Jul 02

I decided at the start of this year to write more short stories.

I decided at the start of this year to write more short stories.

At the midpoint of the year, I have:

– 12 stories about to come out in a solo collection (including 5 that have appeared or will appear elsewhere);

– 1 story sold to a semipro anthology (potentially pro, if their Kickstarter goes well);

– 6 stories on submission to pro/semi-pro magazines or anthologies: Hear Me Roar, Fictionvale, Aurealis, Daily Science Fiction, Inscription, and Asimov’s;

– 1 story that isn’t sold or out on submission currently.

So that’s progressing.

#shortstorychallenge  

Mar 20

Why I’m Doing the Short Story Challenge and What I’ve Learned So Far

Why I’m Doing the Short Story Challenge and What I’ve Learned So Far

This year, I’m doing a Short Story Challenge. Initially, the idea of this was that I would analyse a classic short story each month and write a story based on what I learned. I only ended up analysing one classic story, but I am writing plenty, and since that was the main point I’m happy.

Also, because I now have a reasonable number of stories, I was able to take up Charles Barouch’s idea of a single-author collection as part of his scheme to promote HDWP Books’ Theme-Thologies. 

So what do I hope to gain from this?

1. Practice. The storytelling part of writing is, I know, my weakest skill, and short stories are a good way to work on it in a concentrated way. And with the HDWP collection, I’m working with an editor who isn’t my usual editor (and who I’m not directly paying for), which is good for my development.

2. Exposure. Selling a short story to a magazine is like being paid to advertise your writing. So far, I haven’t sold to any major magazines, but I’m submitting, and have had an encouraging personalised rejection.

3. Credibility. Even being able to say that you’ve published with a small press carries more credibility in some quarters than self-publishing. Being able to say your stories have appeared in X, Y and Z magazines likewise builds social proof: gatekeepers have acknowledged your writing! (Which you and I know is nonsense, but it’s still how perception runs.)

4. Momentum. I’m a bit stuck on my next three novels, and writing short stories in between means at least I’m doing something while I figure out how to move forward with them.

5. Backlist. Having a good backlist appears to be a positive for authors these days – people seem more open to trying a new author if they have multiple titles out – and short stories can help increase the total.  

6. Money. Per-word rates for even the top story magazines are not great, compared with the glory days of the pulps, but you can potentially pick up a few hundred dollars here and there. It all helps with the cover art and editing expenses.

7. Ideas. I have a lot of them, and don’t do much with most of them. If I’m regularly writing short stories, I can use the best ones. This inevitably uncorks the flow of ideas, and I get more and better ones.

8. Variety. Although most of my stories so far are in the Gryphon Clerks setting of my novels, I’ve started writing a few that aren’t, and it makes for a refreshing change and helps to keep me from burning out on my setting. There’s a particular mindset I have to get into, and a large amount of backstory and setting detail I have to hold in my head, to do a Gryphon Clerks story, and there are things from my everyday life that I can’t use because it’s in a secondary world. Those restrictions are removed if I do a story in another setting.

9. Failing fast. I can try things at short length and see if they work. If they don’t, no big.

10. Seized time. Particularly once I get further into a novel, I can only really work on it when I have a chunk of time to dedicate to it, because it’s larger to hold in my head (and I like to use Scrivener, which is only on one of my computers). I can work on a short story when I have half an hour to spare.

Fellow short story writers, anything you’d like to add?

#shortstorychallenge  

Mar 06

Pleased to announce that I’ll be putting out a solo anthology later this year through Charles Barouch’s HDWP Books.

Pleased to announce that I’ll be putting out a solo anthology later this year through Charles Barouch’s HDWP Books. It will feature four* stories originally written for HDWP’s Theme-Thology volumes, plus (at least) six other stories, some previously unpublished.

Most of them will be Gryphon Clerks stories, but at least two will be in other settings.

No title as yet. I’ll probably pick the best title from the stories (or the title from the best of the stories) and use that.

* Assuming I manage to finish the ones I’ve started, which seems likely.

#shortstorychallenge  

Feb 10

(For links, see the original blog post. Text-only version follows.)

(For links, see the original blog post. Text-only version follows.)

I recently read C.L. Moore’s Judgement Night (review here), and it got me thinking.

Moore was writing in the pulp era, very successfully. She and her husband Henry Kuttner (whose first contact with her was a fan letter he wrote, believing she was a man) often collaborated on their stories, but in the interests of not disappearing down a pointless rabbit-hole I’m going to assume that the stories with her name on were primarily her work.

Moore’s stories, while definitely in the pulp mould, had extra elements that lifted them out of the ordinary. Her Wikipedia entry notes her use of the senses and emotions, but I’m going to talk about something else she did, which I refer to as “telling two stories at once”.

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL STORIES

Drastic oversimplification time: one of the key differences between “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction is often that “genre” fiction has a lot going on externally (events that you’d see on a movie screen), whereas “literary” fiction has a lot going on internally to the characters (thoughts, emotions, internal dialogue, reflections on the meaning of life). This makes it unsurprising that most of the top-grossing movies of all time have been “genre” movies: science fiction, fantasy or thrillers, primarily.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Sometimes, I’m in the mood for a story that doesn’t attempt to do anything more than entertain me with the external events. As a matter of taste, I’m personally seldom if ever in the mood for a story that has very few events but a lot of internal reflection. What I really like a lot, though, is when someone manages to pull off both at once, which is what Moore did in many of her stories.

Double Double Toil and Trouble…

Arbron / Foter / CC BY

Most of the stories we recognise as “classic literature” do this. Shakespeare has murder and walking spirits and Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, but he also has “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” and “Out, damned spot!” Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, most of the authors whose names everyone recognises tell two stories at once: the story of the outward events, and the story of the significance of those events.

By the significance of the events I don’t just mean their significance to the characters, though that is how we encounter it, through the characters’ eyes. The authors who are best at this manage to make the characters’ thoughts, reactions and emotions point beyond them to something more universal about being human.

For example, the story “Judgement Night” in the collection of the same name is about the fall of a galactic empire. However, it’s also about the heir to that empire, and her close brush with a love affair, and how her training as an amazon warrior makes her reject the emotional and relational side of life, and how that influences the empire’s fall. And that, in turn, is about masculinity and femininity, relationship and connection, competition and conflict, love and death. It’s all woven together. If you told just the story of the fall of the empire, it would work as a story by itself, but it wouldn’t have the richness and depth of the story that Moore does tell.

HOW I’M APPLYING THIS

If I look at someone else’s craft, it’s at least partly to improve my own (that’s a big part of why I write reviews).

There’s a writing concept called “scene and sequel” that Jim Butcher describes very well. In this context, a “scene” is what I’ve been calling the outward story: some things happen. A “sequel” is where the characters reflect on it and make it part of their internal stories (and hopefully the greater, more universal story).

My first Gryphon Clerks book, Realmgolds, has lost some readers because they felt that I didn’t do enough of the internal story sometimes. Other readers don’t seem bothered by it; perhaps it’s just that they’re already enough like the characters (and me) that they get what I was going for without my spelling it out, that they naturally understand how a character like that would feel. However, if I’m to improve as a writer and satisfy more readers, I need to take that criticism on.

When I was writing Hope and the Clever Man, I had a scene in it where two of the characters get caught up in a riot. Bearing in mind the lessons I’d learned, I added a couple of sentences of sequel to the end of it, in which the characters said something like, “I’ve never been so frightened in my life!” “Me either.”

Starting to deepen your stories can be that simple: taking a moment to show the reader what the events the character has just experienced mean to them.

http://csidemedia.com/gryphonclerks/2014/02/11/writing-two-stories-at-once/

Dec 12

Cool! I just sold a short story to New Realm (the fantasy title of FictionMagazines.com).

Cool! I just sold a short story to New Realm (the fantasy title of FictionMagazines.com). 

I saw the email, and thought, “Oh, here’s the rejection.” But no!

I’m glad that “Good Neighbours” has found a home. I think it’s a nice little story, low-key, about what happens when ordinary people treat other people as people. It takes place in the Gryphon Clerks setting, around Gnome Day.