We’ve been keeping very busy, so here are some quick highlights:

We ate at a restaurant themed around Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. We visited an innovation center housed on a college campus.  We toured a winery in the Casablanca Valley and walked through the amazing, hilly port city of Valparaíso, often compared to San Francisco.  Having spent lots of time in San Francisco visiting my maternal grandparents in my youth, I could definitely see the similarities.

Later this morning we fly to Buenos Aires, Argentina! I have really enjoyed my time in Chile.

Things of note since my previous update:  This morning we were in our first class when the floor started shaking.  We experienced a 4.9 earthquake.

Also, yesterday as we were on our bus heading back from the stunning Maipo Canyon, we were passing through the town of San José de Maipo when our bus encountered a festival.  The street we had planned to take was closed, and it was very tight quarters turning, going in reverse, and getting to another road.  I would like to apologize to the people of San José de Maipo for the resulting traffic backup!  The town was lovely, by the way.

I enjoyed taking in some sights around the city yesterday.  It’s awe-inspiring to see a building towering above the others around it, then to look up and see an Andean peak twice that building’s height looming behind it!  This is the view from my hotel room:

For me, the highlight while exploring Santiago yesterday was climbing Cerro Santa Lucia.  Castillo Hidalgo sits atop it, a fortress with rewards hidden all around for the observant visitor—statues, walkways, fountains.

This morning I got to go horseback riding in the Andes.  The peaks were stunning.  My horse, Pluto, enjoyed munching on grass every chance he got.

For my birthday I got a membership to WorldCon 76 in San Jose, CA, my old stomping grounds from my undergrad days at Santa Clara University!  I’m already excited, even though it’s a year away.  In the meantime, I’m gearing up for two other trips in the next couple of months, one for grad school and one for work.

First up is a two-week study abroad trip next month that will take me back to South America, but this time I won’t be visiting Ecuador or staying with relatives.  Instead I’ll be studying in Chile and Argentina for a week each.  I’m packing a journal featuring a quotation by Chilean author Isabel Allende on the cover.  I lucked into an opportunity to interview her while I was a student at SCU.  She was kind but intimidating, a fascinating person to spend an hour with.

In preparation for my trip, I also read some short fiction by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.  I was so blown away by the richness of his speculative fiction, I couldn’t possibly do it justice in this blog post.  For now suffice it to say my favorite of his is “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Nowadays I focus so much on reading my contemporaries, I find it fascinating to occasionally read classics and see what authors used to be able to get away with.  In this day and age, everything is expected to be tight, trimmed of adverbs and launching the reader right into the action, but Borges and so many others were free to explore a slow boil, slathering on the details and sometimes meandering toward an anticlimax.  (Wow, sorry for those mixed metaphors.)  What can one say?  Expectations of editors and readers evolve.

As my trip draws near, I’m very grateful for this opportunity to travel and learn.  (I will admit, though, the timing is unfortunate because I’ll be missing the total solar eclipse visible from Oregon.)

I’m so excited to share that Triangulation: Appetites is out!  This new anthology includes my science fiction flash story “Little Seed,” along with a whole assortment of speculative fiction delicacies for your enjoyment.

This was some very welcome good news for me during a month when I’ve been in dire need of good news.  I’ve recently taken on some extra responsibilities at work (currently with no backfill), I’m in the thick of summer term for grad school, and a very, very dear family member was just diagnosed with a major medical issue.

Yet somehow ideas for writing keep bubbling up.  I didn’t used to think I wrote to escape, but now I’m less certain.

Earlier this past week I woke up an hour before the alarm, and a kooky idea popped into my head that would invigorate an otherwise stalled story.  Seems favorable enough, a worthy outcome of interrupted sleep—except for the fact that it came during a week when I had three (!) papers due for school, a deadline for editing a colleague’s capstone for a different graduate program, and various other commitments (work, family).

Writers often lament the frequency with which inspiration arrives while they’re ill-equipped to capture it on the page—such as when they’re in the shower, driving, etc.  Inspiration knows nothing of convenience.  Or more like, the two seem to enjoy a largely inverse relationship.  (I firmly believe that when perceived convenience falls to 0, such as while deep in the throes of morning sickness, inspiration drops off as well.  Similarly, when convenience ramps up to its highest levels, inspiration creeps back in—I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but that’s what I tell myself for my eventual retirement…)

For the record, I completed all my writing (and editing) assignments, penned this blog post, and put my early morning inspiration into practice within the week.  In fact, I churned out a complete rough draft of that story.  It still needs work, of course, but I suspect the pressure of constant deadlines unlocked something in my subconscious and silenced my inner critic just long enough to commit the idea to paper at a faster clip than usual for me.  Maybe I should be oddly grateful for the inconvenience.  Maybe.

I attended TEDxPortland this past weekend, and in addition to being blown away by Emma Mcilroy’s TED Talk (seriously, we gave not one but two standing ovations during it), I got to try out a virtual reality rendering of what it feels like to be on the TEDx stage.  Earlier they had brought out a special camera to the actual stage, and on cue we started clapping and cheering.  Then during one of the breaks I was able to put on the VR goggles, look around, and see the speaker’s perspective.  If the visuals had been a bit sharper (or if my eyesight were a bit better), I might have picked out myself to the left in row G, applauding for myself.

Being both an audience member and a “speaker” in that shared moment is analogous to a writer’s responsibility to embody multiple points of view.  And not just of different characters but of both author and reader.  Yes, we must pace that stage, populate those seats, aim the spotlight.  Then ultimately we should consider the effectiveness of our moment frozen in time, preserved for consumption by readers in times, places, and situations beyond our control.  In that sense, the reader is not the audience member but the user donning the VR goggles, deciding where to focus their attention.  Scanning the crowd for a fuzzy yet faintly recognizable rendering of themselves.

Also, the experience reminded me of a story draft that’s been waiting patiently for me to revise, plus an unfinished draft of another story that’s entreating me for completion…

My science fiction story “Little Seed” will be appearing in the upcoming anthology Triangulation: Appetites.  The title of my story got me thinking about the chance experiences, random concepts, and subtle memories that can act as the seeds of a story.  With the right mix of attention and happenstance, ideas can sprout into something wholly unexpected, fraught with meaning.  No wonder one of the most common questions asked of writers is “Where do you get your story ideas?”  (Once I had a story spring from a piece of trivia I read on the wrapper of a snack!)

I can trace the origins of “Venom in the Cloud Forest,” my fantasy story in Myriad Lands: Vol. 2: Beyond the Edge, back to a day when I went over to my parents’ house and they showed me an episode of a travel program that my mom had recorded to show my dad.  She’d saved it because the host was visiting a cloud forest in Ecuador.

Now, being half-Ecuadorian, I’m ashamed to admit that I had never heard of a cloud forest until then.  But what a revelation!  The very name made it a worthy setting for a fantasy story, and by the time they featured a dragon’s blood tree, I was salivating to bring a magical version of this ecosystem to life on the page.  The concept of fever-dreams has fascinated me for some time, and the vulnerability that a fever would create in my main character appealed to me.  And his perspiration would mirror the wet, misty surroundings.

To name my characters, I drew on locations that I had visited or heard of in the Andean region and borrowed some common sounds from their names.  I then researched the flora and fauna of the area, wishing that I could have known about cloud forests sooner so I could have visited one the last time I was down there.  But thank goodness for the wealth of information available these days.

A TV program viewed by chance.  Additional research uncovered and ideas mashed together.  These were my little seedlings of a magical cloud forest.  By the way, after one of my relatives in Ecuador read my story, she told me:  “Once I bought a little bottle of sangre de drago [dragon’s blood], but when I read your story I found out it came from a tree. That I did not know.”  Neither did I, until a fortuitous visit to my parents’ house.

My family and I just got back from visiting my eldest sister’s family in San Diego.  We had a blast taking my kids to LEGOLAND for the first time with their California cousins.  I even worked in some writing time on the beach while my family splashed in the waves.

Then I found out that I’ve sold another story!  Keep an eye out for more details in the near future.

There is a glut of writers of all kinds.  Of all genres, lengths, and abilities.  It’s hard to say whether this is a cause or a result of the proliferation of writing advice out there on the internet, but the fact is that anyone who has ever dreamt of being a writer has a greater amount of wisdom at their fingertips than ever before.  We have submission guidelines, editor interviews, and whole archives of publications ready for our immediate perusal.  Manuscripts can be edited, submitted, and published without once being printed out.  Traditional paths to getting published can be circumvented.  Professional writers as a matter of course share a wealth of tips on everything from inspiration to marketing, easily accessible to any interested party.

And as the barriers to entry shrink and more and more aspiring writers enter the fray, it seems that new, ever more specific barriers get constructed in an ongoing effort to sort the best from the rest.  Today’s editors, workshop leaders, and even casual, anonymous reviewers seem to have internalized all sorts of rules that color their impressions of a story—rules that some older works would never hold up to if they were first being released in today’s market.  I can hardly blame them.  I would imagine that a mental checklist can be very handy in sorting through the growing slush pile.  Of course, whether following all these rules equates to improved writing will vary from case to case.

What sorts of “rules” get bandied about, you ask?  I can only speak to the ones I’ve heard about in discussions of speculative fiction in particular:  Hard science fiction must be sound not only in its extrapolations of science but also in its character development.  Fantasy worlds must be founded upon logical underlying systems of economics and politics, whether those are integral to the plot or not.  Protagonists must be plagued with obstacles, preferably internal as well as external, but must never whine.  Villains must be sympathetic, at least to some degree.  And so forth.

Generally I agree with these types of advice, although I’m still figuring out how much I agree with the grayer areas, the rules of thumb that, yes, probably will elevate a story in most cases but that get preached as though they were infallible scripture.  As if the most creative magic system isn’t enough if, although internally consistent within the story, it doesn’t also have a whole backstory of how it came to exist in that world.  Or your alien protagonist, who has to be human enough for us to connect with, had better not slip into an oh-so-human moment of woe-is-me while facing great odds.

I suppose these rules help us refute the criticisms of those who turn their noses up at genre fiction.  I understand the desire to reward those writers who show their research, and I see the value in holding speculative fiction up to ever higher standards, but isn’t there still room as well for the mysterious, the nonsensical, and the unapologetically archetypal in the ever-swelling sea of writing?  Perhaps the question should be, is there readership for it, and if so, the implied response in this day and age is that it will make its own room.