Category: Uncategorized

This is the fifty-seventh time Ship has tried to stop Zander from entering the cellar.

That’s the opening line to my new story in Lightspeed Magazine, “The Spread of Space and Endless Devastation.”

Time loop stories and other fun tropes

I’ve written time loop stories (and one time loop game) before, and several of them have even been published.

“The Spread of Space” focuses on a couple of other tropes I find myself returning to — either as a reader or an author — time and time again:

• Found families
• Ships/AIs with feelings
• Parenting feels
• Learning to let go, even when it hurts

It’s also got an ensemble cast, with a crew of colourful characters — something I’m particularly amused about in a 1200 word story!

We’ve got Kala, a historian with a tendency for self-insertion. Eun-ja, who is obsessed with dramas. Iope, the crew’s well-intended heckler. And of course there’s Zander, essentially the kind of person who feels he has to keep everyone else on track and is perpetually tired as a result.

The story follows the crew (and, of course, Ship!) as they examine a newly rediscovered asteroid out on the edge of known space, complete with a mysterious ancient ruin that seems to have been inhabited all too recently and weird alien writing.

But what’s in the cellar? Why does Zander keep going down there? What does it all have to do with time loop stories?

For the answer to those questions and more, you’ll have to go read the story! It’s free to read on the Lightspeed website.

I’ve had two new stories out in May and June, so to celebrate their publication I’m here with yet another blog post about things that interest me and probably nobody else!

First off, the stories!

Two New Short Stories

Debuting in May over at Haven Speculative, I’m pleased to present “The Calligrapher’s Granddaughter,” a short story set in early modern Japan. It’s got magic, calligraphy, snotty samurai, probably too much detail about kanji radicals, and found family feels. (Content notes for off-screen child abandonment and child endangerment, plus animal use.)

Next, appropriately published in June, is “The Nature of Stones” in All Worlds Wayfarer’s delightful Prismatic Dreams anthology. Billing itself as a “kaleidoscope of queer speculative fiction,” the anthology has 30 stories featuring queer characters in a variety of genres. My story is about childbirth, mythic astronomy (???), and unhealthy relationships. All set in a world with no concept of gender.

Please consider purchasing a copy of either or both of these great publications if you can afford it, and thank you for supporting small publishers! :)

What is Early Modern Japan?

Early Modern Japan roughly coincides with the period between 1580 and 1868. The Edo Period, with its strong central rule, relative peace, and cultural unification, is emblematic of Japan’s early modern period, to the extent that most historians do not use the term “early modern.”

Myths and Realities of Early Modern Japan

Only one of my new stories is set in early modern Japan, but it’s certainly a time and a place that I return to again and again for inspiration and as a setting for my short stories.

Even if you don’t know much about Japan, you’ve probably seen some kind of popular media set in this time period. Seven Samurai, anybody? Naruto? Shogun?

In fact, early modern Japan is so popular a destination for popular media—both domestically and abroad—that people unfamiliar with Japanese history often claim that Japan has always been a closed-off land of honor-obsessed samurai where nothing ever changed, the social class you were born into was inescapable, and rich lords sat in their tea houses as the shogun plotted against them.

That’s actually not true at all. Like most nations, Japan has a long and fascinating existence with many changes. The early modern period (generally dated between the late 1500s to the late 1800s) amounts to a decent but not outsized portion of its roughly 1400-year recorded history.

For instance, there was no shogun in the Heian period (794-1185) and samurai didn’t even exist as a class or a concept until sometime in the 12th century. Likewise, Japan certainly wasn’t a “closed” country until the Tokugawa shogunate enacted a policy limiting contact with the outside world in the 1630s, and even then it was impossible to totally block out foreign influences.

By the early modern period, however, genre movie staples like samurai and ninja were very much on stage (if only in the popular imagination), and rigid social structures with a powerful centralized government were well entrenched. Despite the somewhat tyrannical rule of the Tokugawa, though–or perhaps because of it–early modern Japan was also a fairly peaceful period in Japanese history, with less outright militancy than some other periods.

All of this is a very oversimplified description of Japanese history, probably to the point where it’s almost as inaccurate as American movies about samurai. (Okay, hopefully it’s not that inaccurate.)

If you’re interested in learning more about Japan during the rule of the Tokugawa, The Tokugawa World is a recent collection of scholarly essays exploring everything from the military to comic books in the time period. (That link will take you to WorldCat, where you can find it in a library near you. Yay, libraries!)

If a whole scholarly book sounds exhausting, the Wikipedia article on Edo period Japan isn’t terrible, either–just don’t tell anybody I suggested it or my librarian street cred will be shot!

“It’s insulting,” the Intelligence drone they’d been assigned to was saying, now. “Yes, we asked you to come here; yes, we asked to join the Federation. But that doesn’t give you the right to treat us like… like…” The drone’s iridescent carapace shuddered slightly, and their speakers gave a remarkably convincing approximation of sputtering with rage. “Like computers!”

From “A Difference of Opinion,” Kaleidotrope, April 2022

The spring 2022 issue of Kaleidotrope includes my story “A Difference of Opinion,” a short space opera in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin’s Hain Cycle and Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. The story features self-aware AI (with AI children!), far-flung federations with an interest in collecting different polities, and a take on the “battle of wits” scene from The Princess Bride. (Yes, that’s right: it’s got AI, space opera, AND poison!)

Although the term space opera started out as a pejorative one for low-quality science fiction, the subgenre is now long established as a force to be reckoned with. Especially in the last five or six years, space opera has been been having “a moment.” Books like Ancillary Justice, Gideon the Ninth and A Memory Called Empire (and their sequels), the Murderbot novellas (and a novel, now!), and all sorts of other great stories have received critical attention in the way of award nominations or wins.

If you’ve read some of those titles and are looking for more, I’ve pulled together a list of some of my favourite space opera settings ranging from classic titles by LeGuin to newer stories by equally amazing authors.

1: Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya

Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya is one of my absolute favourite settings regardless of genre and sub-genre. It interrogates

It has the delicious mix of high-stakes interplanetary conflict and intimate personal stakes that’s one of space opera’s most defining elements, all set in “Confucian galactic empires of Vietnamese and Chinese inspiration.”

If you’re interested in Classical Chinese and Vietnamese culture, or—frankly—just like amazing storytelling with memorable characters, lushly and lovingly described, you’ve definitely got to pick up some of Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya books and stories.

The Tea Master and the Detective, the Nebula-award winning novella that de Bodard describes as a “gender-swapped space opera Sherlock Holmes retelling,” is a great place to start your exploration.

2: Macross Seven

Okay, stick with me here. If you’re not into anime, you’ve probably never even seen that word before. But if you like your space opera with a healthy dose of romantic melodrama and “not taking itself entirely seriously,” you’ll likely appreciate this one.

The Macross franchise of anime (and manga, and games, and…) is well-known among anime fans for a few things, including love triangles, the integration of music into space battles, missile barrages that paint the sky with explosions, and fighter planes that transform into giant, humanoid robots. While its subgenre is technically mecha (“giant robot”) rather than space opera as such, the conflicts are often inter-cultural and inter-species as well as personal, so for my purposes I’m just going to go with it.

There are many different Macross series, but my personal favourite is Macross 7—probably also the one that takes itself the least seriously.

Macross 7 follows pacifist rock musician Nekki Basara as he embarks on a one-man quest to stop war and spread love by… flying a giant transforming space fighter jet / robot that seems to be powered by guitar.

Oh, also he fires speaker pods into enemy fighters and sings at them.

It may be goofy, but it’s a lot of fun. Give it a chance, and soon you too will be shouting 「俺の歌を聴けー！」 (listen to my song!)

Sadly, the DVDs are out of production and it’s not available for streaming, so you’ll have to do some work to find copies of this one.

3: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s Sun Lords of the Principality

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is a Nebula award finalist whose work always moves me. Their Sun Lords of the Principality story series is no different.

Consisting of five stories published in Lightspeed Magazine, the Sun Lords series follows warriors, poets, heroes, villains, and gods through galaxy-sized conflicts that threaten to consume everything and everyone they touch.

Fair warning, some of these stories are super dark—at times, even unrelentingly brutal. But even at their grimmest, they have an inescapable core of humanity and empathy that gives them a warm place in my library. If you’ve ever asked yourself how you can possibly keep going with the world as messed up as it is, give these a try.

Also, I heartily recommend checking out some of Merc’s other work! Their latest publication, “Hero’s Choice“, is a humorous fantasy novelette that sounds like it’s just crying out for an isekai anime adaptation. Or for a broader taste of their work, try Friends for Robots, a recent short story collection.

4: Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle

Okay, Ursula K. LeGuin probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. With decades of acclaim under her belt at the time of her death in 2018, most people know of her work either from A Wizard of Earthsea or sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s the latter we’ll concern ourselves with here.

Le Guin’s science fiction stories usually (but not always) fall into what is referred to as the Hainish Cycle (although the author herself didn’t like the term “cycle”), a series which all deal with a spacefaring civilization called the Ekumen. The Ekumen, and its main planet, Hain, is a kind of Star Trek like galaxy-spanning confederation of planets dedicated to inclusivity and cooperation. Most of the stories and novels in the series deal with members of the Ekumen called mobiles, who go to newly-admitted or isolated planets and observe (while usually also agitating for membership and Hainish values).

A lot of SF fans have read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but my favourites set on Hain are The Telling, set on a suddenly-capitalist-consumerist planet where the old way of doing things still lives on under the surface, and “Five Ways to Forgiveness,” five connected stories about slavery and social change. If you want something shorter and more fun, try “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” a short story that does some fun things with FTL travel.

If you can afford it, I recommend splurging on a copy of the Library of America’s Hainish Novels and Stories boxed set, a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin’s space opera. The two books contain all the stories and novels that feature Hain, including “Five Ways to Forgiveness,” which hasn’t previously been published in full. Also, they’re absolutely gorgeous to look at!

Bonus Story: “How They Name the Ships”

So there you have it: four space opera settings I enjoy!

I don’t have a fully-fledged universe of my own that spans dozens of published stories—yet. But if you like “A Difference of Opinion,” it does take place in the same setting as “How They Name the Ships,” published in 2020 in Frozen Wavelets. That one is only about 750 words, so it’s a quick read.

As the title suggests, it’s all about the power of names and naming—a theme that’s particularly important in a lot of LeGuin’s fiction, but one that also shows up a lot in other space operas. If you’re interested in the topic, you can see what I wrote about some of my favourite ship names from other space opera series in an older blog post: “Ship Names, Naming, and Identity in Space Opera.”

SF author Michael Swanwick recently posted that “New Zealand is giving away books they don’t own.” While I haven’t seen too much conversation about the New Zealand case yet, I’ve definitely seen other folks, including the authors guild and other large authors’ organizations, understandably angry and frustrated at a perceived threat to their livelihood, make similar hyperbolic, overblown, inaccurate claims in the past about library digitization programs. (For an example of a press release that presents the issue accurately and in-context, check out SFWA’s.)

I’m not here to say people are wrong to feel that way, but to say that this is not an accurate description of what’s going on. In reality, what the National Library of New Zealand is doing is donating some books it does own to the Internet Archive, which will digitize and lend them to one user at a time.

Incidentally, this post isn’t the first time the National Library of New Zealand has received negative attention for their project to deaccession a portion of their print collection–they’ve been drawing ire for it in one way or another since they announced the deaccessioning project in 2018. And the Internet Archive is definitely no stranger to controversy in the publishing world. (Vox has a good summary.)

But do authors really need to worry? Are libraries out to ruin us? Do they want us to starve while they benefit from our hard work unfairly?

In a word: no.

Super Basic Summary Version

The rest of this post is pretty long. If you don’t care that much but just want to know why people are mad and what you can do to protect your own rights, here’s a summary that covers the basics and sets right some misconceptions.

1. The National Library of New Zealand is getting rid of 428,231 books in a collection focused on authors and publishers outside New Zealand. They are not “giving away books they don’t own” because they do own these books and have purchased them. (Also, 200,000 of these are unequivocally in the public domain and only 775 titles in the list have a publication date of later than the year 2000.)

2. They are donating the books to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit focused on creating accessible digital archives of books and other forms of media. They are not digitizing the books themselves and then sending over the digital copies. Instead, the Internet Archive will take ownership of the print books.

3. The Internet Archive will digitize the books and let anybody with an account check them out. Loan periods vary, with access to downloadable files usually limited to two weeks. They are not letting anybody just download copies of the ebooks to keep. Also, during the time they are checked out nobody else will be able to access the files.

4. You can opt out of the National Library of New Zealand’s project by December 1st if your titles are affected. To check if anything of yours is in the overseas collection they are getting rid of, download this excel file from their website (warning: it is 45MB) If your title isn’t in that spreadsheet, then this won’t affect you personally and you don’t need to opt out of anything. To opt out, follow the directions here. (Basically, you just email them with the titles and their numbers on the spreadsheet and your email needs to match your author name).

5. If you miss the December 1st deadline, you can still have your materials removed from the Internet Archive, which has a takedown process detailed here.

So, what’s really going on in New Zealand?

What’s actually happening is that the National Library of New Zealand is donating deaccessioned print books (that is: books they do own and have paid for but decided they don’t need anymore) from one specific collection, the Overseas Published Collection (OPC), to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that digitizes print books and lends the virtual copies to pretty much anyone.

The overall mission of the National Library of New Zealand is like any library’s: to make sure people have access to books and other materials. In 2003, the library’s mission changed slightly. As it describes in its collections policy for the OPC, the library started to focus more on published materials that relate to New Zealand and the Pacific. The OPC, which is a more general-purpose collection that holds items published outside the country and region, doesn’t fit with their new mission so much, so they are deaccessioning the majority of it.

The titles that they’re getting rid of are going to be donated to the Internet Archive, who will digitize them and lend the digital copies to anyone with a free account. Note that lending here means that only one person can access a given title at a time, not that anybody can download the title for as long as they want.

What Books Are Affected?

According to the library’s website for the project, they are distributing almost 13,000 titles from the collection to other libraries in New Zealand as requested by those libraries. About 50,000 were also donated to a friends of the library group for a book sale.

The list of affected titles is available in a 45MB excel file from the library’s website. To put things into perspective, here’s some information on the titles it includes:

• There are 428,231 total books
• 258,625 titles were published before 1924, making them almost certainly in the public domain
• Of the remaining 169,606 titles, only about 60,000 were published after 1980. If you go up to 1990, that number drops to 10,000 titles
• I could only find three titles in the list that were published after 2010, and all of them are from 2011

A note on this: the date field is a little buggy in the provided data, which is not unusual for Excel or library cataloguing. There are quite a few dates like “19996” or “Apr 19” (which turned out to be a date from 1931), which makes it hard to get a good handle on what’s in there in a short period of time.

Someone with more free time than me or better Excel skills can probably clean up the data or even create a web interface for searching it, but for the purposes of this blog post the point is: the vast majority of titles in this collection are 40+ years old. This is definitely not some scheme to rip off a bunch of recently-published books and deny up and coming authors the royalties they would be owed.

Help! My Titles are in There and I Don’t Like It

If you find your titles in the spreadsheet and are upset by the idea that the National Library of New Zealand is going to give your books to the Internet Archive, you have until December 1st to opt out of the donation.

The procedure for this is pretty straightforward. Basically, search the Excel file for your work and get the unique number from the spreadsheet. Send this to their email address with “proof of rights” and they will process your request.

Let’s say you’re Jane Austen and you’re very upset. Here’s what the process looks like from start to finish.

Step 1: Find Your Titles

Open up the Excel file and do a find for your name (or book title).

A good tip here is to highlight the author column and search for Lastname, Firstname to weed out false positives:

Now you have a list of your works.

Step 2: Get the Unique Numbers

Next, for each title you want removed, scroll over to column I, titled Our Unique Number. This is the number you need to send the library with your opt out request.

Let’s say Jane Austen doesn’t mind if they have Emma, but Pride and Prejudice? That’s right out. Here are the rows for the two copies of Pride and Prejudice in the collection. The unique number is the very last column on the right.

That screenshot’s hard to parse, so the numbers are:

995774093502836
995718743502836

Step 3: Email with the numbers and proof of rights

This sounds like the most complicated part. How do you “prove” your rights?

Fortunately, the library is not making this hard. All they want is an email sent to opcmanagement@dia.govt.nz containing the unique numbers from the spreadsheet and coming from the “persons or organisations whose names correspond with rights-holders’ names.”

So if your email is prettyunicornluvr69@yahoo.com, for instance, you might need to create a new account. Gmail lets you create free email accounts very quickly, though, so this should be pretty easy. If your name is already taken (it almost certainly is), try adding -author or -writer or something on the end. -professional is also a good one.

Jane Austen is, more’s the pity, dead.

But if she were alive today, she could create JaneAustenAuthor@gmail.com, paste her unique numbers into an email and send it off to opcmanagement@dia.govt.nz to let them know she does not want those titles sent on to the Internet Archive for digitization.

Step 4: But it’s After December 1st!

If you’ve missed the December 1st deadline to opt out but found your titles in the spreadsheet, you can still tell the Internet Archive you don’t want your stuff available for lending.

You can email info@archive.org with a DCMA takedown request and they will remove your items. This works for anything in their archives, by the way, not just books from this collection. You can even get your website unarchived if you want.

The Author’s Guild has a comprehensive guide to sending the Internet Archive a takedown request if you need more help.

The Internet Archive and “Illegal Ebooks”

If you’re an author (like me!), the idea of the Internet Archive taking books they didn’t buy and handing out illegally made digital copies to anyone who asks is alarming.

Fortunately, that’s not what’s really happening here.

In late March of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic cutting off access to libraries for many people, the IA instituted what it called the National Emergency Library, a program that allowed anyone to check out digital copies of IA-owned books without limit.

Understandably, a lot of publishers and authors were angry about this. As a result, the IA (eventually) closed down the program in June of 2020. However, they didn’t stop lending books altogether. Instead, they implemented what’s called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), a fairly new framework that libraries are using to try and loan out digitized versions of print titles they own instead of purchasing additional electronic licenses.

Before we go any further, I should clarify someting: in addition to being an author, I’m also a librarian. (There are quite a few of us author-librarians, in fact!) In my professional opinion as both a librarian and an author, the Internet Archive and digital lending in general are not the pirate-supporting catastrophe they seem to be at first glance. More on that in a moment.

The short version is that the IA only allows one person to check out each digitized title at a time, and they are only lending the same number of coipes of a title as they have print copies. If they have one print copy of your book in their collection, they will let one person borrow its digital version at a time. If they have zero print copies of your book, they can’t (and don’t) even digitize it, let alone lend it.

If you want the long version, well… keep reading.

All About Controlled Digital Lending

At the core of this controversy is a relatively new library framework for ebook management called controlled digital lending (CDL).

Although it certainly helps libraries provide digital content to their patrons without paying for expensive publisher licenses, CDL is definitely controversial in the publishing and writing worlds. This is nothing new. In fact, CDL only the latest bugbear in the ongoing smearfest between libraries and publishers over how to deal with ebooks.

If you want all the details, you can read this statement on CDL from the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). But basically, in CDL libraries digitize a copy of a print item they own and lend it to a patron on a one-to-one basis. That means CDL does not allow multiple patrons access to an item at once, in either format.

In other words, for every one copy of the print book the library owns, one patron can use the book in either print or digital form at any given time.

A similar concept has been around in libraries for ages: Interlibrary loan, or ILL. (Sorry, librarians love acronyms.)

With ILL, a library lets patrons at other libraries borrow copies of books they own. Just like CDL, there’s a one-to-one relationship. Libraries aren’t photocopying entire books and sending them to other people to do whatever with. Also like CDL, the library has to own the item. They don’t just go grab some random copy from somewhere and sneakily mail it to another library.

With CDL, libraries are not making endless digital copies of random books they don’t even own. They’re taking print copies of titles they do own and making one copy accessible in multiple formats. Only one person ever has the title at once, whether it’s the print or digital version.

It’s also important to note that, despite the claims of authors groups, CDL isn’t illegal digitization. Although I do have a good working knowledge of copyright from both my author and librarian backgrounds, I’m not a lawyer, so here’s an explainer from a pair of copyright law experts that goes into much more detail about the legal aspects of CDL.

There Is No War Between Libraries and Publishers

As a sidebar, I really hate that this is classed as a “war.” Publishers, libraries, and authors are all on the same side: we all want to connect written works with readers. Yes, there are some disagreements on the best way to do that, especially with relatively new, disruptive technologies like ebooks.

Basically, the tussle over ebook lending is best classed as growing pains. Publishers have costs they need to cover, but libraries can’t afford to pay for ebook licenses under the current models (the article linked above cites a $60 title with an ebook license that costs $240 for every 50 loans or every two years, for example, and I know from experience that if you want multiple patrons to read the book at once it gets even more expensive).

As a result, what libraries are trying is digitizing copies of books they already own and lending them to patrons that way. This isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, happening on a large scale in most places. Digitizing books takes a lot of time, and so does maintaining the digital version and the software to lend it.

Is CDL the best thing ever? I don’t think so. I don’t think any library does. It’s just the latest attempt to find a solution that respects publisher’s and author’s rights while still allowing libraries to serve the needs of patrons who can’t afford to buy their own books without using more money than they have in their own budgets.

Conclusion: Support Libraries, Support Publishers, Support Authors

New technologies are disruptive.

Although it’s odd to think of ebooks as “new,” they’re much newer than print books.

Project Gutenberg published the first ebook in 1971, but most ebook publishing didn’t catch on until the late 1990s and early 2000s at the earliest. Print books have existed in some form or another since the 9th century.

And as the ongoing debate about CDL proves, ebooks have definitely disrupted the traditional, print-based models of publishing and libraries both.

But trust me, libraries don’t want to put publishers or authors out of business (we kind of, you know, need them in order for us to exist as public storehouses of knowledge and entertainment) and no author I know of wants to shut down libraries (or at least, would ever admit it in public).

I’m not a publisher, but I’m pretty sure publishers aren’t interested in closing libraries down, either. Even those that are sometimes antagonistic toward library ebook lending understand why libraries have value and are supportive of them, generally speaking.

So, by all means, protect your rights to not have your titles digitized without your consent if you want. Get your digitized versions taken down from the Internet Archive. But please, please can we stop characterizing this as some kind of zero sum game where libraries are melodrama villains interested in twirling their moustaches while authors starve in the streets?

My original science fiction stories “The Future, One Summer Behind” and “Letters Submitted in Place of a Thesis to the Department of Chronology” are out in two anthologies currently available for purchase.

In keeping with the season, both are summery kind of stories, with big storms, summer jobs, festivals, and doomed short-term relationships because one of you is a time traveller from a post climate-collapse timeline!

You know, the usual.

Letters Submitted in Place of a Thesis to the Department of Chronology

When Miki signs up to study in the late 21st century, she expects to meet an entire culture of selfish fools who care more about their own luxuries than the state of the planet. The truth, of course, is much more complex than that.

Caught up in the thrill of experiencing real weather on her first trip out of the 32nd century’s carefully protected arcologies, Miki will have to choose between her studies and her present or her new friends—and humanity’s future on the planet.

Told in a mishmash of formats, including a thesis excerpt, emails, and actual letters, “Letters Submitted to the Department of Chronology in Place of a Thesis” is a story about deterministic pessimism, time travel, climate change, academia, and not giving up, with a queer/poly romance among the central characters.

Published in Black Eyed Peas on New Years Day: An Anthology of Hope from Book View Cafe, April, 2021. To purchase a copy, visit the publisher’s website.

The anthology also features stories by Laurence Brothers, Michael M Jones, Holly Schofield, Liam Hogan, and many other excellent writers. Go check it out!

The Future, One Summer Behind

Every year since she was six years old, Kirsi has dreaded Maricourt Crater’s summer festival. The festival’s famous darkroom—supposed to let you experience a thirty-second burst of your own future, one summer ahead—has only ever showed her a feedback loop of anxiety and anticipation.

Now that she’s out of creche, she’s really too old for kids’ stuff like that. As her summer job kicks off, though, she can’t help wondering: what if it’s her own indecision and uselessness to blame for what the darkroom shows her every year? What if she decides to change, before visiting the festival one last time?

Published in A Quiet Afternoon 2, an anthology of “lo-fi” science fiction and fantasy stories from Grace & Victory Press in July, 2021. To purchase a copy, visit the publisher’s website.

The anthology has stories by L. Chan, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, Liam Hogan (yes, again!), Aimee Ogden, and many other great writers as well. This one is a breath of fresh air in these turbulent times and definitely worth picking up.

My story is technically a prequel to another story featuring Kirsi and Aala and the Maricourt Crater community, “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” which came out in last year’s No Police = Know Future anthology from Experimenter Press. If you missed that one, now you have an excuse to go add it to your bookshelf as well!

I’m following up last week’s post on how to write short stories with an interview with Laura Pearlman, a professionally published speculative fiction author and all-around mad genius. But you don’t have to take my word for it…

Laura Pearlman’s fiction has appeared in Nature, Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and a handful of other places. Her LOLcat captions have appeared on McSweeney’s. She’s a former associate editor at Escape Pod and editor of the almost entirely hypothetical CatsCast podcast. You can find her online at @laurasbadideas on Twitter

If you haven’t read Laura’s fiction, you’re in for a treat. Her visions are unique and often hilarious, making it pretty easy to pick out a “Laura story” even if you don’t spot the byline. To be honest, she’s also a whizz at titles, as you can see from “So, One of Those Tiny Alien Spaceships Has Flown Into Your House. Now What?” (Nature, 2018) and “The Shadow Over My Dorm Room” from 2018’s Cackle of Cthulhu anthology.

Perhaps my favourite piece of fiction from Laura, though, is “I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything,” (Flash Fiction Online, 2015). So I was thrilled when Laura agreed to let me interview her about the story (which I’m going to just call “Graalnak”) and her writing process for this blog post!

You don’t have to read the story to enjoy this interview (Laura’s just that good), but I highly recommend it. Not only will it help you figure out how the insights she shares can be applied to writing a story, it’s just such a fun piece of flash.

Interview

Stewart: Graalnak is one of my favourite pieces of humorous flash fiction. It’s got personality in spades (no doubt because spades are important for harvesting radishes), has multiple running gags, effectively mimics a real-life form of communication, and–even more impressively–it does all that while telling an actual story. Which part of the story came to you first, and how did you manage to keep all of those moving parts coherent in under 1000 words?

Laura: At some point, I noticed that the same “I am [name], [verb]-er of [noun]” structure showed up in Reddit AMA titles and Game of Thrones dialogue, and I knew I had to do something with that.

I made the jump to an alien overlord AMA pretty quickly. I had to make a few adjustments — my original concept was that the Vroon were grinding up humans for radish fertilizer, which, it turns out, isn’t funny — but it mostly flowed pretty smoothly from there.

The hardest part was the ending. I knew I wanted Graalnak to leave Earth. I eventually decided he should be tricked into searching for better radishes elsewhere, but my initial thought was that this would require a vast, complicated conspiracy. I couldn’t come up with a good way to convey this without breaking the format, though, so I scaled it down to the current ending.

As to keeping it all to 1000 words — one nice thing about this format is that there’s no need to spend any words on descriptions of characters, settings, or movement.

Stewart: Humans being ground up for fertilizer definitely would have been a very different story! It’s interesting how you jumped from AMA/GOT to alien overlords to uh… less murdery humour. Could you talk a little bit about your usual process for writing flash, and whether you stuck to that with Graalnak or not?

Laura: Graalnak was probably the easiest story I’ve ever written, because I had a strong sense of what it was going to be before I started writing. The details changed along the way, but it was always going to be about an evil alien overlord with an overbearing personality who eventually left Earth.

Most of the time, though, I don’t start out with a solid sense of what a story will be, so I tend to flail a lot. For flash, I might decide on a format (e.g., a Reddit thread), and I’ll write and rewrite the first paragraph until I have a good feel for the main character and voice. Then I’ll struggle to find a plot. At some point, I’ll wonder whether I’ve completely lost my ability to write. Eventually, I’ll either abandon the story or produce a terrible first draft.

Then comes the part I actually enjoy: iterating over that draft, finding threads (themes, running gags, character traits, voice, aspects of the world, etc.) and strengthening them, cutting away excess clutter, changing the ending, sometimes switching to a completely different format — basically, transforming that first draft into something I can read without cringing, then to something that’s maybe sort of okay, and then to something that’s actually pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Stewart: It’s definitely a great feeling to move from a cringey first draft to something that meets your standards! You’ve written flash and longer fiction. Do you think there are any noticeable differences between writing each form? Any tips for people trying their hand at flash fiction for the first time?

Laura: My goals are different for flash and for longer stories. When I’m writing a longer story, my goal is usually to more-or-less directly relate the events of the story. When I’m writing flash, I typically think about what events are happening in the story and then create an artifact (a reddit thread, one side of an email conversation, a public service announcement) that reflects those events indirectly, leaving it up to the reader to infer what’s going on. Just to be clear, I’m not saying all flash should be like that! Lots of excellent flash stories use a straight narrative structure to communicate clearly and directly; it’s just that none of those stories were written by me.

So here’s my advice:

1. Regardless of what form you’re writing in (straight narrative, epistolary, a series of yelp reviews), make sure there’s an actual story behind it.
2. Trust your readers. They’re probably better at picking up inferences than you think.
3. Of course it’s always good to show your story to someone else and get their opinion. But don’t think you need every reader to understand everything about the story — that’s an impossible goal, at least without overexplaining things to death.
4. Ignore this if it doesn’t work for you. There’s lots of writing advice that’s good for some people and bad for others.

Stewart: Excellent advice! Incidentally, have you noticed how “advice” and “radish” have almost all the same letters? Okay, maybe they don’t. But what’s the deal with the radishes in Graalnak? (I notice they’re also in the header image on your website.)

Laura: For the story, I chose them more or less randomly — I wanted something consumable that most people don’t have strong positive or negative feelings about (I don’t think the story would have been nearly as funny if Graalnak had been obsessed with bacon or kale).

Radishes started invading my real life around the time the story was published. My interviewer at Flash Fiction Online told me she grows radishes in her garden. Right after the story came out, my sister said she’d seen radishes at the farmer’s market had bought some because of me. Over the next few weeks, friends started telling me things like “there were radishes in my salad at lunch, and I thought of you.”

So radishes are my thing now. Also, they’re pretty.

Stewart: To be fair, radishes are delicious. I’ve always identified with Graalnak on a deep, primal level for… Okay, I can’t say that with a straight face, either. Anyway, thanks for letting me pick your brain about this story and writing flash fiction in general! Do you have any other stories you’ve written that you’d like to share with people, or any exciting news?

Laura: No exciting news, but you can find links to all my published stories on my website.

Stewart: Thanks again for stopping by!

Closing Thoughts

That’s pretty much it for this post!

You can read and analyze Graalnak, if you want to see what makes a great flash story tick. Otherwise, just keep writing with an eye to your goals and schedule, and take a breather if you’re feeling burnt out. Self-care is an important part of any hobby or career!

Next week, I’ll cover writers block and some methods for tackling it.