Reality Skimming

Reality Skimming

Reality Skimming promotes optimistic SF -- stories that inspire us to fight the good fight for another day. Committment to larger projects, the writer's sense of mission, joy of reading, the creative campfire of the SF community and the love of deserving protagonists are celebrated. We believe in heroes and striving to be what we believe in. It is also a news hub for content related to the Okal Rel Saga written by Lynda Williams.

15Apr/15Off

Interview with Sandra Wickham April 2015

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Sandra Wickham lives in Vancouver, Canada with her husband and two cats. Recently, Sandra has been busy organizing the Creative Ink Festival for Writers, Readers and Artists, which you are welcome to join on Saturday, 25 April. To find out more about Sandra and the festival, please visit http://www.sandrawickham.com/

Sandra is also a writer and her short stories have appeared in Evolve, Vampires of the New Undead, Vampires of the Future Undead, Crossed Genres magazine, The Urban Green Man and more. She blogs about writing with the Inkpunks, is the Fitness Nerd columnist for the Functional Nerds, blogs for Luna Station Quarterly and slush reads for Lightspeed Magazine. Sandra competed in fitness competitions for ten years, including four years in the IFBB Pro ranks. She’s been a trainer for twenty years, offering programs designed for anyone looking to improve their level of health and fitness. Sandra has also acquired her black belt in martial arts.

Interview by Christel Bodenbender

The Creative Ink Festival is less than three weeks away, how has the response been in the community?

I’m overwhelmed by the support I’ve received from professional authors and artists as well as by companies willing to sponsor us. Our programming is stacked with talented and knowledgeable professionals, and our membership tote bags are going to be filled with great stuff, including free books, thanks to the generosity of those sponsors!

Is this the first major event you have planned and produced?

Over a span of ten years I promoted thirteen bodybuilding and fitness shows. Our last one had over 300 athletes, a sold out audience of over 1200, plus dozens of volunteers, sponsors and vendors. While it’s not the same type of event, the festival is similar in many ways and I’m hoping to use my experience to make it a great experience for everyone.

I saw the programming grid went up and am already selecting the panels and workshops I want to attend. How difficult was it to fill the day with these exciting events?

Once again, I’ll thank the presenters and panelists for their contributions, they’re providing so much experience and knowledge for festival members. Many of the panels are simply things I would love to hear about or have enjoyed at other events.

How nervous are you? This could become one of the major events for art and writing in Vancouver.

Well, now I’m extremely nervous since you put it that way! I do thank you for the kind words, but I’m just focusing on the details of this one, and promoting the 2016 event. I am nervous that after getting all these great presenters and sponsors on board, not enough people will come to see them. I’m hoping the “if you build it they will come” magic will work for me.

You had an exciting career in the fitness industry. Was writing speculative fiction something you always had on the backburner and can you live and breathe now?

I’ve always written, including writing my first novel at the age of nine. I dropped writing while I was at university pursuing my degree in English and Drama. After that came backpacking overseas, then competitions for ten years, none of which really went well with serious writing. Once I retired from competition, I went back to writing and started submitting.

What comes next? Are you right away going into planning mode for next year, or do you have other projects planned first?

The one day event has kept me extremely busy, for the full weekend event I will be taking the entire year to plan it. Of course, I also plan to continue with my own writing!


1Apr/15Off

Interview with Charlotte Ashley

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Charlotte is a writer, editor, bookseller, book collector, book historian and Alexandre Dumas fanatic. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two daughters and books. She reviews speculative fiction short stories over at Apex Magazine, where she is also the Reprints Editor. Charlotte has several short stories published, the latest is "La Héron," which appeared in the March/April issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can find more about Charlotte at http://once-and-future.com/

Interview by Christel Bodenbender

Your short story "La Héron" has just been published in the March/April issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. What is the story about?

It’s the story of a duellist and her drunken-nun second competing in an illicit sword fighting tournament in 17th century France. A band of otherworldly folk crash the tourney and the organizers let them compete anyway. Shenanigans ensue!

You have written a wide selection of short stories. What is your inspiration for writing?

In general, I write what I want to read, but on a story-by-story level my inspiration comes from a lot of different places. I’m a big fan of starting from a prompt – preferably several unrelated prompts – and thinking creatively to press these disparate elements into a cohesive story. Somewhere along the way I start to notice patterns and themes emerging on their own. The subtext is usually where my personal concerns and politics start to come out, so I go back in with an awareness of what is being said there and try to shape the story into a good vehicle for the theme.

In a different interview you said you found your feet when you started writing short stories. What draws you to the shorter side of speculative fiction in contrast to the epic plot?

Mostly I find the shorter scale more manageable. Not only do you have the ability to tailor every last word to the plot and theme just the way you want, but if it doesn’t quite work out, you haven’t invested years of your life in the project. I suppose a good writer probably puts the same attention to minutia into a novel, but the scale of that undertaking is just boggling. With a short story, I can hold the whole of it in my mind at once. The shape and pace of it is something I can manipulate and examine. Do I have the processing power to do the same for a novel? I’m not sure. Maybe one day I’ll find out!

You have also published an online story called "Utopia: An Interactive Crisis" using the interactive game engine Twine. How did you like the process of creating a plot without a straight storyline? Where there particular strengths or weaknesses you encountered?

This was really interesting! You’re basically writing dozens of parallel stories using the same characters. I loved it as an exercise in getting to know my characters and what they would do in a wide variety of circumstances.

But on the other hand, I think ultimately I had trouble seeing the story from the player’s perspective. Some storylines were more boring than others, and if a player hit one of these slower lines without knowledge of the others, they might get bored and give up. I found myself being clever, revealing information in one storyline that meant more if you’d read another. But what good is that to the player if they never played the other storyline? I think I got a lot more out of writing the game than anyone could have gotten out of playing it.

What feedback did you get from readers regarding the Twine story, where readers can also steer the plot with their choices?

I actually messed up the feedback mechanism – I neglected to put a contact button in until quite a while after the game launched. But I noticed people take the easy or obvious route the first time through, getting the most generic ending. This was one of the least interesting storylines and a lot of these players wouldn’t play a second time. But the players who went way out there and chose riskier options got the crazier endings and liked the game a lot more!

What are your favorite kinds of stories to write?

Action-adventure alternative histories! I’m interested in utopias and happy endings. I’m well aware that the world is a messy place, but I think the most interesting question you can ask is “How could it be better? What does better look like? What needs to be changed in a world or a society or history in order to get a better outcome?”

A lot of my favourite things can be classified as “guilty pleasures” – things that stir hope and excitement in me, but which can be deeply problematic. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I want to show that you can have the thrill of exploration without the oppression of colonialism; the excitement of a battle without the othering of an enemy; the exceptionalism of a hero without creating a victim of everyone else.

You have also spent a lot of ink as fiction review blogger. How do you think you are able to shape the genre as a critic?

More than anything, I want to change the background noise. The status quo, I guess. I don’t have a particular mandate, but I want to help normalize unconventional stories by treating them as if they are conventional. No matter what you think needs to be changed about publishing or storytelling, it has to happen on all levels. You need not just stories and writers, but editors, critics, publishers, media outlets, networks. Whether you think we need more support for diverse stories, self-published stories, genre stories or whatever, you need people doing the grunt work. Reading those stories for more than just a challenge. Reviewing them as more than experiment. Talking about them as more than activism. If you want something to be the new normal, you need people to just be normal.

So that’s what I like to do. Find the stuff that isn’t getting the attention and give it some without making a big deal out of how little attention a thing is getting.

Could you tell us about some future projects?

My work has been creeping longer on me. I used to write to about 6000 words, but my last three stories have been 6500, 8500, and 8000 words. After a few months of panic, I’ve decided to just let it happen. My big work in progress is actually a novella: an alt-history murder mystery about an 18th century banker wooing investors for an aerocarriage venture. The whole thing takes place on the Isle of Logres, a nation of Ogres trying hard to figure out modernity. Murder gums up the works, as murder is wont to do.

Not that I’ve given up writing shorter short stories! I’ve a few of them in the pipe too.