I finished up a story I’ve been wrestling with for the past week this afternoon. It’s for a game world, and it’s a fun one. I’m not sure why I had so much trouble with this one, but I rewrote the beginning four or five times, which is unprecedented for me.
Anyhow, here’s a chunk:
The book supplied a hand-colored map of the coastline. Letitita had not seen that many maps in her lifetime but she thought that this one might have some shortcomings. For one thing, the area they were heading into was a spot colored a vague green which turned out to be towering pines and cedars, shaly hills, and tiny streams inevitably at the bottom of steep-walled gullies full of blackberry brambles. It was lettered, the amount of lettering sparse in comparison to the amount of blank space provided, “Unexplored Forest,”
They were three days into changing that into “Partially Explored Forest” when they heard the screaming.
It called from off the road, among the trees, unseen but close from the volume, the sound of a horse crying out, and then a second echoing noise, like the harsh squeal of an enormous machine wheel. Poppy’s bow was out and in her hand, the other one pulling an arrow from its quiver, as she sprinted towards it; Letitia followed, pulling daggers from her belt as she went, but moving more cautiously than her mistress and therefore slower.
She arrived in time to see Poppy’s first arrow strike the monstrosity towering over the fallen unicorn, a mass of black fur and teeth and more than one head, protruding at awkward angles from around the main one with its ferocious canine grin. Every eye in the multitude it boasted burned bright as fire, red as madness.
The arrow extinguished one of that pair burning brightest and largest. The beast threw its head back, and the sound of that tortured clash came again, so loud that it throbbed in Letitia’s ears.
Daggers sang from her hands, thrown almost without thinking, thunk thunking into that glistening black snout. Annoying wounds at best, but another of Poppy’s arrows flew straight and true ““ had she really merely said she’d been “all right with the bow” when a girl? ““ putting out the other mad red glare, and as it died so did all the tinier ones, heads slumping awkward as it toppled, halfway over its fallen prey.
They circled it warily as they came up. The unicorn let out a tortured breath. Poppy made a hurt sound in her throat and started to step closer, but Letitia tugged her back.
“You can’t help it, boss,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears, obscuring the gaping belly wound, the entrails fanned out from a savage bite. “It’s hurt too bad.”
“I can put it out of its misery at least,” Poppy said. She tugged one of Letitia’s daggers free from the monster’s corpse, and moved towards the unicorn, speaking softly, calmingly, an ostler’s murmur, soothing and nonsensical, theretheremylove, theretheremypretty.
The gleaming ivory horn raised an inch from the ground as though in challenge, but was too weak to move further. She stroked her hand along the broad neck. Letitia held her breath.
“Move no further,” a voice said from behind them.
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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."
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Patreon Post: Talking in the Night
This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.
Talking in the Night
It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.
After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.
“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”
“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”
He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.
Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.
One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.
He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.
It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.
But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.
She answered.
She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.
And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.
In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Your online persona is a mask, created out of what your words. You do have some control over how you’re perceived, perhaps even more than in real life.I’ve updated my book, Creating an Online Presence, and it’s part of this terrific Storybundle of writing books. Since the Internet moves at the speed of an animated gif with Yakety Sax as the background music, I had a lot of work to do with the update (like checking every link to make sure it was up to date), and it included adding a few essays. Here’s one of those additions, talking about how you present yourself online.
Your Online Persona
One of the things I emphasize in the Creating an Online Presence for Writers live class is that before you start setting up your website and social media, you need to think about some things. What level of personal detail are you willing to give out on the Internet? What side of yourself do you want to reflect? How can you be both professional and approachable at the same time?
And perhaps the most important question: how do you go about being someone who people want to spend a little time with, whose words they want to read and consider, lingering on your webpage rather than clicking away to some more entertaining section of the Internet?
Let’s think about a real life situation: parties. A person’s choice of reading material is like a party they’re creating, inviting different voices and entertainment in order to assemble a pleasant and entertaining medley. If you’ve got a choice, do you invite the braggart to your party? The weepy incoherent girl? The dude who makes every conversation about himself? The preachy lady from down the street? No, and no, and no, and no.
Here’s some ways you can create a bad impression that makes people want to close the door in your virtual face.
Spamming about Spamming
I know, I know, we’re all brought up to believe that it was spam, not lead pipes, that brought about the fall of the Roman Empire, and it’s been causing social ills and woes ever since. We all hate spam. And we hate being thought of as spammers too.
Which brings me to what I’ll call “social spam.” Not some nameless person somewhere on the Internets trying to get you to buy Viagra. Nope, it’s your Uncle Edith, and he wants you to come work his farm in Farmville. Or your buddy Big Burt has tagged you in one of those silly memes where your friendslist gets translated to show which character each friend would be if they were a pie filling. Are either of them doing it because they want to harass you? Probably not.
So what to do if you want to avoid that spam?
Well, first let’s consider the notion that people who, in real life, spend a lot of their time correcting other people are probably not as popular as they could be. And let’s think about whether or not that carries over to virtual life.
Here’s a hint. It does.
Let’s factor in something else. A certain amount of spam is unavoidable. If you post something loud and shouty and ANTI-FARMVILLE on your Facebook page, it may cut down on the Farmville requests. For a while. And then some Farmville player’s going to come along who hasn’t seen it.
So perhaps rather than excoriate the players, disable the game so it can’t send you requests? That’s what I’ve learned to do, and when a new game pops up, I don’t spend time upbraiding my friends for being silly enough to invite me to play a game. I do get invites whenever some new game is popular. I used to get annoyed, now I just ignore.
If someone tags you in a meme, just don’t respond. No one’s forcing you to play. But don’t go further and be a jerk about it and scold them, particularly publicly. If someone tagged you, it’s because they thought you might be interested or enjoy it. It’s as though, in a real life party, someone offered you a mint and you started yelling at them for pushing sweets on you because you’re trying to avoid candy.
Vaguebooking
It’s just…ugh. Just don’t. First and foremost, it makes you look childish, and melodramatic. So often it’s passive aggressive BS and the only person who cares is (sometimes) the person you’re committing it to, which is just petty. Come on. Get out of the high school mentality. For everyone else, it’s like being around that couple that keeps fighting and pretending they’re not.
Beyond that, it makes you look horribly unprofessional, particularly when you’re doing it about an employer, past or present. Yes, you are being funny and entertaining right now. You are also saying to anyone who might want to hire you and that looks at your social media presence — increasingly common with employers — that you will be doing this about them as well.
We have all yielded to this temptation at times. Avoiding it is a habit I continue to work on, because every time I’ve done it I find myself regretting it later.
Setting Other People Straight
Is someone saying something wrong on the Internet? Probably.
Does it matter? Probably not.
If it does, and you have the bandwidth and the energy, more power to you.
Pooping on Other People’s Passions
I know, I know. Everyone else is saying how hot and innovative that new show about the Emperor’s clothes is, but you’ve got the skinny. But maybe hang on a moment before you start letting them know what fools they are.
Do you remember when your grandparent said, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all?” Yeah. They were right about a lot of other stuff too.
It’s okay for other people to like things that you don’t, maybe even love them or otherwise find value that you just don’t see. It is. It really is. Nascar, for example, still exists, much to my bemusement. And that’s okay.
You Are Only a Small Part of the Universe
A wonderful one, to be sure. but one that does not exist for most people. Don’t assume slights are deliberate or that your perception matches up with the other’s. I find that giving other people the benefit of the doubt goes a long way. Such a very long way.
The Perils of Pontification
It is pleasant to be the authority, to hold forth on something you know well, and to have everyone listening. It is okay to do every once in a while. But if that soapbox is something you rarely descend from, rather than something you rarely hop up on, think about your strategy. It’s good to listen; it’s great to solicit opinions (and listen to them). Remember that good communication is a two-way street.
Along the same lines, don’t be afraid to admit when you screw up. It’s part of being human, and it’s better form than blustering or emitting a cloud of excuses and half-truths. Pretending you didn’t make a mistake when you did is not a good strategy usually. Own up and say what you’re going to do in the future to avoid making the same mistake. If it’s something you can fix, fix it. Don’t pretend that it never happened.
Conclusions
In short, you have some measure of control over how you are perceived on the Internet. Act the way you wish other people would act and you have a much better chance of influencing them than by bluster, mockery, or other attacks.
And finally — no one is ever looking as closely at you as you think they are. We are all the center of our particular universe, and that’s always, inevitably, inarguably going to shape your perceptions. If you keep that in mind, it makes dealing with your fellow humans a little easier.
At least, that’s the opinion of one of your fellow humans. Be well and prosper.
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I finished up a story I’ve been wrestling with for the past week this afternoon. It’s for a game world, and it’s a fun one. I’m not sure why I had so much trouble with this one, but I rewrote the beginning four or five times, which is unprecedented for me.
