Tim Newton Anderson's Blog, page 10

Magic Portals

A new collection I have a story in is about to come out on June 10 – Magic Portals. The pre-order details (apart from Amazon which doesn’t do it that way) are at https://books2read.com/u/mZQXVp.

The story is The Cartomancer, for which I invented a new form of magic where a map of an imaginary place becomes a portal to that world.

Maps of unknown worlds have always fascinated me. Amongst my reference books I have J B Post’s Atlas of Fantasy, Stableford’s Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, the magisterial Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Umberto Eco’s Book of Imaginary Lands. I also have a lot of books and maps showing the imaginary or lesser known parts of London and the UK. If you want to know where be monsters, look at the Herb Lester Occult London map or Marvellous Maps British Folklore and Superstition map.

I attempted to do a bit of creative historio-geography myself in a blend of essay and story on the Vanishing Countries of Middle Europe. The central thesis of countries being erased from the map as political boundaries change is not so far from reality if we look at the way Europe arbitrarily divided up Africa after the First World War, or the current situation with Russia claiming Urkraine is not a real country. It is not only history that is written by the winners, but also geography.

We Built This City

Corbusier said houses were a machine for living. Cities are a machine for commerce, control and culture.

Writers of fantasy and science fiction often have to build cities to house their stories, and those cities themselves must be built on stories, as they are in real life. Not just the stories of their own history, but the stories of the people, races and cultures that have made them their home. Those stories are like ingredients in a dish – some may homogenise, but others retain their individual flavours which blend together when you taste them but are still identifiable.

If you want to build a city, you need to look at the common threads in those that exist. The first lesson is that they are a palimpsest – the streets and buildings are built on earlier structures and some of that previous pattern can still be seen. In Norwich – where I lived for many years – the new buildings still conformed to the medieval street pattern. In London and Paris, planned design (Wren’s new city after the fire and Haussman’s boulevards after the 1848 revolution) still has the older streets existing outside the grand new centres. Even mass scale slum clearance will often replace the buildings, but keep the streets as it reduces the infrastructure costs for water, sewage etc.

The second pattern is the waves of colonisation and gentrification. Commerce clusters together in the centre and spreads out, pushing housing out of its way and increasing the cost of what is left. At the same time there is generational dynamic where people want a more comfortable life than their parents and will migrate to the edges of the city where you can get more for your money than in the centre, including space for a family. This tends to leave the centre for individuals and young couples without a family.

There is also a cultural element at work. Immigrants have an understandable desire to live close to people who share their culture and generally settle in poorer areas while they build their new lives. As the next generations come along, they often integrate and move out to the suburbs with everyone else, and their places are taken by the next wave. In New York, Little Italy has been gradually taken over by an expanding Chinatown and the Jewish community in the East End of London has been replaced by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent.

The same pattern can be seen in shops as chains move into more and more areas, pushing up rents, and displacing smaller individual shops which persist in poorer areas, especially those with a large ethnic market they share.

Businesses in the centre tend to be in the finance, retail, and hospitality industries as manufacturing moves to the edges. The exception, again, is in poorer areas where there are small scale craft and manufacturing businesses side by side with their communities.

The other group that tends to migrate to poorer inner city areas is artists. Rents and food prices are lower so they can often have studio as well as living space. Living on the fringes of convention they also thrive in areas with social and ethnic groups who are themselves on the margin, by choice or the imposition of the majority.

So much for commerce and culture, but what about control?

Cities are centres of government, of whatever brand. One of the key desires of government is to stay in power, and one of the threats to that is civil disorder. Even if it does not involve out and out protests and rioting, crime and disobedience of the law are seen as threats by the silent majority who support them so clamping down on it helps them retain power. Unless you are French, who seem to accept civil disobedience as a natural phenomenon like the weather, most people tend to want peace and order and a nice environment and look to their government to provide it.

This means “civic improvement” schemes which replace poorer areas with more conventionally attractive ones in the latest architectural styles. This, once again, means a migration of the poor and ethnic minorities and a planned break up of their community and way of life – especially when there are less and less low rent areas they can move to en masse.

They also tend to mean bigger streets (harder to barricade and easier to police) and bigger buildings which can pack in more of those singletons, young couples, and, of course, offices and businesses.

Running counter to this are the small “c” conservative groups who want to preserve the past and who often have the money and influence to get what they want. Ironically, they seldom live in the areas they want to protect.

So where do fantasy and science fiction live in these cities?

Fantasy will generally be located in those ethnic or economic enclaves where there is more heritage and community protection to keep their secrets, or else out in the countryside and isolated communities. That is also where you can find it in fantasies based in “real” cities – the small streets, the rivers, the old and new run-down housing, the marginal spaces often literally underground.

By contrast science fiction tends to be set in the newer parts of the city, except where they feature “outlaws” who will also gravitate to the margins. The contrast between the corporate and the maverick is a rich soil for stories. In fiction, conflict is king, and counterpoint its court.

A great way to show off the city is to have a character who interacts with both worlds, either in a Steerpike social climb or a social, economic or cultural conflict between the centre and the margins which forces someone from one community to interact with another.

The city is built on stories and will constantly generate new ones.

The ‘Pataphysics of “reality”

It is a central tenet of ‘Pataphysics that all are pataphysicians but only some are consciously so. Therefore we should consider whether all works of non fiction are also unconsciously pataphysical.

When I was writing my first stories about the imaginary (or rather ideal) version of the London Institute of ‘Patapysics I threw into the mix jokes about lots of authors whose work I believed belonged to this tradition of the unconsciously pataphysical. This particularly included people like Velikovsky who practised what I call “join the dots” scholarship.

Since man first looked at the stars and decided if you really work hard you can imagine they make up the cardinal points of gods and legends, we have played with the facts in order to make prettier patterns. It takes quite a lot of imagination to believe that several stars millions of miles away (and similar distances from each other) are some kind of cosmic drawing of people and things. It takes a whole meta level of imagination to then believe these invented likenesses determine who we are as people based upon where they are in the sky when we are born. In one of the LIP stories I made up new star signs based on the Pataphysical Calender as a parody of astrology – emulating John Sladek’s wonderful Arachne Rising.

Sladek’s The New Apocrypha brilliantly demolishes a wide range of fringe cults and ideas using the best tool possible – humour. I am not worthy to emulate his genius, but that didn’t stop me having a go. Velikovsky, Korzibsky, UFOs, pyramidology and a whole lot of other things were cheerfully thrown into the mix. My other template (apart of course from Jarry and his successors) was Robert Anton Wilson and his dictum of adopting universal agnosticism.

There are a number of tools used by proponents of join the dots “scholarship”. Some ar definitely pataphysical including syzygy. In its origins in astronomy this is when three celestial bodies are in a straight line (Orion’s Belt anyone?)(noting of course any two bodies will always be in a straight line mathematically although we have to allow for a clinamen or swerve). In ‘Pataphysics this generally means a pun, and in this faux scholarship there are lots if examples of “This looks a bit like this so they must be the same or linked”. I have even seen examples in books about Jarry where it is claimed he must have been influenced by something because there is a surface resemblance.

The other concept is that of anomaly or exception. This is often used to justify the idea that because there is no proof of something it must be true because the lack of proof shows there is some which is being suppressed. From UFO’s to QAnon this is used to justify the unjustifiable. As a result there is quite a lot of antinomy or incompatible opposites.

Charles Fort at least used his damned facts and anomalies to challenge orthodoxy rather than trying to make his own theories (except when joking), but those seeking to justify the outlandish try and say because their ideas contradict themselves or accepted fact they must be true because consensus reality is not always correct. This is like saying the statistical fact that coin tosses will average half heads and half tails is wrong if you throw three heads in a row.

The joy of the pataphysical approach is that you celebrate the beauty of exceptions and strange juxtapositions in their own right rather than having to make them a basis for belief. You can enjoy online conspiracy theories as art, rather than some absolute transcendent reality. They are the product of unconscious ‘Pataphysics.

One area in which they are absolutely right is that all works of history and science are also contingent. They are theories developed to fit the “facts” that have been revealed and are liable to be altered or abandoned as new “facts” emerge. Everything is potentially Fortean. They may work in practice, but that doesn’t mean there is not something that works better. And that something may in turn be replaced by a further improvement. The joining of the dots may be more rigorously researched and tested, but it is still a way station not a destination. Everything is unconsciously pataphysical, except ‘Pataphysics.

Where do you get your ideas from?

I wrote in a previous post about targeting stories to specific outlets or writing to fit a specific theme. The combination of the two now means I have placed a dozen stories in the past six months with a similar number waiting for a response.

But the traditional question to ask authors is where they get their ideas from. Avoiding the traditional jokes (I have a man who delivers the once a week) my honest answer is “they just arrive”.

I can point to prompts such as an anthology theme, or when I was writing a story a week during lockdown I had asked people to provide a lead character, location and genre I would use as a starting point. Other stories start as a title that pops into my head or something I read or see on the television and think “what if…”

A great help is having read an awful lot of stories (two or three books a week for the last 50 odd years) which means there is a lot of otherwise useless information in my head which suddenly links together when something becomes the germ of a story.

I have also internalised a lot of structures and styles so plot and characters accrete like crystals on a seed in a supersaturated solution (look it up if you didn’t do it at school. It’s really cool to watch).

Reading doesn’t mean you copy someone’s style in detail, just that you get the essence of how a story works from thinking about other people’s stories. I’ve always believed I only have one talent (everything else is a skill), which is pattern recognition. The more you read, the more you absorb patterns and can fit your ideas into one that works for the story.

I sometimes get an idea for a story when researching a different one. I wanted to write a story about the Tarot and a sorcerer who had placed his soul in the Fool card so that it would persevere as a standing wave as people used the cards. He would then resurrect himself in someone else’s body via a Tarot reading. I Googled royal fools to find a suitable candidate and came across Jeffrey Hudson or Lord Minimus, who was a fool in the court of Charles I. I may still use him in the original story, but his life was so fascinating he deserved to be a hero rather than just a villain. When there was a call for historical sword and sorcery tales, he was the perfect character to use. There were enough gaps in his biography to slot in a number of tales which fitted in with historical fact.

He grew up on the estate of Lord Buckingham, being just a couple of years older than the second Lord Buckingham who had an equally colourful life and was a perfect “frenemy” with a relationship that could echo Leiber’s Fafrhd and Grey Mouser (I didn’t mention Hudson was less than 2.5 feet tall for most of his life but mysteriously doubled in height after being captured by Barbary pirates).

He fought in the civil war and was exiled from the court of the widowed queen when he killed a man in a duel (the man being armed with a water squirt and him with a pistol. He had the bad luck to come up to London at a time of anti Catholic fervour and was imprisoned in the Tower of London for several years. Co-incidentally one of the architects of the attacks on Catholics – Titus Oates – came from the same village in Rutland (he was England’s smallest person from England’s smallest county).

I had already researched the period to be able to include stuff about The Royal Society in a novel so the rest of the background fell into place quite easily. The challenge was to write stories that lived up to the wonderful source material. Tim Powers makes it look easy!

Dealing with Rejection

Thankfully, now I have had nine acceptances of writing submissions, I am less concerned when I get a rejection email. The acceptance/rejection rate is running at 1:4 which I don’t think is too bad.

It did cause me to consider the reasons why stories are rejected, however. When I worked in PR and marketing, one of the things we used to say was to treat complaints as valuable feedback – however much they may upset you. I think you should look at rejections the same way (and yes, I realise this is easier said than done).

When I first started submitting stories I got more rejections, and at that time it was because the stories simply were not good enough. That didn’t mean they were bad, just had room for improvement. You shouldn’t expect a detailed critique, but you have to look again at what went wrong and use your beta readers to suggest improvements.

As you get better you will start to get acceptances, but that doesn’t mean everything works. Some stories will not find a market – they may be the story you wanted to write and they may be “good” stories, but that doesn’t mean they will find a ready buyer. If you have faith in them keep looking for the right market and don’t get too despondent when that takes a while. One of my stories – The Cat Factory – was written as a child’s fable about the Holocaust. That’s probably a difficult sell in itself, but one of the ways the villain tries to get people to buy his “perfect” cats rather than the ordinary ones is by using fake news to say the other cats spread disease and need to be rounded up in containment centres. In the present world climate any mention of disease and fake news move the story to a comment on current affairs. Not an issue when I wrote it several years ago, but certainly a reason for not publishing it now, and the feedback said as much.

The other issue to think about is whether the story fits the market you are selling to. I have an eclectic set of interests and my stories reflect that, but magazines and anthologies tend to have a narrower focus. Some stories have been rejected by one publisher but welcomed with open arms by another. Read their submission guidelines carefully and look at what they have published. You can always do what I’ve done sometimes and write a story specifically to fit a publisher’s theme. They are still stories I wanted to write, even though they didn’t occur to me until I saw the opportunity.

Remember, unless you have a track record, they will always be taking a chance on you. My covering letter is getting longer and longer as I get more acceptances but I now just include those in the same genre as the market I’m submitting to. If you are writing to a horror anthology, having sold to a light humour magazine  may not be a good recommendation. Especially as humour is extremely personal and not always a good selling point.

The basic message is: keep writing, keep sending stuff off, keep revising if it comes back, send it off again to somewhere it is a better match.

Another one bites the dust

I am now up to five sales, with the latest being to Jersey Pines Ink for their “Trees” anthology.

At the same time I have had 13 stories rejected, but the 2 or 3 to one balance seems quite good to me. One thing I have learned from some of the positive rejections (if that is not an oxymoron) is that the editors often like the story but it doesn’t fit what they are looking for. I try my best to make sure the subject and length are right, but you often have to guess at the tone of the magazine or anthology and it would still be up to individual editors. You can get a story rejected by one outlet but accepted by another.

I may have mentioned I am quite organised in managing submissions – all of my stories are in a table with a word count, and as I send them off I write down where they have gone and that they are “pending”. When I hear back that changes to “accepted” or “rejected”. I suppose if I was really organised I would also add what they say are the typical reply times.

Being organised is necessary because I had accumulated a lot of stories during my lockdown challenge of writing one a week, and there were also those published in my e-book The Cat Factory and other stories (still available on Amazon!!). Some outlets won’t accept simultaneous submissions (i.e. sending it to more than one place at the same time) and many won’t accept stories that have been published elsewhere, even on blogs (which is why I may now say what I’ve written but not make it accessible in case I can sell it).

I’ve still got quite a few stories which haven’t found a home and am writing more but I’ve also been trying my hand at writing stuff for themed anthologies from scratch. I’ve not yet reached the heights of Roger Zelazny, who wrote a story incorporating the theme of three different anthologies and sold to all of them, but writing “on demand” is fun. The theme has to appeal to me but luckily I have a broad range of interests.

How do I know where to send them? There are two very useful resources I use. One is Erica Verillo’s blog Publishing, and Other Forms of Insanity and the other is the Authors Publish blog. Both do regular updates about places seeking writing with a brief outline of what they are after in terms of genre, length etc and the deadline. There is some overlap between the two in terms of which opportunities are featured but often each has things the other has missed.

Tales of the Shadowmen

I am fortunate enough to have a story published in the latest edition of Tales of the Shadowmen – Eminences Grise.

The story is the first of a planned series of six with Fantomas as the principle character battling against other members of the French Wold Newton Universe in plots that revolve around Gold 207 – a radioactive isotope of the precious metal which, unlike lower numbered ones, is stable. It has landed on earth in meteorites at various times throughout history – including Wold Newton in 1795 – and is responsible for both benevolent mutations and vampirism as well as being vital in a range of scientific creations.

The first tale is set in 1900 Paris, with later stories in London in the same year, Tunguska in 1908, Paris in 1904 and 1795 and prehistoric Africa.

For those not familiar with the TotS series published by the wonderful Black Coat Press, they take place in the wider Wold Newton Universe with an emphasis on the French branch detailed in editors’ Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier’s Shadowmen reference books. The basic conceit of the WN Universe is that many heroes and villains from literature, comics, films and television are real in this particular version of reality. Indeed, as detailed in the two Philip Jose Farmer ‘biographies’ which started the whole thing they are often related and descended from those who were near the Wold Newton meteorite strike. As well as the Lofficier books, the Crossovers books by Win Scott Eckert and Sean Lee Levin map the incredibly complex relationships between members of the WN Universe across time and space.

Even if you are not as familiar with the characters in TotS as those in others stories featuring WN Universe members like Tarzan, Doc Savage and Sherlock Holmes they are well worth a read – and not just the volume in which I appear. Titan Books have also re-issued lots of Phil Farmer’s original Wold Newton stories and novels and both Black Coat Press and Meteor House have books set in the same universe. I am particularly looking forward to Eckert’s completion of The Monster on Hold set in the Secrets of the Nine series.

A Load of Nonsense

I love nonsense when it is done well, so have been enjoying Frank Key’s By Aerostat to Hooting Yard.

Key is one of those authors underappreciated by the general public but loved by those who have managed to find his work – including the listeners of Resonance FM who are treated to weekly visits to his strange world and amazing prose. Those who have been fortunate enough to discover Viv Stanshall’s Rawlinson’s End saga on radio, disc, book or film are in the same boat, as are those who remember The Goons and Beachcomber with great affection.

Actors will often say comedy is harder than tragedy as you need an amazing sense of timing – lots of great comics have had successful acting careers but not many actors succeed in comedy. I would say nonsense is even harder. It can’t just be a load of rubbish – there has to be a connection to the real world at a precisely oblique angle and the world inside the nonsense has to make sense on its own terms.

The 60s were a great time for nonsense – possibly spurred by the sense those who grew up in the war had of how little sense the real world actually made. As well as the Goons we had comic strips like Flook, the absurdist dramatists like N F Simpson (whose writings have recently re-appeared in print) and John Antrobus, TV shows like Do Not Adjust Your Set and Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, and the outpourings of Spike Milligan across most media. There wasn’t quite so much nonsense in the US – perhaps because they take themselves more seriously – apart from the wonderful Firesign Theatre, but perhaps that is also because the English have always been well disposed towards eccentrics.  The French have always embraced the absurd from Jarry through to Vian and beyond.

Having also just read Neurotribes – about the history of understanding and treatment of Autism – I wonder whether there is a link between neurodivergence and nonsense, as there is between those on the spectrum and science fiction and invention. As someone who displays many of the attributes of neurodivergence I have always resonated with John Cooper Clarke’s lines: “speaking as an outsider, what do you think of the human race?” The best nonsense is hardly more absurd than much behaviour in the “real” world.

I have sometimes attempted to write nonsense – not least in my stories of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics – and I can attest that it is hard. Part of it is just about being silly, but to succeed (if indeed I have) you also need to have a world that is consistent and only a few steps away from the real one. The people in it have to be identifiably real, although exaggerated, and there has to be internal logic. The best nonsense writers walk that tightrope with an expertise that is breathtaking.

Slay Ride – now out in Nightmare Fuel

My latest story to be published is now available in the latest edition of Nightmare Fuel:

I’ve been really thrilled with the way the writing is going with four stories now accepted. Another story in Tales of the Shadowmen should be out in the next volume in December and the story in Parsec magazine is queued for a future edition.

Meanwhile I’ve been sending off the other stories I created during lockdown to other outlets. An invaluable asset is Erica Vurillo’s blog Publishing…and other forms of insanity. Erica performs an invaluable service by blogging on which markets are open each month with a brief description of what they are looking for.

I’ve created a spreadsheet with all of the stories and their word count which I then match up with outlets and say if they are pending, accepted or declined. If the latter, I then move them to the bottom for the next submission. A bit anal, but it works for me.

All of the stories are now out and I’ve got time (if it inspires me) to write stories targeted at specific themed anthologies. There is still lots in the ideas file (which I also keep up to date with random ideas and move written stories to the bottom) that could easily be created and I’m polishing one story, writing another, and have two I was stuck on I now know hoe to fix.

Emanations and more

The latest issue of the Emanations anthology series contains a short story by me – together with an illustration I created.

I am delighted to be in such august company including Michael Moorcock and Michael Butterworth and eagerly looking forward to my copy arriving. Check out the book itself – When a planet was a Planet – on Amazon here and see more about the series edited by Carter Kaplan here.

This is the third sale I have made recently with others due to appear later this year in Parsec – the magazine from PS Publishing – and Tales of the Shadowmen. I will let you know when they are available.