Anxious Disclaimer:

Okay, so this post may likely come off as really self-involved.  But, well, this is a blog, and lots of blogs are pretty self-involved, almost by definition.  Also, I know perfectly well there will be lots more self-involved blog posts to come.  So, I’m hemming and hawing here at the top probably because this has to do with my writing, and writing has been a dream of mine for a really long time, and that makes it lots scarier…

Anyway, I think the more pertinent disclaimers are these:

1) In real life, I don’t talk about my writing and my stories very much, even though I quite want to.  Partly that’s because I’m a slow writer, and I have this feeling like I don’t want to give away what’s in my stories before I’ve had a chance to write them (whether that makes any sense or not).  And partly it’s that I assume I am way more interested in my own stories than anyone I might happen to be talking to would be, and I don’t want to bore them to tears.  (And I don’t want to come across as too self-involved… …)

2) I like reading blog posts written by fiction authors.  I like reading about what went into their writing process and what they think about their stories.  And I’ve dreamed about being able to do that with my own stories.  And that’s kind of why I made myself start this whole website/blog in the first place.  So, really, I’m just following through with the plan, self-involved or not.

Main Actual Post:

The setup for what I’m doing in this post is this:  There are several author blogs I like that have series they run where they let other people introduce their new books using a certain theme specific to that blog.  This is essentially promotional writing, but it’s also fun (I think) because it lets the reader cozy up to the idea of a story in a way that’s more personal than just the descriptive blurb on the jacket or what have you.

So I want to give it a shot with my stories – and the only story of mine that is officially ‘published’ is my first SSCS: ‘Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory.’  Ordinarily, most of these introduce-us-to-your-story themes are meant to each take up their own whole post, but we’re talking about a 10,000 word short story, available only on my blog, so I’m just going to work down the list of themes I’ve collected and go for brief responses to each of them.  Maybe it will be interesting, maybe it will just be really random.

First, for context, here’s the descriptive teaser blurb:

SSCS01

‘Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory’

In the middle of a desert, there is a valley of flowers frozen in time.  Long ago, something was stolen from it, and scouts have been sent out, winging through the furthest reaches of space to search and try to recover what was lost.  What they find is an even greater mystery.

Theme 1: John Scalzi’s ‘The Big Idea’

This is not the first story I’ve ever written, but it is the first of my SSCS’s, and when I started it it was really just a way to escape into things that I find beautiful, to write something for pure enjoyment and not any purpose.  Things I love include deserts, and lush flowers, and the vast possibilities of outer space.  There’s a type of emptiness that is so restful, like when you’ve climbed to the top of a tall mountain and everything is spread out all around you, but it’s also far away.  I didn’t realize when I started that the desert was going to be one of the characters in this story, or in fact that several of the characters would be places actually.  But if I had planned intentionally to write a story with a place as a character, then for me a desert would have been the only sensible choice.  I don’t want to live in a desert, but do I very much like to visit with them.

Theme 2: Mary Robinette Kowal’s ‘My Favorite Bit’

On their quest, the scouts meet an entity that’s just called ‘the great, black bone.’  It’s from some completely alien world, and has become lost on a quest very much like the one the scouts are on.  It offers them guidance and context, and it speaks to them by means of the sounds made when it shifts and cracks itself.  They get a glimpse of the world it came from, where the songs it sang were described like this:  It is a song of grass and hillsides, if both grass and hillside were made of glass.  A sharp sighing, breathing, moving; like dust rubbing against itself.  This is my favorite bit, where I like to think I’ve managed to describe something very alien, but also just as beautiful as the desert and the valley of flowers that I started with.

Theme 3: Chuck Wendig’s ‘5 Things I Learned While Writing _’

Well, I’m not going to pull five writing lessons out of a 10,000 word short story, at least not today, but here are two:

1) It’s good to write just for the joy of it sometimes.  Writing can turn into work, just because any large undertaking involves some amount of work.  But taking a break from the work and doing something just for pleasure (a stop-and-smell-the-roses version of writing) can be very refreshing.  Afterward, when you go back to the thing that is work, you have more energy and can bring some of the joy back into it again.  Even if it seems like you don’t have time to do some snippet of a thing just for fun, doing it anyway can make you feel better and can make that other thing you’re working on turn out better, too.  This is the main reason I think my SSCS’s are valuable to me, and why I intend to keep writing them – they help keep the feeling of drudgery at bay (because I am a very, very slow writer).

2) Surprisingly, if you really like all of the things you’re throwing into a project, it might actually turn out not half bad.  This story is extremely random, and not quite non-linear…but calling the plot a plot is stretching things rather a bit.  Yet, every element I dumped into it was something I thought was shiny, in the way that I like.  And I don’t know about everyone else, but somehow it turned itself into a story that I quite like to read.  So, I guess with stories, when you’re stuck on something, sometimes the thing to ask is: What do I really want to have happen right here?  And then go for it.

Theme 4: Sharon Shinn’s ‘An Interesting Tidbit’ (linked to the descriptions of her books, not as a blog series)

So, the vast, icy plane that the scouts cross at one point is based off of my understanding of the rings of Saturn.  From a distance, Saturn’s rings are very beautiful, of course, but also look deceptively solid and static.  But really, they’re like a super-dense asteroid field made up of giant snowballs all rushing around Saturn in their orbits at different speeds depending on their exact distance from the planet.  It’s like the biggest freeway ever at peak rush-hour, but everything is moving just right to avoid collisions (mostly) or traffic jams.  But it’s in space, so it’s perfectly silent.  And it’s so far away from the Sun that it’s so cold everything is made of ice.

Theme 5: (mine own) ‘The Place or Moment I Wish I Could Visit’

(Okay, so for my version of an introduce-us-to-your-story theme, I’m all about setting and world building.  This doesn’t necessarily come out in my stories as much as I’d wish, but it is still one of the things I love about stories in general.)

In this story, the place I wish I could visit is in the past.  I want to be able to visit the valley the way it once was, when there were waterfalls, and bees in the flowers, and frogs hiding under the great, green leaves.  I want to be able to smell the honey of the flowers and feel the thick, misty air.  I don’t imagine it as a terribly big place.  More like a breath-taking secret tucked away somewhere.  Everything about it is green and good and growing.  But, I’m a gardener, and hanging out in the plants is sort of my jam.  As much as I think deserts are beautiful, just thinking about green places feels like getting a great, big hug.  Or settling into an immersive story.