first impressions of Edinburgh

Wow, I am really letting this story slide, aren't I? I took this trip in June, and I'm still only half-done telling you about it in October. Hang with me, people. Sometime soon I'll put up some links to the other parts of this story, if you feel you need a refresher.

During the barbecue at Adam's mum's house in Newcastle on June 18, Adam's mate (who I'll call R.P.) said something interesting.

R.P. is actually a native Scotsman, born and raised in Edinburgh. Jeff and I would be departing for that wondrous city on the East Coast train the next morning (fortunately not too early). We were drunk as lords, trying to dose off the disappointment at England's draw with Algeria in the World Cup. The evening was ripe for some funny stories. So R.P. told us about the time when he and a friend were blind drunk in Edinburgh and were stopped by police.

R.P.'s friend was pretty well gone by that time. This was evidenced by his desperate plea to the constable who'd stopped them:

"I swear I've not been cunting, drinkstable."

But getting back to June 19th: Jeff and I weren't nearly so bad off that morning as we'd been three days earlier, departing for Dublin. We'd had as much to drink, but we'd imbibed it more gradually, and done quite a bit to burn it off in the meantime (like running back and forth trying to grill for our English guests, and yelling bone-bleaching obscenities at the TV as the English team attempted to penetrate the Algerian defense).

We got up about 7:30-ish or so, had something to eat (and a lot of water to drink), checked our knapsacks one more time, got in the taxi, and made Newcastle Station in good time. With some creative finagling we managed to procure two seats in car F, and before we knew it the train was creeping northward out of the Toon.

We slowly left the city, and the multifarious bridges which hung above the River Tyne, their gantries and beams and pylons firmly visible beneath an iron sky. The rows of red brick houses and crenellated steeples faded out, replaced by sheep pastures, hedgerows and woods. As time went on and the train picked up speed, the hills began to multiply, and suddenly the jagged, adamantine coast of Scotland was outside the windows.

The sea was rough and gray, unlike the sky above, where a bit of blue had entered the breach. Wind-surfers nabbed the breakers, dipping up and down like diving birds. The skies cleared further as we rode north, until only a few sullen gray patches remained.

The trip was far shorter than even I had imagined. Remember, now, I spent three days on a train from Fargo to Los Angeles a few summers back. I was smelling pretty ripe by the end, rest assured. But a scant two hours after leaving Newcastle the train pulled into Waverley Station in Edinburgh. Jeff and I bit and clawed our way through a mixed crowd, climbed a massive staircase and emerged into the sunlit chaos of Princes Street.

Stop a minute.

Did you ever have one of those moments when you realize you're doing something you've always wanted to do, and that your dreams are finally coming to fruition, and that you're right where you should be, and all the hard work and waiting has paid off, and you're in for one sweet hell of a time, and the  joy and satisfaction and anticipation and contentedness just well up inside your heart and mind and midsection like one of those baking-soda volcanoes at the school science fair?

Yeah, I had one of those moments just then.

We turned left and headed down Princes Street in search of our hostel.

It took a bit of walking and dodging to find it. We strode nearly the length of Princes Street, hung a right on Queensferry, and then a slight left on Belford where it abscinded at an acute angle from Queensferry.

All the while I gazed about me in unadulterated wonder. The city of Edinburgh was like nothing I'd ever seen before. And I was liking what I saw. When I stepped out of Waverley Station I thought we'd somehow gone through the Chunnel and wound up in Eastern Europe somewhere: Prague, maybe. Mind-boggling stone architecture, enormous monuments, statuary of every description, and a skyline besotted with steeples, towers and minarets, all hung under a cottony sky with the blue breaking through. Nothing had prepared me for it. "Flabbergasted" is the term.

And of course, the requisite bagpiper was on every corner.

The hostel itself was a converted church in a very quiet neighborhood a few hundred yards down Belford Street. Its dark steeple loomed over the narrow street like a brooding curate, the ancient stones worn and weathered by time and the elements. It—

Oh, hell, why am I talking when you could just go to Edinburgh and see for yourself?

We checked in and went to our room. It consisted of three two-person bunks and not much else, except for a slip of mirror on the wall and a few notices. There was no lock on the door. There wasn't even a ceiling on the room: above our heads was empty air, stretching up to meet the dark wooden vault of the church.

A holy experience (as in "Holy shit"). I immediately called dibs on the top bunk, you may rest assured. Laying there with my head east and feet west, I was looking straight over the lip of the western wall to the enormous window below the church steeple, thus:

Talk about a room with a view.

Okay, I'm done being smug. I'm also done with this blog post. This is all I have time to tell you about right now. I have to go drill some holes in the sky chasing unmanned aerial vehicles now. I shall relate to you the events of the first evening (and night) in Edinburgh tomorrow, mayhaps. Until then, good night and enjoy the pictures.

getting back in the ring

Short post today, rest assured.

Flying's been called off for the second day this week. There's a massive storm system deluging SoCal at the moment, including my neck of the desert. You've no notion how strange it is to have rain two days in a row out here, let alone the kind of downpour this has turned out to be. There was a whiz-bang thunder and lightning show last night, which my dad and I stood out on our front stoop and watched. The lights of the town completely disappeared behind fog and mist, and massive tongues of lightning tore open the sky and limned my little neighborhood with a garish lambency. Then the thunder came and pounded our eardrums into our skulls, just to let us know that the world hadn't quite ended...yet.

Anyway, I thought I'd use the extra time to get caught up on my writings. I'm letting the rejected "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" sit and stew awhile on the back burner. As for the four longer stories I have on my desk...well, I think I'll just finish 'em up as I see fit. Have fun with them, you know, and not get obsessed with making them subtle and perfect and sublime and meaningful. Then I'll let them sit awhile and come back to them and fix them later, see? It'll keep the process from becoming too much like work. That's the ticket.

The way I see it, I got into this literary stuff for the fun of it. So I ought to be having fun. I should just write what I want, when I want, when it occurs to me, and worry later about making it so that some editor somewhere will want it. (After I've finished writing it, for example.)

So it behooves me not to reject any ideas. If I get one, I should write it and see where it goes. If I judge every new idea by someone else's standards, I'll never get anywhere. Commercial writers like Robert E. Howard still managed to write some dang good fiction and have a shit-ton of fun doing it, despite writing for a specific market, or even a specific publisher.

My point? I've been stressing. Despite how non-negative the feedback I got from Fantasy & Science Fiction was, I've still been having a crisis.

Oh God, I've been rejected. I'll never be a good writer. I should shave my head and go live in an abbey and solve mysteries like Cadfael.

What in the name of hell's donkeys was I thinking? This story sucks canal water. It'll never get anywhere. Isaac Asimov would laugh me right off the street.

"Too obvious." Okay, my story's too obvious. I'd better go and check and see if my other stories are too obvious. Oh damn, they are. What'll I do? They're mostly written already. How am I going to inject meaning and subtlety into these wads of shallow drivel? I should just delete them off my laptop, run the disk defragmenter, and forget I ever wrote them.

Forget that noise. I just have to write what I like. You should write what you like, too. That's where the magic begins. I and ten thousand other writers endorsed this message. (If you don't believe me, Jade's got a marvelous article about it right here.)

To that end, I sat down at my computer last night and this morning and came up with two new ideas.

That's right, two. Two stories, buster. That's the way you get yourself back into the ring after a major letdown. Double-tap. Arsinoitherium-style. That's how I roll. 

And I've actually begun work on both stories, too. No outlines or anything. I'm just making it all up as I go, seeing how the plots develop. At least both stories have plot and subtlety as far as I can tell. Plus they're just dang fun to write. I don't have to worry about those troublesome things like research or realism or respectability or anything. All I have to do is sit up to the keyboard, let my imagination wander, and write a nice, clean, fun, wacky, character-driven story.

The titles are "Jonah and the Asteroid" and "It's a Jungle in Here."

(See, this is why I love science fiction. I can whip up stories with wacky titles like that and still be considered a legitimate writer. What a racket!)

One more thing: I solemnly promise, on pain of self-mutilation, that I'll finish telling you about my trip to England sometime before the year's out. I haven't even mentioned Scotland yet, and that just can't be missed. Plus I have a little vignette about the trip Miss H and I took to Joshua Tree National Park last weekend, and undoubtedly there'll be some more worthwhile flying stories as autumn comes on and the weather worsens.

Stay tuned.

inside the box: or, how I got my first rejection slip

When asked, "What do you read?", Stephen King replies, "Everything I can get my hands on."

In truth, King does a lot more than that. He buys audio books and listens to them in his car whenever he drives somewhere.
"Come on," he says, "how many times do you need to listen to Deep Purple's 'Highway Star'?"

Good thing I'm not all that fond of Deep Purple. I suppose Led Zeppelin would hardly make an adequate substitute, though.

I suppose it makes good sense for a writer—even a published, internationally famous one—to immerse himself or herself in reading material. Even stuff that isn't strictly related to the author's preferred genre can help. By constantly reading (and writing), King is keeping his skills sharp. He's seeing what's out there. He's getting a feel for his craft. He's learning from his fellow authors and their scribbles. Constant exposure never hurts when you're trying to learn something and/or stay good at it.

Apparently I don't read enough science fiction, then.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Postman has received his first rejection slip.

Well, okay, it wasn't my first. More like the second. Okay, third. Okay, eleventh. (Nah, I'm kidding, it really was only the second slip I've ever received, honest.) But it was the first one I got from a fiction magazine, and that's what counts. Fiction is where I intend to make my mark. And on September 30, 2010, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine sent me a wake-up call. My short story, entitled "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" has officially been rejected.

The editor, good man that he is, wrote me a personal note instead of sending a form letter. He explained that though my story was "a good try" and that F&SF is "always looking for humor," my story was "too obvious."

Okay, I could see that. My story concerns two Earthmen assigned to make contact with the sentient crystalline life-forms of a nearby exoplanet, only to discover, at the end, after spending twenty pages trying to communicate with a chunk of crystal using interpretive dance and impressionist art, that it's actually the sunflowers of this world which are the sentient ones.

Puerile, yes, but I had a lot of fun writing it.

This was a test shot, anyway. I'd read an issue or two of F&SF, and had heard plenty about their submission standards on the Internet, but I wanted to assay the market in person. I thought I'd whip up something short and sweet and submit it before I sent them any of my big honking novelettes. I thought "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" might have a decent chance of being published, so I put the finishing touches on it, packaged it and sent it off.

Well, here's my answer.

It wasn't as though I didn't approach the writing seriously. I was earnestly attempting to construct a character-driven story, with a point, premise, purpose and plot, and all those other P-words which the best sci-fi stories possess. What I've noticed about my favorite sci-fi writers is that they were observant. They perceived the faults and oddities of the civilizations they were a part of, and satirized these societal shortcomings in their stories, using clever and creative metaphors. H.G. Wells lampooned the inherently bestial nature of human beings with The Island of Dr. Moreau; John W. Campbell, Jr. explored trust, survival instincts and collaboration in crisis with his spine-tingling "Who Goes There?"; and Poul Anderson had a great deal to say about identity, freedom, interpersonal relationships and independence in "Call Me Joe."

What I had with "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" was the form of a dramatic, metaphorical, quote-unquote "deep" sci-fi story...but not substance, nor the subtlety to conceal it. I had a story, simple as it was. I had a climax. I had a conclusion. I even had a sort of metaphorical premise, though poor and underrepresented. (The story was intended to show up humanity's abject lack of knowledge about extraterrestrial life, and the futility of attempting to predict the nature of said life...or plan the methods by which we might interact with it.)

But I failed to develop matters fully. I wrote it on the spur of the moment, focusing on the humor and dialogue instead of the story itself. Without planning things out, without taking time to brainstorm the methods I would use to tease the meaningful elements out of the basic tale, I wound up with a substandard bit of drivel. The result, naturally, was "obvious," as F&SF's editor put it. I'd written an anticlimactic and pointless story, with no underlying meaning and a sadly predictable outcome.

I will admit to being...let's see...moderately bummed out by the rejection letter. It was my first (well, second), after all. And I'd honestly thought that "Wrong Life-Form, Genius" had had a shot. It curdled my insides to hear some stranger judging my precious little story. I was embarrassed, discouraged, disconsolate.

I didn't stay that way for long, though. I hadn't been too emotionally invested in the work. (I wrote it on the spur of the moment, remember? In a coffeehouse, sitting across from my best friend to boot. I wrote it basically to make him laugh.) It was just a silly little chunk of humorous fiction, sent off on a whim. That made the rejection easier to take.

And easier to learn from. It wasn't but five minutes before I was analyzing my story, my writing process, examining the manifest of my train of thought, sussing out what I'd done wrong and what I could do better next time. I still had four or five longer stories I was working on, which I did seriously hope to get published. This was no time to be feeling down in the dumps. It was time to start perfecting my other works, based on what I'd learned from this rejection. After all, what are you supposed to when you fall down?

That's right, guys. You get right back up on the, uh, horse.

What do I lack? I asked myself. I sat around and drank alcohol and puzzled until my puzzler was sore. Then I made up my mind. I lack focus. I'm fine with actually writing the story, but I'm getting too hung up on the minor mechanics and ignoring the big picture, the story as a whole, the grand design behind the veil. I'm so blinded by the details that I'm overshooting the inspiration necessary to create a unique and multifaceted masterpiece, and as a result, my stories are turning out to be puerile and obvious. They lack meaning, worth, complexity, subtlety. They don't have the deeper context, the satirical punch, the masterful sophistication of story and plot and character which make better authors' work sizzle.

In short, I need to practice more. I need to write more, and I need to read more, too. Good science fiction will diffuse into my brain through my eyeballs, be analyzed by a crack team of discerning neurons, and then fall down the dusty chute to my fingers, where it will flow back out of my body and onto the blank pages on my laptop screen where it belongs.

No, no, I'm not going to start plagiarizing, smarty-pants. I mean I'm going to get a better feel for my craft, keep abreast of what constitutes "good" and "bad" writing, inspire myself to try for new heights, inundate and imbue my brain with good science fiction, and, like Stephen King, become (and remain) a better writer for it.

By coincidence, I located The Best Science Fiction Stories (Volumes IIA and IIB) in a used bookstore behind the corner gas station a couple of weeks ago.

I also picked up U-Boat Commander, a factual account of a German submariner's service in the Atlantic during World War II; A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; Winged Pharaoh by Joan Grant; and a couple other miscellaneous novels.

Oh, snap.

Training my inner writer is going to be a blast.

I intend to read through these stories (penned by known and unknown authors) and consider them carefully. And then, employing their best elements and most effective devices, I'll revise my own nascent projects.

Wish me luck.