The Next Big Thing - Work in Progress

I was tagged in a chain blog called "The Next Big Thing - Work in Progress." It gives blog readers a bit of a glimpse into the writer's world and the upcoming novel/collection/book that writer is working on.

I'm delighted that speculative fiction writer Morgen Rich tagged me.

She was tagged by TS Gwilliams.

I've linked their blogs, and at the end of the post I'll link the blogs of the two writers I've tagged. So, here we go:

1. What is the working title of your next book? Walking Spanish

2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Midway through writing my first novel, INK, I took a break and wrote a novella that centered on a young Mexican-American woman in Philadelphia who was grappling with two horrifying things at once: one, that her brother — an undocumented immigrant — disappeared off a train platform as he was on his way to work. The other, that a childhood monster from Mexican tradition was alive and preying on people in the protagonist's city.... The narrative got me thinking about the way those of us who immigrate from elsewhere bring our monsters over the borders with us. What happens to them?  Do they prey only on those who know their stories? Do they want to slip their stories as they slip the border?  Do they *gasp* become acculturated? So I decided to write a series of linked stories exploring just that.

3. What genre does your book fall under? I write across genres, but I think dark fantasy or magical realism are probably the easiest fit for most of my work.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?  Since it is a collection of linked stories it is tough to say. But I write Latino protagonists and characters in a fairly wide range of ages .... I quite like Rachel Ticotin for the sexy older protagonist of “The Emporium of Crossings;” Elpidia Carrillo for the artist-witch in “Bad Blood;” and Tyler Posey as the young lead in “With Syringe and Four Reales.” Edgar Ramirez and Gina Rodriguez would be a pretty terrific pairing as Elvis and Kat in "69th Street" (the novella that started it all). There's more, of course. Like, who would I cast as El Cucuy? Or, La Siguanaba? Lots of fun to be had casting monsters. ;)

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Do monsters cross borders with the immigrants who believe in them?

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? I’ll probably shop it around when it’s a little closer to finished. Story collections are a tough sell, I’m told. But there are some amazing small presses out there, so maybe one of them will be interested.

7. How long did/will it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? I’m a slow writer, so if I finish a first draft by this winter I’ll be really pleased.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? That’s the thing about genre-hopping, it doesn’t really give you an easy basis for comparison. Maybe if you took the stories of Augusto Monterroso, Angela Carter, Geoff Ryman, Ana Castillo and Demetria Martinez and put them in a blender together ....

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book? The folktales of Guatemala and Mexico are, of course, my first inspiration for these stories. But it’s also a book of stories about immigrants. So the experiences of my parents, my family, my friends and some of the people I’ve interviewed in my newspaper work all inform the narratives in both big and small ways.

10.What else about the book might pique the reader's interest? There's creepy, grotesque, sexy and bittersweet in this book. And lots and lots of teeth.

Time for tag.

I'm tagging Shay Darrach to post on May 2. I think Shay's a wonderful storyteller with a distinctive voice and beautifully textured prose. Also just a really fine human being. (Fun to hang out with at Arisia, too.) I have it on good authority that one of Shay's upcoming publications is a truly award-worthy piece of short fiction. I can't wait to read about it and his other writing projects.

I'm tagging Kay Holt to post on May 9. I fell in love with Kay's characters in the short story "Parent Hack" in Crossed Genres' anthology Subversion, and later found out it was part of a novel in progress. Like Shay, Kay is a sweetheart. But she's also a terrific editor and publisher and writer. When I was studying fiction with Allan Gurganus, one of the pieces of advice he gave us was: honor everyone in your story. It turns out to be a horribly difficult thing to do, and some writers don't even try. But that is one of the salient features in Kay's work — she honors every character and so produces some of the most nuanced and deeply compassionate SFF I've read.

Be sure to check out their "Next Big Thing" blog postings, and Morgen Rich's, and come check back here and tell me what you think of all the upcoming book projects (yes, mine too)!

A subversion of stories

I love collective nouns: a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks. The provenance of some collective nouns are easy to figure, others less so. With their mythic ties to Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, I can guess how a group of owls became a parliament. But a murder of crows? They aren’t birds of prey -- those lethally efficient killers of the bird world -- just scavengers. Still, in spite of -- or maybe because of -- the horrific meaning of the word murder, this collective noun is one of the most memorable. Easy to remember. Evocative.

 

Which is all background for my intended use of this collective noun for stories: a subversion.

 

Yeah, the word means to overthrow, to ruin and destroy. Not nice words -- as dark, sometimes, as murder -- and not what most writers would choose to describe the painstaking product of their craft. But it fits. Stories supplant and turn things upside down -- even the gentlest and quietest stories. Stories change what we experience (or imagine experiencing) by replacing the felt, the seen, the smelled, the heard, the sensed, the remembered and the said, with a whole new governing system: the written word.

Is there anything more dangerous, more utterly transformative? Not for nothing has literacy (and access to the printed word) long been considered foundational to freedom and the best proof against repression.

Which brings me to the specific subversion of stories I want to write about today.

Crossed Genres Publications (which, I’ll disclose, published one of my short stories a year ago and is slated to publish another story and a novel in the future) is releasing an anthology of short stories tomorrow (Dec. 5). “Subversion - Science Fiction and Fantasy tales of subverting the norm,” and each of its 16 stories, subverts in multiple ways. First and foremost, of course, they are stories. But they are also stories in an already subversive genre (what could be more subversive than swapping our world for another?) and filled with acts of subversion, both large and small. One of the stories even subverts the notion of subversion.

Pretty interesting stuff.

A number of the people included in the anthology are writers whose work I already search out: Daniel José Older, Kelly Jennings, Cat Rambo. Others were discoveries.

Camille Alexa was one of those. Her “And All Its Truths” is a story about a nameless person given up for dead in a prison on another world; a compassionate religious sister; and an act of sabotage worthy (and reminiscent) of the partisans during WWII. Alexa’s story is more Roberto Rossellini than George Lucas, and its images and characters linger long after the story is done. I liked this piece so much I hesitated before reading the rest of the anthology. There have been anthologies that I remember only for one story, good or bad (such as the anthology that contained Geoff Ryman’s “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter”), and I really didn’t want this anthology to be that way.

I shouldn’t have worried.

I’d already read one of Barbara Krasnoff’s smart and well-crafted stories before I started “The Red Dybbuk” in this anthology, so I was predisposed to like it. Like Alexa’s story, there are traditionally understood acts of subversion in Krasnoff’s story about four generations of Jewish women. But beneath the familiar forms of activism is a much more subtle upending of legend and family dynamic. Krasnoff’s writing reminds me just a tiny bit of Grace Paley’s, mostly because the characters are rich and complicated and I’m convinced they have lives off the page as well as on it.

I hadn’t read any of Natania Barron’s stories before I cracked “Pushing paper in Hartleigh,” but now I’m thinking I’ll have to search out the rest of her work. The story is a weird and delightful combination of Western and semi-Elizabethan, in plot, world and character. Though this story, too, has a recognizable act of subversion in the storyline, its real subversion may be that it dares to invite inimical tropes to the party and gets them to play perfectly together. 

Kay Holt’s “Parent Hack” hides subversion within subversion within subversion. In best Sci Fi tradition it takes real world issues -- in this case, absent parents and the shortfalls of the foster care system -- and reimagines them in a future context. The protagonists are two children who want to be brothers, three bots (two of them parent substitutes and a hacker bot) as well as a flesh-and-blood hacker -- and they’re all clandestinely overturning systems, be those code, expectation or actual institution. What’s particularly noteworthy in Holt’s piece is that despite its economy, the characters feel fleshed out, and are intriguingly complex. Worthy of a novel, in fact.

Jean Johnson’s deeply cynical and seamlessly written “The Hero Identity” is, for me, the most distressing of the stories in Subversion. That’s quite a feat in a book whose stories don’t shy away from showing the cruelties we (and our human proxies) visit upon each other. “The Hero Identity” is the subvert-the-subversion story I referred to earlier, and its inclusion in the anthology is sheer brilliance on editor Bart Leib's part. I can’t call this story my favorite -- to borrow a Gollum-ism, it’s tricksy -- but, boy howdy, do I admire its smarts and its skill.

I didn’t want to write about Shanna Germain’s story, “Seed.” Really, I didn’t. This story has the most repugnant of the many cruelties that prompt protagonists to subversive action in this collection of stories. But the thing is, Germain’s a terrific writer. Food, eroticism, cultural disjuncture, something a hair shy of femicide, the promise of revenge -- it’s all in “Seed” and its all laid out with consummate skill. Like Alexa’s story but far more disturbing, this one stays with you long after you’ve come to its close.

Newspaper folks like me know all about shared bylines on articles. It’s easy to do separate interviews and research and pull it into a seamless news story. But how does it work in short fiction? I don’t know -- I’m really asking RJ Astruc and Deirdre Murphy, who together wrote “Scrapheap Angel” for Subversion. This is one of my favorite stories in the anthology, what with its tyranny of depersonalization so well and completely drawn. There’s a lovely irony in Astruc and Murphy’s subversive act, and a gentle goofiness to it. You can’t help but root for it to succeed.

I read Subversion in epub form, but I have to admit, I would have preferred a print copy because -- no matter what the Who song says -- when it comes to this, the new “boss” is definitely not the old “boss.” I miss the feel of paper, the skipping around and the revisits that, for me, are more likely on the page than on the screen.

I know, I know, it makes me a downright unsubversive reader.  I can live with that. Now, if only I could come up with a collective noun ….

Subversion includes stories by: Jessica Reisman, Camille Alexa, Melissa S. Green, Daniel José Older, Kelly Jennings, Barbara Krasnoff, Natania Barron, Kay T. Holt, Jean Johnson, Cat Rambo, Shanna Germain, RJ Astruc and Deirdre Murphy, C.A. Young, Wendy N. Wagner, Timothy T. Murphy and Caleb Jordan Schulz. Click  here for its Goodreads listing and here for its Amazon listing.