Yes, on holiday, I am busy busy. Working on getting “Winter Wheat” quite ready. The task for the next couple of days is trimming off 500 words, just to see if I can, thus getting it into the official wordcount limits of Tesseracts12. I also have a minor rewrite request for “Dhuluma No More…” That means “Defect” slides onto the backburner, probably will I get home, and the Cone Zero thing too. (Though there are no deadlines for those, so it’s fine.) I am also horribly behind on my first installment of “XY” for Cahoots, but I am writing it. …
Category: WRITING
Pahwakhe’s Up! (And an Interview Too!)
While I was holed up in a small, um, let’s call it a villa near Luang Nam Tha, my story “Pahwakhe” went online at Fantasy. It’s the first story I ever sold — what a welcome encouragement that was! — and it was the first of my Week 6 stories from Clarion West, back in 2006. Go read it! Now! No, wait, wait, while you’ve on your way over, there’s also an Author Spotlight up too, which is essentially an interview with me by K. Tempest Bradford, and you can experience me waxing, oh, I have no idea, let’s just …
Writing — A Yearly Review
If you’re not into these “writer posts,” move along. I have sometimes considered putting these onto a separate hunk of blog, and separating them out from the main RSS feed as well, since I don’t think most people are interested, but I have writer friends who are, and no hordes of fans teeming in. Anyway, for now, it’s here, and people who want to read more can click through to the post…
Tippity-Tap, Tappity-Tip: Ze Fingers On Ze Move
One more thing I forgot to mention about the writing, and which is absent from my sidebar: there’s a contest on at Highlights for Children which offers prizes of $1000 for (very) short stories (ie. of 800 words or so) set in the future. I thought of Stephanie when I read that, but I don’t know if I mentioned it to her. Me, I find any contest with no entry fee tempting, and when it’s stories for kids set in the future, man, I can’t resist. So, predictably, I’ve popped out a couple of things and been tinkering with them …
Ten Spikes, A Grasshopper, and Nemonymous Thing
I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve been multitasking so much this semester, but I’m currently reading a bunch of different books — about the first ten on the Now Reading animation that runs in my sidebar, with the rest being books I plan on reading next. Anyway, this multitasking has also bled over into my writing. I’ve been working, off and on, with three different pieces over the last week or so. Very off, not much on, but when I am on, I only do about a thousand words, maximum, on any one of these stories. Then I …
Nemonymous
For those interested, there’s an interesting market I’d never heard of before, which the esteemed author and Interzone e-subs slusher Jetse de Vries mentioned recently on his website. Nemonymous is a series of anthologies put out by Megazanthus Press, a British publisher, and edited by D.F. Lewis. The neat thing is that they publish stories — temporarily — without a byline. (Though they’ve taken to printing the contributors’ names, not in order of contributions, on the [back] cover.) That is, they publish your work anonymously, and then later on let the various cats out of the bag. There was even …
Week Six and Next Year
It seems to me that the stories I wrote toward the end of Week 5 — for critique during Week 6 — at Clarion West (in 2006) have been doing particularly well lately. Surely not because I had a burst of energy: I was exhausted long before Week 5 ended, and yet somehow I (as Shawn, a classmate and friend) put it, I “pooped out” two stories that weekend: a flash piece titled “Pahwakhe” and a novella (of around 15,000 words, at the time) titled “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” The former was my first fiction sale ever, …
Hin Jook, and More Proof of My Existence
I’ve been eating jook all day. If you don’t know what jook is, well, this might not be the best introduction. There is such a thing as delicious jook — after all, the stuff is just rice porridge. If you make it with a little pumpkin, or chicken, or other flavorful things, it can be delightful. But me, I’ve been eating it plain — hin jook, ie. white rice porridge. A little oil, a little salt, but basically plain. And drinking way too much water. This is how one prepares for the tests I’m having tomorrow. At the hospital. I’ll …
Ten Spikes, One Spike, Sado, Baejjangi, and More…
Yeah, another writing update. Well, I finally got “The Broken Pathway” (aka “The Broken Path” and “The Spike”) done. Some neat magical stuff and a (somewhat) dramatic (and dramatically magical) ending with a tiny, quiet coda at the very end… which expanded the story up to nearly the same length as the original draft, even though I removed several characters — one of them animal — and a subplot about a monk raping a woman sent by her infertile husband to the temple to pray for a son… and about his meeting the daughter he never knew he sired that …
Go, Mo-Sa, Go, Go!
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past day thinking about how my story “The Broken Pathway” needs to end. Mo-Sa, the focal character, has been coughing and sniffling rather impatiently as I’ve struggled to figure this out, and finally, looking through older drafts, and at what I did with what was once his cat, Nabi (“Butterfly”, a common name for cats in Korea, for who knows what reason) — now it’s a shabby little brown thing, an apparently stray mountain cat who leads him right to the big what-the-hell-is-that early in the story — and at one other …