Encounters Magazine #6, Out Now and Featuring Shadows That Scratch At Frosted Glass

February 2nd, 2013 Posted in Uncategorized, Writing
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It’s good week for camp Foxie. Winterlands came out yesterday, and I very much hope you’re enjoying your copy.

If you want some more amazing fiction for your weekend, you can purchase Issue 6 of Encounters Magazine, which features my story, Shadows That Scratch at Frosted Glass.

Juna captains a small trawler, working the deep space dust clouds for hydrogen ions.  She has problems with the companies buying her catches squeezing her out the market, she has problems with her first mate Adele, and she has problems with her son.  But none of those problems compare to those of her sleepers, the people who lend their sleeping minds to the on-board computer so the trawler can take a short cut through dreamspace and travel thousands of light years in just a few weeks.  Something has noticed the sleepers, something greater than anything their minds can hold.

Encounters 06 Cover_web

“There’s good fishing around Seventeen,” Alex said. He leaned over the table and lined his shot up. “I heard skipper say she’s been going there for years.”

“And I’ve slept for her the whole damned time. I’ve requested dozens of transfers and I’ve been rejected dozens of times.”

Louisiana finished her drink, turned around, leaned over the counter and mixed herself another.

The eight ball cracked into the corner pocket. “I heard Seventeen was haunted,” Alex said.

“That’s what they said, before I was assigned here. I laughed. Haunted? That’s a child’s word. But Seventeen is a dark place. When I sleep there, I am not myself. I am possessed by something. I am in my body, but I do not control it. It is like being a puppet for God, and God is an old, old thing. Humanity is nothing to it.”

He glanced up at Louisiana. She watched him carefully over the rim of her glass.

“Maybe if I’d been sleeping there for four years, I’d unplug too,” he said.

A sleeper who believed in ghosts was a liability, and no one would hire a liability. It was a dangerous confession.

She traded him in kind.

“I feel it when I’m awake sometimes,” she said. “It watches me. Like a shadow on the wrong side of frosted glass.”

She watched him, worried she’d said too much. If he ruined her, it was one less person he had to compete against for work.

But then he nodded, and she saw the fear in his eyes.

He understood.

Issue  6 also features fantastic fiction from Robert Mitchell Evans, Thomas Canfield, Steven L. Peck, Wade Peterson, Jeff Barr and Harry F. Kane.  So don’t you dare say you’re not getting value for money!

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The Salmon, The Bear, and the Mud Monster

June 26th, 2012 Posted in Links, Writing
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There is a wonderful essay on the Future Fire blog by Filipina writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz about how colonisation has shifted Philippine culture so much, even their natural skin colour is considered inferior to white, and how you can write sci-fi from that tangle. It’s well-worth a read.

I’m not going to address any issues of colonisation. I want to use a question in the essay for an entirely different discussion: who do you want to read your work?

It kisses bumpers with a discussion I was having with Allegra and William Drood about William’s lack of motivation to write. Both Allegra and I said the same thing: we rediscovered our love of writing when we remembered why we started doing it.

See, let me tell you a story.

A few years ago now, I had been slowly slipping myself into the pool of short spec-fic and getting used to spending time in slush piles. But, well, it felt more like grinding away at something than anything enjoyable. I had to learn the tropes, the market, what people wanted, what people would pay for, the clichés, the cliques… What I wanted to write wasn’t what was selling, so I changed what I was writing.

Salmon. Both tasty and wise.

I was at a gathering of druids. The house is a single-story bungalow in the middle of a field in Nebo. The fridge is a bucket of cold water outside the front door, the sofas are old and tired, the Aga’s on and it’s night outside. I sit around a table with Allegra as she chats to the druidess, and she mentions the problems I’m having with my writing. The man next to me has got to be about twelve foot tall, and most of that is beard. His personality is as big as the bear that is his totem. He picks up a deck of animal oracle cards, tells me to shuffle them and take one. I do as commanded. I show it to him.

“Salmon,” he intones. “You said you were having trouble with your writing. Go back to the source.”

I nod and don’t say anything, because I’m young enough to think I know better than the forces of the universe.

But he was right, that bearded bear of a man. I needed to remind myself why I wanted to be a writer.

I was six. It was creative writing in class, and I was writing a story where a mud monster attacked my friends and I. I can still see what it looks like. The story wasn’t finished when class was, and so I took it home and finished it. It was the first–the only–time I’ve ever voluntarily taken classwork home and finished it. Yeah! I thought. This is what I’m going to do when I’m grown up!

With lightsabers. Everything is more awesome with lightsabers.

So, I write to tell stories about cool people doing awesome things. Like fighting mud monsters or talking to the spirits of stars or sinking the British Empire’s engine of terror.

And who do I want to read my stories? That six-year-old kid. The twelve-year-old kid he grew into and the fifteen-year-old kid that followed. Any kid, of any age, who wants to open a book and crawl into a world where awesome things happen, things that are too big for the real world to contain. Because they’re always there, in my head, and I like to know I’m not alone.

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