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Mysterion 2

Mysterion 2

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MysterionLast year, my wife and I published an anthology entitled Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith. We have been working on this project for over a year: reading submissions and selecting the stories, editing for content, copy editing, layout, cover design, printing, and selling. It was, as you can imagine, a lot of work. I wrote about some of the process here at Back Gate: calling for submissions, using math on submissions, and presenting the table of contents.

After all that, we were very happy with the result. We felt that we had achieved our goal of publishing stories that dealt with the Christian faith in an authentic way, stories which don’t fit comfortably into either religious or mainstream markets, which ask hard questions and refuse to settle for easy answers. In other words, stories that explored the mysteries of the faith.

We got a few nice reviews as well, at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Cemetery Dance, and Tangent Online.

So now that we’ve had a chance to rest up, would we do it again?

Well, if you read the title of this post, you can probably guess the answer.

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Star Punk Story Building in Interplanetary Hunter

Star Punk Story Building in Interplanetary Hunter

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Interplanetary Hunter Barnes
I caved and bought some old Pulp.
Interplanetary Hunter Barnes
Monster Manual-style insets describing the various creatures.

I caved and bought some old Pulp.

I couldn’t help it. I was at Eastercon and in the dealers room, and there was Durdles Books with shelves and boxes that took me back to my early teens trawling used bookstores and charity shops for volumes with spaceships on the cover.

And since I started writing my The Eternal Dome of the Unknowable series, I’ve been exploring the roots of what I call Star Punk, the covers were cool… so I came home with some faded paperbacks of yesteryear.

One of these was Interplanetary Hunter by Arthur K Barnes.

What hooked me was the lovely Monster Manual-style insets describing the various creatures. It was actually published before roleplaying was thing in 1956 (mine is the 1972 Ace reprint), and compiled from stories that went out in magazines from 1937-1946, making it technically Golden Age.

And it tells.

It’s definitely in the category of classics you shouldn’t recommend to young people (I talked about this in my first ever BG article!). It’s a good light read, the style and lead-in may be fast and furious — pulpy goodness — but it suffers from Quaint Future and some Quaint Delivery, including excruciatingly detailed science and pseudoscience, complete with equations.

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A Wiscon Reading Report: The Best in Upcoming Fantasy – 2017 Edition

A Wiscon Reading Report: The Best in Upcoming Fantasy – 2017 Edition

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CSE Cooney and Amal El-Mohtar reading at Wiscon 2017-small CSE Cooney and Amal El-Mohtar reading at Wiscon 2017 2-small CSE Cooney and Amal El-Mohtar reading at Wiscon 2017 3-small

CSE Cooney and Guest of Honor Amal El-Mohtar perform Music & Miscellania at Wiscon 2017

Just a few days ago I wrote about Kay Kenyon’s upcoming novel At the Table of Wolves, the tale of a young woman forced to use her budding superpowers to spy on Nazi Germany and prevent the immanent invasion of England. It’s pretty clear to me that this is one of 2017’s breakout novels, and I was thrilled to get a sneak peek at it last year.

How did that happen? By attending a small, intimate reading at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio. In fact, convention readings have tipped me off to countless breakout books over the years, including works from Guy Gavriel Kay, N.K. Jemisin, Ian Tregillis, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis, Cory Doctorow, and many others. I even attended a reading by George R.R. Martin many years ago, in which he read from an unpublished novel titled A Game of Thrones — and then stuck around afterwards to chat to the small audience, and sign my advance copy of the book.

Any convention worth its salt will have a decent reading program. But the best conventions showcase a wide range of writers, and have multiple reading tracks. And after decades of attending cons, I can say without hesitation that the one with the best record for introducing me to stellar new talent — and tipping me off to fantastic new books — through its reading program is Wiscon, held every May in Madison, Wisconsin. And this year’s con was no exception.

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More Thoughts on Ghostwriting for a Living

More Thoughts on Ghostwriting for a Living

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Disorganized_books_piling_one_another

I haven’t written this many books, but I’m working on it

Last year I wrote an article about making a living as a ghostwriter. I talked about how a plethora of small presses have created a new pulp era, in which ghostwriters put out large numbers of stories and short novels under house names. It’s a world that rewards hardworking writers who can hit high word counts and deliver in a variety of genres.

That was more than six months ago, and I thought I’d share some more insights I’ve had from the crazy new world of wordsmiths.

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The 33% Mark: When it’s OK to Stop Drafting Go Back and Edit

The 33% Mark: When it’s OK to Stop Drafting Go Back and Edit

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"Ticket to the last station!"
“Ticket to the last station!”

When you’re writing that first draft, standard advice is: Don’t go back to edit!

Make like Omar Khayyám:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Or if you prefer, Guderian:

Ticket to the last station.

Yes, the ideal first draft is a blitzkrieg: rampage onward with the story, ignore pockets of resistance, you can catch them on the second draft.

However, you are neither a medieval Persian ruminating on life, nor a Panzer general.  For all we like to skin it with the aesthetic or the macho, writing is its own activity. The truth, so I’ve learned, is more complex.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Character Profile Sheet — Revised

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Character Profile Sheet — Revised

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DandD sheet-small

In my last blog, “Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator,” I promised to share my personal character profile sheet. I used to use it on my primary and secondary characters for all my stories. But I haven’t use it in awhile. When I took a look at it, I realized it needed serious revamping. So, here’s the new and improved version.

In the process of revamping it, I realized my writing is stronger when I take the time to really figure out who my characters are: what their quirks are, what makes them an individual. My subconscious can then go to work connecting dots, finding patterns, devising solutions to problems that are uniquely suited to that character, discovering actions and reactions that FEEL right.

I know some authors use a basic RGP character sheet, such as Dungeons & Dragons, but for me, that doesn’t go far enough.

Knowing that my protagonist’s favorite ice cream flavor is peach pecan and they turn very dark and maudlin when they drink tequila may never come up in the story… but it might. Knowing lots of little details about them helps you inhabit your characters and makes them feel more alive.

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Four Thousand Year Old Bread from Ancient Egypt

Four Thousand Year Old Bread from Ancient Egypt

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20170220_151315

Here’s something you don’t see every day, some preserved bread from the Eleventh Dynasty (2134-1991 BC) from Thebes. I snapped this photo in the Cairo Museum during a recent writing retreat.

… and I’m afraid that’s all I have for you this week from Egypt. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m working as a ghostwriter and I have a heinous deadline for a novel due this Friday. I’m also finishing up a short nonfiction booklet and my own novel, the one I went to Cairo to write in the first place. A minor character knocked the plot sideways and added 10,000 words to it.

So if I don’t want to be eating this bread next week, I have to get back to writing. But here are some more pics because I love you.

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Black Gate Interviews Egyptian Science Fiction Author Mohammad Rabie

Black Gate Interviews Egyptian Science Fiction Author Mohammad Rabie

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51JYgQ68kPL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_One pleasant stop on my recent trip to Cairo was the American University’s bookshop near Tahrir Square. It’s a treasure trove of books on Egyptology and Egyptian fiction in translation. Among the titles I picked up was the dystopian novel Otared by Mohammad Rabie.

This novel, originally published in Arabic in 2014 and published in English in 2016 by Hoopoe, the fiction imprint of the American University of Cairo, is a grim dystopian tale of Cairo in 2025.

After several botched revolutions in which the people repeatedly fail to effect real social and political change, Egypt is invaded by a foreign power. The army crumples, most of the police collude with the occupiers, and the general public doesn’t seem to care. A small rebel group decides to take back their nation, and one of its agents is former police officer turned sniper, Otared. The rebels basically become terrorists, deciding the only way to get the people to rise up is to make life under the occupation intolerable, which means killing as many innocent civilians as possible.

The world Rabie paints reminds me very much of the insane landscape in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, with its violence, its cruelty, and its bizarre customs (in Otared almost everyone wears a mask) that begin to make sense once you learn more about the world. Throw in a nightmarish disease that affects only children, plus a national death wish, and you have a grim but compelling read. No science fiction novel has gut punched me this hard for a long, long time.

Mohammad Rabie is an emerging force in Egyptian letters. Born in 1978, he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering in 2002. His first novel, Amber Planet, was released in 2010 and won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award Competition in 2011. His second novel, Year of the Dragon, came out in 2012. Otared was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2016 (popularly referred to as the Arabic Booker). Curious to learn more, I sat down with Rabie (OK, I shot him an email) to speak with him about his writing.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator

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sky god

With the exception of “Folksy Narrators” we often think of omniscient narrators as omnipotent sky-gods who are so vast and powerful that they’re unknowable entities. But looking at them that way hides away a helpful tool in crafting and revising our fiction.

(My blog on folksy narrators is here.)

On Friday, I was leading a seminar for Myth-Ink, the Columbia College genre writing student group, on how to do public readings. They were gearing up for when they’ll be the featured readers at my Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series next week. One of the young women was practicing the first two pages of a story about dragons. Her first read-through was fairly lifeless. She didn’t have confidence in her own vocal skills, and it didn’t sound like she had confidence in the story. We had already gone over many of the basic tips, so I took another tack. I asked her some questions.

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Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

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The Quantum Magician - Cover 2, May 2017
Cover art! By Justin Adams

Black Gate readers were very supportive when I reported the start of my 2-year experiment as a more present parent and as a full-time writer in June of 2015. I am happy to announce some of the fruits of that experiment 23 months into this leave from work.

First of all, my son is now 12 years old and is a wonderful human being. He cares about others, listens more, has more self-possession and seems successful enough socially that girls keep calling him. I can of course, only take half the credit for that, but even if the only thing I accomplished in the last 23 months was my contribution to raising a responsible person, I would have called it a very successful sabbatical.

However, while he was at school, I went to the library to write or edit, and some good things have come of that too.

Last night, at 7:30pm, 6 May, while I was reading at Ad Astra, Toronto’s premier fan convention, a very dedicated but surely sleepy-eyed gentleman in Oxford was posting the press release announcing my first novel! The world English rights to the The Quantum Magician sold to Solaris Books in the UK in November, via my excellent agent Kim-Mei Kirtland, but the news has been under embargo for the last six months while cover art was being developed by the extremely talented Justin Adams.

The Quantum Magician is an sf heist story, basically Ocean’s Eleven meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I took many of the elements of hard sf and aliens that are found in my short fiction pieces “The Way of the Needle,” “Persephone Descending,” “Pollen From a Future Harvest,” “Schools of Clay” and “Flight From the Ages” and found something I’m really excited about: stealing things.

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