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~ Joe Pitkin's stories, queries, and quibbles regarding the human, the inhuman, the humanesque.

The Subway Test

Category Archives: My Fiction

Back at the Keyboard

11 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in fantasy, My Fiction, Stranger Bird, YA fantasy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

fantasy, self-publication, YA fantasy

A couple of months ago, in a flash of youthful optimism, I predicted that I would be able to publish my first book, Stranger Bird, while posting regular musings and ponderation to this blog. Ah, how naïve I was at the tender age of 46…

Today, the grizzled 47 year-old me realizes what a fool’s errand it was to try and publish a book “in my spare time.” Luckily, I had fantastic people–Erica Thomas, Lauren Moran, Jeff Simmons, Gracetopher Kirk–who did practically all the publishing work for me. But even with their heroic efforts, I found that publishing Stranger Bird sucked up all of my blogging time and more.

Now I am back at The Subway Test at last.  I’ll be making a plug for the book from time to time (like now, for instance: Stranger Bird is available here on Amazon and already has a couple of sweet positive reviews! The Kindle version is coming soon!)–but my hope is to return to the musing and the pondering about the topics that have always motivated The Subway Test: science fiction, fantasy, civil society, SETI, the republic’s Trumpist infection, AI, ecology, and mythic themes in children’s cartoons. See you again soon!

 

Potosi Picked Up!

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Advertising, Beta Readers, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories, Stranger Bird, The Time of Troubles, YA fantasy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, books, fantasy, literature, mythopoesis, racism, sci-fi, Science Fiction, self-publication, Stories

I’m happy to announce that the great science fiction magazine Analog has picked up my story “Potosí” for publication. “Potosí” will be the fifth story I’ve had appear in Analog, and by far the longest story (nearly 10,000 words) I’ve ever placed in a professional market.

As I wrote elsewhere, “Potosí” is set in a near future where corporations and countries squabble over the solar system’s vast mineral rights. It’s also a meditation on white supremacy and terrorism, an attempt to explain today’s world in new and striking clothes–much the same way that Star Trek explains the Cold War and Forbidden Planet explores World War II survivors’ guilt.

It’s been a good (and busy) week for my writerly life. One of my recent stories (another Analog pick-up called “Proteus”) is getting some very nice attention, and my quest to publish my first young adult fantasy novel, Stranger Bird, continues apace. I’m hoping for a publication date of November 3–keep watching the transom for that.

There’s also much more that I want to share here on The Subway Test, and I’m sure I’ll have some longer musings and ponderations here soon, but for now I’m pretty busy just keeping on top of my sci fi and fantasy writing.

Time Is Money

05 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Pacifica

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life hacks, money, time, time is money

I’m back after a month away from The Subway Test, the longest hiatus I’ve given this blog in a year or more. As I wrote a month ago, I needed time to focus on getting the manuscript of my novel Stranger Bird ready for publication. It’s been a long few weeks, but the manuscript is finally in the hands of my layout editor, Erica, and I’m glad to be back working on other kinds of creative projects.

More than practically any other issue or idea in my life, I’ve struggled with time. I certainly contended over the last four weeks with a sense of time scarcity, even time starvation. Some of that feeling of lack comes from my own prodigious talents at wasting time. I’ve felt often enough that my time slips away from me like water out of a cracked bucket, lost to internet surfing and daydreaming, to chatting with colleagues and wandering about campus like a dilatory schoolboy.

Yet I don’t waste time every day–some days, some weeks even, I can approach my work with a grim and joyless puritanism, with the motto that if it’s fun, I can’t do it. I rarely feel much jealousy for the wealthy and powerful, but one thought that bedevils me with some frequency is the sense that, in spite of the fact that wealthy and powerful people have the same 24 hours a day that I do, those people have accomplished so much more than I in my 47 years on the planet. If I want to start feeling bad about myself, that’s the expressway to Self Loathington. Sometimes while I am on that expressway I can approach my work with a withering focus for a while, before my natural curiosity about whatever I’m not working on at the moment takes over once again.

One of the main characters in my novel Pacifica is a kind of spiritual self-portrait: a middle-aged librarian named Pánfilo (one of those wonderfully antique Mexican names that I love, from the Greek meaning “lover of all”). As I wrote in my first description of him,

Over the course of his forty-nine years of life, Pánfilo Gonzalez had completed seven hundred and twenty two college credits at nine universities, colleges, conservatories, institutes, and graduate optometry schools. Yet for all that, he had never taken a single college degree. He had come close several times—he would have received his Bachelor of Arts in History at Utah State University if he had just finished his physical education requirement and paid off his university parking tickets—but instead he had hired on to the Sterne College library as a janitor with nothing more than a high school diploma from the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria “José Vasconcelos.”

While in real life I have (barely) managed to take college degrees, as I approach Pánfilo’s real age I feel more and more like him.

taxcredits.net

Photo credit: TaxCredits.net

It is only now that I am halfway or so through my life that I feel some understanding of that phrase “time is money.” As a kid I always regarded it as one of those cartoonish shorthands TV writers would use to establish that a character was a successful businessman. I was not particularly interested in money, and so the phrase only served to make such characters as Mr. Slate from The Flintstones and Mr. Cogswell from The Jetsons unattractive to me. But it has dawned on me slowly over the last few years that if time is money, money is also time. Independently wealthy people may have the same 24 hours per day that I do, but they are much more able to spend their 24 hours doing only what they feel like doing. That so many of them spend their time working phenomenally hard, as though they are driven to it, suggests to me that there is something more to the “time is money” equation that I am not getting, or that perhaps they are not getting.

One of the internet wanderings I’ve made in the last few years that has had the most value for me attempts to quantify just how much money an hour is worth. The page is here at the excellent site clearerthinking.org–answer a few questions about how much you make, how busy you are, and how much you’d charge to do certain kinds of work, and the site will estimate for you just how much you should value your time. I learned a lot about myself after a few minutes at this site: it helped me realize that I’ve been way too willing to take on extra work in my job, and way too reticent about hiring out jobs like housecleaning and yard work. I have a long way to go to adjust my life so that I’m optimizing the number of hours I spend on preferred activities (primarily unpaid work like writing), but the site has really helped me understand just how much an hour is really worth to me.

The Penultimate Stranger Bird

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Beta Readers, fantasy, Journeys, My Fiction, Stranger Bird

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

books, editing, fantasy, marketing, Stranger Bird

As followers of The Subway Test have read before, I’m publishing a fantasy novel called Stranger Bird this year. Working with my estimable friend Erica Thomas at Works Progress Agency, we’ve landed on a launch date of mid-October. And so begins my final editing slog, getting the manuscript ready for layout. I’m surprised at how many little things (and even a couple of big things) I’m changing in response to the feedback of my beta readers and my awesome copy-editor, Ann Eames. Thanks, beta buddies!

If you’re reading this, I’m grateful that you’re reading. And if you like fantasy, I hope you’ll take a look at Stranger Bird when it’s ready.

From Poetry to Science Fiction

27 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Book reviews, fantasy, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories

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B. J. Novak, books, fantasy, literature, poetry, readers, sci-fi, Science Fiction

While on a road trip yesterday, my wife and I listened to B.J. Novak’s hilarious and touching story “J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote.” J.C. is a skilled and thoughtful poet in an age that doesn’t value poetry (that is to say, our age). He finds fame instead by translating, first Don Quixote, and then other great works, each to greater acclaim, even as his translations grow ever more absurd. I won’t say much more about the story for fear of giving away the joke—it really is a marvelous story.

Part of why I was so touched by the story was how much I recognized myself in the character of J.C. Not that I’ve ever been famous—rather, J.C.’s inner struggle with writing poetry for small literary magazines that practically no one reads called up an old personal struggle of mine.

Not long after I started college I knew I wanted to be some kind of writer, and at that time I wrote short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction pretty much in equal measure. Towards the end of my time at college, though, during a tough and lonely time in my life I listened to a cassette tape recording of a Robert Bly reading called “Poetry East and West,” and I decided, precipitously, that I would devote myself to poetry for the rest of my life.

I was not at that time a good poet. I became one over time, but I wrote quite a few bad poems before I wrote a single good one, and I wrote many more bad ones after that first good one. It was some years before I any knack at all for writing good ones.

What attracted me to poetry in the first place was its almost total disdain for market forces. Nobody will pay you to write a poem, and so you are free to write whatever you like, to dig down to the bedrock of existence, beneath those composting strata of life’s trivialities that we spend so much time buying and selling.

That way of writing and living still appeals to me. But it was only after years of writing poems that it dawned on me why nobody will pay you to write a poem: because nobody reads poetry much. To be a poet today is to walk away from readers and towards an absolute experience, like a monk or yogi or hermit. I could shut myself up in my cabin, in the manner of Robert Francis or Bashō or Emily Dickinson, and pour myself into work that few people would see, living a full life in conversation with an indifferent world, like a man calling down into an empty canyon or a sparrow singing for a mate in a supermarket parking lot. That would be a painful way to live, but it would be a life defined by the coolness of an uncompromised vision.

I don’t think I’m cool enough to be an artist of that type. It’s hard to imagine throwing my voice down a canyon for years like that. I want people to read my work, to ask me questions about it, to tell me how they reacted to it. This desire is not the same as the desire for fame—the idea of being famous gives me the willies. Rather, what I want is a conversation, a person who reads something I’ve written and says that was meaningful to me or I’ve been nagged by this question about your main character and I have to ask you. And to have that conversation, I need a reader.

I chose to write science fiction and fantasy because I thought they were genres I could write in, and at the time I was exploring the idea I thought fantasy and science fiction could use a more serious literary treatment than they have usually gotten in recent decades. (The fact that the world is full of literary science fiction and fantasy writers shows how dated my understanding of those genres was, as well as how many writers have been working the same hustle I hoped to, only years before it had ever occurred to me).

Someday I may hole up in the cabin and write poetry for the rest of my life. But not right now. Right now, I’m grateful to have a handful of readers. Every once in a while someone will email me about how much they got out of a story of mine, or with a question about something that didn’t make sense to them, and it’s that feedback from a few readers that keeps me writing.

A Story for the Time of Troubles

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Asteroid Mining, racism, sci-fi, Stories

I’ve been intending to write a story about asteroid mining for some years now. Last week I put the finishing touches on my best attempt at the topic: what started last year as a first draft of about 3,000 words plumped up over the course of a year into a 10,000 word dreadnought of a story (actually a novelette, for those of you interested in the preposterous nomenclature of fiction) about terrorism, white supremacists, and a floating mountain of pure platinum.

There aren’t many science fiction magazines that will take a story of that length, so if it isn’t picked up it may not see print until I publish a collection of my own stories. But I do hope that it is printed before then, partly because so much of what the story became bubbled up out of my struggling with the political climate of the last year.

While the terrorist enemy of the day is ISIS, science fiction looks beyond today’s social structures, refracting the view of today’s enemies and power relations into a new image that arrests our attention with its logic. What I’ve attempted to do is not exactly a bravura leap of imagination: it’s pretty easy today to see parallels between the medievalist Islamic terrorists of ISIS and their reactionary Christian, white supremacist counterparts. The greatest parallel between them is that for all the hostility they seem to have for one another, their common enemy is liberalism: both groups hate the world of globalized commerce and its perceived moral relativism; both are willing to kill innocent people in order to restore what they believe to be the proper–and long-insulted–social order.

Robert Thivierge

Photo Credit: Robert Thivierge

In the last few weeks it’s been comforting to watch the total shambolic ineptitude of the Trump administration. I have some faith that Trump’s vision of a hyper-nationalist, authoritarian America will fall apart over the next two to three years, if only because Trump and his cronies seem so intent on committing impeachable offenses (and crimes) in plain view. However, Trump’s incompetence will not dismiss the anger and hatred of some of his hardest-core supporters, the white supremacists and neo-fascists who have been so emboldened by Trump’s behavior. In fact, I’ve wondered whether Trump’s inability to govern, his failure to encourage the passage of legislation even with a pliant Republican congress eager to pass tax cuts and repeal Obamacare, may lead to even greater violence and frustration among Trump’s hardest core.

When I sat down to start this latest story, called “Potosí,” over a year ago, the thought of a white supremacist terror group seemed far-fetched, a hearkening back to the worst days of the KKK. Today I wonder whether the story is a little too prescient.

 

 

“Nonesuch” is out in Black Static!

24 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in A Place for my Stuff, fantasy, My Fiction, Stories

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Black Static, dark fantasy, fantasy, mythopoesis, Stories

I’ve been meaning to post this note for a couple of weeks, but weariness at day’s end has constantly gotten the better of me lately. I’m excited to share that my story “Nonesuch” has come out in Britain’s great dark fantasy magazine Black Static. I’m quite taken by the layout, and the illustration is the best I’ve seen of my work.

“Nonesuch” is a very meaningful story for me. I set out to write a Bernard Malamud-ian, Marc Chagall-esque collage about my grandparents’ farm in Dayton, Oregon, and what I ended up with was both darker and more frightening than I had anticipated. I realize in retrospect that the story is a meditation on the loss of my brother, my father, and my grandfather, as well as a look at the theft and violence that lies at the root of all land ownership if you dig deeply enough into a family’s history. It was a hard story to write, but I can’t think of anything I’ve written that I feel more proud of. You can pick up the issue at the 800-pound Amazonian gorilla. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to give a reading of the story sometime.

“Proteus” Is In Print!

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, monsters, sci-fi, terraforming, transhumanism, utopia, Venus

My latest story, “Proteus,” is out in the May/June issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact! On the spectrum of my work, “Proteus” is closer to the hard sci-fi  pole–hence its appearance in Analog, widely regarded as one of the preeminent publishers of the hard stuff.

“Proteus” is the second of my stories set in the John Demetrius cycle, set (so far as I can imagine) about 100-200 years in humanity’s future. The whole cycle takes up questions of our coming experiment with transhumanism, as well as a kind of meditation on the nature of utopia and dystopia–I’ve tried to create a world like our own, in which utopia and dystopia coexist in different parts of the world and for different people at the same time. “Proteus” was also an immensely fun story to write–it involved a good deal of research into the terraforming of Venus and the nature of any possible human colony on Venus.

Analog on MAX

Photo credit Carlyn Eames

To get a promotional shot for the blog, my wife obligingly took a couple of pictures on our way to The March for Science this morning. I’m dressed as the most terrifying greenhouse gas on the planet, old silent-but-deadly methane. And given the name of my blog, I thought it best for her to take the photo on the MAX train, Portland’s closest analog to a true subway.

 

Analog on MAX2

It’s hard out here for a simple hydrocarbon. Photo credit Carlyn Eames

Analog can be purchased wherever fine science fiction magazines are sold, including at the 800-pound Amazonian gorilla.

 

Seeking Beta Readers!

09 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Beta Readers, fantasy, My Fiction, Stranger Bird

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Tags

Beta Readers, fantasy, Stranger Bird, YA fantasy

beta--gillie rhodes

Photo credit: Gillie Rhodes

If you’ve spent much time at TheSubwayTest, you know that I have a novel coming out this year. And as I’ve learned recently in my mystical journey into novel publishing, finding readers for your first novel is an adventure in self-promotion. With that in mind, I’d love to find some beta readers for the book here in the forest of fantasy & science fiction blogolalia.

If you like fantasy, if you like young adult lit, or if you just like me, I’d love to send you a pre-publication draft of the manuscript. Young adult and tween readers are especially welcome, though I would like to find a few adult adult readers (i.e. old adults) as well. What’s Stranger Bird about? Well, without giving away too much, it’s the story of a young misfit who is summoned to the service of a great and distant emperor. On his journey, the boy is awakened to his own gift, the talent for understanding the speech of animals, and he comes into contact with many who would use his abilities for their own ends. Yet after arduous travel, the boy arrives at the capital and the emperor’s palace, only to find that the land is held together by a dark secret. How the boy navigates this secret marks his passage from the powerlessness of childhood to adult realization, to the knowledge that, of all creatures, only people can choose what they become. As I say elsewhere on this blog, “The book is an homage to the fantasy authors of [my] youth—Ursula Le Guin, Richard Adams, Lloyd Alexander—and a nostalgic look back at the dark and mythical tales of an earlier generation.”

What’s in it for you, you may well ask? Precious little, but maybe something of value to some of you: your name in the Acknowledgments section of the book, an opportunity to influence the development of this story, a chance to see Stranger Bird before anyone else does.

If you’re interested, you can give me your name and email address by clicking on this link. I will send a draft copy of Stranger Bird to up to 20 people that volunteer. The file is an MS-Word file–feel free to append comments or turn on “Track Changes” to make your suggestions.

Some of you know that I’m a community college English teacher and an old school grammarian–don’t let that scare you away from telling me about things in the book that aren’t working for you grammatically, syntactically, punctuationally, characterologically, or otherwisely. It’s impossible (for me, anyway) to write an 85,000 word story without making some mistakes. My editor, the estimable Ann Eames, has already found a lot of them. But she and I both know there are more.

A Pitkiny Story Is Icumen In!

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in fantasy, My Fiction, Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Black Static, dark fantasy, fantasy

After a bit of a dry spell, I’m happy to announce a new Pitkin publication: my story “Nonesuch” has been accepted for an upcoming issue of Black Static, the great English horror and dark fantasy magazine.

I’m especially excited to have this story find such an excellent home. “Nonesuch” was a huge leap for me as a writer, my first attempt at dark fantasy, and definitely one of the best stories I’ve ever written. Watch for “Nonesuch” in Black Static (as well as my new John Demetrius story “Proteus” in Analog) in the coming months!

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