I’m very close to getting my 100th rejection. Yay! Almost time to order the cake (I’m picturing a black forest cake with those little number candles. Mmmm.)

Out of those ninety-something rejections I’ve gotten only a handful of them were postal submissions. Most of my stories have been submitted through e-mail or online submission systems. I like living in a digital age: with e-mail I get almost immediate confirmation that the magazine received my story and sometimes even a tracking number to see how far along in the queue my story is.

The other thing I like about e-mail submitting is that it costs me nothing. I don’t have to buy paper or ink or worry if my printer is going to conk out on me. I don’t have to use an envelope and go to the post office to mail it. I don’t have to include a self-addressed stamped envelope in order to hear back about my story.

Ah, the SASE. A bit of a tricky business when you live in Canada and most of your markets are in the U.S. Canada Post is not allowed to sell U.S. stamps (or any other country’s stamps for that matter besides Canada’s) so on top of paying the two bucks it takes to mail my submission I also need to buy an International Reply Coupon for five dollars, which means that each postal submission costs me $7.00 to mail (and that’s before factoring in cost of paper and ink).

It’s a shame, because there are a lot of markets I like that only accept postal subs. I’d love to submit stuff to Fantasy & Science Fiction as often as I do to Asimov’s and Analog, but the cost has always made me hesitant. I’ll grit my teeth and do it, but it hurts.

I needed American stamps. I quickly came up with two plans of action:

1. I have a very good friend, Lisa, who lives in Arizona. Lisa is an amazingly kind person and she’s also one of the first people I crow to when I have even a little bit of success with my writing. She’s not only one of my first readers, she’s also been reading my stuff longer than anyone: I’ve been sending her chapters of novels and short stories since we were fourteen. I sent her a Facebook message telling her my dilemma ($5 per IRC!) and begged her to send me some American stamps.

2. My dad travels around a lot for business. Any given week he could be anywhere from Cape Town to Geneva to Shenzhen. My parents have always been supportive of my writing, so I told my dad that I needed American stamps and asked him to pick me up some next time he went through the states.

Both Lisa and my dad came through for me. Lisa sent me a set of five ‘forever’ stamps with Pixar characters on them (Sooo cute. Each stamp shows a set of friends from one of their movies). My dad brought me back a little roll of 20 stamps that he had to rush around New York City to find (did you know they don’t sell stamps in U.S. airports anymore apparently?).

I’m super excited to have so many stamps- when you go from nothing to a lot, it’s hard not to go a little stamp crazy. I’ve already used some to send off a story to F&SF and I’m going to get back on the horse of sending Woman’s World stories. Having the stamps is not only going to save me a ton of money but hassle as well.

But the stamps mean even more than that to me. They reminded me I have people in my life who care about me, who support my dreams and want me to succeed. Not every writer has that. As valuable as the stamps are, it’s the people that got them to me that are the real treasure.

For such a long day I got very little writing done.

I woke up around eight. After a shower I go online and see what the Shock Totem prompt is for this month’s flash fiction challenge. As always, it’s a good one and I get five ideas right away. I mull it over as I take the bus downtown. Driver gives me an extra long transfer ticket- instead of cutting me off at 12:30, I have until 1:30 to make the round trip. Score! When you’re pinching pennies even a free bus trip becomes reason to celebrate.

I get to the library in time to meet up with the lady who runs the adult literacy program. We talk for an hour about what it means to be a tutor. I’m pretty excited about this: for such a small commitment (two hours each Thursday) I could have such a huge, positive impact on someone’s life. Plus, as a volunteer at the library, I don’t have to worry about late fees. No late fees. So I get to do interesting, rewarding work, help somebody improve their life, and I don’t have to worry about a five dollar fine if I keep those Project Runway season six DVDs out for a few extra days? This is great! Sign me up!

It’s a nice spring day, so after I load up my backpack with teaching how-to books I go sit on bench. I’m eating my apple when I feel my phone buzzing in my coat pocket.

“Hello, is this Shannon?” I recognize the voice. Last week I had a interview at my old University about being a don. A don is basically like a den mother or an R.A. They live on campus and help out the students living under their supervision. I really wanted this gig. On one hand, I’d be like the most awesome big sister ever to those kids, caring but keeping them in line. On the other hand, it would be like being a writer in residence. As a don you don’t get paid, but you do get a place to live and all the cafeteria food you can eat. With my essentials covered, I’d have the whole day to write.Maybe when I was feeling especially whimsical I could pretend that I was the writer-in-residence in Paris living above Shakespeare and Company. When I looked out the window I wouldn’t see a boring city street but the river Seine and the Notre Dame.

But I can tell from the voice that my little daydream is as far away from me as Paris is.

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A story of mine is online at Daily Science Fiction today. Go check it out!

http://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/modern/shannon-fay/a-special-day

(If you came to this blog after reading the story, don’t click the link! You’ll be sucked into a never-ending whirlpool where you read the story, click on the link for this blog, then click on the link for the story, then click on the link for this blog, then click on the link for the story…)

For ‘A Special Day’ I wanted to write a simple, suspenseful story. Surprise is easy, but tension? That’s hard. Hitchcock once illustrated the difference by saying: “There’s two people having breakfast and there’s a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that’s a surprise. But if it doesn’t…” Now, I really do love Hitchcock, but I think he’s selling himself short here. If you have interesting, sharp characters doing the talking, you don’t need a bomb under the table: they are the bomb. I was trying to go for that kind of suspense with this story and I think I got it.

I know I said my next post would be about language and dialect in crime fiction, but as you can see that’s not the case. I’m still going to do it, it’s just I’m planning to use James Ellroy as my example and the books I own of his are in a box somewhere in my parents’ basement. I’m moving soon and will have access to them then, but until then I’m going to procrastinate and talk about the difference between the opening minutes of a film vs. The opening pages of a novel.

Last night I watched ‘Alien’ for the first time. Everyone’s got a list of classic films they haven’t seen, and the Alien movies are on mine. My plan is to watch them all before Prometheus comes out so I can stop feigning enthusiasm whenever I’m talking about it with my fellow film geek friends. Anyway, after a long credit sequence, the movies starts off with several outer and interior shots of a spaceship. We don’t see any people, just long empty hallways (I tried to find the opening scene on Youtube, but the best I could find was here. Skip over to 2:27 to get past the credit sequence). Its a few minutes before we see any human beings. The movie starts outside (literally, with the shots outside the spaceship) and then shows us the world in more detail (the shots of the inside of the ship) and only then shows us the characters.

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Strong verbs solve so many problems. They slay adjectives and adverbs, colour otherwise bland narration, and show the reader you know what you’re doing.

Crime writers are masters of the strong verb. Hardboiled prose requires crisp, clear narration. Even when we’re in the detective’s head the narration stays tight. Sure the private dick might spend a couple of paragraphs describing the other patrons at the dive bar he or she’s at, but even when the story digresses from the main plot the writing itself still stays lean and sharp.

My favourite writer for this is Charles Willeford. Just look at the opening paragraph to his novel ‘Pick-Up:’

‘It must have been around a quarter to eleven. A sailor came in and ordered a chili dog and coffee. I sliced a bun, jerked a frank out of the boiling water, nested it, poured a half-dipper of chili over the frank and sprinkled it liberally with chopped onions. I scribbled a check and put it by his plate. I wouldn’t have recommended the unpalatable mess to a starving animal. The sailor was the only customer, and after he ate his dog he left.’

Now let’s look at it again, only this time I’m going to highlight the verbs.

‘It must have been around a quarter to eleven. A sailor came in and ordered a chili dog and coffee. I sliced a bun, jerked a frank out of the boiling water, nested it, poured a half-dipper of chili over the frank and sprinkled it liberally with chopped onions. Iscribbled a check and put it by his plate. I wouldn’t have recommended the unpalatable mess to a starving animal. The sailor was the only customer, and after he atehis dog he left.’

Now of course not all of these verbs are super exciting, but I love the strong verbs used to describe how the protagonist gets the hot dog together: sliced, jerked, nested. Such interesting actions for such a mundane task. But the words aren’t just there for razzle-dazzle: through the main character’s quick but sure movements (poured, sprinkled, scribbled) we get the sense that he’s been doing this for a long time, that he’s spent many a quarter to eleven dishing up disgusting food to strangers and that he’s tired of it. On a large scale all of this is setting up the rest of the novel. On a smaller scale it’s setting up the very next line:

‘That was the exact moment she entered.’

Ah yes, we can see now that things are about to change, that maybe this night is the last night our protagonist is going to spend slopping together chili dogs for drunken sailors. But is his life going to change for the better or worse? Well, that would be spoiling the novel.

Next week: Part 3: Lingo

I love crime stories. Heists, long-cons, murder gone wrong, detective stories, police procedurals, I love them all. I love crime as a genre because it is both escapism – the life of a criminal mastermind is pretty far-removed from my own law-abiding, mundane existence- yet at the same time crime manages to worm its way into everyday existence. But I also like crime stories just because I like the style of writing. Hardboiled novels have a bit of a bad rap thanks to all the noir parodies out there (i.e. “She came to the door with nothing on but the radio.”*) but there is a lot to learn from crime fiction, no matter what genre you write in. Over the next few weeks I plan to go through several of the things that crime fiction in particular has helped me with.

Part 1: Opening Sentences

Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of the hardboiled detective novel. His 1929 novel Red Harvest is a particular favourite of mine, in part because of the opening sentence:

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.”

This opening sentence tells us several things. One, the story’s point of view is a first person narrator who likes to include lots of incidental details in his telling (do we need to know that he heard the nickname in Montana, and the name of the bar he was in? Maybe not, but this kind of detail soon became a trademark of hardboilded fiction). Also, we can see that the author has a gift for names. I mean, Hickey Dewey? A name like that is a good tip that this novel is going to be filled with over the top characters with colourful names (ironically, the protagonist is never named). Most important of all, it tells us what this book is about: not a person, not a thing, but a place. A place that has an officially friendly, welcoming name (‘Personville’) but it more commonly known as a place of moral rot and decay, a poisoned town.

(On a more meta level, it also hints that Hammett isn’t talking about a fictional place at all, but at taking a swipe at Butte, Montana.)

Phew, that’s a lot of heavy lifting for one sentence to do. But I love it. An opening sentence is like firing a bullet from a gun. The rest of the novel should follow naturally, like the trajectory of a bullet until it embeds itself in the back cover of the book.

Next up: Part Two: The Use of Strong Verbs

*Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a fun movie and an affectionate parody of the hardboiled detective genre.

‘You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After Their Breakup’ – If you ever want to become disillusioned about artists you admire, read a book about them. Especially one that focuses on one of the most turbulent periods in their lives, like when they all hate each other and are taking each other to court. The author does a good job of laying out the financial and legal aspects of The Beatles dissolving, while at the same time still keeping the people involved and the human drama at the forefront.

The Kingdom of the Gods – I feel like I can never accurately judge N.K. Jemisin’s books: I just have too much fun reading them to pick them apart. The book, the third in a trilogy, takes a supporting character from the previous two books and puts him in the lead. I like Sieh, but I think I like him better when there’s a little more mystery to him- aka, when he’s not narrating the whole book.

Let the Right One In – Sometimes you pick up a novel and after a few pages you just know that you’re reading your new favourite book. That’s what happened with me and Let the Right One In. The book is funny, dark, scary, violent and sweet- often all at once. It is probably my second favourite book featuring a pedophile as a main character (it would be number 1, but Lolita is a tough book to top).

The Prestige – One of the cases where the movie is better than the book. Someone had described the book to me in a way that made it sound really weird – ‘Dueling magicians! And one of them turns into a ghost and haunts the others descendants!’ But the book is nowhere near as wacky as I had hoped it would be. It’s a fine enough novel, but I think it could have used a little more razzle-dazzle.

The Devil Wears Prada – I was on vacation, and I was just looking for something light to read, and I got it in this book.

Currently reading: Servant of The Underworld by Aliette De Bodard as part of the Absolute Write SF/F book club. If you want to take part, check out the thread here.

Sorry for the no-show post last week, I was on vacation.

German philosophers have a reputation for being depressing, and it’s easy see why when they’ve got a nihilistic heavy-weight like Nietzsche on their team. But while pretty much anyone can quote Nietzsche (sometimes without even realizing it) not as many people know Arthur Schopenhauer. A 19th century writer, Schopenhauer did nothing to break the ‘German-philosophers-sure-make-you-want-to-cut-open-a-vein’ stereotype: his philosophy was a purely pessimistic one, purporting that desire could never be fulfilled, only negated.

But everybody’s got to have something that makes them happy, even a sourpuss like Schopenhauer. For him it was music. Not opera, not folk songs, but just pure instrumental music. To Schopy music in its ‘purest form’ represented the purest expression of ideas, the closest the external world could get to expressing man’s abstract inner thoughts.

As a writer, I often think about Schopenhauer’s take on music. I often listen to music as I write. Sometimes I do this for very base reasons, like to get my blood pumping and psych myself up for another round of writing (the Mortal Kombat theme is my go-to song for this. In fact I’m listening to it as I write this blog post). But more often than not it’s because the song has meaning to me and relates to the story in my mind. It’s not as simple as say, listening to a song about cowboys while writing a western. For me it’s more about how the mood of the song captures something that I’m trying to express in my work. For example, I recently finished a novella that was largely inspired by the sense of unease I get when I listen to ‘I Am The Walrus.’ Lately I’ve been listening to MGMT’s song ‘Electric Feel’ on repeat as I try to find a way to translate the smooth elation I feel whenever I hear that song. Often I will get an idea from a specific lyric, but more often it’s the music itself that gets to me. I like it when a song can make me feel something so deeply that in turn I want to figure out how to express that same feeling through a totally different medium.

And with that note, I should get back to writing.

Recently, a beta reader who was looking over a novella for me said she wasn’t surprised when a certain character died: something about the guy just marked him as a ‘red shirt’ from the start. At first I was a little concerned. This character’s death was supposed to be a turning point, an event that showed that we were moving into the climax of the story and that things were serious now. If this guy seemed like a red shirt, that might dampen the impact of the moment.

(Point of interest: The term ‘red shirt’ comes from the original Star Trek series and refers to the fact that whenever an away party beamed down to an alien planet, there was generally one red-shirted crew member who got eaten/phasered/wasted by the bad guys. I hope that was educational for you. Next week I will explain the term ‘Jump the shark.’).

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I’m part of a fantastic writers’ forum called Absolute Write. AW is packed with talented writers, so when forum owner MacAllister Stone announced that she was putting together a speculative fiction anthology there were plenty of submissions, including mine. I sent in a personal favourite: a short sci-fi story called ‘The Machine that Loved Alan Turing.’ It’s kind of a personal one for me, which sounds weird since it’s a dystopia story about a robot in love with a long dead historical figure, but hey man, I can relate. I really love this story, but I was starting to worry that I was the only one: it had been rejected seven times before I subbed it to the AW anthology.

But then…accepted! My story was one of the 19 that made it into the book. I’m humbled not only to have made it into the anthology, but to have my name alongside writers that I admire such as Suzanne Palmer and K.L. Townsend. I have yet to read the other stories in the anthology, but I am still sure of their quality.

It’s really amazing to have something of mine show up when I type in my name on Amazon.  Right now the hardcopy of the book is for sale for $9.99 on here. A kindle version should be up soon, but for now I can’t wait to have the real thing here in my hands.

Oh God, that last part sounds like ‘That’s what she said’ set-up…

Anyway, in case I’m not being subtle enough: Buy this book! It’s full of work by both talented writers and illustrators (did I mention there’s illustrations?). Support not only the artists but a great forum.