Gnooooooome!

Having recently written two stories about yard gnomes, I'm in danger of becoming The Gnome Writer. Thankfully, my birthday isn't until November, so hopefully my writing group will forget about it by then and I won't end up with a collection.

No, I really don't want a gnome collection,
even if I did buy this beer for the picture.

But at the risk of perpetuating my gnome-loving status, I must share this link with you (thanks to colleague Camille Griep for the link). Go to it now! It's an IKEA ad about garden gnome warfare!

And if that whets your appetite, go read my story in Clarkesworld, "Melt With You."

And now I must get back to writing, thankfully, not about gnomes. I will write gnome more forever!

New stories!

This week saw the release into the wild of two of my stories!

One is "Melt With You," a tale of religious war among apocalypse survivors reincarnated into the bodies of lawn decorations, which is in April's issue of Clarkesworld.

Yes, the Clarkesworld

The other is "Final Testament of a Weapons Engineer," which appears in the anthology After Death. There's a bomb in the garage. And Michael Williams's ghost needs to do something about it before it kills someone else. 

Anyway, it's in a book. With, like, pages! You can buy it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Machismo Construction, Wobbles, and the VIDA Count

Bear with me, if you will, for a moment. I have something to say about women and publishing and society, but I don't know what it is yet. As you may or may not be aware, VIDA's 2012 count once again showed us that women are underrepresented in most book reviews and literary magazines. There are, of course, a lot of reasons and excuses about why this is so, one of which is that women don't submit as often as men. I really like this unpacking of that particular excuse, which strikes fairly close to home. I also love this explanation of how two magazines made their numbers more equal.

A prime example.

As a writer, I have developed a thick skin. It's important. I've made hundreds of submissions to magazines, which means I've received hundreds of rejections. And that's what happens when you're a writer. I know that now, and I knew it then because I was lucky enough to have a mentor who believed in me.

Women are socialized as girls to doubt themselves. To apologize. To please. I like to think of myself as a strong woman, but I still back away from things. I tell myself that I don't really know what I'm doing, or I have nothing to say.

In college, I needed to build a bunk bed. I'd done stage crew for years and built all kinds of things. But when it came time to buy supplies I deferred to a man's opinion. This pile of machismo who shall remain unnamed (not the husband; this was before I met the husband) was seduced by some giant bolts we saw at Home Depot, and we ended up using them. They were ridiculous, and required a ridiculous drill bit and ridiculous wrenches to use. Not only that, but this man's design included no cross-bracing. Half an hour into the building of the wobbliest bed ever built I knew I had made a mistake, that I could have done much better on my own. But it was too late. Male certainty had prevailed over female doubt.

Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying this. But that memory serves for me as a clear reminder to be strong.

At almost the same time as the VIDA count, I became aware of this story about The New Yorker rejecting its own story. In brief, David Cameron:

"grabbed a New Yorker story off the web (no, it wasn't by Alice Munro or William Trevor), copied it into a Word document, changed only the title, created a fictitious author identity, and submitted it to a slew of literary journals, all of whom regularly grace the TOC of Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, O’Henry, etcetera and etcetera. My cover letter simply stated that I am an unpublished writer deeply appreciative of their consideration."

And the story was repeatedly rejected, even by the magazine that published it. So, that's hilarious. But in light of all this other stuff I can't help but wonder whether the fictional identity was male or female.

There's more to this, and I still can't find it. It has to do with the backlash Amanda Palmer is getting, and wondering whether it would be happening if she was a man. It has to do with reading that blind auditions increase the percentage of women hired into orchestras. It even has to do with the Steubenville rape trial, although I wish it didn't.

Can anyone help me put these pieces together?

Or, wait. Maybe I can do it myself.

A hatful of fun

For shits and giggles, I entered a contest. I wrote a story based on this picture:

It had to be 250 words or less, and mine started at around 600. Thanks in part to Cat Rambo's editing class (take a class! they're awesome) I actually got it under the word count.

It's here at Lascaux Flash. Go read it, maybe? Write a comment? If it wins, they'll give me money. And that would be awesome.

Oh! And writer friends? This contest is still open. Go enter it!

Pro Sale #2

Allow me a moment of own-horn tooting. I learned yesterday that "The Taking Tree," my answer to a horrifying book from my childhood, The Giving Tree, will be published by Daily Science Fiction.

This is me, saying, "Woot!"

I love all my publications, but this one pleases me more than most. For one thing, it's a market to which I've submitted many times in the past, and it feels nice to get some love after eleven "no"s. For another, it's a "pro" sale, only my second one. This sale also holds the land-speed record for sales, having only been to two markets.

It also surprises me, because while I rarely write flash fiction, both pro sales thus far have been flash: fiction under 1000 words. This makes me wonder if I'm doing something right with flash, or something wrong with longer fiction.

Along those lines, I think I'll go try to edit a 500-word story down to 250 for a flash contest. Why not?

Becalmed

Like this. Not going anywhere.

(I stole this gorgeous photo from the
Folkestone Camera Club gallery;
it's the work of Frank Barraclough )

There's an ebb and flow to this writer's life. Submissions go out and come back in, and because I am an impatient person I tend to order my submissions based on response times. If the world made sense, this would result in a constant flow of rejections, older ones coming in after months at markets, newer ones every few days.

Of course, that assumes a steady output of stories, one after another. This seems like a reasonable assumption, because I learned long ago that I must finish one project before starting another. It's simple physics, really: projects at rest tend to remain at rest.

And yet, in actuality responses tend to cluster. Supposedly swift markets end up taking six months, getting my hopes up while simultaneously robbing me of the urge to write. Maybe this is just me, but when the responses aren't coming in, the words don't get out as well either.

In other cat-vacuuming, I just realized that I have never had a story accepted in March, April, or December. My best month for acceptances seems to be August. The six-month period from December to May has only yielded a total of four sales, while the other half of the year is responsible for ten. Ebb and flow.

This is all fascinating to me, probably boring to anyone not-me. Hey, other writers: do you have a season that seems to be more successful for you?

The Colored Lens

The newest issue of The Colored Lens is out, and it has a me story in it!

This is one of my oldest SF stories, written while in my MFA program, submitted to Clarion West as an application story, revised a zillion or more times (or, like, five). For most of this story's existence it was the story without an acceptable ending: first it was the ill-fitting happy ending, then the much-too-dark depressing ending. No one who read it could figure out how to bring it to a close. Have I succeeded this time? You be the judge.

The story after mine in the issue is by my Clarion West sister Kris Millering. It was also the story she submitted for application. I just read it and it made me a little teary. I'm pleased that our stories live in adjacent rooms in this magazine, just like we did in that big old sorority house.

Anyway, go buy the issue. It's $2.99, and her story alone is worth that. Consider mine (and all the rest) an added bonus.