An Interview Regarding Dr. Roundbottom
Filed Under: My Writing, Photography, Top Post, Writing Process
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.
On the Merits of Asking What You Hate (or Love)
Filed Under: SF Business, Speculative Fiction
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.
Today’s Market Health Question: How Many Readers Are There?
Filed Under: SF Business, Speculative Fiction
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.
Today’s Hypothesis About What Science Fiction Is
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction
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?
