Feb

19

PicFic

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picfic Here’s a classic example of the importance of listening to what people say to you when they reject your work. As you may remember, back in January I was in the finals of the NYC Midnight “Tweet Me a Story” contest, where the key word to be used in our entries was “below”. As it happens, none of my entries made it into the top 25, but I did like one of them. So I tweaked it a bit and sent it off to @nanoism, one of the TwitFic outlets that I hadn’t (still haven’t!) cracked. This is part of the response that I got back from Ben White, Nanoism’s editor:

This was a close call … I think JS Graustein over at @picfic might really enjoy this, so you might think of slapping a clever title on it (which would help add that depth) and sending it her way.

Now @picfic was the other major Twitter market that I hadn’t cracked, so I of course took his advice. Last night I received my acceptance … from Ben White, who just happened to be covering whilst PicFic’s editor was finishing off another project! The story will appear on PicFic some time in April or May, and it’s called “Not So Much a Rough Guide”.

Meanwhile, I still need to take the other piece of advice that Ben gave me when he rejected it at Nanoism. Which was “send me another” …

Feb

18

The Best of Every Day Fiction Two

Filed Under Anthologies, Publications | 6 Comments 

EDF2009_small My copy of this anthology of stories from EDF’s second year of operation dropped through my letter box the other day, and what a fine, professionally-produced piece of work it is. I’ve got two stories in there: my modern-day fable “Mirror, Mirror” and my Schroedinger’s cat story “Opening the Box”. I could list some of the other authors in there that I admire, but that would – frankly – take quite a long time. I am dead chuffed to be in the same table of contents as them.

The introductory pieces by the editors are also well worth a read – particularly the one by Jordan Lapp on finding a business model for fiction on the web. Here’s a slightly scary quote:

It seems that, excluding patronage, no one has yet found a profitable business model for short fiction on the web.

And that comes from an editor at the most-read flash fiction magazine on the web. Interestingly, though, he does say that one of their goals for 2010 is to raise their pay rates to semi-pro level instead of token, by the expedient of running a paid-for competition. Good luck to him there, although to be honest I’m personally not that concerned about pay rates at EDF (but don’t tell him I said so). The fact that EDF is such a well-read magazine makes it a terrific – and fairly competitive – place to get published in if you want to raise your profile a bit. Every time I’ve got a piece there, the hit count for this place goes up quite significantly, and for me that’s what I’m after right now. The big question, of course, is how to turn that exposure into £££.

Feb

17

Mrs Darcy, Episode Eighteen

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Well, no prizes for guessing the main reference in this one, although there’s another slightly less obvious one in there too. Now that the first phase of unpleasantness has been concluded in Whitechapel, the action moves inexorably towards Rosings …

I’m really quite chuffed that people seem to be enjoying that daft YouTube video. Last time I looked, it had clocked up nearly 700 views in less than a week, which I think is rather impressive. If any of you out there have a moment or two, I’d really appreciated it if you could maybe suggest it to the likes of Boing Boing and Mashable. It would be really cool to get into one of those.

And there’s a non-Mrs Darcy post coming up later on today as well. I was going to post it yesterday, were it not for the fact that my web host lost this place for a few hours last night. Easy thing to do I guess.

Feb

13

Mrs Darcy, Episode Seventeen

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After the gruesomeness (a word which curiously doesn’t seem to be troubling the spellchecker) of the last two episodes, we are now heading back towards the light, as we hear the tale of the Good Ghost. I’d become quite attached to Mary Ann Nicholls, and it seemed a shame to leave her butchered corpse lying around doing nothing.

And that trailer seems to be hitting the right spot, much to my amazement. Austenblog featured it almost immediately, and I believe that Jane Austen Today are also going to be blogging about it this weekend. You are passing it on to all your friends, aren’t you?

(And for all of you out there who are wondering what happened to all the stuff I used to blog about before this Mrs Darcy rubbish started cluttering up the place, I do apologise. The problem is, I haven’t been submitting much lately, what with one thing and another …)

Feb

10

Marketing Mrs Darcy

Filed Under Mrs Darcy | 4 Comments 

I’m beginning to realise that in order to succeed as a writer these days it is necessary (but sadly not sufficient) to lose one’s sense of shame. I’m not sure at which point I lost mine, but looking at what I’ve just done, I can be pretty sure that it’s gone. Let me explain.

I had an idea a couple of weeks ago that it would be really cool to put together a YouTube promo video for “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens”. I’d never done anything remotely like it before, but surely it couldn’t be that hard, could it? I had a look around for the best cheap video editing tools, before realising that I already had iMovie on my Mac, so I didn’t have to spend any money at all. (Thanks, Steve Jobs!)

The next decision was what kind of promo to do. My first thought was one of those mash-ups based on the bunker scene in “Downfall” – in this case, Hitler would be a closet Jane Austen fan, railing about these dreadful mash-ups. I worked out a vague script, found an un-subtitled video on YouTube and downloaded it using KickYouTube. I got as far as adding the first couple of subtitles (and it really is amazingly simple), before it occurred to me that this really was a bit of a tired old meme.

The next plan was to find a version of Pride and Prejudice that had been dubbed into a foreign language, so that I could add my own subtitles to that, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. At this point I realised what I had to do. I would have to dub it myself, doing all the voices. So that’s what I did, and I’m really pleased that I had to, because it led off into all sorts of weird areas that would never have happened before. Here’s the result. Do take a look before the BBC ask me to take it down …

In other news, Mrs Darcy had her first ever proper review today in the web fiction journal ERGOfiction, and I am really pleased with it, for reasons which may become obvious if you take a look at what they said.

Feb

10

Mrs Darcy, Episode Sixteen

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The dark tone continues for another episode, as we reach a kind of resolution to Mary Ann Nicholls’ story and she is at last relocated to her correct place in history. However, as will become apparent in the very next episode, we haven’t quite seen the last of her.

In other news, I have just finished work on a promo video for this thing. It’ll be up on YouTube in the next day or so, once the focus group has completed its report.

Feb

6

Mrs Darcy, Episode Fifteen

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And after the frivolities of Episode Fourteen, things are about to get a whole lot darker, not to say gruesome. Best not to read this one on a full stomach is all I’ll say.

I had a thoroughly bizarre experience yesterday on Twitter when I was exchanging tweets from the @RealMrsDarcy account with a lady who was adopting the persona of Mr Bennet for the day. Think about that for a moment. This is the kind of thing that will probably send me over the edge eventually. If I start babbling, let me know. Meanwhile, @RealMrsDarcy is keen to attract new followers – do join in!

Feb

3

Mrs Darcy, Episode Fourteen

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Ah. This is my homage to the work of the late, great Barry Took and Marty Feldman (yes, that Marty Feldman) who were the writers for “Round the Horne”, my favourite radio programme when I was a young lad. I used to love the verbal interplay of those Kenneth Williams / Hugh Paddick “Julian and Sandy” sketches particularly, without having the faintest clue as to what was going on. Ah, such innocence.

What is remarkable is the extent to which “Round the Horne” is still as funny now as it was then (check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me), unlike (say) “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again”, which to my mind has seriously dated. What is equally remarkable is some of the stuff that Took and Feldman managed to get away with in the post-Sunday lunch slot on the BBC in the mid-sixties; one of their characters was a pop singer in a band called The Pubes, for heaven’s sake – how did that sneak through?

I was inspired to write this episode after looking at a book of Napoleonic War costumes. Have you ever looked at one? It must have been the campest war in history. The toughest fighting men in Europe facing each other across the battlefield, each and every one determined to look absolutely lovely. You don’t see that these days, more’s the pity.

Anyway, excuses for self-indulgence over. Here’s the link. Oh, and I’ve tinkered around with the site to improve the navigation, because – as was pointed out to me by at least one recent new reader – it was very difficult to find your way around it.

(A brief footnote: after reading the first fifteen or so episodes, the only comment that Mrs P made to me was that a cuirassier wouldn’t actually wear a bicorn. But, frankly, I think he should have done.)

Feb

1

“Short Circuit” Review and Interview

Filed Under Interviews, Reviews | 5 Comments 

1844712931book.qxd I don’t usually do reviews of other people’s books here, or indeed interviews. This place was always intended to be a vehicle for my own ego, after all. However, when the opportunity came up to join Vanessa Gebbie’s promotional blog tour for “Short Circuit”, I was very keen to get involved. The next problem was what form this should take, as by now most of the sensible interview questions have already been asked on other blogs. So what we’ve gone for instead is a combination of review and interview-ette – a bit like those keynote CD reviews that you see in Mojo. If you read Mojo, that is. Anyway, here goes.

What I like about “Short Circuit” (subtitled “A Guide to the Art of the Short Story”) is that it’s a book for grown-ups. It assumes that we know the “rules” and that we’re ready to move on to the next stage. So, for example, there is (as far as I can remember) no mention of the – admittedly generally useful – “Show, not tell” rule. This is good news for those wishing to imitate, say, the work of A.C.Tillyer; I’m currently reading “An A to Z of Possible Worlds”, which technically speaking is almost 100% “tell”, but which works superbly because the style is entirely appropriate to the stories. (It’s also a lovely artifact in its own right, and a wonderful counter to the onslaught of the e-book. Buy one now, before they run out.)

When I first started writing short stories seriously, I took to examining the names of the people who got listed in various competitions, and I used to track down stuff that they’d written to see what I could learn from them. One of them, of course, was Vanessa Gebbie herself, who seemed to be everywhere. She still is, of course, and she must have been a shoo-in for the role of editor of this book. But many of the other writers that I came across are in there as well – people like Alex Keegan (whose notorious Bootcamp I dropped in on as a visitor for their “Children in Need” extravaganza back in 2007) and Tania Hershman. If I’d had this book back then, I probably would have saved myself quite a bit of time. So perhaps that’s why it’s called “Short Circuit”.

Each chapter in the main part of the book is written by a different author and analyses one aspect of short story writing, such as the importance of theme (Keegan) or setting (Chika Unigwe). So in that sense it does appear to be a text book in the traditional sense of the term. But scratch a little deeper, and it’s really more a series of profound insights into the writing processes of some of the best short-form writers around. And in the end, that can tell you more about writing good short stories than any by-the-numbers text book.

So will this book teach you how to write a short story? No. The only way to learn how to write short stories is to write them. Loads of them. And then get them savaged by someone you trust. And then re-write them. And get them savaged again. And so on. But “Short Circuit” will give you loads of invaluable advice as to how to write better and more ambitious stories: stories that stand out from the herd.

And finally, I’m extremely grateful to the book for introducing me to the work of David Gaffney, whose “Sawn-off Tales” is an absolute delight.

And now a few words with Vanessa …

First of all, Vanessa, many thanks for dropping in here on your blog tour. I guess the question that I’d like to ask most of all is why you think the world needs this book.

Jon, I’m deeelighted you found the book so good. And equally deeelighted you’ve discovered the amazing David Gaffney!

Short Circuit isn’t anything to do with short cuts, and I wonder how many writers pick up ‘how-to’ books thinking they can cut a few corners?

Short Circuit is about the necessary hard work you have to do if you want to write well, but focussed hard work, with a few insights to save you some elephant traps. Its nothing if not honest, including the fact that there are a hundred different ways to skin a cat, and your creativity and mine may not work the same way!  But craft – there’s another matter. Craft is something solid, grounding.

And that’s why the world needs this book, (she said arrogantly…) because so many of them TELL you how to do things, so says the writer who wrote it. Not many do what this does – its more like sitting down with 24 different  successful and lovely people, who just want to share, in their own words, and in their own way.

Do you think that it will have any impact on the quality of short fiction being produced over the next few years? And will that help in the process of educating the general public to read more of it?

I hope so! If more and more budding writers can discover a passion for the form, and seek to do it well, that can only be a good thing, however they come to it. But they have to be stories that reach the reader, don’t they? Loads of people are switched off by the words ‘literary fiction’, for example. And lots of ‘literary’ buffs turn their noses up at erotica, for example, or chick lit, or horror, sci-fi, the genres.  So – Short Circuit is not actually about ‘literary fiction’ so much as ‘good fiction’ irrespective of genre. I don’t see the point of doing anything unless you do it to the best of your ability, thanks to my late Mum, who always said ‘if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well.’

You’re going to be running a workshop at the forthcoming Get Writing conference organised by the Verulam Writers’ Circle on February 20th. Can you say a little about what you’re going to be doing there?

I am so looking forward to coming to Get Writing 2010!  It will be a packed session – so anyone who’s coming had better practice writing fast. I hope to answer a few questions, such as, “What makes a winning story?” “What makes a story stand out in a slush pile?” “How can you write when you feel blocked?” “What strategies can you discover to release MORE creative buzz?” “What is the flash writing process?”  These and more, plus questions from the floor, of course – so get those ready!

Thanks very much to Vanessa for taking the time to answer those questions. Short Circuit is available direct from Salt Publishing here (as is Vanessa’s excellent book of short stories, “Words from a Glass Bubble“, along with many other superb collections by authors featured in “Short Circuit”). You can book tickets for Get Writing here (and if you come, do say hi to me – I’m the tall awkward-looking one with the beard).

Jan

30

Thaumatrope

Filed Under Acceptances, Publications | 4 Comments 

thaumatropeYesterday I was really pleased to hear that I’d had a piece of TwitFic accepted by Thaumatrope and here it is, published on their Twitter stream today. I was particularly pleased to hear about this one, because Thaumatrope were closed to submissions when I first joined Twitter, and they’ve only just re-opened. It’s also one of my favourite pieces of TwitFic that I’ve written to date. (And I got paid $1.20 for it – which is pro rate!)

So that’s six of the major TwitFic markets cracked now (@escarp,@outshine, @seedpod,  @tweetthemeat, @thaumatrope and @7×20). However, at the time of writing, @nanoism and @picfic have yet to yield …

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