Category: writing

Geyser

I had a fantastic year writing and realized a number of important things. I aimed at writing longer fiction for the first time. I also attended a number of conventions and paid attention more to the business of writing and publishing. I might describe it, in reflection, as a year of transition between being a writer and an author. (And here’s my Year in Writing:2021 from last year.)

I only made about 20 formal submissions for short fiction this year and received three acceptances. An odd little genre-defying story, Something Else to Do was accepted for the anthology Modern Magic by Knight Writing Press. The story Imaginary Friends was published in the anthology The Future’s So Bright. And The Right Motivation appeared in Corporate Catharsis: The work from home edition. But that’s not all I published.

I published several more works with Water Dragon Publishing. I was invited to submit a story for the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy and wrote Better Angels, which appeared in August followed by The Better Angels and the Very Scary Halloween, The Better Angels and the Very Rapid Rescue, and a piece of flash fiction, Who’s Afraid of Whom.

Most importantly, I prevailed upon Water Dragon Publishing to serialize Revin’s Heart that picks up the story after the Third Time’s the Charm. In March, For the Favor of a Lady was released; in June, Storm Clouds Gather; in August, Crossing the Streams; and in December, The End of his Rope. The last two novelettes will appear in March and June 2023.

In total, I wrote about 140,000 words in 2022. Not mentioned above, I wrote several side stories intended for the Revin’s Heart fix-up: Where There’s a Will (the story of how Will and Grip meet and fall in love), Curtains Rise (the back story of how Will met the Baron (Grip’s father)), and Riva’s Escape, the origin story of how Revin transitioned. I also wrote a novel (barely): A Familiar Problem, for which I also wrote a side-story (A Different Midsummer Night’s Dream). I’m just finishing a novelette/novela with the origin of neoboxers for the Truck Stop series. And finally, I’ve started a new novel project, The Ground Never Lies, for which I’ve written a pilot.

Writing the side stories got me to realize that I love writing fan fiction — I just love writing it about my own writing. But every one I’ve written has given me deeper insight into the characters and world building.

I attended a bunch of conventions. Due to the pandemic, most were virtual appearances: Arisia, Boskone, Flights of Foundry, Lambda Literary Awards, Balticon, and OutWrite. I did, however, travel to and participate in Chicon in meatspace (and virtually) where I moderated three panels, served on two others, and performed a reading; in addition to helping run a table for the Small Publishing in a Big Universe Podcast Marketplace. I also helped run a dealer table at the Rhode Island Comic Con.

In August, I was interviewed by the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast (the interview aired in December) and, in October, I was a “guest interviewer” which gave me the chance to interview Francesca Forrest, which was a lot of fun. I don’t personally have the patience to listen to podcasts very often. But being interviewed and interviewing other people is fun, so maybe I should do it more often.

I joined two writing organizations in 2022. The Straw Dog Writer’s Guild is a regional writer support network. I’ve participated in workshops, readings and have joined the Program Committee to help coordinate events. The Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) is a professional association for writers of science fiction and fantasy. I was unable to attend their annual meeting, the Nebulas, because it conflicted with my union’s annual meeting. Hopefully this year, that won’t be an issue. But I participate in their weekly Writing Date events (and even hosted one!) and use their Discord server to interact with other authors.

Finally, I read slush for the first time. It was unbelievably helpful to see less polished writing than what gets published. I was like, “Oh! So this is what they mean when they say, ‘Show, don’t tell’!” This may have been as helpful as anything else I’ve done all year to help improve my writing. Although just getting editorial feedback on my writing continues to be helpful. And I’ve noticed that my most recent writing requires less editing than my older writing, which encourages me to think that my writing is improving.

Overall, It was a great year in writing and I look forward to another great year to come!

from The End of His Rope

When I first wrote The Third Time’s the Charm, it was more like the first chapter of a book than it was a short story. So I had a sense of the larger story that lay beyond the initial foray. But, to be honest, I only had the vaguest idea of the overall arc of the story. I hadn’t made many of the important world building decisions. I went through many rounds of revisions to give it a satisfying arc of its own, but the rest was still there, taunting me and I really wanted to tell the whole story. It speaks volumes that Water Dragon Publishing was willing to take the risk to serialize Revin’s Heart and give me more-or-less free rein to develop the story as I wanted.

I wrote For the Favor of a Lady, primarily to learn more about the characters. I had only the vaguest idea about Grip’s origins. When I wrote Storm Clouds Gather, the Etheric Storm Generator arc presented itself which led directly to Crossing the Streams. And it was at that time, that the shape of the rest of the series took form. But I still had to get from here to there: that’s what The End of His Rope is: a bridge between the earlier arcs and the arcs that follow. It also introduces a couple of important new characters and gives us an opportunity gain more insight into Revin’s character.

As with previous parts, there are many (of what I hope are) “warm, fun interactions between likable characters”. And there are several of the dramatic airship scenes that I know are popular with readers. And some nail-biting action. And, if I say so myself, the ending is particularly satisfying and really sets the stage for the last two parts that follow.

After I finished writing Revin’s Heart, I wrote three side-stories that recount events where Revin is not present. Since Revin’s Heart is told from his point-of-view, these couldn’t be included. But I thought readers that had gotten to know the characters might enjoy seeing how they came to end up where they had. The first of these, Where There’s a Will, is about how Will and Grip met and fell in love (this is teased in For the Favor of a Lady).

“Just how long have you and Will been together,” Revin asked.

“It will be two years next week. On Thursday.” Grip said.

“You know it to the day. That’s very sweet,” Revin said.

Grip looked down, blushing. But he looked happy. “They’ve been the best two years of my life.”

“How did you meet?” Revin asked.

“Oh, that’s a long story for another time,” Grip replied.

from For the Favor of a Lady

The second, Curtains Rise, describes the history that Will and the Baron, (Grip’s father) share. This is teased in Storm Clouds Gather.

Then Will saw the Baron and stopped dead in his tracks.

“Well met, William,” the Baron said.

“It’s Curtains!” Will said.

“What?” Grip said, looking back and forth between the two of them.

“Curtains! That’s what they called him back when…” Will said, then broke off when he caught the Baron’s expression. “I’ll… I’ll tell you sometime later.”

from Storm Clouds Gather

These stories were a delight for me to write. But there was one more side story I decided that I really needed to write: Revin’s origin story. That is, the story of his transition from a woman to man.

I was worried about writing this story because I knew it was going to require to me to make a number of choices that might not support choices I had made in writing Revin’s Heart. But, when I had finished, I was was pleased with the results that required no more than token changes to the stories. And gave me a lot of deeper insight into Revin’s character.

I’m telling this story now because I realized when a beta reader reviewed the manuscript, that there were a number of unanswered questions about the series that some readers would want to know that I now knew the answers to. And there were a couple of perfect scenes that I could elaborate in the The End of His Rope that would allow me to tell this story. So I did. Long after the manuscript was “done” I got it out again and added a thousand words. I hope you’ll be pleased with the results.

Below are my publications that were (or will be) released in 2022.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. The End of His Rope. Part Five of Revin’s Heart, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. 46pp.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. The Right Motivation in Corporate Catharsis: The Work From Home Edition, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. 226-233.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Something Else to Do in Modern Magic. Knight Writing Press, Parker, Colorado. 55-59.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Imaginary Friends in The Future’s So Bright, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. pages 290-297.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Better Angels and the Very Scary Halloween. Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy Boos-Day, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. Available at: https://truckstop.waterdragonpublishing.com/truck-stop-boos-day/very-scary-halloween/

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Who’s Afraid of Whom. Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy Boos-Day, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. Available at: https://truckstop.waterdragonpublishing.com/truck-stop-boos-day/whos-afraid-of-whom/

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Crossing the Streams. Part Four of Revin’s Heart, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. 42pp.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Better Angels. Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. 25pp.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. Storm Clouds Gather. Part Three of Revin’s Heart, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. 36pp.

Brewer, S.D. 2022. For the Favor of a Lady. Part Two of Revin’s Heart, Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose, California. 42pp.

For years, I was aware of the Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) although the eligibility for membership looked pretty far out of reach. But this spring, they changed the rules and I became eligible to join, which I did as soon as possible.

When I joined SFWA, one of the things I discovered was the SFWA Writing Date. Each week, late Sunday afternoon, folks could get together via Zoom to socialize for a few minutes, then write for 45 minutes, socialize again, and then write again. It was nice to have an excuse to meet some writer friends and get some work done.

In August, there was a call looking for people to “host” the writing date. Each week, there were a couple of SFWA people to handle the tech stuff, but then there would an author that was the formal host: they would smile, run a little icebreaker, and generally try to make people feel good that they’d attended. So I put my name forward. And I got picked! There were only a couple of dates that I thought could work for me, but I got the Sunday before the Thanksgiving week.

I got an email the week before that included directions for how I could have a “porthole”. I had seen that the staff running the writing date had little “windows” that looked out into a moving starfield or nebula or something. When I tried to do it on my computer, I discovered that the Zoom client for linux doesn’t offer the capability to have a video background. But I was planning to use OBS Studio anyway and it *does* have the capability so it wasn’t hard to set it up. I cut out a couple of pieces of florescent orange card stock and taped them up over the window in the cover of For the Favor of a Lady. It worked great.

For the icebreaker, I decided to riff on the classic by Barbara Walters. She would always open with the question, “What kind of tree would you like to be and where would you grow?” I’ve used this for years with my writing class. But for this audience, I mixed it up a little by asking, “What kind of FICTIONAL tree would you like to be, preferably from speculative fiction?”

People really got into it! I was really pleased at the response. I was a bit surprised at the ones nobody guessed, but also at some of the ones that I hadn’t been aware of.

After that, the writing was almost anti-climactic. I wrote about 1400 words in the two blocks of time. I’m starting a new story that I will, hopefully, be able to wrap up before the end of the Thanksgiving break.

It’s been a busy fall for me as a writer. In mid-August, Better Angels came out. And then Crossing the Streams came out in September. Next, I have a story, Imaginary Friends coming out in the Future’s So Bright anthology by mid-October. In November, I have a story, Something Else to Do, scheduled to appear in the Modern Magic anthology. I’m still hopeful that the next part of Revin’s Heart, The End of his Rope, will be out in November — perhaps in time for Rhode Island Comic Con, where I’ll be helping run a vendor table for my publisher Water Dragon Publishing. Finally, look for an exciting surprise at the Truck Stop for Halloween! And next year is getting off to a busy start too!

In January, I’ll be a participant at Arisia. And in February, I’ll be at Boskone. At both, we plan to have a table for Water Dragon so, in addition to participating on panels, I’ll be trying to sell books too. But, as I discovered at Chicon, it’s something I enjoy.

Speaking of selling books, I had so much fun with my Airship Pirate ribbons at Chicon8, I decided to make some stickers. If you buy a signed edition of any of the printed editions of Revin’s Heart, I’ll include a sticker for free (until the stickers run out).

When I attended the SFWA Writing Date with Valerie Valdes, rather than having participants introduce themselves, we played a game of “never ever” where she provided prompts and asked us to respond in chat with whether we had ever done that kind of writing. I played along: short fiction, yes. Horror, no. But then she asked about fan fiction. I said, “No” at first. But then I started thinking. And I realized there *is* a kind of fan fiction I like to write: I like to write fan fiction of my own stories and characters.

My first work, Revin’s Heart, has been serialized by Water Dragon Publishing and is being released as seven novelettes. But while I was writing the second one, I realized there was a story that would be fun to tell, but I couldn’t be part of the series because the protagonist wasn’t there, so the story would need to be told from a different point of view. Then, as I was writing the third one, I had another story emerge.

“It’s Curtains!” Will said. 

“What?” Grip said, looking back and forth between the two of them.

“Curtains! That’s what they called him back when…” Will said, then broke off when he caught the Baron’s expression. “I’ll… I’ll tell you sometime later.

—from Storm Clouds Gather

After I finished writing the series, I decided to write these side stories and they were a blast. Especially Curtains Rise which really needed to be told in first person. And after that I *still* didn’t want to quit inhabiting these characters, so I wrote one more that was perhaps the trickiest of all.

I decided to tell the origin story for Revin. In the series, we meet him already trans. But it was clear that there must be a story there and I set out to tell it. It was both challenging and very satisfying and provided me with a variety of new insights about the character. (And a bunch of new characters whom I truly love.)

And after all that, I still didn’t want to stop, so I’ve been telling another story using VSS tweets, one tweet at a time.

Then I did finally switch and I wrote a novel about complete different characters in a complete different setting. But, no sooner had I finished the book, but there was another side story I wanted to write that, once again, couldn’t be told from the point of view of the protagonist.

So it turns out that I love fan faction: I just only write it about my own stories.

One year ago, I attended Readercon 31 and met Water Dragon Publishing. What a year it’s been. In my Year in Writing 2021, I wrote about my early experiences with Water Dragon. But when I wrote that in December, I still only had the single publication: The Third Time’s the Charm.

Since then, in consultation with the managing editor, I was able to persuade Water Dragon to serialize 6 following novelettes that extend Charm totaling about 70,000 words that we have called “Revin’s Heart“. So far two of the novelettes, For the Favor of a Lady and Storm Clouds Gather, have been released — and the manuscript for Crossing the Streams has been submitted. The rest are written and will continue to come out over the rest of this year and the first half of next year. Eventually, I anticipate that we’ll collect them together in a fix-up novel. I have also written three “side stories” about characters from the universe that we can include in the novel.

I am fully cognizant that relatively few authors (and vanishingly few new authors) have the opportunity to be serialized. And I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity to tell the story my way. I had a variety of reasons for wanting to do this. Partly, I found the 10,000 word novelette was a comfortable unit for telling these stories. Partly, I think I’ve also been influenced by reading manga and “light novels” that are often serialized in Japanese media that are more episodic in nature than a lot of American storytelling seems to be. But partly, I also saw an opportunity to engage with the public over the course of a whole year rather than publishing a book in a single event. But Revin’s Heart hasn’t been my only work.

On Tuesday, August 16, Better Angels, my first story set on the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy will be released. It was fascinating to try writing for a common setting developed by a group of authors. In November, Something Else To Do, will be released in Modern Magic, an anthology by Knight Writing Press. And I have another story, Imaginary Friends, appearing in The Future’s So Bright anthology. And several other projects in the works, including a new novel “A Familiar Problem“. It’s been quite a year.

And I’m not just writing. I’ve also joined a local writing community, the Straw Dog Writer’s Guild, serving on the Program Committee. I’m serving as a guest interviewer for the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast. I’m even offering some technical support for Water Dragon.

Capping my experience, during the first week in September, I’m appearing as a participant in Chicon8, this year’s WorldCon — the world’s premiere science fiction convention — in 8 separate events. I’m moderating three panels, participating in two more, offering a “table talk”, reading with other Truck Stop authors, and helping to offer a workshop. What was I thinking? It’s going to be super exciting to meet with other authors and engage with readers.

As soon as I return — literally the next day — I will need to hang up my author hat for a while and focus on my “day job” for the fall semester. But I’m excited to see what will happen next.

I wrote this piece of flash fiction during the winter. It didn’t get accepted, but I was pleased with it as I felt like it hit pretty close to what I was aiming for.

I snuck a glance at him, longingly. Michael, my childhood friend, had returned from university for the New Year. He walked beside me, our hands almost brushing. We passed under the torii, the red gate that marked the entrance, and climbed the stone steps to the tiny, countryside shrine. Light snow overnight had given way to clear skies. The sun had melted nearly all of the snow except where it lingered in the shadows.

We passed the komainu, the guardian lion dogs, and approached the offertory box. After we deposited our coins, we bowed, prayed, and clapped twice.

“What did you pray for?” I asked, as we started back down the path toward the stairs. 

“I prayed that I could be more honest with myself this year.”

“Ah,” I said, looking down. “I prayed for courage: that I might be brave enough to share my feelings with the one I like.” 

“I’m sure you’ll find the courage, William,” he said.

I swallowed hard.

“Michael,” I said, turning, but looking at his shoes, afraid to look at his face. “I… I have feelings for you.”

He reached down and took my hand. I looked up and my heart skipped a beat. His smile was like the sun, shining deep into the darkest places of my spirit and thawing what had long been frozen. 

“I know,” he said. “I’ve always known. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.”

We descended the stairs, hand-in-hand.

Today, when I awoke this morning, I found my editor had returned the edits for Storm Clouds Gather (Part Three of Revin’s Heart, serialized by Water Dragon Publishing). While I was still in bed, I downloaded the PDF on my phone and looked over all the recommended changes.

A lot of people complain about editing and editors, but I love it. Here’s someone’s who’s actually taken the the time to really read and understand my story! And they want to make it better! What’s not to love about that?

In looking over this set of suggestions, the only consistent grammatical mistake I appeared to still make is this one.

It was funny to me because a beta reader had pointed out that I do this just a couple of days ago.

I went through the manuscript and proposed revisions three times. The first time, I simply accepted the inline edits he’d proposed. These were mostly like the commas I mention above. And other minor word order changes or simplifications. The second time, I went through the comments where he had asked questions or identified places where things were unclear or didn’t read cleanly. And finally, I read it one more time to look for places where the track changes had left cruft: there was a “,.” in one place. And two spaces in another.

In one place, my editor commented that a sentence of exposition was unnecessary because the characters would know that information. At first, I misread the comment as that readers would already know and I was like, “Wut? I made that up for this book. Did they already read this book or something?”

In the end, here’s my main observation.

And, luckily, I do love reading my own writing.

I attended the 2022 Lambda Literary award ceremony. I had a lovely time and felt very welcome. I met a bunch of new people and reconnected with a few I’d met before. I was kind of surprised how little overlap there was with Flights of Foundry — I saw a handful of people I recognized, but fewer than I had expected.

The meeting was conducted online and used Airmeet as the platform but had a couple of things I hadn’t seen before. First, it led participants to fill out their profile. Only about 30% of participants did, but this was still significantly higher than at a bunch of online events where it seems everyone is functionally anonymous. Second, they were using an informal discussion tool where everyone was distributed across the screen and could double-click near them to open up a voice/video chat window with them and everyone else in the vicinity. Only a small percentage of the participants came to use the environment, but I thought it actually worked pretty well. I had nice discussions three or four times with people and would have been happy to spend more time meeting and chatting.

The actual awards ceremony was preceded by several hours of panel discussions. They were interesting and useful.

Queer New Worlds was about queer voices in speculative fiction. It was interesting to hear a variety of perspectives. I asked a question that seemed to puzzle the panelists: how to write to bridge queer and straight audiences? The answer that they seemed to like best was that you should write what you want and let the audience find it.

Banned Book List was a gallop through the books currently being banned for queer content. I asked how to get your book banned and got a very nice tongue-in-cheek answer that matched the cheekiness of my question.

LoveWins was about queer sex and erotica. It was a fun romp with lots of interesting discussion.

My take, as a newcomer to this community, is that many queer writers see their work as fundamentally disjunct from writing for straight audiences. It may, in part, due to the uniquely poisoned atmosphere in the public square today, which is being driven by the right-wing mania to torment people that their evangelical minority base hates and wants to see punished. My personal take, is that the majority of people in the country have already accepted the normalization of queer and trans content. I am hopeful that the right wing will find some other whipping boy soon and this particular phase will only last as long as the so-called “War on Christmas.” With their capture of the Supreme Court, they can certainly cause mischief, but I’m hopeful it won’t persist.

That said, I think it’s important that everyone stand up and make clear that they support our queer folk who just want to live without being threatened and harassed by right-wing assholes.

My own writing does try to bridge queer and straight audiences. I would like queer audiences to find characters that they can identify with, like the trans protagonist, Revin. Or his gay mentor Will. Or his bisexual mentors Grip and Curtains. At the same time, my goal for straight readers is that they discover they can also identify with Revin and perhaps even forget that he’s trans from time to time — only to “wake up” when events happen that throw his gender into relief, whether a casually gendered statement (e.g. “Boys like you are always hungry” or “Your penmanship is almost as good as a girl’s”) or in places where gender is enforced, like in a bath.