The Last Week Of The Clarion Blog-A-Thon. Can You Help?

It’s the last week of the Clarion Blog-A-Thon, the annual writing exercise I do for my alma mater.  I have raised $850.  I’d like to get to $1,000 before it finishes this Sunday.
If you donate a mere $5, there’s good value in it, I think; in the Clarion Echo, where I’ve been live-writing things, I’ve posted the final drafts of not one but four stories that I’ve already sent out for publication:

• “The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Olizsewski,” the tale of perhaps the oddest wizard you’ll ever meet, and the envious obituary writer who attempts to dissect his magic;
• “The Cultist’s Son,” the darkest story I’ve ever written (or think I will ever write), detailing the damage a Shub-Niggurath cultist did to her son;
• “REMployee of the Month,” a flash fiction about retail workers who put their shifts in while they sleep;
• “Run Deeper,” a Lovecraftian spin on, of all things, Minecraft.

I think paying $5 for four short stories isn’t a bad deal.  But if you’re a writer, there’s also close to 10,000 words of commentary on how I edited those stories from first to final draft, laying out in detail what I thought was wrong with each of the stories and describing how I fixed it… or how I abandoned it.  I try my best to put you inside my messy little writer’s head, showing you all the tiny tricks that takes a story from “readable” to “good.”  (I won’t say “great,” as I never love my fiction, but at least two of these stories are literally as good as I’m capable of writing right now – The Cultist’s Son is some of the best characterization I’ve done in the past five years.)
So there’s a lot in there.  Plus, if you donate $25, I will critique a story for you – I’ve got four people with critiques I just have to write up, and there’s room for more.  Donate $5 (and email me with your LJ user name), and you’ll get to see ALL THE STORIES.
Like I said, I’d like to hit $1,000, and I think I’ve done the work that even a small donation will get you your money’s worth.  So if you’ve got the cash, please think about helping out the next generation of sci-fi and fantasy writers.

Steps Towards Becoming A Real Writer

I’ve discovered that my feeling of being a Real Writer is ephemeral, easily stolen.  It comes for a few minutes after I’ve been published in a nice magazine, flares for a day or two when I get a kind review, and the Nebula kept it stoked for like a month.
But it fades.  Impostor syndrome sets in.  The latest story is rife with flaws I can’t quite tease out.  Rereading this draft with fresh eyes just shows me how bad I am.  And so, inevitably, I return to being a man who writes, but not a Real Writer – a state I imagine to feeling very much like the angels do, floating above it all, informed directly by a greater wisdom.
Weirdly, the thing that made me feel most like a Real Writer this year?
Hatred.
In the forums discussing my latest Pseudopod story, one guy said, “I haven’t liked a single Ferrett Steinmetz story thus far, and not only did I truly despise his fairy unicorn story on Podcastle (I can’t recall the name), but I thought his author’s note was particularly arrogant and obnoxious.”
And I thought, wow.  I’m part of the club.
I mean, anyone can like a story of mine, and those who post here are inclined to tell me nice things.  Impostor Syndrome causes me to all-too-often discard those compliments like junk mail, because I can’t possibly process sincere affection for my work.
But to hate me?  I mean, not to just dislike a story I wrote, but to bump into enough of them to accumulate a dislike of me personally, and then despair as I showed up yet again?  Wow.  A guy like that isn’t going to blow smoke up my ass, since he didn’t even know I’d read his comment, and the fact that yeah, I guess I have been on the ‘Pod network enough to become an annoyingly regular occurrence made me go, holy crap, this is real in a way no nice review ever had.
Go figure.  Of course, the guy went on to say that he actually liked this story, which I found a tinge disappointing, because now he likes at least one thing I wrote and of course that must be a lie.  But the detestation?  Pure reality.  And it made me Real.

My Wife Requires Your Assistance. She Is A Good Person.

Back after vacation, and my mind is a jumble of potential posts.  Some Sad Things happened on vacation with the old ticker that make me realize a major portion of why I blog, I’m still chewing over Trayvon Martin, and of course I’m simultaneously jetlagged and on island time while untangling 100 catchup tickets from my Day Job.
So of course I’m shilling for Gini!
On Saturday, my wife will be riding 150 miles to raise funds to battle Multiple Sclerosis.  Or she will be trying to.  A hairline fracture in her foot from the triathlon has hampered her workout schedule, and the vacation even more so, so she’s basically headed into a long, gruelling ride without a whole lot of training.  Which means she’s going to be busting her back even more than usual to help out.
But this is personal.  One of our dearest friends in town, the vivacious Patti Substelny, suffers from this dread disease – and being the larger-than-life figure she is, she’s assembled a whole team of people to assist her in this quest.  Gini is a proud member of Patti’s Paladins, and every cent she raises helps Patti and thousands like her to get relief from their dysfunctional immune systems.
Gini feels bad because she hasn’t been as aggressive raising funds this year, so I’ll help her out: this is for a life-threatening illness, it’s something my beloved wife is sweating over, and it’s over by Sunday.  She’s gonna pedal her heart out for good people, and I for one would appreciate it if you’d throw in what you could to encourage her and aid some people who need it.
$35 will fund self-help groups.  $65 will fund wellness programs.  $120 will pay for a physical therapy session, and $200 will help bribe politicians.  But even $1, $5, or $10 will make a difference.  So please help if you can.

Hey, Remember This Story I Live-Wrote For You Back In 2010? It's Done.

Past members of the Clarion Write-A-Thon may remember a weirdie little tale I wrote while you watched called “The Sturdy Bookshelves Of Pawel Olizsewski.”  It was about a very strange and unwitting magician who made some very incredible bookcases, and one (bad) reporter’s discovery of a whole new field of magic.
Since I wrote it during the Clarion Echo (two drafts!), I felt it was only right to finish it during the Clarion Echo, and so yesterday on a plane flight I completed the final draft.  Which means, if you feel like donating $5 to the Clarion Echo to get access to the community, you’ll get to see something really special: an author, explaining why and what he changed upon every step of the drafts he did, right up until he finished it and sent it out for professional publication.
The story, if you’re curious, now starts like this:

When people asked me about Pawel Oliszewski’s bookcases – which they inevitably did, especially for the brief period I was paid to answer their questions – I told them my story in strict chronological order.  I explained how I moved next door to Pawel, a quiet Polish accountant, when my mother died.  I told them how, over the course of seventeen years, my neighbor gifted me with seven fine specimens in his legendary line of improbable bookshelves.
No, I wasn’t willing to sell them.  Yes, he offered me more bookcases – roughly four a year, actually.  Yes, I turned him down – the man would have filled my house with bookcases, if only I’d let him.  Yes, I still have them all – the specimens I currently possess are specimen #89 (Vickers hardness test: 970 MPa), specimen #113 (Vickers: 1325 MPa), specimen #234 (Vickers: 2250 MPa), and the much sought-after late-era specimens #269, #287, #292, and #304 (effectively untestable).
Yes, it is an irony that each of the bookcases are worth more than my house now.  Oh no, I’ve never heard that one before.
But above all, I tried to tell the origin of the bookcases honestly – the tedious hobby of an asocial immigrant who specialized in awkward pauses.  This was an error.  People wanted Pawel’s garage workshop to be a magical wonderland – wanted Pawel himself to be a sage armored in wise silence.
The official biography – which I did not write, despite being both a professional obituary writer and a good friend to the Oliszewski family – jostled the facts around, made it seem as though Agnes knew there was something special about Pawel’s craftsmanship all along.
But no.  His bookcases were boring, as was Pawel, as was I.  Ask yourself: if anyone had seen anything of interest in that quiet accountant, wouldn’t the world have heard of his bookcases years ago?  Wouldn’t they have discovered Myra Turnbull’s purses and Jeb Guhr’s model planes?
No, the truth was there all along; it was just tedious.  Easily overlooked.  Like me.
Still.  I’m going to tell you the way I’ve always told it.  Strict chronological order.  Just to channel a bit of the old man’s magic.
Are you interested now?

But it used to start like this:

Once a month, every month, for thirty years, Pawel Oliszewski built a bookcase.  It was not a particularly pretty bookcase — an undecorated, chest-high white ash box with three plain shelves slotted into grooves — but  though Pawel never seemed to take pleasure from making them, he never varied them either.  Each bookcase was a perfect clone of the last, to the point where his children took to putting their father’s bookshelves in different rooms of the house.  When stood next to each other, they looked like strange, unearthly dominoes.
No one would have mistaken Pawel for a craftsman.  By the time I met him, having moved out of my apartment and into my recently-deceased mother’s old house when I was forty-five, Pawel was a quiet, beer-bellied Polish immigrant with prematurely white hair and soft hands.  He made a decent living as a tax accountant, and never took vacations that I saw; his only time away was on weekends, in his workshop, making bookcases.
And he built precisely three hundred and sixty identical bookcases before dying.
Pawel’s rationale for building so many bookcases was a subject of much debate among his friends and family — who, it must be said, were not avid readers.  His wife Florence told me that when she met me, perhaps feeling a little guilty for her lack of literary enthusiasm once she discovered I was a staff reporter for the Norwalk Hour.  Still, she was a friendly woman with frosted hair who pressed my hand between her manicured fingers and told me, despite my protests, how exciting reporting must be.
“I give it a month,” she said, offering me a glass of vodka and tea.  “You’ll get your bookcase soon enough.”
No one quite knew why he built the same bookcase over and over again.  All Florence knew was that one day in the early 1980s, Pawel had lamented that his desk job was making him fat.
“So take up a hobby,” she’d offered.  “Do something with your hands.”
“I like that,” Pawel had said cheerfully, though he did not grin.  As I soon learned, Pawel met every happiness with a thin-lipped approval and a curt nod.  So he had signed up for the Spring Woodcrafting 101 course at Norwalk Community College, where he made his first bookshelf.

In any case, if you donate $5 to the Clarion Echo (and email me to tell me your LJ user name, and have a bit of patience while I add you, as I’m travelling), you’ll get full access to the Clarion Echo archives, where you can not only see every version of this story from start to finish, but watch me live-write a novel, and go back for a second draft of a story I have been commissioned to write.  I think it’s really quite fascinating, and would have killed back when I was an unpublished writer to have this view into how an author sees the weak points of his tale and corrects them.
And even if you’re not interested, please donate if you can.  I’m writing to raise money for the workshop that literally transformed my life, and they need some cash, and throwing it at them will help the next generation of writers.  So please!  Give the best people in sci-fi a hand.

Fuck Sports Bars. I Want A Cooking Show Bar.

I don’t need to root for the Yankees.  I need a bar where I can sit with a rowdy crowd of other cuisine fans and boo Krissy on Master Chef.  I wanna thump some stranger on the shoulder when Mary nails the Beef Wellington on Hell’s Kitchen, people who’ll bullshit with me about how they’d transform that leftover meatloaf on Chopped, get into friendly arguments because they think Rodney the Pie Man should be the Next Food Network star and I firmly believe that Sinmaster Russell should get in.
A place like that, though, couldn’t just be a sports bar, brimming with Budweiser and reheated potato skins.  No, this would need to be the gastropub’s gastropub, a place with thirty perfectly-selected beers and beautifully-cooked appetizers, served beneath the big screens.
And before the Mystery Box is revealed, you can pay a fee to be one of the six tasters – and when the ingredients are on the table, the bar’s chef will begin cooking furiously along with the contestants, given the same challenge in the large and very visible kitchen so you can watch either the local show or the game show.  (Assuming they have the proper ingredients on hand, of course.)  When it’s done, he’ll serve you up what he would have done with the Iron Chef ingredient of cauliflower, and you can critique it before the crowd.
Where is this bar?  Why does it only exist in my mind?  Can someone local make this for me?  Please?

Perhaps The Most Wonderful Reading Of My Story Yet: "Riding Atlas"

A while back, I pointed you at my consanguination-as-drug-trip story “Riding Atlas,” which starts like this:

They were naked, now, on a dirty mattress.
“Neither of you have eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours?” Ryan asked, hauling equipment into the room: sloshing plastic buckets, packs of hypodermic needles, coils of tubing, straps. “And no drugs in your system? This is a pure trip. Just two bloods commingling. Any impurities will stop Atlas from getting inside you.”
Stewart didn’t answer. He was too distracted by all the naked couples. The attic floor was covered with bodies, lying belly to swollen belly on bedbug-blackened box springs. Their arms were thrust out above their heads, ears resting on their biceps; they clasped hands like lovers, each couple’s circulatory systems knitted into a single bloodstream.
Stewart felt his arms itch where the needles would be inserted, anticipation and fear churning into a sour mix in his gut. But Tina was ready, as she always was for things like this. She’d dragged him here, telling him they had to do this now, before they outlawed consanguination just like they’d outlawed LSD.
She stared up at Ryan with adoration as he strung the wiring above them with efficient motions. Her breath came in excited hitches.
Though his girlfriend was dry-humping Ryan with her eyes, Stewart took satisfaction in the way Ryan refused to look back. Ryan had wanted to take her to Atlas, but Tina had insisted her boyfriend should be her first time. And Stewart had gone along with it — because if he didn’t, Ryan would.
Once you’d exchanged the most vital bodily fluid, Stewart thought, sex was almost an afterthought. That must be why the consanguinated fucked so much. But Tina kept insisting this wasn’t about sex…

And I was glad when horror podcast Pseudopod picked it up for the dramatic reading, because a) I love all audio productions of my stories, and b) this is a particularly squicky story and I wanted to hear how it would feel when read by a pro.
Imagine how thrilled I was to hear that my friend Christopher Reynaga had been tapped to read the tale!   And let me tell you: he read my story like I want to read it.  His performance is stellar, and I want you to all to thunder forth and hear his narration.  So.  If you have forty minutes to have me poor some mingled blood in your ear, and feel like hearing what happens about two lovers who decide to join a circulatory system, well…. go to, my friends.