David Tallerman's Blog, page 40

No Rest For the Death God's Chosen

No one warns you of this, but sometimes there's a staggering amount of patience involved in selling short fiction.  I say this from bitter experience - and also, I guess, lots of not-bitter experience, because that patience does tend to get rewarded if you're only patient enough. 

But I'm talking patience epochs here.

Case in point: No Rest For the Wicked.  No Rest was the result of two decisions that subsequently turned out to be pretty lousy: writing a sequel to a story I hadn't yet sold and then, when I couldn't sell either separately, combining them into one really long story.  Don't get me wrong, I liked the results, but the results also happened to come to 9000+ words, and a rather crazy, episodic 9000+ words at that.

So I was immensely pleased when I finally managed to sell it way back in 2009, less so when the editor failed to publish it or pay me or answer my e-mails asking when he might do either of those things ... the moral apparently being to never trust anyone calling themselves Santa.

Then ... well, time passed.  Rejections piled up.  Years passed.  Four of them.  See what I mean about patience?

So with all that you can imagine how pleased I was when James Tallett's Deepwood Publishing put out a call for stories about necromancers - here I'm assuming you know that No Rest For the Wicked is a story about a necromancer, which you didn't because I forgot to mention it but you do now -  and how much more pleased I was when it got accepted.  And how much more pleased than that when it actually came out, and had that lovely cover up there.

I haven't have a chance to more than flick through Death God's Chosen yet, but it looks like plenty of fun, with a nice old-school Sword and Sorcery vibe to it.  No Rest For the Wicked definitely falls into that category, though it's particularly light-hearted, more Leiber than Howard.  It's perhaps a bit of a prototype for Giant Thief, in fact, and also the single longest thing I've had published outside of novels.  If any of that sounds up your alley then you can pick up an e-book copy from Barnes and Noble, Kobo or Amazon.

To End All Wars: The End of the Beginning

There was something strangely anticlimactic about finishing To End All Wars.

A week (and a wonderfully relaxing week off in the Cotswolds) on, I'm still not sure whether that should have been the case.  It's hard to say that finishing your fifth full novel*, or for that matter your first science fiction novel, or even your first heavily researched historical novel, should be anything other than climatic.  You might even expect it to be one of the most climatic things you could hope to do.

But research aside, it took me five mostly quite pleasant months to write, and when you're used to novel writing being a more traumatic, gut-wrenching experience, that's just very hard to get your head around.  To put it in perspective, the first draft of Giant Thief took me over two years, and while the first drafts of Crown Thief and Prince Thief took a mere six months each, they were six months of pain and borderline terror and thinking I'd never, ever make my deadline - whereas TEAW, by comparison, was pretty much a breeze.  Except for a slight hiccup with the final chapter, which necessitated a last minute wave of extra research, (and let's face it, final chapters aren't supposed to come easily), I never strayed far from the timescale I set down at the start of the year, and even ended up finishing a day early.

It also might just be the best novel I've written.  I'm pretty sure it is.  There are some issues, there are always issues, but I'm pleased with it, and given that To End All Wars was a whole order of magnitude more ambitious than anything I've tried before, that's more than I had any right to expect.  I'm hopeful that, a couple of drafts down the road, it will be something exciting, and also something unique.  When your influences range from The Prisoner to Rogue Male to Regeneration, surely the end result has to be a little unique?

So anticlimactic, it turns out, may not be such a bad thing after all.  If anticlimactic means minimal stress, no last minute panicking and things working out about how you'd hoped they would then, hey, I'm happy if everything I do from hereon is this much of an anticlimax. 

And now I realise, belatedly, that I've done yet another To End All Wars post without talking even slightly about what it's actually about.  Well, maybe next time, when I finish the second draft come November time.  And maybe that time I'll finally break out the champagne too.





* Or possibly fourth, depending where you place War For Funland, currently being radically overhauled as The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland.

Analysing The Lord of Feathers

Recently I updated the freebie story on my website.  It's traditionally been a slight source of woe, in that I obviously wanted something there that didn't make me look rubbish, but it seemed like cheating to use a story already available somewhere else and I didn't want to put anything up that might potentially make me money either because, hey, I need money.  As a compromise I've finally settled on a story called The Lord of Feathers, which though old, was one of the first pieces where I really felt like I'd got things more right than wrong.  It originally appeared in the now-defunct Reflection's Edge, although the version I've put up has been heavily edited (and hopefully improved) from that one.  

What I couldn't edit, however, was the heart of the thing - and coming back to it, I couldn't but wonder what had been going on in my head as I wrote it all those many years ago.*  Now traditionally I don't talk too much here about what my work is about, perhaps because traditionally I've never been entirely sure myself.  But this being a special occasion, and a story I'm so divorced from in time that I probably don't understand it much better than anyone else, I thought I might bend that rule a little.  In fact, what I thought we could do, in a radical departure from usual Writing on the Moon service, is that you go away and read The Lord of Feathers and then come back here and I'll try and make some sense out of it for you.  

Wild, huh?  It's like interactive blogging or something.  In fact, to make it that bit more creepy, why not pretend I'm hiding in your closet while we do this?  Hell yeah!  Okay, here goes...

 Well my first thought - and I'm not sure I should be admitting this - was that, holy crap, that's a bit misogynistic.  Female protagonist acts like an idiot for five thousand words and then gets killed for it.  That's just harsh.

But let's not jump to conclusions here, especially not ones that make me look really bad.  Because the second thing that strikes me is that this is very clearly a love story - as in a story about love, rather than the more traditional story in which two people meet and fall head over heels for each other, because clearly, that doesn't happen at all.**  And thinking back to the time when I wrote it, The Lord of Feathers strikes me as a particularly bitter, angsty take on love: you give up everything for someone, try your best to please them and what happens?  You end up with your heart ripped out in the snow.

So does that make it not sexist?  I'm not entirely sure.  I do find myself wondering, though - and this is a test I often set myself these days - what would happen if the gender roles were reversed.  Could it still function?  My own feeling is that it could, and I have some evidence for this: I actually wrote something a lot like that story.  Like I said, The Lord of Feathers was one of the first things I wrote that seemed somewhat successful, and for a while I thought about spinning it off into a book of connecting tales.  One of those, which I actually finished, featured the Lord of Seven Hills - briefly alluded to at the beginning of The Lord of Feathers - and ran in parallel, telling a similar (and equally cynical!) tale.

The thing is, Isabella's behaviour is stupid, there's no getting around that, but I think that it's at least stupid in a way that's in keeping with her character and background.  She starts out, after all, as a spoiled teenager, and her first act is to run away from home.  And digging a little deeper, it occurs to me that The Lord of Feathers is also - maybe even more so - about the trauma of stepping out of childhood into adulthood: about going away and finding a job and making your own decisions and paying the consequences, however terrible they may be.  (By this view, Isabella's parents curious willingness to let her go seems fractionally more reasonable.)

One last thought, and this is something I do vaguely remember thinking about when I wrote The Lord of Feathers: it's also very much a story about subjectivity.  Isabella's great failing is not so much that she behaves like a dumb, overprivileged teenager but that she assumes everyone else sees the world the way she does.  The Lord of Feathers must love her because she loves him; and why wouldn't Madeleine want to stay and live in crushing poverty just because Isabella thinks it's a good idea?  In this sense, the Isabella we end with is perhaps more sympathetic than the one we began with.  She's learned that love has to cut both ways, what it means to be an adult and that other people see the world in vastly different ways to herself.

If it's a shame that the price of all that knowledge is a horrible death then all I can say is, it took me a long time to realise that there are ways to end your story that aren't killing the protagonist.

 #

So hey, that's my take.  But if anyone has another then I'd be intrigued to hear it; it's perfectly possible you understood The Lord of Feathers a whole lot better than I did.  Comments particularly welcome on this one...







* I feel like I'm making myself seem old now.  Look, it wasn't that long ago.  Put it this way, we still had mobile phones, and not those crazy eighties brick things either.

** Though there's a part of me that thinks that by the end, in his crazy psycho werewolf way, the Lord of Feathers is at least trying.

On Tearing it Up and Starting Anew

One of the pieces of advice that came to me in my formative writing years* - I think it was in Lisa Tuttle's Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, though I may be wrong - was that as a matter of course you should shelve your finished work and then, after a suitable period of absence, begin it afresh.  Give it some thought and it's not hard to see the advantages of such an approach: with so much groundwork already done, your brain is freed up to learn from all the dumb mistakes you made the first time through and spew pure awesome.  But it's harder not to also see the obvious disadvantages, which is that getting anything finished would take a goddamn age and you'd constantly be throwing your babies out with your bathwater - which all else aside, is bound to lead to a severely clogged drain.

Anyway, as advice it stuck with me, at first because it went against everything I believed about the writing process and then later, once I'd actually given it a go and produced good work on the back of it, because I could see the soundness of it but still new full well I'd never make it my standard working practice.  Because life is too short, writing careers can be shorter still, and the more I write, the more I find that I like to write fast.

I certainly never imagined I'd do it with a novel.  So the fact that that's more or less what I'm now in the middle of seems worth commenting on.

What I'm trying with what was once called War For Funland and is now known as The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland is something I've never done before and desperately hope I'll never have to do it again, but I am doing it right now and by gosh it's liberating.  What's good gets polished.  What isn't - or what doesn't work, or fit, or just looks at me funny - gets chucked out, without a shred of mercy or regret.  My schedule gives me practically enough time to rewrite the whole thing from scratch so, hey, who cares?  What I keep is a bonus.  And what I write new will be better, because I've been this way before and know where are the pitfalls and rattlesnakes are hiding.

I've finished the prologue and the first of five parts now, which is solid progress given that this has so far been my B project after To End All Wars (which is really close to finished, by the way, and more on that soon.)  So far I'm finding that this sort of heavyweight rewriting is only a little quicker than writing anew, which I guess leaves the question of whether the results are actually better.  With two novels written together using wildly different approaches, it will be interesting to see which of the two first drafts I'm happier with, which needs more revision at the second draft stage, and whether the parts of The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland that survived in one form or another are significantly better or less in need of revision that the parts I wrote afresh.

In all honesty, though, I suspect those sorts of differences will be negligible.  The differences I'm noticing are ones of character, mostly, along with things like timing and plot construction that - in what is for me quite a layered and ambitious novel - I struggled to get right the first time through and now feel I have a far stronger grasp of on.  Good planning would have sorted much of that in the first place (and I have an infinitely more solid plan this time around) but it has to be said that this approach, what I may or may or not be misguidedly labeling The Tuttle Approach, is getting there too, and that's a definite argument in its favour.

So thanks, kind of, to Lisa Tuttle.  And, since I'm salvaging more than I'd originally hoped, thanks as well to me-of-four-years-ago for not making quite the hash of it that I felt like I was doing at the time.





* Which, thinking about it, I'd like to think I'm still in, since the last few months have been all sorts of formative.  I guess I mean my early formative years...

Third Sale to Pseudopod

Yes!  Pseudopod have indeed joined the tiny but worthy pantheon of markets to have accepted more than one or two of my submissions, having just now followed their purchases of Stockholm Syndrome and Prisoner of Peace with my zombie-story-with-almost-no-zombies-in-it Twitcher.   Yup, very few zombies indeed, but an awful lot of bird watching - as the title suggests - and no that's not a metaphor or a crude pun or something, it really is absolutely a zombie story about bird watching.  Possibly the first and quite probably the last, but I wrote it and Pseudopod have accepted it and that, as the saying goes, is that.

Anyway, what was especially nice about this particular sale is that it ended a quite staggering run of rejections.  I'm sure I've discussed this before*, but there are times when spells of short story rejections (and by the same measure, I suppose, spells of acceptances) seem to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.  Thanks to the might stats-providing majesty of Duotrope's Digest I can say with confidence that my acceptance ratio towards the end of October was above 13%, the highest it's ever been, and that nearly six months and maybe sixty submissions later it was sitting at less than half that.

Now experience has taught me not to worry too much and that it all balances out in the end, but what I find myself wondering is, how does this happen?  How can you be one minute comfortably selling a story a month and then going for six months without a sniff of interest?  I can think of any number of factors, but most of them would depend on me - the types of stories I was submitting, the markets I picked, the regularity with which I sent work out - and as far as I can tell my behaviour is fairly consistent.  To the best of my knowledge I haven't spent the last six months submitting crappy work or picking wildly inappropriate markets or accidentally sending out my shopping list.

Maybe the problem is that I'm looking for micropatterns when I should be looking for macropatterns.  Maybe I'm just a crappy judge of my own work.  (I'm not.)  Maybe the universe is a crazy, random place and the publishing industry is an even more crazy, random place and we're all just like dust motes in a beam of sunlight. 


No!  I believe in order, damn it, and there must be some logic here.  There must be!

But for the life I me I can't see it...




* I did and it was here.

Endangered Weapon B More Available Than Ever

I'll be honest, it hasn't been quite as easy as I might have hoped to lay your hands on mine and Bob Molesworth's graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science (not unrecently described by Sci-Fi Now as "frantic, joyous and brilliant fun"!)  This is probably something I should have talked about before now, because a friend recently mentioned to me the difficulties they'd had picking up a copy on Amazon - you know, that obscure independent bookshop in the Outer Hebrides you probably haven't heard of - and it reminded me that, yeah, that's a thing all right.

But who needs Amazon, right?  Anything that slows down their despotic plans to take over the retail world and replace everyone under the age of twenty-five with robots and insert mind-reading insects into our heads has got to be a good thing.*

So first of all the new and up-to-the-minute news, which is that EWB is one of the launch titles in a new digital anthology PULSE, the first issue of which is just now out from digital comics specialists ROK.  It's dirt cheap at 69 pence an issue, and that buys you not only the opening part of Endangered Weapon but also the beginnings of fellow Markosia titles Serpent Wars and Dinocorp (which Bob happened to illustrate as well, by the by.)  Truth is I don't know exactly what's in there because right now it's iPad only and I don't have an iPad, but hey, 69p.  Even if it spontaneously combusted in your face the moment you looked at it that would still be great value for money.

Then when I was thinking about that I happened to do a little shopping around and I discovered that right now Endangered Weapon is available from Forbidden Planet at the awfully reasonable (if slightly arbitrary) web-only price of £6.89.  That's a fair bit less than you'll see it for anywhere else, so I'm happy to recommend Forbidden Planet as the EWB stockist of choice, especially since I did my Free Comic Book Day signing there and so the whole thing has a nice air of cosmic justice about it.

Anyway, like I said, this is hopefully only the beginning.  Both Markosia and Bob and I have a few things up our sleeves to keep the Endangered Weapon B train a-rolling on, until the inevitable day when the film rights get picked up and it earns us all enough to retire on the moon.  I'm thinking Sean Connery as The Professor, Seychelle Gabriel as Tilly, Ray Park as Wiffles and - of course!- Andy Serkis in the role of Banjo.



* Not that I have any reason to believe that Amazon are doing any of those things and I really don't want to get sued please sorry.

Research Corner #6: WW1 Reading Pt 3

It seems an age since I talked about my WW1 research; as far as I can tell, the reason isn't that I've been slacking off (though I did get briefly diverted into reading the diaries of South Sea Islands missionaries, for reasons that may become apparent one day) but that I read too many damn books at the same time and thus rarely seem to finish anything.

There comes a point, though, when however many books you have on the go you have to finish a few.  Unless you're reading, like, a thousand books simultaneously, I guess, but given that that would be idiotic and I'm not doing it, I have in fact managed to reach the end of a handful - not to mention some more TV and film research.  Here be my thoughts:

A Month in the Country by J. Carr

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I bought this, but whatever I had in mind, it wasn't what A Month in the Country turned out to be ... not a criticism as such, merely an observation.  It's strange little book, though, whichever way you twist it; you could argue that it has almost nothing to do with the First World War and that it's about practically nothing else, and either theory would be as supportable as the other.

At any rate, I really did like it.  It's sort of a pastoral, for want of a better description, and deals with a subject that fascinates me and yet isn't talked about that much, at least when it comes to WW1: how the young men who returned with scars both physical and mental tried to (or tried not to) reintegrate themselves into civilian life.  As I suggested above, A Month in the Country mostly deals with that subject by not talking about it, but on reflection that's completely appropriate: surely that's exactly how most did cope with their experiences.

Beneath Hill 60, dir. Jeremy Sims

It only occurs to me now that the release of Beneath Hill 60 makes the Australian World War One movie an actual sub-genre, what with Gallipoli existing and all.  And just as that film imagined the battle of Gallipoli as being fought entirely by antipodeans, so Beneath Hill 60 seems to think that the tactic of trench undermining began in 1916 and was practiced exclusively by Australians.

That bit of nonsense aside though (and unlike every American war movie ever, it does at least acknowledge that other nationalities bothered to show up) this is a very good, if episodic, picture, and one that admits to a bit more strategic thinking on the Western Front than is generally allowed.  My only slight struggle was with the subplot about the protagonist's relationship with an underage (by modern standards, anyway) girl; it plays oddly, and the film at once seems to expect us not to notice and then constantly draws attention to that oddness.  Still, it's presumably in there because it happened, and I'd hate to be the one who criticizes a war movie for being too historically faithful...

Downton Abbey Season 2

Considering that this was the season I started watching Downton for ... look, uniforms! ... it was disappointing when it turned out to be not as good as the first, and not quite good enough to make me want to press on to the third, research be damned.  It all gets a bit soapy in the middle section is the problem, and certain characters and relationships start to grow a little absurd, and then in a few cases a lot absurd.  (I'm looking at you, John Bates - and I wish I wasn't.)  More than in the first season, I was also increasingly conscious of the ambitious time scale, and the fact that some plot-lines resolutely refuse to keep up with it in any logical way.

On top of that, from a research point of view it proved a disappointment, the threads that dealt directly with the whole "Downton becomes a WW1 rest hospital" development being amongst the poorest on offer.  (Note to every TV writer everywhere: the moment you use long term amnesia as a major plot point is the moment you've lost.)  And I know this is prime time television and everything, but if you're representing casualties of the most mutilating war in human history, a few bandages and the odd eye patch doesn't really do justice to the barely conceivable horror of it all.

Damn it, this is turning into an essay on Downton Abbey, which is the absolute last thing I want to spend my life writing.  Moving swiftly on...

Ladies of the Manor by Pamela Horn

This was brought to my attention by the author of an unreleased work more related to my subject, so it's probably something of a recommendation that I stuck with it even when it turned out that only the last chapter dealt, very briefly, with the First World War.

It's an intriguing overview of a subject that at first seems a touch limited, and then as you go on begins to impact on just about every aspect of Victorian and Edwardian society, just as those titular ladies did.  I'd have liked to see a just slightly more Feminist-minded take on the subject matter, which Horn often seems to be hovering on the verge of, and a little more psychological insight or even questioning would have gone a long way.  It's admirable in a way that Horn restrains herself from imposing modern standards onto her material, but it leaves a great many questions not only unanswered but unasked.  Still, a good book all told, and also a pretty good general insight into late nineteenth and early twentieth century history.

Rivers by Richard Slobodin

As biographies go, this is quite an achievement really, in that W. H. R. Rivers (brilliantly, the R. also stands for Rivers) was a fascinating individual and this is a crushingly dull little book, and it surely must take a certain amount of skill to write the one about the other.

In limited fairness, as far as I can judge this is only part of a larger biography, released as a little pocket book style thing to cash in on the release of the Regeneration movie (hence Rivers looking an awful lot like Jonathan Pryce.)   But that hardly excuses its faults, which are mostly to do with Slobodin's assumption that we all know the period enough that he can name-drop even the most minor historical facts and figures without explanation and his fairly leaden prose.

Still, there's no getting around how awesome Rivers was - frankly the only way he could have been any more awesome would be if he'd listed ninja or astronaut on his CV - so if this is the only biography he gets then I suppose that just about makes it worth recommending.

The Psychic Battlefield by W. Adam Mandelbaum

With a title like that you'd expect this to be dismal, and lo and behold, it really was.  Frustratingly so, because there's just enough nods towards how interesting this subject could potentially be that you get to the end screaming out for a book on the subject written by someone a touch less idiotic.  Mandelbaum's only apparently genuine interest is in the CIA's remote viewing experiments, and everything else he treats with glibness, contempt and some entirely half-arsed research.  And the worst thing?  I'm pretty sure I've read this before, though I can't even begin to imagine why I would have.  Bad enough to read an awful book once, but twice?

On Writer's Block; Or, Why Write One When You Can Write Three?

One of the questions writers apparently get asked a lot (though I've only personally been asked it the once, more's the pity) is how they deal with Writer's Block.

The reason I wish I got asked it more is that I'm hugely cynical about the whole phenomenon, and would like to get to air that cynicism in public more.  I've long suspected that its main victims are those novelists in crappy movies who've written one book and have no idea how to start another, because the first one was a verbatim retelling of their disastrous marriage break-up or the time they got kidnapped by were-ferrets or something, and who do all their work (or lack thereof) on decrepit manual typewriters, and probably end up investigating a murder that then becomes the material for that difficult second novel, because god forbid they go through the indignity of actually inventing something.

Man, I really hate those guys.

Still - while I basically believe that Writer's Block should be renamed Writer's Slacking, or Ill-Conceived Movie Character's Block, or given its main symptom, maybe just Non-Writer's Block - I would concede, if pressed, that it's possible and even sometimes quite easy to run up against brick walls in this line of work.  And sometimes it can be genuinely tricky to maneuver past those walls, to the extent that there will be occasions when you're writing and can feel somewhat, you know, blocked.

Tricky, but by no means impossible, and definitely not worth naming an entire condition for.  So in honour of Hollywood teaching us that all writers are fundamentally lazy, I shall now quote from the answer I gave on this very subject in an interview a couple of years back over at Sci-Fi Fan Letter:

If you get really stuck, move on to something else.  If a line or a story or an idea isn't working, let yourself back off from it and concentrate your efforts elsewhere.  If you can't write the start of a story, skip on to a scene you feel more comfortable with and write that instead.  Meanwhile, keep a little bit of your subconscious busy chipping away at that wall you've hit and come back when you're ready.

Good advice, if I do say so, and I stick by it.  In fact I stick by it so hard that, although it's always been the basis for how I tried to work, for the first time in my life I'm getting to really put it into practice.  As of the beginning of this month, I've been writing two novels simultaneously, as well as a short story, and I'm also writing all three projects non-linearly, with three or more sections in each on the go at once, something that's probably only possible because I've had a lot more time than previously to produce solid plans.  It's the way I've always wanted to work and never been able to, basically, and it's heartening to discover that so far it's absolutely doing the job.

Facetiousness aside, while I realise not everyone has the time to work on multiple projects at once,  I earnestly believe that working on multiple points within a story, or if possible at least a couple of things at a time, is the best way to keep your creative brain in sound running order.  That said, I've come across very few other writers who actually do work remotely the work I do, so I suppose there's a chance that it's just me.  Thoughts welcome!

Suddenly, Zombies

I first became aware of Amanda C. Davis's writing through the Zombonauts anthology, the dreadful piece of nonsense we both inadvertently sold work to* and - this being what caught my attention - which Amanda owned the hell out of.  I mean, I'd like to think that my Fear of a Blue Goo Planet** was one of the less awful pieces contained therein, in that it had been edited and used real words and had a start, beginning and end; but Amanda's Two Things was about the only tale that could genuinely be called good.  "Some lovely, witty writing ... and a slyly understated ending," I said at the time, and I think that about sums it up.

I'm normally far too self-absorbed to notice what anyone else in this industry does, but Amanda's name kept catching my eye.  We appeared in an issue of Redstone Science Fiction together - her On the Sabbath Day Be Ye Cleansed was (and is) entirely great - and I remember noticing that she'd racked up a load of great sales since the last time I'd looked.

Then Amanda got in touch a few days back and asked if I'd be okay with her quoting me on the cover of a mini-anthology she was putting out - Zombonauts having been dire beyond reason, it hadn't garnered a great deal of reviews - and obviously I said yes, because I love seeing my name on stuff even when it's stuff I can't rightly take any credit for.  Said mini-anthology turned out to be called Suddenly, Zombies, and there's the wonderfully lo-fi cover above.  As you can probably extrapolate, asides from the zombies-in-space story there's also a giant-zombie-gorillas tale in there, the perfectly titled Escape From Ape City, which is also both lovely and witty and which gets more mileage than you'd think would be possible from the simple joke of refusing to refer to Giant Zombie Gorillas as anything other than Giant Zombie Gorillas.

(It's to her credit that Amanda acknowledges this fact.)

Oh, and there's a third story too, which is exceedingly short and just the right ending for such silly zombie fun.  And look, 99 cents!  That's hardly even real money.  I mean, I don't know much about American money but I'm guessing that wouldn't even buy you a packet of peanuts, or a Winnebago.





* Not to say that I inadvertently sold the story, because that wouldn't make much sense.  No, my mistake was in thinking you couldn't possibly go wrong with an anthology about zombies in space.

** Which you can listen to in podcast here, should you so wish.

Got a (Par)sec?

I don't pay a huge amount of attention to awards, having failed to win any since I was seven, but I got a nice e-mail from Pseudopod's Shawn Garrett the other day and I thought I'd break my rule, especially since it's not really a rule anyway but more a habit or vague inclination.

Shawn happened to mention in passing that the nominations period for the Parsec awards - a celebration of speculative fiction podcasting, as their website banner usefully points out - is open, and pointed out too that not only is Pseudopod itself eligible for "Best Speculative Fiction Magazine or Anthology Podcast" but that my story Prisoner of Peace (along with almost everything Pseudopod publishes) is potentially nominatable in the category of "Best Speculative Fiction Audio Drama (Short Form)". 

As you surely know if you listen to it on even the most semi-regular of bases, Pseuodpod is great and entirely worthy of a nomination.  However, since winning another award, or even being nominated for one, would probably just detract from that one blazing moment twenty eight years ago, I won't ask that anyone put my name forward for Prisoner of Peace. 

It is, however, surely the best horror story I've written, or at least my own personal favourite.  A tale once described as "Oldboy meets Memento in a prison cell somewhere just west of Hell," (by me, in fact, just then), it's certainly amongst the parts of my work that I'd most like to see nominated for an award or seven.  Here's the link again, in case you missed it before.

Still, like I said, it would be a genuine shame to dim the glory of that seven-year old me's triumph.  As Oscar Wilde possibly said, unless I just made it up, some moments shine too brightly to be tarnished with the tawdriness of repetition.

But you should totally nominate Pseuodpod, yes you should.  And if, while you were at it, you felt an unaccountable urge to mention my story too, well, however much the part of me that will always be that skinny seven year old, clutching his trophy or whatever the hell it was I won, standing in the floodlights and...

Wait, I'm pretty sure my school never had floodlights.  Maybe I just dreamed the whole thing.  Oh all right then, nominate Prisoner of Peace if you're so damned determined.  

I promise not to hold it against you.