Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Electricity



Being an introduction of sorts to this week’s story, which will run in this space tomorrow. With introductions, as with most things, I am of two minds: On the one hand, I firmly believe in letting the meaning of the work speak for itself; on the other, I am a huge fiending nerd for the procedural, and I love to know and talk about where things come from and how they come to be. So for some — though probably not all — of these stories, I imagine I’ll be writing one of these little forewords, the explanatory notes that would go in the collected edition that will never be published. I promise, in any case, to never pull a Harlan Ellison and write an introduction that’s longer than the story itself.

Two huge events happened in the summer of 1969, within weeks of each other — both game-changers, both with seismic impact on culture and industry: the moon shot and Woodstock. Both were first and foremost triumphs of logistics and technology, and as such were natural subjects of speculation for science fiction. For some reason, though, there’s been a lot of SF written about, and for, and in some cases by rocket scientists — but hardly any for audio engineers. The sound systems that (say) Meyer Labs crafted for the Grateful Dead in the 1970s represented a technological leap on a par with anything devised by NASA, but they haven’t been fodder for imaginative extrapolation the way that spacecraft have. And that’s both a shame and an unforgivable oversight. Innovation fuels imagination. And there’s always innovation happening somewhere, often in unfamiliar fields; and there are fresh stories there.

That’s the respectable origin story for tomorrow’s piece. The truth is considerably more stupid: I made this goofy audio mash-up on a whim and wanted to create an in-universe rationale for its existence. So I came up with the idea of a slipstream alt-history story about a big electric rock festival happening in 1937 or so, with a bunch of the American labor movement’s biggest figures on the bill — all of it, an elaborate justification so I could write about Aunt Molly Jackson singing over a Led Zeppelin riff.

And then I realized that maybe I had something here besides a bizarre conceptual gag, so I kept writing; it took a long time, because somewhere along the line the voice became an essential element of the story. When I realized I could write the riff out of the story altogether, I knew I was on the right track.

I am, as I’ve surely noted elsewhere, horrible with titles. The story started as “Red Dog Black Dog” and stayed that for a long time; it went through a couple of fleeting working titles before I started calling it “There Is Power In A Union.” That’s the title under which it will run in this space, tomorrow, at noon Eastern time. See you then.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

The Bradbury Project, Week 2: Van Helsing’s Hound

Redacted while out for submission. It's a slight little thing, which came very quickly; I dictated it into my little digital recorder, pretty much as it ended upon the page, while taking the dog for a long walk.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Shakedown and Update



In January, as noted below, I took a lovely phone interview with Khrista Rypl of Studio 360. The idea was that as I wrote my 52 short stories this year I might share my progress with a national radio audience in a five-minute chat every six weeks or so.

Radio, of course, is a narrative medium, and as I talked to Khrista I could sense her trying to find a narrative frame for my Bradbury Project. What made you want to do this? What are you hoping to get out of it?

Now, I’ve written at some length in this space about my goals and motivations for this folly, and they’re admittedly a little… abstract. My main aim is to shake up my process, to jump-start my ideation; to work in different modes; to use deadlines to inspire velocity; to do the thing for its own sake. My goal, when deciding to write 52 short stories, was mostly just to write 52 short stories. Nothing more, nothing less. My end product would be 52 stories in my trunk and some incremental improvement in my writing. 

Explaining all this to Khrista, I began to realize how unsuited for radio this project really was. As I described it, it all seemed so nonlinear, so entirely process-oriented. There was no arc, no milestones along the way. It didn’t build to anything. It was just ticking off weeks on the calendar and piling up stories, one after another. 

When Studio 360 ultimately declined to include me in their ongoing coverage, I was disappointed but ultimately unsurprised. There was no proper language, no frame that could make the Bradbury Project compelling for radio, and that’s Khrista’s job: to make compelling radio. No harm, no foul.

I kept writing stories anyway. Not one a week, by any means — I should have 30+ in the can by now, and I’ve got nowhere near that — but stories. And any stories I wrote would be more than I wrote last year, so I was satisfied with my numbers. I just kept my head down and worked on thinking up ideas; I focused on the process and had not a worry in the world.

Then a funny thing happened; some of the stories, I thought, turned out pretty good.

This surprised me. When I decided on this exercise, quality never even entered into the equation. If I wrote anything good, it would be strictly by accident.

But I made my way through a batch of stories, and I caught myself thinking, I should pitch this somewhere.

And I’ve been doing just that. Over the last few months, I’ve pitched a number of new stories. They’ve all been dinged, so far. So barring a couple that are still outstanding, I’ve decided to retire this batch — most of which have been rejected by multiple markets — and present them here over the next few weeks, so that at least somebody gets a kick out of them.

First one runs tomorrow. See you then.