The Land Of Wind And Ghosts

1. Begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side.

2. With a 5-lb potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can.

3. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax.

4. Each day you'll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.

5. After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-lb potato sacks.

6. Then try 50-lb potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100-lb potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute.

7. After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each of the sacks. 

...but I've done some more unwriting.   Two more stories cut down to 1000 words, one from 1100, one from 1350.   So I have a set of things to hit flash markets with; that will do, for now (actually, I think there's one more that might stand the cutting).   Oh, and in trimming one of these which is "story-within-a-story" structure (yes, in 1000 words) I think I came up with a fix for the long-outstanding slightly-broken "Carpet of Dreams".

I feel weary from the multiple passes through, though.   Probably took longer than actually writing the original stories.   Unwriting is hard. 


Real life continues to be unconducive to finishing off the various oddments lying around.   But hopefully soon.

 Had very little time/energy to do stuff with words this weekend, but I did indulge in the exercise of going through "Atacama" to see if could prune it to 1000 words (thus allowing it to hit a few markets it was previously too long for).

As you doubtless know, reducing wordcount is not my forte (most of my rewrites end up as expansions, sometimes significantly so).   I wasn't sure I could get 1300 words down to 1000 (that's, what, a 23% cut - almost a quarter) without taking something significant out of the story, but after about five passes through, I managed to do it without losing any scenes.   Some repetition, and some overly wordy sentences, were the first things to go.   Each cut I was only getting 5-odd words clearde out, but I think I ended up with something that has just as much meaning to it (or very close), but is a little bit tighter.

Tiring work, though, and I'd hate to do it for longer pieces - my approach to longer works that need cutting is more to redesign the structure and then rewrite.

Anyway, I did that, and also polished £If We Were Briar Roses" (interestingly, nkocknig about 10% out of that, where I had expected to add words as well), so I have those to get out of the door soon.   One reject in today (Strange Horizons).   

Nothing else to report.

 "The Gray World", my first Yi Qin flash story, has been accepted by EDF.   This is nice, as it was specifically written for that market, as a challenge to see if I could get a Yi Qin story in so few words.

No word on when it'll be up.   But it'll happen.   bondo_ba, I trust this meets with your approval? :) 

 Since there are more new people reading my lj, this one which has come around again seems entirely suitable (in this iteration, it came via pxcampbelland rflong)

Comment and I'll...
1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a colour, a photo, etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you must post this in your LJ.

 1st May - email from Cat saying she's holding "In This City" for Sean to look at.
2nd May - email from Cat saying they want to publish the story sometime this fall.

Life is good.   I was hopeful, but then I read on Cat's blog that she had held fourteen stories from April and expected to take two or three of those.   

So I am even more delighted with this sale.

w00t!   Fourth sale of the year.   Keeps me on target...

Remember my post of Monday? ("Oi, Editors!   Buy more of my stories!")

email this morning from Cat Rambo at Fantasy Magazine; hold notice on "In This City" as she wants Sean to take a look at it.


Fingers crossed in a very crossy way with much crossyness for this one.   One, I like the story (contains some of my most beautiful... language... evarr...), and two, it's a very very good market to be in.

I seem to be blocked on not one, but two Yi Qin stories, and in both cases my problem is this: who is the bad guy, and what is their plan?

Adventure fiction needs bad guys for your protagonist to find and foil.   I've already got quiet a variety for Yi Qin.   There are demons who eat people and make wagers about it (two stories featuring them, both of which have sold).   There are fox-spirits, who seek only their own amusment, often involving unfortunate human males (two stories there, too, one of which has sold).   There are ghosts, who are rarely the real antagonists - behind them are humans, covering up their own crimes of either practicailty or passion (again, two stories, one of which has sold).   There's an old god trying to regain his status (at terrible cost -hmm, two stories on that subject, as well).   There's a sorceror-ghost trapped by his own desire for vengeance.  

I guess it's getting harder to find villains who will work ni stand-alone stories.   I fear I'm getting to the point where recurring villains want to get in on the act; old enemies who were foiled and are back again.   Personal vendettas.   But those onlywork on nivels, where you can build the context.

I fear I may be getting to the end of being able to write stand-alone Yi Qin stories.

Still, if that means I have to concentrate on novel-length Yi Qin works, maybe that's not such a bad thing...

Buy more of my stories!





That's all.   Carry on.

Yesterday, I very briefly checked out Shadow Unit, which is hard to describe (it's a "Criminal Minds" fanfic inspired on-line collaborative TV-show-without-the-TV hypertextual metafiction, put together by the ilkes of Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, Elizabeth Bear, Will Shetterley and others).

It's not entirely my thing, though it's interesting to see that some of the supporting elements are things I've considered doing (i.e. many of the characters have lj blogs - one thing I've toyed with is writing hypertext neo-Lovecraftian horror using ljs to build up the "is it real?" doubt, Blair Witch style).

But my dreams last night were absolutely and completely obsessed with it, in various twisted and surreal permutations (at one point it actually was a TV show, with Jane Horrocks in it; at another point Dame Judi Dench was auditioning for it and voice modulators made her sound like Terence Stamp).

I suspect mind control lasers.

But anyway, if you're interested in looking at where the web can take creativity, it's worth checking out.

Head on over to ipstp to check out all the fun of people providing interesting content hither and yon across the fat tubes that are the intarwebz.

Sadly, I had completely forgotten to prepare anything this year.   Bad me.   But I am still planning to do a serial story on this blog in the not-too-distant future.   So, uh, yeah.   That.

Anyway, there'll be good stuff (though, I suspect, a lot less than last year, which was impressively huge). 

 

An unexpected treat arrived yesterday in the post: contributor's copies (2 - I can read in stereo!) of Fictitious Force #5.   I share the TOC with a few names I know - Aliette de Bodard(aliettedb ) and Kurt Kirchmeier (isaiah13 ) from Liberty Hall, Daniel Ausema from sfreader, and others whose names I have come across (Sarah Monette, who is apparently truepenny  here on lj - her story is short, brutal and powerful, certainly on first read the most powerful story in the issue), and others whose names I hadn't (Mari Ness, aka mariness ).

Less joyful news; issue #2 of Staffs and Starships (in which I am also featured, with "Where No Wind Blows" - a Yi Qin/Yi Zhang story) will be the last for the foreseeable future.   Another magazine that took up more time than its editor expected it to , and that hasn't been able to find the circulation it needed.   Sad.

 

 

 

I signed on to LH Sunday morning and checked the trigger.

I started writing for the 90-minute flash challenge.

80 minutes and 2500 words later, I submitted the first part of a story.

By the end of the day I'd done 4700 words and my guess is that I'll need at least 6000 in total.

*sigh*

And then when that's out of the way, I need to look at my "Ghosts In The Graveyard" story and see where that's going.   Still, the good news is that getting over 5000 in a weekend is beginning to claw back the deficit in word-count terms against my target.

It shoudl be noted, by the way, there are some truly excellent stories in this week's flash challenge, including one that doesn't need so much as a word of polishing as far as I could see.   90 minutes and it's an utterly perfect piece of whimsy.   I am deeply, deeply impressed.

Anyway, crits (bar the DQ) done, and most crits on the Polish Challenge done.   Most crits back on mine in the PC, and highlighting what I suspected was going to be the problem with that story.   I suspect it isn't marketable, anyway, so I'll shelve it.   Shame - I think it has some nice writing in it - but who knows.   When I'm famous I can bring out all the storeis I like and editors didn't, and they'll all change their tune!    
 

 It took me less than 40 minutes, all told, to write a 1142-word story from the LH trigger at the weekend.

It took considerably longer to shave 150 words off that story.

But it's done, and all being well, Yi Qin will head off to EDF later today to try her luck. 

I was just looking through AnthologyBuilder and saw a name I recognised; Mike Lewis.

OK, it's a common name, and what are the odds that the Mike Lewis who, like me, ran an RPG fanzine 25 or so years ago is now writing and selling stories?

But yes, it's the same Mike Lewis.

I also discovered recently that one of his fellow editors of Dragonlords, Marc Gascoigne (who is used to hang around at gigs with in the early 90s when he was in Nottingham and I was in Sheffield - we saw Wire, Kraftwerk, The Cocteau Twins and others, and he introduced me to a range of indie music I might not otherwise have heard), is an editor for the Games Workshop/Warhammer tie-in book range.

Ah, the internet.   It just has everything in it...

Regularly active feeding birds in our garden:

Blackbird
Robin
Starling
House Sparrow
Blue Tit
Great Tit
Long-tailed Tit
Dunnock
Woodpigeon
Collared Dove
Jackdaw

All appear to be nesting (or preparing to) close enough that our garden is part of the feeding territory.   We've had house sparrow, starling, blackbird and robin all nest actually in our garden at one time or another (our garden, I should point out, is about 55' by 30', walled on all sides), but we cut back a lot of the climbers last autumn so I'm not sure if anything is this year (the robins were definitely invesitgating the honeysuckly - where blackbirds have nested before - but I can't confirm whether or not they are actually in).

I will be interested to see, should we get our 15 acres of New Mexico pinon-juniper, what the "garden bird" list will be like...

Almost unheard of, for me...

It's good news time.   

Good news part 1: I've just flashed at LH, for the first time in three months.   The particularly good news is that it's a Yi Qin story, and it's 1142 words long.   If I can carefully prune 142 words of that, then I have the Yi Qin story I want for Every Day Fiction.   Oh, and I've also tossed "When the Men returned" into the Polish Challenge there.   I think the final paragraph/line needs work, it's too abrupt at the moment, but otherwise I'm quite pleased with it.   However it's another of my "fantasy stories without the fantasy" (like "The Man His Father Was") and they appear to be a hard sell.   Never mind; I had fun writing it.   I suppose at a pinch I could even throw it at Sword and Sorceress...

Good news part 2: Howard Jones (aka bg_editor) has passed "What Chains Bind Us" on up to John O'Neill at Black Gate.   If John likes it (fingers crossed) that'll be my third sale there.   So fingers are most definitely crossed.   If he does take it, it lay well end up being the first to see print, since it's set earlier than the other two and also fills in a bit more backstory about Yi Qin and Yi Zhang (and so far all the BG stories feature Yi Zhang - at least in part because BG takes stories long enough to fit her in; in a 4k-or-under Yi Qin story trying to explain not just Yi Qin, but her dead twin sister as well, is just toooo much work).

No other news of interest to the world, I think.

And thanks for the comments on the Serial Fiction post.   Much appreciated.   I wasn't talking about vast quantities of increased traffic (I'm not Scalzi or Doctorow), but I would like to keep a steady slow expansion of my lj presence and name recognition and figured that posting a mini-chapter a day of a Yi Qin story might be worthwhile.   More musings on the subject next week, I suspect.

 

 

I'm pondering.

I'm pondering whether publishing something on this blog - something that can easily be broken down into fairly short, episodic, pieces - would be worthwhile, and creaate any interest or increased traffic whatsoever.

Comments and suggestions welcomed.

Return of the Sword, you ask? Why return? Has it gone somewhere?

Good question. When did the sword ever, really, go away? Oh, certainly, fantasy is a broad church. It has room for clockwork and steam, it has room for vampires and angels, it has room for romance and horror.

But when I first started reading it, there was no doubt that it had room for swords, and it had room for sorcery.

I believe it still does. I have my reasons for this belief. Sure, I also have reasons for wanting to believe it. It’s a rare story I write that doesn’t have one or the other, at the very least. But I’ve sold fourteen stories. Of these, swords feature in eight and sorcery in eleven.

There is still a demand for stories featuring swords, and featuring sorcery. Look at the success of Scott Lynch if you don’t believe me. What is “The Lies Of Locke Lamora” if not a classic, updated, sword’n’sorcery romp in the grand tradition of Howard and Lieber? Locke and Jean are the heirs of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and even of Conan (who was thief and swordsman in one).

So why am I talking about the return of the sword?

Because today I am host to the blog tour supporting The Return Of The Sword from Flashing Swords Press (also available from Amazon).

“Return of the Sword is a brand new anthology of blood-pounding, spine-tingling stories by some of fantasy's most critically acclaimed Sword and Sorcery authors.

Stacey Berg, Bill Ward, Phil Emery, Jeff Draper, Nicholas Ian Hawkins, David Pitchford, Ty Johnston, Jeff Stewart, Angeline Hawkes, Robert Rhodes, E.E. Knight, James Enge, Michael Ehart, Thomas M. MacKay, Christopher Heath, Nathan Meyer, S.C. Bryce, Allen B. Lloyd, William Clunie, Steve Goble, Bruce Durham, and Harold Lamb present you with enough fast paced adventure to keep you reading for hours.

A hand painted, wrap around cover by fantasy artist Johnney Perkins ensures that Return of the Sword will not only be enjoyable to read, but also look good on your coffee table or bookshelf.” 

Sorry I haven't been posting lately.

Work is occupying my entire brain, and will for a while, I fear.

I've had a few rejections (recorded in ra_log) and one hold ("A Certain Future" has entered the third-stage Pool Of Potential at ASIM - I've been in the pool a few times and made it out once, so we shall see).