Pushpin Books will be home to Last Outpost (a military themed SF anthology withing the Far Orbit anthology series) and future Far Orbit space opera anthologies including Far Orbit Perigee (accepting submissions Jan 1 - March 1, 2017, see pushpinbooks.com for more information).
Recently, editor and anthologist Bascomb James announced that his next venture after editing Far Orbit and Far Orbit Apogee for World Weaver Press and Hyperpowers for Third Flatiron Press (forthcoming May, 2016), will be to establish his own publishing house, Pushpin Books, a celebration of short speculative fiction.
Pushpin Books will be home to Last Outpost (a military themed SF anthology withing the Far Orbit anthology series) and future Far Orbit space opera anthologies including Far Orbit Perigee (accepting submissions Jan 1 - March 1, 2017, see pushpinbooks.com for more information). Beginning writers are often given the advice "write what you know." It's not a rule, not by a long shot. It's advice. And it's not even advice that applies long-term. It's training wheels. When you're starting to write, you have a lot of brand new considerations to make. You're learning to balance craft -- storytelling, grammar, narrative, pacing, character, dialog -- and the best way to do that is to do. That is, write. And if you're spending the majority of your time researching, then you're not writing. Further, it can become hard to parse if your story isn't working because of craft issues or because you're writing about something you clearly have no experience with. It's best to eliminate variables to help diagnose the problem. In this case, eliminating places, careers, time periods, situations, etc., that you're unfamiliar with, means that the problems that are left are probably craft problems. So once a writer reaches the stage where her writing feels solid enough to take on research . . . well, that's a brand new, fabulous can of worms. Read on for a discussion of reasons to research, pitfalls to avoid, how to move beyond Wikipedia, and when/how to approach an expert. Last month, I announced that I was stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press, the speculative fiction small press I founded in 2012, to be succeeded by Sarena Ulibarri. I am thrilled with what I've accomplished as Editor-in-Chief and by how far we've come in just under four years. My time as co-founder of the press has been fantastic, primarily because I've had the chance to work with such great authors crafting intensely interesting novels. I think that every reader of speculative fiction should pick up a World Weaver Press title, not because I published them, but because they are such damn engaging stories crafted by truly artful storytellers, each working in her own idiom. I'm happy to be handing off the creative direction -- both for continuing the series we've started and to seek out new ones -- to someone who shares our vision and passion for speculative fiction and who can continue to drive World Weaver Press forward. In her welcome post last week, Sarena Ulibarri writes:
This past weekend, I was ask to participate as a panelist in the day long event "Get Published! 2016" at the Herrick District Library in Holland, Michigan. The event was put on by MiFiWriters and was the first such event they've hosted. I spoke as editor of a small press alongside the editors of MiFiWriters and Caffeinated Press -- all Michigan-based small presses. I'm hopeful it was of use to those attending -- I know I was tickled to talk to a near-full room -- and I'm certain it will only become a better and stronger event if MiFiWriters choose to run another one in 2017.
The programming mainly focused on the mechanics of publication, so that's what I'd prepped for. But there were a couple of questions that arose from the interests of the audience that I hadn't prepped for and, consequently, really got me thinking. One such was about killing off characters. Should you kill off characters or should you avoid it? I’ve been watching Meteor Garden as well as the live action Japanese version of Boys Over Flowers, which I’ll refer to as Hana Yori Dango for clarity’s sake in this post. This brings me to three viewed adaptations total. While I’m not finished watching either of the above, and I’d really like to take a look at Let’s Go Watch Meteor Shower the Chinese version filmed after the more widely known Korean remake, I’ve come to three realizations: 1. Boys Will Be Flowers. Boys Will Be AssholesThe South Korean remake, epitomizes the shiny, saccharine side of kdrama—no swearing, no drugs, no drinking, no sex. Even when the plot involves attempted rape, roofies, and sex scandals, the characters behave as if everyone in the world is equipped with a chastity belt, so no big deal. The F4 are such perfect little-boy-dolls that I struggled (and failed) to wrap my mind around two of them as supposed rampant womanizers who, at eighteen, were regularly seducing women in their twenties. Where Joon Pyo (leader of the F4) remains a violent, destructive force, the rest of the F4 is portrayed as a moderating influence on him (my experience with teenage boys is the exact opposite—usually a group of teens tends toward the lowest common denominator) as well as a gentlemanly shield to Jan Di (female lead). Except that the F4 is, in the school, a violent force of feared and revered, untouchable bullies. The idea that they immediately melted into upstanding young men upon closer inspection was, to me, TV magic—acceptable in a scripted drama but not at all realistic. And not workable in an American scripted drama. At least not without a deeper exploration of the psychology behind these beautiful-but-damaged boys. I couldn't imagine an American F4 ever being produced in a way that stayed true to the manga while appealing to American TV appetites and expectations. Then I watched the Japanese and Taiwanese adaptations of the story. The Taiwanese F4 are drunk selfish assholes. They heckle and harass each other and Shancai (the female lead). They continue, throughout the length of show, to use other students as punching bags. They absolutely cannot stop ragging on Si (the leader of the F4) for his perpetual state of virginity. Ooohh. Now I can totally picture an American adaptation. 2. America Already Has Its Boys Over FlowersNo, not that ill-fated Boys Before Friends adaptation cancelled after a few episodes because the leads and director all hated each other. I'm talking about Veronica Mars. Think about it. If you don't consider the mystery-solving aspect, Veronica Mars is about a working-class girl in a love/hate relationship with a clique of uber rich “It Boys” in a high school rife with class conflict. It has the deeply damaged boys who act out, the hateful mothers, the love triangle, and of course the strong, scrappy teenage girl who holds it all together and changes the lives of everyone around her. Of course it has a strong Girl P.I. premise and plot. But in American TV there are no compelling scripted series that are solely romantic comedies the way there are in Asia. Oh, there are comedies with romances, family sagas that rely heavily on romantic relationships, but in just about every Amercian show I can think of it’s the comedy aspect that comes first (The Mindy Show), or the family drama (Gilmore Girls), or the mystery (Castle), etc. Maybe there are some teen dramas that seem to be only focused on who is getting with whom, but their scopes are much larger than a single couple. I’ve yet to see an American TV show that directly correlates to the romance novel genre: a plot focus solely on the coming together of a single romantic couple. With the possible possible exception of True Blood, which let’s face it, is based on a novel. On television, the sort of romance-only plot we see in romance novels is the purview of made-for-TV movies. (Ex: just about every Christmas movie on the Hallmark Channel.) Which is all to say: I’m willing to overlook the main premise of Veronica Mars, the mystery to be solved, for the sake of this comparison. And maybe you still don't agree with me. That's fine. It makes sense to me. But no big deal. Let's carry on. 3. I’m Itching to Write My Own AdaptationWhile watching Hana Yori Dango, I started to see glimmers of how this storyline could be realistic enough to be set in a US high school. Little plot bunnies started gathering on the edges of my perception, and their furry, twitching ears suggested it be set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
If you’re not familiar with south-east Michigan, Grosse Pointe is one of several ridiculously affluent suburbs of Detroit. Yes, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy, and it’s considered one of the poorest, if not the poorest city in America. But don’t for a second think that this means there’s no money in the area. As a high school athlete who lived about 30-minutes from even the farthest suburbs of Detroit, we traveled into many of the suburbs for games. Some were surrounded by 8’ chain link and a sense of gloom. Some, like the private schools in Grosse Pointe were not only ridiculously shiny and well-equiped, they were remarkable for the fact that oldest, ugliest cars in the parking lot didn’t belong to the sixteen year-olds. No, those were found in the faculty lot. The student lots were full of brand new luxury cars, and VW bugs surely bought for their “cute” factor, and SUVs (frequently tricked out). Sounds like the perfect place to set a Boys Over Flowers adaptation. As eager as I was, it didn’t take much for me to realize that this is not what I want to spend my time writing about. I struggle to care about teen drama long enough to write or read it. I’m usually only able to take one book in any YA series before I’m over it. The exception to that not-really-a-rule are the sorts of YA that have such high tension and world-shattering impact that I must know how the world changes! Such as in Hunger Games. I got two books into Divergent, but don’t know if I’ll ever pick up the third. Cinder, City of Bones, Graceling, Throne of Glass . . . they’ve all fallen victim to this one-and-I’m-outta-here malady. Thankfully Salvage, which is an amazing YA sci-fi novel, is a stand alone. There’s a second book set in the world, but it’s not a direct plot continuation. So go read Salvage by Alexandra Duncan. But you know, says I to myself, because if you’re a writer, all you really do is talk to yourself and sometimes put it down on the page, you know how you could both stay interested in the writing, Eileen, and make allowances for even the least-realistic plot points? Bring it into your wheelhouse. That’s right. I’m now hankering to write a Boys adaptation set in a paranormal Grosse Pointe private school. I'll leave you with that odd little nugget. One of the supposed perks of NaNoWriMo is the community you can find in it. And my first few go rounds, I reveled in that community. I gave myself over to it wholly. I obsessed. And if there's one thing you need to write a novel, it's not community, or time, or skill, or even a good story idea -- it's obsession. "Determination" is a milquetoast. Screw determination. Obsession will get you through this. And okay, my obsession was with pleasing the community and having done what I needed to do to stay in the club. If no one in my clique had posted, I was devastated. I'd write a hundred more words and check back to see if there was a new post by anyone of interest. Then a hundred more. Honestly, I got a lot of work done waiting for my people to talk to me. I wiped my plate of everything else that first month because my obsession was how much of the novel I could complete . . . and therefore talk about having completed on the message boards. My goal was as much to achieve a personal best as it was to stay a thousand words ahead of the woman whom I'd designated my friendly-rival pace-car doppelganger. Tuns out that she and I really had nothing in common, but at the time I could have sworn she was my long lost twin. So it goes. Now . . .Now all that shit annoys me. Particularly the fast-out-of-the-gate hares who are quick to tell everyone else "don't worry, you'll catch up." (I'm not doing this to catch up to you.) Particularly those whom you have a word war with and they type 1000+ words in 15 minutes. (My accurate typing speed is no where near that fast, and when I stop to consider word choice and punctuation, hell no.) And then they can't understand why you're so damn happy about 396 words in the same time frame. Particularly those who think that your day's writing is done by the time they go to bed. (That's when some of us start our day's writing). And don't even get me started on the people who finish five days early and treat you like you're going to lose and comfort you with sentiments of "maybe next year." (Hey, in NaNoWriMos past, I've written over 15,000 words in the last three days of November. Never, never count me out.) (Unless I tell you to count me out. Then -- really, it's over -- just leave me out of it.) Community? Bah! Yep. I'm well on my way to being that cranky old man yelling at kids to "get off my lawn and take your damn dog with you." Currently I'm that not quite middle aged woman who stands in the window grumbling to herself that she really should have the courage to tell the kids to shove off, or get zen enough to not care what happens to her lawn. Although if I hadn't been so confused by what was going on, that little girl who was shoveling the snow pile back onto my driveway would have gotten a lecture that might have at least bored her into going far far away. I'm not against kids per se. Or against kids playing in the snow. Or people walking their dogs. Nor am I against NaNoWriMo if that's what works for you. I'm just weary of dealing with the fall out, whether it's falling out of someone's message board or out of their dog. I call for #HermitNaNoWriMo.How is Hermit Nanowrimo any different from just writing a novel in solitude?
First off, there's the deadline at the end of the month. Second, there's this taciturn leave-me-alone-I'm-doing-a-thing thing that I love . . . but that really isn't a difference. Okay, there's this ideal -- this glorious ideal -- that you will emerge from your Hermit Cave at the end of November, striding forth as choirs sing and smoke machines billow forth light-show-catching clouds, because yes, there will be a rock-star-worthy light show as you bear aloft your novel, completed on deadline, in Hermit cave, without yelling at any kids. And people around you will gasp, and say, "I didn't even know you were trying to do NaNoWriMo." And you will reply, "Yes, that's just how awesome I am: Novels pop out of me without warning. Mind your step, I feel another one coming on." |
Eileen WiedbraukWriter, book designer, coffee addict, cat herder, learning to code, MFA grad, Odyssey Workshop alum, tech geek, kdrama devotee, avid reader, and a somewhat decent cook. Categories
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