isabeljkim

[isabeljkim]

And for posterity, the PM announcement :D

[isabeljkim]

So I sold a book and also uh. Tv rights. Ok it was three books. Normal amount of books. In a seven figure six house auction to Tor. So that’s cool. I’m normal about this. (I am so excited)

[isabeljkim]

Hi! Hope this isn’t a weird question, but I saw you say in an interview something like “all the magazines like to publish your stories at once”. Do SFF venues not publish you when they accept you? Or do they just all accept at the same times? I’m more familiar with literary magazines that accept for the next issue, so I was curious about those timelines. Thanks for answering! Love your stories.

not weird at all! the short answer is that every magazine has a different publication/acceptance schedule, which isn't standardized, and a lot of magazines craft issues with specific story groups. Its perfectly OK to ask the editor when your story is going to be published/for what issue, although they might not know at the time of acceptance. In general, its a few months ahead - i think the longest for me was like....eight months btwn acceptance and publication?

So, the joke for me there was that even though the stories had been accepted at different times, they were all getting published in the same month bc each editor independently was like "yes. now."

[isabeljkim]

buddy youre like the 6th guy today to send this to me. my brand. my god, my brand.

Okay, so, uh, bad, uh, bad news. Bad bad news, we took the kid out of the Omelas hole, yeah. And it turns out that the reason that the utopia was contingent on keeping the kid suffering in the Omelas hole, is that, well, this is pretty awkward to say out loud, but it turns out that the kid really enjoyed suffering in the hole. He specifically enjoyed suffering, in holes and only suffering in holes. Yeah it was actually secretly one of those Aesop's about how utopia will inevitably be dependent on our ability to accept and accommodate lifestyle choices we don't understand. I mean he hasn't said anything, he's clearly trying to be gracious about it, but he's trying the sailing and horseriding and all the other boilerplate utopia shit and you can tell he's kind of just going through the motions, you can tell he really wants to be back in the hole, suffering. He's really hashing the vibe and now everyone is pissed at us

[isabeljkim]

having a weird one, lads.

[isabeljkim]

hello! i just randomly found your blog & when i realized you were the one who wrote Zeta-Epsilon i audibly went HOLY SHIT because i fucking love that story! it hits my heart in all the right ways. anyways i hope you have a good day & thank you for putting Zeta-Epsilon into the world!

aw yay! glad u enjoyed it, that one was really fun to write! Its always really surprising to me when ppl mention a specific thing i wrote cause im like huh! wasnt expecting people to remember things! wow things i wrote exist in the world!

[isabeljkim]

damn i can’t believe i just discovered you have tumblr?? anyway day ten thousand is one of the best short stories i’ve ever read it stuck w me and changed my brain chemistry permanently. thank u for ur work

yeah i host my blog on tumblr because im too lazy to figure out a better way to host it, and because i've been on tumblr since i was 12, which is a very unfortunate reality for me.

sorry and also you're welcome for the brain chemistry change, hope you're enjoying it :D

[isabeljkim]

I have read your beautiful son and I liked it so much that I then read the whole story aloud to my best friends, and they both also liked it a lot. “Load-bearing suffering child” is a genius and evocative turn of phrase. Thank you, I really like your writing, and I just wanted to leave fan mail.

im delighted by the image of you reading my beautiful son with so much wrong with him out loud and repeating the weird little phrases i use so many times. glad u enjoyed the story and my stuff!

[isabeljkim]

🤔

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[isabeljkim]

Tapping the sign

read my beautiful son with so much wrong with him. No I don’t know why it’s like this either.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

[isabeljkim]

read my beautiful son with so much wrong with him. No I don’t know why it’s like this either.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

[isabeljkim]

:3 im on here also other people >:3 vote thru monday !!

#i think the most im doing is posting to my socials

[isabeljkim]

How does getting an agent work for short stories? Did you get your agent for a forthcoming novel, or did that come about from your short stories? (Help, all my friends are novelists and I have no one to ask this.)

unfortunately for you i do not know because i simply wrote a novel in a fever dream and got an agent in the usual manner of things (sending people my novel and the query letter like "please") i have no idea how you would do it as a short fiction author, but quite frankly.....as a short fiction author u do not need an agent. unless a press has reached out to you, in which case its time to start sending some emails to agents.

[isabeljkim]

by popular request: my 2024 awards eligibility post (now on my blog)

so yeah i wrote a bunch of stuff this year but this is the stuff i think is The Best! So you should read these three short stories and if you go "this is great, isabel j. kim, this makes me feel real human emotions and experience joie de vivre or perhaps the opposite of joie de vivre in a good way" then please consider nominating or voting for me on Stuff.

note that the locus award is specifically Open To Everyone, wink.

anyway ok stories, descriptions and links under the cut, in no particular order

Zeta-Epsilon, in Clarkesworld's March 2023 issue Nonlinear spaceship heist. Here's an exerpt: Start at the cleave of it, not at Zed’s meat death or Ep’s centuries-long destruction, but at the moment that Zed halves his own mind and walks away. Or as was reported in the internal memorandum, the moment when Pilot-Commander Zeta San Tano killed himself at his infinite post on the M.K.S. Epsilon, leaving behind an empty airlock and a crippled starship unable to communicate, limping its way home after battle, carrying a full complement of soldiers.

The Big Glass Box and the Boys Inside, in Apex's January 2023 issue Fae, lawyers, and inadvisable queer romance with your officemate. Here's an exerpt: Their power is how they can turn you into one of them. That’s the trick of it, see. You can go in with your swords and sacrifice, you can go in with your red heart and good intentions, and they will grin with their white teeth and say, “Welcome to Grey & Tender, LLP. We’re so glad you’ve agreed to join our summer class. We’ll be sending you the paperwork shortly.”

Day Ten Thousand, in Clarkesworld's June 2023 issue This one is about..oh, just read it. (tw: sui). Here's an exerpt:

A man who will be given a second name in ten thousand years and a man whose name will be forgotten sit in a forest, or perhaps a grassy plain, or perhaps a cold tundra. It is a biome that will not exist in ten thousand years but whose footprint will be pressed into the earth and folded over.

The first man—Dave, let’s call him Dave—says, “Are you sure about this?”

The second man says, “Which one of us has epilepsy and can see the future, you or me?”

#awardsposting #consider me for awards #then work will probably let me take time off to go! #also its pretty good

[isabeljkim]

How do you go about bridging the gap between "cool idea" and "actual story with conflict and such"? I keep getting stuck in the earliest stages of writing because I'll have a worldbuilding conceit or an interesting theme but characters and inciting incidents will elude me!

the trick is to make a guy and put him in situations.

to unpack that a bit:

a guy:

a character is a plot device, in many ways. you need to think about the sort of person who ends up in the world/grappling with the themes that you want to write about. what sort of person is interesting here? what are their character traits and superficial trappings? work backwards from the sort of story/ideas you want to tell

do a lot of sketches - i usually start my guys about 1/3 figured out, and then the rest of them gets figured out on the page, because coming in hot with a fully formed guy is just a good way to figure out this is not actually the guy you want to write.

give your guy a goal. this dude has to want something. it can be something stupid. it does not have to be the Big Plot Point. but they must Want.

situations:

the "worst thing that could happen at any one moment" must always be the next thing to happen.

the character must be in pursuit of their goal, whatever that means (it can be that they dont want to do x, that they desperately want to do y, etc)

you start a story in a place where there is a Problem. this problem is the plot. and you start the story as close to the problem as possible. then the story is about Fixing the Problem - but wait! maybe there's a different Problem! ah! surprise!

in a nutshell if you keep doing that over and over thats essentially what a plot is.

[isabeljkim]

What the hell is going on with Day Ten Thousand:

Day Ten Thousand was weird enough that I felt like it deserved directors commentary, even though I’ve stopped explaining myself mostly except when I do.

Here’s a disclaimer before we begin: don’t read too much into it. I've noticed our culture wants to explain young womens’ art as some sort of public confessional booth and our current culture has a fetish for the autobiographical. Fuck that. I didn’t write three different POVs and three interlocking nonlinear narratives about the nature of storytelling as a psychic technology to be told that my writing isn’t a calculated Craft with a capital C. Now whether it is good Craft is a decision for you, not for me. 

Anyway. 

Day Ten Thousand is a satire of an Isabel story by way of Vonnegut pastiche. We’ll come back to this. 

I called Day Ten Thousand “psychoanalysis bait” on twitter so I shall put all my cards on the table so that your psychoanalysis is at least accurate. Note that these are only my cards, because other people deserve their privacy. I guess you could probably Google all of this but like, jeez. Don’t.

I had a pretty regular time in college except for the tangential deaths. 

When I was twenty, I was the opinion editor for my university newspaper and a girl who was a friend of a friend killed herself by walking in front of a subway. There was then a sort of a small suicide bubble which was a little bit public because we were an Ivy, and one of my opinion columnists was kinda suicidal, and I, without any training, ended up in charge of writing a front page editorial about the mental health crisis on campus on account of the dead kids, etc, and talk to administration about the dead kids. 

I hate talking about dead kids. Don’t ask me about it, or about the reporting. I don’t want to talk about it. 

The whole thing sucked shit and it’s why I’m a lawyer now and not a reporter. 

If this was a story that would be the only fact, but this is reality so I have to mention that a couple years later a guy I knew got literally hate crimed and murdered in a forest. I found out about that because I saw his friend crying in public and didn’t stop to ask what was wrong. Later I heard about this in the news, and realized my acquaintance had been Literally Fucking Murdered. A few months ago I had been arguing with him in the literary magazine editors meeting about whether a poem was good or not. I think he won that argument. Then he was murdered for being gay. 

These were my introductions to the specific emotion of “sometimes people die and you don’t feel like you get to feel bad about their deaths and you still think about it a couple times a month seven years later.” 

You can probably guess where the subject material of this story came from.

Day Ten Thousand was a story about inevitable deaths, and the difference between a death in a story and a death in reality, and about…the way a death marks a narrative and a real life and how it becomes fictionalized over time. I also saw a clean way to finally do my deep time / far future story, which was something I had been thinking about on and off for a couple of years (the original version was about a shaman in the deep-time era who has a vision about having to do a murder re: preserving genetic material for the future, but it never really gelled in a way that made sense). 

I had also been wanting to write something a little metafictional, because I felt like I was writing the same story over and over (if you’ve noticed my stuff getting weirder, that’s why. I was on a bit of an experimentalist kick late last year and early this year). 

So it’s a satire of an Isabel story. I’m self-aware enough to note my obvious recurring motifs: time travel, dead people, grief, people who have a weird relationship to each other, a third-act twist, the tendency to punctuate with in-universe facts to imply emotion, to tell x in order to show y, egregious and blatant use of the second person. And then there’s the stuff that you wouldn’t know, but I do: I dislike writing in the first person, I wanted to do something nonlinear, I think a lot about stories about stories, about the idea of a story as a technology, I find myself dropped into recursive fate-like thought patterns. So a lot of this story is both my self-deprecating poking fun at myself and my habits, and also my thesis statement about…what is the point of fiction if not to make sense of the past and the future, I suppose.

The reason it is a Vonnegut pastiche is because I like Vonnegut a lot and I was trying to do something Slaughterhouse-5-ish with drastically less fucked source material. Sorry Kurt. 

There are three stories happening in Day Ten Thousand, and a secret fourth story. Each story is a suicide loop. The protagonist is trying to break a specific loop by telling a story. This story is about accepting what you have to, and changing what you can. This is a story about letting go and also not letting go. The emotional range of each narrative affects the other psychically, because by changing the vibe of the metanarrative, the individual narratives are allowed to change. 

The story in the archaic is a story that is being told postmortem, it is all hypotheticals based on fact. The story in the future is a singular narrative happening in real time until it isn't. And the story in the present is a guy telling the story about the future, which requires him to tell the story about the past as well, and mostly what Dave is doing here is avoiding the question, but it reflects how Dave thinks about the girl dying in front of the train. 

Does that make sense? No? That’s fair. That’s a postmortem explanation of what actually happened. What actually happened is that I rewrote Day Ten Thousand six times, each time more frustrating than the last, each time with the neutral-ish narrator taking up more and more air. And over time the narrator became a participant, and that’s what created the secret fourth story between “you” and the narrator. 

I had thought there were only three loops that needed to be escaped - the past (archaic, pinned story), and the future (space station, mutable fact), and that the present (the narrator’s world) was something that was static (pinned fact). After all, the girl’s already dead. She’s already stepped in front of the train. 

But the narrator isn’t doing so hot. The narrator is also Dave. And the narrator is telling the story to someone. Somewhere between version one and version six, I realized the only version of this story that makes sense is the one where the story is a conversation, and that you and I, as the narrator and the person at the other end, were also in a loop. 

So. That's whats happening.

I’m not sure if I love the ending. But I rewrote it six times and this one felt as final as it is going to get. I am done reinventing the fucking wheel. You know how it is with spaghetti. Promise I’ll write you something normal next time, I think I’ve gotten the avant- garde out of my system for a few months. 

And hey, I know I said all cards on the table but people deserve their privacy and that includes the kid i used to be when I was twenty, sitting in the shitty little windowless opinion column office, writing about suicide. 

Anyway. Day Ten Thousand is about stuff and things. Themes. So it goes. 

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you later. 

If that was too depressing for you, here are some fun facts: 

The main character is Dave after 2001: A Space Odyssey because I had wanted to make a “I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that” joke, but I couldn’t shove it in :( 

I just thought that phlebotomist was a funny word but I also fucked myself because I misspelled it every time. 

I reread half of Slaughterhouse Five to write this but then my copy got returned to the library automatically so I didn’t finish it. (yes, I’ve read it before, like three times)  

I took one single evolutionary anthropology course in college and it shows.  

I did end up looking at the wikipedia page for “the wheel” for this and then wondering exactly what I was doing with my life. 

About half the facts in this are real, and I read a couple of papers for a couple of things in it (that I promptly then ignored), but the rockets-rome-horse’s ass thing is specifically a story that my friend Max H. likes to tell. 

[isabeljkim]

this prolly never happens to you because your stuff is like ,,, amazing, but as you submit, do you have a cutoff where if you get x number of rejections on a story, you pull it and do an editing overhaul on the manuscript? like is there a point where you stop thinking it’s the editors’ taste not jiving with your work and it’s just a faulty piece of writing?

nah fam my short story that won the shirley jackson was rejected nine times before it was published and then it won the shirley jackson apparently there are no rules to how this works.

i dont really have a cutoff number? i sometimes tinker with stories between when i send them to different magazines like i go :0 oh i must fix it! and then i do edits. i actually usually do this between first and second submission, because i notice stuff i missed the first time.

but there are two stories that will never again see the light of day because i do not like them anymore and they are simply not good and i do not want to fix them, and those both only went on sub to like.....four places each? and there's one thing i wrote that got rejected 11 times but I THINK ITS GOOD and everyone is a COWARD for not publishing it so i will probably send it to markets once a year until the heat death of the universe.

in conclusion i dont think you need to have a hard and fast rule about when you pull a thing and start editing, but if a lot of editors say "hey fix your ending" maybe you need to fix your ending. if something went out 5 times and all the feedback is similar......yeah thats the time to edit.