“My Mask, Humanity” Get’s New Life

Posted on February 20, 2015 by D. Thomas Minton

During my internet silence, I may not have been writing much, but I was fortunate to keep making some sales.  Instead of dumping them all into a single post, I thought I’d spread them out a little (get some mileage out them, you know).  So in no particular order. . . .

One of my favorite stories, with perhaps one of my all-time favorite scenes I’ve ever written, will be getting a second life.  The New Accelerator has picked up the reprint rights for “My Mask, Humanity,” and–well look at that!–it appears in the current issue.  This story originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction several years ago, and picked up at least one “recommended” review from the folks over at Diabolical Plots.

Even though this is a fairly dark, high-tech science fiction story, it was a blast to write.  I hope it’s as much fun to read.

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So I’ve Been Away for a Awhile. . . .

Posted on February 18, 2015 by D. Thomas Minton

I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I’ve been away for a while.  Not that I need to explain myself, but I want to.  It’s a little therapeutic, I think.

I last posted on Dec. 7 before leaving on a trip for the day job where I was of out internet connectivity for a good portion of the time.  I then flew to the east coast of the U.S. to pick up my mom and fly her back to my house for the holidays.

I believe I’ve mentioned it here before that my mom’s been suffering some memory issues, and this fall we finally got a more definitive answer as to what’s up: she has dementia (at best), but more likely Alzheimer’s.  None of my siblings had an inkling how much her condition had declined until late last summer (she did an effective job hiding it from us), and we didn’t fully realize the extent of it until she arrived at my house last December.  My mom stayed with me for a little over a month while we made arrangements to get her the care she needs.  During her stay, I had little time to do anything other than care for her.  I then spent most of January working with my siblings to get her resettled into a care facility.  Her adjustment has been difficult, but she is doing much better now.  I want the best for her, and I think she’s finally starting to get it.  Needless to say, it’s been a difficult two months, and the challenges likely will continue.

What has surprised me during all this is the number of people I’ve met who have had similar experiences, either with a grandparent or parent or other loved one, and I’m surprised how little can be done for people suffering from this brain condition.  Prior to last year, I had heard very little about dementia or Alzheimer’s, and I wonder if it’s because it tends to afflict the elderly, and thus has never received the public and research attention that things like cancer and heart disease get.  I also wonder if this will change in the near future as the number of elderly expand with the aging baby boomer generation.  Given the large number of boomers closing in on that critical age, the care that generation will need is mind-staggering, and I’m having serious doubts that the facilities exist to handle it (in the U.S. at least; I don’t know about other places).  If you could see me as I type this, you’d see a deep crinkle in my brow.  That crinkle has been there a lot recently as my siblings and I have fumbled our way through this.  I don’t think it’s ever going to smooth out again.

So I’m back.  I haven’t done much writing the past two months, but that doesn’t mean things haven’t been happening.  They have, and I hope to start providing consistent updates on recent sales, forthcoming stories, books, and anthologies, works in progress, the craft of writing, and on the business of publishing.  I also hope to catch up with a few writing colleagues that I’ve lost track of these past few months.  Oh, and I plan to get back to writing stories—I don’t want to neglect that.

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Creating vs. Analyzing

Posted on December 7, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

One of the things I like about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is I have to write fast to make it.  Writing 50,000 words in 30 days means I need to average about 1,700 words a day, every day, which is over twice what I usually write.  Given that I can’t spend all day writing, I have no time to waste when I sit down.  I don’t have a lot of time to think about the words I’m writing or to go back and change what I’ve written.  It’s all about the creative flow and not about getting it perfect, which is very liberating in a way.

I find my process to create something new is very different from my process to analyze that creation and hone it into something stronger.  For me, constantly switching between these two processes is inefficient, and I find when I’m struggling with a story, often it’s because I’m allowing myself to overthink it (usually because I underthought it in the initial outlining phase).  Instead of creating, I’m analyzing, then trying to create, and analyzing and creating and. . . .you see the problem.

Over the years I’ve gotten better at identifying when this happens—surprisingly it’s not all that hard to tell, so I find it amazing it took me so long to figure it out.  If a story is going to work, the first draft will usually write itself without much trouble.  When that fails, I’ve learned that I need to step away from the story entirely, upload all the various pieces back into my head, and let it stew for a while longer until I really know what it’s all about.  Once it has jelled sufficiently, I can sit back down at the keyboard and allow the creative process to kick in.  It’s fruitless for me to struggle over individual words and sentences and constantly rewrite paragraphs; that simply doesn’t work.

Of course everyone writes differently and every writer needs to find what works for him or her.  For me, keeping the editing out of the creating process is what I need to do.

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So Close, But Still a Success

Posted on December 1, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

National Novel Writing Month is officially over and for the first time I failed to make the target word count of 50,000 words by November 30th.  I came up a few hundred words short (534 to be exact), but just couldn’t eek out the last ones in the wee hours last night.  To be honest, I’d rather come up a little short than waste my time just putting useless words on the page.

Even though I failed to hit my 50K target, I did actually complete both of my personal goals for this year’s  NaNoWriMo.  First, I wrote almost every day.  I started slow, but made up the words over the course of the month and wrote steadily for nearly every day (I wrote at least some words on 28 of the 30 days).  I even managed to hit my target word count (1,700 words) on most days, so all in all, a successful month.  Second, I finished the first draft of novella #2 in my novella trilogy, tentatively called the “Calypso Tryptych.”   I finished with time and words to spare, so I started writing a short story to get me to the NaNoWriMo word target, but that story eventually withered on the vine, leaving me short at the buzzer.  It was a valiant effort, but it simply wasn’t meant to be this year, and I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

Even in failure, I am actually a winner.  It’s not often I can say that.

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Page Proofs for the End of the World

Posted on November 26, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

I got my page proofs for Wastelands 2, an upcoming anthology that will contain a reprint of my story “Dreams in Dust.”  I’ve only gotten real honest-to-god page proofs a couple of times, but it’s always been exciting to receive them because  they are the first tangible evidence that my story will actually appear in a book.  A real book.  One that will be printed on real paper and be in real brick-and-mortar stores (as well as in the usual online places).

Wastelands 2 is a collection of post-apocalyptic fiction published since about 2000, and contains stories by a who’s-who list of speculative fiction authors, including several personal favorites such as David Brin, Paolo Bacigalupi, Genevieve Valentine, and Bruce Sterling.  You can find the complete table of contents here—by the way, I’m listed about halfway down, between Ms. Valentine and Nancy Kress!  It’s an honor to have a story in this anthology, and I’m looking forward to its release in February 2015.

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Do We Really Get What We’re Reading?

Posted on November 23, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

While e-books have yet to replace print books in terms of sales (and incidentally, growth in sales seems to have slowed in recent years), they are a fixture in the marketplace and not going anywhere.  Some people love them and some people don’t.

Personally I’m in the jury-is-still-out category.  I don’t have an e-book reader, so I haven’t had much opportunity to check them out and determine if I really like them or not.  I can say that for scientific articles—of which I read many for my day job—I prefer to read them on paper over reading them electronically on my computer screen.  I find the reading experience fundamentally different, especially in my retention of the material.  I seem to grasp the information better when reading from paper.

This is interesting because a writing colleague, fellow Hopefull Monster D.J. Cockburn, pointed me to a recent article in the New Scientist that examined the reading experience between e-books and paper books (sorry, there’s no free link for this one, but you can see the first few paragraphs here).  Somewhat to my surprise, their results matched my personal experience.

In general, studies have suggested that e-reading results in poorer comprehension, but this has been primarily attributed to distractions from being online—which reminds me, I should check my email; be right back . . . . . . . . In a more current study, however, people who read a mystery story on paper were nearly twice as good at putting plot events in the right sequence compared to those who read it as an e-book, suggesting there is something fundamentally different about reading on an e-reader vs. in a good old-fashion paper book.

The researches have suggested this may have to do with how we track where we are as we read.  In a paper book, there are physical clues to help us, for example we can see when we are halfway through the book.  With an e-reader, however, we don’t have that physical sense of how far through the book we have come: the amount of text on an e-reader “page” isn’t necessarily fixed, and the e-reader itself can give us no physical clues as to how much we’ve read.  This sense of “place” in a book seems to provide important “signposts” that aid a reader’s comprehension of order.

But how important is all this?  I guess that would depend.  For reading scientific articles, these findings are important because the devils in the details, so to speak.  Being able to assemble the order and logic of what the writer is presenting is critical and anything that makes that more challenging is a bad thing.  When reading a piece of fiction, however, it’s likely not as critical, provided the reader can follow what’s happened in the story and can still relate emotionally to the characters and their plight.  Incidentally, the same study described above found no difference in a reader’s emotional response to the story between those who read via an e-reader and a traditional paper book, so for fiction, it likely doesn’t matter.

Posted in Hopefull Monsters | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

After a Slow Start. . . .

Posted on November 19, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

My National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, got off to a slow start as I wrote less than 1,000 words over the first three days of November (I need to average ~1,700 words per day to reach NaNoWriMo’s 50,000-word target).  This lackluster beginning to my seventh NaNoWriMo shouldn’t have been surprising considering I hadn’t written much since July because of several things in my non-writing life that ate up large chunks of time and sapped my creative energy.  While things have calmed down recently, I have had difficulty getting back into my writing routine, so the timing of NaNoWriMo couldn’t have been better.  I decided to use NaNoWriMo as a kick in the pants.

Fortunately I managed to get rolling.  I passed the 30,000 word mark on my novella yesterday, and I’m still going strong (today I added ~2,000 words).  That puts me almost 2/3 of the way to my NaNoWriMo target with ten days left to go—exactly where I should be at this point!  I feel good about what I’ve written, too.  The words have been good words and should need only a little editing, the story has progressed nicely with good pacing and nice detail, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the appearance of some unexpected characters and actions that have served to deepen the story and not derail it (which often isn’t the case, I find).

Provided I don’t hit any unforeseen bumps, I should successfully complete my seventh NaNoWriMo.  More importantly I’ll have the second novella in my three-novella series in draft form.  While these are good measures of success, the real measuring stick will be whether I re-establish my writing routine and get back to steady story production for the rest of 2014 and beyond.  I’m feeling good about it.  All that’s left now is to make it happen.

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Hoodoo Now Available at Kasma SF

Posted on November 15, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

My new (but old) story “Hoodoo” went live today at Kasma SF.  This story was originally printed in the shortlived and unfortunately overlooked Specutopia.  I doubt more than a handful of people ever read it, which is unfortunate because I think it’s a neat story premise–even the hard to please Lois Tilton at Locus said it was a “neat scientific mystery.”  At Kasma SF, it will get a much wider readership.

The story also comes with artwork, and  José Baetas has produced another wonderful illustration for one of my pieces (he also illustrated “Forget the Rain“).  I love how Mr. Baetas’ drawing captures the feel of “Hoodoo,” right down to some of my favorite little details like Sam Gondo’s fingerless gloves and the thumper truck in the background (you’ll have to read the story to learn more about those).  Even if you don’t read the story, be sure to check out Mr. Baetas’ art work.

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Quarterreads Is Something Different

Posted on November 11, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

Have you ever noticed that most short fiction publications are variations on a narrow approach, especially if they are a revenue generating magazine?  Most are simply extensions of the traditional publication model: a group of stories are assembled by an editor and sold as a cohesive unit.  Generally all the stories and artwork are delivered at the same time (i.e., a magazine), but sometimes the selected stories are delivered in small chunks, say a single story, at more frequent rate.  Whatever the approach, an editor selects the stories and sends them to the reader.  It’s a model that’s worked for a long time, and I assume will continue to be the preferred model well into the future.

Recently I learned about Quarterreads, a new “publication” that is promoting a different model of distribution—I like it when someone thinks outside the box!  Quarterreads takes story selection out of the hands of an editor and puts it into the hands of the reader, which I think is potentially genius.  The way Quarterreads works is authors submit short stories (which if they meet fairly minimal requirements are accepted) that then enter the Quarterreads environment and are made available to readers at the rate of US$0.25 per story.  Readers can search, sample and choose to “purchase” any story on the site, which places it into their personal Quarterreads library.  If they aren’t interested in the story, they don’t have to buy it.  There is no gatekeeping editor; the only limitation is authors must decide to make their stories available on the site, and at this time, the stable of writers is quickly growing, with many well-known speculative fiction writers (e.g., Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, etc) making their work available.

So what does the writer get out of it?  For every story bought, the writer receives 88% of the proceeds, or US$0.22.  Not bad, especially for the shorter-length works the site is promoting.  I’ve submitted several stories that have been previously published, several of which are no longer available anywhere (out of print, so to speak).  They were sitting around collecting dust, anyways, so I thought, “What have I got to lose?”  To my pleasant surprise, they’ve already accrued some modest “royalties,” which is more than any of these stories were earning on my hard drive.

Quarterreads is new, and to be honest, I don’t know if it will succeed.  I’d don’t know the plan to attract new readers or how many return-readers they have (i.e., loyal customers).  As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter because I’m excited by the idea of reader being their own short fiction gatekeeper, and the Quarterreads developers seemed to be investing in upgrading and improving the site, showing they are dedicated to giving this a series try.

If you weren’t aware of them, check Quarterreads out.  If you’re a writer, consider submitting some of your work (read their submission guidelines first).  If you’re a reader, type “MINTON” in the search window and read every story that pops up.

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“The Schrödinger War” Nabs Another Recognition

Posted on November 4, 2014 by D. Thomas Minton

“The Schrödinger War” has been good to me.  It was originally published in Lightspeed Magazine in September 2013, podcasted by Starship Sofa in 2014, and translated into Estonian this past month.  It received good reviews from both Locus (and the always-difficult-to-please Lois Tilton) and Tangent Online.  Gardner Dozois selected it as an honorable mention in his year’s best anthology, and it made Tangent’s recommended reading list for 2013.  All in all a great run, and lots to be proud of.  The little story that could isn’t finished either.

“The Schrödinger War” was selected as a Million Writers Award notable story for 2014 (for works published in 2013).  The Million Writers Award is sponsored by storySouth and, as their website says, is intended “to honor and promote the best fiction published in online literary journals and magazines” during a given year.  It covers all genres and all online publications.  Some of my favorite short stories have won the Million Writers Award (Troy Adam Castro’s “Arvies” is excellent).

This year, about 50 stories were chosen as “notable,” and from that, ten will be shortlisted before a winner is chosen.  Congratulations to everyone who made the list, a notable achievement in and of itself.  I am honored to have “The Schrödinger War” included among so many other fine stories.

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