Diabolical Plots

“Thief of Futures” by D. Thomas Minton demonstrates value in terms of wealth and talent; the story is only concerned with characters who are either rich or possess a very certain innate skill. Everyone else is consigned to the background. “Antiquities and Tangibles” by Tim Pratt examines value through connections and luck; the more social-oriented tools of achieving success and accruing value. Those without connections and luck have no chance of exploring happiness to the extent the main characters do.

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Not everything in a story happens on the page. When an author writes material that occurs “offstage,” that so-called “green room writing” may inform the events that the audience sees. Giving foundations for the characters, their motivations, personalities and activities, green room writing may well feel like wasted effort. Trust me, though — it’s really not.

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The primary reasons for the decline of the magazine business have less to do with the quality of periodicals – less, even, than with the rise of the internet – than with an outmoded, archaic and unspeakably wasteful distribution process.

The method through which periodicals are distributed and sold dates back to the era of cheap paper, expensive televisions, limited media, general print literacy, and the rise of mass advertising.

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Here are the stories resulting from the Storygasm event in rough chronological order of prompts received. Feel free to take yours and post it elsewhere or link directly to this page. Thanks for contributing!

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Here’s how it works: you give me a prompt, and I’ll turn it into a drabble, a 100-word story for you. The best approach, speaking from personal experience, is to keep the prompt between two and five words long, and to avoid getting too specific. For example, something like “werewolf shampoo” can lead all sorts of directions and gives me something to work with.

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With publishing’s gatekeepers now comprising the bulk of short fictions’ readership, I think it reasonable to say that for every story read at least one rejection slip is also read. The rare instances in which writers’ stories are not rejected and to some degree published and possibly read by others are offset by writers’ publishing their rejection slips on public blogs and forums and disseminating them in emails. Similarly, publishers’ returning the same rejection slip to many writers is offset by writers submitting the same story to many publishers. So even ignoring that rejection slips, unlike the stories that inspired them, are almost always read in their entirety, taken to heart and remembered, it all more than cancels out. Ergo rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary genre.

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Each convention has it’s own personality, just like how every city has it’s own personality. Stumptown Comics Fest has one of the best personalities of all the conventions I have attended. It has a very do-it-yourself feel to the entire convention, with a strong feeling of optimism. Most of the artists and storytellers are self employed, or a part of a small artist collective. In fact, most of the tables are webcomics.

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Just launched this week, and offering a big swag of give-aways for the week-long launch, the Showcase takes a different approach to other promotion sites. We actually do our best to send people away!

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My first novella, The Lucid Dreaming, debuted at the con, and seemed to be very well received. Sales were brisk, and by Saturday I was getting lots of, “I read the first 40 pages last night and it’s gooooood”. Hal Bodner became my unofficial publicist, grabbing innocent passersby and forcing them to buy copies.

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This past Labor Day weekend was my very first time attending Dragon*Con as a publishing professional, and really my first “real” time at all. I say first “real” time because I went three years ago for a single day to see Jetse de Vries, who was there at the time with Interzone. I spent most of it with him at his table, watching the crowd pass him by for the guy next to him installing vampire teeth (at $60 a pair, using the same dental instrument and, seemingly, not bothering to clean it between applications). I left with the (mistaken) impression that it was a weird goth con with nothing to offer the book trade.

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