Category: current projects

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Tales of Tales ~ Part 2

  By current projects, just for fun, personal & miscellaneous, publishing, reading, Third Person Press, To Unimagined Shores, writer development, writing life

Today I’ve picked another story out of the table of contents for To Unimagined Shores to talk about a little.

“Little Things” is my first-ever published story. It appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s FANTASY magazine in 1997. It’s also the first story I wrote about what turned out to be a series character, a young mage’s apprentice named Albettra. The funny thing about this sale is that I vividly remember getting a postcard in the mail simply telling me that this story was “on hold” at MZBFM. At that time I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t a rejection, so I was ecstatic! I don’t actually remember getting the acceptance letter. The brain is a funny thing.

This was also the first story I’d submitted anywhere. Its sale made me think that this whole getting-published thing was not going to be so difficult after all. Ah, the golden optimism of the beginning writer!

“That ill-begotten son of a cantankerous sow has gone too far this time!” he bellowed, stalking the room with beard aquiver. “The man is a mountebank! A copper coin would be too much to pay for one of his spells! A lying charlatan, that’s what he is, and he dares to spread rumors about me!”

“Zipnax?” I hazarded the name in a small voice.

“Of course, Zipnax! Bah! The name makes my tongue shrivel to say it!” Nissio was flailing his arms wildly now, his robe fluttering madly and his beard flying in every direction.

I was cautiously working my way around to the other side of my worktable. I had never seen the old fellow so angry and I knew I’d feel a lot safer with something solid between us. When his erratic pacing took him near a wall he’d take an angry swing at it with a wizened fist. There couldn’t be much physical strength left in the man, but it didn’t take much to set the walls of the rattletrap cottage swaying. Dust was floating lazily down from the ceiling again and I stifled a sneeze.

“To accuse me of stealing!” the old mage was ranting now. “Imagine me, stealing one of his pitiful ideas!”

Bam! His fist hit a wall.*

The origins of Albettra herself and the idea for this story escape me now, they’re so far back in the mists of time. I do like Albettra, though, and I like the way she keeps turning up in my brain with a story idea in tow. She’s sometimes unsure of herself but feisty when she needs to be, and determined to win out in the end. I suppose, if I get all psychological about it, she’s a bit of a reflection of myself as a writer.

There are four Albettra stories in To Unimagined Shores. I’d like to know what you think of her as a character, if you happen to read them. You can do that in the comments section of this blog, on my Author Central page at amazon.com, or over at Goodreads.

If you missed the earlier blog post, I’m currently running a contest to win a copy of To Unimagined Shores. Click the link to get all the details, and take a moment to enter. Or if you can’t wait, you can buy a print or ebook copy (in multiple formats) from thirdpersonpress.com, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.

*My more astute writerly colleagues will notice a fair bit of passive voice in this excerpt…probably in the whole story. It’s interesting to note that at the time this story was written/published, it was not considered such a stylistic anathema. It’s an example of the ongoing evolution of writing style that I find fascinating. Anyway, it didn’t feel right to me to re-edit previously published stories for this collection, so I left things like this alone.

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Tales of Tales ~ Part 1

  By current projects, ebooks, just for fun, publishing, reading, Third Person Press, To Unimagined Shores, writer development, writing life

To celebrate the release of my short story collection, To Unimagined Shores, I thought I’d do a series of blog posts about some of the stories in the collection. Where the inspiration for the story came from, or maybe something interesting that happened while I was writing it, or where it was published.

I’m starting with a little story called “The Big Freeze,” since it was one of the stories I read at last night’s launch. It’s also one of my favorites (although as writers, are we supposed to say things like that? I don’t know…but I guess I also don’t care!).

As I look through the table of contents for To Unimagined Shores, I realize that many of the stories I write have a common idea spark: a call for submissions for a themed anthology. I begin pondering ideas to fit the theme, and usually after much mental cogitation come up with a story idea. Now, I don’t always finish writing the story by the anthology deadline, so in many cases I end up sending the story elsewhere. But that’s all right, because the idea spark has served its purpose.

“The Big Freeze” is one of those stories. It was published in Australia’s Semaphore Magazine last year, but I initially wrote it years ago, in response to an anthology call. The idea of the anthology was that all of the stories should be based around a saying about “Hell”–going to Hell in a handbasket, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, etc. I started thinking about “when Hell freezes over”–what might cause such a thing to happen? How would the denizens of Hell react? And what would be the repercussions on Earth?

Here’s a little snippet from “The Big Freeze”:

“Is it getting…chilly in here?”

Beelzebub, the Devil, the Prince of Hell, (or Lord B., as he preferred his most intimate minions to call him) shifted uneasily on the polished red marble of his throne and stroked the tips of his horns. There was no doubt about it. They felt decidedly and unnaturally cool.

He’d been thinking it for some time, but now that he’d finally spoken the words, they hung hesitantly in the sulphurous air like lost souls unsure if they were in the right place. Imps ranged at humming computer terminals around the perennially smouldering room looked up, then glanced at each other. One rubbed his scaly hands together.

“You know,” he chittered slowly, “now that you mention it, my mouse hand’s gone a little cold.”

Another imp nodded. “And my tail. I thought I was getting a chill in my tail, and now I’m sure of it.”

“Right.” Lord B. straightened on his throne and bellowed, “Mr. Snizzle! Get in here!”

A slight, harried-looking demon entered the room at a trot. A pair of tortoiseshell spectacles perched on his nose, and he wore an unexpectedly conservative waistcoat tailored in tasteful ebony silk. “Yes, Lord B.?”

“Mr. Snizzle, run a diagnostic on the temperature controls. This room is falling below acceptable heat standards. Even the imps have noticed it.”

Mr. Snizzle, Lord B.’s administrative assistant, was well-versed in interpreting the subtleties of his employer’s speech. After several centuries in his current position without a vacation, that was hardly surprising. The relative politeness of the Devil’s request worried him. He nodded briskly and hurried back to his own computer to run the heat diagnostics…

As you might guess, “The Big Freeze” is meant to be a fun story—and it got some laughs at last night’s reading. I also read it for an audience in Second Life a while back.

If you missed the earlier blog post, I’m currently running a contest to win a copy of To Unimagined Shores. Click the link to get all the details, and take a moment to enter. Or if you can’t wait, you can buy a print or ebook copy (in multiple formats) from thirdpersonpress.com.

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Contest ~ Win a Copy of To Unimagined Shores

  By current projects, just for fun, reading, To Unimagined Shores

To celebrate the launch of my short story collection on Tuesday, I’ve decided to have a contest. :)

Two winner(s) will each receive a free copy of the book (print or ebook, winner’s choice).

What you have to do: Tell me the inspiration for/provenance of the book’s title.

But there’s a twist, as well. You can either:

  1. Name the specific literary reference (minimal internet search skills should get you there) OR
  2. Make up a brief story about where the title might have come from (where “brief” means 250 words or less).

I will sort the entries into two piles, one for each type of entry (of course only CORRECT answers will go into the literary reference pile), and at the end of the contest, draw one random winner from each pile.

Contest is open NOW. Contest ends DECEMBER 15th, 2011, midnight Atlantic time.

How to enter: Send your entries to me at wordsmith101 (at) excite.com, or use the email form on this website. If you’re sending a story, please type it right into the body of the email. Please use the subject heading “Contest: Reference” or “Contest: Story” as appropriate.

Additional Details, Disclaimers, and Fine Print: Anyone may enter. Well, except my editors. I’m not even sure they know the answer to the question, but still, I should disqualify them just for the look of the thing, right? I will draw the winners on December 16th and notify them via email. I will also post the winners’ names here, so please be sure you’re okay with that before you enter. Please enter only one side of the draw (either literary reference or story). If you enter both, I won’t disqualify you, but I will place the appropriate one of your entries into whichever side has the most entries at that time. Naturally, the odds of winning will depend on the number of entries received. And we all know the vagaries of the internet; if your email goes astray, gets stuck in the inter-tubes, is swallowed up by a minuscule black hole, or fails to reach me because you typed the email address wrong or for any other reason, I’m not responsible. If you send me a “story” entry, I will not use it for any other purposes and I claim no right to it. I promise, it will not form the basis for my next novel. If you win and request the print version, it will be mailed to you via regular parcel post at my expense. If you win and request an electronic version, it will be provided in .epub, .mobi, and .pdf formats. If you need a different, more exotic format, I may or may not be able to provide it. I’ll try, but I can’t make any guarantees. If either of the categories receives NO entries, then of course no prize will be awarded for that category. Whew! Did I miss anything?

I look forward to seeing your entries!

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To Unimagined Shores launches December 6th

  By current projects, personal & miscellaneous, publishing, Third Person Press, To Unimagined Shores

I’m just going to quote the Press Release here (which I did NOT write, by the way, because it would have been much briefer and more modest had I done so. That’s why one of my editors/publishers wrote it. :) )


Third Person Press announces the release of its third book, “To Unimagined Shores,” a collection of speculative fiction stories by Northside native, Sherry D. Ramsey.

Sixteen stories were previously chosen for publication in an impressive array of international magazines, collections and anthologies including On Spec, Simulacrum, Fantasy Magazine, The Day the Men Went to Town (Breton Books), Michael Stackpole’s The Chain Story Project, Gateway S-F, Neo-opsis and others. The seventeenth is a bonus story, never before published.

The collection is divided into three parts. Part One, Science Fictional Shores, includes seven stories about such intriguing topics as a road trip with a hitch-hiking alien, stolen embryos on a colonized planet, and inter-planetary intrigue involving a savvy Spaceport detective. The second section, Fantastic Shores, contains six fantasy-based stories on such deliciously intriguing subjects as a Victorian time machine, climate change in Hell, and a daughter’s redemption with the help of an unconventional angel. The last section, Magical Shores, boasts four stories which revolve around one main character: a young female apprentice to a crotchety but wise old wizard. The stories are by turns funny, tragic, light-hearted, serious but are always adventurous and unusual. Mark Rayner, author of The Amadeus Net and Marvellous Hairy, writes: “Sherry D. Ramsey’s short stories are filled with vibrant characters, good writing, and thrum with humanity, even when there aren’t many actual humans in the story.”

Ramsey, a former lawyer, is a full-time writer whose unpublished novel, “One’s Aspect to the Sun,” won second place in the 28th Annual Atlantic Writing Competition’s novel category, the H.R. (Bill) Percy Prize. She participates in the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Writers-in-the-Schools program, and serves on the boards of The Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia, SF Canada and the Northside Victoria CBDC. She has been editor-in-chief and publisher of the award-winning online writer’s resource, The Scriptorium, for a over dozen years and is one of three founders of Third Person Press, local publishers of speculative fiction.

A book launch will be held Tuesday, December 6, 2011 from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Wilfred Oram Centennial Library, Commercial Street, North Sydney. Refreshments will be served, and the author will read from the collection and be available to sign books. The book can be purchased at the launch or anytime from Third Person Press at www.thirdpersonpress.com in both print or e-book formats, as well as through other online book sellers.
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So, what more can I say? I’m very excited and pleased about this volume, which is a pretty good representation of my short fiction published over the past fifteen years. Come to the launch if you can! I’d love to see you there. :)

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Submission Mondays

  By current projects, publishing, writer development, writing life

In my ongoing quest to better organize my writing life, I’ve decided to institute Submission Mondays. This doesn’t mean that I will make submissions every Monday, or only check/deal with submissions on Mondays, because of course that would be over-organizing, and I don’t want to go down that road.

What it does mean is that I’ve designated every second Monday as a day when I will:

  • check to see if there are submissions I need to follow up on
  • review my projects to see if there is something that is not in submission that should be
  • if so, find a suitable market, prepare the submission, and get it out there
  • if not, see if there is a project close to being submission-ready that I could/should work on, and do so

You might be thinking that I should be doing all of these things regularly anyway. Well, that’s true, but it’s very easy for the submission process to get pushed down the priority list, and for smaller projects (like short stories) to fall off the radar entirely. I think that declaring a specific day, on a specific timetable, to check for things that have fallen through the cracks, makes sense.

And if, on a Submission Monday, I find that everything possible is already in submission–well then, I’ll work on something new, to deal with on a future Submission Monday. Sounds like a good plan to me.

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15k Short Fiction Writing Challenge

  By current projects, writer development, writing life, writing log

Back in January, I threw out a challenge to my Quillian colleagues: write 15k words of new short fiction by the end of June. It could break down any way at all–one 15k story, three 5k stories, fifteen 1k flash stories–any combination was acceptable. The only stipulation was that they had to be new words (revising old stories would not count) and it had to be short fiction (not work on novel-length projects).

I came up with this challenge for a couple of reasons. Although we hear a lot about the “death” of short fiction, I think there’s a lot of life in the form yet. Newer writers can finish short stories much more easily and quickly than long projects, which in turn provides something to edit, workshop, and get feedback on. Short stories provide a great introduction to one’s writing and can be offered freely on websites or sold as .99 ebooks as promotional material.

Still, a lot of writers feel they aren’t doing “real” work unless they’re writing novels. Perhaps this is in part that some writers don’t particularly care to read short stories, either. For myself, I really enjoy short fiction, so maybe I’m just partial to it.

At any rate, I threw out the challenge. I think the first to reach the mark was fellow Quillian Chuck Heintzelman who, unknown to me, had already set himself a short fiction writing goal for the year: 50 new short stories. Whoa. I was blown away by the audacity of that goal, secretly struggling as I was with the question of how many new short stories I should challenge myself to write in the year–3, or 5? I felt suitably dismayed, and secretly promised myself to write 5, although that is strictly off the record, you hear? So far I’ve finished one and have three others in various stages of completion. But I still have six months!

Ahem. So anyway, Chuck hit the 15k in short order (and is still writing, of course; you can find a lot of his stories on his website. And you should!) I’ve been trundling along, and yesterday, I hit the goal! Which is good, because, you know, it would have been pretty sad if I’d been the one to throw out the challenge and then proceeded to fail.

I’ll be polling other members of the group at the next couple of meetings to see how they’re doing, and encourage them along to the finish line. At the end of June, I’ll post links for the other challenge-meeters here.

Photo: me. It’s the magnetic poetry on the side of my fridge. And I think the ‘beautiful spine’ poem is by my daughter.

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Lowering the Scalpel

  By current projects, publishing, writer development, writing life


The past number of weeks I’ve been busy with revisions to a novel manuscript. A publisher requested them, and I have a deadline, and it’s been an interesting and challenging task. My first thought when I got the email requesting them, of course, was, I don’t know how to do this!

But I soon found out that, also of course, I did. It turned out to be a pretty logical process, once I took a few minutes to think about it. Re-read the manuscript, because it had been some time since I’d actually looked at it. Make copious notes about what to change and how to change it and how best to address the concerns. And then—do it.

The reading and note-making took the bulk of the time, because I wanted to be thorough. It’s also sometimes a precarious undertaking, to start tinkering with the innards of a novel manuscript, because if you’ve done it right, it all stands up, nicely stacked and interdependent like a house of cards. Switching out and adding in new cards after the fact can cause the entire thing to come tumbling down, so it takes a lot of care and a steady hand.

I got to a point eventually, though, where I knew it was time to turn on the change-tracking feature and start making those changes. Beginning that part of the process was something I had to push myself into a bit. To switch analogies from cards to medicine, starting to mark up the manuscript felt like the start of a surgical procedure. The scalpel is in hand, you know it’s time, but you haven’t cut into the skin yet, and there’s a moment of hesitation. You have a plan, but you don’t really know how much blood there’s going to be once you start to cut. Any number of things could go wrong. Once you make that initial incision, there’s no going back—you’re committed to seeing the whole thing through to the end.

However, the surgery is the only treatment option, and you know it. And I knew it. So I pushed past that moment of hesitation, and so far the surgery is going well. It has a ways to go yet, but I think the patient is going to survive, and emerge stronger than ever. I’ll report on the prognosis as it becomes available.

Photo credit: chrisgan

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Happenings

  By current projects, publishing, writer development, writing life

I’m putting this lucky ladybug I drew as my illustration for this post, because I am feeling very fortunate right now. A number of good things have happened lately, not all of which I can talk about in detail, but I can throw out some hints. :)

Well, as to the first one, I can talk about it freely–I have a short story collection scheduled to come out later this year. It will consist of many of my previously-published short stories and probably one new one. My editors and I are working on the TOC now, and cover art is pretty much done. It’s exciting! It’ll be available in print and ebook formats.

I also have a publisher interested in one of my novels–provided I can make satisfactory revisions. That’s a somewhat nerve-wracking proposition, but I do have some ideas and will be diving into the project in the next day or so, once I clear a few more items off my list. I have a couple of months to make the changes, which should be do-able. We have a vacation in there but I’ll work around it. This is also, of course, hugely exciting, but I am trying not to get too worked up over it since nothing’s certain until those revisions are done and meet with approval. Of course I can let myself enjoy the fact that they liked the story enough to ask for revisions. :)

The third item was an invitation that I should really keep quiet about for now. But it’s very nice.

Will share more details on all of this as I can. For now–feeling lucky indeed!

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Fourth Time’s the Charm?

  By current projects, writing life, writing log

I’ve been trying to write a new story for an anthology for months now. In fact, I’ve tried three stories–bouncing back and forth between ideas without really settling in to any one of them. Well, that’s not really true. I tried to make two half-written stories fit the theme I was looking for, ditched both of those ideas, thought about a new idea but didn’t start it, got a fourth idea and wrote a few pages before getting stuck…and now I’m back to the other idea.

This time, I think it’s going to stick. I’m still not sure exactly where the story is going–or rather, I know where it’s going, but not precisely how it’s going to get there. However, I’m over 2k into it now in just a couple of writing sessions, so I feel hopeful that this will be the one.

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Motivation

  By current projects, personal & miscellaneous, writer development, writing life

Well, I think I’ve finally figured out what keeps me motivated, stops me from procrastinating, and makes me more productive on a daily basis.

Timekeeping.

Yep, maybe it hearkens back to my lawyering days, when you lived or died by your billable hours, but if I keep a timesheet of how I’m spending my day, I seem to get a lot more productive work done.

Earlier this year I made up a schedule for myself, intended to keep me organized and on track by allotting a certain amount of time each week for the various committments I have. That lasted maybe a week before I wasn’t even really looking at it anymore. However, I decided to keep a timesheet for a week or so, because I really felt that I was falling prey to a lot of time demands that were interfering with my writing. I wanted to see what was sucking away all my time.

The discovery that timekeeping keeps me on track was only a happy coincidence. However, since I’ve made it, I’ve seen a big difference.

I’m not using anything fancy–printed sheets with a simple table I made in OpenOffice, to keep track of time blocks and what I’m doing in them. That’s it. It’s early days yet, but so far it’s working better than anything else I’ve tried. If you have difficulty keeping on task and on track, something similar might work for you.