I was lucky enough to get to attend the Nebula Awards this year, and I was there in my new role as a Director at Large. This meant that, instead of ghosting in to see my friends, I was meeting a lot of people and exchanging business cards. Someone noticed a habit of mine that I picked up a few years ago and commented on it.
It’s this: I use a pen to write down the context I’d met the person who was giving me their business card in, and I write down any follow up actions I need to take. This jogs my memory, which is often overwhelmed by all the people I met at the conference, and it also serves as a simple ‘to do’ action for anything I might have promised to do. It certainly helps me out when I get home with a jacket pocket full of cards that I used to then struggle to figure out what to do with. Now I know.
Enough people noted this little hack that I promised someone I’d blog this up on my website. I remembered this promise because I scribbled it on the back of their business card!
This is probably obvious to many, but to me it was a revelation when I figured it out a while ago. In fact, my new business cards have lines on the back to facilitate this for others!
My latest short story is out in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
When I first started writing short stories, back in the 90s, F&SF was one of the ‘big three’ that I really wanted to get a story in to cross off my bucket list. The big three were Asimov’s, F&SF, and Analog. I managed to place a story in Analog, which was cool. Now I’ve managed F&SF. I guess I’ll need to start plotting stories to send to Asimov’s next…
“Apocalypse Considered Through a Helix of Semiprecious Foods and Recipes” is a non standard structure. It came out of my listening to a presentation by Sofia Samatar about structure where she mentioned that structure could be anything… even a recipe.
When that happened, I wrote the first scene of ‘Helix’ in one quick go.
But it needed something more. I created a series of recipes, each illustrating a different piece of dystopia, moving through the stories with a rhythm and set of characters. The final piece is a mirror help up to the idea of ‘who’s dystopia?’ meant to flip the experiences back on each other.
It is something I spent a lot of time on, because I deeply was grappling with a core idea that it’s not just the future as in cool stuff, neat gadgets, that’s already here but unevenly distributed, but the hellish future as well, depending on who you are.
I hope you’ll consider checking it out…
Here’s the issue link, where you can buy The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in whatever form you prefer!
Writer’s Digest is celebrating its 100th anniversary, which is pretty epic. At the same time, the parent company of F&W is also declaring bankruptcy. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
I’ve been at the writing game since the early 1990s. I was a teenager when I first mailed off a money order to Writer’s Digest to subscribe to the magazine to get an insight into how to become a writer. Back then, I knew next to nothing, and the articles about agents and writing novels were actually really intimidating to a 9th grader just trying to figure out how to finish a story. But it was cool to read interviews with the authors and see how they worked.
When Paolo Bacigalupi and I had an article run in Writer’s Digest about how we collaborated on The Tangled Lands not too long ago, for me it was one of those really cool full circle moments.
It always seemed like whether I was trying to work on craft, or business, there was something that ended up being from Writers Digest in my library.
When I started submitting short stories, I used the Novel and Short Story Writer’s Guide (though back then, with the length of time it took to get printed and my habit of buying an older copy because I was broke, there were a lot of already dead markets!).
My memories of Writer’s Digest are very tied up in the early days of my path to being a writer.
So, disclosure: I’m also a huge fan of Guy LeCharles Gonzales. I first met him while in New York talking about digital strategies and the future of publishing. Guy is the publisher of Writers Digest, now, just promoted a few months ago, and when I heard this I was excited to see what his vision could bring to the leadership there. Guy’s thoughts on twitter about branding and the future meant I had some high hopes for the next evolution of Writer’s Digest.
So, I really hope someone is able to rescue Writer’s Digest from this bankruptcy. Because I’d hate to see this big part of my journey as a writer drift away into memories.
I did a keynote for Writer Digest conference in Cincinnati not too long ago. I really tried to kick my keynoting abilities up to a new level, and I think I was able to deliver. But while there, I met quite a few staff from Writers Digest. I really hope this ends well for them, as they were all excited about helping writers and celebrating books.
March’s short story is a 2,300 word fantasy for Patreon subscribers called “Mr. Skin’s Heart.”
Two of Manny’s bodyguards kicked the door to my shitty, off-the-strip motel room door right off its hinges. I was waiting for them by the peeling door jamb with a taser. I jammed fifty-thousand volts of electricity into Paolo’s neck and two hundred pounds of meathead dropped to the floor with all the grace of a bag of cement.
Jaqi, the other bodyguard, turned to me, exasperated. I dropped the taser when she punched me in the jaw so hard my vision flickered in time to the neon vacancy sign looming over the motel’s parking lot.
“I don’t like to hit women anymore,” she said, reaching out a hand. She had a shotgun cradled in her other arm like it was her kid. “So quit messing around.”
I groaned as I wobbled up to my feet. Jaqi, an aging medium-weight boxer, famous in her time for her vicious combinations, looked bored as she pulled a chair over for me.
“Sit.”
I obeyed like a trained dog. Ass in chair.
“You know why we came,” Jaqi said, pulling another squeaking desk chair over. She sat down across from me, the corners around her gray eyes wrinkled with crow’s feet from the Nevada sun and etched with a weariness that made me want to apologize to her for making her day more complicated than it had to be.
“I can’t pay it back,” I told her, the truth leaping from my lips instead of the lies and pleas I’d spent the last two nights developing.
“Two hundred grand.” Jaqi lay the shotgun across her lap. It made a point. “Manny can’t overlook that kind of debt.”
“I had a system that always worked when I ran tests,” I said. I idly wondered if I could grab the gun from her.
Then I patted the numb side of my face. No way to run away from this.
Hell, Vegas was where I had run to.
Jaqi ignored what I’d just said. Too silly to dignify. Everyone had a system that worked, until it didn’t.
“Manny has a way you can pay him back,” Jaqi said.
“I won’t—”
“You’re not all that, college girl,” Jaqi interrupted me, anticipating my next words. “Not for two hundred thousand. No one can work off that much that way. No, Manny has another use for you.”
I could feel my heart hammer at my chest. I licked my nervous, dry lips. “What does he want?”
Jaqi leaned over as Paolo started to stir and groan. She petted him on the head. “A small piece of your soul,” she said to me…
A few years ago I discovered the concept of a capsule wardrobe by accident when stumbling around some blogs about minimalism and adapting the idea to my clothing. The idea was to only keep the clothes I felt good in, and then it blossomed into a radical purge to make it easier to get dressed quickly and without much thought. I pared things down to a couple pairs of jeans, some dressier slacks, and so on. I threw out all my socks and purchased all the same pairs of my favorite pair. No hunting for the right pair, just grab any two and they fit. Laundry stopped becoming a chore, just an automatic thing done once every two weeks when the clothes ran out. No dragging things out by wearing ill-fitting clothes for another week, or making do with the back of the closet.
It also made travel easier, as a byproduct. I could grab shirts, pants, socks, etc, throw them in a suitcase, and then go. It took about five minutes to pack. That came in handy when I had to leave the house in ten minutes to catch a flight to Florida for an emergency last year. It made mobile life easy.
Yet, when I packed in ten minutes this January to be away from the family for four months, packing up that easily made it feel inconsequential and facile. I had accepted a chance to teach a semester-long class in ‘Writing the Fantastic’ at the University of Alabama Huntsville. I am currently the Esteemed Visiting Scholar. But after a week long bout of the flu, turning 40 while under the haze of fever and not being able to see my good friends to have one last gathering before I had to duck out, I felt like I’d floated away in some weird, ungrounded way.
The drive down to Huntsville is about eight hours. I drag it out a bit longer with stops along the way. As a survivor of blood clots and orders to not sit for too long, and with a body that still responds negatively to being in a seat for long periods (my heart starts doing odd stress skips), the drive saps me. I feel dazed.
I am living in a room at the top of someone’s house who has generously put me up for the four months. But as wonderful as they are, it’s still strange to be in someone else’s domain for weeks at a time, trying not to intrude on their rhythms and life, particularly when I have a strange pattern of night owl myself.
My class is one night a week. So I have taken full advantage of that slack time to drive back to Ohio and see my family as often as I can when there are no other obligations. That means hauling back and forth, and then spending two or three days dazed as I recover from the drive. It’s made this all feel more surreal than I expected.
I’ve started splitting the drive in half, which adds hotel costs, but leaves me not feeling so physically shot. But that has added to that ‘neither here nor there’ sensation, where I am in a room that’s not really mine, then a hotel, then home for three of four days, then back to a hotel, then in a room that’s not mine.
Living out of a suitcase is fun for about three weeks, and then I start to get a little weary of it.
In no way do I regret taking the opportunity to teach down at UAH for a semester. Adapting my workshops, lessons, and thoughts about writing SF/F to a whole semester has been such an amazing opportunity. I have my own office!
I have used the time down in Alabama to revamp this website. I’ve finished revising a novel I cowrote with David Klecha. I am catching up on a lot of things with the time I have in my own office. And after six months of not having a freelance gig, I am stabilizing my finances. This was an opportunity of lifetime, and I am hoping it opens some doors to trying a class again some time. The students I am teaching are passionate and engaged, and the quality of their observations are great.
But once I am done, after April is wrapped, I’m going to be like a barnacle in Bluffton, Ohio for a while. I don’t want to be inside a car on a long drive for a long, long time.
I was very honored when Nisi reached out to me to see if I would write a story for this anthology. Nisi has been one of the most insightful reviewers of my fiction since the very beginning. Whenever I see a review from her of my work it quickly becomes clear that she ‘gets’ everything I ah trying to do in a book. Her review of Hurricane Fever in the LA Review of Books remains so dead on to what I was trying to write that I still have a print out of it in my office. Her comments on Ragamuffin really encouraged me. Her novel Everfair was an amazing steampunk novel, set in the Belgian Congo, that I read far too late to blurb it, to my regret.
As the deadline to write the story approached, I had just gotten back from a trip to the Caribbean where I saw the largest tourist playground of my life, and I’ve seen a lot of them, designed by the same folk who did the great big palm tree in the ocean in the Middle East. It was mega-engineering. The sort of thing you gawp at. It was like an alien world had been dropped onto the island in question.
It was gaudy.
It was impressive.
It was big.
It was like the death star of tourist resorts. You could hate what it did or stood for (some folk I talked to certainly did), or you could be proud of it (some taxi drivers I spoke to were), but the engineering alone was still wildly amazing to behold.
For the first time, I wrote down the phrase ‘Tourist Industrial Complex’ in a notebook, based on the ‘military industrial complex‘ concept Eisenhower created to help me put something into words I’d long struggled with.
After that, I had to come up with a story.
Here’s the beginning of that story to whet your appetite:
When the aliens arrived at JFK they reeked of ammonia, sulphur, and something else that Tavi never could quite put a finger on. He was used to it all after several years of shuttling them through the outer tanks and waiting for their gear to spit ozone and adapt to Earth’s air. He would load luggage, specialized environmental adaptation equipment, and crosscheck the being’s needs, itenerary, and sight seeing needs.
What he wasn’t expecting was for a four hundred pound, octopus-like creature to open the door of his cab a thousand feet over the new Brooklyn Bridge on the way into Manhattan, filling the cab with an explosion of cold, screaming air and lighting the dash up with alarms.
He also definitely wasn’t expecting the alien to scream “look at those spires!” through a speaker that translated language for it.
And for a long moment, after the alien jumped out of the cab, Tavi just kept flying straight ahead, frozen in shock.
This couldn’t be happening. Not to him. Not in his broken down old cab he’d been just keeping going and with a re-up on the Manhattan license due soon.
#
To fly into Manhattan you needed a permit, and Tavi was up to date. That was the first thing he panicked about, because a few years ago he’d let it lapse for a bit. The New York Tourism Bereau hadn’t just fined him, but banned him from operating for a while. Tavi had limped along on some odd jobs, tank cleaning at the airport, cleaning out the backs of the cabs when they came back after a run to the island, and other muck work.
But no, he breathed, all his licenses were up to date. And he knew that it was a horrible thing to worry about as he circled the water near the bridge, he should be worrying about his passenger. Maybe this alien was able to withstand long falls, Tavi thought.
Maybe.
But it wasn’t coming up.
He had a contact card somewhere in the dash screen’s memory. He tapped, calling the alien.
“Please answer. Please.”
But it did not pick up.
What did he know about the alien. It looked like some octupus-type thing. What did that mean? They shouldn’t have even been walking around, so it had to have been wearing an exoskeleton of some kind.
Could that have protected it?
Tavi circled the water once more. He had to call this in. But then the police would start hassling him about past mistakes. Somehow this would be his fault. He would lose his permit to fly into Manhattan. And it was Manhattan that the aliens loved above all else. The authentic American experience. Most of it was built up with zones for varying kinds of aliens. Methane breathers in the Garment district, the buildings capped with translucent covers and an alien atmosphere. Hydrogen types were all north of Central Park.
He found the sheer number of shops fun to browse, but very little of sold anything of use to humans. In the beginning, a lot of researchers and scientists had rushed there to buy what the Galactics were all selling, sure they could reverse engineer what they found.
It was a lot of cheap alien stuff that purported to be made in Earth but wasn’t. Last year some government agency purchased a ‘real’ human sports car that could be shipped back to the home planet of your choice. It had an engine inside that seemed to be some kind of anti-gravity device that got everyone really excited. It exploded when they cracked the casing, taking out several city blocks.
When confronted about it, the tall, furry saurapod-like aliens that had several other models in their windows on Broadway shrugged and said it wasn’t made by them, they just shipped them to Earth to sell.
But the Galactics packed the city buying that shit when they weren’t slouching beside the lakes in Central Park. If Tavi couldn’t get to Manhattan, he didn’t have a job.
With a groan Tavi tapped 9-1-1. There were going to be a lot of questions. He was going to be in it up to his neck.
But if he took off, they’d have his transponder on file. Then he’d look guilty.
With a faint clenching in his stomach Tavi prepared for his day to go wrong.
People often ask me what tools I use to write with. I’ve created this page to summarize all my favorite tools to write with, but keep in mind the best tools for you to write with are the ones that work for you.
All of these items are linked with affiliate links, I get a small kickback if you buy any of them directly off a click.
These tools are listed in order of how essential I personally find them.
Laptop
I use a laptop as my primary computer so that I can write when I’m traveling. I did try using a Apple 13″ MacBook Pro, Retina Display (Newest Version). I have to honestly say I’m not too fond of the ‘butterfly’ keyboard on this compared to the previous generation’s. Because of the keys I downgraded to a 15″ MacBook Pro with the deeper keystroke lengths.
I use Apple computers because I like a set of software for writing that fits with how I work.
Writing Software
Scrivener
I use Scrivener 2 for Mac [Download]to write in. I like subdividing my novel into chapters in the left pane and rearranging them as needed when rewriting. I also enjoy tagging chapters and making them different colors. A lot of this software’s features can lead to you spending more time messing around than writing, but I find the organizational features valuable. Full screen writing is also a treat.
I would guess Scrivener slices half the time off writing a novel for me.
Voodoopad
While I’m not thrilled with the name, Voodoopad is an extremely powerful piece of software that acts as my outboard brain. It basically lets you create a personal wiki on the fly. I use it to keep world building ideas for a novel with internal links everywhere. It automatically links your text for you, so you can create your own encyclopedia on the fly. It’s simple at first, and then grows with you.
Other Software
This stuff isn’t as much a deal-killer for me, but I use Microsoft Excel to keep track of how many words I write each day and build a chart of it. I like charts. I use OmniOutliner sometimes to create quick outlines outside of Scrivener when I need to just wrap my head around or fiddle with an outline before moving it into Scrivener. I use Spotify to create ‘radio stations’ of custom music that has no words sung as I write. I use Acorns to create maps and draw stuff.
These headphones are wireless, so I don’t get tangled up. They block outside noise really well, helping me focus. They sound pretty decent, too. More importantly, the very soft foam cups are better than any other I could find in not pushing my glasses up against my ears in a painful manner, so I can wear these headphones for hours at a time.
I resist the idea that things bring happiness. Experiences bring happiness. But with these headphones I am truly delighted every time I fire them up and the outside world gets mostly muted. And when I travel as a writer, I find they make a huge difference. Airports and planes are loud and constantly noisy, a background stressor that adds up. These headphones help mitigate that a great deal for me.
Keyboard
I use a Kinesis KB600 Advantage2 USB Contoured Keyboard (Black)and find it helps reduce finger travel. Does it help with fatigue and wrist damage? Yes, and I love the mechanical keys and keyboard, even though it took ten days to get accustomed to the unique bowl-shape you put your fingers into. The arrow key placements are helping me reduce my use of the mouse for editing, which has been really nice.
To help with sore wrists after big days of writing I used to just plunge my hands into bowls of ice water. I’ve recently found a set of ice-pack wrist braces that create the same effect and let me move on with other activities instead of sitting around with my hands in a bucket: Wrist Support Brace with Gel Ice Pack for Hot and Cold Therapy.
Paper Notebooks
I’ve become a believer in Bullet Journaling and use it to keep myself organized. In addition to staying organized I use a traveling notebook to scribble ideas and brainstorm story ideas in a more visual manner. I’ve slowly come to realize that I do a lot of brainstorming and thinking about my books on paper, but previously I’ve had tons of scraps of pieces of paper scattered around everywhere. Learning to create an index in the front of the paper journal and then keeping my thoughts to one notebook has really helped me do a better job of brainstorming and coming up with new stories.
On the left side of the Kokuyo Notebook cover I use a slimmer notebook dedicated to just fiction brainstorming and ideas, a Moleskine Cahier Journal.
Deskchair
I sit in a Herman Miller Embody Chair. It’s really expensive, but I view it as an investment in my health. I spend some 8 to 10 hours at a chair on long days of writing. The Embody is a big investment, but an investment in ergonomics and comfort. The desk is where I spend most of my day, so I should make sure it’s a good space.
One trick: wait for seasonal sales, there are 20% off deals that Herman Miller offers on these chairs, usually around Thanksgiving and mid summer. That’s how I was able to get this chair for under a thousand.
To pick out this chair I visited a ton of showrooms and sat on many, many chairs after many years of uncomfortable chairs that quickly wore their padding out and cut into my knees, messing with my circulation.
This thing is pretty dope. I actually prefer this to the mechanical ones, because the well balanced mechanical pneumatic system lets you set it at a variety of heights that match your needs with a quick gesture. I really appreciate being able to stand and work for a while without moving stuff around on my desk when the need hits me, just to vary things up.
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