Going short

It’s September! Did you miss me?

(OK, maybe don’t answer that.)

I hope you had as good a summer as we can be expected to have when the world is almost literally on fire and fascism is on the march around the globe. At times like this it’s hard for me to see the point in, well, anything. But I think this is when we absolutely need to recognize the people and the things that are worth fighting for and surviving for. This, at least, helps balance out the unmitigated rage I feel most days that would surely consume me if I let it have free rein. But, you knew this, of course.

Anyway! Moving on. What have I managed to accomplish this summer?

That’s one of the things I struggle with when it comes to writing. A lot of the time—and I know I’ve said this before—from the outside it looks like very little is going on.

Think about how often you get a new book from your favorite writer. Years may pass between novels, and then suddenly a new one’s on display right there when you walk into a bookstore.

We all realize, I think, that in the in-between time they’ve been hard at work, coming up with ideas and rearranging words on pages (or, more likely, a screen). Still, I think it’s hard to overcome that feeling that there’s nothing going on. It is for me, at least.

I know I’ve also said this before, but I’ve been querying two novel manuscripts over the past year or so. (Probably even longer, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole.) I haven’t been able to attract any interest in them, and I think I’ve submitted them to a fair number of prospects. It may be time to think of something else.

In the meantime, I’ve also finished a queer holiday romantic comedy, which I’m currently revising. I’m close to the end, and then—well, we’ll see.

So, what comes after that? I’ve given that a lot of thought lately, and what I find myself gravitating toward are stories.

This may seem a bit like a step backwards, right? There’s this idea—maybe you’ve heard it or maybe it’s just something prevalent among writers—that you start out writing short stories, hoping to get noticed, and then you eventually shift to writing novels and pretty much stay there for the rest of your writing career.

Some writers are known for their short fiction, though. Ted Chiang is perhaps best known for his story “Story of Your Life,” which was the basis for the Amy Adams film Arrival. It’s one of my all time favorites. Some of his stories are on the long side, but nothing near novel length.

Novels take a long time to write. I’m not complaining, not really, because no one ever asked me to write a book, did they? Nope, they sure did not. I did this to myself.

(It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.)

When you’re not writing to a deadline or a contract, a novel represents a lot of time that may wind up coming to nothing. There’s no guarantee that someone will think enough of it to represent it, publish it, or buy it.

And I have a lot of ideas that are not novel sized. They have main characters who possess enough fuel to power them through fifteen or twenty pages, maybe less. And that’s enough.

At least, it should be. Every time someone has read one of my stories and tried to convince me it needs to be a novel, I bristle. No, I’m willing to follow this character for the time it would take me to drink a cup of coffee. Maybe a sixteen-ounce latte, tops. Asking more of them is unfair. Elizabeth McCracken, in her excellent book on writing A Long Game, described it as the difference in sizes of hearts. “It’s like organ transplantation. A small heart is a good heart, but you cannot put it in a large body and expect it to do the job.”

Bigger is not always better.

To that end, here are just a few of the stories I read this summer that I loved:

​By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohamed. I got acquainted with Mohamed because she was a guest player in a Star Trek role playing game that I play online with a bunch of other writers. She is freaking hilarious (come back and play with us again, Premee!), and so is this story about an aging wizard who’s lost her mojo trying to bluff her way through teaching a new apprentice and also saving the local village from a giant monster. She’s written tons of stories and several novels and I feel like a total slacker by comparison.

​Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive by Nadia Radovich. This is from the first issue of Otherside, a magazine of LGBTQ+ speculative fiction. I can’t overstate how important it is to support publications like this when you find and like them. This is a zombie apocalypse story and it’s written in second person, which is one of my favorite narrative techniques. When you get to the last line, I think you’ll understand.

​The Hidden Heart of Brass Attending by Christopher Scott. This is a bit of a cheat. I listened to this before this summer as read by Wil Wheaton on his podcast It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton. He’s a goddamn delight and has a fantastic narrative style, and this story is beautiful. You can find places to listen to it here:

​Billionaire’s Tears by Vanessa Ricci-Thode. We just got finished reading this in my creative writing class, and I’m pleased to say the students really loved it. Not hard to see why: it’s set in a world where a strange disease has killed off all of the billionaires (hell yes, LFG) or forced them to give away their filthy lucre. It’s at Escape Pod, which means you can either read it or listen to it (or both; I don’t know your life).

​The End of the World by Mike Elam. I read this one just yesterday, at Uncharted magazine. (You’ll recall that they published my story “Grand Canyon” last year.) This is a humor piece about the end of the world, pretentious parents, and taking chances.

And that’s it for this month. See you in October—when I’m hoping it’ll be cool enough to wear long sleeves again….