Sunkissed Summer features stories by wonderful writers from Annie and Dave themselves to Christy FiField, Dayle A. Dermatis, Thea Hutchinson, and so many others. I’m honored to be in such company.

My story happens in summer school, which, in the desert, isn’t as lovely an idea as you would think. And the characters aren’t your average college students…

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But what Frank discovers might change his views…on everything.

Chosen as an Asimov’s Readers Choice Award finalist, “Alien Ball” will be free on this website for one week only. If you want your own copy, you can get it on all retail sites or click here.

Alien Ball

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

They have three arms, one of which, when they play against us, they tie behind their back. They’re short and squat and look more like the basketball writ large than any kind of basketball player. They can’t dunk or even run very well.

But when they play against each other, they transform the game into something else. Something lovely and different, almost like clouds with limbs attempting to confine their movements to a single court with a tiny ball, and strange rules.

It isn’t our basketball. It is their basketball.

And it is beautiful to behold.

***

Basketball, by its very nature, is a gravity-based sport. Sure, there are versions on the Moon, on other planets, on some large spaceships. There are zero-gravity rules, and Moon rules. Courts are different. The ball is weighted differently. The Moon has a no-dunking rule. Mars uses higher poles for their baskets.

Those games, to me, aren’t basketball. Basketball is a two-team sport, played on a court that’s 28 meters long and 15 meters wide. The hoop is 3.05 meters off the ground, and it’s slightly less than half a meter in diameter. The basketball has a circumference of 75 centimeters and weighs 624 grams.

Rules vary slightly. There’s professional basketball, with a longer 3-point distance from the hoop, a shorter shot clock, a jump ball for possession, and a handful of other things, designed to confound, slow down, or challenge the exceedingly good player. There’s college ball, which has 20-minute halves instead of quarters, a slightly smaller regulation court, and weird rules about uniforms.

High school ball and kid’s ball all have their own variations. But at least the international side of basketball has adopted all of those rules, so that when high school kids from Beijing play high school kids from Paris, they’re playing a game familiar to both of them.

I’m sure I’m the one writing this piece because I’m the one who lobbied for stringent rules that remain the same on international lines. I’m the voice of standards and measures.

I’m sure I was also brought in because someone, somewhere, figures I’d be the loudest most well-known voice against bringing aliens into the game.

And not just any aliens.

The Ashtenga.

The Ashtenga are our friends. They’re our allies. We work with them well, especially compared with some of the other aliens we’ve discovered in this galaxy. We’re compatible. In addition to our business and intellectual interests being (mostly) aligned, we also love entertainment of all types.

We share storytelling forms. I find theirs inexplicable—no real beginning or end, just a lot of middle that seems frenetic. I’m told that if I understood the culture the stories come from (and like us, the Ashtenga have several cultures), I would understand the drama.

I have no idea if I would. My expertise is in sport. I go to sport to relax, from baseball to basketball to soccer. For me, the sport has to be physical—played in person, not on a screen or holographically. I want the thud of feet on the floor, the grunt of a player who gets body-checked by another, the splash of sweat as someone pivots and heads in the opposite direction.

I’m fascinated by the small jobs, the way that someone runs out onto the court to clean up that splash of sweat in the instant between the droplets hitting the court and the players catching rebounds at the other basket.

And yes, I’m discussing basketball, because all things being equal, basketball is my sport.

I realize I’m new to some of you. You don’t listen when I announce the pro games, trying to keep them alive and lively for the off-planet crowd. You don’t listen when I announce the college playoff games or when I cover draft day.

You don’t understand my sense of ritual, the honor I feel in participating in a tradition as old as broadcasting itself. Not everyone can watch a game in person. Not everyone can watch in real time.

Not everyone can watch.

It is because of broadcasters that the Ashtenga learned about basketball in the first place. They saw our sporting events before they met us, just like they watched our television programs and our movies. Maybe the reason we find their entertainment to be so simpatico is because we have influenced the way they tell stories. They had a century or more of incorporating our techniques into their storytelling machinery before they met us.

And they also tried to imitate our sports as well.

Baseball confounds them. It’s too slow for them. Soccer doesn’t interest them as players. They like using their arms.

The Ashtenga excel at synchronized swimming and most forms of dance, except those, like Irish Stepdance, that don’t use the arms. The Ashtenga love lacrosse and have developed their own (rather frightening) form of rugby.

Some Ashtenga even play a version of the long-defunct American football, the kind not related to soccer at all. Ashtenga rugby is violent; Ashtenga American Football (as they call it) is violence in slow motion and as such seems to have a lot more in common with dance than I would have expected, hearing it described.

But the Ashtenga love basketball, enough that they want to join one of our leagues—or, maybe, play alongside our professionals in games that mirror the old international rivalries that existed hundreds of years ago.

They don’t care that we’re physically different. They don’t care that the game is designed for our physiology, not theirs.

They want to challenge themselves by playing against us.

They want to—as they put it—reach for the stars.

They want to see how, with (literally) one hand tied behind their backs, the Ashtenga stack up against the species that invented basketball, and still plays it with a fervor that makes the game seem new every single time.

I’m all for interspecies rivalries. I like the idea of playing against others who look different from us.

But when Interglobal Sports Network asked me to weigh in on a possible Ashtenga/Human League, I laughingly said, You’re bringing me in to be the voice of reason.

My boss looked at me—she has withering looks that can make the most hard-bitten sports reporter retreat to his corner—and said, No, Frank. We’re bringing you in to make the anti-alien point of view seem rational. You’re good at that.

***

Her words bothered me for days, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. And then I realized it was for what she didn’t say as much as she did.

Seem rational…even though it isn’t.

Good at that…making the nuttiest topic sound logical.

I could have challenged her and asked if that was what she really meant. I have so much work—I’m one of the most in-demand broadcasters of Earth sports for the stars—that I really don’t need the Interglobal Media job.

And maybe, younger me would have challenged her. Maybe younger me would have taken offense, and said loudly, with a bit too much bite, that she always misunderstood me and my positions.

I would have made it about her.

But I’m older now, and I’ve come to realize that some of the things I love are not things that others love. I know—I have always known—that none of us are exactly alike, that our tastes vary, that our opinions differ.

I also realize that some of those opinions become mired in the past. I worry about my own rigid tendencies, something I wouldn’t even have acknowledged twenty years ago.

I know those tendencies make my passage through this world difficult, as difficult as my aging face, and that when a younger person looks at me, they are already judging me for things I haven’t said (and might never say) before I even open my mouth.

I don’t want to be a caricature of myself.

An older man opposing changes to his beloved Earth-based basketball, that might be a cliché. I might be the caricature that I was afraid of becoming.

That fear, the fear of being judged narrow-minded—and finding that judgement to be true—is what led me to write this piece.

This piece is not the screed my editor hoped for. I’m not exactly sure what it is.

A voyage of discovery, perhaps?

An attempt at change?

Or maybe a delusion—a man who thinks he’s retraining his mind to be open, when in truth, it can never be opened again.

***

The first game I went to was in Los Angeles, in one of those neighborhood courts, surrounded by barbed wire and crumpling apartment complexes. You can hear the faint artificial swoosh of cars rumbling over the 110, the ancient freeway that had its roots in what is now erroneously called the “Great” Depression of the 20^th century. The highway became a historic landmark more than fifty years ago, but none of that reverence for history shows here.

The history, in this part of Los Angeles, is in those crumbling buildings and the neighborhood basketball courts, where kids have played pickup games since long before some urban planner came up with the idea to expand Figueroa all the way to the Port of Los Angeles, creating the foundation for the 110.

The designation “bad” neighborhood applies here, although I’m told that no neighborhood is bad, just underprivileged. All I know, without doing the research into the neighborhood (which is peripheral to my work here), is that various neighborhoods in this part of Los Angeles have been considered “bad” for my entire adult life, and the thing those neighborhoods have always had in common was the presence of “undesirables,” however each generation defines them.

Those undesirables have almost always been immigrants—starting with the Irish and the Germans before the roads had anything but horses, Blacks about the time of the “Great” Depression, Mexicans and Latin Americans when my great-grandparents were young, the White Diaspora when my grandparents got married, and the so-called Mouth Breathers—aliens who could handle Earth’s atmosphere—around the time my parents had my oldest brother.

The Ashtenga were a small group then, but they’ve since taken over the neighborhood. They sponsor—if that’s the right word—mixed species pickup games, and have done so for a generation now.

If rumors and gossip can be believed, this is where the idea of an Ashtenga/Human League was born, among the broken glass tangled in the weeds poking out of the cracked surface of the aging outdoor courts.

I didn’t find this place on my own. My guide isn’t human or Ashtenga. EllaLyn, as she introduces herself, is Cabreeyra. She’s slender and willowy, as most of the Cabreeyra are, her skin grayish-green, her eyes large, and her chin pointed. She comes to my shoulder, and I’m not tall.

She grew up near here, when the local Alien Laws—the Roundups, for those of you old enough to remember—were still being enforced, but she now lives in one of the protected high-rise condos UCLA provides its most distinguished professors.

That she returns here often to maintain that title is an irony that’s not lost on her.

She used to play pickup ball here when there weren’t enough Ashtenga kids to form a team. She was better at it than they were—the Cabreeyra’s long multi-jointed arms could stretch and reach the top of a regulation hoop—but she never used that to her advantage.

When she was a young adult, she was offered a position with a team on the InterSpecies League, out of the Moon, and she turned it down. She was interested in sport in theory, not in practice. She likes the history of it, the changes in it, and the way it brings disparate communities together, under the lights of a hot Los Angeles night.

She does me the courtesy of not explaining how this pickup game is played, assuming I will pick up (pun intended) whatever I need to know. And I do pick up things.

The rules of the game are less fluid than I expect: they’re playing five to a team, but they rotate players in and out as folks arrive. One young woman, who wears an exoskeleton on her lower limbs, sits in the only chair on one side of the court, near the center. She keeps score—verbally—and handles the most controversial calls with an aplomb I haven’t seen before.

It takes me about ten minutes to realize that what I thought was a soccer ball beside her was actually a young Ashtenga, arms and legs rolled around its torso, head at an angle that made it almost impossible for me to see.

The Ashtenga is consulting with her, and she doesn’t make any of her calls until they both seem to agree.

No one argues with her, although every human on the court is bigger and more physically powerful. The Ashtenga float back, their arms blowing in the wind the way that long hair would. Only when the game gets underway do the arms seem to have any substance at all.

The Ashtenga don’t play with one arm tied behind their backs here. They play with all three arms, apparently to make up for the height disadvantage. With that third arm, they’re able to hold the ball between two hands, and use the third arm as a springboard, launching their much lighter bodies upwards, often completing a dunk.

Apparently, gripping the edge of the rim is allowed as is forcing the ball inside. The only dunking disallowed—at least while I was there—was when one of the Ashtenga overshot her target and went through the hoop ball first, letting go as her body hit the edge of the rim, making it vibrate.

She flipped midair, using the third arm to catch some kind of stability halfway down, and landed on her sneaker-clad feet, then immediately chirped an apology.

The apology didn’t sway the judges. Both teams stopped to argue, but it seemed good-natured, no shoving or loud voices. Politeness, EllaLyn tells me, is one of the things that the Ashtenga always insist on in a game. Should the human players say or do something offensive, they will lose points. If the behavior continues, the Ashtenga walk off the court en masse.

Before I got here, I would have thought that the humans wouldn’t care if the Ashtenga leave, but they do care. The young human players want the challenge of playing against a team that has extra abilities, just like they love playing pickup when bona fide pro players show up at these informal outdoor games to test their skills.

The game is interesting, the Ashtenga enthusiastic, the kids willing to give as well as they take, but I’m not as interested as I thought I would be.

I wanted to see a game that approximates the vision the Ashtenga have for the Ashtenga/Human League, not yet another variation on the game I love. At last count, there are 350 official variations of the game of basketball and none of them interest me as much as the pure pro game that has been played in similar style for more than 200 years.

I told this to EllaLyn and she couldn’t hide the grimace of disappointment that crossed her face.

“You know,” she said, “your pro teams aren’t pure either. They were once segregated by gender.”

“And race,” I said. “Times change.”

She inclined her head toward the court. “That’s a change.”

At that point, I was unwilling to concede that it was a change on par with letting other humans play a human game. I didn’t have to say it though; as adept as I was at reading her mood, she seemed even more adept at reading mine.

“There’s an exhibition game at UCLA tomorrow,” she said, as if that was news to me.

One of the reasons I came to LA was that exhibition game. I already had a press pass—a generic one, so that no one knew my agenda.

I thanked her for letting me know, keeping the fiction between us that I’m a bit naïve about all of this, and then we walked away from the court.

I looked up at the crumbling apartment buildings, saw round faces in the windows, a bit of movement on the balconies that haven’t mostly rotted away.

This pickup game had a large Ashtenga audience. They watched with a reverence I hadn’t expected.

I found myself wondering if basketball was more than a game to them. If it had some other kind of meaning, something I didn’t quite understand.

***

Times don’t just change. The click of the calendar means nothing if attitudes don’t change too. Women fought to play basketball since the 1890s, from the day the game was invented. To play by the same rules as white men, to play without corsets, to play in comfortable clothing.

African-Americans played but in segregated leagues, although when they did go head to head with white teams, as they did in 1939, they won, despite rules created to make sure no African-American team would do well.

Other groups found themselves closed out of professional basketball for decades as well, but exhibition games, barnstorming games, and local games filled the gap. Anyone who wanted to play basketball could, on one level or another. If they wanted to get paid for playing basketball—whether in scholarships or in actual cash—well, that was another thing, one that didn’t happen often.

Even though the segregated teams—from the Black Fives to the women’s leagues—were created because the “science” at the time claimed their bodies were different, and therefore not worthy. Of course, real science said otherwise. It took generations of pioneers to make the changes, and when they came—in 1950 to integrate African-Americans into professional basketball, and almost a century later to allow women to play professionally in the dominant National Basketball Association (which, at that point, had been a men’s club)—other changes came with them.

Transgender players were able to play professionally once the professional players were no longer segregated by gender. It didn’t matter how much (or little) testosterone a player had; all that mattered was that the player was exceptional.

Sometimes the physical changes brought a change in rules, always designed to make the game more interesting, more challenging, not less. For decades, smart money said that women couldn’t dunk. And then they started dunking.

The rules weren’t dumbed-down when players who had previously been excluded joined the game; if anything the rules got tougher, in an attempt to eliminate those players entirely.

And those players stepped up. They played better than their (white, male) counterparts because they had to, just to be considered a part of the game.

Eventually, they became the game itself: Every team has players of all backgrounds, and a subtle variation of genders. The focus isn’t on the color of the skin, the ethnic background, or gender of the players; the focus is on how well they play—not just individually, but as a unit.

That’s what should count, right? Not how they look, or even what disadvantages they have to overcome. There are some players who top 240 centimeters, and others who barely make 160 centimeters. There are players with limited mobility who have mad skills in passing and ball retrieval.

The rules now allow players to correct problems that would have kept them out of the game in the past—from artificial eyes and ears to artificial knees and shoulders. The augmentation can’t be done to improve performance—a rule I agree with—but an augmentation, done the way that every other person on the planet who gets such augmentation does it, is completely fair and legal.

All these changes (and more) happened since the game was invented, and yet, if James Naismith somehow found his way out of 1891 and into the present, he would still recognize the elements of the game he’d invented when he nailed a peach basket above a running track.

I know this. I like the changes, many of which happened long before I was born.

I’m not sure why the addition of the Ashtenga bothers me.

I worry that it’s the word “alien.”

I worry about that, because it puts me on the wrong side of history, which is somewhere I never ever want to belong.

***

The exhibition game takes place at Pauley Pavilion, which once housed the Bruins before UCLA built a much better court. Pauley Pavilion has all the features that mark it as a product of the distant past—too large, too many seats, no functional way to view the game and the virtual representation at the same time.

Sound echoes in here in a way that’s almost painful, especially when the seats are mostly empty, as they usually are. I’ve seen events in Pauley Pavilion before, and I’ve always found them frustrating. Some people claim they enjoy the old-fashioned experience, but I’d rather watch ringside virtually than Pauley Pavilion’s ringside. The seats aren’t close enough to trip the players, which was a feature in its time, but is no longer. Not that anyone would be allowed to trip players ringside, not these days.

Despite spending decades in the hot California sun, the Pavilion smells of old wood with a hint of mildew. I suspect the source of the smell is the forced air system, which is older than I am. I’m five rows up from floor level, so that I can watch the game with a bit of detachment.

Even here, though, I can smell human sweat, and the faint odor of strawberries, which is what I’m told Ashtenga smell like after a lot of exertion.

The game is fast-paced and more physical than I would have expected. Even though the tallest Ashtenga barely top 160 centimeters, they handle jump balls better than I expected. Their legs seemed to be made of rubber or some kind of spring. When they bend at the knees and push themselves upwards, they seem to float.

I remember some kind of controversy early on that claimed the Ashtenga used their arms like wings, but I saw none of that here. And the third arm, which is not in use, has been flipped over what I can only call a shoulder (it’s not, but looking up the terminology doesn’t clarify. The words to describe the body part that the arm folds backwards over is unique to the Ashtenga, just like that third arm and its difficult-to-describe parts are). After the flipping, the arm is tied around what we would call a waist, although what the Ashtenga have is the opposite of a waist. More like a circumference, since they are widest at that midpoint.

If you tied one of my arms to my back or my side, and then forced me to play basketball, I would lumber ungainly across the court—or more ungainly, since I’m not a professional athlete and have no pretense at being one. But even if I were to tie an arm of one of the human players, their motion would be restricted in such a way as to possibly unbalance them.

Certainly, they would be thinking about that arm, maybe even more than they would think about the game itself.

The Ashtenga do not appear to be distracted. But, I remind myself, they have had years to get used to this way of playing. The Ashtenga have lobbied for inclusion in the professional basketball ranks for nearly a decade now, which means they’ve been playing with one arm tied behind their backs for much, much longer.

They do lack the grace of the Ashtenga at the pickup game. While I’m watching the exhibition game, I make note of the difference, but I don’t attribute it to the incapacitated arm. I only make that connection later.

Right now, though, I’m leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands folded under my chin. I’m watching the live game, not the streamed game, because I want to see how the two teams play in real life.

There’s grunting, and the squeaking of shoes against the highly polished wooden court. The ball bounces, the sound of dribbling echoes, the shouts reverberate—low and modulated or deep and resonant from the humans, and loud and chirpy from the Ashtenga.

Despite the fact that they’re playing by professional rules, some things are different. The human players, with their long legs and extended torsos, focus on their passing game, keeping the basketball out of arm’s reach for the Ashtenga.

The Ashtenga retaliate by playing a ground game, bounce passes, lots of dribbling, and the occasional dart between someone’s legs.

The humans don’t always see the dart. More than one Ashtenga gets kicked, sprawling across the court with limbs splayed. A kick like that seems unintentional, but I’m seeing it too much, and the refs—human and Ashtenga—agree with me. Each kick is a personal foul, and the personal fouls mount up.

The coaches bring in new players, rotating, just like they would in a game with real stakes.

The Ashtenga have their own tricks. They will stop in front of a human player concentrating on the upper game, and that player—often forty centimeters taller than the Ashtenga—won’t even see the Ashtenga right in front of them.

If the human player deliberately barrels into an Ashtenga, that’s another personal foul, just like it would be if a human barreled into another human player with intent to harm.

But this maneuver by the Ashtenga is a tactic, and the refs see that as well.

There are other maneuvers, though, ones that aren’t illegal, just unusual. The human players will often leap over an Ashtenga—a maneuver that doesn’t always go well, particularly if there’s another Ashtenga nearby.

The Ashtenga will bend at their hips (which is far below their middle) and hover in that position, their eyes moving ever so slightly up their head so that they can see what’s going on without standing upright. They look like large footstools, and it would be tempting to think of them as vulnerable at that moment, but they are not.

If the ball bounces anywhere in their vicinity, their arms extend forward, and they grab that ball, at a much lower point than any human player ever would. The Ashtenga will steal the ball, pass it from one bent-over player to another at lightning speed, until the ball is near their basket.

The way the players are scattered and the width of their bent-over bodies makes it almost impossible for the larger human players to get around them quickly. In that single exhibition game, I watched the Ashtenga rack up 35 points with that maneuver alone.

So the game is different and yet it is the same—fast-paced, exciting, surprising in ways I have not expected.

I find myself thinking we need names for these maneuvers, things we can call them that aren’t insulting or demeaning or unclear. I’m sure what I’ve said above isn’t quite right, because I don’t know how to describe these things in a way that gives my meaning but doesn’t offend the Ashtenga.

Yet I need to be able to describe what they’re doing to humans—and others—all over the galaxy, especially since so many of them will not see any video accompanying my voice. All they will have is their imaginations, just like the radio listeners back when the World Championship went to the all-black New York Renaissance at the Chicago Coliseum.

I wonder when I think of that game, if someone who had announced it had left out skin color, had simply described the fast breaks and the points in the paint, if the entire history of basketball might have gone differently.

I used to think that if I were ever faced with describing an event of that magnitude, one that upended the attitudes—the assumptions—the beliefs—of the day, that I would have been smart enough to keep all of those nasty things out of my commentary.

And then I sit here, watching the Ashtenga play the best players in Los Angeles, and confounding them. The score is tied most of the game, and everyone playing is struggling at the top of their game.

Well, not everyone. Because the Ashtenga have one arm tied behind them. They aren’t allowed to make that lovely maneuver I saw in the pickup game, the third hand planted firmly on the court, the other two hands clutching the ball as the Ashtenga’s body rises—floats, really—toward the basket, as if she were made for the game.

My cheeks heat as I watch the exhibition game, and I can’t quite separate out my tangled emotions.

Am I really moved by the Ashtenga’s performance? Or am I trying to understand a change that is beyond me, one that is as inevitable as African-Americans joining the National Basketball Association in 1950, something that most open-minded people had seen as necessary in 1939, but others managed to ignore for more than a decade after.

Just like the inclusion of women and the trans community. What you needed to play basketball—or so I thought—was athleticism, height, and an ability to see the entire court, to watch for openings, to know how to move between players, to understand how to score, even when there are so many obstacles in front of you that you can’t see beyond them.

Turns out I was wrong. You don’t need height. You do need athleticism, but not the kind I was thinking of. Mostly, you need the ability to see the game in three dimensions, to understand your position in those dimensions, to see how you fit, and how you can capitalize on it.

I leave the exhibition game shaken. I enjoyed the game as much as I could, while I was concentrating on learning from it, on my own opinion, which is not something I generally focus on when I’m watching basketball. Usually I’m trying to suss out maneuvers, figure out how to explain them, trying to cast as far forward into the future as I can, to see how the game will end up or turn out or what will happen in the playoffs or to a particular player. My mind is filled with trivia about each player, each team, the history of everything, because I need something to riff about when the action on the court stalls.

Here, though, I’m looking at things I don’t normally look at—players’ bodies (uninjured bodies), technique on a microlevel—and trying to figure out plays I’ve never seen before, to judge if they’re worthy of the game.

I like to think it was that change of focus that made me so uneasy, but it isn’t until I get back to my hotel room that I realize what has me on edge.

The Ashtenga are playing with a disadvantage, like professional players do when they face off against children at a basketball camp. The Ashtenga aren’t using all of their skills, but the human players are.

You’d think—I’d think—that we invented the game, so we’d be the ones who have the advantage, but we aren’t. Even when they play with a disadvantage, the Ashtenga win.

They beat the best players in the American West by more than 40 points.

Other announcers, friends, people I’ve talked with—people who agree with me, or did, when we used to discuss the inclusion of the Ashtenga in the ranks of pro and college ball—they all say that the human players lost because they didn’t know what to expect.

But that’s not true. Humans have played against the Ashtenga for years now, and generally lose.

In a game built for rapid play, for height and length, where—among humans, anyway—the tall and lean are at the biggest advantage, the Ashtenga dominate and they have none of those qualities.

For days, I find myself pondering the possibility that a game designed by a rather foreboding looking white man with an eye to creating an athletic distraction to keep young men from going stir-crazy in the winter can best be played by individuals who look nothing like the boys Naismith was trying to corral.

I needed one more piece to complete my own mental puzzle, and it took nearly a week to arrange it.

A friend snuck me into an Ashtenga gymnasium, where I finally got to see what the Ashtenga mockingly call “alien ball.”

***

The scent of fresh-cut strawberries fills the gym, dominating everything. The lights are not whitish-gold, but a pinkish-green, which takes some getting used to. The calls between players might be trash-talk or they might be something more profound, but I can’t understand them at all, since they’re whistled in one of the Ashtenga’s fifty-four languages.

Two referees—wearing faded brown—keep pace with the players, occasionally windmilling one arm, which stops play entirely. Then there’s a consultation, and sometimes, a dejected hunch—body language that seems to be the same in both our species.

The game is fast, with lots of splits, and if it weren’t for the numbered jerseys, molded tight to the Ashtenga’s torsos, I wouldn’t be able to tell the players apart. I’m too far away to see their faces, and their bodies look stunningly similar to each other. I can’t say that I’m following the tall player, or the dark-haired player, because none of those things apply.

Instead, I’m watching the game as a pattern, and it looks less to me like basketball than it does basketball combined with chess combined with dance.

Sometimes four of the Ashtenga on a team plant themselves in various positions on the court, and bend over, like they did in the exhibition game, while the remaining member wends his way to the basket. Sometimes they float, slowly and dreamily, as if they’re made of air.

The basketball always bounces against the ground, though, following the time limits set in the original game. It’s only when the ball is passed from player to player to player in rapid succession, no dribbling or bounce-pass in that maneuver, that it looks like the ball can fly too.

This isn’t our basketball. This is their basketball.

And yet—

It seems pure, driven, breathless. It looks like fun rather than work, and the players have a different mien than the exhibition players do, than even the pickup players do. Remove the humans, and the game becomes something filled with joy.

Maybe I would see the same thing watching a game played in zero-G or watching a mix of human players and other alien races. Maybe the difference between this game and all the others I’ve seen on this trip is that I’m actually watching the play as something valuable, not something I have to fight against.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. Just like it didn’t matter what James Naismith thought about teaching “his” game to women and people of color.

Naismith’s book, Basketball: Its Origins and Development, makes no mention of the World Championship played in Chicago a few months before Naismith turned in the manuscript.

He didn’t want to see “his” game transformed. He didn’t like the additions and changes. He had designed the game for young white men, and for young white men it remained “pure” for generations.

I am not Naismith. I did not invent the game. I did not change any of its rules. I have just loved it forever.

But now, after receiving an assignment to write a hatchet piece, to rehash an opinion I’ve espoused for more than a decade, I find myself wondering what, exactly, I have loved about the game. I thought its essence was human and gravity-based, but maybe its essence is something else.

Maybe its essence is its flexibility, its ability to speak to peoples everywhere, people who want to modify this athletic distraction to become something more than a distraction, something that enables them to find worth in a game so simple it needs only ten players, a ball, a basket attached to some kind of pole, and a defined area to run.

Maybe in delving for greater meaning, I have lost the simplicity of the game. In attempting to justify my own self-worth, I have forgotten what the game gave me in the first place.

It used to give me the kind of joy I saw in the faces of the Ashtenga, not just in their own game, but in the pickup game. The faces, ringing those balconies of that crumbling apartment building, the self-satisfaction of the wannabe professional players as they looked at the scoreboard showing their victory over people billed as the best in the west.

Very few games are remembered. Generally, only the turning-point games make it into the history books.

None of the games I watched fit that bill. They are daily diversions, played with great focus. They are important in the now, but maybe not in the future—except as an accumulation—these games, played by these kinds of players, eventually led to this change.

I like to think that I’m incidental to those changes, but I am not. My voice is influential enough that my editor believed I represented a constituency she needed to address, in one way or another. I’m not sure if my voice was red meat thrown as a token to a constituency she wishes would go away or if my voice is important in its own right.

I suspect something in between.

I’m one of those voices basketball historians will cite in the future to show a reaction toward the presence of the Ashtenga. But how will I be used? As the voice of reason or as a barrier?

I suspect my editor thought I would be a barrier. I know I did.

And I’m not sure where I end up now.

Except that, if given the opportunity, I will return. Not to Pauley Pavilion or to that pickup game, but to that gymnasium in a corner of LA that I hadn’t even realized existed. I want to watch basketball played in Earth gravity with players who look like they’re floating. I want to see a three-handed dunk. I want to see small squat players, forming complex patterns on a basketball court.

I want to think about new strategy in an old game.

I think maybe I have discovered my joy again—and this time, I’m not going to let it go.

And, if you want even more time travel, pick up my novel Snipers, which is part of the What If… book in the current Escape from 2026 Storybundle. Lots of alternate history fiction as well as time travel fiction here. The bundle will run for just a few weeks, so get your books now.

Of course, whenever I feel like I need to escape from something, I make plans. Or I try to do something that’s helpful. In this case, I did both.

First, I want to help readers (and writers) figure out how to find some personal time in 2026…by imagining themselves elsewhere. Or elsewhen. I kinda like the elsewhen part. Let’s imagine our world, but different.

So I asked some of my favorite writers if they had time travel or alternate history tales to contribute to a Storybundle. You can now get 14 ebooks, twelve of which are exclusive and impossible to find anywhere else in this bundle. There’s also a writing workshop in case you want to write your own escape.

I’ve included two of my books. One, Snipers, is alternate history and time travel. The other, Consecrated Ground, is neither, but should be. I combined them for reasons that you’ll see when you read the bundle. Consecrated Ground is an author-preferred edition of one of my best reviewed books, but it won’t be available wide until this fall. So if you want to read it early, here’s your chance.

You can get all of these books at a discount, so not only are there a lot of escapes here, but they’re also available at a bargain price.

Which leads to…

Second, I give to charities a lot during times of crisis. We–the world–have been in a prolonged crisis for years now. So I made sure the charity that we chose for this Storybundle responds to crisis. World Central Kitchen provides food in crisis zones worldwide. Their mission has remained the same over the years, but the need has grown, so any money you can give to them would be greatly appreciated.

We made it easy by adding them to the Storybundle.

So…pick up your escape, and spend the summer reading about other places and other times. All the while your money will magically work to help those in need.

Here’s the link to Storybundle. Thanks!

Everything in this bundle is exclusive to the Storybundle, including my book. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The Storybundle ends in two days, so you might want to get yours now. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites. The new edition will release on in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from February of 2025, and is in the second section of  the book. 

DOING THE WORK AMID THE NOISE

From 2025

There are times in life when being a writer is hard. I don’t mean real-world hard. Real-world hard is when your job is so important that one small error means someone else dies. There are a lot of real-world hard jobs in the world, and they keep the rest of us safe and alive.

As I said in Chapter 11, entertainment is important as well. We have an obligation to help those who are doing real-world hard jobs by giving them some kind of respite at the end of their long days.

But that means we have to do the work, and the work comes out of our brains. When we’re panicked and distracted—checking the news every fifteen minutes, looking at our social media, worrying aloud with our friends about what is going to happen next—it’s difficult, if not near impossible to concentrate on our made-up worlds.

They feel so small and unimportant.

We don’t see readers enjoying our work. We have no idea that a reader will close a book and hug it, like I did a week ago when I finished Robert Crais’s latest, The Big Empty. I know that Bob is a slow writer, and I wish he wasn’t, because I would love another of his books right now.

He lives in L.A. Not only are people there dealing with the chaos that is America right now, they’re dealing with the devastating losses of many parts of their community. I suspect he’s distracted.

I know that Connie Willis is distracted because I’m following her Facebook page in which she aggregates all the news of the day. I have no idea how she finds the time to write fiction or if she even is. I hope she is.

I’m a former journalist. I love information, the more the better. But, after the election, I shut off all media. I canceled all of my major newspaper subscriptions, stopped watching everything but the weather on any news channel, and got a lot done. I needed to because of an ongoing business crisis.

But I also needed the rest.

And I knew if I didn’t figure out how to control the information that came to me, I would not write another sentence—at least in fiction.

Writing fiction, as unglamorous as it sounds, is my job. It’s what I do for a living. But it’s also what I would do if the world ended tomorrow (which has gotten closer, according to the Doomsday Clock run by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

I make up stories. I always have. I write them down and have done that since I was in grade school.

Storytelling keeps me sane.

After the despair of the election (not shock, because I kept saying all summer [hell, all year] that this was possible, even if I wasn’t really listening to myself), I needed that quiet. I needed to accept that the world as I had known it for years would change dramatically.

How dramatically? I had—and have—no idea. This post is not about what’s going on out there in the real world. It’s changing too fast. I sat down at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, knowing that by the time I finish, more news will pour in.

It might be good; it might be bad; it might be hopeful; it might be devastating. It might be all those things at once.

It’s too much for the brain to cope with—and right now, it’s designed that way. Which is why I urge you to take care of yourself and your family first. Then take care of your community, whatever that might be, and then pick one or two or three issues to work on and be part of the solution for. If all of us do that, our differences will make sure that we will cover the entire spectrum of problems that are popping up like weeds.

Yes, I know. People are dying. I know. The situation is growing more dire by the day.

One step at a time. That’s all we can do. See above.

The problem is, then, how to corral the brain and give it enough space so that you can write.

That solution is different for each and every one of us. And it’s different each one of us as an individual at different points in our lives.

I can only give you examples from my own life.

Example #1: I got very sick when I was living on the Oregon Coast. I’m already allergic to half the world; there, we later discovered, I was living in mold and was allergic to that too. We moved to the dry desert here in Nevada just in time. I doubt I would have made it through the year otherwise.

But, I was and am a writer. I wrote through all of that, and even wrote a book about my methods for writing when I barely had enough strength to get out of bed. The book is called Writing With Chronic Illness, which will appear in a revised edition in mid-2026.

Some of the solutions in that book might work for some of you now. Doing the writing first, being happy with what you can accomplish, accepting your limits—all of those are important.

I did them as best I could there. Here, in Las Vegas, I’m healthier, although the chronic conditions do fell me more than I would like. I can get through them easier in this dry climate, so sometimes I forget what I had learned.

Example #2: Our close friend Bill Trojan died, and Dean had to handle Bill’s horribly messy estate. At the same time, my editor at one of the traditional publishing houses had a mental meltdown and spent a half an hour on the phone, screaming at me and telling me I was the worst writer on the planet.

No one treats me like that. No one. So I immediately divorced that publisher, offering to pay back the money they had invested in me and my work so that I could get the rights to my books back.

That was at least $250,000 that I would have had to pay—even though we were embroiled in the estate mess and Dean was not working on publishing and writing, due to that big problem.

My confidence was shaken, and we were in financial difficulties. I had to figure out how to write a funny novel that was still under contract.

I did, a page here and a page there. I remember sitting in my office and writing long paragraphs about how awful that editor was to get her out of my head so that I could actually finish a book that was under contract for someone else.

I did it, but shutting out the noise was almost impossible. It took concentration. It took will power. It took a daily reminder to myself that writing is supposed to be fun.

And you know what? Many days, it ended up being that way, just because of the determination.

Example #3: As many of you know, the last two or so years of my life have been filled with turmoil. Dean lost much of his eyesight, which meant we had to make some massive changes in our lives. Then, just as he was getting used to the changes, he fell on a 5K race and destroyed his right shoulder.

He couldn’t do much work. He was healing. I cared for him and, as I dug deeper into the business at our publishing company, I realized it was sick too.

We had to make drastic changes there, and I had to take over the company completely.

Which meant it got run the Kris way—lots of questions, lots of systems, lots of data, lots of procedures. The old staff buckled under the Kris method (which had not been in place since I got very ill in 2015), and within two months, they were gone…leaving problems so massive behind that those problems either had to be solved or the company had to be dissolved.

Dean and I chose solving those problems, and we had (and have) great help in doing so. These sorts of events teach you who your friends really are.

I knew, as we dug in, that I was not going to be focused on the writing. I needed to figure out how to harness that focus in a different way.

I had a novel to finish as well as short story deadlines from traditional short fiction editors. I was not going to miss those deadlines, and I needed to finish that novel.

The problem was that in this small condo, I did not have a second business office. I had to do the work on my laptop and my writing computer in my writing office.

I knew I needed help.

So I set up a challenge with other writers. I made it costly for me to lose (not just pride—which, pardon my French, fuck if I care about personal pride). I started the first challenge in December of 2023, and continued the challenges through most of 2024.

I lost a couple of times. But the challenge was the only thing that got me to the computer. Daily word count…that I had to report (and God, I hate reporting). I couldn’t fudge it for my own sake, and I didn’t.

I finished that novel, and a lot of short fiction, before September hit, and the business stuff combined with some legal matters that were all do-not-miss and I had to miss some writing days.

It irked me—and kept the writing as a focus.

Usually I don’t bring others into my writing process, but I knew I would need it in 2024. So I did it.

I continued the writing challenges into early 2025, because I knew that I needed to get back to massive novel production, and I didn’t want to lose my short story focus. I have to do both (which I have done throughout my career).

It’s not as draconian as the 2024 challenge, but my life is different now. The business has settled into a pattern. We’ve moved the main offices to Nevada, which means I have a business desk. (Yay!) And we’ve gotten through some of the mess left by the old staff, and what’s left we’re slowly wrapping our arms around.

One thing I noticed, though, in all of those crises, is that the world swirled around me, with its problems and its demands. In each of them, it felt like a massive storm pounding on the outside of my house—you know the kind: the rain is horizontal, the winds are devastating, and the view outside the windows is black and gray, with almost no visibility at all.

You just have to wait out those storms and know that when they’re over, everything will be different, but some things will still stand. There will be rebuilding. There will be heartbreak. But the sun will have come out to reveal what’s left.

In the middle of it, though, you just have to survive it and keep the important things safe.

Your writing is one of those important things. It will take effort to keep it safe. Effort on your part.

And you’ll have to figure out what it will take for you to do it. My methods might not work for you. Find what works. Realize that those things might not work in a different kind of crisis.

But you can find a way to be with yourself during these tough times.

Here are a few practical things you can do in most (not all) crises:

• Protect your safe space. For me, that’s my writing space. I couldn’t do it during this last crisis, but I managed somehow. It felt uncomfortable and reminded me yet again about the importance of having a dedicated writing computer.
• Shut off the internet. Dean uses a different computer for his internet research—one that’s just a foot or two away from his writing computer. I shut off my wi-fi, so that clicking over to the internet for research takes a conscious action, and often makes me realize that I was just heading over to distract myself. (Different strokes, y’know.)
• Set a daily writing time. Make sure your family knows what it is, and that you shouldn’t be disturbed. Try to pick a time when it’s not easy to disturb you (early mornings; late evenings)

There are so many other practical things you can do, but again, they become specific to you.

One other thing—a tough thing—is that sometimes the project you were working on when the crisis hit is not the project your creative voice needs right now. You might have to switch—something shorter, something longer, something that requires less research, something that requires a different kind of concentration.

It’s up to you.

But the key here is to remember that when you write, you’re inside and safe from the storm. It will rage around you unabated while you’re working. It’ll probably (sadly) still be there when you’re done with today’s writing session.

But you got that session done. It’s a victory.

Celebrate the tiny victories. Keep writing.

And remember, in almost every difficult time, the only way out is through.

“Doing The Work Amid The Noise” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Anyway, with school ending and a bunch of other things closing down, it feels like summer has started. The end of the school year has always felt like a beginning to me anyway, as the daughter of a professor. I love school (which is why I take the occasional class at UNLV) and I love having school end.

Oh! And basketball season has started just this weekend, even though my Aces allowed themselves to suffer a tragic defeat yesterday.

My summer includes a lot of book design, some learning on a video program, and several writing-adjacent projects. I looked at that, then looked at myself, and realized, Uh,oh. Distract-o Girl will not get much writing done unless she plans really well.

I have learned over the last few years that without firm deadlines from the outside, I need something to get me in the chair first thing. Challenges work, especially when I have a lot of other distractions. (In the past three years, they were mostly bad distractions; now they’re mostly good ones.)

So, I’m in need of a challenge. When I’m in need of an exterior challenge, I set one up. I talked to Dean about it, and it seems that he needs one too. Plus we need to focus on the writing first again, which means we need to do some motivational things. When we get like this, we want to share.

Rather than have me explain it all, I’m going to copy Dean’s blog from Thursday night. (Note that the “I” in the italicized section below is actually Dean.)

Everything in this Storybundle is exclusive, including The Write Attitude. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The bundle will end in 9 days, so hurry on over. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting next month. The new edition will release in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in November of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

SOUNDING LIKE YOURSELF

From 2025

In a Billboard article about Addison Rae, I came across a useful Miles Davis quote. (Billboard, August 13, 2025.) She cited the quote this way:

Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

Wow. That hit home. But before I used it to base a blog post on, I looked it up. I was worried that it really wasn’t a Miles Davis quote or that it was a misquote (although it didn’t sound like one). What I found was that there are two versions of this quote, which leads me to believe that the jazz great remarked on this a lot.

The other version of the quote says:

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

And I think I like that one better, although both quotes are useful. For those of you who don’t know who Miles Davis was, he was one of the most influential musicians of the mid-twentieth century. He is definitely one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time.

If you are not familiar with him or his work, start at his website, milesdavis.com, and scan outward. You are probably familiar with a lot of his music, particularly if you’re a jazz fan.

The reason I like both quotes is that they have at least two different meanings, three if you think of them from the point of view of a prose writer.

The first quote: It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

That’s all about voice. Yes, Miles Davis, Addison Rae, and vocal coach Eric Vetro (who first showed Rae the quote) were talking about a musical voice—about sounding like no one else by channeling your own inner vision.

Which is what the best writers do. (That’s why the worst copy editors aren’t the ones who introduce mistakes; they’re the ones who put some writer’s manuscript into “perfect” grammar, ruining their voice.) If you listen to Stephen King reading his own work, his inflections and pauses are not surprising because he knows how to write them into the prose. (His accent or the tone of his voice might surprise you, but nothing more than that.)

Stephen King, former English teacher, found his own voice as a young boy and then learned how to transmit that voice, via the tool of a manuscript, into the brain of a reader. What he does is an extremely difficult skill, and one I aspire to. That’s why I typed Mick Herron’s work into my computer a while back (see the previous chapter), so that I could learn how someone else did things.

The more tools you have in the toolbox, the better writer you will be.

If you don’t read much fiction or you don’t read much fiction anymore, as so many writers say, then you’ve stopped accumulating tools. As long as I breathe, I will be reading. And the fascinating part to me is that I see writers do things that I thought were impossible or things I’ve never thought of. Or, Mick Herron’s case, he does things that someone, somewhere, decades ago, had warned me away from. (The opening to each Slough House book is an astonishing exercise in setting the stage as well as the characters and the themes of each book.)

Here’s the tough part. Once you sound like yourself, your writing will seem bland to you. Because you live with that voice in your head each and every day.

So that’s the voice part.

That’s the first part of sounding like yourself.

The second part is this: You must defend your voice, your “sound.” Sure, it might be “wrong” to use a dozen semi-colons in a single paragraph, but Herron does it to such great effect (sometimes in a single sentence) that the reader doesn’t notice them.

I didn’t realize the man uses a million semi-colons until I typed in his work. I’m semi-colon lite, dash heavy, which, I thought, made me a much more breathless writer than he is, but his work continually proves me wrong.

I’m sure some silly copy editor somewhere tried, once upon a time, to edit out all of his semi-colons and to make his honkin’ long single-sentence paragraphs into many sentences, and from what I can tell, the man slapped them down.

There’s another component to voice, though, and it has nothing to do with words and grammar and punctuation. It’s subject matter. It’s characterization. It’s something I discussed after the Herron piece. It’s the ability to “go there,” wherever there is. (See chapter 10.) To write the stuff that frightens us, that makes us original, that might get us in trouble with the readers or in some cases, the government.

It’s the stuff that doesn’t fall into genre lines.

I was having a discussion a few weeks back with someone I was considering working with on a future project. That person insisted we use trope charts, like so many writers have started to do in Kickstarters.

Tropes are well and good, if used sparingly. As a romance reader, I want to see—either from the sales copy or from a trope listing—that the book in my hand uses the enemies-to-lovers trope or is a small-town romance. I want to avoid a guardian-ward historical trope because…yucky!

So a one-line description or acknowledgement of the trope is a good thing, especially in books where the ending is prescribed, like a romance (happily ever after) or a cozy mystery (amateur solves a stakes-free murder).

But other than that—a tropes chart? You might as well put two gigantic signs on your work. The first sign says, Read something else because this book is on rails. The second sign says, This book is mediocre. There are no surprises here. There’s a third sign, but only if someone dares to crack open a book based on a tropes chart. And that sign says This writer has no idea what tropes are. The ones listed here are not in the book.

Whoops.

Writers who sound like themselves can’t write books that can be boiled down into a tropes chart. Sure, the overall trope might work because that might form the heart of the book. (I’m thinking of enemies to lovers here in a romance trope.) But going beyond that would harm the reading experience if the writer is writing from their heart.

That’s why writers who are really good at sounding like themselves often have trouble selling their fiction to set markets, particularly traditional markets. Those markets want something they can sell, and a book that’s on rails is easier to market to a consumer than a book that is, at its core, like nothing a reader has ever seen before.

That’s why this quote comes from Miles Davis. His website has this sentence on the home page:

Miles Davis made music that grew from an uncanny talent to hear the future and a headstrong desire to play it.

Note the phrases here. “Uncanny talent.” In other words, he did things no one else dared. “Hear the future.” I might disagree with that one on some level, because on that level, Davis invented the future that his website claimed he heard. And, the most important phrase, “a headstrong desire to play it.”

Later this little biographical snippet points out that Davis never stopped fighting for his art. That’s my memory of him. He wasn’t as respected in his lifetime as he became later, even though no one dared argue with the impact he was having. I worked in listener-sponsored radio in Wisconsin and was immersed in jazz. We could play all kinds of jazz for our listeners and they supported the programming with their dollars.

The other local jazz station was much more conservative. They played traditional melodic jazz, things we call standards now, and would go to modern jazz after 10 p.m. when most Midwesterners went to bed. Even then, you wouldn’t find a lot of Miles Davis on that station. The powers that be loathed his work.

I think that’s the other side of this. You have to become good enough to force people to have opinions about your work. “Having opinions” means they’ll love it or they’ll hate it. What is most important, though, is that they won’t forget it.

These mediocre, “properly written” works? The ones with the voice edited out of them, with the vision troped to death? Those will be forgotten the moment that the reader closes the book.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be accused of being mediocre. Love or hate my work, that’s up to the reader. But finding it dull or predictable…well, then, I’ve done something wrong.

The second quote from Miles Davis is my favorite. I think it might more accurately reflect what he’s getting at, especially if you’re familiar with his music.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Yeah, I know. He’s talking about playing music, often onstage. He was the master of improvisation, but even in the improvisation, the listener knew they were listening to Miles Davis. His perspective was that original.

But what I love here is the word “play.” I love watching jazz musicians in particular improvise. Somewhere in the middle of what they’re doing, they’ll grin at each other. They’re having fun. They’re creating something new, something unexpected, and it gives them joy.

This type of musicianship is why I don’t miss a Keith Urban residency when he’s in Las Vegas. He performs intensely and playfully, goofing around much more than other residency performers I’ve seen. I wasn’t a big fan (or much of a fan at all) when I first saw him perform, and now I go to watch the playful musicianship.

Writers need to play as well. We need to experiment. We need to risk failure. We need to jangle some chords, try a different instrument, and go far, far, far off the beaten path.

That means we’ll miss sometimes, but it also means that when we hit, the work will be powerful.

When I talk about play, I’m not saying that writers should only write something light and “fun.” Instead, I’m talking about experimentation, about risking everything, about free-floating ideas from our own subconscious even if those ideas make us feel uncomfortable.

We should also go for different formats and different genres, different lengths and different ideas than we’ve explored before. We might not be onstage riffing with our friends, but we should write in that same spirit of improvisational play.

We need to be uniquely ourselves as writers. And as Miles Davis said (and yes, he wrote his own stuff), it takes a long time to achieve that.

But finding yourself as a writer? That’s worth the time spent.

“Sounding Like Yourself” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

If you like what you see here, head over to the campaign. You’ll find it here.

You know what? Even if you don’t like the video, head over to the campaign. There’s lots to love in it.

Enjoy!

Got introduced to some marvelous playwrights and some fascinating theater history as well. Also had to wrestle with more bad writer behavior from some of them. I’m going to include two, one amazing woman and a man with a difficult history. 

Fewer articles than usual. Maybe I just wasn’t in an article-recommending mood.

So here’s April’s reading. It’s quite a cornucopia.

April, 2026

Canfield, David, “Love The Sinner,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 11, 2026. This is an interview with Ryan Coogler, written before the Oscar ceremony. It’s worthwhile to see how one of the most creative artists in film approaches story, imposter syndrome, and business negotiations. He got an amazing deal from Warner Bros. last year. About it, The Hollywood Reporter says:

Driven by both the movie’s themes (Sinners) and the evolution of his own career, Coogler negotiated to have Warner Bros. return the rights to him 25 years after release — an uncommon, if hardly unprecedented, arrangement that nonetheless sparked endless debate about its merits both for him, despite his strong track record, and for an embattled Warner Bros.

And yet, he pulled it off. Ask and see what will happen. That’s the art of negotiation. Now, read the article.

Carter, Ally, Only The Good Spy Young, Little, Brown and Company, 2010. I continue to work my way through Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, which takes place at a boarding house for spies. Things are getting real by this, Book 4. I found it a bit distressing, because no one trusted a character that had been set up as a good person earlier in the series. I truly did not know if the earlier impressions were correct. (Not giving spoilers here.) So the book is effective, and even though I read these late in the day, hoping not to stay up late, I ended up staying up late to finish. It’s a good series, but start with the first book.

Carter, Stephen L., The Emperor of Ocean Park, Vintage Contemporaries, 2002. I’ve been planning to read this novel for nearly 25 years. But the cover put me off—or something did. I’ve read other books of Carter’s and liked them. Then I picked up a later work, and saw a mention that it was tied to this one, and thought, “Okay, time to read this book first.”

I’m glad I did. It was a deliberately slow read. (John Grisham’s blurb calls it a legal thriller. Um, no. It’s a legal meanderer.) Mostly it’s a family saga, beautifully written, with characters so vivid they leap off the page. My favorite is our protagonist, Talbot Garland’s son, Bentley, who is only three. I’m guessing that Carter’s son was three at the time the book got written, because this three-year-old sings off the page–all the good and bad things about three-year-olds are here, delightfully so. The love that Talbot has for his son is the best thing about the book, which also shows that no matter how much you love your children, the way you live your life can have an unforeseen impact on them. Bentley makes it to the end, but that charming three-year-old eventually turns four in a different circumstance.

Circling around all of this is the ghost of Talbot’s father, a judge who was nominated to serve on (it seems) Reagan’s Supreme Court, until a scandal that happened in the middle of his hearings brought him down. Rather like Robert Bork, only if Bork had been Black, adding an entire racial component. The judge dies under what some believe to be mysterious circumstances and there’s quite a bit of drama around fake FBI agents and detectives and a university that seems…well…familiar.

The only problem I had with this book is that it felt normal. At the time it was published, it must have been shocking. A corrupt judge that close to the court? Murder? People being uncivil in government, lying about who they are? The book almost seems prescient.

I really, really enjoyed the time I spent with the book and miss visiting it now that I finished.

Grynbaum, Michael M., Empire of the Elite, Simon & Schuster, 2025. Well, I have two ugly covers on this list, and this is, by far, the ugliest. However, the book is fascinating. Empire of the Elite is the history of Condé Nast, from its start 100 years ago or so to now. If you’re a writer who has been at this for more than two decades, back when the New Yorker and Vanity Fair were actually important magazines, you might want to read this. Not just for the dishy (but sourced) gossip, but for the reason that you—a member of the Great Unwashed who did not hang out in rarified circles—could never succeed over the transom. Just the amount of money spent to maintain the illusion of taste and power is breathtaking, even in 2026 terms.

Dunno about the rest of you, but I’m thrilled that we do not live in this curated world any longer. Still, the book itself is quite the publishing education.

Johnson, Georgia Douglas, A Sunday Morning in The South, University of Illinois Press, 2024. Play written in 1924/25. Sadly, while I had heard of a number of writers from the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, I had never heard of Georgia Douglas Johnson. She was exceedingly influential, holding salons and working with younger writers. This play, which is one of her anti-lynching plays, is a gut-punching read. I’d love to see it performed. The book, which is not where I read the play (we got an excerpt from a different book), contains two states—a Black church version and a white church version. I do hope you read this, and when you do, realize that it was a contemporary play, not a historical one. She was dealing with a very real issue 100 years ago, and doing so powerfully.

The play is set in a family kitchen near a church. The music filters in as the grandmother cooks breakfast and talks with her grandchildren. The action is startling and much-too-true. The play’s characters are rich and her writing is amazing, so that you can visualize the show easily while reading the script.

Odets, Clifford, Waiting for Lefty, 1935. I couldn’t find an ebook version, so I linked to a Grove/Atlantic version from 1994. Another political play. Like A Sunday Morning in the South, this feels too on point for where we are in 2026. (Sigh) This is a play of a union meeting—written before Waiting for Godot. Lefty is a union leader who might authorize a strike vote against a taxi-cab company. While everyone waits, they talk about the reasons they need to be paid more.

The structure of the play caught me. Little vignettes in the middle have just as much power as the play overall. I’m still thinking about the format.

Odets himself is a controversial figure. He, along with Elia Kazan, named names in the 1950s blacklist era. There were reasons they did so in the way that they did, but it didn’t play well with the blacklisted authors. (Or others, for that matter.) As we were studying this, I kept thinking, Why do I know his name? so I looked him up after class and realized why I did. It’s fascinating to have the hindsight on a lot of these writers. We also dealt with Bertold Brecht this month, and wowza, was he a piece of work. Still thinking on all of this…

Schmitt, Preston, “How To Win A Nobel Prize,” specifically “Mr. & Mrs. Lederberg,” On Wisconsin, Winter, 2025. When the idiots in the Trump administration started cutting funding for universities (and continue to cut funding for science. Bastards.), most universities have found ways to fight back.The University of Wisconsin is using its alumni magazine to point out how significant the research is, was, and can be. On the was side of the equation is this article, about all the Nobels the university has won. Normally, I wouldn’t point this out, but there is a very sad middle to the entire thing. The only woman on the list, Esther Lederberg, did not win a Nobel. Her husband did in 1958 for work they did together. In fact, she’s the one who made the breakthrough discovery, not him. Take a look at this, please, and do what you can to make sure that things like this never happen again.

Score, Lucy, Mistakes Were Made, Bloom Books, 2026. I forgot that, when I preordered this, I ordered the Amazon special edition, planning to get the regular paperback later. I ended up with, bar none, one of the ugliest books I’ve ever seen. Click over and take a look. Whoever designed it apparently loved yellow. The book screams at you from across the room. I also forgot, until just now, that Lucy Score is an Amazon-exclusive ebook writer, and was picked up by Bloom Books for her paperbacks only. So I’m linking to Amazon so that you can get the ebook. Frustrating as hell.

The book arrived this month, just as I was thinking I needed something light. This is light and funny. Score can write situations that are completely unbelievable, but work. And her dialogue sparkles. There was one too many iterations of will-they-won’t-they, but I was committed. This, in theory, is about an agent who moves to a small town to deal with her one and only client. Yeah, that happens. So suspend your disbelief.

Some good stuff here about living with ADHD, about forgiveness, and about the way lives can be destroyed in a single moment. So behind the humor is some good, if tough, stuff.

The book is exclusive to the Storybundle—meaning that at the moment, you can’t get it anywhere else. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites in a few weeks. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post, which first appeared on this site in slightly different form, is from January of 2015, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Churning It Out

Toward the end of a pretty good Entertainment Weekly article about the romance side of the publishing industry, this sentence appears:

[Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer—on average she churns out four to six books a year—and she released the first one in June 2011.

Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one thing that might or might not be related: There’s a slight snobby tone to EW’s romance article. What’s that all about? The magazine’s called Entertainment Weekly. It’s not The New York Times Book Review. EW sings the praises of The Walking Dead and video games, and everything in between, for heaven’s sake, but somehow romance fiction doesn’t meet the high standards of entertainment?

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.

As I said, the article, “A Billion-Dollar Affair,” by Karen Valby, appeared in the October 24, 2014 issue, and did cover the romance industry (of the time) pretty well. (And is still available online.)

So why am I objecting to that single sentence?

I’m not, really. It’s a common sentence from any media that covers books. And I’m not even objecting to the entire sentence. Bella Andre does write fast by most writers’ standards, and she does so comfortably.

What I’m objecting to is the phrase “churned out.”

It’s become a cliché. Any writer who writes fast “churns out” material. Or she “cranks out” or “pounds out” whatever it is that she writes. Because clearly, no writer who writes fast can think about what she writes.

There are other implications in that phrase. The material “churned out” isn’t very good. Anything “churned out” is an exact copy of what has come before. It has no real value, primarily because of the speed with which the writer “churns out” the material.

In the olden days of traditional publishing, those of us who “churned out” a lot of books did so under a lot of pen names. Here’s how it worked in my case: Kristine Kathryn Rusch might, at best, put out two books per year; Kris Nelscott one every two years; and Kristine Grayson one every six months.

Most reviewers never noticed all the short stories or blog posts or nonfiction. Only a handful of people (including my agents back when I was stupid enough to hire them) knew that I wrote under other pen names as well.

While reading a midlist thriller novel in bed one night several years ago, I laughed so hard that I woke Dean up. What made me laugh? The author’s bio, which stated that the byline of the novel I was reading was a pen name for a “well-known #1 New York Times bestselling author.” Ballsy and hysterical. That writer wrote so many books that his publisher refused to publish them all under the author’s bestselling name.

Or maybe the publisher never got a chance. Because I later discovered who the author in question was (and that’s why I’m not naming the book here), and discovered that the author had nearly a dozen pen names, and kept them all quiet—except for that coy little bio for at least one of them.

In the opening to Bag of Bones (first published in 1998), Stephen King writes that his main character, a bestselling novelist, kept one novel in the drawer for every novel he published, since his publisher was demanding that he publish no more than one book per year.

Think about this, people: How many other industries that have mega-selling products demand that the producer of popular, high-quality material slow down? What happened to providing the consumers with what they wanted?

When Nora Roberts started out, she was fortunate to begin with Harlequin, which could publish as many books as she produced. She stayed with Harlequin even after she moved to a bigger publisher (Bantam) for a once-per-year hardcover, which then became a once-per-year hardcover and twice-a-year mass market paper, and then became twice-a-year hardcovers and three-times-a-year mass market paper, and finally, she had a big fight with Harlequin, and started up the J.D. Robb pen name (twice per year) and her publisher (by then, Putnam) threw in the towel. The publisher finally agreed that Nora could put out a lot of books. But the publisher’s other writers couldn’t.

Nora Roberts’ speed didn’t matter to that publisher because the publisher had no expectation of quality based on the genre. As we all know, and Entertainment Weekly’s snobby tone confirms, romance is trash anyway. No one expects quality fiction from writers who crank out cookie-cutter books for women.

You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. I’m old enough to have read the trade journals as romance got its start as a genre, as the Romance Writers of America (founded in 1980) fought for recognition from publishers, as romance readers slowly realized that they were marketing force that had a lot of clout.

Romance has a lot of respect now compared to the 1980s—and still writers see phrases like “churned out” and that slightly school-boyish tone that every Literary Critic uses when discussing romance.

It’s about love and mushy stuff. It can’t be good. It might include kissing and touching and actual irony-free emotion. Anyone can churn out that crap if they put their minds to it. But most people are sensible enough to want respectability instead of…whatever it is that these romance people have.

Oh, yeah. Money.

And readers.

Who actually like the books.

I have taken exception to that snobbish attitude for my entire career. I’ve written essay after essay about it in all kinds of journals and magazines. I’ve written some business blogs on it too.

Back when I was writing those essays, the attitude was merely annoying. Savvy writers could get past it with the judicious use of pen names, and make not just a living, but a substantial living. As in earning mid-six figures or more, simply by hiding the fact that the fast writers wrote more than one book per year.

That snobbish attitude has always been harmful to writers who wanted to make a living. But in my mind, that snobbery always went hand-in-hand with a desire to be recognized over a desire to have a full-time writing career. The writers who wanted to make a living figured out how to handle the respectability argument while “churning out” a lot of books. The writers who wanted respectability and labored over each word never left their day jobs.

Now, however, that snobbish attitude has become actively harmful to writers. Most of the ways that books sell to readers have broken down. The traditional publishing systems have lost their impact. The old-fashioned way that publishers advertised books—that one-size-fits-all method—no longer works. Bookstores don’t window titles much anymore, if a reader can find a brick-and-mortar bookstore that sells new titles within driving distance of home.

Because books are available all the time rather than for only a few months, readers pay less attention to release dates than ever before. Readers have always read a book when they felt like it, and not a moment sooner. But in the past, readers had to buy the book when they saw it, because they might never find a copy again.

So, even if readers didn’t read the book for a year or more, readers still had to buy it in that limited time window.

Not any longer. Readers can make a note of the title, realize it’s been published, and buy it days or hours or minutes before reading it. That really changes the way that the publishing industry markets books—or it should.

It hasn’t yet, entirely, anyway. But the industry is starting to get a clue.

Event books, the ones that publishers convinced the media to promote, are no longer events. The numbers to become a bestseller are much, much lower than they were in 2007.

Lists matter, but less and less as readers discover their books in other ways.

And one of the major ways that readers discover a book? E-mail alerts or notifications that scroll across the reader’s favorite online retailing site—alerts and notifications tailored to that reader.

No longer do we all get notification of the top five books on The New York Times bestseller list. Now, we get science fiction (if that’s what we read) or romance or mystery. We get notifications about our favorite author’s latest book, not the latest release from some author whose work we would never, ever, ever read.

The notifications come from bots designed by the retailers. What provokes those bots to let a reader know about an author? Publication of her latest work. The bots always send readers a note that an author they have bought before (through that retailer) has released a new book.

The reader might not buy that book immediately, but the book might go on a wish list. It might be put in reserve until the reader has the cash to order or the time to read.

Another change in the way people buy books also has to do with unlimited availability. All readers indulged in binge reading of a new-to-them author, but in the past, that binge reading was combined with treasure hunting.

Whenever I discovered a new writer whose work I liked, I’d read what was easily available, then I’d go to the library to see what it had. Libraries never had the complete oeuvre because, like bookstores, they have limited shelf space. So I’d dig through every used bookstore in every town I visited until I got each and every book by that author.

Or as close to each and every book as I could get.

Other readers did the same.

Now, readers can order every book that a favorite author has written, whether that author has written five books or hundreds. That fear writers have, the fear that readers won’t respect the work if it doesn’t take years to complete, is silly when looked at from a reader’s perspective.

Readers want to escape from their lives for a few hours. They might want to read a beautiful well-written slow-moving literary novel or they might want to read a fast-paced hard-to-believe thriller. But readers want the book when they’re ready to relax. If they liked that book, they want another by the same author. The author becomes a known quantity, and the reader wants more.

Binge-reading has become an all-consuming activity, just like binge-watching. And the best way to get noticed as a writer is to publish enough to enable your readers to binge for a weekend.

But the idea of writing a lot is the opposite of the way that most writers are trained. Writers are told to slow down, think about every word, consider every sentence. Writers are taught to forget story because story is something that hack writers do.

Hack writers can “churn” out words because words are unimportant to them.

Real writers write so slowly that they might only compose a paragraph per day.

Real writers who have day jobs and who still believe myths spouted in the 19^th century.

Real 19^th-century writers who are still read today, like Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, got paid by the word, so they wrote a lot of words, for a lot of publications. These writers wrote fast long hand, and they “churned out” a lot of stories we no longer read.

But they also “churned out” stories that all of us still read.

That little phrase, “churned out,” holds so much disrespect. Deadly disrespect, because writers who hear that phrase—and use it themselves—won’t be able to survive in this new world.

The 21^st century is not leisurely, although we have more leisure time than ever. Can you remember the name of the “important” literary novel of five years ago? Ten? Without looking it up? I didn’t think so.

Yet, I can still name the important literary novels of forty years ago, because they got all the press, and I do mean allthe press.

It’s impossible to get all of the press now. The best way to get attention is to give your readers what they want. If they like your work, they want more of it.

If they want more of it, the only person who can give them more is you.

And the only way to do that is to write a lot, whatever that means for you.

One sure way to teach yourself to write at a comfortable pace is to clean up your language. Watch every word. Make sure you’re using the right phrase—when you’re talking about writing.

Clean “churned out” from your vocabulary. Don’t say you “cranked out” a novel. Don’t apologize for writing fast. Don’t tell anyone how long it took to finish a novel.

Write and release.

The only people who judge fiction writers for how fast they write are people for whom reading isn’t something they do for enjoyment but for prestige. They want to impress others with their literary acumen.

I don’t know about you, but I want readers who get lost in the story, not readers who have already determined that I’m a hack because I don’t write at the proper speed or in the proper genre or with the proper attention to language.

Enjoy your writing. Take as much—or as little—time as you like to compose your stories.

Because how you created the story doesn’t matter. How much readers enjoy the story does. Readers don’t care if it took you one week to write that story or fifteen years. All readers want is escape.

And it’s your job to provide it.

“Churning It Out” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

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