Editing: Not Just For Words

When I finish a story that doesn’t quite feel perfect, it bothers me. I may put it aside but I can’t submit it to a market until I’ve figured out what’s off about it, and corrected it. As time passes, I may even go back and small corrections to stories I’d previously sold, since experience or an evolution in my writing style has given me new perspective.

I do the same thing with my art.

Often a piece is done when I think it’s done, and I don’t have to go back to it. In the case of my Tree Bearing Fruit painting from last year, I knew it wasn’t quite right. I’ve got it hanging on my bedroom wall, where I can see it every day, and there was something about the shape of the tree or the moon or both that wasn’t working for me. So, over the weekend, I fixed it.

Compare:

Tree Bearing Fruit, 2011

vs.

Tree Bearing Fruit, 2011-2012

The photos aren’t the best, but you can click on them to see a larger version. I brought the curve of the tree more to the right, making it rounder and matching it with the size/shape of the moon. I made the moon whiter, though I kept the tricolor (they’re just lighter) pattern. I also added faint lines around the moon that reminded me of viewing the moon just before a rainstorm, when it has that whispy corona.

Detail of the “fruit”:

Detail of “Tree”, 2011

Tree Bearing Fruit, 2011-2012 (detail)

I’m not saying that you always need to go back and tinker with your creations, but at the same time, you shouldn’t be afraid to. If it’s not quite right, then fix it. One of the great things about making Art (or writing) is that you have the power to keep working on it until you’re happy with the results.

I’m glad I took the time to make this painting into what I wanted it to be.

Looking for the Colonized/Decolonized in Speculative Fiction

The other night I was talking with an author (who happens to be a person of color and a first-generation American) about colonialism and whether views about previous invaders/colonizers change over time. While I am lucky enough to have grown up in an area that was ethnically diverse, as a white person born in the US to parents who were not immigrants, I won’t ever have the same view of the world that he does. I’ve always been able to find common ground with people who are not white, as individuals, since we all have parents and siblings and first loves and bad breakups and so on in common. You know, regular people stuff. But I realize that I don’t quite understand the experience of hailing from an oppressed people, as a general concept. Not deep in my bones and blood, not understand it because I lived with it or know it like I know the color of my hair or the shape of my fingers.

This matters partly because I know and care about people of color and I don’t ever want to behave or think in a way that’s dismissive to them. It also matters because I am a writer of SF/spec fiction that assumes a future with more representation for people of color. I have to be aware that I’m creating stories which portray a variety of characters, including people that I have no direct personal experience of being. For the same reason that I sometimes have male readers check stories which feature a male main character – because I want to be sure that it’s coming across the way that I meant it – I want to learn as much as I can about the colonial experience in order to accurately render those characters in my work. I may never have perfect understanding, but that’s no reason not to try to learn.

My fiction reading is actually diverse and getting more so over time, so what I’m looking for at the moment is essays, blog posts, discussions, etc, on colonialism, decolonialism, and post-colonial viewpoints in speculative fiction. Continue reading

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

Today has been a good day. To celebrate that, and in lieu of a blog post with actual depth, I give you some of the things that make me blissfully happy. In no particular order:

  1. The feeling I have after I finish a great story or book, when my real life hasn’t quite come back to me and the world I just left lingers in my mind. Everything else fades away and I’m left with nothingness – no thoughts, no stress, no deadlines, for the space of a long breath or more.
  2. Finding out the book I borrowed is really special to the person who owned it, but they lent it to me anyway.
  3. Being trusted. Being seen for who I am. Being understood.
  4. Hearing that a reader loved a piece of writing I did.
  5. Checking completed items off my “To Do” list.

    The Cult of Done Manifesto

  6. Selling a story. Even better? Selling to a market that had previously rejected me.
  7. Taking a long shower, lying down still wrapped in a towel, and not having to get up and get dressed for a little while.
  8. Watching someone I love become a better person, because they think I’m worth being a better person for.
  9. Bacon. Coffee. Sushi. Cheeseburgers. Good beer. Spicy Thai rice with prawns. Avocados. Oranges. Sticky rice. Dark chocolate. Riesling. Medium-rare steak. Garlic. Chili paste.

    No one sane can look upon bacon and not hunger …

  10. Fixing a tech problem on my own.
  11. Finishing a piece of art and not wanting to change it (same goes for finishing a story and actually thinking it’s done).
  12. Giving someone a gift they really love.
  13. Cooking for my friends. Having my friends come over because they want me to cook for them.
  14. Paying off a bill.
  15. Sitting on my deck with my shoes off, a cold drink in my hand, and a book I haven’t read before.
  16. Groundhogs.

    How cute is he?

  17. That moment where you’re having a fight with someone and you both manage to turn it into a rational conversation that actually solves the problem, instead of just a fight.
  18. My son. Pretty much everything about him.
  19. Cast iron pans.
  20. The feeling of anticipation just before something I know will be wonderful.

Books You Should Read: Etgar Keret’s THE NIMROD FLIPOUT

I got loaned a copy of this book last week, and since its owner was a little nervous about parting with it (not that I would damage it, but that I might love it and not ever want to give it back), I moved The Nimrod Flipout to the front of my queue and read it right away. It took most of the week, since Keret’s stories seem innocuous enough but have an odd depth that rises up to smack you a few minutes or a few hours after you finished each one, so I couldn’t read the collection in one sitting.

There is no complexity to his word choices. There are a few fantastic elements, enough to get him into the “magic realism” genre label, but even when they appear the story isn’t about the thing that happened as much as it is about the people it happened to. The collection is full of tiny stories, short stories, moments in time that span a page or three and no more. Keret tells you everything you need to know in simple words, short sentences, and normal-seeming anecdotes. Yet his writing is so moving, so emotionally true.

The secret to his power as author is that he tells stories a certain kind of person will resonate with. Disconnected, sad, lost, unloved, or unloving? These stories are for you. That isn’t to say that a person who was genuinely happy and had always been so wouldn’t be able to grasp the beauty of Keret’s work. At least, I think they would still get it. Since I don’t know anyone who’s never been hurt, who’s never wondered if the relationship that they were in was really love or was it instead a matter of convenience for one of them or the other … I feel safe in recommending this book to everyone.

Most of his main characters are male but not exclusively and when Keret writes women he does so with the understanding of a man who’s known real women, loved them, and saw their good qualities, rather than a man who’s writing only the fantasies of women he wishes he knew or the worst-quality nightmares of women who wronged him. There are more than a couple of men who’re in marriages that aren’t quite working for them, or watching their friends about to get married to women they wouldn’t have picked, but even then Keret shows where these women were loved, once, before things went sour, and you can usually see where the husband plays a major part in the failure to stay in love. He writes mostly men, it seems, not for any reason other than he is one, and he has male friends, and he knows their stories.

There are cab drivers honking at young women in order to not think about what they’re really afraid of, and men in love with women doing odd things they don’t quite understand (like sunbathing nude on the lawn or turning into a hairy fat guy at night) but who nonetheless love them. There are talking fish – who, granted, might talk more if they weren’t so depressed  – and love dwarves and suicidal soldiers and shrinking parents that fit in your pocket, but the stories never seem to be about that. They’re always about the people these things happen to. They’re about us, really, deep down, and the things we see after Keret reminds us.

A Little Update About My Real Life

Sometimes I’m reminded that because I rarely talk about my personal life, not that many people know that things are actually pretty good right now. Tonight I was told by a friend that he hoped my life got better soon and I realized I’d never told him that it already had.

Yes, a lot of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 sucked, and thank you, if you’re one of those who was still concerned about me. I’m doing well. There’s been a lot to do, starting over in my new life, with a lot of changes, and so yes, I am still behind on projects and deadlines, and I don’t like that. But I have been writing more, submitting and selling more, working on edits for Dagan Books projects, and generally being on the path to being caught up, even if I’m not there yet. I’m still poor, and prone to not getting enough sleep, and there’s been some necessary adjustments to my plans, but overall I wake up happy and I go to bed happy.

My life … has potential. I really like where I am, and what I’m trying to do now, and where I think I will be soon. I’ve sorted it out so that I can start at a local community college in the fall, and work toward a degree that will help me get a better class of dayjob, in a subject that will surprise no one who knows me – computer science. I will always be a writer but I like the idea of having a stable job in a field I love, writing at night and on the weekends, and having those two lives to keep me from getting bored with either one.

Part of what’s so good about my life now is having gotten away from people who were making it bad. Not having to deal with drama and stress every day changes your whole life. I get to choose who I spend my time with now, and the people I get to call friends are people worth making time for.

Bear with me if it takes a little longer to get to everything I want to do, but I will get there. And thank you, for supporting me when I needed it.