primeideal

When the anthology editor sends a crowdfunding update to the backers: I kept the submissions window open a couple weeks longer for underrepresented minorities and then I invited a few more handpicked authors. "I think you're going to be happy with how this affected the book."

When the anthology editor sends out a form rejection to the people who submitted during the open call: I got a lot of great submissions and it was hard to narrow it down.

Like, I know my story might have been a stretch for the theme, and very possibly my sense of humor doesn't click at all. But, come on.

(To their credit, at least those emails were sent within seven hours of each other, some people can't even bother to reject you promptly.)

See a submissions call for a cool-looking poetry thing. Google for more information. First hit is the anthology website. Ask editor to be more specific about what they're looking for. Response is "whatever you want it to mean." Procrastinate two months. Draft something. Set it aside for a day to edit knowing perfectly well I will be busy the next couple days and likely forget. Be busy for next couple days and forget. Sleeping off a migraine, wake up at quarter to four and go "when was the deadline for that." Find out the deadline is that day (the day that's just started, not the one that ended). Reread poem and send off. Wake up at quarter to six. Thinking about "the line count wasn't right, did I accidentally skip a line?" Double-check and see that I did. Add missing line and re-submit. So, there's that. Wish me luck.

One issue I am susceptible to (there are many issues, this is just one) is reading something by someone else, not getting it, and going "am I too stupid, is there something wrong with me, is this one of those where the teacher is trying to coax you to magically come up with his deep interpretation"?) Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory / True Art Is Incomprehensible. So then it's like, "clearly when I'm writing a story, I need to only hint at the edges of what's going on and make the readers jump to a conclusion, because they have neurotypical superpowers and they can do that." Which...doesn't always work.

A couple years ago I wrote a flash fiction piece for a contest, told by a narrator who had undergone some type of memory modification. It's susceptible to the above problems (what has been removed from her memory? Why?) Didn't progress. Later I expanded it into a 5k piece with more of a plot, and (hopefully) less superpower-conclusion-jumping, but that hasn't gotten any takers either.

Saw a call for submissions for "altered memories," etc. Intriguing. But they're looking for things in the 1000-2000 word range. That's pretty narrow, I'm not sure the existing story would work...

Was randomly browsing blogs and saw someone (who I don't know) reviewing another book (which I haven't read) and pointing out "this POV choice is original has some risks associated with it, I think the author pulls it off well, but there could be Unfortunate Implications..." Which, naturally, makes me wonder "what other kinds of setups could be just as provocative (but probably less interesting POV-wise...)"

Someone once made the point that speculative fiction can easily lean progressive, not in the sense of "everything the left-wing party agrees with" but in the sense of "not conservative"--you can worldbuild societies that are very different from ours, and have that not be the main point of the story, just a way of making readers wonder "hmm, what if the world worked like this"? If you're trying to write a story where the subtext is "the old ways are the best ways, actually," it's hard to tell the difference between "the setting is a faux-medieval village because the author wants you to appreciate medieval customs," or "the setting is a faux-medieval village because the author just likes the ~aesthetic~." Whereas, if you try to write a parodic take on "here's why the kids these days are wrong," it often comes off as heavy-handed and unfunny.

But I recently had success with a story where I was like "I'm going to try to illustrate a conservative idea, but that's not the main point of the story, the main point of the story is about extraterrestrials." And so now, I tried again, with "yeah, there are some ideas that might be unsettling, but that's not the main thrust of the story, the story is about something else." The setting might be utopian in some ways, but dystopian in others. And again, it's possible that anything subversive might fly completely under the radar because I'm expecting people to have superpowers that they don't actually possess. Which...yeah, it could backfire, it could be terrible, but...wish me luck. (The magic in use is kind of similar to the original altered-memories story, so perhaps they're set in different regions of the same world.) Anyway, 2k is not a very high max, I was able to bang it out pretty quickly, and then come up with a punny title, so I'll probably have time to send it off and get it rejected a couple times before the memory-alterations window opens ;) 

I was not thinking about this when writing it, but afterwards, I wonder whether some of Bujold's themes were a subconscious influence. Perhaps. I could do a lot worse!

-Some people are finally starting to get rejections from a (fairly broad) themed call I submitted to quite some time ago which has been beset with various delays, so perhaps it has not fallen indefinitely into the void and I will be able to move on and submit it elsewhere in a timely fashion!

-New market just opened for a (much narrower) themed call and... a story I wrote last year for a slightly-broader call actually fits this one too, so might as well give it a shot! I'm a little worried that some of the editors/publishers might be overly performative/insufferable, but one step at a time, if this is rejected then I don't have to worry about it ;)

-The contract and payment for the sale mentioned here went through very promptly, so that's always good. No timeframe for when it will actually come out, though.

I don't usually talk much about my dreams for kind of stupid and silly reasons that I won't get into here. But a couple dream patterns:

• Often, my dreams are set in my childhood, like I'll be in the classroom I had for third and fourth grade. From talking to other people, I think lots of people have an experience of "oh yeah, in my dreams, I'll be in my childhood home even though I haven't lived there in years." Sometimes I recognize that there's something messed-up about this, sometimes not.
• Sometimes, this feeling of messed-up-ness leads to "oh wow, time travel! This would be a great idea for a story!", especially if there's like a false awakening. Usually when I get up for real it's like...I'm not remembering the details very well anyway, and the idea probably wasn't that great.
• Often, when either of my siblings appear in my dreams, I'm at odds with them for some reason. This concerns me, because I wouldn't say we have a bad relationship nor did we as kids! They're tighter with each other than either is with me, but we've never been on bad terms. But my unconscious mind seems to have bad feelings there. :/

So the other night, I dream about my brother, and he's in charge of NASA or something, and I'm working for him. There's this bar graph of "approval ratings he has to get, by year," like a video game challenge or something, increasing over time, and the last couple years it's like "yeah the 'goal' value is lower but the extra challenge is, you have to have a woman astronaut." And his response is basically "...great, I can do this, everybody loves NASA, I'm going to be very popular! And I don't think people will disapprove of having woman astronauts? Is this like a chivalry thing where people are more worried about seeing women in danger? Nah. We got this." And I was like "yess! We do got this, I'm glad to be working for you."

So this was 1. a much better relationship with my brother than I usually have in dreams, and 2. as I was waking up/jumping out of that dream into another one, I did get a story idea that was not about women, bar graphs, or approval ratings, but was about astronauts. Right now it's looking to be a ~800 word flash fic. We'll see.

Between work friends, Reddit, and the Escape Pod flash (more on that to come), I'm having a lot more discussions about speculative fic so I want to write up some of them in a more permanent format. Dreamwidth is good for pretentious-looking babbling, but beware that I am actually way too shallow and uncool for the cool kids. TL;DR.

"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" is a flash-fiction piece from 2013 that won a Nebula Award (and got nominated for a Hugo) in the short fiction format. Even though it's short, I would argue it sort of qualifies as a "story within a story" format, because there's a frame story and then the doubly-fictional world imagined by the narrator as a what-if. In the internal story, the narrator imagines her lover as a T-Rex, who eats goats and performs love songs on Broadway. When the T-Rex eventually marries another (cloned) dinosaur, the narrator is so overcome by emotion that she turns into a flower. Because dinosaurs who perform on Broadway and humans who transform into flowers are not things that happen in our world, such events certainly fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction."

The frame story, however, is a lot more somber. The narrator is, "in fact," speaking to a comatose lover who's been the victim of a violent crime; the perpetrators use hurtful epithets while attacking him, for instance, anti-LGBT slurs, even though the victim isn't necessarily LGBT himself. She's both mourning him and decrying the violence of a world where these things happen.

This story's success at the Hugos and Nebulas was one of the factors in the escalation of the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" campaign for slate nominations at the Hugos (though some of that had preceded this story); this kind of brigading eventually led to rule changes to, hopefully, decrease the ability of collaborating voters to nominate slates. There are a couple of criticisms one can make about the story. One: it's didactic. I agree, it is didactic. Now, "you shouldn't beat up people until they're comatose and shouldn't use bigoted epithets towards them either" is--hopefully--a message that everyone can get behind; I don't think anyone, even the Puppies, were critical of "Dinosaur" because it was harsh on the villains.

There are other stories that make less trivial claims. When person A writes a story that asserts, or even takes for granted, "every right-thinking person should believe X, only an utter troglodyte would believe Y," and person B (who believes Y) reads this, their reaction might be "this is insulting to me, because I don't agree with it," or "because of the didacticism about X, this is difficult to enjoy overall." And I've definitely been in that position.

In cases when the position being presented is something that everyone believes already, more likely reactions are "the story's conflict is kind of boring because everything is very clear-cut," or "the author seems to expect us to be impressed by the bold stance on X, but X isn't actually bold, they're arguing against a strawman/woman/entity." It's not impossible to write a good story that happens to be didactic, but in general, I think it does add an extra layer of difficulty (whether or not the moral is something everyone agrees on, there are easy parts and difficult parts to both approaches). And, of course, none of this justifies abusing or harassing authors who choose to do so, this should go without saying.

But a more relevant criticism of "Dinosaur," and of the fandom sentiment that led it to win a major award for speculative fiction, is that...it's arguably not speculative fiction. Now, I just said that the story-within-a-story clearly is science fiction. But the frame story is not. And, in my opinion, a story set in the mundane world doesn't become speculative merely by having subjunctive what-ifs. You could write a picture book about a kid who takes the bus to school and daydreams, "if I had a dinosaur, I would ride it to school;" I don't think that makes it a science fiction story. But nothing about the world in which the narrator and her love interest "actually" live suggest that that's a world where dinosaurs regularly perform on Broadway or humans transform into flowers, and in that sense, I would not call it SF. And so the fact that it won a Nebula suggests that the voters were much more impressed by the didacticism, which I find disappointing.

So with that, overly wordly, background, I want to talk about another short story Hugo/Nebula nominee from this year, one that several of my friends really liked: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather." (Major spoilers below.)

( Spoilers )

Mostly tangential: the "fake documentation" format lends itself to a lot of fake links, for instance, this is a thing:

I had this premise for a ghost story that was interesting to me (why can some humans talk to ghosts and others can't?) but then didn't really have a plot. So I tried it again as a flash fiction/documentation sort of thing, but that didn't really meet with success. And then later I got an idea for "this is a cool setting and it would be interesting to write about, but again, no plot, no characterization."

But then I had the idea of, "what if it's a weird and cool place...because it's haunted by a ghost!!" The good news is that the ghost has been ghostly for some time now and is not experiencing a post-existential crisis, it can just try to give advice to humans while carrying on its own business.

It still might not really work in terms of having a plot/characters/fitting the genre of the market I'm interested in. And I probably won't be able to retry it at any of the places that turned down the flash fiction version. But hey, it's better than nothing. Ghosts!

There's a certain piece of popular media, and I'm being vague, but maybe it's a well-known poem, or song, or cartoon, just...short work that is not in the public domain, but well-known enough that I think one could make a winking allusion to it without breaking copyright. It is very popular among some quarters. I personally happen to find it very overrated. We get a little sketch of two "characters," and like...the more I think about them, the more I'm curious what their backstory is, how do they know/what do they think of each other. So I keep toying with writing some flash fiction about the arguments between these two. And the punchline is...these aren't just any two strangers, they're the protagonists of [redacted]. I don't really want to do it as fanfic because that would give the punchline away, but I also don't really know what the outlet would be for the "original fiction" version, it would be more humorous than speculative. But anyway, maybe someday I will find a place for it.

What I should be working on: some outstanding fanfic assignments, including but not limited to Fic in a Box
What I'm actually working on: the fricking mermaid story that keeps overrunning length guidelines. I need to just focus on one or two characters, sigh.

Also, a while back seekingferret posted some music compilations/recs including a catchy song called "Harrisburg" by Josh Ritter. (Thanks again!) My extended family has been playing this game where we submit songs that fit a theme and then vote on them so I decided to submit that one. And I think for a while in my head I was mentally conflating Josh Ritter (Americana singer with narrative lyrics) and Josh Groban (Anatoly in 2008 "Chess," has a good version of "O Holy Night.") ...look, no one ever accused me of being knowledgeable about pop culture. Anyway, I think I have them distinct now. Probably.

-Love writing for submission calls with big length windows. Like..."I'm somewhere between 50% to 250% done with this piece!" :D
-From exchange chat discord:


-Also me:

Orange jacket guy shakes his head at intermediate Python documentation hyping up "object-oriented programming" by how you can define custom things like "classes" and "subclasses," so you can make Fido as a member of the class Dog which is a subclass of Animal. And you can assign variables to them like legs=4, and functions like woof() which prints "woof woof," because they feel very indirect and strange--like why would you use "self" as a dummy variable when it isn't doing anything?

Orange jacket guy also shakes his head at spreadsheet-based examples. Like if I wanted to make Joe as a member of the class Customer and have things like zip_code = 12345, bill=49.99, I would just use...a spreadsheet, or some other kind of array/matrix storage format, either in Python or something else.

Orange jacket guy, however, nods appreciatively at the idea of using Python classes to simulate complicated card games like Keyforge. To be clear, I am very very far from implementing any actual cards, but I can now see why you would want to have "power," "defense", "damage," "money captured" as variables assigned to Creatures, which is a subclass of Cards, and how you want to dynamically update them over time through functions like reap() (no input variable) and fight(creature in position X in opponent's battleline)!

I'm a nerd of many facets, and sometimes, I really like it.

A while back I wrote this poem with math-y themes, and I was like, "I don't really want to share this online/under a pseudonym, this feels different enough that I might try to publish it somewhere," and then promptly...did nothing with it because where would I even go to publish a weird poem with "my feelings about math and culture are complicated." Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what "speculative" (SF/F) poetry is, but it occurs to me that this arguably qualifies, and hopefully no harm done in trying. So I might be sending it out to places.

Some of it is on the dark humor/un-progressive side which I suspect is not a point in its favor. But presages some of my more contemporary dark humor/un-progressive stuff, at least!

I'm not sure how obvious it is that I wrote it in one sitting. If I were to edit it, I'd probably tone down the aforementioned parts. But part of the significance (at least to me) is that I wrote it on an interesting (mathy) historical anniversary and I feel like editing it would take away from that. On the other hand, I feel like adding "btw, the significance is that I wrote this on a historic anniversary, get it??" would be an even bigger point against it. I don't know.