An Unlikely Interview with Julie Frost

In the spirit of our issue of deliberately terrible fiction, we asked our authors some deliberately terrible questions. Luckily, they were kind enough to play along. Here’s what Julie Frost, author of War of the Were-Mice had to say…

Where do you get your ideas?

I troll through Yahoo!Answers and steal them from dewy-eyed teenagers after telling them that no one will steal their ideas.

Actually, I get them from everywhere. A glove in the road. Mouse shows. Themed anthologies about coffee, cyborgs, glam bars, or necromancers. Errant clichés, such as “quiet graveyards.” Song lyrics. Jack and the Beanstalk. A honeycomb. Giant bugs. Remarks that friends make about “angry bitter angels” or bears being “big, dumb, and dangerous.” Seriously, they come from everywhere. I just have to be alert enough to write them down when they happen and then get into the brainspace of creating Story from that little tiny nugget.

Have you written anything I’ve heard of?

I wrote a short story about a werewolf private investigator whose case involved a were-squonk. It was called “Different in Blood” and appeared in a well-regarded, award-winning small press called “Plasma Frequency.” You…might be noticing a pattern here.

Nope, I haven’t heard of that. Have you considered writing more like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling? They seem to be pretty popular and rich, so maybe you should do that.

I might, were I a novelist rather than a short story writer. Alas, writing novels is apparently not
part of my skill set. At least not yet. As it is, I’ll toil away in the trenches of short fiction and hope I can one day wring seven novels out of one idea rather than ten short stories/novelettes starring the same characters. Uh, don’t hold your breath.

I have a really great idea for a story about a cowboy and an astronaut who are best friends. It’s kind of like Toy Story, except set during the time of The Great Gatsby, only it takes place in the Lost City of Atlantis. Robert Redford would be perfect for the movie version. Why don’t you write it, and we can split the profit 50/50? Maybe 70/30 since I came up with the idea and that’s the hard part. What do you think?

Let’s see. 70% of nothin’, carry the nothin’… What’s this “profit” of which you speak?

And on a slightly more serious note (but only slightly), given your story is gracing the fine pixilated pages of an issue of deliberately terrible fiction: Do you have any regrets?

I regret that I didn’t start writing much earlier than I did. Protip for the kiddies: Don’t stop in high school like I did and then take it up again in your forties. That’s a whole lot of wasted years. On the other hand, I was a truly terrible writer in high school and never finished anything, so maybe wisdom (or at least better writing) has come with age. I like to think so, anyway.

Julie Frost lives in the beautiful Salt Lake Valley with her family among a slew of anteaters, toucans, and Oaxacan carvings, some of which intersect. You can read her blog at agilebrit.livejournal.com/. No actual mice or cockroaches were harmed in the writing of this story, although all family members (including the pets) lost several brain cells.

Journal of Unlikely Story Acceptances
Issue 8.5 – April 1, 2014

Table of Contents

War of the Were-Mice by Julie Frost
Twisty by Siobhan Gallagher
Whinny If You Love Me: A Love Story by Andrew Kaye
Why, Ethan, Why?!?!? 🙁 by Brynn MacNab
All Flesh is Grass by Kelda Crich
Preface by Bernie Mojzes

Editors Note

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the Journal of Unlikely Acceptances! Whats unlikely about it, you exclaim? The whole thing! Everyone knows theirs no such thing as bad fiction. All author’s know theres only bad readers who fail to recognize the genius of our work. You know who uses grammer and spellcheck? People with no imagination! You no who tells you to know the rules of storytelling before you break them? Them! The people who want to keep us out of they’re little secret clubhouse so they can get all the awards and all the publishing contracts and all the money, that’s what! Everyone knows editors don’t read the submissions anyway because they don’t want to publish you so why even bother to read there stupid guidelines. Just send whatever story, then you can write them about what jerks they are for not publishing it and rub it in their faces when it does get published and everyone loves it. Then they’ll be sorry. You’ll all be sory!

Ahem.

All of which is to say, we hope you enjoy this issue of deliberately terrible flash fiction. In the spirit of the issue, we fully welcome reviews where it’s clear you haven’t read the story, and you hate it because it isn’t a recipe for banana bread, which is what you were really in the mood to read.

Happy April Fool’s Day!

The Editors

Cover art by Suedo Nimh

Announcing Unlikely Story #9: The Journal of Unlikely Cartography

We’re delighted to announce the ToC for the upcoming Unlikely Story #9: The Journal of Unlikely Cartography, which will be out in June.

How a Map Works by Sarah Pinsker
All of Our Past Places by Kat Howard
The Occluded by Rhonda Eikamp
How To Recover a Relative Lost During Transmatter Shipping, In Five Easy Steps by Carrie Cuinn
This Gray Rock, Standing Tall by James Van Pelt
The Cartographer’s Requiem by Shira Lipkin

We’re looking forward to sharing this wonderful issue with you soon.

Gregory Norman Bossert Author Interview

Two Things About Thrand Zandy’s TechoThèque was written during a Clarion Workshop, correct? Could you talk a bit about the experience of Clarion, and how the story came about over the course of the workshop?

I wrote the first draft of Two Things About Thrand Zandy’s TechoThèque in the sixth and final week of the 2010 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Though, overall, Clarion was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, this story was a struggle.

I was fortunate to have a truly extraordinary set of classmates— Adam Israel, Dallas Taylor, Dustin Monk, Erin Gonzales, Jennifer Hsyu, Jessica Hilt, John Chu, Kai Ashante Wilson, Kali Wallace, Karin Tidbeck, LaTisha Redding, Laura Praytor, Leah Thomas, Nick Farrar, Stacie Brown, Tamsyn Muir, and Tom Underberg—and instructors—Delia Sherman & Ellen Kushner, George RR Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R, Delany, and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

Though we avoided the competitiveness and politics that occasional foul a writing workshop, the bar was set pretty high at Clarion 2010, as post-Clarion careers demonstrate: twelve of us have since been published, including sixteen stories drafted at Clarion and another five written for Clarion applications. And we’ve remained close friends, both students and instructors, which has lead to some fantastic opportunities, like doing the One Minute Weird Tales videos with AnnVanderMeer or providing illustrations and videos for Jeff VanderMeer & Jeremy Zerfoss’s Wonderbook.

My Clarion fifth week story had not gone over well, and so I was determined to nail my sixth and final draft. I was determined all that week…to no avail: by the end of the week, with a Sunday night deadline, I had no ideas and no words. So Saturday morning I took refuge in a local cafe with Kai Ashante Wilson and just started frantically dumping whatever came to mind onto the page. I worked pretty much continuously right up to and a little past the deadline the next day, with Kai occasionally reminding me to eat and drink.

I usually do most of my real writing in revision, but this one went raw into the Clarion grinder… and came through it pretty much unscathed, and with some encouraging comments. I’ve done a fair amount of revision on the story since, for the most part in understanding Halo and clarifying her voice. The comments of my Clarion-mates have been invaluable during that process, particularly in helping me avoid the pitfalls of my writing a female character. But at a plot and paragraph level, this is pretty much what I wrote that weekend.

What are you currently reading/what have you read recently that you’re excited about?

Over the holidays I read several of the excellent e-books from Cheeky Frawg and was just blown away by Michael Cisco’s The Divinity Student and Leena Krohn’s Tainaron. Reading writers like these, who ignore and transcend received structure and style, and genre, is both liberating and terrifying, like discovering a bottomless chasm just around the corner from your familiar neighborhood, filled with strange glowing wonders, and people floating there in the void shouting “Go on, jump! We did!”

I recently finished Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame series, and think it’s a brilliant example of exploring (often difficult) characters through (often extreme) action and (often alien) setting. It’s a perfect example of what fantasy and science fiction can do.

I love short fiction, and read a lot of it. I can’t pretend to be unbiased, but I think that some of the recent stories from my Clarion classmates and instructors are just fantastic, e.g. stories in the last year from Karin Tidbeck, Kai Ashante Wilson, Kali Wallace, Leah Thomas, Tamsyn Muir, Dale Bailey and Jeff VanderMeer.

Speaking of Jeff VanderMeer, I’ve been fortunate to read his new series The Southern Reach as he drafts and revises it, and it’s fantastic in every sense. Watching the books come together has been a real master’s class in writing, for which I am quite grateful.

What’s your favorite piece of cryptographic fiction (written, filmed, or otherwise)? Alternately, what real world cryptographic mystery (solved or unsolved) intrigues you the most?

As a kid, I read David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, and for a while was convinced I wanted to be a cryptographer when I grew up. Then the year after I got out of college, William Gibson’s Neuromancer came out and for a while I was convinced I was a cyberpunk. Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is the book that leaps to mind as having successfully used cryptography as a thematic device and setting.

More generally, many of my favorite writers work with the ideas of encryption and code in language itself, sometimes quite explicitly as with Borges or Delany. In this extended sense, storytelling itself is a act of cryptography, so maybe my childhood plan worked out after all.

What are you working on or do you have coming up you want people to know about?

I have my first weird/horror story out now at Schlock Magazine and another upcoming at Kaleidotrope. I’m plugging away at two big, complicated fantasy novellas and a couple of SF shorts. And I’m looking at some longer stuff: I’ve got rough outlines for a couple of novel, and I am getting back to my writing roots with some screenplays, including an adaptation of Two Things About Thrand Zandy’s TechoThèque.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

The job that was the weirdest to do day to day is actually not that big a stretch for a writer: I worked (and still freelance) as a researcher and librarian for feature films, including Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, and Alice in Wonderland. It involved a lot of reading and writing—no surprises there—but on a wide range of topics I might not have otherwise considered. On any given day I might be researching sixth-century Danish dining, Victorian street vendors, or common English shrubs. I’ve got stacks of reference books and web links on everything from historical costume to photographs of insects, and I’m constantly finding inspiration for new stories in them.

I’ve had the requisite writerly odd jobs: dishwashers, folk-rock sound mixer, failed-Silicon-Valley-start-up engineer. And my current job as a layout artist at Industrial Light & Magic is pretty durn wacky.

My stories tend to spring from a synthesis of random ideas and observations, so attributing inspiration is always a bit arbitrary, but as an example: I was working with stop motion animator and film concept sculpture Tony McVey, helping mold and cast some props for a short film, and that experience was one of the threads that tied into my “yeastpunk” story Lost Wax, which came out last year in Asimov’s.

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education -- who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

Well, the fact that I was forced to read and recite Beowulf in the original Old English lead to my first real job in the film industry, which in turn lead to my trying my hand at a screenplay, which lead in turn to writing fiction, so there you go.

But the debate over education is not about facts or ideas, obscure or otherwise: in the lack of other experience or context, people will discover and/or create an endless supply of their own facts and ideas. It’s about providing children with the time and setting and tools to develop social, communication, analytical, and empathic skills that transcend that of their family and immediate social context. The debate is thus between those who hope that the next generation will be something new, and those afraid of that, between who can let go of their old culture identity and revel in the new ones that develop, and those who stubbornly, fearfully cling to that identity and try to force it on their children.

As a reader, let alone a writer of science fiction, I am absolutely confident in the human ability to create new facts and ideas, and thus I will happily let go of those things I have received from the past and trust future folk to provide new wonders. From what I’ve seen and learned, those new ideas grow best in an educational environment that is equally open to, and mingles, children from all cultural and economic backgrounds. Doing so requires significant, serious effort and resources, applied equally and fairly across all children. But that’s what society is for: not living, but living better.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

When I first received these questions, I immediately jotted down Stepan Chapman’s novel The Troika. In the few days between doing so and getting back to writing my replies, I got the sad news that Mr. Chapman passed away. Fortunately, The Troika is available in a new e-book edition from Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg Books, with a great cover by Jeremy Zerfoss of Wonderbook fame.

Everything from Cheeky Frawg, by the way, pretty much falls into the drop-everything category, e.g. Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath, Michael Cisco’s jaw-dropping books beginning with The Divinity Student, works by Leena Krohn, Amal El-Mohtar, Amos Tutuola and others.

Just looking at the nearest shelf to my desk here, I see authors from Gerald Kersch to Jo Clayton whose work should not be obscure but seems to have become so. There are so many wonderful books out there to be discovered by the diligent reader willing to take some risks in the dim stacks of the nearest used bookstore.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

I started writing in 2009, and had my first sale that year. It was my second completed story, The Union of Soil and Sky, which Sheila Williams plucked from the slush pile for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I am still a bit flabbergasted by that, and I’m still deeply grateful to Ms. Williams for her support. I wrote four more stories that year, and sold two to Asimov’s, and then attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in 2010, so it was a bit of a whirlwind start. After Clarion, it took me about a year to regroup and to some degree reinvent my goals and process for writing; it wasn’t until 2012 that I started getting stories out there again.

Looking back now at The Union of Soil and Sky, I’d say it is less ambitious in structure, setting, and style than what I am writing post-Clarion; it took several years to allow myself to attempt interesting, risky stories instead of well-crafted, safe ones. But I am fond of the characters, and of the fabrilum, the alien grass artworks around which the story revolves. At some point I’d like to do a pass over the story and add a short sequel, and see if I can get it back into print. As soon as I finish this stack of half-written stories here on my desktop, that is, and a novel or two, and that screenplay, and…

Gregory Norman Bossert lives in Marin County, CA under a vast untidy heap of words, sounds, and pixels, and spends his weekdays wrangling the same at the legendary Industrial Light & Magic. He grew up in Cambridge MA and wandered to California via Vienna and Lisbon, Minnesota and New Jersey, Silicon Valley and Berlin.

He says: “I began writing in 2009, after artists Iain McCaig and Dermot Power dared (and inspired) me to write a screenplay, and author JC Hsyu convinced me to try his hand at a short story. I attended the 2010 Clarion Writer’s Workshop with an remarkable set of instructors and students. The support and friendship of so many great writers and artists has been a wonder and an immeasurable help to my writing: thanks to this inspiration my first science fiction sale was out of the slush pile to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and I won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for my first published fantasy story, The Telling.”

Greg also freelances as a design researcher, sound designer, animator, and musician: you can find examples of all of this at www.suddensound.com and www.gregorynormanbossert.com

Ada Hoffmann Author Interview

Sometimes the ‘throw-away’ lines and background information authors include in their work can be just as intriguing as the main story. In that spirit, could you give us a plot synopsis or brief review of the movie Catgirls vs. Pterodactyls mentioned in How My Best Friend Rania Crashed a Party and Saved the World, or tell us something juicy about its star, Suman Bachchan?

IN A WORLD where GENETIC ENGINEERING has turned HUMANITY into MONSTERS, ONE MAN stands against the forces of CHAOS! Yet ALL in our hero’s world IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. For the LOYAL PTERODACTYLS to whom he has DEDICATED HIS LIFE, trained to DEFEND AT ALL COSTS the last bastions of true human civilization, may have secretly been genetically engineered THEMSELVES in a SHADOWY CONSPIRACY, which our hero must UNRAVEL as a legion of 27 adorable feline ASSASSINS trained by the GENETICALLY MODIFIED REBEL ALLIANCE close in. Will he SAVE the world he loves, yet LOSE HIS INNOCENCE? Or, after many spectacular CGI battles involving catgirls, pterodactyls, and for some reason giant robots around whom the smaller and nimbler combatants can skirmish freely, will he LEARN THE TERRIBLE TRUTH, CHOOSE THE SIDE OF GOOD, and FIND LOVE?

It’s basically pure popcorn from beginning to end. Surprisingly, it passes Bechdel, because there are interesting scenes of interaction and problem-solving between the different catgirls as they plan their rebellious battles. Several of them are fairly well-realized characters by the standards of this sort of movie and have their own character arcs, including queer catgirl relationships with each other. Also Suman Bachchan takes his shirt off a lot.

What are you currently reading/what have you read recently that you’re excited about?

Will I sound incredibly pedestrian and mainstream if I say The Ocean at the End of the Lane? Yes. Not far through it yet, but excited. I’m also in the middle of Rainbow Lights by Polenth Blake, which is really a remarkable book. There is such unpretentious nuance and verisimilitude in the way Blake deals with a wide variety of characters who are on the margins in various ways. (And robots, and squid, and ambulatory underwater fungi that eat physical manifestations of dreams which come out of a mysterious vent. Squeeeee.) When we don’t read multiply marginalized authors, we miss this; it’s impossible to do it so nonchalantly when it’s not your lived experience, or even when it’s only your lived experience in one way. Also some of it is very relevant to my disability-related interests; I’m definitely going to be reviewing this on my blog when I’m done. [Editor’s note: Hoffmann’s review of Rainbow Lights can be found here.]

What’s your favorite piece of cryptographic fiction (written, filmed, or otherwise)? Alternately, what real world cryptographic mystery (solved or unsolved) intrigues you the most?

Can I tell you a secret? I don’t really read cyberpunk. I mean, I run into it here and there, but with the really important works of cyberpunk, it’s one of these things where I keep meaning to and not. “Rania” comes much more from a place of my own experiences – as a millennial, as a computer /data scientist, as a person whose use of social media is both important in my life and somewhat atypical, and as someone who is continually frustrated by the rhetoric applied both for and against modern uses of social media – than from any real engagement with the existing cyberpunk tradition.
That said, I have very fond memories of the first Matrix movie. Not so much because of the movie itself, though it is a perfectly good movie. But because my first real engagement with a media studies class in high school was with a study of The Matrix. We tore it apart and worked out how everything from religious symbolism to color schemes was used to bolster the movie’s underlying ideas. It was wonderful, and the media studies program in general was wonderful. People think of it as a bird course because it’s all about watching movies and stuff. But I learned much more from those classes about how stories work, and about the dangers of certain kinds of story, than from any writing “how-to” book. And it is necessary to know a little about how stories work in order to navigate our culture, which is saturated in bright shiny media and stories of every kind.

What are you working on or do you have coming up you want people to know about?

Everyone is asking me this all of a sudden. I’m running out of interesting answers. I like to be vague about works in progress, because who knows what will happen. But I have some other works lined up to probably publish in 2014, including two novelettes (one in GigaNotoSaurus, and one in a small-press anthology). I’m also in the early stages of several collaborative projects which are very exciting to me.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

During my schooling, I spent seven years getting paid to sing at a Catholic cathedral on weekends, in spite of a few awkward little technicalities like not being Catholic. I did weddings and funerals occasionally, too. Music is a lot like writing, business-wise. It’s surprisingly easy to get paid for it if you know what you’re doing. But it’s very difficult to make any sort of living out of that.

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education -- who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

Mainly, after being passed around between several different schools as a child, I have learned MANY things about how schools can succeed and fail at actually taking care of their students. Accommodation policies are important, for instance, but they only work if there are the resources, as well as the flexibility and empathy on the part of everyone involved, to carry them out with individual attention. Otherwise they are just more red tape. In the absence of good policy, a sufficiently clueful teacher with sufficient resources and spoons can still accomplish a lot. Meanwhile, the attitudes that make things difficult for disabled children are also harmful to other groups, for related reasons. Any rigid box with the intention of fitting everybody is going to inadvertently hurt someone.

None of this was in the actual curriculum, but I picked it up here and there.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

I’m a broken record, but y’all need to go read Difference of Opinion by Meda Kahn. This minute. It’s free online and everything. GO.

Other wonderful short story authors who don’t seem to get attention: Georgina Bruce. Nghi Vo. Polenth Blake, as I mentioned above. Merc Rustad, though I’m biased because e’s my best writing friend & beta reader. Kiini Ibura Salaam.

(I tried to list some poets too, particularly Rose Lemberg, but speculative poetry is such a tiny tiny field that I really have no idea who is “obscure” and who isn’t. Maybe everybody here is obscure except for Catherynne M. Valente and the people who have been running the SFPA for like 15 years? And the latter would not have been on my list anyway.)

I’m trying to sum up what I love about these people and failing. The authors I love, famous or otherwise, tend to be gorgeous and strange, but a particular kind of strange. It isn’t only strange for the sake of strange. They hold up elaborate alien mirrors in which I recognize the parts of myself that cannot be seen in a mere human reflection.

I’m much less adventurous with novels. At some point, as I continue to make clumsy attempts at writing my own, this will have to change.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

The Chartreuse Monster in Expanded Horizons, July 2010. I actually think that one still holds up pretty well. Some of my other early published works were real clunkers – like “Five Songs and a River”, also from 2010, which was prettily written but vacuous and predictable. And the 2011 story that shall not be named in which I decided that incessant sex jokes were a good way to deal with the experiences and identity issues of an asexual protagonist. CRINGE. I am sorry about that one, asexual readers! But “The Chartreuse Monster” is a subdued little thing that does what it says on the tin, and I’m still proud of it.

Ada Hoffmann is a mild-mannered computer scientist by day and a writer by night. “How My Best Friend Rania Crashed a Party and Saved the World” is her first foray into hard science fiction. Previous work has appeared in Strange Horizons, AE, Shimmer, and elsewhere. She also blogs about autism in speculative fiction. Find her at ada-hoffmann.com or on Twitter at @xasymptote.

Mari Ness Author Interview

An intense feeling of isolation permeates Ink, yet it’s a story where information is passed through the intimate act of touch. Could you talk a bit about the seeming paradox in the story? Do you see your main character as typical within her profession, or is she more unique in her loneliness?

She’s pretty typical – all of the agents are generally loners. What she chooses is less typical.

On a related note, you imply far more to your main character’s story than revealed over the course of the tale. How much of her back story do you know? In writing a story with layers beneath the surface, do you ever write that back story for yourself, or does it exist only in your head?

That’s a hard question to answer. I know quite a bit about the people she’s working for, far more than she does, since that forms part of the overall background to a series of stories/novellas that I’m working on. Bits and pieces of that are written down in note form. I know a little more about her story – I needed some background info. But that part stayed mostly in my head.

What are you currently reading/what have you read recently that you’re excited about?

Plans for the restoration of the Florida Everglades. I keep hoping that we can keep that magic around for years to come, and that everyone will be able to watch blue herons flying into the cypress trees, just missing alligators.

What’s your favorite piece of cryptographic fiction (written, filmed, or otherwise)? Alternately, what real world cryptographic mystery (solved or unsolved) intrigues you the most?

Linear A! What language does this represent? And what might the words tell us? Lists of sheep and cows, or tales of myth and legend? Laws? Betrayal? I haven’t a clue. But it does hint at all kinds of intriguing possibilities.

Or maybe it will just end up being very dull laundry lists. Who knows?

What are you working on or do you have coming up you want people to know about?

My main work coming up that I’m very proud of is an epic poem – and I do mean very epic; the word count is equal to a novella – that retells the story of Helen of Troy in her own voice and song. It’s called Through Immortal Shadows Singing and should be out later this year.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

My thoughts first jumped to my strangest job interview, where the interviewer lit my backpack on fire. Deliberately. I did not take the job.

I’ve had other odd jobs here and there – working as a singer during several holiday seasons; working as a clown (I wasn’t good at it); a three day job with a fierce parrot; some amusing tutoring experiences; and the usual fast food things. But the longest running weirdest job was hands down the five years I spent with a wholesale travel company that sold customized tours around the world to various academic and religious groups. The job itself was a typical office job on the surface. Beneath the surface, it often involved trying to get corpses out of Russia, rescuing clients from various jails around the world, and trying to act as an intermediary between God and various worldwide airlines, who seemed to be in almost constant contention.

I have too many stories from that job to count, really – we usually had at least three or more bizarre things a week – so many that I’ve forgotten most of them. Which is to say I’m not sure just how many of them have crept into my stories. Probably quite a few.

So probably the only odd job that did sink into my stories was my work as a singer – quite a few of my characters are, like me, mediocre singers who occasionally turn to that work to get by.

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education -- who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

I went to a fairly unusual elementary school where I learned quite a bit about opera, chickens, building dragons in opera houses, the life of St. Catherine of Siena, and why you should not keep mommy and daddy canaries in the same cage unless you want a lot of little canaries and you have someone willing to adopt little canaries, which can be difficult since little canaries can make a lot of noise. I feel the canary part was a valuable lesson for the rest of my life, but is any of this obscure? I don’t know.

After I left that school, however, I’m not sure that I learned anything obscure in school until I got to college. In one class we did build little rockets, which was fun, and little wooden cars that we sent speeding through the hallways, and learned the very basics of home construction. That was all helpful later on, though I can’t call it obscure. In another class one of the teachers realized that he was as bored with math as we were with math homework, so instead of teaching math, he told us about his various attempts to become a professional comedian, tried out comedy bits on us, and gave us improv lessons. Again, helpful if not obscure. But the rest of the teachers generally stuck to the curriculum: general information drilled into our little heads, which is probably why I kept reading books in class instead.

And that’s where I learned obscure things: by digging through the library, bits and pieces leading to other bits and pieces, a mention of an interesting person in one biography leading to finding another biography and so on. I read books about weird things in space, dinosaurs, robots, military campaigns, Celtic mythology, Egyptian archaeology, the Opium Wars, and more. To this day I prefer reading non fiction to fiction.

My teachers, alas, were definitely less than enthralled that I preferred reading to finishing homework, but diagramming sentences and doing math exercises – pointless. Opium Wars? THAT was cool stuff.

But that I think highlights one of the problems within the educational system. Teach students practical stuff, like building houses, or fun stuff, like rockets, or trying to make a go at it as a professional comedian, and you can get kids invested and learning. Spend time drilling, and it’s “Why do I need to know this?” – Well, I’ll tell you. It’s so you can get to college, and learn enough about paleochristian sarcophagi to identify one at six paces thus convincing a person who needed to be convinced that yes, yes, you do know what you are talking about. And later, to get to grad school and learn enough about fecal coliform rates to get an annoying person hitting on you to flee, and fast.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

My very first ever ever published work was a little poem in the school newsletter about a clown that I was terribly proud of, published when I had just turned seven, so was now Very Big and Grown Up Enough To Write Poems. I am afraid that the poem did not generate universal applause from my friends: they said it was stupid. That taught me that the world will not always love your creations.

I haven’t seen it for years. If I saw it now, I would probably echo the concerns of my fellow students: find an easier word to rhyme than “clown,” and if you must write a poem about a clown, please let the clown do something more than fall down, down, down.

Mari Ness has often drawn pictures and letters on her skin, always in ink that can be washed off. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Abyss and Apex, and numerous other print and online publications. For more details about her other work, check her blog at marikness.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter at mari_ness. She lives in central Florida.

Reviewed at Locus

Lois Tilton at Locus Online has reviewed Issue 8.

http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2014/02/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-february-4/#unls201402

Congratulations to both Barry King and Mari Ness for having their stories singled out for recommendation.

And now announcing: the Unlikely Story PDF subscription

Two bits of news: First of all, the PDF of Issue 8, The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography, is now completed. It contains all the stories and artwork of the web version, as well as some bonus materials, like author interviews, bringing it to 120 pages. It’s also formatted such that if printed in spreads, there’s a little extra space on the interior margin for the benefit of handcrafters who want to play with bookbinding.

Secondly, we’re changing our distribution model. Rather than putting it up online for people to download for free, we’re offering free email subscriptions. Why are we doing this? To help build up a consistent readership, rather than relying on people to remember to come visit us every few months.

What does a subscription entail? Pretty simple: we will send you an email telling you that an issue is available online when it publishes on the web. The PDF is usually done around a week later, and we will email that to you as well. That means you’ll get somewhere between 6 and 10 emails from us each year. We will never sell or distribute or otherwise let other use the list, and we will never spam you.

Of course, I was too busy actually designing the layout to get the mail system set up and a mailing list created, so for now, if you want to receive Unlikely Story in your inbox FOR FREE, just send us an email at unlikelystory (at) kappamaki.com. We’ll send you the current issue, and when the list is set up, we’ll add you to it to receive future issues.

Thanks,
Bernie

Barry King Author Interview

Your story, Something in Our Minds Will Always Stay, is rich in imagery, and weaves together a lot of narrative threads – the nature of self and memory, the relation of humans to technology and to each other, and that’s just scratching the surface. Did one particular thread of the story come first, or were they interwoven from the beginning as you set out to write the story?

The themes of self versus identity, trust versus faith, and certainty versus doubt are enormously important to me, and all deeply tangled together in my head. I found this story very hard to write initially because there is so much that ties together under the surface. Eventually, I had to fall back on faceted development of the plot because there’s no way to narrate something that interconnected in a linear fashion.

What are you currently reading/what have you read recently that you’re excited about?

Right now, I’m reading Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria and enjoying it very much. The writing is excellent, and there are many lovely turns of phrase on every page, but I find the story is more intriguing than the language or the rich worldbuilding. From what I’ve read so far, it’s a story about someone caught in between cultures, and so reminds me of other novels of the kind (Naipaul’s /A Bend in the River/ and Levi’s /Christ Stopped at Eboli/ gave me the same feeling). But it also reminds me very much of the people I grew up with, who for a variety of reasons found themselves constructing their lives out of found cultural objects from different cultures. In a way, the entire work and its world is an amalgam of that kind. So I feel very much at home reading it.

What’s your favorite piece of cryptographic fiction (written, filmed, or otherwise)? Alternately, what real world cryptographic mystery (solved or unsolved) intrigues you the most?

Cryptography was a passion for me in the early days of the Internet, when it was still considered a controlled munition by the U.S. Government. I was one of those early cheerleaders for Phil Zimmerman, with the PGP rings of trust and all that. I still have a copy of Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography in my office, but that was thirty-something years ago, and nowadays cryptography is ubiquitous, routine—even banal. The stories I like nowadays are the ones about decyphering ancient texts: the Rosetta Stone, Linear B, and, recently, I’ve enjoyed reading Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe.

What are you working on or do you have coming up you want people to know about?

After experimenting with the short story form pretty much exclusively for a couple of years, I’ve gone back to an unfinished novel. It’s a fairly standard fantasy, set in a vaguely familiar Regency/early bourgeois culture, but one that might have come about in London if Danelaw had never ended, and if alchemists had discovered genetic manipulation. “Oliver Twist” with vikings and genetic engineering sort of thing. It ties into a world I wrote another novel in, for which it serves as a sort of prequel and backstory.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

I hit the workforce in the U.S. about the time when traditional jobs started to mutate into blurry sets of duties aided by computers. My first job, which was titled “Administrator” for a small refugee organization, was really a chimera of IT & Communications, logistician, and video editor, as well as general office dogsbody, manning the fax machines and negotiating contracts and correcting the rolodex. The seige of Sarajevo and the “safe zones” was our big issue when I began and the Rwandan genocide started in earnest four months later. A lot of what I write about now, stories that take place during international and intercultural conflicts, involves processing that period of my life.

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education -- who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

My high school experimented with the idea of “Theory of Knowledge” in the Senior year. It was, for the most part, Socratic discussion of the big issues like facts versus truths, perception versus reality, the good of the individual versus the collective good. It underscored to me that knowledge is useless without the ability to think critically and to know the difference between symbol and reality, word and thing. I feel this much more strongly, now that people from any part of the world can debate anyone else online, we trade in totally intangible collections of bits, and our news sources are shedding the last vestiges of unbiased reporting on facts. More than ever, we need bullshit detectors, and we need to get them earlier in life. Give them that, and I believe students will answer the question of “why do I need to do this” for themselves. They’ll also become more insufferable, but that’s why the young exist in the first place: to vex their elders.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

If you haven’t read Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban, do so right now. Buy a copy and start by reading it aloud. Persist with it, because it’s worthwhile. It conveys more about the fall of civilization and the dark age mindset in the smallest space of words possible. But the real payoff is that it also shows how the apocalypse doesn’t happen to all of humanity at once, but to each individual separately, which I think is one of life’s great open secrets.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

Actually, it wasn’t that long ago at all. I sold a novella, “Pythia” in early 2012 to The Colored Lens, which was on its second issue at the time. Psychologically, I found it very difficult to write any sort of fiction when my parents were still alive. They were both novel writers and amateur historical scholars in their own right. My father had a lifelong fascination with Greece and Byzantium, and my mother read and re-read the Homeric epics for as long as I could remember. I was born in Greece and raised with Greek Myth, Art, and History as a staple of my childhood. I put into it all the ancient history I’d osmosed, and the strangeness of the ancient mind from Jaynes and Herodotus that I’d been fascinated with as a teenager, and the idea in West African/Carribean tradition of being “ridden” by a god, which I suspect survived in Greece in the form of mystery cults. So what came out was a broken-pot amalgam of parts of history that the three of us loved from that period, all embodied in the broken-pot mind and body of the protagonist.

It was the second short story I’d written since grade school, and deeply personal in that way, and I don’t think it’s always healthy to write something that you can’t get any distance from. I don’t want to write anything quite like that again, but sometimes, “you just need a Ceremony”, to paraphrase Leslie Mormon Silko.

After being born in Greece and raised by U.S. diplomats in Tunisia, Pakistan, Brunei, and the Phillipines, Barry King spent several years as a technician in Washington, DC’s refugee policy community. It was only natural, then, that he move to his wife’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario and convert to Canadianism. He now works across timezones as an IT consultant to non-governmental organizations and human rights activists, and moonlights for ChiZine Publications. His fiction and poetry has appeared in Crossed Genres, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and other publications. He maintains a token web presence at http://barry-king.livejournal.com.

Journal of Unlikely Cryptography
Issue 8, February 2014

Table of Contents

Something In Our Minds Will Always Stay by Barry King
Ink by Mari Ness
Chilaquiles Con Code by Mary Alexandra Agner
How My Best Friend Rania Crashed a Party and Saved the World by Ada Hoffmann
Two Things About Thrand Zandy’s TechnoThèque by Gregory Norman Bossert

Editors’ Note:

It’s not a new thing. Long before Edward Snowden leaked information pointing to massive and widespread surveillance by the NSA, people in the telecommunications industries not-quite-knew what was going on: large amounts of fiber not belonging to any known company laid in and around major Internet hubs, a string of mysterious breaks in underwater fiber cables, fiber optic equipment deployed in unmarked buildings. The clues were all there. It took Snowden to make it news.

But really, paranoids in speculative fiction have been warning against the police state for a lot longer than that. Philip K. Dick in the 50s and 60s wrote obsessively on the theme. In his book Discipline & Punish, French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault discussed the control structure of the panopticon, which allows a small number of people to clearly see what everyone else is doing, while not being seen themselves. The act of observing changes behavior in the observed; when everything you do can be seen, your choices are reduced.

At Defcon last year, I had a conversation with a friend which pointed out that however chilling the activities of the NSA were, there were legal restrictions on what was collected and how the government could use the data — as long as the government remains a constitutional democracy, and as long as there are whistle-blowers, there will be limits and corrections on government abuse. But the same is not true when it comes to private corporations. There is very little preventing any corporation that obtains data on you from using it any way they want, or to sell it to those who will.

Don’t be fooled by our title; there’s nothing unlikely here. In this issue, you will find stories of hacking and defending, sacrifice and triumph. You’ll find hard coding and social hacking, surveillance and evasion, and visions of both the freedoms and benefits that data technologies afford us, and the dangers that lurk within.

Cover Art by Dermot Power.