Thoughts on Writing

by Barry Rosenberg

In the beginning was the Word. For many, perhaps, but not for me. In the beginning was the Number. As a young person, I was pretty much inarticulate but from school I won a place to study maths at university. Though I wasn’t a diligent student, I did go on to do a PhD in Artificial Intelligence.


At the time, my unconscious assumption was that the brain/mind was to be understood as information processing. This was in the late-60s, the early days of computing. In the mid-70s, however, I became involved with meditation and tai chi. Re-thinking mind, I became convinced that little bits did not add up to make a whole. In other words, data did not add up to make the mind. Atoms and molecules did not add up to make objects. Becoming a 70s dropout, I spent hours in meditation and tai chi.

Until this time, I’d never taken much note of poetry. Yet in meditation, whole poems would appear in my mind. And they would stay as an uncomfortable itch until I wrote them down. For quite a few years, I was highly itinerant while scraping a living from teaching tai chi and relaxation classes. With me went an increasing paper burden of “spiritual” poems.

Later on and married, my wife was part of an exhibition called, Hebraic Connections. I put in a self-published book of my poetry with the same name. It has since become a collectable and sells for slightly more than the original price!

Over those years, I saw a fair number of gurus - either in Australia or in India. Quite a few were pretty shonky, reflecting what is known as the left-hand path. This means that as meditation deepens, psychic abilities may (seem to) appear and the searcher concentrates on them rather than on the inner search. It is these characters who provide tension in a narrative.

So when I became more settled (conventionally employed), my writing focussed more on guru-types who follow the left-hand path. Initially, this led to a gentle quirkiness. For example, in one little story a teenager exudes wax from his ears while he sleeps. So he sticks a string in his ear and concentrates on making candles that he can sell at the market. During this quirky period, the main influence on me was Terry Pratchett and his Discworld.

So my writing was quirky, but not horrorble. Now, I hadn’t seen the film based on Stephen King’s book, The Green Mile. Nor did I have a particular interest in horror. But one day, I picked up the novel and began to read it. I became an immediate convert to Stephen King - and to horror.

Horror comes in many forms. The worst kind can be read in the newspapers. Just as children like to be chased, adults enjoy the more controllable horror that appears in books. In fact, writers derive an unholy glee in describing destructive zombie hordes or plagues of biting vampires. The problem, and the fun, with these and other eldritch creatures is to find new ways of presenting them.

Which brings me, in a rather convoluted way, to my story. Penumbra wanted stories of exploration in a speculative fiction setting. My story could never have been written by one whose beginning was the Number. Nor even by one whose middling was the Word. Dare I say it? It required someone willing to explore the darker shades of fantasy.

So, from the humorous fantasy of Terry Pratchett and the scarifying horror of Stephen King, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you ArachnidMan - a humorous yet scarifying slant on first encounter.

Barry Rosenberg was born in London, then moved to Australia after completing his PhD. Since 1997, Rosenberg has lived on the Sunshine Coast with his artist wife, Judith.

He started to write poetry in 1974 and moved onto short stories and plays. Most of his stories are quirky or speculative fiction. It is only in the past few years that he has been active in submitting his work. His short stories are available on Amazon. The Buddha Leaves, Rosenberg's paranormal e-novel is available at jaffa BOOKS.

Barry invites you all to join his Yahoo group.

On November, Nanowrimo, and Exploration

by Dianna L. Gunn

In spite of the rain and cold keeping me indoors, when I heard that November's Penumbra issue was going to have an exploration theme, I thought it was perfect. Not because American Thanksgiving celebrates taking land from the natives or because of any historical feat, but because November is the month of Nanowrimo.

For those of you who don't know, Nanowrimo is an annual challenge to write 50, 000 words of fiction in a month. The motto of quantity over quality along with the large community and tight deadline forces you to just write, without holding anything back. It's a great way to discover whether or not you actually have a novel in you. Along the way you'll learn more about yourself and about writing than you thought possible, even though you probably won't want to look at the draft when you're done with it.

Even after eight years, I consider every Nanowrimo an exploration. Each year I start with a story—usually the bare bones of one—and explore all its avenues. I travel through the world I've created for this year's novel, learning everything there is to know. I discover my character's darkest secrets and their greatest joys.

Year after year, I also discover things about myself. I've discovered that, if left alone for a month with no ability to go outside and only a computer to keep me company, I can write 300, 000 words in 30 days. I've discovered that this behaviour leads to tendonitis, which I still struggle with. I've also discovered that if I'm actually trying to do well in school, I can't accomplish anywhere near that word count.

Similarly, in one year of working at Penumbra I've learned a lot. I've learned what it takes to build a successful magazine, how difficult it is to manage a blog when you're relying primarily on other people, and how awesome it feels to see the slow but steady climb of readers. I've also learned that even I have a burn out point, and that as much as I want to be superwoman, sometimes I have to take a step back and refuse extra duties.

This November, I planned to discover a whole new world with my writing. I'm also hoping to find new ways to make Penumbra shine and to bring our blog—and the eMagazine itself—to new audiences all over the world.

What did you hope to discover this November?

Dianna L. Gunn is a young Canadian fiction writer who specializes in dark fantasy. She also writes poetry, generally dark, which is her way of dealing with life. This insightful author hosts a website covering every aspect of fiction writing and interviews with noted guest authors.

Learn more about Dianna L. Gunn on her website and follow her on Twitter.

From All of Us at Penumbra eMag

We Wish You and Yours 
a 
HEALTHY
and

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Where Is the Humour?

by Edoardo Albert

The future, it appears, has no jokes. Nor, for that matter, does the urban present, even if it is filled with glittery vampires. For some reason, speculative fiction appears to be almost completely humourless – think of the number of magazines, ezines, fanzines and geezines that advertise themselves as ‘dark’, ‘darker’ or ‘so bloody morbid we’re invisible at night’. Why is this? True, the old grandmasters of speculative fiction that I grew up reading, men like Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov, were more concerned with imagining and, dare I say, propagandising the future than populating it with jokes (although anyone reading ‘The Number of the Beast’ would have to assume that Heinlein, at least, had a sense of humour since the alternative, that he seriously means this, is just too awful to contemplate). But surely now – when we live in a world with all the trappings of the wildest science fiction future in an everyday iPhone – it’s time to admit that the future is here and it’s completely and utterly ridiculous. I mean, what would the Futurians have made of a future that achieved technological miracles and used them to turn Paris Hilton into the most famous person on the planet?

In fact, all the prophets and soothsayers were wrong. Take George Orwell for example. Although he was correct in much, he saw the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever. Well, the future turned out to be a human face gurning forever. As such, maybe the reason there’s so few jokes in speculative fiction is because it’s pretty well impossible to top what’s actually out there. Imagine the most extreme ad absurdum you can, and someone will be offering it on eBay. After all, one young woman just auctioned her virginity for $780,000 and justifies it as a career move. You really couldn’t make it up.

Then why should you? The world is the most wonderful resource for the writer of the absurd and it’s there to be mined: after all, what could be sillier than sex, money and politics?

The temptation, of course, is to conclude that because we are absurd, as a species and a civilisation, then everything is. But that, it turns out, is a conclusion too far – there is nothing absurd in nature although there is much that is strange and grotesque. Absurdity is a human specific attribute, and one that grows more pronounced the greater our powers become. “Ye shall be as gods,” was the promise, and we are, wielding powers undreamed of, sufficient to make a paradise on earth. But, instead, we have the Shopping Channel. It’s an object lesson in unintended consequences. We could imagine Jehovah, standing by the gates of Eden, asking, “So how’s that god business shaping up for you?” It’s the job of the writer to answer, “Er, not so well.”

Edorado Albert's story Time Hoppers is featured in the November issue of Penumbra EMag.

The responses to Edoardo Albert’s work rather prove what he argues above. The stories, the books, the articles, have drawn some compliments, but the best response ever, which saw a friend rolling on the ground, helpless with laughter, was a lonely-hearts ad. It was probably the bit about tickling the belly of a wolf that did it.

Find Edoardo Albert’s books (he’s particularly proud of Northumbria: The Lost Kingdom which has just been published) and stories via his website although the lonely-hearts ad will not be making an appearance in the foreseeable future). Connect with him through his blog, Twitter or Facebook.

The Future of Exploration

by Kristen Saunders

October 16, 2012 before he took the highest skydive in history, Felix Baumgartner said, “Sometimes you have to be up really high to know how small you are. I’m going home now.” A minute or so later he would be the first man to break the sound barrier with nothing but his body going 833.9 mph. Seven years were spent planning and engineering Red Bull Stratos; the project that gave Felix the chance to break three world records in one day. On top of sky diving from the highest point ever, 128,100 feet above the Earth’s surface, he also ballooned to the highest point in history and managed to stay alive. His special pressurized suit kept his blood from boiling in the stratosphere.

Red Bull Stratos was one of many historical explorations that have been done this year. Not only did we achieve our highest heights, we went deep under water, finally taking footage of the distinguished Challenger Deep. In March, James Cameron successfully culminated eight years of hard work. He traveled to the deepest known point on the Earth’s sea floor, Challenger Deep, which lies at the bottom of Mariana’s Trench. Cameron traveled 36,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean in a one man submarine called Deepsea Challenger to see what lay at the bottom of our oceans. He was the first to capture images of life from those depths, succeeding where the Trieste did not in 1960. The Trieste’s descent kicked up so much silt nothing was able to be captured on film.

These projects employed new technology to achieve some of the greatest moments of exploration in our life time. Mars Rover Curiosity also joined the news in August landing on Mars by way of a rocket propelled space crane. These feats of engineering are changing not only what we are able to see, but what we will be able to do in the future.

Writers will now be able to look on these markers of history and imagine what we may next encounter here on Earth or on other planets. The technology in the suit that Felix Baumgartner wore could easily be translated into a suit someone on Mars (or another planet) might wear. The next great sport could be strato-jumping and the wars of the future may well be fought by one-man-submarines at the depths of the oceans. Our history tends to shape our fiction and I am watching closely to see where our next “small steps” will take us.

I am curious to see the role of companies in these projects. NASA’s Curiosity was the only project the U.S. government fully owned. Rolex sponsored the Challenger Deep dive and Red Bull plastered its name into the Red Bull Stratos project. Companies are starting to make major investments in science as pet projects. This isn’t a rant; it is just what’s happening. Private firms are making the discoveries of tomorrow. This may change how exploration will be done. It could open doors of opportunity for some and also shut them for others.

It will be interesting to see how these events will affect the writing done in the near future and also the years to come.

Kristen Saunders is a recent addition to Penumbra EMag, serving as an editorial intern. She loves to write science fiction in her free time and plans to take on NaNoWriMo this year.

Hacking the Writer Brain: The Stevenson Imperative

by Jude Griffin

It’s NaNoWriMo time again. National Novel Writing Month ( hundreds of thousands of people around the world dedicate themselves to writing fifty thousand words between 1 Nov. and 30 Nov.

As an enthusiastic but less than prolific participant, I'm fascinated by the people who manage to write fifty thousand words in a month. Once, when I was relating a glorious but short-lived period of writing 5000 words a week to my writing group, the whole room gasped. As a whole, writers love what they do while simulatenously struggling like hell to do it.

WTF, right?

Right.

So this time around, I'm making my writer brain the subject of an experiment. An experiment that will last til the next NaNo next year, and I will be documenting it in occasional posts here.

The first principle to be put into practice is what I'll call "The Stevenson Imperative" after the wonderful Jennifer Stevenson, author of the astonishing Trash Sex Magic (inter alia), who once sent me one of the finest pieces of writing advice ever:

"Write a page a day or burn in hell."

Genius.

Deceptively simple, but it strikes at the core of what underlies great productivity in writing: make it a habit.

What does it take to form a habit? Repetition+time=habit. But how much time and how much repetition is where it starts to get fuzzy. Maxwell Maltz published his book on cognitive behavioral therapy, Psycho-Cybernetics, in 1960 from which we seem to have gotten the very popular modern-day belief that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit.

While there is no scientific proof that three weeks has magical habit-forming power, we do know that repetition over time creates physical changes in the brain--less the subject of conscious decision-making and focus and more the output of a brain trained to perform.

In The War of Art, a book all about our resistance to writing (or, more generally, behavior chance), Stephen Pressfield writes:

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write."

I used to thrash about in avoidance. I'd do the dishes, clean the utensil drawer, check all the batteries in the flashlights, organize the medicine cabinet, remind myself of how to use our fire extinguishers--until I applied the same tactic that I used to get myself out of bed at 4:15 am for crew: no thought permitted. Just action.

If I treated getting up and getting ready as non-negotiable, if I did not allow myself even one moment of lying back to think about how I felt, how I tired I was, how cold out it must be, could I sleep a little longer, then it was much easier for me every morning to get out of bed. It sounds simple, but changing where you let your brain go takes constant reinforcement.

But now the challenge for me is the writing. I can open the document, read my notes, even envision a scene. But then: nothing. I am frozen. My brain feels weird. I can't write anything good. I don't know how to open the scene.

Ugh.

This is my challenge. To move forward when even the next step is unclear and feels shaky and wrong. This is where I want to teach myself to have faith in the transcendental nature of writing, as so memorably described by Joyce Carol Oates in The Paris Review's "The Art of Fiction No. 72":

"One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

This is parallel to something I have noticed with running, or, more precisely in my case, waddling. It takes about fifteen minutes before it starts to feel good, before it stops being an effort, before a thousand nose and ankle itches stop plaguing me. I've learned to have faith in the power of those fifteen minutes of slogging, before the endorphins release and the dopamine rewards me for sticking it out.

One part of me knows this is also true for writing, that it also takes me about fifteen minutes of sustained effort before the act of writing stops being so difficult and fraught and becomes pleasurable. But, like exercise, the gap between knowing and doing can be large. So my task this month is to have faith. To apply The Stevenson Imperative and have faith that, in the act of doing so, everything changes.

Jude Griffin is a writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. Inclined toward geekitude in all things, she loves to read about the neuroscience of creativity. She is a member of the rollicking NaNo Boston 2012 group, reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed magazines, and is working on a novel that might be sci fi, might be fantasy.

Stay connected with Jude on Facebook.

How do You Shape an Idea into a Publishable Story?

by Larry Ivkovich

Good question. If I’m aiming for a specific market, certainly I’ll follow their guidelines regarding word count and format and any theme that may be required for that particular issue. That also goes for any taboo on graphic sexual content and too much violence, if that’s specified. Each market is different and has different requirements.


Aside from that, I pretty much let my imagination be my guide although there are a couple of rules I adhere to. No matter what the subject, setting and plot, it’s important to focus on the characters. The characters are ultimately what most readers will relate to and the protagonists should react to the situations in the story appropriately and consistently. In the process, the story may change depending on how the characters grow and interact. They really do take on lives of their own!

The first sentence and paragraph should pull the reader into the story immediately. It’s a short story and you may not have a lot to work with so you need to get the readers’ attention right from the start. A couple of opening lines I’ve used in published stories of mine are – “The Hunter-Beasts had found her,” and “Melissa came to work that day dressed as a Valkyrie Warrior Princess.” Anything akin to “It was a dark and stormy night” just won’t cut it.

I also belong to a writing/critique group which has proven invaluable in getting the kinks out of a story. Sometimes I’m too close to a piece and can’t “see the forest for the trees.” A set of fresh eyes helps to point out any faults or inconsistencies.

In the end, the editors will make the final decision and if the story is rejected, it may not be because it’s a bad story but that it isn’t the “right fit” for their market. That’s a hard reason to understand and get used to but you just need to send that rejection out to another market whose editor may decide it’s just what they’ve been looking for. And I mean send it out the next day! Don’t waste time mourning your rejection. As clichéd as it sounds, perseverance will pay off!

Larry Ivkovich is a genre writer who's had several short stories and novellas published in various online and print publications. He's been a finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest and was the 2010 recipient of the CZP/Rannu Fund Award for Fiction. His debut novel, The Sixth Precept, was published last November by IFWG publishing.

Learn more about Larry and his work on his website.

Suspending Disbelief: Achieving a Semblance of Truth

by Barbara A. Barnett

Hypothetical scenario: A hopeful young writer offers up his work to his critique group. His story takes place in a contemporary, real-world setting—except with vampires. In one scene, the protagonist and her vampire boyfriend are in a car accident. The boyfriend is unconscious, bleeding profusely. The protagonist, unaware her boyfriend is a vampire, decides to perform a do-it-yourself blood transfusion. This turns her into a vampire.

Everyone critiquing the story tells the hopeful young writer that the scene is not realistic. They're willing to believe the boyfriend's blood would turn the protagonist into a vampire, but they don't believe an intelligent, modern-day character would try to perform a transfusion on the side of the road instead of using her cell phone to call for help. Heck, she didn't even know if they had compatible blood types.

"But it's fantasy!" the hopeful young writer declares. "There are vampires! It's not supposed to be realistic! Whatever happened to suspending your disbelief?"

Suspension of disbelief. Far too often, I've seen that phrase misused in defense of characters acting in unrealistic ways. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the man who coined the term, had this to say about it in his Biographia Literaria:

"In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

Like our hypothetical hopeful young writer, many people toss around the phrase suspension of disbelief with no awareness that an equally important phrase originally accompanied it: semblance of truth. In other words, if you want your readers to suspend their disbelief long enough to read about your vampire, alien, carnivorous gnome, or what have you, you need to give your story a semblance truth—a world with a consistent reality and characters who act like real people. One reason so many people are willing to accept all of the magic and fantastical creatures in Lord of the Rings is because Tolkien created a world that feels real. Middle Earth has depth and texture and consistency, and it's populated by characters who behave in a realistic manner.

There are times, though, when achieving a semblance of truth means parting ways with actual truth. In Ghost Writer to the Dead, I ask readers to believe in a world like ours, only with ghosts and psychic detective agencies. Giving the story a real-world setting (the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site) and a real-world character (Edgar Allan Poe) meant I had a rich amount of detail and history to draw upon, but it also meant I had to pick the right details. In the first draft, my critique partners pointed to some word choices in Poe's dialogue that threw them out of the story. One word actually was in popular usage during Poe's lifetime, but because it didn't feel like something my critique partners thought Poe would say, it kept them from fully suspending their disbelief. So out it went.

Achieving that semblance of truth can be tricky business, particularly when you're dealing with the fantastic. But the more realistic you make your world and its characters, the more likely readers will be to suspend their disbelief. Vampires, ghosts, and the like may not be real, but the impact they can have when a reader is drawn into the world of your story most definitely is.

Barbara A. Barnett is an avid rejection letter collector, musician, MLIS student, Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, coffee addict, wine lover, bad movie mocker, and all-around geek. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Fantasy Magazine, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Black Static, and Wilde Stories 2011: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction. In addition to writing, she has worked in the performing arts world for several years.

Learn more about Barbara on her website.

Short Fiction In A Fast Market

by Celina Summers

Over at our parent company, Musa Publishing, we've been working with the family of American science fiction pioneer Homer Eon Flint. Flint is one of the original sci fi writers, a hack writer for the pulp magazines of the nineteen-teens through the mid nineteen-twenties. He's best known for his series of pulp novels about Dr. Kinney—forays into planetary exploration from the imagination of a turn of the century imagination: The Emancipatrix, The Devolutionist, The Queen of Life and The Lord of Death. But Homer Eon Flint also had a healthy string of short stories published—and what was, to us, a treasure trove of unpublished short stories as well.

Working through Flint's entire body of work has been professionally fulfilling for me, but it's also called to mind an era most of us can't imagine—a time where submissions were all snail mail, no ifs, ands, or buts. For generations, authors typed and retyped their stories, getting each page picture perfect, then slipped it into an envelope, went to the post office, and mailed it to an editor. That's why Vella Munn, Flint's granddaughter and multi-published author, was able to bring us all these stories that never saw the light of day. Because back then, when an editor rejected a story, he sent it back to the writer.

Some of my favorite childhood books were semi-autobiographical novels about young women who write—Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy stories, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. All three of these classic tales occur within forty years of each other—from the Civil War of Alcott's impetuous heroine Jo, to the American world of Lovelace's charmer Betsy and the Canadian Prince Edward Island of Betsy's contemporary, Montgomery's adopted redhead Anne. All three girls began writing at an early age. All three girls began to send out their stories while still high school aged. Their descriptions of their maiden efforts were very similar.

'When she finished a story she copied it neatly and sent it away with return postage enclosed to The Ladies' Home Journal or The Delineator, The Youth's Companion or St. Nicholas. As regularly as she sent them out, they were returned. But Betsy was stubborn. If a story came back in the morning from one magazine, it went out in the afternoon to another. She kept a record in a little notebook of how much postage each manuscript required, when it went out, and when it came back.'(Betsy and Joe, Maud Hart Lovelace, 1948)

Anne's experience was similar.

'One day Anne took to the Post Office a long bulky envelope, addressed, with the delightful confidence of youth and inexperience, to the very biggest of the "big" magazines...A week of delightful dreaming followed, and then came a bitter awakening. One evening, Diana found Anne in the porch gable, with suspicious-looking eyes. On the table lay a long envelope and a crumpled manuscript.
"Anne, your story hasn't come back?" cried Diana incredulously.
"Yes it has," said Anne shortly.
"Well, that editor must be crazy. What reason did he give?"
"No reason at all. There is just a printed slip saying that it wasn't found acceptable."' (Anne of The Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1915)

See? The form rejection has a long and storied history, and it hasn't changed much since the days of Homer Eon Flint. If anything, the only change is that getting those form rejections is much quicker. The fastest rejection I ever received was ten minutes.

That one stung.

But within a few minutes of that ten minute rejection, that story was on its way to the next magazine on my list. The turnover time was less than half an hour, from writing the query letter and sending the submission, to rejection, to sending the sub to another publication.

Sometimes, I don't think people realize exactly how substantially the publishing industry has changed. A hundred years is an amazingly short time historically. Heck, the last ten years have seen probably the biggest changes. When I was shopping my first novel, the majority of publishers still wanted paper submissions and queries. Now very few do. Home Eon Flint, whose stories foretold space travel and genetic testing—what would he think of publishing now? Of the immediacy of results? Of devices that could carry hundreds of stories at the same time and take up about the same amount of space in your briefcase as a notepad?

I wonder.

With the market faster and the reader demanding more top quality fiction at a greater rate, the speculative fiction market is alive and well and going strong. There's a lot more variety now. Magazines are dedicated to sub-genres now—the market has so many niches in it that every new year narrows the focus of periodicals even more. For the spec fic writer, this is a great thing. Instead of one or two playgrounds, we're now standing in an amusement park of themes—with something for everyone.

So maybe next time you get a form rejection, you can thank your lucky stars that it's 2012 and not 1912. A ten minute rejection is no fun, but at least you can move on quickly.

A ten month rejection? Not so much.