Well, this weekend the members of my Clarion West class have organized a write-in, and like many, I am participating. I’m not working on a new story, but rather, on the rather drastic rewriting of my superheroes-in-East-Asia story. The story is, on one level, a riff on the Cory Doctorow story “The Superman and the Bugout”, which is a Jewish-Canadian Superman riff on the American superman story (available as aa PDF, or as a podcast from Doctorow’s site, by the way: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). I think when I read that story (in his great collection, which …
Category: WRITING
It’s Not Normal For Everybody to Write Poetry
There’s a very interesting piece at Danwei about popular mockery on the Chinese Web of a “poet” named Zhao Lihua whose poems are, well… Well, some people think they’re not poetry at all. She sees them as part of an experimental stage in her past, and there’s an interesting debate about the whole topic going on around the web, but in Chinese, so I have no access to it, except via Danwei. This is really interesting to me for two reasons: 1. This stuff reminds me of a lot of Kerouac’s attempts at poetry, which I don’t hold in very …
Write about what scares you…
I just replied to an email from a classmate from this past summer. Where he lives, the ecology is having a hell of a shock, it’s just drying up — the main river system in his country is drying up — and people still go out and hose down their driveways and farmers are irrigating, and no more rains this year, and forest fires like mad. And my scattered advice was, as it turned out, to write about it. I don’t know if I believe, not just how much, but also whether I believe it at all, this idea that …
Realer Down, Shoopahs Up Next
Whew! Well, I recently mentioned (warning, spoilers if ye dare follow ye linke) commencing work on this piece, and now I’ve finished (the redraft, though not all of the necessary polishing and darlings-killing) that’s one more “trunk” story totally disassembled and reassembled from the ground up… and it turns out I estimate the length within about 15 words (of actual wordcount, anyway): the current draft, which is v10.0, is 6484 words long, and I don’t anticipate much in the way of addition. There’s a minor subplot that might get axed — we’ll see whether the sprawl adds or detracts, depending …
More Writing Stuff
Oddly enough — or perhaps not surprisingly at all — the current political situation over here got me thinking about what exactly I was trying to say in my Northeast-Asian Superheroes story. While a lot of the plot-elements are actually remaining, there’s a slight bit of shuffling in terms of who occupies which place in relationship to the main character, a beleaguered private-sector-employed South Korean superhero. The resolution, which was eluding me for the longest time — since my return from Seattle to Korea roughly eight weeks ago — has finally, sort-of, fallen into place. I wish it were under …
Realer ReDraft Underway
I finally got back to some writing, and let me tell you, it feels good. Today, I just hit roughly 5200 words on a total reworking of a very old, and many-times-reworked “trunk story” called “Realer”. (Seriously, very many times reworked. The current draft is the tenth, and I think, aside from minor tweaking, the last; if I don’t get it basically right this time, it’s going into the “abandoned” file on my hard drive.) The story was originally about 7500 words and I’m guessing the redraft will be about 6500 or 7000, but it’s in every sense possible a …
Another Draft Down… The Wager
This evening, or rather, this morning, I completed another first draft of a story. Yahoo! And it’s only about 5000 words! Double-yahoo! I mentioned it earlier on this blog, the one about the foreign NGO development worker youth in post-war Colorado, jaunting around the countryside on a stupid wager and getting an experience neither of them bargained for. The story in fact ended up integrating something from a piece of tech that I explored in a very different story that I wasn’t 100% happy with, even in revision, “Upgraded Phrase List for Mil-Spec iTrans Phrase Translation Unit, Version 5.2.07”. (I’m …
Rejection #3: Clarkesworld, “Pahwakhe”
For those who read “The Woman Who Married a Ghost”, the revised version of this Clarion Story is now called “Pahwakhe” and it was just turned down by Nick Mamatas at Clarkesworld, with some encouraging comments and thoughts. I’ll look at it again with his suggestions in mind and see what rings true — I’ve heard at least one of his suggestions before, but remain not quite convinced. The fiction editor at the Canadian journal Prism International encouraged me to send it up, though, so maybe I’ll give it a go there first. Ha, maybe I’m just not sending out …
Rejections…
Is it gauche to track your rejections publicly? Wait, I’m talking about rejections of fiction submissions, here. Tracking other rejections publicly is gauche, but sometimes necessary for healing, I suppose. But is it cool for someone to mention when they’ve had a story rejected from a fiction market? I don’t really know. Maybe it is. I can’t say I ever read such comments too closely. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Well, anyway, this one I will mention publicly, since it’s a biggish deal. I got my first rejection of the year, and only the second one of my …
Another Story Idea, Perhaps?
So, YouTube’s Lonelygirl15 was a fake. Well, I can’t say, “I told you so,” because though I did view a clip and shake my head about how this was not a 16-year-old or a regular blogger, I didn’t post about it. (I don’t remember doing so, anyway.) But you know, the news that it’s fake (here too!) includes all kinds of speculations about whether the makers of this sham project are going to quit or not. After all, if it were me, I’d be turning the project on its head, making a film about this girl who’s hired to make …