Writing Community

I've joined a few writing communities over the years with mixed results.  At their roots, some of them seemed like they would be genuinely helpful as workshops and networking opportunities.  Being new to the game, it sounded like I could learn much about a large variety of topics:  writing, promotion, publishing, contracts and more.  I fantasized that I would become part of a tightly knit group of genre fiction writers, helping each other along the way to greatness.

The first was a Yahoo group organized by an enthusiastic writer and geared toward speculative fiction.  I liked the small size, which I hoped would mean lots of opportunities for submissions and constructive criticism of my work.  Each week, we reviewed one story by a different writer in the group.  I worked hard to give gentle but valuable critiques, being specific and offering the best suggestions I could.  When my turn came to submit a story to the group, I expected similar treatment of my work.  My expectations were met by some people, exceeded by a couple and left extremely wanting by most.  Not much later, the group's organizer decided to disband the group, and I was unsurprisingly grateful to move on.

The second group I joined was much larger.  I thought the size would offer so many participants that I could statistically count on some helpful critiques.  Instead, the group's criteria for submissions was based on the number of stories one reviewed compared to those reviewed by other members.  Only a few people who had time to review a dozen or more stories could hope to get any attention given to their own works.  I tried for months but couldn't seem to provide good reviews if I wanted to hit competitive numbers.  Again it failed to be what I needed.

My third attempt was to enroll in a continuing education writing class at my local community college. It was even geared specifically for science fiction and fantasy authors.  The catalog description claimed it would be taught by a published author, and it promised to enlighten me on publishing and marketing strategies as well.  I received notice by mail that the class was cancelled due to insufficient enrollment numbers.  This happened for two different semesters, so I haven't bothered to try a third time.  Thankfully my money was refunded, but I wish I could have talked to the other people who enrolled.  Maybe we could have formed a local writing group, which was one of my initial reasons for signing up for the class in the first place.

I've been lucky enough to have a friend, Cliff, who has been the advanced reader for most of the fiction I've written.  It was with his encouragement that I submitted "Catalyst" to Nonlocal Science Fiction.  He also read my story, "The Hzeen", which is due to be published in Nonlocal SF #3, coming out in September.  Cliff also writes, and we've had a mutually beneficial author-reviewer relationship for several years now.  I've encouraged him to submit to Nonlocal SF as well, since I feel like I've been very lucky to be included and helped out by the publisher, Dan.

Dan has been a different kind of editor/publisher than I've encountered so far.  I was initially blown away by his willingness to offer suggestions for "Catalyst" rather than flatly reject it.  I knew from previous submissions that this was a rare thing, and I was determined not to take it for granted.  When Dan contacted the authors he's agreed to publish so far and mentioned his intentions to establish a community around his publishing company, I couldn't help but feel like I had come home.  There will be some additional work involved.  For instance, I might have to contribute content to the website from time to time and continue to periodically submit stories there.  Honestly, it sounds like stuff I'd like to do anyway if I can find time.

For those of you anxious to check it out, here's a link:  http://nonlocalscifi.com/

You'll find movie and book reviews, as well as articles about science fiction writing and other media. There are links to the podcast, including author interviews such as the one with yours truly.  Dan also has plans for forums lined up, so not only will you be able to consume fantastic content there, you'll be able to join discussions and be part of the community as it develops.

Please help me contribute to the growth of a thriving community, for all lovers of science fiction, by liking Nonlocal Science Fiction on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.  As always, I thank you for reading and all the other support you've given me so far.

Two Things That Made Me Feel Awesome

Two things happened since my last blog entry that made me feel awesome(r), and I'm going to share them with you.  Just try to stop me.

The first was some stellar news in the writing area.  I submitted another story to Nonlocal Science Fiction, and the publisher had some very flattering things to say about it, including that he felt it superior to my story in the first issue.  As with the last story, he gave me some helpful advice about things that he thought would make it better.  He will be sending some more detailed notes later, since I'll be preparing it for the third issue.  I made mention of this story in this blog some time ago.  It's set in a post-apocalyptic world full of savagery and vast tracts of wasteland.  The central character is a member of a society of hybrid plant beings, housed in an enclave amid dangerous mutants and wild creatures.  It was inspired by my time playing a role-playing game called Gamma World.  Some of you might be familiar with its setting.

I find role-playing games to be wondrous outlets for creativity.  They are engines for collaborative storytelling, and I have spent perhaps thousands of hours (if not more) both playing them and creating stories in them.  Given time and imagination, there seems to be no story that couldn't be told using them.  And why not just write the story?  When two, three or more people are involved in the mostly improvised story and a random element of dice rolls is used, the level of uncertainty increases exponentially.  A well planned plot can seemingly run off the rails with a few decisions made by one or more players.  Sometimes that leads to confusion, and other times it leads to unexpected brilliance. Writing stories is cool, don't get me wrong, but being part of a great story created by a group of friends is way cool.  Discussing games like this leads me to awesome thing number two.

My son asked me about a year ago if he could try playing a tabletop role-playing game.  I was elated, but let me put this into its proper perspective.  Lots of dads experience a moment of tearful joy with their sons.  For most, it's that day the son first hits a baseball or scores a touchdown or some other sports-related example of excellence that's beyond me.  For me, it was watching my son carefully roll his first d10 and calculate his defensive bonus.  An even better experience happened today when he said he wanted to try being the Game Master.  This is the person who leads the game, creates the story, acts out the characters not used by the other players and describes the setting and the action.  In other words, the Game Master is THE BOSS and also the person responsible for the players having a good time.  In the case of my son, letting him do this is also an underhanded way for me to get him to practice writing.  Writing is something he hates to do, but imagining and creating are things he loves. I get to teach him that they can be fused together into a +5 Battleaxe of Awesome.  He's also smart, so he might catch on at some point.  Hopefully by then he'll be having too much fun to care.

He's going to flip out when I buy him his own set of dice.  Can't wait.

The third thing was that I received news from people receiving their print copies of Nonlocal Science Fiction #1 and other KickStarter rewards.  Responses so far have been very positive.  I know quite a few of my friends and relatives contributed to the KickStarter, and I want to thank them all again.

But that's three things that made me feel awesome...

Bonus!  

Assimilation Fail

Way back in 1996, fed up with Upstate NY winters, I packed my meager belongings into my '89 Pontiac Grand Am and drove south to Cary, NC.  I liked the idea of settling in a suburb of Raleigh, even if it meant commuting into the city.  NC had frequently been a pit stop on the way to Florida to see my grandparents, and it seemed like someplace better than NY in the winter and less likely to incinerate me in the summer than parts further south.  The Raleigh area was growing, and there were opportunities to be found.

There were enough transplanted Yankees in the Raleigh area to give me a taste of home, but finding a permanent job was a challenge.  I knew a friend who had moved to NC a few months before, and I decided to give him a call.  I hoped he might know some people who were hiring, and I hadn't talked to him in some time.

He didn't have much to offer me in the way of job prospects, but he and his wife let me stay in a spare bedroom while I looked for work.  I moved there to Winston-Salem not long after our phone conversation, quitting my temp job and saying goodbye to the Motel 6 I'd called home for several weeks.

It took some getting used to.  While everyone I met showed me kindness typical of southern hospitality, I could only understand their speech with great effort.  It baffled me that conversations were in English and still so difficult to maintain.  I was often grateful when people would give up trying to speak to me like and adult and switch to greatly exaggerated, monosyllabic speech with familiar hand gestures.  Obviously they had at least a little trouble understanding me as well, but everybody was nice about it.  Often conversations resulted in laughter, after patience had been exhausted.

Eventually I managed an understanding of perhaps 75 percent of the local dialect.  It was easy for me to adopt "y'all", but harder for me to allow other words and phrases to slip into my speech patterns. Some of the resistance was intentional.  I refused to ever "mash" a button.  That's just the way it was. I also never believed that anybody "might could" do something for me, especially a person who told me that he didn't want to "maybe" me.  Didn't "maybe" mean the same thing as "might could"?

I've become pretty adventurous in my gastronomic explorations, and there were many foods I adopted with gusto, as evidenced by my growing gut.  Even my expanding waistline was viewed as "healthy" by my new friends and neighbors.  Fried catfish, pulled pork barbecue and hush puppies seemed like things I should've been eating my entire life, but coleslaw I could not stand.  I will never be a Southerner as long as I'm unable to stomach that slimy cabbage concoction, and people want me to eat it on everything:  hot dogs, burgers, BBQ.  They acted shocked when I asked them to substitute more hush puppies or an actual salad.  It was like I had spit on their heritage when I refused to eat it atop a chili-dog.  Please hold the collard greens, too.  No offense, but anything that has to be seasoned by frying it in pork fat should no longer be considered a vegetable.

So here I've been for nearly 20 years, and I'm stuck at 90 percent assimilation completed.  There I will likely remain as long as 'slaw is part of the equation, even though I speak the lingo, married a native and sampled corn liquor.

Star Wars Envy

I was as psyched as anybody when The Phantom Menace premiered in 1999.  We had all been waiting 16 years for a new Star Wars movie.  I was expecting the same magic that entranced me back when I was six years old and saw A New Hope in the theater.  I didn't account for 16 years of reading and watching other science fiction, let alone my tastes changing and maturing.  None of us children of the '80's can watch Phantom Menace through the same eyes that we saw our first Star Wars movie, and we're all the worse for it.

I'm not a film critic.  I don't have a theater or cinema background.  I'm just a lover of good stories, especially science fiction and fantasy.  I haven't seen the newer films a dozen times each, and I have most of my sanity intact to prove it.  I've certainly watched worse movies, but I seldom watch anything as disappointing.  It's with some reservation that I anticipate the upcoming film, The Force Awakens.  I haven't even watched the trailers.  When I see Age of Ultron, where the next trailer is supposed to debut, I might be the guy in the theater with his fingers in his ears and his eyes clamped shut.

My son had never seen Phantom Menace.  Initially I made the case that he wasn't old enough.  The violence is more intense, I told myself.  It can be hard to follow, especially because the dialogue at times seems like it was written by someone in a hurry to get back to more explosions and light saber duels.  That's exactly how I felt when I watched it, and I was curious to see how my son would feel about it.  Would he experience the same feelings I had for the original trilogy?  Would he choke on the same stuff that gagged me when first saw Phantom Menace, nearly twenty years his senior? Would I have to watch my son experience pain on that same level?  It would break my heart, but there was only one way to find out.  I couldn't just avoid it and pretend he wasn't interested.

My son had been spoiled for the movie a bit because we played the Lego Star Wars games.  In that medium, the Phantom Menace was superior because there was no dialogue, and humor was injected into areas that the movie (laughably) asked you to take seriously.  Jar Jar was funny in the game.  To my son, movie Jar Jar was also funny because he was "likable and stupid".  His words were much kinder than what I would have said.

The pod race was undoubtedly one of the highlights for him.  It was very exciting, but Jake Lloyd's acting makes me cringe.  I could cut him more of a break if I hadn't seen such good acting by kids in Game of Thrones.  Talented child actors can be found if one is willing to do the work.  Even the first time I saw the movie, the pod race seemed longer than made sense.  My son ate it up.  It was one of the few times during the movie that he sat nearly still.  He commented about how difficult that part of the video game was.  I agreed.  We didn't have the benefit of the force when we were trying to pilot those things on the Wii.

Darth Maul was, of course, "cool and creepy" to my son.  The light saber sequence among Qui-Gon, Obiwan and Maul was his and my favorite scene in the movie.  All of the other light saber action in the film seemed casually ridiculous to me.  There were scenes where my son said it was "a lot more fun and crazy in the game".  He called the fight leading to Qui-Gon's death "intense" and some of the same action when fighting droids "lame" by comparison.  Agreed.  How intimidating are droids that fall apart when their control module stops working?  If the Trade Federation isn't smart enough to buy better technology than that, they deserve to be defeated by the likes of Jar Jar and some punk kid, midi-chlorians or not.

My son's overall rating for the movie was "7 out of 10 stars".  He might have given it eight if I hadn't choked on a popcorn hull as he started to suggest it.  I tried not to sway him, but apparently my poker face stinks.  Maybe we'll watch it again in 15 years and see if he feels the same way.  No, why do that to myself.  He can watch it and tell me about it afterward.

Fishing With Family

As a boy, I eagerly awaited April first every year.  Fishing season started that day, though there was sometimes still snow on the ground.  I have a lot of great memories of fishing with my father.  In ten minutes, we could walk to the Delaware River as it flowed through town.  When the weather warmed, we would take the canoe downriver and get picked up by my mom.  We could drift along, casting and slowly reeling in our lures with hardly a need to paddle.  Sometimes in the summer droughts, the river water level would fall so low that we had to wade through the shallows, splashing along in our old sneakers.

Perhaps the most memorable first day of fishing season for me happened over thirty years ago. Naturally some of the details have clouded with time.  I'll always remember it fondly, despite the cold and going home empty-handed.

Dad woke me near sunrise.  I was disoriented, but the announcement of fishing quickly set my heart racing.  I dressed in a hurry, and I could hear him heading downstairs.  Mom and my sister were awake, too.  Our whole family was getting ready to go, some more enthusiastically than others.

After a quick breakfast, we bundled up while Dad grabbed the rods and tackle.    He even had worms for bait.  Who knew where he'd found those that time of year?  The ground was still frozen.  I never thought to ask, too busy thinking about trout.  My sister was still very young, but she was always an adventurous spirit and was nearly as excited as I was.

The walk wasn't far.  To stay out of the road, I walked atop the banks of snow created by the plows. The surface had frozen and easily supported my weight.  I could have run the whole way in my excitement, but we all stuck together.  Dad smiled ear to ear in the early light.  My sister's cheeks were rosy in the cold, and her eyes betrayed the joy she found in nearly everything at that age.  Our noses ran, and we sniffed and coughed.  Mom produced tissues as if by magic, always prepared even at that time of day.

It seemed to take forever to arrive at the bridge.  In the summer, there would always be several people fishing over the guardrails.  It was empty on that frigid day, as the river flowed silently below.  We made our way across the bridge, heading over the piled snow and down the bank, through the frosty grass.  Mom held my sister's hand.  I was too big for that, always in a hurry to grow up.

Dad baited my hook, so I wouldn't have to take off my gloves.  I always felt bad for the worms but tried not to let it show.  I cast the poor, impaled creature out into a deeper pool, where neighborhood kids sometimes swam, and kept my eye on the bobber.  Dad moved on to my sister and cast for her, before taking up his own rod.  It was very quiet, like all sound had frozen, but it didn't last more than a few minutes.

My sister started crying.  I looked over, expecting a hook in her finger.  She had somehow gotten her long hair tangled in the fishing line.  The more Mom tried to unwind her hair, the louder she cried.  I reeled in my worm and watched ice crystals form on his waterlogged segments.  Mom called Dad for some help, but he had stepped away.  I didn't remember when he reeled in his lure, but he wasn't beside me.  I wondered if he had needed to go pee.

Mom called him again, asking where he was.  Nothing.  My sister's crying became less frantic, and I saw that Mom was having some luck with her hair.  She ceased crying altogether as she looked around for Dad, and Mom managed to free the rest of her locks.  Mom grew very quiet.  Inquiries concerning Dad's whereabouts were conspicuously ignored.  The walk home was not as fun as the walk to the bridge.

Inside the house, the heat washed over us.  Dad was nowhere to be seen, but I could smell coffee and hear wood popping in the fireplace.  I pulled off my winter duds and made my way around the corner. There at the dining room table sat Dad.  The fire crackled behind him as he took a very deliberate sip from his steaming coffee cup.  He folded up the newspaper when my sister and Mom entered the room.

"April Fools!"  Dad grinned.  I had forgotten that day wasn't only the beginning of fishing season.  We all had, except Dad.  I couldn't help laughing.

Great Stories Where You'd Least Expect Them

I've long been a fan of speculative fiction.  I love immersing myself in an adventure, fantastical or otherwise, and braving long odds via characters much more courageous than myself.  My favorite tales make it easy to lose myself, as a steady stream of images fill my head.  When I envision everything in the plot in cinematic detail, it's no wonder it takes me so long to read a novel.  I don't really care how long it takes, as long as I'm engaged.  The more in touch I am with the characters and their conflicts, the harder it is to put down the book.

It's the same with video games for me.  There are some games built around a superbly crafted story, complete with characters that seem so genuinely human that you can't help sympathizing with them. These are the gems.  My expectations only seem to rise as the technology improves.  Mashing buttons while defeating threats doesn't really cut it anymore.

Now here I'm definitely dating myself, but I cut my teeth on the Atari 2600.  Space Invaders, Frogger, Pacman and Joust were a few of my favorites.  Beyond the difficulty involved in keeping the pixelated hero alive, there wasn't a lot to these types of games.  There was a game called Adventure that sent me on a quest through mazes and other obstacles, finding keys and battling dragons.  It was the height of gaming technology at the time, and it was about as immersive as an algebra assignment. I could pretend that I, Sir Square, set out to slay the dragons (squiggles) with the help of my trusty sword (an arrow) amid a maze of blue rectangles, but it was very easy to turn off and forget.

I had my first experience with an engaging video game story when I played "System Shock 2" somewhere around 2001. There were undoubtedly others I had missed, but this is the first I remember.  It was also the first game to give me an idea of what the medium could become over time.  I cared about the characters. The tension was very real, often startling me nearly out of my chair.  Even though there was little interaction with other characters outside the artificial intelligence, SHODAN, the crew of the spaceships seemed very real.  I had only their audio journals to learn about them, but I could sympathize with their fears and learn from their instructions, even if I couldn't interact with them.  I wanted more stories in my games after that.  There were a few that came close, but it was a long time until I got what I really wanted.

Nearly 14 years after System Shock 2 was released, The Last of Us debuted.  It was, and remains so far, the only game I ever ordered before it hit shelves.  I did this because I had seen some news about the game's unprecedented storytelling and character development.  The preview really sold me.  I watched the main characters make their ways through part of an American city after a horrible plague wiped out most of civilization.  The characters had been shaped by loss and grief, had hardened themselves to surviving at all costs, and somehow they both needed each other on an emotional level that neither was equipped to express.  Sounds like something I'd enjoy reading, and that's what made it such a compelling game.  It was difficult to stop playing.  I wanted to know what would happen next on their journey, and every time I somehow navigated them through one scrape they would find themselves in another.  It was a video game after all, so there was plenty of running and fighting and overcoming obstacles.  Always the story took precedence over all of these traditional video game elements, and that's what I loved.  I enjoyed the character interactions so much, that I immediately played it again once I had finished it.  That had never happened before with other games.

I don't have time to play video games very often these days, but I have a feeling that I will make time if there's ever another that can engage me the same way a great novel can.  There probably are, and I just haven't heard of them, but so far I haven't found any that string me along like The Last of Us did. Perhaps there's even a future for me as a writer in this medium.  It would be something I'd like to try, though I'm sure it's very different from writing a story or novel.  I'll have to look into it.  Getting a chance to combine two of my favorite things would be a dream come true.

The Twister Down the Street

Extreme weather makes for exciting news.  There's certainly a lot of time spent covering the hurricanes that sweep the NC coast each year.  Some poor newscaster is usually decked out like the Gorton's Fisherman, while rain lashes and wind buffets.  Normally only the aftermath of tornadoes is seen on the news.  Felled trees and power lines feature heavily.

These violent displays of nature are awesome and fascinating to me, from a distance.  Up close, they can be genuinely terrifying and utterly humbling when facing the forces involved.  To see mature trees ripped from the earth and scattered like matchsticks, or vehicles tumbled by surging floodwater, leaves me speechless and feeling fortunate to have survived.

Several years ago, we had a close call with a tornado.  There are no basements in most homes around me.  The water table is too high to make them practical.  The best we could do was find an interior hallway as far from windows as we could manage.  I held the dogs, one panting and trembling during the thunder and the other more concerned with the wandering cat.  The cat, oblivious to the danger, sauntered through the kitchen after escaping us.  He wanted a drink of water.

My son was more excited than scared.  My wife held him, and we did our best to maintain calm faces and voices.  I watched through the kitchen windows as the trees bent nearly double by the wind and the sky darkened.  The rain drummed against the glass of the storm door.  Weather alerts squawked from our cell phones, telling us that a tornado had touched down near our neighborhood.  My mind raced to thoughts of trees crashing into the roof.  I tried not to grind my teeth to powder.

It was over quickly.  The wind calmed, and the rain slackened to a drizzle.  No trees came down on the house or in our back yard, proof of the flexibility of the pines.  We freed the dogs and kid. Slowly we ventured out to assess the damage.  Our house was one of the lucky few left unscathed. My son pointed across the street and said, "Where's their tree?"  My wife pointed to the house nextdoor and replied, "There."  The tree had been blown into the neighbor's garage and through her front window.

Out back, there was a smell we couldn't identify.  We should've recognized it immediately, but for some reason we didn't.  There was a hissing sound, and we realized there was a gas leak nearby.  We rushed out front to talk to people and make sure we weren't crazy.  Word was being passed that we needed to evacuate our neighborhood until the leak could be capped off.

We hurried the dogs into the car, no sign of the cat, and left.  It was crowded in that Chevy Prizm, and my son was soon tired of sharing the back seat with the mutts.  We decided on the park, since we would be able to take the dogs out and walk around a bit.  Small, uprooted trees were scattered about, but none blocked the road.

We spent a couple of hours in the park before deciding we should head home.  The neighborhood wasn't blocked off, so we assumed it was safe to return.  We drove past our house, wanting to assess the damage on our street.  That's when we saw where the gas leak must have originated, just a few blocks away.  The house had been torn from its foundation and blown into the home nextdoor, where it had pulverized half of the second story.  We learned later that the dislodged home had been thankfully vacant at the time of the storm.

I still get a little nervous every time the clouds roll in and the wind picks up this time of year.  I think about how close we came to losing our home, possibly our lives.  It was the first time I had experienced a tornado since moving to NC from NY in 1996.  It probably won't be the last.  When I talk to NC natives about it, they laugh it off like it's just a right of passage, even my wife.  I look at them like they're crazy.  Then it dawns on me that it's the same look they give me when I tell them they've never seen a real snow storm.