I'll say this only once

Words written c33000

Stories completed 4

Rejections 65

Acceptances 1

One of the characteristics that makes the interweb what it is is the lack of social cues.  What I mean is the iterative process of judging what we should be doing by what other people are doing.  It’s what stops the A381 resembling a scene out of Mad Max, or John Lewis the Somme.  This is despite the emphasis on ‘social medja’.

Take social cues away and what do you have?  Well, I suppose the example that springs to mind first and foremost is trolling.  But there does appear to be some default within the human brain that goes after the easy-to-grab-hold-of negative example.  So, what about positives coming about from the lack of line of sight to what the cretin at the next desk is up to?

Which leads me to two instructions very commonly found in submission instructions to sci-fi magazines and small presses: no simultaneous submissions; and no multiple submissions.

The latter is a no brainer line not to cross - I think they’ll spot more than one submission coming their way!  But the former?

I don’t do it.  Honest.  Recently I even noticed that I had misread my spreadsheet and had sent off a story that was already out.  I almost had sleepless nights until a rejection from one came though.

But is this just me?  You won’t find a blog shouting out that their author is a serial multiple submitter, but am I just being naive?  Perhaps, in reality, everyone is at it.  What’s the biggest risk?  An apologetic withdrawal of a story should it be accepted twice?  (Take a look at the numbers above if you want to judge the likelihood of that).  Perhaps it’s like jaywalking - in America it’s a law whereas here in Britain it’s just a pragmatic approach to crossing the road.

Look at it this way.  I’ve had a story with tor.com since September 2013.  If every publisher took two years to respond I’d barely have a chance to get my wares out there before my sci-fi became historical fiction.  Surreptitious multiple submissions are very tempting.  How wrong is it?  And will it make me go blind?

The reality on response rates is somewhere between tor.com and Clarkesworld, of course.  But even so, authors all know the feeling of waiting for months to receive a ‘no thanks’, or worse, a ‘near miss’.

Again, the tally of completed stories has ticked up by one.  I’ve rewritten the near future military sci-fi mentioned in my last post to a far-future far-fetched tale for Cohesion Press’ SNAFU anthology.  Character names, location (now the dumbbell twin planets of Corobus Rama and Corobus Dala sharing an eccentric tumbling orbit around twin suns) and title have all changed.

I don’t currently have both stories out at the same time.  But what if I did?  They have strong similarities, but they aren’t the same story.  I’d probably withdraw one if the other got accepted, but until then... Would they be simultaneous submissions?  Is it just between my conscience and me?  After all, damned if I can see what everybody else is doing…

Is there honey still for tea? A pessimist responds

Words written c32000

Stories completed 3

Rejections 59

Acceptances 1

As I may have said before, I don’t subscribe to a teleological viewpoint; in other words that we’re heading towards a better tomorrow, as opposed to just tomorrow.

Yes, you can’t unthink an idea or uninvent an invention, so in that sense we’re incrementally improving.  But, at the same time, you can run out of things forever like fresh water, dodos or human kindness.

Take ISIS or IS or ISIL or whatever they’re called this week.  There’s something mediaeval about them that makes the terrorists of my youth look positively gentlemanly.  No code words called in ten minutes in advance by this lot.

Regarding their defeat we seem to have a choice between repeating Vietnam - a lot of expensive military technology against an enemy that melts into the jungle (for jungle, read desert) - or World War One - throwing sufficient numbers of boots on the ground to take sufficient numbers of bullets in the chest.

In all honesty, I can’t see the former working, and I fear that we’ll end up with the latter.  The idea of armies fighting through shear weight of numbers is meant to be something we’ve moved on from.  Isn’t that the better tomorrow that the invention of nuclear weapons gave us?  The idea of conscription is meant to be up there with the barber-surgeon and phlogiston.  But then again, TB is back in vogue, so why not call-up papers?

I look at my eleven year old and sometimes think that, if these were the Edwardian years, he’d be a dead man walking.  It wouldn’t matter how clever and talented he was (and he is), if he were destined for Flanders he would be unilaterally entered into the most cruel of lotteries.  And, in those sunny early century summers, there’d be no way of suspecting.  All would seem well with the world.  How could we possibly end up there?

And who’s to say that we’re not there again?  Who’s to say that he won’t be fighting and dying in the Levant, one of tens of thousands?  Who’s to say that the drones and the smart bombs won’t work, and what will be required will be hand-to-hand combat?

I really hope that in ten years time this piece reads as paranoid rather than prescient.

Which leads me to the obligatory link back to the world of sci-fi, tenuous though it may be.  Dear reader, look back at the numbers which head this piece and you may observe that a third story has been completed; a near future military sci-fi yarn regarding the hubris of fighting the oncoming hordes of jihadists through the forests of Austria with technology.

Oh, and Clarkesworld, of course, have rejected it in less than twenty-four hours.  Business as usual, then…

George Osborne's 7"

Words written c31000

Stories completed 2

Rejections 59

Acceptances 1

I am more often than not living my life six weeks or so in the past.

I’ve been watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway in occasional chunks (which really doesn’t lose any narrative sense), recorded off SyFy about six weeks ago, whilst – not simultaneously, I hasten to add - taking in a six-week old sermon from the Church of Wittertainment.  In that sermon Dr Kermode mentioned that Lost Highway garnered its best reviews when French critics were shown the reels in the wrong order.  Serendipity, huh?

What he failed to mention, however, was the similarity between Balthazar Getty and a young George Osborne.

Meanwhile, in a similarly aged copy of the Week, which I was reading in the bath, I noticed that a collection of every UK hit single ever, ever was going under the hammer (metaphorically); 27,000 7” singles were estimated at just £7,000 (they ended up going for a lot more).

During my youth I amassed a weighty collection of vinyl, often bought on the mere recommendation of Melody Maker, or even just on the strength of the name (little did I expect Daisy Hill Puppy Farm to turn out to be Icelandic proto-metal).  Most of it disappeared on eBay over the years for a lot more per disc than was being quoted. 

The reason is obvious, of course: what I sold was the willfully obscure, as opposed to the widely available, and a proportion had become very collectable.  (Unlike top 40 singles, which tended to leave buyers with a morning-after did-I-really-do-that feeling.)  For every Sidi Bou Said there was an early PJ Harvey; for every Faith Over Reason a Rough Trade Singles Club Catatonia.

But could you do that today?  Digital appears to have sucked the joy out of leafing through racks of records, considering the cover, the information, the label.  Not hearing it until it’s bought, paid for, and taken home in a plastic bag swinging from your hand.

Now we have the convenience of hearing it before buying – try explaining that that should be the end of the process.  Where’s the anticipation, the thrill of the hunt?  The sense of buying a gem, which can only come with the experience of buying more often than not, well, Daisy Hill Puppy Farm?

And, in what sense, can you buy a rare gem when it’s just ones and zeros, replicable an infinite number of times over?  I had vinyl that only a handful of others had, and unavailable to anyone running after the bandwagon.  Nowadays your download will be same as mine, even if I downloaded it after being one of three blokes seeing them in a pub, whereas you heard them on national radio.

Jimmy Voldemort (his name must not be uttered!) presciently said that Top of The Pops would last as long as people bought records, and he was right, although I suspect he meant ‘forever’ when he said it.

No more porky prime cuts in the run-off groove.  The youth of today just won’t understand those words…

Earth 'Entering New Extinction Phase'

Words written: c30000

Stories completed: 2

Rejections: 59

Acceptances: 1

Earth 'entering new extinction phase', screamed the BBC news headline.

Except it didn’t.

When I first stumbled across the story it was number four in the pecking order, somewhere behind a baby being chewed by a terrier.  All highly unfortunate for said baby and its family, but not really on an all-enveloping scale compared to the story that caught my eye.

Later that day it fell to number eight, and was thence ejected to the ‘magazine’ section.

Douglas Adams would have loved it.

I’ve always been impressed by the human animal’s ability to see the relatively-trivial here-and-now and miss the glaringly relevant on the horizon.  A case of admiring the tattoo but not seeing the skinhead.

It’s inextricably tied up with wanting our jam today rather than the full cream tea tomorrow.  Human foibles that have a genetic basis in wanting our jam today because by tomorrow we’ve probably become somebody else’s cream tea (just ask that baby).

We may have invented the internet and self-checkouts and mortgages, but genetically we’re still hunting mammoth.  Talk about a species getting too big for its boots.  And we know where such hubris leads to, don’t we kids?  If not, cast your eyes back to the title of this post…

Star Trek - The Next Generation

Words written c28500

Stories completed 2

Rejections 54

Acceptances 1

I have to come to terms with the fact that the bairns don't like the original Star Trek.  In fact, scrub that: they hate it.

They find all the standing around talking boring.  They find the lack of shoot-first-ask-questions-later alien encounters boring.  They find the lack of whizzy CGI boring.  And when the obligatory science officer or ensign with a waist smaller than her hat size but a centre of gravity just below her neck appears, they practically hide behind the cushions in the expectation of Captain Kirk's impending sexual harassment.

I try to tell them that Star Trek is pure science-fiction: the fiction of ideas.  Each episode is like a science experiment, where you change one variable and see what effect that has on the world.  Except the variable isn’t pressure or temperature: it’s being able to implant ideas with a machine or what if the Athenian Gods were real.

I try to tell them that Star Trek has been the inspiration for more of the current generation of scientists than anything else (I may have embroidered a throwaway piece of anecdotal evidence I picked up somewhere).

But they just find it boring.

I find this odd.  Yes, it’s a bit static and talky and much more 1960s than twenty-third (or whatever) century.  But, they're nine and eleven, and bright, the sort of combination that should be intrigued by the ideas - and the best sci-fi is always about ideas, not robots hitting each other.

Thinking about this has led me to ponder two trends, but I’m struggling to decide whether they contradict or complement.

The first, let me illustrate by way of anecdote.  The Film Program on BBC Radio 4 recently ran a series of reminiscences over first film memories.  One man fell in love with cinema in 1950 at the age of nine by being taken to see The Third Man.  Chris Nolan watched 2001, mesmerized, at a similar age.

My point is this.  Fifty, sixty – even twenty - years ago there was a limited diet of what a young mind could be presented with.  Whatever Walt and Looney Tunes could provide was quickly consumed.  Get past a few cowboy B-movies, that week’s Children’s Film Foundation output, and very quickly kids were left with ‘adult’ movies (by which I mean The Third Man, I mean, not Shaving Ryan’s Privates).  Kids got to glimpse a more adult world, and in so doing had to get used to thinking.

Nowadays a child need not have their minds stretched unless they want to.  I’d like to show the kids The Third Man (we tried 2001, with disastrous consequences).  Instead, recent cinema trips have been for Big Hero 6, Paddington, Shaun the Sheep.  And when it’s not the cinema, there are DVDs, 24-hour kids’ TV, Minecraft, Fifa15.  There’s been an infantilisation of, not just cinema, but popular culture.

But, at the same time, we’ve got bloody good at it.  Compare those three movies I mentioned - Big Hero 6, Paddington, Shaun the Sheep – to, say, Doctor Doolittle, Mary Poppins, and Swiss Family Robinson – and I know which I’d prefer.  I even have a soft spot for Frozen, that cinematic equivalent to Slush Puppy.

Even so, it’s like we’ve taken baby food to a new level.  It’s haute cuisine baby food, two Michelin star baby food.  But it’s still baby food.  You have your teeth: use them.

And that, I think, is why Star Trek falls on deaf (non-pointy) ears.  Yes, its static and talky and badly acted and full of sexual harassment of the most jaw-dropping sort.  But its also full of ideas, challenging, stretching ideas.  But we don’t do ideas much any more when there’s so much plain vanilla available letting us get away with being superbly entertained whilst being barely challenged.

Bread and circuses and robots hitting each other.  Progress of a sort, I suppose.

A Word on the Numbers (Three)... and Originality

Words written c28000

Stories completed 2

Rejections 48

Acceptances 1

The numbers quoted here are getting less and less meaningful - except, of course, for the acceptance and rejection tallies.  On the latter count I can report a 'near miss' from Triptych Tales for 'May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door' which made it through to the final round of evaluation but fell at the last.

The main reason the numbers now don't add up to very much is that I've spent the last few weeks cutting down a 91,000 word novel to 39,000 to squeeze it into Tor.com's short novella submission window.  So, does that add up to minus 52,000 words written because I've deleted them?  Who knows?  Who cares?  I'll continue to log the new material I produce on stories going forward.

A more pressing conundrum concerns originality: originality in general, and of that cut down novel in particular.  The fact of the matter is that the first act of the original novel was workshopped on jukepop.com, some 30,000 words.  Which means that there's significant overlap between the first 9,000 to 10,000 words of what's gone to Tor.com and what appeared on Jukepop.

However, not only have huge swathes of text gone for a Burton, it's had a rewrite; the main character is now a clone whereas he wasn't before.  It's not identical, albeit identical in places.  And the latter three-quarters of the novella are absolutely new to the world.  I could have changed the names of people and places but, frankly, that would have looked like a cynical attempt to hide things.

I haven't mentioned this in my submission as I want them to love it before they discover its baggage; in pitching the novel I mentioned jukepop as a strength (it was selected as one of the opening 30 stories), but several publishers used it as a reason for not even reading it.  But I mainly haven't mentioned it to Tor.com because I regard it as original.

Meanwhile, a large chunk of the backstory that has been removed can stand on its own feet, having begun life as a short story in any case about twenty years ago.  I think it may even have gone off to Interzone in an earlier life.  But that has appeared  in its entirety on jukepop.  So I will change the names, locations - and, no doubt, in the process, give it an unrecognisable rewrite - and submit that as original because it will be by then.

Raymond Chandler, I think, quite frequently rewrote short stories into novels, virtually taking each sentence as expanding it into three or four in places.

And here's the rub.  If I were an artist I could repaint the same picture over and over and nobody would regard it as anything but original.  If I were a musician I could gig the same tracks over and over - in fact, it's what the moshpit demands.  How many sculptors or potters just turn out the same thing (hares? why hares?) week after week.  They become much loved signatures.

But, as a writer, try a variation on a theme?  A cover version?  You'll get edited out with extreme prejudice...

I Feel Dirty...

Words written c27000

Stories completed 2

Rejections 44

Acceptances 1

…but not in a good way.

With the bairns being nine and 11 I’ve managed to avoid all the fuss about the Hunger Games, other than regular sermons at the Church of Wittertainment.  But with the Boy having started on the books we sat down to watch the first film as a family, which my newspaper film guide informed me was probably the most important science-fiction story of modern times.

I have to confess that I watched in slack-jawed disbelief at the travesty being committed to celluloid (metaphorically speaking; I know it’s all ones and noughts now) and only continued to watch so that I could be aware of what the Boy was greedily absorbing.  My wife left after twenty minutes or so, as did the Girl.

Please don’t think this is some spineless reaction to the violence in general or children killing themselves in particular.  Battle Royale gave us all that and I didn’t have an issue.  Haven’t watched that for years, but remember it as a satirical classic.

It’s that the story was so… awful.  So awful that I felt physically uncomfortable watching.  Like I needed to wash.

The whole story, unsurprisingly, revolves around the Hunger Games.  Hell, society revolves around the Hunger Games.  It therefore came as a surprise that so little thought seems to have gone into what the Games mean to everybody in the Hunger Games storyverse.

We’re told that Catniss is the first person in 74 years to volunteer for the Games.  Statistically, somebody must be put in her position of seeing a younger sibling picked once every two or three years – do your own guesstimate, but you’ll agree that it’ll have happened at least a dozen times before.  But she’s the first in the best part of a century to want to save little ‘sis.  Really?

And what about the prospect of fame and fortune, even if it comes at the expense of possible death?  Is the writer saying that nobody sees – or has ever seen - the Hunger Games as a way out of their dead-end life?  Not even with that big parade and TV interviews?  Even given two per cent of us are meant to be psychopaths?  Even given the post-apocalyptic decor of District 12?

So, the Hunger Games are so awful that people’ll do anything to get away, that it’s a fate worse than death, that not even the deranged can find any upside in the prospect?  Not if you go by the mother’s reaction.  It’s all a bit ho-hum to her, having her youngest progeny chosen for certain death, having her eldest take her place.  I’ve seen village raffles with more riding on it.

So, ten minutes or so in and I’m getting confused: are these people alien to us?  Am I meant to conclude that the fact that they look like us is a red herring, and that emotionally they’re a different species?  There are plenty of stories out there that fit that model, but what they have, what makes them work is a bridging character through whom we see their world.  Somebody to shout ‘you’re all wrong’ at them, somebody to try to change the world on our behalf because we’re not there.  I’m waiting for them to show up, or for Catniss to be that character…

But, instead, we’re presented with a bunch of ciphers.  Where’s the character who fights the system, not just other characters (should have been Catniss)?  Where the character who falls apart because he doesn’t want to be there?  Where’s the character who thinks he wants to kill, but does so and learns how horrible it really is?  Where’s the character who doesn’t want to kill but is made to (which is sort of Catniss, although not enough is made of it)?

As a writer one of my mantras is that a story has to be about a character who wants something (anything!) but needs to overcome hurdles to get there.  Put that in and you automatically create empathy; we all know what it’s like to want something.  Hell, even The Very Hungry Caterpillar fits that mould.

Yes, Catniss has an aim in trying to save her sister, but she achieves that by volunteering.  I’m amazed that this wasn’t changed to her needing to win the Games to save her sister in the second draft of the outline.  Or amended on the napkin.  And, yes, trying to stay alive is a big aim, but in the grand guignol of the movie I need something, anything, riding on it.  I’m quite happy with stories that are emotionally shallow, but this one was beached.  And without a sense of purpose your character arc flatlines - the Catniss at the end is no different from the girl at the beginning.  And after all that she's been through?!  That's almost an achievement.

Not having read the books I really don’t know how faithful the film is (the Boy says it is), so these comments apply wholly to the movie.  And there’s still a lot to admire: Jennifer Lawrence herself, the cinematography of the forest, the effects.  But if the story doesn’t engage then you find yourself disconnected and nothing can ever draw you back in.  It ends up looking like something silly that should be on a cable channel at 3am.  Or something that looks like a satire but isn't sure what it's satirising.

And, if they can make big cats rise from the forest floor, holograms brought to life, why haven’t they invented the autocue for Stanley Tucci?