Because Sherlock by Rachael Acks

Because Sherlock

Rachael Acks

My love of steampunk is all Sherlock Holmes' fault.

My mother read out loud to my brother and I when we were kids. We read a lot of books over the years, including Just So Stories and The Flame Trees of Thika. But I think the most influential books that my mother poured into my brain were The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The first two have an obvious influence, and on anyone that has ever written fantasy, whether you like the books or not. I've wanted to somehow touch that level of epic storytelling ever since I heard the description of the Battle of Helm's Deep. (Though from my end of things, by preference there would be a lot more women with swords and maybe a little less detail in descriptions of how pretty the forests are.) I wrote stories from a very early age, and there was that fantasy element in them from almost the get-go.

Sherlock Holmes was a different matter entirely. I loved all the short mystery stories, but it didn't infect my brain quite the same way. I didn't have much of a desire to write mysteries. Honestly, outside of Sherlock, I have little interest in the genre. But the world of stinking London streets and hansom cabs lurked in the back of my mind, just waiting for its chance.

There's a sector of people out there that didn't appreciate the steampunk-ish update that Sherlock Holmes received in the 2009 and 2011 movies starring Robert Downey Jr. as the title character. I loved it. Relished it. That twist to the setting and the addition of sudden, grinning and winking mayhem felt like Holmes had just been waiting for steampunk to be invented. It may be because to a little girl sitting on the couch in 1980s Denver, the 1890s in London felt just as far off and fantastical as the idea of zeppelins floating over the Rocky Mountains in some nebulous, quasi-Victorian era.

At their heart, the Sherlock Holmes stories are about adventure and being intellectual simultaneously, solving problems with an inventive mind first and a well-placed bullet only when that fails. Perhaps that is what makes Sherlock Holmes do so well in the speculative fiction family (just look at the spec fic stories that have been written about him, such as Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald) - he's all about thought and adventure. It feels natural to take that adventure and extend it into the 'what if' while maintaining that emphasis on the intellect.

There's a rabid curiosity fundamental to Sherlock Holmes as a character that also exists in every steampunk story that I've ever read and enjoyed. As a subgenre, Steampunk takes something very real - Victorian culture and steam - and goes on an adventure into a realm of big ideas where the first and greatest weapon is an inventive mind. That's what attracted me to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and what has fueled my enthusiasm for steampunk in recent years.

I thought about Sherlock Holmes often as I was writing my own story. I can't make claims one way or the other how much he helped me out, but I like to think there was a knowing smirk or two. 

Advice to Aspiring Writers by Brian Griggs

My advice to aspiring writers in any genre is this:

Write a story that you want to read.

That’s it. Roll credits. Play the theme music. We’re done here.

Except that, much like anything worth doing, there is some work involved in writing an enjoyable story. If you can remember that simple truth, though, everything else has a purpose beyond just making your English teachers/the writing police happy. As I plot, write, revise, edit, pace around my living room like a mad man, and revise some more, I filter it all through if the story is entertaining to me. It makes the effort worth it.

I’ve worked with junior high students for ten years now and the same truth applies: I teach like I would want to be taught and it has brought me years of success. It’s the belief that, deep down, everyone has the same desire to be respected, trusted, and found worthy of something.

What makes writing fun is that you get to mess with all of that. Trust is broken, respect is lost, and worth is ground beneath the boots of life. Pity our characters because, like Catherine Warren said earlier, we can take out our frustrations on them. But skillful authors don’t rest in the role of sadistic warlords bent on personal vengeance.  The effective storyteller invites the reader to want what the main character wants. That’s what really creeps me out over Poe’s “Tell-tale Heart” – I actually want to know what the narrator did. Is there something wrong with me?

Don’t answer that.

I tell my students that a successful story goes beyond grammar and punctuation, although mastery of those skills is like mastery in any other art: the more control you have over your medium, the more likely it is to create what you envision. Sometimes a single sentence will grab my attention and won’t let go. The word choice and structure click. The placement within the greater piece works.

This is where theory comes into application. The actual story creation process looks different for so many people and even for different narratives. I have one story that I wrote on a single legal pad from start to finish late one night, another spread across countless notebooks over time, and then the one found in January’s issue of Penumbra that only came to me when I could envision the imaginative little hero. I heard a sentence of his narration and started typing.

I’ve had the benefit of hosting authors like Ally Carter, Heather Brewer, Mike Lupica, Ridley Pearson, John Flanagan, P.J. Haarsma, Frank Beddor, James Dashner, and Lisa McMann at my school. I don’t list these authors as a humblebrag namedrop, but to share one united word of advice from them: write a story that you would enjoy. And the common step they all say leads to that? Seat time. Sit down and write. Write and then write some more. Write because you like writing. Write to make order out of chaos. Write to inspire and be inspired. Write because you have something to add to the world.

Why are you still reading this? Go write.

Jay Werkheiser talks about the Horror of Short Fiction.

Short Horror Fiction

Jay Werkheiser

Let me set the scene for you. It’s early 1992. I’m fourteen. And I’ve just written a short story. I know it’s not perfect. I know it’s not what anyone would call publishable, but I do know there’s something in this story writing business that I like. There’s potential here. There’s enough room to go exploring and never run out of places to see. There are more stories to tell. Plenty more. 
Anyway, let’s talk horror fiction. Specifically, let’s talk short horror fiction.
First off, why horror fiction? Why write something which will potentially upset, disturb or frighten the reader? Why not aim to add to the world instead of taking away from it with a horror tale? Well, this idea is, frankly speaking, crap. It exists on the basis that horror fiction must always and only be a negative. It must always lessen the reader and writer. There’s an important issue (other than it being crap) which negates this. 
Who’s to say a horror story has to be only concerned with pain, suffering and misery? Who’s to say it has to be as violent and gross as, say, aSaw film? Take Susan Hill’s excellent The Woman In Black. Without question, this is a horror story. The horror of grief, the horror of the past, the horror of the unknown. And there’s no OTT violence or gore. Just as there isn’t in some of John Connolly’s short work. Or some of Stephen King’s. Ultimately, there’s nothing to stop a horror story featuring death and violence but actually being about bravery, love and hope. Even if does feature lashings of the red stuff, then I can live with that. People might complain about it, might say it's unpleasant and lowbrow and won't someone please think of the children? Does anyone say that when they turn the news on and a bomb's gone off somewhere, killing and injurying dozens of people? Does anyone say that when the camera pans over the bloodstains on the concrete or the holes in buildings that used to be windows?
Now obviously, the Susan Hill example is a novel rather than a short piece but the principal remains the same. The short story writer just has less room to play with than the novelist. That doesn’t have to be a problem, though. Some of the most powerfully written and entertaining works of fiction I’ve read have been short (Stephen King’s The Last Rung On The Ladder, and Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado to name just two). Speaking personally, I love to write short fiction. While my focus now is much more on novels, I won’t stop producing a short story when the right idea for one hits me. If I don’t, then when that idea for a nasty little tale with teeth eager to bite comes along, it’s either get it down on paper or risk it biting me. And biting. And biting.
Incidentally, the story I wrote when I was fourteen is pushing twenty years ago and I still get the same sense of happiness and potential when writing short fiction now as I did back then. And I definitely still get the same sense of exploration as I did then. 
So why not pick up your pen and paper and come exploring with me? Be warned, though. We might go into some dark places. 
In fact, I guarantee it.

How to Write Literary Masterpieces of Sheer Gilded Genius by Dumpster Diving -- by Alistair Ainscott

Okay, so you want to write short stories, or you wouldn't be here. Great. Glad we agree on that. Now how exactly does one go about that? More importantly, how does one go about that and succeed?

Now let me level with you here. I'm pretty new to short story writing myself. But I've operated in The World of Big Ideas for decades in my day job as a research scientist. I've published scores of scientific papers, received awards for my research on sensing techniques for mobile devices (that little screen rotation thingy on your iPhone? Yeah, sorry, that was my fault.) I have a docket of patents stretching into the triple digits. I was a student of the late Randy Pausch, who is now famous for his impassioned Last Lecture. I've worked side-by-side with Turing Award winners and billionaires, visionaries and gadflies.

So here's how it works, how you can take Your Big Idea and boil it down to surefire success with the pro short fiction markets in three easy steps.

1. Just Start Typing. In case it's not clear, this means that you sit in your chair, and you start typing words. Some of them might even make sense, and some possibly could still be there when you finish, but you won't get anywhere if you don't type, keep typing, and then finish typing what you started typing. And if the story veers off of your big idea? So what, let your mind go where it will. Just finish that story and take another crack at The Big Unwritten Idea in the next story.

2. Now here's the really hard part. You might want to get your assistants on the horn and tell 'em to hold all your calls for twenty or thirty seconds so you can digest this one. Write THE END and put it in the mail to an editor who might buy it. If you really want to be a go-getter you might even keep track of all the professional markets and put them in a big spreadsheet. I do. There's hundreds of them. When a story comes back with a rejection slip, you pick the next market on your list and send it there. You'll be getting a lot of these slips. If an editor really likes your story they might even scribble a short note encouraging you to submit something else in the future.

3. Write the next one. Don't mess with the stories when they come back from editors. Don't re-revise Your Great Unfinished Masterpiece yet again. Start a new story, and finish that one, and mail it. Then do it again. And again and again. What you're doing here is producing output. Sure, most of the stories will probably stink beyond belief. But so what? Anyone can mail a prizewinner but it takes real guts and determination to mail a stinker. But here's the rub. As the writer of the story, you can't tell if your story is any good or not. So mail it and trust the editors to pick out the gems for you.

Now I have a colleague (actually, he's famous for inventing the laser printer) who used to help evaluate start-ups for his corporate minions. He would tell a story about how he would visit these fledgling companies. He'd chat with the executives. Sit through their PowerPoint slides. Ask lots of questions.

But there was only way to tell for sure if they were talking utter BS or not.

At the end of the day, he'd say his goodbyes, and on the way to his car he'd sneak out back and see what they had in their dumpster.

If it was full of coffee-stained memos and mimeographs and discarded office supplies, he knew it was all a gigantic load of hooey.

But if there were sawed-up sheets of plywood, broken contraptions with wires hanging out of them, glue-gunned monstrosities of fabric and electronics and plastic, then he knew he just might have something here. They were actually doing something. Producing failed experiments.

Their dumpster was full.

This works for any creative endeavor. You must create, and keep on creating. Most ideas will fail, but it doesn't matter if you produce enough of them. Keep your dumpster full. It's the only sure sign of a creative mind at work. Just by sheer numbers-- and most importantly, by the practice of continuing to churn out work-- you'll get better. You'll get lucky. But it will be luck that you have manufactured through hard work.

As a writer of short fiction, of course, your dumpster is the mail (whether postal or electronic). You might even want to keep score for your growing scrap heap of literary greatness. For example, I'm up to 142 submissions this year, and I didn't even mail anything the first three months of the year. I've had as many as 34 pieces in the mail at a time. It's a race against yourself. Keep your stories in the mail and see how high you can jam your numbers up there.

So, stop reading this and get to it. Unvarnished Literary Glory awaits if you keep at it.

#

Alistair Ainscott (@aainscott) is a research scientist by day and a writer of offbeat speculative tales by night. You can find him at alistairainscott.wordpress.com.

February Issue of Penumbra Now Released

February's issue, the Shakespeare issue, is the best issue of Penumbra yet. Not only were we flooded with wonderful stories, only a few of which we could publish, but this issue includes the launch of a second non-fiction column, Terra Incognito by Richard C. White. Today it's my pleasure to talk a bit about the wonderful pieces featured in this issue of Penumbra.


The Fiction


The Globe Theatre in Moonlight by Stan Hampton Senior—A depressed playwright between tours of army service finds hope in Shakespeare's theatre—and his words.


#solstice #dreams by William Meikler—Puck and his friends are up to their tricks in Twitterspace.


A Deed Without a Name by Nycki Blatchley—Three desperate women are given the chance for revenge, but they must pay a price.


Troubles With Shakespeare: or an Idler's Account of his Grand Destiny by Genevieve Taylor—The supposed reincarnation of William Shakespeare convinces his friends to go to the Annual Shakespeare Expo.


Much Ado About Something by Barry Rosenburg—A sculptor finds a lamp on the beach on his thirtieth birthday and with the help of William Shakespeare he attempts to fool the genie.


The Non-Fiction


Interview with Rebecca Treadway—A short interview with the winner of our December art contest and the designer of this month's cover image on the world of fantasy art.


Terra Incognito by Richard G. White—This brand new column is about the nuts and bolts of world-building, designed to help writers 'turn the generic into the unique'. In this first column, Richard has set up the stage for a series of world-building exercises sure to make any writer's worlds more interesting.


Back of Beyond by Lori Basiewicz—An examination of literary allusions and references in Romeo and Juliet showing why Shakespeare's work was so widely love during its time and has withstood centuries.


William Shakespeare: Poet, Playwright and Propagandist by Celina Summers—An opinion piece by our very own editorial director analyzing Shakespeare's use of his plays to further his own political agenda.


To read all of this issue's great stories, purchase your copy for $3.99 here. To subscribe and see the rest of the exciting issues we're planning for this year, click here.