Any Given Sunday

I was drunk enough to agree, but not drunk enough to deny remembering I agree. Leave it to Mercedes to strike at exactly the right time! She wanted a throw down with the loser to re-enact one of my fantasies: to be Jesus, serenaded by Yvonne Elliman, complete with jazz hands:



But that wasn't enough. Oh, no. The more, the merrier, we said, so we invited Harley and Jason.

Yes, we Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are going to be engaged in mortal combat, with a theme chosen by a neutral party, one Boudreau Freret.

The Theme: A sci-fi/fantasy short story describing, "The first contact of two species with a mutual attraction betwixt them."

Story Deadline: We have until February 1, 2010 to come up with an original story based on the theme, to be simultaneously submitted to a SFWA-approved market.

The Stakes: First person to be published in the chosen market wins.

The losers will video themselves performing a song of the winner's choice ("Everything's Alright" in my case), complete with jazz hands!!

These are all worthy adversaries. I don't underestimate a single one of them. I've read their words. We're all at various stages of our writing careers, and yet a contest like this--well hell, a lot of publishing in general--has an "any given Sunday" feel to it. It could very well be me on video, jazz-handing along to someone else's tune.

This is going to be a first. I've never written to avoid humiliation before! :)

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Edited to add: Harley's and Mercedes' understandably skewed opinions on the matter.

Because Reading is Fundamental

An author I met at Astronomicon, Daniel Rabuzzi (The Choir Boats), has been blogging a multipart Year-in-Review of his favorite speculative and fabulistic art. His review of short fiction was of particular interest. I'm in the process of reading most of the anthologies he listed, and can personally second his opinions of two particular pieces: the short story "Rats" by Veronica Schanoes (from the Interfictions anthology) and Benjamin Rosenbaum's collection The Ant King: and Other Stories.

My list of favorite short stories of 2009 won't be half as comprehensive. While I've certainly done my share of short-story reading, it's basically been in service of my writing education. My primary focus was dissection to figure out what made them tick. Still, certain stories and collections stuck out in my mind in 2009--though this is not a comment on the quality of everything else I read, unless where explicitly stated.

We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle. Rarely do I enjoy each and every single story in a given collection. It's only happened three other times, with M. Rickert's Map of Dreams, Howard Waldrop's Howard, Who?, and Ray Vukcevich's Meet Me in the Moon Room. I saw a lot of similarities in theme between Beagle's collection and Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories (Daniel cites Millhauser's story "Dangerous Laughter" as a favorite. I liked it a little less.) but Beagle's stories resonate a little better with me.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God by Etgar Keret. The novella "Kneller's Happy Campers" alone (on which the film Wristcutters: A Love Story is based) is worth the price of the book. There isn't much I could add to RJ Burgess's review on Strange Horizons other than, "Just read it."

Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler. I have yet to read any of Fowler's novels, but I've opened their covers at bookstores and it boggles my mind that I've seen no reference to her short fiction. Okay, that's a lie--I'm not all that surprised there might be those who'd rather not know the Fowler who wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, Wit's End, and Sarah Canary is the same one whose stories still appear every so often in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

"Pride & Prometheus" by John Kessel. Why does it seem that a lot of my favorite writers do Jane Austen riffs? In any case, it was a deserving 2008 Nebula winner.

"Absalom's Mother" by Louise Marley. This was a real diamond in the rough that I discovered in the anthology Futureshocks. Don't even get me started on what I thought about it, but it was worth finding the single story with strong emotional resonance. Because few things resonate more than a mother's love for her child.

"We must set brand new goals/ We must not lose control..."*

(This is from my new planner--nifty, huh?)

Like just about every other writer's blog out there, this is where I get to talk some about my 2010 writing goals.

This is mostly brainstorming, really. It's thinking at what's known in the GTD-world as "horizons of focus." Specifically, the things I'd like to see for my writing future at the "30,000 foot level" (i.e. 12-14 months from now).

1
I'd like to network better. In 2009, I made some strides in connecting with other writers (online and in person) and with other artists. Playwrights, poets, filmmakers, and musicians. But I passed up a lot of opportunities, too. I was shoulder to shoulder with Joyce Carol Oates for a split second, but said nothing, not even when she was signing. Legendary comic book writers from the 70s & 80s come through this town once or twice a year. One of them even lives here, and I haven't introduced myself to him.

The reason is my dread of the thought of being that over-eager writer who gets told by a seasoned master, "Go away kid, you bother me." Time for me to get over that. And I'm going to at Readercon 21!

2
I need to get my lit/flash fiction back on track. This is sort of related to the networking goal. Between here and Twitter, I need to make time to get back into Fictionaut and Zoetrope. I briefly connected with some writers whose work I idolized before I focused on genre stuff, but lost touch. Plus, I learned so much there from the critiques I got from my flash pieces. I was kinda dumb to let that slip away, but you know what? My accounts are still active, and it's never too late, right?

3
12 is the magic number. That's one story per month, written, submitted and kept in circulation. If none of them sell by next December, fine. But they will be in circulation.

4
I need to move a bunch of back-burner non-fiction projects up to the front. I confess, stubbornness is part of what motivates this goal. I'm irked that I haven't been able to repeat my McSweeney's success of five years ago--though I admit, my efforts have been lackadaisical at best. But it's not just humor I'm interested in.

I've mentioned my "seekrit #wip" on Twitter. It's secret because--again, this is a pride thing related to my networking fears, I think--the whole thing could be a wash at any time, and I dread the thought of answering questions like, "Hey, what happened with that [seekrit #wip]?" with "Eh, nothing."

Suffice it to say that it's going to be a researched non-fiction work, and if I can pull this off, it would be quite the feather in my geek cap.

Okay, I think my brain is sufficiently dumped. Maybe today I can actually do something about some of these.

*The title's from here, btw...