Tim Pratt's Blog, page 20

I sold my 100th story! (Including collaborations, audio originals, stories original to my own collections, and a couple of pieces self-published in Christmas chapbooks — but still! 100!)

Initially I thought I'd only sold 99, then realized I'd left a story off my bibliography and declared my story "Rangifer Volans: A Very Cryptozoological Christmas" (upcoming on Drabblecast for the holidays) as #100.

But then I discovered that I'd forgotten to put another story on my bibliography, so my 100th story was actually either "Luminous" or "D is for De Gustibus", both flash pieces sold to Podcastle on the same day. So I've actually got 101 stories published or pending. Unless I forgot another one on my bibliography. Which is admittedly possible. Oh well. There was an arbitrary numerical milestone in there somewhere.

It only occurred to me to count at all because I was looking at The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard and noticed that it had only 98 stories. But I can admit that Ballard had, shall we say, a rather better ratio of quality to quantity than I do.

The other realization I had is that I've got another collection's worth of stories — even excluding flash, Marla Mason stories (I'm saving those for a dedicated collection someday), and a few minor pieces. I may start putting together a story collection manuscript to shop around in the coming months, though I'd want to write a substantial original piece for it, so it won't happen soon. I'm leaning toward Antiquities and Tangibles: Stories as a title, after a novelette I have upcoming in Subterranean. I do love assembling collections.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Whooooo. Been a rough week and it's only Wednesday. I was sick Monday, and stayed home, where I mostly read comics and slept and watched five episodes in a row of The Walking Dead. (Interesting that the plot bears so little resemblance at all to that of the comic.)

Yesterday I felt better, and ran around with the kid, mostly — tried a new playground in North Berkeley, did grocery shopping, tried to do toddler time at the library, but he's pretty much outgrown it and gets bored, so that didn't last long. After the boy went to bed I played Cataclysm, the new expansion of World of Warcraft. I was part of the beta, so it wasn't all wild and new to me, but it's nice to play it and have everything work and be polished, without the constant crashes and placeholder graphics. And I didn't get far in the beta, really, because I was too busy writing books to play in recent months, so much of it will be new to me soon.

I also cooked very delicious sausage/tomato/white bean soup. The key is fresh sage leaves. Yum.

Alas, late in the night, the kid started throwing up. Apparently he caught what I had, only an even worse case. Heather stayed up with him all night. I took over around 6 am so she could get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep before I went to work.

A sick three year old is so sad! He doesn't understand what's happening. Because he gets asthma medicine and baby tylenol and claritin occasionally, he keeps asking for medicine to make his tummy feel better, and ginger and peppermint doesn't do the job. He'll throw up and then say "I sorry daddy," and he mistakes the immediate post-vomit cessation of nausea for being "all better!" Plus he's hungry and thirsty and has trouble eating bread or drinking water slowly — he wants to wolf it down. He's amazingly cheerful for a child who's tossing his cookies every 30 to 90 minutes, though. With luck it'll pass quickly.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Clarion, people. Clarion! They're taking applications for next year's session in San Diego. Here's their pitch:

Clarion is widely recognized as a premier training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction short stories. The 2011 writers in residence are Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, David Anthony Durham, John Kessel and Kij Johnson. Each year 18 students, ranging in age from late teens to those in mid-career, are selected from applicants who have the potential for highly successful writing careers. Students are expected to write several new short stories during the six-week workshop, and to give and receive constructive criticism. Instructors and students reside together in UCSD campus apartments throughout the intensive six-week program.

Application period: December 1 – March 1. Applicants must submit two short stories with their application.

Workshop: June 26 – August 6, 2011.

So go to their website and take a look.

It's a great line-up of teachers. While I can't speak specifically to the experience of doing Clarion in San Diego (I went to Clarion 11 years ago, in the East Lansing Michigan days), I can attest to the experience of Clarion generally, which is: life changing. I know you hear that phrase a lot — about books, movies, restaurants, mind-altering substances, etc., but with Clarion (for me anyway) it was literally true. I met people there who are still among my best friends. My professors were inspirations. I learned more about writing in six weeks than I'd learned in all the years previous. I discovered that awesome famous writers are people, too. It very literally changed my life — without Clarion, I wouldn't have ended up working at Locus, where I've been working for nearly ten years now. (One of my instructors was friends with the boss, and basically got the job for me — plus, I first heard about Locus at Clarion!) I can't promise it'll have that big an impact on your life, of course… but it will give you six weeks to spend intensely focused on writing, surrounded by people who care as much about this stuff as you do. If you can carve out the time, it's worth applying. (I desperately want to teach there some day, myself.)

I can also speak to the awesomeness of San Diego: it's awesome. Great food, great beaches, Mysterious Galaxy bookstore — what more could you want? No offense to East Lansing, which has its charms, but I gotta think San Diego is more fun.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

We put the boy — now no longer a toddler, technically, but a pre-schooler — to bed last night. While attempting to wrestle him into his jammies, he sang/yelled:

"If you're happy and you know it, punch, hit!


If you're happy and you know it, kick, hit!"

All punctuated with punching and kicking. When he finished singing he said, "Do you like that song? Do you? Do you like it? You like that song?" in an extremely manic way.

It was like watching an outtake from a Quentin Tarantino movie. Like Pulp Fiction: Babies.

(Bedtime is still an epic struggle, but it's getting better, in general.)

***

My awesome wife Heather Shaw recently sat down and powered through revisions on her middle grade science fiction novel of gene-hacking mayhem and adventure. She finished it off and sent it to a couple of agents last week. I'm so proud of her!

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My original short-short stories "D is for De Gustibus" and "Luminous" will be at Podcastle in the future, along with audio versions of my stories "Hart and Boot" and "Terrible Ones". Oh, how I love the 'pods! Especially when they send me acceptances for four stories in a single e-mail. Got a rejection from Asimov's this week, too, though, so the sweet is balanced by the sour and etc.

(Speaking of Podcastle, they recently did "Skatouioannis" by Nick Mamatas, one of my favorite of Nick's stories. The title monster even had a brief cameo in one of my Marla novels, as an homage…)

The Way of the Wizard anthology is out, including my story "Mommy Issues of the Dead" (featuring a young Marla Mason) and lots of other awesome tales. Check it out.

Here's the first review I've seen of Welcome to Bordertown, and pleasantly enough it says nice things about my contribution, "Our Stars, Our Selves". I'm so glad I got the opportunity to be part of that anthology.

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My middle grade novel The Deep Woods has been revised and line-edited. I think it's one of my strongest books yet. I'll send it to my agent after Thanksgiving and hope she agrees. And that some publishers agree. And that readers agree. And so on.

All I have on my plate writing-wise at the moment is a few book reviews and a couple of stories (one a flash piece, one a Christmas story). Should be fun. I'm expecting to hear back about some longer projects in upcoming weeks, though, so life could potentially become more exciting soon.

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Worked a 12+ hour day last week to finish up the December issue of A Certain Magazine. (We were on a short production schedule because of Thanksgiving.) Brutal, but at least it was followed by a three-day weekend. I read a bunch of comics, watched some TV, played with the kid, took walks, ate brunch, got fancy ice cream, etc. Wonderfully relaxing. And today… back to work. But I only have to work two days of the next seven, so it's hardly a great trial.

***

Part 12 of The Nex is up. Not sure if anyone's reading it; no one has commented in a couple of weeks, and no one has donated in many weeks. Maybe everyone who cared just bought the e-book version. I still like it, though, and am happy to have it out there.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Life is full of interesting things. Lots of fun projects are bubbling around in my personal Possibilitysphere; I hope they all coalesce into actuality. (Vague enough for you? Well, I don't want to scare the Possibilities away by speaking of them any more specifically.)

I took a whole night off from writing after finishing The Deep Woods. I aimlessly wandered through my house all evening and went to bed much earlier than usual. Dreadful. So last night I dove back into work, doing a 1,000 word story for a project that has attained actuality, but which I'm unprepared to discuss in detail yet. The story's a mash-up of Dora the Explorer and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in about a thousand words. (As my friend Melissa pointed out, Dora is probably far better prepared for the jungle than poor Marlowe was.) Sometimes I just sit around and cackle to myself. I love my brain.

I also love my kid… though he's doing unlovable stuff lately. The bedtime power struggle continues. Peacefully leading him back to bed when he gets up works, I guess, but very, very slowly. Last night we led him back to bed about 50 times — literally — before he finally fell asleep. Heather and I have lost entire evenings lately to kid bedtime drama, which sucks, since that's our only real free time as a couple — and also my main writing time. (Remember: I have a full-time day job, so the books get written on nights and weekends.) I really hope he gets over this soon, but he's firmly enmeshed in the Terrible Threes, so I don't really expect things to get better in the near future. Sigh. He used to be such a good sleeper. Last night he went to bed at 10 and got up at 6 this morning. BRUTAL.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I managed to sneak in some writing time here and there yesterday, in among Toddler Story Hour and putting puzzles together and taking walks and doing other kid-centric activities. I finished my draft of The Deep Woods, my middle grade contemporary fantasy. It's 44,000 words, and I wrote it in 18 days. (And I would have been done in an even two weeks if I hadn't taken some days off from writing, mostly due to Halloween festivities and my kid's birthday.)

Of course, it needs some revising — I already snipped out a minor subplot that seemed neat but ultimately went nowhere, and some of the scenes are little more than streams of unattributed dialogue — but I think it's structurally sound. I hope to have it revised and in good shape by Thanksgiving.

I'm so glad I found time to squeeze in a fun exciting personal project in between contract jobs and tie-in work.

But, as always, now that I've finished writing a novel, I find myself wondering… what do I do with my evenings and weekends now? (Actually, the answer is simple: generate some paying work. Maybe some short stories…)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

My novel The Deep Woods is nearing the end — I've written about 39,000 words since starting the project on October 23. My initial goal was to have a draft done by yesterday, but I took three days off last week when life intervened (I got busy cleaning and cooking for the kid's birthday party, among other things), so I fell a bit behind. I could finish today, or possibly tomorrow. Though the end keeps receding even as I approach, which puts me in mind of Xeno's Paradoxes of motion — except in this case, it's Xeno's Paragraph. I always have to write a few more paragraphs, and if that's the case, how can I ever reach the end?

I sorta got the okay to announce the nature of the last project I was working on (the one I called the Snake book): I wrote it for Wizards of the Coast. They'd prefer I not say anything about the exact nature of the book — my editor hasn't even read it yet — but if you know the sort of things they publish, you can probably make an educated guess. My 14-year-old self would be delighted; and my nearly 34-year-old self enjoyed it a lot too.

My son had a great birthday weekend. We had a party on Saturday with many of his friends, and cupcakes, and banana/chocolate chip muffins, and even some gluten-free vegan no-soy corn muffins I made for a couple of guests with dietary restrictions. The kids ran around, the adults chatted, and a good time was had by all. On Sunday we put together his big gift, a play kitchen with lots of cabinets that open — he aspires to be a tiny chef, so that delights him. On his actual birthday Monday we had to take him to preschool, but they celebrated for him there. When we picked him up he was wearing a paper crown and saying, matter-of-factly, "I king." We gave him a couple of last presents, and a final celebratory cupcake, and made him the dinner of his choice: hot dogs. We think we'll pool his birthday money and take him to pick out a tricycle, which he's been wanting. Hard to believe he's already three.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Trick-or-treating with the kid was great fun. We went to Piedmont Ave. on Saturday in the rain for daytime trick-or-treating and bouncehouse fun, and on Hallowe'en proper we went to Russell Street in Berkeley, which goes all-out for the holiday. Here's a picture of River in his monkey costume with me. I'm a druid, or something. I dunno. I just threw on a cloak and made a wand with some fake foliage and the snapped-off handle of a toy golf club.

Last night I had a dream where I was talking to a fifty-something car salesman (though later he was a postal worker), who was complaining about how miserable he was: he hated his job, his house, his city, and his whole life. So I told him to change his life, if he didn't like it — what was he waiting for? To get even older first? He was resistant, and sneered at me, and basically said, "I don't see you changing your life."

And in the dream I replied, "Why would I change my life? I get paid to write books, I have a great kid, a hot wife, I love my apartment and my neighborhood, and I even like my day job. My life is already where I want it to be."

I woke up thinking, Well, yeah, okay. A message from my unconscious mind to quit my bitching? At the very least, it was a reminder that, despite the fact that I have some problems, most of the important things are exactly how I'd wish them to be. So I'm in a better mood this morning than I have been for ages.

I'm about 26,000 words into my new kid novel, which I'm calling The Deep Woods for now. More than halfway done! I just dealt a rather crushing blow to my characters, which they'll spend the rest of the novel coping with. I should finish in a week or ten days. I'm having great fun.

Good luck to all you NaNoWriMoers. I'm not doing NaNo — as I mentioned, I'm halfway through a book, and after I finish that, I'll probably be lazy for a week or two — but I wish you well. It's fun to throw yourself into a project, isn't it?

No toddler story hour at the library today, as the space has been taken over for election day polling, so I'll have to entertain the boy some other way. The weather's nice, so it'll probably be a long morning of parks, parks, parks. Not such a bad life at all.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

My story "Shark's Teeth", a Marla Mason story which immediately follows the events of Broken Mirrors (but stands alone), will appear in a future edition of Daily Science Fiction. Yay! (I did a chapbook version of this story for some people who donated to the Broken Mirrors serial, but I wanted more than 75 people to read it, so I'm glad it will be made generally available.) Subscribe to DSF (it's free) so you can read it right there in your very own e-mail.

My story "From Around Here" will, I'm told, be translated for publication in major Japanese SF magazine Hayakawa SF in the future. (Interestingly, the main character of that story has a role to play in my 6th Marla Mason novel, which I'm hoping to write next year.)

I'm now about 17,000 words into the new kid's fantasy novel I started last weekend. I'm having such a wonderful time. I've written so much death and tragedy and misery in recent months, it's nice to write a fun adventure. (Though bad stuff still happens — in fact, my characters are about to suffer a particularly devastating setback, which will set up for the back half of the book.) But mostly the book is dedicated to winning by running and thinking faster than the people out to hurt you, and that's what life is all about.

I'm also having lots of those wonderful writerly experiences, where a throwaway line near the beginning turns out to be the perfect solution to an unexpected problem later in the book. And I keep stumbling over things in my research that are absolutely perfect for stuff I want to do in the book. Like, spooky perfect. Stephen King says sometimes writing can be less like creating and more like excavating something that already exists — that's how I feel now. Like I'm meant to be writing this book. (And those who know me know I don't believe I was meant to do anything; there is no fate or destiny — hell, some days I'm dubious about the existence of cause-and-effect, too.) Seems like a good sign. Then again, I felt the same way about The Nex, and nobody wanted to publish that, so who knows?

In life news: It's nearly Hallowe'en! (Or "Pumpkin Halloween!" as my son calls it.) Pumpkins will be carved. We'll take the kid trick-or-treating in his monkey costume. I'll read my wife a scary story. (I usually read Glen Hirshberg's "Mr. Dark's Carnival", but this year I'm thinking maybe "The Crawl" by Stephen Laws — not strictly a Hallowe'en story, but it does have a scarecrow in it, sort of.) Should be great fun.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I have reasons to be stressful, but I'm trying to overcome them. Or, at least, my response to them. Some things are beyond my control, but I'm also screwing up things that are within my control, which is counter-productive, to say the least.

For instance, my toddler's insane screaming refusal to go to bed — which has become traditional over the past few weeks, after years of him being a relatively unproblematic sleeper. My wife talked to a friend about coping strategies for this behavior (since our strategy of threats, bribery, bargaining, exhausted begging, etc. wasn't really working), and we decided to try an incredibly calm approach. When he gets up, we just silently take his hand and lead him back to bed, put a blanket over him, and walk away. Don't engage, don't give him the feedback he's looking for — which is any feedback at all.

He got up seven times, but after the seventh time, he stayed in bed, and it took much less time than usual to go from "It's bedtime!" to actual sleep.

So I'm trying to be more relaxed about kid stuff in general. In the grand scheme of things, potty accidents are no big deal. Dirty hands can get washed. Usually when he does crazy break-the-world stuff, he's just feeling lonely and needy, and giving him a little attention will calm him down. And when he's truly crazy tantruming… well, there's no rule that says I have to stand there and watch him bang his tiny fists on the carpet. I can wander off until he gets over it.

I'm also trying to eat better, since that'll improve my energy levels. And I'm generally going to try and roll with the punches instead of allowing myself to be battered and shattered quite so easily. Life is long, and most of my current and seemingly insurmountable problems will fade into irrelevance in weeks or months. So, yeah. Trying to live in the moment AND take the long view. Should be easy!

At the very least, I can remember that I also have reasons to be thankful and cheerful, as well as full of stress.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.