Penumbra of the Orange Donkey

by B. Morris Allen

I started writing when I was young. It’s probably for the best that there’s only one survivor of the period, a piece called “The Orange Donkey”. It reads like what it is, a story written by a six year old. My parents were proud, but despite their acclaim, I didn’t do much more writing until a few desultory pieces for a college writing class.

After college, as I was deciding what to do about not becoming a veterinarian, I tried my hand at writing. I produced the outline and opening chapters of a fantasy novel, and a short story based on a Deep Purple song, “Blind”. Then graduate school called, and I gave up on writing again.

Over the next two decades, I sent out “Blind” every couple of years, with no result – mostly with no answer at all. Meanwhile, my writing process consisted of: 1) waiting for inspiration to strike, and 2) hoping to be near a keyboard or pen when that happened. It’s surprising how rarely the two coincide. My total output was essentially nil, though I did keep my ‘idea’ file regularly topped up.

In the fall of 2010, something changed – Absent Willow Review (now sadly defunct), accepted “Blind”, the story I’d been sending around for so long. When the shock wore off, I sat down to think. Clearly, my inspiration-based process wasn’t working; twenty years is a pretty fair test period. At the same time, I was working as a short-term consultant; I had time free between gigs. I’m pretty serious about my work. Why not do what so many people recommend, and treat writing as a job?

As with an annoyingly high percentage of popular wisdom, it worked. Every day, after an hour futzing around doing nothing, I would find my rhythm, and the words would pour out. At one point, I was writing a story a day – good ones! I found myself racing to complete stories before the mailman arrived, so that I could send them to those irritating magazines that only accept hardcopies. I was about to burst onto the writing scene in a big way!

Or maybe in a small way. My scintillating prose didn’t seem to wow the editors (it may be that the whole type-and-send approach deserved a rethink). Equally important, I accepted a full-time job, and my period of high production came to a close after only two months.

I kept writing new stories, but at a much slower rate – perhaps one a quarter, if I was lucky. One such was “Tocsin”, inspired by Thomas Covenant; at least, I was reading the latest by Stephen Donaldson, and he used the word. My immediate reaction was “Hey! [Fellow writer] Fran Wilde could use that” as the title for a story of hers that I loved, and which involved ships, a bell, and mysterious disappearances. Unfortunately, her story was more hopeful and uplifting, and I decided the title didn’t fit after all. So I was left with a clever title but no story to go with it. “Tocsin”, with its steady rhythm and echoes of John Donne, is what I came up with.

Despite my meager output, I’d been selling stories occasionally to ‘semi-pro’ venues during 2011 and 2012, and I’d reconciled to the idea of taking the world by light breeze, instead of by storm. Then, in February this year, Penumbra accepted “Tocsin” for its Ocean-themed issue. My first ‘professional’ sale!

Real world requirements have prevented much new writing this year, so the Penumbra sale didn’t open the floodgates, but there are several stories due in anthologies in the near future (including “Blind”, I’m happy to say). I’ve also been experimenting with self-publishing – a few stories, two collections, a novella.

It’s been a long, leisurely path from Alfred the Orange Donkey to here, but I like to think that he’d be pleased with the result. Despite the slowdown in production at the story factory, there’s a sizeable batch of new stories awaiting finishing touches, so there’s a chance that light breeze will pick up soon. Keep your eyes open for a change in the weather!

B. Morris Allen grew up in a house full of books that traveled the world, and was initially a fan of Gogol and Dickens. Then, one cool night, he saw the light of Barsoom...

B. Morris has been a biochemist, an activist, and a lawyer. He pauses from time to time on the Oregon coast to recharge, but now he's back on the move, and the books are multiplying like mad. When he can, he works on his own contributions to speculative fiction.

Consider Iain

by B. Morris Allen

Penumbra asked me to write a blog post on the same day I heard that Iain Banks had only a few months to live. So, in honor of Mr. Banks, I've taken him as the seed for this post.

I've been reading Banks (mostly Iain M. Banks, but I expect both of him are leaving us) since Consider Phlebas, back in the 80s. Happily, a lot of others have too, and he prospered.

Banks is good at a lot of things, but he's an expert at space opera. It's true that Banks' Culture and Smith's Lensmen are parsecs apart, but they both deal with grand themes, vast distances, and big decisions. Both succeed by personalizing those larger than life issues, and bringing them down to a human (or alien) scale.

That's what speculative fiction is all about. Sometimes (Asimov's The Gods Themselves) it's nominally about exploring some new dimension of science. Sometimes (Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas or Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country) it's doing the same with social constructs. But even when it's just Tumithak wandering the corridors, or Durzo Blint training a new apprentice, it's all about people. How do they react to the kind of situations that only speculative fiction can put them in? What do they do, and when they do it, what kind of people do they become?

Of course, not all speculative fiction is quite so contemplative, and I originally came to science fiction and fantasy for Barsoom-type adventure, as I suspect many do. If you'd talked to me about people and character all those years ago, I would have waved it off. Sure, yes, all fiction is really about people. Blah, blah, blah. It wasn't until I read Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth that I realized SF heroes did not have to be John Carter hero types, no mean swordsman on any number of worlds. But even John Carter had Dejah Thoris to bring out a meaningful human side. But I want excitement and imagination too. Speculative fiction's strength is that it takes regular people (plus some steel-thewed heroes and beautiful geniuses), and puts them in situations that make you think.

The good thing about writing speculative fiction is that you can start from either end. In my case, I sometimes have what I think is a neat idea. For example, my novella The Speed of Winter started from the chance conjugation of an idea (what would it be like to be the last child on an arkship gone wrong?) and a line from the UN Human Development Report for Mongolia ("the speed of winter"). I took the scenario that suggested, and imagined what people would do (and what it would do to people). The answer I came up with was grim (that's artistic license at work, not innate pessimism). Just as often, though, I start with characters and see where they take me. I know a little about them when we start, and I get to know them better as we go. As authors have been saying since they first told stories, sometimes the characters surprise me. That's true even when I writing about myself (in my one semi-autobiographical story, "Spring and the Arachnodactylist").

I don't know Iain Banks, and clearly now I never will. But I know his books. He's a master of the technical, both hardware and sociocultural. But his strength is that he never neglects his characters; I know them too. They're complex and finicky, and sometimes they surprise me. Here's hoping they keep doing that in re-read after re-read for many decades to come.

B. Morris Allen grew up in a house full of books that traveled the world, and was initially a fan of Gogol and Dickens. Then, one cool night, he saw the light of Barsoom...

B. Morris has been a biochemist, an activist, and a lawyer. He pauses from time to time on the Oregon coast to recharge, but now he's back on the move, and the books are multiplying like mad. When he can, he works on his own contributions to speculative fiction.