Ville V. Kokko's Blog, page 4

Arrivals

By coincidence, I got two different things in the mail today that relate to my recent publications:



So there are my copies of Writers in Lockdown: A collection of short stories as well as the certificate and merchandise I got for winning second place in the 2020 Cosmos Awards writing contest. I'm looking forward to reading both Writers and The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom: Volume One - The 1930s.

Oh, and there was also this:



A cheque? I think the last time I saw one was thirty years ago, so I'm barely old enough to remember such a thing. It was kind of cool receiving this, but Americans, take my advice, don't send cheques to other countries. Try something more modern, like seashells. (Or PayPal.) The bank is going to want a 30% processing fee for this.

Good thing the money's not the important thing. This is still very cool.

Writers in Lockdown suddenly released

I just received word that Writers in Lockdown , featuring my fantasy short story "Scars", has been published in paperback, with a Kindle ebook soon to follow. This was much sooner than expected. Either way, my thanks to the editor, Faith Jones, for planning and executing this book and letting me take part in it.



As the book's description states:

Writers in Lockdown is an anthology of fiction short stories, not about the coronavirus itself but representing a broad range of genres and subjects, all written when their authors were confined at home during the first three months of ‘lockdown’, from late March to late June 2020. Fitting the something for everyone description, this collection should also be taken as an historical snapshot of creative minds across borders, still producing quality works of thought-provoking fiction during a time of global paralysis. When someone asks “What did you do in lockdown?”, well, 27 authors around the world combined to make this.

Links for buying it:

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BVSVBZ1

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08BVSVBZ...

All right, now I just have to get to reading the book myself. I'll write something about my own story later. I think it was the only fantasy story here.

Coming up: Writers in Lockdown

(Darn, better write this quickly, since I accidentally posted it without text already.)

It's been confirmed: my short story will be appearing in an anthology called Writers in Lockdown, comprised of stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's a fantasy short story based on a dark what-if scenario based on a great book by a friend of mine.

Stay tuned for more details later...

Cosmos Prize winners announcement, and link to my story

The First Fandom Experience website has now* announced the results of the Cosmos Prize contest, the one in which I won second place.

(*now = earlier, but I've been too preoccupied with my other life to write about it before now.)

The announcement can be found here: https://firstfandomexperience.org/the...

Here's an archived version if that page is down in the future when people come here looking for a record of the beginnings of my legendary career: https://web.archive.org/web/202005072...



What the FFE people lack in getting names right, they make up for in praise:

We thank all of the writers for their incredible work on this contest. We asked a lot of them — to read the entirety of Cosmos, to re-imagine a cohesive conclusion to a wild story, to upstage the work of Edward [Edmond] Hamilton — and they delivered. The writing we received was a show of force, a joy to read, and did justice to the spirit of the contest. New technologies were invented, new heroes were born, and the Solar System was saved anew. Thank you for your time and contributions to the 2020 Cosmos Prize.

We chose the winning entries based on how creatively and thoroughly they digested the first sixteen chapters of Cosmos into a new and satisfying ending. Without spoiling anything, the winning entry tied together various threads of plot and character development, invented a new game-changing technology based on ideas previously established in the serial, and read like it could have been published in the pages of Science Fiction Digest.

My entry was not the winning one, of course, but second. Of those things mentioned, I think mine was mainly accomplished in the first one, tying together plot threads. In fact, here's the feedback they gave me personally:

We felt your submission did a great job of building a new and compelling conclusion to Cosmos that was consistent with the characters and plot established in the first sixteen chapters. The development of the plot arc with Nardony [Narodny] and Stone was captivating, and you set a pace that kept us engaged throughout both chapters. The retrieval of Mea-Quinn's [Mea-Quin’s] lost strategy to beat Ay-Artz, and the way you had the characters struggle right to the end of their own genius and innovation, was thrilling to read.

We also appreciated your deep synthesis of the plot events established in Cosmos to create your new ending. Your entry brought together many interesting loose threads from previous chapters in a satisfying way. We also respect the ambition of writing two chapters, which added depth to the conclusion of this epic saga.

I don't disagree. So without further ado, here is the text of my entry as published on their site:

https://firstfandomexperience.org/the...

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/202005230...

Notice that some of the paragraph formatting is messed up, as that may be a bit confusing. But then again, all the names are correct. Except for "Parlece", because nobody knows which it's supposed to be. And okay yes, I think I typoed "Narodny" once.

Make sure to read the original Cosmos , found here, as well to see how cleverly I made use of it. No? Oh, well.

Weirdly, yet delightfully, I think I will soon have another announcement of the "getting published" sort coming up as well.

The Cosmos Prize

Hello, my imaginary hordes of fans.

I took part in this writing contest: https://firstfandomexperience.org/wri...

As the page (as of this writing but probably not for long) says:

Cosmos was an ambitious serial novel orchestrated by the staff of Science Fiction Digest (later Fantasy Magazine) beginning in June, 1933. The story of Cosmos spanned 17 chapters written by 16 different authors. Raymond A. Palmer drafted the plot outline and coordinated the work of the writers. The young fanzine editor was able to convince many of the prominent professionals of the day to participate.

You can read the entirety of the novel and explore the full history of the event at The Cosmos Project web site.

As you can imagine, making this all work was a major challenge. The results — not surprisingly — are a bit of a hash. Still, Cosmos represents an iconic event in the early history of science fiction fandom, and deserves remembering.

Even more than remembering, Cosmos deserves a better ending than it got. In this writer’s humble opinion, the final chapter utterly failed to capitalize on the potential of the installments that preceded it. Penned by no-less an esteemed professional as Edmond Hamilton, the concluding Chapter 17 — Armageddon in Space — seemed to ignore much of what came before. This has always bothered me. The Cosmos Prize is our attempt to right (or re-write) an historic tragedy.

And? My entry won second place, and will be published on the First Fandom Experience website!

It was a really interesting experience to read Cosmos in order to write about it. The serial novel contains a lot of different storylines from different planets, many of which kind of go nowhere once that planet's inhabitants have joined the general plot. Bringing most of them into a relatively short two final chapters seemed like just the right kind of match for my creativity. My mind kept making connections between things in a very enjoyable process. The feedback I got from the judges also praised this aspect of my text(s). It was somewhat similar to how I've been writing my dissertation in a wholly non-linear way, putting cross-references everywhere. If you look at Cosmos as a whole that concludes with my two chapters, only chapter two of the original (my least favourite anyway) seems kind of useless for the overall plot, and I manage to refer even to that one.

There were also other interesting aspects to the writing process. I suppose my style was a kind of modern pastiche of the thirties style of the original, with some light irony and deconstruction about things like the universal translation device and gender roles. The old science fiction story also (unsurprisingly) used scientific or allegedly scientific ideas as plot elements or as points of interest, and it was fun replicating that in my own way. In a couple of places, I just used some modern ideas and presented them as something innovative in the setting which, though set a millennium in the future, is still based on thirties ideas. (When it mentions "computers", for example, they are people.) Other times, I used actual scientific-ish ideas I happened to have knowledge of or made up myself. Not all of them are that legitimate, but that goes with the tone of the original.

I'll post again when the results are announced on the website and the chapters are published there. Maybe I need to hurry up and build a website so that I can use this to promote it...

New fantasy short story in Finnish

My third published short story appeared in this new Finnish online magazine: https://varjorikko.com/maatilan-tytto/

It's about what happens after you've been turned to stone.

Love 'Em, Shoot 'Em released

The book is officially out now.

Smashwords - use this code to get 25% off: EY46G
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Love-em-Shoot-...

And yes, they've got my name wrong in some places...

I can get the e-book for free for reviewers. Just ask if you're interested.

NaNoWriMo 2017: Time travel, dark magic and...

I usually participate in the National Novel Writing Month (https://nanowrimo.org), and this year is no exception. This year's idea starts with time-travellers, but it quickly comes to involve... not to spoil it, but a bunch of other very different speculative fiction themes. You can read more at the novel's page: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/vv...

Cover for Love 'Em, Shoot 'Em

Love 'Em, Shoot 'Em

I just finished checking the master file for the next anthology containing a short story of mine: Love 'Em, Shoot 'Em by Wolfsinger Publications. Here's the original anthology call:

http://www.wolfsingerpubs.com/LoveemS...

As I said in my last post, my story is about what happens when an indomitable mind faces an irresistible curse.

I was really nervous to open the file and look at my story again in case it looked stupid between all these other stories by real writers. It wasn't that bad, though. Now I'm getting excited again.