Sci-Fi, Thrillers, Contemporary
I’ve been listening to the 30 minute improvised radio session by Peter Broderick and Machinefabriek:
stream it on Last.fm
download (free) from Rapidshare – 28Mb.
This piece has an almost classical feel to it – lots of strings – but is still very spare and soothing. Upbeat enough to be engaging.
Over the weekend I’ve been working on a couple of science fiction stories, reworking and whittling them for their intended markets. Antipodean Science Fiction, which has published a couple of my stories already, has a tight limit – around 500 words (they have a little flexibility, but not much over 500). 365Tomorrows has taken one of my stories and their limit is 600. My two current stories are 650 and 570 words respectively.
There’s a good article by Ken Rand here on the Science Fiction Writers of America site, about straightforward ways of cutting ten percent from stories and articles. That’s a good start, though having read the article a while ago I notice that I’ve been doing some of these things automatically anyway.
After that the question becomes, what can I remove without having the whole story collapse into a shambles? Perhaps I could drop the mention of the poker game in the longer story? Well, that’s important for character. But how else could I show that aspect? Perhaps if I took Karl’s character out of the other story and just let it be between Bayliss and Angela it would tighten up a bit? It feels like they need a foil, but could that just be done through the situation?
Well, I’ll keep cutting and see where it gets. Otherwise, I might just re-write them from scratch and see how they will fit with one of sites with longer limits – 1000 words feels like a lot to play with when I’ve been shooting for 500.
Thanks to those who’ve given me feedback on the updated venusvulture.com website – I have made a couple of minor changes. I am certainly a fan of minimal and streamlined and tired of sparkly ads, flash player required, complex links and pages stuffed to bursting or that scroll forever. The index page is 1kb of html and 31kb of images. I’ve avoided Dreamweaver, etc. and just hand-coded the html (yes, typed it as a text file). Too old school? Probably. Anyway, this is the code for the index page, for those who are interested.
Ah, no metadata, no java. That’ll probably cost me hits too. Oh well. I do have a favicon, but I still can’t figure out why it’s not working – something missing in the code?
I’ve just finished the very hip book Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout. It’s a quirky and challenging novel with a seemingly well-paced story, but hiding a subtle and slow build. By the time I realised what was happening, it was almost done, even though all the clues are sown throughout the story. It’s told in episodic fashion, with snippets of radio interviews, flashbacks and with shifting points of view (at times I did find it tricky to know who the pronouns meant immediately). Each chapter begins with a haunting illustration that hints at what is to come.
There seems to be a little bit of Internet hype about the book (it has been out for a while now), and Gout works with James Patterson developing some of that author’s children’s concepts for for animation so he is probably keyed into that promotion machine (Patterson is quoted in support of the book on the back of my copy). Anyway, I enjoyed it enough to hope that Gout isn’t too busy with media production to be able to put out another novel soon.
ps – just surfing and discovered that Gout has posted a deleted chapter from the novel on his Ghost Radio blog. That’ll give you a taste of the novel, plus something you can’t read in the print version.
Whew. It’s been a while in the making, but the new Venus Vulture/Sean Monaghan website is running. It’s tidier and more streamlined. The homepage probably goes against conventions, but I like the look – going for minimal. There are still some bits to update, but it’s always a work in progress.
I promised this a while ago – there’s a screenshot in this post from late last year of how the site used to look.
In my last post I talked about working on the first-draft manuscripts of ten stories – how some were close to ready, others needed a lot of work and one had been “abandoned entirely”; the ideas were worth revisiting but the manuscript itself wasn’t . I’m keen to write a story for the Southern Horror Writer’s Club, since I’m, technically, from the south, so I really want this story set in New Zealand’s South Island to work. I tried a rewrite from scratch last week – similar ideas, but kept two of the characters together so their conversation can do some of the explaining (“telling”) about the situation. It was much more pacey, action oriented and flat out – the new draft opened like this “Connor pushed the stolen Range Rover up over 160, barely slowing for the corners” (that’s 160 kph, which is about 100 mph, I think). (The original draft had been much more introspective and gazey – “Jeff stepped back off the jetty, cradling his twisted wrist” and so on). The rewrite didn’t work – too much pace, not enough character … I just couldn’t get a feel for it. But I still want to submit to the club, the deadline is approaching. So I sat down with the characters (I like Jeff and Connor and Sandra, naive as they are) and put them in a new scenario. I’ve been writing that story for a couple of days and I’m about 1500 words into it and this one doesn’t work. So the three manuscripts are going in a drawer for probably six months and then I might see what may be salvageable from them – who knows, that stolen Range Rover might make a reappearance sometime.
Meanwhile, still wanting to make that deadline, I’m starting a new story – “Doubtful Sound”, with different characters and a way different scenario. We’ll see how that goes.
I’ve been back for about ten days now from my nine-day retreat to the Foxton Beach writing house and I’m still working through what I achieved. I went with a very different approach to other times I’ve been on retreat. Usually what I do is have a specific project to write and I’m starting on a first draft – whether that be an adult novel, a young adult novel, a long short story or what-have-you. I go in with just ideas, perhaps an outline, and start writing.
This time I took a bunch of first draft manuscripts with me. I had ten stories. About half were flash-fiction (under 1000 words), the others longer (though nothing over 3500 words). These were rough manuscripts that varied in quality from fairly complete and structurally sound, to wobbly attempts where I’d just been keeping up the momentum of writing. Often I just have one or two manuscripts underway at once – often I’m too impatient to put things aside for a longer period (which any 101 writing book/course/etc. will tell you is what is important: put it aside for a week or a month and come back with fresh eyes).
Here’s the upshot.
That’s it. I’m stoked about how productive the retreat was – using the space to do editing and reflecting was, I think, a more productive use of my time than had I gone in with a blank page (not to say that blank page is bad, just that this approach worked for me this time).
So now my task is to keep tinkering with those last six plus one stories. I have drafted one new story in the meantime, and begun work on a from-scratch rewrite of the dud story from point 1 above. Of course there is still the question of the novel. My Galley proof arrived yesterday, so I will be working through that to make sure it’s working for me before I do the final submission to the publisher.
The more I read by Joshua Scribner, the more impressed I am: he just keeps getting better and better as a writer. Check out “My Father” on Infinite Windows, which has come out hot on the heels of the remarkable “Hyperbrain” in Static Movement. I look on in awe: Scribner’s sense of pace, of character, of timing and of twist are both stunning and textbook. He has a website where you can keep up with his (prolific?) output.
Jodi MacArthur’s extraordinary story “Spindled Souls” has won the Worst of Love contest for flash fiction at Flashes in the Dark. Jodi’s story is complex, dark and very multi-layered – absolutely a clear winner. Laura Eno’s wonderful “Ironies” came in second and my own “Fiancees Among Us” made third. Well deserved honorable mentions to Graeme Reynolds and Erin Cole.
Thanks to Lori and Bob for running such a challenging contest. Writers – check out Flashes in the Dark for their next contest: Lycanthropy. That contest closes on March 21st.
Kings of the Realm, the lastest in Lame Goat Press’s growing catalogue of anthologies is available now both from both CreateSpace and Amazon. Amazon might be a little more convenient, but from CreateSpace the publishers get a little more folding green, which has gotta be good for their future. The anthology includes two of my stories: “Xuento” a hard-edged science fiction adventure story, and “Scattered Dunes” a character-driven fantasy story.
Sean Monaghan - Writer 