Writer & Editor
It’s official: my short story, “Black Smoke and Water Lilies,” is in the new edition of Insignia Volume 2: Chinese Fantasy Stories, edited by Kelly Matsuura.
If you’re not familiar with the Insignia series of anthologies, each one groups stories set or inspired by a different region in Asia. Volume 1 features Japanese fantasy stories and the upcoming Volume 3 features stories of Southeast Asia (submissions for that one are still open, by the way; the deadline is August 31).
When it comes to future tech, variations on a phrase in a roleplaying game sourcebook always stuck with me: “POOF: YOU’RE HEALED.”
That was the description for the top-level, beyond super-science medical technology of the far future. (For weaponry of that advanced era, it was “POOF: YOU’RE DEAD”; for transportation it was “POOF: YOU’RE THERE.” You get the idea. Also, possibly, I played far too much G.U.R.P.S. if its metaphors remain fixed in my head.)
One thing unquestioned, of course, and not within the scope of RPG rules, is the question: “for whom?”
I was invited by Mary Pletsch (with whom I have the honour of sharing a table of contents with in Kneeling in the Silver Light and Wrestling With Gods) to write a guest post at The Fictorians, on the subject of writing conflict in fiction.
Here’s a little bit of what I had to say:
There are a lot of ways to express conflict through dialogue in a scene, but it can be very effective – and a lot of fun – if it isn’t done openly.
People (and characters) hate conflict. They usually do everything they can to avoid it, unless they’re devoid of empathy. But readers… they love conflict. It makes for great dialogue, exciting scenes, and a plot that keeps moving.
There is a mental trap writers seem to be prone to, if conversations I have on Twitter are any indication. (And I realize they may not be.) That is, that other writers are doing better than you somehow, and that this matters.
I’ve felt it! If you write, I suspect you have, too.
There are a lot of ways to look at storytelling, but one of the crucial ways to look at it, in my view, is by who it includes. I think this is true of any genre, but since I write speculative fiction, that’s how I’m going to consider it here.
Some very talented writers have addressed this already. If you haven’t read what they have had to say, I’d highly recommend you read:
Daniel José Older: 12 Fundamentals of Writing “The Other”
N.K. Jemisin on Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF and more recently Your groundbreaking is not my groundbreaking
Malinda Lo: On Self-Rejection and Writing From a Marginalized Perspective
Derek Newman-Stille on SFF fandom, ableism and homophobia and transphobia: My Cane is Not a Costume, and an interview with Kathryn Allan on disability in science fiction
These are just a few of the people writing on these issues.
I will confess, at the end of 2013 I thought this shelf (seen above in December of that year) would be filling up a bit more by the end of 2014. But that would be ignoring the fact I was beyond thrilled to be included in the titles you’ll see on it at the bottom of this post, Long Hidden and Kneeling in the Silver Light. As one of my favourite teachers, Mr. Gillis, used to say: quality, not quantity.
