Category Archives: Collection

Zen and the Art of Beating Your Head Against a Wall

Posted on by

Subtitle: What Do You Think You’re Doing?

On another forum not too long ago, a well-known editor was expressing puzzlement. There was a very fine writer whose work he’d been promoting for years, buying their stories, featuring them prominently, doing all that was reasonable to do in an attempt to get readers to understand that this writer is worth paying attention to. And it wasn’t a complete bust by any means–the writer has done well by most standards: prolific, won several awards, publishes all over the place. Yet despite it all, they have no “career” to speak of. Sure, nearly every writer in the short-story field knows their work and most have high respect for it; if you follow the sf/f field at all in short stories, you’d recognize the name. But they have never developed the readership or name-recognition that the editor thought they deserved, and why is that?

Later in the thread the editor, in my opinion, answered his own question–it’s because the writer’s stories are too different. Not too different from what’s being published in the field; so far as I can see the sf/f field has a huge tolerance for the different, especially at short story level. Rather, the problem is that the writer’s stories are too different from each other.  Tone, theme, subject matter, you name it. Any reader could read three or four of the writer’s stories, all excellent, and never once realize that they were all written by the same person. Continue reading →

As the Old Year Comes to Its End…We Skip Ahead

Posted on by

Don’t panic. I’m not going to list New Year’s Resolution angst or get all nostalgic and maudlin about 2011. The year was…interesting. Not great, not terrible, just interesting. I got some work done, tried some new things, and in so doing realized I’d actually broken last year’s New Year’s Resolution, which is and was the only resolution I ever make–to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can. All that means is staying in the game. I know very talented writers who have packed it in, and I resolve not to be one of them. Writing-wise, I kept on track, but technically my flirtation with DIY publishing violates the “keep doing what I’ve been doing” part of the resolution. So I’ll make the same resolution this year, with the understanding that “keep doing what I’m doing” has new components, and I always hope that “getting better” is in that process somewhere.

Enough about that. The “skipping ahead” part comes now. To 2013, to be more exact. Sean Wallace at Prime Books and I had agreed to do the first ever Lord Yamada story collection, and 2013 is the year. I don’t even have a title yet, but the bulk of the Table of Contents looks like this:

  • “Fox Tails”                                                      9100
  • “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge”                   13800
  • “A Touch of Hell”                                          9500
  • “Hot Water”                                                    6000
  • “The River of Three Crossings”                      6500
  • “The Bride Doll”                                             8100
  • “The Mansion of Bones”                                7100
  • “Lady of the Ghost Willow”                          8700
  • “Sanji’s Demon”                                              11,300
  • “The Ghost of Shinoda Forest”                        6,000
  • “The Tiger’s Turn”                                            8,900
  • “The Sorrow of Rain”                                        3,700

That number to the right is the word count. Just over half of the Yamada stories are novelettes, so 12 stories adds up to over 98000 words, a pretty respectible size. “The Bride Doll” was sold to an anthology that has yet to appear, and will probably wind up being published first in the collection. “The Sorrow of Rain” was the last story in the sequence and I was going to try it on Realms of Fantasy, but since that’s no longer an option I’ll note it here if it appears anywhere else beforehand. There will be at least one story original to the volume and available nowhere else. I’ll post more here once plans and schedule are more solid.

The quick evolution of the character should be really evident when the stories are read in sequence. “Fox Tails” was the very first, and I’d pictured Yamada as a sort of Heian Noire private eye, which wasn’t completely wrong, but when he reappears in “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge” it’s clear that he’s going in his own direction. After that I just went along, which I think was the right choice.

The Yamada novel will also probably appear in 2013, that’s To Break the Demon Gate, and that will be from PS Publishing, so 2013 might be a pretty busy year. 2012? I have no idea what’s shaking there. I guess we’ll find out as it happens.

Year End Report – 2011

Posted on by

We’re coming up on the end of the publishing year, which in some ways for me has been a little thin this time around. There are reasons for that, yes, but they don’t change the result. I’ve published four stories this year in the traditional way, and I use that term loosely since only two of those were print publications. Electronic media’s becoming the new “traditional,” and soon the idea of paper except for very special projects and limited editions will be seen as positively quaint. I was on track to publish five original stories, which is pretty typical for me, but we all know what happened to Realms of Fantasy. So it goes. I started to compile what would have been a very brief summary when it occurred to me that to consider only the traditional venues marginalizes what else I’ve accomplished this year, projects which I am rather proud of, frankly, both for breaking new ground in my attitudes and pushing my comfort zone into the 21st Century. So for the first time ever I’m going to give my yearly breakdown in two separate sections: Traditional, and eBook.

Continue reading →

Review – The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche by Peter S. Beagle

Posted on by

The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances by Peter S. Beagle, Tachyon Publications, 1997

My first acquaintance with Peter Beagle’s work, like a lot of other people’s, was the classic The Last Unicorn. I was hooked, and sought out everything else I could find, which at that time was I See By My Outfit and A Fine and Private Place, a non-fiction account of a cross-country trip on a motor scooter and Beagle’s first novel, respectively. I didn’t even know that he did any work at less than novel length until I stumbled upon the one-two pairing of “Come Lady Death” and “Lila the Werewolf” in The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle back in 1978.

The Tachyon collection came along a good deal later, in 1997, and even though it also included the above two stories, I snapped it up for what else was there, including the title story which I had managed to miss in its first print appearance, plus “The Naga” (likewise) and a story original to this volume, “Julie’s Unicorn.”

Continue reading →

Review — The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford

Posted on by

The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford.  Golden Gryphon Press, 2002

“Creation” is about what it says it’s about: A young boy undergoing religious training gives in to an impulse to create as God did, and succeeds…after a fashion. The rest of the story concerns the aftermath and the young boy coming to terms with the implications and responsibilities of his action. It’s one of Ford’s better known stories, and I’ve even heard claims that it “transcends genre fantasy.”  Sorry, no. This is what fantasy does. It’s the fun-house mirror that we hold up so we can see ourselves more clearly, and “Creation” does it very well. As for the “genre” part, well, genre is a marketing category, and to say something “transcends” a marketing category is pretty much a meaningless phrase. “Creation” is a damn fine fantasy story, and that’s more than enough. Continue reading →