impacted practically everything I did and was interested in and did.

The second moment of realisation came earlier this week, when I was fortunate enough to attend a small gathering of Doctor Who fans who were hosting an informal interview and Q&A with Daphne Ashbrook, co-star of the 1996 US/UK TV movie with Paul McGann, currently visiting the UK. I’m a Doctor Who fan, I’m happy to admit, but I’ve always had difficulty with the TV Movie. This ‘difficulty’ has evolved from outright denial and upset (hey, I was a sensitive teenager in 1996) through to grudging acceptance of the production, so long as I didn’t actually have to watch it. So driving for an hour to see a co-star I wasn’t particularly interested in talk about a production I didn’t particularly care for seemed, beforehand at least, a bit of a chore. But, what the hell. When was this opportunity going to come up again.

Of course, it was a marvellous evening. Daphne was a delight, and kept us entertained for close to two hours on the ins and outs of her impressive career (come on, forget Doctor Who, she was in Knight Rider, The A-Team, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; hell, even Murder, She Wrote). It was a revelation, especially when I realised that large parts of her lively discussion were her relaying to us the plot of these various shows, so we could have a better understanding of the role she played in each.

There it was. “The Story”. As an experienced actor, Daphne’s job is to deliver “the story” to us.  And “the story” means writing, plain and simple. Storytelling. Writing. Same thing.

So what’s the magic advice I distilled from all of this? Give up on the novel and try a screenplay? Not at all.

My advice is to realise that “the story” is everywhere, and like the guys from Pixar keep saying, “the story is king”. With this in mind, and knowing that writing is a never-ending quest to get better, it’s our job as writers to absorb as much of “the story” as we can. This means reading outside of our comfort zones and genres as well as within them – if I didn’t decide to try Stephen King I would never have discovered his extensive, and quite wonderful, back catalogue. When I was prepping to write a detective noir novel, I decided to bite the bullet and read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Whammo, the whole world of pulp detective fiction was opened to me.

One often-quoted piece of writing advice is to not just turn off your television, but to get rid of it entirely. Stephen King himself goes off on this in On Writing. A lot of writers follow this advice to the letter and do very well indeed. But personally I think this is missing the point, because between the inane loops of twenty-four hour news, reality shows and quizzes, the blowhards that King describes so well in his memoir of the craft, there is some damn good stuff on, be it a television series (old or new) or a film (old or new). So if “the story” is about writing, then by picking and choosing carefully and by not letting it become a time-sink (and that really is where the danger lies and the advice stems from, I think), you can watch, enjoy, and learn from some very, very good examples of the craft.

“The story” is everywhere, and where the story is, you’ll find writing. That will never, ever go away, no matter what weekly slice of negativity comes from the traditional publishing industry. The world needs writers and always will, because our whole lives are based around storytelling.

Read books. Watch TV. Go to the movies. But importantly, read something you might not have thought you’d like, and watch a film that isn’t quite the genre you are interested in. At worst, you’ll absorb another little slice of “the story” that you wouldn’t have otherwise and you’ll learn something from it. At best, you’ll discover something new and wonderful and whole news worlds will instantly become available.

And then think about it, and learn from it, and write.

* The pants rule is pretty simple and surprisingly effective: when writing comes up on your schedule, make sure you are up and doing and dressed. Don’t write in your pyjamas, don’t write in your slippers, no matter how appealing or comfortable it may sound. By “pants”, I mean trousers (not, as British people use it, as underpants… stop sniggering at the back there!), but that’s just a metaphor for being prepared and ready to write. The more prepped you are – showered, shaved, dressed, in a nice pair of shoes – the better your writing. If you want writing to be your job then act like it. Put on a nice shirt, or skirt, not just your comfy “at home” clothes. You can put those on when you’ve finished your job. In fact, the more formal you make it, the better you tend to feel (although I can’t imagine what happens to your writing if you turn up at your desk in full evening wear or a ball gown… I must give that a go sometime). Try it. It works!

Review: The Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle

“For my part, I prefer aliens that look alien. Then when they ritually eat their first-born, or turn arthropod halfway through their life-cycle, it isn’t so much of a shock. You expect it. Humanoid aliens, they’re trouble.”

— Mary Gentle, The Golden Witchbreed

A few months ago, I finally picked up Mary Gentle’s science fiction duology, The Golden Witchbreed and its sequel, Ancient Light. The story that begins in The Golden Witchbreed is standard SF: A human ambassador arrives on an alien world to assist the first contact team, and finds herself snarled in local politics. The difference lies, first, in what those local politics turn out to be, and second, in Mary Gentle’s deft handling of character and interwoven plotlines.

The alien planet, Orthe, is inhabited by humanoid aliens who are just human enough to make the ambassador trip up — and the reader, too, if she’s not careful. The Ortheans are drawn with superb attention to detail. Most of the aliens that the reader meets in The Golden Witchbreed live in small holdings that answer to a larger, elected-as-needed assembly of representatives, and an elected monarch who rules by divine right. Mary Gentle does not make the mistake of having a One World Culture for her aliens, however, or even just a few variations on a theme.

As the ambassador travels away from the capital city, the reader gets to see one culture shade into another. I enjoyed watching the ambassador slowly adapt to Orthe. As her grasp of the language and social niceties moves from being trained, to being practiced, to being second nature, the vocabulary in her narration changes. The humans have classed the Ortheans as a pretech, but when a group of Barbarians arrive in the hollowed-out hull of an ancient flying machine, both the reader and the ambassador realize that something far stranger is going on.

The Golden Witchbreed is a good book, but it is not a complete story without Ancient Light. Ancient Light begins twenty years after the ambassador leaves Orthe. Political upheaval on Earth has left her without a government to represent — instead, she answers to the Company. Having discovered the ruins of an ancient civilization on Orthe, the Company wants to know whether any of the alien technology could be put to human use. Alien politics, human politics, alien religion, and the ambassador’s own shaky hold on her sanity raise the stakes in Ancient Light to the point where I finished this book standing up — because finding a chair would have meant looking away from the page.

Orthe is a world so finely balanced that mere observation by an outsider is enough to change the system. To me, these books read as a statement about invasion and colonization, though Mary Gentle never wields the message stick hard enough to make me confident that’s what she was trying to say. The Orthe duology is good science fiction, and has as much to say about our past as our future. I recommend these books without hesitation.

Review: Zero History by William Gibson

With the possible exception of the Very Ugly Shirt, I think I’ve seen all of the technology in William Gibson’s new novel, Zero History, featured on BoingBoing. Zero History is a science fiction novel because a science fiction writer wrote it. If it had been written by someone other than William Gibson, it could have been shelved with the thrillers. On the other hand, Zero History does two things that science fiction is supposed to do: It examines the impact of technology on human beings; and if the science was taken out, the plot wouldn’t work.

Hubertus Bigend, the eccentric billionaire from Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, once again recruits the former rock star, Hollis Henry. This time he’s tracking a fashion genius whose anti-advertising has created an underground sensation. With the former benzo addict Milgrim, would-be military contractors, and a surprisingly straightforward romantic subplot, William Gibson pulls together another intricate and enthralling novel.

I found this book to be more ambivalent than the other two. Fear drives the characters. I have not figured out what Hollis is running from, aside from her mysterious and frightening benefactor. Milgrim is remembering what fear is like without sedatives to insulate him from the world. The generalized paranoia that underlies modern military-worship keeps the nominal bad guys moving through a series of misunderstood signals that might have been comic if the stakes didn’t feel so high. At the end, despite the protagonists’ celebrations, I had the unsettling impression that the bad guys won.

Zero History is a continuation of the series that started with Pattern Recognition. It brings back both the style and many of the characters from those books, not his earlier work. Gibson’s precisely-machined writing is a pleasure to read, as always. He lets his plot drift, so it feels like all the characters are sliding slowly and inevitably towards towards a single point of crisis. While Zero History never reaches the frenzy I remember from other Gibson novels, it kept me engaged until the end. Also, I adored the bit with the penguin.

I will reread this book. Zero History is not a stand-alone novel, and I believe I will benefit from reading the whole series in order. Readers who are looking for a return to Neuromancer will be disappointed. Fans of the other Bigend books should pick this one up, too.

Review: “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs

One of the things I’m going to miss terribly when e-books are the norm and brick-and-mortar stores are few and far between will be the opportunity to walk into a bookstore, pick up the one thing I really want to read, and then hit the discount rack on the way to the checkout. That’s exactly what I did when I was in Florida recently, picking up I Shall Wear Midnight, which I later reviewed on this site.

Among the books I picked up on my way out of the store was a three-pack of John Carter of Mars novels, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’d heard there might be a movie coming soon, and I wanted to familiarize myself with a sci-fi classic that I probably should’ve read long ago anyway.

Now that I’ve finished A Princess of Mars, I can sort of see why they’re classics. Sort of.

Like many novels written in the late 19th/early 20th century, A Princess of Mars starts out with the discovery of a manuscript by the author himself, and his memories of “Uncle Jack”. Burroughs uses the device effectively to set up the mythology of John Carter, and then jumps into the story. The first act is fairly straightforward: Carter goes to Mars, discovers he’s stronger than most everyone there, and manages to impress the natives. Burroughs spends a lot of time describing this new world, and though most readers of current fiction would say tl;dr or bemoan the author’s use of infodumps, that was the style back then, so I give it a pass. At the end of that act, he meets Dejah Thoris, the eponymous Princess of Mars, and decides he’s fallen in love with her.

By this point in the novel, I’d hit on its major sticking point — at least, in my mind — and it’s something I’ve seen in other fiction of the era: John Carter… well, he’s awesome.

No, he’s not awesome. He’s AWESOME. There’s literally nothing John Carter cannot do on Mars: he has superior strength, agility, martial prowess, physical attractiveness (as compared to humans of Earth, not the Green Men of Barsoom), problem-solving skills, intelligence, and luck. It’s like God rolled a series of natural 20s when He was creating Carter, and Carter knows exactly how to take advantage of that. He instantly figures out how to move in Mars’s lower gravity. He applies his knowledge of battle from the Civil War to fighting alongside several different alien races. He isn’t completely floored by the weird appearance of the Tharks (the green men of Mars). He learns to speak the Martian language and use Martian telepathy despite not — to our knowledge, anyway — knowing any languages other than English nor how to be telepathic at all beforehand.

And, what’s more, he instantly wins the trust of pretty much everyone around him. The few who don’t like him are so clearly Stereotypical Evil Characters that the reader knows almost immediately they’ll be getting some kind of comeuppance, most likely at Carter’s hands (or sword).

The rest of the story is spent on getting Carter back together with Thoris — they are separated in the second act — and it’s kind of blah through there (there’s even a pod racing scene, sort of) before the grand finale, when Carter leads the good Martians against some really, really, unmistake-ably evil Martians. Kind of like how, in Star Trek 6, there were honorable Klingons and evil Klingons.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. There was lots of adventure, interesting scenery and worldbuilding, and if the aliens were a little too human, that’s not really a failing — it’s just the way stories were written back then. Besides, the characters are consistent within themselves — none of them do anything that immediately drags you out of the story. The ending wraps up a little too fast, as stories from that era were wont to do, but that’s okay, because we know there’ll be more John Carter of Mars stories coming up. I feel bad for readers of that era, who didn’t know there’d be more.

A Princess of Mars is short enough that you can read it in a weekend, if you read at a good clip. The version I have has some very nice illustrations by Thomas Yeates, and an introduction by Mike Ashley that lays out the history of the Barsoom series. The book itself is suitable for reading by mature tweens who are already into sci-fi or adventure stories, though the illustrations do contain PG-13 nudity (Carter himself shows up naked on Mars, and to assimilate with the Tharks, he forgoes clothing as they do). I’m glad I picked it up, and I’m currently enjoying the second book, Gods of Mars, which is part of the omnibus.

What We’re Reading: “Gregor the Overlander”

The Underland Chronicles: Gregor the OverlanderI am the mom of an eight-year-old, so I do keep up with the kids’ book market, but I chose these books because they were written by the Queen of Pacing, Suzanne Collins, author of the huge hit, The Hunger Games trilogy. (Which I loved, despite the disappointment of Mockingjay, but that’s another blog post.) When I found that she’d written five midgrade novels, I got them via eMusic. (not an affiliate link, I do love eMusic for their catalog and their non-DRM files.)

Here is where I’m firmly believing that tropes and clichés don’t kill stories; bad writing kills stories. If I told you the basic plot- boy in our world falls into mysterious magical underground kingdom were he’s prophesied to save them all, you’d snort and say, “oh, that’s original.” But so what? Original or not, Collins makes it awesome.

Gregor is eleven, and a pretty responsible kid, since his grandmother has dementia and his mom takes care of him, his seven year old sister Lizzie, and his two year old sister Boots. His dad disappeared over two years ago, and he’s had to take on a lot of the childcare (and elder care) since his mom works to support the five of them. He falls into the Underland, where they immediately treat him like a dirty stranger (they keep insisting he bathe) and he inadvertently offends them frequently. Then we find out about the prophesy, and the giant rats, and a quest, and it’s a whole thing.

What makes Collins’ work shine is, of course, her pacing, which keeps me sitting in the car long after I’ve gotten home to get to the end of a chapter. But her characters are also awesome. Gregor should show a little more fear as an eleven year old- he admits to a fear of heights, but we never see this fear manifest- but he’s a solid kid who’s smart but impulsive. The surprise is how well his two year old sister fits into the story. Boots is charming and fun and has a weird ability to tell the giant cockroaches (“crawlers” is the polite term) apart, something the Underlanders can’t even do. When she has a tantrum in the first book, it’s perfectly suited to the situation, and even comes in handy as they’re captured by some creatures who don’t like loud noises.

Sometimes it seems a little too easy traveling with a two year old (I seem to remember my two year old not being so ready to accept a brand new schedule, never mind constant adventure), and the descriptions in the underland sometimes seem too clear to allow for the amount of light they had available, but those are minor complaints to an otherwise fun read.

Prophesies, other lands, and heroic outsiders are common tropes in fantasy, but give them to a talented writer, and you will still have a book you can’t put down. I’ve finished the first two, Gregor the Overlander and The Prophesy of Bane, and I’m eager to get the other three. Highly recommended for any mid-grade reader (or adult) who loves adventure.

(Since this is an audio podcast, I should mention the audiobook is a great listen, the narrator giving life to the characters. The consistency isn’t the same through the books, though, which is irritating. A major rat character sounds bored and sardonic in book 1 and scratchy and mean in book 2….)

October Fiction Roundup

Some of the best speculative short fiction published every month is available online. The quality of the fiction is impressive, and there are more than enough stories to fill an excellent anthology, each month.  We’ve collected story links from several of the top sites for you here.  Give them a look.

The number of stories is amazing, and these links are largely to sites paying a professional rate for fiction.  There is even more work out there, waiting for us, quietly.

hot mature website