Bryce Beattie's Blog, page 7

Virtual Note Cards

A long while back I wrote a little online app that let you write/edit/delete/rearrange virtual index cards. I quietly let that project die, but instead of writing the submission manager that I should be working on, I was recently overcome with the urge to revisit the idea. So now it’s been rebuilt from the ground up and made into an installable app. Windows only, for now.

Yeah, but what is it?

Virtual Note Cards is a little app that does what it says on the box: it lets you make note “cards”, edit them, and shuffle them around (just drag and drop them where you want them.) When you need it, you can export a text file of all of your notes, in order. It also supports markdown text, if you want the formatting for the text on a card to be a little sexier.

What is it good for?

Well, I made it to help organize thoughts/scenes while writing fiction. But feel free to use for any legal purpose you can think of.

What’s it cost?

It’s free.

If you feel compelled to do something to say thanks, feel free to go to Amazon and check out one of my books. Or give me a high five next time you see me.

Download

You can download the windows installer here: Virtual Note Cards. (~23 mb)

Screenshots







Version History

2018-10-01: Initial Release

Issue Three Update

I’m getting close to release. I have a couple more of my little fillers to do, and I’m waiting for one last piece of interior art, for which the new artist has already sent a couple of sketches. Also, if anybody out there would like to put a blurb for their work or podcast or a message to their girlfriend or something, talk to me. I’m not taking payment for advertising, but I would be happy to work out a trade of some kind. And I’m really open to about anything.

As to the fun stuff. Here’s the cover:

And here’s the Table of Contents page:

This would be a lot faster and cheaper for me to publish without the interior art, but I just love it so much. Is the interior art a thing you care about as a reader? Or is it just a nice bonus that wouldn’t really be missed were it to go away?

The Pre-Campbell Challenge

Hot on the heels of the Pre-Tolkein Challenge, Keith West issued forth the Pre-Campbell Science Fiction Challenge, in which participants are encouraged to read 3 short stories published before John W. Campbell, Jr. took over the editing of Astounding Stories in 1938.

I figured I’d give it a go. After all, I love this stuff.

I found a couple of shorter pieces by writers I’ve never heard of, then dug a slightly longer one out of my perpetually-growing “I always meant to read” pile.

Ready? Here we go.

Space Flotsam

This comes from the February, 1934 issue of Astounding Stories. It’s by Raymond Z. Gallun. It’s not long enough to really weave a deep narrative, but it still packs some actual story into its few pages.

It open with the main character getting tossed out of a spaceship. He ruminates on what brought him to this point, then what to do about it. Finally, he does that thing. That’s all we have time for.

The actual science described was pretty light. I noted that authors apparently have always known that space boots should have magnetic soles. I liked it, though. The character had motivation and he had guts. Plus, I’m currently writing a space opera, so it’s good to get in the mindset.

The Educated Pill

I’ll give you a minute to guess what the second story is about, based on the title.

If you said “baseball” then you get a high five from me the next time we meet.

This one I downloaded from PulpGen, which has pdfs of individual stories from various pulps lovingly scanned into real text and corrected. The site seems to be having trouble right now, but check back. It’s really a great resource. As I’m posting this on the 31st of August, I’ll bet they just ran over their bandwidth or something. Someone really needs to help them get a mirror up. But I digress.

The Educated Pill was written by Bob Olsen and published in the July, 1928 Issue of Amazing Stories.

The story itself is a humorous tale of a baseball team playing for the pennant. After they win two games, the opposing team purposefully injures the pitcher. After taking it in the shorts for the next three games, an inventor shows up, having created a baseball that can fly around crazily and not be hit. The story is pretty silly, even if it misses modern humor ideals. The description of how the baseball works is laughably unfeasible, but hey, the story makes no bones about trying to be anything other than a comedy, so it doesn’t really trip it up.

Ultimately, the story has a neat little moral, as neither team wins because of cheating.

Its fun, and I don’t think it has aged pretty well, other than the fact that pro baseball apparently didn’t have all that many rules back in the day.

Armageddon 2419 A.D.

That’s right, I had never read the first Buck Rogers story, before they even called him “Buck.” I actually cheated a bit on this one and listened to a version on Librivox while I was driving to and from work and such. It’s by Phillip Frances Nowlan and first appeared in the August, 1928 issue of Amazing Stories.

In this novella Anthony Rogers, from 20th century earth, is in a mine during a collapse and is trapped, surrounded by radioactive gasses. The gasses knock him out and preserve him for almost 500 years. I guess people used to think that gasses would be a good way to do that, as this isn’t the first pulp story I’ve read with that basic premise. Anthony wakes up to a world where America has been torn apart by war for centuries, finally coming to be conquered by the Han Empire. The Han Empire is essentially the descendants of modern day China. When this is explained in the narrative, readers with paper-thin skin will likely throw up their arms in a fit of triggered sobs and run screaming from the room. Because as you know, the only acceptable bad guys in science fiction are greedy corporate white American dudes and Nazi stand ins. I would suggest to any easily offended readers that they just pretend the Hans are from another planet or something.

Good old Anthony Rogers doesn’t even make it into space by the end of the book. I guess that came when the creator changed his name and started the comic strip.

I enjoyed the crap out of this one. The plot never stops to navel gaze, there’s many differing types of action sequences, including foot chases, ground-to-air combat, and air-to-air engagements. There’s plenty of fun imagined technology, including what sounds to me an awful lot like a flip phone.

Conclusion

This little diversion was another great reminder that writers have know how to write great stuff since forever. Good writing will always hold up just fine. Especially those two shorter pieces could almost have been written last week.

One more good thing about these challenges is it reminds me how much great short fiction is out there. I don’t have time to tear through all the novels I’d like, but pick up a magazine, pick a crazy title, and a few minutes or a couple of hours later, I can be done having read a complete story and go back to the business of life.

Pre-Tolkien 3: Robert E. Howard and Final Thoughts

The last story I read for the pre-Tolkien challenge was the luridly-named Temptress of the Tower of Torture and Sin by Robert E. Howard. I’d never even heard of this one until I was combing through archive.org’s pulp scans for this challenge. The version I found was a reprint in Avon Fantasy Reader. In my search, I also found another as-yet-unknown-to-me story called The Blonde Goddess of Bal-Sagoth, which I’ll certainly be reading soon.

The story itself is a lost civilization tale, and includes pretty much every appropriate trope you can toss into 17 pages. However, it’s woven in that way only Howard could weave, and it still works, even if it won’t top my favorites list.

The main body of the story begins with two western explorers wandering through the African wilderness. They hear a strange noise a mighty distance off. Of course, being explorers and men of adventure, they guide the expedition toward the sound.  All the native hirelings are terrified and abandon them, but they persist, undaunted. They’re immediately captured by an ancient civilization that has existed in a secluded valley for thousands of years. The plot starts out slow and builds to a furious conclusion. Here, Howard’s settings are vivid and incredible, his descriptions are engrossing and energetic, and his characters just plain fun to watch. I didn’t even mind the history lesson thrown in half way.

One of the intrepid protagonists is named John Conrad. I wonder if he is the same John Conrad from Howard’s Conrad & Kirowan stories, which are primarily about the occult. There’s not really any evidence I can remember from those stories to match up with this, other than the name. I choose to believe it’s the same character anyway.

Final Thoughts

I know there are stories out there that are much closer in tone or milieu to Tolkien than the ones I’ve read. I wasn’t really attempting to trace the history of modern fantasy through this challenge. Merely attempting to survey the state of fantasy before everything became epic tales of longness. And I flipped through a bunch of Fantasy-specific magazine issues before settling on what to read.

What I (re?)learned in doing this challenge is that the fantasy magazines of the era published a staggering variety of styles. As such, even though the rules of the challenge clearly state I’m supposed to compare these to Tolkien, there is not really much to directly compare. Obviously, in a short the plot has to move along at pretty fast clip, where Tolkien can dedicate plenty of pages to description and history. But both still have things to say about bravery and heroism. And both were of an epoch wherein you could almost always tell a clear difference between good and evil.

It seems like the novel-length works published in the pulps I looked at displayed the same breadth of style as the shorter works. When I walk down the fantasy & scifi shelves of Barnes and Noble’s, I only see two flavors: epic-directly-Tolkien-descended fantasy, and sexy-chicks-in-leather-pants-urban-fantasy. And I guess the Dresden files, which share general milieu with the sexy women. And then I suppose I can walk across the store to the YA section and pick up a copy of “Harry Potter and the Stolen Storyline.” I get why retailers do this, but I think there’s definitely something to be said for reading outside your favorite narrow niche.

This challenge has been a fun little diversion. Thanks to Alexandru for starting it, and thanks to everybody who has participated. It’s made me happy to revisit a few longtime favorites and amazing to discover so many long-hidden gems.

Pre-Tolkien #2: The Tale of the Red Dwarf…

… who writes with his tail.

The second short I read for the challenge comes from the hallowed pages of Fantastic Adventures, May 1947. There’s a copy on archive.org if you get the urge to read it for yourself.

This one is written by Richard S. Shaver, who was prolific in the pulp era, but I had never really noticed his name. And on the cover and the title art the credit of authorship is claimed to be “The Red Dwarf Himself, as told to Richard S. Shaver.” This odd attribution really caught my curiosity after I started to read, as the first two sections of the story are devoted to telling the reader that there is absolutely no truth whatsoever contained in the story. This struck me as a really bizarre way to kick off a story, so I googled him.

Richard S. Shaver apparently wrote a few stories for Amazing Stories about an evil subterranean society. Furthermore claimed these stories were in essence, true, and he had firsthand knowledge of this cadre of depraved reprobates. His editor and publisher, Ray Palmer also maintained the inherent truth of these stories. And people flipped out like people do and fought over whether or not the underground people actually existed. Palmer called this “The Shaver Mystery” and continued to promote it even after the pulps lost popularity. Shaver himself and his wife occasionally published the “Shaver Mystery Magazine.”

I swear, every time I learn about a pulp author’s life, I feel a little sad that I was born too late to meet him.

Okay, on to the story.

This one steps a little closer to what most people consider fantasy these days, although there still are no swords or predestined orphans. Just a boy who wants a girl who wants that boy to go get her some wisdom. He goes on a myth-inspired journey to the Red Dwarf to fetch himself some of that sweet, sweet wisdom. Needless to say, things do not go as planned for our poor hero.

The tone is quite light, and the author keeps his tongue firmly in cheek. There’s not a lot of furious action going on, but it’s a fun read just the same. It’s on the longish side, about 25k words, but I’m counting it as a short just the same. As to the lack of breathless fight scenes, well, I’m certain Robert E. Howard won’t let me down when I read the third story for the challenge.

A major theme running through the story is the difference between education and wisdom, musing finand then the true nature of wisdom. All this makes the story sound a bit more cerebral and thinky than it really is.

To finish up, here’s a random quote, taken completely out of context. The hero is talking about a goddess named Diana, whom he met briefly: “Why, she was of a very large construction, and a very fine one, too. If she had been a certain house, one would say it was made of brick.”

Of course, when I read this, I couldn’t get it out of my head that Diana was a brick house, she was mighty mighty, just letting it all hang out. Yes, I know the Commodores didn’t sing that until way after 1947, so it wasn’t an author-intentioned joke. It doesn’t matter. I still thought it was funny.

Pre-Tolkien Fantasy #1: Three Lines of Old French

Here’s a thing I sometimes forget: Not all fantasy fiction involves a protagonist casting magic missile or swinging a sword at scaly and vastly larger foe.

The first story I read for the challenge was “Three Lines of Old French,” by Abraham Merritt. You can tell it’s clearly a fantasy, because it appeared in A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. See? Fantasy is right there in the title. This was a reprint magazine, and clever naming aside, Abraham Merritt was almost certainly not the editor, as he had passed away 6 years before the first issue went to press. Although, that would be some delicious meta fantasy if he did edit it from the other side of the veil. Regardless, It only lasted 5 issues.

Also, I’ve always meant to read some of Merritt’s work, and the Pre-Tolkien Challenge offered a perfect opportunity.

“Three Lines of Old French” concerns a dreamlike, otherworldly experience had by a shell-shocked soldier in World War I. The soldier in question is on night guard duty, and he’s lost in thought. He sees two dead soldiers who have fallen on some barbed wire upon being shot. The barbed wire keeps them half standing, and now they dance as bombs explode around them. It’s too dangerous to retrieve their bodies (see the no-man’s-land scene in Wonder Woman for context of that kind of trench warfare.) This image is repeated during the story, and even got the illustration in the magazine. You can see a cropped portion above this very article. Don’t be disappointed when you find out that this grisly image is not the focus of the story. While thinking upon the atrocities around him, he slips into a trance and heads out on a mind trip/astral voyage thing.

I won’t dive into this otherworldly experience, but the story’s main question is, “Did the soldier actually go on that fantastic voyage, or not?”

So no bow and arrows or horseback riding, but it’s definitely fantasy, and it was an enjoyable read.

One other thing that stuck out to me was the story’s frame. Before diving into the soldier’s story, there’s a conversation between a surgeon and A. Merritt. The surgeon is the one who tells A. Merritt the story, who is now just relating it to us as he heard it. I don’t think I see this device being used too often these days. It didn’t bother me in the slightest, but I can see how it could delay getting to the meat of a tale.

I guess this sort of tale might be called “magical realism” today? I don’t know, everybody who uses that term around me is a hipster, and I can’t be bothered to google it.

The Pre-Tolkien Challenge

Alexandru Constantin posted a week or so ago the Pre-Tolkien Fantasy Challenge. The idea here is that you read and review three fantasy short stories written before 1954. Since I’m just waiting for art on Issue 3, I figure I’ll give it a go. And I’ll try to pick some authors I’ve never read before.

Okay, I’ll try to pick two authors I’ve never read before and one Robert E. Howard, but the Howard at least won’t be one I’ve read before, and won’t be in one of his big name properties like Conan or Solomon Kane. And I’ll see if it’s possible to find something nobody else in the community is reading/reviewing.

Great idea, Alexandru.

Free Audiobook Next Week

Next week I will send out a link to everybody on the newsletter to download the newly recorded audiobook version of my novelette Swordcrossed Frostbite. So if you’d like to give it a listen, make sure you’re on the newsletter and you pay attention to that. And for those who are too slow, well, the following week it will probably go up on Amazon.

My sister-in-law is the one who performed this for me. If you’re an author and are interested in getting some recordings done of your work and you like what you hear, give me a shout here or email or twitter and I can get you in touch.

 

Re: Fiction Magazines

I went to the local Barnes & Noble today, fully intending to purchase one of the few fiction magazines that they still carry. I’m always interested in scoping out the competition. I picked them up one by one, read several paragraphs of some stories, and a few loglines/blurbs of others. Absolutely nothing grabbed me. Not a one seemed like it was going to be fun. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a magazine I know I wouldn’t read. Maybe I’m crazy, but I want short fiction with action, humor, and a little romance. It was very disappointing to have no promise of any of that. So instead I bought the book of the small-press first-time author that was doing a signing. I’m in no hurry to read it, but dang if I don’t respect authors for getting out and trying. And she drove 5 hours to be there.

But speaking of action fiction…

I finally sat down and read an issue of Broadswords and Blasters all the way through. The editors there have different sensibilities than I do, sure, but I’ll tell you this: I actually wanted to read the stories. Every tale contained heaps of action and lots of fun. I have an unread paper issue sitting in my office I need to dig into soon. As it ends up, there is good short fiction out there, you just have to know where to look.

That being said, I need to stop writing this and get back to editing Jay Barnson’s story for StoryHack, Issue Three.

Fyrecon this week

I’ll be at Fyrecon this weekend (June 21-23). It’s a great new (2nd year) convention for creative skills development. There’ll be many skilled and excellent presenters this week, and there will also be me.

Here’s what I’ll be doing:

Thurday

12:00 pm Forgotton Pulp Genres (with Jay Barnson)
1:00 pm Podcasting 101 (with Daniel Swenson of Dungeon Crawlers Radio
6:00 pm Panel: Traditional vs Self Pub Editing Process

Friday

5:00 pm Audiobook Recording for Beginners

Saturday

1:00 pm Plotting Short Stories like the Pulp Masters
5:00 pm Author Websites 101

At the door pricing for all three days is only $50. It’s a young con, still growing, so you’ll have lots of access to all the teachers and presenters. Last year was amazing, and this year appears to be just as good.

For more info on the event, check out Fyrecon.com