Author: mysh000

The Slog of the Novel Writer

I was so excited to see my short story “Simulations” finally appear online in Mythaxis magazine! You can check it out, here: https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-34/. I love Mythaxis because it’s free, ad-free and beautifully curated and illustrated. I highly recommend all the stories in this issue. All were deliciously disturbing, well-written and thought-provoking.

Now that the short story is out in the world, I only have one more story on submission and only at two places. It’s a weird epistolary piece set in 19th century Russia. I will probably submit it a few more places in the fall, but as it stands, it might be a while until anything else of mine is published.

Yes, I’ve been writing a novel. It’s a completely different ball game than a short story in that it’s hard to even know if or when you’ll ever be done. I’ve been working on versions of this novel for close to five years. I *think* I’ve finally committed to a fully outlined plot, but miles to go before I edit… The fear of course is that I’m putting in all this work and I am not sure whether I’ll ever have something to show for it.

But I’ve committed to a slog. Whether it’s five minutes of editing or 3000 new words on the page, I am working on this thing every day, a little bit at a time. If the short story is a 10k, this is like training for an ultra-marathon you aren’t quite sure you’ll ever run. But you just put one foot in front of the other because you enjoy the process, even when you don’t.

I’ve also gotten some great advice, fit for a short story writer, to split the novel up into parts and to work on the parts separately. One of the hardest things for me is staying organized and not getting lost in my own writing, especially when I keep changing the chronological structure from linear to circular to reverse chronology. I’ve tried Scrivner, but it felt like it would be extra work to learn it and use it. So now I just have these three documents that contain three planes of time, which will eventually be braided together. And I slog and I slog and I slog. One word after the other.

Stranger Than Speculative Fiction

My first speculative story, “Simulations” has finally found a home and will be published in the next issue of Mythaxis, a beautiful online journal that gives its readers “speculative fiction without distraction” (their words). Indeed, I was drawn to this publication’s lack of advertising and the gorgeous AI-generated art on its pages.

I wrote “Simulations” nearly three years ago and even though that’s not a long time ago, the ideas in the story felt quite speculative. It’s about a near-future dystopia where rich people can upload themselves to escape climate change catastrophes. The story follows a couple’s strained marriage and the husband’s decision to upload himself, leaving his wife behind to raise their young son in a dying world.

In one part of my story, the protagonist uses an app to figure out when pollution levels will be low enough for her to venture outside with her child. This wasn’t a reality I had yet lived when I wrote the story. But today I downloaded the AirNow app. so I can figure out when my kids, one of whom has asthma, can safely play outside. The smoke from the fires in Canada have blanketed our blue skies. I am painfully aware that the distance between the speculative and the immediate is closing.

As the publication date of “Simulations” draws near, I wanted to highlight exciting recent works with similar themes- the choices we might make when our physical environment becomes uninhabitable and technology offers us a way out. Will we be willing to bargain away our humanity? What about other meaningful experiences, concepts, connections? Extrapolations is an excellent show that makes predictions about what the world will look like as we pass dangerous thresholds of CO2 concentrations and global temperature increases. in a not-so-distant-future. Episode 7 in Season 1: “The Going-Away Party: 2068” especially resonated with my interest in how class will impact day-to-day reality on a hotter planet. I also recently read Louise Erdrich incredible short story “Domain” in Granta, which imagines how digital immortality might be the work of a collaborative creative process.