• Farewell, Velvet Mafia

    Posted on April 18th, 2011, 8:53 pm by Kal Cobalt

    It was with bittersweet memories that I heard the news of Velvet Mafia’s upcoming closure. Waxing nostalgic and links to my free Mafia fic (up until the end of May) below. Read the rest of this entry »

    2 comments blogging

  • Goodreads

    Posted on April 11th, 2011, 8:40 pm by Kal Cobalt

    My author page is now up at Goodreads. Friend me, become a fan, review stuff, or take a peek at the eclectic works on my currently-reading and to-read shelves.

    I’ve also set up a blog post there specifically requesting book recommendations, so please share!

    No comments site announcements

  • It’s here! …sort of.

    Posted on April 3rd, 2011, 12:49 pm by Kal Cobalt

    This is the new and improved version of my website, which has been many years coming. I now have a forehead-shaped divot in my desk from banging my head against it, and there’s still a lot of work to be done here, but what you see now is at least sort of what I meant for you to get. (Of note: writing cyberpunk does not, in any way, mitigate the frustrations of creating websites or installing WordPress. Who knew?)

    Here are a few of the things you can find around here:

    –A complete list of my works which have appeared in anthologies and collections. (I’ll be making the list more complete soon.)

    –A new blog post (one of many to come).

    –Broken tags, slightly wonky CSS, and other bits of tattered code lovingly handcrafted by someone who knows more about writing fictional robots than understanding chmod, FTP permissions, and config files. Hopefully, my doddering will be entertaining at best and only mildly annoying at worst.

    Until I get some more content up (which will be starting soon and recurring frequently), you might want to check out an unconventional essay on gender, a tongue-in-cheek essay about robot sex, or some free erotic cyberpunk/biopunk fiction set in Las Vegas.

    Comments about the new site are welcome (please be gentle). Heck, comments about anything at all are welcome, as long as you aren’t a Nigerian prince seeking assistance to access your funds or passing along a great deal on male enhancement medications.

    Thanks for stopping by, have a look around, and come back soon!

    No comments site announcements

  • On blogging

    Posted on April 3rd, 2011, 12:24 pm by Kal Cobalt

    As I formulated the launch of my blog, a funny thing happened — something that helped me understand what’s kept me from blogging before, reminded me of the importance of honesty, and strengthened my resolve to offer myself up to the wolves of cyberspace. Keith Olbermann, Twitter, and your host the “unamerican ignoramus,” all under the cut.
    Read the rest of this entry »

    No comments blogging

  • No, really…

    Posted on March 21st, 2011, 12:39 pm by Kal Cobalt

    Okay, the gig is up: I suck at site maintenance. It’s hard to sit down and sling code in one window when characters are tugging at my shirttail and begging for their lives to continue in another. However, I can no longer pretend that having a stale little website is the least bit acceptable. All of you who do me the honor of typing this URL into your browser or clicking on the link deserve better!

    Therefore: Here we go! A full retooling of this blog/website is underway. April will bring complete information about all my publications, a regular blogging schedule, and story prizes for two very patient contest winners. This blog will be swapped over to kalcobalt.com proper, replacing the old website infrastructure completely. Then, over the summer, I’ll be adding multimedia content, more contests (with faster prize fulfillment…), lots of freebies, and general mayhem.

    The subheading of this blog still remains true — I’m just a geeky author sorting through the intricacies of WordPress, armed with nothing but the codex, an O’Reilly guide, some very helpful friends, and a few minutes here and there. I promise that there will be some bumps along the way, but I also promise to make it worth your while to see what I can manage around here from time to time. Your interest and your patience will be, I hope, amply rewarded!

    No comments site announcements

  • Long time, no post

    Posted on October 26th, 2010, 7:30 pm by Kal Cobalt

    It’s been a ridiculously long time since I posted. I got a little obsessed with fixing a certain WordPress problem before I made any more progress on the website, and when I emerged triumphant from my programming cave, it was autumn…

    .

    Site updates:

    • “Pretty permalinks” now work! Check it out as you navigate the site: the links look kind of like you’d expect. I grew grey hair making this happen (see the subtitle of this blog for details about that).
    • On the downside, this has somehow broken my tag clouds in weird and inconsistent ways. I’ll get right on it during my next down-the-rabbit-hole programming excursion. Send beer.

    New stuff to read:

    • Another tale of robot love from yours truly, “The Digital O,” is now out in Circlet Press’s Best Erotic Fantasy in digital and physical formats.
    • There’s new nonfiction from me fortnightly at Sexis Magazine for your free and instant reading pleasure. If you fancy sex-related tech and/or the intersection between the sexual and gastronomic appetites, check it out!

    Coming soon:

    • Contest stories! Two winners of customized ficlets will see their tales in this space soon.
    • Whatever you want. Comment on what you’d like to see here and I’ll see what I can do!
    1 comment site announcements

  • Coyotecon guest blog: Anger As Fuel

    Posted on May 21st, 2010, 3:10 pm by Kal Cobalt

    A year ago, I followed Nine Inch Nails around for a week. It was the whole Deadhead experience: endless hours logged on the road with near-strangers, midday naps while lined up on the concrete in front of arenas, midnight runs to In-N-Out. The concerts were beautiful, and the close-knit family of fans traveling from gig to gig repeatedly affirmed my faith in humanity as they helped each other out time and again.
    They also really pissed me off sometimes.
    No one knows drama like hundreds of sleep-deprived sun-addled Nine Inch Nails fans. People cut in line, tweeted lies to further personal interests, read offensive jokes aloud off their iPhones to pass the time, and engaged in the baffling practice of ruthlessly bashing the very musicians we had spent so much money and time and energy to see. Throw in plenty of travel with a carful of relative strangers, all with their own particular quirks, and interpersonal stressors skyrocketed.
    My coping skills for maddening situations are to unload with a friend or write about it. I was stuck in the equivalent of a traveling sardine can with other fans, so calling up my partner to vent was completely out of the question. Even writing was impossible since most of my time was spent shoulder-to-shoulder. (I knew I should have bought that $30 iPhone privacy screen before I went.) Unable to cope but desperate to make it through, I spent a lot of time Thinking Hard, trying to sort out a better way to handle anger than squelching it for the most part and getting passive-aggressive when it all became too much to bear.
    I eventually realized that I had an object lesson right in front of me. Anyone who’s heard a couple of Nine Inch Nails songs knows that the guy behind the band name, Trent Reznor, is an angry, angry guy. His lyrics are fabulously cutting, sarcastic, and even cruel at turns. His stage presence follows suit, with the throwing of instruments just part of the status quo. And yet, to hear him speak in interviews or to read his lengthy online posts is to reveal a well-spoken, reasonably-tempered, even calm personality. It was just the balance I sought to strike, but how?
    Finally, as I watched him scream and throw things on stage the way I wished I could after one of the more frustrating days of my trip, it dawned on me: channeling anger into one’s creative output could potentially free up the rest of the artist from all that vitriol. While one’s point of view can and probably should be consistent between one’s personal and creative life, the amount of emotion sunk into it can be wildly different. It made sense, I realized, to be as emotional and impassioned within the art as I felt like, while still maintaining my core values of openmindedness and radical acceptance in my actual person-to-person interactions.
    Obviously, some anger needs to be acted upon. Sometimes anger is a symptom of a situation so broken that steps of some sort must be taken. But if you’re anything like me, you can take the steps that need to be taken, resolve the issues, and still have some grudging, grouchy anger about the whole situation. I handled myself as honorably as I could during the trip, but what to do with all of these lingering feelings weeks after I got home?
    I wrote.
    I realized that I didn’t even have to be realistic in my writing. It was unlikely that I was 100% correct in my assumptions about the reasons behind anyone’s actions, and since I write fiction, all I needed were story components that were realistic in the general sense — not necessarily realistic about the particular situation I encountered. (In the same vein, my theory about Reznor’s angry art/balanced self is just something I overlay upon what little a fan like me sees of the whole picture; it’s unlikely to be entirely correct, but it doesn’t need to be in order to give me ideas about what I want for my own reality.)
    I thought about some of the fans I’d seen who seemed desperate to get as close to the band as possible while also badmouthing them at every opportunity, and where that dichotomy might originate. From there, I thought about the clash between a musician’s public persona and real life, and the problems that might occur if a rabid fan of the persona met the real person and found that the things they thought they loved were nonexistent. It was a short leap from that to playing with my familiar genre of mixing humans and robots, both of which have some interesting perceptual problems about the other. Out came “Star Fucker,” about an obsessed fan who gets a little too close to her idol for comfort. It wound up one of my favorite stories in ROBOTICA, and to my surprise, a lot of my lingering anger about the weirdnesses of that trip’s fan wankery truly was exorcised from my psyche by writing it.
    Now I don’t just stop at anger. Lust, exhaustion, grief, euphoria, longing, fear, boredom — any situation evoking emotion can be worked through in fiction. The stronger I feel about a situation, the better it seems to work, especially because I’m motivated to focus on the little details that drive me nuts and weave them into the story. The reality of the emotions I work with then shine through on the page, and that’s what it’s all about: a story world realistic enough that readers can get lost in it.
    Plus, it’s cheaper than therapy. When’s the last time a counseling session paid royalties?
    2 comments conferences, guest blog

  • Coyotecon guest blog: What Writers Can Learn From Cats

    Posted on May 14th, 2010, 4:27 pm by Kal Cobalt

    To Coyotecon attendees: Welcome! I hope you’re finding your conference time rewarding. If you like the blog, please feel free to check out the previous post for my schedule of other Coyotecon events, including another guest blog coming up.

    To non-Coyotecon attendees: Welcome! I’m glad to have you here. If you’re curious what this Coyotecon thing is all about, feel free to head on over and take a look. It’s all online, it’s all free, and registration continues throughout the month-long conference.

    To everybody: Sorry about the dots in the blank lines. I’m still learning WordPress… Fixed!

    It seems like almost every writer I run into is a cat person, and why not? Well, there are problems in this relationship, to be sure: stinky litter boxes throw us out of our reveries, “play with me NOW” moments happen just as we’re resolving that troublesome plotline, and…ahem…”digestive problems” threaten the technological tools of our trade daily. With all that interference, what’s the use of having feline companions? Here are five invaluable lessons my furballs have taught me over the years.

    When you feel it, do it! When my cats ran like crazy all over the house at top speed, my parents called it “thunder and lightning,” thanks to the sound and the occasional destructive nature. Now my household calls it “the rips” – look out carpet, clothing, or anything that might get shredded. We writers call this behavior “in the zone,” and cats are masters at it. We should all be so lucky to find our writing sessions as engaging and exciting.

    If you’re too tired to go on, sleep. I’m a night owl by nature and a morning person out of necessity, so the urge to stay up until two even if I’ve been up since six is often a strong one, especially when I’m placating the muse. Every so often, when it’s real inspiration striking hard, it’s worth stumbling into walls the next morning – but more often than not, it’s guilt and responsibility keeping me awake, and you know that’s never given a cat insomnia. Ever.

    Ask for – no, demand – what you need. I’m not sure “wants” exist for cats. Whether it’s the need for water or the need for water out of the kitchen faucet at a slow drip, you and I both know a cat pursues it with a singleminded zest most authors could only wish to train upon their career. This goes for relationships, too: if a cat isn’t given what it needs, it walks away, even if that means being a much more solitary animal. I’ve been guilty of trying to make relationships work that didn’t support my writing because writing is so solitary, but taking the cat approach and only engaging the people who give you what you need is much more rewarding in the long run.

    Exploring rules! Sure, it enrages me when one of my cats plays “the floor is lava” and proceeds to walk all over the top shelf of my bookcase where my contributor’s copies are kept – you know, the shelf I didn’t think any feline could possibly reach no matter what the gymnastics. But in the end I have to admire the intensity of the desire to check out everything, everywhere, sometimes at great risk to dignity and household peacefulness. A cat curious about how something smells will not be easily deterred, like a good writer with a niggling idea.

    Imagination is way more important than reality. When a cat decides that not only does the sparkleball need to die, it is actively getting away and must be caught again and again and rabbit-kicked for good measure and rolled upon and thrown into the air and batted into submission, that cat is being the best kind of Method actor. I’m a Method writer, and you can be, too – putting your whole self into what’s on the page can result in a much higher-quality page (and sometimes a higher-qualty self).

    Oh, and one last bonus tip: Snuggling cures all.

    2 comments guest blog

  • Coyotecon

    Posted on May 12th, 2010, 9:18 pm by Kal Cobalt

    Coyotecon is an innovative online month-long writer’s conference. I’m really enjoying my involvement, and you can check out the transcripts of past events and/or drop by the live events yet to come. Registration is free!

    Writing and Selling Short Works: May 2, 1PM Pacific – transcript
    Artificial Intelligence and Sexuality: May 9, 1PM Pacific — transcript pending
    Gust Blog — What Writers Can Learn From Cats: May 15, right here
    Method Writing: May 21, 4PM Pacific in Anasazi — register here
    Gust Blog — Anger As Fuel: May 22, right here
    Writing GLBTQ Fiction: May 22, 4PM Pacific in Loki — register here

    No comments conferences, online events

  • dead television skies: or, beginnings

    Posted on May 9th, 2010, 6:26 pm by Kal Cobalt

    At long last, my blog lives! Here’s what you need to know:

    1. I will be updating around once a week. More, and I’ll blow up your RSS feed; less, and it won’t be worth the blood, sweat, and tears this wanna-be programmer put into installing WordPress while learning about FTP on the fly.
    2. There will be lots of free stuff. Fiction! Nonfiction! Contests! I’m happy you’re here, and even happier to bribe you to come back. It won’t just be text, either; video, photos (both documentary-style and artsy), and whatever other shiny things I can think of will all show up here.
    3. There will also be lots of up-to-date info. Eventually, the website will stay nice and current too, but for now, this is where it’s at. Stalkers, take note!
    4. Plenty of discussion and interaction. I hate just posting information into a void. (That would be why the website itself is so slow to get updated…) I’m not a delicate flower, either: disagree with me. I like it! I live by a little creed King Whedon once wrote: “Viewpoints other than yours may also be valid.”
    5. Eventually…the unexpected. Once I get this thing up and running smoothly, there will be hidden stuff all over. Don’t knock yourself out yet — just getting the blog going has taken all my geek power for the foreseeable future. I’ll post a little warning once I have a few things tucked away for the curious.
    6. Finally: suggestions are welcome. Wanna see something here? Let me know! I’ll take it under advisement. Just as soon as I figure out these comment thingies…
    2 comments site announcements