Eric James Stone

When I arrived home from Odyssey, I found a check from Intergalactic Medicine Show in my accumulated mail. It’s for the reprints of “Taint of Treason” and “Tabloid Reporter to the Stars” in the anthology coming out from Tor next year. To my astonishment, the check was for more than I was paid for the stories initially. That was a very nice homecoming surprise.

Today I got a contract from Analog for my story “The Ashes of His Fathers.” Stan Schmidt had asked me for some minor changes while I was at Odyssey, and I wasn’t sure whether that was a rewrite request or an acceptance with a request for changes. I initially thought the former but now am leaning toward the latter.

This is my third sale to Analog. I’m not sure when it will appear, but my guess is next year.

Well, I got home a day earlier than I anticipated, thanks to driving over 1300 miles in about 19 hours on Monday.

I finished listening to the Harry Potter book early in the afternoon.

I’m tired.

OK, I won’t exactly be incommunicado over the next few days, but I’ll be on the road back to Utah, with spotty internet access, and trying to avoid any spoliers regarding Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. A couple of Odyssey classmates and I went to Wal-mart after midnight last night in order to purchase it. I bought the audiobook to listen to during my drive home, but since it’s 21 hours long, I won’t get to the end of it until Monday or Tuesday.

This morning, I turned in my last story for critique here at Odyssey, which means I no longer need to stress about getting a story written. My last story was really only sort of a story, as it’s really intended to be the first chapter of the novel I briefly outlined last Monday.

I got a lot of great feedback on the story I turned in on Friday, so I should be able to bang it into shape eventually.

Today was the annual Odyssey Slam at the Barnes & Noble in Nashua, NH. Each student had to read a flash fiction piece in five minutes or less (although there was some flexibility on that point.)

The stories were very entertaining, and it was great to see the improvement in people’s writing.

My original plan was to read a revised version of the 1000-word story I wrote a few weeks ago, but in the last few days I started leaning against that. So last night I began working on a more humorous piece, as I’ve noticed that humor tends to go over very well at readings.

This morning I got up and decided that piece wouldn’t work, because it was too cliched (It was a punchline-type story, and I Googled the punchline and saw a couple of similar stories.) and because the story itself would be too serious before the punchline.

So I looked at revising some of my unpublished flash pieces, and none of them appealed to me. Then I looked at the possibility of chopping down my story “Bird-Dropping and Sunday,” which always gets a good reception at readings, but decided there was no way I could cut half the story.

Finally, before deciding to just go with the original plan, I went over my lists of titles and story seeds, and came across “dragon accountant,” which was a seed I had jotted down sometime in the past couple of weeks, based on a comment by someone (I think it was author Michael Arnzen) about dragon accountants.

So I wrote an 800-word story entitled “Accounting for Dragons,” and read it at the slam. It went over pretty well, and got a few laughs in the right places, which is always a good thing.

Oh, and it’s the first story of mine that was mostly written using Dragon Naturally Speaking (Hah! I had not noticed the dragon coincidence until just now) voice recognition software instead of typing. David Weber, author of my favorite book series, uses Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate his novels, and so I bought the software a week before coming to Odyssey. I’ve used it for bits of some of the earlier stories I’ve written here, and for most of the written critiques I’ve given to the other students. I think I’ll be using it fairly extensively in the future.

I had one of my stories critiqued today, and the feedback was generally positive. I feel like it’s one of my best stories overall, so after I fix some of the weaknesses identified during the critique, I’ll send the story out.

This week is different from the other weeks of Odyssey. For five of the six weeks, Jeanne Cavelos is the instructor, with a guest lecturer brought in for one day. This week, the instructor is the writer-in-residence, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. (I’d actually met Nina a couple of times because she’s a judge for Writers of the Future. In fact, she presented me with my published finalist award back in 2004.)

Today, she conducted an exercise called “Outline a Novel in One Hour.” As a result of this exercise, I’ve come up with a character and plot for a science fiction novel that I’m actually pretty excited about. While I generally have enough short story ideas to write about, I’ve struggled a bit with ideas for novel-length stories–particularly science fiction.

In this case, because the exercise was focused on creating a character and then creating obstacles for the character to overcome, I ended up creating a plot based on an concept that I probably would have rejected if I had come up with it without already having the character in mind.

It looks like this whole “plotting based on character” thing may be very useful to me.