Eugene Fischer

Category: Writing

How I Will Be Spending The Next Two Years

About a month ago, the PBS Newshour ran a segment about the 75th anniversary of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the oldest writing MFA program in the country.

At 1:16 in the above video, the segment cuts to workshop director Samantha Chang standing in an office filled with crates full of manuscripts in red folders, explaining that over 1,200 people applied to the workshop that year. The picture then zooms in on a crate containing “the lucky twenty-six who were accepted.” Somewhere in that lingering shot are 58 pages that passed through my printer before getting to Iowa City.

In the fall of 2011, I will begin studying for an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I decided I wanted to attend graduate school for the time it would afford me to focus on writing, and because I wanted to be in a place that would provide me with extrinsic motivation to create fiction. I had also learned at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop how fantastic it is to be in group of similarly impassioned people, and wanted more of that. It was my original intention to apply to MFA programs immediately after attending Clarion in 2008, but instead I spent most of the next year bedridden by Crohn’s disease. It took me until 2010 to get my life sufficiently orderly to pursue those plans again. So my first steps toward making writing my main focus were fairly stumbling, but things seem to be going smoothly now.

There are still some foreseeable difficulties though. Most notably, that I’ve spent the last 26 years living in a place where the annual temperature looks like this:

and now I’m moving to a place where the annual temperature looks like this:

I’m going from a place where it almost never gets below freezing to a place where I can expect to see frost for half the year.  I am flatly terrified that I am going to find a way to die of exposure walking between classes. But I have chosen to fight terror with terror, and, in a effort to curry the favor of the elder gods, have purchased one of these to protect me:

Bring it on, Iowa.

The Continuing Adventures of My Haiku

Remember how I wrote a haiku last week for a contest to have my name given to a character in John Scalzi’s next novel?

I won.

That’ll do, haiku. That’ll do.

Lawrence Weschler on On The Media

Today NPR’s program On The Media featured a fascinating discussion with Lawrence Weschler on the topic of the inherent fictitious aspects of journalism and nonfiction.  Weschler proposes a nuanced view of what constitutes truth in journalism and nonfiction, but more interesting to me is his implicit identification of the responsibilities of a reader.  Weschler says that as readers we have a responsibility to evaluate works of journalism “as an adult encountering another adult in the world,” which I understand to mean that while we have a right to expect a good-faith effort on the part of journalists, we as readers hold ultimate responsibility for our own credulity. The relevant portion of the program is embedded below.

“Adrift” Reaches Stores

The April/May double issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, containing my story “Adrift,” is now in stores.  This is what the cover looks like, complete with a list of other people I am totally stoked to be sharing a table of contents with!

Look mom and dad!  Finally!  My name, up in ink!

I’ve Been Interviewed for Missions Unknown

Missions Unknown is a blog about science fiction, fantasy, and horror topics in San Antonio, run by John Picacio, Sanford Allen, and Paul Vaughn.  Last week Sanford interviewed me for their regular feature, “Made in S.A.”  He asked about my stories, my background with writing, Clarion, and my current interest in the Texas State Board of Education.  The interview went up today.

I think the last time I was interviewed for anything, I was a freshman in high school being asked my opinion of a proposed dress code for the school newspaper.  This is significantly more exciting than that was.

Rabbit Hole Day Repost

Rabbit Hole Day 2010 has nearly been and gone without my doing anything to recognize it.  Too many distractions this year.  But this seems a fine time to collect in one place the Twitter and Facebook messages I churned out a year ago today.

MICROBLOGGING RABBIT HOLE DAY 2009

Jan. 26, 11:42 pm: Oh hell. Less than half an hour to go until Rabbit Hole Day, and I turn into a jellyfish.

Jan. 27, 11:31 am: Tentacles got too tangled up in the bed, so I slept in the toilet tank. Woke up wet on the bathroom floor, rust stains on my arms and legs.

1:18 pm: Rust stains were actually steampunk spores. All sorts of little dials and whistles budding up now. Will see if body trimmer can work me in.

2:05 pm: Made it to body trimmer, but had to wait 20 minutes listening to a jackhammer outside before I got in his chair and he sliced off the brass.

2:08 pm: Jackhammer reminded me of the aerial shots my dad took of Siberia during the war. Fields of frozen compressors made to steal the atmosphere.

2:26 pm: I think my generation takes the air for granted. I’ve turned off neutral buoyancy for the day. Time to remember what weight feels like.

2:58 pm: Fuck! Weight feels like horrible bending pain in shins, cracking sounds in my knees, and empty cherub husks poking painfully into my feet!

3:17 pm: Non-Texans: Seasons are weird here. Cherubs emerge from ground and molt in Jan rather than Nov. Cat ate so many husks, it needed an enema.

3:33 pm: Uh oh, I’m in trouble. Just got an angry text message from the cat, who is upset I told the internet about its enema. This won’t end well.

4:07 pm: Cat is now threatening to join the neighborhood gestalt. It knows how poorly I handled things when my dog did that where I used to live.

4:11 pm: After my dog sublimed, birds in branches, and the neighbors’ fish would ask me probing questions about my personal life. Total freakout.

4:28 pm: Of course, if the cat does sublime, things won’t be as bad this time. I’ve never let it into the bedroom. ClawBot meets my needs these days.

5:18 pm: Managed to patch things up with cat on phone. Now need to head home before things get angry. Emoteorologist says an affront is blowing in.

6:50 pm: Yeah, I made it home okay, but everything still sucks. I’m SO ANGRY! I just want to go outside and bash people’s thoughts in with a stick!

7:02 pm: Oh god, I’m so ashamed of myself. I actually did go out and pop some kid’s thought balloon with a mop handle. I couldn’t stop myself.

7:06 pm: It wasn’t until that little cloud over his head had burst that I realized what I was doing. I hadn’t even read it! I just didn’t care!

7:08 pm: I don’t usually let angry weather effect me like this. I’d better apologize to his parents tomorrow. I wonder if they like cherub pie.

8:37 pm: Caught enough cherubs. They are always distracted during their mating flights. An even mix of male and female helps the pie taste better.

9:30 pm: Guess the pie in the oven is for me now. The kid’s dad just tattooed an obscenity on the skin of my house. I think that makes us even.

9:49 pm: Brought up the house’s bios to tell it to start breaking down the tattoo, and noticed it is mounting a huge immune response. No idea why.

10:02 pm: OH NO! It’s the steampunk spores! The whole bathroom is infected and overgrown with pipes and stuff! It didn’t even occur to me before!

10:16 pm: Oh my god, there is so much wrench and hacksaw work to be done to get down to the floor before I can even APPLY the genrecidal medication.

11:11 pm: And while working on the bathroom, I forget about the pie in the oven until the delightful smell of tiny burning limbs fills the house. Ugh.

11:21 pm: The spores got into ClawBot. My night is well and truly ruined. Would have been better today to have just stayed a jellyfish. Going to bed.

A Linguistic Blind Spot

There is an interesting article on The Language Log about a particular type of misnegation that, until it was presented to me in a context that said, “this is wrong,” I was unable to see the problem with.  It has to do with phrases of the type No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB.  For example, “No detail is too small to escape notice.”  My brain naturally parses this to mean that everything will be noticed, but it actually says that nothing will be noticed.  Reading this article makes me want to scrape the rust off my knowledge of regular expressions and see if I’ve written any stories that have this mistake.

A more general note about linguistics: I like reading The Language Log and linguistic analyses in general, but every time I’ve tried to actually study linguistics I’ve bounced off the surface of the subject.  Something about the foundational knowledge of the study bores me to tears, for no reason I can satisfactorily explain.  This is useful to me, though, when people tell me that they don’t like physics because it has too much math.  I can think to myself, “crazy as that sounds, it is probably analogous to how I feel about linguistics.”  (I still try periodically.  I secretly hold out hope that some day I will stumble upon a book that makes the foundational ideas of linguistics accessible to me.  And then I will be able to tell people who don’t like physics that they are objectively wrong. Huzzah!)

A Lot of Good News

To begin, other people’s good news:

  • First, and long run most important, Mary Anne had a baby!  Howdy, Anandan.  Welcome to the world.
  • Paul Berger sold one of his Clarion stories, “Small Burdens” to Strange Horizons.  It should be showing up next year in the Spring, and it is a marvelous piece of work.
  • Meghan McCarron also sold a story to Strange Horizons.  It will also be showing up next Spring, and is titled “WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!!”  My personal connection to Meghan is tenuous–I met her at WisCon and was probably creepily excited to do so.  But every one of her stories I’ve read has blown me away, so this leaps onto my list of eagerly anticipated works.
  • Sarah Miller put in the legwork to compile a list of Clarion ’08 publications.  It’s still incomplete, but we’re tallying in email, and it seems that in the slightly more than a year since we disbanded, we’ve sold 25 stories, 10 of which were written at Clarion, and 7 of which are to pro markets.  This counts as meta good news, in a “lots of my friends are doing awesome things” kinda way.

And now, my own good news.

  • I got a job.  After stringing together two consecutive months without losing a day to debilitating intestinal pain, it was time to stop living entirely off my parents.  I will be teaching the GRE for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.  This is part time work, and how much work is available depends on student demand.  I’ll find out how much of my costs this will reliably cover after I finish training.  I may end up needing another job in tandem, but after being on my back for most of a year, this is an awfully heartening development.
  • Another heartening development — I sold a story to Asimov’s!  It’s a hard-SF story titled “Adrift,” (I never was able to think up a better title for it than my working title.  It’s kind of boring, but whatever.) and I haven’t yet been told when it will run.  But when it does it will be my first publication that I can point at in a bookstore.  I’m pretty excited about that.
  • My website is working again. Hello website.

“Advertising at the End of the World” by Keffy Kehrli

Keffy’s last publication was in the print magazine Sybil’s Garage, so I couldn’t link to it.  But this one is online at Apex Magazine.  This was another of Keffy’s Clarion stories, and has one of the best first lines that showed up that summer.  It is also, as so many of his stories are, suffused with dark, understated humor.  Go read “Advertising at the End of the World.”

Check Out That Can, part 2

I can’t stop thinking about Brock Davis’s sculpture in this post.  It is so suggestive of genitalia, as it was intended to be, but it isn’t actually shaped anything like any human genitals.  It’s just a decorated aluminum can.  And to me it equidistant between male and female, suggesting both, but neither predominantly; a clever trick.  (Though I half expect my topologist friend Andrew to pop in and tell me I’m wrong, it’s actually closer to one or the other by some metric.)  How did he do it?

I think the reason it works so well is that, rather than choose individual characteristics of specific genetalia, he took advantage of heuristics by which we recognize them in general.  Flesh tone is an obvious one, with some bumps and texture for verisimilitude.  Genitals are part of a body, and a band-aid is something we only apply to a body, so putting one on the can induces the viewer to think of it as a body part.  A change of curvature is associated with a fringe of hair.  An opening is limned in more reddish “tissue.”  These non-gender-specific but related cues all applied to the same object make me look at it and think “sex organ,” despite it not being shaped like one.

I wonder what an analogous technique in prose would be.  Favoring descriptive words that are associated with a specific object/class/thing, when that isn’t what you are describing?  I read a story recently in which several characters were afraid of encountering a dog.  They are worried that a dog could show up at any time, and when one of them says something the verb used is “yipped.”  Is this an example of a similar trick?  It seems like it would be a powerful tool to have, being able to suggest the presence of something to a reader without the need to actually have it there.  What are other ways this is accomplished in fiction?

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