Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 60

Happy aniversary, Untreed Reads

It's hard to believe Untreed Reads has only been around a year. This is the publisher that released my short story, New Normal, as an e-download last year, as well as Huey Dusk, written by Whitney Howland, who's in my writing group, Writers under the Arch, and will be publishing another member of the group, Chris Bauer. (There must be something in the water around here.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. Happy anniversary, Untreed Reads. To celebrate, they're actually giving gifts, not receiving them. For the month of February, they're giving away the first three books they published last year. They're also taking 25% off everything else. So, I'm finally buying Huey Dusk, which I should have done a long time ago. (Sorry, Whit. Of course, I already know how it ends, since I was present at the creation, or at least the recitation.)

So, in honor of the festive occasion, I want to give away something too. I'll give away a free copy of my story, New Normal, to one person who can answer the following question:

Which three authors did I interview (back in the day, as the kids are fond of saying) for PlaybackSTL magazine?

E-mail me the answer before Feb. 28 at jeffrey@jeffrey-ricker.com, and I'll choose one person at random from the folks who get it right. (You'll find the answer on my website, so really, copying and pasting my e-mail address is probably the trickiest part of this.)

Of course, if I get no responses, I'll know that no one loves me and I will sink into a pit of despair, bitterness, and Chubby Hubby ice cream.

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Finally dipping my toe in the e-reader pool

No one would ever accuse me of being an early adopter. The last time I plunged into cutting-edge technology was when I bought a first-generation iPod back in 2001, and only then because I was buying a new laptop and figured, in for a penny, in for a pound.

Since then, I never install software until at least the first revision (preferably the second), I am never the first person on the block to have the newest gizmo (we just got a flat screen and a Blu-ray late this past year), and when I finally do cave in, I'm not liable to get the top-of-the-line model.

So it took me until this month (along with a sale price and a gift card) to finally take the plunge and buy an e-reader. Call me a luddite, but I have a hard time relinquishing the feel of a bound set of paper pages and the ease of flipping directly (or near enough) to a page in the middle of a book without having to wait for screen redraw.

However, a compelling argument in favor of my getting an e-reader can be found in just about every room of the house: the bookshelves stuffed to overflowing, with books stacked sideways on top of others and rows two deep on the shelf. No, not all of them have been read (I shudder to count all of the books that make up my multipart "to be read" stack). There's a certain amount of guilty feeling to be had there, but if I'm going to be addicted to something, I've always thought books were a sort of noble addiction.

But, like Scotty, I canna change the laws of physics. There are only so many books we can squeeze into this house (which is not a TARDIS), and something's gotta give. So, I gave—myself a Kobo.*

As of yesterday, I was reading three books: one a hardback of the latest Michael Cunningham, one a murder mystery by a friend of mine (she published via Amazon, and I have to say, this book is hilarious), and Conquering Venus, by Collin Kelley, whom I met last May at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in Atlanta. Collin's was the first of the three that I finished (it was excellent—but more on that in another blog post), and I think, much to my surprise, that the e-reader format had a lot to do with how quickly I read.

I doubt I'll be clearing off the shelves and replacing everything with a digital copy, but I do think I'm going to be consiering more carefully whether I want one or the other. For one thing, all of those books are heavy, and I don't look forward to packing (and paying for) them the next time we move. Certain choices, on the other hand, are no-brainers: books by writers I know, I'll want to get a paper copy. After all, it's hard to get an author to sign your Kindle or your Nook.

At least, it is for now.

*They're not paying me for mentioning them. I should be so lucky.

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Can you hear me? I'm connecting with you

OK, I'm borrowing this but giving credit where it's due. Over on his blog, Nathan Bransford asked his readers what their favorite song is. I know, it's like choosing your favorite child, right? I couldn't do it either, though I did narrow my choice down to one of four Kate Bush songs. (I limited it to one artist; that's pretty good, isn't it?)

Music has inspired my writing on more than one occasion, which is funny since I need almost total silence if I'm going to get any writing done. As I was writing my first book, I compiled a bunch of songs into a playlist on my iPod that ended up being what I considered the soundtrack to my book. I didn't actually listen to it while I was writing, but when I wasn't writing, I played it a lot and thought about bookish things. Maybe it helped, I don't know.

 So, here's a question—or actually several: what music inspires you? Have you ever written anything inspired by a particular piece of music? Do you listen to music while you write?

(Oh, and here's another question: What's the song referenced in the title of this entry? No cheating by Googling it. And you, Huntington: I know you know the answer to this, so sit this one out. )

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In praise of Daedalus's son

The latest issue of Icarus is probably the best one I've read yet. The quarterly publication's tagline, "The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction," tells you just how specific a reading (and, of course, a writing) niche can become. Even within that seemingly narrow range, though, there's a lot of ground to cover. My favorites in this issue have to be "The Shapes of Shadows," by Sunny Moraine, about an archeologist encountering an alien artifact on a distant planet and how it conveys its eons-old message, and "Lonesome Road," by Matthew Cheney, about two people and an old, ghostly recording, with an unexpected—and unsettling—ending.

I've  been a fan of science fiction and speculative fiction since I can first remember. Some of the first books I picked up on my own were by Heinlein and Asimov and Herbert. Even moreso, there's something—not comforting, necessarily, but maybe affirming? I'm not sure what the right word is—when you see a character in fiction in which you recognize some essential aspect of yourself, especially when it's so often ignored or dismissed elsewhere.

It's worth checking out.

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In search of discipline

Over at the authors' blog for my forthcoming book's publisher, I've written a post about my experience with a site called 100words.com, something I embarked on because last month I was stuck on several writing projects lately and, instead of focusing on one, I've been bouncing among them and getting very little done. My writing output slowed to almost nothing, and I was finding it very easy to play hooky and doing anything but write. So, my friend Scott suggested this. After all, anyone can write a hundred words, right?

Can you do it every day for a month, though?

I decided to find out. The answer, apparently, is yes. And several of the posts have ended up being parts of a draft for my next novel. Not bad.

So tell me: what do you do to reinforce self-discipline?

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Happiness No. 4

Happiness No. 4



Originally uploaded by jricker

My favorite thing about returning from vacation is going through the mail. I love getting the mail, even (or perhaps especially) in the age of e-mail, text messages, and Facebook posts. I like holding in my hands something that, days or weeks earlier, someone I knew put into an envelope, took to the Post Office, and sent to me. Pressing "send" is just not the same.

When we got home from our trip to the Pacific Northwest (more on that later), I was pleasantly surprised to find a padded mailer from my friend Becky in Houston. Inside was a card, a lovely photo of her, her husband, her writing partner Tim and all of the dogs they are owned by, and the beautiful little painting you see pictured here.

How lucky am I?

Make like a bird and fly

Since I'm a compulsive list maker, it'll come as no surprise that I keep an Excel spreadsheet on my computer to track all of my story submissions. Each time I send out a story, I add a line to the spreadsheet listing where the story was sent, when, and whether the magazine/publication accepts simultaneous submissions. In the last column, I mark whether it was accepted or not.

There are a lot of no's in that column.

When a story is out for consideration, I highlight the line green. When it's available for sending out, blue. When it comes back rejected, yellow. At the moment, there are ten stories highlighted blue on that sheet. (Well, there would be eleven if you counted this one story that I haven't looked at in seven years, but let's not count that one for now.) It seems to me that's way too many.

Now, I am not one to make resolutions. I still have most of the ten extra pounds with which I started 2010, and while I'm managing to save some money, it's mostly through automatic withdrawals into my retirement account, because I have no will power otherwise. So, when I say I'm going to get these stories out the door more often this year, it's not a resolution. It's just something I think I should do.

And I'm starting today.

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Good riddance, or change everything

I'm no Dickens, but 2010 was the year of success and the year of just plain suck. On the bright side: two short stories published, one at Untreed Reads and the other in Blood Sacraments from Bold Strokes Books; my novel getting accepted for publication. Wonderful times with Mike and friends near and far. Everything else? Partly to mostly crappy, but for the life of me, I can't put my finger on any one particular thing. It seems like it's just been a miasma of shittiness that's hung over the year like a dog fart. (The simile is vile, I know, but trust me if you have never experienced this, it's awful.)

I don't make resolutions, because I'm just bound to break them. However, next year I want to start changing everything. At some point this year I realized there are only so many days ahead, and if there are fewer ahead than there are behind, why the hell would you waste them?

Beyond that, all I can say is there are two stories I need to finish revising, a new call for submissions I just received, and a first draft of a novel that needs to be revised and a new book that needs to be finished.

In more ways than one, I feel like I'm just getting started.

Happy New Year, everyone. I am humbled by the good fortune, friendship, and support I've been so very lucky to receive.

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100 words at a time

I've been working on my second novel—or maybe my third; I have a first draft of a book finished, but the one I've been working on more often lately is a new story. At heart I think I'm avoiding the revision of the second book, but at the same time I also don't want to lose the thread of this one.

Here's the thing though; I've been mostly writing it in strings of 100 words. No more, no less.

I've been lacking discipline lately, see, and so I started doing this thing called 100words that challenges you to write a hundred words, every day, for an entire month. At first I thought I'd just write completely random snippets, and the early ones were. But then I started writing completely random bits of this second (or third) book idea, and now they're starting to knit together. And, as I'd hoped, I find myself writing beyond those hundred words.

Here's what I wrote for yesterday:

Remember that thing with the baseball in the back of my mother's head? Finally, I got an explanation for that.

It's true, I do throw like a girl. I can't fault the Billy Strattons of my high school for pointing this out. I throw left handed and I do that overhead flingy, catapult-looking thing with my wrist snapping over at the end. It looks ridiculous.

But it's always fast, and right on target.

Coach Brandt wanted me to go out for junior varsity baseball. I couldn't imagine. But, I did try out for archery. I'm our team's best.

So what do you do when you lack discipline?

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Re-vision

1.

I've been trying to see things differently. Getting sick helped. That, or it just played to my mild hypochondriac tendencies. As the discomfort (I hesitate to call it pain) from my stomach bug lingered, I wondered if some insidious fragment of food poisoning would remain in my system, waiting to do a number on my kidneys and eventually do me in. Let's hear it for paralyzing fear of death. I was overreacting, but it made me realize that I have no time to waste. I may be past the halfway point in my life and I've got thing to finish.

2.

I'm working on a story about a man who's just been thrown out (though gently) by his wife, and then his nomadic parents arrive at his new bachelor apartment with a bunch of boxes—seven, actually—full of stuff that used to belong to him as a kid. Only, when he opens them, he finds they don't belong to him, but rather to his brother, who died when he was sixteen. When I originally workshopped this story, seven years ago, he'd only opened three of the boxes before the story ended. An obvious omission. He has to go through all those boxes, everyone said, and of course they were right. Since then, the contents of the boxes have changed from my original ideas, along with what they meant. A lot about the story has changed, but that makes sense. When I spoke with the workshop leader about it, he said there were enough things going on in the story to spend a career unpacking. At first I thought that was a compliment, and maybe it was. But there's also a criticism in that, which is justified.

3.

There's another story I've decided to rework. I've sent it out about ten times—actually, I've sent it out exactly ten times. I keep track of these things in a spreadsheet, otherwise I'd never be able to keep it all straight. It was a finalist in a contest in 2009, which is as close as it's gotten to seeing the light of day, but it still hasn't quite made it. I don't know that there's anything exactly wrong with the story—in fact, I asked a friend, whose opinion I value highly, to read, it and said, "Tell me what's wrong with it."

"Um, nothing?" he replied.

But, it's tricky. It's hard to fit it into a particular bin, which is why I've decided to revise it. I have an idea where I'd like to see it appear, and so that'll mean some changes, and it'll also add another layer to the story. So apparently, I think the answer to a story that's hard to pigeonhole is to make it harder to pigeonhole. No one ever said I did the smart thing.

4.

After something Alex Chee wrote in his Twitter feed, I've decided to revise that second story by retyping it. I'm starting at the beginning and typing until it changes, and then I'll keep typing and see where it goes. It may end up going somewhere I'm not expecting. That's the fun part.

I'm borrowing more than that from Alex. He often writes his blog posts in numbered blocks, and something about that appeals to me. Maybe all of these parts aren't directly related, but I'm just seeing where they lead and hoping the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

5.

I think there are a lot of things I need to learn to see differently.