Stepping Through

How do you talk about death with your kids, especially if their mother--mommy--died?

I've wrestled with this quite a bit lately. The boys are doing okay, but I don't want to completely shelter them from their feelings. I don't want to hide my grieving, either, because they need to know it's okay to cry and be angry and sad and...

Aunt Heather loaned me a few books about death/children the other day, one of them being a parable about water bugs and dragonflies. You can find a copy on Amazon or simply read the parable for free online. It's a nice story, and one which I hope reflects how the universe really works. Of course, I have no idea how the universe really works. I wish I did.

Those of you who know me well know how much "existential questioning" I do. Now that Aimee is gone, those questions are heavier. They really pull at me, especially at night when I'm trying to go to sleep or wake up at four AM expecting to hear Elliot (and don't--that kid is a world-champ sleeper).

Last night, I thought of a story I'd written several years ago, "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable". It's still one of my favorite stories, originally published at A Fly in Amber and reprinted (in slightly different form) in Triangulation: End of the Rainbow--

I like the way it reads at A Fly in Amber... No explanation of what is beyond the doors. That's where I am right now: on one side of the door. Aimee has stepped through and I can't follow. Not yet. I've got more murals to paint before I join her... Too many to count.

And yes, that is a metaphor from the story.

I frame my world with metaphors. 

When I wrote the "The World in Rubber..." I wasn't thinking about death. But it works. It fits perfectly how I feel right now.

I miss you, Ziggs.  

(a woodcut of a dragonfly from UK artist Christine Howes)

WIP Wednesday: In Which I Leave My Body

Ever have one of those moments when you feel like you're living in another person's body?

I read a snippet from Geoff Willmetts brief mention of Triangulation: End of the Rainbow at Stephen Hunt's SF Crowsnest and had just such an experience:

‘The World In Rubber, Soft And Malleable’ by Aaron Polson has a title you have to love. A small town has a population that is slowly vanishing and one of the local graffiti painting teens remaining decides to celebrate their lives. This story wouldn’t have been out of place under the auspices of Ray Bradbury.

Ray effing Bradbury? Knock me over with a feather.

Speaking of out of body experiences, it seems I've won the Whidbey Writers Workshop Students' Choice Award for October with my magical realism flash, "Different Strings". You can read "Different Strings" online. You can also read some curious comments about one of Mercedes M. Yardley's previous entries. Thanks, Mercedes. I wouldn't have entered without your prompting.

Okay, enough of that astral traveling. Here's a piece of my as-yet-untitled WIP:


Here’s the truth about growing up in a small town: you tell lies to survive.

I worked in a grocery store in high school, part time on the evenings and weekends. I saw plenty of strange things there: avocados stuffed in a barrel of fresh popcorn left to rot, a co-worker who used an awl to punch holes in the caps of beer bottles, pies marked “Verda’s own home-baked” which came frozen on pallets with the Sunday dairy truck. I found a body in the trash bin once, but nobody can prove who put it there.

Don't Let Rainbows End, 'kay?

PARSEC Ink has put together another magnificent collection of short, speculative fiction, and I'm beyond honored to have a story included in its august pages.

I received my contributor's copy of Triangulation: End of the Rainbow yesterday and skimmed a bit. Read a few stories. Read my story, "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable" again...and damn it, my own story made me get all choked up. Coupled with the afterword by editor Bill Moran, I was almost in tears.

Why?

"...fiction writing is dying..." (from the afterword)

By Zeus, I hope not. But Mr. Moran lays out a pretty powerful argument for why it is. (Let's just say Transformers 2 was not his favorite movie...) Me? I blame the internet. For all it's wonder and fantasy, it has made fiction cheap and easy. Cheaper than pulp stories. Hell, authors writing for pulp mags back in the Golden Age were paid near living wages for their words. Now, that kind of pay just isn't feasible (without massive debts) even for the best mags. I'd be shocked if any of them are turning profit. I'd be thrilled if they were.

Yes, YA novels are selling like crazy. And yes, some of them are wonderful. Okay, a few of them are wonderful. There's a ton of shite out there, though. Trust me. I work with teenagers. I see the kind of crap they grab at the library. I try to cultivate a love for good fiction, but it's a grueling, uphill battle. They have a million and one distractions: mindless movies, Youtube, text-messaging, Facebook...

Too many other choices for how to spend their copious leisure time to demand quality fiction. If the readers don't demand it, don't vote with their dollars, who is going to care?

This is the next generation, folks. This is the future.

If fiction dies, is the art of storytelling far behind? Is there anything more human than storytelling?

Man, I'll rage against the dying of that particular light. Rage hard, even if it kills me. I'm going to write, and write hard. Yeah, I'm back from the strange doorway in my basement.

"The colors through that door shamed anything the Krylon people could imagine. Shattered the rainbow, too."

But it was all a lie. A bigger lie than anything fictional. A bigger lie than "...fiction writing is dying..."

I hope.

Buy a copy of Triangulation: End of the Rainbow. Help fight the good fight. Win one for stories and good fiction in an era of paste-pudding and drivel.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Don't worry. I haven't forgotten about the blob in Curt's kitchen.

This post is mostly about what unchecked expansion means to writers: you, me, most everyone who reads this blog.

If you want to be read, at whatever level, you must learn to brand yourself. It's one of the first lessons I learned when I started. It's the reason I purchased my domain (http://www.aaronpolson.com/) before I had anything worthwhile to slap up there. Being read may (or may not) translate into cash someday. Someday. Meaning, this is about making money. Which, much to my wife's chagrin, is not my favorite topic.

People who know a lot about money like to talk about growth. (hence, "Unchecked Expansion")

I used to work at a bookstore. We talked at length about "expansion". New stores in the chain, new sales in the existing stores, blah, blah blah. Beat Last Year! (i.e., did we make more sales than the same day last year?) Yeah, we checked these things all the time.

I also took calculus in high school. I learned that things do not expand without limits.

A bookstore chain cannot continue to build new stores and sell more each year. It. Is. Impossible. Stores close. Sales drop.

The opposite of expansion happens. Big publishing's revenues are contracting. They've stripped themselves to the bone, merged, hostile take-overed, and now, now people still aren't buying books like they used to. The $9.99 e-book will kill us all. Go ahead, run shrieking into the ether.

As mid-list authors, Brian Keene and JA Konrath have their own models of expansion. I read their blogs. I like to see how these things work. Both are hardworking writers who must continually expand their reach because other parts of their revenue stream constantly contract. A vicious situation, to be sure.

Unchecked expansion doesn't exist. Except in fiction. (Yes, the blue sponge is still growing)

I stepped into two new arenas last week: I listed my Friday flash with #fridayflash and sold two reprints ("Catalog Sales" to Ghostlight and "The World in Rubber, Soft and Malleable" to Triangulation: End of the Rainbow--I love what they did with Dark Glass). I guess you could call it "expansion" or "branding". I just want more people to read my stories. The money (sorry, Aimee) is negligible right now.

So choose your own adventure. Decide how hard you want to work (my hat's off to those making a living at this writing thing). Nothing expands forever.

Writing is nothing if not choosing your own adventure. This is what I chose for Curt:

Curt waits for the gun. The blue mass changes. A shape presses against the skin...a face, fingers.

Gail screams. "Sophia...Sophia's gone!"

Guess she shouldn't have tip-toed downstairs to check on her cow-sponge, eh?

Fucking cows.