DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 94

Blind Spot

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Blind Spot

DeAnna Knippling

She sees art.  He sees technology worth killing for.

An artist who sees what nobody else sees:  the visual code generated by the eye's own blind spot.  A VR developer who sees the possiblities–including the threat to her life.

"I can't see myself," Thomas said, raising his hand to touch the Mirror. The reflected room behind him was pale gray and filled with a line of guests, each craning their necks to see around him. It was a terrible sight, and he smiled in delight even as his eyes filled with tears. His body grieved for the lack of himself, the knowledge of how little he mattered, even as he felt like crowing with joy.

"Sir." The guard shook his head. "Don't touch." He'd been saying it through the whole opening, no doubt, to incredulous guests trying to touch the work of art or science or whatever it was. Keeping people far back enough from the frame so they didn't spill wine on it when it clicked.

"How?" Thomas asked, knowing that the guard couldn't answer the question, but unable to stop himself.

"Read the sign, sir," the guard said.

Thomas laughed under his breath. It wasn't what he'd wanted to know, but he bent toward the sign anyway; he would have seemed out of place otherwise.

Why can't you see yourself in "The Mirror of the World without You"?

The sign explained, in language a ten-year-old could understand, that it wasn't a mirror but a television. Cameras in the television screen itself—which had originally been part of a console gaming system—recorded the images that surrounded the screen and projected them.

The real trick was in the way the cameras removed the viewer's image from the screen. The cameras didn't just edit out the image of the viewer—which would have removed all people from the image—but placed a subtle pattern layer over all moving objects. The pattern was cued to align with the orientation of the eyes of each object, if it had any, and simulated the sensory data the eyes sent to the brain from the area directly over the optic nerve, or blind spot.

The brain saw the pattern, interpreted it as the eye's blind spot, and filled it in with what it calculated to be the correct images. The brain, trained to compensate for its own shortcomings, erased anything coded with what seemed to be the same pattern, rendering it invisible.

It was essentially an optical illusion, if a very sophisticated one. It worked wonderfully. As Thomas finished reading the sign, he peeked at the Mirror out of the corner of his eye, trying to get a glimpse of himself. The cameras tracked his gaze quickly, but he was able to catch a white wisp that faded like a breath on glass. It was creepy.

The woman behind him was having a completely different reaction. She was standing with her hands on her hips and grinning, making faces at herself. "Nobody can see me! I can do whatever I want! Nyaaa!" She stuck her tongue out.

But of course Thomas and the other guests could still see her, both in real life and in the mirror; each person only failed to see themselves.

 

Month Long Read-a-Thon (September)

I'm going to be in Back of the Book Reviews' Month Long Read-a-Thon in September, featuring Chance Damnation (probably including a trade paper giveaway, if I can get the galley fixed in time).  There will be a bunch of recommendations, a bunch of giveaways, and a bunch of prizes for mighty readers.  More news as I get it.

Back from Road Trip.

Man.  I thought I was going to be able to keep up with things while I was on this road trip, but that was just not the case.  I was pretty fried, though.

Tony is Lee's son from twenty-five years ago, and the mom told him she didn't want him to have anything to do with the baby's life, so he didn't, which pissed her off.  From what I've heard, though, it's a good thing that Lee's back now.  They're so similar that they're more like brothers than anything else, I guess.  I feel more or less the same about Tony as I did when I met Mike and Dale, anyway.  Tony is, I don't know, more reserved than they are, though, so I don't feel like I know him as well as I do those two, even after first meeting them.  Maybe it's the awkwardness of being a mother-in-law, or just a mother, or that he didn't know Lee for years and years.  Mike and Dale were all blah blah blah, did you know about this horribly embarrassing thing that Lee did when he was eight kind of thing.

Brittney, I think, has found her niche in being a preschool teacher.  I like her but I have to laugh, because it's so foreign.  She does craft projects.  She terrorizes little kids into being good, when they're coming from some pretty harsh backgrounds.  She has me crying TMI…not often, but yeah.  I forget what it was but it was something about farting, maybe.  She can't spell to save her life yet reads all kinds of books and likes sad endings because they're more realistic.  I guess you'd have to meet her to understand, because it's hard to explain.  A sensible battle maiden type?  Hugs for the kids, an axe to the jerks, and burn the house down because you don't feel like cleaning it.

They do well together, but they pick on each other constantly, if seemingly affectionately.  They had their first anniversary while they were out here, both of their wedding and losing their unborn baby together.  They both seemed to take it pretty well, but I got a little wound up about it and had to calm down.

The little things that Tony does that are just like Lee are uncanny.  Hating water, the kinds of foods they like, music.  It's like they're twins sometimes.  Tony seems, if anything, even more Russian-Cossack looking than Lee does.  I can just see this huge bear of a guy with shiny leather boots doing the dance with his buddies.  At twenty-five, he has more of a beard than most men will at fifty.  The genes speak true, I guess.

We went back through Omaha, which was tricky.  The bridges to I-29 are out, which hadn't really clicked until we'd been cut off twice from getting back to the Interstate, so we drove back through Missouri Valley.  Sandbags all along the roads.  The water wasn't that high, but it was close, and we saw house after house flooded out on the way back.   It was strange that there weren't more mosquitoes.  And seeing everything so green in August, knowing that it wasn't a good thing, necessarily.  Standing water in a lot of fields, even after we left the vicinity of the river.

Sioux Falls is changing, becoming bigger and more prosperous, but I still couldn't get away from the feeling that it's a place built on a black, black foundation.  Lee and I joked about it–the Scandinavian depression is everywhere.  He feels a lot more comfortable with it than I do.

I think it's harder to see once you're around it for a while.  Just before we'd come into town, apparently a room had started on fire at the meat-packing plant, Morrell's.  They'd evacuated the room but made everyone else keep working.  We went to Falls Park (lovely) and drove back by the animal chutes, where the pigs were screaming.   Turning Sioux Falls into a place where you go, "I want to be there" instead of "I have family there" or "It's where I ended up" will take more doing than just the Washington Pavilion and cleaning up Falls Park.  Not a horrible place.  But a very dark one.

Lee got a cold on the way back, and his attention span was bad enough that I was about ready to pitch a fit to try to get him to let me drive.  He hates having me drive the Jeep, partly because I do all the driving when he's not with me, back and forth to Grandma camp and whatnot, but also because I bitch and moan about what a pain in the ass driving the Jeep is.  I can't blame him.  Most of the time I just leave it alone, but having the Jeep sway back and forth in the lane was too creepy.  I said something about it, and he got off at the next rest stop to let me drive.  I like driving.  The Jeep was a pain in the ass.  I zoned out and made little vroom vroom noises in the back of my head, and bitched about Denver traffic and jerks who floor it to cut me off whenever I turn the blinker on:  it's you @#$%^ that make people not use their blinkers.

And then we were home.  I had a ton more things that I could talk about, but I have to keep moving to try to get caught up again, which is ironic–one oof the things I came away with on this trip was that I've been working too hard, and I need to spend more time with people and less time with working my ass off.  Still, I'm the kind of person who has to unpack everything the minute I get home, no help needed.  I need to straighten my brain out, and getting caught up is part of that.  The house didn't burn down, the animals were okay, school starts Monday, and I need to buy groceries because being away for almost a week has done nothing good to the milk.

Devil Mountain (New Story)

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Look for justice somewhere between love and revenge for free this weekend with Smashwords coupon FX95H.

Devil Mountain

by DeAnna Knippling

An Eye for an Eye.  A Seed for a Seed.

The alien called him her beloved devil for tempting her away from her brood and tried to make him promise not to take revenge if the other humans turned on him. Now he's on top of Devil Mountain, looking down at the town that murdered his wife, and he has no promises to keep.

Hank dragged me out of the mining sled on my back. I bunched myself up in a ball and got ready to kick, either him or the door of the sled as I went past, just to try to throw off his balance, but he didn't put the ramp down, and the rock knocked the wind out of me. I was lucky I didn't crack my spine.

By the time I could really get a breath again, he was back, holding the processers—five of them—in his hand. "You watching, Farrod?" he asked.

I gritted my teeth around the gag, which was about all I could do.

For a fat guy, he's quick. Three strides forward, and he threw the processors off the side, into the rocks like a javelin thrower, his whole body like a whip. All I needed was to find one of them to fix the sled to get back down the mountain, but it would take some doing.

He pulled his rifle out of the holster on his back. Didn't aim it at me. "You going to be all right if I cut those ties?"

I gritted at him again.

"I better cut your gag anyway," he said. "Don't want you to choke on your own bile." He put the rifle down, far out of reach, and loosened the snap of his sheath. He took a step toward me and waited. Another step, to where I might be able to roll quick and try to thrash out at his legs.

Oh, it was tempting. I knew, deep down in my heart, that he'd done it. He was the rotten son of a bitch who had killed my wife. Nevermind that he'd been with me the whole time. He was with them. He was the one who had kept me in the mines an extra week, extracting iron ore for the damned spacers that came through for parts.

Another step, and my eye started to twitch. He walked back to the gun, sheathing his knife. Damn it. He knew me too well.

"I guess you'll just have to be okay," he said. "Try not to vomit, Farrod. I'll keep an eye on you, but we're done until morning. And try not to piss yourself."

 

Short story submission tips…

I've been sifting through submissions pretty quickly lately, trying to figure out why I can have such an immediate reaction to a story.

Here are the things I had sorted out before:

1) Starting with backstory.

2) Highly dramatic first sentence followed by something boring, like backstory.

3) General cheesiness, spelling errors, writing in stereotypes…

But those are all don't-do things.

Here's what I'm noticing now:

1) Lots of surprising details.  If you say, "We're in a winter forest" and follow up with lots of details proving that it's a winter forest, meh.  But if you follow up with a) a perceptive detail about winter forests that I would not have known unless I was in one, like the sound of rain that comes when heavy frost melts at sunrise or b) something out of place, then I'm interested. And fake details like "The grocery store was big" are a red flag for boooooring.

2) Voice.  If I get the sense that the story has a strong personality, that's good.  But it must be a surprising personality.  Scientists that are hopeful about some bright future–meh.  Scientists that are maaaaaad–meh.  But mad scientists who act out of hope, well.  I don't see that too often.  (Although I do feel like printing the story out so I can fling it across the room when I read a story with interesting voice and all they do is kill themselves.)

Make things real, moody, and surprising–from the first sentence.  Then, don't go back to vague and predictable. I'll at least make it through the story to the end.  Not many people do this AT ALL.  Maybe one in twenty, one in fifty.

AFK

I had something cool come up…have to scamper off for most of the next few days to accomplish it.  Back soon.

Finding Yourself Somewhere Else

Word tracker installed.  Normally, I take Saturdays off and write my short story of the week on Sundays.  This Sunday…I'm on to something, but I don't have a clue what the end is.  I dreamed about it all last night and didn't come to any real conclusions.  So 3100-ish words done yesterday.

—

Terry Pratchett has some pretty great quips on the reasons that people try to find themselves somewhere else.  In The Thief of Time, he talks a lot about the History Monks.  One of the wisest of the monks is a humble sweeper named Lu-Tze who follows not the Way of the History Monks, but the Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite of Ankh-Morpork, the fictional equivalent of London (or "Big-Ass Cities in General," really).

She says things like, "It never rains but it pours," and "Because," and "Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you."  (Yes, otters.)

I've had that in the back of my head since I read it.  Even the wisest of all monks from a tradition holding a lot of wisdom (they can change time, after all) went somewhere else to find himself.  Why is that?

Okay.  I have a theory.  You can't judge something while you're a part of it.

I first noticed this when I moved to Iowa.  I could, after six months or so, start to conceive of stories set in South Dakota, which I had just left.  I didn't write any.  But I started to be able to think about them.

And then after I moved to Colorado, I could, again after a waiting period, start to conceive of stories set in Iowa.

I suppose I could force myself to write a Colorado-based story, but it would have to be about some period of my stays here that I've finished.  Before I had a kid.  Living in one of the rental places.  Working at a previous job.  But writing about what it means to me to live in Colorado, what Colorado, as a place aside from all other possible places, is like–I'm not ready for it yet.

So if it's hard to really get a grasp of where you are until you leave (how can you explain to an outsider what it's like…until you've been outside?), logically, it should be really hard to judge yourself when you're part of the landscape.

What parts of you are you, individually, and what parts of you are the way you were raised or your reaction to people you've known your whole life?  Hard to tell, when you're still in the same place.

I think this is something that's so deeply buried in the human psyche that it provides a template for all our stories:  someone who is not wise must go on a journey in order to accomplish a goal, gaining wisdom in the process.  Human beings, on the whole, are programmed on some deep level to leave home and set out on their own.  It's probably a good thing, species-wise, allowing for exposure to a) new ideas and b) new genetic material.

When I wrote this last story, "Monsoon," I started out thinking of it as a brief diary about a woman who's in India (based on Julie Andrijeski's amazing blogs from there) trying to find herself.  Then, to amuse myself and give the character some way to support herself, I made her a translator of pulp fiction for a second-rate Tibetan publisher, because she could be doing it on the road, and it would let me set up some funny lines.  Cheap reasons.  Then she said something that caught my attention:  she had used to be a writer, but abandoned it due to some of the stupid crap she ran into, at grad school.

Now, I've never been to grad school.  After I graduated from college with an English degree and moved to Iowa City, however, one of the things that crossed my mind was attending the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  In the end, I moved before I got really serious about it, and by then I was sick of reading the kind of stuff that the writers there were producing.

If you weren't writing serious fiction about foreign people, nevermind.  I think Jane Smiley was the big exception, with A Thousand Acres, but that had come out while I was still in college, and I was sick of that kind of thing, too, after four years of reading literature.  They bragged about having Kurt Vonnegut as an instructor but looked at you funny if you wrote SF or genre fiction in general.  Joe Haldeman was probably the big exception as a graduate.

Just being around that took me a long time to get over.  I wasn't writing what the most famous writer's program in the country was saying was good writing.  –It was important because I was talking to other writers and instructors there, listening to their opinions.

It wasn't until I left for Colorado (and started hanging around with gaming folk who happened to be writers, rather than Serious Writers), that I started to get back into writing.  Sure, I'd been going through the motions, but I don't have memories of a single thing that I wrote in Iowa City.  Stuff that I wrote in college.  Stuff that I wrote afterwards.  But Iowa City?  Maybe some poems, but I suspect those were before I left college in South Dakota.

I had no way to judge them, even to say, "It's not for me, eh?"

…And that ended up in "Monsoon," too.  There are all kinds of things you need to be able to find, and going somewhere else is a good way to do it.

 

 

New WIP of DESTINY!

Writing on my new #WIP starts today.

With taking on more freelance projects, I've been doing a LOT less writing.  Funny…I have the time, all I need to do is cut back on dithering with emails, social networking, etc.  Same old, same old.  I'm going to install some wordcount tracking software on here next week to increase the embarrassment/accountability factor (funny, how being held accountable is a lot like being embarrassed), but for today to prevent too much further dithering, here's the plan:

2K on days when I'm working freelancing projects or when Tony/Brittney are here.

6K on days when I'm just doing my own writing.

Project:

I've been working on a kids' series for Ray that started when she was eight and didn't like to read anything that wasn't a) picture books or b) grown-up picture books (comics).  She reads a lot more now, but at eight, she was bored silly with Junie B. Jones, Ramona, etc., and didn't give a rat's ass about books for kids who were older than her.  I could get a few Magic Treehouses down her, but that was about it.  She read mostly nonfiction about animals.

So.  I asked her what kind of story she wanted, and she said "an adventure story with spies and magic."  I started telling it to her verbally, but I couldn't keep track of it all in my head, so it got turned into a book…that she read in two sittings, hogging my computer.

As she gets older, I write more books.  Each book is about a kid who shares the same name, is the same age, and has the same problems, the same concerns.

So.  This is book 4 of 5, will be about 50K, and needs to have the next book right after that.  So I'll probably be writing 100K of the rest of the series, right in a row.

Book 1 has been on submission for over a year and has received nothing but rejections:  middle grade (10-14)  sells.  Chapter books (for kids 6-9) don't.  It's not a perfect story, but it apparently hit the spot and has continued to do so, so there might just be a market for it.  Book 1 is the next book I'm putting out, after I get the POD of Chance Damnation all wrapped up.  I'm going to put up the whole series in a row, because they're kind of like Harry Potter in that each story can stand alone, there's an overarching plot.  I, myself, have been known to wait until all the books in that kind of series to come out before I let myself get invested in them, because it's annoying.

Word count for the day: 6070.

Free ebook this weekend: Monsoon

Now at Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, and OmniLit.

Rain on someone else's parade by getting your copy free this weekend using code PR29Rat Smashwords.

Monsoon

by DeAnna Knippling

Imperfections only exist after you finish a project; until then, they're opportunities.  After Randi finishes her latest project, she runs like hell and winds up at a ten-day Buddhist retreat in India.  Instead of providing her with a distraction, it exposes her to the terrors of her unplanned, wasted life:  middle-aged, loveless, and translating pulp fiction into Tibetan at bargain-basement rates.

Monsoon season is over.

One day, you're hoping that the ledge in front of your door that's meant to keep out ghosts is also high enough to keep the rain on the steps from blowing under your door; the next, you're thinking, I think I saw a monkey on top of the next roof down the mountain; the day after that, you're thinking, I have to get out of this place.

The water…the earth gives birth to water, screaming and thrashing and threatening her husband. The instinct to hole up in a safe place until it's over, but of course you can't. The storm lasts for months, and the lack of refrigerator in my apartment is a kind of hell. Real Indians act like it's nothing big. I drink a lot of coffee and eat a lot of dal. Sometimes I scuttle from overhang to overhang, watching the tiny cars slewing through the streets. Water running down the street shoves them into the opposite lane, but they don't slow down. The drivers who slow down too much have their engines stall and have to have their cars dragged out of the way by small groups of men cheered on by the old women from the laundry at the bottom of the hill. Two days ago I jumped over the runoff on the way to the market but was almost knocked off my feet on the way back, because the rain was coming down even harder than before, if that's possible.

I pushed through the first draft of translating the trilogy on the advice of my neighbor downstairs, who is from Nepal but has been living here for nine years and promised me the monsoon would be over soon. I sent the "final" version off. Cult Sci-Fi surrealist novel in three parts, now safely ensconced in the Tibetan tongue. It was complete and utter crap. Aliens come to earth to worship (and destroy) HHDL based on a mistranslation of a radio transmission made in 1959 by Allen Ginsberg. Commando monks. The Deadly Lotus. Murder by sutra. Apparently HHDL thought the little bits that the author read to him via translator were funny. I hope he likes it, but I think if he does that it'll kill my respect for him a little.

I hate finishing things. Until you sign off on something, a project never has flaws, only development opportunities. So, as usual after "finishing" a big project, I panicked and ran.

If you enjoy reading about a) India, b) spiritual seeking, or c) funny things that happen with monkeys, check out Fighting the Good Fight (by JC Andrijeski).  She recently went on a, ahem, very similar trip…this is the imaginary diary of another one of the women at the retreat.  I'm not really intending to portray anyone, just fascinated by her experiences.

 

Indypub: Burnout

I would like to talk about a topic very near and dear to my heart today:  burnout.

There are days that I crave the blessed mindlessness of a dayjob.  Show up, be a robot, go home.  Evenings and weekends that I spend without panicking that I've wasted five minutes doing…nothing.

To be able to say, "Oh, I don't feel like writing today" and not be a nervous wreck for the rest of the night.

To not feel like I have 1001 publishing tasks to take care of.

To be ignorant of the constant second-guessing that is marketing.  What if something I'm doing or not doing is costing me sales?  Should I be patient…or should I panic?

To be able to hang onto my work until I "know" that it's perfect instead of having committed to putting up something every week.

To be able to give up after an umpteenth rejection because I feel like I'll never get published again and I'm not getting any better.

To be able to take a vacation where I don't spend an hour a day doing work.

To be able to spend days and days and days reading other people's stuff.  Without having to ration my reading time in order keep my life balanced.

To be able to look at something and go, "I want it; I think I'll buy it," without weighing it against independence.

None of these things are good for me.  They don't make me happy.  They don't make me feel like I'm doing anything challenging with my life.  They don't make me fit.

Nevertheless, my head swims with can't can't can't anymore.

How do you resolve something like that?  How do you energize yourself, when every second you spend energizing yourself makes you feel more anxious and less able to go on?  Do you push through?  Do you concentrate on making everything magically all better…using nothing more than the power of your mind?

I don't know.  I do know that some people are genuinely burnt out and need to find something else to do, and some people just have a weird feedback loop going on in their heads and everything really is just fine.  Too many things to do, can't do them all, no point in doing any of them, even more things to do…

Either way, I suspect the first thing to do is make sure you aren't being dominated by those feedback loops.  Make sure your body is rested, fed and watered, and exercised.  Make sure your physical surroundings are cleaned up (my brains get scrambled if everything looks messy).  Resolve any outstanding emotional problems that have nothing to do with writing and publishing.  Read a book, indulge in a few luxuries.  And then look at the situation.  When you first start, it will feel like you're wasting time, but if you're going to force yourself to do something, this is what you should be forcing yourself to do:  give yourself the resources to think and feel clearly.

I've been through this cycle maybe ten times, to a greater or lesser extent, since I started freelancing.  Often the reason that I go into this cycle is that I'm trying to tell myself something that I don't want to hear or have identified a problem for which I have no solution.  For instance, I recently went through a period where I learned how to stop obsessively outlining every damn thing I wrote…by not being able to come up with story ideas until it was deadline time and I had to write something.  I felt like a total loser until I figured out what was going on

Emotions are there to tell me things that logic cannot comprehend.  Logic, unsurprisingly, has a hard time understanding and doesn't handle it well.  Is it burnout or is it your heart's way of saying, "you're just not listening"?

Probably the latter, most of the time.