The War with Canada

My short story, THE WAR WITH CANADA, which placed in the 2012 Bridport Prize anthology UK, is now up on Audible as well as Amazon Kindle.

If you want a free code to download and listen to the amazing Virginia Pettis read this award-winning short story, all you gotta do is ask. Send me a comment on here with your e-addy and I'll fire one off to you.

More online publishing

Two of my short stories have been published in two different online lit sites.

They're very different sites. One is very hipster-ish and the editor is very Los Angeles.

The other is survivalist-meets-vegan-sci-fi-fan and is rather Portland-ish.

Grays Harbor at Subtopian.com.

Love You Long Time at the Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles.

I take no responsibility for layout, readability or art work though, these two are actually quite tasteful.

Thank you Trevor and Robin.

Lie to Me (Please)

A novelist’s business is lying. – Ursula Le Guin, Preface to The Left Hand of Darkness

What’s the biggest mistake fledgling writers make? They’re afraid to lie. I’ve done this, everybody has. It’s an elephant-sized faux pas in fiction writing.

A great deal of writing is born out of journaling, which is an erudite way of saying keeping a diary. Writing tends to have its roots in psychological therapy and so short stories often spring from journaling. This is fine if only the roots of a story are planted in the dark, murky compost of our actual lives.

But really good fiction is just that: somebody made it up. Only from fiction can we find emotional truth. Shakespeare was never an actual prince in Denmark or any where else, but from Hamlet comes a lot of profound emotional truths about human existence including: grief, guilt and anger. Pretty much everybody with a pulse has experienced these feelings at one time or another. It’s easy to empathize with Hamlet, even if he is a prince, Danish and never really existed.

If you don’t believe me, consider these examples.

Was Annie Proulx ever a gay cowboy living in Wyoming in the 1960s? No, she’s a straight woman who was born in and spent most of her life in New England –- Stephen King’s neck of the woods -- not Ennis’ empty rural waste. But she did an award-winning job convincing us she was a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

Never a gay cowboy.
Was there ever a land called Narnia with a giant, Christ-like lion who talked to little English kids? No but Carroll Lewis makes us believe this in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Did an evil spirit cause the death of a family in Amityville, New York? No, but writer Jay Anson did a bang-up job convincing a lot of people that one did in The Amityville Horror. Anson performed the oldest trick in the book: he based a series of lies on a truth. A guy really did kill some family members and, like countless other convicted murderers before him, he alleged for years that the devil made him do it.

Did you go through a tumultuous marriage in your youth? Maybe got married at age 20 and then divorced at 22. Did you and your spouse literally pull each other’s hair out in fights and war over custody rights for years? Do you really want to even hint that you’re writing a story now about that event and risk getting sued? Think up a character, someone NOT like you. Change their hair color, age, height, etc. Now change the setting. If you live in Vermont (like Ms. Proulx) set the divorce story in Wyoming. If you live in Florida, set your story in Nepal.

It’s okay to lie, fellow writers, really it’s just fine. It might even inhibit an angry relative from filing suit. You will never find emotional truth until you learn how to lie about the details that bring your reader to that truth.

Craving Rejection

I lobbed another one at the Bridport Prize yesterday. I cut Those Little Deaths (one of the stories in my anthology, Trailer Trash Confessional) down from about 6,000 words to 4,700 so I could meet the guidelines.


I WISH this was my writer's study

It's amazing how many extraneous words you can squeeze out of a short story. Though, in the case of Those Little Deaths it was more about culling entire descriptive sentences. I'm sure there are still LOTS of words to cut. (I kept a lot of the back story too, not sure how T. will feel about that.) And there are characters that are introduced once, briefly described/summarized and then bow off after one or two paragraphs.

I'm running into the same problem with minor characters in my latest (and still very rough) short story, Brave Sucker. I've got a lot of characters that make an entrance, are briefly sketched out by the narrative voice and then leave the stage. I'm not Charles Dickens, I don't know how to make every damn character important and thread them back into the story later on to underscore the climatic moral duel between the protagonist and the antagonist.

I also got my rejection from Missouri Review which has something like a 99.8% rejection rate according Duotrope.com. It was a form rejection and those tend to be real unhelpful as you don't even get the vaguest critique.

I do not understand why Duotrope is allergic to blind-submission contests that require an entry/reading fee. P. told me blind submissions were THE way to go and, judging from all the famous authors F&SF rejected, I think he's totally right.

Joined the Pity Party

My rejection is vaguely famous.

I guess I have some idea what the dolts on American Idol feel like when Simon tells them they're too ugly to sing.

Dick Lit

I've been in a sci-fi writer's group for over a year and garnered some awesome friends who are eagle-eyed readers, thoughtful critics and open-minded ... normal folk.

Awhile back, I had to temporarily run the writer's group by myself. It was fun at first but after a couple of less-than-great meetings, I started to feel psychically drained.

There's something about the genre of science fiction, aka speculative fiction, which seems to bring a specific type of crazy out enforce. They're almost always white and male and anywhere from Baby Boomer old to Millennial twentysomething.



At the meetings, a predictable scene plays out. A guy (usually wearing mis-matched fleece and khakis) shows up with a slightly creepy smile on his face clutching some tome he has self-published. He'll eagerly tell everyone he spent $5,000 getting it published (an amount equal to a nice used car).

I've yet to see one of these self-published novels that looked good enough that I'd actually pick it up in a bookstore. Usually the cover is glossy, the paperback is over sized and there's some lurid color scheme surrounding a title that over uses all the words they tell you to never use like: space, death, god, stars, love or alien.

Mr. Self Published has brought it to show everybody he's serious about this writing thing, it's not just a hobby! Depending upon his level of crazy, the guy will either tell us the basic plot ("it's about a guy who travels thru time with the help of aliens to rescue the space program from mind-reading CIA agents disguised as runway models"). Or if he's really nuts, he'll smile coyly and tell you it can't be summed up, you must read the entire 750-page doorstop.

During the meetings, we bounce around the room doing an impromptu meet-n-greet where everybody will give their first name, mention what they're reading and what they're working on. Usually Mr. Self Published will interrupt with snarky remarks so the whole process takes twice as long as normal.

About 30 minutes in, maybe while we're talking about "World War Z", Harry Harrison or the next comicon, Mr. Self Published will pick a fight. He'll snicker loudly at the meek college girl who says she loves Terry Brooks and is writing her own fantasy story. Or someone will say something about Ursula LeGuin and he'll pipe in with "Oh, the feminazi ... I mean feminist writer".

Or if he's like the winner I dealt with, he'll take the discussion of post-apocalyptic sci-fi (something both Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy have dabbled in) to interject his theory on human extinction and why using nuclear weapons in the Middle East is a cool idea! The fur will start to fly and then Mr. Self Published will gloat, safe in his delusion of superiority, 'cos ya know, he already wrote a book predicting all this.

These freaks like to attack women authors, even roaring successes like Joanne Rowling.

I have yet to meet one of these trolls who did not use the slur chick lit; which is applied to any novel, play, script or short story ever published by a writer with a vagina. Don't expect Mr. Self Published to actually have read anything by a female author. He's way too busy and women authors just don't interest him! (This includes everyone from Joan Didion to Virginia Woolf). Mr. Self Published and his ilk are the reason why women's literature programs were invented.

I've coined a new phrase for this group of socially stunted bigots. (DISCLAIMER: as usual this applies only to some men, not all 4 billion of you.)

Dick Lit.

I define it as sci-fi or speculative fiction that has several specific elements.

Dick lit must adhere to the uber-geek norms for science fiction already set down by their favorite homophobic, misogynistic authors. It must have a machine, it must involve the hard sciences and it must involve space in some way like the launching of a futuristic space ship (think: erection).

Dick lit must have an average-looking male protagonist who is deeply misunderstood by everyone around him. A hero who everyone has failed to recognize as a genius (every cardboard character Michael Crichton ever invented).

Dick lit must have a female character (nothing but dudes would be gay), possibly extra terrestrial or part cat, who is overtly feminine and exotically beautiful in a sort of dominatrix way but who, weirdly, recognizes the genius in the story's hero and either strives to help him in an appropriately subservient fashion or, works against him since all girls are duplicitous.

At some point in the story, the female character, despite her extraterrestrial-ness or over-powering wiles, will get stuck, lost, arrested, kidnapped, gagged, brain sucked, encased in dry ice or put into a chemically-induced coma. Then, surprise, the misunderstood genius hero will come to her rescue. This will happen because from birth, we are all read stories and taught that women are people whom things happen to and men are people who do things.

Dick lit has to have action because stories where people just sit around and talk are lame, like most books women authors write. Those are just people sitting around and talking, right?

Dick lit can have sex scenes as long as they’re non-sentimental and brief, because damn it, the hero has work to do! He can’t be bangin’ intergalactic babes all day like Capt. Kirk. And there should be some weird distancing aspect to these sex scenes like sex with zombies or sex with She-Rah the raging lesbian from planet nine so if the hero has to break things off with her, it’s okay because he’s not emotionally attached, it was just random humping like on that video game, Grand Theft Auto.

Finally, the hero has either some sort of special power or a special machine for kicking ass (think: getting back at anyone who picked on the author in school).

I strongly urge every female reader and author out there to start using this cool new pop culture term at any given opportunity. Like if your boyfriend starts rambling about Peter Parker’s special powers in Spiderman, interrupt him by saying “Oh, you mean like dick lit!” Or if he begins to rant about how they got the warp drive configuration in the new Star Trek flick wrong, say: “Dude, that’s such a dick lit thing to say!”

Muscadine

I started reading this old historical fiction novel the other night that I've been hauling around for years. I became a fan of the author in my twenties and have read most of his stuff, though my memories of specific plot details are real hazy.

Anyhoo, I was just gonna flip through this 1988 paperback and then toss it on the Get Rid Of pile but, damnit, the author keeps surprising me. He does things with adjectives I don't know how to do. I'm envious.

I came across one phrase the other night that blew me away:
... they fled into the muscadine shadows.

And another: ... the darkness emerald with waking dreams.

There's more: ... the yard swirled with children and ... he took it for its earthing power.

I'm having trouble deciding whether you can commandeer nouns like 'emerald' and force them into adjective work. Is it grammatically correct?

I don't care. I think I'll keep (re-)reading.