The Futility of Utopia

by Kristen Saunders

What is utopia? It is an ideal community or society possessing highly desirable or perfect qualities. The problem lies within humanity’s inability to agree on a single course of action that would create a desirable outcome.

Desire is such a dangerous thing especially when there is only a limited quantity of something. “Something” could be money, time, space, a job, resources, or even the thoughts of people. It then stands to reason that a utopia would be able to fulfill everyone’s desires.

There have been several different kinds of government systems to try and equalize our desires. It could easily be said communism is an even distribution of things so that people will always have the basics and occupation. No one is left to suffer or to have their mind wandering endlessly. However, they can dream of more and are often stuck in a role they are not happy with.

Republics and Democracies are a representation of the people. The people, or their representatives, find their own balance and have their voices heard. Essentially distributing roles and resources as needed in each area. However, the state does not guarantee anything. The people must work with those around them to obtain the resources they need. Those who are not of the majority often lose their say in how the distribution is done for the community.

Dictatorships and Kingdoms raise up a few who would ideally provide and protect those bellow them. Very often this works out poorly. Those at the top often become greedy and deprive the people below them of their basic needs.

Wars are always the result of governments, or on a smaller scale people, having a shared desire of a limited resource. The desire often stems from a need that must be met. Sadly in many cases there is no way to satisfy the needs of everyone and eventually conflict breaks out.

The balancing of desire is a tricky business with an entire society. So hard in fact it is almost impossible to imagine a true utopia where everyone is happy. I would venture to say it would be impossible if people are responsible for the making of that world.

I imagine if utopia actually existed it would be different than we would normally think. It would be a world without want and everyone would have their place. Not only that, but they would be content with their lot.

If utopia existed, the society would very closely mimic that of the Borg from Star Trek. Your personal desires would be gone; you would want for nothing. Your directive would be your life, but you would always be satisfied and taken care of. Utopia would lie in having no desire for more and never dreaming of anything greater. It would the pinnacle for everyone to achieve. There would be neither great happiness nor great sadness. Everything would be in balance, and eventually there would be peace because everyone would be a part of it. After all, resistance is futile.

Kristen Saunders is a recent addition to Penumbra EMag, serving as an editorial intern. She loves to write science fiction in her free time and recently started her blog The Musings of a Growing Writer.

Speculative Fiction: The Genre of "What if...?"

by SS Hampton Sr.

“Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as related static, motion, and virtual arts.” (Speculative Fiction, Wikipedia)

Now that that’s out of the way, everything begins with “What if…?” What if something strange and mysterious found its way into our world? How? Where?

I remembered an article I saw on the Internet about one of the earliest trees—archaeopteris, from the Devonian Era. And, in the 1990s a hiker in Australia discovered a grove of trees whose physical appearance matched prehistoric tree fossils some 200 million years old. The newly discovered trees, proven to be descended from the prehistoric trees, were named Wollemi Pines.

Sooo… Where is this archaeopteris discovered? Some place remote, out of the way. I thought of Minnesota, overrun with lakes and forests, which has some of the oldest rocks in the world. On a map, I saw a mountain range called Mesabi, and thought the name sounded delightfully strange and mysterious. Add to that, the area is also known as the Iron Range. Thus, the Mesabi Iron Range was born. Giving the trees an ordinary nickname, such as Yarmouth Fern, was just yanked out of the air.

Aaand… I’ve lived in Colorado, and always wanted to grow a few Christmas trees.

The character of a crusty old Clint Eastwood-type sitting on the back porch of his home in the Colorado Rockies with an AK-47 across his lap was born. He watches the sun go down, and the valley that contains a branch of his Christmas tree farm is filling with shadows and mist. And he’s staring at a grove of Yarmouth Ferns in the marshy terrain across from his home.

But, I remember reading about fairy trees (ash and oak trees, and hawthorn bushes). Each one reputedly has magical properties, but when all three are found together…

Finally, I have the mysterious ferns, the location, the character, and the idea that where something “prehistoric” and alive, is growing, something else might happen. Maybe something like a doorway opening, especially during a full moon (I’ve always wanted to believe that there’s something magical and mysterious about the full moon).

I open with the sun going down and the old guy sitting on his porch having a beer. He knows there’s something in the Yarmouth grove across from his home. He hears stealthy movements.

Then, flash back to his first hearing of the Yarmouth Ferns, ordering a dozen, and planting them. Add to it the passage of time and (hopefully), a rising tension of something in the valley. His hired help senses something too, and they blame the ferns. The workers report “shadows,” and sometimes see something out of the corner of their eyes. The old guy discovers that the ferns have spread through releasing spores, and small, wild groves have taken root throughout the valley. Add that the weather doesn’t feel right—the clouds are grayer, darker, and the atmosphere is oppressive. Sometimes at night he wakes with a sensation that something is lurking outside his bedroom window. Finally, the workers quit and he’s left alone.

Back to the present. The full moon rises, an ocean of moonlit mist creeps into the valley, and something is moves in the grove. The story ends with gunfire and the old guy screaming in terror.

For me, there have to be enough facts to blend with fiction to create something believable. Add a believable character, and build the suspense—build the suspense—relying on what makes most people nervous, or even fearful—a gut feeling, something in the air, and shadows. Perhaps the most frightening thing of all is the feeling of being in danger, yet you can’t see what’s closing in on you.

My approach isn’t the only way—there are as many successful ways to write speculative fiction as there are writers. As long as you have a goal and map your route to that goal, the details will fill themselves in.

Good luck, and I hope I didn’t bore you too much!

SS Hampton, Sr. is a published photographer and photojournalist, an aspiring painter, and is studying for a degree in anthropology. His writings have appeared as stand-alone stories and in anthologies from MUSA Publishing, (The Lapis Lazuli Throne), Melange Books (Intimate Journeys; R.U.S.H.; Christmas Collectibles 2010; and Hearts of Tomorrow), Ravenous Romance (Back Door Lover), and Dark Opus Press (In Poe’s Shadow), and as stand-alone stories in Horror Bound Magazine, Ruthie’s Club, Lucrezia Magazine, The Harrow, and River Walk Journal, among others. In 2012 he has another story forthcoming in an anthology from Edge SF & Fantasy (Danse Macabre), as well as a stand-alone story releasing from MuseItUp Publishing.

Painting the Unreal

By Damien Walters Grintalis

Speculative fiction is a playground of possibility. Your story might be grounded in the reality of Earth or set on a distant planet, you might have clockwork animals and airships, wizards and magic, or perhaps there's a ghost beneath the floorboards. But no matter the scenario, readers want to believe in your world. It's up to you to paint a vivid picture.

Use wide strokes of your brush for the background and save the little details for the focal points. Add tiny hints for things you want to keep partially obscured, but still want the reader to note.

Engage the reader's senses. All of them. Wrap them in sights, sounds, tastes, scents, and tactile sensations. Let them feel the warmth of the sun on your characters' faces. Let them smell the smoke from a distant fire. But don't go overboard, either. If every fire smells like brimstone, don't choke the reader on the stench. If every drop of water tastes like honey and chocolate, don't give them a cavity. And if every house in your story is round with a thatch roof, you don't need to describe each and every one.

You can also use sensory information to paint the tone of the scene and the story itself. On the surface, there's nothing inherently wrong with stating "the door was tall and wide and painted the color of blood". But it's a rather flat description. It tells the reader that the door is red, sure, but what does it convey? Not much, in truth.

But if it's the only red door in a hallway lined with black doors? It says something is off kilter. Maybe there are strange sounds coming from behind the door. An invitation? A warning?

In a science fiction story, perhaps there's a smell of overheated electronics and a strange glow emerging from the gap beneath door. In fantasy, perhaps there's the sound of faerie wings fluttering or the kiss of heat from a dragon's exhalation. In horror, perhaps there's no light at all and the heavy thump of footsteps.

Find the balance between too much and not enough. You don't want to bury the story beneath an avalanche of description. Not everything needs to be spelled out. Conversely, there's nothing worse than reading a story that feels as if the characters are nowhere at all.

In the real world, our experiences are not limited to what we see. The same should hold true in fiction.

Damien Walters Grintalis lives in Maryland with her husband, two former shelter cats, and two rescued pit bulls. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Penumbra eMag, Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and others. Her debut novel, Ink, will be released in December 2012 by Samhain Horror.

Learn more about Damien Walters Grintalis on her blog and on Twitter.

Confessions of a Writing Addict

by Katherine Heath Shaeffer

I have to write. Specifically, I have to write science fiction and fantasy.

I can't stop.

It's not just a matter of writing for catharsis (though there's an element of that in my writing) or of writing the story that I want to read (though there's an element of that, too). It's not just a matter of honoring, through emulation, the escapist fantasies that got me through the toughest times in my life (and to this day the writing of escapist literature is one of the noblest pursuits I can imagine) or of contributing allegorically to whatever ethical debates are in vogue this season.

I write because I'm a writing addict. Writing is an addictive and self-destructive behavior.

I believe that writing requires a specific kind of sacrifice. As I write, I find myself donating things I remember and things I've dreamed to my fiction. Because, no matter how implausible the premise, in a way I am always writing from experience: my experience of being able to imagine what would happen in the case of my implausible premise. And as I write down memory and dream, I lose them. Not wholly. I'm not giving myself amnesia here. But I don't get to keep these thoughts and images as they were originally constructed in my mind, because I have reconstructed them, through writing.

It's like that family story that's about you when you were a kid: you know that the story is not the whole truth, but you hear it so many times that the 'traditional' version that your parents tell at Thanksgiving every year superimposes itself upon the 'whole truth' that you remember until one day, for the life of you you can't recall what the flaws in your parents' version were, so you just go with it. You and your family have lived with this version so long that it's the truth now, no matter what really happened.

It's like explaining last night's dream to someone after you wake up. Dreams often don't make sense, but the dream you had last night was so wild and interesting that you have to share it with someone, so you fudge the details a little, connecting point A to point B so that the fluidly juxtaposed images of your dreaming mind come together to make a story. Then, when you try to remember your dream, it is not the dream that you invoke but the story you told of your dream. Because we are humans and patterns are easier for us to remember than lacks-of-pattern. So. You've lost a dream but gained a story.

Maybe you write that story. And so it goes.

Even the most fantastic of tales are constructed from the building blocks of memory, just as you can draw a beautiful dragon using the building blocks you develop from studying the anatomy of birds, bats snakes and fish. Or turtles and pterodactyls. (Hey, it's your dragon. Draw what you want.)

It's like that scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Yes, I am dipping into the great well of Star Trek metaphors. Don't judge me.) In “The Measure of a Man,” Data refuses to allow his android body to be dismantled, studied, and reconstructed because he believes that, though his memories will technically stay intact, the 'flavor' of those memories will be lost. Data makes it sound like this is a horrible thing that can only happen to androids, but to me it just sounds like what happens to any of my memories, once I try to tell it.

For me, at least, writing is erosion. It requires sacrificing those loves and fears I hold closest to my heart and reconstructing them into tools. It requires breaking down what I feel, what I remember, what I dream and writing it onto the page in a way that a reader can access. I may lose the immediacy of the feeling, but sometimes, if I am very lucky, I can translate that immediacy -- or a version of it -- to the page.

This self-erosion is both bittersweet and exhilarating.

Katherine Heath Shaeffer is a writer and graduate student who lives in Gainesville, Florida with her boyfriend and three cats. She is the current Production Editor of the academic journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. She has a short story forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction. Katherine's article Beauty and the Body and the Beast, along with her short story The Witch, the Curse and the Prince were published in the May issue of Penumbra eMag.

Random Thoughts on Writing

by Chuck Rothman

I've been writing for over thirty years, but I still don't know how it works. What works for me may not work for you. And vice versa.

● The best writing guide I had was a course I never took called "Effective Writing." The rules were:

○ Write the entire draft, start to finish, without going back.
○ Edit it until it's good.

90% of what makes a story work is in the first draft. But a first draft rarely works unless it's edited or you're Isaac Asimov.

● I hate to outline. Once I know where a story is going, I'm not interested in writing it.

● Never trust anyone who dictates how to write. They're telling you how they write.

● No one ever was taught to write in a creative writing class. However, a writing class can teach you what pitfalls to avoid, saving you from having to figure it out yourself.

● Every rule of writing can be broken. But you need to know the rules so you can know when to break them.

● Remember the three C's: Character, conflict, and change. You create a character that has a conflict, which causes change.

● There is no cliche that can't be given new life, and no original concept that can be made dull.

● My writing motto is "If it doesn't flow, it doesn't go." I have no idea what that means, but at least it rhymes.

● Note to new writers: no one's going to steal your work. You'd be surprised how many times I've come across people worrying about this.

● Someone once said the difference between a good writer and a bad writer is that a good writer only sees what's bad in his work, and a bad writer only sees what's good. If you can't see what's bad, you can never improve it.

● There's a smorgasbord of writing advice. Pick and choose what you like.

● Someone who will tell you why your story is crap is worth their weight in gold-pressed latinum.

● Forget the three C's. Plenty of stories do.

● Algis Budrys wrote about the "seven parts of a story" -- a great concise analysis of what makes a good story. When he edited Tomorrow, someone went through the stories he published for several months. None had all seven parts.

● Feel free to ignore my advice. I often do.

Chuck Rothman has been writing biographical blurbs for his stories for over 30 years, to accompany stories in places like Asimov's, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Daily Science Fiction, Space and Time, and many others publications. He also writes reviews for Tangent Online. He lives in Schenectady. Read more from Chuck on his blog.

Embracing a Multitasking Lifestyle

By Anaea Lay

Between smart phones and Twitter, we're in an age where people love to lament our short attention spans and our inability to focus on any one thing. It seems like writers are particularly prone to this, complaining about flash games and social networking eating away at their fleeting opportunities to commit acts of fiction. They practically create fetishes for unplugging, disconnecting, going on retreat and just focusing on their precious prose. I'm the last person to sneer at anything that leads to more fabulous fiction in the world, but when it comes to the multitasking lifestyle taking over the modern age I can summon only one response: Bring it!

My personal advocacy for multitasking while writing goes back to the day I discovered that I work better with music in the background. Music was the gate-way distraction. At this point I'm so addicted that my response to business trips is excitement over all the writing I'll get done while I'm in meetings. When those stories sell, it's like getting paid twice.

Writing while distracted isn't for everybody, but I'd argue that quality craft demands multitasking. This is something that becomes clear very quickly if you try your hand at writing scripts: the best story craft multitasks like a fiend. A minimally competent line of dialog makes sense and is believable coming from the character who uttered it. A good one will also tell you something about the character. A brilliant one does all those things, moves the scene forward, and changes the stakes.

Writing scripts is a good way to learn the importance of multifunction prose, but you can see it everywhere. For example, take one of my favorite first lines in fiction, the opening to Robert. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. “Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.” In twelve words you learn several things about the book you've picked up, among them:

1) The fairy tale opening words indicate it probably intends to teach you something
2) Mentioning a Martian tells you it's speculative, specifically involving humans having access to Mars or vice versa
3) Opening the sentence with a phrase that essentially means, “Long ago,” and ends with indications that it takes place in the future warns you this isn't an entirely serious book.

Heinlein probably didn't check his twitter feed while writing (I am careful about assumptions when science fiction writers are involved), but he definitely understood putting his prose to multitasking work.

Flash fiction, at its best, indulges in this this kind of heavy-lifting with an expertise worthy of respect, even for people who aren't fans of the form. Take, for example, a story by Robert Smartwood published in Pank magazine, “Seven Items In Jason Reynolds’ Jacket Pocket, Two Days After His Suicide, As Found By His Eight-Year-Old Brother, Grady.” It's a fabulous story, consisting of nothing more than the descriptions of the seven items. The title gives the reader all the frame they need to figure out what's going on, and then appreciate the subtle horror of the interplay between the reader's understanding of what happened and Grady's inability to parse it.

I could go on with dozens of other examples, but I won't. My RSS reader is getting full.

Anaea Lay is not an evil alien bent on sowing chaos and ending the world. Nor is she a mad scientist prone to creating monsters in her basement. She does live in Madison, Wisconsin where she makes up weird things for fun and profit. She is also a featured writer in the June issue of Apex Magazine.

Learn More about Anaea on her website.

See It Before You Write It, Then Get Busy Daydreaming

by Robert Lowell Russell

Every writer has his or her own way of starting a story, so with the caveat that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone, here's how I do it (fair warning, I'm a "pantser").

My stories usually start with a single visual scene in my head, and when I have the scene fixed in my mind, I add a second scene. My job then becomes making sense of the two scenes. It may seem easy to get characters to go from point A to point B, but I often have no idea who my characters are at this stage, and there may be no obvious connections between points A and B.

There are probably certain advantages to starting with characters, then building a world around them. But I like building my world first, then plunking the characters into it and letting them fend for themselves. I also think starting with visual scenes makes it easier to "show" rather than "tell."

With Path of Stones **spoiler alert**, I deconstructed Hansel and Gretel. I started by visualizing a trail of white stones running through a fairy tale forest, then added a scene of a man sitting in a bar, staring at one of the stones in his hand. The challenge was then explaining how the man fit into a story about a couple of kids, and how I got from a fairy tale world to a modern day setting. It was an interesting process. The story started at 1.6K words, ballooned to 6K, was pared to 4K, and was finally condensed to 3K. During the rewriting process, I lost the original bar scene, the Empire State Building, Charles Darwin, Annie Oakley, a sexy witch, and bunch of other stuff.

One advantage of the "plotter" style may be that a writer doesn't end up with as many unusable parts when he or she is finished with a story (Though I tend to recycle my best story fragments. Sexy witches = writing gold!). But I like getting messy, and I like getting weird. My two starting scenes usually serve as corner pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, and with those scenes in my head, I daydream about my story, twisting and turning the middle pieces, deciding what fits and what doesn't. This lets me "work" even when I'm not sitting with an outline in front of a computer, and I've learned to trust my instincts when I write.

However, if you're going to write this way, you need to be able to track a lot of things in your head simultaneously, and make sure you have solid critics reviewing what you write. Our brains work to fill in the gaps of what we perceive, so you need more than one set of eyes to spot the inevitable gaps.

Some final words of advice: bang it out, polish it, fire it off, then cross your fingers. And if you're not having fun, you're probably doing it wrong.

Robert Lowell Russell once aspired to become a history professor, but found working with the real world too constraining. His works in progress, a series of short stories and a novel, incorporate elements of his previous research in Native American history and culture.

For links to more of Rob's stories (or to see him dressed like a ninja) visit his blog.

A Kiss in the Dark

by Michele Lang

I adore short stories, love to both read them and write them. I believe we are in the middle of a short story renaissance, and as a reader I’m a happy beneficiary of the times.

However, writing the short story has mystified as well as bewitched me. As a novelist, for the longest time my short stories turned into partials when I wrote them. When I did manage to finish them, I struggled to bring them in under 10,000 words.

There’s a time-bending element to short stories, a magic about them. How do short story writers manage to compress a world of unforgettable characters, and a profound change in that world, in 5,000 or even 2,000 words?

I wanted to learn that magic for myself. For a solid year, I wrote shorts that read like chopped off first chapters of novels. While I loved the characters and their worlds, I didn’t have the skill to grant them a resolution, the chance of a life after the story. My poor characters just kind of dangled, waiting for what happened next, off-stage, after the end.

I knew I needed to learn more. But I couldn’t grasp the essential difference between a short story and a novel.

They aren’t miniature novels, so what are they?

Last year, at an anthology workshop on the Oregon Coast, I got some advice from Denise Little, a brilliant editor, and she clarified the mystery for me. She told me to think in terms of musical composition:

A short story is like an instrumental solo;
A novella is like a duet between two instruments, say a viola and a flute;
And a novel is a fully orchestrated concerto, with a tripartite structure, complex harmonies, and a contained aesthetic.

A short story won’t tell you all about its world – it can’t. It can’t tie up all the loose ends, it can’t tell you the backstory of all the major characters. The major characters don’t overcome and transform essential flaws in their natures. There’s no room for all of that.

What a short story will do, in fact does do better than a novel, is portray a window into a moment. It captures the essential truth in the music of a single life. It’s a song sung without backup instruments, it’s a hymn, or a lullaby. And a short story can linger in your memory as long and as vividly as any novel.

Stephen King once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that a novel is like a marriage while a short story is a kiss in the dark from a stranger. And yet, there are kisses that reach across memory and transcend time, to change you forever.

And that is why I love short stories.

Michele Lang writes supernatural tales: the stories of witches, lawyers, goddesses, bankers, demons, and other magical creatures hidden in plain sight. She is the author of the LADY LAZARUS historical fantasy trilogy (Tor).

Learn more about Michele on her website.

The Poetry in Fairy Tales

by Lea C. Deschenes

It’s unusual for a poet to be writing about speculative fiction, but not as odd as you’d first think. My love of both forms (or indeed, of all writing) comes from their ability to open worlds, both new and familiar; to stir from our settled patterns into a whirl of possibilities; to give curiosity free rein to ask what if?; and to take on ideas so large they span the universe.

Fairy tales were my first case of reader’s True Love. I had a tattered volume of Grimm’s old enough not to have been sanitized to “child-friendly” mush and from the day my toddler hands got a hold of it, I read it like a holy text. To this day, I will contend that Snow White’s queen must dance in red hot iron shoes until dead dead dead or it’s not the real story (however many “real” versions of the story there are, that one is mine). I will never see Disney’s The Little Mermaid because I can’t bear to think of the mermaid’s knife-walking, voiceless martyrdom ending transformed into an all-singing, all-dancing Happily Ever After!, even though the character’s complete self-sacrifice for her mostly oblivious prince bugs every feminist bone in my body.

Fairy tales are ruthless, red in tooth and claw. As a child it seemed to me that they said everything that my suburban hometown’s polite veneer wanted to deny: Underdogs often make good. It’s good to be clever and better to be kind. Most of all, Bad Things Happen. They will happen to you. You’d better keep your wits about you and learn how to deal with that…

To this day, I can’t pass up a good fairy tale reworking, whether it’s Russia’s Koschei the Deathless, Japan’s Kitsune or a whole bag full of Grimm’s-flavored goodies. And somewhere along the way, speculative fiction has created its own bastions of myth and fable to be told and retold to fit the context of the day: rogue adventurers, schools for wizards and witches, genius detectives, spacemen and their cold equations, aliens, shapeshifters, hackers…ad infinitum, ad astra.

There’s a common saying, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.” There’s poetry in that: the swiping, combining and recombining of tropes and life and bits of timeless metaphors to make something unique to an author’s voice, time and place. It’s poetry when their stories seem larger and wider than plot mechanics and words laid out in neat rows on a page. It’s poetry when an idea as old as human civilization connects itself to a reader and creates a spark.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but if Wallace Stevens can find thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, Neil Gaiman can find new ways of looking at The Jungle Book and African trickster stories, filing off the serial numbers so well that you’ll forget its connection to the original. If Anne Sexton could take on the Grimm Brothers, Ovid and patriarchy in Transformations, Octavia Butler could handle vampires and I can write a poem in which the dancer decides to take off her red shoes.

If Jack can kill his giant, so can you.

Lea C. Deschenes is a poet living in Worcester, MA. She once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse. Her book, The Constant Velocity of Trains, is available from Write Bloody Publishing at Amazon.com, Powells.com and Writebloody.com.

To learn more about Lea and her work, please click on her website.

HE WHO HESITATES…GETS PUBLISHED

HE WHO HESITATES…GETS PUBLISHED

by Marsheila Rockwell

That’s not always true of course, but it’s a good rule of thumb for aspiring writers who may not yet be able to tell when an idea is ready to pick off that tree we all have growing in our backyard, and when it still needs to ripen a bit.

This concept of “the ripening idea” was one I first learned from Orson Scott Card’s seminal How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy back in college, and it has served me well ever since. You see, when that lovely idea first blossoms on the tree, it looks so shiny and perfect that you just want to pick it, even if you don’t have a clue what you’re going to do with it.

My advice? Same thing I’d have said to Eve, or Persephone, or the Fairest Of Them All – resist the temptation! Chances are good that your shiny, delicious-looking idea is not ready to be consumed just yet, and if you try, you’re only going to give yourself indigestion (and likely any editors you submit your unripe story to, as well).

More than that – be suspicious. When an idea seems to sprout full-grown on the idea tree, it’s usually because, even though it looks new and fresh, it’s anything but. “Bullocks,” you protest indignantly, “there are no new ideas – just old ones repackaged in new ways!” And you’re right, of course, but when you pick the idea off the tree the minute it catches your eye, you’re not repackaging it – you’re regurgitating it. And that way lies rejection.

Instead, whip out your handy-dandy notebook, make note of the idea and its location on the tree, and write it down. Keep an eye on it. Watch it grow. Do the same with other shiny ideas that bloom. Periodically shake the tree, and see what falls to the ground. Those ideas? The ones that fall easily, but don’t bruise when they land? They’re the ripe ones. But even they probably aren’t quite ready to be made into a story yet. Not by themselves.

But don’t despair. You’ve probably already got some ideas that you plucked off the tree before they were ready. Some of those went bad and you had to toss them, but some are still usable, if you can find the right ingredients to mix them with – one of the ideas that just fell when you shook the tree, perhaps? That idea from two years ago in Vegas (not everything stays there), a dollop of that one you had three months ago while stuck in traffic behind a garbage truck trailing toilet paper streamers (don’t laugh – that actually happened to me), and two quick shakes of that idea that first caught your eye just last week (the one you wanted to write about right away, but didn’t, because you read this article). Those three ideas, blended together – that’s your story. The one that’s going to get published.

See? Those guys selling Guinness were right – good things really do come to those who wait. So pour yourself a glass to celebrate your sale. Cheers!

Marsheila Rockwell's story, Epidora, will be featured in next month's issue of Penumbra.


"Marsheila (Marcy) Rockwell is the author of three novels for Wizards of the Coast (Skein of Shadows, 2012, The Shard Axe, 2011, and Legacy of Wolves, 2007), as well as the Arabian-flavored, female-centric sword & sorcery series Tales of Sand and Sorcery, available from Musa Publishing. Find out more here: http://www.marsheilarockwell.com/."

February Issue of Penumbra Now Released

February's issue, the Shakespeare issue, is the best issue of Penumbra yet. Not only were we flooded with wonderful stories, only a few of which we could publish, but this issue includes the launch of a second non-fiction column, Terra Incognito by Richard C. White. Today it's my pleasure to talk a bit about the wonderful pieces featured in this issue of Penumbra.


The Fiction


The Globe Theatre in Moonlight by Stan Hampton Senior—A depressed playwright between tours of army service finds hope in Shakespeare's theatre—and his words.


#solstice #dreams by William Meikler—Puck and his friends are up to their tricks in Twitterspace.


A Deed Without a Name by Nycki Blatchley—Three desperate women are given the chance for revenge, but they must pay a price.


Troubles With Shakespeare: or an Idler's Account of his Grand Destiny by Genevieve Taylor—The supposed reincarnation of William Shakespeare convinces his friends to go to the Annual Shakespeare Expo.


Much Ado About Something by Barry Rosenburg—A sculptor finds a lamp on the beach on his thirtieth birthday and with the help of William Shakespeare he attempts to fool the genie.


The Non-Fiction


Interview with Rebecca Treadway—A short interview with the winner of our December art contest and the designer of this month's cover image on the world of fantasy art.


Terra Incognito by Richard G. White—This brand new column is about the nuts and bolts of world-building, designed to help writers 'turn the generic into the unique'. In this first column, Richard has set up the stage for a series of world-building exercises sure to make any writer's worlds more interesting.


Back of Beyond by Lori Basiewicz—An examination of literary allusions and references in Romeo and Juliet showing why Shakespeare's work was so widely love during its time and has withstood centuries.


William Shakespeare: Poet, Playwright and Propagandist by Celina Summers—An opinion piece by our very own editorial director analyzing Shakespeare's use of his plays to further his own political agenda.


To read all of this issue's great stories, purchase your copy for $3.99 here. To subscribe and see the rest of the exciting issues we're planning for this year, click here.

Art Contest Winner!

Congratulations to October's Art Contest winner:

Butterfly ~ Lisa Dovichi

Congratulations Lisa!

November's art will be up shortly so watch for another poll and vote for your favorite!

*SPECIAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS*

Penumbra is seeking stories under 3k

For the following themed issues:



The Arts: Music, visual arts, theater—anything that pertains to the arts and speculative fiction, we want to see it.



Sports: Have a football story with a twist? Create a game on another world? If it's 3k or under, we'd like to see it!



Shakespeare: We have a particular and undying interest in the Bard—and any speculative fiction versions of his work OR spec fic stories that feature him as a character.



Call deadline: October 31, 2011. Please list the particular theme your story applies to in the subject line of your submission email.