Girl, Where You At: 2014 Writing Goals

So, I read an article on the CritiqueCircle blog about meaningful ways to set realistic goals and track progress. As I was in a more productive place, mentally and emotionally, I felt like giving it a try.

I had to look at my past performance honestly to understand what I could achieve in the span of a year. Outliers, like that time I knocked out 16k in 6 days, didn't count. More recently, I was doing the same wordcount in about 30 days, on average, consistently. These were stories I had no intention of putting on track to publication, so I was freewheeling it and not taking the time to make a good first draft.

I had to set milestones. So, no vague by-end-of-year-kazzam goals that I  could choose to do whenever and however. What could I do in one month--how many pieces could I productively work on at the same time? What should I have done in 3 months? Every 3 months? Where could I push myself and where would I need slack?

I had to decide what areas of my writing I would focus on and which had to take a backseat. Since I wanted to get in the habit of being a prolific, published short story author, that meant no long works and no reviving old works.

I had to commit. That's where this post comes in. I'm 3 months into the year and doing better than projected in some areas while in others I'm way behind or doing nothing. It has helped in the past to make my goals known to a writer friend--sometimes known as an accountability buddy. I hope making my goals public (ha! Like anyone's reading this!) will add a bit more incentive to try harder.

So here are those goals. (If you do the math, you'll note I gave myself at least 2 months' padding, and I should be working on 3 pieces at a time):

2014

• 4 for-publication pieces
• 8 token pieces
• 10 pieces polished
• 5 unique pieces subbed

Every 3 Months

•  1 for-pub piece
•  3 tokens (max)
•  3 polished
•  1 subbed

Every Month

• 1 token completed
• 1 act (or a third) of for-pub completed
• 1 polished

Now you know where I'm at. Now you (yes, you!) can nudge me on how it's coming along. I ain't scairt.

Loose Threads #2

Birthday Snack

Just inside, there's a shopping cart nearly emptied of marked down sweets. Chocolate cookies and cupcakes with white frosting and colorful sprinkes.

We move on, picking items, ticking them, making our way around the store until the last stop. In the freezer section, mini towers of boxed canned soda line the aisle. Atop one tower, a pack of those marked down cupcakes. Someone picked them up on their way in and here decided against it at the last moment.

I wonder why until I turn and face the freezer across from it. Layer cake with white frosting and colorful sprinkles on top. Just one box missing from the pile. "Perfect for birthdays!"

Reading Anna Karenina: a deep and intellectual midway analysis

Like:

• Levin
• Kitty
• Seryozha (so far)

Don't mind:

• Stepan
• Dolly
• Vronsky

Dislike:

• Alexandrovich
• Anna (so sue me!)

M Bennardo - The Famous Fabre Fly Caper

Finally, I want to (highly!) recommend The Famous Fabre Fly Caper. From Bennardo’s Blog:

It’s the tale of two decent tree frogs, pushed too far and backed into a corner, forced to stage a daring daylight fly-heist to survive in their increasingly dangerous pond.

First of all, I love the title. It perfectly encapsulates the whimsy and lightheartedness of the tale.

Secondly, the narrative is magic. It is no slight when I say it recalled fond memories of some of my favorite childhood reading. It has that same unspoiled imaginative spirit and deceptive simplicity, characters in set in high relief. Charm.

On Bennardo’s blog, he mentions that he likes to use his love of history as a backdrop for his stories, as in Desert of Trees. Here, I can certainly see how having that setting made the story more vibrant. The Fabre in the title is one real life naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre who studied insects and other creatures. And it's his insects the frogs want to pinch. Two quotes from Fabre’s book, The Life of the Fly, bookend this story in a way that I thought was quite clever. The attention to detail adds richness to the world—how frogs live and herons eat, the motivations of a cat, or the sights and sounds around a pond from the point-of-view of the little creatures living there.

The two protagonists, Claud the brains and Denis the sidekick, are so earnest you really want them to succeed, yet you know their plan is foolhardy at best—after all, they’re only tree frogs. Complications arise, but Bennardo keeps the pace light and the tension high. The animal denizens of the pond and the house, which is the scene of the heist, provide plenty of thrills and laughs and unpredictability along the way. Even old Fabre makes an appearance to great comedic effect.

Really, there’s not much more I can say besides you just have to read it. This story was brilliant fun, if you like a good tall tale, and it is, so far, my favorite of M Bennardo's.

Keep an eye on this author, and hit the links:

• M Bennardo's site
• The Famous Fabre Fly Caper (at The Journal of Unlikely Entomology)
• Previous posts - Part 1 & Part 2

Photo credit: "catch 22 nately" by schammond available under CC BY 2.0

M Bennardo: Part 2

Why am I telling you about author M Bennardo, and what started me on his trail? I guess I should direct you this previous post of mine, wherein I explain what I do when my writing stalls. The short of it is I read, some for research and some to fill the quiet hours. For fiction, I read and research (and write) mostly within a certain genre, and when you read and research (and write) mostly within a certain genre, chances are you’ll metaphorically cross paths with certain authors repeatedly.  Bennardo is one of those authors, and I’m telling you about him because I think he’s one of the good ones.

Bennardo has a blog on his site, and as a writer it is oftentimes nice to read the musings of other writers travelling the same road with success and quiet determination. On this blog, I gandered a list of his most recently published works (this is where I received my second surprise to learn he penned that flash I didn’t quite warm to.)

I decided to try Desert of Trees on NewMyths, which he described, thusly:

This is a tale of an Athabascan woman stranded in the Alaskan taiga in early spring with no gun, no map, no compass, and almost no food. She teams up with an unlikely companion to survive the worst of the journey as she makes her way back to civilization.

Which I skimmed over and headed straight to read. I’m an oddball like that, but in this case I was in for a pleasant surprise. It's a survival story much like Starvation, human will versus the elements versus human limitations. The first line grabbed me and the supporting two or three paragraphs after clarified just how dire the protagonist’s situation was. I wanted to find out what happened to Nansan’s husband and what would ultimately happen to her.

Bennardo only pulls you in deeper from there, for it’s not only Nansan’s life at stake but also her baby’s. Her range of emotions—hope, despair, fear, and unthinking courage—resonated well, in my opinion, due to Bennardo’s straightforward yet evocative descriptions.

It’s the straightforwardness, I think, that gets me most about M Bennardo’s stories, the candid depictions, and the unaffected storytelling that allows the plot and characters to stand on their own with what seems like little authorial wrangling. As concentrated as I am on writing, it sometimes becomes glaring in others’ stories—here a clever turn of phrase to spice things up, there an idea elevated for the sake of profundity—but I noticed none of that reading this story. The writer vanished and the story lived and breathed.

The protagonist’s “unlikely companion” showed up at the right time, for me. I can dig a survival story, but I can only read so much hopeless suffering. I half-expected yet another magical guide who had all the answers and could solve everything if only the foolish human wasn’t so foolish—in other words, the human story would take a backseat to the glory of the Speculative Idea. 

That didn’t happen. The friction of wills between the two personalities, the give and take and trust and suspicion added another layer of intrigue and uncertainty. Speaking of personalities, Bennardo’s portrayal of the companion, I thought, was refreshingly understated and showed a lot of control, as these things can sometimes tend jar and outsize the story. 

Overall, I thought the tale hit just the right tone and pace, a balanced and enjoyable piece that further encouraged me to seek out another of M Bennardo’s stories. 

That other story turned out to be Imagine Cows on Mars on Redstone Science Fiction. It's another kind of survival story (a recurring theme of his?), with illegal emigrants from Earth settling ahead of time on a still-terraforming Mars. I don’t like to rag on stories I’m not enthusiastic about, so I’ll just say this one, for me, recalled the sparseness of the flash. It was an okay story but not as memorable, in terms of characters or plot. 

So, there I was. I’d tried a couple of M Bennardo’s stories and it was half and half. I wasn’t completely sold, wasn’t yet recommending him to friends. That changed with The Famous Fabre Fly Caper...

Until next time, hit the links:

• M Bennardo's site
• Desert of Trees
• Imagine Cows on Mars
• Related Posts - Part 1 & Part 3

Photo credit: "catch 22 nately" by schammond available under CC BY 2.0

M Bennardo: Part 1

This is how I mostly discover new short fiction authors: I skip recommendations and glowing reviews and just read. I lose track of who I read and where, wonder why a name sounds so familiar, and through sheer luck I rediscover them all over again. I may be an oddball in my stumblings, but when I stumble upon storytelling that grabs me, an author who does it right more times than not, I make a note of it.

And this blog is just sitting, so why not make a note of it here and share with others an author I think they will enjoy as I have?

So, who is M Bennardo? I suppose it would be proper to start with a bio of the author, but I’m not going to. I’m going to introduce you M Bennardo over a couple of posts the way I was, through his stories, with hits and misses but mostly, in my humble opinion, hits.

The first M Bennardo story I read was a flash fiction piece at Daily Science Fiction called You’re Heads, She Says. You’re Tails. Honestly, I didn’t like it. It felt spare and cold—even for a flash about a mad scientist. For me, it left something to be desired, that warm spark of an impression.

As I am wont to do, I promptly forgot the author’s name.

Literary SF is fine, if that’s what you like, but I like it in small, infrequent doses. So, when M Bennardo kept popping up in Lois Tilton’s reviews at Locus Magazine—at one point along with a recommended rating—I just assumed ‘literary sf’, as most recommended stories there seem to be, and then I moved on.

At some point, I learned Bennardo is also the editor of Machine of Death. Imagine my surprise. I’ve got MOD on my PC, I recommended it to a friend, and this guy was the one behind it all. Here, I went off to find the author’s site.

But, what’s the Machine of Death, you ask and why should that change my mind? It’s an anthology featuring a machine which predicts how you die. I enjoy picking a story from the collection at random to read how that unifying theme spins off into profound concepts, how it reveals different facets of human behavior.

Bennardo’s contributing story there is Starvation, a nail-biting tale about the physical and psychological pitfalls of two men stranded on an island. Sounds like a familiar premise? Consider that one man knows he will die by homicide and the other knows he will die by starvation. Neither knows when or where or how it will ultimately happen, but desperation makes both predictions chillingly possible on the island.

And via M Bennardo’s site, I found more great tales like it. Check out the links below, read some of his stories, and share your opinions in the comments or wherever you care to.

Next time, more Bennardo and evolving thoughts on why I like his writing…

• M Bennardo's site
• You're Heads, She Says. You're Tails
• Machine of Death anthology
• Related Posts - Part 2 & Part 3

Photo credit: "catch 22 nately" by schammond available under CC BY 2.0

What to do After a Story Goes Bust

Expecting one of those 'Keep Calm' images?

Stay productive.

After being out of the loop for a good long while, I am researching short fiction markets, places where my completed stories can find a home. Before, this meant marking favorites on Duotrope. (You more seasoned authors are now looking upon me with incredulity.) This time, I'm keeping an Excel doc with all the relevant details and notes on my impressions of the publication plus which of my stories might fit in there.

Running a search on Duotrope can only tell you so much about a publication. To get a better feel, I, of course, must read the stories published there. Sometimes I’ll get through 2 and know it’s not right for me. Other times I’ll recline in my seat at my computer and realize I’ve just gone through 6 in one sitting—even if the magazine still isn’t right for my story. I did find some potential homes for my current manuscript, but I found many more great stories.

And that's the upside to this tedious task: I am reading more short fiction and rediscovering what I love so much about genre. So, before I go back to being productive, I'll leave you with three stories that appealed to me on different levels—psychological and emotional, enigmatic and probing, fun and adventurous.

Clarkesworld Magazine
(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky by E. Catherine Tobler (I listened to the podcast version.)
Aquatica by Maggie Clark

Apex Magazine
Weaving Dreams by Mary Robinette Kowal