Short Fiction – Page 12

“A Guy I Know Once Told Me…”

November 12, 2008 by John 2 Comments

The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)

But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.

I suspect I’m not alone in my certainty that many of these have influenced my understanding of the universe, of people, of life. And I may have lots of company, too, in having no idea what portion of it might actually be true, as opposed to simply fun, convenient, or dangerous — and little intention (or time) to check it all out.

In the rest of this post I thought I’d try a little experiment. What follows are three urban legends, two “true” (in the sense that “a guy I know once really DID tell me”), and one made up just for this post. Furthermore, I won’t tell you which are the real ones and which, the impostor.

(One interesting possibility: that someone, somewhere, will (a) find this post via a search on a keyword which figures prominently in the bogus urban legend, (b) do a “find” within the post itself, looking for the keyword and hence skipping over all this background, and eventually (c) spread the false rumor as his/her own bit of “a guy once told me” folklore. Ah, posterity…)

Here goes:

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The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing

November 6, 2008 by John 6 Comments

Cover of D. Hoffman's 'Poe Poe Poe [etc.],' by Anita Kunz For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).

The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” because it seems to be a topic my thoughts revisit every few years. (My favorite book about Poe is Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (yes, seven Poes); the picture at the right is by Anita Kunz, from the cover of the cover of the 1985 paperback Vintage Books edition.)

Here’s Poe laying out a challenge for writers, in a passage often quoted — especially by writers:

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Happy Birthday, Lester Dent

October 12, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Today marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Lester Dent, a/k/a Kenneth Robeson.

Not exactly a household name these days, eh? But in his time, which occupied a substantial chunk of the first half of the last century (he died young, in 1959), Dent was one of the most prolific and most successful writers on the planet. And it all came from a single character, the protagonist of — according to Wikipedia — 190 novels to date, and scads of stories. (Nearly all the books are credited exclusively to Dent, with the majority of the others, even those published long after his death, giving him at least partial credit. The “Kenneth Robeson” whose name actually appeared on the covers, though, was just a pseudonym.)

That protagonist: Doc Savage.

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Short Fiction: The Iron

October 6, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown says something about writing a story from the point of view of a character other than the author’s own sex. I don’t remember the exact words, don’t have my copy with me, and can’t find the quote online. But she says something like this: “Until and unless you can write convincingly about a protagonist who’s the opposite sex from you, you can’t say you’re a mature writer.”

I thought this was challenging, to say the least. Who doesn’t want to be a mature anything? Who wants to believe they’re not already mature?

So I tried a couple things. For one, I made the protagonist of Crossed Wires a woman. I also did a handful of short stories from a woman’s POV.

“The Iron” is one of those stories.

It also is one of those stories which has been workshopped and revised to within an inch of its life — some would say beyond, probably. Agent X (whom I spoke of here) hated one element of the story, which unfortunately was the central element: a steam iron’s place in a position of importance in a story about a married woman.

(Agent X’s point, as she explained it, had something to do with the iron as a symbol of the oppression or outright enslavement of women, and hence an unsuitable vehicle as an object of a wife’s wonder. Something like that, anyhow.)

As you will see, the steam iron in question has many features unlike those of ordinary appliances. Hope you like reading “The Iron” — regardless of your (or the author’s) sex. Here it is.

Update, 2008-10-08: Thanks to Marta’s gentle prodding in the comments on this post, I finally managed (thanks, Amazon!) to find exactly how Rita Mae Brown’s Starting from Scratch addresses this subject (emphasis added):

You must create men who love women and women who love men or your books will be lopsided. In the beginning of everyone’s work the dice are always loaded toward one’s own sex or sex preference. Learning to unload those dice, to throw the bones honestly, is what maturity as an individual and as a writer is all about.

Art, Meet Life. Life, This Is Art.

September 22, 2008 by John 2 Comments

You may remember my 10(ish)-year-old story “The Bug,” which I posted here a few weeks ago. In it, the protagonist — home at work with a fever, some kind of bug anyhow — stumbles upon a very strange cable-TV channel. Its name is The Dead Channel; all its programming has to do, somehow, with death. While some of its schedule is devoted to features (talk shows, old movies like The Loved One, and so on), the bulk consists of what our hero thinks of as “deadcasts.”

You’ll be familiar with the format of a deadcast if you’ve ever seen the regular programming of The Weather Channel. A suited announcer, perhaps armed with a pointer, stands before an electronic wall-sized radar or satellite map of the US. The person waves his/her hands over the map, as the map itself is painted over with glowing-green, -yellow, and -red swatches of color representing storms and other conditions.

On The Dead Channel, the maps don’t show stationary fronts, temperature bands, and the like. They show, oh, well… Take the deadcaster named Jack Llongo, for example. He’s obviously new at his job, a little nervous, and keeps muffing his lines, ad-libbing inappropriately, and so on. At one point he’s got a map behind him labeled MORBIDITY INDEX:

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Upsetting the Apple Cart

September 15, 2008 by John 12 Comments

I’m going to go out on a limb here and…

…no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should.

What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my mouth shut about, since I care about my putative writing career. But it’s been driving me crazy — a real professional and perhaps even personal dilemma.

One of the first pieces of advice you get from agents, published authors, writing workshops, writers’ guides, and so on, is that you must picture where in the bookstore your book will be shelved. This becomes, then, your genre. Fiction’s got mystery, romance, SF/fantasy, young adult (YA), so on and so forth; and then non-fiction too is all over the map — biography, history, true crime, humor (hey, I didn’t make up these categories!), travel, reference…

(Above all else, the advice goes, if you’re serious about your writing career, avoid the dreaded mid-list/mainstream classification.)

Where will your book come to rest? they all want to know. Where do you belong?

Actually, it’s not such questions per se which are problematical. You do need to have some sense of how to explain your work — especially to potential agents, editors, even casual readers — and providing the genre helps accomplish that, even before you’ve offered details.

Where problems do come in is when you select a genre in advance, before a book is even written — despite your own proclivities.

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Short Fiction: Modem Operandi

September 13, 2008 by John 4 Comments

One thing The Missus has always said about my writing: if it amuses no one else, it amuses me. Personally, I think she exaggerates. It doesn’t all “amuse” me. [wounded sniff] But one story, well, I really enjoyed writing it. And it still makes me grin to re-read.

Like many stories I wrote in the ’90s, “Modem Operandi” was born of a writing exercise. This one had a single simple premise: write a story about an online community whose members are dying. That was it. No length restrictions. No gimmicky bits about the opening and closing sentences. No genre specified.

At the time this exercise was presented to me, I’d just finished the first draft of my first book — a mystery which, as it happened, centered around email and electronic bulletin-board systems (BBSes). And I was feeling a little bit burnt out by the requirement to ensure that readers understand the technology. (Remember, this was the early 1990s: no Web, for one thing; online communication itself was via low-speed analog modems whose throughput was in the range of mere hundreds of bits per second. Email had begun making inroads at some companies, true. But by and large this was still very much terra incognita for my presumptive audience.)

So I decided to have fun with the exercise — just write and enjoy it, on the assumption that I wouldn’t have to explain every freaking thing to readers who at least understood the basics.

“Modem Operandi” was the result: a sort of comic-noir first-person story which (although 10K-ish words in length) took me only a couple days to write.

(By the way, the narrator of this story, one Jack Frame, has left a legacy in Merry-Go-Round: his son Kevin plays a minor but significant role.)

It was always too long to appear in print publications of the time, although I did submit it to a couple. Now, some e-zines might accept it… but the technology is woefully out of date, and honestly, I don’t feel a compelling need to re-write it around the Web, Google, even IRC over BBSes.

As always with these longish “short fiction” pieces, I’ll link from here to an opening excerpt. And there’ll be a link at the foot of that page which allows you to download the whole thing as a PDF.

Anyway: here’s “Modem Operandi.” Enjoy!

The Touraine Passenger

September 6, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Flag of former French province of Touraine Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.

(If you’ve no other ideas for how, even generally, to use the word “Touraine,” er, well, you do know by now that Google can be your friend, right?)

Need more details? Read on.

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Short Fiction: “The Cabin”

September 1, 2008 by John 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I said, I’d try to incorporate into the story — somehow — a picture of the two sentences’ author.

If you’d prefer not to know in advance what the two sentences are, and don’t care to see the picture of their author, you can read the first section here. (At the end of that page is a link to a PDF version of the whole story.)

If on the other hand you do want to read the details, the original challenge was here.

And, finally, if you want to read more about my experience of writing a story to these specifications, well, just keep reading below.

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Creating in the Margins

August 27, 2008 by John 2 Comments

After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a story with a given first and last sentence) and a specific deadline: Labor Day, September 1 (this Monday). I had plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime, but my main motivation was a sort of writer’s guilt. I was bothered, see, that I’d been so distracted by other stuff (marketing Merry-Go-Round, blogging, and then of course I do have a day job, a wife, and books to read!) — so distracted by all that stuff that I hadn’t been able to write something new.

(Well, I did write myself a few sentences into a MGR sequel. But that wasn’t “real” writing.)

The main effect of this objective was, alas, not that I sat down, raised the lid of my inkwell, and began to write. The main effect was to foster a different and somewhat more exquisite sort of writer’s guilt: the guilt of not-writing when you know you quote-unquote “have to.” Especially when under your own deadline (you know you can’t weasel out). Especially when you publicly announced your deadline (you know everyone will know, even if you do try to weasel out).

So this morning I’m lying in bed. The alarm has gone off once, been snoozed, and gone off (and been snoozed) again. I’m kind of semi-conscious. It’s 5 a.m.

Then a picture starts to form behind my eyelids: A man in a cabin, dusting something off, it’s not his cabin but someone else’s… Wait, no, that’s not dust — it’s snow… He picks up a scrap of paper and reads it… He finds another scrap of paper, and reads it, and sometime later he finds an old photograph…

…and so on, to the end.

There, in the crevasse between waking and sleeping (or between pokes at the snooze button, if you will), there I found my story.

I’ve always loved the sensation of falling asleep, even more than I like sleeping itself (which I love quite a bit!). But the transition to wakefulness can bring its own rewards.