windupstories.com - fiction by paolo bacigalupi

Crystal Meth House: Coda

The wonderful folks from Crystal Meth House have moved away. Rumor has it that they were foreclosed on, that that they left the house in shambles (broken windows, destroyed lawn, etc)…. and that they also apparently stripped it bare, to the extent of removing the furnace and the kitchen, cabinets and all. I’m still waiting for confirmation on whether or not they also took the toilet.

I sort of admire that level of crazy. I’m damn glad they’re gone. But I’m impressed, nonetheless.

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American Dream

My wife and I have the option of moving into bigger, more spacious, more sunny, more land, and more pretty much of everything, house.

The downside is that it’s also more mortgage, more responsibility, and it exists two miles out of town… basically in that no-man’s land called ex-urban sprawl. I hate this kind of sprawl. The 1-acre and 2-acre and 5-acre subdivisions that eat up farmland and cut up a landscape. And frankly, I hate the feel of 1980’s subdivisions- even though the house we’re looking at has fairly groovy passive solar and decent insulation, it’s still very much a product of the eighties. Right now, we live right down in town in a cute little 1940’s bungalow. It’s two blocks from my writing office. It’s a small house so our utility footprint is pretty modest, for Americans, anyway, and we’re within walking distance of post office, grocery store, bank, and friends. And when I say walking distance, I mean it’s all about four blocks away. Then again, pretty much the whole town is four blocks away.

But I think the thing that bothers me the most is that it’s definitely a case where if we move, it will mean that we have to be more disciplined financially. Right now, we live on a $300/month mortgage in our tiny house, so we have a fair amount of breathing room to do stupid things like write novels and short stories. If we move, it means I’ll need to start writing epic fantasy or start shaking my military-sf money maker or something.

So anyway, I’m torn. As Arjun gets bigger, we’re more and more on top of each other here. But the thing about having bigger more expensive things like houses is that they pretty much enslave you to that whole money jobby-job thing I’ve alluded to above. I hate that treadmill. It’s why I keep quitting jobs to write.

But then, on the flip side, another appealing aspect of the house is that it has more space for gardening, and as spring approaches, I’m dying to get out and plant things. And it’s got interior sun rooms so I could plant things all year round. And even though it’s out of town, it’s still close enough that I can ride my bike so it won’t necessitate another car — but still, the thing about living away from the town center is that the car just naturally gets more of a workout; you drive for groceries instead of walking for them. I can go back and forth about this stuff all day. Actually, I’ve already been doing it for a month.

Basically this boils down the cost/benefit analysis of the American Dream. With the hunger for the fun and the toys and the rosy lifestyle on one side, and the more practical but somewhat less fun version where we accept a life with limits.

Posted in consumerism | 3 Comments »

Bitterness Abated

The work on the book continues. I have not scrapped it.

One of the things that has always troubled me with writing is the need to both be creative and also to differentiate between good and bad paths to follow. The eternal editor/creator conundrum. It’s easy to say that when you’re creating, you should put the editor in a box and ship the bastard around the world, and only let him come visit for copyediting… But I don’t think that works.

Even when you’re in creative mode, you still need to be making choices, aiming toward something, plotting and gunning for something… and that editorial hat, or at least that hat of crafty scheming is necessary to get you there– To say, “umm, you’re deep in cliche here”, “let’s not do something boring here,” “kick it up a notch, eh?” etc.

When the editor gets completely exiled, you end up with a lot of words and not much gleam, either in ideas or prose, so you need… if not an editorial voice, at least a striving and demanding voice to be around. But the trick is to leash it and make it work for you. And I think the way you do that is not to use the editor to tell you what sucks, but to help guide you to what is cool, and to wave a flag for you when you need to go hunting for something better/cooler/more exciting. If you’re in a scene, and you’re thinking, “Christ, what a load of cliches,” the first thing to do is set aside the self-denigration, and the second thing to do is to focus on the much more pleasurable and interesting question of “what’s the coolest thing I can do with this? Let’s play here to make it better.”

It puts an optimistic spin on the realization that something’s not working, and by extension that keeps me working instead of throwing up my hands in despair.

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Dogged

In moments when my overweening ego is feeling buffed, I imagine that I’m a good writer.

After today, what I really think is that I’m a dogged writer. If I polish the turd long enough, eventually something shines. It’s really my specialty. Going after a story again and again until finally I figure out how to spin crap into gold. I often don’t know where I’m going with a story, or why a section of it (or the whole thing) doesn’t work. I just keep working at it, and eventually it gets better. Mostly by magic, it seems.

The problem with this technique is that it works pretty well for short stories, and works terribly for novels. I think I’ve been working on my current novel for almost two years, and mostly, I keep having the urge to throw it all away and give up. But no. Because I’m such a dogged sonofabitch, I keep working on it, trying to force it into a form that works. And that’s a problem, I think, because really, whenever I’ve really successfully reworked a short story, its because I threw everything away and started fresh from some angle that had been revealed in all of my earlier crummy attempts– that’s how I did “The Fluted Girl,” “The Calorie Man,” and my latest, “The Gambler.” I went after the coolest part that wasn’t really shining the way it should, the heart of it if you will, and I ripped that heart out and set it into a whole new body. And then the story worked.

With 150,000 words written, its painful to think that almost everything needs to be trashed, so that something more interesting can be created, but I’m starting to have that creeping feeling. Crash and burn. That’s how this whole project is feeling right now. I woke up in the middle of the night with this feeling of panic about the book– all its problems, all the facts that aren’t checked, all the cultural details that are fudged, all the world-building scaffolding that looks like it could collapse at any moment. All the words. Christ there are a lot of words. And I couldn’t go back to sleep for three hours. It’s not like there aren’t decent sections of the book, but its like the whole is less than sum of its parts.

Posted in writing | 2 Comments »

A friend in Baltimore

I’ve got a friend who moved from our little podunk rural town of Paonia, to the big bad city of Baltimore.

For a taste of his current life, he pointed me to this gem, The Baltimore Crime Blog. If anything, it seems that The Wire is one of those cases where if they told you the whole truth, you’d think they were making it up.

And from the Baltimore Crime Blog, I got linked to Anger Hangover’s More helpful hints for the new drug dealers on my block.

Brilliant.

Posted in travel | 2 Comments »

Free Stories Posted

I’ve added some sample stories under the PUMP SIX header. In addition to “The Tamarisk Hunter” I’ve also added the Hugo and Nebula nominee “The People of Sand and Slag” and just for grins, I also posted the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist “The Fluted Girl.” That should give people enough of an idea about my writing to either love it or hate it.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions about what I should post. It was a big help.

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Pretties

I found these in Night Shade’s triple-top-security storage facility.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point. I’m carrying a couple copies around in my bags right now, and I have to keep resisting the urge to take them out and pet them.

Posted in writing | 9 Comments »

Interview with The Fix

I recently did an interview with Marshall Payne over at The Fix. We chat about PUMP SIX, environmentalism, coal, and the joys of sharing, among other things.

Daniel Ausema has also done an extensive review of the collection. There are a couple small spoilers, especially about “Pop Squad” so if you want the stories to surprise you… well, you decide.

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Now THAT’S a guarantee!

I love traveling. Living in a tiny rural town, I’m normally cut off from the pulse of America. But every so often, I poke my head up, go visit strange urban lands, and roam through busy airports and come across gems like the following:

Now, if you read this while you’re eating your Big Mac, do you think:

A) You’re darn right! And there’s no guarantee better than that!
B) I’m so relieved.
C) Why are you announcing this to me? Is this a new policy?
D) I’m eating beef?

Posted in writing | 5 Comments »

A chat with Michelle Nijhuis

Award-winning science journalist Michelle Nijhuis interviews me over at Grist Magazine. We have a conversation about the connections between the work she does as a science journalist and how I work as a science fiction writer… and how a lot of her articles directly inspire the stories I write.

If you go over to her website, she’s got tons of stories posted about everything from global warming to the impacts of invasive species. Great stuff.

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