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The Subway Test

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

The Subway Test

Tag Archives: that strumpet Fame

Publication Updates

23 Saturday Jul 2016

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

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anthology!, cognitive overload at the bookstore, sci-fi, self-googling, that strumpet Fame, writing practice

I got some good news last week: Trevor Quachri, the editor of the venerable Analog magazine, has decided to pick up my story “Proteus.” I’m not sure when it will be coming out, but it’s been wonderful to have a little run of acceptances after such a long dry spell of rejections last year. I’ll keep you posted when “Proteus” is due to come out, as well as when my story “Count Eszterhazy’s Harmonium” will appear in Kaleidotrope.

“Proteus” will be the 15th story I’ve published. In other words, I’ve published 1.66667 stories per year since I started writing science fiction in 2007. What seems like kind of a paltry rate of publication will still, eventually, yield a decent sized harvest of stories. If I’ve learned nothing else from writing, I’ve learned to be patient.

In other publication-related news, Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection is on the shelves now, as is Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition. My story “The Daughters of John Demetrius” shows up in both of them. It was a wonderful experience to stumble across the Dozois anthology on the “What’s Hot” shelf at Powell’s City of Books last week. Going to Powell’s is often a bit depressing for me: I often come away feeling overwhelmed by how many great books are out there, that feeling that there are way more good books to read than there are days in life to read them. Other times I go in and feel like I don’t amount to much as a writer as I stroll among the towers of great authors and literary hucksters and folks who just got lucky in the publishing game. It was a sweet moment to see that I too get lucky once in a while.

joe with Dozois

The author in his natural habitat. Photo by the lovely  Carlyn Eames.

A Modest Reboot

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in A Place for my Stuff, Welcome

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anonymity, marketing, that strumpet Fame

I had dinner with a friend a couple of weeks ago who mentioned how much she likes the blog posts I send her way. But, she said, she wasn’t sure who was the author of these posts. That was when I realized that perhaps I’ve been overly anonymous on this blog.

So, at last, the picture on the avatar is me (I was a methane molecule for Halloween last year). My name is on the title. To be honest, I feel a little uncomfortable with my name in little lights like that. But I suppose it’s fair, if I want people to read my work, to let people know who I am.

A Meditation on Time

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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

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big 19th century novels, dystopia, resolutions, that strumpet Fame, utopia, writing practice

I have been taking my sweet time in reading Anna Karenina, a Christmas gift from my lovely stepdaughter. At the rate I’m going, I would guess I have two more months with this delicious, painful, hilarious book. Meanwhile, as I dither through this enormous work of art, it’s been hanging over my head that I don’t keep up my blog as befits a serious writer, dispensing witty remarks and novel observations at least once per week.

I really don’t yearn for “simpler times” (e.g. Tolstoy’s time), in which the world of ideas moved more slowly and people had time–from our perspective, anyway–to write long letters and long novels, to linger over an idea in a journal for months and even years. Many people of Tolstoy’s day didn’t regard their time as leisurely: they felt as rushed and harried as we do now, since the era of railroads and electricity had sped up life for them at an unprecedented rate. Perhaps in a hundred years my descendants will regard my lifestyle as leisurely, since most of us today don’t yet have Adderall prescriptions or cranial implants or other technological prostheses to speed up our rate of pumping out new ideas and reacting to new ideas we see.

This morning as I read my ten pages on the bus, I was taken by Tolstoy’s words about time: Prince Shcherbatsky is reacting to being told that “time is money,” and he says, “Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month of for fifty kopeks, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any amount.”

It occurred to me as I sat with that quote today that I have given away lots of time in my life for fifty kopeks, or for less. When I returned to graduate school in my thirties, I was so excited to be able to take classes at public expense (since I am an employee of the state, my classes cost $5 per course)–I often joked with people that I had spent more money on parking tickets than on tuition when I was in grad school the second time. I feel thankful to the Great State of Washington every time I think of what I learned there.

But I also made a huge blunder by valuing my labor at zero in those days. The courses cost $5, so my degree must only cost about $100, no? Yet, of course there was the massive opportunity cost of my shutting myself up for years to read academic papers on ecology and statistical analysis: there were hikes I didn’t take, other skills I didn’t learn, traveling I didn’t do. I’ve written in a couple of my stories from that period about students who get into ecology because they love spending time outdoors in nature, but that their ecological studies lock them up in a lab for months on end doing gas chromatography or grinding up plant tissue samples.

I’ve come home with a fever tonight–ironically, the fever is what has slowed me down enough to be able to meditate about time in this blog post. And I have realized that as I age, I am becoming less and less willing to give up time to others (that is, to people I don’t love) for any amount. Even if by magic I could, I wouldn’t give up this feverish time tonight–unpleasant as it is–for money. I’m sure I have my price for taking on more work, but I’m realizing that the price is much, much higher than a community college would typically pay. I would just rather have the time.

Writerly Updates

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction, Stories

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John Demetrius, marketing, Quixotry, sci-fi, that strumpet Fame, writing practice

It’s a gas to hear that Tom Dooley’s awesome and quixotic Eclectica Anthology Kickstarter was a rousing success and the books are coming out! True to my style as a writer, I’ll be in the Speculative Edition.

Closer to home, I finally got my newest story, “Proteus,” out the door to an editor. Maybe he’ll take it, maybe not, but it feels good to have new work going out.

An Anthological Appeal!

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction, Stories

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"best of" anthologies, marketing, sci-fi, that strumpet Fame

Happy New Year, gentle readers!

As many of you know, my work will be coming out in three anthologies over the next few months: Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction; both of them are anthologizing my story “The Daughters of John Demetrius.”

ECLECTICA LOGO

 

The third of the anthologies is a different case: in honor of its 20 year publishing history, Eclectica magazine is publishing an anthology of the best speculative fiction to appear there–including my story “Better than Google.”

Eclectica’s publisher, Tom Dooley, is hoping to move beyond the print-on-demand market and actually place the book in bookstores. To that end, he has a Kickstarter campaign to gin up support. If you are a fan or a generous well-wisher, please consider contributing!

The part that blows my mind is that Eclectica is a magazine that has been published online since 1996. I was getting on the internet using a 14,400 baud modem back in those days. Eclectica was some of the best literature around, all at 14.4 kilobytes (yes, kb) per second.

I’ve still been sitting through a dry spell with my new material–it’s been several months since I’ve had a new story picked up. But keep watching the skies–I’ll have more stories out soon.

 

The Banality of Self-Promotion vs. the Bogosity of Being Too Cool

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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fandom, marketing, self-googling, that strumpet Fame

Photo credit: David Goehring

Photo credit: David Goehring

I’m a writer. Becoming a writer was actually a lot simpler than I had imagined when I was a youth: basically I just wrote and read and wrote until I felt ok calling myself a writer. I’ve had a few minor crises about it–a crisis of genre, a struggle coming to terms with rejection–but becoming a writer was actually a breeze in most ways.

One way becoming a writer hasn’t been easy, though, has been learning to backburner a whole skillet of other interests in order to make time for writing. Making music, playing sports, continuing education, gaming–all these activities are sadly diminished for the time being and possibly for a long time to come, so that I can scrape together a few hours per week to write. But I’m even ok with that–being a writer means writing, after all, so to call myself a writer I do have to actually make the time to write.

And here’s the part about being a writer that I struggle with still: striking a balance between writing and self-promotion. I don’t have an agent. I don’t make enough from my writing to pay an agent. So if I want anyone to read my work, I have to send it out to magazines, or read it to people, or have someone want to read it for their podcast. And that takes a lot of time, time that I’d love to spend on the actual writing.

I do want people to read my stuff–I’m not Emily Dickinson. It took me a while to realize that the desire to have readers is different from (or at least doesn’t have to be the same as) the desire to be famous. I’m not nearly as interested in being famous. But I do love to have readers. As one of my ESL students wrote in an essay years ago, “when I am writing to you, I am saying please understand me.”

How much time should an artist spend on self-promotion? I’ve just spent a whole weekend sending stories out, trolling through Duotrope, writing a blog post about self-promotion. And not writing stories. How much time do you spend at your work (not necessarily your job, but your work)? How much time do you spend talking about your work?

On Rejection

05 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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marketing, prom dates, that strumpet Fame

I have an account on Duotrope that keeps tabs on how frequently magazines and websites pick up my stories for publication. Depending on where I’ve sent stuff and how recently I’ve gotten a story accepted somewhere, my acceptance rate oscillates somewhere between 5% and 15%. Which is to say, from a glass-half-empty angle, that 17-19 out of every 20 submissions I make get rejected.

And that’s ok. It took me 2687821250_097aee5078_ma while to understand that rejection is the typical outcome for submissions, even for writers much better than me. I know that every book and class on creative writing includes that warning early on: get used to rejection. But, like a lot of people, I saw those warnings (maybe 34 of those warnings) and yet still harbored the sneaking suspicion that my work was so special that somehow I wouldn’t need to get used to rejection.

I can say now that I have been used to rejection for a good long while. The part that I didn’t anticipate, though, is that you can get used to rejection and still find it painful. Having a story rejected is a little like being told “no, I will not go to prom with you.” The nineteenth time I hear that isn’t nearly as painful as the first time I heard it, but I still really hoped that the nineteenth person was going to say yes.

All of this is a long way of saying that I understand why people self-publish. I’ve sure considered self-publishing, too. But why not? What do I lose by forgoing the rejection process? What do I gain by sending work out to gatekeepers I don’t know and who are almost certain to reject it?

And you, reader? What do you lose? What do you gain?

Fan Mail

06 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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fandom, resolutions, that strumpet Fame

Last weekend I received the second piece of fan mail I’ve ever received in my life. I was touched and flattered, of course, but it reminded me of a long-ago resolution I’d made–when I received my first fan mail–and failed to keep. I remembered that I have never once reached out to another author myself.

I can think of many, many authors whose work has meant a great deal to me but who haven’t received the kind of attention that Cormac McCarthy or Ursula LeGuin get. Kij Johnson and John Crowley come immediately to mind. One of them will get an email from me this week–I resolve it. Or re-resolve it.

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