Category: writing

Categories
writing news

And in writer news

I’ve started up a newsletter. If you just want to hear from me about writing stuff (like when I’ve had something published or have big news), that’s the place to sign up. Email from that will be sporadic.

I’ve got two new short stories out!

#1:  Fire in the Belly, over at Mothership Zeta. A space western adventure with a preteen thief! I hope some day to share more of this character’s stories, because she’s one of my favorites.

#2: Silver Fish, at Lakeside Circus. Little flash piece about dreams and nightmares and reflections.

And, in case you’ve missed the social media squee, I now have an agent! His name is DongWon Song and he’s super awesome! It feels so weird that after four years of putting that on my public writer wish list (and trust me, more years than that of looking) it’s finally happened.

Next on the to-do list: get a novel published. Yes, good.

Recent podcast action:

Categories
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.

Categories
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
fandom writing

Entertainment Weekly, Do You Even Fanfic? (Writer Beware)

Today in “big media company attempting to exploit writers,” Entertainment Weekly has really outdone itself with a for-exposure-only-as-prize contest for… fanfiction? Here’s a tumblr summary of this terrible BS, but I wanted to dig into the awful terms and conditions a little more.

All bolding is mine for emphasis.

From section 1, “How to Enter.”

Entries become sole property of Sponsor and none will be acknowledged or returned.

Well, that is a giant screaming warning flag that says WRITER BEWARE. WRITER DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLET $200. WRITER RUN THE FUCK AWAY. Things get more than a little weird because we’re talking fanfic (more about that in a minute), but in general if you EVER see anything that says anyone other than you becomes the sole owner of your writing, unless it comes with a fucking enormous check (and it better be HUGE), you say NO.

In non-abusive contracts, it’s all about the assignment of extremely specific rights (eg: first world electronic rights) with rights not negotiated still remaining with the writer. The writer still retains copyright. You as the writer still own the story; you are negotiating with the publisher for their use of it. Ownership will change hands if you’re, say, writing on spec for a company or doing tie-in work, but that comes with the expectation of some significant pay because you are giving up your ownership.

By entering, Entrant warrants that his or her entry (1) is original and does not infringe the intellectual property rights of any third party, (2) has not been published in any medium or (3) has not won an award.

This is the part that has me just scratching my head. As far as I can tell, whoever had this ugly brain baby at Entertainment Weekly doesn’t actually understand what fanfiction is or how it works. The entire fucking point of fanfic is that it technically does infringe on the intellectual property rights of someone else. You are using someone else’s intellectual property without their permission. Literally. If you weren’t, it wouldn’t be fanfic! But generally it squeaks by under fair use (though this is a topic an entire book can and has been written upon) because there is no profit on the part of the fanfic writer–and I’d argue a lot of big IP holders realize that fanworks add value to the property as a way to encourage fan participation, loyalty, and recruitment. But really, the point here is that what EW is asking for in their own rules is by definition NOT fanfiction. If you owned all the IP on your story, it wouldn’t be fanfic, and you should still definitely not be giving it to Entertainment Weekly for FREE.

Also? Point #2 is basically them demanding first world rights to the work. Considering how egregious the “becomes sole property of Sponsor” is already, this is a footnote, but it’s insult to injury. (By the way, if you want to see what an actual non-predatory contract looks like, SFWA did a model magazine contract that’s really good.)

From section 5 “Conditions of Participation.”

By entering, Entrant represents that any fan fiction submission and other materials submitted as part of Entrant’s Contest entry are original and will not constitute defamation an invasion of privacy or otherwise infringe upon the rights of any third party, and that the Entrant owns or has the rights to convey any and all right and title in such video and other materials.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY DO U EVEN FANFIC

In addition, by entering, Entrant grants to Sponsor a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to edit, publish, promote, republish at any time in the future and otherwise use Entrant’s submitted fan fiction, along with Entrant’s name, likeness, biographical information, and any other information provided by Entrant, in any and all media for possible editorial, promotional or advertising purposes, without further permission, notice or compensation (except where prohibited by law).

Translation: if we pick your fanfic, which we have now said we instantly own upon submission, we can then do whatever we want with it and use you as a promotional tool however and whenever we want. Without even having to tell you when we do it. Or ever give you any kind of monetary compensation for it.

THIS IS BAD ON SO MANY LEVELS.

As a note, regular publishing contracts can and do allow for minor copyediting of the work without the author’s approval. That’s standard. Anything beyond copyediting? In my experience this is NOT something you ever want to agree to unless you trust the editor completely to just fix your grammatical screw ups and not fuck with your story. Considering how gross this has been already, how trustworthy do you think Entertainment Weekly would be with your work?

Acceptance of the prize constitutes permission for Sponsor and its agencies to use Winner’s name and/or likeness, biographical information, fan fiction, other materials submitted for advertising and promotional purposes without additional compensation, unless prohibited by law.

What prize? ALL THAT EXPOSURE? SO MUCH EXPOSURE. LET THEM EAT EXPOSURE. But really, second verse, same as the first. They get to flog you and your work for advertisement and promotion without any compensation to you.

By entering and/or accepting prize, Entrants and Winners agree to hold Sponsor and its promotional partners, its directors, officers, employees and assigns harmless for liability, damages or claims for injury or loss to any person or property relating to, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, participation in this Contest, the acceptance and/or subsequent use or misuse, or condition of any of the prizes awarded, or claims based on publicity rights, defamation, or invasion or privacy.

This is a “hold harmless” clause, which can be anything but harmless to the person tacitly accepting this contract. On one hand, some of this is butt covering in the case of you not liking your “prize” (SO MUCH EXPOSURE) and wiggling out of ay fuss you could kick up if, say, a future employer doesn’t like how EW is using your likeness and fanfiction to promote… whatever it is they’re promoting. But does this also leave the writer holding the bag if an intellectual property holder goes after EW and the writer if they decide this violates fair use, despite the fact that EW has grabbed all possible rights? To be honest, I’m not good enough at this to say yes or no one way or the other, but I wouldn’t fucking trust it.

Any time someone tries to fuck over writers with for-exposure, rights grabby bullshit, I get mad. Those scams are almost always aimed at young writers who are hungry for even acknowledgment, and it’s gross and dishonest–but at least there are resources out there aimed at educating beginning writers about people who want to prey on them. This makes me even angrier because it’s tacitly aimed at a population that has no real reason to even require familiarity with like publishing rights.

Shame on you, Entertainment Weekly. Shame on your house, shame on your publicists, shame on your legal department, shame on your editors.

Categories
writing year in review

2015 Writing Year in Review

Written This Year

Novels: None completed. Edited Fire in the Belly again, edited King’s Hand. Both of them are out at a couple places now. Put some more words on Wrath: a Love Story but got badly sidelined by other projects.

Novellas: 1

Novellettes:  3

Short Stories: 4

Flash: 1

Paid Film Reviews: 6

Treatments: 4

This is probably the fewest stories I’ve ever written in a single year. Part of this is due to the fact that I was taking screenwriting classes all year, and a lot of my writing time got eaten up by homework. I’ve also got several longer pieces in progress, which means they don’t show up on the tally but I spent a lot of time on them.

Also excited because this is the first time I’ve gotten paid to review films!

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: Only one, a shameful “stories that writers who aren’t trans write about trans people” effort.

Best/Favorite story of the year: Favorite is the novelette I just finished writing, Glamazon Versus Deus Ex Machina Man. Best is probably Vaca Muerta and the Hounds of Heck, neither of which I’ve sold yet. But here’s hoping you’ll get to read both of them in the not too distant future.

Magic Spreadsheet wordcount: I have been tracking on the spreadsheet since June 24, 2013.

  • Total words written: 967,047; this puts me at 405,000 words written this year. See, I told you I wrote a shitload even if it didn’t translate out to actual finished stories.
  • Average words per day: 1,110 (better than last year)
  • Days in a row written: 920, so that means for the last two entire years, I have not missed a single day of writing at least 250 words.

Publishing

Queries sent: 40
Rejections received: 25
Pending: 9
Most rejections received: Empty Hallways in Need of Feet has 9 rejections currently, 3 from this year; the former champion, The Long Game, finally got bought by someone! Sometimes I think I should give up on this story, but I just like it too much.
Total earned: $1,133.70, with ~$500 outstanding from various sales at this time. Not nearly as well as I did last year, since I didn’t find another gig like the one I had with Six to Start in 2014.

Published this year:

  1. Superhero, With Crooked Nails in Protectors 2: Heroes
  2. A Brief Memo From Your Amygdala, Re: the Horror Movie We Have Just Seen from Daily Science Fiction (8/4/15)
  3. Only a Crack in a Black Glass Wall in Welcome to the Future
  4. Turbo Kid: Why this BMX Blood Sparkle Unicorn Apocalypse Will Blow Your Mind (review of Turbo Kid) in Mothership Zeta issue 1
  5. Ex Machina Review for Strange Horizons
  6. Avengers: Age of Ultron Review for Strange Horizons
  7. Jupiter Ascending Review for Strange Horizons
  8. Zero Theorem Review for Strange Horizons
  9. [REDACTED]
  10. [REDACTED]

Slated for 2016:

  1. A New Hope (review of The Force Awakens) in Mothership Zeta
  2. Comfort Food in Haunted Futures
  3. .subroutine///end from Shimmer
  4. Fire in the Belly from Mothership Zeta
  5. Silver Fish from Lakeside Circus
  6. The Long Game from Kaleidotrope

Goals for 2016

  1. Be as awesome as Poe Dameron.
  2. Shut up and write
  3. Do the scary thing ASAP oh shit oh shit
  4. Edit together an amazeballs anthology from the glorious, jackalope-infested No Shit Anthology slushpile, seriously I love everyone in this bar and there’s still a little less than a week to get your submission in.
  5. Finish 2 feature length screenplays: Stormcrows and The Heist
  6. Finish writing Wrath: a Love Story
  7. Get your screenwriting certificate from UCLA
  8. Finish up [REDACTED]
  9. Look for a more regular movie review gig; I’d really like to do more of this
  10. Still dreaming of having an agent. Forever dreaming. Though at this point I’d be just as happy to cut out the middle man and go directly to a publisher. Maybe I’ll start bothering smaller presses this year.
  11. Birthday story for TH, got it figured out already and it’s going to be difficult because I’m awful at writing horror.
  12. Do a couple movie torture fundraisers. Maybe Gods of Egypt? That looks terrible.

Other Stuff

  1. Went on my first business trip this year for day job. That was interesting. West Virginia is very pretty and I would not want to live there.
  2. Started playing a first person shooter for the first time ever; Destiny has kind of changed my life.
  3. Went to my first ever professional writer conference. Still mulling over if I think it was worth the cost outlay. It might just be that I’m total shit at networking.
  4. Was crew on a short film. It was… sure something. Stressful and difficult and cool. Still miss all of the wonderful people I worked with on that.
  5. I’ve started running again. I’ve kind of fallen off on the biking just because the roads in Houston scare me way too badly and I have a difficult time waking up early enough to make it for 7AM group ride starts. But running plus the extra walking I’ve been doing thanks to playing Ingress seems to have gone a long way toward fixing my incipient back problems.
  6. The Force Awakens, man. Talk about changing your life. It’s been a long, long time since I was this excited about a movie.
Categories
writing

Where do all the women hide?

I’m sure none of I’m about to say comes as a surprise to anyone reading this blog. But I still think it’s important to say over and over again, as a reminder to myself and others. Because women (and people of color, and people with non-binary genders, and people who aren’t heterosexual [including the dreaded bisexuals]) are not wild animals that hide in trees every time film crews happen to be around.

There are a lot of Indie speculative films that I’m excited about, but the more I build my list, the more painfully obvious it become that women are so rare in these imagined worlds, they might as well be unicorns. I don’t know how any of these people reproduce. At best, you get small films with two male characters and a single female character caught between them (Ex Machina. Z for Zachariah). At worse, it’s an entire team of men, sometimes if you’re lucky with some racial diversity, and the Token Tough Woman. Sometimes there’s also the Token Love Interest Woman. Often, they’re the same woman.

I recently had the privilege of reading some stories by unpublished writers (though I don’t think they’ll remain unpublished for long) and partway through the pile, I couldn’t help but notice that the characters within were either all male, or with a token female. There was only one story I read that had a female main character. I don’t blame new writers for this kind of thing. When I was just starting out, most of my characters were male. The first two novels I ever did for NaNoWriMo had male main characters. I was a couple years into writing my own stuff before I ever wrote a female main character (Hob Ravani, whom you will all get to meet soon, promise) and she was completely surrounded by men.

I think for me, it was partially an outgrowth of the writing I did before I switched to my own original fiction: I wrote a shitload of fanfiction. And with a few exceptions (like Sailor Moon) here and there, my fanfiction was always about male characters, because those were the ones in the anime series or book series or movie that were interesting.

Which brings us back to my list of movies and its depressing lack of women.

I know female characters can and do have interesting stories. I write stories about them now myself. But it’s this vicious cycle where we’re surrounded by media that tells us only men have interesting stories… and the education for the production of that media sure doesn’t help. Look at the beat sheet bible that gets used and overused for film writing: Save the Cat. I don’t think Mr. Snyder is expressing more than the constant background level of societal sexism when he frames all conflicts and characters as being about male characters, and getting the girl, and so on. But it still sticks with you. And then you go and write stories about men, because women are obviously boring and don’t do anything but be the girlfriend.

I finished writing and editing a second-world fantasy novel this year. One of the basic world building concepts was that where the story takes place, the female to male birthrate is two or three to one. And I still had to have it pointed out to me by my long-suffering beta reader that while there were a lot of women as background, almost all of the characters with actual speaking roles were men. And it made no sense. On the edit I went through and changed every male character into a female character unless I had a specific reason he needed to be male. Much better.

I’m working on a screenplay now, for the classes I’ve been taking. Of the core set of characters, one is female and three are male; I can’t really help that, since those three are on a tank crew in a country where crews are all male. But as I’ve continued on, I’ve made a very conscious effort to write the side characters as female unless I have a reason to make them male. And the same principle can be very easily applied to making certain characters of color exist in writing, and characters with different sexualities/gender identities, etc.

And no, this is not “forcing” “political correctness” into my writing. This is actually acknowledging that women exist in the fucking worlds we build as more than furniture in the background. Just like we do in real life. This is challenging my unconscious mental presumption that all characters somehow must be male unless there is a defining need for them to be female. And if other people have a problem with it, it tacitly forces them to admit their sexism (racism/homophobia/transphobia) out loud and attempt justification. Sometimes, in situations like that, people finally listen to themselves talk. Sometimes, other people are listening. It’s a start.

I look forward to the day when I have to go through a story or script I’ve written and switch some of the characters to male because there’s not a realistic enough number. Maybe then I’ll have finally purged that bias from my system.

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.

Categories
writing

Bakery Elf Adventures

A while ago I wrote a little story about those mysterious beings known to the unfortunates who encounter them as bakery elves. This is because I have a friend who has, unwittingly, risen to the bready height of their rank. Since then, I’ve written a couple of sketches about Jester’s adventures as a unproven bakery elf:

First night on the job

Mandatory training

More may come if he keeps telling me amusing stories.

Categories
free read writing

The return of Significant Figures!

Remember that silly story I wrote a year ago, about math and waffles and an alien invasion, only it’s really about choosing your family and loving people for who they are? (And waffles.) It’s back! BuzzyMag has reprinted it and given it oh gosh, the cutest little illustration ever.

So go read it! And eat waffles! Raise a toast to the Blender, may he rest in peace.

Oh and by the way, don’t forget I wrote a bunch of stuff last year that’s eligible for awards!

Categories
writing

Award Eligible Work for 2014

Sure is that magical time of year again! So, this is what I had published in 2014!

Short stories:

Novelette:

All of it is available, free to read, online at the above links. If you have limited reading time, I urge you to read They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain first, then The Heart-Beat Escapement, and then What Purpose a Heart. Stories marked with the green stars contain LGBTQ material.

I also urge you to nominate the Skiffy and Fanty Podcast in fancast and podcast categories! And I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the regular hosts.

I wrote six episodes of the Six to Start game Superhero Workout. The game as a whole is pretty awesome and deserves to be nominated for things as well if you ask me!