Category Archives: Writing

Muse and Writer Dialogues #5

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FADE IN

 A room that passes for an office. There are bookshelves on one wall, a motley assortment of carvings, signed storyboards, and framed magazine covers on the free wall space. On the far wall is a medieval-style heraldic wall display of a cockatrice and a banner in bad Latin “Pullus non Est.”  Horizontal files sit beneath the window , and on top of those a free-standing rack holding Japanese swords. The computer desk is on the wall nearest the door, facing away from the window. Beside that is a printer on a stand. It’s a bit dusty.

Enter the Muse. Her appearance tends to change every now and then, but mostly she appears as a Greek goddess type in a flowing chiton. At the moment she is, to put it mildly, NOT HAPPY. She looms over the Writer who is sitting at his desk, staring at the computer screen.

MUSE: Would you  mind telling me what the hell you’re doing?

WRITER: What does it look like?

MUSE: Well, it LOOKS like you’re writing. But I know you aren’t.

WRITER: How do you know that?

MUSE: I’m a figment of your imagination. How could I NOT know?

WRITER(not taking his eyes off the screen): Good Point. Continue reading →

The Issue of Trust

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Carol’s in the living room watching an episode of the ABC series “Once Upon a Time” as I write this. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s the story of characters from mostly European fairy-tales who were cursed by an Evil Queen so that they have to live out their lives in the modern world, losing all their “happily ever afters” and their memories of who they are.

As premises go, it’s not bad. There are interesting characters, the acting isn’t bad, and I like the fairy-tale background stories that are usually shown as flashbacks in each episode. For a fantasist and someone just interested in modern interpretations of fairy and folk tales, there’s a lot to like there, and it occurs to me that I should like the series quite a bit. I should, but I don’t. That’s why I’m sitting here writing this rather than watching the latest episode. And, after some weeks, I think I finally realize why. Continue reading →

The Final Tally

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I got an email this morning from the owners of Realms of Fantasy officially releasing the last two stories of mine that had been contracted for the magazine. If those two had been published I’d have had 27 stories there, total. As it was, the final count was 25. it’s possilble that someone may have published more stories there than I did, but off the top of my head I can’t think who it might be. As Theodora Goss pointed out elsewhere, with the loss of ROF and the combining of Fantasy Magazine and LightSpeed, there are no more “generalist” fantasy-only fiction magazines, and that’s a shame. There’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Black Gate but both are a bit more specialized in adventure and S&S-type fantasy. Realms of Fantasy under Shawna McCarthy was far more ecumenical, and ran the gamut, which is something I like to do in my work as well. We were a good fit.

For the record, here’s the list of every story I published in Realms of Fantasy over 16 years:

  1. “The Last Waltz,” February 1995
  2. “The Right Sort of Flea,” April 1997
  3. “Lord Madoc and the Red Knight,” December 1997
  4. “Take a Long Step,” April 1999
  5. “How Konti Scrounged the World,” February 2000
  6. “The Fourth Law of Power,” August 2000
  7. “Judgment Day,” October 2000
  8. “The Trickster’s Wife,” February 2001
  9. “The First Law of Power,” June 2001
  10. “A Respectful Silence,” December 2001
  11. “Kallisti,” April 2002
  12. “Worshipping Small Gods,” August 2003
  13. “Yamabushi,” December 2003
  14. “The Right God,” August 2004
  15. “Death, the Devil, and the Lady in White,” April 2005
  16. “Fox Tails,” June 2005 (The first Lord Yamada story)
  17. “The Penultimate Riddle,” August 2005
  18. “Empty Places,” December 2005
  19. “Moon Viewing at Shiji Bridge,” April 2006
  20. “A Touch of Hell,” April 2007
  21. “Hot Water,” December 2007
  22. “On the Banks of the River of Heaven,” April 2008
  23. “The River of Three Crossings,” February 2009
  24. “A Road Once Traveled,” December 2009
  25. “The Swan Troika,” February 2011

Not a bad list. I only wish it could have been longer.

 

Getting It — And no, Not That “It”

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I got a good review not too long ago that made me very happy. Those who recall any previous rants on this subject may be right to wonder why I’m in such a good mood after a thing so inconsequential in the Great Scheme of Things as a favorable review. “We don’t need no steenkin’ validation” and like that, and aren’t I being just a tad hypocritical?

First, my answer is the same as Emerson’s, namely: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” so get over it. Second, I’m not actually talking validation here, or at least not of the stroke kind. Human nature naturally prefers praise but whether the review was a praise or a pan really is beside the point. The reason I’m feeling all chuffed and preening is that the reviewer understood what I was doing.

That is a lot rarer than it should be. Fess up time: haven’t you ever finished a review, good or bad, and wondered just what bloody story they were reading, cause it sure as hell wasn’t the one you wrote? Happens to me all the time. Of the current crop of reviewers, Rich Horton and Lois Tilton are seldom guilty of this, but they’re the exceptions, not the rule.

I’m not going to repeat the “rose petals into the Grand Canyon” analogy. Too tired and obvious. Still, you other writers out there know it’s true. Few things will grind your soul more than realizing that the people who, at least in theory, are your intended readership simply cannot parse your work. “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge” is, in my not so humble opinion, one of the best stories I’ve ever done, and yet the early reader reaction wasn’t much better than a sort of vague puzzlement, and a great deal of: “but I figured out the ending!” Which I never did figure out the polite response to, though the appropriate response was “Then you were paying attention and have decent reading comprehension skills. Congrats.”

Yeah, yeah. He got a good review and he’s a happy guy. So what and why should we care? Why? Because reader reaction — and a reviewer is above all a reader — is one more bit of information that helps us judge whether we accomplished what we set out to do in any given story. While praise is always nice enough, if a reviewer pans OR praises a story of yours in terms that prove he or she didn’t have the vaguest clue what it was about, exactly how inclined are you to pay attention? You may allow yourself a few minutes of annoyed or bemused bafflement at why they could not see what was plainly there, but probably not much more than that. Now, what about a review that is clearly a pan but nevertheless explains the story’s shortcomings in terms that make sense to you? Was your narrative a little unfocused? Did you really indulge in a fun little digression that undercut your theme? Are they right? You can say they’re being too picky if you want, but deep down you know that, in fact, they are right. Chances are you knew the flaws were there and just didn’t want to see them, or knew something wasn’t quite right but couldn’t quite pin it down. When those flaws are exposed to you by someone who understands what the story is about, by someone who reads carefully, knows what the story was attempting and points out where it fails, the chances are much greater that you’re going to learn something you need to know. Such pans are worth reading and such praise is worth enjoying.

The rest is just so much noise.

Avast, Mateys! It’s “Steal Like a Pirate” Day

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Yesterday, I finally joined the club. I had an entire book pirated. I’ve had short stories stolen before, even one translated into Russian and published without my knowledge or consent, but this is the first time someone’s gone to all the bother of ripping off an entire book. And it was at least a little bother. Someone took the time to convert the only electronic files available into an entirely different format, one I’d never sanctioned, and made it available for download for free (and NO, I’m not going to say which or where, you sillies).

I’m a little annoyed, yes, but not much more than that. See, I spent several years on the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Anti-Piracy Committee, helping to track this sort of abuse. I learned a few things in my time there. One was that there were several types of pirate, who distributed work not their own for different reasons. Some were just out to make a buck on other people’s hard work, and those were the ones we tried to shut down whenever possible. Some were like hoarders, and more or less “counted coup” on the number of free books they could accumulate on their disks, and reading any of the stash was never the point. And then there were the ones who considered themselves fans, and honestly thought they were doing nothing wrong but rather helping the writer out by making the work more widely available. I’m not really convinced by that reasoning but I have to concede the possibility, because the other thing I learned, both on and off the committee, was that any given writer’s worst problem was not piracy, but obscurity. You might lose a few sales, but most likely they were to the sort of reader who wouldn’t have bought the book anyway because they didn’t have a clue who you were. Next time? Well, that’s where it gets tricky. Especially if the pirates are enthusiastic and determined.

So what am I going to do? I’m going to monitor the situation and consider a takedown notice if I think he’s doing more harm than good. The pirate is Russian, but his hosting service isn’t, so there may be something I can do. But maybe I won’t need to. We’ll just have to see.