Archive for January, 2010

First story submitted

0
2 years ago
by Damon Kaswell in

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…

Back to business

0
2 years ago
by Damon Kaswell in ,

One of my goals for this month (I have several I’ll discuss later) involves getting plugged back into the business end of writing. The actual writing part of writing is and has been going well. Well enough that I have a backlog of stories that ought to be in the mail. The fact that they aren’t — and haven’t been for six months or more — is frankly embarrassing.

So for the next week or so, I’ll be focused on:

  • Getting my tracking system updated with several missing submissions, the rejection letters of which currently reside in The Filing Cabinet Drawer of Doom.
  • Market research.
  • Putting actual stories in actual envelopes and actually mailing them.

To guarantee I don’t cop out on that last one, I’m going to post how many stories I’ve gotten in the mail every day this week. We’ll see how this goes. I’m open to self-punishment suggestions should that number ever be 0.

Science fiction and polemics

0
2 years ago
by Damon Kaswell in

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.

Go to Top