Coming Soon(ish?) to an E-reader Near You

While I wouldn’t strictly call the story urban fantasy–it’s more along the lines of a fabulist/weird tale–I can’t not announce that I just sold my story, “Green Line,” to Stupefying Stories.  I can’t put an exact date on it, but look for it probably in their next issue.  I’ll post a link here when it becomes available, and you can find it on most major e-reader platforms (Amazon, Apple, B&N–no Kobo yet, but they’re working on it).

How can you not like a magazine with a picture of cyborg Abraham Lincoln on the cover?

A New Project

I know, I know, updates here are sporadic at best, but whatever.  I’m pleased to announce my new online project, Flash in the Pan.

Flash in the Pan is a blog for writing and art, a place where ideas don’t have to be fleshed out perfectly before they get on paper (or the screen).  It’s also a collaborative project with some of my fellow Wilsonites.  For me, it’s a creative outlet for ideas that have been milling around in my head but which I haven’t gotten out anywhere else and which I feel aren’t in keeping with my stated directions for this site.  For my co-contributors?  Each has their own reasons for joining me in this.  There’s a few pieces up already, and more will be coming soon, so check it out.

EDIT: I just wanted to clarify that just because I’ve started this new project doesn’t mean that I’m in any way abandoning this site–Urban Phantasy and Flash in the Pan are two different entities with different goals.

More Tools for Writers

Sorry there haven’t been any real, substantial posts from me in a while, but two posts in the past week-ish is better than nothing, right?

I was recently made aware of a useful tool called the Everchanging Book of Names, a shareware (Windows only, sadly) program that can generate random names based on the structures and phonemes of various languages.  This is great if you, like me, sometimes need a character name right now, and usually get bogged down if you can’t get one quickly.

Not all of the program’s features are available unless you register it, which costs $10, but the free features are useful enough that I’m not too bothered by the things that are locked out.  After all, I really don’t know what I’m missing.

Credit where credit is due, I wouldn’t have found this tool if it hadn’t been mentioned in a recent episode of Writing Excuses.

A Tool for Writers

Hello again,

Thought I had forgotten about you?  Well, no, but I’ve had a lot on my plate for the last half-year or so, and something had to give.  Sorry.

Fear not, though; I have something for you.  Sort of.

If you’ve spent much time researching or submitting to writing markets recently, you’ll doubtless have noticed that more and more of them are moving to electronic submission systems.  They’re cheap and easy, and they’re good for the environment, but they don’t let you paper your wall with rejection slips the same way you could in the old days (Note: the author was barely getting started sending out submissions “in the old days” and is mostly going on anecdotal evidence).

Well, I made a virtual wall, and you can cover it with your rejections to your hearts’ content.  Check it out here.

Senior Reading: the Video

As promised, the video of my senior reading is now online.  A big thank you goes to Lockie Hunter, who introduced me and has made me a much better writer.  The piece about Obama and Kanye West is titled “808s and Healthcare Reform,” and can be found in the writing section of my website.

The piece from which I read excerpts is titled “The Sea of Matchsticks.”

Hugo Award Musings

Ah, yes, the Hugo Award nominations were released ages ago.  Why so late to the party, Hilary?

I was going through some back issues of Locus that were lying around my house and, on a whim, took a look through the 2009 in Review issue.  I was somewhat surprised when I saw so many people going on about The City & The City by China Miéville.  When I say surprised, I don’t mean to impugn the quality of the book; more like I was surprised that, for once, I hadn’t been late to the party.  I read The City & The City way back at the start of fall semester when it first came out based solely on the byline on the spine.  I’ve been a Miéville fan for a while, something my father knew, and was pleased when he brought me a copy of his latest book.

The book itself is a strange sort of duck, very unlike anything else you may have read from Miéville.  It’s one of the grandest and most ambitious urban fantasies I have read, but has no magic, no alien worlds, no elves.  What it does have are two cities occupying a space maybe the size of Jerusalem, separated by customs, dress, language, and politics.  The residents have been taught, from birth, to simply ignore the other city, though it may be as close as the house next door, for there is only one official border, and crossing anywhere else is a serious crime.

I would recommend The City & The City to anyone as an enthralling work.  I had a hard time putting it down at night, and a harder time not picking it up when I had homework to do.

–

Meanwhile, my work continues on a pair of urban phantasies set in my more serious Weird Philadelphia setting (home of Marshall Celan and Project Red).  Time, soon, will be the judge of one of the stories, a piece which is now in final revisions after sitting on the back burner for a year, while the other one is partway through being a first draft.

What I’m Working On

You may remember that, a while back, I posted a call for ideas on topics that you would like to see covered here.  Well, I’m finally responding to the answer I got.  Penguin, in brief, suggested that I talk more about the things that I’m working on and the things which give me trouble in my writing.

Though higher education occasionally gets in the way of my writing whenever I find inspiration, it sometimes helps, and although I haven’t had much time to touch some of my older, unfinished pieces, I have been turning out a lot of new material, and I’m currently sitting on close to a dozen pieces which are in at least ready to progress to second draft, if they haven’t already gotten there or beyond, and another big piece in the works.

My main struggle in my writing is time and inclination.  At school, I often find that the that time I have to work on non-class-related-writing is better consumed by socializing with my equally busy friends or gets wasted away doing seven kinds of nothing.  I often run into the same problems when I’m on break, minus the academic work.  Nevertheless, I have gotten better at managing my time and making sure that I do actually work on my writing.  I strive to do at least as well as I did several summers ago when I managed to turn out close to one hundred manuscript pages of text.  Not all of that got finished, and not all of it was even that good, but I got it done, and a lot of that writing is still useful to me.

Since I have about a dozen pieces of fiction that I’m sitting on right now, I’m not going to try to go into all of them in detail, but I will give some of the highlights.

For several years, I’ve had a character by the name of Marshall Celan who has been my go-to character when I have an idea for a story, but little in the way of characters.  Mr. Celan is also my main urban fantasy protagonist: a paranormal investigator from Philadelphia, circa 1970, who can see what others can’t and does his best to use this as a marketable skill.  At the moment, I have three tales about Mr. Celan which are in various stages of completion, one being out on market pending a response, one on its third draft and almost ready for market, and one in first draft with workshop notes which need to be acted upon.  Marshall also has a stack of stories which are half-formed in my mind, waiting for the right moment to spring onto the page.

Among the other stories which I’m sitting on at the moment, the ones which I’m most excited about don’t quite fit the urban fantasy mold.  One, a novelette about pseudo-Victorian technology, is more of what I’d call weird fiction, running along the lines of Lovecraft, but without any of the supernatural trappings which that normally entails.  Another piece is a retold fairytale, a Cinderella-story set in a post-apocalyptic world, while the third, a total work-in-progress is shaping into an alternate-history story with a healthy dose of mythology.

This last story, which is currently little more than scrawled notes in a few different books, is going to look a lot more like the original, broader definition of urban fantasy, as stated in my last post.  It’s also a rather large project, being assigned as a novelette/novella-length piece, and I’m going to do my best to track progress on it here as a kind of follow-up to my post on research from several months back, so you can expect at least a few posts out of me on that subject in the coming month.

Opportunities (with Pictures)

Sometimes I go out looking for things to inspire me, sometimes I research a place and go there if I can, sometimes I just stumble into an opportunity to go someplace potentially inspiring.  Recently, I had that last thing happen to me, being taken to “the zombie basement,” the basement of a warehouse art-space where one of my friends does a lot of his creating.  I did have enough warning about going that I could grab my camera, and now you can reap the benefits as well.

Outside, it’s a gorgeous almost-spring day.  The sun is shining and people are sitting out on their front steps, taking in one of the first warm days after a long, harsh winter.  The temperature drops several degrees as soon as I step through the warehouse door, and begins to creep further downward as I descend the steps into the basement.  I duck reflexively as I go through the doorway, panning the beam of my flashlight across the dank room in front of me, my ears sensitive to the slightest sound, lest it be the last that I hear.  What is revealed to me piecemeal by the light of my flashlight and the bursts of my camera flash looks like the set of a horror movie or the cramped vistas of a nightmare, but the credits won’t roll on this place, and I’m already awake.

Pictures after the break.

Action

One of the things that tends to be associated with urban fantasy is action/fighting.  If Chekhov is going to show off a gun in the first act, you can be damn sure that it’s going to go off by the third act, and if this is an urban fantasy that you’re talking about, that gun firing is probably going to be intentional.

You’ve probably seen quite a number of action movies with sweet fight scenes in them, and the natural inclination–it was certainly my first inclination when I began writing seriously–is to try to reproduce that sort of carefully-choreographed fight scene in your writing.  The problem with that is that words are not pictures, let alone moving pictures, and it can be hard to translate something you see perfectly well in your head onto the page in such a way that others will see the same things you imagined.

One thing to be sure of, if you have a big fight scene, is to have clear blocking–that is, where everyone important is standing/crouching/lying.  As in the days before it was assumed that you’d be playing D&D with minis, it can be hard to tell readers where everyone is during a fight.  All too often, you may have a character standing in one place, very near an enemy, but readers may imagine that character standing somewhere completely different.  While you’re trying to make your blocking as clear as possible, you must also keep from bogging readers down with information that gets in the way of the action.  You only need to describe the blocking of a scene when it’s very important to know where everyone is; otherwise, you may give broad-stroke information, painting a fight that everyone can imagine without having to tell them “look, here is where the protagonist is, and there are grunts crouched behind barrels here, here, and here.”

As an example, here’s an excerpt from an early draft of an urban fantasy parody that I’m working on:

The sound of the door slamming open was drowned out by the roar of gunfire which accompanied it. The dim warehouse was illuminated by the strobe of muzzle flashes migrating about the floor, going from cover to cover. Sasha had dived behind a huge, disused lathe as soon as she had breached the door, and her Glock chattered out streams of slugs as the thugs shooting at her broke from cover, trying to flank her.

Between bursts, she scanned the room, looking for the shadow of Jack. He had charged in before Sasha was even in cover, his form melting from that of a handsome man and re-coalescing as a large wolf, and he was on a tear. Sasha could only catch flashes of him, but she could hear the results of his work in the screams of the blood-slaves who had been lounging about the warehouse when she and Jack had burst in.

Looking around, Sasha locked her eyes onto the lit window of a small office along one of the warehouse walls. Sasha knew that was where Vladimir’s under-boss, Agrippa, was. She began plotting a route through the room, looking for the shortest distances between pieces of cover. Then, with half a plan in mind as the confidence to make the rest of it up on the fly, she burst from cover, spraying the room with lead for the few seconds that she was in the open.

Crouched behind another piece of heavy machinery, Sasha checked her equipment, noting that she had only a few more loaded clips for her Glock. Holstering the handgun, she unslung the shortened Ithaca pump-action from its place under her trench coat. The next piece of cover was a bit farther away than she had first judged. She peeked around the side of her cover, spotting Jack a dozen yards away, his bare, now-human chest heaving as he crouched, rifle in hand, behind a stack of boxes.

In this example, I’ve communicated all the essential details about the scene without having to give a full layout of the warehouse because readers can imagine what the inside of the warehouse looks like without my telling them every little detail.

There is equal danger in bogging down your readers in a blow-by-blow fight scene.  As is the case with slow pieces of dialog, slow, boring blow-by-blow scenes are better summarized.  There are places where blow-by-blow fight scenes work well, but they’re often better avoided.

The folks over at Writing Excuses did an episode on this topic a while back which I recommend.

Borrowing and Folk Tales

This post may seem to go against my previous posts about abandoning the same old same old, but bear with me.  One of the best places to turn when searching for story ideas is old stories.  The brothers Grimm made their mark not by writing new stories, but by collecting old ones.  Folklore of all stripes is a wonderful starting-point for a story, even if it’s only inspiration that leads you off on another track.  Likewise, borrowing plots can be a fun exercise, and can start your writing back up when you’ve stalled.

Now comes the part where I tell you not to write the same old same old.  When I say that you should borrow plots, I mean that you should borrow frameworks.  You’ll get a lot farther trying on a framework that you’ve seen used by a favorite author than you will trying to write something that nobody has written before, for, as the Barenaked Ladies say, “It’s all been done.”

Tolkien is a good example of this kind of borrowing.  The Hobbit is Beowulf with hobbits, dwarfs, elves, wizards, and orcs.  If you don’t believe me, go  read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, then come back and see about quibbling with me.

Often, when a story pops into my head, it will borrow its framework from an H. P. Lovecraft story or a piece of mythology or folklore that I remember.  The key here is that, while I borrow that framework, I’m not just writing that remembered story over again with different names.  I’m taking something old and making it new by putting my own twist on it.

When it comes to borrowing from folk tales, I can’t think of a body of work that does so better than Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. Maybe you’re not familiar with all the folk tales that are used as the framework for various Hellboy stories, maybe you are, but whatever the case is, you can’t argue with the fresh treatment that they’re given.

Even if you’re not inclined to borrow whole frameworks from folk tales any mythology, it’s worth taking a look at for source material.  Though it may sometimes be disappointing to find that something that you thought was an original creation of your mind actually comes from a story you were read when you were a child, take heart.  Borrowed elements come with familiarity attached to them already, and you can use that familiarity to your advantage, forging a stronger connection with readers and strengthening your own work by incorporating those elements that you had forgotten.

This all comes with my usual boilerplate, don’t overdo it.  It becomes tiring to realize that an author is just using obviously borrowed frameworks, to the point that you may be able to predict the ending from the first few pages of a story.  You can’t rely on the work of others to hold up your own stories, you must support them with your own strong writing if they’re to have a chance of standing up against jaded readers and editors who’ve seen everything twice over.