Meanwhile…

Erin has a new story up over at Every Day Fiction. It went up on the 4th, and is about the failings of democracy! Check it out.

And in honor of yesterday, happy birthday you poor, deluded, doomed nation.

I almost forgot, but the writing group is doing our annual Story Every Day contest this month. For the next couple of weeks we’ll be churning out a short story every single day. It is crazy!

Thanks to some forgetfulness and a minor communications snafu, we’re actually starting today instead of yesterday like we’d originally intended. But no biggie. So I’ll be trying to post excerpts of my attempts each day.

This is a little of what I wrote last night at the write-in to kick things off. I thought this might serve as a good companion piece to a story I’ll have appearing in A Thousand Faces later this year.

Continue reading

I’m delighted to present “Aftershocks: The Musical” over at Everyday Fiction. I kid, I kid. It is, however, an audio reading of the story, read by M. Sherlock of the UK’s own Storm the Gates.

Sherlock enjoyed chewing me out a little for writing a story with such difficult names, and deservedly so. I can check “get called a git by a real Briton” off my bucket list. Next: Piss off Alan Moore with a film adaptation of Captain Britain.

Anyway, you should go give it a listen, even if maybe you read the story back in the day. Audio podcast markets are something I’d like to penetrate more, when I get around to it. I never seem to have something that’s the right length.

Woke up to a fresh new rejection today, this one to “The Organization,” a flash piece I wrote a while back. It’s a sort of romantic comedy/GIJoe-super-espionage parody piece. I like it, but I can see why they rejected it. If you’re not familiar with the sort of genre the piece is having fun with, it would seem like a lot is being left out. I suppose I could expand the story, really flesh out the universe and everything, but it seems like the people who would have fun reading this story might find that unnecessary and even tedious. Like sitting down to Get Smart but having to sit through twenty minutes of someone explaining to you what a spy is.

That’s part of the danger of writing genre I suppose, especially these days. We often rely heavily on what’s been written before, and simply stand on previous writers’ shoulders.

You can see that flaw really well in Cameron’s Avatar. All the characters and even the technology are derived from archetypes that are used all the time in science fiction. One glance at Sigourney Weaver’s character will tell you she’s the Compassionate But Stubborn Scientist that we’ve seen so many times before. Five seconds after he appears on screen, we understand that Giovanni Ribisi is the Greedy Corporate Guy. Then meet Hardass Military Dude. He’s got scars. Trust me when I say they do deep!

Similarly, most of the technology in the film we’ve seen in dozens of video games and even Cameron’s old movies. Those dropships and armored exoskeletons all look awfully familiar!

It’s all shorthand. The writer doesn’t have to spend much any time developing these personalities because we immediately know who they are, how they’re going to act, what their motivations are, etc. It’s just unfortunate when the writer doesn’t bother to take them further than the attributes and stats on the pre-generated character sheet (which Cameron, unfortunately, doesn’t do).

It is handy for some situations, though. In flash, for example, you don’t necessarily have space to do more with a character. So you can reassure the reader that this is Standard Security Guard Sleeping At His Post or Pseudo-Lesbian Who Doesn’t Shave And Wants To Save The Whales and move on. Nothing particularly lost. In parody and satire, you’re relying on those sorts of archetypes, even if it’s your job to show how they’re silly or shatter them. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was based purely on reversing the Blond Running From a Monster Does Something Stupid and Dies archetype.

Either way, if the audience doesn’t know the archetype, the effect is lost. So do I try to shop the story elsewhere, where the editors and audience will immediately recognize the genre parody, or do I try to expand the story and try to net a larger audience? Hurm.

(You can do it in comedy, too – one of my favorite running gags in Monty Python’s Flying Circus was that any time someone started to tell a “If I could walk that way…” joke they would be interrupted. We all know how that would have ended, so there’s no need to finish it – you can basically get two jokes with one stroke by interrupting them.)

My rock ‘n roll story IN SPAAAAACE! story is up over at Every Day Fiction. Check it out. Let me know what you think.

And now I’m off to work for another 11-hour day. Guh.

Update – I immensely enjoy that Jim Hartley left a curmudgeonly “get off my lawn, damn kids!”-style comment. It fits the story perfectly.

I have a new flash piece up over at Big Pulp. It’s fun! Check it out here!

In case you are interested, there really was a train called the Ak-Sar-Ben Zephyr, it was the overnight return trip from Nebraska to Chicago. They just reversed Nebraska. I suppose they should have also reversed Zephyr, just for consistency, but wants to try and explain how to pronounce Ryhpez? This, of course, was all back in the first half of the 20th century, when trains still had personality.

At any rate, let me know what you think! These are characters I wouldn’t mind returning to. I love the scientist-adventurer archetype.

New story up! “Stragglers,” a dramatic piece of crime fiction, is up over at the excellent 10Flash. I’m pretty happy with this piece. Check it out and let me (and superstar editor KC Ball) know what you think by leaving a comment over there (and here, too, of course, if you want).

Make sure you check out the other stories as well. There are some great authors featured there.

Speaking of KC, she’s got an awesome piece of crime fiction of her own up today over at Every Day Fiction.

In case you haven’t noticed it already, there’s a flash fiction contest going on over at the Flash Fiction Chronicles. If you have an urge to write a few 250-word stories, based on prompts, head on over and check out the guidelines. Prizes include publication and copies of EDF’s Best of 2008 Anthology. Best hurry, it’s only running until Sunday.

I’ll see what I can get written up!

Things have been crazy busy this past week or so. We finally decided to get rid of our pool, which has been nothing but a drag on our time and money for the past year. So the last couple hours of each day have been spent slaving away at dismantling the damned thing (work and the unbearable heat pretty much make it impossible to anything during the day). Work has been busy. This past Saturday was spent at the Can’t Stop the Serenity charity event, which was fantastic, as usual. I spent Sunday wading through half a foot of sludge to cut the liner out of the pool. I’m be glad when it’s all finally gone, at least.

Most annoying, I missed out on seeing Moon this past weekend. Since Fort Worth is a cinematic wasteland, I’ll have to either drive to Dallas to see it or wait for the DVD.

At any rate, I’ve been kind plucking away at this zombie flash piece, but I’m not very happy with it. It needs to be more immediate and immerse the reader in what’s going on. It feels too much like a big info dump in these first few paragraphs, which in my opinion doesn’t work well for flash.

It’s going to be a very depressing story. My stuff is usually pretty light and fluffy. I almost feel bad for how dark this story will be. This is what happens when you write about zombies and it’s not a comedy, I suppose.

So here’s the first few paragraphs. I’ll be keeping some of this, but likely reworking it heavily to make it feel more like the reader is there in the house with them, rather than reading some account of it later.

Continue reading

I just noticed that my steampunkish story “Four Liars” is live over at the premier issue of 10Flash. Check it out and let me know what you think, over there or here.

There are some other awesome writers featured there as well, including Jordan, Gay, and Erin, so you should find something you like. I need to check them all out myself.