The book in question, for any interested readers, does appear to be available for pretty cheap prices in both hardcover and paperback on Amazon. I’m sure it can be gotten elsewhere, too. And yes, it really is entirely worth it.

Circlet’s made a business of putting out not only top-notch erotica but also top-notch writing, period – I’ve been continually impressed by the quality of work that I’ve seen them put out, and it’s been an honor to be a part of the anthologies in which they’ve included me. They were actually my very first publication ever and I’ll always be grateful to them. Congrats, Circlet. Here’s to many more years of SFnal porny goodness.

I’m including a lengthy and NSFW excerpt of “Catch and Release” below the cut.

- – -

It takes him a second or two to get the field down with how much his hands are shaking, but he calms them, closes his eyes and takes a few breaths, and even the stale, recycled air is soothing when pulled in at that amount. When he opens his eyes again, the field is down, and it takes another couple of commands to lower the tray and open the column’s panels with a soft hiss, making an opening he can walk through.

Everything echoes tinnily once he’s inside, and usually he doesn’t spend much time in here, the air strangely thin and a profound feeling that he is somehow closer to the vacuum here than at any other point in the ship except the main airlock, which he knows isn’t true, but he also knows by now that here, feelings count for a great deal.

And still he hesitates, standing over the little cylinder. It doesn’t look like anything. He knows that technically, he could be bathing in radiation, though the scan at least hadn’t detected any emissions of any kind. Still. He swallows hard, bends and picks up the thing.

It’s astonishingly light for how dense it’s supposed to be. It feels as though it might contain nothing. So perhaps it does. He turns it over in his hands, squinting at it in the bright lights that ring the inside of the intake column. It’s smooth, metallic, featureless but for a small panel set into one end. He knows he shouldn’t touch it. He touches it. It depresses very slightly. He knows he shouldn’t press it. He presses it.

Later, he will decide that any number of things could have made him do it. The laughter of the people in the pub, the flush in his face, or the boy-self, lying on the rooftops of the new Baghdad, staring up and dreaming star-dreams. Aiwa. Dreams that stayed that way, only dreams melting away into the everyday slog that his life up here has become. To catch something big. To have a good story to tell, one that doesn’t make them laugh or make his face burn. Yes, it could be so.

But he will also know that none of those things is the real reason why. He will know that it is her. And here she is, standing in front of him, her long hair full of starlight.

It’s the hair that he sees, at first and most clearly. Then the rest of her comes into focus, though whether it’s his eyes or reality he’ll never be sure. Her long limbs, almost bizarrely slender, a half inch away from alien, the transparency of her flesh, her essential nudity. He can see the lights of the column shining through her cheeks. Her skin has a faintly blueish tinge. her eyes are closed, and she is making no attempt to cover herself, though her hair floats around her and now and then passes over her small breasts. Suleiman looks down, momentarily unable to draw breath, and he sees that the tips of her toes are only just brushing the floor.

Her eyes open. There are no pupils there, and they are the color of the densest parts of the Milky Way.

Have you come to kill me?

Suleiman shakes his head. It’s all he can think to do. Her voice is low, smooth, quiet, and does not even seem to be sound as he knows it, for it comes from the very center of his head. “I…” he starts, hands at his sides, though they already itch to reach for her with the same itch that brought him back up to this deck in the first place. “I found you.”

It occurs to him to wonder if he might already be dead.

She cocks her head slightly, lifting her arms in a kind of supplication that becomes a dance that becomes an echo of flight that becomes merely her, if she can be called “mere’ in any sense of the word, floating before him with her hands held out, palms up. Then my term is not ended? Am I still to be imprisoned? Are you still angry with me? She pauses then, and seems to look more closely at him. At another time and with another woman he would be ashamed of his rumpled clothing and his mussed hair, his face badly in need of a shave. But this is now, and she may not be a woman. He’s sure she isn’t.

She shakes her head slightly, and when she speaks again her voice is edged with slow realization. You are not my adjudicator.

“I am not.”

She steps forward without stepping, her star-filled hair rising around her as if blown by a breeze he can’t feel. Her hands lift with real purpose now, and the first time they touch him he thinks of ice so cold it burns. Then touch me, would-be liberator. Aiwa, touch me… it has been such a long time.

She does not have to tell him. She is already touching him, and to that he thinks there can only be one answer.

He manages to get them out of the cylinder and then they sink to the floor, her levitating body coming to rest on it at last, and he has time to wish that he kept this deck cleaner before she closes a burning kiss over his lips and he thinks of only her, her breasts curving into his palms as if they ache to be there, nipples so hard they no longer feel like flesh. When he pulls back to look at her beneath him, he can see light moving beneath that glass-like skin, not veins or organs but electrical impulses, tiny surges of power. He lowers his mouth to her, takes her nipple between his teeth and bites down and he could swear he sees sparks.

She moans and clutches at him, and it doesn’t take very much to make himself forget how different this is, how strange this is, how remarkable that he remembers how to do everything and that what he does can give her pleasure. He’s stripping off his rumpled clothes and she’s helping him with her icy fingers; he’s looking up for permission as he slides between her thighs and she’s already shoving his head down, gone from so calm to so frantic in a matter of minutes. She tastes like lightly sugared milk and the succulent juices of a broiled hen. She tastes like he somehow knew she would taste. She comes explosively and this time he knows he sees sparks under her skin, lines of chain lightning shooting up into what would be her spine.

She doesn’t give him time to rest and she does not take it for herself. She’s pulling at him again, dragging him up against her, gone from frantic to ravenous, and part of him is beginning to be a little bit afraid. She reaches between them and grasps at his cock and he cries out, because it hurts, it hurts almost as much as it did when he woke in his bunk with dreams of her and of Baghdad still echoing behind his eyes. She strokes him and the pain is bowled over and forgotten. She is opening her legs for him, rolling up with her hips, her whole body like a hungry mouth. He falls into her and she hooks her legs over his hips and takes him, her long arms curled around his neck and the whisper of a hundred half incomprehensible demands and entreaties between his ears.

She is Baghdad, he thinks fitfully. They are one and the same, new, ancient, enticing, hungry. Baghdad rebuilt, center of the new world, rich with the wealth of the global economy, swelling with all the nations, reaching out to take him in. Trying to hold on. Which is why he had run, and now he is caught again. She is Baghdad, gleaming and seductive; she is the stars over him and the hot roof beneath, she is the lights and the noise and she is touching him, and this time he doesn’t pull away.

Later, when they lie together in the tangle of his clothing and he notes that her skin shines without a drop of sweat, she tells him that she will give him a gift. She will let him choose how he dies.

I like doing these, and I like Soundcloud, but I think I may need to move to a different host. At some point I’m going to run out of space.

As always, please give me things to talk about if you want me to talk about about anything specific.

The text of the excerpt I read is under the cut.

- – -

Samir Ghani dodged the first punch but failed to evade the second. Pain exploded up through his jaw and into his skull, a spike of pale light stabbing into his temporal lobe and spidering out into the rest of him. He was sure he felt his teeth crunching into the inside of his cheek; he tasted blood. Someone was screaming, a wet and gasping sound. He had an awful suspicion that it might be him.

So much for a quiet evening.

Not that he really should have expected it. But one found oneself hoping, no matter how much one tried to restrain the impulse.

The punch had dropped him down to one knee; he rolled and tried to scramble away, the world doubling and lurching around him in a dim, warped image like a scene underwater. Was he under a table? Something was towering over him—a table, a person, flesh and furniture, and there wasn’t always the finest distinction between the two.

He was aware of other looming shapes, possibly animate and possibly not. He was aware of flashing lights, bass that thumped against the outside of his skull in time with the blood thumping against the inside. He was aware, even through the haze of pain and noise, of the sensation of being watched—on a large scale. The bar had been crowded when the fight began; he remembered that, even if the beginning of the fight itself was now as fuzzy and indistinct as his vision. The bar had been crowded, and every one of those people would welcome a free show. So they were probably the people he sensed watching him. And they were probably benign.

For now.

And then the shape looming over him took a heavy step forward and he was sure that at least one of them wasn’t benign at all.

“Take it easy, man,” he slurred. His lips weren’t being responsive. He swiped at them and his hand came away in a glistening smear of blood. Again, he tried to move backward, and his shoulder-blades struck an obstacle—rough edges, exposed brick. The wall. “You win, okay? Whatever, fuck it. You win.”

“Yeah,” the looming form rumbled, laughed a sound that was only a deeper and louder rumble, and then something like a sledgehammer slammed into Samir’s gut and the world faded out for a while.

When it swam back into focus he was in the air. For a moment he was simply confused in a foggy kind of way, blinking swollen eyes and trying to make sense of gravity, airflow, movement and the raucous cheers all around him. Then he got it, and the hard tug of his shirt under his arms helped. He was being lifted bodily up, held and turned around the room, displayed like a fucking trophy. Which he supposed he was. All those cheers, like rocks raining against the inside of his head—benign now?

In that they weren’t actively trying to hurt him. And what a low, sad benchmark that was.

“This is what fucking happens!” the looming man-thing was yelling, his voice rumbling over and under the noise of the crowd, the bass underpinning everything. “This is what you get!”

Then Samir was flying.

He expected it. That didn’t make it easier. The ceiling of the bar was strung with garlands of red lights, hung with crimson paper lanterns, and the whole room dissolved into a sickly red blur as he hurtled backward. It would have made him sick if he had stayed airborne longer, and he was almost thankful for the flimsy pressboard table that took the impact of his weight and then collapsed under it, pulling kinetic energy out of him and swallowing it down, glass shattering as it all hit the floor. He hoped that what he felt pooling at his back was just spilled beer. He didn’t think anything besides the table and the glasses were broken. Not as bad as it could be.

A kind of mantra, really. The chorus of his entire life. Not as bad as it could be.

How much longer might that be true?

Whatever. Perhaps judiciously, he passed out again.

New thing-what-I-don’t-feel-comfortable-calling-a-podcast. Turns out I’m feeling a lot better this week. Also I wrote a story that I actually like. I read a bit of it. Text of the excerpt is under the cut.

As always, please get in touch with me with any questions, anything you want me to read or talk about -  really anything.

- – -

There are the houses of bodies in the district of the dead, an entire section of the city marked off to stand in silent evidence of what happened. But then there are also the memorials at the city center, and we go there in the first warm swell of the afternoon before second sunrise. We’re accompanied by a Lejshethri guide; her name is Shairovin, and even for a Lejshethri she is long-limbed and graceful, floating rather than walking and making me feel heavy-footed and clumsy. At the memorial she stands quietly aside, her hands tucked into the folds of her light tunic. I note that it is the same color of blue as the cloth that wrapped the spine in the house of the dead.

The memorial itself is a single black spike one hundred feet high. It impales the sky. Shairovin has told us, in a tone that subtly suggested apology, that her people feel that it is too aggressive. Too accusing. They worried that it might maintain the terror that followed the killing weeks, when the colonists began preparing for the war of Lejshethrai retribution. The war that never came.

But we wanted it, so as with everything else, they stood aside and allowed it. “I think it is for you more than it is for us,” Shairovin said on the ride to the memorial. “All that business, what good it is to remember? It can’t be undone.”

She said that some of the Lejshethrai would just as soon bury the dead, clear the houses, and make use of the space. “We don’t wish animosity.” In the groundcar, she leaned forward, her narrow eyes widening to show her earnestness, her three-fingered hands outstretched and open. “All we want now is peace.”

It puzzles them, our need to remember what we’ve done. The way we seem to treasure it, to hold it close like something precious.

Aaron and I stand in the shadow of the spike, looking up until our necks are sore and our eyes ache. “It’s bigger than I thought,” Aaron murmurs. I just nod.

The spike is bounded by a circular plaza dotted with stone benches. There are no trees. Besides Shairovin, we’re the only ones there. After fifteen minutes, we get back in the car and roll back to the hotel in silence.

Note: I mean that I’m in my third year of grad school. Not third semester. Blahblah.

You can read the excerpt I read aloud below. From untitled time-travel-war-thing.

- – -

Let me start over.

Once upon a time there was a girl and she was going to be married to herself. Everything was arranged for the wedding day, but after the ceremony was solemnized and she was joined to herself in faithfulness unto death, the world opened up and swallowed her into darkness. Frantic and grief-stricken, she searched, and in the end she went down into the darkness after herself, down into the bowels of the realm of the dead, and there she found herself cold and frozen, sitting with her hand in the skeletal grip of Death.

Give me back myself, she said to Death, and such was her pain and grief that even Death was moved.

You may recover yourself, said Death, and return to the world above. But you may not reflect on yourself on the journey. Keep moving forward. Do not look back as you climb.

So the girl began her long climb back to the world above, followed by the silent shade of herself–or so she believed. So she was made to believe. Until her conviction began to waver there in the darkness. Until she began to wonder if she was anywhere at all. Until she came to a moment where she knew she would either look, or not.

All our choices are made in single instants. All our lives are singularities of time, strung together like pearls.

I’m █████ to ████ █████ the ████ █████ I’m ███████ on. I ████, it █████ █████-██████. We’ll see.

██████ I ████: I ████ it’s set in a █████████ ████████ ██████. I ████ ████ █████’s a █████ of █████ █████ ████████ ████████████. I ████ my ████ ██████████ are █████ █████–a man ████ a ███████ ██████████ who has ████ ████████ ████ a ██████████ and who has ███████ to ████ █████ the █████████–and ███████–a man ████ a ██████ ██████, a ██████████ ████, and ██████████ ██████, who █████ to ███████ ████ he is an ███████████ of St. ███████ █████████. I ████ ████ █████ and ███████ ████ ██████████ ████ a █████. I ████ ████ the ████ █████ not ████ ██████ █████ ███████ ████████████ but ██████ the ███████ of a ████████ █████████ █████ to ███████ a █████ to █████████ the ██████████.

██████ I don’t ████: ███████ or not ███████ ██████ is an █████. ███████ or not █████’s ██████ is one of the ████ ████. ███████ or not █████ ████ be a █████ ██████.

█████ I ████ all of ████ out, ████ a █████.

- – -

He ████ ███████ the ████, ███████ his █████ ███████ it, ██████ ████ ████ and ██████ ███████ ████ and █████████ on. He no ██████ ██████████ how ████ he had ████ ███████.

█████ he had ███████ ████ the dog-man, █████ had ████ a █████ ████ of ████████ and ███████████ █████. ████ had ████ the ████, and for a ██████ █████ he had ██████ ████ ████. █████ was █████████ █████ the █████ ██████, so █████████ ████ the ██████ and ██████████ █████ ████ he had ████ all ██████ him, the ████ ███████ in the █████ █████. The █████ had ████ a ██████ ████…

████.

And he had ██████ in it, ████████ █████ in the ██████ of an ████████ █████ ████ █████, ██████ █████ ███████ ████ his ████ ████, ████ ██████ up to the sky and his ████ ██████. █████. ████. █████ ████ ████ ██████. He ██████████ ████ ████.

████ a ██████ and the █████ of ███████ █████████ ██████ him, and the ███████ of ██████ had ████████. The █████ ██████ him ███████. He was ██████ █████.

████ or █████ he █████ a █████ ████ ██████ to him ████ the █████ did, and █████████ in him ████████ him ████ the █████ was █████ and the █████ was ███████, and he ███████ and ████ ███████ ████ █████ and ██████ his ████ ██████ ███████ as his ████ was ███████ ████ ███████. He was ███████████ █████, █████████ and █████████ ██████ ████ ███████ a ████. ████████ █████. ██████ ████ was so █████ to ██████, ████ ████ was so █████ to ████.

████ was not ████. ████ was a ████ ██████ of it. He ███████ ████ and ██████ on, ██████ ███████ ███████, ███████ ██████ ██████████.

Why was he ████? █████ had he ████ ████? It ████ a ████ for the █████████ to ████ to him—to ████ ████████ █████████ as █████ as the ████ of his █████████—but ████ ████ ████ ████ ████ █████████, ██████████ to ██████, and ██████ by a ████████ █████████ ████ █████████ █████ ████ ███████. ████ he █████ ████ ████ ████. By ████ the █████ was ████████ and far ████ ████████, no ██████ █████████ to ████ in. █████ was ███████ his ████. He ███████ in a ████ █████ of ██████ and ██████ his ███████ █████ ███████ the █████ of his ████ and █████████.

He ████’t ████ why, █████ all ██████, he ██████ be ███████ ███████████.

I’m also a bit of an oddball, though, and I’d like to mark the release by talking about why.

“Wetwire” started out just straight-up erotica, but part of the way through the inception process, something interesting happened: I started to think about Themes. Those themes eventually expanded to fill most of the mental space of the story, until I ended up feeling like the sex was mostly a way of talking about something else. Two primary something elses, actually. They are:

- William Gibson’s idea of  how “the street finds its own uses for things”. “Burning Chrome” is one of my favorite short stories ever, and Gibson is one of my favorite authors ever, so of course, setting out to write cyberpunk porn, it makes sense that he would be lurking in the background (not like in a creepy way). But the idea is interesting to me beyond that. What I ended up writing about was that initial moment in the emergence of a new form of technology – or a new evolution of an existing one – when it’s not yet widespread or widely commercial, when the only people making much use of it are techies and hackers. At those moments, its actual use might be extremely up for grabs – people might use it for a whole set of things for which it was not originally designed, and for which it may not be used by the public in general once it goes mainstream.

We were the first ones in the pool, sinking in the data-seas, surfing on waves of raw binary, slammed against the shores of our own perception and then straight back out for more. We loved it. It was like being there at the beginning of the universe, an explosion of unformed potentiality, the point of cosmic orgasm. I tossed out my name after I dropped out of college, and I called myself Tiamat because I floated in the watery chaos of that world like it was home. Once Kim gave me a taste I never wanted to come back. We were out there, Kim and me and all the rest of the net-jetsam, drifting through a paradise of incompatible coding, where anything could be and was and would be forever.

The characters in my story exist in that moment, dealing with a new form of communications technology where the interface is within the brain rather than at the fingertips. This isn’t in itself a new idea -  a fully immersive version of the internet has been a cyberpunk trope since the beginning of the genre. But I wanted to tackle it, nevertheless, because of the other thing I ended up primarily writing about:

- The nature of cyborgs. I should be clear about this: I’m thinking of cyborgs in the Donna Haraway sense, beings for whom the line between humanity and technology is not in any way clear or static. My characters are already in that state, much as we are now – their reality is augmented, their world is a lived implosion of atoms and bits. Indeed, their experience of the world is becoming more about the perception of bits than of atoms – the virtual world in which Tiamat and her friends spend most of their time is chaotic and unformed, almost nothing like the “real” world, and as such their very ideas of what the world is and should be are changing in response to a relationship with technology.

In that sense, I’m also responding to a trope in a lot of cyberpunk: the idea of shedding the physical body in favor of an existence in digital space. This is an interesting idea and it continues to resonate with a lot of people, but I wanted to turn it a bit on its head. Tiamat is losing touch with her body, her flesh, her meat. But her body is still a feature of her world. It still matters. I wanted to try to pull her back into that, to put her in a situation where the very technology that disconnected her from her flesh puts her back into full and immediate contact with it. I wanted to implode atoms and bits from a different angle.

With sex.

So “Wetwire” happened. I think it’s interesting. I hope other people think it is, too. But it is, again, an odd SFnal bird in a flock of stories many of whose authors are usually identified with romance. And in light of that, I feel like I should issue a warning, especially given some of the early reviews that have trickled in:

If you are generally a romance reader, you will probably not like this story. Because it’s not romance. It’s not even romance-ish. I’ve seen it described in more than one place as “cold” and “emotionless”, and I fully own that. I wasn’t especially interested in emotion when I was writing it, and I think that shows. I wasn’t interested in establishing any kind of meaningful relationship between my main characters, and I think that shows as well. So if you’re looking for those things, be aware that you won’t find them. This is probably not the story for you. Hopefully, given that it’s a pretty diverse collection, there will be plenty of other stories in there that provide all the things I left out.

But just as an aside, I do think this is indicative of some ongoing issues in the classification and marketing of “erotica”, some of which I’ve written about before – including how it’s kind of weird to me that I’ve sold a bunch of things that are marketed pretty heavily toward romance readers when I don’t consider myself at all a writer of romance.

But what the hey. People like categories. This is useful but also clearly creates problems.

Regardless, I hope you’ll pick up the anthology. Again, with that diverse a collection of authors and takes on a theme, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find something that floats your boat.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

—

“You can tell me to stop anytime,” he said. “If you really don’t like it. And I swear, I will.”

At first there was nothing. I watched him go back to the netbook again, and I squirmed a little, experimentally, but as he tapped on the keyboard I caught myself starting to doubt this whole “input” thing, starting to wonder if this was all just some kind of kinky prank.

Then he hit a key and my fucking brain started buzzing.

It was a low hum at first, but it ramped up until it was a purring between my temples. My vision doubled; I shook my head, trying to clear it, and then he was crouching over me. I licked my lips, tried to gather myself enough to speak, and he touched me again, light, running the tips of his fingers up the insides of my bent arms. It was like the raking of little needles over my skin. I jerked and he laughed.

“Kim, tell me what the fuck—” His fingers moved back down, quick, and he pinched my nipple through my shirt. No gentle teasing, just one hard pinch. It should have made me yell, and it just about did—but it didn’t hurt. It was like someone pressing a slick finger down on my clit, flicking it so fucking perfectly, all pleasure. I dropped my head back and whimpered.

“I rewired your peripheral nervous system,” he murmured, lips against my ear as his fingers kept twisting, pulling my skin out of shape. “Pain is some of the most intense shit you can feel, right? Pleasure is harder, more subtle . . . So I figure, if I switch which makes you feel what . . .” He gave my nipple one more hard twist and released me. I let out a whine of disappointment, but it cut off when his hand smacked hard against the side of my face.

Tears flooded my eyes. He’d avoided the jacks, but I could feel my cheek burning . . . and it was hard to describe what else. It was all the pain I would feel from a slap like that, but flipped. Sweetened. It was lingering, a warm honey-glow spreading down my neck, all through me. I gasped, twisted a little, but I wasn’t trying to get away.

“You like that?” He flicked his tongue against my ear, and it was like he’d dug his fingernail into the lobe. I tried to get words out—what I would have said, then, I have no idea—and they didn’t come. Should it have been scary, what he’d done to me? Maybe. I hadn’t known exactly what was coming. But I hadn’t really asked. Because I’d wanted something new, I’d wanted to be surprised . . . and here we were, and I wanted . . . Fuck, I wanted him to hurt me.

So this is neither a regular series anymore, nor is it happening on Mondays. I’m keeping the title around because I like alliteration, but if there’s one thing that’s made itself abundantly clear over the last semester, it’s that regular blogging is much harder for me than regular story-writing.

Nevertheless, here’s this installment: for when you’ve written and beta’d and edited and written and edited and written some more, and you have something that you’re really happy with.

So now you send it out.

And yet I get the sense that a lot of people struggle with this part. Which makes total sense – before, the people reading your stuff have probably just been you and some people you at least know sort of well. Now you’re sending your little story that you love and worked so hard on out to people who don’t know you at all. And they’ll look at it, and you know that it’s likely that they won’t want it. That they’ll reject it.

Buddy, that hurts.

And it hurts every single time. It gets a little easier as you go, but really it’s always pretty much a downer. I’ve written elsewhere about what I think some good ways to handle the agony of defeat are, but really the one thing I’ve found that always seems to work best and most immediately is sending it back out again. But if you even want to get to that point at all, you have to submit the thing in the first place. And again, that can be a really hard step to take.

How to make it easier? I’m honestly not sure. I’m not sure there is any one way – everyone is different in every aspect of this process anyway, but when it comes to this particular jumble of hope and fear, I think people’s individual differences are likely to be of even greater than normal consequence. So whatever works for you is basically going to just be what works for you. And it may not work for anyone else but you.

I think perhaps it helps to remember what’s at stake,  though: You worked hard on this story. You really (I assume) believe in it. That means that a lot is out there to get stomped on with that first rejection slip, true – but I think it also means that a lot is there to be lost if you never send the story anywhere. What if it gets accepted? What if it would have been accepted, but it never got the chance because you could never let it go? And what if someone out there would have really enjoyed it, and has now been denied the chance? There are few things that feel as awesome – I think – than someone you’ve never met, someone who has no reason in the world to go out of their way to be nice to you, dropping you a line to say “That thing you wrote? I really dug it.”

There’s also the issue of meaning to submit but never feeling that the story is quite good enough. The impulse to edit and tweak endlessly. I’m not sure what to say to that either, especially given that I tend to err rather heavily in the other direction. But I think that usually, when a story really is done, you know. And if you don’t, hopefully one of your betas will tell you.

If you’ve worked hard on your story, it deserves a chance out in the big scary world. You owe it that. So get it out there. And when you get rejected – and yeah, that’ll probably happen, and it’ll probably happen a fair amount – get back on the horse and send it out again. Hope and persistence are really necessary in this. Perhaps to a slightly loopy degree.

A word about the title of these: I realize that it might read sort of obnoxious, like I think that this is the the definitive way  to be a writer and to publish. Let me be clear about this: I don’t think that, nor am I claiming it. I think there are some broad conventions that are likely to work across different people and working styles, as well as techniques that might be more likely to yield good results than others. But this is only what’s worked for me, and what I’ve done. It might not work for you. It might be bad advice for you. So I make no claim to authority here outside my own experience. The wording of the title itself is meant to convey impatience and exasperation toward the craft/process itself, which is frankly how I feel about writing a lot of the time.

That clarified, this week: editing.

I’ve written a lot around and about the process of editing, but not much that deals directly with what the process looks like, for me. This is mostly because, for me, the process is still very much in the middle of being hammered out, and it changes all the time. Of all the elements of writing that I deal with, editing is probably the one on which I still need to do the most work – which sucks, because it’s sort of really really important.

Me, I’m impatient (see above). I’m also blessed with the ability to write first drafts that often don’t need drastic tweaking before they’re at least okay. But because I don’t usually see the need for massive tweaking, and because I’m impatient and I have an itchy submission finger (more about this next week), I tend to overlook the need for more subtle polishing, and I sometimes send things out before they’re really ready – before they really are about as good as they can be.

In that vein, some things I’ve learned, most of which I’m sure are familiar to you:

• Get some distance. Put the piece aside and do other things, so you can come back to it in a week or two and read it like you’re not so close to it that you can’t actually see what shape it’s in. This is hugely important, and hugely difficult if you’re as impatient as I am. But you need it. You’ll miss things without at least an approximation of objectivity.
• Get some good beta readers and listen to them. Do not pick people who have good reason to massage your ego, or people whom you believe might do so out of nicety. Pick the most ruthlessly blunt people you know and demand their honesty. I firmly believe that no story is so good that it can’t do with at least two extra sets of eyes. And you may not like what they say. But be ready to trust them, even if the truths they tell you are hard to hear.
• Be ready to murder your darlings. One thing I especially need to work on in the editing phase is cutting. Cutting is hard, especially if you have a habit of falling in love with your own prose. But I’ve lost count of the number of stories I’ve written that ended up being hampered, and in some cases rejected, because of their length – more specifically, because of the amount of plot in the length. Short stories especially are tricky this way: they need to be lean and mean. Stuff needs to happen and it needs to happen fast, because there isn’t a lot of space for it to happen in. So ideally, each individual word should do something specific. If it doesn’t, or if it doesn’t do it efficiently enough, cut it and find a new one. And if you really really  love this passage or that turn of phrase, that’s when you most likely need to be the most ruthless. Seriously: you are a serial killer and words are your hapless victims. Murder them.
• Be ready for more. Even after a story gets accepted, there are almost certainly one or two or even four or five more rounds of editing that it’ll need to go through. Sometimes an editor will also have something of a different vision of your story than you do. A writer should never sacrifice the soul of her story, or make concessions that she really finds harmful to the piece, but be ready to work constructively with criticism, and be ready to be open to ideas that might, at first shot, seem very far apart from how you see things unfolding. Don’t be a prima donna. Trust your editor, at least unless she’s really given you good reason not to.

Next week: the submission process. Joy.

This is something else I’ve written about before. It tends to be more of an issue with longer pieces for me, because those are the points at which stamina really comes into play (people who compare writing novels to running marathons are not kidding in the slightest, nor are they overstating the point, though again, everyone is different). But I think it’s the kind of thing that has the potential to be a problem for anyone, at any point.

Here’s what I’m talking about: there is going to come a time – and probably this time will come semi-frequently – where you’re not blocked, but nothing you write seems good and you’re sure that it all sucks. This is naturally going to make you want to stop writing, because writing sucktastic stuff is no fun, even if no one else ever sees it. It’s embarrassing and it feels like a slogging waste of time.

This is a trap. Don’t fall for it.

It’s possible that what you’re writing sucks, yes. Here’s two things, though.

1. You are too close to your own writing to be sure of that. I really think that true objectivity – when you’re in the midst of the process – is just about impossible for most people. It certainly is for me. This is why we have editors, or why we should. You might think that what you’ve written sucks, and then come back to it days or weeks later and be pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s actually pretty good. But if you had quit back when you had started to feel like you were sucking, that’s some pretty good writing that wouldn’t have happened. Also, every time you walk away from a project, I think you may find that it’s more and more difficult to walk back to it. The times when it’s hardest to keep going are often the times when it’s most important to do so.
2. You need to be okay with sucking. Anne Lamott has written a great deal on being okay with shitty first drafts, so let me just put in yet another plug for her: if you’re neurotic about writing, go read her stuff. She won’t make you less neurotic, but she’ll help you embrace your own issues and maybe even turn them into stuff that can work for you. But let me also reiterate her point: You have to get comfortable with your first draft being shitty. Because while what you’re writing may not suck, it also may suck quite badly. And that’s fine. That’s why we have first and second and third drafts, why we have beta readers and editors. You know what’s worse than having a shitty first draft? Having no first draft. A shitty first draft is almost certainly not shit all the way through. There’s probably a good story hiding in there, one that you can pull out and clean off in the editing phases, sharpen and reshape and polish into what you really want it to be. But you can’t do anything with nothing. Shit is still something to work with, even if it’s not good clay.

So take heart in the midst of hating everything you write. Keep going, even if it’s miserable. Even if you hate it and you want it to die. Finish it, put it away, come back to it later when the hate has subsided and you can see it with fresh eyes. You might be shocked at what you find.

And if what you find is still shit… go back to work on it. People have used shit to build houses with. It’s all good.