Asakiyume mita

This was my microfiction for yesterday (prompt was "by," of all words)

"How will you triumph?" the old man asked the opponents.

"By feats of arms," said the knight.
"By hook or by crook," said the con artist.
"By the grace of God," said the cleric.
"By logic," said the philosopher.
"By luck," said the gambler.
"By sleight of hand," said the stage magician.
"By attrition," said the field marshal.
"By default," said the loan shark.
"By consensus," said the negotiator.
"By acclamation," said the populist.

I was retired, but when the Queen of Faery comes with a request, you listen.

"I have a little job I need you to do. It requires cold iron--and lead. I'll pay you well."

Now I didn't want to get wrapped up in that line of work again, but she's a hard creature to say no to, so I agreed. My only stipulation: payment in cash, up front.

"But of course," she smiled.

And left me two gold coins, a king's ransom in today's world.

Pineapple
I discovered that a pineapple top I'd tossed in the compost bin was looking very healthy and green, not at all like something that was falling apart to make way for other life. Checking online, I found that yes, pineapple tops grow new pineapples.

You know what this means? I can have my very own bromeliad! I can have another ungainly, climate-inappropriate plant! In three short years, I might harvest my own pineapple.

So I have transplanted it.

( photos under the cut )

pepper
My Amazonian pepper, which I nursed along through the winter despite houseplant-plaguing little bugs, has come back with a vengeance this hot, wet summer. Look at all its peppers! They are about the size of the top part--the fingerprint part--of my middle finger. They're not ripe yet. When they're ripe, they'll be orange. And hot!



The word for hot pepper in Ticuna is meë.

charmed
Today, the prompt word for the daily prompt thing I'm doing was "charm"...

I am magnificent in infinitesimality.
I am a tiny fragment, but I partner--elegantly.
Come to me for symmetry.
I have been called "a magical device to avert evil,"
for I prevent unwanted decay in the physicists' theories.
Come to me for blessings.
I am not up, or down, and there is nothing strange about my nonduality.
You may find me enjoying my life in an accelerator near you--it's very brief, but charmed.



(Charm quark I do not understand the physics of any of this, but I do love the lingo and the quotes.)

There was this place where the sidewalk pressed right against the flank of McKinnock Hill. Walking that section of sidewalk, you’d have ferns dropping moisture on your shoulders. It was a narrow sidewalk: you couldn’t walk on it and hold your left arm out straight. Too much McKinnock Hill in the way. But if you bent your arm, you could press your hand into the hill’s thick moss.

You could also kiss a bare patch of stone. That was the kind of thing we’d do when we walked home from school as kids: “Kiss that spot there … Gross! You just kissed McKinnock Hill! You’re going to marry McKinnock Hill!”

There were animals on McKinnock Hill. Mainly squirrels and chipmunks were what we saw, but sometimes there’d be roadkill—possums or the occasional raccoon. So we knew those lived up there too.

And foxes, too. A place like McKinnock Hill has to have foxes.



( At some point we heard a story... )

I have turned this little story into a PDF with the foxes in the header ;-) If you would like a copy--if you would like a copy to send to your millions of friends so that my flash-fiction reputation spreads like a tsunami worldwide!--you can message me here or send me an email at forrestfm (at) gmail dot com, and I will email it to you.

Thanks to osprey_archer, I've been (very leisurely) reading the first few Betsy-Tacy books. They are a real delight, and I laughed at this scene from the second, Betsy-Tacy and Tib. The girls are eight years old, and they're each looking after a younger sibling, and Betsy, the inventive one, has hit upon learning to fly as an activity. They will jump off progressively taller things, flapping their arms, until they master flight. At the point of this excerpt, they've already jumped off a hitching block and a rail fence, and next they're going to jump from the lowest branch of a maple tree. But this presents problems....

( I'll go next, unless you want to )

Betsy never does jump: instead she distracts them all (not just Tib and Tacy, but the younger siblings too) by telling a story about the three of them as birds, and about why they turn back from birds to girls (because their mothers are weeping so sadly because they're gone)--which story causes everyone present to burst into tears, and Betsy has to hasten to the point where they transform back into girls and climb, not fly, down from the maple tree. "Like this," and she climbs down.

Maud Hart Lovelace never once says that Tacy and Betsy are afraid to jump; you get it all from the dialogue and the action. [okay, she does say Tacy is scared, but MAINLY it's from the other things.] Very cute.

(I like telling just fine in stories, as it happens; I'm not sharing this as some kind of implicit writing directive. I just thought it was a very cute example of the art of showing in practice.)

Sometimes on Wednesday nights, I join an online writing session--you know the type of thing: everyone introduces themselves, then settles down for X amount of time for writing, then comes back together to chat about it. Usually, along with the introductions, there's some kind of icebreaker question...

( CW! You are about to enter the realm of petty, competitive thoughts and resentments! )

So there you go folks! Unvarnished Asakiyume!

The teacher I used to work with in Holyoke asked me back to give a talk on writing to her high school-aged students, who are working on personal narratives. These are all kids for whom regular high school hasn't worked out, but they are still fighting for an education and a future, and the teachers at this program are 100 percent dedicated to helping them with that.

This happened in front of the building housing the program. This is these kids' daily life.

We talked about what makes writing hard, and how you have to strive to write in a way that your readers will understand and feel what you're sharing--even if your reader is only your future self. It's too easy to be cryptic or use a sort of shorthand that speaks to you in the moment but not later. And of course if your audience is going to include people other than yourself, you have to work even harder. Learning what you need to improve is good--but we also need reassurance and praise for what we're doing.

( the writing exercise I did with them )

Afterward, I answered questions and the talk drifted to (among other things) languages. I think I maybe went overboard talking about how learning languages made me positively high, but it led to a touching conversation on my way out with a student who confided that he'd started teaching himself Hebrew.

"Oh wow, Hebrew!" I said. "How did you choose that? Is it part of your heritage?"

"No. It's because of ... You know. The news. I thought of doing Arabic, too, but the letters seemed too hard."

I felt so much love for that kid in that moment. What a profound response to what's going on. What an instinct for healing.

So take heart, everyone. You can be a kid growing up in a neighborhood where stray bullets kill babies, and yet you're teaching yourself language to Tikkun Olam the hell out of our broken world.

I finished my six-page picture book about planting eggs and incubating avocado seeds. Behold! The egg grew into a tree that has eggs on it:



And the avocado seeds that the hen sat on hatched some avocado chicks:



I sent the text and pictures to my friend and Tikuna teacher and said if she wanted to put it into Tikuna, we could create a dual-language book ;-) (And I said she should tell me if I'd messed up the Spanish, which is highly probable.)

The complete PDF is too large for me to send to my guides, let alone my friend, so I will try printing it up here and mailing it--though I'm not sure postal mail will reach anyone. But in any case, they have the pictures and (minimal) text to get a smile out of, and if my friend does put it into Tikuna, I'll add that in and send her the text and pictures again.

According to Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld (as quoted in this Guardian article), there are get-rich-quick schemers out there who are encouraging people to submit AI-generated stories to high-paying, highly regarded venues. Clarkesworld has seen an increase from an average of 10 to over 500. As a consequence, Clarkesworld has closed submissions.

Another venue said it would only accept submissions from known authors.

That’s a terrible blow for up-and-coming writers and ultimately for the whole ecosystem. How to solve it?

First, I want to clarify the difference between the problem as it exists now and the ultimate problem. Judging from the fact that Clarkesworld was able to recognize and reject 500 stories as AI-generated, the problem right now isn’t that AI-written stories are indistinguishable from human-written ones; right now it’s a problem of spam. It’s a problem of a deluge of trash submissions making it untenable for zine teams to sort through to find the genuine ones.

Ultimately, as AI-generated stories get better, we’ll have the problem of distinguishing them from human-produced ones—if we decide that's a problem—and the solutions will be different, but I have some ideas for right now.

Idea 1: a cool-off period. Writers submit their names only. They are contacted a month later and invited at that point to submit their story. This ought to deter most spam.

Idea 2 a change in directionality. What if instead of authors submitting to publishers, publishers went looking for authors? This is already what’s had to happen to increase submissions from marginalized, lesser-heard-from demographics: publishers have actively sought them out. It’s distressing for writers to have to sit around like flowers in a garden waiting to be picked, but it’s a possibility.

Idea 3: writing circles. Essentially groups of writers who choose to come together to write in a certain style or about certain topics or just because they get along. They share writing with one another, talk about and share stories they’ve read as well. They would share some writing publicly (for free), so that there would be a public record of the circle’s existence and the sort of work its members produced. Then once every [time period], circles would make recommendations to zines of works to consider for publication. In other words, writers themselves would be doing first-level slush management, and zines could judge the types of stories they’d likely be getting from the circles by the work posted publicly.

These ideas have drawbacks, I realize, but maybe with refinement one or several of them could work?

I’m delighted to share with you a second story from Fernando da Costa Pires, this one dealing with the life of Mauko, who is born with a disability. Nando’s statement about why he wrote the story is below.

Ha’u kontente loos aprezenta ba imi istória ne’e, istória daruak husi Fernando da Costa Pires. Istória ne’e ko’alia kona-ba problema saúde defisiente. Imi bele lee kona-ba Sr. Nando nia intensaun iha “author statement" okos. (Ha’u husu deskulpa ba ha’u nia liafuan la loos iha Tetun.)

The story is direct and simple in how it’s told, but I felt a strong weight of emotion behind it: the emphasis, for instance, on the fact that Mauko’s parents loved him, and the anxiety they expressed when they talked in bed together. I know these are conversations that parents all over the world have as they worry about providing for children with disabilities after they themselves are gone.

Some of the details of the storytelling may seem strange: the focus on how long it takes to get to school or how big kumbili¹ are, but I like them for what they tell me. I met kids in Ainaro who had to walk similar distances to get to school. (Why does it take less time to get home, Wakanomori asked me—not a question I put to Nando, but I would guess it’s a matter of whether you’re going mainly uphill or mainly downhill.) And I liked knowing the process of digging up kumbili, and how big they are. (Were those details written with a foreign audience in mind? Maybe. But maybe they were also written for a city-dwelling audience in Dili, Timor-Leste’s capital.)

I have some other thoughts to share as well, but I’ll save them until after you’ve had a chance to read the story.

If you would like a PDF of the story in English, Tetun, or both, leave me a message here or email me at forrestfm@gmail.com.
Se imi hakarak istória ne’e (PDF) iha inglés, Tetun, ka versaun rua ne’e, hakerek mensajen okos ka, manda email mai ha’u: forrestfm@gmail.com.

And if you have any questions for Nando, type them here and I’ll share them with him.
Se iha pergunta ba Sr. Nando, bele hakerek mensajen okos no ha’u fó-hatene ba nia.

( Author statement )

( Mauko Meet a Monkey: English Version )

( Mauko Hasoru Lekirauk: Versaun Tetun )

¹Kumbili is Dioscorea esculenta, known in English as “lesser yam.”