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What is Penumbra?

Penumbra is the speculative fiction eMag published monthly by Musa Publishing. At Penumbra, the Muses are clustered in the part of the psyche caught between the darkness and the light. Whether that results in hardcore science fiction or fantasy humor, psychological horror or a Steampunk poem with a twist is out of the Muses' control.

That control is in the hands of the author.

Penumbra publishes speculative fiction that always culminates in something unexpected - a flash of humor in the darkest tale or a fantasy piece that goes against the tropes - always something that hovers right on the periphery of the eclipse.

To Stay tuned of what is happening with Penumbra please follow our blog.

See It Before You Write It, Then Get Busy Daydreaming

by Robert Lowell Russell

Every writer has his or her own way of starting a story, so with the caveat that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone, here's how I do it (fair warning, I'm a "pantser").

My stories usually start with a single visual scene in my head, and when I have the scene fixed in my mind, I add a second scene. My job then becomes making sense of the two scenes. It may seem easy to get characters to go from point A to point B, but I often have no idea who my characters are at this stage, and there may be no obvious connections between points A and B.

There are probably certain advantages to starting with characters, then building a world around them. But I like building my world first, then plunking the characters into it and letting them fend for themselves. I also think starting with visual scenes makes it easier to "show" rather than "tell."

With Path of Stones **spoiler alert**, I deconstructed Hansel and Gretel. I started by visualizing a trail of white stones running through a fairy tale forest, then added a scene of a man sitting in a bar, staring at one of the stones in his hand. The challenge was then explaining how the man fit into a story about a couple of kids, and how I got from a fairy tale world to a modern day setting. It was an interesting process. The story started at 1.6K words, ballooned to 6K, was pared to 4K, and was finally condensed to 3K. During the rewriting process, I lost the original bar scene, the Empire State Building, Charles Darwin, Annie Oakley, a sexy witch, and bunch of other stuff.

One advantage of the "plotter" style may be that a writer doesn't end up with as many unusable parts when he or she is finished with a story (Though I tend to recycle my best story fragments. Sexy witches = writing gold!). But I like getting messy, and I like getting weird. My two starting scenes usually serve as corner pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, and with those scenes in my head, I daydream about my story, twisting and turning the middle pieces, deciding what fits and what doesn't. This lets me "work" even when I'm not sitting with an outline in front of a computer, and I've learned to trust my instincts when I write.

However, if you're going to write this way, you need to be able to track a lot of things in your head simultaneously, and make sure you have solid critics reviewing what you write. Our brains work to fill in the gaps of what we perceive, so you need more than one set of eyes to spot the inevitable gaps.

Some final words of advice: bang it out, polish it, fire it off, then cross your fingers. And if you're not having fun, you're probably doing it wrong.

Robert Lowell Russell once aspired to become a history professor, but found working with the real world too constraining. His works in progress, a series of short stories and a novel, incorporate elements of his previous research in Native American history and culture.

For links to more of Rob's stories (or to see him dressed like a ninja) visit his blog.

A Kiss in the Dark

by Michele Lang

I adore short stories, love to both read them and write them. I believe we are in the middle of a short story renaissance, and as a reader I’m a happy beneficiary of the times.

However, writing the short story has mystified as well as bewitched me. As a novelist, for the longest time my short stories turned into partials when I wrote them. When I did manage to finish them, I struggled to bring them in under 10,000 words.

There’s a time-bending element to short stories, a magic about them. How do short story writers manage to compress a world of unforgettable characters, and a profound change in that world, in 5,000 or even 2,000 words?

I wanted to learn that magic for myself. For a solid year, I wrote shorts that read like chopped off first chapters of novels. While I loved the characters and their worlds, I didn’t have the skill to grant them a resolution, the chance of a life after the story. My poor characters just kind of dangled, waiting for what happened next, off-stage, after the end.

I knew I needed to learn more. But I couldn’t grasp the essential difference between a short story and a novel.

They aren’t miniature novels, so what are they?

Last year, at an anthology workshop on the Oregon Coast, I got some advice from Denise Little, a brilliant editor, and she clarified the mystery for me. She told me to think in terms of musical composition:

A short story is like an instrumental solo;
A novella is like a duet between two instruments, say a viola and a flute;
And a novel is a fully orchestrated concerto, with a tripartite structure, complex harmonies, and a contained aesthetic.

A short story won’t tell you all about its world – it can’t. It can’t tie up all the loose ends, it can’t tell you the backstory of all the major characters. The major characters don’t overcome and transform essential flaws in their natures. There’s no room for all of that.

What a short story will do, in fact does do better than a novel, is portray a window into a moment. It captures the essential truth in the music of a single life. It’s a song sung without backup instruments, it’s a hymn, or a lullaby. And a short story can linger in your memory as long and as vividly as any novel.

Stephen King once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that a novel is like a marriage while a short story is a kiss in the dark from a stranger. And yet, there are kisses that reach across memory and transcend time, to change you forever.

And that is why I love short stories.

Michele Lang writes supernatural tales: the stories of witches, lawyers, goddesses, bankers, demons, and other magical creatures hidden in plain sight. She is the author of the LADY LAZARUS historical fantasy trilogy (Tor).

Learn more about Michele on her website.

The Poetry in Fairy Tales

by Lea C. Deschenes

It’s unusual for a poet to be writing about speculative fiction, but not as odd as you’d first think. My love of both forms (or indeed, of all writing) comes from their ability to open worlds, both new and familiar; to stir from our settled patterns into a whirl of possibilities; to give curiosity free rein to ask what if?; and to take on ideas so large they span the universe.

Fairy tales were my first case of reader’s True Love. I had a tattered volume of Grimm’s old enough not to have been sanitized to “child-friendly” mush and from the day my toddler hands got a hold of it, I read it like a holy text. To this day, I will contend that Snow White’s queen must dance in red hot iron shoes until dead dead dead or it’s not the real story (however many “real” versions of the story there are, that one is mine). I will never see Disney’s The Little Mermaid because I can’t bear to think of the mermaid’s knife-walking, voiceless martyrdom ending transformed into an all-singing, all-dancing Happily Ever After!, even though the character’s complete self-sacrifice for her mostly oblivious prince bugs every feminist bone in my body.

Fairy tales are ruthless, red in tooth and claw. As a child it seemed to me that they said everything that my suburban hometown’s polite veneer wanted to deny: Underdogs often make good. It’s good to be clever and better to be kind. Most of all, Bad Things Happen. They will happen to you. You’d better keep your wits about you and learn how to deal with that…

To this day, I can’t pass up a good fairy tale reworking, whether it’s Russia’s Koschei the Deathless, Japan’s Kitsune or a whole bag full of Grimm’s-flavored goodies. And somewhere along the way, speculative fiction has created its own bastions of myth and fable to be told and retold to fit the context of the day: rogue adventurers, schools for wizards and witches, genius detectives, spacemen and their cold equations, aliens, shapeshifters, hackers…ad infinitum, ad astra.

There’s a common saying, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.” There’s poetry in that: the swiping, combining and recombining of tropes and life and bits of timeless metaphors to make something unique to an author’s voice, time and place. It’s poetry when their stories seem larger and wider than plot mechanics and words laid out in neat rows on a page. It’s poetry when an idea as old as human civilization connects itself to a reader and creates a spark.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but if Wallace Stevens can find thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, Neil Gaiman can find new ways of looking at The Jungle Book and African trickster stories, filing off the serial numbers so well that you’ll forget its connection to the original. If Anne Sexton could take on the Grimm Brothers, Ovid and patriarchy in Transformations, Octavia Butler could handle vampires and I can write a poem in which the dancer decides to take off her red shoes.

If Jack can kill his giant, so can you.

Lea C. Deschenes is a poet living in Worcester, MA. She once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse. Her book, The Constant Velocity of Trains, is available from Write Bloody Publishing at Amazon.com, Powells.com and Writebloody.com.

To learn more about Lea and her work, please click on her website.

Writing Short Speculative Fiction

by Pauline J. Alama

I was a bit daunted, at first, by the idea of blogging about the process of writing short speculative fiction. I avoid con panels about the writing process, because they tend toward heavy moralizing, loading a ton of “shoulds” (you should write every day, you should accept criticism gratefully, you should be relentless in editing your stories to perfection) onto a process that I believe should (oops!) be playful.

Let me circumvent that moralizing tendency by writing in praise of imperfection.

I’m no good at drawing, having the manual dexterity of a cow, but I enjoy it anyway. Once upon a time, my son asked me to draw the Big Bad Wolf, and I wasn’t sure how to do it. I looked at a picture in The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales of the wolf in Grandma’s nightgown. That can be a terrifying image: the predator disguised as a nurturer. The first nightmare I can remember from childhood was finding in my Aunt Betty’s chair not a beloved curmudgeonly aunt, but KING KONG! The wolf in Grandma’s nightgown can evoke the same nightmarish sense of betrayal and insecurity.

But when I tried to draw him, the wolf didn’t look scary. He looked a bit embarrassed. Thence came the inspiration for my “fractured fairy tale.”

If I’d drawn the wolf perfectly, the subtle wind of inspiration would have lacked a chink to enter my soul. Very often, too, books I thought had stupid endings or infuriating plot holes inspired me to write my own stories. Creativity doesn’t flourish in the sterility of perfection: it needs to be nourished by the fertilizing manure of error.

Pauline J. Alama is the author of the fantasy novel The Eye of Night Bantam Spectra 2002) and stories published in Realms of Fantasy, Abyss and Apex, and various anthologies. A lifelong fairy tale fanatic, she published a fantasy based on three Grimm tales in Sword & Sorceress XVIII (DAW 2001), and encountered the Grimms’ scholarship during a
doctoral program in Old English. Although driven out of academia for her controversial theory of the Klingon origin of Beowulf, she lives happily ever after in New Jersey with her husband Paul, their firstborn child, and two royal cats.

To learn more about Pauline and her work, please click HERE.

HE WHO HESITATES…GETS PUBLISHED

HE WHO HESITATES…GETS PUBLISHED

by Marsheila Rockwell

That’s not always true of course, but it’s a good rule of thumb for aspiring writers who may not yet be able to tell when an idea is ready to pick off that tree we all have growing in our backyard, and when it still needs to ripen a bit.

This concept of “the ripening idea” was one I first learned from Orson Scott Card’s seminal How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy back in college, and it has served me well ever since. You see, when that lovely idea first blossoms on the tree, it looks so shiny and perfect that you just want to pick it, even if you don’t have a clue what you’re going to do with it.

My advice? Same thing I’d have said to Eve, or Persephone, or the Fairest Of Them All – resist the temptation! Chances are good that your shiny, delicious-looking idea is not ready to be consumed just yet, and if you try, you’re only going to give yourself indigestion (and likely any editors you submit your unripe story to, as well).

More than that – be suspicious. When an idea seems to sprout full-grown on the idea tree, it’s usually because, even though it looks new and fresh, it’s anything but. “Bullocks,” you protest indignantly, “there are no new ideas – just old ones repackaged in new ways!” And you’re right, of course, but when you pick the idea off the tree the minute it catches your eye, you’re not repackaging it – you’re regurgitating it. And that way lies rejection.

Instead, whip out your handy-dandy notebook, make note of the idea and its location on the tree, and write it down. Keep an eye on it. Watch it grow. Do the same with other shiny ideas that bloom. Periodically shake the tree, and see what falls to the ground. Those ideas? The ones that fall easily, but don’t bruise when they land? They’re the ripe ones. But even they probably aren’t quite ready to be made into a story yet. Not by themselves.

But don’t despair. You’ve probably already got some ideas that you plucked off the tree before they were ready. Some of those went bad and you had to toss them, but some are still usable, if you can find the right ingredients to mix them with – one of the ideas that just fell when you shook the tree, perhaps? That idea from two years ago in Vegas (not everything stays there), a dollop of that one you had three months ago while stuck in traffic behind a garbage truck trailing toilet paper streamers (don’t laugh – that actually happened to me), and two quick shakes of that idea that first caught your eye just last week (the one you wanted to write about right away, but didn’t, because you read this article). Those three ideas, blended together – that’s your story. The one that’s going to get published.

See? Those guys selling Guinness were right – good things really do come to those who wait. So pour yourself a glass to celebrate your sale. Cheers!

Marsheila Rockwell's story, Epidora, will be featured in next month's issue of Penumbra.


"Marsheila (Marcy) Rockwell is the author of three novels for Wizards of the Coast (Skein of Shadows, 2012, The Shard Axe, 2011, and Legacy of Wolves, 2007), as well as the Arabian-flavored, female-centric sword & sorcery series Tales of Sand and Sorcery, available from Musa Publishing. Find out more here: http://www.marsheilarockwell.com/."

Animals And Penumbra

Our April issue of Penumbra--with our animal theme--is now available!  In addition to the stories  by writers Andrew Kaye, Stuart Barton, Bruce Golden (Penumbra's first multi-contracted author), Laurie Tom, Brenda Kazar, and John Moran, this month boasts poetry from Amy Watkins and an amazing feature story, Love Gaia, Live Green by author Lyn CA Gardner.

We are also featuring an interview with Duncton Wood author William Horwood, as well as our regular monthly features from columnists Lori Basiewicz and Richard C. White.

Don't forget, too, that you can not only purchase Penumbra issues separately, but that we are also offering subscriptions on our website.

And next month is our eagerly awaited Fractured Fairy Tales issue--you won't want to miss that.