Posts Tagged ‘Fiction’

New Story and New Article

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Here’s a quick note to say that I have two new pieces of writ­ing out in the world this month for your read­ing plea­sure.  The first is one of my all-​​time favorite short sto­ries, “Work, With Occasional Molemen”:

I blinked in the sud­den bright light, and so did the three mole men who were slumped at drunken angles on my futon. Frozen pizza boxes and emp­ties lit­tered the floor. One of them hic­cupped. A sec­ond barfed all over my throw rug with a loud spat­ter­ing sound. The third, and most familiar-​​looking, made a groan­ing sound like the gate of an old aban­doned church­yard and waved a paw weakly in my direction.

I stared at the scene for a few sec­onds longer. Worked my jaw a lit­tle to keep it from lock­ing up. “Screw it,” I finally said, and stomped back up stairs. It was more than I could deal with right after a six­teen hour shift.

You can read that here over at Giganotosaurus, which has run some amaz­ing fic­tion so far.  I’m really proud to be part of the exper­i­ment in pub­lish­ing longer works online.  Fun fact:  this is by far the longest thing I have ever writ­ten at about 12,000 words.  I hope you enjoy it.  Don’t say a word to nobody if you don’t, or the mole­men will get you…

Second, if you buy the ebook edi­tion, you can read my fun arti­cle “Five Animals That Will Take Over the World After We Eradicate Ourselves,” in the January issue of Lightspeed Magazine.  If you aren’t hip to the ereader thing or can’t afford the issue, you can wait until the 25th to read it on the website!

Story is False Memory; Why I Write

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Of the many lines that stand out in Delany’s About Writing, this one in par­tic­u­lar keeps twist­ing itself around in my mind. 

Fiction is an intel­lec­tu­ally imag­i­na­tive act com­mit­ted on the mate­ri­als of mem­ory that tries for the form of history.

And then later:

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actu­ally doing, how­ever, is using words to evoke a series of micromem­o­ries from your own expe­ri­ence that inmix, join, and con­nect in your mind in an order the writer con­trols, so that, in effect, you have a sus­tained mem­ory of some­thing that never hap­pened to you.

That false mem­ory is what a story is.

If you had asked me prior to read­ing the above what a story does or is, I would have prob­a­bly said: “I don’t know… I guess it can do a lot of dif­fer­ent things.  It makes you feel emotions—short sto­ries do that par­tic­u­larly. Uh…” and then I would have trailed off.

I’ve put lit­tle thought into the nature of fic­tion itself because it always seemed self-​​evident to me.  I didn’t think I would have any­thing to learn from ask­ing what it is.  The les­son I’ve learned this week, from Delany (just one of many) is that by under­stand­ing what fic­tion and story is, I can under­stand my inner process more.  I under­stand fic­tion more.  It’s a small rev­e­la­tion that casts know­ing light into shad­ows, reveal­ing beau­ties that I hadn’t real­ized were there. 

If I were to hon­estly inter­ro­gate why I write, I would admit that I write for sev­eral rea­sons. They’re not all flat­ter­ing reveals either. 

First, I write to impress oth­ers with my clev­er­ness.  I’m writ­ing because I want oth­ers in the world to acknowl­edge me and my ideas.  That’s the self­ish, prim­i­tive rea­son. I’m writ­ing at least on one level to gar­ner atten­tion.  Maybe I didn’t get enough of it as a kid.  But a decent amount of plea­sure from writ­ing comes from know­ing when oth­ers have read it and enjoyed it.  I have a drive to be liked and appre­ci­ated, and writ­ing is how I attempt to sat­isfy it, partially.

Two, I write to fig­ure out who I am, and what’s inside of me.  So much of our brains and selves are locked up in the sub­con­scious.  My con­scious mind, in its desire to under­stand every­thing, works col­lab­o­ra­tively with the sub­con­scious on fiction—it’s the clos­est I can get to hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion between the two halves of mind. I say halves, but sub­con­scious might be more like 80% of our mind, and the con­scious 20%.  By writ­ing fic­tion, I tap into that mys­te­ri­ous part, like tap­ping a maple tree for syrup.   Or per­haps a min­ing metaphor is bet­ter, because when you dig into a hole, you never know what you’re going to dig up.  Might just be dirt and rock.  Might be a dis­gust­ing worm or cen­tipede.  Or you might find a gem. 

Three: I write to enter­tain myself and oth­ers.  I find the act of read­ing pleasurable—I imag­ine any­one read­ing this blog does, and it goes with­out say­ing. However, I know a lot of peo­ple who don’t enjoy read­ing, and they don’t do much of it.  They read maybe a book or two a year.  I write sto­ries hop­ing that I can pro­vide a plea­sur­able diver­sion from life for a short period of time. Entertainment is such a bland word for what we do, but there it is.

Four: I write because I can­not paint, or draw, or play music.  I write because I’m deeply com­pelled to cre­ate things, and writ­ing is what I can do.  I’m not a mas­ter of words, but I have at least some com­pe­tence.  I think to some degree we take the path of less resis­tance when it comes to cre­ativ­ity.  I branch out reg­u­larly to other cre­ative fields, but I always return to the writ­ten word, because for me, it’s what comes most naturally. 

Relating these rea­sons back to what fic­tion is, I see that some of them are irrel­e­vant to craft, and some of them are.  The sec­ond rea­son is per­haps the most con­nected.  Knowing now that what I am attempt­ing to do is cre­ate false mem­ory puts writ­ing into a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive for me.  The words I choose will be dif­fer­ent now.  The way I struc­ture them will be as well.   When you’re writ­ing to cre­ate a last­ing mem­ory, you have to work dif­fer­ently than if you’re writ­ing sim­ply to entertain. 

I can feel some half-​​formed thoughts devel­op­ing in the rear of my mind regard­ing how one delib­er­ately cre­ates the effect of false mem­ory, and I’ll share them when they’re more fully cooked.  This is a les­son that is still in progress, as most of them are.

What do you think?  Why do you write, and how does it relate to what fic­tion is, using either Delany’s def­i­n­i­tion or one of your own?

On Richness

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Lately, I’ve been try­ing to iden­tify where my writ­ing really dif­fers from the stuff that’s great, great writ­ing. There are a hell of a lot of places, but I’ve fix­ated for a while now on this con­cept of richness.

The sto­ries that *really* blow me away exude infor­ma­tion and con­fi­dence. They are full of a rich­ness of detail that is bog­gling. Telling details show up in nearly every sen­tence. The entire story works to con­vince you of this place, these char­ac­ters, these events.

A great exam­ple of a story with amaz­ing rich­ness was David Moles’ “Finnisterra.” I think China Mieville’s nov­els demon­strate it pretty well too. I see it in many of the sto­ries I have read by Gord Sellar as well. Basically, I see rich­ness as one of the defin­ing qual­i­ties of award-​​winning writing.

The rich telling details are rarely fab­ri­cated whole cloth. They’re believ­able because they draw from some real world knowl­edge. David uses mul­ti­ple lan­guages and cul­tures effort­lessly because he knows them inti­mately. China writes about cities because he dwells in them com­pletely. London is not so dif­fer­ent from his fan­tas­ti­cal cities. And Gord is so immersed in Korean cul­ture it can’t help but ooze onto the page in a totally engag­ing way.

I strug­gle with rich­ness in par­tic­u­lar because I’m not sure there’s any way to learn rich­ness other than to immerse your­self in a sub­ject like they do. I think the rea­son many new writ­ers work fall flat for me is because the only thing they are immers­ing them­selves in is writ­ing and SF/​F. The mark of some­one who really wants to get out there seems to be some­one who takes pas­sion for some­thing else and really dri­ves that home in a story.

There may be veins of rich­ness to tap into from my life, but I’m not sure. It leaves me wish­ing I could pack up and do some for­eign travel for six months all while read­ing trav­el­ogues and his­tory books. I feel like I just don’t have enough packed into my brain that isn’t about com­put­ers and web design that can be used to enrich my work.

So that’s the next big thing I’m work­ing on in improv­ing my writ­ing. What’s yours?

What Is a Podcastable Story?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Greg Van Eekhout asks:

Thoughts on what kinds of sto­ries trans­late well to pod­casts and what kinds don’t?

First of all, full dis­claimer. I am the man­ag­ing edi­tor at Escape Pod, the sci­ence fic­tion audio pod­cast. I’ve been doing this job for about 3 or 4 months now, and I am by no means an expert on to topic. I can only com­ment as to my per­sonal tastes here. I reserve the right to change my opin­ion as I learn more about my job and what seems to work.

I can talk much more eas­ily about what does not work well in pod­casts. Here are a few things:

  • Typographic weird­ness, of the sort you would see in The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
  • Fiction that plays with for­mat­ting in some way–fake news report, branch­ing dia­logue, and so on. This would be great if we pro­duced audio dra­mas, but Escape Pod approaches pro­duc­tion in a very straigh­for­ward nar­ra­tive fash­ion. I’d love to do more radio-​​drama style read­ings, and we have one com­ing up that was recorded live by Steve Eley at a con­ven­tion. But the pro­duc­tion that goes into a reg­u­lar episode is dif­fi­cult enough.
  • Stories that have a lot of very short scenes and lots of jump­ing around in time.

The last one is the one I’m least cer­tain about, but I find that sto­ries that go back and forth in time can be a bit more con­fus­ing in audio for­mat. On the page, it seems eas­ier to orga­nize the events into a chrono­log­i­cal order, but when lis­ten­ing to a story, it is harder to do this. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing I pay atten­tion to.

Okay, so what works par­tic­u­larly well? Here are some gen­eral ideas:

  • A strong, unique per­spec­tive or voice. It’s my expe­ri­ence that some of the most pop­u­lar EP episodes have been from a very unique char­ac­ter, such as a bomb dog or the AI that resides in a soldier’s hel­met. These sto­ries are often in first per­son per­spec­tive. That’s not to say that I find first per­son bet­ter than third per­son. First per­son cou­pled with a really unique and orginal voice stands out very well. Like it does in reg­u­lar fiction.
  • All the other, usual things that make a story good.

Other than the few things I think don’t work that are spe­cific to the audio for­mat, I use basi­cally the same cri­te­ria for select­ing a story in audio that I would for select­ing in print. I have some restric­tions unique to Escape Pod, such as length. I can’t tell you how many times I remem­ber what I think would be a great story fo rthe pod­cast, only to look it up and find out that it was a novella. It’s some­thing I’d like to see us do more of in the future, but I’d want to pay more for them and pos­si­bly seri­al­ize them over the course of two or more episodes. It’s some­thing I think about a lit­tle when I have time.

If you lis­ten to pod­cast fic­tion, what do you think? What kinds of sto­ries really work well for you in audio? Try to focus on the things you think work par­tic­u­larly well, and cite spe­cific exam­ples if you like. This will make up for my rather under­de­vel­oped list. If you have some­thing crit­i­cal to say about a par­tic­u­lar pod­cast story, share it on the forums over at the ‘cast or send it to our feed­back email, as a favor to me, please.

Postmortem: What the hell was #futureJer?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My 3 month long exper­i­ment in 140 char­ac­ter fic­tion posts ended on Sunday.  You can read my ser­ial fic­tion #future­Jer on the Thaumatrope web­site here.  The premise was  pretty sim­ple: I attempted to imag­ine my life 2 years into the future if our econ­omy doesn’t get any bet­ter.  It’s fairly grim, but has a touch of hope to it too.  The cast were barely fic­tional ver­sions of my fam­ily and friends, and it takes place in rural Kansas.

The Genesis of a Twitter Serial

Back before I was actu­ally laid off, but knew the threat was loom­ing, I was expe­ri­enc­ing a lot of anx­i­ety.  On a whim, I decided to imag­ine how bad things could get to exter­nal­ize my fears, and I started twit­ter­ing this in the form of #future­Jer.  Within a cou­ple of days, Nathan Lilly, the edi­tor of Thaumatrope, direct mes­saged me and offered to pay me to do what I was already doing, at pro rates no less.  It was an easy deci­sion to make.

Postmortem

I never had any inten­tion of telling a story when I started out doing this, but once I was offered money, I had to give it an arc.  I intro­duced the ele­ments of the preg­nancy and the grow­ing vio­lence to develop the drama.  I was hap­pi­est about the project when I was sim­ply imag­in­ing our lives as essen­tially sub­sis­tence farmer/​hunters.  I find some­thing deeply com­pelling about a life with­out work, where you sim­ply grow your own food, main­tain your own home, and enjoy life.  I think we’re hard­wired more for the hunter/​gatherer or farmer life more than we are for work­ing in offices.

The tone prob­a­bly got even darker when I was actu­ally laid off at the end of January.  I sat down a few days later and wrote the entire month of February in an after­noon, plot­ting out the remain­der.  I sus­pect the final bit felt slightly more cohe­sive than the bits that led up to it.

Overall, it was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in writ­ing on the fly, and hope­fully I didn’t screw it up too much.  Also, I hope it doesn’t turn from fic­tion to real­ity, because I don’t actu­ally know how to build or repair wind tur­bines or cas­trate bulls, although I’m will­ing to learn if some­one wants to teach me!

First Story of 2009: Engines of Survival, by Larissa Kelly

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

At least, the first one I have read.  My goal is to read at least one a week now that I am writ­ing again.  My think­ing is

Strange Horizons Fiction: Engines of Survival, by Larissa Kelly.

It’s always the lit­tle things in the future that are the hard­est to adjust to. You’ll be walk­ing in the park after mak­ing your deliv­ery, tak­ing amused note of the robot nan­nies and the teenagers rac­ing in their jet har­nesses, soak­ing in the expected nov­elty of the scene. And then all at once, you real­ize that the young man on the path ahead isn’t walk­ing a small dog, as you had orig­i­nally thought, but a raccoon.

Cryptic cap­sule review: like an acci­den­tal brush of an attrac­tive stranger’s hand across your own in a crowded space.

Speaking of short fic­tion, I miss Nick Mamatas over at Clarkesworld.  Damn you Viz!

On Giving Up on Fiction Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been talk­ing about this in pri­vate for a while now, but I’ve decided to talk about it pub­li­cally.  There’s a lot of infor­ma­tion out there about how to start writ­ing, but there’s not a lot writ­ten about how to stop.  Sorry if you’ve heard some of this before.

I’ve been strug­gling with writ­ing since my father’s death a few years ago.  His death was fol­lowed by his brother, then his mother, then both of my mother’s par­ents within a year.  Around the same time, my lit­tle sister’s health prob­lems became sig­nif­i­cant enough that she needed a kid­ney trans­plant.  Our fam­ily was put through the wringer, and I did not come out of it okay.

Early last year, my occa­sional panic attack prob­lem turned into a daily panic attack prob­lem.  Eating any­thing made me feel sick, and feel­ing sick felt like dying, and then I really lost it.  I tried to get help via my med­ical doc­tor, but they were afraid to pre­scribe a high enough dose of any­thing to help me.  I finally gave up and went to a psy­chi­a­trist who quadru­pled the med­ica­tion and finally started get­ting my attacks under con­trol.  The panic attacks had gone on for so long that I had lost over 50 pounds.  After get­ting med­ica­tion work­ing to con­trol the attacks,  I con­tin­ued to lose weight.  Recently, to my dis­may I’ve started to regain some, but that’s a topic for another post.

So it wasn’t until last year that men­tally I was start­ing to come back together.  Prior to my father’s ill­ness, I was pretty solid. I was enthu­si­as­tic and I was very pro­duc­tive as a writer.  I hated Laramie, but liv­ing there moti­vated me some­how to write 1–3 short sto­ries a week.  It was a won­der­ful out­let, and I learned a lot in my time there and started mak­ing my first few big sales.

So come the bad times of the last few years, my pro­duc­tion ground to a halt.  I had been work­ing on a novel loosely based on my father’s child­hood in Kansas in the 70s called Prince Starling when he called to tell me he had can­cer.  I think the coin­ci­dence here dam­aged me in some fun­da­men­tal way inside regard­ing writ­ing.  It broke some con­nec­tion I had to my cre­ative spirit.  The mon­key deep inside some­how decided, ridicu­lously, that by hav­ing used my father’s sto­ries that way, it was some how respon­si­ble for his illness.

I wrote some while he strug­gled with it.  I really didn’t believe he was dying until he was in hos­pice, because he did such a good job of pre­tend­ing he was going to beat it.  I will always react with sus­pi­cion to claims of recov­ery from can­cer now.  But I believed because I wanted to believe and I had to believe.

Now, in the last six months, I was laid off from a hor­ri­ble job and after a cou­ple of months of ter­ri­fy­ing free­lance scur­ry­ing, I got my best job yet with a new com­pany. I  work from home, I have tremen­dous cre­ative free­dom, and I get to work with cut­ting edge web tech­nolo­gies.   The only down­side is that it’s pretty time con­sum­ing and it leaves me more men­tally drained at the end of the day than I have ever been.

Rather than fight it, I’ve decided to just go with it.  The job is great, but it takes enough from me that I find writ­ing to be far too dif­fi­cult to man­age at this time.  Roundbottom takes up a con­sid­er­able chunk of my free time and I find it mostly very cre­atively ful­fill­ing.   I cer­tainly won’t run that site and project for the rest of my life, but I could get sev­eral years out of it for sure.

I love the idea of writ­ing.  I love writ­ing ideas.  But lately, the strug­gles to keep my life afloat have left me with lit­tle energy to deal with the fight of publishing.

Truth is, I am still pretty emo­tion­ally sen­si­tive.  I was much thicker-​​skinned before all this, but neg­a­tive reviews lit­er­ally send me into stu­pid tears.   Rejections some­times as well.   My one and only Clarkesworld rejec­tion con­firmed my worst fears about my inabil­i­ties and I nearly made the deci­sion there to give up on writ­ing per­ma­nently.    I do not have what it takes to shrug off rejec­tion very well.  Perhaps its because I have deep per­sonal issues iwth the sub­ject of rejec­tion or some­thing.  Either case, I can’t seem to make it not both­er­ing me, so when I’m doing it, it’s a major source of pain for me.

So to recap,  per­sonal issues, strug­gle with time and energy, plus inabil­ity to han­dle rejec­tion (all adding up to what is prob­a­bly a lack of motivation)–these are the rea­sons I have decided to set aside my pur­suit of a side-​​career as a fic­tion writer, at least until I have a bet­ter grip on the basics of a life, a fam­ily, and a job.

I hope those of you who are my writer and edi­tor friends won’t drift away because I’m not writ­ing.  I will be more than happy to read stuff for peo­ple.  I will not be giv­ing up read­ing, and talk­ing about SF.  Just putting any real story words out myself, except for the weekly Roundbottom sched­ule stuff which is not insignificant.

I don’t con­sider this a per­ma­nent retire­ment.  It’s still a pas­sion of mine, and I hope to return to it when I feel like it’s in me, maybe in a cou­ple of years.

The Mainstreaming of Science Fiction on TV?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert
Lost (TV series)Image via Wikipedia

The ABC series Lost is, quite pos­si­bly, the most broadly suc­cess­ful sci­ence fic­tion tele­vi­sion show yet. While rat­ings have been on a decline in this, the fourth sea­son, the season’s pre­miere pulled in 16.07 mil­lion view­ers. Now, these are Nielsen num­bers, which I con­sider sus­pect at best, but it shows that the show is very pop­u­lar, and almost cer­tainly not just with tra­di­tional SF fans (those num­bers can­not be accounted for purely by fans). Current episodes have dealt openly with sci­ence fic­tion tropes (which I will not name exactly to avoid spoil­ers). You could argue about the true clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the show, but it most cer­tainly falls into sci­ence fic­tion, as well as maybe a cou­ple of other genres.

When the show first started, fans knew some­thing was unusual, but that was a bit sub­tle. Dozens of peo­ple had sur­vived a hor­rific plane crash, land­ing on a strange island. Compasses don’t work. There’s a weird radio trans­mis­sion. And there’s a mon­ster in the jun­gle that nobody can see.

Still, I sup­pose, many audi­ence mem­bers dis­in­clined to like SF could make the case for the show being in the thriller/​mystery genre. And it did have a heavy human, more dra­matic ele­ment in the form of each episode’s character-​​centric back story arcs. It wasn’t until late sea­son 2 that things really began to take a turn for the spec­u­la­tive. And even then, it was sub­tle, just a few ele­ments. But as the show has pro­gressed, it’s become clear that the entire foun­da­tion of what the show is about is sci­ence fic­tion (or at least sci­ence fantasy).

But as each sea­son has gone on, it has been increas­ingly impos­si­ble for even the most deter­mined to deny that Lost is, at its roots, a sci­ence fic­tion show. You could call the tech­niques they used to grab their audi­ence bait-​​and-​​switch, because the show cre­ators intro­duced the heavy spec­u­la­tive ele­ments slowly. I’d also call it the frog in a pot of boil­ing water accli­ma­tion method.

My coworker, the Lost fan

An anec­dote: I have a coworker who hates sci­ence fic­tion. In his words, he likes “real things.” He despises super­hero movies, and pretty much every­thing a SF fan loves. Early on, the show cre­ators of Lost said in an inter­view that every­thing pre­sented on the show had a ground­ing in real sci­ence (some­thing that at this point is highly debat­able). Still– my coworker clung to this state­ment like it was a life pre­server. It allowed him to keep watch­ing the show no mat­ter how fan­tas­tic things got, because it was still some­how “real.” At this point in the fourth sea­son, he’s pissed off, because he real­izes that state­ment was total bull­shit. But he’s still watch­ing, and still hooked.

The rea­son? A good mys­tery is com­pelling no mat­ter what other genre tropes you add to the stew of your story. The char­ac­ters, after 3 com­plete sea­sons, are sym­pa­thetic and well-​​known. All the foun­da­tions of a good story are there, to the point that, despite my coworker hat­ing every­thing there is to hate about sci­ence fic­tion, he is still a huge fan of the show.

This is a good exam­ple of how genre is becom­ing the main­stream. For those fans who would like to see the genre remain dis­tinct and sep­a­rate, I think this turn of events is going to be a mas­sive dis­ap­point­ment. Reviewing the past events of the show, it almost looks as if the show cre­ators delib­er­ately plot­ted out their intro­duc­tion of SF tropes to cre­ate the frog in a pot of boil­ing water effect.

What’s espe­cially fan­tas­tic in my mind is that Lost hasn’t given us SF-​​lite. It slowly intro­duced the ele­ments, yes, but they are not watered down to be more palat­able. We have full-​​fledged weird­ness here. This is a show that Charles Fort would watch and clap his hands with glee.

The poten­tial for new fans

By the time Lost com­pletes its arc, there is going to be a whole new audi­ence primed to accept our stranger ideas. New TV shows will come along to take advan­tage of this, but maybe, just maybe, SF pub­lish­ers can lure some of them in too. Frankly, you could do worse than adding even 1% of Lost’s fan­base to your read­er­ship. You could do a hell of a lot worse.

I’m sure there are down­sides to the main­stream­ing of SF tropes. It makes us feel less spe­cial and unique, maybe. But as a work­ing cre­ative, I will just have to swal­low my pride on that one. With this kind of poten­tial for fans out there, it gives me hope that we could actu­ally make a good liv­ing telling genre sto­ries, and not just the ones mar­keted to an aging, increas­ingly con­ser­v­a­tive SF fanbase.

But then, maybe I’m all wrong

But then, the decline in rat­ings that Lost is suf­fer­ing right now might be an indi­ca­tor that the broader audi­ence of Lost has been alien­ated by the spec­u­la­tive aspects of the show. For the week of May 4, the show didn’t even break the top 20. There may be many rea­sons why this show is falling in the rat­ings. And even if it is pop­u­lar by genre show stan­dards, it pales in com­par­i­son to real­ity shows involv­ing danc­ing and singing.

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