Gary Kloster

An idea of mine has been stolen!  Stolen I say!

One of the previews before Star Trek was for the film Surrogates.  It’s a Bruce Willis movie coming out in September.  Basic plot- no one leaves their homes anymore, instead they use robotic surrogates (that look like prettier versions of themselves, naturally) to go out and experience the big, wild world.  And of course things go horribly wrong, and Bruce will get beat up and then beat other people up and the world will be saved.  It looks like fun.

But robot surrogates?  Why, that’s exactly the idea behind my story ‘The Farthest Born’ which will be in the Writers of the Future.  Okay, that story was set (mostly) on an alien world, but still the surrogates were an important part of it.  I called them golems though, ’cause that’s cooler.  Anyway, they obviously stole my idea.

And not just them. There’s another movie coming out, Sleep Dealer, which I heard about on Science Friday.  Also about people jacking in to run robots in distant locations.  So they stole my idea too.

Except this idea appears in a story that hasn’t been published yet.  And Surrogates is based on a graphic novel that was published in 2005, which is before I wrote the story.  (Which I will now emphatically state that I never read, since I would hate to have someone accuse me of stealing an idea…)  And I’m not sure when they started making Sleep Dealer, but since movies usually take at least year to make, and this one was at Sundance and…  Okay, so maybe, just maybe, they didn’t steal my idea.

And I didn’t steal there’s.  This happens all the time in media.  Because ideas are almost never completely new.  Modern media surrounds us like a vast bloom of informational krill, and we’re all sucking it down like starving whales.  We pull it in, so much at once that most of it is forgotten even as we swallow.  But bits stick, things we want to keep in mind and things that just cling like tarter, and our busy little brains use it to beaver together our ‘new’ ideas.  Which is why variations of the same new idea tend to pop out all over at around the same time.  Just the old stuff, processed, digested and spit back out in another form.

So we can all admire it’s shiny newness.

‘Adam, Unwilling’ is now online.  This was the second story I sold, but it’s the first that will be going out to the world.  It’s really weird, seeing my name on a cover, but in a definite good way.

One hazard of appearing in an online publication has now occurred to me.  I feel highly tempted to go out and get an Iphone or a Kindle, just for the opportunity of brandishing this image in the face of anyone who asks me, ‘so what have you written?’

Just got back from Wisconsin, where we spent our Memorial Day weekend.  Three days, children free (thanks, parental units!) in lovely Madison.  Just me, the Genius Wife, and a hotel chock full of fannish goodness.

WisCon is, as their website proudly proclaims, the worlds leading feminist science fiction convention.  I started going last year, with the GW, on the advice of Lyda Morehouse.  She was teaching a course on writing speculative fiction that I was taking at the Loft, and she told us that it was a great convention for writers.  Since it was close (relatively) we went, and had a great time. A writers workshop, lots of good panels, and we got to meet some cool people.

This year was even better.  We both volunteered to be on a few panels this time, and while it was a bit nervous-making, it ended up being a lot of fun and an excellent way to meet more people.  So there was less of the standing around awkwardly at parties, trying to figure out who to talk to, and a lot more socialization.

So bunches of fun, and we both recommend the con.

And for any writer types who might be reading, especially the guys who might see ‘leading feminist science fiction convention’ and wonder if they should go- yes.  For many excellent reasons, but here’s one that’s short and extremely practical.  Women make up the majority of the readership in spec-fic.  If you want to write in the genre, your going to be interacting with them a lot.  So cons where the majority of the attendees are female- that’s a feature, not a bug.  Take advantage of it.

I finished my edits on ‘A Legion Blade’ last night (5,998 lovely words), and sent it off to Fantasy Magazine this morning.  It’s been awhile since I submitted something to them, which is unfortunate.  The last story I sent bounced, but it got a nice ‘please send more’ rejection.  And I would have loved to, but I’ve been mostly doing sci-fi lately and the fantasy stories I did have were way outside their word count.

So since then, they’ve gone from being a semi-pro market to a pro one, upping their pay rates and getting a very pretty website.  They also implemented a new submission system, which is very slick.

Stories are submitted through a web form, which asks for the basic info and gives you space for a brief cover letter (Hey! Hey!  Somebody else once bought my stuff!  You could do worse!).  Then you attach the story and send it off.  They spit back a ‘received’ email that has a tracking number with it.  You can use that to see where your story is in the queue.  Their response time is suppose to be within  72 hours.  Which is hella fast.

I wonder if they’re using a tiered system, where they bounce most stories fast, then throw the maybes in a bin for a longer mull.  Hopefully, I’ll get to find out.

Postscript:  72 hours?  That was less than 12.  And a bounce, so I guess I won’t find out if it is a tiered system.  Well, I applaud their efficiency, though it’s a bit unsettling to get rejected that fast.  Maybe I should have left in those last two words…

My short stories have a distressing tendency to be not-so-short.  What’s the problem with that?  Most places pay by the word, right?  Yeah, but most places have word count limits too.  4000, 6000, 9000… sounds like a lot, but my not-really-shorts sometimes sprawl past even the 9000, drifting from novelette out towards novella.  Which means that sometimes, in order to make a story ready for submission to a certain market, I have to get out the cleaver and go chasing words.

Early this week I took a story called ‘Changeling Fall’ from 9500 words to 9000, so that I could send it out to Strange Horizons.  Tonight, ‘A Legion Blade’ is under the knife, so that it can go to Fantasy.  6700 words going to 6000.  It’s painful, but good exercise.  It forces me to justify every word, which is important in a short story.

And not a bad idea in a novel, either.  I mean, does every fantasy book have to be over 500 pages?  Books are for reading, not for killing marmots.

Sample stories are problematic.  Why?  Well, people might read them and decide I’m a hack, that’s one thing.

The other is that I’m actually trying to sell this stuff.  If I write a great story (if?), it’s getting sent off to the slush piles to work for a living.  Hopefully, it’ll send back a check, otherwise it has to slog on to the next pile.  Posting the story on the web before it’s picked up would count as publication and completely nerfs the poor things chance at getting a real job.

If I happened to have a story that made the rounds and was rejected by every market, well, I could publish that.  But its failure at selling might suggest that it has some inherent problems, and might not be the best example of my work.  And so far, nothing has made it that far down yet.  Yet.  

That’s the problem.  Here’s one work-around.  I have a piece of flash sci-fi called Neverland that I did for a contest, mostly just to see if I could write an actual story that had only 500 words.  I manage to wring something out, and it got an honorable mention, which hopefully means it’s not completely full of fail.  I trotted it out to the one pro flash market, but it bounced.  So, shazam, it becomes my gift to you, oh reader.

Mostly so that I can now say- ‘Check out my work at garykloster.com!’  And it’s true.  In a truthy sort of way.

It’s quiet, which is a rare thing.  The kids are out with the grandmas, the GW(genius wife) is hard at work, and I’m sitting all alone just listening to the hum of the furnace and the baby monitor.  Waiting for the desk.

They’re delivering it today, the big ass desk that we ordered that will be the Apple’s home, the hiding place for the office supplies (Daughter #1 has adopted the viking approach to procuring material for her art), and a place for me to write.  

Writing.  Genre writing, specifically.  Sci-Fi, fantasy, horror– the geeky stuff.  The good stuff.  Though whether my writing falls into that latter category remains to be seen, I suppose.  Why am I trying to be a writer?  Well, after a life of spent immersing myself in other people’s stories, I want to inflict my own on the public.  At least the small wedge of the public that I can manage to reach.  So for the past three years, when the children have passed out, when the house isn’t in immediate danger of being declared a haz-mat site, when I’ve had enough sleep to be almost coherent, I’ve been tapping away at a keyboard, trying to tell stories.  And then trying to sell them.

So far, some success. Two stories sold, one to the Writers of the Future Contest, one to Baen’s Universe.  Neither is out yet, so I’m only published in a theoretical sense, but that’s good enough for me right now.  So I can pretend, at least, that this might go somewhere.  Someday, I might find an agent.  Someday, I might sell Chosen Wings, my first book.  Or the second book, which still lacks a title- and a middle, and an ending (solid beginning though).  Someday I might sell a third story, and qualify as a pro writer- really!  At least according to SFWA (if I pay to join).  Someday…

Someday I might earn enough from writing to pay for the big ass desk.