A Moving Roundup

I'm still in the throes of my move, spreading my time between Cumbria and Liverpool. We've just moved into a temporary house with a suitcase each. I'm still working fulltime, writing a tech book, and trying to write. I seem to remember this was once about making more time. Maybe when the dust settles.

If I've managed little literary in recent weeks, I have at least watched my betters at their labors. In the last week or so Charlie Stross explained the publishing industry (how does he find time to write books, too?), super short fiction made the grade and a longer work hit the wastebin. We reflected on the gap between our potential and the sad reality we keep on churning out. We saw a book cover designed in two minutes. A.L Kennedy got into a fight with her inner editor. It turned out that there are ten rules to writing fiction. Trouble is, nobody's sure which are the right ones.

Link Clear Out: All Merchandise As New

When I'm keeping up with roundups, I tend to hoard links, and even jot some notes as I go. Recently things got stupidly busy (moving continents, being temporarily homeless, etc), and the feature is on hiatus for a while.

I found these links in my blog queue the other day, though, and quality is quality. So here they are:

In Cumbria/The Do-Over

In Cumbria, UK having come via NYC, Philadelphia, Manchester, which is my excuse for the quiet around here. I'm missing America dreadfully already, but I'm looking forward to getting back to college if I can find one to take me.

Checked in with hilobrow.com, and found I hadn't won the troubled superhero short fiction competition (surprise!). So as promised, here's my entry, slightly edited. The brief was to write about a non-caped type superhero, either troubled or troubling, in 250 words:

One more day for 250 word superhero story competition

There's a micro-fiction competition going on at hilobrow.com. The brief is to create a troubled or troubling superhero in 250 words or less. I should be working on a tech book (the third edition of my PHP Objects book), and submitting a chapter to my writing group, but I couldn't resist having a go. Have you noticed that the thing you shouldn't be doing is always the most attractive.

Even if you're not interested in submitting it's worth visiting to read the stories, which are available as comments to the competition blog post. The standard is pretty high, I think.

I'll repost my little effort here next week, alongside links to the winner/runners up.

If you submit as a result of this post, I'd love a link to it. Hurry up, though.

Stripping down an SF story (Part 3)

I'm returning to this after a short break (sorry about that - turns out that preparing to relocate to another continent is something of a timesuck).

In previous posts I summarized a story by Robert Reed, and looked at some of its features. This time I'll boil the story down to its bones. My objective here is to see if the revealed structure might support new flesh.

Here's how I read the structure:

Stripping down an SF story (Part 2)

In the last post I summarized a story by Robert Reed by breaking it down into scenes. That seems a useful way to start, because at once we get a sense of the structure.

This time, I'm going to look at some interesting features of this story.

Who is the protagonist?
This is a first person narrative, and it follows an established pattern. A faithful servant replaces his king and restores order. It's interesting, though, that in this case the only real instigator throughout is the Emperor himself.

Stripping down an SF story (Part 1)

For a while my submission policy has been completely crazy. It goes a little like this.

I write a story. I make it as good as I can. Then I submit it.

Sound sane? Then you're crazy. There's a key step missing here. I have not been making any serious analysis of the kind of story that my target publications actually want.

To put that right recently (and it's depressing that I've taken so long to come round to this) I've been dismantling published stories in my target publications to work out how they hang together. The process has changed the way I think about writing a genre story.

I started by taking apart a nice story called “The Long Retreat” by Robert Reed. It was published in this month's Science Fiction & Fantasy magazine (total spoilers ahead, don't proceed if you've been saving up this month's SF&F for a read down the pub). In this, and in the next post or two, I'm going to share my workings. This is part of a new site feature I'm trying out under the tag 'noteshare'. In noteshare posts I'll be, er, sharing my notes.

Let's kick off with a story summary.