Well, after yesterday’s pervading gloomy sense of failure, I put in some serious labour on my university work yesterday afternoon to clear the decks for today. My cunning plan being to spend today writing until my knuckles ached.
So I did.
I scrapped all the work I’d done on the short story so far–figuring some of my difficulty with it was my subconscious telling me I was doing it wrong–and started from scratch.
The new version retained the main character’s voice, but switched from first to third person. Two existing scenes lost an event and I merged them into a single slightly longer scene with a more logical progression.
And, in two long sessions, I managed a total of 2700 words. By my standards, that’s not a small number! I’m very pleased with that progress. Now I have a much clearer idea of how to progress the story from where I am.
Needless to say, it was also marvelous to actually devote a full day to nothing but writing. Feels like Christmas!
Alan Baxter’s anthology Crow Shine has recently been nominated for an Aurealis award for best collection, and when you read it it’s easy to see why. It’s a bloody good read, start to finish.
There are nineteen stories from the dark end of the speculative fiction genre, mostly horror, but with a smattering of weird and urban and dark fantasy. Character, time period, geographical setting, and supernatural element are richly varied, so no mid-anthology ennui here. Indeed, the collection starts well and only gets better as it proceeds.
For my money, the closest thing to a weak story is Punishment of the Sun, which, while engaging, I felt lacked clarity in its underlying events. But it’s still a pretty high low, and its surrounded by gems.
Tiny Lives is such a pristine and moving example of shorter short fiction that I read it several times to see what I could learn from it about writing. The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner is a brilliant eldritch pirate story, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and a highlight. Darkest Shade of Grey is like a lost episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker, but with extra added humanity. A Strong Urge to Fly is pure Tales of the Unexpected, with some beautiful, atmospheric prose in the descriptions of the town of Beston-on-Sea. The Old Magic is a moving story of longevity and power. Among these highs, the final story, The Darkness in Clara, in which a woman struggles to make sense of her partner’s death, still manages to stand out as exceptional. Again, moving and humane, with a point to be made about how we harm each other and ourselves.
Peter M. Ball, over on Man Versus Bear, is hosting The Sunday Circle for followers of his blog—in which people answer three questions about their current creative efforts.
What are you working on this week?
What is inspiring you at the moment?
What part of your project are you trying to avoid?
It seems fun, reflexive, and an interesting means to pin a bit of accountability to what you’re up to, so I’m giving it a try.
What are you working on this week?
In general, I’m currently trying to write a series of different short stories. The goal is to go fairly quickly (by my slow standards) and without necessarily thinking too much about future submission, with a view to improving skills and experimenting with viewpoints, styles, genres, and such. Essentially as discussed on a recent Writing Excuses podcast.
Next week, specifically, I’m hoping to progress a short science fiction story with the working title of Good Wolf Bad Wolf. It’s space colony SF looking at the exact moment someone decides to resist a cosy kind of oppression.
What is inspiring you at the moment?
I’m at the start of my final semester of a BA(sociology/criminology), and that inevitably involves a lot of academic reading on what makes people and societies tick. That’s where a lot of my inspiration is presently coming from. When reading about subjectively strange social phenomena, it’s hard not to stop and think, “Hey… what if you wrapped that behaviour around a world? A person? A well-resourced villain?”
What part of your project are you trying to avoid?
The writing. I am avoiding the writing. The, you know, crucial bit. Well, I’m not avoiding it, really, or even genuinely reluctant to engage with it. But the aforementioned study is requiring a lot of my attention as the first round of assessment approaches, and that creates a powerful pressure to enclose my writing time to the service of my study time.
Yet… I know it’s also excuse making. I know perfectly well I can devote an hour per day to writing without impacting study, and that’s enough for progress. Given that my confidence is a bit low at the moment, and I’m finding writing unfamiliar things a bit difficult and awkward, I suspect my subconscious is trying to nudge me towards easier pastures. And I’m not having it!
I read more science fiction than fantasy but write almost exclusively fantasy. The reason is embarrassing. At some point, I can’t say exactly when, I let hard SF—science fiction with a solid scientific basis—intimidate me.
When I first began to write as a young teenager, I was science fiction all the way. Isaac Asimov was my young self’s writing hero and I tried to emulate his style and approach in story after story without the slightest self-consciousness that he was a biochemist and the greatest science writer who ever lived and I was in high school and doing one science subject indifferently well. Not too many years later I was getting personal rejections from the major magazines and had a teenager’s perfect faith that it was only a matter of time until I was a fully fledged science fiction writer hammering on the door of the SFWA.
Three things then went “wrong” more or less simultaneously. I left school, got a job, and had less time and, I thought, inclination to write. My first two accepted stories were, by accident, fantasy. And the next time I paid much attention to the markets “the new space opera” had came along, your Stephen Baxters and Alastair Reynolds and Vernor Vinges and Greg Bears, telling Asimovian stories but with rigorously and brilliantly scientific cores that I didn’t believe for a moment I could emulate. My confidence went down like a ship’s sail in a gale and I never really got it back. But I did tell myself that those published fantasy stories meant that fantasy remained within my reach. Much easier to research how long it takes a horse to go from point A to point B than to suddenly realise an obscure chemical is as well-suited to be the foundation of life as carbon or that quantum physics implies a clever new space drive, I thought.
Thing is, I knew better. For some time my favourite science fiction author has been Ursula K. Leguin, whose work explores social themes rather than physics, and with luminous literary skill. But her work is often described as anthropological or sociological and I’d gotten so far inside my own head that I convinced myself that I was too ignorant of the social sciences to try that sort of thing, either.
Of course, somewhere in there I stopped writing for an eon. When I returned to it as I started university in 2014, I defaulted to fantasy as that was what I did. Only latterly have I been getting restless with my avoidance of my favourite genre. Possibly nearing graduation in a BA(sociology/criminology) has undermined my old conviction that I didn’t know enough to write science fiction. If I can’t bring the social sciences to a story by now then something has gone horribly wrong with my education!
Yet I’ve still been engaged in an anguished debate with myself. As if it were a purely binary decision, I’ve been dithering between fantasy (which I have still been writing, and was the genre of my last published story) and SF (beating myself up as too idiotic to try). My work has slowed to a crawl.
OK, obviously the lesson here is the extent to which a writer’s own fears are their worst obstacles. Do better than me.
Oddly, what broke the deadlock for me was the most recent episode of the world’s best writing podcast, Writing Excuses. In it, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells, and Tananrive Due repeatedly asserted that writing short stories, even if it was no longer foundational to a genre writing career, is a great way to experiment with genres and styles that you might not normally attempt.
Yes, I know, obvious to everyone but me. Hush. Low confidence produces its own special flavour of stupid.
Long story short (too late), I’ve resolved to write an unequivocally, shamelessly, even brazenly science-y science fiction short story in order to settle the matter. Spent today putting together notes for a space opera background that seems good to me. Identified a plot with a nice built-in sociological theme. Began constructing a (I hope) scientifically plausible system of planets to orbit the star Epsilon Indi. When the background’s finished, I’m writing that sucker.
Alan Baxter’s anthology Crow Shine has recently been nominated for an 
Worlds Made of Words 