“This, My Body”, my sexy chef story that appeared previously in Interzone 199, will be–I believe– featured in the 150th episode of Escape Pod next week. Steve Eley totally rocks.
Man, this year just keeps getting better! What a fantastic pick-me-up after the work events of earlier this week.
Big thanks to Rachel Swirsky for encouraging me to try Escape Pod with the story!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
I have, of recent, become a total fanboy for SF Author Maureen McHugh. I loved her stories published in SciFiction, but the real tipping point for me has been her blogging. Today, she made a great post about Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and her own label for the genre of fiction that has been labeled strenuously by the authors and publishers, Not Science Fiction.
I love this term for it’s double-sidedness. If you’re inclined, you can take the term literally. If SF scares you, then the term is a comfort. “There, there,” the publisher coos softly. “There is no Nerd Schmutz on this fine, fine book.” But if you like SF and you have a sense of humor about these genre wars, then you can take it to mean that you will like it as SF despite what anyone says. It’s like a secret handshake. I say we make it Official.
PS: I guess I should read this book, huh? With endorsements from McHugh and Moles, I can’t go wrong.
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?
