The title of this one came first. I thought it up as I was falling asleep Saturday night. I liked the sound of it and how it evoked an image of caustic dreams. Got up Sunday morning and just plunged into the story. I thought of time travel and a 12 year old girl and her relationship with her mother and deceased father somehow gurgled up from my sub conscious brain. I wrote steadily for four hours and finished the story about 11 in the morning. Broke for lunch and to do the dishes. Found a good picture on Dreamstime of the earth rusting away and put the cover together. I spell-checked the thing, read it over twice, gave it to Kim for her fixes and posted it in the afternoon. Total time, including writing, doing the cover, and publishing it to the ebook sites: about 6 hours. It came to a little over 5,000 words.
Got up about 7 and spent the morning with Kim before she went to Portland for a workshop for the day. After she left I muddled around with some ideas, but nothing much was coming to me. I had no inspiration for a story at all. Nada. Zippo. I remember this from my poetry writing days. Some days it seems that there’s nothing with which to make a poem or a story. I suppose I could have just let the writing go for today, but I didn’t want to do that. I was committed to this challenge, so I was going to find a way. I browsed through Dreamstime.com looking for an illustration that might jump start me. Found one that struck my fancy, a profile of a person fading off into oblivion. Hmmm. Something there. Made me think of loss and illusion. Good themes for a story, right? Right. Then I looked through some story fragments I had lying around on my hard drive. Found a pretty good 500-word beginning about a tattoo artist in Portland. I read it over a couple of times, just to get the feel of the character and his milieu, and I was off. Spent the next three hours writing the story. Took a break every hour to walk around, drink some water, and get ready for the next hour. Finished the story about 1 p.m. Went outside for a walk and came back and read the story over, gave it a title, and printed it out for Kim to read. When she got home I finished making dinner and she read the story and gave her opinion. I fixed the booboos she found and published it. About 3600 words total, 3100 of them new today. Total time, including looking for inspiration, writing the story, proofing the story, formatting and publishing the story: about 6 hours. A good day.
This is a catch-up post on my challenge to myself. A few weeks ago I decided I would write and publish a short story a week for a year. I began on 9 October 2011 with the 3700 word short story “Killing Time.” I wrote and published it the same day. I make no claims as to its quality, either good or bad. The e-book revolution allows writers to put out their work quickly and easily for the whole world to discover but I’m not venturing an opinion as to whether or not that’s a good idea for literature, reading, society, or life in general. Time will tell; history will judge. I will say that it is a great feeling to have the freedom that indie publishing gives an author. I can publish what I want, at the length I want, with the covers and blurbs I want, and at the pace I want. So far I’m not seeing a down side.
My second story in the challenge was “They Taste Like Chicken” (4300 words). I wrote that one on 16 October. Total elapsed time between starting the story and getting it published on the ebook sites was a little over 6 hours. I felt like I hit my stride with this one. The concept, story, cover, and title just all slotted together very nicely and I was pleased with the result.
The third story in the challenge I wrote today, 23 October. “The Night Alex Almost Flew Over Old Lady Grayson’s Place” ended up being 4400 words long. I started it at 7:15, when I got up. I worked on it for a bit, then went downstairs and washed some sushi rice for the night’s dinner. I set the rice to drain and went back upstairs and wrote for another hour or so. I went back downstairs and put the rice on to soak. Back to my upstairs office and more writing. Kim made us both some breakfast. I took a break and we ate together and talked for a bit. Then I returned upstairs and finished the story some time before noon. I spell checked it and did a quick read through to see if it made sense. It seemed to, so I left it and Kim and I went out to the woods for a hike. We were gone about two and half to three hours. When we got back I printed out the story and Kim read it while I made us a quick lunch of soup and sandwiches and also put the rice on to cook and did the dishes. After lunch I went over the story and made the corrections that Kim suggested. Then I put the cover together and published the story to all the ebook sites. Total time working on the story and getting it published: About 7 hours. Not bad. A day’s work. After I published, I made the sushi and we ate it while flipping between the fourth game of the World Series and the Sixty Minutes piece on Steve Jobs. Maybe more information than you wanted to know about one day in the life of an indie writer, but there it is. The creative life interweaving with the everyday life. Or maybe making the everyday life a creative life. Either way, it felt like a really good day.
I’m making each challenge story free on this site until I write the next story.
I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before that often the best way to learn to do something is to do it, even before you know how. That’s the way I learned to write poetry. I wrote a poem a day for three years. Practice practice practice. Or, as I’ve heard others put it: chop wood, carry water. So. In the spirit of daily practice, I’ve undertaken a new project: I’m going to write and publish a short story a week for a full year. First one is up now. Click on the “Free” tab at the top to read “Killing Time.”
The Red Market looks at the global market in human tissue. Carney uncovers a class system in which the products of poor human bodies migrate to the bodies of rich humans. From a section of the book in which he details the practice of hiring people to do clinical trials of drugs:
As with kidneys, eggs, and every other red market, the flesh of trial subjects can only move upward through the social hierarchy…. The poor and destitute bear the risk of testing drugs, but only the affluent receive their potential benefits.
This book was a real eye opener for me. Carney writes about a village in India in which almost all the women have sold their kidneys just to survive. He tells of the common practice of kidnapping young children to sell them to orphanages where affluent adoptee parents are duped into thinking the child they are about to adopt actually is an orphan. He explains how a temple takes in donated hair from pilgrims then sells the hair on the open market, a nearly billion dollar a year market. And he explains how grave robbers in India bleach bones to be sold to medical schools in England, the United States, and other countries. And that’s just for starters. There are chapters on professional lab rats, egg harvesters, and bone merchants. The red market is extensive and all-encompassing. Almost every country in the world is knee deep in it, as provider, recipient, or both.
I had no idea of the extent of this market. It is a global enterprise in which kidneys, bones, skin, blood, and anything else that can be sourced from a human body attracts a clandestine underground in which the recipients are generally ignorant of the source of the tissue they use. Medical schools, hospitals, doctors, and patients almost universally close their eyes and cover their ears when it comes to knowing exactly where the body parts they use comes from.
The Red Market is a thorough and sometimes harrowing work of reportage. I was transfixed and fascinated. Very highly recommended.
Ekaterina Sedia is a terrific writer and an accomplished editor and anthologist. She’s just published her anthology Bewere the Night: Tales of Shapeshifters and Werecreatures, which is brimming with marvelous stories about werewolves and suchlike creatures. It even includes one of mine: “An Unnatural History of Scarecrows.” You think scarecrows aren’t scary? You think scarecrows can’t shapeshift? So did I, until I started looking into the matter while researching my story. Be afraid.
I just finished this book after reading nothing else for the past three or four days. It’s riveting and spellbinding, an epic story about an epic disease. Mukherjee is an oncologist himself and his inside knowledge, not to mention his obviously astute research, brings a quiet authority to his tale.
My father died of cancer. So have some of my friends. I also know many survivors of cancer. Most people do, since the disease is so prevalent. This book describes the efforts of scientists and doctors who have struggled to understand and defeat cancer. It details moments of great triumph, and times when the principals displayed poor judgement and dangerous stubbornness. Today many cancers can be cured by medication which takes advantage of what has been learned of the genetic machinations of cancer cells. The Emperor of All Maladies traces the history of how we got to this point and how we might continue from here.
It’s a terrific read. It pulls no punches in relating the misery and death that cancer has wrought. But it also points to a hopeful future when cancer might become a frightening memory rather than a terrifying reality.
Very highly recommended.
I was putting together a dish for a potluck, but I was away from my home library, and the book with the recipe for the potato salad I wanted, Recipes For a Small Planet, was not at any local bookstore, not in any local branch of the library, not on Google books, and not on Amazon’s Look Inside feature. So I went to this nifty site called Worldcat and found a library in Montana, the Swan Valley branch of the Missoula Public Library, which had the book on its shelf. I called them up and explained my situation and the woman who answered the phone plucked the book from the shelf and read me the recipe over the phone. And she was happy to do it. That’s why I LOVE libraries.
The internet has changed the definition of a magazine. For example, Daily Science Fiction is an online magazine that delivers its content to subscribers by e-mail. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, DSF sends out a short story to everyone on its subscription list. Last Monday, November 1st, they emailed my story “Faith.” Now they’ve put it up on their website for all the world to read.
I sometimes do story time for preschool children at the library where I work. Often the books I choose to read leave the kids distinctly underwhelmed. I’m always on the look out for good stories that don’t bore them to distraction. Kids are a tough audience! I’m happy to report that I found an exceptional version of the Goldilocks story, Goldie and the Three Bears, written and illustrated by Diane Stanley. It’s the classic Goldilocks story, updated to a suburban setting. My audience of 3- and 4-year-olds were absolutely mesmerized by this book. Not one of them moved a muscle the whole time. I enjoyed it, too. The book has charm, smarts, a touch of danger and transgression, and a marvelously spirited central character, Goldie, who knows exactly what she likes, and when she finds it, she loves it with all her heart.
Thanks!
