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Sales and Translations
The Library of Congress reading was cool. (Thanks to Matt Hulan for reminding me to bring a hand mirror to deflect the lasers shot by the eyes of the robotic guardian shark-dogs -- worked like a charm).
Hmm, you know, given that this is supposed to be some kind of writing blog, I am not very good about posting the actual, you know, writing stuff.
Recent stuff:
- I sold "A Siege of Cranes" to Twenty Epics. If, by some bizarre chance, you were reading this blog in January of 2001 (when it was an "online journal", since I'd never heard the word "blog"), you may remember this story. That's right, I worked on that freaking thing for five years, and it went through umpteen major revisions -- the last, and among the most ambitious, after I'd already sold it, at Dave Moles's gentle prodding. I'm pretty excited that it finally found a home.
It's interesting to re-read that old entry and see what I was working on then -- it makes me wonder, in part, if I shouldn't perhaps be less cagey about what I'm working on now, except that I've noticed that I tend to get skittish about finishing things I've talked up in public. The two stories I was setting aside at the time, I've never picked up again yet -- as stories. But in both cases, the backstory got reused in a totally different context. The Amra story was set in a world of symbionts which later became the backdrop to "Embracing-the-New"; and the setting to "The Trouble with Danny" (which I hope still to get back to someday) got reused in "Falling" (that link, alas, will now only work if you have an account with Nature; if you're at a university or federal agency, you can go ahead and click it, otherwise, not so much). Nice to know my confidence in the process was justified -- re-use, revise, recycle...
- I also sold "The House Beyond Your Sky" to Strange Horizons. I am, it goes without saying, extremely pleased to once again appear in SH, as they are my peeps. I'm also very fond of the story, which is set so far in the future that it makes "Droplet" look like historical fiction: the stars have all gone out, and the remaining mass in the universe is being scattered by quintessence in a Big Freeze; it's the first SF story I've seen inspired by Dyson's eternal intelligence hypothesis, though I'm sure there are others. In being a hard-physics eschatological tale, it's similar in spirit to Ken Wharton's wonderful Aloha, although, since that is set at the midpoint of a Big Crunch, mine takes place much later, so nyaah. (I wonder if it's in the top ten latest-set SF stories of all time?)
- A number of translations are in the works:
- "Start the Clock" is being translated into Czech, as I mentioned earlier, but also into Swedish for the magazine Mitraina.
- "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum" is being translated into Italian by Francesco Lato, for the magazine Robot.
- "The White City" and, I think, one other Other City, is being translated into Finnish by Jukka Halme, for the magazine Legolas.
- There is also a rumor of a Central European translation of "Embracing-the-New"
I love getting translated. Along with hearing audio versions of my stories, seeing them in other languages is the bomb -- particularly for languages which I can more or less follow (it helps when you know what it's supposed to say). Along with the existing Spanish, Japanese, Croatian, Bulgarian, French, and Rumanian translations of various stories, that makes ten languages. Whee!
Ben;
I wasn't reading this journal/blog back in 2001, but I did read the entire archives once. (And if I haven't scared you away with that admission, I'd like to ask a question (for you and any other writers lurking about)).
I think journals like this are invaluable, from the perspective of a novice writer especially, for helping to show how other folks balance writing and life, and how specific writers develop. I'm glad to hear, for instance, that you had to work on "A Siege of Cranes" for five years; I've been writing for almost six years, and decided to make a list of all the stories I've set aside for various reasons, thinking there would be four or five, and thinking to finish them now that I'm bigger and stronger. It turned out there were over twenty. (Still, I'm having fun finishing a story I started in 2004, a sequel to my ASZAS story that I had lost the will to write because of the generally depressing political climate).
Anyway, the question: I've heard writers like Paul Di Filippo and Jeff Ford mention ten years as the sort of chrysalis period it took them to "get good." Obviously these are not prescriptive statements, but I've been considering everything within my first ten years a sort of self-guided writer's school. I even spent the last year forcing myself to write in styles and genres where I am weakest in the hopes of coming out stronger, despite producing several sucky stories.
I think it's time to follow my passions again, though, and concentrate on my strengths. Sometimes I think a writer's only priority should be to write and submit as often as possible, and forget all the meta-cognitive crap.
So, cocoons: do they help or hinder, and do you consider yourself to still be in one?
P.S. Glad to hear the reading went well!
Posted by: Robert Burke Richardson at February 26, 2006 03:48 PMHmm.... a very good question, Robert.
The thing is, it's relative. I can look back and pick various points at which I think a bunch of things clicked and date from then as "that's when I got it". But I do hope a future me will look upon my current state as equally benighted. That is to say, I *hope* I haven't "gotten good" yet.
I guess I have shifted gears somewhat, though, from feeling like I ought to try out lots of different styles and genres and tropes and so on, to noticing that I like perhaps altogether too much trying out different styles and tropes and genres, and perhaps I ought to settle on one sort of thing and go deeply into it, at least for a while. This is pretty theoretical at this point, mind you; I don't know which sort of thing to settle on. But I am less inclined than I was three years ago to try to tackle mysteries or westerns or sonnets or haiku or screenplays just for the hell of it.
I mean, if one comes along, I won't necessarily say no to it. But it would need to be pretty insistent in wanting to be written, since I now begin to know enough to be intimidated by the work of getting competent in a new form.
(Probably a new genre is less work than a new form; I might be more likely to try and write a mystery than a screenplay. In some future era when I have no day job I want to try to write historical fiction, or historical mysteries.)
In terms of a crysalis period, I think my "latent period", when I swore off writing between the ages of 19 and 27-ish, probably did me a lot of good. I think a lot was going on under the surface while I wasn't writing. Not, obviously, that this is prescriptive! Except in the sense that perhaps those who are blocked maybe shouldn't stress about it too much -- there's such a thing as lying fallow.
Once I got started again, I think everything I wrote for the first couple of years was absolute crap. Then a few lightning bolts like "The Ant King" and "The Orange" began to arrive, usually when I least expected them.
In some ways, actually, I sometimes think (or fear) that those are my best stories, at least along a certain axis. I had no idea how to reliably reproduce the conditions for their arrival, so most of what I was writing was still crap -- but I also didn't know enough to get in their way. I've since improved the mean and reduced the standard deviation -- but I may also have capped the maximum.
Anyway, after Clarion West I had more of an idea how to reliably write stuff that would at least get published.
Another way of looking at it is that probably as many of my ideas are crap as ever, but I tend to weed them out earlier in the process -- which has the downside of possible false positives, which might have been truly great...
I expect there will be some oscillation between getting good at things, but also "tight", constrained, and then breaking down the self-imposed rules, loosening up, and making a lot more mistakes again. I hope so, anyway.
It might be good to go into a cocoon every ten years.
Posted by: Benjamin Rosenbaum at February 28, 2006 10:01 AMThanks for the thoughtful answer, Ben. I like the notion of successive cocoons and periods of development quite a bit.
Posted by: Robert Burke Richardson at February 28, 2006 05:32 PM