Posts Tagged ‘Short Story’

“Where We Live” by Daniel J. Pinney

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

“Instead of a Loving Heart’ on Escape Pod

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

“We Love Deena” by Alice Sola Kim

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

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

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

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

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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

The Role of Idea in my Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

Art Is About the Lonliness of Sentience, Especially SF

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

f you haven’t read it already, I rec­om­mend you go check out Jetse de Vries’ story in Clarkeworld today, “Qubit Conflicts.” I am kind of spoil­ing part of it here in this post, so if you are against that kind of thing, go read the story and then come back here.Interesting, wasn’t it? I like the uncon­ven­tional sto­ries, that take risks with not hav­ing con­ven­tional char­ac­ters and sto­ry­lines. I can’t write them, but I love read­ing them. Anyway, the end­ing of this story, I think, could be read as an inter­est­ing response to some of the ideas of Mundane SF. And it gets to some­thing that I am only just now pick­ing up on, which is maybe what pur­pose art serves and why we cre­ate art at all.

The end of the story has this super intel­li­gent sin­gu­lar­ity AI remark­ing on how maybe it was a mis­take to set a think­ing pace so fast (Planck speed), and ulti­mately how lonely it is, wait­ing for aliens to con­tact it. And it got me think­ing about some­thing I read recently, a quote of the late great Kurt Vonnegut, about how every being needs to be reminded that they are not alone, that there are oth­ers like them out there.

I think there’s some­thing inher­ent about the nature of our sen­tience that brings along a cer­tain lone­li­ness. I can’t quite put my fin­ger on why being able to think and being self-​​aware means that we pine for the minds of oth­ers, to know them, but we do. Maybe it’s a side effect of being the evo­lu­tion­ary end prod­uct of a social species. Maybe a sen­tient soli­tary preda­tor wouldn’t have this prob­lem, and it’s only a pecu­liar side effect of our own sen­tience. But any sen­tient cre­ations of ours will have this prob­lem, as Jetse seems to con­vey. I think I agree with that. Their intel­li­gence, while arti­fi­cial, will be mod­eled after ours. And we def­i­nitely seem to be lonely, every one of us, and I think we cre­ate and con­sume art because it soothes that fear that we’re alone. We get to, through a com­plex invented sys­tem thou­sands of years in the mak­ing, enter the mind of another being. No mat­ter what the nar­ra­tive is, there is that, in the back­ground, that comfort.

And SF takes that them and makes it explicit in tales of the extrater­res­trial. Fantasy does the same thing. Honestly, I don’t find SF/​F that com­pletely rules out the idea of the Other Mind very sat­is­fy­ing. It can be com­pelling and enter­tain­ing, but aliens and elves and all of it, they are a salve that we have invented to soothe a pain of which we’re barely aware.

Oh no. What if our species is the Emo Kid of the Galactic Lunchroom?