Author: StevenDBrewer

Author of speculative fiction and poetry in English and Esperanto. Teacher of scientific writing. Lover of natural history. (he/his)
Revin's Heart bundle

When I joined Water Dragon Publishing, my first publication was The Third Time’s the Charm. It is a steampunky fantasy adventure with pirates and airships and a trans protagonist. An 8000-word novelette, it was published as part of the Dragon Gems program. Especially during the pandemic, Water Dragon had discovered that small books seemed to sell well. Now the rest of the world may be catching up.

In Short Books are Perfect for Our Distracted Age, Margaret Renkl describes finding short novels and novellas are rewarding because you can read them in a single sitting. Enough to immerse yourself in but not something you’ll need to return to day after day to finish.

When I wrote The Third Time’s the Charm, I imagined it as part of a series of connected stories: each with its own arc, but connected to an overarching story that linked them all. After writing the second, For the Favor of A Lady, I was able to persuade my publisher to let me serialize them as Revin’s Heart. Five more stories followed in which the protagonist goes from obscurity to the heart of a kingdom and shakes its foundations.

After, Rewriting the Rules came out, we created a collected edition that includes the seven novelettes plus three “side quests” that tell background stories about the characters, including Riva’s Escape, that describes the transition of the protagonist. In the stories he’s only ever described as an man with his transition simply an established fact. But I thought readers would be interested in learning more about his history.

It was a surprise to me to discover that the bundles of the individual stories was actually easier to sell than the collected edition. Another author was envious of how at conventions, the bundles seemed to fly off the table.

Soon, I’m hoping to see if lightning will strike twice. I’ve written another series of novelettes set in the same world, but twenty years earlier. A minor character in Revin’s Heart is Lady Cecelia, who is the curator of a botanical garden. She shows up just a couple of times. But I was interested in telling her background story.

In Lady Cecelia’s Journey, two young women, aristocrat and commoner, fall in love and struggle against societal norms against same-sex relationships and the difference in their social status. In order to live together openly, they flee their backward town to travel to the more cosmopolitan capital. I’m billing it as a sapphic romantasy road story. I’m hoping for it to be serialized as six novelettes, with a seventh omake novelette, Lady Cecelia’s Temptation, that will be part of a collected edition.

Many years ago, I was a doctoral student in science education… (Pro-tip: Always call yourself a “doctoral student” rather than a “graduate student” because the University staff will treat you way better) Anyway, I was taking mostly Biology classes, but also some classes in the Geology Department.

Geology tends to be a much more blue-collar science than Biology. At least, this department was. And a number of the more blue-collar students pegged me as some egghead intellectual that was slumming in Geology and gave me the cold shoulder. One was a non-traditional student — my age or older — who had worked for years as a well-drilling operator and was going back to school to finish a bachelors degree.

One night, we were running a pump test out in the field. For this test, you run a pump for like 24 hours or longer to create a cone of depression in the water table and then, when you turn off the pump, you monitor how quickly the water table returns to baseline. This can yield useful information about the nature of the permeability of the soil, etc. Anyway, I was one of 6 or 7 students out in the middle of a field at night with a huge generator truck monitoring a pump from like 2-4am.

The guy was chain smoking and holding forth with the rest of the students. They were all traditional late teen or early 20’s undergrads and they looked up to him. He was joking with them and telling stories. Then he looked around at them and said, “If you don’t get a job before sundown… Anybody? Anybody?” There was silence. Into the silence, I said, “You get a goddamned job before sundown or we’re shippin’ ya off to military school with that GODDAMN FINKELSTEIN SHIT KID! SONOVABITCH!” It’s a quote from Cheech & Chong’s movie Up in Smoke.

The guy was stunned. He’d had me pegged for some goody two-shoes academic and had no idea that I was a former stoner and had come of age in a blue-collar environment. He was ecstatic to discover me as a fellow-thinker. “Right? Right?” he crowed. After that, I was officially OK and was welcomed into the bosom of the Geology student community.

Almost all rejections you get as an author provide no feedback. Clarkesworld, which has rejected everything I’ve sent (often within hours) says, “Unfortunately, your story isn’t quite what we’re looking for right now.”

I used to think that more feedback would be useful. But I’ve come around. One place that still gives feedback rejected my story today with a message from the slush reader that was, in essence, that he didn’t think magic would work like that.

I mean, what? What does that even mean? You can tell me that science doesn’t work like that. Or any fact-based domain. But magic? Give me a break!

In the end, all you can know from a rejection is that this editor didn’t like your story. It tells you little about whether or not a different editor might like it. So just tell me you didn’t like the story and keep your weird opinions to yourself.

Still, that’s plenty for a publication. The editors know (or should know) what their readers are looking for.

Things might be different for beginners. Especially, if their problems are related to the practices of authorship and craft of writing. It might be helpful to have someone remind them to follow the submission guidelines, spellcheck their manuscript, write in paragraphs, use punctuation correctly, etc.

It’s very useful to spend a few hours on the other side of the table. I did some slush reading a couple of years ago and it was astonishing to see what people submit. I remember one story that had, in essence, 5 or 6 pages of exposition — basically a really long preface setting up the action. And then there was about two paragraphs of “story” right at the very end.

It was not what we were looking for.

Yesterday was the last day of Writing Month. During November, 2024, I wrote 23,100 words. I did not reach the goal I had set of 50,000 words. I knew the goal was probably unrealistic even in the beginning. But then my mother was in the hospital for the first week in November, which explains part of my lack of progress. I was also simply too busy with work. In the end, I was still satisfied with the progress I made.

Writing Month was a hack put together by a guy to replace NaNoWriMo. He had grander ambitions, but managed to only create a very bare-bones site by the beginning of the month. But he did! And the site worked flawlessly for me — at least in terms of tracking my progress. It didn’t really have any mechanisms for discovery or social networking, so I only found one other person as a “buddy” and never figured out how to see how they were doing.

The final statistic showed that 44 authors wrote a total of 40,174 words towards a total goal of 1,427,380 words. That suggests that maybe only one or two other people entered word counts. (Or maybe several did for a few days and then dropped off.)

I spent Writing Month working on my manuscript for The Ground Never Lies. This is a sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem who has given up on love, but who then discovers a capacity for love she didn’t realize she had. I wrote a pilot for the story a couple of years ago, but shelved it because I couldn’t decide if a shorter version worked or if I should commit to writing it as a novel. I had this idea that the geomancer has a day job doing land assessments for properties in a karst region, where people want to be sure that a sinkhole won’t open up wrecking the property. But that the geomancer also moonlights as the crime-scene assessor for the local constabulary. But, as I wrote the story, I didn’t see any way to work in scenes of her doing other crime-scene assessments. Then I realized that there are two stories here: one is the original arc. But the other is how she became the person she is at the beginning of the story: embittered and disgusted with herself and life. So once I finished writing the original arc, I spent a week writing this second arc. Then I’ll have to figure out how to stitch them together.

I might using the Writing Month structure again in January, when it will be Intersession and I’ll have more free time to write.

I’ve served in leadership and Board roles in non-profits a number of times over the years. I’ve been a Secretary, Vice President, and President, in addition to serving on boards. I’ve learned some things about what makes a Board work.

Foremost is that the primary goal of the leadership should not be to make decisions, but rather to defend the power of the Board. I’ve served in organizations where tensions develop between the Executive Director and the elected leadership. And sometimes Presidents bring their own agenda that they would like to push through. It can feel simpler for the leadership to try to push their own agendas and treat the Board like a rubber stamp. But the leadership needs to resist that. The Board should remain in control and the leadership should only decide when the Board cannot.

Second, any decision you make as a Board is going to make some people unhappy. In dysfunctional organizations, the leadership can become paralyzed because it can feel like only way to avoid making people angry is to do nothing. Of course, doing nothing will also make some number of people angry. But it also guarantees the organization will founder and drift, rudderless.

A former Chancellor at my university had a saying about leadership that’s stuck with me. He said, “Money matters, quality counts, and time is the enemy.” Point being, money matters, but it’s not everything. Quality counts. If something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly. But you need to prioritize, make tradeoffs, and not try to do everything if it means that everything is bad. Finally, the more time you spend deliberating and deciding will put the organization behind.

Since my recent election to SFWA, I’ve been reassured to find that the Board and leadership are aligned and prepared to work on addressing the real challenges that exist. I have great confidence that we are well positioned to more forward together as an organization.

One more observation: Shortly after I assumed a leadership position for the first time, I discovered an interesting phenomenon. The moment you step into the role, it’s like a target gets painted on your back. You assume ownership of all of the problems of the organization. And people who bear some grudge against the organization immediately start targeting you. So it has been here.

You can’t let it stop you.

This year, the fixup for Revin’s Heart was published, which included three short stories. And I wrote a short story that was published in an anthology.

  • Brewer, S.D. 2024. Revin’s Heart, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California, including
    • “Where There’s a Will” pp 269-282,
    • “Curtains Rise” pp 283-302,
    • “Riva’s Escape” pp 303-329.
  • Brewer, S.D. 2024. Always a Destroyer (pp 99-111) in Romancing the Rainbow. Knight Writing Press, Parker, Colorado. 240pp.
icon for wss366

Wandering Shop Stories, a writing prompt that began in January and recently migrated to wandering.shop, has now taken a new step to be more available to the wider SFF community: We ‘re now on Bluesky too!

It looks like the announcement that birdchan would start using everything everyone posted to train its AI finally roused a huge number of people to get up and leave the Nazi bar. And it appears that Bluesky is where the SFF community is going to land. Personally, I find this a bit disappointing as Bluesky is funded by venture capital. It’s currently very nice, but I suspect it will inevitably become enshittified. But, like it or not, that’s where the vast majority of the SFF community is going.

I decided, therefore, to see if I could create a bot to share the Wandering Shop Stories prompts at Bluesky in addition to Mastodon. I still prefer the vibe at Mastodon and am not planning to leave. But I’d like to be able to cross-post stuff. So it would be nice if the #wss366 hashtag would reference something. And there may be people that would like to play along at Bluesky. So, I decided to see how difficult it was to adapt the python script I use for Mastodon to also post at Bluesky.

It turned out to be super easy. Well… Sorta.

It also turned out that when I installed the atproto library, it updated something else that caused the Mastodon bot to quit working. I hate when that happens. After spending a few hours fighting with it, I decided to just do a side-install of a newer version of python and use a virtual environment to make sure that everything was separate from the system install of python. I should have done that in the first place, honestly.

Then, everything worked. Well… Almost.

It turns out you can’t just emit text and have it auto-format it, like it does if you post it. You have to run it through the filter on the client side to build rich-text using a utility called “textbuilder” before you submit it. That was a bit cranky and not well documented. But, eventually, I got that to work just tickety boo.

I used to do this kind of technical work all the time. It’s nice to see that I still can navigate programming and building reliable unix services. But, honestly, I’m pretty glad it’s not my day job anymore. My father always described these kinds of things as “just like using a computer.”

In the end, I’ve found spending a few minutes a day writing a very short story — especially when I’m otherwise too busy — to be really helpful at sustaining my creativity. The prompts that we choose are aimed to be ordinary words that have multiple meanings, so you can spin them a bunch of different ways. I love how it makes me feel to write something short and sweet.

Even more, I love seeing the contributions that other people make. I’m looking forward to seeing what people on Bluesky choose to contribute!

potsherds

I attended a craft workshop organized by the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild about translating poetry by Jesse Lee Kercheval. She’s Zona Gale Professor of English Emerit at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The workshop had to be rescheduled when she had computer difficulties several weeks ago, but it was still pretty well attended for a Zoom event on a rainy Saturday morning.

She talked a bit about her path to translating poetry. She grew up speaking French, but learned English in her childhood. For the past 15 years, she’s been going to Uruguay and learning about the language and literature of the region. She’s published both original poetry and poetry in translation.

She brought several examples to show the kinds of choices translators make when trying to share a poem from one language to another. They were fascinating and gave the audience the opportunity to discover how choices throw cultural and linguistics aspect of both the original and target languages into relief.

One poem, translated by her and by another poet was particularly fascinating to me, as I could see how the other poet created a more masculine take on the poem showing cultural differences in how men and women speak. It reminded me of how in Japanese, men use a much rougher, more clipped, kind of speech.

Another poem showed the challenges — and limitations — of trying to bring a cultural construct from one language into another without intersecting with different cultural biases in the target language. The word “barrio” has different cultural connotations in the two communities: do you try to translate it or leave it in? Even the title of the poem, which was purely metaphorical: do you translate it literally? Or try to capture a corresponding metaphorical meaning in English? Choices!

For many, many years, (more than 30!) I have been writing poetry in Esperanto and trying to translate it into English. I’ve also done some limited translation of English poetry into Esperanto. And as an undergraduate, I studied Spanish for many years. So this was just a perfect fit for my interests and needs. I’ve been thinking about making a new chapbook of Esperanto haiku and now I’m even more excited to get started.

In 2001, Philip kept a diary while attending the Clarion East speculative fiction writing retreat. He had a transformative experience that I got to watch from the outside.

Years later, he wrote a round up post, where he collected some of his most meaningful reflections and provided a link to his Clarion at home page where he describes how to accomplish similar goals to attending the workshop, for people who can’t attend. Because attending Clarion is a huge commitment.

Clarion, as currently constituted, is difficult for most people to attend. It requires leaving home for 6 weeks, probably getting a leave from work, and being able to pay for room-and-board someplace while maintaining one’s current housing. Many people just can’t do that. Moreover, it requires living in close proximity to other people which I can’t do because of my chronic lung condition.

So I was excited to see that, next year (in 2025), Clarion is moving to an online format. Next year, at that time, I’ve already applied to participate in the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat. It’s a shorter online workshop that I think could be a good fit for my needs. But maybe next year, I’ll apply for Clarion.

The other workshop I’ve always wanted to attend is Viable Paradise. In the past, I couldn’t attend because it takes place during the fall, when I’m busy with work. But now that I’m in my phased retirement, I’m only working half time and might be able to attend. Applications open in January and I may well apply.

pine cone

Yesterday, I attended my first Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) Board Meeting as Secretary. It was a thoroughly positive experience. I took notes carefully and generated a set of minutes. I shared both my raw notes and my proposed set of minutes with the Board in order to get feedback in terms of how much detail people would like in the minutes. Some boards I’ve served on would like the full set of notes, but a set of minutes is generally a concise set of notes that captures only the essentials of what was decided. It will take me a while to get a sense of this Board to understand what is needed.

I had only met a few of the board members previously. We did around of introductions and it was interesting to see the range of perspectives and backgrounds present. I think it’s a nicely diverse board with members who bring very different life experiences, although many of us have teaching backgrounds. I immediately was made to feel at home and I think I will fit in well.

Initially, I had no plans to be Secretary. During the summer, when it became clear that SFWA was facing some challenges, I offered myself as a volunteer. Since I am beginning my phased retirement, I have more time available to dedicate to service. When the special election was called, I saw that someone had immediately offered themselves for Secretary and I was like, “Great!” If someone else wanted to do the work, I was happy to let them have at it. But then, due to some new opportunity at work, that candidate decided they had to withdraw. Seeing no other candidate step forward, I was happy to do so. I’m familiar with the work of being Secretary and happy to do what I can to support the organization.

SFWA is going through a major transition. I was aware of SFWA long before I began seriously writing speculative fiction. When I first started getting my fiction published, I was eager to join. At the time, however, the rules were such that it seemed an insurmountable challenge to become eligible. The rules required getting certain number of publications in markets that paid “pro” rates — except hardly any did. I spoke with my publisher — a small press — about the issue. They pay about a quarter of pro rates and admitted that without some other significant source of funding, they would not be able to sustain paying higher rates. But then SFWA changed the rules to be measured against absolute earnings through publishing. I was immediately able to join as an “associate” member and, when I renewed my membership the following year, I had reached the level necessary for “full” membership.

Not everyone is evidently happy about the change. It has produced a large influx of eager new members but, reportedly, some of the old-time members preferred the exclusivity of the previous, more restrictive, rules for entry. Personally, I think the new rules are better and produce a population that is more representative of the population of speculative fiction authors the organization is designed to serve. But I recognize the diversity of viewpoints on the matter.

A number of people have been worried about SFWA. The Romance Writers of America recently collapsed into bankruptcy. When SFWA experienced a number of resignations in a short time, people worried that there was some deep, dark secret that meant that the organization itself was in jeopardy. I have seen nothing that suggests this is the case. There are some challenges, but they are ordinary sorts of challenges. I have every confidence that the current board will meet those challenges and the organization will emerge all the stronger.

I would again like to thank everyone who had the confidence to vote for me for Secretary. I know that I was a bit of a dark horse. But I will work hard to repay your trust and help SFWA to meet its challenges.