Author: Shara

Fiction Friday: “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky

~ Shara ~ 9 Comments

Today’s pick comes directly off of the 2014 Hugo Ballot, one of four nominees for “Best Short Story.” Not everyone votes for the Hugo’s, but if the fiction is free, and if it’s on the internet, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get a taste of some of the nominees, and Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” is short, sweet, and weirdly wonderful. It packs a punch at the end, and it’s the kind of story that makes you want to read it all over again once you finish the first time, because you have a new point of view from which to read.

“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” was originally published in the March 2013 issue of Apex Magazine (Issue 46). Below, if you’re so inclined, is the link to the story at Apex’s website.

Click here to read IF YOU WERE A DINOSAUR, MY LOVE for free

Cover art “Mistaken Identity” by Ken Wong.
Cover art “Mistaken Identity” by Ken Wong.

Like it? Love it? Hate it? Sound off below!

Writing Wednesday: The Waiting Game

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I’ve got nothing exciting to report this week. So far, no news from the magazine I sent my short story to, but according to their guidelines, they usually get back to authors in two weeks, so I’ve got a bit of time left to go.

Writing-wise, I had one late-night of free-writing in the UF world I’m playing with, but nothing since. The week has been busy, and it’s also been draining on a lot of fronts. Those two variables do not make for good motivation, so I’ve been slumping just a little. I did try writing Monday night, but when I sat down to churn out some words, even just a page’s worth, my brain kind of glazed over and I decided it was best not to push anything too hard for fear of breaking something.

So that’s it for now. Next week, I hope to provide far more encouraging writing stats and maybe even a short story response! Only time will tell, so we’ll see.

Music Monday: In This Moment, “Beautiful Tragedy”

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Funny story about this band: my husband and I were in a local record shop looking for this new heavy metal band with a female lead vocalist, and we were sure the band’s name was “Beautiful Tragedy” but we couldn’t find the album anywhere, and finally we figured out that we’d flipped the name of the song with the name of the band, and the real name of the band was In This Moment.

So we go to pay for the CD, and while we’re doing it, we ask about tickets for the upcoming Lacuna Coil concert. The guy ringing us up is giving us WEIRD LOOKS, but we get our CD, we get our tickets, and we go.

And then we learn, when we get home, that there would be three opening acts for Lacuna Coil: Stolen Babies, Within Temptation (who you listened to last week), and — you guessed it — In This Moment.

So that was a happy, but slightly embarrassing coincidence. But the concert rocked, this band rocked, so I thought I’d treat you to their debut song, which encapsulates what I like best about this band: strong melodies with a solid dash of metal screaming. The later albums are sometimes more metal than I’d like (with some questionable lyrics), but their songs with strong melodies win me over every time. If you like this song, but don’t want to get TOO metal, you should pick up their sophomore album, The Dream.

But first, let’s get hear their debut song, shall we?

Like it? Love it? Hate it? Sound off below!

Reminder: Music Monday is about the music, not the videos. Videos are just the medium I’m using to share the music, and some videos aren’t actually videos at all. Enjoy the songs, but if YouTube forces you to watch some sort of advertisement before you can get to the music, please be patient.

Fiction Friday: “The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard

~ Shara ~ 6 Comments

I skipped last Friday because last Friday was the 4th of July, and most Americans have bigger, better things to do than toil away at their computers looking for free fiction to read. But this week, I’m back, I want to start highlighting some stories from the 2014 Hugo Ballot. I don’t do this to steer any votes so much as I want to make sure people get a chance to read, for free, what’s been nominated. Even if you can’t vote, you should still be allowed to enjoy these pieces of fiction. So let’s get started.

“The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard is set in the same world as last year’s Hugo and Nebula-nominated novella, On a Red Station, Drifting, and this novelette has already snagged the Nebula for 2014. The universe de Bodard has created is interesting, compelling, and I have to say I enjoyed “The Waiting Stars” even more than On a Red Station, Drifting, and I enjoyed that one quite a lot. And the ending. . .  oh, this has such a good ending.

Originally published in the anthology The Other Half of the Sky, you can read this story for free on de Bodard’s site, or download it (for free) on your e-reader. Both options are available at the link below:

Click here to read THE WAITING STARS for free

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Like it? Love it? Hate it? Sound off below!

Letting Go: Continued

~ Shara ~ 4 Comments

So on Tuesday I talked about my plan for my short stories: when to push forward, and when to let them go. The old ones are getting let go. This was partially inspired by common sense and partially inspired by Carrie Vaughn’s post “On Being Prolific”. I promised that my novels were another post for another day, and it’s another day, so let’s do this post before I completely forget about it.

So, the plan for my novels? I’m not trunking anything. Every time I think I’ve moved beyond my thesis novel, the SF novel code named Telepathic Soulmates, I realize I’m still deeply invested in that world. Last year, I wrote a prequel, code name LB Prequel (fun fact, I still haven’t found a title for that sucker, yet), and it taught me so much about my world-building and things I want to fix and tweak in Telepathic Soulmates. This isn’t a novel I need trunk, at least not yet.

I still believe in the wisdom that Vaughn has to share. But when I read the Telepathic Soulmates draft, I don’t feel I’m beyond it. The world is so rich, and has so much potential, that it’s easy to get sucked right back into it all over again.

So I’m not trunking it. And I believe that with novels, unlike short stories, you need more distance from them in order to be effective in revising them. Since I’m not considered professional by any sense of the word, I may change my tune when my writing becomes a paying career, rather than an intense hobby. What I really need to learn is how to move on to a new project rather than taking a months-long writing vacation. I’ll still let the recently finished project sit, because my novels need that. It’s just that now, I intend to be working on something else, preferably something completely different.

Some breaks happen because they’re necessary, because real life gets in the way and trying to focus on anything creative is an exercise in futility. Other times, you just need a break from what you were writing, but that doesn’t mean you should stop writing. You should just write something different.

Writing Wednesday: Getting Back in the Saddle

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I had such high hopes for this year, but you know what they say about best laid plans and all of that. For those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while, or if you know me really well, you know 2014 has been a tough year for me personally. Things are looking up, and I may get into that at a later time, but for now, I want to focus on something tangible. Like creating another alliterative weekly post. 🙂

So the idea behind “Writing Wednesdays” is to basically give a progress report for what I accomplished writing-wise during the week. Not too formal, not too structured, but something to keep me accountable and give you all a chance to hear about what I’m working on.

Right now, I’m free-writing. I started on 6/30 with a toying in a secondary fantasy setting, but while I’ve been chewing on the setting for a while, I’m not sure where I really want to go with that world, so short of writing a page-and-a-half scene, I’ve got nothing. So on 7/3 and 7/7, I started free-writing in an urban fantasy setting I’ve been brainstorming for a while. I like the opening, but the second scene I’m feeling my way through, and I’m having to consider what I’m really driving at in the story and what I want the payoff to be. But it’ll be fun to think about. I’ve been thinking about the magic system for a while, so it’s going to be fun to play around with.

I also decided to take my short story that got rejected from F&SF and start putting it back out in the market. I’m too superstitious to say the name of the story or where I sent it, but should it get accepted or rejected, I’ll reveal the market and likely ask for suggestions for other markets, should the response be a big fat no. This is submission #18 for the story.

And that’s all I wrote!

Short Fiction: Letting Go

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And there’s one other trait I hit on lately:  Abandonment.  Knowing when to let go.  Being able to move on to the next thing when one thing isn’t working.

What this means if you’re an aspiring writer, if you want to be a professional writer:  Don’t pin all your hopes on one thing. As soon as you finish writing that first story, that first novel — start the next. Immediately.

—Carrie Vaughn, “On Being Prolific”

Earlier this year, I opened up the file that contained all of the short stories I wrote during my stint at Odyssey back in 2005. The reason for this was simple: Lightspeed Magazine was accepting submissions for their Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue, and I wanted to see which of those stories I’d worked on would be most appropriate to dust off, polish up, and submit.

But after reading each of those stories, and all of the short stories I wrote since then for various purposes, I found myself largely dissatisfied. It wasn’t that the stories were totally bad: they still needed revision, but my problem was that I’d moved on. I wasn’t the same person who wrote those short stories, and the revisions that need to be made should’ve been made back then, not now. Not by the current me, who is so far removed emotionally that while I recognize there’s good stuff in those stories, and I definitely learned something from those stories, they aren’t the stories I want to tell now. I definitely don’t want to get sucked in the mire of working on such old material when I really need to be stretching my brain and working on something new.

It was a frustrating lesson to learn on a lot of levels. Frustrating, but necessary.

So from here on out, this will be my modus operandi for short fiction:

1) Write.
2) Get it critiqued.
3) Revise.
4) Get final feedback.
5) Polish.
6) Send it out.

No breaks in between. No letting something “sit” for a while. With short fiction, it is what it is. I’ve now got ten years experience on the girl who was at Odyssey. I’m not the same girl who was learning how to hone her craft and slowly gaining confidence writing SF/F, which was still such a very new genre to me back then. I know why I let those stories sit:

I wasn’t confident.

I wanted to make sure things were perfect.

I feared rejection.

I felt like a story wasn’t ready to go out unless all readers I sent it to for feedback gave me a thumbs up.

I felt like a story wasn’t worth publishing unless a big market accepted it.

I now know that way lies madness. And likely dragons. And right now, I’ve got enough dragons to battle in my own head, thanks. No need to add more.

So if you’re an aspiring writer, and you’re revising and revising and revising, or maybe you wrote something and you’re letting it sit for a while (which, in some cases, isn’t wholly a bad thing, but that’s a post for another day), you need to learn when to submit, and when to let it go. Carrie Vaughn’s above-referenced post has some excellent advice. Right now, I’m applying that advice to my short fiction: letting the old stuff go and learning from the past.

As for my novels? Well, that’s a different story and a different post. 🙂

Music Monday: Within Temptation, “Faster”

~ Shara ~ 6 Comments

This week’s pick was a little bit tricky. I definitely wanted to do Within Temptation, but the only video off of their latest album, Hydra, wasn’t a song I wanted to feature, even though I like the song. But the songs I wanted to feature don’t yet have a video, so I decided to take a step back to their previous album, The Unforgiving, because it was this album that finally brought me on board with this band, notably with the single, “Faster.” Which I’ll listen to on repeat for freaking hours when the mood strikes me. The album itself is, for lack of a better term, a concept album, in that it tells a big story and is even based on a comic book series. You can read all about it here.

The video I selected isn’t anything super exciting, just the band performing with some nifty special effects, which in and of itself can be cool depending on what tickles your fantasy. So, without further adieu, here’s “Faster”!

Like it? Love it? Hate it? Sound off below!

Reminder: Music Monday is about the music, not the videos. Videos are just the medium I’m using to share the music, and some videos aren’t actually videos at all. Enjoy the songs, but if YouTube forces you to watch some sort of advertisement before you can get to the music, please be patient.

Fiction Friday: Doing My Homework

~ Shara ~ 4 Comments

There will be no Fiction Friday today, no matter what the title of this posts says. Reason for this is the 4th of July holiday, and while I know that’s strictly an American holiday and nobody else gives a fudge, I know today isn’t exactly a highly-trafficked internet day, so why promote a story that’s likely to get overlooked while people (including yours truly) are gorging at the grill?

But in addition to wishing a Happy 4th to all who celebrate it, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the July/August 2014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I haven’t read this magazine in years, and the only reason I picked it up yesterday was because it was the issue guest-edited by C.C. Finlay. And you may still be wondering, “Okay, and….?”

It’s the issue I was rejected from. *insert sad face* You might think it I’m torturing myself by wanting to read all the stories that beat me, and you may be right. However, Finlay will be guest-editing at least two more issues of the magazine. The announcement, reading dates, and deadlines are listed here.

I’ve always wanted to get published in this magazine, and rightly or wrongly, I feel I have a better shot with Finlay at the helm than the usual suspects. Of course, I might read this latest issue of F&SF and realize that’s an insane thought, but hey: that’s why you do your homework.

I want to read this issue 1) to discover new voices and read great stories, 2) to figure out what Finlay thinks are great stories and 3) see if I get inspired. Doing my homework doesn’t mean I’m going to intentionally write a story with the editor’s tastes in mind, but it does mean that I’ll know if any of my ideas are even remotely in the ballpark of what he might publish. In other words, I wouldn’t send an fantasy story to Analog, you know?

So here’s to the July/August 2014 issue of F&SF. I hope it doesn’t suck, because if it does, I’ll be bitter. 🙂 But I really don’t think it’ll suck. I’ve read some of the authors who are listed in the Table of Contents, and I’ve been quite pleased with work in the past.

Cover by Maurizio Manzieri For "Palm Strike's Last Case"
Cover by Maurizio Manzieri For “Palm Strike’s Last Case”

Culture Consumption: June 2014

~ Shara ~ 13 Comments

It’s that time again! Amazing how fast the time flies, but once more, it’s time for another Culture Consumption. As always, I’ll post a list of what I’ve read/watched over the past month, and in some cases, provide some commentary. If there’s anything you’re interested in or curious about, don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments, and I’ll be happy to talk further!

June was a strange reading month, thanks to the Hugos. Comics were neglected, and I only read one actual novel-length work. Crazy! But I ended up reading a lot of short fiction and finished a television show I’ve been wanting to complete for a long time. So let’s see what June held in store, shall we?

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