New Story!

So I completed my first short story of the year. Hooray! I am currently typing it up -- being a hand-written kind of guy -- and it's breaking 2000 words right now with plenty to go and plenty of room for expansion.

 It's tentatively titled, "The Temple of Guayna Tuampa" and takes place in the same world as my "Empress of the Danforthe" stories. It was a challenge on one of the websites I participate in to write a story in alternate history Earth that included dragons. So I wrote about a temple-busting explorer who encounters a dragon in a temple in South America. It's a pretty romping good time.

 I'm working as hard as ever on the new Milwaukee Writers Workshop venture. I.E., it's a business now (or will be very shortly) and so it's a bit of a mentality shift to go from "Oh, this is just a fun group I run" to "Hey, this is a business, and I need to treat it professionally." Not that I wasn't professional before, but it's a big change, and I think it'll put a good light on us for the future and help our potential. It's exciting nonetheless, and we've got some good help with a new intern who's very capable.

 On a side note, the revisions to "The Mechanics of Man" -- my steampunk rewrite of the infamous "charles" novel -- have been going very well, and I am nearly through the entirety of Book One with my additions and rewrites.

Implications and Inferences

I talk so often about writing, and improving writing, and motivating one's self to write, and blah blah blah, that I forget to take a minute to really reconnect with why I write. Why it's important to me to write.

Lately, for some unknown reason -- and one that I am not about to question -- I have been writing consistently, constantly, and (quite honestly) pretty damn well. Since February, I have done a complete edit of my 30-thousand-word novella and written the following pieces:

"You Could Be Happy" -- 3600 words; contemporary
(Untitled) -- 4100 words; near-future

I've also done a complete revision on "Westward Expansion" and "The Pod Village of San-Zhr" (which I was sad to receive a rejection for in the Library of Fantasy & Science Fiction "Liminality" anthology, until I realized that I don't think it's science fiction). So those will get a second round very soon.

I've also done a fair amount of work on a project I've been writing since last November with a writing partner. It's a Steampunk work that focuses on letters written between the two main characters from my short story "Westward Expansion." It's going quite well, and we're really delving into the nitty-gritty of the plot. I like it.

I also have about 11 pages written on a new, but slightly revised version of an old piece, story that is very plot-driven, which was a change for me. As well, I recently started an idea that started about 10 years ago after reading Stephen King's Gunslinger, which formulated, sputtered into life briefly, and then died. Now, though, nearly finished with The Drawing of the Three, the second book in the Dark Tower series, the idea came back to me.

Two things: 1) the stories are almost entirely unrelated, but the world in King's books bring to mind the sort of world I originally wanted to create for that first piece and just couldn't really find the story behind it. Now I think I have. 2) I think I've been influenced, if only slightly, by the very visceral writing of King's that sort of allows things to happen as they ought to. What does that mean? Well, in my case, I've written two stories (the previously-mentioned, "You Could Be Happy" and this new project) that have very blatant and necessary sex in them.

Previously, I felt that sex was something that didn't really fit in my work because it wasn't relevant to the piece. Some people have said otherwise in regards to a few stories; and I think I will have to go back and reexamine those works because of the new turn I've taken. Partly, too, though, I felt like sex was a bit of a "reader-grabber" simply for the fact that it was put in to get readers to say to their friends, "Oh my God, I just read this great book with awesome sex scenes in it." I never wanted that (and I still don't), but I recognize the place it has in other stories, and I recognize the place it has in these stories.

And that's what's important. Everything is relevant. Everything is given meaning by the act of writing it. And that is why I write. I feel like lately, with all of the things that are going on in my life, have gone on in the past year, and continue to inspire me, I am forced to make sense of things and give them meaning in the hopes that I can find some answers.

Although I think maybe I should just buy some chocolates and take my girlfriend out to dinner more often, so I can take care of the latent implications of writing sex into my stories.

Giddy With Inspiration

Three years ago, when the Milwaukee Writers Workshop still had all of its groups on one day, I braved the novel critique with a project that was nearly seven years old (at least) and in its fourth or fifth iteration. It was a novel that was (perhaps still is) my former* wife's favorite piece. A colleague in the group, who I thoroughly respect for his critique and his writing skill, offered up the advice to turn what is essntially a pastiche of a Charles Dickens novel into a science fiction piece. At the time, I had no idea how that could be possible. 

Over the last two days, though, I think I've discovered how I can make that happen. I'm entrenched in the Steampunk genre now. I love it more now than I did when I first discovered it, than I did when I fully recognized its potential, and than I did when I read "The Difference Engine" for the first time. I enjoy the genre, and I enjoy its capabilities. Now, I believe I have truly discovered the root of the story that began as an attempt to write a Victorian novel. 

So, putting most other projects aside, I am going to revisit said project -- which I haven't looked at in nearly two years -- to try and hammer out this new direction. I have it in my head, and also on a ton of scraps in my bag at work, and I think I can really make something marvellous out of it. 

Also, in short story news, I completed a brand new story this week that's roughly 4200 words, and it's about cowboys, in the future, in a post-catastrophe America. It's fun. 

*I like to use the term former for my soon-to-be-ex-wife because it sounds better. It's like being the former president: the title is still there, because the importance of the position hasn't changed, but there's no real duties that lie therein. We're still friends, which is nice, so she's not really an "ex," just (as I say) former. 

Updates Feb. 2011

So here's the scoop. Since the beginning of the year, I have the following new pieces written:

"The Pariah of Langeford" -- 1100 words; pseudo fantasy
"Electric Golems" -- 4700 words; steampunk
"The Pageant Fire" -- 1700 words; contemporary
"The Horticenter" -- 900 words; futurist science fiction
"Annalisa (WT)" -- 3400 words; steampunk
"Thomas, Boy Wonder" -- unfinished steampunk

I have also been working diligently with a new writing partner on an extension of the "Westerward Expansion" story that unfortunately got rejected (by default) for the Clockwork Choas anthology, which I hope to see very soon in publication. The project is a series of letters, along with narrative, between the two main characters presented in the short story. I believe I'll be polishing the short work to be sent out as a stand-alone with the longer work to follow.

I also sent out "The Pod Village of San-Zhr," which is an older story, but one that I liked quite a lot. It went out to an anthology for stories of liminality. Needless to say, I am excited for that one.

Once polished and critiqued, I will be sending out "Annalisa," "Thomas, Boy Wonder," "Electric Golems," and "The Pariah of Langeford." I think they're all solid and with a good polish should prove to be good works. My hope is to get at least two pieces published this year, and I know that there are a few new publications to look forward to.

I'll also be trying out a bit of something new on the blog, but I'll need some help from my trusty readers: I would like to answer writing questions. I have one in the wings -- perhaps by Friday or Saturday -- and that should give some idea of what I'm talking about. Feel free to send me things. You can send it to boone@milwaukeewritersworkshop.com; just be sure to put something like "writing question" in the subject, so I know to mark it properly.

Things That Make Me Cry

I've been running a writers workshop in a town north of where I live. Last night was the third meeting, and it went well -- as have all the others. We are working on characters and character development, because the majority of the writers there are new to the craft and have a lot to learn. I think creating believable characters are always a great place to start to write memorable stories.

As a good example of character development, I read Mary Robison's Yours, which is a poignant story about a man and his wife carving pumpkins before Halloween. I've read the story a dozen times, or more, and yet something about it at that reading nearly made me cry in front of the group. There's something about short stories -- and I suppose novels are the same way, only they take longer to read -- that hits you at a certain time and strikes a chord. That's part of why I love short stories. Each reading gives something new to the reader; each new interaction with the story sheds some new light on the reader's perspective of the world. It is that moment -- that personal revelation -- that I really strive to find in others' works, as well as my own.

Writing has been going well lately, though, which I'm happy about. NaNoWriMo is in full swing and even with folks in town and a new niece, I've been happy to have reached my word count every day (plus a little extra).

Make It Mean Something

I was speaking with one of my students the other day, and she asked, "What is it about short stories that make them stand out?" I asked her if she meant stand out from other stories or stand out as a medium for fiction. She wanted both answers.

So . . . what makes certain short stories stand out from other short stories?

For me, it's stories that mean something. Not in the truly metaphorical way but more in the metaphysical one. They have to speak to me in some way - make me connect with the story, the characters, the concept, something. I want to walk away from a short story with having gained some sense of the author's truth about the world.

Perhaps it's the literary mind in me. Perhaps it's the theorist as well. For a long time, I thought that there was a slight sense of arrogance to my preference (and I'll admit that might be part of it) - a hold-over from my academic days where criticism meant the world. Honestly, though, I think that it comes from a continually-growing love of short fiction. I try and read as much as I can when I can afford it and go to the library when I can't. So I've digested a lot of fiction in the last three years. To me, the stories that resonate the most are the ones that I respond to in some way. Whether it's "Wow, that was great" or "What the hell did I just read?"

And . . . what makes short stories stand out from other fiction media?

I will give you my thoughts, and then I will give you the thoughts of two individuals that I highly agree with.

First, I think that it takes a distinct desire to create something concise when one is writing a short story. And with that in mind the author gives himself a challenge to put together one grand thought into a short amount of space. I think it's a challenge because we have want to say what others have said before, but we want to say it our way, and we want it to resonate with someone in a way that it hasn't done before.

Second, I think that short stories are wonderful and diverse and offer a way to be creative, artistic, experimental, and out of the ordinary. Novels are hard to sell and harder still to make "out of the box." Poetry is, by its nature, out of the ordinary. It speaks to the soul in a way that the short story speaks to the mind. And fiction on stage and screen is dramatic and visual; it's hard to compare that to fiction most times.

I think it's best summed up by these two quotes:

Martha Foley, one of the first editors of the Best American series said, "A good short story is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling she has undergone a memorable experience." I think that Barbara Kingslover - the author - expands upon that nicely: "A good short story cannot simply be Lit Lite; it is the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces."