JJ Litke

the neural pathways less traveled

Short story roundup, July 2018

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I’m focused on short stories for next year’s Hugos. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could start sharing the stories I’m reading in a highly organized way? Well sure, that would be lovely, but let’s just start with the sharing. Then we’ll move on to organized, and later on see if we can eventually attach a highly in there as well. So here are some stories I read this past month that were not necessarily freshly published this month.

Untimely Frost, Unlikely Bloom, by Hayley Stone, in Flash Fiction Online, July 2018
Lovely, creepy, and sad, this is sort of a dark fairy tale of a poisonous person who kills any creature she comes in contact. It did bring up quite a few logistical questions as I read it—how did she survive to adulthood, and how is she managing to survive now—but you really just need to accept that it’s a fairy tale.

A Most Elegant Solution, by M. Darusha Wehm, in Terraform, April 27, 2018
People are always proud of their own creations, aren’t they? Even when those creations wind up devouring everyone. It was nice of them to kill everyone else first and leave mom for last, at least. That’s the scenario as the story begins, then goes into flashback to show how we got to that point. I think the story would be a bit stronger with the last couple of paragraphs (don’t think we needed the extra explanation), but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds, by James Beamon, in Lightspeed, July 2018
Holy shit, this piece. Monkeys as weapons of war, controlled by an organ grinder… you know what, describing it isn’t going to do it justice, just go read it.

Waterbirds, by G.V. Anderson, in Lightspeed, July 2018
Celia is an A.I. Companion whose employer is missing. Celia’s memory about what exactly happened seems a bit hazy on a few details, and the more pieces are filled in, the more tense it gets. What’s going to become of poor Celia now that her benefactor is gone? G.V. Anderson won the World Fantasy Award Best Short Fiction for Das Steingeschöpf in 2017, and this story is a likely candidate to be brought up in award conversations next year.

 

Fun to hate: mimes

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According to TV Tropes, everyone hates mimes. Okay, maybe not everyone, but mimes are not exactly beloved by one and all.

Just look at this guy. You don’t want him coming anywhere near you, do you?

What’s with all the mime hate? TV Tropes theorizes it’s an Uncanny Valley effect, that is, when something gets very close to appearing human but isn’t quite all the way there (think ventriloquist dummy or clown) it creeps the hell out of people. Probably a lot to do with it, but I suspect it doesn’t help that mimes are also associated with street performers who follow people around and mock them. You make someone feel foolish and they can unleash a crazy amount of hate for it.

But I think it has everything to do with that painted face. Which I think is the same reason people are creeped out by clowns. And aren’t mimes really just a subset of clowns?

Anyway, in my latest story, The Invisible Box, a woman uses the idea that people would avoid a mime like the plague to get revenge. Personally I love how absurd the concept is, but it’s still so dark at the same time. Maybe that’s just me and my weirdo sense of humor, though.

Read more, enjoy it more

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A father reading a novel with an affecting plot to family. Wellcome L0040392
Dude, you are scaring the crap out of your family.
I need to read more books. I mean, really really need to read more. I used to read tons of books, and when I ran out of books I reread the ones I had. And I’m still reading a whole lot. But last year I was still focused on short stories (which I read virtually every day). I logged an embarrassingly low six novels in Goodreads. To be fair, I did read more than that, so now I’m also embarrassed that I didn’t even fully track the small number I read. It doesn’t help that my to-be-read list is so freaking long that sometimes just looking at it makes me go do something else, like clean the shower or dig out an old tree stump in the backyard. At least those things were achievable, with a decided end point. The TBR list has no end in sight. It is infinite. Eternal. Someday, after the world ends, the electrons of people’s TBR lists from Goodreads will be all that remain. So put some good stuff on yours, okay?

Now I’m going to consciously focus on getting in more novels, instead of books’ worth of shorts. I saw a good blog post about this from Roni Loren, who is going for five pages a day. Of course it’s a trick—she’ll get herself hooked and read more than that! See? I don’t think that five-page trick is going to work so well on me, though. Not that I’m too clever for it, not at all. It’s just that my brain can be weirdly literal. Five pages means FIVE PAGES WE’RE STOPPING AFTER FIVE.

So my goal is twenty pages—something achievable, yet I could still make progress. And strangely, I find my brain is more flexible about that number. Why? I don’t know, by twenty pages it just gives up or something. Anyway, I think I can make that work.

The best tip for me in Roni’s post is the bit about trying to decide what to read next and trying out the first five pages of a couple of books. I think this will help me get rid of the “what I should read” monster that takes some of the fun out of reading.

And that’s a pretty important part of all this—have fun with it. Find what works for you, then keep doing that.

Though there’s a lot to be said for short fiction, too.

Newly published story: When the Planets Left

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My flash story—When the Planets Left—is live at Cast of Wonders!

It’s one of their Little Wonders episodes that combine flash stories together. My story is second, starting at about 9:15. The first story is The There-It-Is Store by Adam Gaylord.

The episode theme is Embracing Change. I knew my story involved a concept of change (I know because I wrote it), but it was eerie to listen to the entire episode and see what an amazing job they did of blending my little story into a deeply meaningful theme.

Enjoy!

Harbinie of Death!

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Farstrider2CoverArtA circling raven is never a good sign, even when it’s riding a bicycle.

At last, Harbinie of Death is live at Farstrider Magazine!

I really love this story, and I’ve gotten really great, encouraging feedback on it from other writers (thank you, Slugtribe!). In fact I’d have to give this story credit as one of the main pieces that helped me feel like I’m really part of a writing community instead of an outsider peeking in the windows.

The amazing Damoclian wrote a review for it on his blog. I’m not sure the story does his review justice, but it’s a little thrilling to let myself imagine that it does.

I’m currently working on a novel based in this same world that I hope to start querying soon. Yay, querying, right? Nothing’s more fun than that!

Dragon cake!

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Before recent events, I had never ordered a custom cake. Not even for my wedding reception. That whole deal was casual, and cake was the least of my worries then.

Mom: What about the cake?

Me: *shrug* I don’t know. I guess we should get one.

Mom: You want me to take care of that?

Me: Sure.

It was a very nice sheet cake that served the obligatory wedding-reception-cake purposes.

But as my 50th birthday approached, I got it into my head that I wanted fancy cake. Cake so special and amazing that if you saw it somewhere, you’d be struck by its awesomeness and try to think how to ask it out, but in the end you wouldn’t because you know it can do better and you really aren’t in this cake’s league. That kind of cake.

I found my cake artist at Kelly’s Cakes. When I told Kelly I wanted a dragon on the cake, she asked if I wanted it to be in the style of the O’Connor Dungeons & Dragons type—I knew I had the right person for the job.

And this was the cake!

Photos courtesy of my friend Jo at wavytail.com.

You guys, look at the details! The little tears in the wings! All the scaling! The teeth! His adorable nostrils!

He’s made of modeling chocolate, with fondant wings and gum paste details on his head. So, yes, he’s technically edible. My quandary now is whether to go ahead and eat him until the sugar overload makes me ill, or try to keep him wrapped in plastic until he decomposes. Or I could throw everything else in my freezer away and keep him in there forever, just so I can peek in on him every so often. Freezer dragon could be a fun thing, right?