Derek Zumsteg’s site of doom
“Azure” which really needs a rename. I love the story but it’s way long, which kills the tension and is generally bad news. So.
V1: 8500 words
V2, edited for length: 8900 words (that’s not a joke)
V3, immediate edit following crit yesterday: 8350
V4, yesterday: 7400
There’s at least another 500-700 words coming out of this thing.
I just realized I didn’t post about it here — my short story “Usurpers” is in the current month’s Asimov’s, my first sale of a short story to a science fiction market. I love the story and I’m happy to see it in Asimov’s, which I’ve been reading for ages and am huge on.
I was thinking about writing an “author’s commentary” on it, but I don’t want to spoil it — and I’m not sure how much demand there’d be for that anyway.
But yeah, check it out.
Ira Glass, on storytelling:
I watched this in stark terror the first time. This is me: post-Clarion, I am more than ever able to see and aspire to something and criticize myself for not being there. I write short stories and sit on them, I’ve been working on a book in semi-secret this year and only a couple people read the first chapter, after which I stopped sending pieces out. When I write something I really truly like, I have a weird impulse to stop immediately, put my hands up, say “that’s as good as it gets, I’m going to go learn acoustic guitar or something”.
So yeah. It’s weird, that interview’s been out for almost two years (which would have been a great time for me to see it) but watching it, I felt a lot like I did at Clarion, where if you’re very, very lucky like me, the lesson of the whole thing is the things you’re doing wrong are exactly what you’re most afraid you’ve been doing wrong, so now you have to fix them.
I want to go write.
A story of mine was sweet but the characters were too naive.
I don’t think I ever anticipated that I’d get that response. I think it’s kind of awesome.
I’ve been doing a huge amount of space-related research as part of the book I’m working on, and today I came across this, which I thought I’d share. It’s from an actual space shuttle schematic, a “penetration guide” on how to cut the thing open in case of… I’m not sure why you’d ever need to do this, but anyway:
“Dear God! We have to get into that orbiter immediately!”
“What do we do?”
“Use your Q-34 Penetrator Tool, quickly!”
“Are you coming on to me?”
“There’s no time for that! Shove it in there approximately two feet!”
“Okay! Now what?”
“Wiggle it around.”
“Wiggling…”
“Have you penetrated and destroyed the metal filter which is flush with the payload bay liner?”
“Um… no?”
“Oh well, it’s too late. What do you say we go get a beer or something?”
Yup. I realized I was researching, in pretty serious detail, a list of about a dozen topics that started with:
I wonder, now that I write this, if the scope’s too huge for me to ever start on a book, and I should just write a draft and figure out the science later by having people in those fields read and laugh at it.
It’s a doozy, though. I’m totally jazzed.
My story about (beeeeep) in (beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep), written at Clarion West, honed through the fine crit skills of my comrades, sold to Asimov’s. Details to follow, but this is my first sale to Asimov’s — my first sale to any of the esteemed digests. I’m super happy. Especially since I read and love Asimov’s.
During Clarion, every week I turned in my story in a sweat, freaked out, anxious, exhausted from the week’s effort, wondering if I’d gone mad, if it was any good, if I’d made any progress at all. I would, seriously, turn in, sit down quietly somewhere for a couple minutes to calm down, and then take a shower, or go for a walk, or fall asleep.
I wrote harder, in an exertion sense, then I’d ever before. And here’s the thing that’s come to me: you don’t stop writing that hard. The things I learned don’t make it easy to crank out a story. They made it harder. In some cases, far harder — putting the visceral and the emotional in my stories is still a huge struggle, for instance, and it puts the fear into me again, and when I don’t pull it off I want to bang my head against a wall.
Looking back, I’m not sure why that’s a surprise. I didn’t expect that in week four, Kelly would say “and surprise, here’s the secret to turning out consistently great short stories — drink a cup of green tea quickly five minutes before you sit down! There it is, everyone! Don’t spread it around, because you’d only be helping your competition.”
And yet it’s hard to grasp: to write stories I liked as much as the ones I produced in those six weeks, I have to work just as hard as I worked then. The difficulty setting on the treadmill only goes up.
Unless you write some flash fiction, right Gary?
“If I may offer you some advice, Anshinnal,” he said, “taunting the crow is a really poor idea.”
My last story at Clarion West, I wrote a fantasy story about an assassin with painfully heightened senses forced to fight in daylight out of desperation. I spent a ton of time on the world and the dynamics, the sweeping conflict he’s caught up in, the economics of a slavery economy, and most of that ended up torn out to make deadline and focus on the story at the heart of it.
It’s been two weeks, and I still don’t know what to do with it. Putting the larger world in means I’d be running at novelette size immediately, while trimming it down seems like an even more painful cut.
I wrote five new stories at Clarion West. In order, they are:
Nature and Applicability of Incompleteness in Marketing and Domestic Contexts. Wooo!
Earth in the Future is Earth in the Past. I like this a lot, but it needs some quality rework.
Single Incident Study of Modern Training Programs Competing Against Genetic Doping in High School Athletics (aka “King”). Here’s Clarion for you: it’s hard to me to believe I wrote this, I like it so much.
Making a Killing. Near-future heist setup. Nice concept, needs connective tissue. Could be expanded into a book.
Marks. My try at fantasy. I don’t know what to think about it still.
And I rewrote Archipelago almost entirely in week one: the Word diff shows ~80% new, which doesn’t mean I at least rewrote the sentences and scenes as I went.