According to this post by Scalzi, some authors don’t suffer from impostor syndrome. Sorry, I just don’t buy that. Have Dunning and Kruger taught us nothing?
I Just…Don’t Understand This
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Friday Fragmentary Fiction
“Bees!” Amalia shouted. Her laser pistol sizzled.
“What’s that?” I asked. I fired myself.
“Bees!” Amlia shouted again. She grabbed my shoulder, pointed. I gasped at the sight. Bees they were, indeed. Clockwork bees, swarming toward us. That was Dr. Mordechai’s latest trick. He’d tried bears. He’d sent owls. We’d fought them all back. But how do you fight bees? Amalia fired again. I followed suit, with no real hope. All around, our scrappy band was assaulted. The bees were too small to shoot. Their clockwork wings hummed. They stung and slashed.
“Run!” Amalia shouted. I needed no more encouragement. We ran, Amalia lifting her petticoats. All around us, a terrible buzzing sounded. We made the door just in time. Slammed through into the laboratory. We stood, listening to muffled screams outside.
It had been a rough several months, since Dr. Mordecai’s efforts to recover the mysterious tome had reached a fever pitch–months when his famous clockwork creations (previously the toast of Paris before he’d gone mad and begun to use them to for nefarious ends related to evil rituals) had been thrown upon our little college in ever more desperate assaults, assaults we’d thrown back only through pluck, courage, and the frantic use of applied research, and in these months our little band had grown close (at times almost disturbingly close, as in the case of Big Fred the chef and his particular friends Emma and Shiela-Jo, the chief of the ornithopter pool and the ferret wrangler, respectively) as we tried to divine the terrible secrets of the book, secrets which hinted at something even more terrible than the horrifying eldritch machinations that allowed Dr. Mordechai to fashion the many hideous clockwork automata that had killed so many, caused so much destruction wherever in the wide world that knowledge and light attempted to battle ignorance and darkness; but rough as the months had been, there had been times of joy, brought on by triumph or simply the aforementioned closeness amongst our shrinking band, as well as small but satisfying triumphs, of the sort only a desperate band of embattled academics and mechanics can know, as they see their various theories proved in the most impressive fashion, saving lives and striking down abominable foes (when, of course, they didn’t fail spectacularly as in the tragic case of Dr. Bemberfred’s ‘transformative brass-shielded airship battle platform’ which killed not only Dr. Bemberfred but six students, a chancellor, and a passing fishmonger on it maiden voyage); truly, they were remarkable, and in a strange way, exhilarating, times.
And now they might come to an end because of a bunch of stupid bees.
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Knowing What You Don’t Know
We live in an age of wonders, as far as research on fiction goes. Not so long ago, an aspiring author had to go to a library, or take a course or something, to research some topic important to their book (hence the classic advice to ‘write what you know’, which might be more accurately stated as ‘write what you already know’). But of course, those of us engaged in speculative fiction can only take that so far, and anyway there generally comes a time when you need to go a bit beyond the realm of personal experience (especially if your life is not a non-stop thrill-ride but you want to give your readers something a bit exciting to read about).
So research. Made so much easier by the internet. All you need to do these days is just type whatever you want to know about into a search engine (which let’s face it is likely Google, but if you are an Alta Vista fan don’t let me stop you). I’ve recently had some reminders, though, of the secondary functions of beta readers and editors. Their primary function, of course, is to unsuckify your writing (sorry if that isn’t a word – this hasn’t been edited). But secondarily, they may have had some direct experience with something your characters have done. Because it is all fine and well to read about things, but it doesn’t measure up to personal experience with corsets and half-moon clips and so on, simply because basic information about something may miss those little details that really make something come to life. Oh, you can perhaps find that if you look hard enough on the Internet, but you risk the grim reality of diminishing returns when you start to search for those finer points:
Even more importantly, though, is that without personal experience, you likely don’t know what sort of questions to ask the all-knowing Internet. So short of just getting out and living life (bleah, right?), I think the best bet is getting to know some interesting people who are willing to read your stuff.
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New Digs
So here I am at a new Universal Resource Locator. The old URL(s) and website were intended to be focused on my horror/vaguely Lovecraftian writing, and they’d drifted away from that focus, so it seemed time for a more general-purpose site. Also, setting up a new website is sort of like rearranging furniture, and who doesn’t want to do that every once in a while? My intention is to try out some new things content-wise as well, and we’ll see how long that resolution lasts.
I would continue on, and make this first post of my new internet manifestation more memorable, but daylight savings time just started, and man, I just … what? Was I saying something?
Anyway, for older posts, go here. But be careful, you might find yourself going in a circle.
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