Hear My Story "Black Swan Oracle" Over At Escape Pod!
When we were doing the Kickstarter for the What Fates Impose anthology (which also includes Keffy‘s truly unforgettable Peeps-and-vomit related Gazing into the Carnauba Wax Eyes of the Future), I had this to say about my tale Black Swan Oracle:
The best story I’ve written in the past year is a glacial little tale called “Black Swan Oracle,” originally entitled “Facebook Oracle” – a fortune-teller who reads social media, contrasting and comparing the posting habits of billions of users to tell you your fate out to six significant digits. It was heavily influenced by Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, a nonfiction book on forecasting. Thematically, it’s got a lot in common with my story “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” if you liked that.
The good news: I sold this story.
The better news: You can buy it.
And, like “‘Run’, Bakri Says” – which won their 2012 Best Story Reader Contest – Escape Pod has now done an audio adaptation of Black Swan Oracle, read by Amy Robinson. This one’s dark and juicy, and frankly, it was hands-down the best thing I wrote in 2013. I’m glad to see it continuing its arc to an even wider audience.
So head over and listen to it, and if you like it, feel free to Retweet it or blog it or whatever you kids do.
(Also, the folks at Escape Pod gave a kind shout-out to my videogame-Lovecraft tale Hollow as the World, which garnered way more nominations for the Hugo than I ever thought it would [even if it didn’t make the final cut this year]. So if you’ve got some spare time, check that one out too.)
The Unexpected Changes That Come From Finally Selling A Novel (Part 1 in a Series)
When, after twenty-five years of plugging away, I finally sold my first novel, I thought the changes would be more personal than professional. After all, how different can it be, moving from a short story writer to a novelist?
As it turns out, quite a bit.
Short stories don’t need blurbs. Short stories don’t have covers to discuss. Short stories are tiny events, and do not require the author to see what promotions he can whip up amongst his friends. If my short story is disappointing, that’s a bad review in Locus and maybe a slight black mark on the editor’s legacy, but my tale is surrounded by four other stories and they can hold up the slack.
My impending novel, on the other hand, drops on its own. I am solely responsible for it. And so even though I’m not a self-publisher and Angry Robot is handling most of the hard work in terms of editing/finding a good cover/selling it to B&N/Amazon/Powells/whoever , I’m still thinking up ways to get the word out because this is my baby. I’ve never really had to think this much about “Say, how do I inform people about this thing? How do I get people to express their enthusiasm for it where other people can see it?” because until now, a blog post was sufficient. This involves actual marketing, and though I could lie back and just let everyone else do the work, I think y’all know that’s not my style.
But the biggest change? Short stories are short, and deadline-free.
I mean, they do have deadlines, if you write for anthologies (I can’t, as my stories take upwards of a year to gestate), and certainly edits are due after acceptance. But generally, it’s “write a story on any topic, send it off whenever.” And if they like it, they like it! And if they don’t, well, whatevs.
So I’m used to wandering free as a cloud, letting my muse flit from tale to tale – and since stories generally take me about two to three weeks to finish a draft, my schedule’s been my own.
However. The edits for Flex (please buy it) drop sometime in mid-May. That’s about two weeks from now. And I’m working on two novels – the sequel to Flex, which exists mostly inside my head at this point, and the story of a space-bound gourmet restaurant, which I have three chapters written for and want to continue.
Normally, I’d just say, “All right, let’s do this!” and commit the next three months to powering out a first draft. But I can’t start the process, because for me, writing a novel is like uncorking a soda – you need to finish it quickly, before all the fizz leaks out. And I know from years of experience managing my creative muse that if I pour all my energy into New Book, then get yanked rudely out of New Book Headspace to rewrite portions of Flex, by the time I return from Old Novel Land, poor little New Novel will be deflated and decarbonated.
So I’m in a holding pattern, with two novels I really want to sink my teeth into, and not quite able to let slip the dogs of war because I have Deadline barring my way. And there was a recent Writing Excuses talking about this same problem, where once they became novelists they had to deal with the reality of Edits potentially bursting through the enthusiasm of this new project like some sort of sadistic Kool-Aid Man.
Which is weird. If I’m successful at this, then I’m going to have to find a way to restructure my creativity so that I don’t need an uninterrupted three months to finish a novel. But for now, I’m new enough at writing novels that people want to publish that I’m not going to futz with the formula that got me here.
So I’ve got all the reason in the world to write: I’m on contract for a sequel, manuscript due next summer. I’ve got a really cool spacebound restaurant based in part on the Velvet Tango Room. And I’m sitting here walking in small circles, working on tiny projects that don’t require ambition, because soon Amanda will plop her revision requests for Flex on my desk and I must be ready.
So I’m twiddling. Twiddling as hard as I can.
The AMAZING SPIDER-NAILS Revealed!
I told you I’d post ’em. Just not until after con.
Alas, my right middle finger chipped as soon as I got home from con. Danger of non-gel polishes. I’m not used to this, but I guess I exchange prettiness for endurance.
WITNESS!
Yeah, Ashley my manicurist is pretty amazing herself.
In other news, Penguicon was good. Saw many of my peeps – but never enough. I’ve hit Con Critical Mass at Penguicon, where I now know so many awesome people there is now no way I can see them all in 36 hours.
Highlight of the con was teaching a fireplay class, which I‘ve written up in detail on FetLife (the Facebook for Kinksters!) if you want to explore some slightly heated content.
I'll Be At Penguicon With My AMAZING SPIDER-NAILS
You guys.
I got literally the best nails I have ever had on my body yesterday. I gave my mad manicurist Ashley license to go nuts, and go nuts she did, with nails so awesome that strangers who’ve witnessed them have dragged me over to other strangers to show it to them.
My inner ten-year-old boy is doing giddy leaps. These are precisely the fingernails I wanted when I was eight years old and my parents told me that boys could not have fingernail polish. Oh, how I would show these to the kids on the playground!
…what’s that?
You want pictures?
No, not yet. These nails are too good. And I’ll be at Penguicon in Southfield, Michigan tonight, doing a grueling nine panels for your entertainment. In fact, if you want to see me, I’m not going to list them all but I suspect my better panels will be:
The Guilty Orgasm: Does Traditional Masculinity Make You Worse In Bed?
Friday at midnight
In which I read my FetLife essay (which I think is one of the most important I’ve ever written) and hold a group discussion.
Straight-Razor Shaving: A Semi-Bloody Tutorial
Saturday at 2:00 pm
I’ll be teaching with Alex Drummer, another straight razor enthusiast, and we’ll see whether we can actually shave live for your entertainment. Expect lively debates of “That’s not how you do it!”
Why Do We Love The 80’s?
Saturday at 3:00 pm
Where I get to be on a panel with Ready Player One author Ernie Cline and my, uh, best friend (and Ernie Cline superfan) Angie.
Fireplay 101: Burninating The Peasants And/Or Girlfriends
Saturday at 10:00 pm
Not a live demonstration, alas – hotels hate that – but I’ll discuss the essentials (and dangers!) of fireplay, along with all my multudinous equipment.
But I’ll be at five other panels. Readily available, you might say. And if you want to see the nails of awesome, you must come up to me and say:
FERRETT! SHOW ME YOUR AMAZING SPIDER-NAILS!
And oh, my friends, I shall unfurl the wonder.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: A Review (No Spoilers)
Last night, I Tweeted this:
If I wanted to show a non-writer what a really promising novel looked like about two drafts before completion, I’d show them Spider-Man 2.
— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) May 2, 2014
Which is, really, all you need to know about Spider-Man 2. It’s got some really awesome stuff, things I haven’t seen before in a Spider-Man movie. And it’s also half-baked, strangling its own emotional impact with storylines that could have been magnificent with a bit of tweaking.
Here’s the good: this is the first movie to show Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in full effect. I used to say that Christopher Reeve’s Superman was the only superhero who waved hello and goodbye, giving a little human interaction between his acts of heroism, and that’s what made him great; it told you Superman cared. All those other heroes swooped in and saved you, then disappeared or soared away. Superman was about the niceties.
This Spider-Man is clearly The Good Guy. He remembers people by name. He stops in mid-chase to brush off the shoulders of the people he’s saved, to encourage them. He’s not just saving people, he’s chit-chatting, he’s making quips, he’s funny and fun to be around.
This film doesn’t even attempt to make The Daily Bugle’s hack jobs look real. Everyone in town adores Spider-Man, and that’s that.
And Spider-Man loves what he does. Teresa Nielsen-Hayden said something on Twitter along the lines of “Spider-Man says there’s nothing wrong with being Spider-Man? Oh, these people don’t understand the character.”
Except it’s Teresa who doesn’t understand. Spider-Man is the only good thing about Peter Parker’s life, in many ways: he works a shit job, lives in poverty with his elderly aunt, and he gets to creep out of the house to play the Big Damn Hero every night. Everything that sucks about being Spider-Man is Peter Parker – his friends get endangered (often through ridiculous plot development), he has to choose between survival and doing the right thing. If he could only be Spider-Man, he’d be fine.
But eventually, he has to be Peter Parker.
And the film gets that. And the emotional realism between Peter and Gwen is well-developed, an achingly real first love, where they both realize they’re wrong for each other but think that love can overcome all that. Nothing matters but love. And, obviously, when you’re Spider-Man, the universe is going to teach you how that may not be true.
The problem is the movie’s unbalanced. There’s two villains, and, well, experienced superhero film fans know what that means. And worse, they’re not really particularly well-created villains. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feels like a step back after Sam Raimi’s richly-reimagined Doc Ock and Green Goblin – Electro is a dysfunctional, one-note nebbish who becomes a dysfunctional, one-note supervillain, and could have been taken straight from the 1960s comics.
That’s not a compliment. Movies have grown, and so have the audiences, and while I won’t hear a bad word said about Ditko and Lee, I will say that copying their simplicity in today’s market doesn’t feel groundbreaking, but simple.
And the second half of the film falls apart, with two half-baked villains trying to take the emotional place of one, and all sorts of scenes that don’t make sense given what we’ve been told before. We have the clear Idiot Plot, and on the way back from the theater Gini and I thought up several fixes that would have preserved the integrity of the characters and raised the emotional stakes. Our fixes might not have been perfect, but this film feels like they had several action sequences to film, and an end, and didn’t really think about how to connect them all together in a way that satisfies.
(IMDB informs me that the PG-13 rating they had to keep also played a factor – you couldn’t make the villains too scary, so instead of fighting and trimming, they simply filmed entirely new scenes, much to their detriment.)
And what happens next, well, that enters the land of spoilers. Over on LiveJournal, I’ll leave a comment discussing some of the problems and how I would have fixed them… but the point is that these could have been fixed. This is what redrafting is for, to interrogate yourself honestly about the weak points in the plot and to see whether the emotional moments you’re going for are actually earned. And they’re not, not quite. The elements are all there, waiting to be honed, reshaped, rearranged. But what you get is an okay movie – and after the awesomeness of Captain America 2, we really needed better than okay.
(Also: I’d like to tell my ten-year-old self that “By the way, the fifth Spider-Man movie won’t be nearly as good as the second Captain America movie” and watch his little mind go boom. What a marvelous age we live in.)