Shukyou
shukyou (主教) is the pseudonym of ladysisyphus/Whitney Bishop/W2. She has been the editor of the f/f Special Issues since 2008 and editor-in-chief of the whole project since 2010.
Her personal website is Letters From the Wasteland, though her AO3 page is updated much more frequently. Her Twitter is @ladysisyphus and her Tumblr is ladysisyphus.tumblr.com. Her Goodreads author page is goodreads.com/shukyou.
Contributions
shukyou has written or co-written the following stories:
- The Amanuensis
- And All the King's Men
- And That's the News (co-written with Tsukizubon Saruko)
- Anthracosis
- Are You Now or Have You Ever Been
- Bless Your Heart
- Bodies in Space
- Bright Mouths
- Busted (co-written with Domashita Romero)
- c:\rano.bergerac
- Duet for Tenor and Transradial Orthosis
- Eve
- Heist of the Century
- Heterogenesis
- Ibeji
- The Jazzman's Last Jive
- Knight
- The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell
- The Mechanical Turk
- Mike Dies At The End
- Murder Ballad
- Navid Arash Taraghijah: Still Life With Chair (I-XXV)
- One False Move
- The Only Living Boy In New York
- The Passion of Saints Tryphaena and Tryphosa
- A Prescription for Love
- Pyrophoric
- Rain Dogs (script for comic by detonate)
- Real Time
- The Red Scare
- The Red Woman
- Riding Drag
- The Sad Blanket
- Sid Stills' Blues (Three-Quarters in the Bag in Alphabet City)
- Six Sundays in July
- so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen
- The Soul of Jonathan
- Stack Whackers
- The Stone Fox and the Bloody Hands (co-written with Tsukizubon Saruko)
- Terlingua
- This Story Is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don't Read It
- This Thing Of Ours
- This Year's Prom King
- Throwing Smoke
- Up the Garden Path
- A Voice in the Wilderness
- War Bonds
- Welcome Back, Class of 1990
- The White Palace
- Yellow Fever
- zero six four eight three are you listening
- 心也許很小很小世界卻很大很大
On Writing
I like to roll around in language, much to my word count’s horror, which is why sometimes these stories seem a little truncated—SSBB’s got a 128k character limit, done in two 64k entries, and there are times I’ve been cutting individual letters to make my stories fit. It’s a technical limitation, not a personal rule, or else as editor I’d bend it all the time. The reason stories like Sid Stills' Blues (Three-Quarters in the Bag in Alphabet City) and The White Palace are so long, though, is that once a year we lift the limit and do stories that span more than two entries (sort of a pain in the butt, which is why we only do it in December). I feel what I do well is voice, in that each narrator, whether first- or third-person opining, has a distinct set of vocabulary, idioms, observations, and unvoiced thoughts.
The other thing about my work for SSBB in particular is that, well, sometimes it’s NOT my best work. But that’s why I like SSBB as a project: it forces me to write, and then it forces me to move on. I can sit on a story and pick it to pieces if you give me infinite editing time, and have done so before; however, if a story’s been published, well, it’s been published, and there’s nothing for it now but to drop it, warts and all, and move on to whatever I’m doing next. Of course, I try to make everything as pretty as I can before it goes to press, but you know, sometimes I’m crunched for time or I’m editing everyone else’s stories or (as with Eve and A Prescription For Love) I last-minute wrote a story because I felt the issue was going to be too thin. And that’s okay! Sometimes I write stories for one person, and if that person was brought amusement and joy by it, to hell with what everyone else thinks.
But just damn WRITING has made me a better writer. I was a good fanfic writer, but that’s worlds different from being a good fiction author. My early SSBB stories make me cringe, because I could see how to do them better now, and at least one of them I really do want to go back and revamp someday. (There was also the problem that early SSBB stories were capped at 64k, period, but a lot of mine wanted to be longer.) So on the one hand, it’s kind of embarrassing to look back and see how crummy I was, and on the other hand, hey, progress!
