Archive for January, 2008
Postmortem:”Babe, I Am Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
Yesterday, I released my intensely personal story of death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope with death, “Babe, I am Going to Leave You” as a CC-licensed story. A friend asked what my thinking was behind doing this, so I thought I’d break it down in a blog post, in case anyone else was interested.I wrote this story, over the course of about a year, in an attempt to come to terms with my own father’s death from cancer. I always intended to try and publish it somewhere like any other story I wrote, but once I tried doing so, I found I had invested too much of myself to be able to handle the rejections. Most rejections are slightly painful, but you can shrug them off. I just couldn’t shrug off rejections to this story.
I struggled with whether I should essentially “self-publish” the story. I don’t have a large readership here. I’m not John Scalzi or Jay Lake, although I hope to attract as many followers some day. Am I the only writer who wonders about maximizing the audience for their stories, or do we all worry about that? I don’t make much money from my stories, so I’ve focused on growing an audience more than the money.
I also worried that some would see releasing the story myself as a coward’s way out. I do feel guilty for not trying harder to find a place to publish the story that could have given it more readers than I could on my own. The story is, in a big way, my way of honoring my father. Did I do him honor just releasing it to the handful of people who read this? I don’t know. I was tired of having it here, and having no one read it though. I really wanted to do good with this story. I had experienced something profound and painful, and I wanted to help others get through a similar experience. The chance to do some good, even a little, is what convinced me it was the right thing to do.
I want to thank those of you who linked my story in your own blogs. I really appreciated that. It made me feel much more like I made a good choice here. And those of you who have written me, thanking me for posting the story. I am glad that it has helped you.
In the future, I will definitely continue to release reprints of my stories online under the Creative Commons. It can only help a writer at my stage of career. I don’t think I will release any other unpublished stories though, because I think it’s too easy and attractive to circumvent the rejection/acceptance process.
For example, I have this story about a plague that turns famous people into plastic statues and about the people who collect the formerly famous like baseball cards. It’s got a very political slant, and never found a home probably because of that, or maybe because it’s not as funny as I think it is. There’s a strong temptation to just publish it on the web, especially because it’s partially about Bush and he’s about to leave the White House (I hope) and the story will lose its relevancy at that point. I don’t know. Maybe I can find a publisher for it int he next 9 months. Or I can sell it as alt-history futurism later.
Still, regardless, I am glad I released this one story this way. Thank you for reading it.
A CC-Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Top Post
A CC-Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”
I slept very badly last night, and had a migraine to end all migraines. I’m slowly recovering this morning. I recently woke up and, along with this lingering headache, I found I have an overwhelming desire to give something away.
I’ve posted a story online under a Creative Commons license. It’s about death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope. A lot of it really happened. Some of it did not. It’s so intensely personal that I can’t bear to receive another rejection calling it “slight” or anything else, so here it is, posted for anyone to read and call “slight” or anything else they want to call it. What is important to me is that maybe someone reads it who is going through something similar and feels a little less alone. Writing it sure helped me. But your milage may vary.
With that said, here’s the link to the story. Share it as you see fit.
Babe, I’m Going to Leave You
Bt-cotton vs. the bollworm. Bollworm wins in 72 rounds!
Filed Under: Science
First documented case of pest resistance to biotech cottonNature is wicked awesome. Let me show you.
This story is about three organisms. First, we have cotton plants. Tasty, yummy cotton plants. Secondly, we have the bollworm, aka Helicoverpa zea. Finally, we have a little bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis which produces a toxin that kills insects. We call that toxin Bt for short.
In 1996, some smart biologists decided to take the genes from B. thuringeiensis that produce those toxin proteins and insert them into the genome of the cotton plant (and potatoes and corn too). This served to make the cotton plants not so tasty to the bollworm. Tasty cotton plants become “ack-ack, plant of death!” to them. This was good because the cotton crop is worth $4.5 billion annually, and 70% of the damage caused to the crop is caused by catterpillars like the lowly bollworm.
All was well in the land of cotton for a while. But then in 2003, bollworms were found eating Bt-cotton plants! What gives? Evolution, baby!
Here are a few cool things about this. Places where bt-cotton is grown as a huge monoculture resulted in faster evolution of bt-resistance in the bollworm. Basically, the only bollworms that could be found to mate with had a tendency to be resistant, and so you got really fast resistance in the overall population. In places where bollworms could end up on non bt-resistant plants, the resistance developed much more slowly.
Now, of course the gengineers at Monsanto have upped the ante and produced a cotton variety that produces two varieties of Bt-toxin. For now, the bollworms are resistant to only one of those two. Soon, the scientists will develop another variant that kills the resistant bollworms and reset the clock.
So I looked it up, and the bollworms have a lifecycle of 30 days. BT cotton went out in 1996, and in 2003, we have levels of resistance large enough that we see it. That means in roughly 72 generations, H zea populations developed widespread resistance to the toxin.
There are two morals to this story. One: insects evolve really fast. Two: insects evolve resistance even faster when their environment is uniformly poisonous. Plant some normal plants here and there to provide refuges so that evolved resistance develops slower.
Think about the above the next time you spray everything you own with antibacterial soap.
The Role of Idea in my Fiction
Filed Under: My Writing, Writing Process
Part of my minicrisis last week about writing and getting back to it was that I was having trouble generating the ideas part of the equation. This is almost always my starting point; a cool idea that I can at least delude myself is something new that I haven’t seen done before. Or a twist on an old idea. Just, something fresh. Some people might start with a plot or a character, but I don’t find myself working that way.My flow is Idea->Character->Plot ->Theme magically appears when it all comes together. Theme for me is a mysterious thing that the subconscious puts into the work. It’s like the underpants gnomes from South Park/Slashdot meme: Step One: Get Idea, Character, and Plot. Step Two: write story. Step Three:???? End Result: Theme (Profit!).
Lately, I have been trying to establish an idea for an overall mood when I start a piece, particularly in my fantasy stories. From my reading of classic, non-genre short stories, it seems that mood is the most important thing. Stories can get away with not having a plot like genre readers expect, because the way the story makes you feel is the whole point. I think genre stories are often thought as being about how they make you think. There’s no reason they can’t be about both, and I suspect the most successful stories are ones that do both.
I think I’ve been working on the mood/how the story makes you feel thing for a while now, but I came to it first by trying to be funny. Later, I broaded my emotional horizons, you could say. I think “The Yeti Behind Me” (Published in the Fantasy Sampler) is my most successful story for creating a mood. Followed by an as-of-yet unpublished story called “Maggie’s Man.” But even early work like “Girl with the Sun in her Head” had some of this. It wasn’t intentional then, but it ended up in there anyway, and I’m sure that’s part of why it sold.
I don’t know why, but I have real trouble trying to put a mood into a more science fictional piece. For some reason, when I work in that mode, thinking about things like emotional content is much harder. The analytical very easily overpowers the emotional for me. It’s something I really need to work on, because I would like to write more science fiction than I do.
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