STATUS: Thursday, September 1st

The Daily Report

Well, my end-of-month push for August yielded mixed results. I did start (and mostly finish, more on that a paragraph down) a new piece with which I’m very happy, and which I will finish today and post as a slightly belated short story for August. But a pair of (still ongoing) family health situations did impact things.

After I made the decision (mentioned earlier this week) to basically take a fail on August, I have decided that the centerpiece of my Patreon and my planned “year of awesome” really must stand: one short story a month for a year. I think that’s the central value I’m offering. This is why rather than just saying August was a miss and taking the thing I started writing earlier this week and using it to get a headstart on September, I’m going to finish it and post it.

Now, I’m calling it a short story, but I had to some soul-searching regarding categorization. What it is, in fact, is an epic science fiction poem. I’m calling it a short story because it is short story length (it’s going to wind up between 3,000 and 4,000 words, when I’ve shored up a few passages that need shoring up) and because it does, in fact, tell a story in a distinctly linear fashion. Poetry is the form, but it is a short story.

I had some moments of going back and forth with myself about whether or not this “counted”. It already felt a bit like I was just giving myself wiggle room when I made one of my monthly goals “a flash fiction or poem”, as if I’m treating those interchangeably when they’re different things. And they are, but so are two different pieces of fiction, or two different poems.

The poem is (currently) called “Our World Is A Lifeboat”. It’s a science fiction poem that, in practical terms, is about the survivors of a crashed space ship, at least in the way that Asimov wrote stories that were about robots.

Financial Status

Awkward. Much improved from before the summer, though tight because of WorldCon, because a “nominal fee” we had planned for wound up being a couple hundred more than we’d anticipated, and because my dismal performance in the August heat means Tales of MU made me very little money, which is fair, I’m not complaining. The whole point of the model I’m using for that is that people only pay to support it when it’s being update. But it’s a fact that my income at the start of this month looks a lot more like my income back in March or April than the rest of the summer, and that’s a problem.

I have been enjoying increasing celebrity and acclaim, but the real long and short of it all is that I need this to translate into Patreon growth, and that’s not happening. I keep churning along just below the $400 mark, which has been my goal pretty much since I started, and even that is just an initial goal. I need to be making more money.

It might be that I need to cut back on how much of my time, energy, and creative output is given away for free. As much as I hew to the model of the “the foundation of crowdfunding is the crowd”, I need a better way to get the crowd to bring the funds. Do I start my entertaining and/or insightful digressions off Twitter and put them directly on my Patreon page? Start locking down my short stories, posting only the beginnings?

I have to do something different. I need to figure out what it is. Heat or no heat, con or no con, I think I would have had an easier time sustaining my momentum through August if the numbers had been growing the way I had thought/expected/hoped they would.

The State of the Me

Doing pretty good? Late night hospital visits leading to late night dining out instead of cooking at home has played havoc with my eating and sleeping habits; my choices for drinks the past two nights have pretty much been something with caffeine at 10 or 11 at night, something with sugar, or ice water. I might have to get back in the habit of carrying flavor drops in my bag. For all that I’ve been overcaffeinated the past two nights, I have slept okay… not deeply, but deeply enough. Thank goodness for high tolerance.

Plans For Today

I’m going to be finishing up my epic poem and posting it in some form, but also doing a lot of stocktaking and figuring out where I go from here.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

EPIC POEM: Our World Is A Lifeboat

I started writing this after recently becoming entangled with the early access game Subnautica, a survival sandbox game where you play the lone survivor of a starship crash on what seems like a largely aquatic world (though most spaceships that crashed on earth would think the same thing, statistically).

The world in the game is conveniently earth-like enough that you can breathe its air and consume its food and water with reasonable filtration and processing, but early on in the game, before you gather enough resources to use magical technology to construct a habitat, your home is a tiny emergency escape pod bobbing in the shallows. It’s big enough for two people, but simultaneously claustrophobic and clangingly empty with just one.

This poem started with the idea of a scenario like Subnautica’s, but tweaked. What if the water was less shallow? What if the world outside was that much more dangerous, that much less compatible with terrestrial biology? What if the lifepod was not just your first home on the new world but the whole of your world? What if you weren’t alone?

That’s what I started with. Where it grew from there is complicated, and far deeper than I initially planned or intended. Essentially, it’s a creation myth shown from the other side.

The poem consists of fourteen named and numbered segments. The first one is like this:

---

I – Stranded

*

Our world is a lifeboat.

*

This was once metaphor

for all humanity,

back on ancient Earth,

back before the push,

back before the spread

of all humanity

to every corner of the cosmos,

to every habitable world

beneath every sky.

*

Our world is a lifeboat.

*

Outside is a world,

not habitable,

not safe, not ours.

*

So close, on the other side

of our pod’s glasteel ports,

so close and yet so far,

too close for comfort sometimes

when the tempest rages

and the hull shakes

and we toss and twist

upon the surface

of the sea.

*

The autoevac

did its job

as best it could

with the materials

available.

*

No plotted worlds within range,

nor any habitable ones,

it put the survivors down

in a planet-sized puddle

we could almost survive.

*

The exosurveyors speak of

the Goldilocks zone;

just the right distance

from just the right star,

everything just right,

just like the old story

that only survived

because exosurveyors

still tell it to explain

about the zone.

*

The only tell half the story, though.

*

Sometimes, Goldilocks

shows up and the porridge

is thin and runny, or already gone.

*

Sometimes the bears are home when she gets there.

*

Sometimes there is no home.

*

The world outside is in the zone,

but it feeds us watery gruel indeed.

*

Warm but not the right warm.

Wet but not the right pH.

Life, but not the right life.

It can’t grow inside our bubble.

We can’t live in its world.

It can’t live in ours.

We cannot cultivate it.

It cannot sustain us.

*

The replicycle

does its job

as best it can

with the materials

available.

*

It filters the water.

It filters the plants.

It filters the wriggling

fish-like organisms

that have never encountered

a single artificial object

in their brief lives

and have no reason to fear it.

*

The water tastes like ionized nothing.

The food tastes like stale nothing.

The nutritional supplements taste,

but like nothing good.

*

Our world is a lifeboat,

bobbing on the surface

of a world we can see

but not touch,

a world that

will never

be ours.

---

Again, the full poem contains thirteen more segments: Fruitless, Fruitful, Benediction, Malediction, Posterity, Titanomachy, Flowering, Awakening, Foreboding, Temptation, Apotheosis, Exegesis, and Coda.

At around 5,000 words depending on who is counting, it’s long for most short stories, though not unduly so for one of mine. I have posted the whole of it to Patreon, but as part of my new approach to Patreon, I am keeping the whole of it under patron-locked wraps for now.

You can read it immediately by pledging any amount. Because we’re trying to rebuild our financial cushion, I will also unlock it for everyone to read if I receive one hundred dollars in PayPal or Square Cash tips today.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.