Friends

In this day and age, submitting a story isn’t that hard. Many markets accept electronic submissions, and for those that don’t, the most time-consuming part of the process is printing the manuscript.

Yet more often than not, I find myself procrastinating about actually pulling up a list of markets (say, from ralan.com or duotrope.com) and putting stories out there.

It’s not fear anymore. It used to be, but after your 87th rejection letter, you find your terror of editorial rebuke quite faded.

No, it’s pure inertia. Authors at rest tend to stay at rest. Nobody ever told me that as a neo-pro, I might fall into this trap and have to slog out of it (by way of fun self-challenges like the one that led to six stories in the mail as of this afternoon).

Fortunately, I can report that authors in motion tend to stay in motion. There’s something invigorating about finally getting moving that’s self-perpetuating.

On that note, tonight’s goal: Edit an almost-ready story and make it tomorrow’s first submission.

I just got my first story in a couple months out the door. There’s so much more to do, but it’s a start. I’ve got a lot of finished stories that have been languishing, and a lot of stories that are so close to finished it’s criminal how long I’ve let them sit. My unofficial goal for this month will be clearing the backlog. I’d like to end the month with around 25 stories in the mail.

And I can do it, too, if I focus my writing energy on those almost-done stories and do just one submission a day.

Edit: And then there were two…

Anyone who has seen Avatar knows this: Whatever else James Cameron has done, good and bad (and there’s plenty of both), he’s created an environmentalist polemic. The humans are rapacious destroyers of an environment they don’t understand, and eventually, armed with the knowledge of a human who has become a part of the Na’vi, that environment strikes back at the humans.

Humans are divided into two camps: The scientists, who are well-meaning, if ignorantly patronizing, and the military-industrial complex, which is monolithic and evil. They get what’s coming to them, and the movie makes it clear that they don’t deserve any sympathy.

Science fiction is replete with polemics on everything from politics to economics and everything in between. Authors frequently use alternate worlds, the distant future, and alien civilizations as backdrops to support some ideas, and attack others.

I have very strong political, environmental, religious, and social opinions myself, but avoid reading overtly opinionated stories, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. Unfortunately, those strong opinions tend to come across simplistically, and I don’t want to read — or write — stories laden with built-in assumptions about who is right and just and pure, and who is evil.

In science fiction stories like Avatar, the bad guys are simply bad. There’s no validity granted to their point of view.

Much more satisfying to me are stories such as Jennifer Government, a flawed — but still engrossing — alternate reality novel by Max Barry that explores capitalism run amok without falling into the trap of assuming everyone who is for unfettered free-market capitalism is pure evil, or that those who oppose it are entirely good. Then there’s Hayao Miyazaki’s beautiful Princess Mononoke, an environmentalist’s movie to be sure, yet one in which the anti-environmental actions of the movie’s only “villain,” if she could even be called that, are not only understandable and sensible, but practically inevitable given her circumstances.

Polemics in which the characters who disagree with the author’s perspective are uncomplicated and evil or just plain stupid are easier to write than layered, multifaceted stories about humanity in disagreement with itself. But I find the latter far more rewarding, and strive to write like that when my own opinions inevitably leak into my stories.

Edit: I just want to emphasize that I’m not against opinions of any stripe ending up in science fiction and fantasy. What I’m against is simplistic characterizations of people and perspectives the author disagrees with.

Almost four years ago, I started a short story — more of a novelette, really — called Anya in the Dry Lands. I love the story, but it was woefully broken for a very long time. I put it on the back burner, and worked on other things, but I never forgot about it. There are stories I just dash off in a few hours, and there are stories I care about. The latter are much harder, because I labor over them. Caring about a story, strangely enough, makes it more difficult to write.

But not impossible.

Today, on New Year’s eve, just a few short hours ago, I finished a much-updated draft of the story. All the broken bits are fixed. I’m going to let Loreen read it over for a final editing pass, if any edits are even needed, then get that sucker in the mail.

Good gravy, I love that feeling of accomplishment. What a great way to end the year.

Ahh, New Year’s Eve. The time of year we promise ourselves we’ll eat right, start using that gym membership, and do our taxes on time for once. This year, I’m strictly adhering to some resolutions I can keep.

• Start blogging again – Oh, look at that! This one’s already done!
• Create a new centralized web page from which to blog – I’m two for two so far! I’ll be posting this to my existing LiveJournal account and Facebook notes.
• Blog at least once a week – OK, this one’s not already done, so I can’t cheat on it, but come on… Once a week should be no problem. Hell, I can update my site from my phone.
• Track writing wordcounts – Sigh… I used to do this. I was good at it. Then I became a parent. I’m not so good at it anymore.

And yes, I’ll try to eat right, exercise more, and get my taxes done early. Hey, it could happen.

OK, that's it for the first chapter of my weird little experimental fiction piece. In a few days, I'll be marking all of these posts as private prior to moving them to my new website, where I'll post future chapters, and this will become a blog again. (Don't bother trying to find my new website yet, it's not live. I hope to bring it online next month.)

Thank you for putting up with this.