Pete Wood is an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he
lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our
pages was “Mission Accomplished,” in the now out-of-print Stupefying Stories #6. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to becoming a
regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us
things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get
them.
For the past few years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first and foremost with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from The Brahma, and on, and on. Along the way he’s introduced us to the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Kimberly Ann Smiley, Kai Holmwood, Brandon Case, Jason Burnham, and many, many more. We suspect Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow this link.
[Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker]
With all the attention we’ve been paying to The Pete Wood Challenge lately, this seemed like an opportune time to catch up with Pete and ask him our usual batch of half-serious, half-silly questions.
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SS: What is the first SF/F book or story you remember reading?
PW: That’s tough. I used to go to the bookmobile a couple of times a week and check out fairy tales when I was in first or second grade. Then I moved onto fantasy and science fiction. The first science fiction book may have been Danny Dunn, kid genius who developed all sorts of cutting edge technology from time machines to shrink rays. Or it may have been a paperback novelization of the 1960s television show, The Time Tunnel. I remember reading The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet in fourth grade. A bunch of us did. The first serious science fiction book that really stuck with me might be The Infinite Worlds of Maybe, by Lester Del Ray, or the story “Frost and Fire,” by Ray Bradbury. [Nb: You’ll find that one, along with a lot more stories that are iconic now, in Bradbury’s R is for Rocket.]
SS: When you write a new story, are you a plotter or a pantser?
PW: I’ve always been a pantser. I develop the characters first and then a concept and let the characters lead me where they want to go. My last two novellas have been heavily plotted with the characters thrust into the plot after the fact. That’s a tougher way to write, I think, because the characters can’t act naturally if their fates have already been predestined.
SS: Of everything you've had published, which book or story of yours is the one you are most proud of? Where can readers find it?
PW: “The Less Than Divine Invasion,” published in the January/February 2023 issue of Asimov’s. This story took ten years to write. It started out as a novel and ballooned up to 40,000 words before I had to admit it just wasn’t working. I cut it back to 18,000 eventually. I had to massacre my darlings, but I think it ended up being a damned good story. It’s about an incredibly ill-conceived (and I hope reasonably comical) alien invasion that starts in a small town in North Carolina.
SS: Do you listen to music while writing? If so, what kinds of music or which artists?
PW: I listen to albums or just a mix of certain artists. Back in college, I put on the Moody Blues LP of Days of Future Passed to write. That’s still an option, but my new favorite is probably Making Movies by Dire Straits. Kinda mellow, kinda profound and never too intrusive. A good Steely Dan mix is nice too.
SS: What feels like your best natural length for a story?
PW: Flash. I love a good flash story. I can crank out a flash piece in an hour or so if I am lucky. You can pack a lot into flash if you try. I have a lot more respect for decent flash than stories or (God help us) novels that run on forever and have endless sequels. That’s why I love doing the Challenges for Stupefying Stories. The diverse takes on the prompts are fun and fascinating.
SS: If you could snap your fingers and make one cliché, trope, or plot gimmick vanish, which one would it be?
PW: Sexism. I find it just depressing that so many golden age stories and novels have no female characters. In so many, the women are window dressing or sex objects. I gave up a third of the way through Stranger in a Strange Land, because Heinlein didn’t have a clue what women are like. Sadly, there’s still a lot of sexism going on. Women characters and authors have much more of a voice, but we still haven’t gone nearly far enough.
SS: Thank you for your time, and just in case we haven’t plugged it enough, here’s the link to every Pete Wood Challenge story we’ve published so far. There are more than 200 stories in this list, all free to read for the cost of a click on a link. Check it out!
The Pete Wood Challenge Story Index (So Far)
Heads up: from Sunday, October 27 to Thursday, October 31, Stupefying Stories #26 will be FREE on Kindle. You don't even have to be a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, it will just plain be FREE on Kindle for those five days. For those same five days we will be running a variety of discount deals for Stupefying Stories #23, #24, and #25.
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2 comments:
Thank you for calling out Stranger in a Strange Land! (I know that that wasn’t the primary purpose of this interview but…) I read it as a teen and thought “This? This vapid misogynistic piece of garbage is what everyone has been talking about all these years?” (I do like when he examines why we laugh - I’ll admit that). And while much old school science fiction struggled with female characters, at least those other works had genuine merit (Brave New World and the like). But Stranger in a Strange Land has always irked me. Thank goodness for Ursula K Le Guin…
Hey, thanks for reading the interview! I agree with you. I'm alsoa big Le Guin fan. My favorite of her novels is probably The Lathe of Heaven.
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