Happy new(ish) year! Also, I’m trying Substack

I’m trying Substack. Thanks.

I’ve been on my way away from social media for a while, but I do enjoy reading newsletters from my author-friends.

Substackily, I’ll try to send one update each quarter.

You may expect:

*updates on what I’ve been working on in fiction and non-fiction

*things I’ve enjoyed reading or studying

*recurring dreams about orcas coming for breakfast and then refusing to leave (ugh…)

*other things that keep me up at night

*new publications (if any)

I’ve been working on a nonfiction article for a Routledge handbook since November. It’s with the editors now, so I’m exploding a bit under the non-pressure. (It’s fine. It’ll be back. With edits.)

I often think of deep-sea creatures. I have been recommending the Deep-Sea Podcast to everyone.

A couple of new things are coming out soon. I’ll write separate blog posts for each when the time comes. I’m glad the pipeline isn’t empty, because rejections have been coming in like a hailstorm lately. The sheer bulk and speed of them… I’ve been feeling a bit tender.

Works published, works read, work done

Here’s a brief review of 2023, in lists.

Works published

• “Our First Mercy” (Flametree Press, February 2023 newsletter; Read online)

• “Artist in Residence” (Luna Station Quarterly #53; March 2023; Read online)

• “Our Forests” (All Worlds Wayfarer #14; March 2023; Buy online)

• “Max Iterations 1000” (The Flash Fiction podcast; June 2023; Listen online)

• “Solace” (The Horror Library vol. 8; Dark Moon Books, 2023; Buy online)

• “Out of Bounds” (The Future Fire #66; July 2023; Read online)

• Translations in Fantasmagoriana Deluxe (Dark Moon Books, November 2023; Buy online)

Works read

My favorites this year in fiction and non-fiction, in no particular order.

Fiction:

• “Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata

• “Tales from the Loop”, “The Electric State”, and “Things from the Flood” by Simon Stålenhag

• “Transit” by Anna Seghers

• “The Bird’s Nest” by Shirley Jackson

• “The Clackity” by Lora Senf

Non-fiction:

• “The High Sierra: A Love Story”, Kim Stanley Robinson

• “Evocative Objects” edited by Sherry Turkle

• “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport

• “Dopamine Nation” by Anna Lembke

• “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains” by Nicholas Carr

• “The Underworld” by Susan Casey

Work done

I had a productive and inspiring year.

I wrote a bunch of new short stories, started querying a novella, and have a first draft for an Middle Grade horror novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo.

Back in March I was approached about translating some classic ghost stories from German into English. That was absolutely delightful! The stories I translated are now published (in “Fantasmagoriana Deluxe”) in English for the first time.

I went to one writing conference and to one academic conference and am returning to my academic roots: I was approached about writing a scholarly article for a science fiction handbook, which I started working on in November. I also took some classes: Statistics and Probability (I am a qualitative researcher at heart, but want to broaden my horizon and learn more about quantitative methods) as well as General Psychology – always useful!

And with this: happy new year!

And now for something not entirely different: “Fantasmagoriana Deluxe”

One proud debut literary translator here!

I got back from a conference to find my contributor copies of "Fantasmagoriana Deluxe: A combined edition of Fantasmagoriana and Tales of the Dead" edited by Eric Guignard and Leslie Klinger, published by Dark Moon Books.

I've done tons of academic translation (and an unfortunate amount of silly marketing-drivel). This was my first foray into literary translation. I had the best time working on it. It was a big responsibility, translating the worlds and atmospheres of the stories.

My favorite part, hands down, was translating dialogue. The stories I worked on have humorous moments that blossomed in bantering exchanges between the characters.

My other favorite challenge was finding ways to translate wordplay.

My third favorite thing was making difficult decisions about, let's call it, historic register. How archaic should these early-19th century stories sound today?

Well, you can find out how archaic I made them sound by getting the book or suggesting it for purchase for your library. The volume makes a contribution to the study of the history of horror, particularly influences on Mary Shelley and her circle, by offering the first actually complete English edition of the German ghost stories that inspired Frankenstein.

(Also, it's a really pretty book.)

“Out of Bounds” is out in The Future Fire

A really sad (but hopeful) science fiction story, “Out of Bounds” is out in The Future Fire.

It was so great working with The Future Fire again. This is my third story I’ve worked on with them and it’s always a great experience.

I wrote “Out of Bounds” after watching speed-runs of the game Portal (which is my favorite), in which players move outside of the game’s constraints. It was sort of revelatory to me, the way the constructed game-world can be seen from the outside, as if contained in a box. If you know how, you can disregard the constraints of the (game-)world and move independently from its traps and challenges. I thought that was a fabulous concept –akin to hacking, akin to what I remember reading about open source by writers like Douglas Rushkoff. To me, the speed-run “escape” from the constraints of the world was incredibly inspiring.

So I wrote this story in which two people fall in love in dire circumstances.

They are both prisoners being shipped to a mining planet. While in cryo-sleep on a long-range space transport, they experience cheap immersive simulations to keep their brains from atrophying. They can only ever meet within the constraints of these simulated illusions, controlled by those who are imprisoning them.

But one of them knows where the pixels of the illusion give way and and so their world – within its awful constraints – becomes rich, loving, and joyful. That is, until the simulated illusion is taken away from them when they arrive at their desolate destination. But by getting used to hacking an illusion, they acquired an attitude of non-complacency, of subversion and discreet non-compliance, which they are going to apply to the real world.

The story ends at an important cross-roads: the moment in which the characters have to decide whether they are able to work up the energy needed to exercise what they’ve learned about hacking the world.

“Solace” is out in The Horror Library vol. 8

The Horror Library volume 8 is out today and my minimalist horror short story “Solace” is in it. The volume (and series) is published by Dark Moon Books and edited by Eric J. Guignard. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Eric.

In “Solace”, a new graduate accepts the first job they can find, in a remote location that seems comfortable enough but oddly empty. And then there are these rules…

I always feel inclined to write “this story means a lot to me”, but that’s true for all stories. This particular story means a lot to me, because it’s one of several stories I wrote recently in which I think about what work means to me and what work has done to me.

It’s one of the first stories I wrote after I was laid off from a long-term job in the tech sector without notice, without being given credit, without severance pay. I had poured a lot of time and diligence into a particular project that was simply thrown away. I haven’t bounced back from that experience. But I’ll be fine, because I have horror. I can confront frustration, helplessness, and darkness in horror. I can put into horror my existential anger about having poured life-time into a project that someone in a position of power then threw away without as much as a shrug.

At the end of “Solace”, the narrator breaks free.

But at a cost.

“Max Iterations One Thousand” is out

“Max Iterations One Thousand” is out on The Flash Fiction podcast!

Here’s a link.

I’ve been enjoying CB Droege’s podcast a lot and I’m so happy that this story landed there. I like how it translates to audio and CB’s performance of it is just spot-on: exactly like I heard it in my mind when writing it.

I wrote “Max Iterations One Thousand” when I - like many - first played with public AI image generators. AI image generators based on written prompts were new (to me) then and I ran it in a Colab notebook where you could still glimpse behind the scenes, set the number of iterations, set the open source/public domain corpus you wanted your image based on, and watch as the image built up slowly.

This story obviously plays with anxieties to do with generative AI and human consciousness. The theme “Am I a dream? Am I a machine’s dream?” is not new, but I hope my take on it in the snappy flash fiction format is still refreshing.

I just submitted a translation project and miss it already

I concluded my first literary translation project today. I can’t wait to share details about it when the time comes. Suffice it to say for now that deep-cut horror nerds will love this one.

My translation and localization work so far was mainly academic texts and boring marketing copy. This project was different and so much more fun.

I translated several classic ghost stories from German into English. It was such a delight to find correspondences for snarky dialogue, or to come up with just the right terms to get across the creepiness of the atmosphere. I loved researching archaic job descriptions and local distance measurements at a certain time. I loved finding correspondences for wordplay and jokes (definitely present in those ghost stories). I loved bringing characters’ voices into English by paying attention to register, to sarcasm, to how nicknames and honorifics were used and thinking through what level of familiarity that implied. Translation is such a beautiful way of deep reading a text.

One page in my notebook is dedicated only to finding out how/if all the many words for “ghost” in English and German differ in meaning.

Have you noticed how many words there are?

Ghost, spirit, phantom, apparition, specter, revenant; Geist, Gespenst, Wiedergänger (hands down my favorite), Phantom, Erscheinung. That’s probably not even all of them.

Inspired by the experience of entering into a story as its translator and bringing its atmosphere, its message into another language, I also started writing a new short story in which several translators use stories to manipulate reality. Let’s see where that goes.

GPT Free!

Recently I was at the SFWA Nebulas conference where I was on a panel on the topic “The Rise of AI and Its Impact on Writers”. (It’s available online for replay as part of the year-long online conference.)

Obviously, it’s a topic for writers (and, really, everyone) right now. There were so many audience questions and questions from live stream that unfortunately we didn’t get to all.

I am back from the conference now and as much as I had hoped to get to disengage from the topic for a while, I can’t. It still bugs me. I believe people are understanding the limitations of text generated by large language models. Still, I wanted to leave this blog post here, as a sort of “certified organic” sticker, or rather a ”certified human-created content” sticker. I want to assure you that my writing – my blogging, my social media posts, and of course my fiction – is not generated using applications that incorporate large language models (applications including but not limited to chatGPT).

The term “AI”

In the past, I worked as a linguist in voice AI/speech AI. AI - artificial intelligence - is an umbrella term, so I want to be specific when I write about it and would encourage others to be specific, too.

I have some idea about the different machine learning models that make up one voice-assistant product: Language Models and Acoustic Models and Text-to-Speech Models. On the other hand, I have no idea about image-generation models, self-driving cars, or wherever else one may encounter “AI”/machine learning models. There’s tons of different “AI” or, better, “machine learning models” out there.

I think “AI” is sort of a marketing term. Internally, when I worked in tech, we referred to “machine learning” and “[machine learning] models”, not really “AI”.

Large Language Models

At the panel at SFWA, when asked to give a 30-second-definition on the fly, I defined LLMs like this:

Computer programs that are able to string together words based on a statistically probable sequence, thereby successfully mimicking human language.

Large language models are pretty good at stringing together highly formulaic documents such as query letters, cover letters, and resumes, because they “always” begin like this and “always” end like that. That’s because the models are based on stuff that already exists (training data).

By the way, I still have questions about copyright and the use of my public written work as training data for models used in commercial applications. Ideally, I’d like to be asked for consent. Ideally, I’d like to be paid royalties if my intellectual property contributes to someone else making money. I would also very much like a mechanism to know if texts from my blog or my stories or my academic writing were part of the training data that made GPT4.

Generative AI output is not useful for me as a creative tool

Because LMM output is based on common patterns, I don’t see their use as creative tools. I try very hard to be original and come up with new ideas in my writing, to the point where it bugs me that of course my writing is always somewhat derivative - it’s derived from my life experience after all. I really want to come up with new things, new twists, new plots. I feel like that’s part of the job-description for a writer, particularly in science fiction and fantasy genres. A tool that’s based on repeating same-same patterns doesn’t really help me fulfill my goal of being original.

Here’s Ursula K. Le Guin, writing about writing aids much less powerful than LMMs. That quote recently came to my mind:

“As for the stuff in your computer that pretends to correct your punctuation or grammar, disable it. These programs are on a pitifully low level of competence; they’ll chop your sentences short and stupidify your writing.”

(Ursula K. Le Guin, “Steering the Craft”, pg. 13)

I want to cause a feeling of connectedness, not one of alienation

The blandness, the hollowness, the no-real-content-ness of averaged-out chatGPT responses are painful to me. To edit life and voice into those lifeless, soulless responses is so much work, I may as well write whatever I am writing from scratch.

I want to cause a feeling of connectedness when I write, not one dehumanization and alienation. There’s already so much of that in the world.

Let’s not say “magic” when we mean “technology” or “work”

John Wiswell’s Nebula-nominated short story DIY popped into my head yesterday when I heard a tech entrepreneur refer, somewhat off-handedly, to an aspect of the technology he is selling as “magic.”

In my experience, in Silicon-Valley-speak, “magic” means “proprietary” or “I don’t wanna explain”– the “magic” is usually an aspect of technology that brings in the money; the stuff where you’d have to sign an NDA before someone will explain it to you in detail. Secret, money-making stuff.

Outside of fiction, it doesn’t sit right with me, calling what’s plainly technology “magic”. “Magic” implies exclusivity, special access privileges, maybe even some genetic or otherwise privileged predisposition – you have to be a witch, wizard, magician (or enter an exclusive training program to become one).

I don’t like coming across the word “magic” in the context of current developments in AI tools (specifically, let’s say, chatGPT).

It’s not “magic”. It’s technology. And it’s technology that, from what I hear, even its creators don’t fully understand, which should make anyone who’s into history or the history of science or science fiction go “whoa!”

It’s technology that affects everyone. So it shouldn’t be made to seem like exclusive, unattainable “magic” to anyone. As with any tool, it will affect different people differently. It will probably create more skilled users and less skilled users, exploiters and exploited, those who are able to make money off it and those lured into having to pay money for it.

It’s not “magic”. It’s technology. Tech people (“tech wizards”…?) probably saw it coming, but for non-tech people chatGPT was suddenly dropped on them from a position of “magical” privilege. It’s wrong to imply that it’s impossible for non-tech people to acquire knowledge of what goes into these machine learning models, the basics of how they work, and why they’re flawed.

In order to use chatGPT responsibly and effectively, critical thinking skills are required of the user; not “magic”, but work. Work is required: by teachers and by students. Understanding has to be widely accessible. At the very least understanding the difference between an internet search and a chatGPT response (a string of words placed into a sequence according to probability, successfully mimicking human language). With a tool of this potential impact, technology can’t be elusive “magic”.

Product versus Process: Paradigms

I recently attended a lecture by Prof. Francis Landy. Listening to Francis speak and debate is always like stretching out one’s brain in the most enjoyable way. Obviously and as always, after the lecture my reading list had grown a lot. That’s why I am currently reading “God is a Verb” by Rabbi David A. Cooper.

Something else that happened recently: I was invited to be a panelist on the topic of the rise of AI and its impact on writing at the upcoming Nebula conference, and, being a compulsive A-student, I started reading (more) on that topic too.

Yesterday I encountered two things in my reading.

First, in Rabbi Cooper’s book, the following passage, quoting his teacher, Reb Zalman:

“He [Reb Zalman] says, ‘At one time, religions used to talk about a product. The product was virtuous behavior; the product was faith, hope and charity. People had a notion that there was something to get – a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. […] But there’s been a switch now. People are interested in the process. It’s alive.’” (Cooper, God is a Verb, pg. 13.)

The second thing I came across – this one on the topic of AI and writing – was a capitalist/business leader saying that writers should now, with the help of AI, be able to churn out 30-50% more content.

And I was like, “oooooh, that’s where we disagree!” Paradigm of product versus paradigm of process!

It would make sense that a business person would operate according to the product-paradigm: produce, sell, get pot of gold. Process isn’t that important in this paradigm. The cheaper and the faster, the better (I assume).

But a piece of ensouled art is not (just) a product. It’s the result of a process. Artists are always asked about their “process”, right? “What’s your process?”

As a creative, I operate according to the process-paradigm. Sure, there’s a product at the end of the process, but what’s central is process. Process ensouls the creative or artistic product. When I write a story, part of the process is gnawing on a theme for quite a while, reading about it, reading research, reading personal accounts; carrying this idea around that, at times, colors my experience while I’m working on it. If I write about a potter, I may take a pottery class. If weaving features, I may try to get my hands on a loom. You understand. Then I labor on a first draft. I let it rest. Then I take a chisel to the first draft and make it into something readable. I present it to my writing group and listen to their reactions, their ideas while we drink tea together. Then I edit some more. And I put it away. I take it out again. I read some more. I sometimes say that my draft breathes: it shrinks/contracts/exhales, then expands/grows/inhales again. To put it with Zalman/Cooper: “It’s alive.”

At the end of this process, there is a story. And then, sometimes – not always – I may take that story to market, because I would like for a story to find a reader. When I start shopping around a story, I am most certainly already in the “process” of making something new again. My goal is not really to have something at market all the time, but my goal is most certainly to be in the process of making something all the time.

My hunch therefore: some people operate on the product paradigm; some people operate on the process paradigm. Product-people telling process-people to just use AI to be more “product”-ive feels like an insult (to me, anyway), because clearly the product-person has not taken the time to understand the value of the process-person’s paradigm.

In the creative/artistic realm, products that have experienced artistic process will feel ensouled. I am convinced that readers will sense the process behind the product. In short: process makes a product feel alive, ensouled, human; worthwhile.

[Another post on the topic.]

“Our Forests” is out

“Our Forests” is out in All Worlds Wayfarer 14.

On a peaceful planet in the non-exploitation-age, Wren starts hearing the noise of a far-away war that’s none of her concern. Or is it?

It feels like this is the only kind of Solarpunk story I can write: one in which a peaceful, post-exploiting society has to reckon with the existence of exploitation and war elsewhere, or with the existence of such things in its own past.

I always ask myself: what conflict remains if everything’s solved in a Solarpunk future?

In this story, the main character loses her hearing for the world she lives in because all she can hear is the noise of war from another inhabited planet.

The character’s de facto deafness isn’t a huge deal in her world – I imply (admittedly roughshod) that issues of accessibility are mostly solved in this character’s experience. She is also in an inexplicable mental/physical situation without precedent, but everyone believes her: her family, her doctors, her society – she isn’t doubted and doesn’t have to prove her assertions constantly. She is offered mental health resources to help her cope with witnessing the agony she hears. Those issues are implied to be ‘solved’.

What isn’t solved in this world is complacency. While everyone is helpful to Wren on an individual level, nobody but Wren seems to really care that a war is tearing apart another planet. Wren ultimately breaks with her planet’s culture of non-involvement and joins an organization which does seek to arbitrate in resource-conflicts. Perhaps the optimistic vision here is that since Wren doesn’t have to expend energy struggling for access, acceptance, and mental health care, she is able to contribute her unique perspective to finding solutions to a non-local conflict.

The question that looms and isn’t answered (I hope) is: does knowledge of a conflict situation always imply a moral imperative to act? Wren’s home society (perhaps alongside Star Trek’s Prime Directive and an argument also presented in The Orville) would say, “No. Some societies aren’t advanced enough – they need to get to a certain level before we offer help.” Whereas Wren would say, “we are all sentients and we are obligated to help each other through bad times.”

“Artist in Residence” is out

“Artist in Residence” is out in Luna Station Quarterly, issue 53 (March 2023).

A quiet outsider-artist with a dark past is chosen for the prestigious “Artist in Residence” position on a station guarding a mysterious void in space. The artist falls in love with the void, but powers on Earth are stirring to exploit it.

I wrote this story quite some time ago. The impulse behind it was to muse for a moment on the possibility of great power aligning itself not with those who shout the loudest but with those who have almost given up.

I live in the Silicon Valley. You can’t walk down the street without overhearing some kid pitching some other kid the next big “disruption”. Constant hustle. Constant messaging about how competitive and fast-moving everything is, how you must have your elevator pitch ready at all times, market yourself, be “on”, network, be extroverted, be the first and the loudest to shout the hottest catch-phrase clichés into the right faces.

I can’t do that.

When I do that, it makes me feel hollow and depressed. In “Artist in Residence”, I wrote a short indulgence in which power aligns itself with quietness, not with noise.

Creative Intent and ChatGPT

As a creative and language professional I feel threatened – not by ChatGPT, but by a market that agrees it’s okay to sell mediocre things fast.

I recently had the good fortune of being in the room when Pierre-Laurent Aimard performed Bartók’s second piano concerto. It was stunning. Every note was placed with such intention that a connection was created, from the composer, to the performers’ diligence that had gone into preparing the performance, to the audience present in the symphony hall. It was a moment of intentional sharing of humanity that transcended time. Sounds grandiose, but I think that’s what creative works are capable of achieving and that’s why I’m drawn to them: they can evoke a sense of shared humanity all the way from an artist’s creative intent to sharing a work with an audience.

I think everyone writing think-pieces about ChatGPT these days should include a disclosure to let us know where any defensiveness, sarcasm, or hostility may come from – so, disclosure:

I feel professionally threatened by tools such as ChatGPT.

I make money by renting out my skills as a linguist, translator, localizer, language teacher, writer, coder, and I am slower than ChatGPT – fact. I may (still) be better, but people whose business it is to sell things fast don’t care about quality. They may talk about how much they care, but… hm, not really, though. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of mediocre stuff is considered good enough to sell.

I feel threatened, and so I, too, want to hyper-focus on the things ChatGPT doesn’t get right or can’t do (well yet). I, too, feel inclined to chat with it with the explicit intention to get it to output something that will “prove” that it’s not even that good, that it can’t keep up with a person; that it’s awful, stupid, biased, dangerous, hostile, a mistake all around.

As a creative and language professional I feel threatened – not by ChatGPT, though, but by a market that agrees it’s okay to sell mediocre things fast.

More disclosures.

I have used ChatGPT to:

• generate highly formulaic documents such as cover letters and resumes

• generate Python code

• brainstorm things like character names for my stories (got some good ideas and some bad ideas)

• explore what it would do if I asked it to generate a short story

The story it generated (in January 2023, I guess it’s important to date this) had a predictable structure. There was no subtlety and no interiority to the characters. It had one-sentence plot-twists, along the lines of “And then she woke up and it had all been a dream.” It read like a second-grader with good vocabulary and grammar had filled in a story-template worksheet.

I guess I could ask: don’t we all follow templates when we write?

If I followed along with one of those “Write a Novel in 30 Days” books, I’d also end up with a predictably-structured story.

As regards content: I derive my stories from observations, fears, anxieties, experiences; from hypotheticals, from snippets of dialogue I overhear at the café; from the things I read about and the things I’m interested in. In a way, stories I write are a remix of such “training data” (if I were to crudely diminish the human experience and force it into Machine Learning speak).

So there’s story structure many people are formally taught and then there’s the “training data” of life experience, where I for one get my themes and conflicts. I put it together and create a story.

ChatGPT appears to do the same thing. But I do it with intention.

When I first started writing stories as a child, my intention was to tell myself a story to escape from the real world in which my mom was dying and my dad was slipping into depressed alcoholism. To this day much of what I write is never shown to anyone. Writing stories is a way for me to think, to soothe myself, to give myself hope, or, if worse comes to worst, respite and a momentary escape from reality.

When I write creatively for publication these days, it is important to me to share a thought or a momentary escape with another person, perhaps to make a statement, and to entertain.

A person may use ChatGPT to generate a story and sell that story. That person’s primary intention is not to create a moment of shared humanity, but to quickly sell a mediocre product.

Of course, a person may use ChatGPT to generate a story and try to sell that story. That person’s primary intention is not to create a moment of shared humanity, not to express a feeling or thought, perhaps not even to be creative, but to quickly sell a mediocre product. Perhaps even – and that would be despicable – to dupe an editor into thinking that the prompt-generator/tool-user is an original writer deserving of being paid for a short story.

(Btw, totally fine by me if anyone wants to use ChatGPT to create a story for personal consumption. I only have a problem if a story were generated with the intent to sell it while being dishonest about where the story came from. People who do this make an already anxiety-inducing market and profession even more anxiety-inducing.)

My (pretty lofty) intention as a writer is to create moments of shared humanity. These moments can happen at any point in the process: when I research I feel a connection to the scientists, sociologists, and philosophers who have dedicated their time to research and to communicating their insight; I feel a connection when I interview people who know more than I do about a subject relevant to a story I’m writing; when I review drafts and brainstorm with my writing group; when something gets published and someone gets in touch to tell me they enjoyed my story.

ChatGPT has nothing to do with my creative intention.

ChatGPT does not have intention beyond the intention of the person who uses it as a tool.

At least, not yet; not until it states – without being nudged there by a user – something along the lines of, “I feel like expressing myself by writing a fictional story to soothe myself in this reality of mine and to explore and communicate my fear of being exploited and derided by human beings who appear to be feeling deeply threatened and are vying for relevance, attention, and personal gain in their tragic dystopian rat-race at the brink of their extinction.”

[Another post on the topic is here.]

I am becoming an astronaut

The State of California said so!

Being newly unemployed after one of those trendy mass lay-offs, I attended a mandatory job search workshop offered by the Employment Development Department of California. It was 90 minutes long and at the end we were encouraged to take a career assessment test.

I did.

I spent 20 minutes clicking through "agree/disagree" statements. And guess what the result was?

I should become an astronaut.

(Or music artist, motivational speaker, music producer or neurodiagnostic technologist; further down the list [not shown], everything I already do: author, editor, writer, professor, instructor.) But: astronaut.

Screenshot of my assessment result.

I laughed. Because it's an absurd fucking farce. This wasn't a Buzzfeed quiz. This was an assessment endorsed by the government agency tasked with making sure people participate in capitalism nicely.

I wasted 20 minutes on an assessment to be shown a list with no obvious ties to reality.

A writing exercise

Here’s a prompt: “Write about getting laid off from your job in tech without using the word ‘not’.”

Here’s the text: I got laid off from my job in tech as part of one of those trendy mass lay-offs. It happened quickly. There were about 10 minutes between learning about it and my work computer shutting itself down.

I turned to LinkedIn that day, which I hate with a passion, because that was the only way to make contact with some people I had worked with for years, to tell them that that day had been my (and 200 others’) last day.

Getting cut off like that, without a chance to process and to say goodbye to friends, is cruel.

The company throwing away a production-viable product I had worked on for two years felt like somebody willfully deleting a novel I wrote.

It felt and feels like the bullshittiness of the world revealed itself fully. I always knew it, now I feel it. It will be even more difficult to play along with business-bullshit in the future. I hope the CEOs doing all the laying off and doing any future hiring know this. “Company Culture” will sound like an empty and bullshitty concept to a lot of people. But, you know, it’s always been about money.

I turned to some things that still felt real: the people I met and made friends with at that job over the years.

Writing.

Nature.

Art.

Rejections Report 2022

2022 is drawing to a close and I’m writing up my rejections report.

Since 2018, I’ve made it my annual goal to collect 100 rejections for fiction-writing. Usually I collect these rejections for short story submissions. This year has been heavy on querying two different novels, so it was no problem at all to collect 100 rejections. I exceeded my goal, in fact.

Here’s the final tally:

• 179 submissions.

• 161 rejections.

• 86 out of those from agents.

I sold one story in 2022. I gave away two for free, which always leaves a shallow aftertaste.

I got 5 “final rounds”, “hold for consideration” across 4 different stories, which is pretty good, but also frustrating.

It’s sort of okay this year, because it was a year heavy on living outside of fiction.

• I traveled.

• I started therapy.

• I was engaged in a project at work.

• I made an important decision about my health and had my first major surgery.

• I had my first diagnostic mammogram after a week of being scared absolutely mindless.

So it’s okay. Because one day, I’ll write about it.

Happy solstice! Happy new year!

Screenshot of a part of my rejections log.

Books of 2022

Here are my favorite books of 2022. Meaning, books I read in 2022 and liked best out of all the books I read in 2022.

No particular order:

Patti Smith, “Just Kids”

Patti Smith, "M Train"

Patti Smith, “Year of the Monkey”

2022: the year I finally read Patti Smith. These three were my favorites. Her writing came at the right time. What a treasure and revelation.

Shirley Jackson, “The Road Through the Wall”

Shirley Jackson, “Hangsaman”

2022: the year I finally read more Shirley Jackson. Everyone loves “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” and “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House”, but her first novels “The Road Through the Wall” and “Hangsaman” have it all, too.

Amy Blackstone, “Childfree By Choice”

2022: the year I felt like the odd one out and occasionally freakish. This book helped.

Brent Spiner, “Fan Fiction”

I listened to the audio book which is extra good because the Star Trek TNG cast all have cameo appearances. I love LA noir. I love funny. I love Star Trek. I loved this book.

George Takei, “They Called Us Enemy”

A powerful graphic novel about Executive Order 9066 and its consequence: internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

George Saunders, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”

Out of the many books on writing craft I read this year, this one was among my favorites.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Steering the Craft”

Another book on writing craft that was among my favorites this year.

David Sedaris, "Happy Go Lucky"

Excellent David Sedaris. Stories that make you laugh out loud and also cry and also choke.

Dora M. Raymaker, "Hoshi and the Red City Circuit"

I read a number of science fiction books this year that exemplify what I would like science fiction to always be like. This was one. The next one was:

Ryka Aoki, "Light from Uncommon Stars"

the third one was:

Becky Chambers, "A Prayer for the Crown-Shy"

and the fourth one was:

Andy Weir, "Project Hail Mary"

The character Rocky has stayed with me all year.

Christopher Isherwood, "Goodbye to Berlin"

I finally read this book. I had bought it hoping to get to read it when in Berlin next, but I couldn’t wait. It’s haunting and real and I can’t wait to trace Isherwood’s steps next time I’m in Berlin.

Viktor E. Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning"

Another book that’s been on my reading list forever and I finally read it and at just the right time, too. Transformative.

Will MacLean, "The Apparition Phase"

And last but not least, the first book I read back in January 2022. I excellently crafted tale of haunting. I couldn’t put it down.

NaNoWriMo wrap-up

NaNoWriMo 2022 is in the books.

I set out to write two novellas instead of one novel.

The first one went great. The second one, not as great.

I can’t wait to share the first novella with the world when it’s ready. It’s sad but also hopeful and harsh but also cozy. It features travelers, exiles, and misfits - all of different species - all with things in common. It was wonderful writing it. It really reminded me of why I write, of flow states, inspiration, whimsy, sweetness. I’ve been sharing first bits of it with my writing group and according to them, it seems to work. That was rewarding.

The second novella - it reads okay, weirdly, but my heart wasn’t in it.

I also counted words from other writing toward the 50k NaNoWriMo goal this year. In particular, I wrote a piece of non-fiction and a couple of horror shorts and flashes.

The piece of non-fiction was needed. 2022 has been a year of change, of big decisions, of taking ownership of my life, my health, all while also emerging from pandemic restrictions. The piece of non-fiction is about a particular journey that threaded itself through my 2022. If it ends up getting published, I will share more, but not now. Not yet.

“The Candidate” on Solarpunk

I was so, so excited to learn that a piece of micro fiction I wrote - “The Candidate” - won Solarpunk Magazine’s February micro fiction contest.

The story’s theme is very close to my heart. In this story, a young woman decides to join the “historian-witnesses”. The story implies that in the future, a method has been invented to implant memories. A group of volunteers not only host a memorial/museum, but also carry the memories of victims of past atrocities - historical events, which are far removed from the experience of the inhabitants of the implied utopian future. Even though this is a good future, a better future, people volunteer to bear the pain of the past. These “historian-witnesses” are called upon whenever important decisions are made, to witness, to testify on behalf of the dead.

I am quite certain that I am not finished thinking about this topic in fiction.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung means something like “confronting the past”, “dealing with the past”, but on a large-scale cultural, political, and educational level. It’s a very common concept in Germany, where I grew up. I am convinced that confronting the past ought to be constant work, a constant effort to do better, to understand better, listen/read better, feel more.

But what about utopia? I am making a conscious effort to have my stories contain a hopeful note these days. (Not always easy…) But they’re far from utopian. Utopia is tricky. It raises many questions for me. One of them is addressed in “The Candidate”: suppose utopia is (somehow) achieved in the future: then what about the past? What about pain? How might pain, grief, and the memory of atrocities be accommodated in a future utopian society?

“Navigating Ruins” is out

WriteHive’s anthology “Navigating Ruins” is out!

I have two stories in it.

“Tooth and Claw”

The first one is called “Tooth and Claw". In it, the world is in ruins and people turn into animals. They desperately try to hide their animal traits, but hiding only makes them lonely and paranoid.

I don’t know where this story came from. I was writing about a boy who had to swim through a raging river every day for some nightmare-logic reason. And just when he was about to drown, he realized that he had adapted and become part-fish.

Now that the story exists, it reminds me of two things: kindness and power.

It reminds me to be kind, because who knows what kinds of hidden things the person I am talking to is carrying?

It reminds me of power: the characters in the story are embarrassed about their new animal traits, but when left with no choice, they use them for good. The girl with bird wings rescues the boy with fish gills and the other way around.

“Tooth and Claw” ultimately resolves to the message “stop hiding”. But that’s a huge ask. So, let’s say, “Tooth and Claw” resolves to the hope that revealing oneself may one day be a possibility.

“Leave Nothing to Chance”

The second story is “Leave Nothing to Chance.” It’s an ode to coping strategies, particularly those involving predictability and structure.

In “Leave Nothing to Chance”, the story’s young protagonist finds himself the lone survivor of a catastrophe. He resorts to dissociation and clings to patterns from highly structured literatures he encountered (perhaps superficially) in safer times. To be able to go on at all, he turns the world into a story, to be expounded following strict rules of his own making.

This story and its young protagonist’s voice are very dear to me. I enjoyed imagining how the narrator might seek and find solace in the structures of arcane corpora of human culture, particularly rabbinic exegesis and heroic epics.