The Cage on Kindle, courtesy @tordotcom

Hey, Kindlers, look what’s just hit the virtual bookshelves… or, rather, what will hit the bookshelves on February 1st! As far as I can tell, the story is not yet in the iTunes store, but it is supposed to be coming.

Writing this story, and having it get such a positive reception from so many readers, was one of the real treats of 2010 for me. If you’ve read “The Cage”, or you end up reading it, I hope it was good for you too.

2011 Fiction Plan

My 2011 fiction writing plan is vague in the same way last year’s was: it’s composed of a lot of “drop everything,” as in:

If X hits my desk, drop everything and do it. If Y comes in, ditto.

In other words, I still have a lot of stuff in progress and lines in the water.

In 2011 the priority will be on turning around completed works as they are given to me. BLUE MAGIC is scheduled for 2011, for example, so it’s certain to hit my desk three to four times before November. Meanwhile, I have three other big projects that might go forward soon, or later, or possibly not. In theory, three or even four drop-everything projects could land on me at once. How I will deal with that, if it happens, will be interesting.

What’s more likely (she said optimistically) is that the priority stuff will stutter in in dribs and drabs over the next two to three years, and I will have some downtime for working on other things. The goals for this hypothetical allotment of time are:

1. Finish either of the two novels drafted in 2010.
2. If 2010’s proposal is unsuccessful, write a 2011 Canada Council proposal and thirty sample pages of another new novel.
3. Finish the outstanding short stories from 2010.
4. Draft short fiction rather than novels in 2011 until some of the above projects shake out.

The upshot, if I’m not buried in drop-everything projects? Six stories drafted, three finished and to market, and a novel finished.

Last line blues

I will often get to the very last sentence of a nonfiction piece and find myself stymied. It is as though I can hear the tone of the thing, the notes I want to hit, but am waiting on lyrics.

When this happens, it usually plays out like this: I’ll polish up the article. Then I will spend ten or twenty minutes rearranging the few sentences before the yet-to-be-written ending. This can be followed by a denial phase. Maybe now that I have prettied that up, I can just stop. Damn! No! What if I rearrange thusly?

Eventually I buckle down and just grind out an approximation of whatever it is I’m trying to say, and then buff that from nonsense into coherence. Sometimes I give myself an extra public pants kick by tweetin’ about how I got those last line blues again. This triggers many helpful* suggestions on Facebook (“Write THE END”). Other times I whine via email to Snuffy, and then try to have something before she gets back to me.

This syndrome doesn’t manifest quite the same way with fiction. If I am writing a story, I will often end a session mere paragraphs from the end. Somehow, that feels okay, like waiting for a first layer of paint to dry. There are even times when the end comes early, and just waits for me to ravel together the beginning-middle-crisis.

The current story, tentatively titled “Among the Silvering Herd” has been weirdly recalcitrant, though, my writerbrain refusing to choke up a last line… until today. I am so happy that I finally have it. I am not such a one as enjoys thrashing with the same 250 words for two frickin’ weeks.

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*By which I mean “helpful.” As in, with air quotes.

Story Intro: “Faces of Gemini”

When I sat down to write this post, it occurred to me that I’d written Faces of Gemini after I started blogging, so I went digging in my old Livejournal entries and found this:

Sept 16, 2003 … the current story, provisionally entitled “Shards.” It’s completed–the first draft was 3,400 words and now after a couple revisions it’s up to 51K. By the time I’ve fleshed out the setting and converted some of the dialogue to narrative (it’s a bit too talky) it’ll probably hit 6K.

Do I care how long it ends up being? No, not really. But I’m interested in the way that my last two drafts have been extremely spare, with much adding in subsequent drafts. It’s a technique I want to play with. Where’s the line between spare draft and ornate outline? Can I find it? Do I want to?

And then on September 29th – I got a story off to market today. It’s called “Faces of Gemini,” it’s 7K words long, and it was originally drafted only two and a half weeks ago.

What I remember about this story is that it was one of two that came up suddenly, under almost exactly the same circumstances. Emily Pohl-Weary was working on the book that became Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, and she had heard that I was a feminist comics nerd (though she put it more tactfully than that) and asked if I wanted in.

I love writing for theme anthologies. For me, a bit of a restriction on what I can write poses a fundamentally sexy challenge. I start with ‘what would fit here?’ and usually slide pretty quickly into ‘what can I get away with?”*

The idea I came up with in this case was very much a prose version of a four-color hero team comic, your X-Men, Justice League of America type of book, one whose founders were falling apart. I remember outlining it in detail, really planning every little shift and revelation. Time was short, and I didn’t want to find myself wandering down any interesting ten thousand word side streets. The outline developed from a group of sticky notes on a wall into a series of twenty sentences, each of which laid out what I wanted to achieve. I then fleshed them out, in record time.

I did almost exactly the same thing with Origin of Species, but I haven’t pulled it off in quite the same way since, despite some attempts. The particular mixture: short deadline, limited space, specific antho requirements, had some kind of alchemical effect that hasn’t come together again. The crucible may have been stress: I wrote both stories at an emotionally challenging point in the life of me.

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*Walter Jon Williams, I’ve heard, works from the proposition: What will everyone else do, and how can I go 180 degrees in the other direction?

Story Intro: “The Children of Port Allain”

The Children of Port Allain” is the example I pull out when someone asks me where I get my ideas… because I happen to remember exactly.

The story is a distorted vision of life on the rainy, forestry-dependent West Coast of B.C., this place:

RSCN5385

It was back in the days when I still followed current events, which would put it before 2001. I would usually have CBC Radio One on for an hour or two when I was cooking or playing Asheron’s Call, and in that time I might catch the local news twice, as well as a national or international broadcast.

On one such occasion, the B.C. news had two stories back to back. The first was about a Vancouver Island town whose core employer, a pulp mill, was closing down. The town council was, therefore, wooing a medicinal marijuana operation to come in and set up shop, the idea being that the government-anointed pot growers would replace the lost jobs.

The second story was about a newly paroled pedophile who was getting hounded from town to town. He’d settle somewhere, there’d be an outcry, and eventually he’d try somewhere else.

“Where should these people go?” the interviewer asked one of the most recent hounders in this story.

“What do we care as long as it’s not here?” was the reply.

What happened, naturally, was my writerbrain came up with a mashup: the same desperate pulp-mill town, working up a scheme to create jobs by becoming a haven for paroled child molesters.

“The Children of Port Allain” is a prickly, uncomfortable story. There’s no overt violence in it, but it’s unsavory by design: if it was something you found in the back of your fridge, you’d imagine you could still smell it weeks later, even after giving your kitchen a nice bleach flambe. It’s about how kids live where their parents do, whether it’s next to a toxin-emitting mill or a prison; it’s not a great conspiracy, just a fact of life. It’s about the idea one hears lofted, sometimes, that anything is okay as long as one’s creating jobs. It wasn’t much of a surprise, once it was written, to find I had a little trouble finding it a home. But then I found myself at Norwescon on a panel where someone asked where my inspiration came from. I told the above anecdote and my friend, Derryl Murphy, who happened to be in the audience, said I should send it to On Spec.

“It’s too long,” I replied automatically. (Their word limit, then as now, is 6000 words.)

“Tell ’em I said it was okay,” Derryl said, and the eventual result was that the story appeared in their Summer 2003 issue.