Sneak Peek at Near + Far's Cover Art

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.

This is what I’ve been working on today. It’s a lot closer to being done that it was.

This is how Renee lost her phone and gained an obsession.

She was in the park near work. It was a sunny day, on the edge of cold, the wind carrying autumn with it like an accessory it was trying on before settling for it for good.

She set her phone down on the bench beside her as she unfolded her bento box, levering back metal flaps to reveal still-steaming rice, a quivering piece of tofu.

Movement caught her eye. She pulled her feet away as a creature leaped up onto the bench slats beside her, an elastic band snap’s worth of fear as it grabbed the phone, half as large as the creature itself, and moved to the other end of the bench.

The bento box clattered as it hit the concrete, rice grains spilling across the grey.

She’d thought it an animal at first, but it was actually a small robot, a can-opener that had been greatly and somewhat inexpertly augmented, modified. It had two corkscrew claws, and grasshopper legs made from nutcrackers to augment the tiny wheels on its base that had once let it move to hand as needed in a kitchen. Frayed raffia wrapped its handles, scratchy strands feathering out to weathered fuzz. Its original plastic had been some sort of blue, faded now to match the concrete beneath her sensible shoes.

The bench jerked as the robot leaped again, moving behind the trash barrel, still carrying her phone. She stood, stepping over the spilled rice to try to get to the phone, but the leaves still on the rhododendrons thrashed and stilled, and her phone was gone.

Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon..