Waylines - Issue 4



  EDITORIAL

  Summer Blast

  INTERVIEWS

  A Chat with Dean Wesely Smith

  The Writers Room – Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  FEATURE

  In Search of the Secret Number

  FICTION

  Chip's Six Attempts at Popularity by Jake Kerr

  Samsara by Rachael Acks

  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

  Editors: Darryl Knickrehm & David Rees-ThomasIllustrations/Design: Darryl Knickrehm

  Contribution Writer: Alisa Alering First Readers: Alisa Alering, Dawn Bonanno, Beth Cato, Micaiah Evans, Ewan Forbes, Marina J. Lostetter, Emi Morimoto, Sandra Odell

  https://waylinesmagaizne.com

  Ah summer. A time for barbecues. A time for fireworks. And a time for a whole lot of sweating. Sounds like the perfect opportunity to stay in some air conditioning and enjoy a little Waylines! So let us introduce you to Issue 4’s fiction:

  Rachael Acks takes us on the exploration of a new world, and the sacrifices made in order to do so in”Samsara.”

  And…

  Jake Kerr offers a fun-filled tale of time travel, alternate selves and self-improvement in “Chip’s Six Attempts at Popularity.”

  For our films this issue:

  “The Secret Number” is Colin Levy’s masterful film that walks the line of fantasy and mystery in the search for a new undiscovered number. This is one you won’t want to miss!

  Luke Randall’s endearing animation, “Reach,” is a reminder to all of us of our dreams and the obstacles that often keep them just out of reach.

  And finally...

  K-Michel Pandari takes us into the future of law enforcement, in “From the Future with Love,” a mix of Robocop with a dash of frightening future possibilities.

  And as always, we have our interviews. Alisa sat down with Nina Kiriki Hoffman for the Writers Room. And for our featured author interview, we chatted with the prolific Dean Wesley Smith. And as always, we have our interviews with this issues writers/film makers.

  Along with the summer season, Waylines is closed to submission from June 25 through August 25. But don’t worry, we’ve already go some exciting tales lined up for Issue 5 and will open up submissions once again on August 25. But for now, stay cool, enjoy the stories, the films and the interviews.

  Also, Waylines is gearing up for Year Two and will be running our fund raising campaign from January 10-February 10, 2014. If you like the magazine think about heading over to our Kickstarter campaign then. There are pledge rewards like posters, bookmarks, and our Zero Issue - an issue made just for our supporters. Help make Year Two a reality.

  For now, enjoy Issue 4! Safe Journeys!

  Sincerely,

  D & D

  P.S. - If you want to send us a message, you can do so on our site, and we can also be found at Facebook and Twitter.

  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

  This month we are very pleased to have an interview double header. Not only do we have Nina Kiriki Hoffman in our writer’s room but we also have an interview with Dean Wesley Smith. Both writers have a long history together, and between them have a vast amount of experience as writers in science fiction and fantasy. Dean writes across the genres and also, with his wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, owns and manages WMG Publishing https://www.wmgpublishinginc.com/

  Many people view you as a distinctly ‘genre’ writer. But you have also said you like Richard Brautigan, particularly, Dreaming of Babylon, and you also used to write poetry. So, what does genre really mean to you, and how do you reconcile it with the word, literature?

  Literature is just another genre. Genre is a way for readers to find certain types of stories in bookstores and online. Nothing more.

  Do I like science fiction, mystery, romance more than literature to write? Not a clue, honestly. I write across all genres, whatever strikes me. I did a lot of media that was sf, and I have a thriller series and a mystery series under a hidden pen name, but I like it all. I even write a form of romance at time.

  But yes, Dreaming of Babylon, which is a mystery fantasy by Richard Brautigan is one of my favorite books.

  Legend has it that you and Nina Kiriki Hoffman had a pact to help you both with your writing in your early days. Could you tell us a bit about that, and how valuable it was in you getting ahead as a writer?

  Oh, the challenge with Nina was everything early on. We challenged each other to write and mail a story every week and we kept it up. At times we added in other challenges like “Add five senses every 500 words.” Without Nina and those early challenges, I’m not sure I would have gotten started the way I did.

  Back in those distant days (1982-1984) I owned a bookstore and Nina lived above my bookstore. It was a house full of books, that’s for sure. Nina and I and a couple of other friends also started a local bootstrap workshop with a bunch of beginning writers and that workshop really helped for a few years as well.

  How did you enjoy working in the Star Trek universe? How does writing in an established world differ from writing in your own, satisfaction wise?

  Both are great fun, but writing my own stuff is a lot more fun. Writing in an established universe such as Star Trek or Men in Black or Spider-Man, you have to follow the rules of those universes. In my own stuff I get to make it all up.

  Everyone thinks writing media is easier. It’s not. It’s a ton harder. And a lot more people are looking over your shoulder. I would much rather write my own books and stories, even though most of them have been under pen names in the last few years.

  However, I am finally getting a couple of original novels under my own name out this next year. One is titled Dead Money, a thriller set in the poker universe. The other is an urban fantasy novel around a fun character I invented called Poker Boy. I’ve done about twenty or so Poker Boy stories so far, so the novel was great fun. Both will be out under Dean Wesley Smith name.

  You run many workshops, both online and real world, with your wife, writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. What do you find that you learn, or take away from the experience?

  Wow, teaching can really, really sharpen your own tools. Especially with the workshops here at the coast where we only invite the newer professional level writers who are past the early stuff.

  Doing graduate level teaching on different topics is amazingly hard and challenging and I learn with every workshop. Many of the online workshops are the graduate level workshops we used to do here and we converted them to online video classes. There isn’t a week that goes by with those that I don’t learn new stuff. The moment I stop learning from them we’ll shut them down, but no signs of that slowing at the moment and I’m still having a blast doing it.

  What writers or books have you read recently that have got you particularly excited in the SF/fantasy genres?

  Honestly, the last books inside of sf I read were Kris’s two new novels. One in her Diving Universe series that will be out next fall and another in her Retrieval Artist series called Blowback that just came out this winter. I read issues of Asimov’s magazine and Analog regularly, but not many novels inside the field. However, I have been reading a ton outside the field, mostly thriller writers, like Dean Koontz.

  What are you currently working on? What can we expect to see from DWS this year?

  You will see a ton more short fiction from me, not counting the new story in every issue of Fiction River. I will have the new thriller Dead Money out next fall, the new Poker Boy urban fantasy novel called The Slots of Saturn out next fall as well. I just finished a novel that I can’t talk about that I ghosted for another publisher, more than likely the last of those kind of projects I will do.
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  I am working on yet another novel between short stories that might see print this winter. And I have an sf/romance that I want to get finished and out as well. So more than likely about 50-100 short stories and eight or so novels in the next full year. But all under my own name from now on out. The world has changed and I like the change.

  Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has published traditionally more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he co-wrote The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and ghosts for a number of top bestselling writers. His lively blog can be accessed here https://www.deanwesleysmith.com.

  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

  Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread that Binds the Bones, won a Stoker award in 1994, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula Award in 2009.

  Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches a short story writing class through her local community college, and she works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon. Website: https://ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html

 

  Your first pro story, “Petrified,” appeared in Asimov’s in 1983. That’s more than 30 years of writing. How has your preferred writing environment changed over that time?

  My writing environment has changed in the tool department, for sure. I was so jazzed when I got my first IBM Selectric with correcting tape! Wahoo!

  In 1985, I told my dad that my plan was to write a novel, sell it, and use the money to buy myself a computer. He said that plan was backward. Get the computer, then write the novel. He was a technophile, an early member of the Geek species. He had just upgraded his computer, so he gave me his old one, an Apple III. For the many who don’t know, this was a brief blip on the Apple product line that disappeared as a dead end system. I wrote a bunch of stuff on it. I still have the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies from that, though the computer went to NextStep Recycling. I got some of the contents transferred onto three-and-a-half-inch floppies, but not all. Hidden history. There are things on there with titles like “Vampire Leprechauns from Space.”

  Last week I bought a new iMac computer to replace my seven-year-old iMac, which was glitching up a storm. My, this new screen is pretty.

  As for my surroundings, I used to write at home. I usually set up my desk in the living room of whatever apartment I lived in.

  For the last twenty-two years I’ve lived in the same house in Eugene, Oregon, and I use the spare bedroom as an office.

  In 2007, I was working on two book deadlines, and in the middle of that, I got my cancer diagnosis. Surgery, radiation, and chemo followed. I managed to wrap up one of the books the night before I started radiation, and I’m not quite sure when I finished the other one.

  Somehow, the stress of sickness, treatment, and work combined to make me allergic to writing at home. I can manage it if I have a deadline and all the coffee shops are closed. Now that I have this new computer, I might reclaim my writing at home; I’m hopeful.

  But for the last five or six years, I’ve been writing out. I write at the public library, at several different Starbucks around town, at local coffee shops and food courts. I’ve written at friends’ houses and at Market of Choice, our fancy and fabulous supermarket. I’ve written in yogurt shops (they stay open late down near campus!). I’ve written at a picnic table overlooking the river. Mostly I write on my little MacBook Air, but sometimes I write longhand in a journal. I love fountain pens.

  I have a list of eighteen writing buddies. When I plan to write somewhere, I send an email to the list and invite people to join me. I treasure the company of other writers writing, even if we don’t speak to each other. It makes what we’re doing in public seem a little less weird, and it’s great to have a friend to watch your stuff when you need a bathroom break.

  Some writers are happier and more productive than others, but everyone has days when they just don’t feel like facing the page. What do you do when you’ve lost your writing mojo?

  My process involves walks and naps. If I get stuck, a walk can help. Sometimes solutions to stories come to me in naptime dreams, or as soon as I wake up, if I grab the journal and write without censoring myself. I’ve also found that a long drive with the radio off will stimulate my imagination — gotta have something going on, and if I can’t get it outside my head, it will start up inside.

  Sometimes, I forget the writing and go out to a grange and play country western/bluegrass music with my Oregon Old Time Fiddlers Association friends.

  You have a beautiful collection of masks in your office. Any good stories behind them?

  My mask collection has expanded over time. Some of them I bought myself; many were gifts. They come from a variety of cultures. I don’t know most of their deep stories, but I can make things up about them.

  One of the masks is a life mask I did in art therapy when I was a patient at a hospital for people with eating disorders; it has a night side and a day side, and a third eye.

  Kim Antieau assembled the paper Medusa mask, then gave it to me because it spooked her too much.

  The fiery leather sun mask came from my sister, who worked on movies until she retired, and sometimes bought set decorations after filming ended. I’m not sure what movie it appeared in.

  Leslie What gave me a mask she picked up in a thrift store — the woven wicker mask with flaring straw hair, mustache, and beard.

  The glow-in-the-dark skull mask with its own black cloak was part of my Halloween costume one year.

  There’s a half-mask with cat ears fashioned of green-and-gold brocade that my friend Loreen Heneghan made — I plan to wear it at my next costume event, probably FaerieWorlds this summer.

  I like a wall of masks in my office to remind me of some of the people I might become while I’m writing.

  What’s your favorite thing about your current writing space?

  Peppermint mocha frappuccinos.

  What do you wish you were reading but aren’t, because it doesn’t exist?

  The next Jim Butcher Harry Dresden book, or the next book of Charlaine Harris’s Harper Connelly or Lily Bard mysteries, or the next Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson book, or, dang it, the next Celia Jerome Willow Tate book — looks like she stopped writing those, and I wish she’d start again. The next Gini Koch Alien book — no, wait, I have that on my Kindle already!

  What should a reader do after reading this?

  I have some free fiction online you could check out if you like. “Ghost Hedgehog,” on Tor.com, a novelette about a boy who talks to ghosts, and the basis of my next book from Viking. “Key Signatures,” about a girl who followed my own path into the music world here in Eugene. A very weird Christmas story called “The Weight of Wishes.”

 

  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two

  Issue 4 of Waylines features the pyschological thriller, The Secret Number. Following the imaginative concept of a yet undiscovered number, the Secret Number walks the line of fantasy and mystery in a way few stories can. Directed by Colin Levy, the film is based on Igor Teper’s short story of the same name. If you haven’t done so yet, be sure to check out Igor’s original story that appeared in Strange Horizons in 2000 and Colin Levy’s film, now screening at Waylines.

  In June, we sat down with both Colin and igor and traced how the short story became a film, chatted about the differences between the two versions, and explored the process of film making. Here’s what they both had to say:

  What’s the story behind this story? Why did you make The Secret Number?

&
nbsp; Colin: Honestly, I’m a bit perplexed by how The Secret Number found its way into the world. I mean, Igor wrote the short over a decade ago. Years after it was published, some guy on the internet found it, read it, and liked it enough to submit it to the social news site reddit.com.

  I was living in Amsterdam at the time, entrenched in the final throes of production on a short animated film called Sintel, when I came across the link. Normally I would have read the short story, cast my upvote and scrolled on. But I had taken a year off of school to make Sintel, and was starting to think about what I would do when I got back in school -- what I should do for my senior film. For a film student, it’s a pretty big deal. The senior film is their one shot to tell the world “hey, I can do this!”

  The Secret Number just struck me, immediately, as something I wanted to see - as an audience member. Even as I was reading it, my gears were turning.

  The story was short, simple, fun and mysterious. It was quirky, thought-provoking and dramatic. It was a character piece, and relied heavily on dialogue -- both things that made me uncomfortable, and gave me plenty to sink my teeth into as a director. The most dramatic elements of the story were told visually, so it seemed to call out for a film adaptation. And it was sci-fi, which was something I really wanted to try.