Writing Updates
If any of you have been paying attention to the right column where I keep all my writing nonsense (which you’ll likely pay attention to now, if you haven’t already), then you’ll have noticed that I’m terribly behind. I hit a horrible slump. Yes, I had been writing (mostly blog posts), but I refuse to include those in my writing total unless they are essay-style.Well, I finally got on track today. I wrote roughly 2,300 words, and have finished writing two new chapters for The Spellweaver of Dern and am about 5/6th through a new fantasy short story called “The Gnomes of New Timberfax”.If all goes as planned I should finish the gnome story tomorrow and have scheduled two chapters to show up this week and next week for SoD. I apologize for the lateness. Many things came in and really sucked up my time (school mostly, as I’ve said before). I expect to have some sort of semi-regular schedule for SoD now. I’m going to try to shoot for the “new chapter every other week” thing, with my optimistic side shooting for “new chapter every week”. I am writing a load of other things.In other news about my writing in general: I’m planning to take a short hiatus from writing to do something that I need to get done. I won’t stop SoD, but other writing will come to a standstill. What could possibly be more important that writing new work? I have hit a snag in my SF novel The Lies of Venicia that can’t be resolved unless I spend a considerably amount of time developing a map for my universe. I had decided that for the time being I could just put ellipses where I couldn’t be sure of a system’s name or planet’s name due to not having a set out map of where things lie. I’m using a form of wormhole jumping for space travel, but it’s limited. You can’t jump great distances (in terms of lightyears as basic units of measurement here), which means that all jump nodes (or gates, or whatever you want to call them) have to lead to a relatively nearby location. That means you can jump from Sol to Alpha Centauri just fine, because that’s under five lightyears, but you can’t jump from Sol to Eta Cassiopeiae 2 because that’s a distance of over nineteen lightyears, which is too far for such a jump to be stable. You could do it, but you’d have to hack the network of jump nodes to do it and you’d be a moron to try (you could kill yourself or kill someone else during the jump, or both). The problem is that the galaxy is extremely complex and stars function in 3D, not 2D. That means I can’t just say “point A to point B” and draw a straight line ————– like so. I have to be conscious of where a particular stars lies in relation to other stars. Alpha Centauri it’s a straight shot if we look at the universe lying on a plane where Earth’s polar north and south are our reference points. It might be up and over to the left, and from Alpha Centauri another star may be down and back.But I don’t know where all the stars sit. I don’t have that in my head mostly because it’s really complex information (a flat map of a fantasy world is easier to remember). What this means is I need to map this universe and I’m not 100% sure how to do that yet. I’ve considered trying a 3D program, but such programs may or may not allow me to create makeshift “shipping lanes” to represent where one can jump from any location.I have one idea on how to do this. It involves using a foam base (some sort of hard foam I can stick things into) and measuring it, then putting Sol smackdab in the middle and try to scale down the coordinates proportionately. I’d use sticks or something that I can stick into the foam and basically cut them to the proper length, etc. That’s what I have right now and I don’t know if there is a better way.Do you all have any suggestions? I don’t know how else to do that. I am not a 3D whiz, nor much of an artist. I basically need a visual to represent stars that actually do exist so I can accurately keep track of things. Perhaps it can be done in a 2D display somehow. I don’t know.Anyway, I just wanted you all to know there may be a brief hiatus to do that. If you have suggestions, please let me know. Maybe there is a program of some sort to create 3D star charts or star maps of some sort. Well, having said all that I can get on with whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing (wait, that’s writing!) and head on out to the wild blue yonder (okay, that was hokey and I know it).
Post A Rejection Day
That’s apparently what today has been declared. Several folks have already done it (Tobias Buckell, Justine Larbalesteir, Willow Fagan, and likely many others.). So, throwing aside personal integrity, I thought I’d do the same thing. So I decided I’d post two of them. No mentions of the stories or which markets, for obvious reasons. Here is the first one: Shaun, Thanks, but it’s not for us. We look for the new, so we tend to stay away from the suite of elements like AI, wetware, near-future dystopias and so on which have become as ubiquitous in SF as wizards, fairies and monarchies are in fantasy. These ideas have been strip mined for more than twenty years now, and there’s very little life left in them which doesn’t depend on significant renovation from the familiar. We didn’t find that here; instead, moments like this: [redacted] could have been lifted from any number of cyberhappy SF literature, movies and TV we’ve all seen before. That all roughly translated to “don’t write crap from the 80s”, which totally makes sense now. And for something happier: Dear Shaun, Thank you for submitting [redacted] to [redacted]. It was well receivedhere, but after some thought we have decided not to accept it forpublication. I hope you’ll consider us again, and I wish you the best success inplacing this story elsewhere. So, yeah! Good stuff. Hope you all enjoy it.
Gnomes or Erdluitles?
I started writing a short story yesterday titled “The Erdluitles of New Timberfax”. But about half a page into the story I thought, “nobody ever writes about gnomes.” So, now, the title is “The Gnomes of New Timberfax” and it’s currently nothing more than a slightly humorous story about a hermit who discovers that gnomes are real and aren’t very fond of his neighbor. I have a feeling it will become slightly dark in the center, like a white-chocolate covered raisin. I’m not entirely sure if the city of New Timberfax is a magical city. The introduction of gnomes doesn’t necessarily mean I want the whole world to be a magical one, though on the one hand this does mean that magic, or at least magical creatures, exist.Needless to say, gnomes will be real and not exactly what one would expect of them (or at least that’s what I’m shooting for). We’ll see what happens. Anywho. (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Two Days Off
Just a note, I took today and yesterday off for editing. I’m dangerously close to the WOTF deadline, so I needed to get some things spruced up and then figure out what to do with each of them. I also have a third story in the works that I expect will become another issue for me while I figure out what the heck to do with it too. Also, a note for those that read SoD: I edited in a character that I had forgotten about. Not a lot to worry about though. Iliad is now back in there. Anywho. (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Independent Study Ideas?
As most of you know (or at least those of you who read this blog regularly) I have already taken an independent study course at UC Santa Cruz on select works of Philip K. Dick. It was a thoroughly enjoyable course partly because I got to select what I wanted to read, and because, well, it’s Philip K. Dick. How can you go wrong with that, right? Add the fact that I got to work with a professor who is equally as enthusiastic about science fiction (and related genres, and particularly Mr. Dick and authors like Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, etc.) and I can honestly say it was one of the best classes I have ever taken. One thing I found thoroughly helpful was being able to meet with the professor and have a one-on-one, discussing the works, the themes, the author, etc. While I have no problem with standard classes of 30 people, I find that the personalized approach does bring a broader understanding of whatever material you are looking at, which was the case for me. Having said all this, I am starting to think about what to do for next year. I already hope to do an I.S. course with a professor interested in Cyberpunk, which is great for me, because I’m interested in it too. That leaves me the option of doing one other I.S. course, since I’m allowed three of them for my degree. Quite honestly, I have every intention to use all three because it allows me to directly relate to the material most interesting to me. The result is that I haven’t a clue what I want to do with that free slot. Currently I’m thinking of the following ideas: Flirting With the Edges: A course that looks at works that flirt with the edges of genre fiction. Folks like Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki Murakami, and no doubt loads more. I’d research this, but think of it as a look at books that may have fantastic elements, or SF elements, but don’t flaunt them. One of Kazuo Ishiguro’s books is apparently about clones, but he supposedly writes it so well that you don’t notice until later in the novel. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenisis: I’ve thought of doing a course on this. It’s a huge trilogy, but it is also an awesome trilogy, or so I hear. I really like Butler’s work. I’ve read a novel and several short stories by her and have to say her work is very good. This would be an interesting course. William Horwood’s Duncton Wood: I absolutely loved the first book and the second. I’ve yet to read the whole series, but his work is stunning. I don’t know, though. While I would have a blast looking deep into this amazing work, I wonder if it’s not enough. It’s a huge book by itself, and having the others would make for a great survey, but that’s a lot of reading. I do love his work, though. I wonder if maybe I could do something with his work for a research project… My question is, what sort of things would you recommend? Any particular themes, authors, etc.? If you had the opportunity in school (whether you’re still in it or have moved on), what would be a specfic idea you’d want to pursue?
USCS: One Year Down (probably 500 more to go)
Seeing how this was my first year at a real college (I don’t consider community college “real college”, just high school with better choices), I feel it necessary to babble about this year in retrospect.It has been a tremendous year, to say the least. My first quarter was a bit of a shocker for two reasons: I found out that University level work is not all that difficult, despite people telling me that “it’s so hard” or “it’s a lot of work”. Not really, to be honest. Yes, it’s work, but would I say that, for the most part, it’s drastically more so than community college? No, not really. I got a little kick in the butt as far as writing is concerned (non-fiction essay writing). I’m a good writer, or so I’m told, so it’s not so much that I couldn’t write, it was that I still had some things to learn. And I feel like I have learned those things, or some of them. This is good news. I learned quite a lot about literary theory in my Lit. 1 course (which is good because I had never heard of literary theory before, as odd as that sounds) and learned even more in my Opera course, which was probably one of my more memorable courses in the last five years. I know, it’s Opera! But it was actually really fascinating. You’d be surprised what lies behind all that funny singing and exaggerated performances. The last course for that quarter was Modern German Fiction, which was entertaining. I can’t say I learned a great deal in that course (perhaps I got a little jolt in how to look at literature), but I enjoyed it because the works were really good and the professor was rather entertaining (and I like that professor, even though several people in the class hated him). The result of that semester was an A+ (Opera), A (German Fiction), and A- (Lit. 101), which is all good for me. The second quarter (winter) proved to be much of the same, although perhaps more of a challenge on the reading front. My British Canon class was entertaining, but draining at the same time. There was quite a lot of reading that needed to be done for it (a bit too much, in my opinion, to be very effective in discussing all the works), but the professor was probably the best professor you could ever have for the material (which stretched from Chaucer to right around when the English colonies were being formed in America). He made a lot of great jokes, brought our attention to the myriad of meanings for words we take for granted (most of which I have forgotten and a vast majority of which were dirty in the 1400s). We even got to read Rochester, who is the filthiest poet pre-WW2 that I have ever read.Then there was my Colonial American Literature course, which, I have to admit, was not all the entertaining. The professor was more interesting than the material, but at the same time, because of the professor, I at least enjoyed the course some. The end of that course was spent watching, and ridiculing, the special edition DVD of Pocahontas. Needless to say, the special edition is terrible (why does Disney think it’s a great idea to add new songs to an already entertaining film? And why do they try to play it off that their story is “truth” with little behind the scenes videos of artists saying how “we wanted to capture the real story”? The movie is BS…just say it is and we’ll all be happy with accepting it as entertainment).The last class was my favorite: Science Fiction in Multicultural America. It was essentially a class focused on “Black speculative fiction”. We read a little Delany, a little Butler, and lots of other folks (like Mosley and some non-fiction stuff). It was a terrific class with a bizarre set of texts and movies, some of which were fantastic (Blade Runner is a good film to watch for its elements, but not for entertainment value). One of my favorite courses ever.The result of that quarter was a B (British Canon), A (Colonial Fiction), and A- (Scifi). There came Spring Quarter, the one I just finished. Most of you recall that I was overloaded. This was my own stupidity. The classes weren’t necessarily hard, but combined together it was so much reading my head nearly popped. Lit. 101 (Animal Theory) is a required course for the literature major (not the Animal Theory part, but the Lit. 101 part; Animal Theory is just a theme). The course is an attempt at familiarizing you with a specific form of literary theory. In the end, I wasn’t sure that the class worked as a whole. While Animal Theory is interesting, it needed more focus on the literary aspect of it, and less on the ethical/political/social aspect (yes, those would be in the literature, but we weren’t discussing the literature in those contexts, but Animals). Still, I think the goal of the class was to make me question the human relation to itself and to the animal kingdom, and it did that, though perhaps not in the way that the professor intended (I’m still going to eat meat and support animal testing).The other course I took was Global Fiction (which had a specific theme of fiction from the African continent). This course was intense, not because it was hard, but because the subject matter was screwed up. I don’t know how much you all know about Apartheid in South Africa, but the things we read about and learned was disturbing. There was even a point where we watched recorded testimonies from Truth & Reconciliation Commission. It was a lot to take in and unsettling to hear the real stories of real things that happened to people.Then there was my independent study on Philip K. Dick. What can I say? I got to choose my