Random Thought on Writing and Reading

[Edited because of technical difficulties.] My family had a good time at Worldcon, and my head is still buzzing from being on great craft panels, and meeting writers I admire. Hopefully I can write a few things about that when life settles down a little more. But something I wanted to get out of my head: In talking about fiction writing we say a lot about the reader. The reader, as E.B. White once put it, is much in the news. The reader needs this. The reader wants that. You will win the reader over if you do this. You will lose the reader if you do that. All this is fair and well-intended. But it misses something I tried to say at one of the panels, that actual flesh-and-blood readers (as opposed to the hypothetical construct we call "the reader") are every bit as idiosyncratic as writers, and if you're going to seek feedback, seek it from more than one person. More to say later, but I'm having trouble with formatting and will need to sort that out.

My Worldcon Schedule

I’m excited and honored to be on panels at LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, in Anaheim. On Saturday 8/28, I'll be participating in two panels: 9AM-10AM “Purple vs. Windowpane Prose: Navigating Between Two Extremes” 3PM-4PM “Writing Series vs. Standalones” And on Sunday 8/30 I'll be on one more: 4:30PM-5PM “Point of View, What’s the Point?” Please say hello if you would like to! Thank you to the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests (SCIFI) Inc., and the California Anime Foundation for organizing and sponsoring the convention!

A New Story, and Reappearances of Old Stories

Hope you are all doing well. I wanted to announce a new story at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, "A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library." This one is set in my "Eldshore" series, though it's a standalone. (Gaunt and Bone are somewhere in the vicinity but they don't make an appearance.) Thanks to BCS editor Scott Andrews for his advice and to the amazing author Yoon Ha Lee for an early read.

Also, my story from Reactor magazine, "Nine Billion Turing Tests," has been reprinted *twice* recently in two cool anthologies: The Year's Top Robot and AI Stories, 6th Annual Collection, edited by Allan Kaster, and Think Weirder: The Year's Best Science Fiction Ideas, edited by Joe Stech.

Last but not least, I'm thrilled to announce that actor and audiobook narrator Wil Wheaton chose to record my story "The Odyssey Problem" from Clarkesworld magazine for his podcast "It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton." He has narrated audiobooks by John Scalzi and Ernest Cline and many others and has featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Picard as well as the movie Stand By Me and many other roles. As an old Star Trek fan I'm over the moon that he wanted to narrate something of mine.

That's all the news for now. Be well, take care, stay safe out there.

Three Recent Stories

Hope everyone who reads this is doing well. Since I last posted I've had a few stories appear. "Hausferatu" is a fantasy story at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a reminiscence of my recurring character Imago Bone from the days before he met Persimmon Gaunt. "Nine Billion Turing Tests" is a near-future science fiction story about AI, cats, grief, and climate change. It's at Reactor (formerly Tor.com.) And back at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, "To Hunt the Grey Lady" is out today. It's a standalone fantasy set in Gaunt and Bone's world, a tale of memory, self-discovery, and magic sea battles. Hope you enjoy them, or anything else you're currently reading!

Lots of Good News

I'm delighted to announce that my story "The Odyssey Problem" from the June 2022 Clarkesworld has been selected by guest editor R.F. Kuang (author of The Poppy War, Babel, and Yellowface) for the anthology BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 2023. Series editor John Joseph Adams has posted the table of contents, and what a star-studded lineup it is, and though I got the news a while ago I'm still shocked and honored to be in this company. For that matter the list of notable stories for the year is also full of amazing work. I'm so over the moon I can see lunar farside from here. The book is available for pre-order and will be out October 17. I'm also excited to share that contracts are signed for two upcoming stories, but I will let all that percolate a bit before talking more about them. (Edited to italicize R.F. Kuang's book titles.)

New story and upcoming anthology

I'm thrilled to report the new issue of Asimov's Science Fiction containing my story "The Second Labyrinth" is out now! The issue has a great lineup and I'm looking forward to reading it all. I hope people enjoy my oddball story. Although it's in the same setting as most of my other fantasy stories, it's much more in the line of "weird fiction" than my usual work.

I'm also delighted to announce I've got a story in the upcoming fantasy anthology Tales from Stolki's Hall, edited by Lou Anders. The stories are all set in Lou's Scandinavia-inspired setting of Norrøngard, which he first explored in his "Thrones and Bones" children's fantasy trilogy from Penguin Random House, and then adapted into a roleplaying game setting from Lazy Wolf Studios. Although the Norrøngard novels are children's books, this anthology is aimed at adults. I had a great time working a new story into Lou's fascinating setting. The anthology has ten stories from eleven contributors. More info is here.

(Edited because it took me this long to see I typed "trilled" instead of "thrilled.")

Verisimilitude: Who and What Is It For?

(The above image is by Corey A. Potter and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.) A stray thought, and maybe this is the right place to put it.

I was recently looking up a detail on ships and boats for a story. I'm fascinated by things nautical, even though my actual experience is very minor (I was briefly a deckhand on a harbor cruise ship.) As is often the case when I'm researching something, I've really enjoyed learning some new facts and sharing them.

Grounding fiction in fact can make it more convincing. The fancy term for this is "verisimilitude," a semblance of reality, a different word than "realism." Why the distinction? "Verisimilitude" acknowledges that we're not reporters conveying real events; we're storytellers trying to hook readers into believing in a story, at least for the duration of reading it. So the goal isn't conveying real information but making the story seem real through careful use of detail.

As a side note, this is why science fiction writers often can't resist using numbers ("the alien ship's nine kilometers off our bow -- point blank range") even in situations where there's no need for numbers and they increase the chance of error (say if you've already specified that your heroes' ship's lasers have a maximum effective range of eight kilometers.) Numbers just sound authoritative. 73% of Americans can't resist making them up. (I made that up.)

So the goal of verisimilitude is to convince, not to report on the world, whether the fictional one or the real one. Excessive use of detail is, in fact, generally looked down upon in writing as overdone exposition, or "info-dumping." To convince readers is an important practical goal for writers -- a convinced reader is more likely to be an entertained reader, and an entertained reader is more likely to be a return customer. More detail can actually work against this goal, by taking a reader out of the story.

But should our investigation of the real world in fiction begin and end with verisimilitude? Should we only present facts as a kind of sweetener to make the reader swallow the medicine of our fine literature? And what is that medicine? Characterization? Philosophy? Social commentary? Pure entertainment?

Nothing wrong with any of the above. But something nags at me: the thought that maybe we shouldn't limit our use of facts to a kind of sales job. Because the real world is an interesting place! A science fiction writer can include concepts from real-world science; this indeed is part of the draw of science fiction. A fantasy writer can include realistic details drawn from history. A mystery writer can include slice-of-life detail from interesting professions or parts of the world. A thriller writer can include details of actual espionage. And so on.

The risk, if you want to call it that, of using more real-world detail in fiction is that it will de-rail the story you have in mind. Say you want to have a character cross a redwood forest and you have a great scene in mind where they climb a tree to escape wolves. But on learning more about redwood trees you realize the trees aren't all that easy to climb.

But if your story doesn't jibe well with your own observations of the world, maybe it's the story that should bend, not the facts?

I want to chew on this idea a bit, so I'm putting it here.