short fiction » Deborah Kalin

so much for regular blogging

Apr 052012

So how dull do deadlines make my blog, huh? The answer is, apparently, very.

The past month has seen me squirrelling every spare minute into writing a commissioned short (which I intended to be a touch on the melancholy side of light-hearted, but which actually turned out to be … angry). The pace I set myself to get it done was somewhat faster than normal, because I was worried about it eating into my writing-for-TPP time, so it's been a pretty gruelling month, and I've been frothing at the mouth with envy for those who don't have time-gobbling dayjobs. Yeah, I know, we've all been there, if we're not all still there.

Sometimes I can't help but think Plan B¹ is a trap.

Things may² continue to be dull around these parts for a while to come, since the deadlines are by no means satisfied and my own personal neuroses brought on by needing BUFFERS whenever I start to consider numbers as targets require feeding in the face of the deadlines. I'm more active (if barely) on Twitter, which lets me dip in and out as it suits me.

namely: making sure you can pay the rent [↩]
or may not. Hopefully may not. But I can't promise. [↩]

Sale to TPP!

announcements, briskwater mare, cherry crow children, the wages of honey 8 Responses »

Mar 132012

I have a confession to make: for a couple of months now, I've had some Good News that I've not been able to share. And by good news, I mean KERMIT-FLAILINGLY AWESOME NEWS!

It has been very difficult not to share this news with you all, and I feel most strongly that you should all admire my stoic moral character as a consequence.

But now the news is out:

Twelfth Planet Press is delighted to announce that fantasy author Deborah Kalin has joined the Twelve Planets series with a collection featuring her beautifully horrific story, “Wages of Honey”.

YES, I AM BEING PUBLISHED BY TWELFTH PLANET PRESS!

This is a dream come true for me. Twelfth Planet Press has been producing some breathtaking work, and almost as soon as I heard about the Twelve Planets series I wanted to be a part of it. I still can't quite believe that it's happening.

"The Wages of Honey" (aka the thorn girls story) cost me not a little pain in the making, and ended up at a difficult length. And thank all that's holy that it did, because if it hadn't been so demanding, and so awkward and defiant a length, I might not have loved it so fiercely that only the very best home for it would do. I submitted it to TPP almost in spite of myself: it fit their brief so perfectly that, even though I didn't have any stories to accompany it, and even though TPP didn't publish single stories, and even though the Twelve Planet series was full at that stage, I just had to.

To my delight, Alisa also felt that my story had come home to roost with her press, and so I'm now hard at work writing three more equally awkward and defiant stories to match and accompany "The Wages of Honey" in what will be my first collection.

(I can't believe I just wrote that. I'm going to have a collection to my name! It's like I'm a real author or something!)

I don't have a title for the collection yet, but I can tell you that two of the three in-progress stories have titles. (This is unusual for me, to have a title before a story.)

They're going to be called "The Briskwater Mare", and "The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood".¹

Unless they're not. [↩]

i can't help but count the seconds ticking by

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Feb 042012

Time is proving more elusive than usual, of late. This is possibly (shh, don't tell anyone) due to being a smidge over-committed. On pretty much all fronts.

There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

today's alpha draft addiction is the em-dash

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Jan 102012

The playlist for the kelpie story is full of drowning songs. Sinking songs. Listening to it is like having all the air siphoned slowly out of my lungs while weariness expands like a squeaking black balloon in my head.

I suspect I need to write this story very, very quickly — or else very, very slowly.

Probably I will do neither of these things.

sometimes, daily means when you can

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Jan 072012

I started this year with an admittedly-ambitious daily target: 1,200 a day on the faerie novel and 700 a day on a short story (which will probably end up not entirely that short). I could have aimed for a lower target, but that would have meant working on Saturdays and Sundays and one thing I learnt last year is that time off — and flexibility — are things I can't skimp on.

So naturally this week threw me two non-writing day curveballs in the form of a 3-hour round trip to get the hail damage on the car assessed on Thursday, and a dizzy spell on Friday. So today has been all about catching up (on the faerie novel, at least). Sometimes, writing every day does not mean writing daily.

Eh. Whatever works, right?

I "met" this fellow at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn: he's a Marabou, a species of bird of which I had never heard before that day. He's part of the stork family, and he's from Africa.

And he has a magnificent get-off-my-damn-lawn! dance the like of which I have never seen before. Wings akimbo, he would cover the length of each wall of his enclosure in a sliding-hopping-gliding motion in heartbeats.

Do storks dance in courtship, or is it only the crane family who do that?

I wonder if the poor, magnificent fellow was simply bored, and passing the time?

I'd love to see him in the wild.

there is no moral to this tale

journal, the wages of honey 2 Responses »

May 232011

Glimpse by whim by "What if…?", the Europe trip is starting to take shape. So far there's no actual firm itinerary, but just today StumbleUpon gave me 66 Beautiful Small Cities & Towns in Europe and hello!

Bern, Graz and Salzburg, Bled, Trogir and Hvar were already on my list, but I'm now seriously considering a day trip to Mostar into the bargain. I was trying to find a way to get across from Dubrovnik to Meteora, but so far the world is not proving particularly accommodating in that regard. Colour me somewhat peeved.

I'm also told by reliable sources that there are a range of castles for sale in Slovenia to suit any budget. If that's true, I'm totally buying one. It may be my only chance to own property, ever.

In more banal news, it's been an "I'm a writing CHUMP" sort of string of days, lately. Mostly this has been because I turned back to the thorn girls story to do some more revision, now that it's had a little bit of time to sit alone and unattended and think about what it really wants to be. Stories are like children: if you want them to be cogent, you have to ignore them. They chatter too fast when they're born to take absolutely everything they say seriously.

(Actually, I really like that analogy.)

(Like, a lot.)

(Anyway.)

Feedback on this story has been varied, so juggling what I want for the story, versus what readers want and need (this is definitely one of those stories where the latter two attributes are not the same), has resulted in much whining, stomping of feet, and snarling at the screen. When all of this failed, I picked a new title.

And suddenly it all fell into place. The feel, the focus, the direction, the words I should choose over their similar-but-slightly-different synonyms… Titles, it turns out, matter. Who knew? This is why I wish I could find them at the start of writing a story, instead of at the end.

So the thorn girls story, which was never officially titled the thorn girls but instead had a string of ill-fitting names to do with reclamation and silence, is now "The Wages of Honey". Which is just perfect.¹

And here's hoping whoever publishes it, if I can find someone to publish it, agrees. 'Cos now I love that title and never want to give it up. [↩]

it's alive!

journal, the wages of honey, writing life 2 Responses »

Mar 132011

You guys, I've done it: I've finished the thorn girls short story.

And by short I mean 9,156 / 10,750 words (depending on whether you count by human rules or printer's rule), so, um, yeah, not exactly short. In fact, it's what I affectionately like to call one of those unsellable lengths between a short story and a novel.

And by finished I mean I have a working first draft that I'm not ashamed to show people, and will doubtless need more work but I'm pretty sure said work, from this point on, will be polishing only, not structural. (Please, please, please let it not need any more structural work. This story has been taken apart and put back into exactly the same shape only different so many times I've lost count. Not to mention numerous brain cells in the process.)

This poor little frankenstein of a story was first started halfway through 2007, which takes a bit of believing even for me. I always forget that writing a short story is no quicker for me than writing a novel — in fact sometimes it's slower. Although in all honesty a great deal of the slowness in this case had to do with the story being constantly temporarily abandoned in favour of higher priorities, such as the editing passes on Shadow Queen and Shadow Bound.

There's something heady about the moment you know you have an actual draft, a "finished" draft. Somewhat akin to the moment you pull your hands back from adding the final card to a house of cards, holding your breath for fear of triggering the collapse and realising no, it's steady.

If I had the means on hand, I would totally be getting celebratorily drunk right now.

your mission for sunday: stare at the screen

journal, the wages of honey 11 Responses »

Mar 062011

Today I am full of yearning.

It's been too long since I travelled; I've forgotten the feel of an open sky. There are plans … not in place, but at least taking shape, for the next trip; but they won't come to fruition for months. MONTHS. All I can do is flick through my pictures of Mongolia and Bhutan and promise/remind myself there will be mountains before the year's end.

(I love Melbourne, but I must admit to missing hills. Australia doesn't really do mountains, not by a world scale, but Melbourne takes that to ridiculous extremes and while that can be great for walking everywhere it's not great for getting my lungs somewhere they can feel swept clean of cobwebs.)

The next trip is going to be Switzerland — or rather, it shall start in Switzerland. That part has been set by a friend's wedding. The rest, though, is yet to be determined. I'm tempted to head east to Vienna, then south to Croatia through Slovenia. What do you recommend, my better-travelled blog people? Have you been over that way? What should I know about, so I don't miss it?

In the meantime, my weekends will consist of the usual staring contest between my and my brain.

thorn girls: a battle of wills, wordcount, and attrition

two months down? already?

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Mar 032011

I'm behind in my blogging (as usual), and partly that's because I'm this close to wrapping up the thorn girls short story. I am tempted to indulge in the cliche so close I can taste it, but really that would only be attractive if finishing were, say, a peanut butter sandwich. With fresh white bread. Yum.

Last night I got the structure all but nailed down (albeit with an awful lot of white space in the manuscript which is nothing more than the note GET HIM OUTSIDE NOW, or some other such crossing-the-room instruction); tonight I get to trawl through and put in all those room-crossings and transitions.

Normally when I write my first draft, I put the transitions in — but in a tricky first draft, such as this one, which I got half-written and then threw at Tess in desperation, and sulked until she came back with the suggestion to rip it to pieces (which was more helpful than it sounds, given she told me which pieces I needed to keep) and thus required significant structural edits at the same time as trying to write the rest of the story … well. In those cases I tend to skip the transitions. Mostly because I find I'll spend hours agonising over the one sentence that will impel the character across the room, only to find that character now needs to not be in the scene at all. Structural edits never progress linearly, for me. Heck, nothing about my story-writing process is linear. Let's be honest.

So, because listening to me opine about editing is bound to be a little dry, I'll point you instead to Gillian's blog, where there is a piece up by me in honour of Women's History Month, where I talk about my dayjob:

…my favourite subjects were mathematics and chemistry. …I could go on at length about the appeal of science and engineering — the way it takes hard physical evidence and observable, reproducible phenomena, and strings theorems and hypotheses between them to create stories of why the leaves are green and the sky is blue. That, just like writing, it's about past experiences, a shared history, imagination, and daring to dream. The fact that the entire discipline is built on a premise of being collaborative and rigorously open, encouraging invention and innovation, like a global remix project centred around numbers and factoids. I like that language is immaterial, that the stars speak to us through chemicals and fractals and ratios.

In the end, it comes down to the fact that I crave answers, yes, but more than anything, I want space and the chance to both be curious and to indulge that curiosity.

ETA: Oops! Link was borked. Fixt.

i asked him for a title and all he said was: i see…

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Feb 122011

What to say about today?

Mostly I worked on the thorn girls story (which is now 2 pages longer, bringing the tally up to 46 pages — I live in a dreamworld in that I still hope, despite all evidence and rationality to the contrary, that it will shrink to a manageable length some time very soon). Today's efforts involved killing a character with sudden violence, a little bit of blood, and a lot of ennui. This, I think, is a worthy enough effort for now. It's an effort that cost me some seven cups of tea, at a conservative estimate. However much Earl Grey a human body can stand before the brain begins to pickle in the tannins, I think I've had one sip less than that.

I also attempted to minimise the STUFF I own. It just accumulates despite my best efforts. I've hatched a daring new tactic: if I sell its breeding grounds, the drawers and empty surfaces and nooks and crannies otherwise known as my desk and filing cabinet, then I might be able to wipe out this infestation right proper. Or at least cut it back to non-plague levels. (Anyone want a desk? Or filing cabinet? C'mon. Save me from ebay.) So far I've managed to throw out a lot of ink-less pens I apparently thought would be worth hoarding in case of apocalypse. (What? They'd make excellent dart-blowers. I could sit on my balcony poison-darting all those zombies jostling three floors below. It would be sport and entertainment at the same time!)

I also realised, for the zillionth time this past four weeks, that despite knowing there are hot cross buns available for delicious purchase right now, I have (STILL) yet to buy any.

This has got to change. And HOW.

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