The Ferryman

Hey, you guys, remember when I told you about the Walk the Fire anthology which contains a swell story by me? No? Click here. Well, my friend John Anealio wrote and recorded a song for the book called The Ferryman. Click through to listen and download it for free! Who's that Matthew guy, he mentions? Hmmmm . . .

Read the book, listen to the song, immerse yourself in the world of Walk the Fire!

http://johnanealio.com/track/the-ferryman

Write With Spider!

StarShipSofa does a lot of cool webinars that hook up people like you and me with folk who are successful in creative fields and Tony has sent me some info on the latest. Spider Robinson is going to be talking to participants about writing science fiction and he's a guy who knows how it works. He's been writing professionally for forty years and has won three Hugo awards and a Nebula. He's probably best known for his novels and stories featuring Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.

If you're a writer or are thinking about becoming one, you may want to check this out. Even if you're not a writer, as a listener of Spider's podcast, I can tell you that the guy's a great storyteller with a beautiful voice and you may want to sit in on this for the sheer entertainment. Click the picture above or this link http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/4880911939/Spider1/47219574345 and you'll be whisked away to a page where you can learn more and sign up. If you can't make it to the webinar, you can still sign up and get a recording of the show about a week later. Blast off!

Dad Was A Veteran

Dad was a veteran. He fought from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines, re-upping again and again because he didn't want to leave his brothers behind. Unlike a lot of vets, he talked about the war. He talked about it enough to shape me, to make me realize how bloody evil war is. He told me about the guy who got his head blown off and the six feet that the guy's decapitated body walked before it collapsed. He told me about Japanese soldiers who strapped landmines to their bodies and threw themselves under tanks. He told me about rape, murder and cannibalism.

Dad was 100% disabled by government standards. He once showed me the paperwork that confirmed 60% of that disability was psychological. I can't believe that anyone could come out of a ground war like that without being psychologically damaged.

He also taught me - without meaning to - that there are no heroes in war. Soldiers can do heroic things. My dad did heroic things. He saved lives and I don't just mean here on the homefront. I knew a guy who owed my father his life. Dad pulled him from the burning wreckage of a plane. My father escaped after two weeks in a Japanese prison camp when he and two others overpowered guards and took their weapons. One of those two others died during the fight. The other took a different direction outside the walls and dad never knew what happened to him.

My dad also did evil things, stuff that I won't share here and stuff that was in no way unique to him. Accepted policy and procedure during wartime that you won't find written anywhere as well as some things that weren't so accepted. He told me two or three years before he died that if there was a Hell, he was going to it. That sort of thing was a rare admission from him.

People do what they feel they need to do in war. It brings out the worst and the best in people, in individuals. I don't vilify my father in my heart. He performed acts noble and vile. He was human in a nightmarish situation. And I understand that the things that he and his fellow soldiers did preserved our way of life here at home. 

I'd like people to educate themselves on what wars are really like so maybe we'll have less of them and we won't need to put human beings anywhere in the world through the meat grinder. I hope one day we see a Veterans Day where there are no veterans of war to thank because there haven't been any wars in a lifetime. 

In the meantime, my thanks to all our veterans for their incredible sacrifices.

WTF!

Walk the Fire! That's the e-book in which you'll find my latest story, Aborted Love with Chaos Motor at Lucky Pierre's! That's number 138 of The One-Thousand. You can get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Walk-The-Fire-ebook/dp/B009GQYF6E

Or just click on the cover above.

So the book is a shared world anthology set in a universe in which there are certain fires which can each trace their origin back to one eternal fire discovered in a cave in France long ago. If you step into one of these fires, you might step out from another one, whether it's miles or light years away. You might also get lost forever, unless you're escorted by one of the Ferrymen, people who are able to navigate the space between fires safely. My fellow authors have come up with a wide variety of scenarios for stories set in this world, some of which take place in the past.

My story takes place in the future on planets far from Earth, wherein a trio of feminist revolutionaries from the Democratic Republic of the Congo are on the run, having stolen a very valuable artifact. The guy that's after them has a strong and complicated connection to one of the three. And one of the others seems just a bit insane. There's also a robot, a sociopath and snails. Lots and lots of snails.

As I post this, you have about six and a half hours left to grab a chance to win a free copy of the book from me. Hop on Twitter and retweet one of the contest tweets I've posted this weekend and you're entered to win. That's all there is to it. You can find me here: twitter.com/upwithgravity. You don't even have to follow me, but it would be swell if you did.

To top it all off, here's the beginning of the story to prime your pumpiness:

ABORTED LOVE WITH CHAOS MOTOR AT LUCKY PIERRE'S

by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The ocean filled her head.

Saltwater packed Shoksi's skull air-foam tight. It filled her gaping mouth and trickled down into her throat, toward her starving lungs just so. A little more. A little more.

Indroid! Shoksi's mind screamed to her onboard systems. Which way is up? Eight hundred and ninety three arrows, fluorescent orange in the green sea, swam past her vision like a school of fish. They pointed toward her feet. She flipped over and pushed her cold sluggish muscles for whatever they had left.

Shoksi broke through the skin. Her sinuses were on fire, her hearing bubbled and muted. Her throat spasmed between sucking in air and coughing up water in spatters and glugs. Through dripping curls she saw Tambi's head bobbing along the dark waters. They weren't far from a beach, thank god. Crowds hooted from the shore. The sky was pink.

“Where's Asha?” Tambi cried.

“I'll find her,” Shoksi said in a phlegm-choked voice. But as she fought for breath for the dive she saw a large form rising up beneath them. A mini-sub? Standing on top of it was that fool of a Firewalker. Asha's gloved fists broke the surface first, then her head with a great sucking gasp. Whatever she stood on knocked Shoksi off balance as it caught up all three of them. Shoksi fell back down, soaked her head again before her rear end hit the platform. She came into the air once more, wiped her fingers across her eyes and pushed her heavy hair aside. What the hell was going on?

“Yes! Yes!” Asha was shouting to the sky. She turned to the people on shore and pumped her fists. They ate it up. Whatever had rescued the three women had raised edges and began to resemble a raft as it drained. Bone white and navy blue, it sported a texture like a basketball. Shoksi felt lighter, even out of the water. Less gravity here. A low-flying seabird swooped close enough that the air smacked her as it passed.

The raft said something to them in what sounded like English.

“Lingala,” Shoksi said with a cough. “Or even French.”

"Sorry about that, ladies," the raft said in accented French, as it swept them toward the nearby shore. "People here like to exercise what they think is a sense of humor." It extended a bit of its edge into a hand shape, pointing into the air opposite the shore. A thin plastic pipe rose about six meters above the water. A Flame erupted from a brass fitting at its top. Across the sky beyond that was projected a replay of the three women emerging from that Flame and falling into the ocean below. Then idiot Asha rising from the ocean like a rockstar. The people on the beach were lined up waiting for them.

Shoksi instinctively went for her collapsible automatic. Kill them all, men first. But sadly, her hand slapped empty webbing on her pant leg. That's right. Tambi had said no weapons. Damned Tambi. Shoksi vomited a little sea water, only partially over the edge of the raft. She felt the alkaline burn of bile up inside her nose.

“What the hell kind of piece of shit Firewalker are you?” she shouted at Asha.

“Are you kidding?” Asha asked, looking down at her. “You should be thrilled! I had no idea we were going to come through alive!”

“What?”

“She's not a real Firewalker,” Tambi said. Her long horse face wasn't looking at Shoksi, but toward their reception committee.

“You're telling me this now?”

“You can't let a real Firewalker in on a Church heist! You know that!”

“I'm almost a Firewalker!” Asha said.

“Almost?”

A cloud of odd insects converged around the raft, each one hovering rather than buzzing about. Cameras. To Shoksi there was no such thing as good publicity. There were others higher up in the Culture Clash that handled that better than she did. She didn't know what this was, but she did know it wasn't part of the plan.

“Tell me you still have the motor!” Shoksi said to Tambi, remembering what had brought them to this point.

“I don't have your strength,” Tambi said holding up the little device by the handle, “But nothing would make me let go of this.”

“Thank god! Let's hope the water hasn't ruined it.”

“If it was that easy, it would have been ruined already.”

“Everybody's white.” Asha said, studying the shore. She still stood, as if this raft was her personal chariot. “I mean everybody.”

"We must be far out," Tambi said. "These people's ancestors probably left Earth when North America and Europe were still wealthy.”

“Australia,” the raft said.

“Same thing. Boat, we need to get back to that Flame. This isn't the world we wanted."

“There are plenty of other Flames on shore,” the raft said. “A lot easier to reach too.”

“Plenty?”

“Welcome to Pearth,” it said. “P-E-A-R-T-H. I guarantee you haven't seen anything like it before.”

If you want to read the rest of the story, enter to win a copy of the book on Twitter twitter.com/upwithgravity or just go buy the darned thing! http://www.amazon.com/Walk-The-Fire-ebook/dp/B009GQYF6E

Thanks, folks!

Catching Lightning In An IPod

On my walk this evening. For some perspective the light to the lower left of the lightning is a house light and the lumpy dark blobs behind that are trees.

A Reminder

If you want to skip to the good part, it's below in bold print.

This is an important reminder for you. At least I think it's for you. It's definitely for other writers, probably for other artists and possibly for other human beings.

I've been writing stories to submit to magazines for over twenty one years now and I still make rookie mistakes. I keep forgetting all those good, hard lessons I've learned over the decades and when I remind myself about them I feel dumb and then get back on track.

My life has gotten a lot better recently. With the payment of some big bills and a new position at my store, things are lined up more than ever for me to devote more time to writing.

And I'm not writing.

Or, more precisely, I waste a bunch of time to avoid the heck out of writing, then I write a little, then I bounce off and waste a bunch more time. That's right. The thing that I've wanted to do with my life since I was a kid, I don't do it. Even when I've adjusted my life to give myself plenty of opportunities to do it.

Rather than seek out medication which might throw everything into chaos, I look at the symptoms, I look at what I've learned, and I smack myself in the head. Because avoidance of this thing I want to do always boils down to the same cause: Perfection.

Perfection is the devil. It freezes you up at the keyboard and makes you climb the walls. Did Linda Blair climb the walls? It's been twenty years since I last watched, but probably. The devil's got a thing for horizontal surfaces, I think. Perfection is particularly devilish, because you don't know it's there. You think it's a thing you put behind you long ago. But then, why are you frozen when you're not busy wall-climbing? Damn it. There it is.

The solution is easy. Stop trying to be perfect. Just do something. Do anything. Be crappy on purpose. This is something I've told myself a few thousand times and still forget. That's why I need the reminder and maybe you needed it right now too. Doing something half-assed is more progress than not doing it at all.

Okay, I see now, that this advice is definitely not for everyone. Please ignore this if you're a surgeon, for instance. I'm sorry, but you'll have to figure out your own shit. Try a surgery blog.

Light Bulb

I've always experimented with different ways to write stories. I dig trying something just to see if it will work. But it struck me today that my best stories were written using the same method. I'll share that here with you, in case you can take something from it. This is an overview, of course. There are a thousand tiny details beyond this in any story.

I have a nebulous germ of an idea and I feel the mood of the thing. Mood is key to make me want to write the thing. I've started hundreds of pieces that just lie down dead after a few paragraphs or pages. They go nowhere because I don't feel anything for them.

I hardly have characters in mind at this point. If anything, they're just placeholders. Given the idea and the mood, I figure out what sort of interaction between characters would evoke such a mood and I start writing dialogue or rudimentary direction. If I have more than one interaction in mind that will capture the feeling for me, I write the dialogue for each one. They're like lines from a play. There isn't necessarily an order to these pieces yet. The characters are being created line by line and any words they say, any movements they make, all go toward making them who they ultimately become.

An order sort of suggests itself as I go and I write any connecting bits as they occur to me. Throughout the process, I'm throwing in whatever cool ideas I want to throw in, whether they're details, lines or situations. A narrative is starting to form, partly guided by the developing characters. By now I have a rough idea of the beginning, middle and end of the story.

After I've written as much as I can think of and added enough detail to put some meat on the skeleton, I call it a first draft. Even if there are holes or entire scenes missing because I can't yet think of anything to write in those places.

Then I outline. Yes. After the first draft. I write down a sentence for each scene or key interaction and bullet point them. This way, on a single screen, I can see the flow of the story, the order of events, the number of scenes and what chunks are missing. Now I can see if scenes need to be rearranged, where the action is happening, which character is really the focus and what sorts of scenes I need to fill in those holes. I can also see if there are extraneous characters or scenes which can be collapsed into single characters or scenes.

I make any changes according to what I've discovered in the last step.

I rewrite, making it as close to a finished story as I can.

I send it to friends and fellow writers and ask them to tell me what works for them and what doesn't.

I go over their feedback and follow the advice with which I agree or set aside that with which I don't. Consensus is an important part of this. If one person says a character's action doesn't make any sense, that's probably not a real problem. If many people say that action doesn't make sense, I need to fix that.

I rewrite to fix any issues. Bang. I've got myself a story.

###

A few months ago I came up with a list of points of what, in my opinion, makes a great story. You're welcome to agree or disagree. I'm showing them to you in case you can get anything useful from them, not to start an argument.


A Story Well Told needs:

1. A Killer idea
2. A beginning that drags you in
3. To be told with Excitement and Crackling words
4. An emotional aspect
5. Characters that you believe are real people
6. An ending:
     a. The reader doesn't expect
     b. That makes sense
     c. That hits home

I hope something here helps you. Good luck.

Podcastomania!

I've dabbled in a boatload of podcasts recently, for some strange reason. If you miss the sound of my voice, you're in luck!

I was on the panel for the SF Signal Podcast number 133 and we talked about spoilers. How long is long enough before we can spoil the shit out of something?

Then a little later I did a Mango style intro for the SF Signal Podcast number 138.

I contributed a 100 word story to Laurence Simon's 100 Word Story Podcast number 325. Laurence and others promised to donate a buck to the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life for each story contributed to this episode, so I had to kick a story in. The theme for this episode's stories? Life. This is a huge, huge show. Like, over four hours. I'm near the end, but there are so many stories here, you're bound to enjoy lots of them, so you may want to listen.

Christie Yant and I read our pal Grant Stone's awesome story, Young Love on the Run from the Federal Alien Administration New Mexico Division (1984), on StarShipSofa number 248.

I got in on a panel for the SFF Audio Podcast number 171 in which we discuss new releases and recent arrivals in the realm of science fiction and fantasy audio books.

And just yesterday SFF Audio ran a show we recorded the same day in which we discuss a science fiction story by Jack London called A Thousand Deaths on episode 173. If you haven't read it, don't sweat it, because before we start yapping, Julie Hoverson reads it for you!

And if, after all of that, you're still not sick and tired of the sound of me, head over to my hovel away from home, Beware the Hairy Mango! A new episode will be popping up less than two hours from the time I write this!

Get me into your hot ears and enjoy it all!

Do What You Can With What You've Got

138

Man, working on the novel means these stories are few and far between, but I finally finished story 138 of The One-Thousand! It's called Aborted Love With Chaos Motor at Lucky Pierre's. I usually don't let you guys in on the titles until they've been accepted. In this case, I was invited to contribute to an anthology and the editor accepted this today, shortly after I sent it. I really dig this story and once it's out, I'll tell you how you can get it.

Guest Dog

Daisy's crashing at our place for a few days. You know, while she looks for work.

We Visit The Dali

There's a Salvadore Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida that I've been wanting to visit for decades. It's over three hours away by car, so I've never gotten around to it, but The Boy and I finally hit it today and we agreed it was fantastic, worth the many hours on the road. Here's the site: http://thedali.org/home.php

The museum just moved into a new building about a year and a half ago. The bottom floor is all gift shop, second floor is for staff and third for the galleries. We couldn't take photos inside the galleries, as you may imagine, but I'm sure you can find images of almost everything online. The Boy wanted to sneak some photos anyway, but those people watch you like hawks. We could take photos outside of the gallery, so here are a few of those. Click on the images to see larger versions. I shouldn't have to tell you that really. You should know how to use the Internet by now.

Here's me on a melty bench.

Much more after the jump! 

Little Bummer

Just a quick one. I'm plugging away at 138 of The One-Thousand and I realized all these little things I post on Twitter and Facebook are keeping me from posting here. So I'm posting here. Maybe the posts will get shorter but more numerous. Who know? By the way that "s" was left off on purpose.

Some people like to figure out mystery stories and twist ending stories ahead of time. I'm not one of those people. In fact, I try hard not to think too much about what's going to happen because I like to be surprised. Well, I was just listening to Philip K. Dick's The Skull (number 14 here: http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-030/) and I just ruined it for myself. Maybe Dick made it too obvious, but now I'm bummed.

Kaizinga!

I'm as tired as an old joke tonight. I was up at five a.m. after a slow trickle of sleep, the feed torn from my arm long before my vein belly was filled. Two hour meeting at the job, then off to celebrate my daughter's seventeenth birthday with movies and more movies, junk food on top of junk food served between two cupcake pizzas and 64 oz. Crisco sodas all around. Got a little nap, then unsleepytime misery, trying to crawl from the grave into the living room and a little fun with The Sims. She had a great day.

Now, though, still running on the distant memory of fumes, all I want to do is sleep. But I'm Kaizening myself into getting some things done. It's a Japanese philosophy of improvement for corporations, but as Kaizen applies to an individual, it's basically conning your lazy ass into doing something by taking on a ridiculously small piece of it. 

"I'm just going to fold one shirt."

"I'm just going to write one sentence."

"I'm just going to walk twenty feet."

And maybe you do just that, which is something you wouldn't have otherwise done or, which is often the case, you do a bit more because you're there anyway. It's good for getting something from yourself when you don't want to give anything.