My story Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of sky is live in Sunday Morning Transport. It’s about a happily married selkie and her complex feelings about the sea, Christianity, and a magical princess.

One of my persistent fascinations in fantasy is the lives of comparatively ordinary people. Of course, the protagonist of this story is not exactly ordinary— she is a seal who has decided to live as a human woman— but the life that she has chosen for herself is simple. Often, in the fantasy genre, such things only come at the end of long adventures. One of the nice things about short fiction is that it can be a space to tell stories about people who have plain and ordinary lives, without needing to add undue elaboration for plot purposes.

I am extremely grateful to Fran Wilde and Julian Yap for buying this weird, introspective story, for letting me keep the title (Genesis 1:20, fyi), and for being flexible with their word count restrictions.

The story is behind a paywall. If you’re not a subscriber to Sunday Morning Transport—which is excellent and I recommend it highly— you can use this link to get a free 60 day subscription.

For All The Love Within an Orange-Fruit, or, Two Stories With Happy Endings

Two or three years ago I made the decision to focus on book-length work (novels and novellas) which I don’t regret. But one of the things about transitioning to writing longer work is that I can spend years on a single project and then it may or may not ever see the light of day. Which is sad, because I do really love these stories and I want to share them with you!

Anyway, I just finished revisions on a novel that took me several years to write, and another year to revise, and I have decided that I should tell you all a little bit about it, because who knows how long it will take to see the light of day?

The novel is called For All The Love Within an Orange-Fruit, or, Two Stories With Happy Endings. It is a multi-generational fantasy epic about love, beauty, stories, religion, and how fantasies of perfect love can end up stifling or destroying real feelings and relationships. It shares a broad setting, but not a storyteller, with my Great Sweet Sea stories in Lightspeed Magazine.

Once upon a time, in a tiny mountain kingdom just to the north of the Enumerated Lands, there was a prince who was noble and beautiful and true. Everyone said that he was just like a prince out of a story. Because of this—and certainly not to spare themselves to expense of a royal dowry—his people gathered into parliament and decreed that he must marry a princess like out of a story, as beautiful as the sun or at the very least the moon.

Unwilling to oppose the edicts of his parliament, and accompanied by only a plain-faced shepherdess, the prince set out into the to find just such a bride. And thus begins a story that will carry them to enchanted isles and republican cities, to the courts of kings and Witch-Queens, to oliphants and lionesses and what remains of goddesses, fables and stories and prayers, and then, at last, to war and the cold truth of Reason Absolute.

It is, as the title suggests, split into two parts, each of which is roughly 50,000 words. In my opinion, it contains some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and some of my most likeable characters. Despite the title, I cannot promise that it has a happy ending. But that is the way of stories, I think. They are a strange bitter root that we take, not knowing whether it will heal or poison us.

The novel is on submission to editors right now. I hope that someday I will be able to share the rest of it with you.

Until next time

As before, I don’t know when my next newsletter will be, because I don’t have any publications in the pipeline right now. Might do one soon with some of the things I’ve been reading and enjoying lately. Regardless, thank you all for reading, and I hope to have something for you again soon.

The Ones Who Come at Last is up in Lightspeed Magazine. It is a sequel of sorts to A House by the Sea, my first published story. It is, in fact, a bit older than that.

In 2017 when I met Rachel Swirsky and she took it upon herself to convince me that I could write fiction professionally, one of the first things she did was ask to see my old writing. I sent her a bunch of stories from the previous decade—the early form of the Great Sweet Sea stories, which were originally conceived as ancillary material for a fantasy role-playing game; a still-unpublished novel about navigating post-singularity bureaucracy; and a triptych of fanfiction stories about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (which included early forms of both A House by the Sea and The Ones Who Come at Last). “This is good,” she said, about A House by the Sea. “You should send it to Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.” I did, and they bought it, and that was my first professional fiction publication. (I had published fiction before, but only in connection to friends’ or my own role-playing game work.)

After A House by the Sea was published and got a positive response, I had to decide what to do with The Ones Who Come at Last and third piece. I decided that I should probably wait for a while before pursuing publication, because I didn’t want to get a reputation as “the writer who does all the The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas fanfiction.” Recently I decided that probably five years was a sufficient interval, so I dusted off The Ones Who Come at Last and revised it extensively and here we are.

I am glad, to have taken the time with the story. The revisions certainly helped. It is an important story to me, and I think it was worth it to get it right. It does mean that it is being published in a literary, political, and social context which is now far removed from when I first wrote it, but that is ultimately the fate of all fiction. I can only hope that it means something to you, as it does to me.

Reccommending Asunder by Kerstin Hall

Asunder by Kerstin Hall is my favorite fantasy novel of the year, and probably my favorite fantasy novel for a long while. It is a story about an isolated former runaway (now an adult) who sold her soul for the ability to speak to the dead, not for any spiritual or personal reason, but simply as a means to eke out a living. Through a mistaken moment of kindness, she ends up with an aristocrat from a neighboring empire living inside her shadow. The rest of the plot unfolds from there.

Like most of Hall’s work, it is beautifully written and full of striking, terrifying imagery. But it has a mature cohesiveness that I think puts it far above the rest. There is amazing prose, yes, and beautiful imagery. There is also unrelenting horror—supernatural, political, and interpersonal. There is incredibly detailed, exquisite world-building—Hall has imagined not merely multiple forms of magic, but how they intersect and how their intersection fuels the civic and political infrastructure of the setting.

But the horror, the prose, and the world-building never overwhelm the core of the story, which is about finding grace and love even in the midst of a brutal struggle for survival in an uncaring, dangerous world. It made me laugh (bitterly, joyfully) and made me cry (bitterly, joyfully). It made me late to a doctor’s appointment because I was unable to put it down.

It has a demon with an infant’s face in his crotch who somehow manages to be even creepier than that. It has a beautiful moment of grace and compassion at an elephant-themed tourist trap.

Just a wonderful book. You will not regret reading it.

No forthcoming stories

The structure of this newsletter has finally run up against my choice to de-emphasize short fiction and emphasize novels. For the first time in many, many years [1] I have no forthcoming fiction publications. There are a few stories still circulating, and I’m sure that I will be writing more short fiction eventually, but it does leave a bit of a conundrum about how to handle this newsletter, which generally only updates if I have a new story available to read.

What would you like? I could remain quiescent until I have something to announce. I could use this space to “reprint” some fiction that has previously only be available in offline anthologies. I could try to revive my essays on writing (I have things to say, but less confidence in saying them these days.) While I can’t promise anything, if you’re up for letting me know what your interests are, I would certainly appreciate it.

[1] I think. I haven’t checked this. It’s possible there was a brief gap a little while ago.

Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows in Lightspeed

My story Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows is free to read in Lightspeed. It’s about disgraced former president Richard Nixon in the last few hours before a comet strikes the Earth and destroys humanity.

This is an unusual story in that it is the transcription of one of my dreams. Many of my story ideas come from dreams, but usually they require some modification or restructuring. This story comes almost directly from a dream—I was arguing with a friend of mine, a folklore and history research from the future, about whether or not Richard Nixon was a real historical figure or an allegorical cultural trickster figure. They advanced the argument that it was impossible for Richard Nixon to have actually existed, and cited this story as proof. I woke up and wrote it down and it’s basically unchanged from then.

I am very happy with the mix of traditional folk-tale, alternate history, and science fiction. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do!

Until next time—
—Lee

Only Some of True Love’s Miracles in Lightspeed

A miracle, done once, must be done a thousand times again, or else it is no miracle at all, but merely a coincidence.

Only Some of True Love’s Miracles is free to read today in Lightspeed. It is, in a sense, a retelling of the Galatea myth. Or, perhaps, an expansion on it—imagining the same miracles, not a singular story, but as a means of economic and social development.

I wrote this story basically all in one go in less than an hour. I’m very proud of it. It has that certain strangeness which is common to my favorite stories. I hope you will like it, too.

If you do like this story, or some of my other very odd stories, I encourage you to subscribe to Lightspeed. John Joseph Adams (the editor) is very willing to take risks on stories like this one which would otherwise have a hard time finding a home.

Upcoming Stories

My next published story will likely be Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows, also in Lightspeed, coming in May. After that, I have a vampire story with ReacTor (formerly tor.com) in October.

A Sad Song for a Young Tarantula in Sunday Morning Transport

Sunday Morning Transport is a really cool new short fiction venue from Fran Wilde (who’s novel Riverland is, by the by, fantastic) and Julian Yap. It’s a substack-based newsletter which sends out a weekly short story—some free, others limited to paying subscribers. A Sad Song for a Young Tarantula is one of their paywalled stories this month, but I have a link for my subscribers that offers a two months free subscription (if you want to read it and then cancel—although I recommend reading some of the other stories while you’ve got it!)

A Sad Song for a Young Tarantula is based on the relationship between the Colombian Lesserblack Tarantula and the Dotted Humming Frog. Yes, the tarantulas described in the stories are real and they really do keep “domesticated” frogs as pets / egg guardians. And daughters sometimes inherit their mother’s burrows and the frogs to go with them. This story took an absolutely wild amount of research given its length, but I’m very happy to have written it. I think, also, you will be happy to have read it.

That’s all for now. See you next week!

I know it’s been quite a while since the last newsletter, but I haven’t really had anything to report in 2023. But this year should have more short fiction publications and thus more newsletters.

Normally I have a little essay about something ready to go out with these, but this month I just completely forgot, so you’ll have to make due with just the story.

A Sojourn in the Fifth City in Lightspeed

A Sojourn in the Fifth City is free-to-read in Lightspeed Magazine. It’s a story about an apprentice caught in a nearly impossible pilgrimage to a city of the dead, far in the future and on a distant world. I wrote an enormous amount of the development of the story in the Lightspeed Author Spotlight, but in some ways of looking at it, it’s a story I have been working on for 30 years. In another way, it’s a birthday present for Kelly Link, so: happy (quite belated) birthday, Kelly Link!

Though this story sort of gently skims along the surface, this is a world that I have spent a lot of time and blood on. I hope that maybe, someday, I will be able to return to it with a novel. If you also hope that, let me know! Maybe it will happen.

I’d like to specifically thank Kerstin Hall, who gave me some great suggestions on this story that improved the beginning considerably, and Rachel Swirsky, who convinced me that it wasn’t too weird to be understood and was worth submitting.

Odds and Ends

Also in this month’s Lightspeed is Wen-Yi Lee’s What Becomes of Curious Minds, which is a really lovely story that I was fortunate enough to read an early draft of. The premise—a human child raised in Alice’s Wonderland who has positioned himself as the resident expert on our world, despite having never been here—is brilliant and the execution is pleasantly unsettling.

I have another story coming out in Lightspeed next month, a flash piece called Only Some of True Love’s Miracles. So I will see you for the next newsletter then—hopefully with a small essay as well. I also have two more stories forthcoming in Lightspeed at some point and a story with ReacTor (formerly tor.com) in October.

The Greatest Home Run in Baseball History in Strange Horizons

When I was a kid and reading every science fiction anthology that I could find at the used bookstore, there was a wonderful sub-genre of sports science fiction, particularly stories about the future of baseball—stories about cyborg leagues, or aliens learning to play, or things like that. As the demographics of science fiction readers and writers have shifted, this genre has mostly died out, but as a childhood baseball fanatic, I always enjoyed these stories. So I decided to try my hand at writing one.

The result is not really a story about baseball, at least not in the same way as the stories I liked as a kid. But, then again, neither is the baseball of today the baseball I loved as a kid. So, instead, please enjoy this story about love, loss, dysfunctional relationships, time crystals and (yes) the future of baseball.

A side note about time crystals: time crystals are real! They were theorized by Prof. Frank Wilczek in 2012 and created in laboratories in 2016. They are not quite as described in the story, though.

A Stray Thought About Community and Writing

This has been bubbling in my head for a while (nearly a year), and with so many changes happening in the SFF community, it seemed like a good time to post it. Please understand that this is an observation over a long period of time, not in response to any current event.

In the SFF writer world, a lot of people like to praise our community, whether that's a particular social media site, particular conventions, some private industry group, workshop, specific fandom, or anything else. People talk about how great and supportive and kind the community is, which is great. I am extremely happy that they've had positive experiences.

But also, for some people, this is not their experience of community. Sometimes, the SFF community is something frustrating that you have to deal with, sometimes it's something you're better off avoiding, sometimes it's alienating and isolating, sometimes it's actively hostile and something that you have to figure out how to survive.

(Often, it's some of each of these things! Lord knows that's true of me, and I'm far from alone. Most peoples' experiences are complex.)

I don't have much of a point here. I guess I just want to say: if the writing community is something that you're alienated from, or frustrated by, feel shut out from, or that you're just trying desperately to survive, that doesn't mean your writing is any less good, or less important. People who are good at networking or even simply people who are not actively being persecuted will of course have their careers benefit from their proximity to the community, but that doesn't make their fiction any better or more legitimate.

If the writing community helps you and your writing, that's fantastic! If it harms you and your writing, there's nothing wrong with cutting it out as much as possible, or with any steps you take the mitigate the damage from the parts you can't cut out.

And, while it’s absolutely important to try to build an inclusive community, we should recognize that no community is going to include everyone. There will always be writers who are excluded, or alienated, or attacked, or dismissed. And being excluded, alienated, attacked and dismissed will never reflect on them as people, them as writers, or the quality or importance of their work.

If that's you: Your writing matters, both in general and to me personally. Please keep writing, if you can.

&c

Fun fact: The ampersand (&) is a ligature of the letters “e” and “t,” which is why it is used for “and,” via the French “et.” It can also be used in other abbreviations, substituting for the “et” combo, such as in &c—meaning “etc” or “etcetera.”

I continue to not have very much short fiction on the horizon—there are a couple of stories that I expect will be out soon-ish, so you’ll hear from me at least a little more this year. As for the novels, there is no news to share. You’ll know as soon as I do!

How to Serve the Dead: A Confucian Alternate History is free to read in the inaugural issue of The Cosmic Background, a new flash fiction site. I’m really excited about The Cosmic Background and I’m incredibly honored that Sam and Chelsea chose this story for one of their first issues.

This story is, admittedly, very odd. Its protagonist is Zi Lu, one of Confucius’s disciples who I have always been fascinating with. As portrayed in the Analects, Zi Lu is quick-thinking and incredibly smart, and prone to be led astray by that same quick-thinking and intelligence. He’s constantly looking for edge cases, pushing boundaries, and showing off his smarts, but struggles to keep himself centered on what really matters—care for others and service to humanity. For reasons that are probably obvious, I sympathize with him a great deal.

The historical Zi Lu was caught up in court intrigue at Wey and killed. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was capable of putting the whole of his intellect towards service to others and the betterment of humanity? What kind of world could he have made, if his life wasn’t wasted by court intrigue?

There is no way to know. And perhaps I am being too clever for asking—history happened as it happened, and there is no undoing it. But alternate history stories are a way to explore, a way to ask ourselves “what if” or even, perhaps, look to the past and think “if only…”

I also think that the particular passage of the Analects (link to original classical Chinese) that I based the story around is itself quite profound. In it, Confucius specifically and emphatically refuses to engage in questions of the supernatural, redirecting Zi Lu towards the actual well-being of actual humans. I think that there is an important lesson in this for all spiritual practice—regardless of supernatural claims or theology, what matters in the end is the welfare of real people in the real world. I tried to carry this lesson through the entire story, although I am a speculative fiction writer and could not help but put in a little bit of the supernatural in the ending.

In writing the story, I have made a few simplifications and fudges to history. The term I translate as “the dead” in literal truth is closer to “gods and spirits” or “supernatural beings” but the spirits in question definitely include the spirits of the dead. Similarly, I refer to Zi Lu as “Zi Lu” throughout the story, although that is actually his courtesy name, and would have only been used after his death. In life, he would have been called “You.”

Anyway, I have now gone on for more than half the length of the entire story, so I will leave off before it gets any longer. I hope that you enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

A Few Thoughts on How to Receive and Process Criticism

In the writing world, there’s a proliferation of advice and systems and structures and policies about how give critique on a draft work of fiction. But there is comparatively little advice about how to receive critique, and very few if-any structures or systems (other than, perhaps, to not speak at all.) And as for processing after the fact—how to turn critique into actionable points for revision work—there is basically nothing.

I have no intention or capacity to actuall fill in these gaps. However, because I find myself giving the same advice over and over again to new writers who are trying to figure out how to navigate receiving and processing critique, I thought I would compile a few things here as a bulleted list).

(It’s worth noting that this is a discussion of critique—which is to say solicited feedback about draft writing in the context of a workshop or a writers’ group or personal relationships. It is not about literary criticism, commercial reviews, ten thousand people lighting up your mentions on Twitter, or anything else that sometimes goes under the name “critique.”)

• Critique is not a to-do list.
  Which simply means, just because someone is has given you a piece of critical feedback does not obligate you to change the story in accordance with their feedback. Most feedback, most of the time, doesn’t need any direct or specific action on your part. (In fact, receiving a piece of critical feedback does not obligate any response from you whatsoever, except perhaps a polite “thank you.”)
  If you think a piece of feedback is well-founded (i.e. it comes from a place of genuine response and isn’t simply someone thoughtlessly recapitulating a rule that they learned from composition class, Strunk and White, or twitter), then it behooves you to carefully examine it and decide, on your own terms, what response it merits. For instance, if someone says “this part drags for me,” then it maybe you should reread the part in question and decide, on your own, whether or not it drags and only after that decide if you want to do anything about it or just stash it away for later.
  Note: If the person giving critique is someone who you respect as an authority or a writer (like a teacher, or a author you’re a fan of) it is even more important that you take each item of critique from them on your own terms, and not on theirs.

• Critique is better as information than as advice.
  Often, good critique simply reveals a problem. Or, if it does include a solution, it is a solution that is wrong for the story due to other reasons. Because critiquers are less familiar with your story than you are, they don’t necessarily understand all the moving parts of the story, and thus their recommendations will often make things worse.
  One failure state here is to simply blindly accept a critiquer’s suggestions and revise accordingly. This can end up with a lumpy, frustrating story with a “too many cooks” feeling. But another failure state is to reject the criticism outright “well, she may be right that the story drags here, but I can’t cut this dialogue like she suggested, because I need it for foreshadowing the climax.” This can end up leaving good critique on the floor, and with a story with an awkward rough-draft feeling.
  The happy medium here is to accept and use good critique, but not as a direct guideline for revision. Rather, if someone points out something that’s wrong with your story, that is useful information. Line it up with other critiques. Figure out, from the collective, what the problems are in your story, and then figure out (on your own) revisions that might address those problems. For example, maybe you really can’t streamline the scene that one critiquer says drags a little. But maybe you can make the scene before it snappier, which will in turn make the whole passage feel faster. For another example: Maybe the ending seems abrupt, but that doesn’t mean you need to expand the ending even if everyone tells you to. Maybe it’s actually because there isn’t enough conflict in the middle.
  The point is simply: use critique as data about how people will read your story. Analyze your story with that data. Don’t simply take suggestions and apply them directly to your story without at least first doing your own analysis and thought.

• Keep a “fuck you, no” close to your heart.
  This is going to sound like a repeat of the last two but: As the author of your story, you are the person who knows it best in the world. Thankfully, you’re also the only person who has final say about what goes in, what comes out, and how it’s shaped.
  When receiving critique, particularly critique that is somewhat wrong-headed, there is a natural impulse to jump to the defense of our writing and our story. But this is counter-productive—it discourages people from offering their own experiences and critique, and it can drag you into a completely unproductive and useless back and forth in defense of your story, when you already have a 100% perfect defense available: If someone says you need to make the aliens orange, or take out the fight scene, or anything else that you think is just wrong, wrong, wrong, you can simply ignore that critique.
  This spirit—ownership over your own work, custodianship of it, and confidence in that authority—is something that I think that all creative people have to find in their own heart in their own way. Because I’m vulgar, I think of this as my “fuck you, no.” If someone makes a bad suggestion, I have the power to simply say “fuck you, no” to that suggestion. Of course, I do not actually tell my critiquers to fuck themselves. I’m not that vulgar. I just hold my power to do so inside my heart while listening to critique.
  The benefits of this are multitudinous. First, it saves the stress of being worried about the impact of bad critique on your story—it will have no, because “fuck you, no.” Second, it means that during critique, you can let go of defensiveness, because you already have a 100% perfect defense: “Fuck you, no.” This, at least to me and I’ve observed in others, opens up a more peaceful and analytical relationship to critique. Instead of just rejecting bad critique outright, I can use it as data—“Oh, so this passive made a reader thing that vampires were purple. Well, that’s a dumb thing to think when I made it clear that they’re green, but why might someone have thought that?” Because I’m free to reject the bulk of the critique, I am also free to rework, reuse, or repurpose it, completely unilaterally.

• If you are going to engage, look for information rather than debate
  There is a perfectly respectable tradition that holds that a writer should not respond while recieving critique—they should simply note down what people say about the story and move along. There are also formats and structures which limit the ways or the topics about which a writer can respond. These traditions and forms—often associated with formal writing workshops in which relative strangers are critiquing each other’s work—are specific to their contexts and purposes. But there is nothing inherently wrong with only replying “thank you” to critique. If that works for you, do it.
  That said, a lot of critique happens outside of those contexts, and there are a lot of reasons why, even in a formal context, you might want to speak up and respond. Particularly in informal, one-on-one discussions with critiquers (often called “beta reading”), you will get more benefit out of a back-and-forth discussion than simply passively listening. There are many reasons why you might want to respond to critique.
  When you do respond to critique, though, it should be about seeking information, rather than about engaging in a debate or discussion about your story. Remember that you are the authority of your own work and to keep a “fuck you, no” close to your heart. Given the level of authority you have, it is pointless to engage in a back-and-forth about the story. If someone has a wrong-headed idea, there is no point in your correcting them. “What led you to think that vampires are purple?” is a better response than “but I said explicitly that vampires were green in the previous scene,” because it opens the door to more information. Likewise, if you don’t want to hear any more about a particular point, just say “okay, I have taken that on-board, do you have any comments about anything else?”
  Particularly in informal, one on one environments, critique can feel like just having a discussion about your story. But it isn’t. Make sure to push in ways that are useful to you, rather than getting bogged down in argument. Even if the argument feels good at the time, your story will benefit more from information and fact-finding.

• Critique will hurt and that’s okay.
  Critique is an inherently painful process. You take your story, which is sometimes a story you’ve worked on to make as good as you can, and other times so clearly a rough draft with flaws, and you hand it off to other people who then point out all its flaws that they can find.
  Now, sometimes critique can also be exciting, and I don’t want to diminish that. But most critique processes have a degree of emotional pain. At worst, it can feel like giving life to all those negative voices in your head that tell you that your writing is awful and you shouldn’t bother and why not taking up a more healthy hobby like hiking or cross-stitch maybe chain-smoking?
  I don’t have any magical suggestions to deal with the emotional pain of critique. I just want to acknowledge that it’s very real, not only for new writers, but for experienced ones as well. Even though over time you may (emphasis on may) build up some emotionally calluses, this pain affects everyone. There are some handful of writers who claim that critique never affects them this way, but unless you’re one of those lucky few, you’re just stuck with it.
  The painful experience of critique is, to my mind, a worthwhile cost in order to improve my story and my writing as a whole. But it is, nonetheless, a cost, and a very real one.
  Instead of thinking that this pain will go away, or that you’re weak or selfish for feeling it, consider ways of ameliorating the pain and stress of a critique experience. I’m not going to give you instructions on self-care—for one, you know yourself better than I know you, and for two, I’m pretty bad at it myself. But please know that you’re not alone and you don’t have to “tough it out” in order to be a good writer. Give yourself support.

An Exercept From My Almost-Finished Novel

Here’s the first two paragraphs of my novel that is almost out of revisions

People say that it's like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky. People say it's like being pulled into a black hole. People say it's like a typhoon, like a cyclone, like an earthquake. People say it's like falling in love.

I wouldn't know. I've never been struck by lightning; I've never been near a black hole; and the weather's never a surprise to me. I've never even been in love, except for her.

As you might be able to tell, it’s a love story.

Forthcoming stories in Lightspeed

I’m not sure when my next newsletter will be. I have a couple of stories—A Sojourn in the Fifth City and Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows—forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine that should be out sometime this year. And I have literally no idea when or if I’ll ever have something to announce on the novel publication front.

Thanks for sticking with me through this long silence! I hope you enjoy How to Serve the Dead and I’ll see you next time.

To my daughter, in the dark of the moon is in this month’s Lightspeed, and it’s free to read right now! A lot of my stories begin as flash, and then I grow them upward during revision, adding hundreds or thousands of words. But this story—something about it just refused any expansion or revision. I wrote it in a single pass, nearly a single breath, and with the exception of a couple of minor grammatical tweaks it has remained exactly the same as when I first wrote it.

I think that the voice, and the character, are simply so strong that it was impossible for me to revise them.

I’m reluctant to analyze the story before you’ve all had a chance to read it and make up your own minds, so instead I’ll tell you a little about how I came to write it. I first wrote To my daughter, in the dark of the moon in response to a challenge to “write a story based on your favorite video game.” In this case, that video game is the truly excellent Slay the Spire by MegaCrit games. If you haven’t played the game, and you like card games or rogue-likes or RPGs, I highly recommend it. If you have, you might enjoy seeing how many references you can spot in To my daughter.

When it came time to publish the story, this put me in a bit of a tricky spot. To my daughter, in the dark of the moon isn’t exactly Slay the Spire fanfiction—it’s not directly related to the game’s characters or canon. But it uses a lot of the game’s imagery, to the point where I was uncomfortable publishing it without disclaimer and permission. Fortunately, the people at MegaCrit games were incredibly supportive and responsive, and perfectly happy to let me play around with the toys that they invented. So this story’s publication is thanks to them, specifically!

Megabot vs. the Fundamental Arbitrariness of Existence in fuckit

This issue of fuckit magazine has another entry in my “the Power Rangers in group therapy” series, entitled Megabot vs. the Fundamental Arbitrariness of Existence. If that sounds entertaining to you, or if you’d just like to check out an excellent zine with excellent stickers (my favorite is “Make Weird Art” but there’s a pile of good ones), I highly recommend fuckit.

I started a writer tumblr

Okay, technically I’ve had this tumblr since 2014, but I recently started actually posting to it. If you want to follow me there, it will have about the same announcement as the newsletter (although, as always, the newsletter will get all announcement first.)

Thank you for subscribing and reading. I hope you have a great rest of your year and the beginning of the new one. I can’t say for sure when the next newsletter will be (I only have one short story in the pipeline at the moment, but another could sell at any time) so I will see you all when I see you next.

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter, or, the Full Fruit of Love’s Fully Folly is live at tor.com! I love this story a great deal—it started when I was exhausted from writing novels and gave myself permission to write anything I wanted, without plans or structures. I think that the final story retains some of that joy and playfulness (even if the ending, well—)

I’m going to avoid the urge to talk more about the story as I’d like to let it speak for itself. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

(I’m writing this ahead of time, so if that URL doesn’t work, it’s because the story hasn’t posted yet.)

The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad in Lightspeed

The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad is coming out tomorrow at Lightspeed Magazine. (That link won’t work yet; it should go live at midnight tonight.)

It’s a very strange story, even by my standards, surrealistic science fiction in the form of a prophetic warning, based on the Jewish prophets and incredibly obscure Romantic poetry.

It’s part of an ongoing aesthetic movement I’ve been making towards writing “weird Judaica” (along with, for examples, Just Enough Rain and A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas) but I think it stands on its own as a piece of weird science fiction.

Thoughts on Writing Long Sentences, with an example

Writing advice books are quite typically full of techniques for trimming your sentences: everything from eliminating adjectives and adverbs to cutting the first or last clauses. If you tend to write sentences that are overly long*, these are, I assume, helpful techniques. But if you, like me, tend to write short and have to add words later, these techniques and approaches are counter-productive at best.

(* Of course, there is no single “correct” length for a sentence. Everything is dependent on your voice, style, and the role the sentence is playing in the paragraph, the scene, and the story as a whole. But sometimes you will want to expand a sentence, so I thought I’d showcase some techniques for that.)

Speaking for myself, I often find that in my revision process I need to take a sentence that is too short, too spare, or too blunt and expand it—adding context, description, stylistic flourishes, and so on.

Since, at least in my reading, there is very little advice out there about how to grow and expand sentences, I thought I would provide a worked example. Now, for the purposes of the example, this is a somewhat extreme case (I’m going to take the sentence from four words to one hundred and eighty words). Further, this isn’t actually from a real story, so I won’t be able to illustrate it in the context context of a paragraph, scene, or chapter. Nonetheless I hope it gives you some ideas about how to grow large sentences, how to structure them so that they’re easy to read, and some of the reasons you might want to use one.

This is an incredibly shallow discussion of the topic, limited to one sentence, without discussing the broader use of long sentences, ambiguity, and flexibility to weave a story structure. The whole topic is (characteristically) complex and interlacing, and would probably take a whole book to describe.

Let’s start with a very simple declarative sentence.

There was a dragon.

A perfectly fine sentence for what it is, but it’s lacking any context. There are several ways to develop this (one could change the verb into an active one, to give active context, one could establish a time, etc.) In this case, though, I decide that what matters is the physical location. Where was there a dragon? So let’s add a location to our sentence.

Over the hill there was a dragon.

That’s better, but it lacks immediacy, which makes it lack punch. We can fix that with one more word.

Just over the hill there was a dragon.

Now the dragon isn’t just over the hill somewhere. It’s just over the hill, which makes it considerably more imminent and considerably more threatening. But it’s still fairly contextless. Currently this narration is omniscient, pulled back from judgement. That can be fine, of course! But in this case I want to add more immediacy, so I’m going to add more context, particularly, the context of an observer.

Just over the hill from Rachel there was a dragon.

Good! Now we know that Rachel is right here, and there’s a dragon right there, and that’s fairly tense. But Rachel is completely neutral right now. We don’t have reason to care about her; we don’t have access to her thoughts or feelings. Let’s give some context to that by framing the observation inside of her viewpoint, rather than omnisciently.

Rachel knew that just over the hill there was a dragon.

But of course this opens the question of why does she know? If the dragon is just over the hill, she probably can’t see it directly. Giving a sensory impression helps.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew that just over the hill there was a dragon.

Great! Now we have a character, we have some internality, we have some action. But Rachel is still fairly flat as a character. Let’s add some characterization, using a parenthetical phrase.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over the hill there was a dragon.

There’s a cool thing about this parenthetical where the insistence that she knows paradoxically adds doubt to her perceptions. When her observation is uncommented on, it seems neutral, and thus the reader is likely to accept it. When the narrative insists on it, though, the reader is going to be more skeptical. It’s a cool voice effect. Let’s add some more to that phrase to make it hit harder.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew, as sure as she knew anything!—that just over the hill there was a dragon.

(A brief sidebar: I chose to add “as sure as she knew anything” because it is a fairly common phrase. Often writing advice is to cut out all common phrases from your writing. Which can be good advice, particularly if you’re using them unconsciously. But in this case the sentence is already getting somewhat long, and I want to make sure that the reader has a place to rest. If every part of a long sentence is some novel juxtaposition or unique description, that quickly becomes confusing for the reader. Adding in some more expected phrases give the reader a place to rest their attention, and thus makes the sentence easier to follow.)

Right now, the hill is pretty flat in this sentence. There are several approaches to dealing with that, including just letting it be flat. Not every part of a sentence has to pop. But let’s say that I want to make the hill a bit more specific.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew, as sure as she knew anything!—that just over that hill there was a dragon.

Now, despite the fact that there is no additional description of the hill, just by changing the article, the hill now feels more specific, closer, more threatening. It would be perfectly fine to leave it there, of course, but let’s say that having done that, I would like to add some more specifity to this hill, and give Rachel some more contextual relationship to it.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over that hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children—there was a dragon.

(Sidebar: I’ve reduced the first parenthetical because I added a much longer one immediately after, and two long parentheticals in a row is wearying. Don’t worry, though! I’ve saved the cut text in a side document. It’ll be back later.)

Now we know a lot more about the situation! Rachel is near her home, or at least near where she grew up. She has a particular history with this place. Currently, though, the memory is somewhat general. Let’s expand on it, adding specific events.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over that hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children, where they had gone up in the winters to sled on her mother's old baking sheets, where that one day, after they had both turned eight, when Isaac had said he was still older than her and she had gotten so mad and pushed him and he'd rolled all the way down the hill—that just over that hill there was a dragon.

Now that’s a scene! Note also that I’ve added some repetition at the end of the long parenthetical. This sort of repetition allows the reader to re-center themselves after a long divergence from the sentence. It also, paradoxically, makes the sentence read faster: we’re now fully immersed in Rachel’s train of thought, and so the repetition comes off not as redundant, but as panicked and rushed.

But this scene lacks a lot of specific detail. There’s room to flesh out Isaac and Rachel’s characters here, if we want to. Obviously we don’t have to, but let’s do it anyway.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over the hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children, where they had gone up in the winters to sled on her mother's old baking sheets, where that one day, after they had both turned eight, when Isaac had said he was still older than her and she had gotten so mad and pushed him and he'd rolled all the way down the hill and when she got to the bottom his face was snow-white and his breath was quiet and she screamed for help as loud as she could and afterwards, at the hospital with his broken ankle, she had felt so guilty that she promised him her ice cream for the year and even after a whole year of ice creams she hadn't resented it, not even once—that just over that hill there was a dragon.

(Normally I would be adding this in several stages—you can probably see the steps that I’d take—but this discussion is already running long, so here’s the full backstory at once.)

This is great! We have gone from a completely inert sentence to an interwoven fabric—a character in a specific context to her, her specific perceptions and assumptions, her relationship to her childhood friend (a brother, maybe?), an insight into who she is as a person.

But, at this point, the length of the sentence is pretty wearying. We want to give the reader some more places to rest. Plus, with such a long parenthetical, we need an even longer repeated section to bring us back to the present. So let’s add in a few repetitions and common phrases, including the one we cut earlier, to speed up the sentence and give it more of a rhythm. While we’re at it, we can expand a bit on Rachel’s voice and characterization.

Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over that hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children, where they had gone up in the winters to sled on her mother's old baking sheets, where that one day, after they had both turned eight, when Isaac had said he was still older than her and she had gotten so mad—so mad!—and pushed him and he'd rolled all the way down the hill and when she got to the bottom his face was snow-white and his breath was quiet and she screamed for help as loud as she could and afterwards, at the hospital with his broken ankle, she had felt so guilty that she promised him her ice cream for the year—the whole year!—and even after a whole year of ice creams she hadn't resented it, not even once—she saw that burst of steam and she knew, as certain as she knew anything, that just over that hill there was a dragon.

Now that’s a long sentence! It hits a lot of points, provides a lot of context, and reads fairly smoothly.

Note that we expanded this sentence almost entirely “to the left,” which is to say that that the core sentence there was a dragon comes right at the end. We could also expand the sentence “to the right,” expounding on the dragon’s appearance, Rachel’s opinions about dragons in general or this dragon in particular, or the context of Rachel looking for it. But this sentence is already one hundred and eighty words long. It’s unlikely that we could support both expansions without exhausting the reader, so I’ve chosen to showcase this approach.

Anyway, I hope that this is helpful or at least interesting! If you have any other approaches to expanding sentences, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Forthcoming Work

Unless I have some breaking news before then, this will be my last newsletter until December, when To my daughter, in the dark of the moon will be published in Lightspeed. Despite the story being only 750 words long, it actually showcases some of the sentence-expansion techniques I talk about above!

A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas is free to read in Fantasy Magazine. It is a kind of post-singularity fable, drawn from a novel I wrote which shares that setting, based on a fable told by Rabbi Akiva during the Roman occupation of Judea, as well as Akiva’s eventual death by torture by the Roman authorities.

Despite the topic, it is a light-hearted and fun story! I hope you enjoy it. It is definitely a milestone in my progress in the field of “Weird Judaica.”

I am still extremely tired so I am truncating the rest of the newsletter

Apologies. I’m still kind of barely hanging on and have not had the energy to write my normal craft / analysis essays. I was hoping to have an essay about workshops in general and the experience of Clarion West and how when people want to reform a workshop too much emphasis is put on critique structures and not enough on power structures and decision-making processes.

But, to be polite about it, that’s definitely not happening today. So hopefully I will have that ready for you all to read at some point in the future.

I hope to see some of you at WorldCon at the end of the month.

My next story that will be published is The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad in Lightspeed in October: a completely different milestone in my “Weird Judaica” progress. Hopefully by then I will be recovered enough to write an essay, whether it is on the topic mentioned above or a completely different topic.

Megabot vs. Teamwork, the first in a series of flash about “what if the Power Rangers went to group therapy?” is in the latest issue of fuckit. I’ve loved the essays and poetry and fiction in fuckit for quite a while and I’m happy to finally have something I can publish there.

You do have to buy the zine to read the story, but shipping is fairly fast and it comes with excellent stickers.

Completely flattened by Clarion West

Normally I would have a craft or theory or critique essay here, but I just got done with the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, where I wrote 41,000 words and critiqued 440,000 words, so I have no capacity to do much thought-work at all.

It was a very eventful experience, with a lot of ups and downs, but I am beyond grateful for my classmates, who are an extraordinary and talented group of people and I am happy to have a chance to encounter their writing. At the very least, I am grateful that when they’re all famous I can say that I was a fan from the start.

In news that might interest people here, I finished a novella while at Clarion, tentatively titled The Queen Beneath the Earth. Publication plans up in the air for now, while I deal with revisions.

Chicon 8 schedule

I will be at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago at the end of the month. Unlike previous WorldCons, they’re actually put me on some panels and events.

SF Depictions of Disability in the Future (Panel), Friday 7 PM (Crystal Ballroom A)
Reading (Solo Reading), Friday 8:30 PM (Crystal Ballroom A)
Future Food (Panel), Saturday 2:30 PM (Grand Hall I)
Table Talk (what they’re calling a kaffeeklatsch), Sunday 2:30 PM (Crystal Foyer)

If you’re going to be there, please let me know! I would love a chance to meet you, even briefly. (Also, I am hoping that at least someone will come to my reading and kaffeeklatsch.)

A Few Recommendations

I’m in the middle of The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall and enjoying it immensely. Kerstin’s descriptions are gorgeous and inviting, even when the world she is describing grotesque and bizarre.

The Demon Sage’s Daughter by Varsha Dinesh was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, which is richly deserved. I know I’ve mentioned it a lot, but it’s my favorite short fiction from the last year and it’s well worth your time.

As someone who longs for nothing more than to transform into a tree, I greatly enjoyed Rooted by Wen-yi Lee.

(These are a few of my Clarion West classmates—they’re mostly who I’ve been reading lately.)

Forthcoming stories

A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas will be out in Fantasy later this month (hopefully by then I will have the strength to write an essay). The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad will be out in Lightspeed in October. Both of these are weird Judaica, a genre I’ve been writing a great deal of recently, so it’s exciting to have them come out back-to-back.

In general I am of the opinion that there should be more monotheism in the fantasy genre, so I’m hoping that these stories will hold open the way for others.

June’s Lightspeed features the most recent in my Tales of the Great Sweet Sea series, called The Turnip. It is based on the Grimm story of the same name, one of the odder stories in the Grimm canon, which has always fascinated me.

Because The Turnip is much less well-known than some of the other stories I’ve drawn on for this series, and because I feel like it needs very little massaging, this is the closest I’ve come to writing a direct fairy-tale retelling. Normally, when doing fairy tale work, I feel like I should offer the audience new insight or perspective on the story, but in this case I’m working from the assumption that you haven’t heard the story a hundred or a thousand times.

That being said, I could not resist adding a third act which resolves most of the major plot threads, since the original cuts off right in the middle of events. Regardless, I hope you enjoy it!

This will be the last Great Sweet Sea story for a while, since I’m currently working on two half-finished longer pieces and don’t have anything in the publication pipeline. I expect that the series will have at least half a dozen more entries, though, eventually.

A few stray thoughts on pacing and metrical feet

I have been thinking a lot about scene-to-scene structure in fiction and the concept of “scenes and sequels.” In case you hadn’t heard of the concept before, the idea is that scenes in fiction are divided into two types: Scenes, in which events occur and characters take action, and Sequels, which show the aftermath and consequences of the choices in the previous scene as well as setting up the next one.

(Yes, both scenes and sequels are types of scenes. The terminology is incredibly confusing, but it’s also standard. I’m sorry.)

The traditional framing of this, as I understand it, is Scene-sequel-Scene-sequel-Scene-sequel and so on until the end of the book. Chapter divisions are kind of arbitrary, but they’re often broken down in these pairs as well—a chapter might be a single Scene-sequel pair, or perhaps two or three of them strung together.

At the beginning of the current novel I’m writing, for various reasons, it was useful for me to adopt a different structure. Each of the early chapters is structured like this: Scene-sequel-another sequel. I ended up quite liking this rhythm—it gave the events of the Scenes a little more breathing space and made the character feel more “lived in” rather than rushing from event to event.

When I was describing this to a friend of mine, who is also a poetic, I ended up saying “the novel has a dactyllic structure,” referring to the metrical foot, because that seemed like the simplest way to describe it. That started as a convenience, but it has been rattling around in my head and I think that there may be more to it than that.

Metrical feet are about stressed and unstressed syllables. And, in a way, a scene is a “stressed” scene, and a sequel an “unstressed” scene. Rather than simply assuming that Scenes always come first, and are always followed by one Sequel, it’s interesting to look at what the other possibilities are, and how they feel to read.

The traditional Scene-sequel-Scene-sequel structure is equivalent to trochaic meter, and it has a similar drumbeat feeling—BUM-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-buh—like it’s marching you forward towards the climax of the book. You can practically hear the brass band.

Maybe it’s just in my head, but I also feel like there is some relation between how dactylls give a tripping-off-the-tongue feeling and how Scene-sequel-sequel structure gives a very fluid motion in the plot, less like marching, and more like falling-forward. BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-buh.

Anyway, my thoughts on this have continued to rattle around and arrived at the very natural conclusion of “what about iambs?” Iambic meter—unstressed followed by stressed—is often called the “natural rhythm of English,” so it seems very straightforward to think about it. But what does it mean, in a scene structure, to start with an unstressed scene?

It’s not a “sequel” because it doesn’t come after anything, right? And the more I think about it, the more I think that background (or even the dreaded prologue) can form an unstressed scene at the beginning of a work of fiction. And I think that a lot of stories have this structure, although not most modern stories.

Fairy tales, for instance, often start with a fair amount of table-setting before we get to the first choice. “Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a king with three daughters, each more beautiful than the last” is not really a scene in the “scenes and sequels” sense. No one has taken action; no one has made a choice. It’s just letting you know the context. That, to me, feels very unstressed.

Similarly, if you’re recounting an anecdote to a friend, you might start with similar material. “So my buddy Cameron—you don’t know them, they’re an architect in Cincinnati—is heading into work one day…” again, it’s mostly table-setting.

In a formal fiction context, we might end up cutting this kind of material, or redistributing it throughout the book so we can start with something gripping. But in casual narrative, we’re much more likely to just front-load it.

Similarly, an interesting thing about an “iambic” scene stress pattern is that it ends on the scene, not the sequel. This is, again, something that isn’t terrible common in modern professional fiction, but used to be very common in serialized fiction: you end your narrative unit not with the aftermath of a dramatic choice, but with the dramatic choice itself, saving the aftermath for the beginning of the next unit (and leaving your readers in suspense about what consequences might ensue.)

Anyway this isn’t a fully formed thought, so it doesn’t have a conclusion. It’s just a thing I’ve been thinking about lately. If you have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them. (Including if you think I’m just completely wrong-headed about it, as long as you tell me why you think that.)

A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas forthcoming in Fantasy

I have sold my story A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas, to Fantasy Magazine. It is based on a parable by Rabbi Akiva and also about the events of his life and death. I’m very happy to have sold the story, particularly to Fantasy, a magazine that I love. Also, having sold a story to Fantasy means that I have sold at least one story to each of the Adamant family of publications (Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy), which is exactly the sort of trivial achievement that I love.

I have no idea which issue it will be in.

In general I have a handful of stories awaiting publication—two flash stories in Lightspeed and a short story with Tor.com. In general, I expect 2022 to be a somewhat slower year for my publications than the last two—a result of shifting more towards long-form writing as well as having my short stories become even stranger and thus harder to sell.

My story An Ill-Fated Girl Just Happens to Meet an Ill-Fated Man is in the May/June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Unfortunately I can’t find a link to buy the individual issue, but it should be available at newstands throughout the United States, as well as through subscription services on Weightless Books and Amazon.

The story is basically my (fantasy) love letter to the great Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (also know as The Story of the Stone in English)— doomed love and unavoidable tragedy on a backdrop of fading opulence. I’m also very fortunate to be good friends with an expert on Qing history, which was invaluable for this story in particular. My hope is that the story will be entertaining for those who understand the references while still being accessible to those that don’t.

This is also my first publication in one of the “Big Three” print magazines, and my first time on newstands, which is a pretty nice career achievement. Of the Big Three, F&SF has always been my favorite, too.

2022 Clarion West Class Announced

And I’m in it! Not that this is a surprise, since I’ve been delayed since the cancelled 2020 class. But I’m really looking forward to have a chance to work with these amazing and talented people. (Relatedly, I’ll be 99% offline for the whole workshop, so no newsletters for June or July.)

Deadline for Nebula Voting

The deadline for Nebula voting is tonight (Saturday, April 30) at Midnight Pacific Time. If you’re a SFWA member, please vote!

2022 Award Reading

Are you a SFF writer? Do you have a story that will be published in 2022? Do you want me to read and consider it for award nominations and favorite stories lists?

Send it to me! Send an e-mail to whattheplumsaid@gmail.com with [Award Reading 2022] in the title and include a link to your work (if it’s online) or an attachment (if it’s not.) Yes, it’s early in the year, but getting a jump on reading makes it easier for me. Near the end of the year I will get overwhelmed; if you send the story now I’ll definitely read it.

Normally this is the sort of thing that gets posted in private industry forums, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve found that I get a better response if I post a call in public.

Details:

• Please only send “Flash,” “Short Story” and “Novelette” length works (so anything up to 17,500 words.)

• It’s okay to send stuff that will be published later this year. Just attach the manuscript.

• Please only send one story.

• This offer is open to any writer with a story published in 2022. Feel free to share it around.

• Please don’t send stories that aren’t yet purchased for publication (I’m not a publisher or editor! I can’t publish them!)

Some Thoughts on Exposition and “As You Know, Bob”

Exposition is an ongoing problem for SFF writers. You can’t just assume a reader knows about the world you invented (well, you can, but you have to be very careful about it.) In general, you’re going to want to explain to the reader how things work.

But, because direct exposition is often boring, writers try to work the details of their world into dialogue and character interaction. (Direct exposition need not be boring, as long as you work to keep your reader engaged. Douglas Adams is a great example of someone who does direct exposition incredibly well.) This, then, creates another potential issue, where one character explains to another character something about their shared world that they both already know. This can end up being stilted and unnatural—why is this character saying something that the other one already knows?—and in SFF writing circles it goes by the name “As You Know, Bob.”

In general, writing advice is to avoid both “As You Know, Bob” and direct exposition. But, of course, this still leaves the problem of how to do your necessary exposition. There’s not a single, clear-cut way to do it, but I think a lot of these “rules about things not to do” end up primarily being impediments.

With exposition in mind, I’ve been observing natural language uses, looking for situations in which people explain things about our world and how it works. And what I’ve noticed is that people say things that everyone knows all the time. The only difference from the classic “As You Know, Bob” problem is that they don’t explain it in a neutral or informative tone.

Here’s a few of the natural circumstances in which people say things that everyone in the conversation already knows:

They’re angry or frustrated. Say you’re in the US, and the president has just done something stupid that pissed off Canada, and you’re mad about it. You might well say “—He pissed off Canada! Canada, the country right to the north of us!” In this case, the comment is intended not to be informative—everyone in the US knows that Canada is to the north of us—but to use the obvious fact emphasize the stupidity of the action.

They’re condescending. Mansplaining is so commonplace that it’s a bit of a cliche, but anyone who sees themself as “above” another person (including, most certainly, men to women) will often “explain” something incredibly obvious to everyone involved. Sometimes they’ll even explain it wrong!

They’re explaining something else that is more complicated. When you’re trying to explain a complex topic, it is incredibly useful—and incredibly common—to start with basic, obviously shared knowledge and build out from there. For instance, when I was studying physics, it was very common to start to explain a new concept with the equation “F=ma”—the basic building block of all physics—and then building the concept out from there.

They’re pointing out hypocrisy. This is kind of a secondary case of “angry or frustrated,” but it’s incredibly common to repeat very well-known norms while pointing out that they’re not actually true. To use another example from US political discourse, it’s incredibly common to see a statement like “Everyone says that the US is a ‘country of immigrants,’ but our immigration policy is actually incredibly restrictive.” Again, the expectation is not that the first part of this is new information, but to point out the juxtaposition of stated ideals and actual policy.

(This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list, just some of the circumstances I have noticed. Once you start looking for people saying things that everybody knows, it turns out that to be way more common than you’d expect.)

I’ve been experimenting with integrating these into my writing. So far it’s working great. And, additionally, there’s something else useful about them for writing purposes—most of them contain an implicit conflict (whether between individuals, between states or institutions, or between ideals), which serves to make them inherently pretty interesting to read.

Anyway, I just wanted to pass that along in case anyone is struggling with exposition or dialogue.

My story This Story is Called “The Transformation of Things,” originally published in the Xenocultivars anthology, is reprinted in Zooscape. I’m very happy to finally have a story in Zooscape, which is a fascinating publication and well worth reading. I’m very grateful to the editor, Mary Lowd, for being willing to publish an anthropomorphic tree story in a genre that is primarily about anthropomorphic animals. (Although properly the trees in the story aren’t anthropomorphic. They’re physically ordinary trees. Only their thoughts and dialogue and societies are human-like.)

The title and much of the content of the story is based on the philosophy of Zhuang Zhou. He’s famous in the English-speaking world for his vivid dream of being a butterfly, but that’s only one example of his incredibly deep thinking on many topics such as language, identity, and categorization. If you find the ideas in the story compelling, I’d encourage you to go engage with Zhuangzi!

Unfortunately there isn’t an English translation that captures the vivid, kinetic feeling of his writing in Classical Chinese, so I don’t have a great one to recommend, but I use AC Graham’s translation as my baseline.

A few thoughts on “writing rules”

I hope you will forgive these scattered thoughts on “how to write.” I’ve both seen a lot of awful prescriptions tossed out on social media and been reading a lot of “how to write” books that engage very poorly with these topics, so it’s on my mind.

—

It's not uncommon to see writers confidently dismissing particular approaches to write or the use of particular techniques. This is done either with an authoritative voice—"you must never use more than two forms of 'to be' on a single page—"or it is framed as a matter of universal taste and aesthetics—"second person is so cringe."

This is all completely wrong. There is no structure, form, voice, person, or narrative style that cannot be written beautifully, thoughtfully, and well. Similarly, there is no specific set of techniques and approaches which are so widely accepted that they place one's writing above reproach.

As writers, when writing, it behooves us to put this sort of pseudo-rule or pseudo-taste out of our mind, and write the story we want to write in the manner which best befits our own goals for the story and the story's own demands.

Sometimes, of course, this means we should critically look at our own approaches to voice, person, point of view, &c and determine whether they're serving the story. Likewise, it may often require us to leave our comfort zone and learn to use new voices and new grammars effectively.

To me, the most fruitful approach to these techniques is not to ask whether they're allowed (it's fiction—everything is allowed), or whether they're good (every approach can be good, every approach can be awful), or whether they're popular (screw popular), but rather to ask myself what reader-experience they're good at producing, and how best to use them to accomplish that. To give an example: second person can provide intimacy, alienation, ambiguity, or immediacy.

Sometimes, that means learning. For instance, for a current project, I had to learn how to write in close, emotional first person. I'd done similar writing in the second person, but my first person narrators have tended to be detached and intellectual—they have tended to reminisce rather than react. Learning to write an intense first person narration is not trivial, but neither is it impossible: It's a project, and requires both reading other writers that do it well (in my case: Holly Black and Alaya Dawn Johnson) and a lot of my own trial and error.

To give another example: most writers and editors detest "head-hopping--" having multiple narrative points of view in a single scene. But it can be used to great effect. In Frank Herbert's Dune, we see almost every character's inner thoughts every time they speak or act, regardless of how many characters there are in the scene. The effect of this in a twisty political narrative like Dune, where every character has secrets and plots, is that the reader can actually follow along with the plotting and maneuvering—absolutely none of it is saved for a "reveal." This serves to make the intricacy of the political action incredibly legible to the reader, in a way that it would not be if we were stuck in a single point of view (or even if we changed point-of-view once a chapter.) In many cases, head-hopping can be confusing, which is part of why it's generally disdained. But in Dune, it makes the action of the narrative clear and comprehensible, and I think it's a big part of why it's a classic story that is still beloved and still read many decades after it was published.

The most important thing, when writing fiction, is to use the correct techniques and approaches to make your story clear, compelling, beautiful, and interesting (or to accomplish whatever other aesthetic goals you have for the text.) Secondarily, you can rely on your own strengths and growth as a writer. "Rules for writing" or current stylistic fashions should be a distant concern, if they enter into your process at all.

Appreciating Leonora Carrington

One of my favorite 20th century artists is Leonora Carrington, a English-Mexican surrealist whose painting “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur” inspired Leaving Room for the Moon. I just think she’s an excellent artist and I “click” with her work creatively in a way that I can struggle to with other visual art.

Something a friend of mine pointed out is that, unlike many other painters, Carrington does a ton of “world building” work in her paintings. Take, for example, “The Lovers” which was just posted on a fan twitter account. Yes, it’s gorgeous and compelling and unsettling. But also there’s just so much going on in that painting. They’re in a tent. In a desert. There are stars. There’s some weird cult of crypto-nuns surrounding them. There’s an anthropomorphic wolf with two walking sticks. A snake is talking to some kind of animal. And that’s barely half the details of the painting.

Anyway, if you’ve never seen her work before, I recommend checking it out! There are fan accounts on twitter and tumblr that post images regularly, if you’re a social media person, and of course also art books and so on.

Until Next Time

I know things have been relatively quiet here, after a big burst of news. I’ve mostly been working on novels with my new agent, so I expect that there will be less frequent updates in the future (although hopefully some big ones eventually!) I do have a story coming out in F&SF in May, and another coming out in Lightspeed in June, so I will let you know as soon as those are available.

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes, my tragedy of intercommunal romance in (fantasy) Medieval Sicily, is going to be in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. I’m very happy about this! I really love Garden—it’s become my go-to story for readings—and I’m going to take the chance to make some very minor textual changes as well, so this version will be the definitive one.

(Please no one tell him that the story was actually published in 2020.)

Hugo Nominations Close Today

If you’re a member of WorldCon, here’s a reminder to get your Hugo nominations in. I’ve already done all my award promotion a few months ago, so I won’t belabor that, but I just wanted to make a couple of Hugo-related recommendations.

Lulu Kadhim (Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet; A Softness of the Heart) is an excellent writer in her first year of eligibility for the Astounding Award.

Varsha Dinesh (The Demon-Sage’s Daughter) is also excellent and Astounding eligible.

Wizards vs. Lesbians, a great review/criticism podcast which I sometimes guest on, is eligible for “Best Fancast.”

Nebula Final Voting Opens

If you’re a SFWA member; Nebula final voting opens today! I have a story eligible, but there are many great stories nominated and I’m sure you will choose excellent ones.

Some Thoughts About Disability in SFF Secondary Worlds

I wrote about this a while back on twitter, but I thought I’d revisit those thoughts now.

A lot of times, people talk about how it’s hard to write disabilities in fantasy or science fiction settings because “they’d just be fixed by [technology or magic].” I can understand how authors feel this way! But it’s important to understand that disability is not a fixed category of medical impairments. Certain impairments are disabled by society, which people with those impairments are denied access needs, denied personal autonomy, or otherwise discrinated against. Other impairments are not disabled, which means that they are considered part of normal human variation and not subject to the above restrictions.

This changes over time! For instance, left-handedness was, in Anglo-American culture, disabled for a very long time. Left-handed children were beaten, forced to use their right hands, and generally discriminated against. Then, as the cultural biases and approaches shifted, that vanished.

In the case of left-handedness, the change was cultural and not technological, but technological development can spur which impairments are considered disabilities and which ones are considered benign variations. In a pre-literate society, or a society where literacy is skill limited to certain professions, dyslexia is simply not a big deal. In our society, where literacy is considered necessary to be a functional adult, dyslexia is a serious disability. In a future society where accommodations for dyslexia are easily available (either due to new technology, due to cultural shifts, or something else altogether), it may well go back to being considered benign variation.

When inventing a secondary world, whether science fiction or fantasy, don’t simply consider categories that are considered “disabled” by our current society. Consider also what new disabilities might be present in the setting.

The easiest way to do this is to simply consider the people who do not have access to the central features of your secondary world. For example: In a world where “everyone” can use magic, what happens to people whose ability to use magic is constrained or problematic? Or, in a world with persistent virtual reality, what about people (like me!) who get horribly seasick from VR environments? In a galaxy-spanning space empire, what about people who have an allergy to the chemicals used for faster-than-light travel?

A secondary approach is to simply pick some fairly benign human variation, similar left-handedness, and have the society apply various justified-but-ultimately-irrational stigmas about it. Disabilities aren’t always tied to meaningful impairments! Sometimes they’re just there.

It’s important to note that prejudices about disabilities are not always rationally related to their impairments. In a VR-heavy world, for instance, it’s possible that people would argue that people without access to VR cannot meaningfully sign contracts or otherwise give consent, because they lack access to the ancillary information necessary to inform their decisions. To us, this looks obviously wrong, but to someone who is used to using that information, it might seem quite reasonable (and similar arguments are used, today, to deny legal agency to adults with learning or developmental disabilities.)

Another thing is that disabilities don’t have to be a big deal in your story to be included in your story. If you’re doing this world-building work, which I encourage you to do if it fits your process, you don’t need to have a disabled protagonists (although more disabled protagonists, including by non-disabled authors, are always welcome.) You can simply have it be part of the texture of the world, present in conversations, social norms, secondary and tertiary characters, etc.

Anyway, that’s just a few scattered thoughts on developing disabilities for your secondary worlds. I hope it’s useful to some of you!