David Barr Kirtley

Science fiction author and podcaster

“Cats in Victory” Review at ActuSF.com Forum

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Here’s a review of “Cats in Victory” from the ActuSF forum. It’s in French, so I’ve taken the liberty of running it through Babel Fish:

Cats in Victory de David Barr Kirtley really did me hot in the middle. A ground populated by men cats created millenia ago by men who started from then a long time. But there are also men dogs whom one believes disappeared. And when men cats and men dogs meet again it can be only one disaster. Unless a badly liked feeling do not come to change the things: curiosity. In short one spoke about positive SF it does not have there so a long time. This text is a splendid example in spite of its wrongfully naive tone. And it is a nice homage in Cordwainer Smith some share.

Of course, doing you hot in the middle is definitely one of my goals, so I’m glad to hear that I’m succeeding.

Loose Leaf Stories Reviews My Short Story “Cats in Victory”

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Here’s a review of “Cats in Victory” from Loose Leaf Stories:

Another short story from Lightspeed Magazine, “Cats in Victory”! Don’t let the first sections mislead you, “Cats in Victory” is science fiction, not fantasy. I loved Tailchaser’s Song, so I’m naturally fine with cats – or catmen – as characters. “Cats in Victory” is written by David Barr Kirtley, a chronic and incorrigible contributor to sci-fi publications. It’s a pretty good story, very much in the spirit of Planet of the Apes. I won’t be saving it off to my hard drive or anything, but it was a fun read and I’d certainly give anything else by Kirtley a shot! Lightspeed offers “Cats in Victory” both in print and podcast. Happy reading!

One thing I’m wondering is what exactly qualifies an author as “chronic”? Is that sort of like “prolific”? Jeff Carlson just referred to me as “prolific” too, which sort of surprised me, since I’ve been managing about two short stories a year lately, which doesn’t seem like that much to me. Or is it “chronic” meaning like “badass?” — like “You are totally chronic, man, totally.” Is that something the kids are saying these days? In any event, I’m happy to be referred to as chronic, since I confess I’ve always sort of liked to think of myself as like the gout of science fiction.

More Comments on My Short Story “Cats in Victory”

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A few more comments on “Cats in Victory.”

On the StarShipSofa forum, subgenre says, “I liked the idea of taking a childhood fantasy with moral simplicity and racist undertones and re-envisioning it as a morally complex post-apocalyptic tale.” Dinsdale says, “I liked both stories this week, especially ‘Cats in Victory.’ Great stuff, kind of reminded me of Planet of the Apes. I like that type of story. I wish the monkeyman would’ve protected his amulet better. I wonder if the author has considered a sequel?” And Talia says, “‘Cats in Victory’ was just great. Made me think of Thundercats, which made me wonder if that was one of the cartoons that inspired the author.”

Over at Lightspeed, Non Believer writes, “I think the ‘Cats in Victory’ story is a likely outcome of genetically enhanced intelligence in animals. Not the apocalyptic background, but the creation of those animals to be used as soldiers, slaves, servants. Our pets are our slaves, despite how awful it sounds. They are pampered, loved, and well cared for, but they are not free to leave. Even when they are free to leave, we have created a learned captivity behavior in them, so they don’t leave. I don’t say it’s bad. I am not one of those over-the-top PETA folks. I am saying that if we converted them into a more intelligent and interactive being, they would likely still be in the position of pet/food/slave. I hope we never go down that road.”

My Short Story “Cats in Victory” on the StarShipSofa Podcast

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I should mention that the podcast for my short story “Cats in Victory” was co-produced by StarShipSofa, and also appears in their Episode 141 alongside “Pressure” by thriller writer Jeff Carlson. I’ve been listening to StarShipSofa since the beginning, so it’s fun to have something appear there.

If you’ve read “Cats in Victory” and want to comment on it, you can do so over at Lightspeed. There are a handful of comments so far. Brett writes, “I was a little turned off at first that it was going to be a fantasy story, but my curiosity got the better of me. I’m glad I kept reading.” Marianne writes, “Great story. I really enjoyed it.” And Chris writes, “Loved this. Loved it so much. Well done.”

Over on my Facebook page, Katie writes, “I think you read this at Alpha (’08). I loved this story!” To which I replied, “Yup, this is the same story I read at Confluence in ’08. I remember that some people didn’t get to hear the end of it because they were all like, ‘Oh, we have to go see the guest of honor speech blah blah blah.’ Some friends they are. I was tempted to never publish this story just so those people would never get to find out how it ends, but finally I decided to take mercy on them.” To which Katie replies, “Well, I’m glad it’s finally published! I’ve been telling friends about this story and now they can read it!” Rachel adds, “Oh, yeah, I remember this story! And you should consider the heretics who failed to listen to the whole story justly punished, since they had to wait until now for the final revelation of Cat’s will. Like Katie, I’m glad it’s now in a place where I can make people read it.”

Thanks everyone for your comments!

Rat’s Reading Reviews Lightspeed Magazine June 2010

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Rat’s Reading has reviewed the June issue of Lightspeed magazine. Here’s what he says about “Cats in Victory”:

This was an awesome post-apocalyptic story. On a future Earth, the catmen are pretty much the only people left. They haven’t retained any history of their origins as genetic experiments. Instead, they believe the great Cat created the world and designated catmen to purge it of dogmen, birdmen, and monkeymen. All sorts of cliches about cats twisted through centuries of decline. Clever and interesting.

When a Story Understands You

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Here’s a touching comment from zinnia_zeroth:

I really love www.davidbarrkirtley.com/virginstext.html. I’m in a weird mood that’s not as good as it should be, but rereading “Blood of Virgins” is turning out to be my best choice. It’s kind of a weird mood when you feel like a story understands you more than the rest of the world. No offense to those of you who understand me; it’s a mood.

Note from Jason Warden of the ShadowCast Podcast

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Nice note from Jason Warden of the ShadowCast podcast, who writes:

Just thought you’d like to know your story “The Skull-Faced Boy” got me hooked on podcast fiction. It was perhaps the first I’d ever listened to, although I have always been an avid audiophile. In 2009 I started my own short fiction podcast. I just ran across your story in iTunes again today and gave it another listen. It strikes me that you and your story are somewhat responsible for what I’m doing now. For that I thank you … and also for that my wife would like to kill you. Keep writing original ideas.

Temple Library Reviews reviews The Living Dead Anthology

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Temple Library Reviews is reviewing every story in the anthology The Living Dead, which contains my piece “The Skull-Faced Boy.” My story’s in the latter half of the book, and the reviews have been going up since December, so for a long time this review has been approaching … slowly … slowly but inexorably … like a hungry zombie. I was thinking what a drag it would be if after all that suspense they totally slagged the story, but fortunately the review is quite positive:

“The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley: Another interesting story, which is emotional as well as a pure joy to read due to the world-building decisions. According to Kirtley, those newly deceased of natural causes and incidents come back as zombies who are intelligent but also with no hunger. This however is not the case with those dead for a longer period of time or already munched on. The main protagonists are Jack and Dustin, who die in a car crash on the night zombies decide to rise, and while Jack has an intact humanity and moral compass, Dustin raises an army of the dead and decides to conquer the living in America. Fun, huh? But not for Jack, who has to be an outsider and treated with hate by the living and feel out of place with the other intelligent dead. I can really connect with this story since it is largely about those people, the minorities, the misfits, who are usually looked down on and mistreated for being different.

Letter from Maria, High School English Teacher

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Maria, a high school English teacher, writes:

Someone on the Reading For the Future listserv recommended your Teen Resources webpage. I’d like to make a link to it from my class website, if that’s okay. I read your bio and am intrigued, so I am promising myself a break to read one of your stories after I grade some tests!

Hi Maria. Yes, please feel free to link to my teen writers page. (And that goes for anyone who might be reading this.) I hope you enjoy the fiction.

A short time later I received:

AAAAAAAAHHHHHH I just finished “Save Me Plz”! loved it!!! Curses, now I must hit the bookstore and part with my hard-earned in order to keep you writing!

During the coming days, I’ll be eating my lunches one-handed while continuing to browse your website (that’s how I read today’s material, with microwavable chicken pot pie). I’m looking forward to the media versions as well as the other online stories. Daily treats.

Wow! Thanks! I’m glad you liked the story.

Man, what a cool English teacher. By the way, I just went and checked out the website for Reading for the Future. It’s “a grassroots volunteer organization whose aim is to help young people develop a love of reading and intellectual adventure through the vehicle of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction.” Sounds good to me.

Letter from Chris, High School Freshman and Aspiring Fantasy & Science Fiction Writer

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Chris writes:

Dear Mr. Kirtley, I am a high school freshman who is aspiring to be a writer of fantasy and science fiction. I discovered your website and read your stories “Save Me Plz” and “Pomegranate Heart.” I really enjoyed them, especially the one you published in Merlyn’s Pen. I saw from your website that you were extremely active writing as a high school student, and I was wondering how you started out writing in high school. What were your writing habits as a student? Did you strive to write a certain amount of words each day? What kind of publishers did you send to? I was also interested in your opinions on plotting. All of your plots and ideas seem to be very well developed. Are you a person who believes in plotting out an entire story extensively, or do you start with an ending in mind and develop the plot as you write? Also, do you have a way of knowing if an idea is good or what its chances are of being accepted by an editor as you first begin to write a story. I have trouble judging the originality, appeal, and creativity of my work as I first begin to write, and sometimes abandon works after a page or two to start something new. Thank you so much for reading my email! I really admire your work.

Hi Chris. Thanks for writing. I’m glad you enjoyed the stories.

I wasn’t a particularly disciplined writer in high school, so I don’t know if you’d necessarily want to emulate my habits from back then. In those days, writing was just something I did for fun, and I had a lot of other interests too, and often I only submitting things after being prodded by my parents and teachers. I mean, I liked writing a lot, and always had, so by the time I was in high school I’d produced dozens and dozens of stories, but I didn’t have a regimen or anything. If you want to hear about my current writing habits, which would probably be more helpful, I talk about that in this blog post over here, though keep in mind that every writer is different and you really just have to experiment and figure out what works for you.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any reliable way of gauging how good a story is or how likely it is to be published. I tend to bounce back and forth between thinking something I’m writing/have written is sheer brilliance and thinking it’s not worth showing to anyone, and this cycle of overweening confidence/crushing insecurity tends to never go away, even after the story is published, though at least if a story gets picked for a book or magazine, or prompts a lot of fan mail, that tends to blunt your doubts about it somewhat. I also write a lot of stories that I’m sure will never be published because they’re just too odd or uncommercial, and ironically I tend to have better luck getting these ones published than the ones that I’m sure everyone will love, so who knows? Also, I always finish every short story that I start. Often projects that seem like a disaster when you’re stuck in the middle end up looking a whole lot better once you’re done. And if not, well, you learn a lot more from writing a whole crappy story than from writing the first few pages of a crappy story.

As far as sending your work out, I’d be thinking about the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (which has a fantasy/science fiction category) and the Dell Magazines Award (though you have to be an undergrad for this one). You also might consider applying to Alpha, a weeklong summer workshop for aspiring sf writers ages 14-19. (I’ve helped out with this workshop for several years now.) Former Alpha students have sold fiction to Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Cicada, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, so those are a few markets that I know are publishing younger writers. I also have a Resources for Teen Writers page, though it hasn’t been updated for a while. I hope that helps.

Reader Reactions to My Short Story “The Skull-Faced Boy”

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Pseudopod listeners are beginning to post responses to my story “The Skull-Faced Boy.” See here and here.

Overall I think the feedback is pretty positive. Deflective writes: “This story is everything Pseudopod! A classic scenario with a twist. An action-driven plot with a hint of meaning. Just right for audio. Well-performed audio at that.” Sylvan calls the piece “a fascinating story that takes the zombie genre to new places,” and M. says it’s “some of the best listening I’ve done in a while.”

Chivalrybean writes: “The whole smart zombie aspect was brilliant. Not done before as far as the extent that my zombie experiences reach. Commanzomdos [commando zombies]. How cool is that?”

Many listeners seem to think that the story could or should be longer, either because they think some aspect of it is underdeveloped (boo) or because they think the setup is just really neat (yay). For example, Clinton Trucks notes, “This is the first Pseudopod offering that I thought could be expanded to novel length without suffering a dilution of its central idea.”

One thing I’ve noticed in writing workshops is that people will often say of a short story “This should be a novel” or “I wanted to see more of x,” and I almost always disagree. (Not just about my own stories, but with stories in general.) Part of it I’m sure is just taste. I know that I tend more than most people to prefer stories that are short and to the point and that always feel like they’re going somewhere. I also think it’s natural if you basically enjoy a story to feel that you want more of it … but that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you actually got more of it you’d be happier. I think there’s a lot to be said for leaving the reader wanting more. It certainly seems to me that it’s preferable to err in that direction than to err on the side of boring the reader. (There are also practical limits to how long you can make a piece that you’re hoping to sell to a magazine.) Still, given the number of listeners so far who seem to want more, more, more, it’s certainly something I’ll be thinking about vis-a-vis future stories.

Finally, I also came across a nice mention of “The Skull-Faced Boy” on this amusing blog post about zombies:

A Reader Requests a Sequel to My Short Story “Save Me Plz”

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Here’s a really nice note I received recently from a reader about my story “Save Me Plz”:

The ending is so incredibly sad it makes me want to cry and save Meg; the story as a whole is miraculously awesome! You’re an extremely talented writer. I’d love to see a sequel with a ‘happily every after’ ending, but I know that those can be cheesy :]

Thanks! I will almost certainly never write a sequel story in which Meg is rescued from her predicament and in which everything is resolved happily and tied up neatly at the end, but it occurred to me that if I did, I could call the story, “K Thnx Bai.”

Or maybe not.

I Dream of Dragons

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So I stumbled across I Dream of Dragons, the blog of aspiring fantasy writer Bryan Hitchcock, who has some nice things to say about some of my stories.

On “Save Me Plz”: “Kirtley wrote one of my favorite Realms of Fantasy stories, ‘Blood of Virgins,’ and I was thrilled when that one was picked up by Escape Pod. ‘Save Me Plz’ is a riff on life with a video game addict. There was a lot here that rang true, since me and my whole family basically are WoW players, though I have managed to limit my addiction to Friday nights…. mostly. The thing I enjoyed most about this story was the way it kept unfolding and revealing layers of meaning and turns in the plot. Sure there are always going to be questions and places where the explanations run thin in a story that starts so small and becomes so epic. But, for the most part, the gaming issues rang true and the relationship was realistic. Mur‘s reading was excellent. I think her gaming background helped her make some really good choices for emphasis and emotion. I really enjoyed this story. A+”

On “The Second Rat”: “Wow. My favorite short stories are ones with a different twist to them that somehow make the reader appreciate life in a new and profound way. This was a story like that. I don’t want to give much away, but the basic idea is about a guy who can ‘rewind’ time and live parts of his life over again, and again, and again, if he wishes. This story blew my mind. So far, Kirtley is 3 for 3 with me. He writes stories that matter in the way I want my stories to matter.”

And finally on “The Disciple”: “A good spooky story about a man who is driven by his own losses and sense of mediocrity to pursue powers that ‘man was not meant to meddle in.’ Great twist at the end. Excellent buildup and homage to Lovecraft.” This blogger also notes that, “This guy is becoming one of my favorite short story writers.”

Thanks, Bryan. Coincidentally, you are now becoming one of my favorite bloggers.

Listeners to the Escape Pod Podcast React to My Short Story “Save Me Plz”

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There’s now a lively discussion over at the Escape Pod message board about my story “Save Me Plz.” The story seems to have particularly struck a nerve with some gamers (or their significant others).

Warning: Spoilers for “Save Me Plz”

For example, mattatarms writes, “First time poster, been listening to the podcast for months. This one connected with me enough in such a way that I felt compelled to come here and post. I am a former MMO addict (Star Wars Galaxies), and during the height of my time in the game I really had the feeling that it was my life. When I was working (the little I was), I would want my life to be that swaggering smuggler/fighter pilot that I was in the game. I was involved in a role-playing guild, and the stories that we had in there just felt more real to me than real life did. There was a time where if I wanted to change the world to fit the universe I was involved with in the game, I would. It’s been a world of change since I decided to ‘unplug’ though. I’ve turned my life around, and found the love of my life. Moved to a new city and started a new and better life. Anyway, my point … The end of the piece, where they found the car in their fantasy world that Devon created, rung some sort of bell, along with Meg’s emotional reaction. That this piece of the old world that she had mostly forgotten would bring her back in that way, and then cry for help, makes me wonder what in my own personal situation reminded me of ‘reality’ and made me cry for help. Anyway, great podcast. Keep up the awesome work!”

Biscuit writes, “This story really struck a chord with me because it is SO close to the bone. At some times in my relationship with my husband, I have had to say, ‘Me or the computer game.’ And now I’m fully on the other side. Having watched on the outside for so many years, I decided to find out what all the fuss is about, and now I am a complete Guild Wars fanatic, to the point it IS pushing aside some of my aspirations in life. (I want to be a writer, but am ‘crippled’ by the amount of time I spend playing during my free time. Even all my other hobbies have suffered because of GW.) I sound like a freak, but I’m actually a very well-centered human being. There’s a whole lot of emotional Ouch in this story. And after all, isn’t that one component that makes a good story?”

CieBird writes, “I am SURE that I dated that guy in college. Brilliant programmer, always spouting some self-important wisdom, never went to class, got high a lot, WAY into gaming, dropped out. I am sure that was him the story was about.”

Speaking of “that guy,” the character Devon, many listeners seem to have very strong reactions to him. Some are creeped out, while others sympathize with his desire to change the world.

Sayeth writes, “The thing I liked best about this story is that the ‘bad guy’ wasn’t really what most people would call evil; he was just trying to make the world into what he thought would be a better place. I don’t think he would have considered himself selfish (though he was), rather he was just so myopic that he believed that by remaking the world he would be helping everyone out. This gives the story resonances with not just multiplayer games, but politics as well. Perhaps I’m a bit naive, but I think most of the political battles are not good vs. evil, but people trying to reshape the world into what they think would be ideal, not grasping that their view of heaven is the other man’s hell.”

ScottC writes, “The story also made me think of Disney. I read (well listened) to the recent biography, and the theme was that Disney wanted to make a perfect world (Snow White, Disneyland, the original concept for EPCOT). But the difference was that Disney invited you into his world, while Devon forced everyone, including Meg, into his. I bet Devon is still fine-tuning his world, still thinking the problem is with reality and not with him.”

To read more, go here.

Roger Barr

My grandfather Roger Barr passed away early this morning at the age of 98. He was my mom’s father, and was my last surviving grandparent. He was being cared for by my uncle Steve (his son) and aunt Denice — both medical professionals — and was still sharp and good-humored in his final days. Yesterday […]

David Barr Kirtley

David Barr Kirtley is the host of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, for which he’s interviewed over four hundred guests, including George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, Simon Pegg, Margaret Atwood, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. His short fiction appears in the book Save Me Plz and Other Stories.