Sue Burke's Blog, page 63

Go Ahead — Write This Story: Real time

Most stories use some sort of compressed time: a story takes place over hours or days or years. Others take place without breaks or lapses. Slice of life stories are one example: Dorothy Parker’s “But the One on My Right” is an interior monologue during a boring dinner party. Some real-time stories consist of a single scene involving a revealing moment, or a series of scenes that occur in immediate succession. The technique can create compelling scenes, theater, short stories, and flash fiction.

If you need an idea for a real-time narrative, here are a few:

• This is a one-act stage play about a group of soldiers preparing for battle, trying to convince themselves they’ll defeat an army rumored to include dragons among its weapons.

• This is the first chapter of a mistaken identity romance novel in which the future lovers first meet but they don’t speak the same language or correctly figure out who each other is – and yet a spark ignites.

• This is a magical realism story in which a case of spontaneous human combustion is confused with political protest.

— Sue Burke

Updates worth reading at Castles in Spain

Over at our crowdfunding for the Castles in Spain / Castillos en el aire, we’ve been posting regular updates. We’re not talking about how we’re doing (pretty well, now at 47%) – instead we’re describing what we want to bring you. Take a look at these posts here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/castles-in-spain#activity

• The flavor of Spain’s future, by César Mallorquí

• Translation: a juggling act, by Gwyneth Box

• Spanish science fiction finds its identity, by Elia Barceló

• Why the titles Castles in Spain and Castillos en el aire?

We’ll have even more fascinating updates in the near future.

— Sue Burke

Crowdfunding: the good, the bad, and the ugly

I’m part of the team organizing a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the translation of a science fiction anthology, Castles in Spain / Castillos en el aire, from Spanish to English. (You can see it here. Please donate and help spread the word.)

It launched on January 19. I’ve already learned some important lessons.

THE GOOD

We’ve received a lot of help and interest, and contributions have been sent from the United States, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Finland, and Croatia. More than 2449 people have looked at the page from all over the world, including Indonesia, Egypt, and Korea. Facebook and direct email have brought in most of the donations, and mentions on websites have helped, too.

Still, a lot more people are looking than giving. Advice from Indiegogo and Kickstarter says that people hesitate to give until the campaign looks like it will succeed. We’re up to 38% now after two weeks, so it’s looking good.

THE BAD

Relatively few people have heard about us in the English-speaking world. Language is a barrier. Although our authors are well known in Spain, who’s heard of them in the US? And since most donations come from direct solicitations, and few of them know anyone in the US, they can’t rely on mailing lists or wide-branching English-language friend networks. Science fiction has fans worldwide, but fans can’t necessarily talk to each other.

Physical barriers limit the campaign, too. I’d have preferred to use Kickstarter, but it doesn’t operate in Spain. In any case, moving money from one country to another involves extra fees that eat into the net result. International postage costs are high, too, which limit the kinds of gifts we can send to donors at different giving levels.

It would be a lot easier to run an in-country campaign, but then we wouldn’t need to translate the anthology, would we? Countries really are isolated from each other, no matter how much we wish they weren’t.

THE UGLY

Spam! Within the first three days, we received sixteen comments like this:

Hello!
Can We help you with your campaign?
We can share your campaign on facebook with 27000+ active users,friends and fans of crowdfunding campaigns from many countries.Spread the word about your thing.
It will help your campaign get more views and potential backers,get a better position here.Raise your gogofactor.
If people dont know about it,they cant contribute.
We will also give you few tips how to be successful.
Over 200 satisfied customers,see the reviews.

Someone who writes like that can hardly help us with our “thing.” Spam comments get promptly terminated with extreme prejudice.

Meanwhile, I have barriers to overcome.

— Sue Burke

If you want to nominate my work...

I have only one thing eligible this year for a prize, the short-short story “Summer Home” published in the December issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.

It’s gotten good reviews. For example, Mark Watson at Best SF says this:

“Only a page and a half, a list of 6 ‘Must Do’s’ for a new summer home, but the paragraphs contain a lot, and what could easily have been covered in a novella is covered more succinctly, much more succinctly, but with equal impact.”

Alas, the story is available only in the magazine, so I can’t give you a link to read it online, but thank you for considering me, at least during the time it took to read this post.

— Sue Burke

Translating poetry: a thorny problem

Here's a brief article by me about difficulties of translating poetry and ways to deal with them: compensation, paraphrase, adaptation, and word play. I use my own haiku as an example, and as you'll see, even with the finest techniques, the translations don't always work.

http://tantamount.com/2015/01/23/translating-poetry-a-thorny-problem/

-- Sue Burke

Go Ahead — Write This Story: Little big stories

Suppose you want to write a story about a big subject, say the destruction of Earth, but it’s too daunting. Try taking a minimal approach. Write about one person, perhaps not an important one, stuffing her future into a single suitcase as fast as she can. Use small details to illustrate big things, like the tree in the back yard that died so fast its leaves remain attached, green, freeze-dried, being shredded by the relentless gale. Pick moments that evoke epic events in miniature, like a bank’s front doors banging wide open in the wind, ignored, since money means nothing anymore. If you need an idea for a little big story, here are a few:

• This is a story set during a regional water shortage so severe that the local economy is failing and the population must decide whether to stay, go, or seek some sort of solution or accommodation.

• This is a story in which a miracle cure for obesity is discovered, and people rush to try it despite the complications.

• This is a historical novel about the witch hunts in Renaissance Europe when tens of thousands of women were killed.

— Sue Burke

Crowdfunding campaign to translate a Spanish anthology

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres capture hearts, minds, and pens worldwide, but language barriers keep its stories from being truly global.

I’m working with a team of authors, editors, and translators to take a step toward changing that. We want to bring the stories that have served as milestones in Spain in the genre to English-language readers, but we need a little help to pay for the translation.

To do that, we’re holding an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for a bilingual anthology, Castles in Spain / Castillos en el aire. (Kickstarter is only for US-based projects.)

You can see it here: http://igg.me/at/CastlesInSpain

I hope you can support us – and help us spread the word.

Thank you,
Gracias,

— Sue Burke

A review of Spain’s 2014 national SF convention

What’s a science fiction convention like in another country? In Spain, for example? I attended the 32nd Hispacon, known as MIRcon, in December 2014, and my review is up at Science Fiction & Science Fact Concatenation, a European SF e-zine.

You can read it here:
http://www.concatenation.org/conrev/hispacon2014.html

An excerpt: “One woman who had never attended a science fiction convention before was thrilled by the atmosphere. She could talk and laugh with her favourite authors, make new friends, pose with Stargate fans who had come in costume, and in general have a lot of fun – and she learned that this was the typical experience at a Hispacon. She promised to come back.”

— Sue Burke

Alucinadas: Women destroy Spanish science fiction

A major Spanish newspaper recently listed its top ten books of 2014: they included only one by a woman, a Polish poet at that. Don’t Spanish women write?

Of course they do, but they get published and recognized even less than women in the English-speaking world. Add to that a general disregard among the literary establishment for science fiction, and until the 1980s, almost no Spanish-speaking women seemed to see much point in writing science fiction.

That slowly began to change, and women fans and authors were welcomed by men in SF. But they still face a problem, one they share with men: the Spanish-language genre market is small, with few opportunities for publication.

To overcome that, and inspired by projects like Lightspeed magazine’s “Women Destroy Science Fiction!” special issue, Cristina Macía, Cristina Jurado, and María Leticia Lara Palomino decided in spring of 2014 to create an anthology to give women writers more visibility. Their call for stories was answered with 205 works by 185 female authors from 12 countries. In late November, they published Alucinadas. (Cover art by Ana Día Eiriz.)



It’s a clever title. Alucinado is slang for “astounded” or “impressed” and comes from the word “hallucinate.” So you could translate Alucinadas as “Astounded Women,” “Hallucinated Women,” or even “Female Fantastics.”

You can buy the anthology as an e-book for as little as €1.99 (US$2.43) – not a high price, but between a small market and a depressed economy, no one’s getting rich by writing science fiction in Spanish. This is a labor of love.

The eleven stories show an impressive breadth of imagination:

• In “La Terpsícore” (The Terpsichore) by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría, the captain of a ship, the Terpsichore, travels by means of versions of herself brought from other dimensions, each with its own ethical and existential problems.

• “La Plaga” (The Plague) is a military space opera, at times humorous, by Felicidad Martínez about an attack on a distant colony. The problem is figuring out exactly what’s attacking.

• “La Tormenta” (The Storm) by Laura Ponce opens with a routine visit by some soldiers to a distant colony, but it turns into a tender story about loyalty and love. It becomes, as the author says, “a story about a story about a story.”

• Yolanda Espiñeira says “El método Schiwoll” (The Schiwoll Method) is about betrayal. It’s also a tightly-paced thriller alternating between first and third person that opens with a woman being interrogated for a crime she might not have committed, but does she know who did?

• “Casas Rojas” (Red Houses) by Nieves Delgado explores what it means to be human or machine. It also tells the story of an arrogant man outsmarted. Like many of the stories, it ends with a twist.

• “Mares que cambian” (Seas That Change) by Lola Robles is set on a planet of islands where the main business is tourist sex change operations. The author says, “I believe I’ve also written a story about the need to belong to a place, a group, a people affected.”

• “Techt” (Teched) by Sofía Rhei presents a linguistic dystopia with echoes of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984, but in terms of the way technologies like text messaging and pre-fabricated best-sellers limit language and thought, made worse by a limited economy.

• “Bienvenidos a Croatoan” (Welcome to Croatoan) takes place in an underground post-apocalyptic Madrid. A drug take use memories and turn the past, present, and future into fiction, but people desperate enough to steal it for resale on the black market must avoid the temptation to use it.

• Marian Womack visited Black Isle in Scotland during the summer, and she turned her experience with its fragile ecology into the story “Black Isle.” In the future, technology attempts to recreate its lost ecology, but suddenly all the artificial animals start to die.

• Carmen Torras tells “Memoria de equipo” (Team Memory) in the form of blog posts by former members of a basketball team. When their star player winds up on death row, they mount a crowdfunded scientific investigation to prove his innocence.

• “A la luz de la casta luna electrónica” (By the Light of the Electric Moon Caste) by Angélica Gorodischer is the first chapter of the book Trafalgar, a collection of humorous stories about a somewhat honest intergalactic merchant. Here, he travels to a planet ruled by women with plans to sell comic books and runs afoul of the law.

Is there something “female” about these stories? Not that I could tell, not even a preponderance of female main characters. A few stories are tender, others unflinching. The frequent twists at the end may be pure coincidence or an editorial leaning, but it’s nothing especially pink rather than blue.

The anthology’s strongest point may be just that: women write a lot like men. Long ago and far away – in the English-speaking world – some men once feared women would “destroy” science fiction. They were the ones hallucinating.

— Sue Burke

Also posted at

“Selfi” – the Spanish word of the year

“Selfi” is the Word of the Year according to Spain’s Fundación de Español Urgente (Urgent Spanish Foundation). “Selfi” is the Spanish adaption of the English word “selfie.” Here’s an example of a selfie of me and my brother at the Prado Museum earlier this year.



The foundation, staffed by linguists and journalists, exists to answer Spanish usage questions for terms in the news. For example, if you’re writing about an airplane that disappeared near Indonesia, did it crash into the “mar de Java” or “Mar de Java” (Java Sea)? It should be lower case, “mar de Java,” the same as you would write “océano Pacífico,” since the geographic designation is a common generic. Thanks for asking.

For the Word of the Year, the foundation looks for words in the news with some linguistic interest. In this case, there’s the adaptation from “selfie” into “selfi,” in accordance with Spanish spelling rules. The proper plural is “selfis.” But is it “el selfi” or “la selfi”? We urgently need to know. Here’s the official answer:

“...it can be considered an ambiguous word regarding its gender, el/la selfie, like el/la mar, el/la armazón and many other words.” Mar (sea) and armazón (frame, such as a glasses frame or tent frame) are intersex words. I bet you didn’t know Spanish had them.

Tthe foundation adds that you can also use “autoretrato” or “autofoto” if you don’t like “selfi.” It assures us that Spanish includes terms for the same thing borrowed from other languages as well as terms created with its own linguistic resources, like “fútbol” versus “balompié” (football).

“Selfie” was the 2013 Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. This year, for Oxford, it’s “vape.” The Fundación de Español Urgente recomends using “vaporear” instead of “vapear” as the Spanish equivalent, since it comes from the word “vapor,” but I’m afraid the foundation is fighting a losing battle there.

“Selfi,” however, is probably going to stick.

— Sue Burke