Street art in Jaco, across from the sushi restaurant.What I worked on:
1007 words on Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain, although I really need to start going back and making some of the early parts make more sense. Right now there’s an awful lot of leaping about between the original short story it’s based on (news of that coming soon) and the final outline for the novel.
1005 words on Prairiedog Town (working title)
Total wordcount: 2012, but there’s still time to get a little more in
Today’s new Spanish words: la abeja (the bee), cienca ficción (science fiction), mamar (to suck, as it mother’s milk), el mamon (a kind of fruit), el lavavavillas (the dishwasher), el rastro (the flea market).
We walked down to the farmer’s market in the morning and bought lovely fruit, including bananas and rambutan. After some work in the afternoon, we took a swim break and tried out the pool here, which was delicious. But holy cow, I’d forgotten how tiring swimming can be, and what it’s like to step out of the water and feel gravity reclaiming what was just light and buoyant.
Later on, we went for an evening walk and were forced by rain into a sushi restaurant where we had terrific sushi (although the spicy tuna was a bit too much for me). We’ve been told that Jaco picks up considerably during the weekends, when everyone from San Jose comes down to spend some time here, and it does seem a good bit livelier this evening.
And a little translating! I’ve started “Panecillo tostado, con devoción para acompaña” and am undoubtedly mangling it considerably, all in the name of practice.
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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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Travel Update, Mid-August
I've taken a ton of pictures along the way, but haven't had a lot of time to sit down and go through them all. I'll post some of the best ones when I get the chance.Huzzah! We drove across America and it was an awesome trip, with lots of visits with good friends and relatives. Today we head off to NYC for a few days, after some time with the godkids, and sometime next week we head off to Costa Rica, where we have a lovely place on the beach secured for a month and the price is great because it’s rainy season. I’ve been practicing my Spanish and getting ready.
The major frustration of the road has been trying to get time to write. I find it takes me a while to get started and in the flow when I write, and for those of you writing in scraps and odd bits of time snatched from kids and jobs and other concerns – I don’t know how you do it, but I salute you. I’ve got a story simmering and partially written, which I really want to send out as the next Patreon installment, so I need to get butt in chair and finish writing it in the next couple of days. Contemporary horror, set in Western Kansas. (I know my cousins will appreciate the last bit.)
Here’s a tiny bit to whet people’s appetites. If you want to read it when it’s done, you’ll need to support the Patreon campaign. 😉
Penny saw the sign coming east along route 70. Yellow letters on a background the color of drying blood. 50 MILES – PRAIRIE DOG TOWN ““ WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG ““ BISON ““ KIT FOXES ““ BADGERS ““ FIVE-LEGGED STEER. Another sign followed it: BRING THE KIDS. GIFT SHOP!
She suppressed the urge to snort and glanced at the rental car’s gauges. She would have rather flown, but driving, she could carry gear with her the airlines wouldn’t have allowed past. Or would have arrested her for, much more likely. She might look like an ordinary, slightly heavy middle-aged woman, but the contents of her suitcase were suited to a world-class assassin.
Which she was, of course.
I’ve also been working on some nonfiction, including mulling over some posts on things like writer etiquette, self-publishing, and the idea of writing for “exposure” (which I am not a big fan of, and will explain why.) Stay tuned for some of those in the next couple of months.
Michael DeLuca's Reckoning 2: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice
Reckoning 2: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice is solid in weight and content. The stories, poetry, essays, and art deal with the world around us and our ethics in dealing with it. This refined focus sharpens the magazine’s impact, I think, and makes it something that tries to evoke change through its art rather than the shallow comfort afforded by something whose theme was simply “Nature”.
The annual’s mission statement is A locus for the conflict between the world as it has become and the world as we wanted it to be. Editor Michael DeLuca’s opening editor’s note, “On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse,” deals with a life situation that makes that mission even more pressing: having a kid:
My son is three months old. He has no idea what the world is, what it has become. I can say anything in front of him. I can curse. I can cry. He’s happy or he’s sad. there’s no cause and effect. I can read to him from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book that spends hundreds of pages drawing an analogy between a child growing up and an invasive tree species flourishing in a sidewalk crack, a book full of compassion for the poor hated by the rich, casual about the hatred it portrays for people of other cultures. He doesn’t understand a word.
The essay is intimate, frank, and willing to comtemplate its own imperfections:
Maybe this revelation isn’t for everyone. Maybe not everyone needs it. Maybe, to people who aren’t white, aren’t straight, aren’t privileged children of educated families, some of this is so painfully obvious. I’ve spent this essay embarrassing myself. I needed it. I needed to write it. I needed my assumptions undermined and broken up and reassembled around someone who wasn’t me.
While there are several essays in the magazine, all of them nicely put together and executed, my favorite pieces from the issue are all stories:
“Wispy Chastening” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires is slight but significant, much like the narrator’s crimes against the environment, turning this into a sharp look at the idea of thinking globally but acting locally, or even individually.
“To the Place of Skulls” by Innocent Ilo provides an Afrofuturist post-apocalyptic world where its protagonists visit a landscape of grit and myth:
We are going to the Place of Skulls: Saro-Wiwa, Babbe, Gokana, Ken, Nyo, Ueme, Tai, and myself. For you to know, this is not the place Bro Lucas said Jesus was crucified when he was spitting into my face from the broken lectern during his sermon, last Sunday. The Place of Skulls is where a stark reality stares us in the face. We all have after-school exhaustion, Babbe’s diarrhea has worsened, Gokana is still nursing the burns on his legs from our last visit and Mama will yank at my ear if she hears fim about it, but we must go. The Place of Skulls is that important.
“Girl Singing with Farm” by Kathrin Köhler broke my heart and yet I know I’ll go back and read it several more times. What seems like it may be simplistic turns into a beautiful, layered story with a final image that will linger with the reader.
I’m saving the best for last and that is the story “Fourth-Dimensional Tessellations of the American College Graduate” by Marie Vibbert. I love this story so much that I am not going to discuss a single detail except that the ending made my heart leap and it is my favorite story of 2018 so far. I will hold onto my copy of this magazine forever because it contains it.
Highly recommended for those enjoying more literary SF as well as thoughtful essays.
