Archive of February 2009
What happens to junk left behind in foreclosed homes? That is a very good question, and ripe for storytelling, either from the POV of the former home-owner, or, even better, the POV of the foreclosure people. Sad, really. In fact, this video interview format would make a great trope for a piece of fiction. 09:50 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: inspiration, setting, character, story-starter
I don’t care about golf, but this periscope is fantastic. I want to write a story about someone who happens upon something like this accidentally. Perhaps a long-abandoned and overgrown gold course. Thank you boingboing.
09:45 AM
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Tags: inspiration, setting, story-starter
Sci-Fi Hugo Award magazines
The following is a list of magazines I grabbed from Locus Magazine’s voting page for the Hugo Awards, which is a good indication of whether they’re well-regarded in the industry, and thus where it would be good to get featured.
Analog
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight
Ansible
Asimov’s
Black Gate
Cemetery Dance
Clarkesworld
Electric Velocipede
Electric City
F&SF
Fantasy Magazine
Internet Review of Science Fiction
Interzone
Jim Baen’s Universe
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
The New York Review of Science Fiction
Postscripts
Realms of Fantasy
SFSite
SFWeekly
SF Revu
Strange Horizons
Subterranean
Talebones
Weird Tales
sl---morris-bobetter-narrative08u.doc
I haven't read it through yet, but I believe this is an actual semi-readable draft. Or real real close. 04:18 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: fiction, writing, draft, in-progress, swapmeet, bobetter
Possibly my favorite Youtube video ever. I have nothing to offer in terms of storytelling. Just be captivated. 11:48 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: inspiration, video
James's Metastasizing Face
Her name was Dorothy. And though we never introduced ourselves, I have no choice but to blame her for the simple reason of synchronicity. I was on the train, packed in with all the other commuters, and had to look somewhere. She was cute. Small but thick lips, dark hair pulled back into an early twenties bun. A mismatch of colored clothing over Asian skin. Green framed glasses. She was reading, something called Hurricane I think out of an old hardcover book with those pages that make your fingertips feel dry and rough. I had to look somewhere and she was pleasant to look at. We were holding on to the same slick metal pole to keep from falling over. When the train cleared out at the first city stop, she sat down and continued reading. I watched her, tried to determine what age or nationality she might be. And then she looked at me. She looked directly and did not look away. After a second, I turned away, but I know that somewhere in that look, somewhere in that second, she did something to my face. Whether she took something, like a photo may steal your soul, or whether she gave something, like a curse or a flea, I cannot say, but I can say this: my face is changing. It is metastasizing. By the time I saw here again, at the coffee stand, when the barista called her name and taught it to me, my skin already felt loose and warm. Before noon, the skin had dissolved from the scalp to the bottom of my chin leaving only muscle and tendon and cartilege. By night it had regrown, but woody. I woke up and my face was a thick wooden mask with black horns and a red nose and false wooden eyes and slits beneath the false eyes for my real ones, and my ears were twice the size, though the back of my head still had it’s brown shaved hair. I stayed home to monitor it, called in sick, which everyone understood. Sometimes my face’s rate of change seemed to be speeding up, moving through phases minute by minute, and other times it seemed to slow down, taking almost a full day to shift. But then maybe it has stayed constant and it is only my assumptions on the borders between the phases that is mistaken. What do you call a face, and not just an expression, an unformed proto-face, or the sloughing of a face past its prime?
Today, my face is that of a reptile. I can tell by touch. There are no more mirrors in my house.
(The face becomes a butt and I walk on my head and hands, until I meet her at the art show and we shed our scales like fish.)
10:41 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: story-starterKurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing a short story
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. 02:37 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: on writing
Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius
I like Elizabeth’s premise that we need a better way to think about creative genius: both for the doers and the would-be doers. I also like her anthropological breakdown of the word: ‘genius’ being a greek term which replaced the greek ‘daemon’, both of which basically mean ‘that mystical thing in the corner giving you all this creative power.’ Her point that is protects against both the artist’s narcissism and depression is a good one too, and I can see how that shifted with the man-centric post-Renaissance of being a genius, rather than having a genius in your corner.
However, what I do not agree with is the elevation of the ‘creative mystery’ to this otherworldly, godlike form. If we are going to truly get the creative spirit spreading and appreciated it should not be elevated like a midas touch, but brought down to earth as a simple and healthy process (providing it is well-integrated into your life). We all know that moments of supreme eureka can happen just as easily in scientific labs as in dingy studio apartments, so don’t think it doesn’t discount the fact that you don’t always know where your ideas come from. The fact is that you’re participating.
But I digress. Hers was an enjoyable talk.
02:27 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: on creativity, video, tedJuan Enriquez shares mindboggling new science
Juan covers a lot of territory here, and he’s not without his dramatic delivery. But if anything you should take away to chew upon, it is probably his naming of the next evolutionary step of mankind (or not!):
Homo Evolutis: Hominids that take direct and deliberate control over the evolution of their species…and others.
02:21 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: science, video, ted, technology, evolutionT. C. Boyle: an email dialogue with Cameron Martin
Barnes & Nobles’ interview with TC Boyle after the release of his latest book The Women, about Frank Lloyd Wright. Here’s a snippet:
01:25 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: interviewBNR: The women in Wright’s life are introduced in reverse order, with his last wife first. Why did you choose to do introduce the stories in this way?
TCB: The book, I hope, is doing a number of things. One them is to allow me and you and any others intrepid enough to jump into this fictional world to reflect on our relationships, how they begin in sunshine and maybe possibly occasionally end in rain. So for me there’s a wonderful irony, not to mention joy, in for instance dramatizing FLLW’s relationship with Olgivanna while the castoff Miriam becomes the gorgon, and then moving backwards to give you the sunshine of the awakening relationship with Miriam all those years before. Plus, going backwards allows me to end with the conflagration and tragedy of Mamah and Taliesen I.
McAllister Coaching Newsletter--February 17, 2009
I’ve never taken one of Bruce McAllister’s workshops, but his newsletters always have good tidbits of information.
Highlights:
- duotrope.com (resource for writers)
- ralan.com (resource for genre writers)
- Online journals with reputations equal to some of the more traditional printed ones: Opium, The Barcelona Review, Blackbird, McSweeneys
- The beauty of the short-short story (12k-words) for filling the demand of magazines for such length.
Fantastic footage of a dust storm in New South Wales. Great setting for a story. 09:36 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: inspiration, setting
Flickr set of the abandoned Henryton State Hospital, for whenever detail of an abandoned hospital is needed.
09:05 AM
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Tags: inspiration, setting