Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 19

Wednesday Links: a kind of serendipitous book recommendation

It’s rare that I get a book recommendation that I haven’t in some way sought out. They come either from friends (or are books written BY friends) or through some podcast or website that I went to specifically to find something to read. This one’s different. I accidentally clicked on a sidebar ad somewhere, probably Book Riot, because I’ve been spending way too much time there lately. At first my reaction was, “How the hell did I end up here?” Then I read the blurb, thought it sounded interesting, and started reading the excerpt. It’s on my to-read list now. How cool is that? (And to Harriet Reuter Hapgood’s publicity person, yes, the ad worked, even if totally by accident. But a good accident.)

Right. On to the links!

First, I’m going to keep reminding folks that I have an e-mail newsletter and you should totally sign up for it. for my advice on writing, news about upcoming publications, and free stuff. And Adele GIFs.

(still in love with this)

Okay, moving on.

Woo! Congratulations to my friend Sierra Skye Gemma for winning a National Newspaper Award for this piece in The Globe & Mail.

A conversation with a massage therapist, by the fantastic Francine Cunningham. I especially love that there’s an audio clip on that page of her reading her piece. It’s always nice to hear work in the writer’s own voice; even more awesome when it’s someone you know who’s far away.

And while you’re at it, a fantastic poem by my friend Chris Evans.

Why do you make?

Christian Baines on shifting genre gears, a topic close to my heart since as someone once described me, I’m kind of a genre chameleon.

Is it even possible to read every story published in a year? Most impressive.

Write music, not words.

The song remains the same

(Psst. I have an e-mail newsletter. You should totally sign up for it. I might surprise you with stuff you don’t get to see here, or anywhere, for that matter. Okay, on with the story….)

This past week I was sitting in a coffee shop, as I am wont to do—and there’s a phrase that doesn’t get used often enough, “wont to do.” And to be honest, until I just typed it here, I never have bothered to look up the origin of “wont.” As it turns out, it’s of Germanic origin, coming to us through Old English, and means “dwell” or “be accustomed.” You’re welcome.

Where was I? Oh, right. Coffee shop. Because life doesn’t happen until caffeine happens. So there I was, drinking an Americano and trying (but failing) to write, when the song “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” came on. Immediately, I thought of Cathie.

Cathie worked in the office where I had my first summer job, for the Air Force, between senior year of high school and freshman year of undergrad. It was in the Pentagon, which probably sounds cooler than it really was. I drove to work with my dad at the ungodly hour of five thirty in the morning along with two other Marines, scoped out an Adirondack chair in the courtyard, and usually napped until the cafeteria opened and I’d get breakfast. This was in 1987, the building itself was finished in 1943, and in the intervening 44 years things had declined a bit. Most days I had to skirt around parts of hallways that were shrouded in plastic while they removed asbestos. Still, working there was cool. How many high schoolers get to say they worked at the Pentagon, right?

Cathie was the secretary in the office where I worked as a clerk typist over the summer. She was a blonde twenty-something who pretty much took me under her wing and showed me how to work in an office. She gave me responsibilities, let me tackle some things on my own, but was always ready with advice or a hint or the number of who to call when we needed something.

I hadn’t thought about Cathie for years, probably decades, before that song came on in the café, but it all came back to me. I remembered a whole lot more about her and the office and the two summers I spent working there, people I met, mistakes I made, and much more. All of this came back because of a black sundress that Cathie used to wear that showed off her blonde hair and fantastic tan, and because when we had the radio on low in the office and this song came on, we’d turn it up.

This isn’t exactly a writing prompt per se (and I love it when I can use the term per se and be confident I’m using it correctly), but hopefully it’s a reminder to pay attention to these cues in our environment that compel us to draw associations that we might have completely forgotten about. I can see a gardenia and immediately think of a friend from college. I can smell this strange combination of dust and carpet and be in the Sears at Southgate Mall in Yuma, Arizona, looking at Star Wars toys and wishing I could get them all. Or I can hear a song and immediately come up with a character for a new story. The stories are all there if we’re ready to pay attention to them.

Wednesday Links, or “Just write”

A writer friend of mine recently wondered whether she should pack it in—”Who am I kidding? I’m no writer,” she wrote. Which is nonsense, of course, as I know for a fact that she’s a writer, and a darn good one at that. She can run circles around me when it comes to imagery and character, and I tend to think I’m kind of okay when it comes to characters.

At the same time I read this, a writer/teacher/designer/dirty socialist vegan named Paul Jarvis pondered whether all of his best writing was behind him. What if he’d reached “Peak Paul”? What then?

I wonder the same things about myself frequently. And yet, I keep writing, mainly because I have no idea what else I’d do (maybe become an artisan baker selling loaves out of the back of a van, I dunno). Mainly because I haven’t run out of things to say, or at least haven’t run out of different ways to say the same thing—which let’s call “reinforcement” instead of “redundancy,” shall we? Also, a teacher I know named Nancy Lee (who wrote this stellar novel The Age) said writing is a game of attrition. Which is why I figure, hang on and outlast. Being a persistent, stubborn SOB may just pay off for me in the long run. And for you too.

Right. On to the links!

Immediately related to all of the above, Chuck Wendig has, as usual, lots to say about writing myths, but this stood out for me: “No thing is wrong as long as the thing is getting done. Whatever your process is, accept no shame for it. (Shame is a worthless booster anyway.)” Also, “Write if you wanna write. You don’t even need to marry being a writer with being published.”

The most common words in poetry.

Speaking of poetry, here’s a poem and an interview with the wonderful Sandra Marchetti.

Authors against Trump. Here’s the petition, in case you’re inclined to sign.

Lastly, my favorite Amazon, Lynda Carter, on beauty, music, and her current TV obsession. (Thanks for the link, David Green!)

Catching up with ’Nathan Burgoine, author of TRIAD BLOOD

’Nathan Burgoine is the author of the novel Light, a Lambda Literary Award finalist . His second novel, Triad Blood, just came out this month and features a trio of supernatural characters first introduced in stories that have appeared in a range of anthologies over the years. Now they’re finally getting their own standalone book, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I’ve known ’Nathan since sometime in 2009 and often think of him as my anthology brother, since we’ve had stories appear in the same collections more times than I can count. And ever since I met him and his husband at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, they’ve been people I always look forward to catching up with.  He’s a great writer, a super supportive reader, and generally one of the damn nicest human beings I know. (It should come as no surprise, therefore, when I tell you he’s Canadian.)

So you’re an avowed lover of the short story form and, what d’you know, here’s another novel! How is it for you to shift from short to long and back again?

If I had my druthers, I’d likely live in the world of short fiction (and maybe novellas), but the publishing world is what it is and I have to admit that every now and then there’s a story that won’t “fit” in the short story format that wants out of my noggin. Triad Blood was exactly that—it was a multiple-times failure at a short fiction piece that I finally clued in was too much to tell in a short story. Then it grew to a novella, and even then I had more I wanted to do with it, so… Novel.

How I shift is mostly a matter of timing. I work on the novel-in-progress on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and I work on short fiction pieces on Wednesdays and on the weekend (catch-as-catch can between time with my fella and his fluffy lordship). Novel writing doesn’t come naturally to me, so I find breaking it up with Wednesday back in my comfort zone helps a tonne.

Heading back to a short fiction piece always feels more comfortable, though, and nothing is as inspiring as that feeling when a call for submission comes up and an idea just explodes in the brain. Novels are slow processes, even when the turnaround is tight, and such a different animal all around. I think working on short fiction does help me be a leaner novel writer, but the two rarely compare.

This is your second novel (the first being the Lambda Literary finalist Light). How was the experience of writing this one different from writing the first?

I had no idea what I was doing when I was writing Light. I started at the end, then wrote the start, then the middle, then filled in gaps, realized I had massive continuity issues, panicked, rewrote, and wondered why I’d ever agreed to write a novel in the first place. My process wasn’t so much a process as it was a series of accidents forced into one whole. I was also working full time at a job that had an hour-plus commute (one way) and a terrible schedule while I wrote Light, so it was spread out over three years and done very much when I could, between moments of other stuff.

So, I learned from that. A lot. Triad Blood (and the next one I’m working on now, Triad Soul) are a lot more planned out. I’m still very loose with my plan and the order in which I write things, but there’s way more of a framework for these two than there was with Light. I’m also working very part time now, rather than a full-time gig, so writing gets to be what I’m doing as a priority the vast majority of the time. It’s amazing how many times I can have a thousand-plus word days when my day is built around writing, rather than writing being shoehorned in wherever it will fit.

Between having a plan and that lack of time management stress, writing Triad Blood was a dream.

Triad Blood centers around characters you’d already created and explored in several short stories. What’s the most surprising thing you discovered (about your writing, about your characters, however you want to interpret that) while working on this book?

I think the biggest thing was realizing how much I hadn’t already done. That sounds sort of silly, but I had a very concrete picture of the guys in my head, and I realized with four short fiction pieces already out there, I needed to make sure I didn’t start contradicting myself. So I sat down with the four stories and collected all the facts for each character and the world-building and realized I’d not put much in stone at all. The larger details, yes: the way the supernatural world was based on threes, some of the origin and interpretation of demons, and how magic worked—I was glad I went back and looked and organized those.

But beyond that? There wasn’t a tonne of stuff that “trapped” me. I still had a very wide range to work with. Going into the novel, though, I had that far much more on my mind: I didn’t want to set up too many “easy outs” for the characters in the sense of how Curtis’s magic worked, especially, so that if I did write more Triad stuff (which I am doing), readers won’t wonder why he doesn’t just do the same thing he did to solve the problem last time. That’s always a trap with anything fantastical or spec-fic: Once you’ve invented a power or an ability or a process, you need to consider how that could be used again later. Sort of like how the transporter in Star Trek needed to not work through particular minerals to make kidnapping plots function.

It was also really freeing. Luc, especially, is quite unexplored, and he has the most history of the three to unravel, and though I know it, it was fun to have him only drop hints here and there. He’s quite private in many ways, and he’s also aware that of the three of them, he’s the most realistic and responsible in the sense of how he believes their survival is best secured. Curtis is an optimist and young. Anders is self-involved and a walking id. So it’s often up to Luc to keep everyone on-track, and it was a lot of fun to write the three playing off each other with that in mind.

You’ve projected this as a trilogy, right? What can readers expect in the second and third books?

Yes, if everything goes well, Triad Blood will be followed by Triad Soul and then Triad Magic. Where Triad Blood is about the three trying to carve some security into their place in the supernatural world, in Triad Soul, you’ve got them a lot more settled and, if not welcomed, at least tolerated—and then something comes along that puts them in the rather unique position of being the only people without an agenda when bodies start to pile up. Putting them in the position of having to work for the people who’d previously been so antagonistic against them is interesting, and I’m playing with that quite a bit: They’re trying to solve a problem before it screws up everyone around them, and at the same time they’re realizing there’s a reason everyone wasn’t happy when they first formed their group.

Triad Magic is a bit more nebulous and still forming in my head, but the key plot thread involves the three realizing just what it is everyone was so afraid of when they created their unique bond, and there’s just no putting the genie back in the bottle for them.

You’re also working on another project that I’ve seen you mention on Twitter but not on your blog, a novel in stories revolving around a set of shops in Ottawa’s gay village. Tell me a little more about that.

Last NaNoWriMo I decided to work on short stories for the month instead of a novel, and I had great success. I wrote a Christmas novella themed around chosen family (something I always want to read at that time of year, but never quite find). Instead of a short story, it turned into a novella, which I wasn’t expecting, but having written one already (“In Memoriam”), I like the freedom of the length to explore more than you can usually explore with a short piece, and it wasn’t for a contract or any particular call, so I wasn’t trying to come under a particular word count limit. I’m happy with how it turned out, and need to figure out a next step there.

Then I wrote another short story that turned into a novella. It’s about a young man who works in an occult shop in his local gay village. He doesn’t believe in magic, not like his boss does (she’s a self-professed believer), but she’s adamant he has a gift. And that gift comes forth when he starts to crush out on a painter restoring the memorial mural across the street.

This was the start of my Village stories notion taking root. I wanted to explore a gay village with a series of short stories, but I’d envisioned them as a collection of short fiction, and it wasn’t working out that way.

I’d already written a piece set in the same fictionalized village’s chocolate shop. That actually found a welcome home in Matthew Bright’s Threesome. “Vanilla” was an erotic short, though, and this occult shop story wasn’t lending itself to being erotica. “A Little Village Magic,” was a romance with zero smut, and was much longer than a short fiction. Again, it turned into a novella.

The end result was that I decided to consider “A Little Village Magic” the start of a series, though “Vanilla” absolutely takes place in the same place. A secondary character introduced in “A Little Village Magic” (the owner of the tea shop) became the main character for the next story, “A Little Village Blend,” and while working on that story, I popped in a visit to a pet shop/pet rescue and introduced the character that will be in the third story, “A Little Village Hope.” And so on. They’re all novella length stories, and the idea is to link them up, have characters carry over in wee cameos, and spin a romantic (and slightly magical or slightly psychic) story each time with different members of this fictionalized version of Ottawa’s Village.

The first story is ready for beta reading. The second isn’t quite finished. The third is just notes and ideas and a few rough passages, and beyond that I’ve got characters at the back of my head for a vintage and consignment clothing shop, the art gallery (which has featured once already in passing), the coffee shop (mentioned often), and so on. There’s a part of me that would love to wrangle in other authors, too, and make this a shared world experience, once I’ve got a few pieces finished. I don’t know. I’d love to step into a shared world anthology project, and maybe this could be a stepping stone to get there. We’ll see.

The Village stories don’t have a contract, a home, or a plan. So right now they’re very much a fun project on the side.

In the acknowledgements for Light, you told your husband you were ready to get a dog. Obviously, that happened. Any promises in store following Triad Blood?

Ha! Writing the acknowledgements for Triad Blood was painful, because I had nothing to promise! Hopefully what I did say is good enough. I certainly had my illusions blown about acknowledgments with Light, though. I figured no one actually read them, and boy was that wrong. My poor husband was inundated with people telling him to grab a copy of Light and read the acknowledgements right now. He’d already done so, I’m happy to note, and yeah, it happened.

I’d like to think I’ve adapted to his fluffy lordship just fine.

You can find ’Nathan online at his website, nathanburgoine.com, as well as his blog. He’s also on Twitter and Facebook. (The aforementioned fluffy lordship, Coach, also has his own Twitter account, which is delightful. Also? Buying ’Nathan’s books means Coach gets peanut butter, so do the right thing, hey?)

Wednesday Links, the “get off your ass” edition

So, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve worked on the novel with anything that could be called regularity. (Insert obvious Metamucil joke here.) Instead, I’ve been really feeling the short stories lately, and I’ve got three new ideas for pieces under way. This, I thought, was a good thing, but I’ve also been thinking, have I been focusing on stories because I’m afraid of my novel? It’s a mess already, and I’m worried I’ll screw it up so badly that I have to put it aside and declare it a drawer novel.

But that’s no excuse. So I’m dusting it off and trying again. Anyway.

First of all, a general reminder to sign up for my mailing list. You’ll find out about stories and other publications first, and you’ll get some stuff that never hits the blog. And I won’t sell your address, lend it out, or ask for your bank account number so I can deposit a billion dollars from my recently deceased uncle.

(Whoa, I just realized I don’t have any uncles left.)

Congratulations to my friend Ruth Daniell, who was shortlisted for the 2016 Magpie Prize for Poetry!

Got something in your slush pile that’s very once upon a time? Fairy Tale Review is seeking submissions.

“I was angry that, as feminists, we’d won the right to divorce, but not the right to be happy about it.”

“I’ve read too many beige short stories in my life.”

I love a list story. “First Loves, 1989–2002,” by Steven Tagle, at NDR magazine. And this nonfiction piece, so beautiful and moving: “Washed (or, the Cleanest I Might Ever Be)” in The Puritan by Brent van Staalduinen.

Also in The Puritan, check out stories by the fabulous Natalie Morrill and Ellie Sawatzky.

Q&A with Fiona Riley, author of MISS MATCH

I’ve mentioned the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival a lot in the past, and one of the things I like best about this annual gathering of writers, editors, and readers of queer literature is catching up with old friends and making new ones. This year, meeting Fiona Riley was one of the highlights for me: enthusiastic, charming, and all-around wonderful, I had a great time hanging out with her and her wife, and she also provided a much-needed kick in the pants to me to get my own writing practice into higher gear.

Fiona’s debut novel, Miss Match, comes out this week officially. It’s already available at the Bold Strokes Books website, so go check it out. (Bonus: Any ebook you order from the site this month gets you a free copy of “Three,” the ’Nathan Burgoine story that introduced the characters at the centre* of his new novel Triad Blood—but more about him later.)

*Because he’s Canadian, don’t ya know….

I was lucky enough to read Miss Match in advance last month, and it was quite the enjoyable read and, as an erotic lesbian romance, very much outside my wheelhouse. And that’s one of the things I enjoyed so much about it. As much as I looked to fiction while I was growing up for representations of myself, as an adult I am drawn to stories and characters outside my own experience.

Also, it’s just way sexy, yo.

After I finished reading it, I caught up with Fiona to ask her a few questions. Without further ado, here’s what she had to say. It’s long, but it’s pretty awesome, kind of like her.

Congratulations on your debut novel, first of all. I’m always interested in writers’ journeys to their first book. What was your writing background before this? Was writing a book something you’d always wanted to do?

I was about six or seven when I first remember the discussion of becoming a writer coming up with my neighborhood best friend. I was drawing with chalk on my driveway and randomly started writing little speeches or phrases that I made up on the spot. He told me I should be a writer. I think I laughed and purposely stepped on his Ninja Turtle pavement art. I was a total jerk that day. Once I developed an iota of maturity, I found myself really into music and poetry. I was drawn to the stories hidden in lyrics and rhymes as a preteen and teenager. I published my first poem at around age twelve and then another once I was in high school. It was a way for me to explore self-acceptance and creativity. I loved words and reading, it made sense to write as well.

Even though I was a little terror on that summer day during our afternoon chalk art session, it was the first concrete memory I have of exploring my creativity in a new way. The more I read and experienced the magic of getting lost in literature, the more I realized I wanted to be a part of that, if even just a small one. So, for as long as I can remember, yes, I have always wanted to be a published author. In my youth, I thought I would write great novels with tales of adventure that were spattered with life lessons and intrigue. As a college student, I thought I would publish something profound in a medical journal and write a textbook. After the excitement of college life turned into the reality of adulthood, I decided that writing about my day job was far less appealing than revisiting the adventures I dreamed about as a child. I settled for something in between and decided on romance. Why not?

The erotic and romantic aspects of their relationship are obviously the heart of the story (Wow, were they! I felt like I should put on oven mitts while I was reading sometimes), but there’s a lot more going on around that, too. I was especially interested in how aspects of their working lives were central to their stories: Lucinda’s navigating office politics and dealing with men threatened by a woman with power, and Samantha stepping very carefully to keep her own business on track. A lot of times it seems characters’ working lives get sidelined or left out entirely in fiction. Was this focus a conscious choice on your part?

This was absolutely an important focus for me. The fact is that as much as I am that child drawing on the pavement with chalk, I’m also a grown-up with adult responsibilities and relationships that take nurturing to maintain. For me, to really get into a story and its characters, I need the characters to have lots of individual development and growth. I want to know why Samantha would say this versus that when confronted with an unhappy client/mother, or why Lucinda is so protective of her privacy and her past. Why is she haunted?

Both of these women are established in their careers, and their careers are what brought them together in the first place:

Samantha is a matchmaker—she specializes in making the impossible possible. Navigating people’s emotions and vulnerabilities is an important part of her work life. As much fun as matchmaking sounds, there is a lot that goes into finding a mate that lines up with the idiosyncrasies and “wish lists” of her clients. Sometimes that involves having hard conversations with people unwilling to change. Other times that may mean biting her tongue and toeing the line of giving someone what they think they want in a partner versus what they truly need. It’s her job to find them a perfect match and help them to see the complexity and compromise that goes into making that work. During the story the reader will see that this is something Samantha worries about, she’s afraid she’s lost touch with her matchmaking abilities when her own relationship fails.

Samantha also struggles with keeping her relationship failure a secret so that her business doesn’t suffer… she’s in the business of happy endings, after all. She can’t really sell that brand if she’s not living that authentic life herself, and she knows that; in a way, she’s hiding behind her work to ignore the reality that she may never find what she promises everyone else: a perfect match.

Lucinda on the other hand is hiding behind her work in a different way- she’s had a tough life from early on and worked hard to find success in everything that she does. She was a talented dancer for the beginning of her life, but when that came to an abrupt end, she had to find a new way to harness the creativity and the control that dancing gave her. Two seemingly opposite things woven into one: grace with dancing comes from discipline and dedication; it is as much raw talent as it is hard work, and she didn’t become as successful as she was when she was as a dancer by natural good looks and a stroke of luck alone. She translated this ambition and drive into a successful career as a director of PR and marketing: She uses her creativity to help solve the problems of her clients while being able to harness the discipline and control necessary to manage a team of executives to run a profitable business. For her, this work is as much a literal translation of the well-choreographed nature of dance as any career could offer her.

But she works too much. Between juggling her dance studio with her high-powered executive career, she desperately tries to keep moving so that she doesn’t have time to stop and realize how alone she is in this world.

To ignore the importance of their work would deny the readers the opportunity to truly understand the intricacies of their personalities. The choices they make are entirely based on their past experiences, their aspirations, and their dreams. Both women are playful and childlike at their core but driven to success by the failures of their past. I did my best to express this in their dialogue and exchanges with each other. They are passionate, strong women and this spills onto the page in more ways than one when they finally cross paths and embrace their attraction.

TLDR; in a perfect world, the work we do to sustain the life we want to live should be as much a joy and adventure as the time we spend with our loved ones outside of that work. Samantha and Lucinda love their work, they love their lives in different ways, and the only way to really understand them is to understand what drives them to be successful in making sure that their work and their play contribute equally to their happiness. Aside from all of that—I love a woman who can rock heels and a suit while commanding the attention of a room. Both Samantha and Lucinda have this in spades. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a beautiful woman in a well-tailored suit that is smart, sassy, and a little dirty? *raises hand enthusiastically*

I was intrigued by this line in your bio: “A series of bizarre events afforded her with some unexpected extra time and she found herself reaching for her favorite blue notebook to write, never looking back.” Sounds like a story! Care to elaborate?

As much as I consider myself very playful and light hearted, this part of the story of my life is a little more somber. Two months after my 28th birthday I was diagnosed with advanced, metastatic cancer. There wasn’t a lot of time to consider how much my life would change after my diagnosis since we needed to act fast to try and save my life—I would have to contemplate all of that later on. After a long, complicated surgical intervention and hospital stay, I started a difficult and exhausting six months of chemotherapy. It was during this time that the little hobby of writing one-shots became something more serious. The truth was that if I wanted to become a published author, my window for that becoming a reality was quickly closing. Coincidentally, I had started writing the beginning of Miss Match about two weeks before my diagnosis, as soon as I was well enough to sit up again, I promised myself I would finish that novel no matter what.

That’s the real story behind the “series of bizarre events” alluded to in my bio. Had I not been diagnosed and subsequently treated for cancer, I don’t know that Miss Match would ever have been published. Cancer gave me a chance to put all of my “adulting” responsibilities on hold for long enough to decide what I really wanted to accomplish in my time on this planet—and that little girl playing with chalk on that summer day was the loudest voice in the crowd. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to write about the one thing that I wasn’t sure I would get: a happy ending. So a little idea about a matchmaker and a dancer with a dark past quickly became the living, breathing reason I woke up in the morning on the days I felt the worst.

I’m a bit of a wonk for people’s process. How long did it take you to finish Miss Match? What was your schedule like while you were working on it?

I wrote the outline for Miss Match over the course of one day in August 2012. I started working on the full story in January 2013 and finished it in March of that same year. I wrote 4–8 hours a day, 3–4 days a week during that time. It was an exercise in distraction as much as one of dedication. I was determined to quiet the side effects of treatment by engaging my imagination to paint a world of possibility. It was an exercise in dedication because some days my fingers hurt so much from the chemotherapy that I couldn’t touch anything colder or warmer than room temperature because of the rawness of the nerves in my extremities. Typing was a real bitch sometimes.

Wednesday links that have no link in common except I thought they were interesting and oh geez this is the longest title RIGHT?

No preamble this week. (Do you prefer that? Or do you like to hear me blather a bit before I run down the “hey, this is interesting” roll? Let me know.) Anyway, let’s get right to the links:

Trends in YA book covers. This is interesting to me as a writer as well as a graphic designer.

This offer has expired, but the presentation of it is anything but boring as fuck.

Like novellas? Do you like writing them? What about science fiction? This is from 2015, but Tor might be up your alley. My friend ’Nathan posted this on Facebook.

Defy reality. Become an artist. I kind of have an entire post about this coming in the future, so stay tuned for that rant—er, I mean thoughtful, in-depth piece.

Little Fiction is seeking diverse voices for an upcoming anthology called Roads Less Travelled. I’m not sure if an aging white queer is necessarily diverse, but I’m thinking of submitting. So should you.

“The best part of writing is the constant searching, the twisting, the turning, the back-and-forth, the things you think you understand, the things you understand more than you know.” “On Homecomings” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

It’s not just Amazon (thank heavens). Milkweed Editions is opening an indie bookstore.

Interesting: book return rates are lower as print book sales have stabilized.

Writing prompt: when is Super not so super?

Take a look at the picture below.

Excuse the blurriness; I’ve zoomed in a bit here.

I happened upon this sight while I was biking to Forest Park, which is the main urban park here in St. Louis (it’s also apparently the best city park in the country, according to USA Today). It was a Saturday morning, and the guy in the red suit had just crossed the street and was heading toward the Central West End, a part of town that has a bunch of restaurants and a major hospital complex.

The first thought that came to me was, Hmm, that’s odd. It’s not every day you see Superman walking (walking!) around the neighborhood. I couldn’t help but wonder where the guy was going and why he was walking instead of driving.

Or, you know, flying.

I got as close as I could without seeming like a weird whacko stalker to take the picture. Admittedly, however, I figured a guy in a cape probably gets a lot of people stopping him on the street. In fact, as I was getting ready to take this picture, a car did a slow pass by him and, while I couldn’t tell if the driver said anything, there was definitely some rubbernecking action going on.

The second thought that occurred to me was, Hey, this could make for an interesting writing prompt. For me, a lot of my writing starts off as a game of “what-if.” I see or imagine something that’s odd or out of place, and that gets me thinking. If the wheels turn long enough, that gets me writing.



So, if you’re of a mind to write something, start with a guy in a cape walking down the street in the early morning. He could be just a guy in a superhero suit, or he could be the genuine article. But you’ll still have to figure out where he’s going and why.

Wednesday links, springing forth like Athena fully formed

Okay, the headline has nothing to do with the links below. It does, however, have to do with something that happened yesterday. I’d just finished revising a story I’ve been working on for, no lie, three years. I’d originally intended to submit it as my manuscript for the Lambda Emerging Writers Fellowship, but as that deadline got closer I knew there was no chance I’d get it done in time so I submitted something else. (As it happened, I wrote that other story in less than a month, so there’s just no telling.)

Yesterday, after finishing that revision (and giving the story a new title), I had another idea for a story, and darn it if it didn’t have a beginning, middle, and end all pretty clearly figured out in my head. It feels like all I have to do is write it down. I don’t know why or how that happens, nor do I know why I’m feeling the short stories a lot more lately than any of my novel-length projects, but I’m going with it for now. Which is also a way of saying the novel in progress is still resting, kind of like dough. I’ll turn it into bread when it is or I am damn good and ready.

ANYWAY. Here are a few things I’ve been reading this week:

This is a riot: How to Be a Teenager in a Contemporary Novel Written for Adults

I loved the first season of Supergirl and really, really hope it gets picked up. This article at Panels pretty much sums up what I love about it (and what they need to work on in season 2).

Handy! Here’s a list of 100 must-read science fiction/fantasy novels by female authors. I’ve only read a handful of these, so there’s lots to explore. I’d also add Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and Sandra McDonald’s Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories to this list, although the latter is a short story collection and not a novel. It’s still awesome.

“I didn’t know Prince personally. Ultimately, I only worked with him for a couple of weeks in December three years ago. But I will remember that time for the rest of my life, not because of his celebrity — I mean, a little bit because of that, sure — but because I got to observe the way he worked. I got to observe the rigor and the care that he put into every detail, every word, every moment.”

Don’t let this be the only thing you do

So, this week I got a rejection on a story, a notice that I was wait-listed for a residency, and a job application rejected in, no lie, one hour. One hour! Now that’s efficiency. And getting wait-listed is at least not an outright rejection of my application, but unless someone wins the lottery and embarks on a whirlwind global cruise, contracts Ebola, or gets abducted by aliens, I’m outta luck. Still, glass half full!

I know, I’ve used this GIF before, but how could I not?

This isn’t even the most rejection I’ve gotten in a week. There was that one week when I got four rejection notices. Three of them came on the same day. I was like, “This isn’t rejection. This is sarcasm!”

I suspect that this afternoon I will do what I’ve gotten used to doing in times like this. No, I’m not talking about pouring a glass of wine. (You totally thought that was what I was going to say, didn’t you? Well, I might still do that.) I’m going to make a loaf of bread.

Now, I get it, of course. Rejection is par for the course. Word has it that Isaac Asimov even had his stories rejected by the magazine that his name is on. (Yes, really.) I mean, if he can’t catch a break, the rest of us shouldn’t expect to, either.

Everyone has a limit to how much they can take in a given period of time. It turns out my recommended weekly allowance for rejection is four. If you’re a writer (or any kind of artist/creator/person in the world), at some point you’re going to be up to your eyeballs in rejection and think that you’re incapable of getting anything right.

(That’s not just me, is it? Please tell me it’s not just me.)

That’s when I get out a bowl and the bag of flour. When I need to know I can do something right, I make bread. Maybe I can’t revise a paragraph to save my life or get my subjects and verbs to agree, but I can still combine flour, salt, yeast, and water with heat. It’s really amazing, how basic ingredients like that can come together to make something completely different from its component parts. 

Granted, sometimes the bread doesn’t turn out the way I want it. I go for something chewy and open-crumbed, and I get dense and doughy. Worse, sometimes it doesn’t rise at all and I wind up with a doorstop or, if I’m lucky, the makings for croutons. Or at least breadcrumbs.

Maybe there are writers who don’t get disheartened or discouraged by rejection—and if you’re one of them, congratulations. No, seriously. I mean it. If you’re like me, and the arrival of the fourth or fifth rejection in as many days makes you want to stay in your pajamas and eat cookie dough all morning, then it helps to be good at something else, something that doesn’t require anyone else to think it’s good. That may be baking or knitting or making marinara sauce or getting your tomato plants to produce an insane number of tomatoes. (Again, congratulations. Mine never cooperate.) Maybe you can rock a calligraphy pen. Maybe no one can fold a fitted sheet as well as you do. (How? HOW?)

Whatever it is, do that for a while. Then come back to your writing.