Recent Online Reading: Short Notes about Short Stories

Swan — Taken at the American Museum of Natural History. I just love the delicacy of those feathers.

I loved Kris Dikeman’s Silent, Still and Cold in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It has a high fantasy sensibility mixed with zombies, which always seems like a win-win to me. Also in this month’s issue is Jesse Bullington’s The Adventures of Ernst, Who Began a Man, Became a Cyclops, and Finished A Hero. Both stories have great titles, which is one of the things that’s been obsessing me lately.

Abyss & Apex has a slew of interesting stories in this issue, including J. Kathleen Cheney’s steampunky Of Ambergris, Blood and Brandy, C. J. Cherryh’s The Last Tower and Vylar Kaftan’s Mind-Diver.

Part I and Part II of Gavin Grant’s Widows in the World, published at Strange Horizons, are both full of interest and awesome. JoSelle Vanderhooft’s Mythpunk Roundtable is also full of sparkling, interesting thoughts from some smart people: Amal El-Mohtar, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally McFarlane, Shweta Narayan and, of course, Vanderhooft.

Over at Daily Science Fiction, Peter M. Ball’s The Birdcage Heart displayed Ball’s poetic sensibility, which evokes but never enforces a trembling, exquisite realization for the reader. Lurvely. I also really liked Memory Bugs by Alter S. Reiss and Colum Paget’s chilling Imaginary Enemies. Lots of interesting near-future science.

Recent favorites on Tor.com include Kij Johnson’s Ponies and Ken Scholes’s monkey-riffic Making My Entrance Again With My Usual Flair

Crossed Genres included Therese Arkenburg’s The Halcyon in Flight, Corinne Duyvis’s The Rule of Three, and a story from fellow Clarion West 2005 class member, Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nadirah Sends Her Love, which I first heard at Wiscon a couple of years back.

Redstone Science Fiction’s Like a Hawk in its Gyre by Philip Brewer features one of the best bicycle characters I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.

I loved seeing a Tanith Lee story in Lightspeed Magazine. She’s one of my favorite writers, and Black Fire didn’t disappoint. Even though I tend to think of her as a fantasy writer, when she does sf, she does it extraordinarily well (The Silver Metal Lover, for example, and Drinking Sapphire Wine, neither of which are available on the Kindle and one of which is out of print, for the love of God.)

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Pingback: Cat Rambo likes my bicycle! | Philip Brewer
Philip Brewer says:

February 21, 2011 at 6:09 am

Thanks for the kind words!

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1. Cat says:
  
  February 21, 2011 at 9:12 am
  
  You’re welcome! Thanks for writing the cool story that inspired them!
  
  Reply

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Class Notes from Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories - Week One

December 15, 2011

San Francisco Santas — Keep an eye on the world around you and see what stories present themselves.

As I said in class, I’ll be posting notes after each Wednesday session, which all three classes can use to ask questions about or comment on what we covered. I encourage the students to hop into the discussion here, but it’s also open to the public.

We started by talking about what makes a story and the idea of character(s) involved in a conflict with rising tension that moves to a resolution at the end. It’s a pretty classic model and Vonnegut says some useful things about it here. Everyone brought a two line description of the story they’d like to write, and we listened to those and talked about which would work as is for stories and which need some narrowing down.

In discussing how we know when a story will be good, we looked at the first few paragraphs of stories by Carol Emshwiller, Joe Hill, and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked you to, in the coming week, look particularly at how people begin stories, and for Week 2, people will be bringing in a story beginning by someone else that knocks their socks. I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments): Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. One of the things I mentioned is that reading other people’s short fiction, particularly good stuff, is important: you’ll find more story ideas coming to you, you’ll learn new tricks from them, and you’ll become familiar with the markets you hope to sell to.

We also spent some time on writing process and the idea of timed writings, as taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and did some in class. Feel free to post yours here if you like it. I urged you to spend some time this week thinking about your writing process and perhaps trying to change it up a little: writing by hand instead of the keyboard, or in a place you don’t normally write.

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Final Version of the Near + Far Covers, plus a Sneak Peek at the Promo Items

August 22, 2012

Yay! Yesterday the publisher dropped by to bring me the proof version of Near + Far. It is GORGEOUS. Absolutely GORGEOUS, managing to look modern but still have a touch of that retro, Ace Double feel.

So here’s NEAR, with fabulous art by Sean Counley:

Book cover - Near — The Near side of Near + Far. That's fabulous art by Sean Counley, pulled from "The Mermaids Singing Each to Each". Cover design is by Tod McCoy.

And FAR, cover art by the same artist.

Book cover — And here&#039s the Far side, by the same artist, referencing the story "Amid the Words of War."

One of the things I’ve been doing in preparation for the launch party at WorldCon is making jewelry using the interior art by Mark Tripp. Here’s a little sample of that. If you’ve attending WorldCon and attend the party, you’ve got a decent chance of receiving one, but no matter what, stop by and you will get something. 😉

Jewelry in the process of being made — We've tried a couple of different approaches to this, using both the black and white images as well as versions printed on colored paper.

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