Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 41

Random omnibus update, i.e. story! And contest!

It’s only the second week of term and already I’m exhausted. You’d think it wouldn’t be quite so hectic considering that I only have one class, a fiction workshop, in the first term, but I’m also managing the writing contests this year for PRISM international, the literary magazine published by UBC’s Creative Writing Program.

I was randomly flipping through back issues this past week and came across a few notable bylines: Joyce Carol Oates, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Charles Bukowski. And that was just random picking. There’s fifty-plus years of back issues that probably contain even more names. The thing that I think is exciting is the possibility that we’re going to publish (or may have already published) the next Atwood or Heaney.

Hey, you never know. It might even be you.

Now, here’s where I have a favor to ask: If you’re on Twitter, it’d be great if you could retweet the contest announcement. Here, I’ll even make it easier:

Submit to PRISM's 2013/14 Writing Contests! wp.me/pVd4C-Y2—
Prism International (@PrismLitMag) September 09, 2013

See? Easy.

If you’re on Facebook, I posted about the contest here. Share it with your friends! (And click “like” on my page while you’re at it. You’ll make my day.)

Okay, moving on.

I’ve already submitted my first story for my fiction workshop, which’ll be critiqued this week. Get as much out of the way as early as possible, I figure, and clear the deck for the unexpected. I’m also wrapping up the first draft of my thesis (currently stands at 74,493 words—attention, Carsen Taite!) and just sent in revisions on a story for an anthology that I can’t wait to tell you all about. (Keywords for this story: bears in space. That’s bears in spaaaaaaace.) And I don’t mean the fuzzy kind of bears. Well, I suppose I do, but—

Never mind, I’ll explain later.

I’ve also finished revising one of the stories I wrote last year and now just need to figure out where to send it. I have a couple places in mind, so we’ll see. One thing I want to do more of this year is submitting my work to magazines. I’ve got a lot of anthology credits under my belt—and let’s hear it for anthologies! I love getting to read a range of writers’ work all in one convenient volume. I’d like to see if I can’t get some magazine credits as well.

And that’s the news with me. How are you?

The word Smith dba ’Nathan Burgoine

Enough of tooting my own horn. I’m going to sing someone else’s praises for a while.

I met ’Nathan Smith (who publishes under the name ’Nathan Burgoine) in May of 2009 when Michael and I went to the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. I knew a little about him already at that point, because we’d both just had our first stories published in the same anthology, Fool for Love: New Gay Fiction, from Cleis Press. He wrote a story titled “Heart” that is still one of my favorites from him.

At this point, I should warn you that ’Nathan writes stories that will make you cry. Keep Kleenex® handy when you read him.

We spent a lot of time that weekend hanging out with ’Nathan and his husband Dan, and it kind of felt like we were going through Writing School orientation together: this is how you give a reading, this is you signing your work for the first time, this is your life slowly starting down the track that you’ve had in sight for more years than you can count. For me, it was a relief not to be going through that alone, and to have made a fast friend who could say, “I know exactly what you mean.”

The thing about my circle(s) of friends is how often their members live in farflung cities. If I’m lucky, I get to see some of them once a year. In many cases, years go by before we’re able to catch up in person. The irony, when I started grad school in Vancouver, was that though we were both in the same country (’Nathan lives in Ottawa), I was actually farther away from him and Dan here than I was in St. Louis.

Still, most every year we’ve caught up in New Orleans and talked about writing, living, dogs, cats, and why coffee is so much better than tea. (I’m kidding about that last part; we don’t talk about it, though coffee is obviously superior.)

I’m sure ’Nathan lost track of the number of times people asked him, “When are you going to write a book?” ’Nathan loves short stories; he loves writing them, reading them, telling people to pick up this fantastic anthology he’s been reading, and on and on. He’s got more than two dozen of his own stories in print, perhaps most notably in the recent anthology This Is How You Die, where his story is the lead-off in this sequel to the Machine of Death anthology. He’s so good at writing stories, he doesn’t have to write a novel, and really, I don’t think writers of stories should feel pressured or be expected to think of their work as a springboard to a novel. Stories are wonderful creations in their own right and are, if you ask me, a lot harder in some ways.

That being said, the next time someone asks “When are you going to write a book?” ‘Nathan can say, “Oh, I already did that.”

Light‘s about Kieran, an unlikely superhero. An unlikely gay psychokinetic superhero (and how often do you get to say that?) who can also refract light in spectacular and sometimes blinding ways. He has his hands full with a fundamentalist preacher/prophet who decides to bring his message of hate to Pride Week and things get violent. If that weren’t enough, there’s also Sebastien, who takes a liking to Kieran and who also has Pilot, who might be one of my favorite dogs in fiction. He’s certainly my favorite of the moment.

I can’t wait to read what ‘Nathan comes up with next.

Who got mentioned in Library Journal? This guy!

There’s an article in this month’s Library Journal by Ellen Bosman titled “Opening the Fiction Closet.” Imagine my surprise when my friend Cindy (by way of my other friend Joe) told me that my novel Detours got a mention in the article, which is about the growth of queer fiction and how collections development and readers’ advisory staff at libraries can identify contemporary works worth acquiring.

So, I’m worthy!

Along with my book, also mentioned were Jameson Currier’s The Third Buddha (which I’ve read and is excellent) and Trebor Healey‘s A Horse Named Sorrow (which is on my to-read list), among many others including Ali Liebegott and Stacy d’Erasmo (both of whom I’ve read and enjoyed). Jerry Wheeler’s review site Out in Print also gets mentioned as a resource for finding what’s new and good.

I believe a version of this article will be available online at reviews.libraryjournal.com soon that will also address series books. I’ll update this post with a link when that goes live. Right now, the article is exclusive to their print edition, but I just couldn’t resist pointing it out now, because BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION!

Is the number of published books really a problem? or “Need a hug, Colin?”

Poor Colin Robinson. Are you okay, hon? Do you need a hug?

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, the aforementioned Mr. Robinson is an editor for OR Books and wrote a column in The Guardian this past week about the plight of the poor, put-upon reader. There are just too many books for readers to read, you see. And a whole lot of them—well, they just aren’t very good, are they? Who’s to blame? Writers, that’s who. So they should all just take a year off so the rest of us can catch their breath and catch up on their reading.

Bless your heart, Mr. Robinson, I’d love a vacation! (It’s your treat, right?)

Now, there’s something here that doesn’t quite make sense to me. And I think it’s this: “Paradoxically, the deluge of writing itself contributes to declining readership. It’s not just that if you’re writing then you can’t be reading.”

Yep, there’s so many books, no one knows where to start. This explains why Big Brother is a thing.

Okay now, show of hands, writer friends! How many of you haven’t read any books this year? Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller? Bueller?

I have a hunch here—and it’s only a hunch; I don’t have any statistics to back it up, so I’m not going to pretend I do—that if you took all of the writers out of the book-buying market, the dip would be noticeable. I’ve noted on many occasions how book buying is a bad, bad habit for me that I doubt I’ll ever be able to shake (and thank heavens for it). So far this year I’ve read 21 books. Trust me when I say that’s a whole lot more than the number of books I’ve written this year (which would add up to less than one, at the moment, but I’m workin’ on it).

Mr. Robinson also mentions the disturbing statistic that one in four Americans did not read a single book last year. Or, I should say, this would be disturbing if this hadn’t already been the case for years. (Even the Pew Center says the increase is “statistically insignificant.” You know the saying: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.)

Feel like the sky is falling yet?

However you look at it, in America at least, a lot of people don’t read. At least, they don’t read books. It’s not like we’re saying that a lot of people can’t read (although that’s a problem too, and one deserving of more attention). But let’s not overlook the fact that three-quarters of Americans did read at least one book last year. It’s funny, how often that gets overlooked. I mean, if the current population of the United States is 313.9 million (thank you, Google), then (gets out calculator) 235,425,000 Americans read a book last year. A few of them even read two or more.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of books to me.

Back to poor Mr. Robinson, though. I’m worried about him. He sounds so put upon by his job: “Sometimes,” he writes, “on darker days, it seems that my job as an editor comprises little more than hacking away at the Gormenghast-like tangle of poorly crafted words in order to admit sunlight for the few well-composed ones that are left.”

(To be honest, I’d never heard of Gormenghast, so don’t feel bad if you hadn’t either. They’re a bit long, is what he’s saying.)

Now, if you happen to be one of the authors published by his house, you might be asking yourself, gosh, I hope he doesn’t mean me. Let’s not dwell there, because, you know, we writers are optimistic by nature. We start out writing a book thinking we’re going to finish it, and then that eventually someone’s going to read it. And not just our mothers. If that isn’t optimism, I don’t know what is.

The first person who says that’s insanity gets a stern finger-wagging.

“The writers would survive a break,” he says. Well, who wouldn’t love a year-long holiday? Of course, the bills would tend to pile up, and the mortgage might get foreclosed. And then there’s the matter of all those people employed in the publishing industry other than writers. Let’s hope the backlists would keep selling.

I feel you though, Colin. (Can I call you Colin?) Longtime readers may recall the accompanying shot of my to-read stack back home. (In full disclosure, it’s not so much a stack as it is a tower block.) There’s a lot of books and only so much time. And yet I am still managing. But I’m more worried that you’ve been singing a version of this tune since way back in 2009. Babe, you need to relax. Publishing has not yet imploded. Readers have not run into the streets tearing out their hair because they haven’t been able to tell the good books from the bad. (At this point, I will not presume to tell them which are which.) And the innovations in publishing that have occurred have done more than just make it possible to publish many more titles in a year; they’ve also made your own enterprise possible. That’s a good thing, surely?

But perhaps you don’t see it that way? Well, that’s okay. Maybe you just need a break. How about some time off? Go for a walk? Work on your golf game? Let someone else tackle those manuscripts that need editing?

How about that hug?

A live chess game, or “I Mighta Been Queen”

Where some people see a patio, Francis saw a chessboard.

A couple weeks ago he noticed an outdoor deck at a nearby building where all the patio tiles were square and just big enough for a person to stand on. It didn’t take long before a bunch of residents at the graduate college where I stay in Vancouver started hatching plans to play a chess game with live players standing in for the game pieces.

I don’t know much about chess (although it is my favorite musical) apart from the names of the pieces and the basic goal of the game (capture the king), but I was still game for it… as long as I could play the most powerful piece on the board.

Naturally, costumes would be required.

Sadly, I was not able to find a skirt that fit me (it turns out I’m more a size 16 than a 14), but I did find a great vest and a suitable pair of earrings, and my friend Rebecca let me borrow a fascinator accented with a big, tall feather—because a hat really does complete an outfit.

Check out all the photos here.

I’m always impressed by the ingenuity and creativity of the people I’m living among. In the end, I think I made a pretty good Black Queen. Brittany made an equally awesome White Queen, especially after she got my dagger away from me. (Well, okay, admittedly it was a letter opener, but still.)

Good dog

He looks like he only has eyes for me, doesn’t he? It’s a total lie. The groomer was off to the side holding up a toy.

Look, I promise this is not going to degenerate into one of those “my dog died and I’m a complete mess as a result” posts—and it kind of disturbs me that it won’t.

Wait. Let’s rewind, shall we?

Specifically, let’s go back to 2007, when both of my cats died within a month of each other. The first, Boris, was unexpected, and I was so caught by surprise I had no idea how to cope. When Natasha died less than a month later, I was just, “What next? Boils? Plague of locusts?”

Because, you know, I’m not prone to overreact.

Dakota had been well into his sunset before this past summer, and by the end of July it was pretty clear that twilight was approaching. (Let’s work this metaphor to death, what do you say?) Still, when I left for Vancouver on August 1 he’d been to the vet and was pretty stable.

By August 5 he was gone.

Now, everyone who knows me is well aware that I’m pretty much crazy cat lady when it comes to pets. When I got the call that Dakota was heading for his final visit to the vet, I was over a thousand miles away, and he had seemed, not exactly fine when I left, but stable. After getting this news I was, much to my surprise, not a complete and total basket case.

So, in a way, it feels like he’s either not yet left or he’s been gone for ages.

Is this me being in Kübler-Ross’s denial stage? Or have I just skipped on to acceptance? Or is that whole five stages not all it’s cracked up to be?

Distance obviously helps. Also, it’s not like he left all at once. He’d shown signs of slowing down and getting more frail over the past two years. This wasn’t exactly unexpected.

Still, it would have been nice to be there.

But, things like death don’t happen just when it’s convenient for all parties involved. In the end, he was surrounded by people who cared for him. And that’s the best that any of us can hope for at the end, isn’t it?

The other thing about Dakota was that he never took a bad picture. And I think that’s not just me being biased; that’s an empirical, verifiable fact. Don’t believe me? Go take a look at all the pictures I took of him that are over on Flickr. Yep, he was a damn handsome dog.

Diary, blog, or social media?

Do you keep a diary, or do posts on Facebook or Twitter suffice for you? I sometimes think of my blog as a diary in addition to being BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION (hey, it’s Tuesday, so I have to slip that in at least once), but it’s still a record open to the world in more or less real time.

Reading this article this morning reminded me that I do keep a diary. I keep several, in fact. There’s a file on my computer, a bound journal that I sometimes carry around with me, and another file on my phone, all filled with items of varying degrees of personal interest. I’d hate for any of them to see the light of day. Each is a space where I can sit with my own thoughts without having to sanitize them for public consumption (such as, for example, my mother).

I know, you don’t believe that I censor myself in public forums, do you? Assorted f-bombs aside, it’s true. If you heard what goes through my head, you’d probably be appalled.

Social media is great—I’ve gleaned insights and struck up acquaintances with any number of writers I admire. A diary is When I was in college I received a copy of Andy Warhol’s diaries for Christmas. It was delightful and, of course, a little scandalous, but I also loved that it was a conversation between him and his secretary, Pat Hackett. She kept track of expenses in the diary (Warhol was audited by the IRS), but also there are glimpses of what’s on his mind, and occasionally there was a level of sentiment that surprised me. Similarly, collections of letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor reveal a side of the writer’s mindset that is, of course, now very familiar to us.

I started keeping a journal when I was sixteen. If I could find those legal pad pages and read them now, I’d probably cringe and want to burn them. At the time, though, it was at least getting me writing.

Do you keep a diary?

Un(Face)booked, sort of, or “I have the attention span of a—ooh! Shiny!”

So, recently, my friends may have noticed, my profile on Facebook disappeared. It’s been a long time coming. For the past several months, people have had to put up with me grumbling and, occasionally, outright shouting whenever I’d log in. I couldn’t help it. Someone would post something so patently false that I’d be compelled by a sense of righteous indignation (and years of training in journalism) to do the most basic of research online to point out, politely, that they might want to check their facts.

Then there are the endless pleas for homes for stray animals—on the other side of the country. Or the world. It’s like trying to one-up Sarah McLachlan, which I can barely take on the best of days. Seriously, my computer needs a USB box of Kleenex as a peripheral.

And politics. Don’t get me started on politics.

And yet, I couldn’t tear myself away. I’m not blaming Facebook. (No, really. I’m not.) The fault is not in my stars, but in myself. I suffer from a heinously short attention span, so I’m easily distracted. I know it’s not uncommon; I’m the sort of person who will go online to look up something—say, how far Galveston is from the Johnson Space Center—and three hours later I’m looking at Google photos of the Texas City disaster from 1947 and a friend’s Flickr set of the beach at Galveston and I still haven’t finished writing the sentence that involved getting from the Johnson Space Center to Galveston.

Um, not that this actually happened (on Monday).

Facebook was the same way. Log in to check if there are any messages and surface an hour later after finding and commenting on eleventy million vegan chili recipes (none of which are as good as mine, of course, but still) or barely containing my (admittedly impotent) rage at the most recent injustice in the world.

Still, I didn’t quite want to hit the self-destruct button. I’m a writer, after all, and a queer writer just getting his start who’s published by a (wonderful) independent press at that. (Insert obligatory BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION to please buy my book here.) My audience, it goes without saying, is not huge, and I value all of them. But I do know of one or two writers who aren’t on Facebook. And last year, when my friend James cut the Facebook cord, I wondered if I could do the same.

Besides, I’d been a split personality on Facebook for a while as well. In addition to my profile, I also had a writer’s Page that kept up with the comings and goings of what I was working on (and, when I’m lucky, publishing).

A couple weeks ago, two things finally conspired to drive me over the edge: the Trayvon Martin trial, and a friend’s somewhat messy breakup.

Click. Boom.

It’s not like I’ve abandoned social media, of course. I still spend some time on Twitter, where I find that 140 characters is ideally suited to my attention span. And killing the Facebook profile means I can’t go comment on everyone else’s photos and profiles, so it’s kind of like forcing myself to focus. (You know what else helps? This program.) It serves to keep me from going out and searching for diversion and distraction.

Um, not that I’d ever do that (daily).

What I did on my summer vacation. (Hint: Wrote. A lot.)

I can’t believe this Thursday I’ll be back in Vancouver to finish the first draft of my thesis and get ready for my second year of grad school. Where has the summer gone? And what have I done to make use of the time?

I’m glad you asked! (I know, you didn’t ask, and by implying that I’m putting words in your mouths, but bear with me here.) I decided to tally up everything I’ve written while I’ve been back in St. Louis. It adds up to this:

Thesis: 58,278 words (and counting)
Short story for a submissions call: 7,441 words
Short story for another submissions call (that wound up too long for the room they had so I need to find another home for it): 6,543 words
Blog posts galore! 9,200+ words
And assorted miscellany including 1,100 words on a possible sequel to The Unwanted (coming soon!).

Add to that all of the stories I wrote in my first year of grad school, two graphic novel projects, and part of a middle-grade science fiction book, and this has probably been the most productive year for me writing-wise in ever. So, grad school? Totally worth it.

Yes, as a matter of fact I CAN sign your e-book. (But will you review it for me too?)

As I wrote about recently, I’ve gradually become a convert to e-books. It took a while, but I’ve gotten used to purchasing titles to read on screen, even though I’ve read and can pretty much attest to the fact that we read differently on screen than we do in print. I probably wouldn’t want to have read Anna Karenina on my Kobo, and when I decided to tackle A Portrait of a Lady, I bought it in paperback.

Mind you, I haven’t read it yet, but still.

Another reason I still buy some books in print is because they’re written by my friends—and I want my friends to autograph them! You can sign a Kindle, I guess, but eventually you’re going to run out of room on the case for more writers to sign it. Of course, with friends who’ve released e-book-only titles, that’s a bit of a problem. I’ve got three e-shorts from Untreed Reads that fall into that category as well. And, it almost goes without saying (but I’m gonna say it anyway because BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION), my first novel, Detours, is also available as an e-book. How do I sign those for people?

There’s a way around that now. I recently signed up at a site called Authorgraph where you can list titles you’ve written and have readers request signings for them. If you’ve got an iPad or a tablet, it’s pretty slick: type a message, then use a stylus and you can literally sign your name and—whoosh!—off it goes to the reader.

So, if you’ve bought one of those e-shorts or my first novel, you can go over there an request an autograph. I’ll be happy to sign! (On the downside, you’re going to see how terrible my penmanship is.)

But, I do have a favor to ask.

If you liked that title I’m signing, would you be so kind as to write a review? You can put it on Goodreads, Amazon, wherever you bought it. Reviews help other readers find my work, and your opinions give them an idea of what they can expect. My friend ‘Nathan, who’s a reviewing machine (seriously, go check out his blog to see what I mean), offered some helpful hints on how to write a review. It’s easier than you think: you can do it in three sentences!

If you do write a review, first of all THANK YOU. Secondly, THANK YOU again. Thirdly, shoot me an email and let me know about it so I can check it out.

Did I say thanks already? I did? Well, I’ll say it again: thanks!