Archive for the ‘Speculative Fiction’ Category

Not Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Not Science Fiction

I have, of recent, become a total fan­boy for SF Author Maureen McHugh.  I loved her sto­ries pub­lished in SciFiction, but the real tip­ping point for me has been her blog­ging. Today, she made a great post about Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and her own label for the genre of fic­tion that has been labeled stren­u­ously by the authors and pub­lish­ers, Not Science Fiction.

I love this term for it’s double-​​sidedness.  If you’re inclined, you can take the term lit­er­ally. If SF scares you, then the term is a com­fort. “There, there,” the pub­lisher coos softly.  “There is no Nerd Schmutz on this fine, fine book.”    But if you like SF and you have a sense of humor about these genre wars, then you can take it to mean that you will like it as SF despite what any­one says.  It’s like a secret hand­shake.  I say we make it Official.

PS: I guess I should read this book, huh? With endorse­ments from McHugh and Moles, I can’t go wrong.

Nine Reasons I Read Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Nine Reasons I Read Science Fiction

1. Neophilia.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea intro­duced the idea of neophilia to me in their great con­spir­acy the­ory mag­num opus, The Illuminatus Trilogy. Hagbard Celine, the half-​​Atlantian Discordian sub­ma­rine cap­tain describes the world as being divided into two types of peo­ple– neophiles and neo­phobes; those who are attracted by the new, and those who are repelled by it. I read this book when I was six­teen. I imme­di­ately rec­og­nized myself as a neophile. Science fic­tion writ­ers gen­er­ally attempt to show things that have never been seen before in their work. There is a tra­di­tion of the orig­i­nal within it. If there is a genre of fic­tion that can be described as neophillic, it is sci­ence fic­tion.

2. To chal­lenge my preconceptions.

I grew up in Kansas, which if you read the news at all, is a state where peo­ple are gen­er­ally very con­ser­v­a­tive. Racism is ram­pant. Homophobia was, at least when I was a child, the gen­eral rule. And if you weren’t Christian, then you were going to Hell. It is easy to accept all of these beliefs as fact when you are immersed in them. Even if you don’t agree with them, they find a way to seep into your mind. In that envi­ron­ment, sci­ence fic­tion, with it’s unusual and pro­gres­sive views about gen­der, race, sex, and reli­gion pro­vides an escape, and an alter­nate view point. Ursula K. LeGuin alone chal­lenged much of my pre­con­cep­tions in her work. Whether it was the peo­ple of color in the Earthsea books, or chal­leng­ing the idea of gen­der in The Left Hand of Darkness, her work opened up my mind to a world where cul­tural ideas are not hegemonic.

3. To travel to exotic places with­out leav­ing the house.

Science fic­tion is often set in places that no human being has ever vis­ited before. I love to travel, and with enough time, I could one day see much of what Earth has to offer. And I don’t think there is any sub­sti­tute for get­ting up and actu­ally going to the places. But some places are beyond the reach of a jet plane. Without sci­ence fic­tion, I would never know or imag­ine what the skies of Venus are like, never feel the breeze of an alien wind across my skin, or feel the dread as a small alien space­craft full of humans slips over the event hori­zon of a black hole. Science fic­tion inspires us to push this bound­ary of the lim­its of travel. I know more now about the sur­face of Mars than I could have expected to, ten years ago. I would bet that it was partly sci­ence fic­tion that inspired the NASA sci­en­tists to build the Mars rovers that gave me this knowledge.

4. To be pre­pared for pos­si­ble future.

1984. Fahrenheit 451. These are no longer fic­tion, they’re prac­ti­cally mod­ern day sur­vival guides. Science fic­tion pre­pares us for the “what ifs” of the future. Science fic­tion read­ers as a group are more pre­pared for what comes. We’ve been con­sid­er­ing the chal­lenges and moral dilem­mas of stem cells and cloning long before any­one else. The Singularity may be com­ing, and if any­one will be pre­pared for it, it will be the read­ers and writ­ers of sci­ence fiction.

5. To escape the mundane.

Because I need adven­ture and excite­ment and stim­u­la­tion! I work a desk job. I spend 48+ weeks a year in the same 100 mile square area. I see the same peo­ple, do the same tasks, and walk or drive the same streets day in, day out. Life is repet­i­tive. Science fic­tion allows me to escape that. I don’t want to read about peo­ple who have bor­ing jobs and rela­tion­ship prob­lems with their spouses. I want to read about things that stir sur­prise and amaze­ment in me–what we call sen­sawunda. I don’t get sen­sawunda from my day to day life very often. When I do, it’s a bless­ing. But I know that if I turn to my book shelf, I can get a hefty dose of it any time I want.

6. Because I care about plot.

Science fic­tion sto­ries often deal with Big Things. Saving the world. Saving the uni­verse, even. Plot seems to be more empha­sized in sci­ence fic­tion than it is in other gen­res, and it tends to have a larger scope. The stakes are higher. In the pro­to­typ­i­cal lit­er­ary story, the stakes are a col­lege professor’s mar­riage. Yawn. I want some­thing big on the line. I want schemes from my vil­lains, where the stake is noth­ing less than every­thing the pro­tag­o­nists hold dear. Little sto­ries are nice, from time to time, but its the big sto­ries that hold my atten­tion the best. And sci­ence fic­tion offers those.

7. To learn science.

Reading isn’t just about fun. I like it best when I read fic­tion that teaches me some­thing use­ful along with enter­tain­ing me. I find two gen­res par­tic­u­larly excel at this; his­tor­i­cal fic­tion and sci­ence fic­tion. I love sci­ence for the way it makes sense of the world in a log­i­cal man­ner. And you could argue that some sci­ence fic­tion is really just his­tor­i­cal fic­tion about the future. Both can occa­sion­ally pro­vide life lessons. One is from pre­vi­ous exam­ples and the other from theoretical.

8. Because it’s dan­ger­ous to like it.

Everybody has their way of being dif­fer­ent. For me, it’s being a SF nut. This got me picked on more than a few times in my child­hood. It gets me sneered upon by lit­er­ary writ­ers who hang out at the cof­fee shops around town. To some peo­ple, being a sci­ence fic­tion writer means I am lower on the totem pole than a garbage man. I like that. I don’t have much rebel in me, but I like tak­ing plea­sure in things that those kinds of peo­ple hate.

9. Because it offers hope.

Not all sci­ence fic­tion, but a great deal of it, has offered hope. Hope that the future can be bet­ter than the present. At times, it has fetishized the idea of progress, but when it is at its best, it can give hope to the lowli­est soul that their life, or their children’s lives could be bet­ter than it is today. Yes, there is a great tra­di­tion of dystopia fic­tion in the genre, but I would argue that dystopias are writ­ten from a posi­tion of optimism–that per­haps, if the author lays out their dystopian vision, the world can avoid it. Dystopian writ­ers see some­thing that could go wrong and warn against it. Even this is opti­mistic to me and offers hope.

I am not usu­ally a cheer­leader for sci­ence fic­tion. I think there can be some very bad things about it and its fan­dom. I do not believe that sci­ence fic­tion fans are bet­ter than any­one else. That is not what this post is about. It is about why I per­son­ally con­tinue to read sci­ence fic­tion today, twenty years after I dis­cov­ered my first Anne McCaffery book. I encour­age you to think about why you read sci­ence fic­tion too. Sometimes, we all need a reminder. I know that I did.

10 Things Your Website Should Have if You Are An Author

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

1. Your own domain name.

In this day an age, a domain costs almost noth­ing, and host­ing, not much more. I charge $15 a year for a domain and $20 a year for host­ing for my clients, and there might be cheaper (but less feature-​​rich) host­ing avail­able out there. Sff​.net might have been cool a decade ago, but it’s not now. It just looks unpro­fes­sional. Buy a domain, and if you can, make it your full pub­lish­ing name. If you can’t, don’t get too clever, by which I mean don’t pick some­thing you’re going to hate 10 years from now. Domain names can be changed, but you should really try to avoid it, to pre­serve your rat­ings in the search engines.

2. A biog­ra­phy and bib­li­og­ra­phy with lots and lots of links.

If some­one is com­ing to your web­site, it is likely that they want to know who you are, and what else you’ve done. Don’t be stingy here. Don’t pub­li­cize any­thing you’re embar­rassed of, such as that mpreg slash fic that you wrote late one night while drunk, but def­i­nitely include your bib­li­og­ra­phy, and if your story is avail­able online, for free in a webzine or for sale in some form, link to it. If you don’t, you’re miss­ing a chance for a sale to a poten­tial fan.

3. A News Blog with an RSS feed. Or a newslet­ter. Or both.

Note that I said a News Blog. Writer blogs are great enter­tain­ment, but they are noto­ri­ously clut­tered with non­sense quizzes, word counts, whin­ing, and so much other crap that find­ing out when an author you like has a story com­ing out can be harder than it should. Maintain a clean weblog that is sim­ply for announc­ing your sales, appear­ances, and other pro­fes­sional items of inter­est. Don’t use it to post pic­tures of your cats. I’m an RSS feed man myself, and I think they are the future, but per­haps you should do an email mail­ing list as well. Post the same con­tent to both, but make sure it’s clear that they are the same infor­ma­tion, so your fans don’t sign up for both and get irri­tated for receiv­ing dupli­cate information.

4. A pro­fes­sional design

This isn’t cheap, but if you are a pro­fes­sional author, you owe it to your­self to hire a designer who can build you some­thing nice and main­tain­able. Tony Greer does great work. Tobias Buckell’s web­site is a model exam­ple of this list. I work fairly afford­ably myself, and you may inquire for rates if you’re inter­ested. But seri­ously, your nephew who has a copy of Front Page 2000 isn’t going to be good enough. Spend a lit­tle money on it, and you’re going to have bet­ter results. People buy books based on cov­ers, and they’re going to judge you by how pro­fes­sional and fresh your design is as well.

5. Full sto­ries and/​or nov­els. Possibly excerpts.

Free sam­ples have been used in mar­ket­ing since the inven­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. Writers and other intel­lec­tual prop­erty cre­ators are often ter­ri­fied of this, and admit­tedly, there’s a risk that all your stuff will be stolen and you will be left pen­ni­less. If you’re lucky! Someone who comes to your web­site may not have read any­thing you have writ­ten. Post a story from a year or two. If you’re brave, put it in the Creative Commons as soon as you can. That might limit resale rights, but chalk it up as a mar­ket­ing expense. I’m not going to go into the Creative Commons too much here, as Cory Doctorow does it bet­ter than any­one else. Let me just say that I agree with him, but I under­stand those who don’t, and I don’t think this will make or break you. But try it out, and see what hap­pens. It worked for Peter Watts!

6. A way to buy your work.

Post links to Amazon, Fictionwise, what­ever. Make them promi­nent. If you have work in print for sale, it should be easy for me to buy it. Somebody really has to make this as easy as iTunes. But that’s a topic for another issue. Link, link, and link again.

7. A way to con­tact you.

Boo, spam! Nobody likes spam, but if you don’t have a way for fans or poten­tial pub­lish­ers to con­tact you, you’re miss­ing out on fan mail, hate mail, and pos­si­ble sales. There are javascript tricks you can use, or you can set up a spe­cific email address that you check on a reg­u­lar basis. You really should have this email address be at your domain above, too. Even if it for­wards to your gmail account. It’s a mat­ter of per­cep­tion. If you own a domain, and you should, use it for your email.

8. A Press Kit

I was run­ning out of ideas, so I stole this one from Tobias Buckell’s page. Short story authors prob­a­bly don’t need press kits, but nov­el­ists might. Photos, book cov­ers, and any­thing else that makes a reporter’s job eas­ier when he wants to report on your work is a very good thing.

9. A Goodies Section

I have seri­ous doubts about peo­ple lov­ing books so much that they want desk­top wall­pa­per, icons, and such, but hey, if it doesn’t cost you any­thing to make them or have them made by a designer, why not? Little rewards like this don’t cost much, but they might be just the edge you need to start a buzz about your lat­est work.Think out­side the box here. I’m hes­i­tant to give this idea away, but if your read­er­ship is young and nerdy, con­sider pub­lish­ing D&D gam­ing stats for your char­ac­ters and cre­ations. Make it easy and allow­able for your fans to play in your world. They’re not going to make any money off of it, so don’t worry. It stopped being yours when you pub­lished it.

10. Something nobody else has tried.

See the idea about about D&D stats. Do some­thing like that. Do some­thing wild and new. It’s a tough world out there for writ­ers. There are a lot of us, and I wish I could say that the best writ­ers win. But mar­ket­ing money has a direct effect on sales. If you’re read­ing this and giv­ing it seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion, then there’s a good chance that your pub­lisher doesn’t have any mar­ket­ing bucks for you. That means you need to take mat­ters into your own hands. A web­site with all the fea­tures I’ve described above costs any­where from $300-$500 from me. It could cost you thou­sands from other, equally qual­i­fied design­ers, but no mat­ter what, if you do it right, and you give it time, you’re going to make your money back. I won’t guar­an­tee it, but it’s bet­ter than noth­ing at all!

5 Things I don’t rec­om­mend doing:

  1. Featuring your photo promi­nently in the design.
  2. Posting your daily word counts and/​or in-​​depth analy­sis of your daily work. This is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers. Probably not so much to fans, unless they want to be a writer too. Keep a sep­a­rate blog for this.
  3. Your rejec­tions. I’ve ranted about this before. Posting about your rejec­tions is some­thing you should stop doing. I can under­stand why you might do it, but keep it pri­vate. You might say some­thing you regret. Editors read web­sites too.
  4. Excerpts of unpub­lished work. Sorry, nobody cares unless you’re super-​​established and semi-​​famous.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t release the whole thing online if you want.
  5. Bad reviews. I’ve not read books because of the bad reviews their own authors have pub­li­cized. If you don’t link them, I won’t hear about them. This is con­tentious, but I just don’t rec­om­mend it personally.

One last thing. I haven’t been fol­low­ing my own advice here, but you can be sure that after this, I will be, both for myself and for any future clients.

Today’s Market Health Question: How Many Readers Are There?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

How many indi­vid­u­als, all told in the English speak­ing world, do you think cur­rently read SF/​F short fic­tion, by which I mean read at least one story pub­lished in the past year? Do you think that num­ber is grow­ing or shrink­ing? Explain your num­ber, if you can. My thoughts after the jump.I don’t think the num­ber could be more than 35,000 peo­ple. This is a totally soft num­ber, and I’m guess­ing based on dou­bling the sub­scrip­tion fig­ure of the largest print mag­a­zine, which is as good of a method as I can think of. I sus­pect that we can’t just total up all the sub­scrip­tion num­bers because there’s a huge over­lap between the groups.

If that num­ber is even close to being right, it sure does make genre short fic­tion seem like the most niche of activities…

Now China and it’s SF mag­a­zine… that’s around half a mil­lion? I keep com­ing back to that. There’s some­thing in that num­ber, in that size that I can learn from, that is telling of the sit­u­a­tion, but I can­not fig­ure it out.

Honestly, after being in London, I am sur­prised short fic­tion isn’t more pop­u­lar than it is. Everyone on the tubes appeared to be read­ing some­thing. I saw a lot of books, but mostly the free papers. Has any­one ever tried to do a free paper con­sist­ing of fic­tion? I need to read up on the eco­nom­ics of those free papers. You could get one at every sin­gle tube sta­tion, from one of sev­eral people.

SF Magazines: Financial Models

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

For my own ben­e­fit as much as any­thing else, I’d like to run through the mod­els that I am aware of that can be used to finan­cially sup­port a magazine–whether it is a print or an elec­tronic mag­a­zine. Here’s what I got. If I miss any, please let me know and I will con­tinue to update this. These are not mutu­ally exclu­sive. Many mag­a­zines use a com­bi­na­tion of these.

Subscription/​Pay Model

Giving the con­tent in return for a sub­scrip­tion fee or a cover price. Generally sell­ing a bun­dle of stories/​content. Example: tra­di­tional print magazines.

Advertising Model

Selling access to your read­ers to adver­tis­ers, and plac­ing their adver­tis­ing among your con­tent. Example: most tra­di­tional print mag­a­zines sell adver­tis­ing as well.

Patron Model

Supported by a sin­gle per­son or small pri­vate group of peo­ple from pri­vate funds. Example: The Fortean Bureau was pri­mar­ily our pri­vate money. (If you ever donated? You are my hero).

Donation/​Fund Drive model

The NPR model, as I’ve heard it referred to. Regular requests for funds from read­ers, with no set amount. Example: Strange Horizons is the most suc­cess­ful exam­ple of this. I believe Escape Pod does this as well, but I haven’t seen any fund dri­ves from them.

Full Site Sponsorship

A sin­gle cor­po­rate entity, for what­ever rea­son, sub­si­dizes the mag­a­zine. Example: SCIFICTION. I seem to think Chizine as well?

Premium Content

Special access to spe­cial con­tent. A kind of sub­scrip­tion model. I’m not sure about this one, what do you guys think? Is it dif­fer­ent enough? Example: Salon used to do this, but I am not sure if they do anymore.These mod­els are irrel­e­vant as to whether a mag­a­zine is non­profit, hobby, or for-​​profit. Many of these mod­els are con­sid­ered fail­ures. Which ones do you think work or don’t? Perhaps the best solu­tion for a sus­tain­able mag­a­zine (online or off) would be a com­bi­na­tion of 3 or more?

I am not sure that the sub­scrip­tion model is work­ing very well any­more. As Chance pointed out in the com­ments of the Triad post yes­ter­day, com­par­ing Escape Pod to the Triad isn’t a good com­par­i­son because Escape Pod doesn’t have a cost to sub­scribe. I argued that just because the one has a dif­fer­ent model for sup­port than the other doesn’t mean that they can’t be com­pared as “mag­a­zines” with readerships.

Steve, I know you some­times read this– could you tell me or pro­vide me a link to where you might talk more about the fund­ing model behind Escape Pod? Chance argues that Escape Pod is your hobby, as another rea­son that the sub­scriber num­bers can’t be com­pared. I’d like to know more about how Escape Pod affords to func­tion, if you’re com­fort­able talk­ing about it.

Today’s Hypothesis About What Science Fiction Is

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Science fic­tion is a body of lit­er­a­ture in which it is held implicit and true that tech­nol­ogy, and by that exten­sion, human­ity, can change the world for bet­ter or worse. It holds true, essen­tially, that the world is muta­ble, and not static.

This would require that there is a body of lit­er­a­ture that does not hold this true. Thoughts?

The Central Problem with SFWA’s Main Website, And Solutions

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The Central Problem with SFWA’s Main Website, And Solutions

The cen­tral prob­lem with the func­tion­al­ity of SFWA’s web­site is that it doesn’t know who it is attempt­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with. This is under­stand­able, as there are sev­eral pos­si­ble audi­ences for the SFWA web­site: a poten­tial mem­ber, the mem­ber, and the gen­eral inter­ested pub­lic. You might argue that indus­try members/​publishers/​editors are also another audi­ence, but I would just group them in with the gen­eral public.

A lesser prob­lem is that the site is sim­ply dated in design. A quick look at the html code indi­cates pretty seman­tic mark-​​up, but an odd mix of inline styling and stylesheets. There’s a heavy dose of javascript required for the drop-​​down menus to func­tion, which I think is just fine. The links mostly lack title attrib­utes, which might cause prob­lems down the road with show­ing up prop­erly in search engines, but prob­a­bly not a huge deal there. But the real prob­lem is that it just isn’t very inter­est­ing to look at. This is the group of peo­ple that have inspired more big-​​budget amaz­ing action pic­tures with cool eye candy than any other genre of fic­tion. Their web­site should rep­re­sent this, while still being designed with acces­si­bil­ity in mind, of course. But there is a lot you could do to spice up the look.

The infor­ma­tion and tools are orga­nized in a fairly hap­haz­ard way. Why is the Search tool grouped with with the mem­ber login and con­tact infor­ma­tion? Why does the “Why should I join SFWA?” infor­ma­tion take prece­dence on the front page over the press infor­ma­tion? I would rethink the orga­niz­ing and impor­tance of infor­ma­tion here. The piracy cam­paign stuff? I would remove it entirely. It’s an impor­tant issue prob­a­bly, but does it really deserve such front page real estate? Also, I’m sorry, but web rings went out of style in 1998. This really serves to make the page look dated. Of all the pro­fes­sional writ­ing orga­ni­za­tions I looked at, the only one still fea­tur­ing a web ring is SFWA. That goes for the badge images as well. These are all signs of a designer that hasn’t really kept with the times, and are more indica­tive of a pri­vate web­site than a pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion. If you dis­agree with me, just scroll down to the links entry on this blog from a few days ago and look at the other orga­ni­za­tions. Even the worst of them have this right. SFWA’s web­site should get it right too.

Among other sug­ges­tions I will be detail­ing in the future, I rec­om­mend chunk­ing the nav­i­ga­tional infor­ma­tion together bet­ter. Focus the outward-​​facing web­site for prospec­tive mem­bers and the gen­eral pub­lic and remove all infor­ma­tion for exist­ing mem­bers to the log-​​in sec­tion. Prominently fea­ture a log-​​in screen some­where on the page for mem­bers, but have the site behind that be designed to their needs. It’s a dif­fer­ent project and a dif­fer­ent site.

Also, I highly rec­om­mend using some of the wasted screen space now to include a side­bar that rotates on a ran­dom basis from a list of sub­mit­ted authors. Call this Featured Member and have it include 50 words on an author along­side a nice photo of the author or the cover of their lat­est book.

Junk every­thing in the right col­umn and start over, basi­cally. None of that belongs here. And it’s all ugly and out­dated in look.

So these are just a few of my ini­tial thoughts on the web­site. As I am not a mem­ber, I can’t really speak for the pri­vate mate­ri­als behind the login page, but I think there is plenty of work to be done on the public-​​facing side of things.

Jetse de Vries on What Should be Left Unsaid in Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Jetse de Vries on What Should be Left Unsaid in Fiction

Jetse of Interzone has made a post talk­ing about the bal­ance of answered vs. unan­swered ques­tions in fiction.

This is an attempt to pin­point one of the things that makes a story res­onate: that is, one of those qual­i­ties that makes a story stay with the reader long after she/​he has fin­ished read­ing it. I’m aim­ing at what should be left unsaid in a story.

Different read­ers are going to want dif­fer­ent things out of a story. One thing I used to get burned on in crits was that every­one wanted more, but the “more” that they wanted, background-​​wise, was dif­fer­ent. I think as a writer, I end up try­ing to focus on only what is imme­di­ately impor­tant to the story, and then let­ting the reader fill in the rest. On my Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad story pub­lished in Interzone, one of the fun things some of my reader friends did was come up with the daikaiju mon­ster mas­cots for other states. That’s the kind of reader par­tic­i­pa­tion I whole-​​heartedly endorse.

Jason Stoddard Has a Blog (And He Knows How to Use it)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Jason Stoddard, a fan­tas­tic SF author that we pub­lished in the last issue of the Fortean Bureau, and with whom I have shared at least one issue of Interzone, I believe, has a blog, and lately, he’s using it to pro­pose a model for a SF mag­a­zine that could not only sur­vive, but thrive, in our cur­rent media envi­ron­ment. He says many things I have been try­ing to say for the last five years, and says them a hell of a lot bet­ter than I can. For instance:

Great. Now go back and read the above. Yeah, there are a bil­lion blogs out there, but most of them are noth­ing more than an exten­sion of a sophomore’s Livejournal. You’re the edi­tor of a major pub­li­ca­tion, or a pro­fes­sional writer. You have inter­est­ing things to talk about. Hell, you have con­tent. Set it free. There’s end­less inter­est in proto-​​science-​​fiction com­mu­ni­ties such as Slashdot, SomethingAwful, and BoingBoing about pub­li­ca­tions and authors. Use this.

YES, god yes. Listen to this man. How in the world SF mag­a­zines got left in the dust on the web rev­o­lu­tion is com­pletely beyond me. Time to catch up. Now. Or cease to be.

Fantastika

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Fantastika

Today, in his email newslet­ter, Warren Ellis offered this word as the Russian equiv­a­lent of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion: fan­tastika. I love it lots for rea­sons I can­not explain. The word has the mouth-​​feel that I want from a word describ­ing what I do. Would it be pre­ten­tious of me to adopt this word as my genre? Probably so. I will try it out for a while any­way. To see if it fits.

Been doing writ­ing most days on my lunch break from the day job lately. It’s about all my poor tired brain can stand, maybe 45 min­utes of sus­tained work. The prob­lem is, the piece I am work­ing on is lack­ing in the gonzo imag­i­na­tion that I want. I’ve been think­ing too much inside the greater box. I need to break out and really go side­ways with this one. For instance, I was writ­ing a small inter­ro­ga­tion scene, and I ended up writ­ing it straight cliche. I real­ized that most of the story was com­ing out that way. I wasn’t think­ing hard enough. I shall go to din­ner now and talk it over with Sarah and see what I can do to break free of my own medi­oc­rity this time. I’ve done it before. I know it can be done. I just need to moti­vate myself.