Stories

I've got a new and tiny, one story Fiction Crawler on this week's StarShipSofa, in which I try to convince any of you who are eligible to nominate stories for the Hugos, to read Blood, Blood by Abbey Mei Otis, in my opinion, the best story of 2010. Listen here, about 49:00 in and click the links to the story at the bottom of that post, or below: http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2011/03/16/starshipsofa-no-180-nebula-nominated-christopher-kastensmidt/

Blood, Blood Part 1: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20101115/blood-f.shtml
Blood, Blood Part 2: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20101122/blood-f.shtml

Please read this excellent story and consider nominating it. There's only a little over a week left!

In other news, I'll have a piece of brand new flash fiction appearing at Chizine for their big-ass site re-launch in April! I'll remind you and link to it, when the time comes.

Thank You, Anonymous Friend!

Some wonderful one of you who doesn't want his or her identity to be revealed (even to me), has covered the fee for me for StarShipSofa's Online Writer's Workshop which I mentioned here a few days ago (You still have about a day and a half to sign up)! All I can say is:

THANK YOU!

I appreciate it greatly and would give you a big smooch if I knew who you were. Maybe that's why you don't want me to know! To sit at the virtual feet of Michael Swanwick, Sheila Williams and the gang as they dispense their wisdom for an hour or two is a fantastic opportunity. I'll pay your generosity forward in the future!

Who was that masked stranger?

132

Story 132 is done and out the door. Jesus, it's been three months since my last one!

StarShipSofa Online Writers Workshop

Welcome to new followers, Munsi and CynCB!

You've got one week left to sign up for the StarShipSofa Online Writers Workshop. http://writers-workshop.eventbrite.com It's a couple hours of advice and answers from some big names in the science fiction and fantasy field (including one of my favorite authors). And a week after the workshop, participants get a video download of the whole thing so they can return to those words of wisdom again and again. Here's a little rundown of the agenda and presenters:The Beginning - Gregory Frost

• Plot Tricks from the Dark Side - James Patrick Kelly
• How To Fix Your Story After It's Written and You Discover That It Doesn't Work - Michael Swanwick
• Why Writing Groups - Mercurio D. Rivera
• What An Editor Wants - Sheila Williams
• Question And Answers - All

You can get all the details and sign up here: http://writers-workshop.eventbrite.com

Helping Christchurch

As of this writing, the numbers I'm seeing on the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand are 113 dead and hundreds still missing. If you want to lend a hand, here's the website for the Red Cross http://www.redcross.org.nz/ . Make a donation, help some folks out.

Also, If you're a geek and want something cool in exchange for your donation, check this out: Drive Thru RPG is offering up something like 41 role playing pdf files for just $20.00 to help out the Red Cross. Grant Stone tweeted last night that they've raised $10,000 so far. If you're interested, go here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=88713&it=1&SRC=Newsletter

My Guilty Pleasure

I was invited to participate in the latest Mind Meld over at SF Signal this past week. The topic was guilty SF pleasures. You can read about mine and others here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/02/mind-meld-favorite-guilty-sff-pleasures/.

I'll you a hint about mine: Starts with an "S."

The Story Behind Beauty Belongs To The Flowers

As you may have read here yesterday, my story, Beauty Belongs to the Flowers is up at Tor.com. Today's post is about the making of the story. You should read the story before reading this post. You can read it here: http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/01/beauty-belongs-to-the-flowers

How it started: I never cared for anime, though everyone else in the family was a fan, so I would often catch bits and pieces of shows, which I then decided were crap. Then I saw a bit of FLCL (Fooly Cooly) and loved the manga-in-the-anime scenes. I could never catch the whole show, but liked what I saw. Finally, Adult Swim ran the lot of them together and I TIVOed it, watched the whole thing at once and absolutely loved it. To this day, it's the only anime I love.

Long time readers know that I used to write a piece of flash fiction each day and post it at this blog. After I had watched FLCL, I decided to write my story for the day. I was inspired, especially by the pent up frustration of a couple of the characters in the show. Not just the sexual frustration, but the frustration of unrequited love. Naota was surrounded by older girls that seemed to love him in one way or another. He seemed oblivious to their feelings, yet at the same time he seemed to need them terribly. Mamimi sent me over the edge. There was so much yearning in that girl, I wanted to capture her trying not to overflow, the way she hugged Naota when she couldn't help herself anymore.

I went for a drive with these thoughts in my head and began to compose my story. I put Miho at the beginning of the scene at the high road party with the storm going on. All I had was Miho, the spacescrapers and the weather. I stopped the car at a Wal-Mart in the next town and began to lay the story down in the parking lot on my Alphasmart. I had the party, the need for Ichiro and the trip to Tanaka-san's restaurant before I ran out of steam. Then I got a call from the then-wife. When she discovered I was at Wal-Mart she asked me to pick up something inside. While I was in there, I checked out the Deli, wondering what future food service might be like in relation to Tanaka-san's establishment. I envisioned the food injector and very quickly saw to what use Miho would put the machine. Bang. I had my story.

But . . .

I thought, "This is too good a story for the smelly old blog [sorry, smelly old blog]. I need to develop this and send it to an editor." So I fleshed it out a bit and sent it to some friends, all women, because it happened to turn out that way at the time. They all found it interesting, but they didn't buy the romance. They hardly knew these people, after all, and found no reason to care about them. My friend, Nan, also a writer, said I had developed the city as if it were a character, but I needed to develop Miho as much as I had Nagasaki. So, that's where the flashbacks came in. I figured I'd tell the story of Miho's and Ichiro's relationship in a series of flashbacks within the story. I fiddled with this thing for months, seeking feedback. "Is it done yet? How 'bout now?"

One night I was thinking about Spider-Man 2 and how great it was. I actually didn't give much of a damn about the Doc Ock part of the storyline. What hooked me in a big way was Peter Parker's story. Those writers (Michael Chabon, among them) made that poor bastard's life hell and made me realize that this was what made fiction great. Make your main character miserable. That's when I knew I was sending Miho's pop to the hospital and all those chunks went in. It finally began to come together.

I sent it out and tinkered and talked to people. For some reason, among my friends, women seemed to like it and men didn't so much. Across the board. I got a little bit of encouraging feedback. I got a lot of people telling me the story took way too long for not much payoff. I felt those people missed the point. I think they were looking for the big science fiction gimmick, while I just wanted to capture a certain feeling, that teenage demoralization and heartbreak and inner burning that lasts forever, wherever you go and whatever you try to do to take your mind off of it. I'm proud of the story and I hope other people like it as much as I do.

I named Miho after Miho Hatori (straight out of purgatory!), lead singer of Cibo Matto. Miho has a gorgeous voice and is a beautiful woman and I can't tell you how many times the kids and I have listened to Stereotype-A. Tanaka-san was named after Tiger Tanaka from You Only Live Twice. I love Bond films and always liked the name. Tomi was named after a childhood friend's mom, Tomiko Gonzales, a wonderful woman who knew how to lay out a spread at the dinner table and was the first Japanese person I knew.

I chose Nagasaki because I thought Tokyo was overused in Japanese science fiction and I wanted to write a futuristic Japanese story that wasn't cyberpunk. Tokyo equals cyberpunk in my mind. The biker boys were my nod to Akira. The idea of the ephemeral nature of beauty was totally ripped off from James Clavell's Shogun. That's right.

Now for the acknowledgement part of our program. First and foremost, my big thanks to Liz Gorinsky, the editor at Tor.com who saw something similar to what I saw in the story and made it possible for me to share it with everyone else. She also improved it through piles of good suggestions and her mad punctuation skills.

Thanks to my very first readers, the above mentioned Nan Mick (And thank you, Nan for convincing me to trash that original, awful last line) as well as a whole pile of Smiths who aren't related to me: Danielle, Zack, Rani and Dana. It was the feedback from the ladies that really shaped the story. Many thanks to Zack's friend Collin Rand, who had lived for a while in Japan and whom I questioned relentlessly on Japanese social customs on a long trip back from a movie theater one night long ago.

My dear friend and resident Japanophile, Mike Ramshaw, who passed away last year, helped a bunch, with everything from research to editing, loaning me videos and marking the shit out of my manuscript with his red pen. Wonderful, intelligent and a man who cut to the heart of things. There will never be another like him.

Big thanks to Inkpunk John Remy, Jack Haringa and Paul Berger, all one-time residents of Nagasaki or its outlying burbs, who looked over my story and called out all the bullshit. If you see any bullshit in the story, that's where I wouldn't smarten up and listen to them.

Thanks to Irene Gallo and all the awesome folk of Tor.com and thanks to Yuko Shimizu, the remarkable woman who created the art for the story, which you can also see at the top of this post. When Liz sent me the art last week, my excitement squirted out of me. To imagine that something I created could inspire such gorgeous work from such a wonderful artist filled me with happy.

If you guys have any questions, ask them here in the comments. But if you have comments, I'd rather you wrote them on the story's post, so Tor can hear you.

That's all I've got to say. Go outside and play, it's nice outside.

Beauty Belongs to the Flowers

Hey! My story, Beauty Belongs to the Flowers is over at Tor.com! http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/01/beauty-belongs-to-the-flowers Gorgeous art by Yuko Shimizu! Give it a look-see, why doncha? I'll be posting the story behind the story sometime in the next day or two, so check back. I hope you enjoy!

The Latest Sofa

StarShipSofa No 173 Mary Rosenblum

Short Story: Momentum by Damien G Walter

Fact: Everything by Morgan Saletta

Main Fiction: Jumpers by Mary Rosenblum

Fact: Science News by J.J. Campanella

Serial: Escape From Kathmandu Pt3 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Cover Art: Hamilcar Pereira

Narrators: Victoria Kelly, Randal Schwartz

Hear The Old Weird Masters

As you know, I'm a lover of audio fiction and I've recently made a couple of discoveries featuring two of the legends of Weird Tales from the 1920s and '30s.

The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (http://hppodcraft.com/) is an awesome way to be introduced to or to revisit the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Each episode explores one of the old man's stories and they do so in chronological order, so you can pick up a collection and read along with them. Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey discuss the tales with intelligence and great senses of humor with plenty of excerpts thrown in. I'm only three shows in and I know I'll be downloading all of them soon.

The SFFaudio podcast #79 (http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=24487) gives us a free reading of the entirety of Robert E. Howard's Conan adventure, Queen of the Black Coast, read by Gary Kobler. This is a great story which I've read a few times and am listening to now. I don't normally reread or re-listen to anything, but great stylists like William Gibson, Ray Bradbury and Robert E. Howard always bring me back to the table.

Both of these podcasts give the listener a taste of the old masters at work. If you've never tried them or if you have and you love them, then check these out.

The 45th Mango

The new episode of Beware the Hairy Mango is live! More Than a Muffin! Check it out here:
http://bewarethehairymango.com/episode-45-more-than-a-muffin/

I know what you're saying. You're saying, "Wait, you were just crying about your dog, now you're cracking jokes? What an asshole!" Well, maybe so, but perhaps you'll enjoy the show anyway.

The Dog Days Are Over

Sorry for neglecting you, little blog.

My dog died about a week and a half ago. She was old and sick, arthritis, kidney and liver problems. She was improving on meds, but on her last Friday night she was acting really weird. She wouldn't eat or drink, and for over a year she'd been drinking and pissing constantly. At about quarter to two Saturday morning she was breathing hard, so I called the 24-hour vet one town up. I was going to bring her in, either to fix her up, or put her out of her misery. By the time I hung up the phone, she was dying.

When I was a kid, I'd be upset for a couple of hours when I lost a dog and then pretty much forget about it. I never missed a dog after that. This one was different. I never had a dog last so long; I never had an old dog before. My dogs would get hit by cars, or run away, or I'd have to give them away for one reason or another.

Because she was sick and I live alone most of the time, I had rearranged my life around her. The day she died, I kept doing things as if she was there. When I went out, I closed my bedroom door before realizing I didn't need to. No one was going to go in there and tear up my room when I was gone. I didn't need to brace myself for her when I came home. I didn't need to get back home at a certain time to take care of her. No bowls to fill, no piss to clean up, no pills to hide in food. I could leave the front door open if I wanted. I wasn't woken up three to five times a night to let her drink and pee. I didn't have to set aside a portion of my food for her, didn't have to do lots of little things that had become second nature to me. In the space of a few horrible minutes my whole life had changed.

I had been telling people for a while that my life would improve when the dog died. That's not to say I didn't love the dog. That was just fact. When she was around, it was unusual for me to sleep for more than two hours straight. I couldn't concentrate on a project for more than an hour or so because she would need something. So, I'm suddenly liberated, but the length and the depth of the sadness that I feel astonishes me.

2010: Wrappin' It Up

2010 was a hell of a lot better than 2009, that's for damned sure. Even with a major family issue that's been handled. One old disaster carried over from 2009 is slowly getting more disastrous. I hope to wrangle that one in the coming year. As far as writing goes, I failed big time at my major goal and also had my best year ever. Let's review.

My big goal, as you may or may not remember, was to write 52 stories in 2010. Sadly, I did what I always do and screwed around too much. I wound up with twelve new stories. Somewhat less than fifty-two. I did create a bunch of unfinished stories that may pop up in the future. I'd like to think that the goal spurred me on to write more than I otherwise would have. Inspired by my cohort in crime, Grant Stone, I wrote a comic script, which was fun. I wrote some stories of which I was really proud.

Let's look at my lesser goals. I wanted to make two-hundred story submissions in 2010. I made seventy-one. Admittedly, if I had written fifty-two stories, two-hundred submissions would have been much easier to do.

I did not keep the house as clean as I wanted to. At first I wrote, "I did not keep the house cleaner," then decided to rewrite that, because some of you who are reading this quickly might interpret that to mean I fired one of the servants. I did not watch the whole of Wagner's Ring Cycle, although I did watch the first part, a 2006 production from Copenhagen done in a 1920s style which was quite cool.

Now for the wins. One of my goals was an off-the-cuff, "lose a few pounds." I visited the emergency room in September, after feeling funky after-hours and found out all those middle-aged fat guy diseases I had been avoiding had finally caught me. I had high blood-pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and probably a few other high things. Although I don't mind dying, I don't want to live sick. I started taking care of myself the moment I got out of the hospital. I cut out a lot of fat and sodium, added more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and started exercising every day. I lost thirty-five pounds in three months and the doctor told me a couple of weeks ago that everything was looking good. No more meds for me. Yay!

2010 was off to a great start from day one, as the audio version of my story, Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range kicked off Paul W. Campbell's Cossmass Infinities podcast. June saw my biggest career win so far with a sale of one of my favorite stories to Tor.com, Beauty Belongs to the Flowers. It marked my second pro sale and you should be able to read it in early 2011. In October I made my third pro sale with Steve Sepp, Tasty! Tasty! to the British science journal Nature (You'll be able to read that some time in the future as well). Big doings! I also sold stories to Electric Spec, Everyday Weirdness and got to participate in the launching of Grant's new fanzine, b0t.

On to the future. I don't think I'm announcing my 2011 goals here. I want to see if I'll handle them differently if they're not in the public eye. Also, they may be changing depending on an opportunity on the horizon which would change the time available to me. Rest assured there are insane writing goals involved and I look forward to 2011 being a great year for me.

I wish all of you a great year to come as well! Keep in touch.

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.