Had a short short story, aka flash, appear this morning and shape itself while en route to coffee. Just finished writing it out, although the last line needs a lot of sharpening. Huzzah for starting the day with a new story, though! I think one reason for recent productivity is the reading and thinking about short stories involved in teaching the short story class.
And here’s a teaser from the short story I’m finishing up today. It’s a secondary world S&S piece, with a working title of “Love’s Footsteps”.
At the time he did it, Moulder found the idea of removing his heart, applying a calcifying solution, and storing it in a safe place, all in the name of immortality, quite reasonable. He performed the ritual in the diminutive but ominous tower he had built in one corner of his parents’ estate, watched over by dour-jawed examples of taxidermy, crocodiles and glassy-eyes owls, assisted by his faithful servant, Small. She held out the iron receptacle to hold his heart, her face impassive and unjudgmental, and afterwards laved his hands with cold water and wiped them dry.
For mylesf, I’d add Tobias Wolff to the list, altho he’s not speculative fiction and I also do understand that his stuff is not going to appeal to everyone. And, needless to say (?), these are generally not happy stories. (In fact, as I recall, they never are.) But I think he’s a master craftsman. “Bullet in the Brain” — about a man getting shot — does more in 6 pages than I’ve read in entire books.
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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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Interviewed by Genevieve Valentine
Cat in the San Juan Islands. Photo by Wayne Rambo.In 2009, Genevieve Valentine did this interview for the press kit included with my collection. I’ve posted it here for posterity.
Genevieve Valentine: Though your stories take place in different worlds and range from the comic to the tragic, a common theme is the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday (for certain values of “everyday”); do you find it more satisfying, as a reader, when there is conflict between worlds, or cooperation?
Cat Rambo: Well – story inevitably comes about as a result of conflict. Where there is only cooperation, as nice as it sounds, stories become a lot subtler and dreamier and sometimes easy to miss.
To me one of the inevitable things about the intrusion of the fantastic is that it makes us rethink the everyday in a way that may provoke a similar conflict in our souls. The very best stories sock us in the gut and leave us gasping with realization that we almost missed a cathartic moment.
GV: The workshopping process seems close to your heart; in what ways do you feel it’s shaped you as a writer and as a reader? What is your advice for writers who want to find, our found, a writers’ group?
CR: Curiously, I’ve found myself listening less and less to the line by line comments and more to the broad-scale, big-picture level stuff. If I can infuriate my friend Derek Zumsteg, I know I’ve gone far.
It’s possible to get too carried away with workshopping, to end up pulled in too many directions by too many voices. As far as founding a group goes – make sure everyone is at a comparable level, that people communicate with trust and respect, and that you establish the ground rules early on.
GV: Your stories are steeped in folklore, but your retellings seem built on the barest bones of the original tale. What advice would you give for writers who want to make an old fairy tale new again?
CR: When I was a kid, I was working with a somewhat limited library. I ran out of fiction to read, in fact, and they wouldn’t let kids 13 or below check out books from the adult stacks. So I spent a few months one summer working my way through the fairy tale and folklore section, which is where all the bones of fairytales that come glimmering through in my stories, such as “Heart in a Box” or “A Key Decides Its Destiny”, grow from.
It’s hard to do anything new with fairytales anymore because the top layer has been mined so thoroughly. If I’d seen the wealth of mermaid stories that I’ve seen since taking on reading for Fantasy Magazine, I don’t know that I would have been arrogant enough to try a new take on the Little Mermaid or Dick Wellington’s Cat (The Dead Girl’s Wedding March).
GV: What was the particular fact or piece of trivia that determined your course in writing “The Towering Monarch of His Race”?
CR: I was writing an encyclopedia entry on the acquisition of Jumbo the elephant by P.T. Barnum and the story’s details were too good not to go into a story. They are, for the most part, true — Jumbo did die as a result of a collision with a train and it’s true that when Barnum was told that Jumbo had laid down and refused to board the ship to America, he said every day the elephant spent lying down was priceless in terms of publicity. The elephant did refuse to go aboard until his keeper coaxed him onto it, and all of England mourned the elephant’s departure.
GV: Animals make frequent appearances in your stories; what are the challenges of writing around (and sometimes, writing as) an animal?
CR: Well, I have never found this quite as radical an act as some readers seem to have thought it. I know I caught some flak about writing from an elephant’s pov part of the time in The Towering Monarch of His Race, but I didn’t think it too over the top. I researched it and I spent time thinking about what an elephant would notice.
GV: So, what’s your beef with eagles?
CR: I like eagles! I see both golden and bald eagles almost every morning when I go to get my coffee – we have a tree down near the water that they’re nesting in.
GV: What’s something you feel people overlook in your writing?
CR: The muscular nature of my sentences, which I try to pare down as much as possible.
GV: What about your writing makes you roll your eyes sometimes?
CR: Often I get carried away with the intense beauty of my prose.
GV: As an [Overlord for Armageddon, you came to the table well aware of the potential and the peril of an online identity. What online platforms have been of most benefit to you as a writer? What should new writers avoid?
CR: I was, and still am, an Overlord for Armageddon, which is a game I’ve worked with for almost two decades now. I have been a public figure in the game for most of that time, and find being a writer/editor not much different. People are generally kind and patient if you are patient and kind with them, but you should also not be a pushover.
Computers are TERRIBLE TIME SUCKS but sort of unavoidable. Avoid committing too much of your time to an online presence – it does you no good if you don’t have some actual writing to sell.
GV: You’re doing a DIY promotional tour for Eyes Like”¦. In an age where publishing is getting scaled back, writers are becoming their own best publicists. What have you discovered about self-promotion while preparing for this tour? What are you looking forward to? What’s the number one mistake you’re afraid of making?
CR: That it’s incredibly hard, tedious work. I’ve been going through my mail compiling a list of reviewers and bloggers, for example, that I want to make sure get an ARC (advance reading copy of the book). I’m preparing for a 31 day virtual blog tour, as well as a month on the road where I’ll be reading at the KGB bar in NYC as well as venues in Philadelphia, Indiana, Kansas, Colorado, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
In this I’ve been happy to have my retired mother compiling a lot of the info as well as my incredibly talented friend Kris doing a lot of the graphic work.
I am worried about pushing too hard with this book and alienating people, but at the same time, I’m learning that unless you ask, you can’t find out, sometimes.
GV: The most frustrating part of the writing process is _________.
CR: The slowness. I can’t stand markets that take 6+ months to reply. I think that’s RIDICULOUS. At Fantasy we turn stuff around within a week tops, and that’s processing 400-500 fiction pieces a month. :p
GV: This can be solved by _________ and liberal applications of _________.
I’ve been reading Donald Maass’s excellent, excellent book Writing the Breakout Novel (which is, unfortunately, not available on the Kindle so I actually had to do the archaic order and wait for a hardcopy thing) and it’s at a perfect time for me since I’m beginning the second pass at the current project.
Work in different places when revising. Move around a lot. Keep your mind agile and ready to incorporate new things.As I’ve read, I’ve collected ideas to apply to rewrite. I’m making the heroine’s past considerably more complex, shoving the hero a bit more ruthlessly out of his depth, making some bad guys more ambiguous morally, killing my very favorite character, letting a villainess be much, much bitchier (and funnier), and raising the stakes repeatedly. I’ve wrestled with the first 33 pages so far, and they are SO MUCH better now, even though there’s a ton of comments that will need to be addressed, particularly moments of B-grade writing that need to get elevated to A-level.
I find it handy to do this sort of pass. Last time, when revising Phat Fairy, I used a list from Holly Lisle and went through scene by scene, checking for criteria like what got accomplished, were there any loose ends, what characters appeared, was there a sensory moment, was there character development for at least one character. I did something similar with The Moon’s Accomplice, which was the first novel that I completed. There is much to be said for making your revision process efficient and mechanical. While moments of inspiration are useful, it’s the elbow grease put into the scenes at this point that pays off.
At the same time, I think it would be easy to get overly concerned with this and make it a barrier for writers who have a hard time finishing. And so I develop my criteria that each scene will be judged by, my checklist of necessaries, and then I go through, scene by scene. More post-its may get scattered in the wake of that pass for knotty bits, hard little problems like “Why is Zappo showing up now?” or “Exactly how do we find out Crystal’s father’s past?” that I want to think about, and those will get taken care of in a tertiary pass. My strategy with revision is to pick one set of criteria each pass and stick to it, without adding more to do by reading other pieces on approaches to revision and continuing to change your strategy, putting yourself in the position of going back to earlier work.
Pick a single lens for each pass you make through the manuscript and stick with it. One set of criteria or even single thing that you’re looking at. This will be more labor-intensive (perhaps dauntingly so) but more effective than performing the writerly equivalent of multi-tasking.
I know this is very counter to the write a draft and get it out philosophy, but that’s how I work. What about other people, which camp do you fall in? What’s the most important thing to you when doing a revision?
One Response
For mylesf, I’d add Tobias Wolff to the list, altho he’s not speculative fiction and I also do understand that his stuff is not going to appeal to everyone. And, needless to say (?), these are generally not happy stories. (In fact, as I recall, they never are.) But I think he’s a master craftsman. “Bullet in the Brain” — about a man getting shot — does more in 6 pages than I’ve read in entire books.