It must be weird to be asked to talk to someone with a camera long enough to have an hour and a half of footage. I’m watching the William Gibson documentary No Maps For These Territories, and I’m struck by the difficulty of this kind of “performance.” No doubt it is a performance: sitting around and talking is different from sitting around and talking to a camera. It’s interesting in a number of ways. It certainly provides some context to Gibson’s career, especially his recent comments about SF and the comments in the documentary about the relative difficulty of imagining …
Category: WRITING
Bye, Wonjjang
Two posts just got eaten. How come it only happens when I blog using Internet Exploiter? Anyway, I got Wonjjang out the door today. Poor fella has been waiting to be sent out into the cold, cruel world for a while now. That brings my current total number of stories out to market up to six. (Not including that story at Adbusters that I gave up on, which is nearly 11 months with no response, and which I only leave in my submissions tracker because, hey, it’s amusing me.) “Dhuluma…” and “McWar” (which will be retitled) will also both be …
“Wonjjang,” “Dhuluma,” “McWar,” and “The Broken Path”
Well, here’s my done/to-do list in terms of creative writing: Done: checked the feedback from Lime on “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyonyang”: some good feedback, plus some basic disagreement on politics. From a Korean point-of-view, this story seems to have a very right-wing bent, though to me, it’s not so much aligned with either “right” or “left.” If the so-called Korean left gets more of a drubbing, well, it’s on their watch and under their policies that North Korea developed the nukes that inspired this tale. Anyway, I made some changes lessening the likelihood for misinterpretation of things that …
Dhuluma No More, My Brother, and the Rains Will Come Again
Whew! I don’t know if the title is working, but it’s the one I’ve settled upon. That’s the new name of a story a lot of my crit group may remember as “Ogallala,” the rewrite of which I mentioned here. T’was a hell of a struggle to get from the 2,500 words there to the 5,500 words here. All kinds of logistics, plot changes, shifts in plans, shifts in character action, and struggles to make my viewpoint character actually work. Note to self: it takes a lot of work to make a cameraman an effective character, meaning one who is …
Deadlines Whoosh Past
But they’re not firm, and I may get to those projects tomorrow. I’m listening to the latest Björk release, Volga. I shall have to buy it, it’s quite cool. There are always a couple of tracks on every one of Björk’s albums which are, for me, perfect SF-writing fodder. In this case, it’s both mixes of “Earth Intruders,” the tuen “Declare Independenc”, and the Mark Stent mix of “Innocence.” So what I’m working on is a rewrite of my novelette “Ogallala,” which was too long and slow, and was turned down by Analog a while back with a plain old …
Cheap Brain Implants! (But Read the Fine Print in your EULA…)
Oh yes. New story. For the call for the Mundane SF issue of Interzone, because while I don’t think SF needs to be Mundane, it’s after all just a set of constraints. I learnt stuff from full tonal writing fugues, I learned stuff from composing using serialist procedures, I learned stuff composing with twelve-sided dice, and I learned stuff when (badly) arranging Thelonious Monk songs for chamber orchestra and jazz quintet. So I’m sure I can learn something from writing a little Mundane SF. (And though I have a few potentially Mundane works, I’ve got nothing really appropriate under 5,000 …
5 writing strengths Meme
Jade Park has tagged me in her response to the 5 writing strengths Meme, where writers list five things that they know are their writing strengths. A few years ago, this might have been much harder for me. Drafting was a lot like shooting a rifle off into the dark, trying to hit things. As one of my writer-heroes, Maureen McHugh, pointed out when I talked to her one-on-one in Seattle, I couldn’t see what I could do better and was just kind of stuck, with nothing actually improving in my writing and no sense of why, or how I …
4 5 Ready, 2 More on the Way
Whew! I finally got some proofreading done. I’m now about to send four five stories out. Here are the titles (with the original titles included for those who have read or critted them in the past): “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” (originally “The Crystal Methuselah,” 2006) “Iblis’ Devotion”(originally “Iblis’ Desire,” 2006) “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues”(first draft Clarion West 2006 Week 6, same title) “Solvjaynghi’s Christmas Wish” (originally, long ago, “The Plea From Factory Unit #5”, ca. 2002) “Empty of Words, the Page” (originally”Professor Whitney’s Resignation,” ca. 2000) Tonight I’ll be entering the edits for two one …
Quantum Computing?
Anyone have a good site or book to recommend me? I need a little more background than I have for a story idea (and just knowing more would be nice anyhow, even if the story doesn’t pan out). Thanks!
Quiet Nights of Quiet… Proofreading?
Lime was out of town last night, visiting her folks, and I ended up proofreading one story then, and another today. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s almost 25,000 words of fiction I was working with. It was a lot. The good news is that with only a few changes, two more pieces will be ready to go out the door: my Korean superheroes novella and the latest version of a story I started years ago, about one Professor Whitney (now set in the 1970s, with some tighter thematic material and a tighter character arc, as well …