Unabashed

How many stories are there in a day? Every day, every one of us is a story. Some are boring, but some are fantastic. Every soul on Earth has its own story, set to the cadence of every heartbeat drumming up the words. The most frustrating thing is not knowing the stories of the lives that we intersect with. Points of interest along the route of life compile without definition: we don’t meet, we don’t know, we only move on, just as the story does. Today I met four stories, but I have no idea how they began or end, I only have the snapshot in my mind, a single page or paragraph, and the frustration and wonder at what it is that made that story fantastic.

In order of occurrence:

There was a dark-haired woman and a toddler sitting at a table in McDonald’s eating breakfast. Her arms and legs were crossed and she stared down at her food, but the little boy, with a pacifier in his mouth, watched me as I walked by. When I left, walking back by them to get to the door, I noticed a car right outside the door with New York plates, and I wondered if it belonged to her and the little boy.

A big, tall man with copper-colored long hair was walking along the side of the road with a petite blonde woman wearing short-shorts. The woman was holding the hand of a little girl who might have been five years old, and the little girl had a dolly wrapped in her free arm. All four of them stared straight ahead, without expression or conversation (at least in those ten seconds that I saw them). The man was walking with a deliberate gait, and the other two were just keeping pace as well as they could. Or so it appeared.

A woman wearing a white dress and a black backpack was standing by a patrol car with the police lights spinning, and the officer, a burly macho type with mirrored sunglasses, was standing beside her holding a book or a pamphlet of some type, staring down at it. The woman wasn’t looking at him, but past him, at nothing I could see. There was a church nearby, but the road they were on was a connector route between Centreville and Tuscaloosa. There are a lot of houses along that stretch, but not much else, so it was kind of odd to see a woman walking alone through there.

Another woman, barefoot, wearing a tee shirt that was just long enough to make it look like that was all she was wearing and with a big blonde hairdo of loopy curls, was walking smoothly across the pavement around her car, which was stopped at an intersecting road between Centreville and Montevallo. She wasn’t walking with the “I think I have a flat tire” hop, but as if she was thinking something through, something very distracting. I didn’t stop to help because she got back into her car, and I saw in my rearview that she was pulling onto the main highway, heading back toward Centreville.

All of these people were beautiful, from the burly cop right down to the little dolly. They were all people in my own story’s margin, people whose lives I’ve glimpsed but whose stories I’ll never know, no matter how boring or adventurous or scandalous or petty or eager or psychopathic or horrific or desirable or melodic or distressful or macabre or mischievous. All I know is each one of those stories was interesting, for those few words I was able to read of them. All the planets this morning were spinning out of line–or into a line–and gave me a glimpse into the eyes of ordinary grandeur, everyday wonder. And I liked it.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: stories, story

While I’m thinking about it, I’ve had dreams before that have ended up being incorporated into various stories I’ve written. For instance, one morning I woke up with a clear line in my head, which may not make any sense to you (it didn’t to my wife), but nevertheless I liked it and I thought it was funny so I adapted it. The line was this:

“Being the first ith, he was Irmth. His name was Irmth the Eleventh.”

As it happened I was embroiled in the writing of a scifi comedy about a space-traveling zydeco accordion player named Joe Remeleaux Redmill. Irmth became the bad guy for that story, and it’s one of those humorous SciFic pieces I told you I’d really like to find a home for.

The way it finally worked out was: Irmth belonged to a race that was the result of a genome abnormality in an entirely other race, the name of which is inconsequential at this point. Irmth and his kind were called “Shifts” by those they were spun off from, and were shunned despite their evident superior evolutionary state. Irmth was the eleventh Shift to have evolved, though there are many thousands in the universe now. Shifts were art-loving Methuselahs who lived millions of years. They were born with duplex personalities and referred to themselves using 1st person plural pronouns (we, us, our). They speak with two voices and, in the bulbous, gelatinous, transparent midriff of their bodies, which is usually tinted green or blue or brown and inside of which can be seen their organs and various floating detritus, had a second face, though their physiology was otherwise more or less human in appearance. They were usually phenomenally rich, intelligent, and deviant (though not sexually, not having the necessary equipment). Irmth himself was the first Shift of a separate branch called Ith. The only difference between a normal Shift and an Ith was that an Ith was much taller. Irmth specifically enjoys cocktails, sometimes delivered intravenously, technology and information, and music. He has organized numerous events throughout the Universe, some of which were so successful that they never stopped. Irmth scours the Galaxy, looking for musical talent to feature at his events, and is currently organizing and promoting an event in the Hypersholean system called “Music Horizon,” which promises to be a never-ending event and boasts five generation seven Posi-Tek SubSpaceWoofter Platforms, release 5ZR11.32.99, AKA the GalactiBlaster, which essentially turns a moon or planet into a speaker. When Irmth hears music he likes, he usually leaves his card, which is the model of simplicity:

Being the first ith, he was Irmth.
His name was Irmth the Eleventh.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: galactiblaster, ideas, irmth, ith, science fiction, scifi, scific, shift, stories, story, writing

There are lessons to be learned over at Whatever. John Scalzi announced the winning entrants (two runners up and one grand prize) for his Zoe’s Tale ARC contest this morning and it occurred to me, as I read the entries (many of which were really good), that it might be better to be published on the Whatever than in a publication dedicated to the exact same type of material. There are a lot of creative types who read Scalzi regularly, so it just makes sense that they’ll write some really good material in response to his request. And this is where it gets kind of interesting: When the contest started out it seemed like it was just a fun little thing; you might even go so far as to call it gimicky. Someone send in something funny, entertain me, and I’ll give you this book. But then I started reading the entries. I saw mostly what I expected to see: nothing you could really call a submission, just little anecdotes and humorous quips people were writing on the fly. But a few of them are good, very good, as you can see by the winners. I began to realize that these weren’t just little humorous quips, these are stories.

As it is, they are published–on Whatever, which is one of the most-read personal blogs on the internet. Not a venue where you’d expect to find good fiction unless the author published something himself, which he rarely does.  What’s interesting to me is that, even though it was a very informal forum, we got to see the whole process unfold right there in the comments section. Every entry (or submission, as it were) is readable by anyone. The three best, as judged by the site owner, got their very own dedicated post right on the front page of the site. There is a curious lack of linkage to their websites, at least for those who provided websites to be linked to. I would have thought a winning entry would get a link on the front page too, but you have to dig back through the comments of the ARC contest post to find out where their websites are (JS must be greedy with his Technorati ratings handouts). (JS advises me this was just an oversight and has been corrected). But even without the link, that’s a lot of great exposure for a writer or blogger.

These entries may not be a fit for SF&F or Strange Horizons, but they’re no less entertaining, and I would come back and read more if I thought more would follow. This is a serious feat that I’m wondering if anyone else will pick up on. It would be interesting to see more contests like this one, basically asking for fiction (I know there have been some of these before, I just haven’t seen many done so well). Most of the time if someone asks for fiction, even if they provide the theme, they’ll get a lot of 3k-word stories that are basically just more of the same. This time, the stories responding to the theme “The evening of August 19, 1994. What can you tell me about it?” were actually interesting (for the most part). And I generally don’t like to read short fiction.

I didn’t write an entry myself, but I did keep checking back to see what was being written. Maybe next time I’ll give it a try. And yes, I’ll go ahead and say that it would be nice to see Whatever do this as a regular feature. I’d do it here if I had half his readership and, you know, some stuff to give away. The results could be looked back upon one day as visionary.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Contest, Fiction, John Scalzi, markets, stories, Zoe's ARC

Whatever happened to the novella as a form of prose? Many of the greatest stories of all time were written in the 20k - 50k word range. Stories like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and A River Runs Through It. There are countless others, but it seems the publishing world in general is intent on not publishing any novelettes or novellas. And this is particularly frustrating to me because all of my best work seems to be in novella word-count range.

I know: there’s no money in novellas for the publishing houses. If they can’t get 90k words or more they don’t want it. And short fiction had best not be written any longer than 5k if you want any decent shot at getting it out there. But there’s something about a thin book that I can carry comfortably in my back pocket and read in a couple of days that’s immensely appealing to me. But then the whole publishing industry seems to have veered starkly away from the middle class: there are the haves, of course, and the have nots, but there are rarely any have a littles or comfortably just getting bys. And of course this goes right back to the root of the publishing problem today: fewer and fewer people read any more. More and more it seems the only folks who read are those who are also either writers or who want to be. It seems to me a grand idea to put a wire rack back in the quick stop and stock it with pulp novellas, but then, I guess those would just sit there until the one or two of us who actually like to read them would buy them. Same goes for comic books. More and more, if you want a book, you have to visit Amazon or one of the huge booksellers, because the little bookstores are out of business now, and the selection at the drugstores and grocers are simply awful if you’re into anything other than romance.

I wish the novella format would make a return; just put them out there in pulp paperbacks and see if people won’t give them a try. I would, and that’s not just because I write them. Some of the best reads I’ve ever had were in novella format.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Fiction, novella, novellette, stories, writers, writing