How It All Began

Today, we host a short Q&A with Randy Lindsay, "Not Fragile", and Edorado Albert, "Time Hoppers". Both talented authors and their work appeared in the November issue of Penumbra eMag.

Randy, when did you first realize you wanted to pursue writing as a career rather than a hobby?

It’s entirely possible that I live in a fantasy world of my own devising. Whenever a great idea pops into my head, I am convinced that there is a market for it – somewhere. So, it isn’t as much a matter of when I decided to pursue a writing career as it is a question of when I decided to start writing.

That happened while I was reading a book. I happened to disagree with many of the story telling decisions that the author made and discussed with one of my friends how I would have written it. When I finished, I thought I had a pretty good alternate story going on and started my journey as an author.

Several years of learning the craft and dozens of failed stories later I decided it was time to get serious about writing as a career. That would have been about three years ago. I started attending conferences to network within the industry. I started my blog so it could serve as a media platform once my stories started to be published. And I started submitting my stories.

What I find most interesting is that while it took a while to get here, things are really popping for me now. Right on the heels of my sale to Penumbra I had three more stories accepted for publication and will be coming out in 2013. I appreciate Penumbra opening the flood gates for writing career.

Edoardo, when did you first realize you wanted to pursue writing as a career rather than a hobby?

The first thing I can remember wanting to be was a paleontologist. When I realised that, unfortunately and despite the hopes raised by Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, all the dinosaurs really were dead, I switched to zoology. Then, an astronaut, a physicist, the President of the United States (abandoned when I found out that, not being American, I couldn't actually be president), an engineer and various other ideas in a rather dizzying succession. However, the only constant through all of this was reading.

I read - all the time. I even got told off as a seven-year-old for sneaking a book into a lesson and reading it under the desk because I couldn't wait to find out what happened (it was one of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books and to this day I will hear no calumny against her). So, in the end, I realised there was a thread through my life: words. And I began to pursue them. It has, though, been a long, slow slog - some thirty (30!) years of learning, being rejected, learning some more, making connections, getting rejected, and, hopefully, learning even more.

Randy Lindsay worked in the Hobby-Game industry for several years as a game designer and is now a stay-at-home dad looking to establish himself as an author. He writes Fantasy, SF, and is working on a Murder-Comedy. His short fiction has appeared in City of the Gods anthology and now Penumbra with upcoming stories in the Once Upon An Apocalypse anthology and the second City of the Gods anthology.

Learn more about Randy on his website and blog where he also writes on topics related to the craft of writing and offers movie reviews.

The responses to Edoardo Albert’s work rather prove what he argues. 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.

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.