Modern-day irony

Words written c37500

Stories completed 6

Rejections 99

Acceptances 1

Stumbled across an article the other day promising to tell me how to better cope in the information-overload age, how not to go crazy with the relentless bombardment of views, opinions, facts, data, information, knowledge, psudo-knowledge, quasi-knowledge, numbers, words, images and stuff.  Particularly stuff.  How to cut down our brain-input to a manageable burbling brook of what's most important.

Quite agree that that sort of thing is vital.

So I took an important first step by skipping it.

Listen carefully, I will say this only once (for a second time)

(Well, there's irony for you - a reprint of an earlier posting which garbled its formatting for no immediately apparent reason...)

I'm doing a lot of DIY at the moment, renovating a Victorian villa on the English Riviera.  A bathroom has recently been on the agenda.  Which means a lot of cardboard boxes to open and things to assemble and fit.


Which also means a lot of instructions, diagrams, insert tab A into slot B, and so forth.  Not that I've spent a great deal of time studying them.  Hell, some I only find in the box when the towel rail is nailed to the wall (that is right, isn't it?).


Which has led me to think of why instructions seem so alien to us.  Maybe it's just a man thing, but I suspect it's more of a Mankind thing.  There's an oil & water nature to humanity and paper instructions.  We love information, can't get enough of it.  But whatever you do, don't tell me how to do things.


I once took part in an Operation Raleigh selection exercise, during which the selectors instantly spotted what a total liability I would have been in the wild.  One of the exercises, the only one where I acquitted myself with any kind of honour, involved following a set of instructions.  I think I may have done something like this before as an army cadet, so I suspected that the instructions ended with 'please ignore everything above'.


Hence I just read the last line, which was indeed an instruction that quashed all the commands that went before, and sat whilst my teammates carefully made paper aeroplanes or something.  I was the only person to complete that task correctly - by doing nothing.  Given that I approached the exercise totally out of character - I rarely start reading instructions, let alone finish them - this rare victory just underlined the correctness of the decision not to let me loose on the developing world. 


But, I digress.  I've come to the conclusion that we have been trawling an evolutionary cul-de-sac here, and that Apple have got it right with products that don't come with any instructions.  There were no instructions produced by cavemen to help catch that mastodon.  You just did.  Then we went through a brief (in cosmic terms) period of creating items too complicated to understand at first glance, and we needed to back the up with telephone directories of how-to wisdom.  But now we're heading back to intuitive design, point n' shoot, click n' collect.  Or something.


Our TVs are slightly behind the curve - in my youth they had three controls at the front (on/off, volume, channel) and two at the back (vertical and horizontal wobble); now I have three remotes, each with three dozen buttons.  But I suspect in ten years those buttons will boil down to a few intuitive controls.  Maybe I'll choose my channel by mind control (in which case, how do I avoid defaulting to porn?).


So, my advice to you is, if you want to surf the evolutionary bleeding edge, you can chuck all those instructions.  If you need them, your thing is clearly a bit cro-magnon.  And you wouldn't want that, would you?

A homeopathic hit rate - and just as effective

Words written c35500

Stories completed 5

Rejections 99

Acceptances 1

I have a simple annual target: to sell three stories.

You'll see from the numbers that, with Christmas already here if you're in retail, this year is not a vintage one.  Response number one hundred is rejection number 99.

And then, take into consideration that I'm due a grand total of $14.16 (or a $7.08 'kill fee' if my story is stillborn) for my efforts.  Not much of a career, is it?

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it

Words written c35500
Stories completed 5
Rejections 83
Acceptances 1

I don't know what it is about the current incarnation of Dr Who that grates so much.

Or, rather, I don't know which aspect grates the most, whether it's the Doctor-centric storylines, with the time lord being the centre of attention rather than a dispassionate observer in others' stories who watches the equivalent of laboratory rats bumble around a maze before intervening, or Malcolm Tucker's trying-too-hard-to-convince-everyone-including-himself performance.

But, as a writer, hackles - which I didn't even realise I had - rose during The Witch's Familiar.  You see, as a writer, you construct a storyverse with a set of rules, the local laws of physics and logic.  And then you stick with it.  Tales of American series having telephone-directory size guidebooks to character and setting are legion, with the hanging threat that any writer who strays outside of them can forget ever working in that town again.  Or planet, if it's sci-fi.  So, if you have to make up a get-out-clause to get you out of a corner of your own painting, then go back to the start and do not pass Go.

You see - spoiler alert! spoiler alert! - the Doctor solves his problems with a laying on of hands (hello? the Doctor as Jesus?), channelling his regenerative energy.  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't ever recall that being in the Doctor's arsenal.  In fact, my childhood recollection is that the Doctor met his regenerations as I would root canal work, as a rather nasty experience being done entirely to him.  Not by him.  I don't remember the Doctor having any control whatsoever over the whole regeneration trip.

But suddenly, because its the brush that's now needed to paint himself back to the doorway of this particular room, he can turn it on like a tap.

I'm not proposing to do this, but I wonder how many storylines from the last fifty years would be different if he had had this power all along.  Which, of course, within the Dr Who storyverse, it turns out he had all the time...

Issigonis said something along the lines of any fool can design a big car; the challenge is in designing a small car.  And promptly gave us the Mini.  Bend the rules all you like.  Find ones that everybody thought was a rule, but isn't (like you can't set the engine sideways).  But don't break them.  Or make up new ones.

It's damn hard keeping a character going for 35 series over half a century.  All credit to them.  But when you have to make up new attributes to get out of ever more extreme scenarios then you may wish to consider whether the Doctor has run his course...

And this is progress, how?

Words written c35500

Stories completed 5

Rejections 82

Acceptances 1

Recently, two young women asked me to jump start their engine.

I'd like to say that's a euphemism but I mean it literally.  They were stuck just down the road outside my house having left their lights on all night and wanted me to jump their engine.

So, I pulled my car up to theirs, unlatched the bonnet (or 'hood', if you're reading this in the former colonies).  And stared.

I'm not totally impractical, although I'm better with houses than cars (have I mentioned my self-build book is available on Amazon?).  But, for the life of me, I couldn't even find the battery.

We used to drive a previous version of the same model and I've previously whipped the battery in and out at regular intervals, mainly because the alternator was dead and I was flogging the beast until it finally gave up the ghost.  But this space-age (well, 2012) update of the same vehicle had had its mechanical innards covered with molded plastic.

I eventually located two unspecified terminals poking out of the side of the molding.  On checking the manual as to which was negative and which positive it simply told me to leave the whole caboodle alone as it was far too complex for my small homo sapien brain to comprehend and that anything to do with the battery - or any thing else - should be left to a qualified mechanic.

For a car battery. Ye Gods.

When we got the new car we still had the old for some time.  I remember holding up the key to the old (traditional design, sits in your palm or pocket quite comfortably) against the new (an unwieldy 'keycard', dimensions of The Little Book of Calm but thinner, although equally stress-inducing) in a restaurant, railing "And this is progress - how?"

This isn't isolated; it's a direction of travel misnamed progress.

I'm firmly of the belief that, if and when the balloon goes up, any medieval child would survive - catching rabbits, making its own shoes - whilst we would starve, staring at a tin can, opener-less, like an abandoned cartoon cat and wondering whether our coffee-shop loyalty cards are still valid.

Filling in the gaps

Words written c35500

Stories completed 5

Rejections 80

Acceptances 1

So, I learnt recently, but only by reading month-old news, NASA’s best candidate for a ‘twin’ for Earth, a planet orbiting its star in the so-called Goldilocks zone, Kepler-452b, is only possibly rocky (and equally likely to be gassy), and then only possibly has an atmosphere and liquid water.  And then, and only then, may it possibly have life.  Oh, and its 1400 light years away.

Face it, we’ll never make it to the stars.

Not that I’m personally bothered; I found commuting from Devon to Edinburgh back in the springtime taxing enough.  However, my thoughts turn to the implications for science-fiction.  Not so much the implications of what we know is out there, but the avenues that, one-by-one, close off. 

Let me explain.  It strikes me that SF is, and always has been, ‘filling in the gaps’.  As knowledge increases our scope for speculating shrinks.  For example, until faster-than-light travel is proved impossible (if a negative can ever be proved) stories will still be littered with inexplicable sleight-of-hands in the shape of portals and wormholes lifting our protagonists to impossibly-faraway worlds.

But something curious happens when a hitherto possible gets crossed through in red ink. Once we know what is or is not, it is hard to posit what could have been.  If a proof is ever offered and accepted of the impossibility of FLT then all such story devices will become somewhat silly.  They feel that the author is cheating.  But - and this is the curious aspect - stories written before the bar dropped somehow seem exempt.

There is something about ‘period’ SF (or any fiction) where we naturally find ourselves reading it in the context of when it was written.  It seems impossible for the brain to tell itself to ‘pretend this story were written in 1950’ whereas it happily copes with a story genuinely written in 1950 with all its accompanying pre Moon-landing clunk?  I mean, it’s all a fiction anyway and we have to buy into a fictional storyverse, so why is it so hard to buy into then-current truths being circumvented, even when done in a non-cheating way.

Compare two books, one I’m reading, H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain, with one I finished a few hours ago, Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness.  Both, in different ways, fictional anthropological studies, the former of a society on another planet, the second of the dark continent of Africa.  But I can read Haggard in the context of it being written with the mores as well as knowledge of the Victorians, whereas LeGuin’s 1960s novel has to move its unknown society into space.

A regards the books themselves, in both cases I find their fictional anthropological studies interesting intellectually, but ultimately hollow.  Both sag when the story doesn’t move forward - the novel as shark.  It reminds me of a point made in my (largely linguistics) masters degree: that there are savants who can master any real language in days, but find artificial, man-made languages impossible.  The point there is about a need for Chomskian deep-grammar; the point here is about documentary needing to ring true.

For my money, world-building is only of interest in the context of story telling, then the test becomes whether the story is consistent with the rules of the fictional world rather than whether the rules of the fictional world are themselves internally consistent.  I find some SF authors and editors too interested in the science not the story - I once had a story praised by an editor for speculating on unmanned mining ships set to come down in the Australian desert, but rejected for the not being enough of such conjecture.  To me, that was just a throwaway bit of background travelogue; what about the story?

But, whatever the story, prepare for it to become archaic should anything you posit turn out not quite to be the case.  Haggard could build his world on this planet; LeGuin had to, literally, push the boundaries.  As SF always does.

A candle flares, briefly illuminates my soul, and is lost to darkness again

Words written c35000

Stories completed 5

Rejections 79

Acceptances 1

One of the myriad frustrations of being a semi-professional (i.e. desperate to get paid, but hardly ever doing so) writer is rejection.

Not so much that you get rejected; experience teaches me to expect every email from a small press or magazine to be one, making the odd acceptance a joyous high, but that you hardly ever have any idea how near or far off target you were.  The form rejection rules.  How many careers ended before they begun because writers were blind to how close to print they came, I wonder - or, conversely, were needlessly sustained because they imagined their crayoned drivel had only just missed the mark?

My email revealed four rejections this morning, including one from CC Finlay, Editor at Fantasy & Science Fiction.  These followed on closely on one from ‘Lucy’ at Andromeda Spaceways.

What makes CC’s and Lucy’s notable amongst the 79 so far received this calendar year is that they had some feedback.

CC’s first, in full: Thank you for giving me a chance to read "Share the Love." I got to the end of the story and had no idea what it meant either... Overall the beginning started too slow and the narrative developed too slowly for me until it got to the weird, interesting stuff. I'm going to pass, but I wish you best of luck finding the right market for it. I appreciate your interest in F&SF and hope that you'll keep us in mind in the future.  

I’ve decided, at arm’s length, that I like CC.  He’s my kinda guy.  I think we could drink beer together.  No idea why I’ve come to that conclusion.  Never met him, no idea what CC stands for.  Could be thinking of CC Baxter, of course.

And now an extract of Lucy’s: The first ten pages move very slowly and indirectly. This is novel speed, not short story speed.

Hmmm.  Feedback that tallies is almost more unexpected than feedback at all.

Of course, my inclination is that I have judged the pace correctly, whilst acknowledging that there’s always some fat on the carcass that can go.  They've been written, rewritten, honed and polished.  But when two editors are on the same page...  Share the Love is essentially about a man dropping down, step by step, into the pits of despair until the succour offered by a religious cult that brings peace through linkage - mental, physical and spiritual - with a giant cockroach appears to be his best option.  You don’t strip away his job, relationship, reason for living in three pages.

Or do you?  Perhaps I’m missing the point of what short story editors want in a world where we now have a shorter attention span than goldfish.

Remember that Chandler quote, When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand?  Raymond Chandler was writing about what to do when the plot flags; perhaps in 2015 it needs to be applied just after the by-line?

That said, it’s worth exploring the section of Chandler’s 1950 The Simple Art of Murder in which it appears:

This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action and if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong

As I look back on my own stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published (my emphasis)

Happy to take the feedback on the nose, respond to the market and make my drafts quicker and slicker, make them a firework - even if, in my eyes and, possibly Chandler's too, they may not be as good as the slow burn that I’m writing.