astray in worlds and words.

Category: Writing Page 1 of 3

New short story: Forever the Forest

My new story “Forever the Forest” is out in Life Beyond Us, an anthology edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest, published in cooperation with the European Astrobiology Institute. Every one of its 27 stories is paired with an essay diving deeper into the science behind the fiction.

I was immediately hooked by the idea! I grew up with Carl Sagan’s books, so being in this science outreach project means a lot to me. I also wanted to write my very own take on trees in space inspired by Silent Running (another thing I grew up with) and tap into my love for anything tree-ish, and here was my chance: I mixed up what I had read about NASA’s “Moon Trees” (1) and indigenous forest stewardship, namely “Helping forests walk” (2), and then I simply needed to tell it from the perspective of the trees.

Did I say “simply”? It was like wrestling with an Ent for every single word. Of course I’m not the first one to up take this challenge (I specifically like The Leaves of October by Don Sakers and the tree shapechanging sequence in The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip). It still felt like I needed to learn writing anew, because I wasn’t able to fall back on my senses of vision and hearing, my sense of time, and my perception of my body and its limits. But in the end, does it really matter if it’s another language or another mind I’m trying to relate to, with a whole different sensorium? Deep at my core, I’m a translator, and I try my best to translate different modes of inhabiting the world into a shared language, even if it feels like bouncing an image back and forth between funhouse mirrors. Sure, it’s bound to fail. But I aim to fail in a meaningful way.

So I kept asking: what is it like to be a forest? I used theories about mycorrhizal networks (3) to create a collective perception and wondered if the astronaut and the forest stood any chance of having some shared concepts to start a conversation. This is also where the wonderful companion piece “Astra Narrans” by Connor Martini begins its exploration and extrapolation of the core themes of the story in a way that transcends my humble attempts at establishing an understanding between the protagonists. If you want to learn how we can possibly communicate with any being that is not us, this essay is a splendid place to start.

Life Beyond Us cover

This whole project has been a delight to be part of from beginning to publication and beyond. Big thanks to Julie Nováková for having me in the first place & her tireless work to make this anthology shine in any possible way, and to Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law at Laksa Media for working out the kinks of the story and making the whole book look incredibly good, and to Connor Martini for his thoughtful, knowledgeable and entertaining essay about semiotics! (Plus a big thank you to the beta readers who always have my back: Sonia Focke, Jennifer Hudak, Elena Kotsiliti, and Ella Voss.)

You’ll find materials and where to buy the book here, and it will not only enable you to roam through my alien woodlands, but also a wide selection of other adventures set in our solar system and far beyond. If you are intrigued by “Forever the Forest”, I bet you’d also enjoy “Defective” by Peter Watts, “Heavy Lies” by Rich Larson, and “Cyclic Amplification, Meaning Family” by Bogi Takács. I’d love for you to listen in on all those Conversations!

1 see: Moon Trees Stand as Living Testaments to First Voyages to Moon & Moon Tree
2 see: Assisted migration of forests in North America
3 read about the current state of this research here: Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi?

R.I.P. Terry K. Amthor

I learned only yesterday that the world of pen & paper role-playing, or rather the world of speculative fiction, has recently lost Terry K. Amthor. He has been one of my favorite creators and a strong influence. His work made me gaze upon science fiction with a fantasy mindset and vice versa, and opened my eyes to the wild possibilities the genre has to offer.

There are better places to read up on Terry’s long and significant history in rpgs, mostly with Iron Crown Enterprises (for example this interview). I’m not too much of a regular role-player myself, but of all the places I’ve adventured in, Shadow World is the one I keep coming back to. It’s a world of darkness, but also a rainbow of colors, a realm of high fantasy in the best sense, where everything is possible, or at least was possible once and left its imprint. And most of all it opens up room for the imagination to soar, and provides a lot of breathing space for the audience’s minds to work their own magic.

Detail-obsessed worldbuilding can be one of the duller aspects of speculative fiction, but while Terry was a true and dedicated worldbuilder, his creation always offered a fresh perspective. He worked on MERP earlier and was deeply immersed in Middle-earth, so the Tolkien influence is strongly visible on Shadow World, in its languages, in its myths bleeding into the present age, in the hierarchy of all things living. It transcended these roots, adding lots of powerful women, queer culture, and people of color not only in some “exotic” background settings. Many varied cultures exist in parallel, interweaving at points, and many forces shape this world. It started out distinctly 80s-flavored, but Some older Shadow World source bookshas always been more diverse in ways high fantasy (rpgs) at this time simply weren’t. And it has been developed to be ever more so, because Terry stayed, uncovering bits and pieces, telling the story, the multitude of histories and seeds and glimpses that made his world come alive.

Shadow World has constantly opened up my perception of what fantasy could be, has razed so many of the limits I once might have seen, and has never, ever failed to show me something wonderful. That’s why I felt I had to toast Randæ and Andraax yesterday, but I guess my favorite Loremaster of them all is Terry after all.

Life Beyond Us anthology

There are only few days left to crowdfund the Life Beyond Us anthology, organized by the European Astrobiology Institute and Canadian publisher Laksa Media. The anthology will not only feature 22 original science fiction stories, but also accompanying essays by scientists matched to them. And I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to contributing one of these stories and having the support of a scientist for research!

I’m already working on the concepts and themes of my story and can’t wait to start writing it. It’s still just blurry shapes in the mist (maybe quite literally!), but it might have an alien point of view character (surprise), show alienation by meeting humans, and debate our sense of curiosity and our interest in meeting others vs. the cost of our meddling. So let’s see how much of this will survive my awful writing process …

The Kickstarter updates are full of additional resources, including short interviews with many of the contributors. You can find mine here! Editor & organizer Julie Novakova did stellar work to prepare the campaign.

The icing on the cake, though, would be reaching the stretch goals. The anthology is already international, but the first stretch goals would unlock translated stories, with contributions from Lisa Jenny Krieg, Liu Yang, Jana Bianchi, and Renan Bernardo. I’d love to see all of these translated, because we need more sf in translation, and because from what I know we don’t want to miss these stories. I greatly enjoyed Jana Bianchi’s “Death is for Those Who Die” in Clarkesworld and want more, and I already love the not-yet-expanded version of “Ranya’s Crash” by Lisa Jenny Krieg (if you read German, you can find it here as “Ranya stürzt ab”). If there’s even further funding, there will be open slots for submitting stories to the anthology!
Life Beyond Us cover
So, if you’re interested in strange forms of life, exploring other planets (or a fresh angle on our own), AND the science behind it all, this might be a project for you! And whether you choose to back it, spread the word, or are simply excited about this book — thank you!

Reading with Vital authors

I’ve been under the spell of converging deadlines, again. It happens regularly with my main client (mostly due to licencing issues). Imagine I spent the last weeks under a massive Lego brick; that’s very close to the truth. One of the few occasions I crawled out of my translation zombie state was when I was asked to join a reading with three authors of the Vital anthology, Congyun “Mu Ming” Gu, Sally Wiener Grotta, and Eric Schwitzgebel, and our shared editor RM Ambrose.

Plush reptile stand-in audience at online reading

The audience was fabulous!

So I found myself preparing for my first ever online reading, actually my first reading since sixth grade. It was a fun evening (noon break for others), perfectly organized by the wonderful Inlandia Institute, and I can’t wait to read everyone’s stories in the anthology. I really hope a lot of these online formats are here to stay – it’s an easy way for people all around the globe to participate in panels and readings!

I think I’m going to spend the weekend staring at a wall and internalising the translate-sleep-translate-cycle is over for now. But if you want to listen to me read from “Keloid Dreams”, the event is up on Youtube:

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New short story: Keloid Dreams

My new story “Keloid Dreams” is out in Future SF #8, a medical-themed issue published in September 2020. Read on if you’re interested in process and trivia, but beware, here be spoilers!

If you’d like to experience Carebot’s sensor input first and see to the patient’s wellbeing, please come along. And don’t forget to take a look at the other stories in this issue – I’m totally awed by the big ideas and scientific details my TOC mates came up with!



Future SF #8 coverFirst of all, phew! All my writing attempts since 2018 got shelved during first draft, and while people kept congratulating me on my last story, I plunged into a pitch-black hole. Then along came this healthcare prompt to yank me out of my comfort zone, with a tight deadline on top. And here we are, finished story! “Keloid Dreams” originated in thoughts about healthcare getting under your skin via implanted sensors, combined with the idea of robots caring for people. How would they become accepted, what would their humanizing features have to be so that you’d trust them with your parents?

I was planning to write about dementia first, about a patient losing himself, and a robot finding a personality, but the emotion-learning robot voice didn’t work for me. The refurbished warbot idea had been lurking from the beginning, and I truly hit my stride when I imagined the two veterans on a last mission together, despite the fallout of going to war.

Then it was a question of digging deeper. I connected bits and pieces to family history: my Dad, who was excluded from taking part in my life when I was ten. My Grandfather, who turned his back to fighting, but the whole story was obscured by the way German families don’t talk about their WWII past. On a lighter note, Overwatch inspired some details of the story, and if you played the game, you may find teeny-tiny easter-eggs and guess who my favorite character is. When I considered what Callas would do as a hobby, I settled on bird-feeding, partially because bird-feeding has gotten me through the worst of this pandemic. This decision made me pull one of my favorite graphic novels from the shelf, Enemy Ace: War Idyll by George Pratt, providing further inspiration.

My thanks go out to Ella Voss and Elena Kotsiliti who were lightning quick with their insights on very short notice, and Jennifer Hudak, who helped me make the story so much sleeker and more powerful. To firefighter/paramedic Meo, who was awesome at explaining complex physiological processes and effects (any bugger-ups are on the author’s side). And to my editor, RM Ambrose, who really got to the core of the story and helped me polish it. If you like his work for Future SF and feel the need to imagine the future of healthcare differently, consider backing his anthology Vital on Kickstarter, bringing you more stories soon!

Writing this piece of post-military SF has unlocked an achievement: true short story! I almost made it down to 5,000 words – and I’m in deep awe of people who truly master this and even shorter lengths!

Achievements remaining unlocked:
– write something that’s not 1st person
– write a story without reptiles (They’re invisible this time. Improved much?)
– write a story from the POV of an actual human.

Next time, maybe. Or maybe not. I have a roster of a dozen partially told stories, some mostly dead, some quite fresh, and some same old in a shiny new skin. Onwards!

Eugie Award

As promised, this bit of “news” gets an extra blog post, no matter how late I am: My novelette “When We Were Starless” is the winner of the 2019 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction.

This makes me incredibly happy, not only because I’m still having trouble believing my writing was nominated for awards, let alone won one! It’s an award celebrating short fiction (yay!), and it boasts an incredibly fine selection of finalists and winners in the five years of its existence. Previous winners are Catherynne M. Valente, N.K. Jemisin, and Fran Wilde, so I’m clearly the odd one out here. And on top of that, it’s awarded in the memory of a truly brilliant short fiction writer.

I can only recommend you go and check out current and former finalists, and read Eugie’s work, too, if you don’t know it yet.

Plaque of the 2019 Eugie AwardI deeply regret I wasn’t able to be in Atlanta for the award ceremony personally – financial and health issues upset my plans to go. I celebrated two times, though – once in the middle of the night when I discovered on Twitter that my story had won, and a second time when the beautiful plaque designed by Tangled Earth Arts came in the mail.

And don’t forget to look at this year’s finalists, too. (Yes, my bad, there’s already a new round, and they’re amazing!)

Things happened …

… and things didn’t happen.
Most amazing among the things that happened was the fact that my latest story resonated with readers and was nominated for awards, to my utter astonishment. “When We Were Starless” went on to be a finalist for the Hugo and Sturgeon Awards, and it won the Eugie Foster Memorial Award (which deserves an extra blog post, even if I’m horribly late). Yay! I mean, YAAAAAYYYYY! I still can’t believe that happened!

But the fact that my latest story was, and is, still my latest story also serves as a hint to the things that didn’t happen.
I started a few new things and stopped in the middle of the process because I didn’t like where they were going. Some others simply refused to go anywhere. I dropped into that big black hole that keeps opening and swallowing me whole. I usually retreat and hunker down with (translation) work then, but last year was not great for translations, at least from my point of view. So the hole gave me some trouble this time around. Anyway, this is where I am. I haven’t given up; it’s just that my brain didn’t put out a lot of useful stuff these past months.

But things happen even when we sit in holes, and I’m lucky enough to have wonderful friends who keep nudging even if I’m at my worst holed-up self, and so the future doesn’t look all bleak: right now, a really wonderful (and challenging) translation is waiting on my desk. Friends have written amazing stories (and sometimes books) I want to talk about. And I might have been talked into doing a thing or two myself, one of them coming up right at Halloween! Which is, in the amorphous ways of 2020 time both forever in the future and sneaking up on us in a week or so.

Island Quest at Viable Paradise

It begins with an ocean.

You cross the water, waves nipping at your ankles, salt stinging on your face. You have hopes, but you don’t know it yet: this is a real transition. You leave familiar shores behind, and all certainty about what kind of creature you are, what you are allowed to do, what you are able to achieve. What you thought safe. What you thought sound. Your concerns that this endeavor was maybe just an error, a misapprehension. Now you are here, on a boat.

You’re entering new, unexplored terrain.

You are welcomed by kind spirits. And while they tell you in no uncertain terms that you are on a quest, that you have challenges before you and obstacles to overcome, they assure you that no harm will befall you in their domain, nor shall you ever go hungry or cold. They care for you, heart and mind and belly, and they provide you with the strength to push on when things get rough.

There are giants on the island. You might be nervous about meeting them, a little bit afraid even. Then you discover that what makes them giants is not something that separates you, but something you have in common: a shared passion, a disposition to strive for better words, better tales, a will to explore and learn and marvel. And they want you to grow into a giant, too.

You find companions, true soulmates. They are on the same quest, and you’re in this together and get to know and love each other until you can be sure you have each other’s backs. You form a fellowship of the pen, a fellowship of quiet keystrokes, a fellowship of sealed plot holes and salvaged story arcs. You share meals and songs and ideas. Sometimes, you also share the horror, because there are times of plight.

But you are given tools to take paths you didn’t risk before. You are encouraged to mold your perception and find new ways to see yourself, your work, and all the stories you encounter. Most of all, you are given a place of acceptance, of companionship, of belonging. You are right where you are supposed to be, and this is a powerful gift.

Time behaves strangely on the island. Hours glide languidly into everlong midsummer-like days full of adventure. One night can stretch into an eternity, enough time to get you to the edge of the galaxy and back. But all too soon it will compress and accelerate and rush madly towards the end.

Things have to end, to circle back, to move onward, you know this by heart now. You cry, there is no way around that. You leave, eyes swollen, heart full. A multitude of ideas in your head, but they won’t form into something coherent until you are less overwhelmed, less miserable because you have to go.

It will take some time for you to discover: part of the island stays with you. The winds, and the knowledge you’ll smile at them again after all you have mastered. The waves, rocking your old shell off of you to make room for growth, rippling with ongoing change. The hearth fire, telling you you are not alone in this. The jellyfish, glowing in the darkness when you need a spark of inspiration. You set out on an ocean of possibilities.

This, you know, is a beginning.

———

I spent a week on Martha’s Vineyard at the Viable Paradise writing workshop in October, and this might have been one of the best things I ever did. Viable Paradise 22, squinting in the sunI’ll probably get back to this with a more practical and down-to-earth post at some point in the future. Because if next year’s chosen ones are like me and my classmates, they will google every scrap of information, and they’ll need to know to bring warm socks without holes and such!

New novelette: When We Were Starless

My new novelette When We Were Starless was published in the October issue of Clarkesworld, and I wanted to provide a little bit of trivia and background for readers with an interest in such things. There may be mild spoilers. If you want to read the story first, here it is – you could go chasin’ ghosts among the ruins of a fallen world with Mink right now!

Clarkesworld 145

It is my second story set in a world I call the Shrouded Earth. It’s not a direct sequel to How Bees Fly, but they follow a shared trajectory, and WWWS holds some spoilers for things that are revealed in the course of HBF.

When We Were Starless had a rough start. I was struggling with what felt like the certain knowledge that my first story had been a fluke, and I wasn’t convinced it would be a good idea to revisit this world. But the image that stuck with me was nomad herders with 3D printer spiders!!! I imagined a trickster story first, about a stranger shaking the tribe up and inducing change, before leaving them again. It took me some time to realize I didn’t want another outcast story. So the only thing I kept was Mink’s ability to change her color. The trickster goddess whom this would have been attributed to (as well as the ability to drop tails) sadly had to go.

My main source for research was Vanishing Footprints: Nomadic People Speak by Ann Perry and Anthony Swift (not a perfect book, but it makes an effort to feature the voices of nomadic people). As I figured out the plot, I visited a planetarium (for the first time ever!). Huge parts of the story clicked into place while I was there.

Nikolaus-Kopernikus-Planetarium

Nikolaus-Kopernikus-Planetarium, Nuremberg: For a very brief moment, I thought this might be the ghost Mink meets …

There are some direct inspirations: part of the opening was inspired by the framing narrative of Clifford D. Simak’s City; and when I began to think about the exhibits in the dome, I couldn’t resist the urge to write a happy ending for xkcd’s super sad Mars Rover episode.

The music was a happy accident, more or less: I always envisioned Mink’s people as musical, but the strong focus on music snuck into the text almost without me noticing. The moment I found out how it would play into the ending, I knew I could make this story work. I also listened to a lot of music and have my own Paean of Manifest Horizons (more of a Paean of Manifest Finishing Line, because it took me forever to get there …).

Last but not least: Many thanks for encouraging me, and your brilliant ideas and editorial help, to Juliana Socher, Maike Claussnitzer, Catherine Brennan, Miriah Hetherington, and Sonia Focke! <3 And thank you, Clarkesworld, for publishing me a second time!
And thank you, readers, for spending time with my stories! Your comments, shares, and reviews mean the world to me!

There might be more of what I secretly call lizardpunk coming up at one point, more Shrouded Earth to unveil – or maybe space nomads? Or something else altogether. I’m not decided yet. Gotta go writing now to find out which egg will hatch next (or, you know, at all)!

Thou shalt have no other stories …

After another few months spent in translator-bot mode, producing daily word-counts I can only dream of as a writer, I have some thoughts about writing and having a day job as a freelancer in the publishing industry at the same time. It seems like a dream situation – to gain a foothold, to learn the business … and when I started this line of work over 10 years ago, it was a dream job. Second best thing to publishing my own stuff. A chance to work with words, with languages and their intricacies, in the genres and with the authors I loved. Translating has always been very close to my heart – it’s a special kind of approach to a text and can be extremely rewarding (for everyone involved, yay!).

Some aspects didn’t turn out quite the way I had hoped for, but that’s a different story. A job closely connected to writing is, in some ways, a major boost for writing. I learned a great deal about language and how to construct stories while translating superb novels, and then some more by editing not-so-superb-yet novels. The moment you have to propose a solution when something isn’t good enough, a vague feeling of “I don’t like it” just doesn’t do. You have to get to the root of the problem, and that makes you see what will work and what won’t.

So I doubt I’d be able to write the way I do without my job, without being surrounded by professional words and stories daily.

But.

My own words inevitably dry up when I am deep in the translating game. I’m surrounded by another person’s story and strive to get into its style, mood, tone. If I try to start writing then, I might end up emulating the thing I’m working on at the moment.

Mostly I don’t even try: I simply can’t bring myself to hack out another word on my keyboard after I already spent 6 hours straight doing just that. Braindead. Daily amount of words used up. Instinct for stories vaporized.

I’m aware that the majority of writers out there are writing in their free time, and surely there’s no shortage of jobs eating your brain. I’m in awe of everyone who sits down to tell their story anyway.

I seem to be at a point where my day job isn’t producing synergies for writing anymore, or even just some (mildly lucrative) background noise; it has turned counterproductive. I guess that’s mostly because I’m working and writing in exactly the same genres. It’s just so close to my own words, and if I want to do it justice, I have to live the to-be-translated text in the same way I have to live my own stories. So my own writing is always relegated to the backburner.

Add in the precarious nature of freelancing, which makes you inclined to always take on another rush job, another project, because there’s no way to know whether and when the next thing might come up. And soon there is no room left for your own stories to unfold. I can relate to every writer who just wants an unobtrusive, not-too-demanding job.

What I do now, accompanied by a lot of anxiety, is decline some jobs. And try to shift a certain portion to other modes and genres, mostly non-fiction, to create synergies again. (But who am I kidding here – offer me a cool science fiction or fantasy project, and I’ll bite).

So, fair warning: having a second dream job apart from writing might not be the best strategy for producing a lot of words, especially if said dream job is, well, also writing, just for other people in another language.

Do what you love and you'll work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally

This has been all over the place recently … I simply had to add it. (from adamjk’s Instagram )

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