Jay Lake: Writer

[writing|process] Poetry and fiction

Yesterday, the inestimable jimvanpelt made a terrifically interesting post about recasting prose as poetry in order to more effectively see what kinds of language choices the writer had made.

Being me, I of course immediately had to try this. It’s, well, interesting. I give you several examples.

The opening to Mainspring, recast as poetry.

The angel
Gleamed in the light of
Hethor’s reading candle
Bright as any brasswork automaton
The young man
Clutched his threadbare coverlet
In the irrational hope
That the quilted cotton scraps
Could shield him
From whatever power
Had invaded his attic room.
Trembling
He closed his eyes

The opening to Green….

The first thing I can remember
In this life
Is my father
Driving his white ox
Endurance
To the sky burial platforms
His back was before me
As we walked along a dusty road
All things were dusty
In the country of my birth
    Unless they were flooded
A ditch yawned at each side
To beckon me toward play
The fields beyond
Were drained of water and
    Filled with stubble
Though I could not now say
Which of the harvest seasons it was

The opening to Death of Starship…

“Z-flotilla’s gone over to the rebels!”
Shouted one of the comm ensigns
Sweat beaded on the boy’s
Shaved head
He was still young enough
    To be excited by combat
NSS Enver Hoxha‘s battle bridge
Was wedge-shaped
Command stations
    At the narrow aft end
A giant array of displays
    At the blunt end
All finished out in military-grade carbonmesh
    And low-intensity gel interfaces
A dozen duty stations
Arrayed before and below Captain Saenz
Eighteen officers and men
Laboring wet-backed and trembling
In the service of their own
    Imminent death
Everything reeked
Of panicked men
And distressed electronics

That last one’s a little strange, but I think they all three hold up okay. Am I poetic? Lyrical? Who’s to say from three opening passages?

How does this work on your fiction?

Tags: Books, Green, Mainspring, Process, Starship, Writing

Posted: 5:51 am Wed October 12 2011 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad wishes for improbable food

selfavowedgeek with a review of my short novel Death of a Starship

Deciding to fish or cut bait. Jonesing for MMORPGs. — Urban Fantasy author J.A. Pitts on why he used to game obsessively, and why he doesn’t any more. I could have written this same post, except that I quit RPGs before MMORPGs came along. As I’ve said before, if Everquest or World of Warcraft had existed in my teens or twenties, I wouldn’t have a writing career today. I’d be an umpteenth level wizard-thief or whatever instead of an author. And I continue to wonder how many voices never came to being in SF/F because they chose the rewards of a collaborative, immersive gaming environment over hours, days and years alone at the keyboard. Who knows what stories we’ll never read?

Fantasy: High, Low and…? Part Two: Saving the World Six Times before Breakfast (Or Not) — Author A.J. Luxton continues their ruminations on fantasy.

B&N and DC: Exclusivity Rears Its Ugly Head Once Again — Crap. I’ve been boycotting Amazon for the past year and a half for doing eaxctly what Barnes & Noble just did. That is, abuse its market power to punish print authors for an only tangentially related dispute in a different product line. B&N’s actions don’t affect me directly, as I’m not a DC comics author nor a reader, but god damn it, I don’t want to run out of big bookstores. (And yes, I buy independent when I can, but sometimes big is useful.)

World’s oldest running car fetches $4.6 million at auction — Now this is just awesome. (Snurched from jimvanpelt.)

Electric TRON Lightcycle Outed by Parker Brothers — (Via David Goldman.)

Will the Large Hadron Collider Explain Everything?

Octopi Wall Street! — (Thanks to danjite.)

Herman Cain: pizza boss, radio host, ballistics expert, minister. President? — Once the butt of late-night comedians, the Tennessee-born politician has emerged as the unlikely darling of the right.

Palin pulls a Palin — Sarah-watchers were not surprised when she announced she wouldn’t run for president. It was never her goal. A con’s a con. Thank you John McCain for visiting this woman upon America. She will be your political legacy.

Will Romney-Perry race be Christian vs. Christian? — I will point out that claiming the Mormon church is not Christian isn’t equivalent to saying it’s a cult. Whether something is a cult is a matter of perspective. As an atheist, to my view Mormons are no more or less a cult than Southern Baptists. As for Christian, I’m not in charge of those labels, but that would seem to be a definable matter. What I do know is that conservative party is infested with Christianists, that is, people who use the trappings of Christianity as clubs to wage political and cultural war for their personal bigotry and wilful ignorance. Mormon, Southern Baptist, I could not care less; it’s the Christianists I fear and despise. It’s the Christianists who’ve been busily destroying the social fabric of our nation my entire political lifetime.

Why Not Question Romney’s Religion? — Back in 2008, the only moment when the Obama campaign looked to be in some difficulty was when the GOP attacked his church and firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright. The attack itself was dishonest in that the McCain campaign took the words of the sermon out of context. On the one hand, I’m perfectly happy to see the Republican party eating their own young for a change instead of pissing in the national pot as usual. On the other hand, even as atheist, I don’t think this is a legitimate line of attack. My own belief in freedom of religion is absolute, but I likewise believe it absolutely stops at the edge of the public square. In other words, Romney or Perry or whoever can believe what they will with my full support, but they can’t impose those beliefs on me on or anybody else. It’s in the second part of that belief that I find my lifelong quarrel with American conservatism, not the first.

?otD: Melon balls or mountain oysters?

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10/9/2011
Writing time yesterday: 3.5 hours (revisions and WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 218.0
Currently reading: The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod

Tags: amazonfail, Books, cars, Christianism, Cool, Funny, Links, Occupy Wall Street, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Science, Starship, Writing

Posted: 6:45 am Sun October 09 2011 | Comments(2) |

[interviews] Another reader interview with me

Per my recent call for questions, here’s another reader interview with me. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

djelibeybi_meg: During all your cancer treatment, how did you manage to continue to motivate yourself to write and to keep up your regular blogs? If there were days when you didn’t manage it, what impact did this have upon you?

Jay Lake: The fiction writing eventually fell away, during month four of chemotherapy. That part of my brain essentially went to sleep for about three and a half months. Which was tough, because it’s a huge part of my identity, as well as being a very important activity. The blogging never stopped. In fact, if anything it stepped up. While I was in treatment I seemed to be able to focus on that kind of brief, non-fictional narrative in a way that was very distinct from my fiction.

I never really fell down on the blogging except on infusion days and in the time immediately around my surgeries. I was frankly very depressed and upset about losing the months of fiction writing time.

djelibeybi_meg: Are there particular characters (of yours) which have helped you through the treatment and recovery?

Jay Lake: I don’t suppose I think of it that way, mostly because I don’t think in terms of character so much as I think in terms of story. At one level, the character of Jay Lake in The Specific Gravity of Grief might fill that role. Though in truth I did not expect to become him so much as I have. I’ve also spent a lot of time this last year with Green, of Green, Endurance and Kalimpura, as well as the Before Michaela Cannon of Sunspin. Their stories have been important to me.

djelibeybi_meg: Do you have a favourite book or story to which you return when you need a “comfort blanket”? (Mine is Ringworld by Larry Niven)

Jay Lake: Two series, actually. Discworld by Terry Pratchett, and the Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold. My tolerance for re-reading books is actually fairly low, but I’ve returned to both of those time and again. Plus I discovered while on chemo that I couldn’t process new books mentally, but I could re-read familiar stuff. Which, incidentally, did include Ringworld. But also most definitely Bujold and Pratchett.

eljaydaly: You’ve spoken about how challenging it was to make the shift from short stories to novels (at least, I think you have!), and the difficulty with changing from one span of control to another.

Jay Lake: You are right. I certainly have addressed those issues before. And it was quite an intimidating transition. I ran scared of novels for a long time before I embraced the process and let myself become absorbed in them.

eljaydaly: Speaking as somebody who’s made the difficult transition from writing “voicey” short stories to novels… how did you do that? How did you manage to stretch your thought process (or shrink it) so that muscles that were used to working in short, dense idea-chunks got used to handling a very long span? How did you teach yourself to switch from making a single very dense dish to making a seven-course meal?

Jay Lake: Essentially my early mistake was to assume that short stories and novels were the same craft. For me, at least, they are not. (Note, this is not generic advice, merely my observations concerning my own experiences.) A short story is like a piece of cabinetwork — finely crafted, with many carefully executed details. A novel is like framing a house — lots of big strokes and long runs of heavy, rough material. No matter how carefully one crafts a novel, it’s simply a different animal than the supple twistiness of a short story.

The deceptive aspect, to further abuse my metaphor, is that both crafts use similar or analogous tools. Saws, hammers, braces. They just use them differently.

So the retraining of my thought processes was rather like the retraining of a cabinet maker to become a framing carpenter. I still bring my cabinetry skills into the housebuilding. The lessons learned from housebuilding have improved my cabinet making. But realizing and embracing the notion that short stories and novels are distinct-yet-related arts was a huge step for me.

As to how I taught myself to make the switch… The same way I’ve taught myself everything else I’ve learned in my career. Practice, practice, practice; leavened with editorial feedback, critical commentary from other writers, reader response and plentiful self-examination. But mostly practice. That is to say, writing more. Thinking about what I’ve written. Then more writing more.

eljaydaly: Day to day, how did that process look? How did you manage to wrap your head around it all? Compared with the eleven years it took you to start selling, how long would you say it took you to get a comfortable handle on such a different way of thinking and writing? Or did you actually not find it so very different? (I don’t want to make an inadvertent assumption.)

Jay Lake: Well, it took me eleven years from when I first started writing short stories seriously to when I began to sell them. I wrote my first novel in 1994, The January Machine. Someday I might even produce a Lulu.com/ebook edition of that, just for laughs, but trust me, it’s definitely a first novel. Post-millennial religious terrorism amid the collapse of the Westphalian model of statehood. With rogue AIs, zombies, global warming, and time travel.

Did I mention that it was a first novel?

So figure about ten years from that effort until I sold Rocket Science, my first novel in the independent press. And yes, as discussed above, very different. Along with lots of practice.

Did I mention how important practice is to developing as a writer?

And to be clear, “practice” does not mean polishing your Great American Novel endlessly. It means writing another one, then another one, then another one. Revision is an important skill. Critical, even. But don’t ever neglect drafting.

eljaydaly: I’m not sure that question (er… bunch of questions) even makes sense. But there it is. I’d be interested in your insights, as always.

Jay Lake: Well, I hope I covered what you intended to ask. Certainly the questions made sense to me. Let’s see if the answers make sense to you or any of my other readers.

ruralwriter: You’ve mentioned that you wrote hundreds (or some value of “a lot”) of stories before publishing a pro story; are you ever tempted to return to any of those pieces and revise them? Or do ideas from those stories sometimes reappear in your newer work without your consciously returning to revise those stories?

Jay Lake: Yes.

Oh, wait, you probably wanted more detail than that. Off the top of my head, “The Rose Egg” (Postscripts issue one) was one such story idea pulled from the deep trunk and re-addressed. My short novel Death of a Starship is another. And certainly the old ideas re-appear in the newer work. I am occasionally alarmed at how closely I can unknowingly repeat myself. On the other hand, if I’m repeating myself, that probably means the idea was strong in the first place.

Or possibly I’m just perseverating.

An example of this is my realization about two years ago that cancer has been a long time recurrent theme, albeit on a minor note, within my work. For years before it became a concern in my daily life, in fact. I’m not sure I ever would have noticed the trend if I hadn’t fallen down that particular rabbithole myself.

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That was fun. Feel free to ask followup questions in comments here. In a month or so, I’ll probably post another call for new reader interview questions. My thanks to those who participated by asking this time.

Tags: Books, Cancer, Endurance, Green, Grief, health, interviews, January, Kalimpura, Personal, Process, Rocket, Starship, stories, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:30 am Mon January 24 2011 | Comments(3) |

[links] Link salad cherrypicks reviews

Don’t forget the METAtropolis contests — Today is the last day to enter.

A reader reacts to METAtropolis

Another Locus review of Is Anybody Out There? — In which my story “Permanent Fatal Errors” appears.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt reviews my novel Death of a Starship

How do they get to be that way? — Roger Ebert on racism. I grew up in Africa and Asia, but come from an old Southern family that’s white as Ivory soap, and have a multiracial family today. I know quite deeply how life experience can contradict cultural programming.

Dark Roasted Blend with Unusual and Marvelous Maps, Part 2

One Tablet per Child — OLPC may drop “$100 laptop” in an attempt to develop an innovative $75 tablet computer.

Jupiter Impacts Add Up — Hoovering the outer system so we don’t have to.

ETA: Did you miss the ?otD?

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6/7/2010
Writing time yesterday: n/a (chemo exhaustion)
Body movement: Stationary bike ride to come
Hours slept: 8.5 (solid, with plentiful naps during the day)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (forgot)
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 9/10 (on the pump)
Currently (re)reading: Faust Eric by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Books, Cool, Culture, Links, Metatropolis, Personal, race, reviews, Science, Starship, stories, Tech

Posted: 5:17 am Mon June 07 2010 | Comments(1) |

[awards] Updated pimpage for Nebula and Hugos

We’re at the end of the Nebula window, and in the Hugo window, so I thought I’d so some updated pimpage here.

My favorite picks are in bold.

Oddball Nebula eligibility (but not Hugo) due to rules change:

* “America, Such As She Is”; Alembical; ed. Lawrence M. Schoen and Arthur Dorrance, Paper Golem Press; November, 2008 [novella]
This is probably my favorite published story of my own to date, and I wish it had received more attention. If you’re a SFWA member interested in reading it for consideration this weekend, please contact for a .pdf.

2009 Published Science Fiction:

* “On the Human Plan“; Lone Star Stories; February, 2009 [short story]
* “Rolling Steel: A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story“ (with Shannon Page); Clarkesworld; April, 2009 [short story]
* “To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves”; The New Space Opera 2, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos, April, 2009 [novelette] [in Sunspin continuity]
“Leopard“; Jim Baen’s Universe, June, 2009 [short story]
“Black Heart, White Mourning”; Grant’s Pass, ed. Jennifer Brozek and Amanda Pillar, Morrigan Books; August, 2009 [short story]
* “Chain of Stars“; Subterranean, October, 2009 – [novella] [In Mainspring continuity]
“Last Drink Bird Head”; Last Drink Bird Head, ed. Jeff vanderMeer; Ministry of Whimsy Press, October, 2009 [flash]
* Death of a Starship; MonkeyBrain Books, November, 2009 [novel]

2009 Published Fantasy:

* “Golden Pepper“; Flash Fiction Online; February, 2009 [flash]
“The True Secret of Magic”, as Joe Edwards; Crime Spells, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren Coleman, DAW; February, 2009 [short story]
“Witness to the Fall”; Crime Spells, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren Coleman, DAW; February, 2009 [short story]
“To Stone” (with Shannon Page); Morrigan eZine, May, 2009 [short story]
* Green; Tor Books, June, 2009 [novel]
“People of Leaf and Branch“; Fantasy; June, 2009 [short story] [in Green continuity]
“Tale of the Poet and the Dog”; Japanese Dreams, ed. Sean Wallace, Prime Books; Summer, 2009 [short story]
“An Elderly Pirate Recalls the Death of Love”; Electric Velocipede Issue 17/18 [short story]
* “Red Dirt Kingdoms”; Realms of Fantasy, October, 2009 [short story]
Madness of Flowers; Night Shade Books, November, 2009 [novel]
“Bone Island” (with Shannon Page); Interzone, Fall, 2009 [novelette]
“Shedding Skin; Or How the World Came to Be”; Shimmer (Clockwork Jungle Issue), Fall, 2009 [short story]

Tags: Awards, Books, Calendula, Green, Madness, Repost, Starship, stories

Posted: 5:07 pm Thu February 11 2010 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad goes back to the Day Jobbe

with an interesting take on my new short novel, Death of a Starship

Andrew Wheeler reviews Finch — A most excellent book I’ve been meaning to review glowingly.

Longacre Square: 1904 — Shorpy with a photo Times Square, way back when.

Evaporation Ponds, Salar de Atacama, Chile — Another cool photo from NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Juan Cole contrasts Bush response to shoe bomber with Obama response to underwear bomber — More to the point, contrasts press and commentariat coverage of same. Your Liberal Media, enabling conservative lunacy for years past and to come.

?otD: Work or play?

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1/4/2009
Body movement: 30 minute ride on stationary bike
Hours slept: 5.5
This morning’s weigh-in: 225.5
Currently reading: Bangkok Tattoo/em> by John Burdett

Tags: Books, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, reviews, Science, Starship

Posted: 5:30 am Mon January 04 2010 | Comments(0) |

[awards] A largely complete 2009 bibliography, as it is Nebula time

With the new Nebula Awards rules in place, nominating season is upon us. I thought I’d mention my works this year, highlighting my own favorites, for those interested in considering them. My favorite picks are in bold with *.

2009 Published Science Fiction:

* “On the Human Plan“; Lone Star Stories; February, 2009 [short story]
* “Rolling Steel: A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story“ (with Shannon Page); Clarkesworld; April, 2009 [short story]
* “To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves”; The New Space Opera 2, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos, April, 2009 [novelette] [in Sunspin continuity]
“Leopard“; Jim Baen’s Universe, June, 2009 [short story]
“Black Heart, White Mourning”; Grant’s Pass, ed. Jennifer Brozek and Amanda Pillar, Morrigan Books; August, 2009 [short story]
* “Chain of Stars“; Subterranean, October, 2009 – [novella] [In Mainspring continuity]
“Last Drink Bird Head”; Last Drink Bird Head, ed. Jeff vanderMeer; Ministry of Whimsy Press, October, 2009 [flash]
* Death of a Starship; MonkeyBrain Books, November, 2009 [novel]

2009 Forthcoming Science Fiction:

“Bringing the Future Home”; Global Warming Aftermaths, ed. Eric T. Reynolds, Hadley Rille Books; Fall, 2009 [short story]
“Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder” (with Ken Scholes); Tor.com, Fall, 2009 [short story]
“The Starship Mechanic” (with Ken Scholes); Tor.com, Fall, 2009 [short story]

2009 Published Fantasy:

* “Golden Pepper“; Flash Fiction Online; February, 2009 [flash]
“The True Secret of Magic”, as Joe Edwards; Crime Spells, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren Coleman, DAW; February, 2009 [short story]
“Witness to the Fall”; Crime Spells, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren Coleman, DAW; February, 2009 [short story]
“To Stone” (with Shannon Page); Morrigan eZine, May, 2009 [short story]
* Green; Tor Books, June, 2009 [novel]
“People of Leaf and Branch“; Fantasy; June, 2009 [short story] [in Green continuity]
“Tale of the Poet and the Dog”; Japanese Dreams, ed. Sean Wallace, Prime Books; Summer, 2009 [short story]
“An Elderly Pirate Recalls the Death of Love”; Electric Velocipede Issue 17/18 [short story]
* “Red Dirt Kingdoms”; Realms of Fantasy, October, 2009 [short story]
Madness of Flowers; Night Shade Books, November, 2009 [novel]

2009 Forthcoming Fantasy:

“Bone Island” (with Shannon Page); Interzone, Fall, 2009 [novelette]
“In the Emperor’s Garden” (with Shannon Page); Fantasy, Fall, 2009 [short story]
“The Passion of Mother Vajpai” (with Shannon Page); Subterranean, Fall, 2009 [novelette] [in GREEN continuity]
“Shedding Skin; Or How the World Came to Be”; Shimmer (Clockwork Jungle Issue), Fall, 2009 [short story]

Tags: Awards, Books, Calendula, Green, Madness, Starship, stories

Posted: 5:53 pm Sun November 15 2009 | Comments(1) |