What's Goin' On

Real quick, because I haven't been here for a while, but I also want to go to bed.

Welcome to followers Polenth, who's been here for a while, and to Spacey who's newer.

Finished story 131 the other day.

Just chose my stories for Beware the Hairy Mango #44. The Boy effed up the desktop where the show's music is, so I'll have to hunt around for new files.

Finished The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin today. It's event when I actually finish reading a book because I'm always distracted by . . .

I've been wanting to read the book for years, since I saw the A&E version with James Caan and Lisa Bonet. Some deep shit going on in the book that I could appreciate, though I'm not bright enough to fully digest it.

That's it for now. More another time, I hope.

The Guy Who Hated Thanksgiving

You may think this is going to be some sort of parable or funny story from the title. No and no. On one of my first Thanksgivings in Florida my father and brother were out working shortly before dinner. Their work was towing vehicles, reselling or scrapping them, that sort of thing. They came back to the house obviously moved by something. They'd towed a car in a really poor part of town and talked to some people there, among them the guy who hated Thanksgiving.

He hated Thanksgiving, in fact he hated all holidays, because he was poor and couldn't give his family what they knew so many other families in the U.S. had. I'm not talking about a new X-Box here. I'm talking about food on the table.

I've got some extreme righty beliefs but what I have more of is extreme lefty beliefs (as well as some that fall into neither camp. I've got something to piss off everybody). Among other things, I believe a strong nation needs not only a strong military, but a population that's well fed, as healthy as possible and well educated. We seem to find unending supplies of money for only one of those things. Beyond the interests of national strength, though, there's basic human decency and the desire to ease a person's suffering.

I'm asking everyone who reads this to consider doing something to relieve hunger. If you want to do something on a grand scale, that's wonderful, but I know most of us don't. Tiny things done by many people work wonders as well. I'm not trying to guilt anyone. What I'm trying to say is many of us can give something small so as to not even feel the pain. So why not do it?

Donate a little something to a food charity. Five bucks. One buck. A can of food. Something you won't even feel, but something. Buy food for a homeless person you see on the street. Bake a little something for a neighbor who's seeing hard times. Go play Free Rice for a few minutes. Anything you can do, any little thing that will fill a belly for a few hours is one of the noblest things any one of us can do. And it really does make the world a better place.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone. I hope you have a fantastic holiday. And if you don't live in the U.S., just have a fantastic Thursday.

130

Just finished and sent out story 130, my first story in nearly two months. That's sobering. Shipped it off to The New Yorker because, like the lottery (not Shirley Jackson's), you can't win if you don't play. And your odds at being published in The New Yorker, as impossible as they may seem, are much better than your odds at winning the lottery.

A Body Is For Driving

Go read my latest story, A Body is for Driving, in Grant Stone's sparkly new fanzine, b0t. http://b0tzine.com/ Its beautiful cover is by Ashley Storrie.

b0t is published as an epub file, meaning you can read it on the plastic reading device of your choice. If that device happens to be a big-ass computer, Firefox has an add-on called, strangely enough, EPUBreader, which works pretty well.

Now go enjoy and you can tell me how wonderful I am later.

NaFlaWriMo

My take on National Novel Writing Month will be National Flash Writing Month. I'm going to write 50,000 words of flash fiction this November. Let's say 250 words a piece (Though that's not in stone) so we're looking at 200 stories. I believe this is in line with my goal as I may try to sell some of them, and expand others to short stories. I can use goofy ones for the Beware the Hairy Mango podcast.

That's all for now.

Dear Some People On The Internet

Dear Some People On The Internet,

You get upset at stupid things.

Many people die horrible and unjust deaths in this world. Many starve. Babies are beaten to death.

And you throw shitfits when someone offends you with their words.

Grow up. Grow a spine. The world isn't a polite place to be. We living things eat each other to survive.

Mom used to say, "If they're calling you names, just ignore them." What Mom knew but didn't say was that you can't change an asshole, so what are you going to do? Raise your blood pressure? Who's in control of you? You or Mean People?

I'm betting that people who have to struggle for food or for survival in a war zone somehow don't let other people's words eat them up. We can't help that we were born into our soft lifestyles, but let's get some perspective here. At the very least carry yourselves with some dignity so you don't look like whiners to the other three-quarters of the planet.

If you're planning to comment that I'm getting upset over a stupid thing, don't strain your fingers. I already know that.

It Just Ain't Happenin'

As late as one month ago, I thought I could still pull off my goal of 52 stories in 2010 and a flurry of activity ensued. Then life straightened my ass out again. I won't bore you with a litany of excuses, I'm just letting you know it ain't happenin'. If I can't do that, I have no idea how I'll make my ultimate goal after which this blog is named. However, I'm not fretting at the moment. I'm still moving in that direction and If I end up being like one of those marathon runners who limp over the finish line fourteen hours after everyone else has left, I'll be okay with that.

That being said, this has still been the most successful year ever for my writing career, so you're not going to hear too much bitching from me. I haven't really gone into my health, but about a month and a half ago I found out I was zooming down that slope into all those middle-age fat diseases and decided I wasn't going to have any of it. I've dropped twenty-five pounds since then. Everybody was telling me how great I looked yesterday. Once I drop the remaining twenty-five, they'll only be talking to each other: "Jesus, Matt looks sickly!" Normal looks sickly to Americans..

Gord Zajac, the swell guy who edited my story Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range for Chizine was nudging me about a novel the other day and I told him, "Not now," and then pulled out an incomplete novel and started digging into it. Don't anybody get your hopes up.

I'm reading some Raymond Carver right now as I have a couple of stories in suspension that could really benefit from his influence.

If you need some Fiction Crawler in your life, head over to this week's StarShipSofa. I apologize for talking so damn fast in it. I didn't realize it until I listened to it in comparison with everyone else. You also get a story by Pat Cadigan, the First Lady of Cyberpunk!

Aural Delights No 159 Pat Cadigan & Jason Sanford

Coming Up This Week

Announcements: Larry Santoro on StaShipSofa Stories Vol 2

Fact: Fiction Crawler by Matthew Sanborn Smith:

Main Fiction: Life on Earth by Pat Cadigan

Fact: Looking Back at Science Fiction by Amy H Sturgis

Serial: Sublimation Angels Pt 2 by Jason Sanford

Fact: Everything by Morgan Saletta

Promo: Schlock Magazine

Narrators: Cheryl Martin, Josh Roseman

Fiction Crawler Links:

In Pacmandu by Lavie Tidhar

Michelangelo’s Chisel by Christopher Miller

The Strega Cristobel and the Old Rattler Ken by Larry Santoro

Daughter Earth by James Morrow Pt 1

Daughter Earth by James Morrow Pt 2

Elegy for a Young Elk by Hannu Rajaniemi

Yellow Card man by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Ones That Got Away

You can listen to my latest story, The Ones That Got Away (64 in the canon), on this week's episode of StarShipSofa. It's narrated by my golden-voiced chum, Grant Stone. There's other good stuff on the show that you can also listen to.






Aural Delights No 158 Jason Sanford & Jeff Carlson

StarShipSofa Stories Vol 2

Coming Up This Week

Announcements: StaShipSofa Stories Vol 2

Flash Fiction: The One That Got Away by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Interview: Jeff Calson

Main Fiction: Meme by Jeff Carlson

StarShipSofa Interrogations: China Meiville

Serial: Sublimation Angels Pt 1 by Jason Sanford

Narrators: Mike Boris, Josh Roseman

Sale To Nature!

I sold my story, Steve Sepp, Tasty! Tasty! (story 128) to Nature! "Wait," you say, "Isn't that a science journal (Maybe the science journal)?" It is, but they leave a little room in the back for a flash-fiction piece. They've also published Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Sterling and currently, my Twitter pal, Polenth Blake. As Bart Simpson might say, "I am so juzzed!"

I've got a sneaking suspicion that this qualifies as my third pro-sale as far as SFWA is concerned. If so, we may be hooking up soon.

As a bit of icing, I sent off 129 last week.

Now I Am A Gazelle

If you missed my prancing, see here: http://theonethousand.blogspot.com/2010/07/prancing-through-bookstore.html

A couple of days ago, a guy at the store asked for something and as we walked back to get it he said, "Man, you must have been an athlete. You move like a gazelle!" Certainly the first time I've ever heard those words. And I'm quite confident that he wasn't hitting on me. If this keeps up, people will demand to see video of me walking around.

The magnificent Harlan Ellison says that he is dying: http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=30610 Which makes me a sad gazelle. You can listen to my open letter to Harlan Ellison on this subject here at the very beginning of the latest episode of StarShipSofa's Aural Delights: http://www.starshipsofa.com/20100929/aural-delights-no-156-robert-reed/

If you want to read my latest published work, head over to Twitter where Grant Stone's embryonic fanzine, b0t, is tweeting my Twitter serial, CITY1. One part is being released each day in October. Look: http://twitter.com/b0tzine If you're not familiar with Twitter, you'll have to read those posts (marked with the hashtag #CITY1) from the bottom up.

My Casino Cameo

I make a brief appearance at http://www.casinoonline.co.uk this week. The article is The Top 50 Gambling Books of All Time. As I've gained world-renown for tweeting about Casino Royale, editor Holly Emblem asked if I could talk about the novel as a whole in a single tweet. I did, and you can read the results here:

http://www.casinoonline.co.uk/book-reviews/top-50-gambling-books

This is essential reading for the Matthew Sanborn Smith completist and it's free and it will only take a couple of seconds of your life. Go read.

StarShipSofa Stories Volume 2

http://www.youtube.com/v/s6ONVlpR9G8?fs=1&hl=en_GB

127, 128

Welcome new followers Robyn, Baedon and Philipp!

Stories 127 and 128 are out the door. I feel this news would be slightly more interesting if I gave you the titles as well, but now I'm all paranoid and think some editors might give enough of a crap to Google titles I send them and if they see the story's been floating around for months, they'll figure they didn't get it first and will be offended and will reject my story on that basis alone. It's all very stupid of me.

I'll have another story or two done in the next few days. I've really got to crank it now if I'm going to make my goal of 52 in 2010. Right now that's 9 stories for the year, 43 to go!

Maisy's Many Souls

My latest story, Maisy's Many Souls (number 75 of The One-Thousand) is available in GUD magazine's issue #6! You can score yourself a copy here: http://www.gudmagazine.com/vault/6

So you know, It's not one of my happy/funny/pleasant stories which Mango fans might expect.

I often like to do the story behind the story, which I'll do here and now. You can come back and read this after you've read the story if you want, there are some minor spoilers here.

The story behind Maisy's Many Souls

I come up with story ideas in a lot of ways, one way being to write a bunch of silly sounding phrases down and see if they inspire something. This time, one of the things I wrote was, "Maisy had jars," and I looked at that and wondered what Maisy had in those jars. I decided she had souls in those jars and then I decided they were on circuit boards.

I wanted a little conflict so I created a human rights guy (that's the technical term) who wants to protect those souls and he's got a partner. Maybe they're a different sort of partners. Then I wanted to throw one more element in to make things interesting. His partner makes sculptures out of light. And that was it. I was off to the races with four or five sentences. If you've read the story, you'll know there's one more rather major idea, but that wouldn't come to me until later.

I wrote a huge chunk of this story on my AlphaSmart 3000 while waiting around at my job while off the clock because I had ordered my iPod and had it sent there to avoid shenanigans. So one of the things I did while waiting for FedEx was to hole myself up in an office and write. This worked marvelously because there were no distractions and no internet and I wrote some great stuff. I was in a flow which was mostly dialogue. Once I get into conflict, it's usually all dialogue in the first draft and then I fill in other stuff later. I realized something was happening in this story, I had risen above the plateau I'd been on for quite some time. Something new and interesting was coming out of me and the characters were coming alive.

I realized something else. I was onto some dark shit. It wasn't horror, but I was getting inside these people and not liking what was there. The whole story made me uncomfortable and when I reread it two weeks ago, not having read it for fifteen months, it still made me feel uncomfortable. I showed it around and got some really positive reactions but everyone agreed that one of the characters made a decision near the end that just wasn't believable.

My thanks to friend and writing compadre Grant Stone who gave me the solution. I immediately forgot it, tried a couple of things and finally hit on something that worked. It was only after I went back to Grant's e-mail that I found I had done exactly what he told me.

Thanks to Colleen Leong who liked the story so much she made me believe it was really good.

Thanks to the gang at GUD magazine, a very nice bunch of people with whom I hope I can work in the future.

Finally, thanks to Mike Ramshaw who passed away earlier this year. Mike was a co-worker (Like Colleen) and a dear friend and I loved him. I wish I could have given him a big hug before he died. Mike was a great writer who never got around to sending his work out to publishers. He was the best first reader any writer could ask for. He questioned everything from the use of a particular semi-colon to the major themes of a story and everything in between. And he wasn't afraid to tell you when something was awful. His extensive notes and our ensuing discussion helped flesh out lots of little details in Maisy. Maisy's kitchen came alive because of Mike and the Kiss-Me-Quick T shirt was all his.

Thanks, Mike.