Unbranching Personal Narratives

written by David Steffen

When I was about nine years old I was out at a story with my older brother who would’ve been about eighteen years old at the time. I think it was around Christmastime and there were a few inches of snow and ice on the ground. As we were walking out of the store, minds casting ahead to what we were going to do at home. Before we got to the car, a woman walking alone ahead of us slipped and fell on the ice, ending up flat on her back ahead of us.

If anyone had asked, I would’ve considered myself a compassionate person. But my kneejerk reaction was that we would keep on walking. But, to my surprise, my brother stopped and made sure she was okay. She was capable of responding and had no apparent injury. We helped her up to her feet. Some other people came over to check she was okay and then we were on our way. She was okay and no harm done, but of course I didn’t know that at the time.

That incident comes up in my mind from time to time, especially at times when I have a chance to help someone. I expect my brother doesn’t remember it. The woman probably doesn’t remember it either. But it comes to mind when I have an opportunity to help someone, so I don’t make the same mistake. It was a formative moment even though it probably wasn’t significant to anyone else.

From time to time I wondered why I acted that way at the time? I thought of myself as a compassionate person. So why didn’t I even think to help? I learned the Golden Rule in school and believed it was right, and if I fell I’d want someone to check that I was okay. The best explanation that I can think of is that I was focused on my own personal life narrative and I didn’t see how this stranger fit in–I was ready to get on to the next scene. But that’s no way to go about life. Everyone has their own storyline and maybe sometimes you’re just playing a bit role in someone else’s story–maybe no one will even remember it, maybe they will, but doesn’t matter.

 

Interview: Jeff Carlson

Jeff Carlson Jeff Carlson was a shortlister for the Campbell, a finalist for the Dick, and a first placer for WOTF. He is the author the alien Frozen Sky series and the post-apocalyptic Plague War series. His latest novel is the post-apocalyptic Interrupt. His short stories have appeared in Asimov’s and Strange Horizons. His short story collection is Long Eyes. His stories have been published in 16 languages.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: I listened to a podcast of “Topsider” on StarShipSofa. I was very impressed with the writing. So clear and efficient. Every passage is relevant, every sentence is in the right place, every scene is vivid. How did you learn to write so well? Did you attend a workshop? Do you have a ghost writer? Do you have an army of editorial assistants hidden in your basement combing over every word, every line, every paragraph? Are you an alien sent here to intimidate us human writers with your superior skill? Or do you just have a natural gift?

JEFF CARLSON: The truth is I’m the evil pod clone host of the poltergeists of Hemingway and Eliot. Every word is pure gold. Kneel before me, you fools!

Aha ha ha.

Thank you. No, actually I’m just an obsessive freak who fell in love with the spare, evocative styles of authors like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, Connie Willis and Spider Robinson right as I was coming of age as a fledging writer myself. Short story collections like Dealing In Futures and The Persistence of Vision made a vibrant impression on me. At their best, Haldeman and Varley could pack more human complexity into one sentence than some writers accomplish with a full page.

Most of their works are dated now. The science and the geopolitical scenarios in their books can seem alien to 21st Century thinking†¦ which isn’t a bad thing if you enjoy the “what if” sense of wonder on which science fiction is built. Seriously. Go read the Worlds trilogy or Steel Beach or Bellwether or Night Of Power. Those books are mind-croggling even if there’s not an iPhone in sight.

Early in my teens and twenties, I did attend a lot of conferences and book signings, soaking up as much as I could from established authors. I joined a local writer’s group. I have a B.A. in English Lit. Mostly I read a lot and wrote a lot. Trial by fire.

I came up the once-traditional path in writing. When I was fifteen, I cranked out a sprawling, million word epic novel. It was pretty bad but it had heart. Then I got serious, buckled down, and began writing short stories. Of course I tried to emulate the minimalist, shock-ya story arcs of Haldeman and company. It’s a real challenge to squeeze an entire plot and character development into the space of forty pages, especially if you’re also introducing new worlds and explaining futuristic science and weapons tech. Each story was also a different opportunity to play with voice or POV.

In time, I began selling short pieces to small press publications, then to semi-pro and finally to full-on professional magazines with glossy ads and comparatively nice pay rates. Then I wrote a new book. Landed an agent. Sold the book in a minor bidding war. I think some people still become writers that way even now after the e-revolution.

What I should add is that in the process, I learned everything I could about editing. Some of this education came through studying what the magazine editors and the staff at Penguin did with my manuscripts. Other tricks I learned through sheer repetition.

The brain is a muscle. You can strengthen it.

From first draft to final proofs, I read Plague Year more than forty times. The sequel, Plague War, I read thirty times. The third book in the trilogy, Plague Zone, I read twenty times. By the time I got to The Frozen Sky and Interrupt, I was reading my books fifteen times. I don’t know if I’ll go less than that, but I hope I’ve streamlined the process. I’ve learned to avoid some mistakes.

Oh, just to clarify: “Topsider” is an excerpt from The Frozen Sky, and Sky and its sequels are self-published. Yes, I have beta readers. No, there are zero professional editors involved. These books are essentially a solo act. I’m working without a net, although I have surrounded myself with a small squad of keen-eyed volunteers as well as paid masterminds like the cover artist, Jasper Schreurs, who’s a freaking genius.

 

The Frozen Sky includes a lot of science and several fields of science. Astrophysics, biology, geology, pharmacology, AIs, computer hacking. How much research do you have to do for all that science to be feasible and accurate? Or do you have a rolodex of consultants on speed dial?

I read a lot. I remember what I read. The bulletin board on my office wall is layered in a madman’s stack of print-outs and clippings. Oh, and I have this thing called the internet, ha ha. I’m constantly jumping online to reach how granite is formed or what’s the capital of Finland or because I need to examine the molecular structure of hemoglobin. As a sci fi guy, I’m also fortunate to know any number of real-world engineers and scientists. I pester them from time to time.

 

Frozen SkyThe aliens in The Frozen Sky are intelligent, but they look a bit like squids, they don’t speak and they don’t have sight. Why not bipedal aliens like Vulcans or Klingons or Romulans with vocal cords and eyes?

Because I’m not constrained by a production budget! Ha. “Let’s glue some ears on him. We’ll glue some forehead thingies on them. Okay, we’re done.”

Star Trek is good fun but limited in presentation. That’s the beauty of being a novelist. The medium requires the reader’s imagination. Yes, I direct the action, but hard sf readers are smart readers. They want to be strangers in a strange land. So I can say, well, I have this claustrophobic three-dimensional low-gravity environment like the mazes of an ant farm inside Europa’s icy crust. What would kind of creatures would evolve here? Six-foot-tall bipedal creatures like people? Heck no.

 

The aliens have a math system and hieroglyphics type alphabet. Have they invented the wheel yet? How technologically advanced are they?

Man, I can’t tell you that! You’ll have to go deeper into the ice!

 

The novels of The Frozen Sky are told through the POV of Alexis Vonderach, one of the European astronauts. Why not the POV of a member of a different team like the Chinese or the Brazilians? Why not the POV of one of the aliens?

Great question. I have written novels with multiple POV storylines like Interrupt or the Plague Year trilogy†¦ but for The Frozen Sky, the setting is already so complicated, I wanted to ground the story as best I could.

Also, I really like Vonnie. She’s smart and brave and capable and resilient. Does she have her weaknesses? Yes. She’s very human. I felt like staying within her mind was a necessary focal point. The catacombs inside Europa’s “frozen sky” are a bizarre and horrific environment. Adding more storylines was too much.

Having said that, an early draft included some chapters from the POV of an alien. Holy cow, was that a chore! These aliens are really strange, am I right? Trying to convey their thoughts in English was like dropping acid at the bottom of a Vegas swimming pool with Hunter S. Thompson, three tigers, a box of cookies and leaking SCUBA masks while reciting a Latin mass with the pope on your waterproof phone to Snooki as she’s driving drunk in downtown L.A. through commuter traffic. Did you follow that? I don’t know what it means, either. That’s just an approximation of how convoluted it felt trying to write from inside the brain of a sunfish. Whoa, Nelly.

I hope I managed to convey their very foreign way of thinking in their dealings with Von and the other human characters. The transcripts of their sonar calls and body language were incredibly fun to write. Also, I love comparing so many of things we take for granted with the pure, straightforward existence of my alien tribes.

 

If there was an alien main character, what would he be saying to his friends about Earthlings? Kill them and feed them to our offspring. Perform an autopsy on one of them. Steal their technology. Maybe they’re causing all the geological instability.

Examples one, three and four are reasonable. Number two doesn’t sound like the sunfish because, well, they’d just eat ya†¦

 

In the recent movie Europa Report, people travel to the same moon and encounter a similar alien. Then it turns into a body count horror movie as the squid picks off the entire crew. Instead, you have the two species interacting. What type of issues do they face trying to communicate with each other and understand each other’s cultures?

I haven’t seen Europa Report because I know I’d be disappointed. My book was first. More important, movies tend to suffer from the exact same problems you laid out for Star Trek and from the necessity for a body count.

That’s not to say The Frozen Sky doesn’t include sex and violence. Heck, the first 100 pages are basically one big chase scene, and among my favorite haters of all time is a lady who chastised me for using this novel to depict human beings as “just rutting animals with no purpose other than to destroy everything in sight with the exception of a few enlightened yet rutting souls.”

Hee hee. The oh-so-graphic depictions of sex in The Frozen Sky amount to a few interested glances between the heroine and her crewmates, one deep kiss, and an erotic thought or two from her POV.

Do I believe sex and violence are not only central to the human condition but also go hand in hand? God, yes. Look at what we consider entertainment. Look at the geopolitical scene. Every problem we have , pollution, racism, religious strife, war, disease , can be traced to overpopulation and the pressures between various groups or nations. Now that’s a nuts-and-bolts view of an extremely complex planet. We could spend our lifetimes connecting the dots. It’s easier to simplify everything to a basic dogma of “We’re right, they’re wrong,” but that easier view is part of what makes life harder on everyone in the world.

If sexuality makes you uncomfortable , if you think it’s scary or forbidden , I’d like to suggest that you have an immature sense of reality. Where did these seven freaking billion people come from if raw desire isn’t a major element of human motivation?
If greed , if destroying everything in sight , isn’t another major element of human motivation, why are our cities and slums expanding while the forests disappear and the oceans fill up with trash and poisons? Why are we fighting ancient wars over worthless deserts except to control everything we see? Granted, the oil in select areas of those deserts is valuable, but doesn’t that further prove my point? Is killing people for religious or racial differences better than killing them for energy sources?

Anyway. Too much coffee for me again this morning.

From what I see, we’re barely able to communicate among ourselves. Human beings cheat and lie and hurt each other. We have so many forms of insanity. Developing The Frozen Sky, I thought “Why wouldn’t intelligent aliens have their own delusions and conflicts?” Those fallacies would make it even harder for people and aliens to communicate.

 

Your work has been translated into 16 languages worldwide. How big of a chunk of your sales comes from foreign markets?

Never as much as I’d like. It is really, really fun to see my stories in languages I can’t read with new titles and new cover art. The experience is a mix of dà ©jàvu and that awesome, twisty sense of “What if?”

When a foreign edition appears, it’s like having written an all-new book without having put in the work because those publishers have their own translators and artists. Every now and then a new magazine or a new novel shows up on my doorstep and I examine it with a smile, imagining how it reads in Spanish or Czech or whatever. Less frequently, I get fan mail from someone overseas, occasionally in broken English but usually in more grammatically precise English than my own, which is even more of a pleasure. Over time, I’ve struck up e-friendships with readers in the Netherlands, Estonia, Germany, you name it.

My job description is I sit alone in a room with a laptop listening to the voices in my head. It’s spectacular to hear from real live people who enjoy the books.

 

A lot of novelists continue to write short stories to keep their name out there. They have bylines on the cover of Asimov’s two or three times a year. They get nominated for multiple Hugos and Nebulas. They get top billing at conventions. You chose not to go that route. What was the reasoning and how has that worked out for you?

Ha! Is that a trick question? I would love to be nominated for Hugos and Nebulas and receive top billing at conventions. I didn’t choose not to go that route. I haven’t been invited!!!

Regardless, I don’t know that bylines in Asimov’s equate to Hugo nominations and GOH slots at the big cons. I’ve had three stories with Asimov’s, and Penguin took out a lovely full-page ad in the magazine to promote Plague Zone, which was seriously cool. Also, Sheila Williams is a gracious, witty, hard-working genius and a pleasure to work with†¦

†¦but these days I write very little short fiction because I have a family and a mortgage, and short fiction rarely pays well. Equally important, as a reader I prefer to sink my head into a good novel and stay with the characters for a while. Most people are the same way. Hence the pay rates for short fiction. There’s just not as much demand for short stories.

I’m totally overwhelmed with my life in the real world plus my own writing / editing / research / etc., so my choice is to write a chapter of the next book rather than a short story. I only have so many hours in the day. Having said that, surprise! I recently accepted an invitation to contribute to a new anthology, and I have two more pieces of short fiction in progress. It’s just a matter of carving out enough minutes to get to everything. I definitely need some Carlson Clones.

 

Big open-ended questions: After the ebook revolution, when have you opted for self-publishing and what was the result? When have you opted for traditional publishing and what was the result?

Late in 2010, I self-re-e-published the original short story of “The Frozen Sky” on Kindle, Nook, and iTunes. It sold 40,000 copies.

I’d always wanted to develop it into a novel. The setting is literally as large as an entire moon. That’s plenty of room for new storylines, surprises and reversals. So I moved this project to the front burner. Going solo involved any number of new learning curves, but, again, I’d been paying close attention to the game while working with Penguin for the Plague Year trilogy.

Late in 2012, I self-published the all-new The Frozen Sky: The Novel. To date, it’s sold 37,000 copies. For a hard sf novel, that’s a very strong number, better than a mid-lister would expect with a Big 5 publisher in NYC. Color me excited. Japanese rights recently sold to Tokyo Sogensha, and our hope is the book’s success will lead to more interest overseas and in Hollywood. Let’s face it. It’s a cool idea, and far better executed than Europa Report.

If I had to pitch The Frozen Sky in a few words, I’d say: “This story is Pitch Black crossed with The Thing, and it features a strong female lead in impossible situations.” Also, it wouldn’t demand a massive budget, more like Lucy than Prometheus.

As for the many forms of publishing in our brave new e-world, these days I’m sort of climbing back and forth over the fence. Traditional publishing was good to me, and I’d happily accept the right deal. In the meantime, Interrupt was published by 47North, one of the new Amazon imprints stocked with top editors and publicists who were headhunted out of New York and released from many of the usual corporate restraints. They’re wild-eyed e-pirates on the laser’s edge of the future, man! Working with 47North was a delight. The book did well. You can’t really say 47North is a traditional publisher because their focus is ebooks, but the process was similar and I take pride now in being a triple hybrid , a traditional, a new model, and a self-published writer.

 

What comfort level have you reached as an author? Do you have liveried servants, do you still mow your own lawn, or somewhere in between?

Uh, yeah. Someday I hope to become such a jaded bigshot that I float in a pool lazily dictating my lunatic visions to a super model while legions of butlers and maid polish the silverware and fold our all-organic silk wardrobes. Hasn’t happened yet. I’m still barely making an honest wage in part because the money’s up and down. I have fat months. I have lean months.

But it beats working for the man!

 

Hollywood used to be into spaceship sci fi. Now they’re into alien sci fi and post-apocalyptic sci fi. You’ve got both. Any feelers from Hollywood?

Paging Steven Spielberg†¦ Paging Mr. Spielberg†¦

 

Which actress would you chose to play Von?

Someone who’s smart and bright-eyed. Quick of wit and quick in combat.

 

Got any advice to aspiring writers?

Get a job, hippie! Bwah ha ha ha.

No, seriously: writing is a sketchy way to make a living. It takes a lot of work (which you can control) and some luck (which you can’t control), so the main thing is to put butt in chair and grind away. Try not to make yourself too crazy. Use the crazy to drive you. A little monomania never hurt anybody. Finishing a novel can be a long, hard marathon, which is why I always recommend starting out with short stories. It’s a joy to finish something, and each short story can be a different experiment in voice or pacing. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. Move on. Work hard. Read a lot. Improve.

I suppose those sound like slogans, but there’s truth in slogans. Very few of us are the magic wunderkind who simply writes a perfect book and hits the bestseller lists. Most of us labor at our craft for years. We always labor at it. That means you need to enjoy the work. Write because you love listening to the voices in your head. Write because language and imagery and the human condition are fascinating to you. The work isn’t always fun, but should be satisfying.

That’s my five cents. If you don’t take satisfaction in the challenges you set for yourself, you’re doing it wrong. Enjoy the solitude. Enjoy the thinking. Believe me, when you get an email from Moscow or Dallas or Poughkeepsie informing you that you’re a genius, it’s worth the hours spent.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

Anime Catch-Up Review: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

written by Laurie Tom

fullmetalalchemistbrotherhood

Fullmetal Alchemist has been around since the early 2000s. It was one of those anime series famous enough that it was hard to be a fan and not have heard of it.

In 2009, a few years after the first FMA wrapped up, it was rebooted. That felt unusually soon, but the first series had deviated heavily from the original manga (at the creator’s request, since the manga was still ongoing) and the second series was going to be true to the soon-to-be ending manga. The buzz around the second series, titled Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in English, was even stronger than the first one.

But I didn’t think much of the two teenaged protagonists. What I knew was that Edward and Alphonse Elric had tried to resurrect their dead mother through alchemy (that never goes over well) and as a result of that botched attempt Ed lost his right arm and left leg, and Al lost his body so his soul had to be bonded to a suit of armor. Much of the story involves them searching for a way to become whole again, and I wasn’t really interested in following two teenagers trying to fix themselves after having done something horribly stupid.

Fortunately, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is a lot more than that.

Manga creator Hiromu Arakawa has built a world that invokes the look of 1930s England, with cars, telephones, radios, and trains; a world where alchemy is considered a science. The country of Amestris lives and breathes independent of the Elric brothers’ existence, which allows the series to be so much more than two teenagers trying to fix a childhood mistake.

I’m sure Ed and Al do well enough with their target demographic of pre-teen and teenage boys. They’re incredibly talented and kick-ass for their age with just enough emotional insecurity to make them relatable. Much of the show’s humor centers around the antics of the two of them, and Alphonse’s animations are adorable when he’s out of sorts (though Ed’s sensitivity about his height is a little overdone the first few episodes). But for me, it’s the parallel conspiracy story that gets me going.

The brothers are searching for a way to restore themselves and a possible key to that is finding or creating a philosopher’s stone, which magnifies an alchemist’s ability. Normally alchemy requires an equivalent exchange; alchemists cannot create something out of nothing. Since a philosopher’s stone reduces or outright negates the need for exchange, it’s a highly desirable object for alchemists beyond the Elric brothers.

This sets up the parallel storyline.

While the Elric brothers are dealing with their own issues on the center stage, there is another story involving a conspiracy within the military, philosopher’s stones, and a civil war from six years ago. The two overlap from time to time, and eventually merge later in the series, but for the first half of the series the Elric brothers are largely in the dark or only tangentially involved with what’s going on.

This segment of the story is spearheaded by the ambitious Colonel Roy Mustang who understands that there is something rotten in his country’s military and he intends to root it out. Roy’s storyline is fascinating to watch, because he’s very aware he’s playing a dangerous game against an unknown enemy who outranks him, and his enemy is equally aware that Roy is getting too nosy for his own good.

Roy plays his moves intelligently and shoots for the long game; so long that his real agenda doesn’t even come out until halfway through the series (a rarity for a protagonist). And since he’s not the titular character (Ed is the Fullmetal Alchemist) the moments when he finds himself in trouble are a lot more nerve-wrecking since there’s less of a guarantee he’ll make it out intact.

The two plots connect through the Elric brothers’ pursuit of a philosopher’s stone and because as a state alchemist Ed reports to Roy Mustang, though Roy seldom gives him any direct orders or involves him in any of his plans (probably because he knows the Elric brothers are uncontrollable wild cannons). Roy himself is also a powerful alchemist, specializing in fire.

I have a suspicion that the manga writer/artist made Roy too powerful a secondary protagonist because he frequently gets hamstrung in ways that keep him out of the action. While the Elric brothers often start fight scenes at full strength, Roy is usually wet (he can’t start a fire when damp), crippled, or both when faced with a potential battle. When he finally does get some action in, it ends up being one of the most badass scenes in the first half of the series.

This isn’t a show that I would have watched on my own, but it’s better than I expected and I can see why it was so popular. The use of alchemy throughout the series is not only well designed and integral to the story, but allows for some creative problem solving that just wouldn’t be possible for protagonists in most other series. Given the 1930s setting, this can mean knowing the chemical composition of what they’re transmuting. It feels very smart.

Though Ed and Al aren’t my typical cup of tea, I don’t dislike them, and they eventually grew on me by the end. But I would have found the series more difficult to get into if Roy had not been working in the background. I really needed that more mature storyline and the element of danger and uncertainty that came with it. It’s a bit of a shame that when their enemies become one that Roy’s role becomes diminished in much of the third quarter of the series (more hamstringing), though he bounces back in a spectacular way by the end.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the grand revelation of the villain’s plans at the end of the story, but I can’t deny that the final episodes demanded to be watched one after another. What comes together in this series is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s probably one of the best I’ve watched in a long time.

Number of Episodes: 64

Pluses: Uncommon period setting, cool alchemy system, good sense of suspense, Roy Mustang makes everything better

Minuses: Ed and Al feel like they’re unconnected to the greater storyline in the early episodes, the final villain’s motivations don’t quite come together

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was reviewed on Blu-Ray and watched in the original Japanese with subtitles. The first four episodes are available for free both subbed and dubbed on Hulu.

 

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

GAME REVIEW: Chains

2014-11-16_00001

Chains is a color-matching app-style game released by 2DEngine.com. At first glance, it looks like other color matching app-style games like Bejeweled and Candy Crush. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, mind you, but Candy Crush already does what it does so well that most people don’t need another Candy Crush.

The concept is similar, to link up adjacent like-colored objects to clear them out. But Chains goes above and beyond by giving a much more varied level design and with different objectives. In some levels the objective is simply to reach a certain level of matches, or to reach a certain level of matches without losing more than x off the side of the screen. Still others require an extended chain of more than X balls to pass the level, to exactly match two pails full of balls that each have a “weight” value, or to make exact change with numbered balls. My personal favorite is a level where the balls are flowing in a river through a partial obstructed streambed and you have to make matches to keep the stream clear. Fast paced twitchy fun.

2014-11-16_00002Visuals
What you’d expect for a color-matching game.

Audio
Good instrumental museum.

Challenge
Some of the levels are pretty challenging, trying to keep up with the high pace of matching.

Story
None

Session Time
None of the fast-paced levels take more than a few minutes. You only lose your progress within the level, probably just a few minutes.

Playability
Very easy to pick up–click on a colored ball and drag across nearby ones. Release button to clear or right-click to cancel. Easy peasy.

Replayability
Depends on how “record” oriented you are. If you like to try to beat records could replay for that, I guess.

Originality
Not super original, being more of the color-matching variety. But I thought they did as good a job with level variety as they could.

Playtime
It took about 2 hours to play through the 20 levels.

Overall
Fun game, of the app variety, does a better job with level style variety than most color matching games. $5 on Steam.

 

Anime Movie Review: Hal

written by Laurie Tom

hal

Hal is an original animated movie from Studio Wit about a robot sent to help the bereaved. Specially, the titular character, Hal, is sent to the young woman Kurumi after a fatal airplane accident.

Hal is told that it’s his job as a robot that looks and sounds like the original Hal to help Kurumi through her grief. Initially I had to question why it would be a good idea to send someone a care robot who looks exactly like the person they had lost, but as the story progresses I can see why it works, as it allows the bereaved to address the misgivings and unsaid feelings they never got to say to the unexpectedly departed.

Watching Hal learn to become human is touching, especially as he tries to figure out how to reach Kurumi. He discovers that it’s not enough just to show up and be kind, but he needs to understand who it was that she had lost, which is most often done through the puzzle cubes that Kurumi and the original Hal had made for each other.

Essentially a 5×5 Rubik’s Cube, the puzzle cubes have a colored face on each side, and on each face the couple had inscribed wishes they wanted to come true, then scrambled them, because there is a saying that fixing the cube will make the wishes come true. As Hal solves the cubes, or gets help from others around him to do so, he begins to see what the relationship between Hal and Kurumi was like and what kind of person Hal had been.

At an hour in length, Hal is on the short side for a movie, but it’s exactly the length it needs to be, as it doesn’t burden itself with complicated subplots, and it allows the story to focus on Hal and him finding who he really is.

There is, however, a twist towards the end of the story that has virtually no foreshadowing. It worked for me, and I think it dovetailed nicely with the premise, but others viewers might be less forgiving. It’s possible to detect on a second viewing as there are subtle animation cues, and a couple lines of dialogue that make more sense, but I would be very surprised if anyone figured it out the first time around.

I really enjoyed Hal and would recommend it to anyone who likes animation. Anime outside of Hayao Miyazaki films and assorted TV series rarely get much attention in the U.S. and with its length I’m sure Hal would never have gotten a theatrical run here, but it’s a touching bit of science fiction that deserves to be seen by more people.

Hal was reviewed on Funimation’s YouTube channel as part of a limited time promotion, with the first viewing dubbed and the second subtitled. The trailer and the first seven minutes are still available for viewing. Hal is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Funimation.

 

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Persistence

written by David Steffen

One of the most important traits to lasting as a writer is persistence even in the face of long odds. I’m nothing if not persistent–I’ve sent more than 1500 submissions since I started submitting 6 and a half years ago.

Thinking back on my childhood, there may have been some early signs that I was (perhaps unreasonably) persistent. One particular story happened in 1991 with the release of Super NES game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I’d grown up playing the first two Zelda games on my brother’s NES. I had my own SNES and I was very eager to try out the game. But when the game was released, I didn’t have $50 on account of being an unemployed child. I had my eye on the game at the Lewis Drug down the street, and I was scrounging for pocket change in the couch, doing odd jobs for family, and so on. While I was saving up, I was worried the game would go out of stock and never come back in, so every single night 10-year old me would call Lewis Drug and ask them if they still had the game on their shelves. Somehow I was genuinely surprised when, after the first night or two, they didn’t actually go check before they told me they have it. It never occurred to me that I was most certainly the only one calling every day to ask about an item I didnt’ buy. Eventually I did come up with the cash to buy the game. And I’m pretty sure that when I came into the store the clerk asked me if I was the kid who called every day… before I counted out $50 of pocket change onto the counter.

Interview: Jacey Bedford

 

Jacey Bedford

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

Jacey Bedford uses the Milford Method for workshopping/critiquing. She uses Diabolical Plots’ Submissions Grinder for submitting. Her debut novel is 171,000 words, so she apparently doesn’t suffer from writer’s block. She has been participating in workshopping/critiquing 20 years. She is one of the organizers of the Northwrite SF Writers’ Group and the Milford SF Writers Conference. She is represented by Maass agent Amy Boggs, who was also interviewed by Diabolical Plots. She has signed a 3 book contract with DAW and Empire of Dust is out this month.
You’ve done a lot of workshopping and critiquing. First, what’s the difference between workshopping and critiquing? Is a writers conference synonymous with a writers workshop? What are the advantages and disadvantages of workshopping? What should you expect and not expect from worshopping. What are the advantages and disadvantages of critiquing? What should you expect and not expect from critiquing?

I’ve been part of various critique groups over the last twenty years, both face to face and by email, and I’m also one of the organisers of the Northwrite SF Writers’ Group and the Milford SF Writers Conference which is a week long event where writers take chunks of their works in progress or complete short stories for both critiquing and workshopping. In Milford terms workshopping just means a general discussion where fellow writers will make suggestions and dissect ideas, sometimes in macro terms, sometimes micro. This usually goes above and beyond what you would probably get in a normal critique session and usually evolves throughout the week. When you have fifteen writers kettled together deep discussions are often the result. (Though, of course there are workshops which are more like courses where there is a leader or moderator and writing exercises may be involved. I haven’t taken part in any of those, so I’m not qualified to talk about them.)

At Milford each writer submits (in advance) up to 15,000 words in one or two pieces. The week is organised to include reading/writing time (mornings), formal critique time (afternoons) and social time (evenings). There are no teachers and no students. At Milford every writer is equal, whether they have a string of published novels or a single short story sale. The critique sessions use what has become known as the Milford Method which is now used in many other writers’ groups. (Just Google Milford Method and see how many hits you get.) Basically each participant, in rotation, spends up to four minutes (timed) giving their critique of the work at hand. No interruption, whether by the author or anyone else, is allowed during this stage of the proceedings. After everyone has spoken the author gets an uninterrupted right of reply and then this is followed by a more general discussion which is often continued over a good glass of red in the library after dinner.

 

Is Milford a workshop? A conference? A critique session? The short answer is: all of the above and more. It’s called a conference because historically that’s what James Blish called it when he brought it over from the USA to the UK in 1972 – way before my time. Should it really be called a conference? Is it a conference? I haven’t a clue, but it’s the name we inherited.

Before Milford I was part of a small email critique group which we called RECOG. There were ten of us and we took turns to submit a piece of up to 10,000 words in rotation. So there would be a piece to critique every ten to fourteen days and your own turn would come round every eight to ten weeks. The critiques from participants tended to vary from macro critiques to detailed line edits. Very occasionally if someone was having a plot problem there would be a request for ‘plot-noodling’ in which ideas would be exchanged. We were truly international with writers from the UK, USA, New Zealand and Finland, so there was no face-to-face interaction at all.

Writing is a solitary experience, so writers’ groups are great because apart from the obvious advantages of getting a second (third, fourth, fifth etc.) opinion on your work, the transmission of information, expertise and enthusiasm is vital. It’s easy to get too close to your own work so you lose track of the big picture. Someone else can often pick out what’s wrong, or tell you what’s right. Of course if you have nine other writers’ opinions you may get some conflicting ideas. At the end of the day it’s still your book and where it goes is your responsibility.

Setting up your own writing group is an option if there isn’t a suitable one nearby, but you might want to try critiquing by joining an online group like Critters first to see if it’s for you. Beware some local writing groups that exist just to read their work aloud and pat each other on the back. Some people get into creative writing as a form of therapy or for social reasons (which is all very valid if that’s what you want) but if you are working towards publication, you need a serious group of like-minded writers who are going to inspire each other to greater efforts. It helps if it’s genre specific if that’s where your writing ambitions are.
What about your own experience. What was your writing life like before and after workshopping and critiquing?

I’ve always written. My first novel attempt was at the age of fifteen. I managed six chapters, typed out very slowly on an ancient Imperial 66. Until the advent of the internet I was a secret writer, amassing many unread manuscripts, mostly in longhand. As soon as I got online, back in the 1990s, I was lucky to find two usenet newsgroups, misc.writing and rec.arts.sf.composition. They were not critique groups, but offered discussions about the writing process and delivered important information about the nuts and bolts of welding words together.

Critique groups are not just important for the critique you get, of course, but also for the critiques you give. You get to read a lot of work by other writers, some much more experienced than you, and some much less. You see mistakes and critique them (thoroughly and constructively, but also sensitively) and learn not to make the same mistakes yourself. Whether online or face to face, you need to be able to commit to a critique group. It can be hard work, but very rewarding.
Your debut novel has just come out. DAW is a very distinguished publisher. How did you break into that market? Did you go through an agent, did you meet the editor at a convention, did you do some networking, or did you just submit through the slushpile?

I’d had an agent, whom I liked a lot, but who made the decision to cease her agency business, so while I was looking for another agent I sent a manuscript to DAW, but with an introduction from another DAW author (met at Milford). It was kind of a slushpile thing, but because I had an introduction I was able to land it directly on Sheila Gilbert’s desk. Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim are the two managing editors and the leading lights of DAW. Though DAW is now part of the Penguin Group it still feels like a family firm, and, of course, Betsy is the daughter of Donald A Wollheim, the founder. It’s a fabulous publisher to work with. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Sheila and Betsy at both the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2013 and Worldcon in London in 2014, which was marvellous because normally we’re on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
What kind of feedback did you get from Sheila Gilbert? What was it about “Empire of Dust” or your writing that appealed to her? What’s it like working with her? You signed a 3 book contract. Will they be a trilogy? What’s the timeframe for the release of the next 2 books?

When Sheila emailed to say she’d like to buy my manuscript I was gobsmacked (surprised/delighted/elated). She asked when she could call me and I said NOW! The phone rang almost before I’d hit send on the email. The manuscript Sheila bought was my magic pirate adventure, which – as I’m sure you’ve guessed – is not the first book that’s been published.

Sheila bought Winterwood and then asked that wonderful question: What else have you got? She liked the idea of science fiction as well as fantasy so I sent her Empire of Dust – at that point a finished novel but only 123,000 words long (actually cut back to that on the advice of a previous agent). In the meantime I’d accepted an offer of agency representation from Amy Boggs at Donald Maas, so the actual negotiations went to Amy at this point. The next thing I knew Amy called me with DAW’s offer of a three book deal for Empire of Dust, a sequel (as yet unwritten) and Winterwood. It turned out that DAW’s publication schedule meant that there was a gap for the space opera in November 2014, so Sheila decided that would be the first one out. The sequel, Crossways, which is at the editing stage, is scheduled for August 2015 and Winterwood (which may yet have a title change) will be published in 2016.

I hope to be able to write more in my psi-tech universe. It has the potential to be a series rather than a trilogy. Of course, I have other novel projects on the go, too.

Sheila is a hands-on editor, but rather than getting a manuscript back from her covered in blue pencil, I get extensive and detailed phone calls or a face to face meeting over breakfast at a convention. When Sheila talks I listen (and scribble notes like mad) because she’s vastly experienced. She quickly spots where my character and worldbuilding holes are and gives me the opportunity to fill them without being prescriptive. If anything DAW tends to like long books, so Sheila is keen to encourage relevant detail. I ended up adding in a lot of what I’d cut out to please my previous agent and Empire of Dust grew from 123,000 words to 171,000 words between submission and publication.
What themes do you address in Empire of Dust?

The broad theme is trust and betrayal, but there are lots of strands which include corporate over-growth, colonialism, personal freedom, and of course it’s all told via a very personal story because themes affect characters. Megacorporations, more powerful than any individual planetary government, even that of Earth, are racing each other to establish colonies and gobble up resources, using as their agents psi-techs, humans implanted with telepath technology, who are bound to the megacorps – if they want to retain their sanity. Empire of Dust is the story of what happens when two psi-techs from rival megacorps (Cara Carlinni and Reska (Ben) Benjamin) both fall foul of their respective bosses and hook up. What happens next turns into a galaxy-spanning manhunt and endangers a new colony. It’s fast-paced with a twisty plot. I had a whale of a time writing it.
Are you treating us to any short stories anywhere?

I don’t write many short stories because writing novels takes up pretty much all of my writing time, but I do have a few published recently. My story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Panda”, came out in Nature Magazine in 2011 and was also done as a podcast and republished in the Futures 2 anthology in August 2014. Then it was translated into Galician for the Spanish magazine Nova Fantasia, and has been bought for the online publication, Buzzy Mag for 2015. I’ve just sold a short ghost story, “Last Train”, to Grievous Angel, again for publication in 2015, and I have a short-short story, “Root and Branch”, out in the September 2014 issue of Albedo One, the Irish SF magazine. There’s a list of story publications on my website including some upcoming ones. I can particularly recommend the anthology River, edited by Alma Alexander, which contains my story, Floodlust.

I used to be very bad at sending out my short stories. I would send out a batch and then gradually they would come back in with rejection slips (or sometimes sell, of course) and then they’d sit on my hard drive where they weren’t any use at all until the next time I worked up enthusiasm to submit them all again. My Milford buddy, Deborah Walker, has a motto which is ‘Submit until your fingers bleed.’ She’s inspired me to make sure that as soon as a story is rejected by one magazine or anthology I send it out to another, so my stories are always out there looking for a home. Unsurprisingly I’ve actually sold a lot more stories since I started following Deb’s advice. It’s the writer equivalent of ‘If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.’ I use the Submission Grinder at Diabolical Plots to research suitable markets and track submissions and then I back it up with my own database to I know exactly where all my stories have been. I’ve just sent Crossways off to my editor, so I have a few weeks before I get the editorial comments back. Maybe it’s time to write a couple of short stories. Watch this space†¦

 

http://www.jaceybedford.co.uk

http://jaceybedford.wordpress.com

http://www.milfordSF.co.uk

Twitter: @jaceybedford

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacey.bedford.writer

 

Book buy links:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com
Amazon.com Kindle edition http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JJXV5PI?tag=freshfiction-20&link_code=as3&creativeASIN=B00JJXV5PI&creative=373489&camp=211189

Barnes and Noble / Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/empire-of-dust-jacey-bedford/1119058678?ean=9780756410162

The Book Depository
http://www.bookdepository.com/Empire-Dust-Jacey-Bedford/9780756410162

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

Diabolical Plots To Become Professional Fiction Market

written by David Steffen
Diabolical Plots has been continuously providing nonfiction content related to speculative fiction since I launched it in 2008. Reviews, interviews, “Best of” lists, relating to magazines, books, TV shows, games. It was founded by me in 2008 on a very simple Blogspot page. Anthony and I joined forces in 2009 and, among other things, moved to the much nicer site that is still used today, commissioning the iconic mad scientist artwork by the wildly talented Joey Jordan.
In January 2013, Diabolical Plots launched the fiction writers’ submission-tracking and market-finding tool, The Submission Grinder.
This post is to announce the news that Diabolical Plots will trying something entirely new, expanding to become a professional-paying publisher of original speculative fiction! We’re not open for submissions quite yet, but we wanted to share the exciting news and let you prepare your very best short stories that are 2000 words or less for submission. For full guidelines see <LINK TO GUIDELINES>.
And Diabolical Plots the fiction market now has a market listing on the Grinder <LINK TO GRINDER LISTING>. We’ve put in requests to Ralan for the same.
This is all a grand experiment to see what kind of interest we get from writers and from readers. At this point we’re aiming for a single original story of 2000 words or less once a month for a year. What happens after that depends largely on how much interest. We have set up a Patreon page <LINK TO PATREON PAGE> with some goals for breaking even and goals for expanding our offering to more stories. If we get enough support through Patreon or through PayPal (and support of the Grinder all goes into the same place so Grinder donors, thank you as well) and iwe enjoy doing this fiction thing, then we’ll keep on going after the year is up. If not, we will surely have learned from the experience , and we will have helped the twelve authors find a venue for their work.
So, thanks for all the support over the years, everyone. We hope you’re as excited about this grand experiment as we are.

Anime Review: Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun

written by Laurie Tom

monthlygirlsnozakiI had considered watching Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun back when the summer season first started, but at the time I thought it was going to be a more straightforward romantic comedy and with everything else premiering that I wanted to check out, Nozaki-kun got pushed to the side.

Fortunately, I came back to Nozaki-kun and this is one of the few shows that actually made me laugh out loud. It starts out looking like a rom-com, but it’s really just a comedy. The characters are a bunch of screwballs who tend to play against type, which makes for hilarious scenes where nothing happens the way it should.

Chiyo Sakura is a second year high school student who finally works up the nerve to confess her feelings to her crush, a fellow second year called Umetarou Nozaki. But the words don’t come out right so he confuses her for a fan of his work, gives her an autograph, and invites her over for his place.

It turns out that under a pen name Nozaki is secretly the hugely popular shoujo (girls) manga artist behind the series Let’s Fall in Love. But Nozaki isn’t the typical romantic. In fact, he admits he’s never been in love at all (and he’s completely oblivious to the fact Sakura is crushing on him). He just happens to be really good at the shoujo style and has a feel for the tropes needed for a series to succeed.

The real reason he asked Sakura over is that he’s seen her work as part of the school art club and he needs someone to do the beta coloring for his manga. Sakura, just happy to get involved in his life, accepts, setting the stage for the rest of the series.

Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun runs a lot like a sitcom, with one or two plot lines per episode that may or may not be referenced later. There’s not much of an overarching story, with most of the episodes focusing on things like Nozaki doing research, but the supporting characters are what make it worthwhile.

Like many authors, Nozaki draws on things around him for inspiration. Everything turns into research for Nozaki, from visiting a toy store to an unexpected sleepover consisting entirely of male classmates, but the most fun is how Nozaki chooses to model his characters off the people he knows.

For instance, the protagonist of Let’s Fall in Love is a teenage girl who gets easily embarrassed by the opposite sex, discouraged at the drop of a hat, but ultimately gives her best.

She’s based on Nozaki’s classmate Mikoshiba, who is male, and in any other series he’s the guy with the good looks who would be the lead.

When Nozaki needs a rival character for his manga’s male love interest he ends up basing him on Sakura’s brash and unthinking classmate Seo, who is female.

The fun is in seeing how the characters transition from life to the page, and how Nozaki tries to craft ways in which he can research or observe what he has no experience in himself. The image I chose for this review is from the first episode where Nozaki wants to figure out how to do a romantic bike ride as a couple. (Hint: It doesn’t go over well.)

Being teenagers, most of the characters have no frame of reference for how relationships are supposed to work (both romantic and non), and nearly all of them draw on popular media to see how things are supposed to go, with unintended results. Some of the best scenes are when Nozaki will witness something that plays out completely wrong “in real life” and then transforms it into something that manga readers will eat up once it’s on the page.

Not every episode has every character, but the show manages to keep most of them engaged in some manner or another, and truthfully it’s a little crowded once they’re all introduced, with a primary cast of seven and then a few others.

Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun isn’t a show that demands to be devoured in large chunks, but it’s a great pick-me-up for when you need a laugh and reminder that it’s okay for real life to not be like fiction.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: Lots of gender role reversals, hilarious insight into creative types, fantastic cast of characters

Minuses: Sitcom nature means that the series wraps up without actually resolving anything, lots of characters and not enough time to focus on all of them

Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Sentai Filmworks has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Interview: Toni Weisskopf

WeisskopfCARL SLAUGHTER: Let’s start with some business questions, especially about ebooks, the first one being very open ended. How has Baen’s adapted during the ebook revolution and what has been the result?

TONI WEISSKOPF: Baen joined the ebook revolution very early on; we published our first ebooks in 1999. Jim Baen (and our webmaster at the time, Arnold Bailey) listened to our readers, so we quickly settled on the best way to deliver ebooks to our customers, at a price point they would accept. We helped create the market for ebooks with our CDs full of free ebooks bound into first edition hardcovers. And with our Baen Free Library, we made it very easy for people to understand how to download and use ebooks. And we still do.

 

Do most ebooks sell through retail, direct mail, or downloads?

Through retail outlets like Baen.com, Amazon, B&N.com and so on.

 

Does every book have a hardcover, paperback, and ebook version? Are they published in a certain order? Are they ever published simultaneously?

No, not necessarily. Sometimes a book is a paperback original, and only later gets a hardcover edition, like Mike Williamson’s Freehold or Eric Flint’s first novel, Mother to Demons. We have two modes of ebook delivery: pre-pub, in which we sell both the EARCs and the serialized Webscription books of the month. Then post-pub, when both the paper book and ebook edition are available simultaneously.

 

Which version sells more copies? Which version is more profitable for the publisher? Which version is more profitable for the author?

Entirely depends on the book and the times.

Does a manuscript get to the reader faster because it’s in electronic form?

No.

 

How many copies of a book do you need to sell to break even?

Another question that depends on so many variables,it’s a different number for each title.

Exactly how many sales constitutes a best seller?

Also a sliding scale, depending on what other books were published that month, that week, that day.

 

Has Baen been affected by the self publishing revolution?

Probably, in that some authors go directly to self-pub and we don’t see their submissions. But I also know many authors who do both. So perhaps not all that much.

 

Now some writer questions. Are there any subgenres you are specifically looking for, any you definitely don’t accept, any you like but get too much of, any you like but don’t get enough of?

We are always looking for strong stories, whatever the subgenre. Of course we publish only science fiction and fantasy.

 

Looking through the catalogs of the speculative fiction imprints, I notice an awful lot of trilogies and series. Is this the order of the day? Or has this always been the case?

There is such a large investment in a writer’s time to create a world, a future history, a magical system, that often they discover that more than one story can be told. And the same is true of the reader’s time, getting invested in a world. So it’s inherent to the genre.

 

Is a trilogy/series more commercially viable/safer than a string of stand alones?

Depends on the author.

 

When you sign a contract with an author, is it for a single manuscript, a certain number of books, or a certain amount of time?

Either a single book or a certain number of books. Again, depends on the author, how much experience he or she has had, what our experience of working with the author is like, and so on.

About how many manuscript submissions per year do you receive?

Thousands.

 

What percentage of those manuscripts do you buy from debut authors?

We buy on average 1-2 new-to-Baen authors a year.

 

Do you prefer an author with a resume of several short stories and maybe an award or two, or is the decision based solely on the manuscript?

Those other things don’t hurt, but the decision to buy is based solely on manuscript.

 

What are the most frequent questions you receive from writers at conventions/workshops?

While most people are there to hone their craft, a few, perhaps optimists, are looking for a magic bullet, the secret thing that will shoot them to the top of the bestseller lists right away. If there is such a thing, I don’t know what it is. Some people ask, what are you looking for now? But the answer is always the same: great stories of science fiction and fantasy. If you say vampires or space opera or unicorn zombies, you will always be chasing a trend. I’d rather see what most excites you now.

What are common misconceptions writers have about editing and publishing?

Perceptions of time. Things take longer than they think, from typesetting to marketing and sales promotion.

What are the most common manuscript mistakes authors make?

Computer screen formatting instead of double-spaced, no line breaks between paragraphs. Oh, and not numbering the pages. We need a running head or footer with page number, last name of author and enough of the title to identify it, if say the printed manuscript the editor is reading gets mixed with some other manuscript. I’m not saying that’s happened to me,but it’s happened to me.

 

Advice to aspiring writers?

Pastiches, fan fiction, and homages are a great way to hone your craft. But at some point you will want to find your own voice, and write about what moves you most.

 

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.