Category: Writers of the Future

First Reviews of “El Mirador”

Two reviews of “El Mirador” have cropped up across the net, one by Writers of the Future winner and author Ryan Harvey on Amazon and another on a personal blog, and the general impression seems to be positive.

Harvey, who gave the story four out of five stars, writes:

It’s tough to write a story entirely in second person and not have it come across as an unreadable gimmick, but Alex J. Kane pulls it off in this high-tech SF thriller about a female assassin laden with cyber-enhancements tracking down a murderer in order to pay off her own debts. The future-noir setting is well-realized in the confines of the short story, and overall the work is a fast and rewarding read.

The other reviewer explains:

I was very much caught off guard by the story. I really didn’t have any idea what to expect based on the title, but I definitely had not expected a second person story, but that’s what I got. Interesting choice that. The ideas are good, the pacing is good, the story overall is good, although it left me wanting more. More depth, more detail, more Tzitzi. I guess realistically being left wanting more is definitely a better thing than wanting less. I also expect that it’s something that’s totally common among people who are primarily book readers, and even more so in my case as I primarily read series. So going from stories which typically are told in hundreds of thousands to millions of words, and instead down to something that’s more appropriately counted in hundreds of words. Odds are that it’s going to leave you wanting more. Even stories that very clearly have a completed arc are likely to leave you with questions like: but what happens next?

Bottom line, I enjoyed the story and would consider reading more work by Alex J. Kane, but at this point I’m not going to go to any particular effort to seek it out.

Hey, fair enough. I’m pleased the story has gotten a reaction at all, let alone a humbling bit of praise from a writer as fine and hard-working as Ryan Harvey. I’m honored.

Writing Goals 2012

Okay, so 2011 was a year spent largely riding on the fumes of 2010′s few modest successes. Why lie? But, on a positive note, I must say that the quality of my fiction, while perhaps yet inconsistent, continues to increase, both in my own eyes and those of readers. I sold a short story from 2010 that I loved (“In the Arms of Lachiga”) to Digital Science Fiction at SFWA-standard professional rates (i.e. hundreds of dollars, praise the cosmos — and many thanks to Michael Wills, Christine Clukey, et al.!), and in doing so got my name on the cover of a pro publication next to none other than Nebula Award-winner Eric James Stone. I wrote fiction I’m proud of — “El Mirador,” which sold to Tom Carpenter’s Mirror Shards anthology springs to mind; as does the story “Prospect of a World I Dream,” which has yet to find a home. And, perhaps most importantly, I read some really great fiction: Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Choke and Damned by Chuck Palahniuk, Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi (and a zillion other books and short stories I can’t remember at the moment).

I can hardly call 2011 a failure…but it was a disappointment. I saw all the hard work I did in 2010, with the exception of a small press collapsing under its own weight and canning three of the books I was supposed to appear in, finally come to fruition in the form of books. These things were great. But I didn’t do the writing I’d hoped to do; what I did, I’m proud of, sure, but I could have accomplished so much more… Instead, I chose to bask in the glory of yesterdays, to dream and ponder instead of getting my hands dirty. For the most part.

So here it is, folks. My official declaration of intent for 2012. It’s modest, and extremely doable, but that’s the point. In the course of the next year, I will:

  • Apply to Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey
  • Complete and submit my current novel project, Doomster
  • Write, revise, and submit 12 new finished short stories
  • Continue to enter Writers of the Future every contest quarter
  • Follow Heinlein’s Rules henceforth without exception
  • Begin making lists of nouns, titles, concepts, and story ideas a la Bradbury’s essay “Run Fast, Stand Still, or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds,” from Zen in the Art of Writing
  • Graduate college with a B.A. in English
My “dreams,” then — and these can happen anytime before I die, not necessarily in 2012:
  • Sell a novel to a major SF/F/H publisher (i.e. Tor, Daw, Ace, Nightshade, etc.)
  • Sell a short story collection to a similar publisher
  • Get nominated for a prestigious award in the SF, F, or H field (i.e. Stoker, Nebula, Hugo, etc.)
  • Attend a workshop like Clarion, Clarion West, or Odyssey
  • Sell a story to one or several of my dream markets: Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Cemetery Dance, etc.

Writers of the Future Q3 Results

After two consecutive straight rejections, I finally received my third Honorable Mention in the international Writers of the Future contest, for my short story “Prospect of a World I Dream.” Something of a bummer, but hell, I’ll take an HM. Truth be told, I’m most excited about having the story back to shop around to my dream markets. It’s easily my best work to date, and I feel very good about where it might end up. Fingers — as always — are crossed. So still no Semifinalist or Finalist, but at least I’ve got another marketable story I’m proud of.

Brief Writing Update

My goal for the summer was to write six market-ready stories between flash fiction to novelette length. So far, I’ve been sort of lazy. Summer’s a time to be enjoyed fully, especially when you’re still slogging your way through an undergrad English degree. Next year will entail a bunch of Victorian novels and a senior thesis manuscript, so yeah, I’m taking my rest while I can get it. No excuse for my low productivity — except that maybe I was expecting it.

What I have done, though, is get four new manuscripts on the market: My Quarter 3 WotF story, which is still pending at K.D. Wentworth’s underground lair of torchlit doom and gloom; a short story titled “El Mirador,” which already sold to Tom Carpenter’s Mirror Shards anthology; a flash fiction piece called “Moonbound,” which is equal halves weird Bradbury-an fantasy and autobiography; and another flash piece titled “An Apocalypse of Her Own, One Day.” The lightning-fast sale of “El Mirador” was satisfying, but I still have similar hopes for the other three pieces.

So, total word count since mid-May: 9,417 words.

Ouch.

Alpha reader feedback on the Quarter 3 entry has me feeling pretty confident about the not-too-distant future. I’m fully content with my current progress with the craft, with where I’m at in my so-far-barely-existent career. I feel I’ve reached another point with my storytelling abilities, and am learning to enjoy the act of writing by taking the pressure off and writing when the ideas are ready. My next piece is still gestating, but it’ll get written within the next couple of weeks. Then it’s off to Redstone SF’s Identity Crisis contest, just in time for me to get a piece written for the Science in My Fiction contest.

So maybe I put a lot of stock in contests. I dunno. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on my mind at present regarding online presence, long-term career planning for new fiction writers, and general human decency, so expect a rather lengthy and somewhat meandering blog post in the next few days. For now, I’m off to bed, to work, and to a week of glorious vacation.

Midsummer Randomicity

Things are getting back to normal as the dead skin of blisters past flake and peel away. Back to the day job until the first week in August, when I’ll be heading to Wisconsin for a week of much-needed vacationing. Meantime, I’m recovering from second-degree burns to most of my upper arms and torso inflicted by that big blazing bastard in the sky.

Now that I’m able to sleep again, my mind will be suited to start writing again after a two-week lull in productivity. I’ve got several projects lined up, and I’m looking forward to writing them — especially the next one, which I’m tentatively calling “Liberty’s Mask.” Should be a helluva fun story to tell. Quarter 3 story is off to Writers of the Future, rejections are trickling in from every dark corner of the cosmos, and new short stories are off to find homes. Alpha Readers are saying very positive things, and nothing could please me more — except, you know, another sale.

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Sale: “El Mirador” to Mirror Shards anthology

I’m enormously pleased to report that my latest short story, “El Mirador,” will be appearing in the first volume of Thomas K. Carpenter’s new augmented reality/post-cyberpunk anthology Mirror Shards: Exploring the Edges of Augmented Reality, scheduled for publication in both print and ebook format sometime in September 2011 from Black Moon Books.

As the name suggests, the book will feature science fiction stories centered around the exciting technology of augmented reality, about which Wikipedia explains the following:

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or an indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one.

I gather that the table of contents is far from finalized, but should be announced sometime in late July or early August.

The genesis of this story is an interesting one, and served as an exciting — but also frightening — experiment for me. Lately I’ve been rereading veteran professional fiction writer Dean Wesley Smith’s series of blog posts, Killing the Sacred Cows, in which he ruthlessly shatters the myths that make up the basis for the traditional publishing industry, most people’s preconception of the writer’s life, and even the inexperienced writer’s way of working.

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Weekend Update (Minus the Humor)

I didn’t get into Clarion. No explanation was given, other than the obvious: they receive hundreds of applications every year, and mine simply didn’t meet their specific needs. I’m okay with this, although I was feeling the sting yesterday. I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t disappointed.

Got my first personal rejection from Strange Horizons, which is one of my favorite fiction markets. After 72 days of waiting, I committed the greatest folly to ever plague the emerging writer: I got my goddamn hopes up.

And then, right on cue, at the pinnacle of my story-selling fantasy, the email came. Sorry, no thanks.

It pointed out a few overlooked flaws in my premise, reasons why my characters’ relationships with one another weren’t entirely believable, but it also complimented me on the worldbuilding. So my ideas are enough to give an editor pause, perhaps, but they need developed further.

So I plan to work on that. Practice, practice, practice.

My intuition, and the feedback I’ve gotten here and there, tells me that my initial drafting process is my greatest strength. I can produce decent words, and create a somewhat unified piece of literature. My weaknesses are what take place before, and then after, the dreaded first draft. Worldbuilding, plotting, character development, and revision; some of the most difficult things about the craft of fiction, so really not much of a surprise.

So “In the Arms of Lachiga” is out to the next market. And will surely go on to the next after that. It may end up getting absorbed entirely into the planned eventual novel, if its current form isn’t strong enough as-is. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ve got some exciting ideas for my Q2 Writers of the Future story — just need to actually draft them out. My time is growing truly precious, and I feel myself creeping toward a nervous breakdown of my own quiet design. Hopefully the anxiety will get expunged in the heat of writing.

Hopefully.

Finished Gary A. Braunbeck’s To Each Their Darkness. What a beautiful fucking book.

Can’t even imagine where I’d begin with a real review; not sure I’ve got the nerve to try and criticize the man’s writing. His voice is strong and literary, his all-too-true tales as powerful as a shotgun blast to the chest. I’ve got insane respect for the man, and I’ll be seeking out more of his works.

You could say the book lacks focus, or organization, but damned if it isn’t a great read. It had me enthralled for hours and hours at a time. His history overshadowed whatever darkness I have to call my own ten-, maybe a hundred-fold. And his intermittent manifesto chapters on storytelling resonated deeply with me. His beliefs regarding both the potential value and present state of genre fiction spoke volumes of familiarity, and I think anyone planning to write speculative fiction would do right to follow his lead.

To finish on a lighter note, I saw The Adjustment Bureau and Battle: Los Angeles.

As a huge Philip K. Dick fan, who has somehow neglected to read the short story “Adjustment Team” so far, I was impressed by the choices made by the director regarding the nature of reality and of the adjustment officers themselves. Dick wasn’t a scientist; he was a philosopher of the metaphysical. Whatever its faults (there are some), the film got that much right, and as a Dickian acolyte I applaud it for that.

Battle: Los Angeles is basically the same alien invasion plot we’ve seen come out of Hollywood a hundred times, except this time they basically got it almost right. Aaron Eckhart, Transformers 2‘s Ramone Rodriguez, Ne-Yo, Michelle Rodriguez, and Gran Torino‘s Cory Hardrict make up a cast of U.S. Marines that for the most part behave intelligently and make believable strategic decisions. The design of the aliens was surprisingly original, but the technology of both their weaponry and spacecraft raised some suspicion. I kept thinking, Did human beings build this shit? Sure looks like it. Are those bullets? Rockets? Flying football stadiums? And while the aliens didn’t look remotely humanoid, they were bipedal, and moved like human infantry. Otherwise, I thought they looked cool as hell.

But overall, the movie is tense in all the right places, the action is necessary and believable, and the script is mature and intelligent in its portrayal of an event that’s rarely handled that way. It isn’t some heavyhanded metaphor for one specific human problem (you could make an argument for terrorism, but the creatures aren’t waging some mindless crusade a la George W. Bush — I mean, er, Al Qaeda); the creatures have a legitimate, scientifically sound reason for locating and seizing Earth. If you can overlook the difficulty of extraterrestrials with fairly crude technology finding Earth, and then getting here, I pretty much bought it. And it’s entertaining as hell. Lacked a certain sense of revelation — which is part of the appeal of science fiction, I think — but maybe that’s a way to leave open the possibility (but please, oh please, don’t!) of a sequel.

Writers of the Future Results

My short novelette “A Kindling Among Shadows” received a straight rejection this quarter. Major downer. Here I was expecting responses from about twelve other markets for various stories, not expecting to hear from Writers of the Future for at least another month or so.

A sobering outcome, but it goes to prove the old axiom about writers being the worst judges of their own work. Perhaps the plot was forced, contrived. Perhaps the characters were flat. Maybe both of these are true…or maybe K.D. just didn’t like this particular story. “In the Arms of Lachiga” earned an honorable mention last quarter, and “Like Stars Beneath the Water” before it, so this logically feels like a major step down.

But I’ll just have to ignore that, and keep writing the best stories I can.

On the bright side, I can send the story elsewhere and start something new for next quarter. And you’ve gotta love a two-month response time compared to past quarters, before they enabled electronic submissions.

Writers of the Future Q4 2010 Results

My longish short story “In the Arms of Lachiga” was awarded an Honorable Mention status in the most recent quarter of the Writers of the Future contest, which is both cool and frustrating. It’s fantastic that I’m able to break into the top 10% or so of entrants in two consecutive quarters, but a little disappointing that I did no better than last quarter. Nevertheless, I think I’m improving and feel I can aspire with confidence to eventually ascend into the semi-finalist category with a lot of necessary practice and discipline. My entry for Q1 2011 is much stronger, but I have no idea how it will fare in the contest. We’ll see.

Congratulatory shout-outs to my writer friends Aaron Williams, Annie Bellet, Ben Godby, Rahul Kanakia, and Eileen Rhoadarmer, who all achieved HM status for their Q4 stories. Feels good to see such a staggering number of familiar names on the list.

More congratulations are in order for Ben Godby, who recently made his first fiction sale! ”In the Deep Deep Sea There is an Even Deeper Susurrus” will be published online by the ever-awesome Brain Harvest this Sunday, January 16th. What a phenomenal title!

No news on my own writing, really. Plenty of ideas simmering at the moment. Doing a lot of writerly introspection and recreational reading — specifically, Kevin J. Anderson’s Enemies & Allies, Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, and John Joseph Adams’ Brave New Worlds anthology. One story has been in the exalted hands of one of my favorite professional e-zine editors for some time, although I won’t for a moment entertain the idea that I’ve a chance in hell of selling to said editor right now. Would be nice, though; damn nice. Two other stories are being held by request for consideration in two different print anthologies, which is pretty wonderful.

To anyone wanting to write anything at all: Read Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. To those who dabble, as this fool does, in the horror or dark fantasy genres: Check out King’s Danse Macabre. I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the best pop-culture overviews in existence. King really understands his art, from craft to the very psychology of those who enjoy it.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled multi-week lapse in blog activity…

Writing Update

Pre-writing, outline stage, et cetera, is proceeding quite wonderfully on my 1st-Quarter 2011 Writers of the Future entry. I’m very excited about the worldbuilding in this one, and I think that the story has the potential to rise above the more typical SF works I’ve sent in the past. It has a voice, an atmosphere, and a potentially unique idea to explore. Not sure exactly how unique, but I’m really looking forward to drafting it. In two days, the semester will be over and I’ll have a month to just write and enjoy life — and redirect my attention toward a few somewhat neglected relationships. I have some great people in my life, but I often feel a pang of guilt for how little time I actually manage to spend with them.

On a brighter note, I received a signed, personalized hardcover copy of Jay Lake’s amazing new short story collection, The Sky That Wraps in the mail this morning. Mr. Lake is a writer whom I greatly admire, and I was very pleased to win the book in his recent caption contest poll. Wishing him well in this difficult time.

I’ve received notice that several of my unpublished works are currently being held for consideration at various places. I won’t bother getting my hopes up, but things are starting to look fairly promising. I’ve received an equal number of rejections, as well, of course — but at least I’m finally breaking past the round-one slush level at some of the journals and e-zines. A couple of my stories are also being held for potential inclusion in a couple anthologies, as well. No word yet regarding the release dates of Made You Flinch, Vol. I, Fearology 2, or Rockets, Swords, and Rainbows. Hopefully some news is coming soon.

The most exciting bit of updatery: I’m sending in my application for Clarion 2011 tomorrow. I have two stressful English finals to study for tonight, so that will taking up all my time this evening, but tomorrow I’m looking toward the future — to the horizon. A lot of my literary heroes emerged from Clarion armed with the skills that got them to where they are today, and the more I read of their experiences there, the more I believe that it’s where I want to be. This summer, or the next. I’ll likely apply to Clarion UCSD as long as I can afford to, but either this year or the next would be the optimal timeframe — when I’m still insanely driven and psychologically malleable. At this point in my life, I’m more eager to learn than I can possibly contain, and also very open to criticism — particularly from folks with names like John Scalzi and Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Bring on the criticism! But, of course, I have to get accepted before I go getting too excited. I was hesitant to even announce my application, but then again who could possibly contain such enthusiasm? I’ve never wanted anything more in my life, to be quite honest. Since I was eleven years old, I’ve known I wanted to be a writer.

So, we’ll see how that goes. Stay tuned.