Category: anthology

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anthology writing

No Sh!t There I Was: Uranus Calling

For today’s dip into the table of contents of this anthology (hey, we’re halfway to our goal! KEEP GOING!) I have for you Uranus Calling by Devyani Borade.

As you can imagine, with an opening line like No shit there I was, we got a number of submissions from writers who took it a bit literally. And I’m not going to lie, the best of those stories are represented in the anthology. I’M ONLY HUMAN, PEOPLE, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME.

Devyani went a step beyond though, a free association from shit to farts to butts to the planet Uranus, and the results are hilarious. (In our heart of hearts lives a five year old child.) The gassy heroine of Uranus Calling, Tina, receives an urgent distress call from Uranus (no, really) and must produce a Clever Plan to save the planet from a terrible fate after flying there in her inflatable spaceship with her obnoxious cousin Tommy.

The absolute charm of this story goes far beyond giggling at some well-timed fart jokes. If you, like those of us on the anthology crew, grew up reading Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, there’s an immediate mental connection between Tina’s tale and the Adventures of Spaceman Spiff. Tina and Tommy’s trip out to Uranus has that same feeling of imaginative illogic that we found with Calvin, and you’re never quite sure if the adventure is real, or if any moment Tina’s mom is going to come out of the house and yell at the kids to come in and have dinner, and please stop farting on each other, it’s not funny.

(Mom’s wrong. It’s very funny.)

Uranus Calling pins the silly end of the tonal spectrum for the anthology. It’s all in good-natured fun. I’d say it was clean fun too, but you should probably wash your hands first.

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anthology writing

No Sh!t There I Was: The Storyteller’s Sleight

And that’s how I ended up at the gambling table with a motley collection of aliens.

Wait, let me back up and tell you the whole story.

I knew Wren Wallis‘s The Storyteller’s Sleight was special from the first paragraph. This is not a story that tentatively dips its toes into the world or winks coyly at being space opera. You get thrown right into a colorful, rich universe full of myriad aliens and people and cultures without apology. You know you’ve only just scratched the surface as you follow the plots and tales of Esmat, the titular storyteller. There’s an incredible amount of world building depth visible in less than 5000 words.

(One thing I asked Wren right away is if there are more stories about Esmat, because I want to read more about her and the fascinating universe around her.)

And all that? Is the sumptuous backdrop for a heist that takes place during a game of chance, one that keeps you guessing about just what Esmat’s plan is until the end. I loved this story because it drew me in and kept me guessing–and I loved all of the players in it, sketched out with dialog and action. I have to give a shout out here to Captain Pham, the host of the game, who spends the entire story Done With Everything. (“The next person to ask me why anyone else at the shitting table got invited can show themself out the shitting airlock, right?”)

I’m a sucker for this kind of technicolor space opera, and for fun heist stories, and for clever storytellers. So no shit, there I was. And there you can be too, if you support the Kickstarter!

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anthology writing

No Sh!t, There I Was: Steal From the Sun

The great RNGesus has spoken! Today, I get to tell you about Steal From the Sun, by William Ledbetter, yet another amazing story you can read if you support the Kickstarter and get the book.

Bill actually goes back to the very inception of this anthology–no shit, there he was. I mentioned my idea for getting a bunch of science fiction and fantasy writers to do stories with this classic starting line at a panel, and he said he thought it was a great idea. “Okay,” I said. “But you’d better submit something if I do this.”

He said, sure he would, in that laughing way that I tend to assume means actually no. But then he did. Bill’s a man who puts his story where his mouth is, and he spun me a tale of two wisecracking guys who are basically space auto mechanics, trying to retrieve Mariner 10 from its orbit near the sun.

There’s a wide range of stories in this anthology, and my slush jackalopes and I mentally arranged them on spectrums between two poles. From the moment I read Bill’s story, Steal From the Sun, I knew I wanted it. And I knew it would pin down the “hard scifi” end of the spectrum. It’s got everything I could want out of a hard science fiction story in the style of the classics–space ships, physics, witty banter, and people solving engineering problem after engineering problem as the hull temperature slowly creeps up and threatens to cook the intrepid heroes.

Oh, and a flirtatious news anchorman who is adorable.

And unlike some hard SF that has left me cold before, Bill balances his elements in a perfect mix of cheeky wit and engineer porn that I was doomed to love. I jammed Steal From the Sun into the “I WILL HAVE THIS” file so fast I probably gave the pixels friction burns. It was almost–almost–the first item in that file, only the necromantic weasels got there first.

But that’s a story for another time. Literally.

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anthology writing

No Sh!t, There I Was: The One About Jacob

As promised yesterday, I asked the great god RNG to pick a story for me to tell you about today, and it has. That story is: The One About Jacob, by Tyler Hayes.

The One About Jacob is one of the few dark/horror stories that made it into the anthology–we didn’t get a whole lot of horror submissions, and that’s just fine, because I’m not that big of a reader of horror either. And it’s one of those stories that I didn’t read and immediately body slam onto the YES I WILL HAVE THIS list–because it did its work in a much subtler way. It crept up on me, day after day, and I found myself just thinking about the story, and the eerie nature of it, and the creepy final lines, until I finally had to beg: “Look, if I put you in the ToC, will you please stop whispering in my ear when I’m trying to make my morning tea?”

And Jacob smiled, that game, preternaturally likable smile of his, and said “Sure.” (He was lying.)

The One About Jacob is a story that’s about the power of stories people tell each other, both positive and negative. The way stories can bring the wounded together, and the way they can warp and twist and become something truly awful without anyone ever intending the end result. It’s also about the tenuous nature of free will, and how it’s a bad idea for anyone to have the power to change peoples’ minds in a permanent way, but an even worse idea when we’re talking pissed off, lonely, fucked up teenagers. Because this is what happens when people can literally create their own perfect friends, when perfection tends to hide something monstrous and ugly beneath.

It’s an excellent, creepy story, and it’s in No Shit, There I Was. Reason number 1 of 24 to support the Kickstarter so you can read it!

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anthology writing

No Shit, There I Was, thinking about successful stories

I made a little list yesterday, about some basic problems I noticed repeatedly in my slush pile. Things worth fixing that’ll help a story survive the savaging of the slush jackalopes, at least.

But what about the stories we liked and loved? And I’m not talking here about just the ones I sent acceptances for. I had 15 or so additional stories beyond those I could accept that I desperately wanted to keep and didn’t have room for. These were decisions that made me cry tears of blood because I didn’t want to make them.

The thing is, it’s way easier to tell you what doesn’t work about a story than quantify what does.

After the initial Rejectopocalypse, I had 58 stories left. How did I get that down to the stories I ended up picking?

There was a sort of two-tiered process to how I filled out the ToC . There was an initial set of stories that I read that just clicked with me so well, I put them in a file labeled “You can have these stories when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.” Each one of these stories was a hill I would have been willing to die on, so to speak. And there weren’t that many of them. They didn’t even take up half of my available space, when all was said in done.

A few of the stories that ended up on that list didn’t even make it there on first reading; I thought they were good and liked them a great deal, but wasn’t immediately ready to fight a great white shark armed with an assault rifle for them. But those stories lingered, and niggled, and refused to let me go, and a week later I was still thinking about how utterly fucked up they had made me feel. I realized I couldn’t let them go either.

But the bulk of those 58 stories in the second round were simply “stuff wot the jackalopes and I liked,”  and there were way too many of them. So I went over those with a much less forgiving eye. A lot of stories, I enjoyed, but had to tack on a mental caveat of “but X needs to be tweaked.” Unless X amounted to copyediting issues, I made myself let those go. Other quite good stories were too similar to stories that I considered non-negotiable, either in plot or tone or topic, so those I let go as well. That took us down to around 35, when things got really brutal.

I ended up dragging my excellent slush jackalopes onto a Skype call so we could sit down in real time and look at what we had. Fights were had. Alcohol was imbibed to deal with the pain. Stories were sorted into keep or go piles. But the reason I wanted the slush jackalopes on the call was that each of them had a few stories that were hills they were willing to die on, and I thought that was important. A story that I thought was very good and merely (“merely“) liked might be a gut punch to one of them. I needed perspectives from outside myself, from people who knew the shape of the slush, because otherwise I was at a stalemate of, gosh I like all this stuff equally and 35,000 words of it has to go, what do I do?

So what made for the stories we universally liked and someone was willing to fight for? There’s not a single answer, partially because I tried to choose a wide array of stories that cross the genres from hard scifi to high fantasy, the tones from utter bleakness to screwy hilarity. (You’ll see what I mean when I finally show you the ToC.) The best I can come up with is:

  • Stories with a strong narrative voice and tone. This isn’t just about first person narration; there’s a tone that goes with third person as well, that’s evident in word choice and sentence structure. Every story we loved had a consistent tone and a strong voice that made us want to keep reading.
  • Good pacing. Pacing is what knocked a lot of the stories out at the second round; pacing hiccups are one of the most frustrating things in the world to try to fix as a writer, and I didn’t even want to deal with it as an editor. I won’t say that all of the stories we kept were fast-paced; there are a couple I’d consider to have a very deliberate feel to them. But they don’t stop. They don’t bog down. They’re exactly as long as they need to be.
  • Fascinating characters. Most of them, we liked. Some of them, we just wanted to follow and see what kind of train wreck they’d be getting into.
  • The stories that were funny made us laugh out loud. Heartily. Inappropriately.
  • We have a profound weakness for ridiculous, long titles, but only if the story that follows supports it.

But those things? Aren’t that helpful if you’re looking for a blueprint, except perhaps for the point about pacing. You can get into some useful wonkery with pacing and arranging your beats and making sure none of them are lasting too long, and that might help. But I don’t think anyone sets out to write characters who aren’t fascinating, or stories that don’t have a strong tone. I’m sure everyone who sent us a funny story thought we’d find it funny.

And that’s perhaps the point. While there are objective measures (many of them grammar-based) that can tell us if a story isn’t going to work, there’s not a rubric I could give to say what does. This is your reminder, then, that getting published is ultimately a crapshoot. You could be at the top of your prose game, you could have a tight story with great characters and an interesting plot, and unless it hit one of us in just the right way to make her say I would wrestle a bear for this story, it wasn’t going to make it. And I think it’s worth remembering that the stories I was willing to go to bat for were not all the same stories the jackalopes defended with their antlers filed to razor sharpness.

I know we’ve all had the experience of reading a story and thinking who the hell paid actual money for this, my story is way better. Sometimes you might be right, but sometimes it’s that your story didn’t deliver the plot payload the way you’d hoped, because no two editors are the same. Maybe you got the wrong editor, the wrong time of day, the wrong phase of the moon. There’s no knowing. If being able to write a story that punches someone in the gut and steals their emotional lunch money is the best part of being a writer, it’s also the most frustrating. Because you’ll never know if that punch landed until you open your email and see yes instead of no.

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anthology writing

No Shit, There I Was, with lessons from the depths of my own slush pile

I’ve now sent the last of the responses for the anthology; if you haven’t gotten an email of some sort from me and submitted a story, please query immediately. This is the first time I’ve ever truly dived into a slush pile, and it was a really cool experience. I ended up enjoying way more stories than I could fit in the anthology, which made writing the last round of rejections particularly agonizing.

But after shoveling all the slush, here’s some things I noticed. These are not meant to specifically call someone out, and I will not be naming names because that would be damn rude and unkind. Any details are made up as examples.

Technical Things

  1. A lot of people apparently don’t know what is meant by standard manuscript format. But honestly, I’m not even this picky. I just want double spacing, indents on the first line of each paragraph, a readable font, your contact info, and a header with page numbers.
  2. If you can’t be bothered to send me your story in one of the acceptable document formats I list, I can’t be bothered to open it.
  3. Please don’t summarize your story for me in your query letter. I want to read your story and find out for myself. In fact, summarizing in the query letter actually makes it more difficult for me to evaluate whether your story accomplishes what you set out to do.
  4. Please make sure you have deleted all editing comments and accepted all tracked changes in a document before sending it. I really don’t want to know how the sausage was made before it arrived in my inbox. (Note that this did not cause me to reject anyone, but it was super distracting.)
  5. You’d better darn well know what you’re doing with ellipses or one of my slush jackalopes will probably take out a hit on you.
  6. Commas are extremely important. They make the difference between sarcastic insult (“Awesome, jerkoff”) and porn (“Awesome jerkoff”).
  7. If you’re not querying a piece as a reprint, it better not have been published anywhere. Ever. Things that count as publishing even if you made not a blessed cent and only your grandmother saw it: putting it in your uni literary magazine, posting it publicly on your blog, publishing it in your church bulletin, writing it up on a series of pictures that you’ve shared on instagram. And so on.
  8. Don’t tell me what the speculative element is. If I can’t locate it without you telling me beforehand, I’m not going to accept your story.
  9. A lot of stories really stumbled when it came to the integration of the first line. If I can tell it’s literally pasted onto the start of a story and nothing’s been adjusted around it, that’s not going to fill me with confidence. Also, I admit this is a weakness of such a prompt, if a narrator starts with “No Shit, there I was” and the rest of the story contains absolutely no cussing and no colloquial language, that’s going to be very dissonant.
  10. I don’t generally find puns amusing. Sorry, punsters. This is a flaw in my character I’ve never been shy of pointing out.

General Plot Things

  1. Speaking of speculative elements, it has to have a clear “what if” that is fantastic or science fictional in some way. If your main character just thinks the orange on their desk is talking to them, that’s not speculative. If the orange on their desk is actually talking to them, then it is speculative.
  2. Stories need to have a fully realized plot with a beginning, middle, and end, in which something changes. It could be the character. It could be the development of the plot itself, or a change in the world caused by the action of plot and character.
    1. What does not count as a plot: several thousand worlds in which a narrator describes the history of the world in a giant, expository dump. If there is more time spent by your character describing the world than actively interacting with it, you do not have enough plot.
    2. Personally, I prefer character driven stories, where the internal and external needs to the character either drive the plot or become developed through interaction with the plot. However, if you write a really good plot driven story (there are several in the anthology) I will still enjoy it!
  3. First act bloat is a problem I battle, myself. But the setup of the world and the introduction of the plot should be at most 1/3 of your page count. Multiple stories had a first act break was 1/2 to 2/3 of the way of the page count in, which makes for an unevenly paced read.
    1. Your story needs to have a beginning, middle, and some kind of conclusion. If it reads like the first chapter of a novel, it’s not going to work as a self-contained short story.
    2. Three act structure is most definitely not required or necessary, but it’s not a bad place to start if you’re not sure about your pacing. An alternative tool is Jule Selbo’s 11 steps (broken out here in three act structure, but actually they don’t have to be); while this is a film structure tool, it’s useful for examining the development of plot and character.
  4. Twist endings can be good, but they still need to make some kind of sense. Approach with caution. I need to be able to look back on the rest of your story and think ah, now X, Y, and Z make sense or oh man that totally screws with my perception of all those events! If your “twist” amounts to kids picking daisies in a field and suddenly a lorry comes screaming out of nowhere and runs them over, that’s not actually a twist. It’s a non sequitor.

Thoughts about the how and why of the successful stories to follow later.

And hey! I’m raising money for Act For Change by hate watching Gods of Egypt. You should check it out.

Categories
anthology writing

Hey you. Yes you. I want you to write a story for my anthology.

What fresh hell is this? Only the freshest of hells, my darlings: No Shit, There I Was. And yes, that sure is my name as the editor.

See, this one time at this one con, I was sitting in the bar with other writers, and we were doing what writers do, which is drink and cry about our life choices, when I mentioned how I thought there should totally be an anthology where every story started with the immortal line, “No shit, there I was.” Because where those stories go is always a magical and at times intensely horrifying place. And every time I mentioned this fictitious anthology, my fellow writers would always laugh and say hell yeah, they’d either write a story for that, or read the shit out of it, or both.

Then one day I hauled out my threadbare little idea when I was in a bar with Steven Saus. Which lead to him sending me an e-mail that basically said, “Hey, were you actually serious about that anthology idea?”

And here we are.

Okay, everyone who ever told me that you thought that sounded like hella fun and you’d write a story: time to do the thing. And everyone else? You should write me something too. Give me comedy, give me tragedy, give me both at the same time so I won’t be sure if I’m crying with laughter or sorrow, just so long as it’s speculative fiction. I want to see all the interesting places your characters can go when you take a step past the obviousness of the line.

This is going to be awesome.