I’ve been reading Flash Fiction Online for a while now (not like some magazines), and I’m always impressed by the breadth and variety of stories that they have.
Well. This week they outdid themselves, with one of the most moving and beautiful stories I’ve ever read in their venue, and already a contender for my favorite story of the year. I read lots of good stories. Sometime I think I even write a good story. But this was a great story.
A really fun story to be found today at Fantasy Magazine: Teaching a Pink Elephant to Ski. It works on so many levels: straightforward comedy, romance, and satire.
It’s a great entry, after a few weeks of stories which didn’t interest me. I really liked The Gnomes Are Coast Guards, but before that I have to go back to A Trail of Demure Virgins before I got to one that I really cared for
Back from a wonderful holiday in Colorado, which was inexplicably less snowy than the Seattle. (Snowpocalyptic Seattle: A ghastly wasteland covered in a mysterious white powder, rendering vehicles ineffective and striking terror into the hearts of everyone who dared venture outside.) I got to see my brother and his wife and their new baby, which was the highlight of the trip, plus I played Rock Band and Wii Sports.
(Aside: my parents bought a Wii. What kind of world is this where my parents buy video games for themselves? I may have more to say about this later.)
However, the first piece of fiction that I want to commend to you all is Sisters of the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. The title does not contain a typo. Read it.
I have to mention that the current issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is pure excellence. Do you like fantasy stories? Do you like interesting characters and riveting storytelling? Then go and read both of its current stories, now.
The first story, The God-Death of Halla is one of those “elaborate religious ritual” stories that I’ve talked about before, but completely unsubverted. That is, it turns out that the God is being manipulated, but the reality of the God is unambiguously established throughout the story. The conclusion was exciting and glowed with the numinous–something hard to do in a short story.
The second, Precious Meat could easily pass for science fiction. The narrator is non-human, and nothing magical happens. What I loved about it, though, was the fact that it takes place at the moment the narrator’s species is passing into a social mode of existence; which is to say becoming fully sentient, and becoming something that we humans can relate to.
An awesome story from one of my favorite bloggers.
The premise (and I spoil slightly) is that human kindness has become a vector for a fatal “social disease”. A haunting, majestic story.
Articles like this are why you must read widely, my friends. I have tears in my eyes, now, and I’m thinking about perfume, something that I have seriously never thought about for more than two minutes in my entire life. And the real treat is that I now have a story idea.
There is a particular type of fantasy story that has at its core an elaborate religious or social ritual, the more shocking and bizarre the better. I mean things like His One True Bride by Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Break the Vessel by Vylar Kaftan, or The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto. The subtext of these stories is usually that the religious beliefs underlying the ritual are false, and that they oppress those that participate in them. The opposite type also exists, in which someone, usually an outsider, derides the poor local superstition and gets his comeuppance for it.
Kingspeaker by Marie Brennan seems to be one of this type, but its conclusion does something amazing with the trope.
(Mild spoilers follow.)
At the opening of the story we see the female protagonist being stripped of her own voice to speak with the voice of the King. This seems at first to be merely ritual–she still speaks, and even speaks to the king, though she insists that she’s only saying the king’s words back to him. At the novel’s climax, though, the king becomes psychologically unable to say what he needs to say, and in a crucial moment the protag decides to speak up without the king’s command.
But notice: the protag doesn’t speak up for herself, which would violate the ritual logic presented in the story. Instead, she speaks in the voice of the king, saying what truly are the king’s words, the words the king cannot bring himself to say. Right at the place where I expected to see the ritual subverted, it was instead affirmed in a dramatic and ironic way. I was tickled with delight.
It’s ironic that my first published story is one of the quickest-written stories I’ve ever done.
On Wednesday, I read Vylar Kaftan’s challenge to writers to write a fantasy piece about movies for the Cinema Spec anthology. The anthology was near closing, and the editor Karen Romanko had said that she was still looking for a high fantasy story.
Now, I had an idea for a somewhat-appropriate story that had been mellowing in my head for a long time. It wasn’t high fantasy as I originally intended it, but I was able to make some minor tweaks to the premise to make it fit. It wound up not being secondary-world fantasy but a portal fantasy–close enough that I hoped it would meet the editor’s needs. So I banged it out in a few hours Wednesday night, and mailed it to a few friends Thursday. Based on their feedback I revised it on Friday–and submitted, two hours before the deadline.
Karen was wonderful, and responded within a few days saying she was holding it for a second look. About a week after that I got the acceptance notice.
The moral of the story is: A good way to get published is to write something that fits an editor’s needs, even if you have to crank it out in 48 hours :).
You know what I got in the mail a little while ago? A message saying that my story Screening of a Silent Film was accepted for publication. Woot! First sale!
The story will appear in the anthology Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy, forthcoming in early 2009.
Up at Clarkesworld this week is a historically accurate story about life in 21st century California. Phone sex, traffic jams, and gun battles. That sounds about like the California that I know. But don’t read it for the amazing historical recreations. Read it for the funny, insightful mashup of historical revisionism, reality TV, and the way it warps human relations.
J.S. Bangs 