I was recently interviewed by the lovely and talented Silvia Moreno-Garcia over at Innsmouth Free Press regarding my stint at Clarion West and Writers of the Future. I was extremely pleased to do the interview, first off because Silvia’s a friend, and a fellow Vancouverite, but also because I’m excited by the concept behind Innsmouth Free Press.

From their website:

Innsmouth Free Press is a fictional newspaper publishing faux news in a Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos universe, as well as original short fiction stories. We also feature some of Lovecraft’s classic tales.

My own fiction has, of late, been inspired by the Lovecraftian Mythos. It feels like a rejection of the popular “god as just a dude with super powers” theme that’s emerged recently. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read my share of Forgotten Realms/Dragonlance novels and loved them, but if you want to write outside of media fiction, you should steer clear of their ideas too, and the “gods as suped-up characters” is really their thing.

To Lovecraft, gods and demons were alien to our universe, and thus, by definition, beyond comprehension. The divine beings who show up in my fiction are closer to the one described in Nancy Kress’ award winning short story “Trinity” than an old guy in a beard–that is to say, creatures of such immense power that we are as beyond Their notice as an ant is to us. Or an amoeba.

Innsmouth has also been publishing some of my favourite spec fic personalities, from Campbell Award Winner Mary Robinette Kowal in their latest issue, to editor/writer Nick Mamatas in their debut. With such big names anchoring each issue, expect great things from this little magazine.

Tags: Clarion West, Innsmouth Free Press, Interviews, Writers of the Future

I am writing this from my laptop, which is tethered to my iPhone. I now have internet anywhere, which, I’m pretty sure, makes me some kind of Info God. Technology tickles me.

Clarion West week 6 went really well. I really got along with Rudy Rucker and his wife, who were both very sweet. Rucker is damn weird, but really fun. He took us all into the scary sorority shrine I mentioned earlier and made us chant writerly chants for about half an hour. If I can find it, I’ll try and post the chant at a later date. He really encouraged us to break free from our moulds. Rucker’s writing style is very different from anything you read out there, and you can tell he doesn’t adhere to convention. And it works for him. I’d recommend reading Postsingular to see what I mean (it was a quick read. Finished it in a couple of hours).

Rucker gave us a couple of pieces of advice from his own career. A) Start or (preferably join) a movement like Cyperpunk. It gets you media attention. B) Don’t be afraid to start your own ezine. That column is checked for me!

Graduation was awesome. Leslie and Neile really go all out. We got secret decoder rings with LEDs in them, but the battery was dead in mine. How fitting. There are no shortcuts for me.

Now I’m back in Vancouver trying to get all caught up, which is why I’ve been absent. Writers of the Future looms next week, so it’s literally out of the workshop frying pan and into the fire for me. It’s funny though, because they’ve set up a google group and are full of excitement and anticipation, the exact same way everyone was for Clarion West, except that there are still “missing you” messages coming through the CW group. I’m feeling like I can’t be chipper and anticipactory yet, because I’m still in missing CW mode. I don’t recommend doing these two workshops in one year.

Anyways, Andrew LeBlanc and I are challenging each other to keep writing a story a week, so this week I wrote DON’T MOVE A MUSCLE, MR. LIBERTY, which I’m quite proud of. Andy took a look at it and told me that CW has stepped up my writing a notch. High praise.

Andy is my single biggest influence as a writer. When we first met, I thought I knew how to write.  We collaborated on a novel idea about someone who could teleport, and I basically wrote Jumper. He wrote what I thought was weird shit about some autistic dude who could fold space. The prose was freaking phenomenal, but I was like “this idea is too weird”. I can see now that I wasn’t even skilled enough to recognize good writing. I used to spend long hours studying Andy’s prose to see how the hell he managed to write prose so brilliantly. His line edits were treasured possessions. I probably wouldn’t have won WotF with “After the Final Sunset, Again” if Andy hadn’t offered suggestions on how to rework the beginning.

That’s why I really hope this challenge is successful. Andy is a brilliant writer when he writes, and the world needs brilliant writers. I need him to continue writing so I can continue learning from him (and just maybe teach him a trick or two of my own). Most of all, I want to read his stuff.

I’ve learned a couple of things over the last four years. If you write, you’ll get better. If you don’t you won’t (of course, that doesn’t matter too much if you’re like Andy and you start at brilliant). And for chrissakes, hang out with better writers than you. Don’t go to writing.com or critters because the vast majority of that stuff is awful. Find your own Andy to mentor you, and then return the favour by kicking his ass when he doesn’t write.

Hopefully one day, you’ll see a LeBlanc novel sitting on a shelf next to a Lapp. But only if he writes one. I know I will.

*Andy, consider this your ass-kicking post. If you’re reading this, you should be writing!

Tags: Andy LeBlanc, Clarion West

The thing about being an amazing Thing player is that you get picked right away as a Thing and then killed (because people trust your judgement and you are likely to eliminate the real Things).

Dammit. I need to be a worse Thing player so that I’m able to survive the first couple of rounds. I’m ALWAYS turned into the Thing sooner or later.

Tags: Clarion West

Sorry that I haven’t been posting lately. Believe me when I tell you that we’ve been worked off our asses here.

For this Clarion class, Week 5 was our week four. There was a fair amount of drama, some people broke down (but recovered), and there were tons of in-jokes in the stories.

We held a Drunken Flash Fiction night. This was awesome, and fully deserves to become a new Clarion West tradition. We all got hammered then sat down in the common room, all sixteen of us, laptops open. We got two “one word prompts” from the person on either side of us. Mine were “motherland” and “gangsta land”. We had twenty minuets to write, then we went around the circle and read what we had aloud. Maybe some day I’ll be convinced to post the story I wrote on this blog, but my arm would have to be twisted something fierce. Let’s just say that I’m the only guy in the world who, when he tries to read in the voice of an African American gangsta, actually sounds whiter. Like Christopher Walkin, to be exact. People were falling out of their chairs laughing.

David Hartwell’s week was pretty tough. He shared a lot of Things You Don’t Want To Hear with several writers, and I know one of us was almost in tears. My story, “GAS PIPES AND SIGILS” (soon to be retitled), did fairly well in critique. The main comments were that my characterization was thin (as always), and the world needed to be developed more (as always in a first draft). Then it got to David Hartwell. He suggested that I was doing too many close-ups and that I needed a better ear for prose. A better ear for prose? Ouch. I went into private conference a little upset, but he told me that I write publishable stuff and that I needed to just take my prose from 85% to 100%. This was extremely heartening. He said that if I wrote an entire novel like the story I’d written it would probably sell, because he didn’t recall anything like it. Zing! He did, however, suggest that I buy a major poetry anthology and read it aloud to work on the meter of my prose. I will certainly do that.

The party on Friday was pretty awesome (for me). I got to meet one of my heroes, David D Levine. I’ve been following (and trying to emulate) his career. He was the reason I entered Writers of the Future, and he was the reason that I signed up for Clarion West. He’s a tremendous writer (did I mention that he won a Hugo!), and he’s pretty free with advice. It’s always nice when your heroes turn out to be great people in real life.  Unfortunately, I had to rescue a fellow Clarionite who’d run into some trouble, so I never got to say goodbye, but I hope to meet him again at a local con.

I also got to meet Jay Lake, who’s a pretty great guy. The first time I met him, he gave me a pin that read “My Mom Thinks I’m Better Than Jay Lake”, and when I reminded him of that, he chuckled and said that that sounded like something he’d do. He shared some advice about Writers of the Future (he won that too), and we spoke a little about blogging. Apparently, it kills conversation because people you talk to know all your small talk.

We got to meet Rudy Rucker and he seems really cool and pretty laid back which is definitely what we need. A few people have hit “critique fail”, where they have been reading a story and said “All the words are there, but they just don’t make sense to me in my current state”, not because the stories aren’t strong, but because we’re all so exhausted.

My last piece is entitled GIANT IN THE PLAYGROUND and is a hard-sci fi space opera (does that made sense??). The bones are there, but it’ll need at least two more rewrites. If I had to sum it up, it would be Sherlock Holmes battles Cthulu in space. Reconcile that to the first line of this paragraph, and you might just get it. Oh, and it’s based on a blond joke. So there.

Anyways, five more days until I get to see Alicia. Clarion West has been amazing, but I really miss my actual life. Six weeks is great, but I don’t think I could do a seventh.

Tags: Clarion West, David G Hartwell, Rudy Rucker, Writers of the Future

Well, just turned in my horror short story, THE SHAKEN LEAF, complete at 5300 words. The title is taken from this very mangled biblical quote from Leviticus “and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth“.

The premise is an interesting one, one I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years, and is my attempt to generate a completely original monster not based on tropes from any established mythology. I got tired of reading about zombies and vampires (even in pro mags like ChiZine), and wondered why there weren’t more original monsters in modern storytelling. Usually, when I ask myself, “Why doesn’t X exist?” that’s a cue for me to write one. Thus, “The Shaken Leaf” was born, though I’m thinking of retitling it “As From the Sword” since that has a better ring to it.

This piece gave me a lot of hassles, and I have to admit that I’m not entirely satisified with it. At one point, I found myself writing a “power up” point for my fleeing hereos, complete with medkits. It is not good to find yourself slipping into video game tropes. Ended up scrapping that scene completely and tightening the chase, so I suppose it may work now, but it’s far from my best work. What’s worse is that I don’t think it will sell. It’s an action horror, not a psychological one (though I hope it works on that level as well), and magazines seldom buy these pieces. Their reasoning? “Why isn’t this a movie?”. And I think they’re right too. I wrote this piece, in part, so try and develop the idea for eventual script treatment. Only time will tell there.

Next week I’m going back to what I hope is my strong suit: character-driven urban fantasy with a tasty sci-fi dressing. Structually, it’s a huge experiment, but I guess I’m thinking of it as a Hail Mary. If it works, I expect it to work big. If it doesn’t, well, I still like the idea, so maybe I’ll tackle it again with a more traditional format.

Nalo’s been great so far and I’m looking forward to my private interview with her on Thursday. For tonight, I might try and rent True Romance for the CW crew, or perhaps just outline my newest piece with the horrible, horrible working title of “Pruning the Tree”. No, it is not about landscaping.

Thanks to everyone who’s been commenting. I haven’t had time to answer a lot of you, but I appreciate you guys. This is much easier with a cheering section!

Tags: Clarion West, Workshop