Lately I've been reading Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, which is a bit of an outlier read for me. I don't often read historical fiction (though there are exceptions), and usually I like a bit more action in my plots—and I'll admit, there have been parts reading this book that I've itched for something to, you know, happen. But I find the content and context fascinating enough that it's kept me reading, albeit a bit slowly.
One of the reasons I picked up The Tale of Murasaki was to get some context for The Tale of Genji, which I made an aborted attempt to read a few months back. A bit of a mental shift is always necessary when reading something from so long ago, but I found Genji particularly opaque because much of the plot hinges on the rhythms and expectations of Japanese imperial court, a world foreign to me in just about every respect.
And I'm happy to report that The Tale of Murasaki makes an excellent bridge in that regard, bringing just enough of a western, modern sensibility to ground me in this world. In many respects, this kind of far-in-the-past setting requires the same attention to worldbuilding as a secondary world. Honestly, it's easier for me to picture how the world works in a future Earth setting like Star Trek than in 11th-century Japan, probably because a speculative future world is inevitably laced with the perspectives of the time it's written in. It can't fully spring from the substrate of the future because that culture doesn't yet exist, and we don't really know what will happen between now and the 24th century that will shape how people then think. With things that happened in the distant past, there is an established cultural context separate from our own, even if we no longer know or understand the full details of it.
I’m mostly a pantser when it comes to the writing process. Now and then I’ll know where a story’s going ahead of time, and may even do a bit of outlining for longer works, but my preferred approach is just to start writing and let the story tell me where it wants to go.
Because of this, my rough drafts don’t tend to be what I would call “finished stories.” They have a beginning, middle, and end (usually) but they still don’t have an effective arc, are riddled with inconsistencies, and have the kind of rambling pacing that feels like the author’s just making shit up as they go instead of intentionally moving from one scene to the next. Which makes sense, because that’s exactly what happened.
The editing process is when I wrangle these messy rough drafts into something other people can actually read and make sense of (and hopefully enjoy). I do have some help in this process because I have an incredible writing group. But even with a workshop group or beta reader, you can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for you. Most stories need to go through multiple editing rounds before they’re fully finished—more versions than you can realistically expect anyone else to read.
I’ve had some somewhat contradictory reading experiences of late. On the one hand, I’ve read several wonderful short stories in a fairy tale or folklore tone that inhabit a vague and floaty world in a beautiful way. On the other, I’ve written a few different feedbacks for After Happy Hour submissions where one of my major issues was a lack of grounding—that the world felt too floaty, to the point I couldn’t picture the world the characters were inhabiting.
The right level of worldbuilding and description is a tricky balance to strike for writers in any genre, and I think particularly so for those in speculative worlds. Not every type of story lends itself to lush, lengthy descriptions, either. In some modes, sparse details are a defining characteristic of the genre. Stories that stem from an oral storytelling tradition tend to fall into this category, which includes genres like folklore and fairy tales. Mythic voices give more flexibility for detailed descriptions, but even so it can break the effect to spend too many words grounding the reader. There are other genres that need this kind of deft hand, as well. Magical realism is one example—the rules of the world need to be established enough that the reader isn’t confused, but if you explain too much then it can lose the “magic” part of the name, or start to read like a different type of fantasy.
What's especially challenging about fairy tale writing is that a vaguely defined setting is a common genre trope. Fairy tales often take place somewhere “far away” and “once upon a time”, intentionally placed outside of a historical context. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but the more solidly a story is tethered to reality, the less like a fairy tale it seems.
I took last week off from writing a blog because I was busy with stuff for both After Happy Hour and Scribble House—things like getting ready for the return of the Send It! group next week and wrapping up the Issue 27 reading period, but mostly finishing up a workshop I did yesterday through Chill Subs about common mistakes made by submitters. Doing that has made me think a bit more deeply than I usually do about why we reject work for After Happy Hour.
People have asked me this question before, of course, mostly during events like AWP or other conferences when I'm at the AHH table wearing my Managing Editor hat. I feel like they're usually a bit annoyed by my answer, because the truth is, the best way to get an acceptance from us is the same generic advice you get from every journal: Send us your best, read what we publish, follow our guidelines. And, yes, this is stuff every writer has heard before. But there's also a reason editors keep saying it over and over again: Almost everything that we reject at After Happy Hour, it's because the writer didn’t do one (or more) of those things.
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, quirky short fiction
tl;dr summary: Collection of (mostly) literary stories in which characters hope, for better or worse (mostly worse).
I usually mostly enjoy being a freelancer—more than I've enjoyed any past jobs, if nothing else. Even so, there are those days that it just feels like a personal affront that it's 2025 and we still have to work for a living. No matter what you do for money, there are times that it's just a grind.
And I get why a lot of writers neglect work in their stories. If you're the kind of person who writes (or reads) as an escape, then your job is probably one of the primary things you want to escape from. It already sucks up 40+ of your hours every week. Does it really need to take up real estate in your creative writing, too?
Literary genres in general can be confusing to navigate, especially once you get into the convoluted quagmire of speculative subgenres or the oddly specific categories for romance. The “punk” subset of genres is one that I find particularly head-scratch inducing. I often think I understand a term only to see someone use it in a way that makes me question whether they (or I) actually know what it means. It doesn't help that “punk” takes on a different meaning when it's being used in a cultural, stylistic, or musical context.
I have to give the usual caveat for a post like this, which is that genre definitions aren't set in stone. That's even more true with genres that were recently invented, like a lot of the punk subgenres. That being said, here's a run-down on the various literary flavors of punk, and how they relate to the term in a broader sense. So, to kick things off...
Read this if you like: unique alien ecosystems, Rick Claypool, Vernor Vinge
tl;dr summary: Political prisoners in an Orwellian dystopia are sent to a labor camp on Kiln, a planet where the life is aggressively symbiotic and potentially sentient.
When I was first preparing my short story collection to send to publishers, I was self-conscious that I’d broken a writerly rule: 3 of the 12 stories start with the viewpoint character waking up. And even worse, some would say: two of those include the dream the character was having right before they did. I wasted a good amount of time trying to “fix” those stories to avoid this, but quickly realized those adjustments hurt the stories rather than helping them. That rule is still a decent one to follow, but in these stories, the moment of waking really was the right place to jump in.
Granted, that collection still hasn't been picked up by a publisher, so maybe that is a bigger problem than I want to think. But all 3 stories that start with wake-ups have been published, so some editor at least thinks they passed muster. And I'm far from the only writer who includes dreams and sleeping in my work. The collection I'm currently reading has dream right on the tin (Adam Dove's Everyone! In the Dream! is You!) and makes use of dreams at multiple points. You can even find examples in the canon—maybe most famously Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, which opens on Gregor Samsa waking as a beetle.
