Go The Donald! Woo! Woo! Woo!

I don't think it's too outrageous to claim that, with a few notable exceptions such as the automatic writings of Andre Breton, that all pieces of writing, from shopping lists upwards, are first drafted in the mind.

These postings start off that way, despite appearances to the contrary, albeit as half-baked ideas congealing to some sort of substance then dashed off with an editorial eye barely open.  I was going to open this post with something along the lines of: 'When it comes to AI people see the challenge as being whether a machine will ever pass the Turing Test but, for me, the real question is whether Donald Trump will ever pass one'.

However, concurrent with those thoughts knocking around my mind like a dead goldfish spiralling down the pan, I was going through the SM without the BD that is the process of applying for ESTAs for entry to the US of A in the summer - my previous post noted that I will be a temporary Cascadian this August.  And what I had been assured was a pretty automatic process (I'd ticked the boxes to say that I was importing neither genocide nor plague) didn't seem to be for me.  Indeed, I'm still waiting a couple of days on.

Join the dots, people.  I think cause and effect is obvious.  Here in the UK Theresa May can only read your emails; in the States The Donald can read your thoughts.

And, it's not great a leap from there to posit that it's a two way street.  If he can read your thoughts he can also put ideas in your head.  I see no other way to explain the election result.

So now I'm silently chanting Go The Donald! Go The Donald!

Can we have our ESTAs?

Go The Donald!

Pretty please?

Perfect ten

...on the BBC science fiction quiz.  Which is, unfortunately, out of fifteen.

In other news, The Overcast want to podcast my story 'The Trouble with Vacations', even though I'm not a Cascadian - although, if all goes to plan, I will be watching this summer's eclipse somewhere in the vicinity of Mt Hood.  Which is nice.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol’n the scraps

Here's a story idea.  You can have it.

Not for free, of course.  I want a 'from an original idea' credit, a sack of cash, and a seat next to Mila Kunis at the premiere of the movie adaptation.  I think those are all reasonable demands.

Okay, here goes.  Shakespeare was a time traveller.

I'm not referring to the fact that  Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, but eleven days apart, Spain having adopted the Gregorian calendar, which England regarded as Papist nonsense.  That's diary mismanagement, not time travel.

No, stay with me on this one.  I've always been a sucker for things like the Marlovian Theory, all that stuff about the 'second best bed' in Shakespeare's will, and so forth.  Not to mention the William Shakespeare of Stratford being referred to at the time as a merchant, not a playwright, together with a plethora of other inexplicables.  But my favourite (supposed) Fortean fact about Shakespeare is that it appears he died with no books amongst his possessions.

Think about it*.  No books.  This from one of the literary giants of the last millennia, one who wrote history plays and plays based on existing myths and legends, which would have taken a modicum of research.  But, no, he had no books or manuscripts.

Even my father-in-law has books, and his reading habits don't extend much beyond The Daily Mail, road signs and restaurant menus.

But not William Shakespeare, the Bard.

And then the answer came to me.  He's a time traveller.  He doesn't need printed paper, because he has Wikipedia and an e-reader.  Because that's the way the world is going, isn't it?  Books, bookshelves, bookshops - all replaced by Amazon and Kindle.  Records, CDs, cassette tapes, DVDs, VHS and Betamax, laserdisc - everything is digital and on demand.  The HiFi has merged with your phone.  How soon before TV and computer merge, first with each other, and then with some contact lens arrangement that puts us at the match, at the firefight, at the orgy?  How soon after that before we learn to bypass the retina and eardrum and beam those ones and zeroes straight into the appropriate bits of your cortex?  Mankind's wet(ware) dream.

Case closed.  Shakespeare was from our future, a future where leisure has virtually no tangible presence because every physical manifestation of it has been superseded, replaced, and made redundant.  That's why he had no books but managed to display a library-worth's knowledge of history, politics, myth and arcana.

But, actually, that's not how the world is going.  Because, to add to that Internet meme only slightly less prevalent than a funny kitten video, that vinyl sales are resurgent, we can add the resumption of production of Kodak Ektachrome.

Both are things that the digital revolution should have done away with, that the twenty-first century should have made null and void.  Vinyl?  Big and bulky, and you really can't hear the difference, you only think you can.  35mm camera film?  Really?  Using a camera that won't make calls or surf the web or emulate a torch?  Processing costs?  Processing time?  Won't run software that swaps your faces or turns your eyeballs funny or gives you a comedy afro?  Are you nuts?

But clearly there are enough people who don't think such propositions are nuts.  Who think such bulky, labour-costing, elaborate palavers are nice to have.

You see, there's a degree of miniaturisation and convenience that we don't want; we want to be able to get our hands on things.  Hard work is its own reward; food tastes better when you cook it yourself, and so forth, not when it comes out of Star Trek-style replicator.

And when it comes to the essence being removed from its physical wrappings we often find that we quite liked the physical wrappings too.  Music and movies are more than ones and noughts, they're packaging and pictures and sleeve notes and sitting in the dark with strangers too.  Those opposable thumbs aren't just functional; they provide a tactile experience of the outside world.

No.  If Shakespeare was a writer and not a front for Kit Marlowe, then he would have had a library.  Or, at least, a library card.

So, what else could come back with enough people swimming against the reductio ad absurdum of the digital tide?  How about queueing, I hear you say?  And 'please wait twenty-eight days for delivery'?  Invasive surgery with the requisite recovery time, and three days for a cheque to clear.  Or TV programs that are on once and if you miss it you miss it?

But that's enough cynicism.  If you stopped one of those bearded hipsters with their metal-bodied 35mm cameras hanging from their necks and John Coltrane albums under their arms, what would they cite?

How about talking to your neighbours face to face?  Or not caring what you look or sound like because you don't have to maintain an illusion of a perfect lifestyle on social media, the failure of which leads to feelings of inadequacy and suicide?  Or shopping in real shops run by real people in real town centres, for things that will last rather than wear-once-and-discard because some accountancy software has said that will provide the biggest profit for the man and his shareholders?  Or missing out on the fear of missing out?  Or not being available 24/7 just because we can be?

Just a few ideas.

* but not too much, otherwise you'll work out it's hokum.

Product Recall

I see my story 'Product Recall' is now live at Flash Fiction Online.  Which is nice.  Why not go there, read, and even get a subscription like those nice people suggest...

Fetch me my periwig

The BBC recently reported that coffee shops are shouldering traditional pubs aside as, amongst other reasons, they become informal centres for doing business, and a younger generation eschews alcohol.

Am I the only one to get a sense of history repeating itself, of what goes around comes around?  Hasn't the 'bitter Mohammedan gruel' done its best to push aside ale before?  Perhaps somebody would care to trade some stocks and shares over a tall silver pot of chocolate?  Have the tea clippers arrived in the East India Dock, anyone?

I, for one, intend to cash in on the boom when my ten gross of powdered wigs arrive from China, to be placed on eBay at vastly inflated sums.  Laugh now, but every hipster will have one by 2019.

"Mrs Lombard, there are some situations which are too stupid to be allowed to continue"

I was going to post a review of the Doctor Who Christmas special (still watching Christmas TV, which seems supremely appropriate given, if you work in marketing, it starts in October), but the perfect summation appeared to fall out of Malcolm Tucker's face halfway through.

In any case, I'm not sure I'd know where to start with this one.  Doctor Who appears to be in a race with Sherlock, both BBC money-spinning staples, to see who can be the first to wave out of their own mouths having wedged themselves up their own fundaments with plots that owe more to Dada than three-act structure.  Bigger doesn't equal better, nor does more absurd, unless you're trying to use the dancing dolphins and fire-eating unicorns to distract from problems at the centre.

I'll leave you with that image.

End of term report

I think I've already noted in these postings that I have an annual target of selling three stories.  I tell myself anything less and I'll give up.  However, as stories are constantly tumbling around my brain, always have, always will, like cats in a bag on acid, I'm not sure if even a fallow couple of years will stop me.  (I've suffered for my art; now it's your turn.)

Well, the numbers, short-story-wise for the calendar year 2016 are these:

• 170 submissions of
• 40 different stories, of which 
• eight were newly written this year, to
• I haven't checked how many publications, which garnered
• 135 rejections,
• three and a half acceptances, with
• 31 still pending, and
• earnings of $45 for stories accepted this year (of which $10 is yet to be paid)

I say three and a half as, at the very end of the year, Flash Fiction Online (professional SFWA market!) accepted a story pending edits (make it shorter, yet add information - ??!), which I'm yet to complete.  So, I'll take the creative accountants' line of counting it for both 2016 and 2017, if it's taken.

Otherwise, the small victories were:

• 'Where do all the Accountants Come From' in Beyond the Hedge vol.1 (which appears to have generated my first substantive review, of which I'm pretty happy - "though it wasn’t my favorite story of the collection, I thought it had the most original take on the theme"); and,
• 'Litterpicking on the Moon', which was sold to PunksWritePoems for their Don't Open 'Til Doomsday anthology at the beginning of the year, and the Chronos Chronicles from Indie Authors Press at the end.  So my first reprint sale.

But that doesn't tell the whole story.  Analog encouraged submissions on strength of one story, which has been with editor-in-chief of Spark since May (although my reading of the runes is that there's an awful lot in the editor-in-chief's in-tray).  Another was a near miss with Asimov's (although the story that was with them for five and a half months just seemed to be slow rather than good-but-not-quite-good-enough).  A third was a near miss with Daily Science Fiction, the same story that has made it to within spitting distance of the inner sanctum of Flash Fiction Online.  Another fell in final round at New Myths, and also received positive feedback from Grimdark.

So, overall, a better year than 2015.  However, there does appear to be a consistent theme appearing in that editors find my pace and style more suited to the long form than the short.  I'm even beginning to wonder whether what I write is a series of chapter 1s, set-ups which are never resolved properly.  I've long passed them off as artfully ambiguous; maybe I should see them for what they really: unfinished.  Hence I've decided to concentrate on the novel this year.  I'll see if I can ignore the short story itch that I'm all too eager to scratch when it comes.  Watch this space for growing frustration.

Oh, and, yes, I'm still awaiting payment of the kill fee from Carrie Cuinn at Lakeside Circus.  Unsurprisingly...