Category Archives: Writing

Another Honorable Mention

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I see on their blog that the story I sent in last December received an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest. This is my 3rd or 4th HM, which used to be known as “quarter finalist.”

Skimming the rest of the list, I recognized a couple of other names: Rick Novy and Brian Dolton, two of my friends from the Codex Writers’ Group. Rick had a short story in the issue of Tales of the Talisman that ran a “flash fiction” piece I wrote; he also has about a dozen Honorable Mentions from WotF. (I also see something called a “Silver Honorable Mention,” but I have no idea what that is.)

Now, to try to sell the story to a magazine. And maybe the new story I mailed to WotF last Friday — more science fiction than fantasy, this time — will do better.

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RavenCon Panels Workshop

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Yesterday I got my schedule for Ravencon, which is coming up in April in Richmond, Virginia.

I will be part of a workshop entitled “Pitching Your Work and Writing a Query Letter,” in which I expect I’ll share a horror story or two from the last few years of slush reading. In addition, I’ll be on five panels:

  • Making the Science Fit the Story
  • The Pen is Mightier Than The … (Moderator)
  • Will there be BBQ’s in Space?
  • What does the future hold for space travel?
  • Blogging, Twittering, —ings: Are They Productive Time or An Addiction? (Moderator)

Being the moderator of a panel about blogging, it seemed appropriate to post this on the blog.

Since I missed StellarCon last weekend, RavenCon will be my first con of the season. I had a lot of fun last year, except for the ill-fated trip to the restaurant-which-shall-not-be-named across the street. But the con is in a new hotel this year, so I think it’ll be even better! I look forward to seeing some old friends and making a few new ones.

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New Year, New Free Downloads Available

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Happy 2010, folks! Hope your New Year has started off well.

I’ve been meaning to make some new items available for download on my GrayMan Writes web site, and today seemed like a good day to do it.

First, a new essay: “An Unsolicited Proposal for the Secretary of Education.” Here’s the opening:

We often treat education in the United States as a utility; i.e., we take it for granted the way we take for granted that the lights will work when we flip a switch. As long as it appears to be working, most of us give little thought to education, and it only takes a little interruption to arouse a great deal of attention. The Department of Education could and should help this vital national “utility” run better and produce uniformly excellent results, but to do so it should do more than collect and disseminate research, and more than dole out Federal funds for various programs.

With that in mind, we offer this proposal for how the Department of Education could lead by example: the Department of Education should establish, staff, and operate a charter school in metropolitan D.C. and make it the best school in the country….

The full essay is at this link.

Second, some free fiction: a historical short story entitled, “The Surfman.” The market for historical short fiction is almost nonexistent, but hopefully folks who like historical fiction will be able to find it on the web site. Here’s how it begins:

Several hundred yards off Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the small freighter should have been slipping along the wavetops headed who-knows-where. Her captain must’ve been drunk or incompetent to have hit the shoals in broad daylight with a favorable tide, but that didn’t matter to Silas Jacobs. It didn’t so much matter that the ship had ten or twelve sailors on board, and most couldn’t swim a lick; deep ocean sailors were like that. What mattered to Silas was that the ocean was trying to kill them….

If you want to read the story, you can download it here.

Both of these downloads are licensed under Creative Commons, so you can feel free to share them with anyone — all I ask is that you include the right attribution.

And I hope you have a terrific New Year!

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Water on the Moon, Slush on the Desk

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I was very excited to see the news about the latest results from lunar survey missions about the presence of water on the moon.

(Moon Mineralogy Mapper composite image. Click to enlarge. Left: Sunlight reflected off the near side of the moon. Right: Infrared image showing water and hydroxl molecule signatures near the poles. “The blue arrow indicates Goldschmidt crater, a large feldspar-rich region with a higher water and hydroxyl signature.” NASA image.)

The full story is here, but here are the highlights:

The observations were made by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3 (“M-cubed”), aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft have confirmed the find….

“When we say ‘water on the Moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles,” explained Carle Pieters, M3’s principal investigator from Brown University, Providence, R.I. “Water on the Moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the Moon’s surface.

I have a personal reason for being excited about this finding, and since so few people look at this blog I assume all of you already know what that reason is. So let’s move on to the slush on my desk.

Literary slush — unsolicited manuscripts, proposals, and queries — moves on and off my desk in waves. Reading it can be mind-numbing, but it can also be interesting and sometimes even entertaining. It’s not often a source of inspiration, but my writing friend Jim Hines wrote an ode to the slush pile entitled “Slush Reading, Seuss Style” that is absolutely fantastic. Check it out!

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Zombie Haiku

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Friday afternoon at Dragon*Con I went to “Princess Alethea’s Traveling Road Show,” in which my friends Alethea Kontis, Ada Milenkovich Brown, and James Maxey read some of their work. Before the show began, Alethea invited the audience to compose their own “Zombie Haiku” to share with everyone.

I had never written a haiku before, though I know the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. And I am not particularly a fan of the zombies, vampires, etc., that are all the rage these days. But, game for a challenge, I put one together. (I wrote it on the back of one of my business cards.)

My Zombie Haiku:

Delicious brains,
Still warm, though a little dry.
Need more blood. And salt.

For what it’s worth . . . .

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Pioneer-11's Saturnian Encounter — PLUS, A Scavenger Hunt

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Thirty years ago today — September 1, 1979 — Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly by Saturn. It flew past Saturn’s rings, passing 13,000 miles above the planet’s cloud tops.


(Pioneer-11 image of Saturn during its approach to the planet on August 26, 1979, from a distance of 1,768,422 miles. Saturn’s moon Titan is visible in the upper left. NASA image.)

[BREAK, BREAK]

Dragon*Con is coming!

For those of you who may be interested, Anthology Builder is sponsoring a scavenger hunt at the con. Nancy Fulda, the founder and high potentate of Anthology Builder — where, as the name implies, you can build your own anthology of (mostly science fiction and fantasy) short stories — produced a series of badges which con-goers can collect and display to win a free anthology. Details of the scavenger hunt are on this page, and here’s the badge for yours truly — not sure why the first version stopped working —

(Click to enlarge.)

— made to come as close as possible to the grandmother who is the lead character in “The Rocket Seamstress,” my story on the site.

So if you’re going to Dragon*Con, look for the badges … and if you’re not, pop on over and see all the stories that are available on Anthology Builder.

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Latest Results: Courting Literary Agents

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After four months of trying to find literary representation, my scorecard looks like this:

  • 53 agents queried
  • 5 requested partials or additional information
  • 2 full manuscripts sent
  • 35 rejections

Of the 18 agents who still have my query, I expect I will never hear from many of them: some are very clear in their guidelines that they only contact people whose work they want to see. So that “rejection” number is low, but I have no way to know how low.

I never knew there were so many agents, and of course I’m only contacting those who represent science fiction and fantasy — a very small subset of the whole literary field. I still have a long list of agents I haven’t queried yet, but I admit that I’m starting to get discouraged. But I keep hoping that one day an agent will like my near-future science fiction story of survival and sacrifice on the moon, even though science fiction is lagging behind fantasy these days, and like it enough to take into those publishers who don’t accept unagented manuscripts.

And until then … we keep knocking on the metaphorical door.

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My Guest Spot on the Magical Words Blog

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Yesterday I had the honor of being the guest blogger at the “Magical Words” blog. My entry was called, “Some Writers Make My Job Easy, And I Hate Them For It.”

“Hate” is really too strong a word for my feeling; yes, it’s in the title, but it’s hyperbole. If you make my job too easy, I won’t actually hate you; in fact, I probably won’t invest much emotional energy in even disliking you. In truth, we might get along as people, outside the strictly business relationship — offer to buy me a drink at Dragon*Con in a couple of weeks and I won’t turn up my nose at you — but if you make my job too easy then I’m likely to dismiss you as a writer.

I’m very grateful to Misty Massey, Faith Hunter, and David B. Coe for letting me join them on their blog. Hope you enjoy it!

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Ignore the Tour Guides, If You Can (Free Download)

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Have you ever gone to a museum and been annoyed by overzealous or talkative tour guides who kept you from enjoying the experience?

Have you ever gone to a worship service and been annoyed by singers or musicians who kept you from enjoying the experience?

I’ve uploaded a brief essay I wrote about worship leaders as “tour guides,” and the need for us to be as unobtrusive as possible so that we call attention to God and not ourselves. You can download the essay as a PDF file here.

Too many of us come together to “praise the LORD” not because the LORD is great and “worthy to be praised” (Samuel 22:4, Psalm 18:3), but because we need to feel good — to get that emotional high in order to make it through the coming week. We do not bring the “sacrifice” of praise, because the very word “sacrifice” reminds us that we have to give up something — and what we have to give up is our pride, our illusions, our very selves. And so, too often, those of us who are trying to lead and guide the worship experience call undue attention to ourselves.

Please ignore us, if you can.

If you like it, if you disagree with it, if you share it with your pastor or worship leader, or even if you wonder why I was so uptight that I needed to write an essay, I’d appreciate any and all comments.

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Elusive Success, and Believing In Our Work

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A literary agent whom I hoped to query with my novel posted this message on Twitter yesterday:

Straight SF is very very hard to sell right now.

I wrote back that I hope I’m first in line when that trend changes.

I believe I’ve written a good book: it’s certainly the best book I could write at this time, and several early readers gave me very tough critiques that made it even better. I’ve got a great cover quote from a bestselling author, and have done everything I know how to do to increase its chances of success. Yet it is very possible that the current market will not accept a near-future, realistic, essentially hopeful SF story about colonists struggling to survive on the moon.

The uncertainty of succeeding with this novel makes me wonder . . .

In the grand if not the grandest scheme of things, does it matter, the success of a single person in any field of endeavor? What inventor or artist or thinker, if disease or injury or other calamity had prevented their accomplishments, would not have been replaced eventually? If not by a similar or even identical art (more likely in the realm of science than in any other), then by one that would be equally admired, equally revered?

So runs the train of thought headlong to disaster.

No — we must believe that our works have value for the moment and more than the moment. We must labor as if what we produce will make a difference on some scale — if not the universal, on the global scale; if not global, continental; if not continental, local; if not local, personal, even if limited to ourselves.

And so, onward.

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