Review Roundup: ZUGZWANG

Posting this to track reviews for a former 512 which became a longer story, and was published last September! You might see some ETA's below as time goes on...

"Zugzwang"

Games with aliens. The sort of story that's not in the least bit groundbreaking, but still enjoyable.

— Psocoptera, "2014 online short fantasy and science fiction recommendations, part 6"

A middle-aged woman is challenged to a game of alien chess to save the crew of a spaceship. This story could’ve been bleak, but instead it made me happy and hopeful.

— Sara Norja, "Sunday recs: Fairytale, memory loss, alien chess"

[T]his story is about an alien encounter and it hooked me in right from the beginning. Its writer’s name is Curtis [C.] Chen. As a big fan of Ted Chiang and Ken Liu (if you haven’t heard of them, you’re missing out on some awesome stories!), I was curious to see another Chinese American name.

And I wasn’t disappointed. The story was excellently crafted. The plot had tension and several layers of things going on, yet no word seemed redundant and all of the sentences were simple-yet-varied.

— Natso, "A Cool Sci-Fi Short Story, A Question That Sprouted From It"

ETA (28 Mar 2016):

Although space chess is never a terribly original idea for a story, I rather liked Curtis C. Chen’s “Zugwang.” While he definitely dwells a little too much on his heroine’s insecurities about her body, and things are tied up a little too neatly at the end of the tale, it was solid enough to get me to read his other two stories [in Up and Coming].

— Bridget McKinney, SF Bluestocking

(original 512: "Zugzwang," posted 29 Mar 2013)

Thanks for reading!

Review Roundup: IT'S MACHINE CODE

Hello there, readers! It's been a while. Hope you've been well.

I meant to do a "one year later" sales/stats post about Thursday's Children, but clearly that hasn't happened. I have good excuses, though, and I'll be able to talk about them soon. SOON™

Meanwhile, I'm posting this to track reviews for a former 512 piece which became a longer story and was published this February! You might see some ETA's below as time goes on...

"It's Machine Code"

[This] is a light-hearted piece without much literal ass-kicking nor anger, but Julie Nickerson is great fun anyway. She’s a bored techie, a new Portland Deputy Police Officer (this issue of Unlikely Journal contains a disproportionate number of police procedurals) and small-time criminal who, in the course of a simple data-mining investigation, stumbles upon the machinations of a much more ambitious criminal.

Julie starts out as a bit a shlubb, the sort of civil servant who is made lazy by her intelligence and has very little interest in her job or her coworkers. She has an antagonistic relationship with her friend Victor that provides some funny lines and good banter, but there’s no real loyalty or affection between the two. Julie solves the story’s original case incidentally, off-page between scenes, while focusing her real energy on a very interesting data packet she found in the course of the investigation.

Julie’s not interested in catching any criminals: she’s much more interested in the crime. She’s casually competent, having “learned how to use military-grade encryption before learning how to ride a bicycle,” but stuck in the comfortable rut that casually competent people often get stuck in. In trying to solve the mystery of her data packet, she stumbles across a much more interesting character and some inspiration to become more interesting herself.

It wouldn’t be any fun to give away the mystery’s solution, but suffice to say this is a story that gets best right at the end. Julie, Victor, and their rather hapless department are fun in a bumbling kind of way, but they aren’t particularly motivated people. It takes a criminal mastermind to show how much fun it can be to go off script and just flip off the system. This story’s real star is the criminal.

Yah, you could be a comfortable civil servant. Or you could kick ass. “A clean desktop, a blank slate, a new life.”

— Charlotte Ashley, Clavis Aurea #25 (Apex Magazine)

Julie Nickerson works in the IT Department of the Portland Municipal Police. She is assigned a request that came to them from the FBI. A traffic bot had stopped a car speeding almost fifty kilometers an hour over the speed limit. The bot pulled the car over but was put out of commission just as it had activated facial recognition overlay just as it approached the driver's side of the car. Along with another techie, Victor, they check a Universal Internet broadband router in a house (owned by a sweet grandmotherly type named Margie Fisher) near the incident. It might have recorded sensor reading from the downed bot. She discovers evidence of a felony by dear sweet Margie. But things take a wild turn at this point and make for a fun story.

— Sam Tomaino, SFRevu

(original 512: "CSI: Computer Science Investigation," posted 11 Jan 2013)

Thanks for reading!

Making Book: A Great Reason to Throw a Party

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Time for some numbers! Are you ready? As of today--Friday, February 7th, one week after Thursday's Children officially went on sale--here's how many copies have been sold:

• 8 Kindle eBooks
• 13 paperbacks

Of course, that doesn't count the 15 copies I purchased to give away as gifts--10 of them at last week's launch party--or the free downloads: 120 PDF and 11 plain text. (Creative Commons wins, amirite?)

There are now over 160 copies of the book in the hands of readers, and that's fantastic.

None of this is at all record-breaking, but it's not bad for a single-author short story collection by an obscure writer, with no marketing budget and no promotion aside from a handful of Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail messages.

Besides, this was never about "sales velocity." (I'm a terrible salesman, and I learned years ago to just stop trying.) It's not even really about sales. Honestly, nobody who doesn't know me has any reason to care about this book, and not even all of my friends or family will be interested in it. I appreciate all the congratulatory messages I've received, but I don't expect anyone to rush out and buy the book just because I wrote it.

I wrote these stories because I wanted people to read them. You can still find all of them online, but most people prefer their reading material packaged in some kind of book format--because that process implies editorial intervention and approval. Presenting something as a book is the publisher telling the reader that people who care about its content have looked at it, reviewed it, curated it and made it the best they could before actually publishing it.

When you pick up a book, you're trusting that its author and publisher have worked for months or years to ensure that the book you're about to read is something you'll enjoy. And that's why it feels like a betrayal when a book doesn't fulfill that promise.

Thursday's Children is not for everyone. (I pointed out to one friend that his grade-school-aged daughters should definitely not read it until they're older.) I hope the variety of stories included will appeal to a wide audience, but like I said, I'm a terrible salesman. I have no idea how to identify those "leads" and "target" them for "acquisition."

I'm playing the long game here, hoping that by putting my stuff out there for free, the people who find it and love it will help spread the word. (If you happen to be one of those people, the best thing you can do to support the book is to tell two friends about it, and ask them to tell two friends, and...) It might be a very long game, but I can wait.

Meanwhile, I'll keep writing.

Making Book: Happy New Book!

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Today's the day! You can now buy Thursday's Children in paperback or Kindle editions:

Attack of the stacks of paperbacks


My friend Kenna checks the eBook

I know traditionally published authors may wait as long as two years from the time they submit a finished manuscript to when the book actually goes on sale, and I imagine that's rather torturous. It's been maybe five months since DeeAnn and I started working on Thursday's Children, and though I'm very happy with how much we accomplished in such a short time, this final week has been a real crunch, and I'm ready for the production process to be over. (Mostly. I still have to produce an EPUB file to push to other, non-Amazon eBook distributors, but that's always been lower priority.)

Today is also the the start of the Chinese New Year, traditionally a time for celebration and hope (and red envelopes). It's now the year of the horse. In Chinese, the characters for "horse" and "mother" are very similar, and in fact, they're near-homophones in Mandarin, differing only in inflection. I don't know why I mentioned that. It's not really relevant. I may be a little punchy. Did you know my mom worked for many years as a public librarian? It's true.

One last thing... I may not have mentioned it before, but I'm releasing Thursday's Children under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. (You can download PDF and plain text versions of the entire book for free, and re-share them as much as you like. Please. I'm begging you.) I started the 512 Words of Fewer project with the same license, and I still believe it's a good idea. Because I am pretty much a nobody in the wider writing world, and making a name for myself is more important than making money at this point.

Sure, my friends and family and other acquaintances who like me are extremely supportive, but the few hundred people I know personally isn't a big enough audience to build a career. If I ever want one thousand true fans, I'm going to need an even greater number of casually interested readers, and I want as few barriers as possible between them and my content, for that fraction of a second between pictures of cats with pork products adhered to them.

Hi! I'm Curtis Chen. I write science fiction and fantasy. Would you like to read some of my stories?

Making Book: The Mythical One-Man Band

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Just in case it wasn't clear before: THURSDAY'S CHILDREN is self-published. Yes, I said self-published. I know some writers prefer the term "indie author," but I don't feel the need for that bit of dress-up. Let's call a spade a spade. This one book will not bring me any sort of fame or fortune. Nobody in the history of the world has ever gotten rich off a frickin' short story collection.

The main reason I'm publishing at all is to commemorate a personal milestone, and to share it with my family and friends. I've written more than two hundred and fifty stories, y'all. That's a hell of a thing. I want to celebrate it, and you're invited to join me. That's all.

So I'm self-publishing this book for fun. I am doing the work mostly by myself, but I'm not doing it alone. What's the difference? I'm not alone, because I couldn't do any of this without the infrastructure and systems that others have already built.

It's like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says:

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/joebehr/6170035291/

There is an entire Internet of resources that I've taken advantage of, and which have been absolutely necessary for this project. I don't begrudge any of those other individuals and organizations the money I've paid for their tools or the time I've spent learning how to use them.

Here's a short list of just some of the software, sites, and services I've used in the creation of this book: Scrivener, Microsoft Word, GIMP, Emacs, Lulu, Createspace, Amazon, BookBaby, Blogger, Gmail, Chrome, Flickr, and PayPal.

(By the way, that list doesn't include all the standards—file formats, network protocols, and more—that make it possible for me to turn my raw data into something humans will want to look at. For example: HTML/XHTML, CSS, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, DOC/DOCX, MOBI, EPUB, and ZIP, to name just a few.)

And then there are the people, actual human beings, who helped me with the production process: DeeAnn Sole, my redoubtable editor; Laura Mixon, who wrote a fantastic introduction; and Natalie Metzger, who created the amazing cover art and interior illustrations. Plus there are all the 512 readers who gave feedback over the last five years, and my fellow writers who offered invaluable publishing advice. (You'll find a more complete list in the Acknowledgements section at the back of the book.)

I could have made the book without these people, but it would have been a much inferior thing.

Nobody creates in a vacuum. If nothing else, any artist needs an audience for her work; sometimes it's an audience of one, but in most cases, we want a plurality to see and enjoy our work. At the very least, it's asking yourself: "Will anybody else care about this?" And in a world of seven billion people, the answer is probably YES. Then it's a matter of crafting your work so that it's meaningful and appealing, to whatever degree satisfies your sensibilities, commercial or otherwise.

It's okay to make art for art's sake, and not expect to reap a dime of financial reward. I mean, hell, I spend who knows how many hours making at least a dozen free puzzling events every year, and even spend my own hard-earned money (and precious time) to subsidize their creation. I do this because I want to share those fun things with other like-minded people. If I get something tangible in return, great. I'm not expecting it. That's not why I do the work.

All that is to say that I don't expect to break even on self-publishing THURSDAY'S CHILDREN. (You know the old joke: How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Well, you start with a large fortune...) I don't expect to sell more than a hundred copies of the book—if that many—and that's just fine. I'm doing this for love, not money. And we will do things for love that we would not do for any amount of money.

Making Book: Inspirations and Introductions

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Before I get into this week's behind-the-scenes stuff, a quick announcement:

Thursday's Children, the 512 book, is officially launching on Friday, January 31, 2014 (less than two weeks from today), in eBook and trade paperback. Mark your calendars!

Now, let me tell you about the notable science fiction author who wrote the introduction for Thursday's Children. (TL;DR: it's Laura J. Mixon, and she's awesome.)

As you know, Bob, I attended the Viable Paradise (VP) science fiction and fantasy writers' workshop in 2008. See how excited I was when I got the news of my acceptance? I was not disappointed by the experience. A bit overwhelmed, perhaps; VP packs a lot of stuff into a single week. And Thursday night... well, we don't talk about Thursday night.

I met a lot of great people at VPXII. My classmates included the amazing Claire Humphrey, munchkin wrangler Marko Kloos, "the other Asian guy" Anthony Ha, and more.

And then there were the instructors: the distinguished Nielsen Haydens, Uncle Jim & Doctor Doyle, Scalzi, Bear, Steven Gould, and Laura Mixon.

Every one of these people had something important to teach me, and even if I'm still figuring out how to apply many of those lessons, the time I spent on the island was invaluable.

In particular, Laura Mixon offered a refreshing, analytical perspective on writing, which resonated with me—we're both engineers by training, and I love it when there's actual data behind a presentation. (Laura even has research to back up her use of the gender-neutral pseudonym "M. J. Locke." PREACH.) At VPXII, she lectured about a cognitive model of the writing process. "There's a study," she said more than once, before explaining the science of it.

The example I remember best involved two creative writing classes: one was told their work had to be perfect; the other was graded by word count. The result? The second class actually produced, instead of agonizing over whether they could produce for each assignment—and their final work was of comparable quality to the first class' output, plus there was much more of it. More practice was better. Quantity trumps quality.

For a time when I was younger, I hated the word "practice," because it meant sitting in front of the piano and playing the same piece or passage over and over again, with very little variation, until I got it right or made some measurable improvement in technique. It was tedious, and as a child, there were a million other more interesting things I wanted to do.

It takes great discipline to have a long-term goal in mind, and to work tirelessly toward that goal. It helps if you enjoy what you're doing along the way, because plans changes, and you may end up in a totally different place than you originally targeted. And here's the thing: you don't need to be good at something in order to enjoy it.

As Laura explained at VP, there are four stages of learning a new skill:

1. unconscious incompetence - you have no idea what you're doing, and you're not very good at it
2. conscious incompetence - you're trying real hard, but you still suck
3. unconscious competence - you're getting better, but you don't really understand how or why
4. conscious competence - you know exactly what you're doing, and you're good at it

It's important to note that reaching that fourth stage is not the endgame. You may be good, but you're not great. At this point, the ten-thousand-hours rule applies—especially in "cognitively demanding" fields like playing the piano, where competence is a long way from mastery. Writers often talk about the million words of crap (give or take) which you need to get out of your system before you're producing stuff of publishable quality. And even at that point, it's still a buyer's market. It's good to be good, but it's better to be lucky.

Does any of that discourage me? No. Because I love what I'm doing. I spent 4.9 years writing (or at least editing) a new piece of 512 flash fiction every week. That amounts to a grand total of roughly 130,000 words, and maybe 1,000 hours of practice. During that same time period, I also spent a lot of time writing other stuff—short stories, novels, non-fiction, puzzles, and more—but 512 Words or Fewer was the one thing that demanded regular, deliberate effort, and I am confident it has done more than any other single project to improve my skills as a writer.

None of that would have happened without VPXII and Laura Mixon, and I'm elated that she agreed to write a brief introduction for Thursday's Children. Her intro is the source of the blurb at the top of the 512 book web page, and you should also go read her most recent novel, because it's damn good.

Making Book: 1,024 Words or More

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Remember that surprise puzzle hunt my friends organized for my birthday last year? (Yeah, no, I'm never going to stop talking about it. Because awesome.) Well, that same weekend, our friend Natalie sent me this "Cowboys and Aliens" fan art as an early birthday gift:

That was also completely unexpected and wonderful. And it got me to thinking, since DeeAnn and I had already decided to publish a collection of 512 stories: we're going to need a cover. Why not hire Natalie to draw it?

(The image above is also what I used for the "not very good" cover mock-up mentioned last week.)

I'm not precisely sure when I first met Natalie—it was probably during one of the JoCo cruises or at some kind of Doubleclicks-related event in the Portland area, where we both live. But I knew she was quite an accomplished artist—she was one of five finalists in Scalzi's Redshirts fan art contest—and her illustrations had a cartoony, whimsical style that I liked a lot.

So, back in November, I asked her how she was at drawing vehicles. She said she could handle spaceships and dirigibles and probably more. And away we went.

We met just once in person to discuss concepts, and everything else happened by e-mail. Her first set of sketches included two designs with elements that clicked right away, including the astronaut-not-loving-her-EVA:

 

I had already thrown out the idea of using interior illustrations to break up the 117 stories into thematic sections—one character per theme—and asked if she could find some way to incorporate those same characters into the front cover. I sent her some feedback on those initial sketches, and she came up with this:

That's pretty much the final layout, as you'll see below, with one character showing through each of those portholes. I was impressed with how quickly she dialed it in, and well how the rest of it all came together.

For reference, here are her finished pencils and inks:

 

We also went through another, somewhat parallel process to figure out the six theme characters. That also went very quickly, except for making sure that a small picture of a female superhero would read correctly and with the right amount of gravitas.

Here are some "super-lady" designs that didn't quite hit the target, for various reasons which I could only articulate after seeing them:

Once we got the characters nailed down, it was just a matter of picking which three should appear in the portholes. We also went back and forth on fonts and engine colors for a bit, but I'll spare you those details and just show you the final cover art:

Long story short: I love it. It's far better than anything I could have imagined or produced on my own, and I think it conveys the perfect tone for this collection.

I look forward to working with Natalie again, and next time, I'll do my best to give her some more monsters to draw. :)

Making Book: By Any Other Name

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

I'm terrible at coming up with story titles. If you've read more than a couple of 512s, you already know this; my typical go-tos are song titles (e.g., "Don't Fence Me In") or the titles of SF/F novels (e.g., "Stranger in a Strange Land"). Because you can't copyright a title, and I'm lazy. I also like re-using existing phrases, because I can then exploit that emotional resonance. Or just turn it into an awful pun. Both are good.

For this book, however, I wanted something that was at least a little more evocative and meaningful. I'm not a big fan of one-word titles, which can seem very generic, but I also didn't want something too long, since I planned to add some kind of explanatory subtitle to describe the content (i.e., to make it clear that this was a short fiction collection).

Because I am so very lazy, I procrastinated on this until DeeAnn and I started working with our friend and awesome artist Natalie Metzger on the cover and interior illustrations. I'll talk more about that process next week, but she was invaluable in helping me nail down the title and also figure out exactly what images should go on the cover.

Long story short, the relevant portion of our e-mail conversation went roughly like this:

Natalie: Have you come up with a title yet?

Me: ...

(three days pass)

Me: How about SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTS? Or WRITTEN ON THURSDAY? And here's a mock-up which is not very good. :)

(image attachment sent)

DeeAnn: I like WRITTEN ON THURSDAYS. And I agree, that mock-up is not good. ;)

(the next day)

Natalie: How about THURSDAY STORIES? I like how the day sounds in the title.

Me: I've got it... THURSDAY'S CHILDREN!

(End of scene.)

So there you are: the title of the book will be Thursday's Children: Flash Fiction from 512 Words or Fewer. It's not strictly a "best of" collection, as I explained last week, but it does include many of the most interesting and successful results of my often late-night weekly writing sessions--which usually happened on Thursdays. And some of them have grown up to become longer works, but many others are still developing.

In case you're curious about the mock-up image which I sent as part of the e-mail thread cited above: That's directly related to Natalie's artwork, and I'll show you how next week.

Making Book: Selection Criteria

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

The 512 collection DeeAnn and I are publishing next month will include one hundred and seventeen stories out of the two hundred and fifty-six from my weekly blog. Why aren't we including all the stories? The main reasons are:

1. Some have been or will be published elsewhere.
2. Some are in the process of becoming longer finished works (e.g., novels).
3. Some of them just weren't very good.

So given all that, how did we pick the stories to include? First, we each rated all the stories independently.



In hindsight, we should have synced up on our rating methods beforehand, because I only used integers (0==no, 1==maybe, 2==yes) and DeeAnn used rational numbers between 0 and 2, inclusive. But we averaged the scores anyway, and discussed any wildly divergent scores or right-in-the-middle ratings.

After we agreed on the set of stories to include, we had to decide on an order in which to present them. To that end, DeeAnn created a new spreadsheet where she summarized each 512 in a logline, and also noted the general theme of each piece and whether it was a strong candidate for an opener or a closer.



Out of all that data, she distilled the themes down to six major sections. Then I took a stab at sorting the sections and stories. (Note my clever use of an old BASIC line numbering trick--i.e., using increasing but non-consecutive numbers to allow later additions--which would have much more useful if I had started doing it before I was halfway through the spreadsheet.)



At that point, we knew exactly what content would be in the book, even if we weren't yet sure about the final order. I spent a few days copying the text of all 117 stories into a Scrivener project, using that latest spreadsheet as a guide, and now we can make whatever tweaks we need to while looking at the actual, mostly formatted text.

So now we have a book, more or less. Yay! What are we going to call it? I'll talk about that next week.

Making Book: Teaser

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

I don't think I ever made a formal announcement about this, so here it is: a collection of stories from 512 Words or Fewer will be available next month, as a print-on-demand trade paperback or e-book edition. I'm aiming for an official release on Friday, January 31st (which happens to coincide with the Lunar New Year).

Note that this is not a "best of" collection. Certainly some of the best 512s are included, but I've turned other great pieces into longer stories for submission to paying markets. For example, I recently sold "Somebody's Daughter," a Jake and Andy novelette (13,400 words) which started with "Who's Your Daddy?". The expanded story will be in the next issue (#65) of Leading Edge Magazine, and you should all go buy that when it comes out. :)

Anyway, I'm going to post every Friday from now until the 512 book launches with some background info on its creation. DeeAnn helped me select the stories, I love the title we came up with, and there's going to be spectacular cover and interior artwork by our friend Natalie. Stay tuned for details on all that and more!

"Sidrav Corsol's Backstory"

SIDRAV CORSOL'S BACKSTORY
By Curtis C. Chen

"Where's Feli?" Sidrav asked when he got home from Academy.

"She's not here," his father said. He held a glass of ethanol in his metal hands.

"Where is she?" Sidrav asked. "Dad, it's not my fault. I waited right outside the library for her, and I never saw her. She must have snuck out some other way. Brat."

His father stood up. He walked over to the sideboard and picked up a datapad, and Sidrav's heart jumped when he recognized the device he'd been using to track his sister's monthly cycles and medico charts—without her knowledge. They were forbidden calculations, and Sidrav always kept his curiosity hidden. He realized he had left the datapad in the pocket of his trousers before throwing them in the laundry.

Sidrav's father said, "Did you know about this?"

Fear overruled Sidrav's nobler instincts, and he said: "What is it?"

"It's blasphemy!" his father roared, and threw the datapad. Sidrav flinched at the sound of plastic breaking against the wall. His father sat down and shook his head.

"Dad," Sidrav asked quietly, "what happened to Feli?"

"She's gone," his father said. "And good riddance to her. I always knew she would be trouble. I blame your mother." He pointed a chrome finger at Sidrav. "She's at temple now, asking forgiveness, and we're joining her right after I finish my drink."

Sidrav wondered how long his father had been home, and how much he'd already drunk. He wondered when Feliax had been taken away. Maybe there was still time. Maybe he could tell the Pealers that it wasn't her datapad—

And then what? Of course Feli would have denied ownership. She knew it wasn't hers. She had to know it was Sidrav's. She could have given him up. Why hadn't she tried to save herself?

Sidrav agonized about it all night, and finally decided that he had to incriminate himself. He woke early the next morning and searched for some other evidence of his wrongdoing, something traceable to him directly but not Feliax.

He found her message under the bathroom sink, where they used to hide their childhood treasures. It was a palm-sized repro disk, the kind girls used to pass notes and boys used to literally hurl insults at each other. The timeprint showed Feli had written the disk yesterday afternoon.

The message read: "Dear Sid, CONTINUE. Love, Feli."

Sidrav sat on the floor and wept.

"Continue" was what Feli and Sid said to each other in rare, tender moments, when they actually sought permission to persist in teasing each other. "Continue" was what Feliax had said to more than one boy who started asking her out, but became intimidated by the big brother standing beside her.

"Continue" was what Sidrav now heard all over Academy, and he wondered if he and Feliax had been leading a trend, or if he was just noticing it more because of his guilt.

CONTINUE was what Sidrav did. But he vowed to never again risk anyone else's life for his beliefs. Especially not his family.



This week's 512 is an excerpt from my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel, which is based on a previous 512 story, "Better."

"Rieta Linbitter's Backstory"

RIETA LINBITTER'S BACKSTORY
By Curtis C. Chen

It still amazed Rieta that her husband could do so many delicate things with his metal appendages. The men in Rieta's family were rarely gentle. Her own father had earned his arms through military service, and he would have stayed in except that the rulers had discharged him. It happened to a few soldiers every year. The rulers never explained why, and nobody dared to complain.

Rieta's mother was happy to have her father home instead of being deployed to faraway lands at some commander's whim, but he had been denied a lifetime of glorious conquest and a warrior's death on the battlefield, and he felt cheated. Rieta's grandfather had been a ground general in the Amphibious War. All the men in Rieta's family had grown up in a martial atmosphere, conditioned to respect strength in others and cultivate it in themselves.

Rieta had learned the same lessons from the receiving end. Men were protectors, or destroyers, and for the longest time she believed that her own happiness and safety depended on choosing the right kind to be her husband. Then her father had been discharged, and she had watched him turn from a good man into something else.

She would always hesitate to say what he became after leaving the army. It wasn't that she couldn't put a name to it; she just feared that saying the word aloud would cement the concept in reality. Rieta knew the power of incantation, and she did not want to curse her father any more than he already had been.

He had only struck her once in her life. Rieta had been nine years old and late getting home for dinner one night. She had walked into the dining room to find the table set with food, and her parents sitting but not eating.

Rieta couldn't remember if she or her father had said anything. She remembered that her mother had stayed silent, with wide eyes and a pale face. She remembered that her father had stood and raised his arm, and she had wondered what he was going to do with it.

She remembered the pain. She winced when she thought of it, and her tongue went involuntarily to the space in her mouth where there used to be a tooth. She remembered blacking out for a moment, and her father being gone when she struggled back to her feet, and her mother still sitting at the table.

He had only struck Rieta once, and never again. The Pealers found him asleep in an alley the next morning and brought him home.

Rieta had not looked at made men and their metal arms the same after that. Where once she saw strength, she also now saw terrible power. She understood that even though those metal arms and legs were bonded to human bodies, they were no more or less tools than the shovels and lasers used by builders. And tools could be used for good or ill.



This week's 512 is an excerpt from my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel, which is based on a previous 512 story, "Better."

Third Person Shooter

Oh, like you've never written any Matrix fan fiction. Glass houses, my friend. Glass houses.

In related news, DeeAnn and I have been having a lot of fun playing Left 4 Dead online with our friends Chris and Karl. We're definitely looking forward to the sequel.

And, yes, this is the end of Year One of 512 Words or Fewer. Some changes are coming. More about that on Monday.

Another Reason to Want a Publisher

This week's story was inspired in part by my friend Jeff's sojourn in DocBook ligature hell earlier this year. An excerpt:

Since I was obsessing about the way the page looked, I decided it would be nice to turn on whatever magic DocBook has available to make printed pages look nice. After all, if DocBook is good enough for O'Reilly, it ought to be good enough for me. I'd already noticed that DocBook was making my quotes curve (as long as you use the hideously verbose <quote></quote> tags). Then I looked into getting my apostrophes to curve.

Hello? Tap tap. Is this thing on?

Turns out the number one rule of the DocBook Club is you don’t talk about the DocBook Club. There’s plenty of mailing lists and stuff, but there are no answers. Eventually, it seemed to me the actual answer is "insert the Unicode symbol for them yourself".

Wow, that's seriously fucking stupid. Not even [Microsoft] Word is that stupid... and I thought Word had the market cornered on stupid.

Geek rants--hilarious! Visit jra's thoughts to read more about font decoration and why SGML sucks.

Source Materials

Dollhouse Sucks

Let the flamewar begin!

But seriously, folks... I like Dollhouse just fine, and I'm glad it's getting a second season, but I really felt like the show was spinning its wheels for the first five episodes. Others agree. Some quite vocally.

Man on the Street was good, and Epitaph One was very good. But what does it say about a series when its best episode is the one that takes place outside of its normal continuity, doesn't feature the regular cast, and which the network didn't even broadcast? Maybe that Joss Whedon should stop messing around with suited humans and just go make whatever he wants.

Anyway. Many science fiction writers have explored the idea of mind transfer and duplication, and the philosophical implications of identical people. Just to be clear, this is not cloning--a clone is just a time-shifted twin of the original. A duplicate also has the same memories and personality as the original. I don't know that my take here is original, but it's new to me. I might explore it further and see where it leads.

One Man's Trash

An earlier draft of this week's story featured more detailed descriptions of the setting, which I modeled after our friend Acorn's garage. He really does have open bins of scrap metal--and worse--lying around all the time. Plus that coffin we made for FoBiK, but that's another story...

25 Years Later

In August, 1984, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension opened at theatres across the United States. It was #1 at the box office that weekend, but with a $620K opening weekend and a final domestic gross of just over $6 million, it could hardly be called a success.

Now, two and a half decades later, the movie has a dedicated cult following, despite failures to launch either a television series or the promised film sequel, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League (from which title I have borrowed part of the premise for this week's flash fiction).

Over at the Drex Files, artist Doug Drexler has quite a treasure trove of sketches and ideas from the development of the Buckaroo Banzai TV series. He mentions that many of the Star Trek: The Next Generation production crew were big BB fans. And this is the 47th story in my 512 Words or Fewer project. Coincidence? You decide!

Finally, shouts out to my fellow VPXII alum Steve Kopka and fellow DASH GC member Justin Santamaria, both of whom I have tuckerized for the forces of good.

Take Me Out to the Black

Tell 'em I ain't comin' back. Et cetera. (Also: "BAM," said the lady!)

My first draft of this week's story was just over 1,200 words, and it was much better than this stripped-down version. (Except for the title: "Magic Bullet." My wife agrees on both counts.) I'll be revising and submitting that longer tale soon.

An Ode to RaceFail2009

In haiku form:

What racial tension?
Friend, all I see around here
are people like me.

Thank you! I'll be here all week. Tip your servers, they're working real hard.

(Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about...)