Tag: story

On to Round 2!

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

The results of the first round of the nycMidnight Flash Fiction Challenge are in.

The writers of the top 7 stories in each group move on to round 2. There are 88 groups, each with apparently 30-35 stories. In my group, my story came in 6th. Whew.

On Friday, at midnight NYC-time, I’ll be assigned to a new group. Like round 1, we’ll get a genre, a setting, and an object. Then we have 48 hours to write a 1000-word or less story in that genre, set in that place, including that object. Only this time my competition will be people who have already proven their ability to write a decent flash fiction story.

I’m hoping that this round goes a little mor smoothly for me than round 1. Can I get a genre like sci-fi or fantasy or fairytale or comedy? All those were given to some groups in round 1. Political Satire was quite the challenge for me. I think my odds are good of getting a genre that’s a more natural fit for me, but historical fiction and romance are still out there like landmines waiting to blow up in my face.

I was also at my parents’ place for most of round 1’s window. Honestly, the political friction that exists between my folks and me might have helped the genre part of the story, but otherwise it was a big distraction. Round 2’s distraction (as mentioned in my last post) is the start of the school year. Friday is my first in-service day. Fortunately, the writing window is the weekend, so I’m hoping to avoid too much back-to-school distraction. Maybe I can use that atmosphere to my story’s advantage like I did with the last one.

I’m happy to make it to round 2. I was very nervous that I took too many liberties with the setting and object for round 1. I’m going to need a better showing if I want to make round 3. For now, I’m going to polish up that round 1 story and send it out to and editor. I’m supposed to let 10 days pass before publishing the story anywhere, but a 10-day turnaround for a response would be very fast, let alone sub-to-pub. I think there are some markets that “TruthSerum.ai” would fit into nicely. Let’s find out.

Writing uphill through a blizzard

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

I am still excited to be finally writing my Festival of the Naked Man story, but progress is taking forever.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided this should be set on an English-speaking planet founded by Japanese with a rich cross-section of cultures represented.  My main character has a Norse name and heritage but his family all believes in the planet’s Shinto-based religion.  The protag’s girlfriend is Chinese and the religious leaders are pretty much all Japanese.  I spent hours just researching the names.  A little slang follows each culture with the Japanese filtering in more than anything due to thir dominance of the population.  Considering the only language I have any background in (other than English) is Spanish, this language thing has been wearing out my Google.  Now watch me end up cutting half of those words in the end.  Grrr…

Even the parts in English are slow going due to my desire to really choose the right word.  I know it’s still a first draft, but I can’t just throw any word on the page.  (I recommend Flip Dictionary for this — an exceptional thesaurus for getting the right word out of a close miss.)

I dare say this will end up novella length, or at least novelette.  My pace is starting slow but there’s a lot to get out there early.

I really think this will be the first of my stories that could fit in Analog magazine.  There’s a lot of “soft science” wrapped in a shell of hard science.  I’m pretty sure I’ve buried some commentary about American organized religion in with my plot.  (For the record, I am a baptized-Catholic who attends a Methodist church where I deliver the children’s sermon each week.  You’ll have to read the story to find the message that comes out of that Christian crossover.)

Mostly I’m just happy to be writing again.  Now if I could just disconnect from all the other stuff I do (video games, television, parenting, teaching, sleeping, eating…blogging) I might have enough time to finish this story before my daughter goes to college.

-Oso

What’s good for the writer is murder on the teacher

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I spent a lot of this evening brainstorming characters for my next story (I’ve mentioned my Festival of the Naked Man idea beforel I just needed characters to get it going).  Now I have the bug to start writing it…now.  The problem?  It’s a quarter after twelve and I have to teach tomorrow at 7:45.

So what to do?  Blog about it, apparently.  Then I’ll sign off here and go tap away at it until about one.  If I get enough steam going, maybe I’ll take a day off this week to finish my first draft.  (Leaving a story dangling when I need to be writing really does make me ill.)

Okay, I have forty minutes left.  Time to write an opening scene.  Night all.

Little sale, big relief

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

The first short story I ever wrote sold to the first market I sent it to (The Fifth Di… I think).  I attribute that luck to good market research and a charitable editorial staff.  Since that inaugural publication, no story has sold to its first market.  Until today.

Big thanks to Jordan Lapp and his staff at Every Day Fiction.  They picked up “How Quickly We Forget” without it being rejected by anyone else first.  The story was inspired by a prompt from Jordan.

Being a friend, Jordan didn’t want to look at it without knowing his editors’ opinions first.  Fortunately they liked it, too.  No word yet on whn the massive three-dollar chec will arrive.  They still have “A Game of Telephone” in their queue, the story I wrote for the CoolStuff4Writers.com all-dialogue contest in May.  Maybe they’ll like that, too.

It’s always good to make a sale, no matter the size of the check.  It’s even better when it’s the firsttime selling to a market.  It’s an added bonus it’s Jordan’s zine.

-Oso

Rewriting and revision

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 7 Comments

As I mentioned in a few posts, I’ve been rewriting an old gem I found on my hard drive from at least five years ago, probably more. I think I just finished that rewrite, at almost exactly midnight on May 2nd.  I’ll probably want to edit more in a few days, but I’m pretty pleased with the results.

I didn’t cut the massive opening sequence I had considered axing.  It seemed to start kind of slow, but it was more the fault of excessive wordiness than anything else. Maybe I’ll stick it in Baen’s Bar to get some feedback.

In ways, “Secondhand Rush” is simpler than “Leech Run” which got slapped around.  It’s simpler in that the protagonist’s motivations are perfectly clear from the beginning.  His needs are simple, his life is simple, his goal is simple.

The story’s structure, however, is oddly complex.  It violates Jordan Lapp’s rule that a first person POV story should have no scene breaks.  I, in fact, jump periodically to other characters to eavesdrop of their conversations.  The story wouldn’t work without miranda7 and LucAs [sic] popping in and out.  It’s the nature of the narration that it happen that way.  Trust me, it works.  Some people may not like it, but it works.

miranda7 and LucAs also converse a lot like my students do with text messages.  It’s a byproduct of their living situation (they are downloaded into computers for immortality).  It may make their dialogue tough to read, but it’s always short blurbs and it fits the story.

I’m proud of this little creation.  Sad that I shelved it so long ago.  It wasn’t ready for the public and I wasn’t ready to fix it.  I’m curious to see its reception.  If I don’t declare otherwise here, I’ll have “Secondhand Rush” up in Baen’s Universe Slush by the end of the weekend.

In related news, I have put my Critters membership on hiatus.  I still love Critters, I just don’t have time to keep up my crit count.  That, and I’m considering joining the “sff online writing workshop”, maybe next month when school is getting out for the summer.  (Tarcie, I haven’t forgotten.)  Hopefully I’ll have another story ready by then.

Ever feel brilliant?

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

Some days I feel like I am a genius.  This usually happens on days where I don’t get a lot of actual writing done.  Today is one of those days.

I was once an outliner, using the whole Roman numeral system and everything, just like they taught me in middle school.  I eventually regressed to a bullet system, but even that is often too rigid for my short fiction.  Now I do almost all of my story planning in freewriting exercises (also something i learned in middle school).  It usually just helps me find character motivations, flesh out plots.  Today it worked a miracle.

Okay, it’s probably not the freewriting.  Only so much of it is even me.  I got my inspiration from, of all places, a reality television show.  The rest came from about a dozen of those writing books that line my bookshelf (many described here).  I kept asking myslf the right questions.  Like what?  The biggest: What human truth am I revealing with this story?  According to Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, triviality is a regular problem with stories, even at Clarion.  I suffer that problem a lot.  I am pleased to say that this story isn’t planned to be trivial.  How about that, huh?  (Sorry, watching Leno as I type.)

Other questions: Why do I care?  Who’s viewpoint is the most dramatic?  Why would she do that?  How would I accomplish this or that goal?  It’s all basic stuff, but I finally feel like I’m asking the right questions at the right time.

I realize, this late in the post, that most of you probably don’t care.  I sound kind of like I’m bragging.  Maybe I am.  It has seemed recently that everything I’ve been writing has either slipped out too smoothly or bogged down in attempts  be relevant only to end up monotonous.  People keep telling me that making the Clarion West waitlist this year means I’ll surely make it next year (unless lightning hits Jordan Lapp before June).  But I hadn’t felt like the ideas hitting me had the potential to be any better than “Leech Run” or “Glow Baby”.  This one could be.  I’m excited about my good idea and I’m taking it out on you.

Reality check: I haven’t written the first word yet.  I have my main characters (mother and daughter named Evelyn and Kelby Abrams), an opening scene idea (think the opening of The Great Gatsby set in a CEO’s waiting lounge), a POV (Kelby’s), the antagonist’s motvation, the SF plot points, comuppance, a major foreshadowing element, a few minor characters, and that great human truth that so many of us endure…but they are all ideas in paraphrased forms that may or may not play out in words the way I envision them.  Basiclly, I’ve done the easy part.  Next comes the gruesome act of spewing this into narrative form, followd by the painful art of revision and editing.  It’s like I’m looing at Everest from basecamp praising myself for making it this far.

Still, I am thrilled that my brain has returned to me.  I go through phases like this, where I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere just to come out of it a long way ahead of where I fell off.  My monkey paw touched the monolith.  Now let’s see what I can do with this bone.

free stuff from my past

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I dug through a file on my computer called “sold stories” and found some gems that will not likely be sold as reprints unless I make it big or need filler for my own anthology. Not to say they were bad stories — they sold, didn’t they? — but they aree clearly from my past.

I decided to post one of those stories here, despite mixed opinions from my readers.  The story I’m posting (right now) is “Blood of a Soldier”, my 5000-word military-vampire story.  It’s probably more science fiction than it is horror, but it does get a touch graphic.  I am more disturbed by some of the amateur flags I flew throughout the story (watch for my not-too-blatant “said bookisms”).  Still, there are a few well-turned phrases and a lot of my preferred direct style.  Surprisingly there is little in the way of dialog; I feel I’m usually strong with dialog and fill stories with it because of that.

Anyway, this is where I’ve been.  Stories like this got me this far.  Depending on its reception, I mayreplace it sometime in the future, but it’ll be here for a while.  I don’t have a trunk of pieces I’m ready to fling around for free…at least not yet.  Maybe someday.  For now, enjoy.

Fiction on a blog on fiction

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

A question for all you writers with blogs: is it worth the effort to post a story to your personal blog?  Not a story you plan to sell, obviously, but one you already sold or one you can’t quite find the market for.

I can see the both sides of things.  On the pro side, it gives your blog reade a taste of your writing, turns lurkers into potential fans.  You have control of how long it’s available and can track how many people read it.  As for cons, who really goes to blogs looking for fiction?  It says something about a story’s quality to have the author pimping it him/herself for free.  And of coure, it uses up some rights for the story (even second electronic rights could be worth something).

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a few stories that have vanished from the net that I’d like to get back out there, notably my first sale.  Not to mention my military vampire story, my story for young readers.  I even have a short comedy that can’t quite find a market.  I’m thinking about putting one up here,adding more if it goes over well.

I haven’t decided yet. We’ll see.

-Oso

writing overtime

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been working on a quaint little story the past few days (the Kree story is in time-out for bad behavior).  I won’t go into details on the plot, but I was trying to put the first draft to paper and kept getting stuck trying to finish it.  I knew I was close to an ending, but I just couldn’t find the angle of approach. I couldn’t even bear to look at it during my pergatory of a day at school.  I opened up my laptop tonight and realized…it was already done.

Don’t get me wrong (I say that a lot, don’t I), this is about as rough a rough draft as I’ve ever created.  The idea was still sketchy and my characters need better motivation and the setting is beige, but the essence of the story was complete.  It’s one of those stories without a satisfying ending; I knew that before I started writing it.  I just kept trying to trudge along into unnecessary summary.  Either the reader gets it (gets something out of it) or she doesn’t.

Fred (as Damon Knight called the subconscious) must have known when the story ended.  I just kept writing and deleting back to the exact same spot, the spot where one character walks out and the story ends.

Now the hard part: editing.  Writing can be tough, grueling, but it’s the creative side.  I made something out of nothing.  Now I need to make something good out of something raw.  This is the sculpting part, an art all its own.  It seems more satisfying when I edit.  I get the sense of doing something right, making something better.  It’s still tough.  Most things worth doing are.

This story, titled “Roshambo”,  comes in about 1800 words.  It may grow a little as I flesh out the setting, maybe put more character into the beats, but it’s still the shortest thing I’ve written (over drabble length) in quite a while.  I hope that’s a good thing.  We’ll see.

The things you find…

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I was surfing the contents of my own harddrive, as I am prone to do every so often, and rediscovered an old story of mine.  It was so old the byline was S. Winfield Baker rather than Scott W. Baker.  I don’t remember submitting it anywhere and I have no record of sending it out, but I had gone to the trouble of typing “Disposable Manuscript” at the top.

It was a story set in a world where people choose to save themselves as computer programs before they die, that signalling the end of their “fleshtime” but not their lifetime since they live forever as programs.  The idea was that exciting memories would be hot commodities for the program-people since they can’t do exciting stuff.  Even if they could, they lacked the adrenaline to truly enjoy thrills.  Memories of thrills from their fleshtime were the closest they could get.  These memories end up no more than computer files and can be transferred to others.  If someone in storage had real money (useless inside the program), they could pay flesh people to do what they wanted to remember in exchange for the right to acquire that memory.  I’m not sure it took that many words to describe the setting in the story.

Anyway, I had put the story away as not SF enough.  Can you believe it?  Sure the guy doing the stunt is a real person and doing stuff that is (kind of) feasible in present society, but the story falls apart without the speculative elements.

It’s a better story than I ever gave it credit for being.  I don’t think it’s pro-calibur, but I’ll probably brush it up and circulate it through some semi-pro zines.  I may Critter it first.  Some of the techniques were clever.  I wonder if I did them intentionally.

  • The story is a memory that is interrupted a few times by program-people chatting in text-like format.
  • The story is told in first person, the flesh person being the POV character.
  • It’s really supposed to be the memory roughly as perceived by the program-person.  The sensory events are good but need more tastes and smells.
  • The POV character is part of a clever little subculture.

It’s not brilliant, but it’s cute.  A little disturbing, too.  It might have more meaning in it than some of my better stories.  Death, as a theme, often plays well.  This story gives a reasonable first person account of dying since the memory is transferred to someone else.  The explanation of why everyone can’t do that needs a lot more strength, but otherwise I was pleasantly surprised by this old story.  We’ll see what comes of it.

-Oso