It was a muted day, fishscale colored, and the sea and the horizon merged seamlessly. No wind — the waves were innocent of foam, existing as a series of sullen gray swells.
Ever since stepping on the beach, she’d been catching kingfish: one cast, one fish, usually from just inside the sandbar. As the sun rose higher, its dazzle on the water intensified, until her eyes watered and her head ached from the relentless sparkle.
She reeled in a pair of six-inchers, one on each of the rig’s hooks, and freed them to put back in the water — too small to be worth cleaning on a day of such largesse.
She misjudged the next cast. It went out well past the sand bar, into the deeper, colder, darker water, The strike was swift, a yank that set the reel singing as it spun. How big was it? Twenty-pound nylon line — would it withstand the pull’s strength if she played the fish in right?
The fish leaped, as though in challenge. It was crimson, an enormous, yard-king fish as red as blood, with impossible, ornate fins of the kind seen in heraldry or on ornamental carp. As it splashed back into the water, it seemed to set the horizon aboil with color, blues and violets and emeralds at play beneath the meshed surface of the sea. She set her teeth and braced herself in the fluffy sand.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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And So March Begins
Cover for Beasts of Tabat, first volume in the Tabat Quartet.Things are cranking away as we get ready for the book release. Here’s the cover – the typo that some of you will notice has been addressed. 😉
The book will be available at Emerald City Comicon — find me there at one of my panels, or stop by the Wordfire Press table, which is where I’ll be hanging out when not stalking John Barrowman.
Those panels will be:
Friday, March 27: Fueling Creativity: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors on Ideas
Room: Hall B (WSCC 602-603)
Time: 3:30PM – 4:20PM
Moderator: David Hulton
Guest(s): Cat Rambo, Greg Bear, Ramez Naam, Jason M. Hough, Myke Cole
Authors often dread the interview question “where did you get the idea for this book?” because the answer is never simple. There’s rarely a single moment where an entire plot or world comes to mind. This panel is an exploration of why that’s such a difficult question to answer. Our panel of novelists will discuss the many ways they find inspiration for their work. In addition, they’ll talk about the wonderful and often strange ways an idea will find its way into a novel.
Sunday, March 29: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
Room: Hall B (WSCC 602-603)
Time: 10:30AM – 11:20AM
Moderator: Anna Alexander
Guest(s): Cat Rambo, Garth Reasby
Diversity in entertainment is both vital and challenging. This panel of novelists will cover how to effectively write compelling characters who are different than you and how to deal with critics of who you are versus your work. Panelists include Anna Alexander, Jamie Ford, Cat Rambo, Aaron Duran, J.R. Terrel, Garth Reasby, and Sarah Remy.
I’ll also be appearing at ICFA March 18-22, and will be leading an informational meeting about SFWA there.
Plenty of stuff is lined up for the blog over the next two months, including:
Several giveaways
Lots of guest posts, including experts talking about writing for games and comic books, how to write more than one series at the same time, food and fantasy, writing collaboratively, and more!
Pieces of original fiction related to the book
Essays on the writers that influenced the book
Links to appearances elsewhere
Snippets from the sequel, Hearts of Tabat
I will not be teaching or taking on any new editing projects in March; I will be mailing out soon about April and May classes.
Here's one of my newer connections, nephew Mason. Even though he's exhausted his father, he's still cuddling up while watching "Adventure Time" with the rest of us.I had a wonderful time talking to Shaun Duke and Jen Zink of the Skiffy and Fanty Show last week. The podcast is up here. If you enjoy it and use iTunes, show them a little love with a rating on there.
A reason the interview wa so enjoyable was that they asked really interesting, incisive questions about the stories in Near + Far, in that way a writer desires and dreads at the same time, where they’re seeing some of your psyche’s underpinnings shaping the stories that you create. I’ve been mulling over some of those questions since then, and was thinking about one on the bus home the other day.
They pointed to many of the stories being about the need for connection, with characters like the protagonist of “Angry Rose’s Lament” being addicted to a drug that makes him feel connected, the hero of “Therapy Buddha” projecting all his needs onto a toy, or Sean Marksman’s ultimate fate in “Seeking Nothing.” Going through other stories in my head, I see the theme of connection coming up in various forms throughout. I think that’s a basic human need, one born of monkey roots, an instinct to be with the other monkeys.
Connection’s been something I’ve sought throughout my life. I was a brainy and isolated child, and still am to some extent. NowadaysI work in a profession that requires stretches of isolation in order to produce. So I value my time spent with other people, and particularly writers and likeminded people. I know that I’m happiest when I’ve got a group of interesting and lovely friends doing wonderful things and setting the world afire, just as I know that without some of them I would be a much different person.
Still, it’s not something I’m alone in exploring, as a writer. Human connections — gone awry, gone swimmingly, mistaken or acute, agape or philia or eros — are what fiction is made of.
At a panel at this year’s Worldcon, a fellow panelist got quite huffy when I mentioned the idea that fiction teaches us about being human. He found the idea outmoded and far too 19th century. Perhaps the divergence lay in our conceptions of what the word “teach” means — and perhaps “demonstrates” or “discusses” would be a better verb there, but I don’t know. We’re all just flailing about trying to fit into our own particular monkey packs and we’re watching the other monkeys to see what they’re doing and what we’re supposed to be doing. Don’t we read fiction to find some of that information? Perhaps we don’t say to ourselves, “I will be like character X in Book Y,” but we do think about heroes. We try to be better human beings sometimes because we have their examples. Or perhaps to avoid whatever fictional fate they fell prey to.
So, yeah. Connections. In fiction, the connections between characters, the way they choose to interpret word or gesture or telepathic scream. In the absence of human (or perhaps, intelligent, rather than human) connection, they make imaginary ones, creating fiction within fiction. That’s one of the things I’m looking at in the book I’m currently working on, focusing on the connections between the main character and the beings around her. It’s let me plunge into her head in a way I haven’t before, and I’m enjoying the heck out of it, connecting with her.
