Well, I’ve just completed a pretty radical redraft of a story. (Critters, it was “Professor Whitney’s Resignation” when you saw it.) The original couple of drafts (in 2000 and 2006) were in 1st person POV, and then I redrafted the story again in epistolary form last week. That just wasn’t cutting it, though it helped me expand the story and know what was going on. The burden with the epistolary form is that if you use it exclusively, your “narrator” has to provide all the information he or she would reasonably do in a letter. One fix for this is …
Category: WRITING
Professor Whitney’s Last Letter (Not Yet in the Can)
I finally rampaged my way to the end of Professor Whitney’s Last Letter. The ending was holding out on me, but I think I’ve got one that will work, if I massage it a little. I’ll be giving it another look tomorrow to cut a few hunks of unnecessary material, and what I can improve. It’d be nice if I could get the story down to 5,000 words, but since it’s now 8,550, I’m shooting for 6,500 words. I’ve cut some of the lighter comedy and substituted in some more bizarreness and darker humor. While I’m on a roll, I’m …
Skewering Twits
I remember reading, somewhere — in a long-ago issue of Dragon Magazine back in the 80s, I think — some quip about wizards being “cute… on the end of a spear.” One of the joys in the blogosphere, for me, is watching Nick Mamatas skewer twits so we can see how cute they are on the end of his verbal spears. Example here. Object lesson? Don’t pretend you’re in a Creative Writing MFA program with a writer who is: actually good cleverer than you likely to verbally bitchslap you online (deservedly) when you inevitably become offensive … and then go …
Rachmaninov & Professor Whitney
Sometimes, I write in silence. It’s useful for me when I need to shut everything out and just figure out what’s going to happen next. Of course, sometimes what I really need is to get myself into an emotional space so that I can feel where the story is supposed to go. This is where I’ve found that listening to music I don’t know, on a repeating loop, is surprisingly helpful. Lime’s a big fan of Rachmaninov, or at least his piano music, but I’m not… not really. However, she loaned me a double-CD compilation of different pianists performing various …
Thank you, Auntie Björk — Solvjaynghi’s Finally Ready To Be Sent On His Way
Got revisions done, finally, on one more brutal little piece, “Solvjaynghi’s Christmas Wish.” It’s now very slim, very muscular, and very bloody at ~4800 words, and that’s the absolute lower limit for that story, so I’m accepting it and moving on. I thank Auntie Björk because I was listening to a few mixes of “Army of Me” on a loop as I worked on it. The best one for battles involving staple guns, filthy trolls, and a screwdriver in the brain is the mix featuring Skunk Anansie. But this story took a lot of work to get done. Just tidying, …
Read, Write
Go read Ian’s “Requiem in D-Minor (for prions, whale and burning bush)” in the latest Hub, issue #24. If you’re so inclined, the Mundane SF issue of InterZone is still taking submissions for a month or so more. Details and file upload interface here.
Mark’s Review and Other Random Catches
By the way, since Mark reminds me (in this comments section) that I haven’t mentioned it, he reviewed my story from the Postcards From Hell series, as well as the stories of some other people, here. I’m glad it came across as Lovecraftian, and was happy it wasn’t cartoonish, but mostly was happy at his first reaction to seeing my name in his mail, on something addressed to his wife. (See the review.) In other news, someone I knew online a while back emailed me today, also, mentioning that a roommate had by chance given him a copy of Nature …
Redrafts and Edits Galore
Finally getting some work done again. This is good — anything related to a recent publication seems to spur me to write or edit or send out more stuff, and not just to sit back and bask in the enjoyment. (But also, it’s my first totally free chunk of time in a while, and Lime’s busy so I can devote it mostly to writing.) In the last couple of days, I’ve variously tidied, redrafted chunks of, or edited the following pieces: Realer (~9600 words) Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands (~4250 words) Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues (now …
The Egan Thief… and a Mention on BoingBoing?
Apparently so. A netfriend alerted me via my much-neglected Facebook account. Sure, just in passing, but it’s still cool. Why? Rudy Rucker published the new issue (#4) of his SF webzine Flurb and my story, “The Egan Thief,” is among those in the latest selection of tasty treats. (This marks my third SF publication, and is very very cool to have it at such a cool venue.) And there are some very, very tasty treats there, so go give everything a look.
Up He Pops
It’s been an insanely busy week, and weekend. Lots of editing work going on writing now, and between that and keeping up with crits, I am not getting much productive work done on writing. (I’m writing, it’s just not usable or productive.) Anyone who’s commented here, or sent email, don’t be alarmed. I’m just dreadfully busy. It should be calming down some in the next week or so. I think. Meanwhile, I’ve had a look at the draft of the SF story I was so happy about — the one I’ve been working on for about 8 years — and …