Although it seems to indicate that I should have kept FictionMock going.

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(Here’s a good FictionMock sample…)

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Tja. Enjoy it maybe. I’ll miss it.

Dave shined his penlight on the mountain of olive drab sea bags piled against the storage bay bulkhead. He didn’t see his name, but his bag must be buried in there somewhere. He switched off the penlight and felt for a bag, grabbed onto it, then threw it against the far wall. It landed with a heavy sigh and he reached for another bag, picked it up, and threw it.

Dave’s clothes stuck to him. He took off his undershirt and listened for footsteps outside the hold: there was nothing but the thrum of the ship’s engines. He rolled up the shirt and wedged it into his pants at the small of his back, then grabbed another seabag off the pile and threw it toward the opposite wall. He picked up another and threw it, then another, which rattled when it hit the ground. Then Dave pulled his penlight back out of his pocket and waved it across the pile. Still didn’t see his name.

The room smelled like mildew and Dave’s own sweat, a drop of which dripped onto his upper lip. He blew upward at it until it flew off his face, then set his penlight onto the deck. He picked up the next bag and tossed it aside, then the next, then the next, then the next, then — there it was. In the circle of light he saw his name stenciled white in the mass of green: PFC. DAVID A. WOOLFORD.

Dave wrestled his bag out of the pile, then heard voices outside the hatch. He dropped the bag, fell to the deck, picked up the penlight, switched it off. He scooted into the pile of seabags, pulled his on top of himself, and waited.

First Voice: “…been gambling dirty since they been on board.”

Second Voice: “I’ll be glader’n hell to get their green asses off our boat.”

Their footsteps stopped outside the hatch.

“Don’t gotta say that twice.” The first voice paused and Dave smelled cigarette smoke. “But hell, much as I hate ‘em, them boys could all be dead tomorrow, y’know?”

The second voice had a soft drawl to it. “Well better them than us.”

“Ah, that’s low.” Dave imagined the sailor pulling a draw from his cig. “Some of them got mommas too, y’know.”

“The hell?” the second said. “Marines got mommas?”

The smoke smelled like Camels. Dave hadn’t smelled Camel smoke since New River and the scent left him yearning for the swamp.

“Well,” the first said. “Thems as got mommas, I’ll feel bad for. ‘Cept thems as’s been cheatin’ at cards.”

“I’ll drink to that,” the second said.

“Yeah? Whatcha gonna drink?”

“I got a stash o’ beers in engineering.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. You comin’?”

“Don’t gotta ask me twice.”

Their footsteps clanked across the steel deck away from the storage bay.

Likewise clanking,

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Closed shop on my spec-fic literary magazine dream. Officially. It’s probably been dead since last summer — at least, in my heart. I feel bad for holding onto some stories over that time. It’s probably not the biggest crime ever committed by an editor, but maybe it is. Ultimately, though:

• It wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped.
• The reading market really isn’t demanding that another web-zine exist.
• In fact, we had far more submitters than readers. Far. More.
• I couldn’t get anything written while working on TR.
• After the second issue, I started to doubt that running the mag would expedite my ascent to King of the World.
• My slush readers were fantastic (many sincere thanks).

And hopefully someone knocks off my layout approach. I really think that’s the way to go for online literary journals: make it look more like print. Print looks that way because it’s easier to read serifed fonts, loosened leading, ten-ish words per line, and indented paragraphs over the long-haul, not just because it’s a different medium. IMHO. Always IMHO.

Bleib schoen gesund.

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• How did the planet get like this? How long have they been walking? How old is the boy? How old is the man? Where are they exactly? Why is it always cold? How did they survive whatever happened? What are the bloodcults? (*They* sound interesting — you should write your story about them instead!) Who are these roving gangs? We need more back-story, otherwise this is way too confusing. You should try using more exposition if you don’t want to confuse people. No editor would ever buy a novel that confuses people like this one does.
• Sometimes you wrote paragraphs about stuff that didn’t seem relevant to what was going on — you should get rid of those or else explain what they mean.
• Once in a while you wrote some long run-on sentences that were really distracting. You should try breaking them up into smaller sentences.
• I don’t even know the characters’ names!
• Or what they look like!
• I don’t like stories where the action all happens in dialog.
• Your writing requires a lot of trust from the reader. You need to give stronger indications early on that let me know I can trust you.
• The lack of punctuation and irregular capitalization was totally gimmicky. You should just use normal punctuation.
• There wasn’t enough of a setting here. I never felt like I could see what was going on.
• This world feels trite. I feel like I’ve read this before — a bunch of times.
• The pace was too slow — you should pick it up by adding event.
• My main concern was a lack of forward movement in the story. It was like it was a series of loosely connected vignettes.
• I stopped at the part where you implied that the dog was killed because people shouldn’t mistreat animals. (I was okay with the cannibalism, just not when they killed the dog.)
• Sometimes the dialog was confusing. If you added dialog tags, I’d know who was speaking; you should do that.
• Some of the dialog was repetitive! I got really tired of having the kid say “okay”. You should change it up a little. Kids have bigger vocabularies than that!
• I got tired of reading about those two characters. You need more characters to keep it interesting.
• I’m not sure this is realistic enough. If the guy is sick or injured or starving, I don’t think he could possibly do all the things he did. You should do more research.
• There are a lot of convenient plot points in the story, like every time they really need something, they *just happen* to find it. They need to earn everything.
• This story is too cold and bleak and there’s not enough reason to hope. I don’t like that.
• The POV shift was thoroughly annoying.
• The tension in the story was great, but when they finally reached their objective, I wasn’t sure what was still on the table — only that there were still 50 or 60 pages left. I need something that gives me a stronger indication of what I’m still reading for and what the characters are trying to achieve; the ultimate aim that’s achieved seems oddly missing throughout most of the book. (<– This would’ve been my comment.)

I love the fact that this book exists, got published, got reviewed glowingly, and got read widely. Gives me hope for the future. A little bit.

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Finally got to have my 15 minutes with Kelly Link. It was more like an hour and a half. Here’s what I think she told me…:

1. I write good details and the SFnal elements of my stories work very well.
2. My characters are sympathetic. Of course, she didn’t get to read about the guy who killed his fish, cat, and wife in order to spite poor white people. But I’m sure she would’ve liked him too. So there.
3. Editors have to get used to seeing my name and get used to seeing my writing before they’ll start getting excited about it. (The fools — certainly I as an editor would never treat writers that way. Certainly. Certainly.)
4. Huh. Well, most of what she told me was specific to the stories she’d graciously asked me to send her for critique. When I asked her whether there was something systematic about my writing that needed improvement, she didn’t have much in mind other than being stricter when tightening down the draft. Not that she loved everything I wrote, just that, you know, from a systemic viewpoint… But she also mentioned that she thought I was already doing the right things and that what I needed to do was keep doing them.
5. So, looking at that on the screen, that’s probably a real positive comment. Oh, and she really liked the giant mosquito story, full-on explanations be damned. As they should be… She thought it was dead-on (my word) from page six on, but wanted it sped up through the first scene. I’ll take a look.
6. She also listed some editors who she thought might like my approach. Assuming I have an approach. My word, not hers.

The only problem with that meeting was that I have no context for what she said. I mean, if she tells everyone else that they’re the worst writer in the world and she tells me that my stories are “mostly okay”, then obviously that’s high praise. I have no idea where I stand in the hierarchy of writers based on Kelly’s comments. But I’d like to *think* that she likes my writing all right. I mean, why *wouldn’t* she…?

Not that I need people to like my writing to feel good about myself. That would, obviously, be ASININE. And certainly *I’m* not asinine.

Also, in case you care, I really like Kelly Link. Like, more than I thought I would. I was kind of afraid she was going to be “just another” team-player, group-thinking, “all my friends think this way so it must be right” type of person who blind-squirrel-nut-findingly lucked into being a really good writer. She wasn’t that way at all. My favorite moment was leaving breakfast Sunday morning when KL said something to the effect of “NaNoWriMo is cool when people I like are doing it — otherwise it’s kind of stupid”. I likes self-aware people.

BK

PS, Got taken out to dinner by our good consultants out of Austin last night. They took us to a fish place in Newport Beach. I opened the menu and it looked oddly familiar. It looked, in fact, identical to the menu at the restaurant I ate at in Austin with IT, Melinda, Sam, Sharon, and Daniel last Saturday. Because it’s owned by the same people. Different name. Different city. Same EXACT menu. Five days later. But the desserts were good. And I liked the calimari. And the water came in square bottles with square bottle-holders.

PPS, And Mark McGwire was eating at the table next to ours. And I watched the end of the Rutgers-Louisville game as it was reflected in the window opposite me. Not that I care about either team, but I’ve been without TV for so long now that I can’t not watch it when it’s on. And the Big East sux0rz.

TrabucoRoad.com

It’s named after the street that I work on sort of. My job’s paying for this endeavor, so I figure I may as well give the street where the offices are located credit, because without that street, I wouldn’t have a job. Obviously. Except that the street name changes to Irvine Boulevard right when it passes by our building. So the office address isn’t really Trabuco Road. But it *almost* is.

Further justification, because this is critical knowledge that you can’t live without: I wanted a name that was connotation-neutral and that didn’t sound nerdy. So I settled for bland and meaningless. But “trabuco” is a cool word. Anything that implies violence is cool.

Which I suppose brings me to the $103 question: What kind of crap am I going to publish? We’ll see how it goes. I’d like it to be “high-brow” spec-lit, but possibly more “aggressive” than the other “high-brow” pubs. I’m going to be paying, right, $103/story (or rather, $0.03/word up *to*), at least until the glory and honor of publication in TR becomes reward enough, then I can kill the honorarium. Or cut it off at the knees. Unless I get a big promotion at work, then — I KNOW! I’LL MAKE IT A PRO-PUB! WE’LL GO FULL-COLOR PRINT, GET SUBSCRIPTIONS, HIRE A SALES STAFF AND…

Hopefully publishing 1-2 new stories monthly. No poetry. Because I hate poetry. I have more brazen things I could say about poetry, especially “speculative poetry”, but I’ll refrain. Plenty of time for a full-fledged assault once my forces have been marshalled. And my ducks have been rowed-up. Me and half a duck aren’t going to be able to take on the writhing masses of SF-poetry fan boyee-dom. But we’ll recruit more ducks and then return, stronger than ever; we will fight, we will win, and we will rule over you with an iron fist. We’ll share the fist, depending on the moon phase.

So wish me luck — good or bad, don’t matter none. I’m thinking I’ll micromanage it for a while until TRABUCO ROAD has an identity of some sort, then hopefully I can refer the crap work over to a choice set of highly qualified lackeys. You can wish me luck on that point as well. Whichever kind, I’m not picky. Not about luck-wishing.

BK!

More proof: I was at WorldCon yesterday and saw Nancy Kress on a panel. Went up to talk with her afterward and asked how she was doing. Essentially got a “fine” and then saw her blow past me to talk to someone else. She had no idea who I was. At least Gay Haldemann stood there for a minute to let me re-introduce myself.

No. Evidence. I. Was. There.

But maybe it’s better that way.

It’ll be interesting to see how the post-C social scene works out and whom I end up ever talking to again. The NY trip in October and Austin in November should be the remaining lithmus tests. I’m meeting Vince at the convention center this morning, so I’ll put this date down on his permanent record. After a couple years I’ll evaluate everyone’s interaction-with-me density and use that to predict future utility values for other potential anonymous-group-meets-each-other social settings.

And FWIW, I’m so used to using my side-mirrors now that I never look through that rear window anyway. It cost $285, which was a lot less than the $700+ the dealer (and one other company) quoted me. And beyond that — I don’t think there’s anything beyond that.

BK

This is why I also submit short stories. To keep the validation in check. Found out today that I was an “authorial coward” and “unambitious”. I’ve been called worse. But never at my *real* job. Anyway — that was the “positive rejection” from Mr. Mamatas — the one with three “pleases” in it. Unfortunately, the three-please rejection also maps up, according to his website, with this comment: “I wish you’d not send me a story you already have in inventory but that you’d just sit down and write a fresh one for me because —- I’m paying ten —-ing cents a word here so stop sending me the stuff all the other editors have sniffed at and rejected, okay?”

I am so transparent. Or opaque. OTOH, I’m very happy that transparent and opaque now mean the same thing. I can see that working out well for the future. But FWIW, the version I sent Nick was way better than what I sent JJA. Although, he seemed to feel like there wasn’t enough *there*, so maybe cutting 22% of its length between versions wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Tja.

And for anyone who’d like to gauge what’s okay and what’s not vis a vis CW Mag, Nick’s apparently okay at some level with crazy voices. The story I sent him, “Gravel Lot Grudge”, has the hardest-to-get-through voice I’ve used in anything before. He said it was “very well-written and clever” and that it “won this eader over…, which is a feat”. That’s where the b-conjunction came in, of course. He didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of Clarion, though — although it’s not like it got rejected outright for that word appearing in the cover letter. I don’t think.

The turnaround on the rejection was 5.5 hours. At $0.10/word and that kind of turnaround time — man, I guess Asimov’s and F&SF get bumped down a rung. Except that CW only takes stories under 4K words. Which is short of my usual arrival point.

Also, I drove around looking at houses today. I can’t buy for another four months or so, but it seems like prices for actual detached homes have gone down a little in the two years since I’ve been gone. Not that you’re getting a *lot* for $550K these days, but the fact that you’re getting anything at all is promising. IMHO. Relative to the OC.

Yep.

BK.

PS, Could someone define what “ambitious” means when referring to a short story?

The hard part is that this story has heretofore been known to me as “the mosquito story”. Except now there are no mosquitoes in it. I’m not sure if it works without the mosquitoes. ‘Course, I wasn’t sure it worked *with* them, either. The mosquitoes are dead, long live the mosquito story. Which can’t really be called the mosquito story any more. OTOH, I like the way the word “mosquito” looks.

In other news, I watched the movie A Boy and His Dog last night. It was so-so and left me wondering why it is a super-intelligent dog would *cough* telepathically. I’m open to answers. Jason Robards was quality, though. Don Johnson was — better than the voice of the dog, who sounded like an early prototype of the Knight 2000, but without all the charm and gentle wit.

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