22 January 2008

Postmortem:“Babe, I Am Going to Leave You”

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.

21 January 2008

A CC-​​Licensed Story: “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You”

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

08 January 2008

Bt-​​cotton vs. the bollworm. Bollworm wins in 72 rounds!

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.

07 January 2008

The Role of Idea in my Fiction

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.

07 December 2007

Favorite Films of 2006

This is not a year end review post. Okay, maybe a little.6. The Fountain. Winner of the 2006 Cohen Brothers Cinemagraphic Award Usually Reserved For the Actual Cohen Brothers When They Can Be Bothered To Make a Film. This is on the list because it was very pretty to look at, even if the plot left me sleepy. I still like watch­ing Rachel Weis very much, but my patience is wear­ing thin for Hugh Jackman. He can act, so why doesn’t he?

5. Hollywoodland. The movie that reminded me why I used to like Ben Affleck, and the movie that was to L.A. what Black Dahlia really wanted to be. I was drawn into the mys­tery, left won­der­ing what had really hap­pened to the man who was super­man, the man who killed him­self with a Nazi pis­tol. Or did he?

4. Little Miss Sunshine Steve Carrell is worth watch­ing in any­thing except The Office. I can’t get into that show because it is too real­is­tic and I like my tele­vi­sion to be a reprieve from the real­ity of office labor. Lest I focus on his small roll too much, all of the actors in this film put in a great per­for­mance. I still hate Greg Kinnear, but he plays parts that want me to, so that’s prob­a­bly a com­pli­ment to him. Has Kinnear ever played a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter? He’s like that pop­u­lar guy from high school who was always nice to you in per­son, but you knew he really didn’t like you, he just wanted your vote for stu­dent body pres­i­dent. Everybody knew that guy, right? No? Just me? Moving on then.

3. The Prestige. The actors were all drained of their emo­tions via a spe­cial process prior to film­ing, but I really enjoyed this for the set­ting, for the sub­ject mat­ter, and for the plot. It had a few small prob­lems, but I was thrilled any­way. Christian Bale is really creepy, like, always. I imag­ine that chil­dren are espe­cially fright­ened of him. I won­der if this both­ers him?

2. Casino Royale. How weird is it that my sec­ond favorite movie of the year as of think­ing right now was a James Bond movie that every­one seemed to think was doomed to fail? Sure, it needed about 15 min­utes of poker-​​playing cut from it, and more (LOTS MORE) naked Eva Green (thank you, Mr. Internet, for mak­ing up for this defi­ciency in my celebrity nudity diet), but I loved how it took the Bond stan­dards and turned them on their heads. I espe­cially liked the car chase.

1. Brick. Jesus, that kid from Third Rock from the Sun can act. Noir dia­logue plus crazy teen actors with mad skills plus high school set­ting equals, I dunno, usu­ally I would say a really bad high school pro­duc­tion of The Big Sleep. Instead, we have Brick, which mes­mer­ized me com­pletely. I want to make movies like this some day.

Movies I have yet to see but am sure will be added to the list:
Pan’s Labyrinth
Children of Men
Volver
The Queen
Overlord
Thank You For Smoking

28 November 2007

An Interview Regarding Dr. Roundbottom

K. Tempest Bradford has inter­viewed me for Fantasy mag­a­zine about my Dr. Roundbottom project. The inter­view is now live here.

K. Tempest Bradford: Did the ini­tial inspi­ra­tion for Dr. Roundbottom start with the pho­tog­ra­phy or with the story?

Jeremiah Tolbert: The work started specif­i­cally in pho­tog­ra­phy. I had an oppor­tu­nity after a week of rain to go out and take some pic­tures of mush­rooms. I started play­ing with some of the images in post, and ended up cre­at­ing my most pop­u­lar pho­to­graph, the eye­ball mush­room. From there, I started writ­ing flash fic­tion around the pho­tog­ra­phy, and Dr. Roundbottom was born.

K. Tempest Bradford: Did the ini­tial inspi­ra­tion for Dr. Roundbottom start with the pho­tog­ra­phy or with the story?

Jeremiah Tolbert: The work started specif­i­cally in pho­tog­ra­phy. I had an oppor­tu­nity after a week of rain to go out and take some pic­tures of mush­rooms. I started play­ing with some of the images in post, and ended up cre­at­ing my most pop­u­lar pho­to­graph, the eye­ball mush­room. From there, I started writ­ing flash fic­tion around the pho­tog­ra­phy, and Dr. Roundbottom was born.

Tempest: How does a typ­i­cal Roundbottom image come about?

Jeremiah: I’m pretty strongly lim­ited by my own sur­round­ings and what I have the capac­ity to pho­to­graph myself. Some of them come from exper­i­ments in pho­to­graphic tech­niques that I want to try out, and some of them come from spe­cific images that I con­ceive and then try and pho­to­graph. Then some just come about as happy dis­cov­er­ies of odd things as I explore my sur­round­ings with cam­era in hand.

For instance, there are not a lot of peo­ple in the Roundbottom pho­tographs at this point because of my lim­ited bud­get and access to period cos­tumes. Luckily, I have leads on some cos­tum­ing resources, so that will change with time as I do more sto­ry­lines for the project. Also, my wife is hard at work sewing a more for­mal Roundbottom cos­tume for myself, and a cos­tume for a female char­ac­ter that’s part of the narrative.

27 November 2007

More Thoughts on the Depression of Science Fiction

Charlie Finlay said in the com­ments on the last post that, for the past sev­eral years, every SF novel he’s read has seemed this way, which is why he’s trended towards fan­tasy. So I put some thought into what SF nov­els I had read recently.

The Execution Channel was the most recent one. Holy smokes, was this depress­ing. So it fits the bill. Postsingular seemed a lot more upbeat. In fact, it was the first near-​​future SF any­thing that I’ve read in a while that didn’t men­tion ter­ror­ism. So I haven’t really noticed a trend of depres­sive ele­ments in my most recent read­ing of nov­els, but then, I don’t read a lot of SF novels.

I do know that Gordon has been talk­ing about get­ting a lot more sto­ries about death for a while now. Maybe I’m just now start­ing to see those sto­ries being pub­lished here and there.

It’s odd, because I’ve spent the past cou­ple of years kind of obsessed with death and the after­life, and now that I’m com­ing out of that obses­sion and start­ing to feel bet­ter, I find death all over the place in my read­ing. Was it that com­mon of a theme before? Not sure. I don’t remem­ber it being so, but it’s prob­a­bly a mat­ter of my changed per­spec­tive as much as any­thing else.

Some ques­tions.

1. Does any­one know how rel­a­tively opti­mistic the SF pub­lished in China is?

2. I don’t read Baen’s–are they more upbeat?

3. Do you think British writ­ers have been more prone to depres­sive stuff since their own ter­ror­ist attacks recently?

4. Is there a need for upbeat SF? Not nec­es­sar­ily more pos­i­tive, but maybe less, well, grim?

20 November 2007

On the Merits of Asking What You Hate (or Love)

Jason Stoddard has asked “What do you Hate Most about SF Short Fiction?”. I must say, I was dis­ap­pointed with the responses. There’s no con­sis­tency among the com­ments, just like there’s no con­sis­tency in the tastes of any large, diverse audi­ence. I haven’t got­ten to read the Something Awful responses yet, but I am look­ing for­ward to see­ing if they are more use­ful to me as a writer than “Put in more robots” and “too much char­ac­ter devel­op­ment” (a com­ment quickly fol­lowed by some­one com­plain­ing about too lit­tle char­ac­ter development).I kind of hoped a pat­tern would emerge, that we would diag­nose the prob­lem that every­one is so sure is there, because of the num­bers. We’re like doc­tors hud­dled around a comatose patient we believe to be dying because of the mon­i­tors, each shout­ing their own diag­no­sis. We’ll never come to any kind of con­clu­sion because it’s all a mat­ter of opin­ion. And you know what? I’m sick of opin­ion. Give me infor­ma­tion, sto­ries, humor, not opin­ions. Anything but those. Everyone has one, and every­one is always wrong.* As an aggre­gate. Being sick of opin­ion prob­a­bly means I am suf­fer­ing blog burnout. Anyway–

What I am begin­ning to hate most about short SF is its inces­sant need to talk about itself. If I put half as much energy into talk­ing about it and think­ing about it, I prob­a­bly would have got­ten a damn novel writ­ten by now.

I’m just going to shut up and write now.

*Exceptions made for Nick Mamatas and David Moles.

11 October 2007

Whale Fall

When a whale dies, an entire ecosys­tem blos­soms in its corpse. Species of clams, worms, and other inver­te­brates can be found on the bones of a dead whale that can­not be found any­where else. The “seeds” of these ecosys­tems seem to lay dor­mant in the ben­thos of the deep oceans, wait­ing for that one-​​in-​​a-​​million chance that a whale, it’s last breath escap­ing for the sur­face, will fall to the muck and mud. Imagine being stranded in the desert, your only hope for flour­ish­ing in the form of a giant falling from the sky. Tons and tons of meat and bone, pro­vid­ing nour­ish­ment and suc­cor. Later, sulfur-​​loving bac­te­ria pick over the bones and release hydro­gen sul­fide, launch­ing an entirely new ecosys­tem of chemosyn­thetic bac­te­ria. And it’s here where the diver­sity really gets wild, with nearly 200 dif­fer­ent species mak­ing up the com­mu­nity, feed­ing on the bac­te­ria, feed­ing on the feed­ers of the bacteria.

Swim in the sky
Creative Commons License photo credit: t2s

I see no beauty in death. I am ter­ri­fied of it, as a gen­eral rule. The loss of a human mind to the black maw of noth­ing is the only thing that fright­ens me, really. My panic attacks, at their root, are all about my fear of death. But, for some rea­son, I read about whale falls, and I am filled with awe and amaze­ment. There is beauty there, for me, and I don’t know why. A great, amaz­ing crea­ture dies, and gives life to not just one, but sev­eral ecosys­tems, for years and years after its death.

I want my death, when it comes, if it comes (as I hope to catch the wave of life exten­sion sci­ence and live for centuries–a fool­ish hope, but I can­not relin­quish it), to be as beau­ti­ful and as gen­er­a­tive as a whale fall. I want what I have done in my life to cre­ate as much, per­haps. And the fear of death that I have–maybe it’s because I know I haven’t done that yet. Now would be too soon. I’m not ready. That’s what the attacks are about. Not being ready.

I refuse to come to terms with the idea of my own mor­tal­ity. Not yet. Not until I can die like the whales do.

19 August 2007

To Save SF Short Fiction, We Had to Destroy It

(Warning, the below is poorly thought out and writ­ten hastily. I will write more later this week.)
Doug Cohen has recently launched a sub­scribe to a SF mag­a­zine drive via his Livejournal.

I have a sus­pi­cion that telling the SF writ­ing blo­gos­phere to sub­scribe to short fic­tion mag­a­zines in an effort to save short fic­tion is like instruct­ing a bunch of buggy whip mak­ers to buy buggy whips to save the buggy whip man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try.  I know Doug means well, and I don’t mean this as a crit­i­cism of him, but I am very doubt­ful that telling a small group of active online fan­dom to sub­scribe to mag­a­zines will make a bit of dif­fer­ence in the gen­eral decline.   I’ve been just as guilty

The gorilla in the room that we rarely acknowl­edge is that nobody wants to read short fic­tion.  If they did, then there wouldn’t be this mess. I’ve heard and read hand wav­ing about the changes in dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els, but hon­estly, I don’t buy it.  In this day and age, if you have a burn­ing desire to read sci­ence fic­tion short sto­ries, you can Google up a mag­a­zine in less than a second.

Do I think that the pub­lic could be mar­keted towards to encour­age the read­ing of more short fic­tion? Maybe.  A good mar­ket­ing team can sell just about any­thing.  Do I think any­one has the money to back a large cam­paign like this?  No.  SFWA would be the only orga­ni­za­tion that I could see such an ini­tia­tive com­ing from, and they’re a mas­sive joke; an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to inter­nal pol­i­tics and rumor­mon­ger­ing more than the decline and col­lapse of the indus­try around it.

There is no solu­tion.  The public’s inter­est has moved on.  If you’re a writer, go write video games, movies, tele­vi­sion, or books, in that order of pop­u­lar­ity.  That is where the public’s inter­est is right now, and if you don’t like it, then I’m afraid that you should prob­a­bly get used to the idea that short fic­tion is a small, niche hobby of lit­tle impor­tance.  I’m fine with that.  I find that I enjoy writ­ing it, and that’s enough for me.  Short fic­tion for me is a way to learn writ­ing, but I won’t regret leav­ing it behind if I were to crack another (more pop­u­lar and bet­ter pay­ing) medium, or find some amal­gam of sev­eral of my own.

I don’t sup­port the record indus­try for its fail­ing busi­ness model. I don’t think the SF print mag­a­zine world deserve spe­cial treat­ment either.  I do, in fact sub­scribe to quite a few mag­a­zines.  But it’s not out of any effort to save them from the dust­bin. There’s plenty to read online, and will be as long as weirdos like me keep writ­ing it.

I’ve been around and around the fund­ing mod­els for online mag­a­zines in my head.  I’ve con­cocted the most ridicu­lous Web 2.0 mod­els for online pub­lish­ing that you can imag­ine.  But none of them will work, because there’s no evi­dence what-​​so-​​ever that there is enough pub­lic inter­est to jus­tify the build­ing of such a thing.  Every model fails, because there just aren’t enough peo­ple inter­ested in read­ing and sup­port­ing a mag­a­zine mon­e­tar­ily for it to even sus­tain itself.   Don’t quote Strange Horizons at me, either.  Their fund drive doesn’t seem to be doing too well this time around.

Science Fiction, meet the long tail.  It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.