Category Archives: science-fiction

Not bad for 50

I recently published a flash story, “Pulling up the Moon” (and blogged about it here as well). As I was posting the news about it on the usual social networks, I started to wonder: how many stories have I sold?

I went back through my archives, including downloads from diskettes, for Buddha’s sake, until I was able to reconstruct a fairly accurate record of how many pieces of fiction were bought by an editor (though not necessarily published).

50. That’s how many. Fifty stories. (There was a bit of poetry and other things, but let’s focus on the core.) How did that happen?

I was that many years old when I went to my first professional writing workshop, Viable Paradise. I learned many things, made some actual industry contacts, and vowed to taking this whole writing thing seriously. Before VP, I’d sold 7 stories, 2 to pro markets.

Not long after I graduated from VP, I sold my 8th story (“Layover”) to a pro market, which earned me Full Member status at SFWA.

The time between the 7th & 8th sale was… 19 years. That first ten were a time of much darkness and confusion. The next nine were pretty much devoted to parenting and DayJob™.

I still wrote during the interregnum. And submitted. Don’t get me wrong. I was missing the target, though. Not sticking the landing. Flaying about with mediocre ideas. Et cetera.

The next few years saw a gradual, not quite consistent, improvement in both the quality and quantity of my fiction output (and concurrent submissions). The sales ticked up.

In 2023, I managed to sell a dozen stories. Six so far this year.

I don’t have a favorite. Some of definitely stronger than others (and SF doesn’t always age well). For my flash stories, I’m quite fond of  “We Who Stay Behind,” “Stones of Särdal,” and “The Last Best Day of Antonio Silveri, Ph.D.” There are many others that showcase some darker humor, like “Five Things You Should Know Before Summoning a Demon” and “Harry the Ice Man.” In the slightly longer range, I still like “Papa Pedro’s Children” and “The Astrologer of the Fifth Floor.” “Sullied Flesh” has surprised me with its prescience. “Schadenfreuders” makes me smile.

“Jizo Rides the Bus” was my answer to grief. (The memorable stories, I realized, have their own unique origins. There is no common template.)

This journey started on a Mac 256K (remember those?) in 1988 with “Potential Gains” for Beyond magazine (photocopied and stapled by hand) and continues on a MacBook, where I composed “Pulling up the Moon” for Stupefying Stories.

If I get to 100 stories, I suppose I’m legally required to write a novel.

Thanks for reading.

Karl

Death and the Nebulas

Nebulas 2024 sign

The 2024 Nebula Conference was held this month in Pasadena, which is a ridiculously short flight away (Oakland—Burbank), so I bought a ticket and signed up to volunteer. Decided to pass on the banquet due to $$. (Later, I was given a dinner ticket by mistake and they refused to take it back. Free rubber chicken!)

But the week before the event was a confluence of DayJob stress, side effects from my prescription, and the death of a friend, Gabriel de Anda. Since Gabriel was one of my three oldest friends who still lived in the greater Los Angeles area, I had planned to see him. It had been a few years. Plague, political fuckwits, and contracting chaos had all contributed to the situation.

It’s a pretty poor excuse in retrospect. The constant distraction of Mundane Reality is, well, distracting. You talk with friends, or see them on Zoom, but if they’re more than a hour or two away by any sort of transit, any plans for sitting down to eat freshly grilled fish and drink pisco sour never come to fruition.

Then that bastard cancer drops by and well, bad things happen. Sometimes they happy really fast. I had just emailed Gabriel to confirm his physical address so I could drop a graduation announcement in the mail. Oh, and I was going to be in Pasadena the following weekend. Maybe we could get together.

He responded immediately. Said he’d been in the hospital for two weeks and was now home under hospice. Some kind of unknown cancer. He expected to be gone in a few days and was starting to say his goodbyes.

WTF? WTAF? I mean, he was doing edits on a story promised to a pro SF magazine. This was a totally shitty time to die. (Yes, there’s rarely a good time.)

I almost canceled my plans. Looked into a last-minute flight and hotel, but couldn’t put it together. (Migraines are a grand thing, aren’t they?) I hoped that Gabriel would still be around in a week when my brain was back online and I was within striking distance.

He wasn’t. Three days after we corresponded about literary estates and my possible contribution of an afterward to his story, his widow posted the news of his passing.

Shit.

So I went to the Nebula Conference in a weird fog. While it was truly good to see a few friends, it was also good that the panels were being streamed and recorded because I hid out in my room. A lot. I threw myself into a new flash story for a contest with a painfully short deadline. I slept more than usual.

Then I saw that my latest podcast story had dropped (“There are Worse Travel Companions” – Sudden Fictions). The story is about a man who works in an orbital crematorium. It’s a brief conversation about how we treat the remains (cremains) of loved ones.

The synchronicity wasn’t pleasant.

Fortunately, I have two dear friends, Tash and Dan, who live in the greater LA/Orange County. I saw them both last weekend. Gave them books. Talked their ears off. Hugged and was hugged in returned.

It struck me at one point that all four of us had shared only one experience: my wedding. Here’s Gabriel back on that day in 2000:

Gabriel de Anda, Esq.

I like to think his mind was filled at that moment with its usual urbane and clever thoughts. In addition to being an attorney fighting for the underdog, Gabriel was a writer of lush, poetic SF. He was one of my first students in a continuing ed course of “Writing the Fantastic” or some-such. After the class ended, we became friends, trading letters and story drafts for three decades.

Our styles were nearly opposite. He sometimes compared my writing to a zen garden, clean and focused (ha!), while his writing felt more like a swirl of ants trying to find a scent trail. My advice to him usually boiled down to Whoa there, partner. Do you really think you need three adjectives to describe that thing? Pick the best one. But Gabriel was a baroque artiste who believed in good excess. He loved Ridley Scott and Gaudí, William Gibson and secret interstellar societies, good coffee and street art.

He read everything I published (and some things I didn’t) and asked me repeatedly when was I going to write a novel. When I retire, I answered. Don’t worry, you’ll get a chance to see the first draft.

Damn.

So tomorrow I will go back into the word mines and chip away at a new vein, because someone has to tell the story.

Adios mi amigo. Adios.

Happy (Accidents) and New Year

If you’ve been following along on my fiction journey, you may note my recent appearances on Sudden Fictions, R.B. Wood’s podcast. He likes to toss out a writing prompt every month or so, and ask his fellow writers to contribute.

Well… I saw the prompt (“Celebration”) and came up with I thought was a cool low-key horror story that might work in <1000 words. In reality, I had conflated that word with all the NY Eve prep. The actual prompt was “Champagne.”

champagne cork flying out of bottle

D’oh!

So I threw my original idea into the metaphysical drawer and sat myself down on Jan 1 to write something about that fancy wine. A day later, I had “The Last Year of Champagne.” It was a fun idea to play with. The ever-gracious R.B. bought the piece and recorded it later in the week (despite his, ah, disagreement with la langue française).

Enjoy episode 40 of Sudden Fictions.

2023 in Review

Well, that was certainly a year. Very good and very bad things, indeed. I sold lots of stories and had to go back on unemployment for a while (which is itself a sordid tale I shall spare the reader).

I published more fiction than ever. I wrote and revised a fair amount:

  • Jan – Short fiction class with John Wiswell; finished “The Mala and the Monkey Brain”
  • Feb – “Krishna’s Gift”
  • Mar – “The Walkup Atheneum”
  • Apr – “Lizzie McNeil and the Veil Between Worlds”
  • May – “Sign of the Red Dragon”
  • Jun – “Copper Bright as the Sun” (revised Red Dragon)
  • Jul – “Blood of the Hierophant”
  • Aug – “When the Third Bell Rings”
  • Sep – “Pull the Red Cord”; “Poltergeist of Fastini Crater”
  • Oct – “Buffalo” (revised Week before Xmas)
  • Nov – “Order of Compassionate Death” (revision); “Third Bell” (revision); “Red Cord” (revision)
  • Dec – “A sailor’s tale”

In progress:

  • “Taldin the Thief Faces the Executioner’s Block”

Idea pile:

  • Something something wizard’s duel
  • The multiverse and some guy at a desk?

For this year’s success, I must thank my family, my weekly writing group, my occasional critique partners, and of course my fabulous coach, Cat Rambo. I found an impending deadline for her to be an effective motivation: Get out of your head and write the damn thing. (My words, not hers.)

Next year? If I can hang on to my current DayJob™ and see the scion successfully launched from college, I’d like to finish (and send out) a bunch of revisions, take a few classes, see some folks in person rather than Zoom, and write something so good it knock the socks off a pro editor.

Hey, it could happen.

May your 2024 be creative, fulfilling, and safe.

See you in the word mines,

Karl

 

Eligibility Post 2023

Want to support an underdog writer? Now’s your chance! Here’s a list of everything I published this year:

Short Fiction

Novelette

Thank you for your consideration. Now I must feed the cats.

 

Baker’s Dozen

or

What I Sold in 2023

2023 has been a record-setting year in the word mines. Apparently, if you regularly write lots of stories and send them out, editors will buy some. Who knew?

Sure, the ratio for rejections/sales is still *way* off. For now, let’s focus on the positive.

Flash fiction was king of the hill this year: 6 original stories and 1 reprint.

Short fiction had a very respectable showing: 4 original stories.

You want novelettes? We got 2. And one of those was featured in a three-part podcast voiced by a classically trained British theatre student.

It was also the year of extended holds – 2 of my acceptances came more than a year after the initial submission.

All told: 12 original stories and 1 reprint. A baker’s dozen of spec fic.

Genres were certainly up for grabs. I sold stories involving the military, time travelers, assassins, wizards, mechanics, lost civilizations, ghosts, demonic possession, found family, and a happiness virus.

The last two sales this year are pending final paperwork. Nearly everything else is available online. Links here.

In order of acceptance:

“The USS Copernicus Sixth (Semi-Annual) Contraband Run”
“The Linen Closet Nexus”
“The Antidote for Longing” (print and podcast)
“Ruby Throat and Gold”
“For Better or Worse”
“Krishna’s Gift”
“Come the Waters High (Podcast)
“The Danger of Frequent Flyer Miles”*
“The Poltergeist of Fastini Crater” (podcast)
“Come the Waters High” (Reprint)
“Last Cold Beer for 50 Miles”**

*forthcoming 2024
**Appears 12/13/2023 in Haven Spec

November ghost story and a reboot of NaNoWriMo

My latest story, “The Poltergeist of Fastini Crater,” appeared on Sudden Fictions this week. I wrote the flash story based on a prompt (“haunting”) from the editor, R.B. Wood, in what was then a Halloween-themed submissions call. However, mundane reality™ got involved, delaying the project past the holiday. Still, I set out to write a little ghost story on the moon, and it came together in two quick bursts. It was definitely the most fun I’ve had at the keyboard in a while. (For those keeping score, it’s publication #9 this year. Huzzah!)

Sudden Fictions, Episode 39

Unfortunately, my dayjob situation tool an unexpected downturn (i.e., our project was put on hold and all the writers furloughed), so I decided to revisit the ghosts of Unfinished Short Fiction for my version of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to complete (or revise) 5 stories by 11-30-2023. It may not be as tough as 50,000 words but it’s enough of a challenge!

Let’s see what happens.

Things are heating up

Cover of Stupefying Stories #24

No, this isn’t the Southwest, or the Midwest, or anywhere else suffering ridiculous summer heat. It’s just the cool, er hot cover for Stupefying Stories #24. And look there – a familiar name!

The editor/publisher, Bruce Bethke, has been an absolute gem, publishing my work no fewer than six times. That’s a happy record for me, and I look forward to continuing our relationship.

The latest story is “Krishna’s Gift” – a near-future SF tale about difficult family relationships and the cost of actual happiness. It’s more expensive than you might think.