Based on comparing listeners and subscriber numbers, Escape Pod is the second largest market for short science fiction, with 20,000 downloads after a month for each episode. I don’t have anything to say about that. I just want to mention it, and see what you all think of that. I’ve talked about this before, but I think their listener count has grown since then.
(And yes, the prospect of my latest sale to them being heard by 20,000 people is somewhat terrifying.)
I am utterly failing to keep up the pace of writing this week. No words. Not even any revisions. I probably shouldn’t have bought that design book earlier this week. It’s great for the day job stuff, but reading it eats up the time and energy I should be spending working on my next story.
There’s this trope I am examining right now. One of the things about second world fantasy that bothers me is that it’s rarely very ambitious with how different things are from our world. Now, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out.
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John Joseph Adams has posted the ToC of his upcoming Seeds of Change anthology with Prime Books. Some of the authors included are Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Mark Budz, Ken McLeod, and… me!
Strange Horizons Fiction: Where We Live, by Daniel J. Pinney
Grim, grim, grim–as I’ve come to expect from Strange Horizons lately. A future without hope, and yet, the characters themselves continue to exist. This story is full of telling details. I didn’t have to read the author’s bio to know that he had lived in the Middle East. Every descriptive line speaks with authority.
The character’s life unfolds slowly, in a nonlinear fashion, moving back and forth through time. The protagonist moves through life, ever forward, never hesitating, never despairing, despite the apparent end of the world around him.
The ending–I have to mention the ending–fucking perfect. Absolutely god damned perfect. The scene before it, even more so. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who might read it, and if you read this, go read it.
It builds slow, sets the stage, fleshes it out, piece at a time. It’s horrific, and beautiful. And hopeful. Did I say that?
More, more of this, please. Daniel J. Pinney is going on my “to watch” list, you can bet on that.
I am super, super excited to announce that my story from All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (edited by Jay Lake and David Moles–two of the finest cats to mark up a manuscript) has gone live on Escape Pod. Escape Pod is the one podcast I listen to every week without fail, and I’ve been using Escape Pod as an example of the best reader/listenership you can find online. Having a story go live with them is one of my major career goals. I just gave it a listen as I got ready for work, and I loved it. Major, major squee for me today.
Strange Horizons Fiction: We Love Deena, by Alice Sola Kim, illustration by Hellen JoIt’s the classic tale of love lost, obsessive love. Girl meet edgy girl, who kills people professionally for the government. Girl loses edgy girl. Girl possesses half the other women on the planet attempting to seduce edgy girl once more. Haven’t we read this one a million times before?
Well, no, actually. This is actually pretty good. The protagonist is believable, even sympathetic in her stalker ways. The story moves along at a very nice clip, and it ends in the only way it could. I’ve never heard of Alice Sola Kim before, but I will be looking forward to more.
Still have that death obsession going a little, Strange Horizons. This story was perky, but still kinda dark and twisted like everything else lately.
Sci-fi rant: Why giant mecha robots are stupid | Geekend | TechRepublic.com
Jay Garmon has written a very well thought-out article on why giant mecha robots are stupid and will never work. I am afraid I must provide a counter to this article. Giant mecha robots are also totally awesome, and I think he’s wrong. Here’s why:
Okay, so yeah, it’s hard to make robots that can walk bipedally. They fall over a lot. That’s part of the charm! Who wants a giant robot that doesn’t smash everything in it’s path? Tanks can roll over cars and stuff, but can they shove other tanks so that they go flying through the air, crashing into skyscrapers and causing massive gasline explosions everywhere? No? Tanks are stupid.
Robot hands exist on giant mecha so that they can wield giant energy swords. Do you think lightsabers are cool? Of course you do. A four story energy sword is like, 400 times more awesome than a lightsaber. That alone is enough reason for me to have giant mecha hands. However, there is one other thing that Jay Garmon has overlooked here. If giant mecha robots did not have all-purpose hands, they could not rescue kittens from trees. You are not going to build a special kitten-rescuing attachment for a mecha. That would just be silly.
If I could fill my iPod with just the sounds of giant mecha robots walking around and shooting up shit, that is all I would ever listen to. And millions of people just like me would do the same. The music industry would collapse. Thanks to giant mecha robots. Bonus!
What else are we going to build to protect us from giant monsters? As the recent Daikaiju documentary Cloverfield demonstrates, conventional military weaponry is not sufficient to defend our citizens against the menace of giant monsters that rise up from the sea. As to the cost? $725 million is a small price to pay to prevent some damage to New York City. I say some damage of course, because it is inevitable that in fending off the beast, the giant mecha robots will do considerable damage itself. But sometimes you have to burn the village to save it.
Giant mecha wars will be televised. All the violence of Ultimate Fighting combined with the metal-on-metal crunching of demolition derby. Sports bars will turn to the Giant Mecha Battles channel and throw away the remote. All other sports will fall before the juggernaut of Giant Mecha Robot Wars!
Some giant robots will undoubtedly be powered by nuclear reactors. I think you know what that means. Explosions are totally awesome. If you cannot agree to this, you should stop reading my blog.So there it is. Six very good reasons why, despite the cost and technical difficulties, we will build mecha robots. Because they’re totally awesome should be the only reason we make anything at all.
This post brought to you by the Infernocrusher Movement.
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.
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.
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.
My story “Groob’s Stupid Grubs,” a story of a goblin’s hopes for his idiot children, is available in Black Gate 15.
I recently finished the first draft of a YA novel called Takedown Notice set in the net-mage universe of my stories “Captain Blood’s B00ty” and “One Click Banishment.” What happens when the Magical Association of Atlantis finally gets the upper hand against the net mages in the spell program copyfight?
