Blog Posts - Schrodinger's Stories

Thanks, But...

2/4/2016

<gasp>

I got a personalized rejection from Fantasy & Science Fiction!!!!
"I liked the themes of this, and appreciated some of the creative decisions about presenting the material, but overall the story didn't quite win me over so I'm going to pass. I wish you best of luck finding the right market for it. I appreciate your interest in F&SF and hope that you'll keep us in mind in the future."

<gasp>

On the Way to Lucca

10/27/2015

Hmmmm. Flight to Lucca delayed, so we don't need to leave for the airport for another two hours. Looks like Diablo time!!

An Escape into the Surreal

10/20/2015

We watched Kumiko the Treasure Hunter over the weekend (it's available through Amazon Prime, and I assume other places) and it's remarkable and completely unexpected. The pacing's deliberate, dreamlike, and the movie's beautifully shot and well acted (recognize Rinko Kikuchi from Pacific Rim?), with a plot that made me rewatch the movie immediately and see meaningful details that I'd missed the first time. Go find it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Must Have Raised Him Right

10/13/2015

My son's taking the SATs tomorrow, and I've been reminding him that he needs a calculator. He doesn't have a calculator, he tells me. All right, I say, I'll pick one up after work. This morning I get this text:

S: Got a calculator.
Me: Cool! Where?
S: The devil himself and it was a pretty good deal too. All it took was some chalk, a basic understanding of pentagrams, an unknowable text in an unspeakable tongue, and my everlasting soul and I have a calculator.
.
.
.
S: I'm joking, the college bookstore had it for like 30 bucks, minus the chalk.

Anime-niacs

9/9/2015

My teenage son and I are watching old school anime together. We finished Cowboy Bebop last night (he thought the end was "typically anime depressing" --- ah, the optimism of youth!) and started Aeon Flux. He finds the lack of linear narrative much more disturbing than the frequently bizarre content.

Cosplay vs. M:tG

8/31/2015

I failed to save Seattle (now a smoking ruin) from the giant M:TG monster. I blame my plastic gun.

Gaming the Dreamtime

7/13/2015

Kentucky Route Zero continues to amaze and mystify me. The animation style is haunting, like shadow puppets in a murky landscape.

Falling

5/31/2015

Rule #1: Smile.
Rule #2: Arch.
Rule #3: Feet up for landing.

For a day all about the sky, it was perfect. No clouds smudged the blue bowl above Harvey Field. I sat in the insistent sun waiting for our flight, half an ear on the parachute packers' profane banter, half an eye on the kid riding a ripstick in effortless ovals. A pack of Gonzaga almost-grads suited up, selfied, and disappeared into a chittering prop plane, to come floating down ten minutes later. I closed my eyes in the sun and the smell of diesel, not quite dozing. I wasn't nervous at all.

Finally, three hours after we'd left the house for the drive to Snohomish, two hours after we'd watched the brief, encouraging safety video ("Smile! Breathe through your teeth during freefall. Keep your arms out of the way until your tandem instructor taps you. Maintain the hands-out-feet-up arch until the chute opens. Hold your feet up as you land; your instructor's legs must touch the ground first. And have fun!"), it was our turn to suit up. Finally, I was percolating with excitement.

The flight suit was too big, the harness was unexpectedly tight around my thighs, and I'm desperately glad there are no photos of the red-and-black padded helmet (which I'm sure we wore to keep us from smacking our heads into our instructors' teeth in a moment of panic, and to keep long hair out of their faces during freefall). Didn't matter. I followed my admirably tattooed tandem instructor across the grass, onto the plane, into the sky.

The plane leapt off the ground. It felt as if we were climbing straight into the sun, Rainier and Mt. Baker gleaming white and the Sound speckled with the dark outlines of ferries and container ships, the spikes of Seattle towers hazed with distance. I couldn't take my eyes away. Bruce had to tap me to get my attention; we held hands for a moment, grinned at one another. But I wanted to see the world fall away as we rose.

So loud, the engines, and the helmet made me deaf. Extravagantly mustached Jake tightened my harness and connected it to his, joking that I'd have to change my Facebook status to say I had a new BFF. Suddenly it seemed like a lot to remember, to scoot toward the door, to put my heels on the bottom of the plane as we sat in the door, 1, 2, 3 and we'll go. But then three solo divers opened the door and dove, the first stepping into the air feet first --- step, then gone! - and the other two together, and I applauded them, laughed. It was astonishing, the wonderful fearlessness of them.

Then Jake was scooting us forward, into the door, and the wind tore my legs sideways. How to keep them on the belly of the plane? Cold, and suddenly the sky was very big. 1, 2, 3! I could feel Jake push us out, and for a moment there was nothing: no sound, no wind, nothing but feeling myself falling, plummeting like a tossed stone toward the hungry green ground.

For . . . maybe three seconds? . . . I was more terrified than I have ever been in my life. You feel the fall, the vast nothing beneath you.

Then you reach maximum velocity, and the wind rises up to hold you. Then, falling was a miracle, air pounding against your arched body like an invisible waterfall, loud as a train. We turned (Jake turned; I was luggage) one way and the other, the circle of the horizon revolving around us river-fields-mountains-Sound-trees. I couldn't speak, or hear. I grinned, breathed though my teeth.

Did the chute make a noise? Seems like it should have, like I remember a whoosh, a crack!, but I'm not sure. A giant hand plucked my body out of the wind, tug! And then everything was silent, and the beauty of the world needles through your eyes, burrows beneath your skin. River. Fields. Mountains. Sound. Trees. Farm equipment white-shrouded hayrolls stacks of lumber boats cars houses treestreestrees twisting river. Jake made tight turns one way, the other, and I couldn't stop laughing.

Feet up for landing.

And now I don't know which I'll go back for: the three seconds of fear or the next fifty of exhilaration.

Structure: It's not just for breakfast anymore

3/28/2015

Do you remember how, in high school, the kids in honors English would sometimes take an attitude about the VoTech kids? "We read Hemingway and do Ibsen in drama club, and wasn't Birdman just wonderful? What could the people who spend all day in wood shop possibly know about Art?"

Makes you want to reach back in time and smack them, doesn't it? The assumption that making something with words is somehow fundamentally different and better than making something concrete and useful with your hands? Well, remembered high school aesthetes, just think about how hard it's going to be to enthuse about Sylvia Plath when your houses fall down on your heads!

As an editor of both fiction and nonfiction, I can promise you that knowing how to build something fundamentally sound is just as important as knowing how to rub two words together to make an adverb. Word craft and subject-matter mastery are great, but if you don't have a solid structural foundation, you won't be able to keep your reader's attention.

Structure is, of course, the key to successfully communicating your message in nonfiction. Without structure, you can't explain how to change the gasket in an espresso machine, or how the rules of your new game work, or what those laboratory results tell you about your project. But structure is also a crucial underpinning for works of more creative nonfiction like memoirs. It's not enough just to tell what happened; you need to find a framework in which to tell what happened in a way that makes it interesting for the reader, a theme to tie the piece together, and a sense of progression, of building scene upon scene to create a whole greater than the parts.

Here's someone who does both things well, word craft and structure:

Dead Things by John Tormey

Structure is, of course, important to fiction as well. When we talk about plot, scene construction, and pacing, we're really talking about structure. About building the framework on which your ideas can hang.

Actions Speak Louder than Adjectives

2/18/2015

This week's Gotham (the part of a story arc from last week) really speaks to me as a piece of exceptional writing. Most shows (and many books) give you a character who's described as powerful and ruthless. This one shows you Fish's calculating intelligence, her planning, her charisma and leadership. It shows you the qualities, in action, that earned her the adjectives "powerful" and "ruthless." This, for me, pops Fish from (well-acted) mob-boss in waiting into a compelling, three-dimensional character.

I need to think about how to do this with my current WIP.

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