Colin Harvey – author

By a happy coincidence, since I wrote the basic outline of this a day or two ago, my fellow author Joanne Hall has posted this article on editing over at Writer Revealed.

It seemed particularly timely, since this week –and the last two or three weeks before that- I’ve done a lot of editing for Transtories (yes, the one without a cover, so I’ve used Andy Bigwood’s cover for Dark Spires).

I’ve probably spent about sixteen to twenty hours a week on the process, which might not sound a lot, four hours a day, but because of the concentration that it calls for, it’s probably one of the most tiring activities concerned with writing.

What’s I’ve drawn from this is that many semi-pro writers, those easing toward their first professional sale, are quite capable of writing fine turns of phrase, even individual sentences; where they struggle is to convey information through organization of paragraphs.

There are two theories of organizing paragraphs. The more basic one is that each character’s actions and speech should be separated and given a paragraph to themselves.

Then there is the Chip Delany view, that the paragraph is the unit of emotional currency, and that it’s okay to group related activities together.

When I looked through my various books on writing this morning (Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction;  Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller; Orson Scott Card’s Characters & Viewpoint; Steve May’s Doing Creative Writing) none of them -that’s none, note- have an entry on paragraphs.

I find that significant. Are budding writers supposed to learn by osmosis? I’m all for learning by example, but it helps to know the theory.

So, with the agreement of one of the contributors to Transtories, I have selected a short story at random and reprinted a paragraph from it, and then edited it. It’s my opinion only, and will probably vary from day to day, but it’s a useful exercise to perform.

This is the first version:

Settling back into the polished leather, she pulled her small, rough purse nearer, giving it a reassuring pat in the process.  A wedding present from her uncle, its texture felt comforting, the familiarity soothing.  The cab smelled damp, its dim illumination cast by two oil lamps making the purse look dowdy and old.   The memory of her uncle brought forth a renewed desire to escape, and with mounting resolution she settled back as the coach moved off.

So here’s the summary of the series of actions.

1) She settles back in the seat.

2) She pats the purse.

3) Background on the purse

4) Description of the cab, smell, illumination etc

5) More on the purse

6) More on her uncle

7) She settles back in her seat (again)

 Notice at least one action recurs – her settling back into the seat. If you have to repeat something -unless you’re doing it purposefully, for emphasis, it’s a sure sign that there’s something wrong with your paragraph structure. Notice how the author (and this is not intended to make them feel bad, I’m just as guilty during first drafts, and sometimes beyond) flits from purse to uncle to cab

And this is the same version after I’d edited it.

She gave her small, rough purse a reassuring pat.  A wedding present from her uncle, its familiarity soothed her, although the lamplight made it look dowdy. Thoughts of her uncle loaned her bravery and she settled back into the polished leather as the coach moved off.

It’s 40% shorter, because all the elements are grouped together and flow logically one into another.

I may post more such entries, where I think that the standard textbooks are neglecting key points, but for the moment it’s a one off entry, but for any of you struggling with your writing, I hope that it helps.

I realized yesterday as I posted the review of Interzone that it was my first post for a week. Given that I’ve been fairly quiet on other venues as well, a few of you might be forgiven for thinking that I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole.

You should be so lucky.

As I write this, at the same time last week I was on my way over to Gareth‘s place, to set off for Eastercon. Two days of long periods of relaxation, interspersed with frantic running around to get to and from signing sessions to promote Damage Time. Six of us ended up coming back from Birmingham Waterstone’s in a taxi to get back in time for the Illustrious signing.

That should have sounded a warning – the railway station was in chaos, which was only going to get worse by the evening. I duly found myself stranded by the chaos, although I eventually got home only an hour late by leaping in a taxi at Bristol Temple Meads.

So off on holiday on Sunday morning down to Poole. On the plus side, we were going on holiday. On the downside, I had a shedload of work to get through, and was suffering from tendonitis, preventing me from walking more than a few hundred yards without having to take painkillers.

In a way that injury was a blessing. Unable to go out, and with minimal distractions -since I couldn’t go for our usual long walks in the Purbecks or on the beaches, I had no option but to buckle down to editing Transtories. (More about that tomorrow) And since the weather was so good, I was able to read in the garden in the afternoon.

But it’s meant for a strange, claustrophobic existence that doesn’t really feel like a proper holiday at all. So I shall have no option but  to take another one, later this year…

The March-April 2011 issue of Interzone starts with one of the magazine’s all too rare novellas. Nina Allan’s ‘The Silver Wind’ is set in a near-future dystopia where the BNP have seized power a generation earlier and ‘repatriated’ the non-Caucasian population to Africa, Asia and other points beyond Dover.

A derelict hospital ostensibly being used as an asylum is actually a portal to a number of other periods “Think of it as the lobby of a large hotel, with doors and lifts and corridors opening off it.” Martin the narrator featured in ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ in Black Static 12, and ‘The Silver Wind’ shows another aspect of Martin’s complex relationship with time.

Allan is emerging as a natural successor to early Harrison and Roberts in detailed depictions of near or alternate futures in which technological changes are limited to allow her to better focus on the characters. What sets her recent fiction apart from most writers is the sheer transparency of her prose:

Shooter’s Hill had a rough reputation. The reforestation policy had returned the place to its original state, and the tract of woodland between Blackheath and Woolwich was now as dense and extensive as it had once been in the years and centuries before the first industrial revolution. The woods were rife with carjackers and highwaymen, and scarcely a week went by without reports of some new atrocity. The situation had become so serious that there were moves in parliament to reinstate the death penalty for highway robbery as it had already been reinstated for high treason.

2011 already looks to be an outstanding year for novellas – two excellent but very different stories in F&SF already, followed by Allan’s best story to date, making for an astonishing first quarter at this length.

Chris Butler’s ‘Tell Me Everything’ is a curious hybrid of immersive fantasy –a world in which everyone can read everyone else’s emotions through the generation of spores—crossed with a mystery that isn’t really much of a mystery, since it’s obvious whodunnit on page one. Nonetheless the spores and people’s reactions to man who can’t generate them provide an effective metaphor for privacy and the right of the authorities to invade that privacy on a whim, and the ending leaves a powerful aftertaste. Recommended.

Ray Cluley

Black Static regular Ray Cluley makes his Interzone debut with a story that’s almost dark enough for his regular haunt. In a post-apocalyptic world of perpetual winter, a handful of traumatized survivors cling onto what’s left of civilization at isolated stations, until Jackson befriends a passing traveller and decides to walk to the orbital elevator, from where he can ride to the sky.

 Two-Nine is hilly terrain to cross on foot. It’s tiring work, and treacherous in the dark, but I have to keep going to charge the kin-gen. Without it, if the batteries die I die with them. Even in full outgear. As it is, I’ve got regulated temperature, zero grade rads, and a nav-com that crackles too often but is otherwise fine. I can’t afford to be without any of it.

 If I have any reservations about the story, they revolve around the opening, which is marred by a little too much ostentatious tech-talk, as if Cluley is desperately signalling look reader, I’m writing SF! But once the story really gets going the mix of nuclear winter and space elevator is a good one and Jackson and Mother (who isn’t his mother) are well drawn.

But where ‘Tethered to the Cold and Dying’ really delivers is in Cluley’s characterization, which is very, very good, and the stark tone that suffuses the story.  Two of his stories bejewelled Black Static last year (‘At Night, When the Demons Come’ was selected for Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror 3, but I think that ‘Beachcombing’ is the better story) and ‘Tethered to the Cold and Dying’ certainly deserves consideration as one of this year’s better SF stories. Highly Recommended.

Tim Lees

Tim Lees rounds out the fiction with ‘Crosstown Traffic,’ his return to a slightly other-ly Manhattan last visited in Interzone 218. Reuben the courier has to dodge aliens, talking dogs and dinosaurs to deliver a strange package. There’s something appealing about the doomed loser, and Reuben has all the get-rich-quick schemes filed away in his head, but somehow we know he’s never going to make those bucks. Highly Recommended.

Wrapped in another glorious Richard Wagner cover, Interzone 233 is an above average issue of a magazine whose average  is better than most magazines’ best. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

So that’s it then. The shadows have lengthened, the world seems -all of a sudden- to be a slightly shabbier place. Time to turn out the lights on another part of yesterday.

Elisabeth Sladen wasn’t really Sarah Jane Smith, of course. Lis Sladen married in 1968 at the age of 20, and had a daughter in 1985, and played other parts, although I don’t think I ever saw a single one of them. Not because I avoided anything else she was in, but because the parts were usually so fleeting, or off my radar. That was her fate, for better or for worse, to be so tied to one role. Did she feel that to be a blessing or a curse, I wonder? Maybe both, at different times.

Because to tens, even hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more than that, she was the girl who burst onto our screens in 1973 and for three years tried to do more than look cute and scream when the monsters entered. And my God, how she succeeded. I always felt that a scriptwriter with sufficient balls would have had her lean back and drop-kick the monster in the nuts. From 1973 to 1976, when she left, as far as my teenage self was concerned, she was The One.

So much so that for a year -in protest- I stopped watching Doctor Who when she went, and when I did -grudgingly- start watching it again, I suddenly noticed how rubbish the effects were, and I never forgave the girl with the loincloth, and the increasingly pretty-but-vacuous successors for usurping her. It was almost a relief when the Beeb killed the increasingly crappy series off in 1989. Maybe that lingering sense of betrayal is why I’m so damned impatient with the old guard. The BBC had already killed it for me, thirteen years earlier, and all they were doing in 1989 was applying the bullet instead of the slow death.

But of course, the truth was, the truth my teenage self couldn’t see, was that Lis Sladen had a life, wanted a family and a career. I hope she got everything she longed for. I’m sure she did.

I really expected the worst when the show came back, but RTD surprised and delighted me. And when she returned in 2006, he gave a belated rationale to why she had to go. Finally…closure. And her return was proof that sometimes –not very often– but sometimes we do get a second chance.

Then, joy of joys, a grown up SJ with kids, because it would have felt wrong for her virtual life to have been so empty, even if (as I’m sure) her real one was so rich.

I’d like to have met her, to ask if she ever resented having this strange dual life,  a virtual half-life to go with the real one, but I also know that it would have probably broken the spell.

So goodbye, Lis Sladen, who wasn’t Sarah Jane, and sympathies to her family, who are the ones who have really lost someone, and someone real at that. At least we still have the re-runs.

It must be something about the heat -it’s 22.1 c here- that melts my brain cells.

The last three days have seen me chewing into my TBR pile in the shape of the next issue of F&SF, and I finally finished it. Over to the site, to download the cover art — hold on? Where’s the cover art, Gordon?

So I checked the date of sale. Oh, crap. It’s not actually up until May 3rd. I can’t believe I made such a novice error as not checking the on sale date. Oh well, I’ll just have to fill in, I thought.

Which is why you’re reading this, and not the review of F&SF I’ve been working on. It’s good sometimes to be reminded to check things, and in that spirit, I’ve read the extract from ‘Spindizzy’ for the open mic night I’m participating in later.  I’m not making that mistake again. At least, not until the next time.

This week’s guest blog is from author, editor and serial blogger Brandon H. Bell 

“It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.”

–Julius Caesar

1. Write story

2. Get said story published

3. Profit! Karma!

I believe short fiction is important. The small press magazine I edit (Fantastique Unfettered, aka FU) uses a Creative Commons license, CC-BY-SA, for reasons related to this view, and in service to the dual end-goals of money and karma on behalf of the writers we publish.

Our alignment is not indie against corporate, small against large, or fan against pro. Those are foolish stances. Our alignment is one against obscurity expressed via a pragmatism that acknowledges money may or may not follow our good karma. We certainly hope it does: our goal, after providing quality fiction to our readers, is to pay writers professional rates.

This article will appear in the second issue of FU, but I hope it’s not where you originally read it. You see, it carries the same CC-BY-SA license. A Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareAlike license, meaning that others can do pretty much anything they want with the article, but they must give attribution and release under the same. Each instance of a presentation, adaptation, or derivative of the article is, essentially, a finger pointed back at FU. Um, not that finger.

The old world-think of walled gardens and content farms suggests the only way forward is copyright extensions, possibly to perpetuity. Our old-thinkers recognize the current audience is merely the first audience. It’s a numbers game, and while individual creators will not make much to crow over statistically, the bulk IP of the mass of creators certainly will. These Caesars would own human culture, every song a commercial jingle, every myth protected by a ™.

I’m not an ideologue: I’ve stated in blog posts that I don’t know how well CC-BY-SA scales, and for the Stephen Kings of the world, traditional copyright may be the only reasonable default for their work. Creative Commons is a tool, in a toolbox that includes tradition copyright, and I have no prohibition against the latter (though even if I reach ‘rockstar’ level, I would ensure my work returns to the culture at some point.)

With Aether Age (our first CC-BY-SA project, a shared world of space-faring Greeks and social revolutions in Egypt) we’ve made the work immediately available to the culture. The same is true of FU. The same will be true of my novella, Elegant Threat, to be release in the M-Brane Double #1 later this year. The New People by Alex Jeffers, the other half of the Double, will carry a traditional copyright. My first novel may carry a traditional copyright, depending on the publisher.

Writers deserve to be paid for their work, and we hope that you, dear reader, will take an active interest in supporting short fiction. If not FU then some other venue. As a writer I hope to someday make loads of cash at my craft and to have people bemoan my place on the NYT list. That hack, they’ll complain as I laugh my way to the bank. (Yeah, it’s a writer thing.) So, a final reminder that our use of Creative Commons licensing is not purely ideological or a revolt against traditional publishing.

Creative Commons licensing does not rob writers of ownership of their work, the ability to publish it in anthologies, collections, or even to waive the license to accommodate incoming requests to publish/adapt under other terms.

The license is a tool to reach readers, and to proclaim cultural relevance to the future. Maybe our work, and work like it, becomes an island of open/libre culture in a future of copyrighted IP masquerading as culture. We intend to run FU much like a nonprofit (though it isn’t a nonprofit), to not profit off the periodical ourselves, but to use any incoming funds to make FU self-sustaining, then better pay our contributors.

CC-BY-SA is a tool for proactively freeing art to the culture, and will be right for some projects, and wrong for others. It is a tool for generating karma and reaching more readers. The other CC licenses and traditional copyright are also valid tools.

While the small press is a valuable part of the greater cultural ecosystem, big publishers (and big writers) are our heroes. Copyright is, ultimately, agnostic, insofar as it allows creators and their families to benefit from their work. The same is true of Creative Commons, and use of CC licenses does not preclude profitability.

It would be easy to stop there, with that pithy statement ignoring the real challenge we face in obscurity. The small press is a playground for the new, the odd, the possibly non-commercial –or not commercial right now–, the niche. The small press bears the responsibility to pursue the mandates of a given niche while striving for a quality of content, presentation, and a dedication to the idea that if anyone should be hungry and unsatisfied with imitation and shallowness, the merely commercially viable, it is us.

To close on a theme, perhaps our Caesar is that societal voice addressed to those who would participate in the culture, that suggests: you are a consumer, only.

We have come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

Please steal this article and post anywhere you like, just provide attribution and keep it under the same license. Encourage others to do the same.*

 *Use the above link for the general license, attribution: Brandon H. Bell, editor, Fantastique Unfettered

Cover by Ben Baldwin

Apologies for the delay – in almost four years, this is the first time the review has been quite this late….

Black Static for February / March 2011 sees the usual strong mix of returning regulars and talented neophytes, but this issue it the non-fiction that stands out especially, starting with genre news in White Noise, which details several new releases from Steven Pirie, Tim Lees and others.

Electric Darkness by Stephen Volk

In which Volk dresses as Father Christmas and puts the boot in to Bath City’s most famous supporter, who is almost a national treasure in some quarters.

Stand up, Mike Leigh. I’ve had enough of all your actors thinking that a speech impediment and ill-considered wardrobe is a substitute for characterization. I’m pissed off at hearing them going on and on endlessly about your “method” when the result of it seems to be the same deeply irritating whine. (It should have a verb: to blethyn)… Leigh sends out actors to observe and report. But writing isn’t just observing and reporting. It’s about imagining. 

Volk’s irritation is with those in the arts who elevate realism above the imaginary. All writers create secondary worlds, but in the case of Leigh and other ‘realists’ they limit their imaginations and substitute our primary world as a crutch, and then use this limited approach to validate their work.

Night’s Plutonian Shore by Mike O’Driscoll

In ‘The Genre Fallacy’ O’Driscoll issues a counterblast to what was largely a pompous, dim-witted and self-serving denigration of genre fiction, notably a shoddy attempt to publicize his new novel by Booker finalist Edward Docx in The Guardian.

O’Driscoll correctly identifies that ‘literary fiction’ is as much a genre as any other, and makes the point that constraining through the conventions of genre can actually result in a greater work than otherwise would be the case. 

Interference by Christopher Fowler

In the last of the comment columns, Fowler calls for a grass-roots movement to supplant the current crop of Hollywood no-brainers (How did Yogi Bear and The Three Stooges ever get green-lit?).

Fiction

V.H. Leslie opens the fiction with a first sale that bodes well for the future. Daniel and his expectant partner Robyn are converting an isolated baron the edge of the woods. Robyn decorates the nursery with wallpaper that as the story progresses, Daniel finds more and more disturbing.

‘Ulterior Design’ starts with a close focus on the couple, only gradually panning out to reveal more and more of the setting, which becomes increasingly claustrophobic. Its nightmarishly fairytale feel works well until the slightly telegraphed and rather conventional ending, but perhaps any feeling of slight anticlimax is more a reflection on how good the first half is.

The art by Paul Milne would overwhelm most stories, but Leslie’s imagery is so powerful that it actually complements it. Highly Recommended.

Ray Cluley

Ray Cluley appears in a second consecutive issue with ‘Pins and Needles’ in which James, a young man profoundly obsessed with space passes his days by putting pins, razor blades, even knitting needles in places where the unwary will impale themselves.

Because it’s the only way to make you feel something. Because sometimes the hurt is good, it helps, and eventually you can get used to the bad part, the pain, if everything’s all better afterwards. Just a quick pain, a nip, just a bit of a sting, that’s all. Then gone. All better.

For a brief while Cluley offers both James and the reader hope, in the shape of Angela, a kindly, carnal dental nurse, but it’s obvious that James is just too strange, and when the ending comes it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and poignant, which may be a first. Outstanding. (And it has great artwork by Rik Rawling as well)

Maura McHugh’s ‘Water’ is short but strange.

Watery references recur in Ed Grabianowski’s ‘Extraneous Invokat,’ in which a young couple about to move home become prey to disturbing visions and other unpleasant phenomena. The artwork is by Dan Henk. 

James Cooper

James Cooper’s ‘Cushing’ concludes the fiction, with an illustration by Ben Baldwin that provides the basis for the cover. Two brothers whose father has committed suicide live with their widowed mother, who spends her days painting and sketching her elder son, while she all but ignores the younger one. This is only slightly disturbing, but Cooper heightens the sense of ‘wrongness’ with one delicate touch: in all the pictures, elder brother David’s face has been cut out, and replaced with that of Peter Cushing. With a commendable sense of restraint, Cooper creates a tension between what is stated and that left unstated, leaving the reader space to think. Outstanding.

Reviews

The magazine concludes with Peter Tennant’s Case Notes (book reviews), which this time -in honour of Women in Horror Recognition Month- focuses on women writers; an interview with Australian horror writer Angela Slatter, and reviews of her three collections. Plus Amelia Beamer’s The Loving Dead, anthology Rigor Amortis, Allyson Bird’s Wine and Rank Poison (her follow-up collection to Bull Running for Girls) and many more. Tony Lee’s Blood Spectrum (DVD/Blu-ray reviews) profiles the remake of I Spit on Your Grave and A Serbian Film, amongst others.

 Perhaps the best way to sum the issue up is with a quote from Ellen Datlow: The most consistently excellent horror magazine published. Indeed, and Bs21 continues to maintain this consistency.

The March 2011 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction showcases some returning regulars and some new names making their F&SF debut, and this month there is a greater preponderance of SF than usual, much of it very, very good.

Cover by Kent Bash

Albert E. Cowdrey appeared three times in just six issues in 2010, and ‘Scatter My Ashes’ is already his second story of 2011  – in just two issues. This latest story features a variation on the golem myth, but unusually and unfortunately Cowdrey’s meandering style makes it hard to get into this one.

Paul Di Filippo’s ‘A Pocketful Of Faces’ merges crime with SF to good effect as two cops from the Aspect Protection and Enforcement Agency try to find out who is behind a rash of stolen aspects. Highly Recommended.

Ken Liu’s ‘The Paper Menagerie’ is superficially almost Disney-esque in its evocation of paper animals that come to life, but this fairytale has teeth, in the shape of the narrator’s awkward relationship with his mother. Like ‘The Ideomancer’ in the last anniversary issue, the author is interested in using fantasy tropes to examine issues of identity and ethnicity. Highly Recommended.

The longest story this issue is Sheila Finch’s final Lingster novella, ‘The Evening And The Morning.’ Thirteen years after she won a Nebula for ‘Reading The Bones,’ an earlier entry in the series, Finch takes a crew of Guild representatives back to a strangely deserted future Earth in an intriguing mystery that has echoes of both Le Guin’s anthropological SF and Simak’s classic City; an early contender for the best single story of the year. Outstanding.

From SF to pulp horror with ‘Night Gauntlet’ by  a team of no less than six collaborators (ftr, Walter C. DeBill, Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W. H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb). Perhaps it’s that which makes the narrative feel so clunky with the sudden lurches in subject and awkward lumps of exposition – which is a shame, because there’s a real warmth in the author’s obvious affection for their subject, but it’s all but lost in the clunkiness ofsome of the writing.

More SF with James Patrick Kelly’s timeslip story  ‘Happy Ending 2.0.’ Brief, but Recommended.

Francis Marion Soty debuts with ‘The Second Kalandar’s Tale,’ which retells one of the lesser known stories from the Thousand and One Nights- in which a woodcutter finds an enchanted copper ring. It’ll appeal to those who like fairy tales, but I’m not one of them, however much I can appreciate the writer’s skill.                

In Karl Bunker’s ‘Bodyguard,’ a human diplomat has to explore his difficult relationship with his alien bodyguard, and does so with great originality and pathos. Recommended.

Better is Kali Wallace’s ‘Botanical Exercises  For Curious Girls’ which has echoes of Gene Wolfe, with its little girl held captive by a scientist for research purposes in some indeterminate future; Rosalie has no idea of why she has tutors named after the seasons, but would like to see the garden. Highly Recommended.                        

‘Ping’ by Dixon Wragg is a reprint from the Washington Post, and is barely longer than this line.

This month ends with James Stoddard’s ‘The Ifs Of Time,’ in which Enoch, caretaker of the almost infinitely large Evenmere (the setting for Stoddard’s acclaimed The High House and The False House) meets a mysterious group of aged storytellers in a secluded room high in the house. These ancients present a very real threat to Evenmere, and tales within tales abound, as Stoddard, more than any author present, blurs the lines between fantasy and science fiction in this issue. Highly Recommended.

As always with F&SF there are odd dips in quality, although that may be more to do with my taste than any objective criteria, but there seem to be far fewer than usual, and the March 2011 issue is an especially good one.