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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: writing practice

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.

Real Life Takes Center Stage

21 Saturday May 2016

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

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dadly responsibilities, Making a buck, resolutions, writing practice

Hello, Friends:

My two month-long radio silence from this blog has been a little sad-making for me. I have a lot to report about my writing; my incisive (to me) observations are piling up, waiting to be observed in this blog. But dang–work life and my dadly responsibilities have made blogging hard of late.

There’s more to come on The Subway Test: I am hopeful that the coming two months will be less bananas at work than the last two months have been. There are books I want to share with you, scientific discoveries I’d like to philosophize about, news about my own writing to share. I hope we’ll see each other here soon.

–Joe

writing hands

Photo Credit: Marco Castellani

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.

The Zeroth Draft

12 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction, Pacifica

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Pacifica, sci-fi, writing practice, zeroth drafts

I finished the roughest draft of a novel I’ve ever roughed out in a rough world. It is so rough that I couldn’t bring myself to write Pacifica: first draft at the beginning of the notebook–instead I titled it Pacifica notes. It’s a ridiculous mix of fatuous underwriting and deep purple gasbaggery. But, if you don’t mind characters appearing,  disappearing, and changing gender midway through, it’s also a finished draft.

So far as I can tell, I wrote about 60,000 words–shorter than Stranger Bird, but still a novel. I would guess there are 15,000 words I’ll toss out immediately and maybe that many new words to add. And it’s still too early to tell whether it will ever amount to anything.

But, while I feel more exhausted than excited, it does feel at least a little good to have a story of that scope and sweep, and with a beginning, middle, and end on paper.

2127729064_e6f501a363_z

Photo Credit: Miheco

The Pacifica Process

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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NaNoWriMo, volcanoes, writing practice

I’ve always regarded NaNoWriMo participants with a mixture of admiration and skepticism: I love the can-do spirit of the movement, but I’m also curious about what kinds of novels come out of the experience. I remember when I was first considering NaNoWriMo for myself, I read an article by founder Chris Baty that “Slow writers find they can write about 800 words of novel per hour; a speedy writer (and good typist) can easily do twice that.” I knew then that I was not the droid Chris Baty was looking for.

Whatever the merits of NaNoWriMo, someone writing 800 words per hour is not a slow writer in my book. When I was writing Stranger Bird, I rarely wrote faster than 250 words per hour, I would guess–and that was on days that I was focused and serious. And that worked for me–Stranger Bird turned out well, I think, and while it may never get picked up for publication, it’s not a badly written novel at all.

mt lassen volcano

So why do I even care how fast Chris Baty thinks a slow writer can write? Well, for a number of reasons, I don’t have the luxury of writing time that I had when I was working on Stranger Bird: long empty summer months when writing a novel was really the only thing I was doing. One of the main reasons I turned to writing short fiction since then has been that a slowpoke like me can cobble a good story together with the dribs and drabs of time that are available to me: a half hour here, a few minutes before bed there, maybe a couple of uninterrupted hours on the weekend.

Pacifica is the working title of my second novel. Often I’ve felt foolish for taking a run at it: I feel so starved for time on most days that I’ve no idea how the whole draft will come together. As I work on it, I have to calm myself down daily, get clear with myself that this draft will be sloppy, come to accept that it will be full of dead ends and plot holes. All first drafts are loose, but I am consciously giving myself permission to write something truly horrible in the rough draft, in the hopes that somewhere in the slop of it there will be a story I can draw out. Otherwise the book will never come together; I just don’t have the time to write a tighter rough draft. This isn’t a NaNoWriMo project–I’ve been working on this draft since July and have at least another month or two to go–but I feel as though I’ve absorbed something of the NaNoWriMo ethic.

It’s been an uncomfortable process, almost painful some days. And it may turn out to be a flaming disaster of an experiment. But if anything good comes of it, it will be because I got over my control freakery long enough to allow 50,000 words to erupt on to the page.

Is Your Story a Lager or an Ale?

22 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Uncategorized

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beery goodness, writing practice

I’m generally not interested in giving writing advice on this blog. But every once in a while a fellow writer will drop in on this site; some of these fellows are creative writing students of mine. If you’re interested in free advice from a barely-published writer, I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?

Lagers.

If I had to condense what I’ve learned about writing fiction into a single piece of advice, it would be that I got much better as a writer when I learned to lager my work. That is, like a patient brewer, I’ve learned to put just about any story that I’m working on into cold storage for a while before I decide whether it’s finished (the cold storage is what makes a lager a lager; beers that aren’t made that way are called ales).

story_lagering

So here’s my process: I get a story idea. I work on it for weeks or months, drafting and redrafting. Usually after about three drafts (sometimes two), I put the story away for a while. Three to six months seems like a goodly length. When I pull the story out again after that, I will nearly always see some changes, often pretty deep changes, that I want to make to the story before sending it out. That 3-6 month waiting process–the lagering–is what tightens up the story for me. For whatever reason, I have to let my work sit that long before I can tell what work needs to be done on it.

How did I learn this process? Well, I could have learned it from any number of creative writing workshops or texts–lagering is not some exotic technique. But, as with most things I’ve learned about writing, I had to learn this practice Robinson Crusoe-wise, through trial and error and my own experience. The technique came to me after a couple of different incidents: once when I had a story published, then looked at the story again on the website a couple of years later and realized that there were some things I would really have done differently with that story if it weren’t already in print now. Another experience that gave me the lagering insight was when I put away a much-rejected story, having concluded that (since no one seemed to want to print it) it must not be a very good story. It was only after pulling it out years later that I concluded that, actually, it is a very good story–or at least the best kind of story I’m capable of–and that 12 rejections or 15 or whatever are not necessarily evidence that the story sucks. Some stories are just harder to place in a magazine. I decided to keep at it, and I did find a good home for it (that story is “Better than Google,” by the way, in Eclectica).

You don’t need to take my word for it. Find out for yourself, Robinson Crusoe-like. But when you discover lagering your work, one of the footprints you’ll see down there in the cellar is mine.

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