If you’re up for a story about far-future Buddhists, ecological devastation, and what our descendants might think of us, check my most recent publication, “The Bodhisattvas”, which is now available over at the latest edition of Subterranean Online, guest edited by Jonathan Strahan. (Also, stories by Maureen McHugh and Tom Holt! I think more stories will be going online throughout the month so do check back on it, too.) It’s especially wonderful to share a TOC with Maureen, who I count not just as one of my teachers and a literary hero but also as a friend.
Category: WRITING
Writing Double, Or Why You Should Try to Kill Two or More Birds With One Scene
So one of the things I’ve stressed a few times to my Creative Writing class — and I’m impressed, it only took a few times, now they’re calling on one another to try do it more — is killing several birds with one stone. If you’re writing a scene, you should always have more than one thing going on… something explicit, and something implicit. There’s the surface and then there’s the subtext. That’s the minimum. There’s a scene in the 2007 Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters1 where this is played out beautifully. One of the main characters, having just …
Moura — Drafted! (Finally.)
Whew! I finally got a draft done of a story I’ve been thinking about writing since 2006, and researching for the last few weeks. (Working title: “Moura” — the one about H.G. Wells’ last lover, and about… well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you, now, would I? I don’t think the title will change, by the way, but who knows…?) I’m going to show it to a few friends and get some feedback, which is something I haven’t done so much lately with stories. But this is a different sort of story than I’ve written before. For those …
Character Balance
A while back, we were critiquing a story and the student’s character seemed a little too blessed for the story to be interesting. Everything she wanted, came true. She needed a place to stay, and someone immediately offered her one. She shared something from her culture with a person from another culture, and the person enthusiastically embraced it. (It was red bean paste. A quick survey of the room showed that about half the Korean students hate red bean paste as much as I do!) Over and over, people urged the author to push her character into a corner. Which …
Shine Interview with Charles Tan
Charles Tan interviewed me in connection with my contribution to the Shine anthology, and other stuff. Check it out here.
Critting Protocols
Since a few people have expressed interest, I thought I’d post a little protocol for how to run a critique session in a class. The feedback routine is basically the procedure we used at Clarion West, as suggested by Maureen McHugh, though after a few weeks most of us tended to play a bit more loosely and freely with it. Basically: for a given crit session, students will have texts ahead of time, and are expected to have written a critique of each text to be critique, but also are expected to provide verbal critique. The critique session begins with …
What I Learned From RPGing and GMing
Update: One of the points below was unfinished. I was actually planning on splitting this post into two parts, but I guess I left it scheduled and it got posted while I was doing other things. It’s been linked a few times, so… I’ll leave it as it is. Except I went ahead and finished that point. ORIGINAL Post: So: what did I learn from RPGing, and specifically from GMing? This is the last post in the projected series (though who knows, there may be more to say…) I think I should put this into two categories: stuff I learned …
Article Help?
UPDATE (20 minutes later): I got the articles. The second one is, indeed, online here. That was quick. Thanks KSM! ORIGINAL POST: Anyone have a copy of this article kicking around? Ahem, I mean, you know, I could use a copy for my research, but my employer won’t have JSTOR access till 2011. Ooh, and this one? Yes, it’s just background for a story, at most likely to turn into a vaguely passing detail here and there, though I suspect the former article may factor into a discussion of Ian McDonald’s River of Gods/Cyberabad Days too. (McDonald is a citizen …
Offstage Time, and This Weekend’s Research/Writing
I’m into some heavy research right now, trying to make some headway on a story of mine that ties together the lives of HG Wells, Moura Budberg, RH Bruce Lockhart, Constance Coolidge, Gorky, Stalin, a Malayan woman of the time named only Amai (Lockhart’s first “wife” if common-law marriage had applied to “natives” in the Empire), and many more figures, locked together with questions central to the later work of Wells, SF and nonfictional futurism alike. (It’s a story I considered attempting at Clarion West, before going, but which I realized, after I’d arrived, I would have to research a …
Cut, Cut, Cut, and Another Review of “Sarging Rasmussen”
Well, today is not a particularly interesting day: I spent much of it cutting text. (I’ll spend the rest of it on laundry, steaming my floors with my new steamer vacuum, probably watching the remaining two-thirds of the Bollywood film Krrish, maybe having a coffee with the espresso machine that arrived today to replaced my previous, broken machine, and avoiding seed fruit, nuts, brown rice, and beans–because I’ve have an upset digestive system for most of the time since I got back from Indonesia, and am going to go to the hospital Monday morning to undergo, yes, basically the same …