Checkhov's Gun Rack

This one was a request by a good friend. I'm on a writing group that engages in a weekly exercise wherein one of us will put up a prompt and all of us will write for one hour and then share the results. I've actually gotten some really fun (albeit unpolished) stories from this, and I enjoy both writing and world building on the fly.

Because I only have an hour, I usually won't spend to much time figuring out what I'm going to do. As soon as I have a vague concept (usually related to the prompt), a character with one or two traits (eg. a shy student, a crabby old woman, an outlaw poet), a goal (eg. to be married, to be normal, to protect a colony of monkeys), and an obstacle, I dive in.

And the first thing I do is start putting in detail completely at random.

Alright, not completely at random. If I want to write a funny story, it will be funny detail; same for horror, romance, what have you. Details will be as in-period as I can make them without research if it's a period piece. Things won't be per se infodumped- in part because I'm not attempting coherency yet- but at every juncture I can without stopping the action, I'll drop in something specific. The heroine has five children, two of whom have died. The garden is full of mangoes and cinnamon trees. The love interest worked in a cigar shop until it burned down. The town's main export is gourmet cheese. Umbrellas have become fashionable even on sunny days. It is religiously forbidden for women to wear shoes. Just, you know, whatever. It doesn't need an internal logic or consistency. I'm building on the fly.

In trying to explain this and grasping for terms, I started calling it Chekhov's gun rack. You know some of them have to be fired by the end, but you can get away without shooting all of them. In improv theater terms, it's called "saying yes"- taking every new idea put forward as true and doing whatever you have to not to contradict it.

By the time I've inserted half a dozen to a dozen details (and I've been writing this whole time), patterns will have begun to suggest themselves. Perhaps our heroine, now a crabby older woman, lost those two children in an epidemic that caused people to radically rethink their faith and adopt all sorts of new, troublesome, fundamentalist practices, like women being forbidden from wearing shoes. This offers up a great potential conflict, since she and her love interest can be of different opinions as to whether or not this is a good thing- which in turn gives them something to believe and reasons to believe it (being righteous didn't save his shop from burning down, did it?). It also presents some additional obstacles for my main character (there are jobs she can't safely do and places she can't safely go without shoes- or indeed, perhaps she's been denied the protection of footwear she has some sort of wound or old injury that results in a limp). What I can't consolidate (mangoes, cheese, umbrellas) becomes background detail and ambiance (in this case it means our setting is tropical, linked to broader trade networks, probably industrialized, and relatively prosperous on the global scale), and what I can weave in starts eventually (hopefully) to support itself and look like it was planned from the start. Occasionally, I'm left with something striking but orphaned (I wrote an alien invasion story where I'd stated there was no more coffee anywhere in the world, but left it unsupported as to why or how it was connected), but distracting little bits like that are pretty easy to delete later.

Just as a note- I'll often throw out the first idea I have for connections or extrapolations (in the above example my first impulse was to write the woman as grouchy about how things have changed and her lost freedom, while the man was a true believer, but I think it's actually more charming the other way around, as the heroine then goes from someone who cannot fight against the overwhelming currents of her times to someone who refuses to engage in acts that would actually benefit her, because they run counter to her convictions. It also makes for a more sympathetic love interest. I envision a gentle, sad old man.) The easiest answer is often not the most interesting one.

The process doesn't lend itself to careful world building, but I find I really like the results, which end up as often as not being kind of quirky and unexpected. Honestly, even when I have world-built, I still do some of this, because I find it much easier (and honestly more fun) than trying to start by making a complete and consistent world and extrapolate the details that logically follow from it.

In my experience, life itself is chaotic, and full of silly little things that don't fit neatly. Like a brutal dictator kidnapping a film director to make his personal rubber-suit monster movie, or a large amount of the red food dye you eat being ground up insect shells. It's not always something you could have come up with logically, but it makes the world a more interesting place.

On Imagery

I've actually been asked for an imagery post, so here it goes. My thoughts. As always your mileage may vary, but this is what I think and what tends to work for me.

The most important thing, I think, to remember about imagery is that no word you ever use is a discreet entity whole and perfect unto itself. Let's take the word "cat". Because we're fluent speakers, we understand this particular aggregation of sounds (or in the written form letters) to mean a small furry domesticated predator, with sharp claws and whiskers and a reputation for gracefulness and good landings, sleeping 14 hours of every day, playing sadistically with its food, self-cleaning, arching its back defensively, purring when contented, maintaining an independent ambivalence it its owners if it has any, among other things. We also understand the word to refer to the groups of characteristics the house cats above share with the rest of the felis genus. We also, more distantly, understand it as slang for carousing (catting around) or a sort of beatnik cool gentleman or related to slang for female genitalia (also related to this relation: the phrase "cat house"). We know it can be subdivided into toms and strays and tabbies and calicoes and Siamese and kittens among others. We know its synonyms and related words include feline, pussy, kitten, etc; and even if we don't specifically know it's a term that came to us through germanic roots, but we know it's not a fancy french/latin term like feline. We may think of witches and cat ladies. Visions of yarn and litter boxes and mice dance in our heads. If we've had our own cats, we may think of them, or we may be thinking of some platonic ideal of a cat, or we may be thinking of the horrible smell of cat spray, the feel of shed hair on carpets and furniture. The grand American cultural lexicon gives us Garfield and Lolcats and the eponymous musical.

All of this and more is attached to the word "cat" to varying degrees, and each word used above has its own web of associations that include but are not limited to "cat". When you say "like a cat" you have the freedom to mean any of these things, and the hazard of all the things you're not trying to say. I think being really good at imagery is being able to draw out the threads of connotation around an individual word or concept and tie the ones you want to your subject.

(If you're interested in it academically, there's a whole psycho-cultural-linguistic school of thought called structuralism which examines our cultural foundations and our ability to perceive the world through the lens of our language and where we draw both connections and distinctions between the words that form the building materials of our thoughts. There's also a post-structuralist/deconstructionist vein of thought that is principally about examining how the intrinsic biases of culturally shaped language constrain and warp our ability to perceive. For the later you'll probably want to start the term semiotics and branch out from there)

se·mi·ot·ics

   [see-mee-ot-iks, sem-ee-, see-mahy-] Show IPA

noun ( used with a singular verb )

1.

the study of signs and symbols as elements ofcommunicative behavior; the analysis of systems ofcommunication, as language, gestures, or clothing.

2.

a general theory of signs and symbolism, usually divided intothe branches of pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics.)

Anyway, that got a little more lecture-y than I meant it to, but basically the point I want to get across is that imagery is artfully bringing to bear some or all of the connotations of an unrelated concept in order to describe a thing or create a mood or motif that influences the tone of the larger piece.

I admit, personally, a lot of the time I use imagery just because it's fun and that's the style of writing I enjoy both producing and consuming (I go for baroque). There is definitely something to be said for crisp, uncluttered, Hemingway-esque prose. It's absolutely beautiful for understating action and making it stand out more because it's casually presented. It's clean, it reads fast, it conveys information, and done well it evokes just as much reader involvement because it doesn't overburden the reader with the author's opinions or observations. Imagery-heavy prose, by contrast, can at its best make sure the reader is bringing a life full of memory, culture, and sensation to bear on what might be an otherwise plain scene. It's good for developing the internality of a character- how they see the world and what associations they make. It can paint a neutral scene dark or bright, forlorn or tense, by the way you chose to describe things.

So. One of the points I would like to make is that imagery is certainly not just going "her X was like Y". Sometimes it's just a pretty image and you do it because it's a darling little phrase you want to birth into the world, but every time you tie one thing to another it stays with us. You can't describe the armchair in which your father sits in terms of an electric chair for one line and expect that not to leave smears of doom and criminality (or unjust punishment) all over the father character, and a lingering sense of fear attached to that chair for the rest of your story (assuming it reappears, you may just be trying to describe the father obliquely). If you read a lot of horror stories, you'll notice a pattern especially that things are not white like clouds and daisies, they're white like bones and maggots, because the horror writer is trying to subtly unsettle you the whole way through, to recreate that feeling of being alone in a too-big house, jumping at shadows and seeing murderous intruders when all that's there is your grandfather clock. Likewise, you're probably not going to see maggot white in a love story, because the author is trying to craft a gestalt of want, of desire, of appreciating beauty, sometimes of feeling safe, sometimes of feeling dangerously excited (to the latter end they might describe something like the rush of standing at the edge of a tall cliff and feeling the wind whip against them). Images are great for giving cues, for provoking emotional reaction, or even just for conveying something that language does not have a single adequate word for. (Seriously, just as an exercise, try to describe the feeling of being smiled at by someone you love in a way that lets you know they love you too, and tell me if "good", "relieved", or "happy" really sum it up.)

Any word choice has the potential to nurture a little imagery (I was going to use a different example, but see "nurture" in that sentence? It's not strictly an accurate word. Neither word has volition or needs, but I can animate the sentence by the analogy of word choice gently feeding and caring for imagery so that imagery can grow up big and strong). One good not-strictly-accurate verb is a beautiful microcosm for a larger analogy, and sometimes that's all you really need. You don't have to tell me the salesman was reptilian and predatory toward his customers, if you can just tell me he slithered. Sometimes the lightest touch is absolutely best.

As for giving imagery punch, the biggest thing is just not to use common analogies unless you're really going to push them through to the other side of boring. It's really unimpressive to hear your heroine's eyes shine like diamonds or are as blue as the deep blue sea- unless you're going to carry that analogy further, from blandly pretty (or blandly horrible) into something novel and interesting. "Her eyes were like the deep blue sea; he knew below the surface they were full of sharks". Reversals on standard analogies are actually one of my favorite things to do. We have a lot of stock images that are associated with being wholly good or evil, positive or negative, masculine or feminine, active or passive. How many times have you heard golden used to describe something ugly? How often have you seen snakes used to describe something good? When you use an analogy we expect to conform to one category to describe something pertaining to another, there's an inherent tension that makes the sentence memorable. "His movements were clean, alive, and graceful as a snake new-burst from its skin." This works especially well when the analogy is something that's got a lot whole lot of force and expectation behind it (eg. mother, priest, sex, criminal, money, heroin, infant, lynch mob)

I guess the only other big theory I've got about it is that the analogies you make, whether explicit or implied are kind of a bridge between two things, and the farther those things are apart, the more tense and interesting that comparison is (though the farther apart they are, the more you have to shore them up to keep them from falling apart.) "The strawberries were like raspberries" is not a terribly interesting statement (in fact it's kind of a confusing thing to say because it's close enough it hardly seems like imagery at all), especially not next to "the strawberries were like red dirigibles" or "the strawberries were like can-can dancers" (the latter example is one that needs shoring. Left at that, I'm really not sure what you mean, but if you give me a bit about them being, teasing and succulent, or lined up on top of the white platform of a cake, the bridge is strong enough to carry a reader across, if a little self-indulgent (honestly, possibly enough so to put a number of readers off, but that's a matter of taste.))

Imagery's like spice in your cooking. It's entirely possible to overdo it and spoil the whole thing, but it's worth bearing in mind that some people love plain potatoes and grilled chicken breast, and some of us really dig a steaming bowl of super-hot curry. My advice is play, do what you love, figure out the mechanisms, and understand that there's no absolute way to do it right (though there are numerous ways to do it very wrong). 

Generative Ethnography of the Fantastic

I love me some pretentious titles!

Anyway, I was talking to a couple of friends independently about world building over the last couple of days, specifically about both how to create a world in which to put her characters in one friend's case, and how to tell character stories in a built world, which I think is something we all struggle with in fantasy and science fiction to some extent. So, this is often my process:

1. Big theme, difference, or "hook"

What is the single biggest "not our world" element of your story? Is there a sickness that turns people into animals according to their sins? Is it a future where our smart phones have all become nodes of a global machine consciousness bent on our destruction? Are there psychic alien parasites residing in every bit of aluminum on the planet? More conventionally, is there a world where fairies and humans coexist and fairies are the source of all magic, though humans are slowly appropriating some of it? You know, whatever you like, but this'll be the thing that makes your story genre, and very likely one of the central plot points.

2. Anchor details

I like at least two other big unrelated details about your world or your society. There are rivers full of corrosive hallucinogens, it's a matriarchy, there's been a global war, cannibalism is accepted practice, kids are born by batch cloning, things are modeled on feudal Japan, everyone has a backup heart, the country is on the edge of a revolution because of a powerful anarchist faction, capital punishment is banned and instead criminals are maimed or blinded, graven idols actually grant wishes, family bonds are totemic rather than by blood, what have you. The important thing is that they're things you think would be fun, and they're not related to what you picked in number one.

2.5 Borrowing

My degree is in anthropology and I read a lot of ethnographic, history, science, and trivia stuff for fun. I have a vast cache of information I can plunder from at the drop of a hat, and often my new ideas come from reading the sorts of things above and going "man, that would make a great element in a story". I recommend reading widely and without particular predisposition to anyone interested in world building. Serious, just click the random link of the day in wikipedia and surf on through. When you come across something you're not familiar with, read up. You may end up with a pidgin-speaking wizard with a capybara familiar, and it might just be awesome.

3. Extrapolation

What do your three things mean in conjunction with each other? What kind of society accommodates all three? Let's pick three of the above: the animal plague, the anarchist revolution, and the wishing idols. Because they're a society that can form an anarchist philosophy and stage a revolution, I'm going to say they're pretty sophisticated as far as government, centralization, and dissemination of ideas. In fact, I'm going to say that the fact that idols can grant wishes has led to an economy with very little scarcity, which has allowed technology to flourish, especially since some motivated people were able to wish for faustian level understandings of things, so they actually have some things way more sophisticated than we do (this is a totally arbitrary aesthetic choice I'm backing up with a rationale from one of my three points. What I'm envisioning is something SORT of steam punk, a combination of 18th-19th century style setting and future tech. The point I want to make is at this stage, it's still about what's possible, and what's fun, rather than what's necessary.) I want the animal plague to be something the idols can't fix. The next thought is if anyone can wish for anything, how did we get a centralized system that anarchists would rebel against? And the immediate option I come up with is that there is a single class that controls access to the icons. To me it makes the most sense that they would be priests of some kind, and I love the word hierophant, so our ruling class will be a central religious bureaucracy that has become sprawling, officious, and corrupt. I don't want it to be based on lineage, because that seems done, but I do want it to be secretive and very picky about who it lets in and who it promotes- after all, I'm creating conditions that would lead to popular anarchism and revolution. The animal plague is going to be the spark that lights that whole powder keg, as the priests will start restricting idol access even more when they don't work to cure the plague, because these things are the basis of their power and they don't want them questioned- whereas of course people on the outside will see it as a strike against everyone who isn't bureaucracy.

3.5 Points of conflict

I'm already doing this in the example above, but I think one of the important things to do at this stage is look for points of conflict, because these are where the good stories happen. Is there a massive criminal organization? Does one group have way more power than another? Are there restrictive laws and taboos? Is there a disenfranchised minority? Is there some rare product or material that's necessary for magic or technology to work? Where is a person's social mobility limited? What's potentially unfair? Are there deadly monsters or weather phenomenon? What in this society will get you hurt, exploited, raped, disowned, arrested, or killed?

4. Body stress test

Take a moment and look at what you've made critically. What factors don't work with each other and how can you address them? Important note: I don't think you actually HAVE to revise them. Our world is full of contradictions, and they lend a feeling of lived-in verisimilitude to a fake world. They can be exceptions, rarities, minority group dissensions, or even outright hypocrisy, but you're going to want to be aware they're there. Done consciously it looks nuanced. Done without examining it, it looks sloppy. For example, does your city with high-ranking sacred prostitute priestesses still demonize female sexuality and use "whore" as an insult? If you don't deal with why, it looks inconsistent, but possibly it's a rebellious faction trying to slander them, possibly it's the mores of a conquered people vs. the mores of an invading ruling class, possibly it's the priestesses' own way to undercut and debase any potential competition. Or, you can deal with it by removing either the priestesses or the prejudice for most people. Basically just give everything a once over as a whole piece, look for any glaring errors, and decide if and how they fit into the larger picture.

5. Character choice

Who is least well served by this society? For whom will it require the most conflict to reap the rewards your world offers? In the animal plague story above, I need somebody who is cut out of the political structure entirely- so someone who's no friend either to the bureaucrats or the anarchists. I'll pick somebody who tried to get into the priesthood but failed out and in the process got blacklisted for offending a high level hierophant, so now they get blocked no matter what they try to do, but most especially they are banned from idol wishing, and the anarchists have no love for this person, because they clearly had bureaucracy aspirations. This person has someone they love more than anyone else- I'm tempted to say a spouse, sibling, or child, who has stuck with them and helped them throughout all of this and now has contracted the painful, humiliating, and ultimately personhood-annihilating plague. Maybe they'll win over the anarchists to overthrow the priesthood or maybe they'll beg the priesthood to let them make one wish if they willingly act as a mole. Who knows. The important thing is you've got someone who this world has backed into a corner, and that's when people get desperate and interesting.

Other potentially interesting characters for a longer work, or as an alternate main for a short work, include people who are so thoroughly indoctrinated into one subgroup or culture (or even the main culture) that they can't see the contradictions that inform their daily lives. To borrow from the example above, maybe you write about the specific prostitute priestess whose job it is to defame, punish, and humiliate lesser whores, which she sees as her holy duty because she clearly has nothing in common with these women. These can be great stories of awakening. Often the best people for this are the enforcers or primary beneficiaries of the system, though it's a good arc for someone you want to be an opposition demagogue as well.

You can also, certainly, reverse engineer from this point. Say you've got a fabulous character and their conflict planned out. You can pick their hypocrisies and their points of opposition and build a whole world out of that. Say you want to do a blind seer who falls in love with a prince whose father and kingdom she's seeing dooooooom for. What can you put in to make that even harder for her? Maybe a strict caste marriage system? Maybe all sorts of extra prejudice about blind people and a lingering suspicion that it's communicable by touch? Maybe vastly different vaguely connected language groups that make her seem clumsy and ineloquent to the point of being deliberately hateful to him when she talks, when all she's trying to do is warn him for his own good? And what sort of wars, feuds, or geographic uncrossables would divide two people who previously spoke the same language until they mutated into barely intelligible dialects? You could pick a massive open lava crack that spewed poison and which each side blamed the others' magic for, and across which trade and travel had only just recently been reestablished. The world is your oyster. The best of my advice is to make sure you have fun.

So those are my two cents, which means I appear to be operating at about a $0.000015 a word today.

EDIT:

6. Checklist

This is not as much work as it's about to sound like, you don't have to have an exhaustive encyclopedia on these, but it helps to have at least a vague idea of your fantasy society's:

1. geographical features
2. weather patterns
3. ecology (flora and fauna (also if you have monsters, what do they eat?))
4. local industries including crops
5. trade goods
6. goods acquirable only through trade (what is exotic, valuable, and scary?)
7. food and fresh water sources
8. demographics (population numbers, ages, races, common physical features, birth and death numbers)
9. religions
10. social groups and castes
11. methods of determining status
12. upward or downward mobility
13. gender and age roles (including sex and relationship expectations)
14. cuisine
15. drugs, alcohol, and basically what people do to get high (or at least some segment of people)
16. fashions (including jewelry and body modification)
17. taboos and superstitions
18. local legends, myths, and ghost stories
19. birth, marriage, coming of age, and funeral rites
20. holidays and festivals
21. system of currency or exchange, economics (eg. shells, precious metals, paper money, floating debt, system of gift giving)
22. laws and process of jurisprudence (who is a criminal, how they are judged, and how they are punished?)
23. waste disposal process (including human waste. Seriously. It's important)
24. language
25. writing system and literacy
26. means of transportation
27. methods of communicating over long distances
28. medicine
29. level of technology
30. martial prowess, especially if they have a specialty weapon or style of fighting (eg. Mongol horseback archery)
31. history including wars, allegiances, and treaties
32. knowledge of the outside world (including dead-wrong misconceptions)
33. entertainment, games, leisure activities
34. magical system, if they have one
35. criminal segment, black market, or otherwise illicit industries and activities

And probably more, though I think 35's a reasonable list. If you don't know, don't be afraid to just jot in a quick filler like "cuisine: spicy, lots of rice and peppers" or "medicine: medieval Europe". It's not important what you put, just that you've thought about it- and often, just thinking about it will give you an idea for a good scene. And again, each of these can certainly play off another. For example, if you have a taboo about women showing their hair, the fashion will likely include a lot of scarves and hats.

Enjoy!

Autoapocryphal

I write myself a lot of notes. Very often, I'm driving, and I'll hold an idea in my head just long enough to get to the next red light and vomit it out (metaphorically) onto whatever paper is close enough to contain it. I tend to assume that as long as I have some hook to cling to, I'll be able to remember what I was thinking. I'm often wrong. Taken archaeologically, there are whole strata of things I've written down that are currently a mystery to me. Here are some of these:

"the mainspring of heaven"

"oneric?"

"The novel gypsies have a drum syllabary"

"Sequel, if needed, she starts school"

"Apocalypso- the steel drum of doom. Jerk sauce Ragnarok. End of Day-os"

"Zombie fruit"

"It was started by some famous dead guy"

"Rocket Surgeon"

"Catsploitation"

"Sex laws under Caesar Augustus"

"Look at underground railroad."

"Hawaiian fusion bone breaking art"

"The Gastronaut"

"When crossing the psychic music desert, one must rely on one's spirit rocker as a guide" (Joe Strummer is written in the margin)

"The Ever-After Machine"

"Mixed medium assemblage with electricity"

"Perpetual present"

"knife throwing, if you think about it, jesus"

I know I meant something when I wrote those things. I'm not above repurposing them, because some of them sound quite cool, but I wonder what the original impetus for them was.

The Five Year Plan, Comrades

I stopped by Tim Pratt's website, and he mentioned both his birthday and the goals he'd set for himself back in his college years. He also mentioned he'd sold his hundredth story recently. It got me thinking about where I am now and where I want to be as a writer.

So, here it is, starting with my birthday (coming up next month) because that's a nice, easy, memorable date.

Year One (January 2012):

Have 30 short stories in circulation (I list "in circulation" because that's the aspect I control of. Ideally some of these will be published as well).
Have 1 novel in circulation.
Attend at least two professional conventions.
Be eligible for and purchase SFWA membership.

Year Two (January 2013, assuming inaccurate Mayan doomsday prophecies):

Have at least 70 stories in circulation.
Have 2 novels in circulation.
Attend a nice writing workshop (I wish you didn't have to quit a job, basically, to go to Clarion, but I've heard good things about Viable Paradise.)
See if I can get on a panel at a convention.

Year Three (2014):

Have enough short stories previously published to be able to pitch an anthology.
Have at least one novel written that I think is awesome and clever.
Have met Neil Gaiman.
Have had previously published work solicited.

Year Four (2015):

Have acquired an agent and sold at least one novel. Have earned an advance.
Write a novel on contract
See if I can get someone to pay for me to be at a convention (room and entry).

Year Five (2016):

Have had a book published.
Have achieved enlightenment/happiness.

I don't know, I actually start to get a bit nebulous more than a few years out. I mean, I don't know what else will be going on in my life. I can't anticipate windfalls or serious setbacks. I'm probably missing some steps or approaching things naively, and examining it, five years seems like an awfully long way away.

Still, I guess if you're going driving it always helps to have a map.

The 1% Project

Before I start, I want to say, this is less a political manifesto than a thought experiment.

The Credit Suisse estimates that across the 4.4 billion adults living on the planet, there is a collective net worth of 195 trillion US dollars in 2010. Of that 195, the study indicates that the top 1% own about 84 trillion. Given a World Bank estimate that the global population is about 6.7 billion (please excuse the quick, dirty math), the redistributed wealth of the top 1% would give every man, woman, and child on earth about 12,500 US dollars.

I have thought for some time that it would just be the most fascinating thing to do to get a bunch of authors to posit on that exactly happening, in a collection of short tightly focussed stories. Again, not out of a sense of populist rage, but just as a way to examine what that amount of money means around the world, and different people's take on what that loss or windfall would mean for the people who received it.

How many people quit the jobs where they were making dollars a day? How many people quit the jobs where they were making minimum wage? What does this mean to a man who worked his whole life to amass his fortune, and now finds himself with nothing, just on the whim of the universe? What about the man who has never worked at all? The addict? The wife who's trying to leave? The wife who's trying to make her husband stay? What does it mean to the fisherman on the Amazon who lives on less than ten dollars a day? What does it mean to a middle class American who is 70,000 dollars in debt? What does it mean to the American who was previously just middle class, but is now the new richest man in the world (the report indicates you're in the top 1% of the world if you have a net worth of over about 560,000 USD)? What does it mean to the village in a war torn or dictatorial country that can now pool their money to buy a used T-55 Russian tank?

What happens to that money in places where it's illegal for women or certain races or religions to own property? What happens to that money when it goes to a child, or a comatose adult? Do people pool their new money with their friends and family to take care of collective needs, or do they jealously guard it as something that's just their own? What does that money mean to someone three days walk from the nearest place with electricity? Do people use it to improve their means of earning a living, like with the micro-loan program (which gives out loans in averages of about 100 USD to help people own the tools of their trade, rather than spending all their income renting them)? Do they blow it on something silly? How many people, unused to having money, are immediately taken advantage of by someone just a bit more canny? How many are robbed, now that the people with guns know everyone has $12,500? What happens at the IRS offices? What happens to powerful political figures who were used to being able to hire guards? What happens to an illegal drug mogul?

How do people change their lives? How do they survive? How do they rebuild empires?

Obviously, in the end, it varies by person.

What I envision are small, character focussed stories from as many locales as possible, detailing the reactions of one character or one family to the changes around them. I think it's something that would be a lot of fun, especially if one was able to get the perspective of multiple people. This is the sort of thing it's very easy to get blinders on about, and someone's always thought of something you haven't.

I don't really have the infrastructure or time to make this happen right now, but I really do think it's a fun and fabulous idea. Sometime later.

The Inventory

So, recently, I went through what stories I have on my computer. These are the rough numbers:

-? an unknown number of unwritten stories (though probably over 50) for which I have made quick notations as they occurred to me. These include:

• a weird west Chinese gunslinger story
• an instillation artist vs. a zombie invasion
• a puppeteer in a house of imperial courtesans
• a love story in a restaurant called "Baba Yaga's Dancing Chicken Shack" with some notes about folk-tale themed dishes the place would serve.

I have been scribbling notes down on receipts, spare pieces of paper, the backs of class notebooks, just whatever's handy. Many of these are affixed to my refrigerator with magnets, and, honestly, I don't look at them much, but they're there when I need them.

-About 50 unfinished stories. In my defense, the bulk of these come from a weekly group exercise I was a part of in which we would be assigned a quick prompt and then given one hour in which to complete a story. Some of these were the disposable trash one might expect, but I got some real gems too, and I hope to go back to many of them.

-About 75 first drafts. Between hour writing on one site and contests on another, I have finished a fair bit of fiction, but I have a great deal of anxiety about editing. I realize it's something I just need more practice at, but it has had an unfortunate tendency to actually make stories worse. Even among the best of these stories, I don't feel there are any ready to send out yet.

-About 10-15 stories in some stage of editing.

-6 stories currently in submission rotation, of which 3 are flash.

-1 published story.

I went through this list and looked at which stories I was absolutely sure I wanted to publish. These were my personal favorites, and the ones I think show off my best as a writer. I came up with 28 out of that list of 125 written and partially written stories, which is a little easier to work with. For the 17 that were first drafts, I'm going to see if I can find a magazine home to submit them to, and if I can, I'll edit up the ones I think I can place first.

Those 17 are (in alphabetical order by title (not appearing)):

• the beetle creation myth
• the wish granted to the schizophrenic
• the slipstream thing in the car trunk
• the noveau-arabian nights fable with the pastry
• the story about the maze and the guy destined to die 100000 times
• the flash dream piece with the lizards
• the arctic unicorns story
• the kid's fiction about fear and manticores
• the swamp witch love story
• the punk rock version of the orpheus myth
• the story where they show crazy people in a circus
• the flash about virgin sacrifices in a divine brothel
• the story about the old female knight coming home
• the story about the dragon rider pirates
• the jazz era retelling of Eros and Psyche
• the hungry ghost story/ Chinese festival story

So that's my plan.

Happy Bicentenial Mexican Independence Day!