summer's here and we're all melting
Why hello there, stranger! It’s been a minute since I popped into your inbox, hasn’t it? (Sheepish grin.) I’ve been swamped with copyedits for The Hacienda, dissertation writing, and post-vaccinated traveling to see family and totally let June’s newsletter slip through the cracks. I didn't even realize it until about half way through the month. Oops!
I don't know about you, but my productivity absolutely fizzles out as temperatures rise. I'm a cool weather creature to the core and I am Suffering. I feel like I'm clawing my way from deadline to deadline, barely squeezing enough work out of myself to keep afloat before the too-hot afternoons squeeze the brains out of me. In three weeks, I'll be heading to Vancouver Island to see my husband's family, and while I'm worried not even that will provide respite *waves hands vaguely in existential climate crisis* I am looking forward to sea breezes, pines, and cool nights.
Though I have a ton of favorites and plenty of news about forthcoming story publications to share in this newsletter, my craft essay will be pretty short and sweet. That dissertation isn’t going to write itself, you know! (We wish. God, we wish.)
Let’s dive right in!
Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian: more literary than my usual fare, but I was enticed by the hypnotic cover and the promise of magical realism. Reader, I was not disappointed. The intergenerational dynamics and pressure cooker high school stakes of the first half of the novel resonated so much with me I literally could not put the book down, and the midpoint tragedy absolutely knocked the breath out of me. The protagonist, Neil, shines through the prose as so achingly alive, even when he’s failing, that I could not help but root for him and his co-conspirator, Anita, as they took on one final heist in the third act. (And I was extremely stressed throughout. Highly recommend.)I don't know about you, but my productivity absolutely fizzles out as temperatures rise. I'm a cool weather creature to the core and I am Suffering. I feel like I'm clawing my way from deadline to deadline, barely squeezing enough work out of myself to keep afloat before the too-hot afternoons squeeze the brains out of me. In three weeks, I'll be heading to Vancouver Island to see my husband's family, and while I'm worried not even that will provide respite *waves hands vaguely in existential climate crisis* I am looking forward to sea breezes, pines, and cool nights.
Though I have a ton of favorites and plenty of news about forthcoming story publications to share in this newsletter, my craft essay will be pretty short and sweet. That dissertation isn’t going to write itself, you know! (We wish. God, we wish.)
Let’s dive right in!
May and June Favorites | books, stories, and music I disappeared into over the last month(s)
BooksThe Mirror Season, Anna-Marie McLemore: I’ve sobbed my way through much of McLemore’s oeuvre (looking at you, When The Moon Was Ours) and this was no exception. A complicated, tender, and bruising novel and delicate take on the Snow Queen fairy tale infused with McLemore’s trademark magical realism and deep emotional resonance. Queer characters abound! It’s set in a Catholic high school in the town where I went to a Catholic high school, San Juan Capistrano, California! The ending was perfect! We cried! We actually cried a lot! [Big content warning for sexual assault]
Infinite Country, Patricia Engel: if you’re keyed into the world of contemporary Latinx fiction or keep tabs on Reese Witherspoon’s book club picks, you’ve definitely heard of Infinite Country. A cathartic and sharp read with just the right doses of sweet and bitter. I read this slowly—each chapter feels like a tight short story, almost flash fiction—and was terrified it would end in tragedy. No spoilers here, but it definitely didn’t. And I sobbed.
Bestiary, K-Ming Chang: I just started this one but I already know it’s going to be a winner. Chang’s prose seizes you by the throat and does not relent.
For the Wolf, Hannah Whitten: an indulgent high fantasy for those who love terrifyingly sentient forests, feminist fairy tale remixes, self-sacrificing wife guys who smell damn good, deliciously nebulous magic, sibling love so fierce it’s destructive, and a big ol’ middle finger to religion. I don’t often dream about novel settings, but I dreamed about the Wilderwood. Suffering from heat waves? Get thee to the (indie) bookstore and bury yourself in Whitten’s atmosphere stat.
Stories
“When New Flowers Bloomed,” Carmen Naranjo: another winner from Sudden Fiction Latino anthology I mentioned in my last newsletter. One online reviewer of Sudden Fiction Latino tried to lambast its lack of diversity by saying it only had one Puerto Rican writer, but if you look at the author bios in the back, frankly, it is really diverse. In addition to featuring U.S. Latinx writers of diverse backgrounds, it breaks the Mexico-Argentina domination that big, general LatAm anthologies so often fall victim to by featuring a number of writers from Central America and the Caribbean. Naranjo is a Costa Rican writer I had never encountered before—I was stunned by “When New Flowers Bloomed” and am 100% ready to dive deeper into her oeuvre.
“Walrus,” B. Pladek: I may be biased given we’re members of the same Clarion West cohort, but I literally need all of Pladek’s fiction injected directly into my veins. Have an amouse-bouche of stunning prose.
“Medusa,” Pat Barker: [blaring siren content warning for sexual assault] For years, I have hated New Yorker fiction. I was wrong to. “Medusa” has one of the best twists I’ve read in a long, long time. The tension infusing this piece spiked my cortisol levels and kept them there for, like, days. Excuse me while I go check the locks on my door again.
In a Flash!: Writing & Publishing Dynamic Flash Prose, Melanie Faith: think of this as a supplement to Nancy Stohlman's Going Short, which I mentioned in my last newsletter. It primarily focuses on flash creative non-fiction (CNF). The end of chapter prompts are the only ones that have ever worked for me, period. I don’t know what this witchcraft is, but if you’re like me and bristle at what you perceive as stupid or too-obvious writing prompts (especially those based on an image, ugh, I hate these, they just feels so lazy to me), these alone might be worth the price of admission.
Brevity Mag Craft Essays: namely, “Impatience and Craft” by Jen Corrigan, and Joy Castro’s “Genre as a Vessel for Presence.” The former has this sentence: “Nothing makes me happier than when characters are terribly unhappy. I’m least likely to turn off a movie or stop reading a memoir when I am enmeshed in-scene with the characters.” I’m writing that on a post it note and sticking it to my computer screen as I march through my pre-writing paces for my next novel. The characters are definitely getting a little too happy as I outline… time to shatter all their hopes and dreams!
Morning pages: I haven’t yet read The Artist’s Way, but I was familiar with the practice of morning pages from my mom and my high school best friend. I picked up a throw-away notebook from Muji and had a whack at it starting in mid-May. I am stunned. I haven’t felt this creatively on fire in a while. Highly recommend if you’re a) a morning writer, b) not a morning writer, and/or c) in a creative, er, languishing state as I feel like I have been the last few months.
Making Comics, Lynda Barry: I’m currently taking a class on Catapult taught by Sanjena Sathian and she’s been assigning us freewriting prompts from this book. For my creative brain, these exercises (especially Barry’s daily diaries, below) are everything I love about morning pages cranked up to 11. HIGHLY recommend.
I'm not giving you the writing prompt that goes along with the above setup because you honestly need to go out and buy this book as fast as I did. Seriously.News
I officially left Twitter on June 1st. My personal account has now been converted to an updates-only account. Find me on Instagram @isabelcanas_!George R.R. Martin wrote about me and The Hacienda on his Not A Blog! I received his Worldbuilder scholarship to attend Clarion West in 2018 and wrote to thank him for his generosity, as I don’t believe I would have written The Hacienda without the community I formed while at the workshop. He writes: “I was pleased as hell by Isabel’s big sale, and look forward to reading her novel.”
Forthcoming Stories
In March, I let you know that my January #storyamonth challenge story “My Sister is a Scorpion” sold to Lightspeed Magazine. I’m now happy to report that it will appear in the August issue! Mark your calendars!I sold a reprint to The Deadlands! “The Kingdom of the Butterflies” will appear in their September issue. In the meantime, check out the first two issues of The Deadlands, a new pro speculative fiction magazine helmed by the editor-in-chief of the dearly departed-Shimmer. The publication’s theme? Death. Or, as they put it, more poetically: “We will publish short stories, poems, and essays about the other realms, of the ends we face here, and the beginnings we find elsewhere. It will be a journey into the unknown, to meet those who live there still, even though they may be dead. Death is a journey we all will take, but we’d like to peek at the map before we go.”
I sold a flash story to Nightmare Magazine! “There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista” was born from a meandering digression in a story I wrote in January. I carved it out and helped it stand on two legs and voilà! “No Monsters” is especially close to my heart because set in the world of my next Adult horror/historical novel. I’m absolutely over the moon that this fanged morsel of a story found a home at Nightmare.
What Size Is This Idea?: A Few Unscientific Strategies
It’s summer. Smack dab in the middle of sweltering city summer. Long summer evenings spent chasing deadlines reminds me of Clarion West and makes me enormously homesick. But it also got me thinking about the question I used to ask everyone at Clarion West. As a novelist, I was royally out of my depth writing a short story a week—every idea I had was just too big. I would have given my left kidney to turn out the 2000-word polished gems members of my cohort seemed capable of writing (and on deadline, no less! How dare they! *shakes fist*). I was absolutely at wit’s end after the story I swore would be 9,000 words maximum grew… and grew… and grew… until I turned in a 13,500 word monstrosity.Except it wasn’t a monstrosity. It just wasn’t a short story. Nor a novelette, for that matter. It was an outline for a novella. Which is fine. Great, even--we all love a good novella. But the fact stood that I was trying to learn how to write short, and something wasn't clicking.
That week, I started asking the same question of everyone I could, including mystery muses, instructors, my fellow classmates: when you get an idea, how do you know what length it should be?
Everyone had different answers. (Ted Chiang's answer was bloody useless, bless him. He only writes short stories, so, well, he knows every idea is a short story. Useless, I tell you.) I walked out of that workshop with no handy go-to magic formula, no elixir that would turn my sprawling novel ideas into tidy 3,500-word origami cranes.
In the three years since that workshop, I have gotten slightly better at eyeballing ideas from the outside. I’m not perfect, not at all. But here is a preliminary list of unscientific strategies for all ye Goldilockses out there who can’t seem to find the story shape that fits just right:
1. Sometimes you just know.
Trust your gut. Seriously.
2. Sometimes you just don’t know.
Doubt your gut. Even if you think you have a good idea of how long this story will be, it’s a healthy exercise to interrogate your decision. Push back, try to find holes that may trip you up in writing. Second guess your first instinct every once in a while. (Not all the time--that way lies madness. Try it just enough to keep things spicy, especially if you catch yourself feeling a smidge overconfident about your own instinctive genius.)
An example from my own life: once upon a time, I thought I had a novel. After about a year plus of decidedly not writing that novel, I tried reframing it as a novelette. I had an inkling something still wasn’t working, because I wasn’t excited about writing it, and it sat in my “ideas” dumping ground for another 18 months.
Then, in May, I tried writing it as a flash piece of 999 words.
Surprise, it actually worked really well at that length.
I would have never tried this idea as a flash it if I hadn’t interrogated my initial plan.
3. Count the characters, settings, and plot elements.
Mary Robinette Kowal’s explanation of the MICE quotient is a touchstone for me when it comes to figuring out short stories. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.
Here’s a shortcut tip if you have an idea and aren’t sure what size it might be: count up your idea's characters, settings, and plot elements. If you have >3 of any of these, you might have a novelette or novella idea on your hands. You could swing three of one of these elements (characters, settings, or plot elements) in a short story, but any more would be tricky. If you really want the idea to be a short story, or even a flash piece, strongly consider narrowing the story’s focus by eliminating or combining multiples of these elements.
4. Sometimes you really, really just don’t know.
So try on every size possible. Are you certain this is even a short story? Is it a flash? Is it a novella? Re-outline the idea as all of the above. Things will have to change dramatically in each form, yes, but what's the harm in trying?
Going longer: lift your head and look about the world. What meta crises could tie (neatly or messily) into your character’s emotional arc? What other characters interest you? Is there romance? How do you feel about dual or multiple POV? Is there backstory that could spin into its own timeline? Lean into novel craft books (Story Genius, Save the Cat!Writes a Novel) to help spark ideas that fit a longer scope.
Going shorter: chop, chop, chop, my friend. What if you were to cut out a bunch of elements, strip the idea down to its bones? Which is the most essential element, the one you are the most excited to write? Your darling? Plot twist: don’t kill it. Make it the heart of the story. Distill it to its most essential essence and then crank that up to 11.
What about those other elements in the story? The beloved but sadly nonessential? Consider re-homing them in another story. Consider making them the heart of their own story.
5. Begin, fail, start again.
Sometimes you don’t know your story is the wrong size until you’re midway through it. Or even (and I hate to say it) at the end. My advice? Try writing it anyway.
I have spent literal years fussing over one space opera idea, trying to force it into differently shaped boxes (short story, novelette, novel trilogy, novella…), and you know what? Even though I love the characters to pieces and love getting obsess-y over them, even though it gives me all the A Memory Called Empire vibes I crave from shiny scifi, I still haven’t written it.
Don’t do that.
Start the story.
Because you’ll never know until you actually try. You’ll never know what may or may not fail until you’ve leaped and fallen… or are still flying.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Take care, stay cool, and I'll catch you on the flip side in August. I'll be writing all about fast drafting my new novel and absolutely cannot wait to share some new tips and tricks I've discovered!
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