Icarus’s Labyrinth

It's not goodbye . . .

2011-07-09T03:45:00.002-04:00

Way back on March 14th of 2008, I set out to document my renewed commitment to a dream that kept popping up every few years, every time I thought I'd successfully smothered it and locked it into a trunk in my attic: I wanted to be a writer. I saw some folks around me have some success, and I became convinced that the only thing holding me back was myself--that if I let my obsession thrive, my writing would improve and I would find that selling your writing was not some pie-in-the-sky thing that only happened to those strangers whose names line the shelves in Barnes and Noble. It was actually a few months before March (*gasp* Pi Day!) when I got serious, but by March I was starting to see results, and starting to believe I was on the right track. I started to believe I was on the road to somewhere, and so I set out to document my observations.

Now I still haven't reached my writing goals. And when I do succeed in convincing somebody to buy my words, I know I'll have new goals in my sites. But I've been thinking for some time just the same that it was time for a new kind of web presence. This blog was, as I noted in that first post, intended to be a diary of sorts, that other people were welcome to read, but a diary specifically of my writing journey. The journey continues, but I've begun to want other things out of a website. I knew all along that this blog was likely of little interest to anybody but me, and I said right at the beginning that I wasn't looking to create an every-day what's-going-on-in-my-life kind of blog. In the time that's passed, though, I've begun to interact more and more online, commenting on other people's blogs, having a ton of fun at facebook, and lastly really getting into twitter. There are real communities out there: communities of writers, of readers, and of all around cool people. And I'm finding that after three-plus years, I want to broaden my scope.

On the other hand, I don't want to lose the period in my growth that this blog was always intended to chronicle, and so I've decided that the best thing to do is keep this blog for as long as Blogger/Google maintains the space, but develop a new website for most of my future online interaction.

I've spend the last couple of days tinkering with WordPress and I'm finally ready to start pointing people to that new page: labyrinthrat.com. If you're one of the half-dozen or so people who seem to have gotten something out of reading my blog over the last few years, I hope you'll follow me on my new one. Since it's going to be larger in scope, I hope to have a lot more to share with people over there. If I currently trade links with you, I've gone ahead and linked your webpage/blog on the new site. Those of you who link to me, if you'd update your links I'd be grateful.

I'm not entirely done with this blog. There are some milestones I haven't reached yet, and when I do, those observations really belong here. But there won't be very many more posts here in the future. This is not goodbye, but it is a transition.

I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some Happy News

2011-06-21T07:31:00.004-04:00

I can't bury this deep within the post like I'm typically inclined to, because I'm just too excited: I have an agent!!

Ahem.

I actually got two offers of representation, the first of which came on June 10th, so I've been keeping this under my hat until I'm fit to burst.

The first agent tried to call me on the last teacher work day before summer vacation. I had left my desk to run some errands--drop off paperwork and get signatures, and I very consciously left my phone on my desk, because what could I possibly need it for, right? When I came back, I saw I had missed a call . . . hm, New York/New Jersey area code . . . as I played the voice mail, it gradually dawned on me that I was receiving The Call. I'm surprised I didn't kick my desk over in my excitement. I let out a whoop that neighboring teachers could hear in their classrooms--and let me assure you, I am not generally given to whooping.

That call came from an agent I had met in person at Backspace--so you see? Go to Backspace!--who works at a fantastic house that is closed to queries unless they meet you at a conference--you see? Go to Backspace! This house was high on my list because they rep not only what I've written, but everything I could see myself possibly wanting to write some day, and because they had a fantastic reputation everywhere I looked.

For the rest of the day, I was not fit to work at all--but I still had a deadline! I had to call Lisa to come over when she was done and help me, and while I got my grades turned in on time, I was about five minutes late turning in my keys and had to wait until Monday to turn them in and get that last paycheck of the year.

So I went home and informed the other agents looking at my work that I had an offer now, and stood back and watched the flurry of activity. I did have one vaguely snarky reply, slapping my wrists for my presumption in nudging, but otherwise everybody was nice and enthusiastic. Even the agents who stepped aside did so with very kind words for my writing and my story, and a few said they simply didn't have time to get back to me within the time frame that I intended to get back to the offering agent. Within a week I had a second offer! Yay! Proof the first agent wasn't high on crack when she called me!

I always thought having any offer at all was a dream come true, but that having more than one--having a choice of agents--must just be sitting on cloud nine. I confess I wasn't terribly sympathetic when my wife went through this several months before. Now I know. You may not, though, and if not then you probably won't get how much anxiety this caused in me. For one thing, with choice comes the possibility of regret. Would I make the right choice? Almost more importantly, in this case, is I really have little stomach for letting people down. Here are two professionals who both loved my novel enough to offer to invest their time and resources into helping it see the light of day! Before last week I could count on one hand the number of people who'd read the full manuscript of Vanishing Act. To have somebody read it and love it and tell me what they loved about it . . . I just can't tell you what it meant to me. I wanted to hug them both; I wanted to give them both whatever they wanted.

Instead, I had to tell one of them that she wasn't my choice.

It was probably harder on me than it was on her. Agents know this is a business, and they know some other book'll come along that they'll love and want to sell. I can't help but feel like a bit of a jerk, though, even though rationally I know this is just how it goes.

Choose I did, though. I can't imagine anybody reading this doesn't already know from facebook or twitter or just from hearing me whooping all the way cross country, but I am now represented by Cameron McClure of the Donald Maass Literary Agency! :) I chose Cameron for a variety of reasons. Cameron had some ideas on how I could make my novel stronger that really resonated with me. As I read her e-mail, I found myself nodding my head and saying, Yes! That would totally make my book better! Also, I like the idea of being agent-cousins with my wife, who is also represented by DMLA. I don't know if most husbands and wives who write are at the same agency or at different ones--the only pair I know offhand is Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier, who are both represented by the Jill Grinberg agency--but it just seems cool to me to keep it in-house, so to speak. And heck, DMLA is also an amazing agency with a fantastic reputation--an agency that represents a boatload of my favorite speculative fiction writers. I'm thrilled to be agent cousins with so many amazing writers!

Two Steps Forward, One Backspace

2011-06-12T23:37:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned a couple posts back, I had the opportunity to attend the Backspace Writers Conference at the end of May. Let me come right out and say that this experience was everything I hoped it would be. I met a lot of awesome aspiring writers, pitched my book to some great agents, and, as much as anything else, walked away with a satisfying feeling of validation.

It really is energizing to spend a few days with writers--aspiring and/or published. In my daily life, so many people really just don't get what this is all about. They ask if I'm "still writing that book" or they don't get why my book hasn't come out yet. Or they suggest I get advice from the person who paid to print up her students' stories and thus calls herself, alternately, an "editor" and an "author." Or they smile and nod but clearly look at this as some foolish pipe dream that any sane person would have given up on by now. "Save me an autographed copy! Get me front row tickets to the movie premiere!" When I talk about looking for an agent, most people don't get what that's about. They think you just go out and hire an agent, or that an agent is some vaguely suspicious thing--"This person gets a percentage? For doing what?" If you do sign with an agent--like my wife did, with Amy Boggs of the Donald Maass agency--many people outside the field don't recognize that as a huge step toward reaching your goal.

The folks you meet at Backspace all get it, though. We all want the same things, and we're all comparing notes and sharing what we've learned. It's so nice to talk about these things and not have to first explain and second have it all sail right over someone's head anyway. (And not feel like people are rolling their eyes, either.) And the mix of people there--besides the aspiring writers there are the agents, the editors, and the published writers. I virtually never felt like I wasn't taken seriously by the pros. I got to hang out by the bar with professionals who understood my dream because it was their dream too, and not so long ago.

It's always hard to come down from that high--from feeling like a writer, dammit for several days in a row. It's a challenge whenever I attend a writers' conference (I can't help but feel like there should be an apostrophe after that S) or, heck, after my crit group meetings. It's not about not liking my day job--I do. But this is a passion too, and it's one that usually has to be fed in stolen moments. Stolen from grading and lesson planning, stolen from cleaning the house, stolen from having a hobby or watching television. Going to Backspace was like mainlining that feeling that I normally only get in small doses.

And I hope it doesn't sound too arrogant to say this, but this trip was also a positive for me because it made me feel like I had the goods for real. Obviously winning a scholarship helped in that department, but just getting the chance to exchange ideas, and to have people look at my work and tell me what was good and what could stand to be improved, all made me feel like it wasn't some pipe dream after all. That's not a competitive thing--writing isn't a zero-sum game, and my success doesn't come at the expense of someone else's.

There was a time when I kept writing once in a while because I couldn't seem to stop for long, but when I had pretty much concluded that I would never be published. That time couldn't be further away now.

I'll end with a pitch of my own, for any novelist who's serious about taking the next step. Go to Backspace. Get as ready as you can first, learn as much as you can, get as polished as you can. It's a good experience and a good education either way, but you'd be wise to prepare yourself to get the most from it. And save up, obviously. But even if you have to pay for it yourself, this conference is worth every penny. My only caveat is, do your damnedest to have a product worth selling. A good manuscript, a polished log line, and if you're shy, whatever source of personal courage you have to find to enable you to walk right up to people and start a conversation about your novel. I've seen this experience up close twice now, once when Lisa attended and now for myself, and no other conference I've been to compares.

An experiment in characterization

2011-04-18T17:08:00.004-04:00

Back in January, I had the pleasure of reading Leviathan Wakes (Click on image for link to Indiebound), a full five months ahead of [most of] you nerds. If you're into science fiction and you follow the big releases, you probably already know about this book. If not, you're going to hear about it this year. It's Orbit's feature release this summer, it's already garnered fantastic reviews--including Kirkus, which is famous for being a tough reviewer, and a starred review from Publisher's Weekly--and it's quite possibly the most widely anticipated SF book this year. And check out the blurb from George R-freaking-R Martin! Also? This book simply kicks ass. You should read it. When you can. *snicker*

Anyway, one thing that struck me as I read it was how vivid all the characters are, including the secondary ones. There are two main POV characters, but countless others that we meet throughout the book, including some that only live for a few chapters, and they all feel like real people, with real foibles and distinct personalities.

Not to take anything away from the fantastic writing job that Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (the authors behind the pen name James S. A. Corey) have done, but I can't help but figure that part of that awesome characterization job is rooted in the fact that this story was born as a role playing game, and that many/most/(all?) of the characters were drawn from characters in Franck's campaign. (Daniel Abraham talks about the role-playing campaign that gave rise to the Expanse universe here.)

Now more often than not stories drawn from RPG's are denigrated, but I think that's more about when people take their generic D&D campaigns and attempt to turn them into generic, cliché pseudo-feudal fantasies, complete with elves and dwarves. This is nothing like that. Franck had a sweeping, cinematic background conflict that was as well-thought-out as any novel before the RPG ever got started, as Abraham notes above.

I was one of the many people fortunate enough to play in Ty's rich, rich universe over the years, which is how I came to get an ARC of this six months early. I only came in near the end, and my character does not appear (by name, anyway) in Leviathan Wakes. But I spent several months traipsing around the belt with Captain James Holden, and I'll tell you what--he feels more real to me than some people I know.

Each of us created a character for the campaign, rolling up stats and then inventing a backstory that would put them in the path of the action. We then introduced our characters to each other by writing a vignette starring our character, set some time before our character entered the events of the campaign. The vast majority of the players involved were writers, with varying degrees of publication success, so we all took our characterization seriously, and we each set out to create just one person that would ring true. There wasn't any sense that this or that character was "the girlfriend" or "the sidekick" or "the token" or any of those ruts we can easily fall into as writers when we're creating a whole cast of characters at once, and when we view those characters as a means to an end. In our case as players, the characters were the end.

Which brings me, finally, to my point on characterization. I've tried character sheets. I've tried interviewing my characters. I've tried writing up biographies. I've tried other people's worksheets with questions about a character's goal or what a character learns. Hopefully I haven't made to bad a botch of anything, but I haven't found any of these to be especially useful to me. Characters come alive or not, but months later I find whatever details I wrote down about these characters in some file and realize I never gave this or that trait a second thought. On the other hand, Eddie Suarez, the radical guerrilla liberation theologian I made up for Ty's game, still feels very real to me. I'm confident I could slip right back into his character and write new scenes from his point of view, and they would feel right.

So I'm going to try and duplicate the process I followed with Eddie with my new project. Not by playing an RPG. I think stories that are epic in scale lend themselves to that, but my stories tend to be much more . . . intimate. But in addition to coming up with background sketches for my characters, focusing on the roots of their personalities, I'm going to write little vignettes for each of the major ones from their point of view (whether it's in first or tight third). In Vanishing Act, I never wrote anything where the point of view character was Danny (the antagonist), or Paul (one of the good guys), or Steven (Chris's father). I hope spending some time in those other character's heads will help me make them more than just foils for the protagonist to play off of.

Kind of like Method Acting for writers.

We'll see, right?

Progress Report Time (Contest Win Edition!)

2011-04-15T04:54:00.004-04:00

Allergies have got me up a bit earlier than I'd prefer this morning, so it seems like a good time to get down to something I never quite seem to make it to on my priority list--this blog. Insert here the standard whinge about what a difficult school year this has been in terms of powers that be putting new requirements on our plate that weren't there before without relieving us of any of the old requirements. The smart course of action would be to figure out which of their directives I can get away with ignoring, but I'm too obsessive/compulsive to know how to do that, so instead I drive myself into the ground trying to do every single damn thing. I put in twelve+ hour days every single day, and that's no hyperbole. You'd think that would be enough to be ridiculously together and on top of everything, but really it's just barely enough to tread water. And the worst thing is most days I'm not sure anybody notices how much I'm doing at all.

But enough whining about work--I want to talk about writing!

I've actually done a pretty decent job of making time for writing in spite of the work madness. I've got a new idea for a YA fantasy novel fleshed out and hope to get a running start of several thousand words written before the summer begins. I wish I had a title for it, if for no other reason than so I could come up with a meaningful label for this post.

My most exciting news right now is still about Vanishing Act, though: my query letter and opening pages won Janet Reid's Backspace Contest! My biggest frustration is how few people appreciate what a big deal that is, to me anyway. Lisa went to the Backspace Writers Conference in 2009 and it was an amazing experience. The chance to workshop your query and opening pages with scores of agents, in-depth and all in one venue, seems to work wonders for helping aspiring novelists master that step on the road to publication. I don't know if anybody's tried to collect data on what percent of their participants go on to secure representation and eventual publication, but, anecdotally, their numbers seem to be phenomenal. Indeed, Lisa arrived at Backspace unrepresented, but left with an offer from an agent. She's not the only one.

The Backspace folks have already been in touch with me and they've already been unbelievably enthusiastic and generous. I've won other prizes before--vacations and such--where I felt on arrival that the attitude was, "You're already getting this for free, so don't expect any frills at all." Not so with the Backspace conference. They've made it clear to me that my prize includes any and all parts of the conference that I'm interested in, including the parts that would normally be an extra charge. They've also made me feel as welcome and as valued as any paying customer.

It occurs to me that in all this gushing about the Backspace folks, I really ought to express more appreciation for the folks at Fine Print Lit and Nancy Coffey Lit & Media, not just for choosing me, but for holding this contest every year. I'm not certain who's picking up the tab for me to attend this conference, but we (teachers in my county) haven't had a cost of living increase to our salaries in three years, and now we have to deal in the coming years with attacks on our profession and our salaries from Republicans in our state legislature, and times have gotten increasingly tough for us as the years have passed. Every year it seems we tighten our belts a little more, and only occasionally do we look back in awe at just how much spending power we've lost, bit by little bit. Used to be we could go to the occasional writers' conference, or, hell, take a vacation or something. Used to be we could afford to buy tickets to Disney World right in our own backyard. Used to be we could eat out with some frequency. Now we cross our fingers that next year will still find us living in the same house. It's safe to say there is no way we could afford to send me to a $750-$800 conference (not counting airfare or hotel). This is an awesome opportunity that I would never have if not for this contest. Also? Janet Reid sounds totally nice on the phone, and not like a shark at all.

I can't wait until the end of May!

Relax Mom, It's a Joke

2011-01-08T12:29:00.004-05:00

A few words of explanation: Veronica Roth is holding a contest for an ARC of her new book, Divergent, on her blog. You could get a second entry by posting a picture illustrating a difficult choice. Unfortunately for me, I just found out about it this morning, and I got this idea at 12:15, just minutes before the contest closed. So the only camera I had handy was on my phone, the only prop gun I had handy was from Pirates of the Caribbean, and I'm not sure if you can tell that's one of those tiny rejection slips some agencies send out so they can get twenty rejections out of a single sheet of paper. I'm not sure if it comes across that the choice is between continuing to write and violent action, but that was the intent.

As for me, things are going much better than this photo implies. I'm still a finalist in the contest-that-must-not-be-named, and while I'm receiving my fair share of rejections, I'm getting a respectable amount of not-rejections as well. I've been way too swamped at work to blog much, but I'll try to get back on it soon.

Poetry and Mind Reading

2010-11-26T14:00:00.000-05:00

I was reading a poem that I didn't quite get, but I could get some sense of the meaning and passion behind it, just out of reach, and it occurred to me that if some sort of mind reading were possible, this is what it would be like: Sometimes a message comes through loud and clear and you get it and can either agree or not, or you can at least appreciate it. And sometimes the set of experiences that you'd need for the thought to speak to you are just slightly skew of your own, and you get some vague impressions but at the end of it all you just can't say what it's about. And usually, even when the meaning is reasonably clear, it takes a little bit of intellectual work to unpack it all. I'm not claiming for a moment that this is an original thought, but when I approach it this way, even poetry I don't get provides me with a neat experience.

This is a switch from my experience as a literature major in college and grad school. So much of my schooling focused on decoding poetry, as if we'd intercepted from the front--"If they be two, they are two so/As stiffe twin compasses are two"--"Roger that: the lovers are staying together BRRRSSSCHT!!!" "The white dove sails at dawn" "BRRRSSSCHT!!! Wait--what?!" If you decoded it the same as the professor did, you had succeeded. If you decoded it differently or not at all, you failed. And that's where my discomfort with poetry probably stems from: too much experience of failure. Who likes feeling inept so much?

I've been stumbling across a lot of poetry lately. I suppose discovering Taylor Mali a few months ago reawakened my interest in the form. I don't ever find that I don't know what Mali is talking about. Maybe because he places an emphasis on accessibility, or maybe because, as a teacher, I share enough common background with him that I get what he's talking about.

I'd like to go to a poetry slam sometime, ideally with someone who was into them and knowledgeable. I don't pretend for a moment that I could write anything worthwhile myself, but I'm just enjoying the opportunity to appreciate what others can do. It's a little bit of a relief, actually, to be able to come to art as a consumer only. I think I can maybe appreciate more purely when I'm not thinking about how I would like to do it myself.

And yet . . . and yet part of me wishes I understood the medium better because I'd like to crystallize thought this way. I wrote crappy poetry as a teenager like every angsty, arty kid does. I don't mean that. I mean I wish I had some sense of how to write poetry that captures and evokes something without being self-conscious. Maybe I'd like to experience more poetry in the hopes of getting a sense of how this is done. Lord knows we don't need crappy teen poetry from nearly-forty-year-olds.

Some poetry I've been reading recently, along with how I ended up there:

"On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" by Sherman Alexie. I read this because The Rejectionist posted it on her blog, and I was especially interested because Alexie wrote a YA novel I'm dying to read, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. (You saw what I did there, didn't you?) I have no experience of genocide, but I can thoroughly identify with being a minority who can pass for Anglo, and with having white people say things in front of me they might not say if they realized I wasn't Anglo. So while all of this poem speaks to me, parts of it do so as experiences I share and parts of it as experiences I'm grateful not to share. Here's some more poetry by Alexie: http://www.slipstreampress.org/horses.html
"Love poem in the shape of a cochlear mechanism" by J. Mae Barizo (not a permalink, sorry). I found this poem while looking for more online poetry by Alexie. This poem actually prompted this post, largely because I don't get it. My uncle and aunt are deaf, so I have some passing awareness of what a Cochlear mechanism is and the pros and cons of restoring hearing this way. I feel like I can *almost* sense meaning here, but like I lack some experience that would tie it all together and make it understandable to me. This is what prompted the comparison to mind-reading without the background to make the thoughts intelligible. In the past, coming across a poem like this would make me feel inadequate, like maybe if I were smarter I would get it. This would be followed in short order by anger: This poet is obviously some pseudo-intellectual playing a masturbatory game by stringing together cryptic phrases so that a bunch of snobby elites would stand around and nod thoughtfully, with nobody daring to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Now I'm just appreciating the experience for its very alien-ness.
"Narrative 5" by Paul Guest. Another look inside someone else's head. I like the images here, particularly that of the soaked book and the crude drawing of a bus. I feel like a lot of it sails over my head, but that's okay. I ran across his poem when I followed a link to his excellent rant about the idiocy of the new TSA screening procedures, and his uncomfortable experience with them.
"Song for an Ancient City" and "To the River," by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick, respectively. Elizabeth Bear linked to this page on Twitter, and possibly in her LiveJournal as well. She was linking to "Song for an Ancient City," but I actually found "To the River" more compelling. Later I read here that El-Mohtar wrote "Somg for an Ancient City" as a love song to Damascus and this seemed to emphasize my sense that my ability to "get" poetry depends on my ability to step at least partway into another's shoes*. I'm not going to feel embarrassed if what I took from "To the River" is something other than what Wick intended, or if I missed a world of nuance--because there's the flipside: that our experience of someone else's poetry is our own, neh? I guess the speaker is a ghost or possibly a vampire, but I keyed in on the images of stolen innocence: the ribbon, the knee-socks, the unmade bed. As an adult survivor, these images speak to me. There is a sense, to me anyway, that the speaker is now tempting new victims to the river, which is of course disturbing when I look at the poem in that light. But I focused instead on the confusion embodied in the lines "And I'm hideous and hair-thatched/because I must be trash/for him to throw me to the river/like a used cigarette." Who can't identify with being used and discarded?

Anyway, I don't think I'm fully communicating how much this idea of poetry as imperfect mind-reading changes my appreciation of poetry, but to me it's kind of game changing. It goes beyond a throwaway metaphor. It basically empowers me to enjoy poetry without regard to whether I'm decoding it in the way the author intended, where before I could only enjoy it if it spoke to me perfectly.

*Um, I totally intended to put a footnote here, but now I can't remember what it was. Damn.

Waxing rhapsodic about independent booksellers.

2010-11-25T09:27:00.003-05:00

As part of her series on the changes in the publishing industry, Kristine Kathryn Rusch has more or less your typical paean to independent bookstores, along with all the reasons the rise of superstores and Amazon are a bad thing.

Intellectually I know how the prominence of Barnes & Noble limited the possibilities for the midlist author. If the buyer for Barnes & Noble didn't want to carry your book, then the publisher may as well not bother to publish it. And I know how Amazon throws its weight around to demand bigger discounts, resulting, among other things, in less viability for traditional royalty publishers and lower royalties for authors.

Rusch hasn't quite gotten into all of that yet, but she's got a ton of experience in the publishing world, and I don't doubt her observations as a buyer.

I just haven't experienced it the same way myself.

I remember the days before the box stores well, but I only remember one independent bookseller competing with the Waldenbooks and B. Daltons back then in Miami: Books and Books in Coral Gables. Books and Books is still there. As a teenager, I perceived Books and Books as a place I could go experience indifference from the employees, and to find virtually no science fiction and fantasy. Lots of artsy literary stuff, but none of what I liked. I absolutely received more attentive service from the mall chain.

Maybe the only reason they ignored me was because they didn't perceive teenagers as genuine customers; maybe I'd have had a different experience as an adult, or if I'd brought an adult in with me. Maybe their selection of books changed somewhere along the line. Though I don't live in Miami anymore, I have noticed online that most of the genre signings in Miami seem to end up at Books and Books. Does that mean they're friendlier to the genres, that they're friendlier to signings, or that authors are trying to help them out out of some fetish for independent bookstores?

Waldenbooks and B. Daltons had a pretty terrible selection of just about anything, to be sure. They had like a "club" you could sign up for as a genre reader, though. You got some worthless little card that might have scored you discounts on some things, I can't remember. And a little flimsy magazine-type thing that would talk about upcoming books to look for. The staff pretty much kept behind the counter, but they did seem enthusiastic about books and occasionally about science fiction and fantasy.

Bookstop was the first big bookstore I ever encountered. They also did the genre club thing, as I recall, and they sold the discount card like everyone does now. But their selection was huge! I only had a year or two of shopping there before they were eaten up by Barnes and Noble, but again, a huge selection compared to the mall stores. (And compared to Books and Books.) As a reader barely into his twenties, I loved the place.

I haven't had Rusch's bad experience with B&N employees. Of course, I don't ask for recommendations from them, so that might be part of it. For the most part, my interaction with bookstore employees involves asking where this or that title is, or if they plan on ordering something else, and I suppose that interaction looks the same at one bookstore as it does at another. I do often get engaged in casual conversations about the books I'm buying or looking for, and the staff always strikes me as pretty knowledgeable, actually. I've never worked at a bookstore; during the time in my life when I was working for minimum wage, the closest bookstore involved an hour's drive on the interstate. But it has always struck me as a job that attracts people who love reading, and I've always found that very cool.

Now as an aspiring writer, I know I've got a vested interest (or not technically vested yet, I suppose, but certainly an interest) in what happens to book retailers, and in whichever option increases the likelihood of my making money from my writing. So yeah, go independent bookstores. Rah.

And I'm not saying I disagree with Rusch's observations. She's describing her experiences, so she can't possibly be wrong. I just found it interesting food for thought, because I find myself sharing the knee-jerk reaction to Amazon and Barnes & Noble that the literary blogosphere tells me to have. And yet, when I look through my own memories, I've never really experienced that mythical independent bookseller where the light is always golden and they're knowledgeable about my genres and they hand-sell me all sorts of awesome things I'd never find on my own.

(Incidentally, you know where I get my to-be-read titles from? Not booksellers. Blogs. I see stuff that sounds cool and add it to my--wait for it--Amazon Wish List. And then I pull that wish list up on my phone when I'm in a brick and mortar store and find maybe 25% of the things on it. Other stuff I order online when I get around to it. Which does make Rusch's point that while the big box stores have a big selection, they don't have a lot of variety. One bookstore's selection is much the same as another's. Again, I'm not disputing her observations, just noting that I've never known a time when it was substantially better.)

I can haz full request?

2010-11-24T13:59:00.002-05:00

So I'm easing into the query process, and made this video to blow off some steam.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Checking In

2010-10-30T20:19:00.007-04:00

I basically haven't looked at my blog since school started, so I figured I ought to check in lest people think I fell by the wayside when it came to writing too.

This school year has been brutal--the hardest I can ever remember. There is so much paperwork and jumping through hoops. Some of it is punishment for having been a D school for two years--clearly we teachers aren't doing enough. (I'm sure the powers-that-be would take exception to my labeling it a punishment, but the shoe fits, you know?) We also have new textbooks, and I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel at every turn. I've never worked so hard, nor felt like I was accomplishing so little. I feel like the sacrifices I make, the time I put in, the things I do well, are all largely unnoticed. The things I don't get around to, though--because there's so much to do I can't possibly get around to it all--are immediately noticed and commented upon. I get to work at 6:15, on average, and leave at 4 on average, and still feel constantly guilty for every second I'm not working.

Through it all, though, I haven't let the writing slip. In fact, I've done a better job this year of being dedicated to my art and craft than I did last year. Since I'm getting up early to do schoolwork, I'm giving myself the evenings to write. Every night I put in at least a couple of hours, and progress is slow but steady.

Good News: I think I mentioned that Vanishing Act was a finalist in the Royal Palm Literary Award in the category of Unpublished Young Adult Novel. Well it won! First place! So my record in contests continues to be pretty good.

As for the submissions process--some up, some down. I'm submitting to agents at a snail's pace, because it seems better to fire them out in small bursts and be able to use whatever feedback I do get, rather than to blanket the literary world and see what happens. I can still count the number of agents I've queried without taking my shoes off. I've had a grand total of one form rejection, which I think is some kind of awesome, even with as few queries as I've sent out. I got a rejection today from an agent I'd really been crossing my fingers on. It had good feedback on it--good points, though I'm going to have to sleep on things for a bit to figure out how to make the improvements she said the MS needed. (See? Querying slowly was a good call!) To be unbelievably arrogant, I kind of have a feeling someone's going to want to represent this book, but if it doesn't happen, hopefully this agent will like my next manuscript better.

Anyway, I feel like a loser for not updating this blog more, but right now my priorities seem to be work, parenting, writing, and reading. There pretty much isn't room for a fifth thing on my list right now, be it television, going out with friends, tweeting, blogging, or reading other people's blogs. I have a feeling next year won't be much better in that regard, because I'm helping to kick off a new IB program at my school, so I'll be reinventing the wheel yet again. Hopefully someday I'll find myself teaching courses I've taught before, using materials I've used before. Certainly I've been in my career long enough to have reached that point. Now I understand why my father, late in his career, didn't want to take on the opportunity of starting a new Computer Science program at a school that didn't have one.

Speaking of reading: I've been reading Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness trilogy. Why is it so hard to find in bookstores? I thought How to Ditch Your Fairy was fantastic, but I think these are better. Razorbill is not exactly a small house, so what the heck gives? Among YA authors, Larbalestier and Janice Hardy are the ones most writing the kinds of books I want to be writing. (Among science fiction writers, in case anyone's keeping score, the list would be Steven Gould--whose writing is often so close to YA as to blur any meaningful distinction--Mary Robinette Kowal, and Elizabeth Bear. I'm probably forgetting someone, but that's who comes to mind.)

On perspective, and experiencing your work as a reader

2010-08-14T22:29:00.007-04:00

Alternate Title: In which I wax immodest about the manuscript I'm shopping . . .

So I recently had a request for a full from an agent--

-o-

Since this is kind of a braggy post, let me gather all my recent brags together. I'll put 'em in spoiler tags, though, in case you don't want to put up with all the immodesty:

» Click to show shameless bragging - click again to hide... «

-o-

Ahem. Where were we then? Oh yes, the full request.

I'll never be done working on making this manuscript the best it can possibly be until it's in print (or in the trunk, I suppose), so even though I'm querying for it I'm still trying to polish it as much as I can. It's been a pretty painstaking process, going through one chapter at a time in multiple sweeps looking for different things each time, and from time to time I think I've lost sight of the forest in all these trees.

Before sending the full off, though, I went through to the end tightening wherever I could, temporarily abandoning my slow pace. As I neared the end of the process, I realized that this was the first time in a long time that I had gone through such a large portion of my manuscript in such a short period of time. While I was still working on it and picking at nits and not merely reading for pleasure, I have to say it was a refreshing change in perspective. For the first time in a long time I had a chance to get caught up in the narrative.

If you're in the same situation I've been in--with a completed manuscript you've been picking at from up close that you haven't stepped back and read for a while, I recommend you try reading it through at some point. I found myself experiencing the tension in a way that you just can't when you spend forever looking at each chapter. As I neared the end, I looked back and marveled at all I'd been through with these characters. At all the emotional moments, I found myself getting emotional myself, verklempt both when things went awfully wrong and when things went astonishingly right.

For a lot of my revision process I've been focusing on the things I didn't know when I began, and I've been amazed and embarrassed at my overuse of to be verbs, my cart-before-horse tendency to talk about what characters could see and hear rather than simply showing. When you look really closely at something, especially something you made, you can only see the flaws. Take a step back and maybe you'll see something different. When I had the chance to experience my novel more like a reader might, I felt proud. I felt like I'd created and polished and worked and, in the end, come up with something that was actually pretty good.

Lord knows if anybody else will think so. Maybe I'll get a lot of "close but no cigar" from my agent search. I have to acknowledge that so it doesn't seem like I've got a fat head, because in our society we don't like it when anybody feels too good about themselves. We slap people down for having the hubris to think they're special. But you know what? If you don't believe in your own work, who the heck will?

The big dog is not always the one doing the barking

2010-08-06T17:13:00.006-04:00

I'm working on Vanishing Act again, and I came across this piece:

“Yeah, yeah, we heard you kid. You’re not doing it. I’m not talking to you; I’m talking to your old man.” To Steven, he added, “Tell me this wasn’t the easiest money you ever made. What do I always say? Kids are natural born con artists.”

“Says the natural born bullshit artist.”

Why were they staring at him? Oh Jesus, he hadn’t said that out loud, had he?

Chris’s father narrowed his eyes. “Boy, what have I told you about talking to your Uncle Danny like that?”

Chris wished he could disappear right now, but of course that wasn’t how things worked. Fine, then. There was no point in apologizing or backing down. He’d said what he’d said. They wouldn’t forget; they wouldn’t forgive.

“He’s not my uncle.” Chris noticed his hands shaking, and he dropped them into his lap to keep the men from seeing. “He’s not your brother. He’s just your loser friend. And if you were any sort of father, you’d take my side when your buddy comes around trying to make me do bad stuff.” Tears streamed down his face by the time he finished, but he didn’t care. Much. He wiped his nose on a napkin and dropped it on the table in front of him.

Steven’s eyes flashed and he backed his seat away from the table. Chris thought he would get up and beat him right there, but Danny grabbed his forearm and kept him from standing. “Relax, Steve-O,” he said, looking around at the mostly empty restaurant. “The kid’s pulled off his first big job and he’s feeling his oats. He figures he’s a man now, and he can tell us off like an equal.”

Looking around once more, he leaned in and said, “Ain’t that right, boy? You think you’re a man now? Think you’re a big deal? Think you did all those jobs by yourself? Who gave you that busted iPod? Who found the Adamses and set you up there in the first place? Who comes up with damn near every idea for the three of us? Who carried all that stuff out of the Adams’s house while you pretended to be a private school brat? We all did this kid, not just you. You don’t think about what anyone else does because you can’t see past the edge of your own nose. Just like a typical little kid. You think you’re a man now, gonna call me by my first name? You think you’re my equal? Well let me tell you when you’ll be my equal. The day you can kick my ass is the day I’ll treat you like my equal. Until then, you’re nothing but a snot-faced brat.”

Danny flicked Chris’s mucus-filled napkin onto his lap for emphasis and lowered his voice further. “You call me whatever you want if it makes you feel big. You go ahead and tell us what you will and won’t do to help out. But I’ll tell you something: you can’t be with us only part-time. You’re either all in, all the way, or don’t expect to share in the rewards. Don’t go to war with me, little boy. You’ll lose.”

As I worked on this, I realized that there are several instances in the book where Chris's father is ready to physically punish Chris for not showing Danny enough respect, and is prevented from doing so by Danny. I questioned myself when I noticed it. Why did they keep ending up in this pattern? Was I too lazy to write the ugly scene that would otherwise have come next? Is there a nice streak in Danny I've never noticed?

Well, there are plenty of unpleasant scenes in the book, so that's not it. And Danny's definitely the bad guy (or rather, the worse guy). So what's up with his seeming benevolence? For some reason, Danny's actions felt right in these instances, but I hadn't really thought about why.

Once I'd noticed the pattern, though, I thought about it and I think I see why it is the right behavior for Danny. If Chris's father beats Chris into submission for Danny, he's essentially defending Danny. Danny's alpha dog status would be challenged by this. By preventing Chris's father from harming him, Danny asserts superiority over both. He's telling Chris's father what to do, and he's acting magnanimous toward Chris. Only the king can be magnanimous, right? (Or the powerful, anyway. Notice the root word, magnus: great.)

Danny gets his revenge--he always does--but he does it his way, not by having someone defend him.

I didn't think about all this consciously before, but I think I made the right choice by Danny because I was in character. It can be hard to write a bad guy because I don't want to admit that I've got that somewhere inside of me to pull out. But everybody, I think, has it in them to be selfish, petty, and just generally shitty to other people. Maybe instead of being afraid to face this in ourselves, it's more useful to revel in having a safe place to put on this mask and play.

Yikes!

2010-07-23T12:33:00.003-04:00

So I recently had a story become a finalist in a literary competition. (Pause for a moment of "Yay me!")

-o-

On an entirely unrelated note, I had cause to pull up an old story and read through it. This is a story that has not sold yet, and is pretty much out of pro-paying options. However, it received very nice, personal rejections from some editors at pro markets who complimented my writing and indicated they wanted to see more from me. It was also a finalist in a couple of literary competitions.

You know what? I was stunned at how awful the writing seems to me. My attempts to create tension and hook the reader seem so obvious and hamfisted, my conflict so melodramatic, and I'm embarrassed that I sent this story out to anyone.

I'm also, secretly, a bit thrilled.

Because when I started sending this story out a couple of years ago, I thought it was sooo polished. From a writing standpoint if not a storytelling one, I thought I was at the top of my game. So what I take away from how amateurish it seems to me now is that I've gotten a lot better since then, and that, FSM willing, it won't be long before I break through.

Here is the opening of the old story in question:

Kayla burst through the door and into the night, clutching her prize in her hand. It had worked. It had worked! Now all she needed to do was get back home. Back to her new life.

Her senses seemed to be on high alert as she covered the couple blocks to her parents’ home. On some level, she had been sure something would go wrong, and now everything she saw, from the guy drinking a beer in a paper bag right outside the store to the SUV hurtling past as she jogged along the sidewalk, took on a sinister purpose in her mind. Mostly she looked out for police, or perhaps some dark, unmarked sedan instead. But nothing stopped her, and in less than five minutes she was standing behind the house.

Through the rear window, she could see her mother walking around the kitchen. It looked like she was on the phone. At this hour, her father would be in the living room, watching his CSI: Miami or Criminal Minds or whatever crime drama he was currently obsessing over. They’d be furious if they knew she’d been this close without stopping in to say hello, but there was no time.

She chuckled at the irony in that.

Behind the house, she stood just outside of the faintly glowing edges of the displacement field and eyed it warily as she rested with one hand on her old swing set, catching her breath while the peeling corners of the paint dug into her palm. The field was rotating rather more quickly than it had been twenty minutes ago, and, beyond it, the floor of the laboratory was pitching and yawing—or at least, it seemed to from her vantage point. Clumsy. She could have done better, but then, she was out here.

As she watched, the rotation slowed. The alignment wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t going to be, and she couldn’t wait forever. The floor in her lab was a little more than a foot higher than the grass was, and the wall was in view, setting the course of her landing skew to the path she’d have to take into the displacement field, but she had to move now.

Kayla ran the three steps separating her from the field and jumped. For one blessed second, she was back in the lab. Then the change in gravity hit her. This was still new to her, and she flailed as “back” became “down.” She tottered, and time seemed to slow. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dirt behind her house coming up to meet her, and, worse, the neon-colored rim of the displacement field. She could not let that touch her.

“Help me!” she cried out, flailing, thrusting her hands in front of her. And then her breath was taken away by a searing pain and the sweet stench of sizzling flesh she barely had time to recognize as her own. The ticket, fluttering leaflike in the chaos where the air of the yard met the air of the lab, was the last thing she saw before the edge of the field sliced from her right armpit to her left ear.

All that past perfect, signaling that I'm giving backstory. I was so desperate to start with action, but so desperate to dump info there just the same. And an intro that ends in the death of the central character, only to have her alive again after the # break. How provocative! And the clumsy bits of foreshadowing: her chuckling at an irony that the reader can't possibly get yet, or the comments about how inexpertly the displacement field is being handled. I use the word "as" six times here, something I've come to regard as a marker of inexpertly trying to weave action together with info. Sixteen uses of the word "was," which I've come to associate with telling rather than showing. I feel like I was trying so hard.

Here is the intro to a short story I'm working on right now, that I'm maybe a fourth of the way through writing. This story doesn't even have a title yet. It's first draft, not the least bit cleaned up:

The Orinoco’s dark surface twitched and undulated, one eddy gradually separating itself from the otherwise languid film. Carolina edged back into the shadows between the bait shop and the boatyard and maintained her vigil, gripping her father’s revolver with both hands like a talisman. From the other end of the alleyway, strains of an old song by Maná drifted down.

Over the debris that had once formed the retaining wall, a shape rose, shimmery and pink and dripping. Carolina’s eyes reported the scene faithfully, but she blinked anyway, scrunching her eyelids together as though demanding her eyes bring back better information next time. Blink. Slick pink-grey skin, a ridged back with water cascading off, and a long snout. Blink. No, not a snout. A nose. A regular old human nose, though maybe larger than average, and a high forehead. Blink. No, not pink. White like a norteamericano. Whiter than her own caramel skin certainly, but not pink. Blink. And not naked, after all, but wearing clothes so white she could hardly make them out in the twilight. He stood up, clearly a man now, and the moonlight practically reflected off his liquiliqui, especially the silver buttons on his high collar. The silvery light made something else clear: he wore nothing beneath his loose linen pants. Blink. What she had taken to be a high forehead now appeared to be the crown of a llanero hat, with a fashionably narrow brim pulled low.

Carolina sucked in a breath. He was still beautiful. Eight years had worn down her girlhood and left her instead with calluses and worry lines, but he was still the achingly perfect boy she remembered, as though not a day had passed. She crouched behind an empty tank, wrinkling her nose at the shrimp and algae scent, and watched him step past, whistling an upbeat tune she’d not heard before as he swam through the night. When his back was to her, she stepped out and pointed the gun at his back.

“Looking for someone, tonino?” she asked.

Now maybe I'm just full of myself—or maybe I'm full of something else—but this reads so much better to me right now. Only three uses of "as," and two of those are in the context of comparisons, and none to show simultaneous action. Only three uses of the word "was."

I feel like this piece is more vibrant because, while the previous one begins with action, it tells the reader about the action while this one shows it more. I show it through Carolina's eyes, but I try not to use words that give the reader a sense of detachment. I don't indicate that she sees this or that—I just show this or that and assume it's obvious that she's doing the seeing.

It still needs some work. I'm not at all sure the blink paragraph works, and I think the cadence of the first paragraph could be better. And maybe someone reading this blog will think it absolutely sucks. But I like it. I think it's a lot better and that excites me.

Maybe in a year or two I'll think it's horribly amateurish and I'll be embarrassed that I ever bragged on these awful paragraphs. I kind of hope so, because that'll mean I'll have continued to grow as a writer.

Congratulations to my wife on her prize-winning essay!

2010-07-18T23:05:00.003-04:00

I don't know that I have any regular readers who aren't already friends with my wife, but just in case I figured I throw a shout-out to her win in the "Pyr and Dragons Adventure" essay contest:

Linky!

Lots of us who love speculative fiction have similar stories. The particulars differ--I never had asthma or ITP--but the fact that we all found something that fired our dreams and our imagination is pretty constant. In that, I think Lisa speaks for all of us.

So go check the link out if you haven't already, read the essay, and congratulate her!

And if you're going to Dragon*Con, let me know!

On honorary men, stereotypical women, and feminized men

2010-07-17T01:54:00.003-04:00

I read some great food for thought on writing and gender over the last couple of days. At sfnovelists, Marie Brennan talked about the tendency of writers to attempt to create "strong female characters" by basically writing "men with tits": characters who act like stereotypical men in every way but the plumbing and the name.

In the comments to Brennan's post, someone linked to an article deconstructing the trope of the Hollywood strong female character. This was the bit that best summed it up for me:

I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.

(I had mixed feelings on the discussion of hot women ending up with schlubby everydudes. While reading the article, I couldn't deny that the author [I could only find the author's online handle, not a real name] was onto something, but the farther I got into the comments the more clear it became that many of the commenters seemed to buy into the myth that looks were the only component of desirability. As a schlubby ugly guy who's nevertheless pretty decent in a lot of ways ;) I beg to differ.)

I also ran across a rather heated debate on Absolute Write on whether it was okay to write gay characters who conformed to gay stereotypes. One of the principals in the discussion claimed to be a gay male who was stereotypically feminine, and his argument was, as I understood it, that people like him existed and shouldn't be swept under the rug in the name of fighting stereotypes.

I've thought a lot about this issue over the years, because it's something I don't want to inadvertently do in my own writing. I seem to be drawn to characters of either sex who fuck with gender expectations. I'm not the most macho of men, so I like seeing sensitive male characters. I'm also drawn to strong females in life as in art. My male characters tend to be sensitive--am I feminizing them? My female characters tend to be strong--are they just boys in drag? And I've not yet gotten around to writing a gay character, but since my tendency is generally to buck stereotypes, that's a tack I could certainly see myself taking.

I don't have any good answers, but in all three discussions I found online this week, the bottom line seemed to be about characterization. At least some of the vitriol in the Absolute Write discussion seemed to come from the fact that the poster suggested writing gays according to stereotype with no real focus on who these characters were--in other words, instead of allowing their characteristics to grow organically from their personalities, to use stereotypes as a code for "this guy is gay." In real life, most people don't conform that perfectly to a whole set of expectations. They'll conform to some and defy others, and which is which is rooted in their personalities and their experiences and who they are.

Likewise in the Overthinking It article and in Brennan's blog post, the emphasis seemed to come down to making the female characters good characters, not on whether they do or do not kick ass. In particular, my eyes lit up when Brennan cited Firefly's Zoe (pictured) as an example of a good strong character of the female variety--and not just because I have a crush on Zoe. Oh yes, she definitely kicks ass, but she is also definitely a real woman, and not a guy in disguise.

As for my own writing, all I can do is try my hardest to do right by my characters, and think of them as real people who come by their personality quirks the hard way. So far I haven't had any complaints, but when I do, hopefully I'll listen with an open mind.

This

2010-07-14T23:21:00.004-04:00

Editorial Anonymous: Countdown: A Conversation with Deborah Wiles

In revision I throw out great wads of the plot (usually the entire second half), but as I do that, the light begins to dawn, I begin to understand who my characters are and what their motivations are, which inform their actions and reactions, and as these things begin coming clear, I go back and layer in foreshadowing and tension.

This novel sounds fascinating--no, I haven't read it, or anything by Deborah Wiles. But this paragraph struck me because it echoes my experience of writing a 129,000 word YA novel and then cutting out 48,000 words of it.

All that stuff I cut? It was useful. It was useful to me because it was time I spent with my protagonist. I didn't consciously think about characterization as much as I'd like to in the future--and yeah, I'd prefer not to chop a third off of my next MS--but in the process of writing all those scenes I was unconsciously working on characterization, if nothing else.

I'm tired of the way people laugh when I tell them my first draft clocked in at 129,000 words. Hello, it's not like I was ignorant of the expectations. I'd already written a YA trunk novel of 90,000 words. And yeah, writing long is something I've always wrestled with.

But I ain't sorry.

The time I spent writing that huge first draft was time well spent. Time getting to know my characters and my setting and the living situations of all the players. Some people walk around the mall holding imaginary conversations with their characters. Some people go off and do firsthand research, living as a migrant worker or whatever. I wrote.

No shame in that.

Blue Fire

2010-07-13T10:22:00.002-04:00

For anybody who was intrigued by my post about Janice Hardy's Shifter last November, you might be interested to know that the sequel, Blue Fire, is just about ready to come out, and you can win an ARC of it here, but you won't, because I will. :p

On the (un)importance of getting everything right

2010-07-12T20:56:00.002-04:00

I have a tendency sometimes to research myself into a corner. I don't want to get something wrong, so I come up with all the flaws in my story ideas and try to torture my stories into working around these flaws. And I've certainly had the experience as a reader of getting annoyed at a story that touched on something that I am knowledgeable about and Got It Wrong.

But I'm starting to think you can make a fetish of accuracy and take it too far. Recently I read a couple of stories that touched on areas I am knowledgeable about and got things wrong . . . and worked anyway.

I think many of us are passionate about the things we're "experts" in--that's why we're experts in the first place, sometimes. Maybe it's a musical instrument you play or your ethnic background or your religion or your occupation. Maybe it's a language you speak. With me these areas include (but are probably not limited to) my culture and first language, the religion I grew up in, teaching, the geography of places I've lived . . .

When I was a kid my parents used to watch a lot of cooking shows on PBS. We were a one television family for much of my childhood--and I never had a TV in my room--so I either watched what they watched or I watched nothing at all. So I grew up with more than my share of Julia Child and Yan Can Cook and the Galloping Gourmet. My favorite among these shows--pretty much the only one I could stand, actually, was Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet. I didn't give much of a damn about cooking--though maybe these shows laid the groundwork for my cooking as an adult--but Jeff Smith didn't just give recipes. He gave stories and history and bits of folklore about every recipe and about the people who ate whatever dish he was presenting. I loved the stories.

Until he did an episode on Cuban Cooking! Oh my goodness he got everything so wrong! He explained how Cubans and Mexicans pronounce "tamales" differently--um no, USians pronounce it differently, and incorrectly surmise their pronunciation is how Mexicans actually pronounce it. Then he showed how to make a Cuban Sandwich--with mayonnaise and salami! Ugh! (Yes, some restaurants make Cuban Sandwiches like this. They are wrong.) Along with my sense of outrage of seeing him get my culture and my food wrong was this thought: what else had he been getting wrong over the years? How could I trust now that any of his other stories were more authentic than the ones he told about Cubans?

I never looked at the show quite the same way again.

But here's the thing--if I had wanted to cook authentic food, I could see how that mattered. But when it came to enjoying his stories, did it make them any less enjoyable if they weren't totally accurate or well-researched?

Getting back to food, when I eat at a restaurant that is not Cuban, I really don't care how authentic the food is--I care if I like how it tastes. I know most of the Asian and Mexican food I eat is inauthentic, and I'm okay with that. For some reason, though, it drives me nuts when an allegedly Cuban restaurant serves a bunch of spicy dishes or makes a dish wrong.

And okay, if you get a detail wrong in your story, experts in that field will howl. But will most people care?

I suppose they will if it's something so fundamental that lots of non-experts know you blew it. And why tick off even the experts if you don't have to? There's nothing wrong with getting things as right as you can. Sure, that's a virtue.

But maybe it's good to remember sometimes that telling a good story is what it's really about.

How do you want to be remembered?

2010-06-12T21:55:00.004-04:00

Thursday I was able to get away from work for a few hours to attend my kids' fifth grade graduation. (Who schedules an event like this at 9:30 in the morning?! Are those of us who actually work for a living such a small minority around here?)

Since I was giving a final exam until 9:15, I got there with literally seconds to spare before the ceremony began. The graduation was in the school's gymnasium, and I didn't even bother trying to find a seat in the bleachers, because I basically would have had to walk in front of the action to do so. I was able to find a nice spot to stand in the wings, and I've never minded standing. (I pretty much do it all day anyway.) Shortly after I got there, a guy with a camcorder showed up and decided that smack in front of me was the perfect spot for him to shoot the entire ceremony from, so for most of the event, this was my view:

Anyway, I spend the week or two leading up to the graduation trying not to be too cynical about it in front of my kids. Seriously, though, why do we need to many graduations? Before my kids ever get to high school, they will have graduated three times from the very same school! Seriously: there was kindergarten graduation, now elementary school graduation, and in three years middle school graduation, but they go to a K-8! And I was annoyed at some of the expensive ways this was turning into a big deal. For instance, there was an expectation that the girls would wear a nice dress, but they have occasion to wear such a dress maybe once before they outgrow it. I couldn't see buying fancy dresses just for this.

They actually had nice dresses from last summer that they could just barely still squeeze into, but we were worried that the straps on them would be too thin for the school's dress code. They also had nice shoes, but they could not wear those because they were backless. This has been a tough few years for teachers in this state, with pay cuts, cuts in benefits, and rising prices on everything, so the idea of buying new things when we actually had stuff they could wear was doubly aggravating. Seriously, if you've decided this is such a big event that they need to dress up for it, then suspend the parts of your dress code that would rule out a lot of nice clothes. In the end, we went with the dresses they had, but we bought new shoes. We couldn't find any that were dressy and closed back and flat while still being a good fit, so we also had them wear bobby socks with them. I thought that would work fine, but I'm embarrassed to report that they're the only girls who wore socks. :-/

Rather than imitate a high school graduation to the hilt, they had each teacher introduce the kids in his or her class. As the kids crossed the stage, they were handed the microphone and they told the audience either one thing they were looking forward to in middle school or one thing they'd like to be remembered for. I thought that was a nice twist.

So as I stood there listening to kids giving their little soundbites and watching the head of the guy in front of me, I turned the question on myself. What would I like to be remembered for? (I'm not planning on going anywhere any time soon, but then, my kids aren't planning on leaving their school for three years either, so I guess the question is just as relevant to me as it is to them.)

I don't need to be remembered as talented or successful. I hope people remember me as generous and as hard-working. I think I am these things, but I often feel that other people don't notice it. I'm not necessarily showy in the things I do, so sometimes I work really hard on something and people assume it was easy, or sometimes my definition of generous doesn't seem to match that of other people. (For instance, as a teacher, I don't define generous as "giving everybody good grades." I define it in terms of generosity with my time and effort.)

So what about you, my three or four regular readers? What do you want to be remembered for?

Middle Grade Musings

2010-06-09T11:13:00.002-04:00

One of the books I ordered from that amazing BN.com sale was categorized under Young Adult but was really Middle Grade. I read it yesterday with an eye toward whether or not I could write straight-up MG, since I already tend toward the young end of YA.

I'm not going to name the book here, not because I have anything bad to say about the novel per se, but because I'm focusing more on my own reaction to it, and I'd hate to come across as being critical of the book when that's not my intention.

In tone, this felt a lot like pieces I *have* written--just not long pieces. I don't know if I could write like this for sixty or seventy thousand words. I think I could; I'm not sure how much I'd like it, though. One thing that helped mitigate that twee-ness I often pick up from MG writing is that it was in first person. The young narrative voice helped keep it from having that grandmotherly voice that grates on me. Actually, it reminded me of short humorous pieces I wrote when I was about the same age as the protagonist--when I was a ninth grader.

It was innocent in content--not that this comes as a surprise. High school freshmen in MG books apparently crush all the time, but they never think overtly sexual thoughts or make overtly sexual statements. Or even much innuendo. They say "damn" and "crap" and possibly "hell," but nothing stronger than that. These don't read like real-life freshmen--they read like middle-schoolers (and innocent middle-schoolers at that), which is to be expected, given that middle-schoolers are the target readers.

There are other considerations beyond tone, though. I think the biggest one for me is the scale of the conflict. This book was about beginning high school, and all the changes that come with that. Now I know some MG books have higher stakes--life and death, even. On the one hand, the relatively low stakes in this book worked with the faintly humorous voice of the narrator. On the other hand, it made it hard for the book to grab my interest at first. There wasn't much happening beyond middle school friends drifting apart, crushes, new friends, and so forth. I would have liked a bit more adventure. Eventually the emotional stakes got high enough to carry me through to the end, but I could see some readers not making it that far.

So the bottom line? I don't know any more than I did before whether I could write on the MG side of the divide. I think I could hit that tone and keep the content down. What I'm not certain of is that I could come up with a plotline that would hold my own interest. In the bookstore, YA's are far more likely to intrigue me than MG's, but I'll keep my eyes open and keep learning the genre. Maybe Barnes and Noble with have another awesome sale.

Tension on Every Page

2010-06-08T17:49:00.004-04:00

A couple years or so ago, I was reading a writing resource that advocated listing various elements about each scene in your novel--I no longer remember exactly what, characters, time, whatever, and conflict. That is, what conflict was occurring in each scene. It said, in passing, that any scene without conflict should be scrapped.

At the time, I blew it off. It was just the sort of impracticable writing advice that vague how-to's were full of. How can you possibly have conflict in every scene? Sometimes you have other things you need to achieve in a scene--bring characters together, have a character investigate something, lay the groundwork for something you're going to need later, you name it.

Of course, that's how I ended up writing a 120,000-word YA novel with lots of boring scenes that didn't carry their weight. *grin* Over the course of cutting off forty-thousand words, I slowly and painstakingly learned that this was actually pretty good advice. But conflict doesn't have to be between people. And even if it is between people, it doesn't have to be overt. So what we're talking about here isn't so much conflict as it is tension. If I'd understood that, I would have written a better novel in the first place, and the revision process wouldn't have been as painful as it's been.

I've done a pretty good job of pulling unnecessary scenes, but this week I ran across a bit that wasn't working for me. Chris is staying with Michelle and Paul Adams, the marks. He needs to stay with them long enough for a relationship to form that will make it hard to con them, and I need to show this relationship developing. Chris also needs to learn the location of the key to a rifle case in which the Adamses keep some Civil War-era rifles Danny and Steve want to steal. So quality-time relationship-building, and finding stuff. The scenes are necessary, but where's the conflict come in?

In retrospect the answer is pretty obvious. What I'm doing is trimming back on the description, of which there's too much, and ramping up the tension. The tension comes from Chris misinterpreting every signal he gets from the Adamses, based on a lifetime of interaction with Danny and Steve:

Paul obviously wanted to chat, but Chris had no idea what to say. Paul seemed nice and sort of funny, but other than baseball, Chris had no idea what he was interested in. And Chris knew next to nothing about baseball.

Well, it was something, anyway. “So do the Braves play again soon?” he asked.

Paul chuckled. What, was it a stupid question? “From April through September, they play nearly every day.” Of course it was a stupid question. Chris felt his face heat up. Whatever, I don’t really like baseball anyway.

Later:

Chris got the sense Paul was trying to get him interested in something--several times, he offered to buy Chris whatever he was looking at. Chris declined as politely as he could each time--although it was particularly hard to say no in the bookstore. He’s not really being generous, Chris reminded himself. He’s trying to buy you. Anyway, it was easy to be generous if you were rich; it didn’t really mean anything. Chris’s father would probably have loved to buy him all sorts of things, if he had the money. Probably.

and:

When they got to a store that sold nothing but baseball caps, though, Paul insisted on buying Chris a fitted Atlanta Braves cap, and would not listen to his objections. Fine, thought Chris. You’re not buying it for me. You’re buying it for you.

Here's another bit:

Finally, mercifully, the game was over. Paul made a show of throwing away the scorecard, saying it didn’t matter who won or lost, they were just playing for fun.

“Fifty-three to eighty-four,” muttered Chris.

“What?”

“Fifty-three to eight-four. You won.” In case you weren’t sure. “If you didn’t care what the score was, why did you write it down after each hole?”
Paul held out a placating hand. “I don’t know. They give you a card and a pencil, and it’s just what everyone does. It didn’t even occur to me not to. But it’s not like it matters. Who cares who won?”

“Sure,” said Chris. Whatever you say.

Last one, I promise:

Ah, so that was it. “Well I’m sorry,” said Chris. “It looks like you’ll have to find some other kid to live out your sports fantasies through.”

Paul’s eyes widened. He’s going to hit me now, thought Chris.

Anyway, these aren't quite as cleaned up as they could be--I see some repetitive phrasing and way too much use of the characters' names--but the point is that I get all the interaction and relationship-building. In fact, the relationship-building is arguably deeper because now it repeatedly sets up Chris's expectations and repeatedly showcases how the Adamses are different from the kind of family he is used to.

I wish I'd had a better understanding years ago of how conflict and tension could--and should--underlie any scene, even one that wasn't overtly about disagreement.

Juno Good Characterization When You See It

2010-06-05T12:13:00.005-04:00

I just saw the movie Juno for the first time last night. I remember hearing it was very good when it was new, but I don't get out to theaters much and I miss a lot of movies. Eventually this movie slipped out of theaters and out of my consciousness. Just one more flick my artsy friends liked that I never got around to seeing, along with Bend it Like Beckham and Whale Rider. But then one of the cable channels, I forgot which, started advertising that they were going to show the film, which reminded me of its existence, except I don't like to watch movies on broadcast TV because of commercials, editing, and lack of widescreen, so I rented it on iTunes instead. See industry people? Make stuff available for free and people will pay to enjoy it instead. Paradoxical, but seemingly true. (It's funny how I can't stand iTunes for music, what it's intended for, but absolutely love it for renting movies.)

I enjoyed the movie the whole way through, but at first I was enjoying it as just another quirky comedy. Somewhere near the end it dawned on my that I was actually seeing an excellent movie. Afterward, I read up on Juno's critical reception and box office performance. I saw that it won the Oscar for best screenplay for Diablo Cody, which surprises me not at all, and I saw discussion of its portrayal of abortion--which it really did handle sensitively enough that you can think it's pro-whatever-your-side is, regardless of what side you're on. I saw praise for its humor and its dialogue and the performances. What I didn't see much mention of was its characterization.

This may be the best example of characterization I have ever seen. All the stock sentiments about how to create excellent characters, which never come with specifics on how to accomplish them, are carried off here. No major character is a villain, even when some of them are at odds with Juno. The primary and secondary characters are all dynamic, and we gradually learn bits about them, and can see the strengths and flaws of each. The canard that each character is the star of his or her own story is actually brought to life here, as each was treated, again, with respect and sensitivity and none was merely a stand-in for the author to beat up for the sake of making a point.

When I was done watching the movie I tried to mentally retrace how Cody accomplished this--I mean, these are the things everyone says to do, but I rarely see them accomplished this well. It's one thing to say you should treat your secondary characters, and even your adversarial characters, with respect, but actually accomplishing this is rarer. How can I learn from Juno?

Um, here there be spoilers, obviously.

Here's what I've come up with: For the first half of the movie or so, every character actually slides right in to a stock role. Juno is your typical intelligent, brash-mouth, eccentric, sassy teen heroine. She mocks pop culture and high school life and gives us a cheeky narration of the world as she sees it. I've seen her at least a dozen times before. Bleeker is the typical sweet nerd who straddles the line between boy friend and boyfriend. He's awestruck by Juno, obviously in love, and she can't see it. On the other hand, he's too passive to do anything about it. Juno's father is the standard over-indulgent beleaguered dad. Her step-mother is your typical slightly-theatening, not-entirely-welcome step-mother. When she meets Mark and Vanessa, the prospective adoptive parents of Juno's baby, Mark is that sweet, understanding adult who can see past Juno's quirkiness because he still hasn't lost his connection to his own youth. He's the cool dad figure. Vanessa is his shrewish wife who forces him to confine his youthful expressions to one room in his house that she has granted him, where he can keep his guitars and his posters and stuff. She seems a little flaky in her intense desire for a baby. She reads all the baby books and prepares months in advance while Mark advocates a little more common sense. She is the working woman who criticizes work-from-home Mark for not holding up his end of the workload even though he appears to earn more money than she does. She's too serious, while Mark hasn't lost his playful side. We can see that they're headed for problems, but the problems all appear to be Vanessa's fault. All very stock characters in stock interactions. If the movie had kept going in the direction it was headed it would have been entertaining enough, but not necessarily a Very Good Movie.

Sounds like I'm undercutting my point here, huh? But the thing is, it felt to me as though Diablo used those stock roles as our introduction to the characters to give us a handle on them. And maybe that answers the question of how to pull off deep, dynamic characters. Because you can't really front-load all the things that make your characters unique snowflakes, can you? You try to give it all at once and all you have is a messy hodge-podge. But isn't the way it plays out in Juno actually more like how we get to know people in real life? You meet someone, and you immediately pigeon-hole them, not because you're bad or shallow, but because your brain needs to figure out how the world fits together. So this person is a jock or a joker or an artist or a brainy type or an asshole or a drunk or dumb or a minority. I think we first see people as typical whatevers, and I'm not convinced there's anything wrong with that. Then we get to know them as individuals and see how they diverge from that typical role we've classified them as, and the people who become important in our lives become far too complex to possibly boil down to a central characteristic. The loudmouth drunk at the bar that we never see again, though, remains nothing but a loudmouth drunk, as though he has absolutely nothing else going on in his life. The teacher whose class we couldn't wait to get out of remains nothing but a bitch who finds fault in our best efforts, and we neither know nor care about who she is when she leaves the classroom. (For that matter, Beeker's mother is never anything but a nasty, judgmental lady, because she's not central to the story. If she were, we'd probably see the reasons for her bad characteristics and we'd also see her redeeming virtues.) We do stereotype, and I think this is a necessary feature--our brains' only way of making sense of the world. We are freed from those stereotypes to the extent that we remember that they aren't actually the sum of anybody's being, and to the extent that we remain open to revising our generalizations with specific information.

So what I think Cody gives us those easy characterizations on purpose so that we have a starting point, and spends the second half of the movie subverting them one by one. I kept seeing a scene begin and thinking I knew exactly where it was going, and then being surprised when it went somewhere else instead.

The first moment that surprised me was when Juno's stepmother accompanied her to the ultrasound. I was a little surprised to see her there at all, because I had the impression that Juno and she were not close, but I chalked it up to her wanting to have a woman-to-woman moment with her. But then her stepmother reams out the ultrasound technician for making a judgmental remark--it's a beautiful thing, not a hysterical shouting fit but a cold, calculated verbal take-down--and I think, whoa, she's not such a bitch! Or rather, she's a bitch, but she's a good bitch! She doesn't hate Juno or see her as a distracting reminder of her husband's first marriage--she actually cares for her.

The next scene that didn't play out as I foresaw was when Juno and Leah see Vanessa at the mall. I expected them to mock her from a distance, since some antipathy between Juno and Vanessa has already been set up. Or I expected Juno to see that Vanessa was an unfit mother, as she ran around with . . . I think it was her young niece. It was actually a weird moment of . . . crap, I can't think of the right word. I'm going to go with paradigm-shifting: I'm watching this scene and trying to fit it into my preconceived notion of where it's going. Vanessa is running around with this kid and I think she's going to try too hard, show her desperation for a kid by smothering her niece with attention and create an unpleasant scene. But it doesn't happen . . . they just have fun together. Then she runs into Juno and I'm thinking she's going to display her paranoia by accusing Juno of stalking her, but it doesn't happen. Then Juno invites her to feel the fetus kicking, and it seems as though the fetus won't kick for Vanessa, though it will for everyone else, and this seems like it's going to make a point about Vanessa's unfitness to be a mother. Juno encourages Vanessa to talk to her fetus, and a tender-awkward scene ensues, and I'm waiting for Vanessa to screw it up, but she doesn't. And then the scene ends and I realize it didn't play to my expectations. It was awkward, yes--so's real life. In the end we see Vanessa not as this shrill rival but as a person, with faults and virtues, who happens to want very badly to be a mother.

But the scene that really subverted my expectations was Juno's last scene inside Mark and Vanessa's home. In keeping with my expectations of Juno as a sassy teen and Mark as a warm, friendly older guy, I'm expecting that Juno's mom or Vanessa are going to perceive something creepy about the friendship between Juno and Mark when there isn't, because they Just Don't Understand. But then Juno and Mark are alone in his house and they're getting closer and closer--uncomfortably close. And I'm watching the scene, revising my expectations, and thinking, okay, Juno, because she is naive, has fallen in love with Mark, but he doesn't realize what's going on in this scene because he thinks of her as a kid, or because he thinks nothing can happen with her because she's pregnant. She's going to embarrassingly cross some line, and he's going to have to pick up the pieces and that's where this is going . . . . Only that wasn't it at all. Instead, it's Mark who has developed an attraction for Juno, and Juno who didn't see it coming because she saw him as this safe adult, and it's Juno who is most definitely Not Okay with this. Because, sure, Mark is this fun-loving kind guy who has not lost his youthful side, but he's also, we now see, shallow and immature and not yet ready to act like a grown-up. And yet, he has a point when he defends himself in the inevitable confrontation with Vanessa--just because she decided she was ready to have a child didn't mean he was ready for the same thing. (Of course, a grown-up, a man, would have communicated with his wife before it got to this point. Vanessa is controlling because Mark can't or won't communicate.) Mark's the closest thing to a villain in this movie, because there's just no getting around his inappropriate attachment to a sixteen-year-old, but we do see his virtues and his side of things, even if in the end we conclude that he's kind of a jerk. (But again the reversal, because we spend half the movie thinking he's cool and Vanessa's awful.)

There isn't as clear-cut a moment of reversal with Juno's father. He's sweet throughout. But at first he seems to be played as your stereotypical Stupid Dad, and we see through his conversation with his wife when Juno's not there, and with how he deals with Juno throughout the movie, that he's not stupid at all. He's actually one of the few smart, loving dad figures in film.

So, to sum up, Diablo Cody seems to use standard character tropes to get us into the story, to introduce us to the characters, and then spend the rest of the movie subverting those tropes, and fleshing out the major characters through scenes that defy our expectations.

Can this be applied to every kind of story? I don't know. I think it necessarily changes a story when you portray all the characters as people trying to walk their journeys to the best of their abilities (whether they're flawed or not). In Vanishing Act, Uncle Danny is a villain. There's no doubt about that. I tried to flesh him out, and to understand his rationalizations for why he acts the way he does, but he's really just a jerk. Chris's father is half villain and half spineless loser. As the story progresses, you may learn more about the characters and why they are as they are, but I don't know that I ever really subvert who they seem to be. (And that's hardly unique. Most stories don't.) If I had it to do over again, where would the story go if I decided to make things not be as they appear? I guess I'd have to start with more sympathetic portrayals of Danny and Steve, if I want Chris to end up where he does. Maybe have Paul and Michelle seem more like clueless marks at first. (Now I find myself wondering if Cody planned the reversals at first, or if she got halfway through a typical teenage dramedy and then just decided halfway through that it would be more interesting if, in the words of Wierd Al, "everything you know is wrong."

I don't know. Food for thought, neh?

Nick and Norah Have Way More Glamorous Lives Than You

2010-05-30T13:03:00.005-04:00

BN.com had a fantastic sale on YA books last weekend--basically the sort of stuff that usually ends up on the bargain shelf near the front of the the store. They had three books for $9.99, in many cases hardcovers, and so I decided this was a good chance to expand my reading in the field.

They had almost no YA speculative fiction, though--or at least, almost none that wasn't about vampires or otherwise unappealing to me--so I ended up with a couple of books that are outside of what I write.

The books arrived yesterday, and I went ahead and read through one of them--the thin Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. I chose it partly *because* it was so thin--if this book is much over 60,000 words, I'll eat my laptop--and partly because I'd seen and been intrigued by the movie poster already. (Say, whatever happened to that movie? Did it come out and tank? Has it not come out yet? Also, why does every book get turned into "A Major Motion Picture"? If every book is "a major motion picture," doesn't that make it a little less "major"? Will I ever see a book cover boasting "Now a Run-of-the-Mill Motion Picture"?)

The title is an effective one, for me anyway; I think I was hooked from the first time I read it on the poster. It's hard to explain why it works for me, but I think the crux is that it's so unconventional, it suggests the movie/novel with have an offbeat sensibility that will resonate well with me.

The book wasn't really all that offbeat. The narrative was a bit unconventional, largely because of the way it was co-authored. Apparently Rachel Cohn and David Levithan took turns writing chapter by chapter, alternating the POVs of the two protagonists. (I'm under the impression that Levithan wrote Nick's chapters and Cohn wrote Norah's, but I'm too lazy to double-check.) I thought Levithan did a fantastic job of setting Cohn up with hooks at the end of most of the Nick chapters--it reminded me of that improv game where one comedian throws another one a total blindside right before turning the story over, just to see the other react.

As I mentioned, this was outside of my usual reading habits--which is cool. I used to read much more widely than I do now. This is very much in the genre of teen romance that has become so hot in the last two or three years. I have read a little romance, but not the teen variety. I also read enough *about* the teen romance scene on the blogosphere that it's refreshing to see one partly written by a male author, and featuring a sensitive male protagonist.

I've been hearing for two or three years that YA titles had gotten a lot more racy, and not really seen evidence for that in my own YA reading. But then, the YA I read is almost exclusively speculative fiction. With this book, I did see evidence for that. There were three instances of frustrated near-fellatio, neither of the protagonists is a virgin, and the casual assumption that virtually no eighteen-year-old is seems evident. The assumed audience for YA novels is two or three years younger than the protagonists are, so my own kids are a bit young for this book yet. Would I want them reading it in three or four years? um . . . I don't know. I can see parents of intelligent, well-read, sophisticated teens being okay with it. I guess it depends on the kid and the parent and the level of discourse that already goes on between the two.

There's also a sense, I think, that artistic lives are somehow more pure than more mundane lives, as evidences by the unquestioned disdain the characters feel for people with corporate jobs midtown. Hey, somebody has to do those jobs. We can't all be Bohemians.

I rather enjoyed the opening hook--Nick, a bassist in a "queer-core" band, sees his ex-girlfriend show up at the end of one of his shows, and, in order to avoid confronting her after the show, asks the girl standing next to him, Norah, to be his five-minute-girlfriend. The plot takes some interesting twists to extend their time together, bit by bit, until they end up spending pretty much the whole night together, going from one New York spot to another. The major tensions are more or less resolved two-thirds of the way through, and the remainder drags on and verges on anticlimactic. We have the last of the near-fellatios, the decision by the protagonists to wait before introducing sex to their relationship, and a rather contrived minor tension where Norah begins to wonder if Nick might be gay. But we pretty much know their relationship will continue beyond this first night.

I have to think I read this book the way it was meant to be read. I began reading it around eleven at night, and finished around two in the morning. I recommend reading it this way, as it lead me to feel that my own body mirrored the protagonists' tiredness, beginning their adventure at what could easily have been the end of an already-eventful night, and their happy exhaustion by the end of the story. It's such a short book that you can read it in a single sitting, and the extended denouement doesn't really bother you that much.

I also enjoyed the setting, since I love New York City so much--although Nick's ridiculous luck in finding free parking in the city strains credulity.

The insert of full-color photos in the middle of the book was a delightful bit of nostalgia for me. I can't remember the last time I read a book that included "scenes from the movie," but it's certainly been a long time. And yet, the photos irritated me because I could see from the captions that the filmmakers made significant changes to the plotline, and that those changes appeared to make the film more formulaic. It's funny how that always seems to happen, isn't it?

Permission to write crap

2010-05-20T19:52:00.005-04:00

I've never been big on the whole philosophy of turning off your inner editor and letting yourself write crap and fix it later. Forever ago when I wrote Prototype I tried doing just that, and the results were disappointing. Writing had always tended to come easily for me, but I found myself stuck at the beginning of this book, feeling like someone had shut off a valve in me and the words just wouldn't flow. So I did what I'd always heard other people talking about and just plowed ahead, figuring I could fix it later. In the end, I wasn't very happy with what I wrote, and I don't feel like I ever quite fixed it either.

With Vanishing Act I didn't set out giving myself permission to write crap. That doesn't mean I wrote wonderfully polished stuff either. Many times crap is what I did write, but it was the best crap I was capable of turning out at the time. I've done a ton of revision, as I've attested to here, so this post is certainly not about writing stuff so good you don't need to revise. But I came to feel that if I gave myself permission to write stuff I thought was crap at the time, then crap was precisely what I would write, and I found decrapping crap to be excruciating and verging on impossible.

Years after Prototype when this whole NaNoWriMo thing came into popularity, I just figured "different strokes for different folks." Maybe some people really need the freeing effect of telling themselves to just get something down. That didn't seem to be how I worked.

I think I may be coming around.

I've put so much work into revising Vanishing Act, which used to be over fifty percent longer than it is now, that I think I've finally learned some lessons which couldn't seem to sink in before. I'm starting to get much better at finding prose that is not tight, and, more importantly, I'm starting to put my finger on what makes a scene boring or irrelevant. Revising was excruciating when it consisted of recognizing that something was crap but not having a clue in a bucket how to fix it. The other day it struck me that I've finally gotten a bit of a handle on how to decrap crap.

So next time I write something new instead of revising, I'm going to experiment with turning off that inner editor. It might be freeing. We'll see.

As for NaNoWriMo and the folks who preach "Give yourself permission to write crap," the one caveat I'll add to that is that if you don't spend a ton of time revising--as much time as you spend revising as you spend writing, probably, crap is still all you'll end up with. (Unless you're much luckier or more talented than I am.) I'm only now starting to feel like I have some of the tools to fix my own worst writing. If I were less obsessive, how would I pick up those tools? Books are wonderful, but I've learned that I can read advice that is true and useful and learn nothing until something makes me get it--not in my head, but down in my bones. (I know there's a NaNoReviseMo, but somehow I don't see as many people talking about participating in that.)

Revising is not a heady rush of artistic inspiration, but it may just be that it's in revising that you learn how to write.

If you get stung in your dreams, can you go into anaphylactic shock in real life?

2010-05-15T07:45:00.003-04:00

I've always been jealous of my wife's dreams. She gets scenes, characters, hell, entire plotlines. She wakes up and says, "I had this awesome dream! I have to write this!" Her plots seem to just come to her, while I have to work for mine.

Like most people, probably, I tend not to remember my dreams, and to think I didn't have any. I've read that everyone has dreams, and if you think you don't you're just not remembering them, but it's probably not unreasonable to suppose the fact that I get so little sleep plays a factor in either my frequency of dreaming or my ability to remember them. Maybe when I do sleep I have to sleep more deeply or something.

When I do remember my dreams, they're of the most pathetic and mundane variety. I kid you not, I dream I'm grading papers, or teaching, or driving my kids somewhere. Maybe I don't remember 'em because they're so damn unmemorable. I also get the universal stress dreams. My most frequent one seems to be of the oh-no-I-forgot-to-put-on-pants variety. (What's odd about that one is I'm always terrified that everyone's going to notice, but pretty much nobody ever does. I become a master of misdirection and hiding. Hmm. Maybe there's a story there.)

Once in a long while, like maybe every year or two, I have a truly awful dream, and I discovered years ago that I had kind of an interesting ability when it came to dreams like that.

The night before last, for example, I dreamt that I was doing some spring cleaning (see?!) and while I was cleaning an outdoor storage compartment (which we don't actually have) I disturbed an enormous hive of wasps. Now you have to understand that wasps fill me with the most unmanly terror. The worst thing about being an adult is that I can't run to someone else when I find a wasp's nest; being the one who has to face them down pretty much is my definition of being a grown-up.

Anyway, this nest seems to have been the deathstar of wasps, because I was being chased by dozens of them (I'm pretty sure bees congregate in numbers but wasps don't, but I didn't have time to argue with my dream logic, mmkay?) I was also dimly aware that I may have released other wasps into my home, but I had my own problems at the moment. In real life wasps aren't all that fast, and you can outrun them if you run ten or twenty feet or so, but these suckers were tenacious. I was sprinting (well, as best a two-hundred-and-mumblety pound guy can sprint, anyway) and each time I looked back, they were still on my tail. Most of them hadn't stung me yet, though two or three might have gotten me, but I knew that I didn't have a lot of endurance, and there was no way I'd be able to keep this up for long. Any second now, I would lose my steam and get stung by an epic number of angry wasps.

And then my brain did this strange thing it's done a handful of times in the past. As I was running, I had this moment of This isn't actually happening you know. This is a dream, and I don't have to accept this outcome. I can wake up.

So I did, and I lay there in the darkness with my heart pounding for a while before I decided to get up and get some grading done.

As I mentioned, this isn't the first time I've opted out of an unpleasant dream. I remember doing it once when I dreamt that my father was dying, and another time when I dreamt I was going to jail for something I didn't do. And other times I can't specifically recall. I always thought it was kind of cool that I could do that. I don't really know a thing about lucid dreaming, but this seemed to have that sort of quality of exercising control over your dreams.

As I was driving to work in the morning, it struck me that this "feature" had a downside. Maybe the reason I never dream storylines is because I can opt out of unpleasantness in my dreams. How can you have a story without unpleasantness? My wife's dreams have characters getting tortured, captured by enemies, accused of crimes, discovering they're clones. Hell, I wouldn't make it halfway through one of her dreams, and so I can't possibly make it to the cool resolution either!

I actually have gotten ideas from dreams from time to time, but they're always premises or things like that, not full blown plots with conflicts and resolutions.

I wonder if there's a way to train my brain to not wake up, but to work out the happy ending to whatever awful situation it generates.

Where do I begin . . .

2010-05-02T09:51:00.002-04:00

I keep thinking of things I should post to my blog, and then I never seem to get around to it. Then when I finally get time, I sit in front of the computer trying to remember what amazing insight I had and coming up empty.

I've been getting a lot of great revision done on Vanishing Act lately. I've crossed another milestone on the way down, and now I'm at 82,000 words. I really am finding that now, months later, it's easier for me to make some of the tough changes.

You're not supposed to blog about this, because allegedly agents and/or editor sometimes look up the blogs of people they're considering, and you don't want them to know how long you've been looking for or how many people have rejected you, but I sent out my very first query/partial for Vanishing Act Friday. (I guess if a really long time passes without a bite, I can always come back and edit this line out.)

While I was out, I also mailed off submissions for a writing contest for me and for my wife. There's kind of a funny story, there. I wanted to keep working on making my manuscript better for as long as I could, right up until the deadline. There were some specific searches I wanted to get done for junk words, passive constructions, and so forth. Like any metropolitan area I'm familiar with, we have a late night post office at the airport, where I tend to run things when I'm up against a postmark deadline. So I went into Friday night fully intending to get our submissions to the post office some time between 11 pm and midnight. I worked backward, figuring I should try to get there by eleven, to leave some cushion. I figured on a half hour of driving, so I should leave home by 10:30. I figured I'd give myself an hour to do all the printing and formatting (that may seem like a lot, but the contest had very specific guidelines. Names removed from manuscripts, a thirty word bio, a thirty word logline, three copies of the first fifty pages, and so forth. So I figured I wanted to be done trying to revise by nine or nine-thirty.

Well I'm not sure where the time went--I think putting the manuscript together took even longer than I allowed for--but I ended up leaving the house at 11:30. I got to the post office at 11:56, and ran in with my four packages. There wasn't a deadline really on the agent submission, so I did the three contest submissions first. As each postmarked stamp came out of the machine, I checked the date and did a little dance for each one that came out April 30th. When I finally did the one for the agent submission, it came out postmarked May 1.

O_O

Okay, maybe that was a bit closer than I intended to cut it.

Then again, I have friends who congratulate you if you get a tax refund of zero, because that means you avoided giving the government any more of your money than they were entitled to. I suppose you could call this a win, because I literally got every last possible second of revision in on these contest entries before I sent them out.

Sometimes you can't simply tweak something

2010-03-27T19:21:00.002-04:00

This morning's struggle was this paragraph, still in the first third of the book (I'm looking forward to getting past chapter eight or so, where I feel like the writing really improved. Right now revising feels too much like rewriting.

Anyway, here goes:

The bookshelves lining two entire walls of the study held almost as much interest for him as the rifle cabinet did. Paul or Michelle, or perhaps both, liked to read as much as he did. Uncle Danny had made him leave everything behind, including the book he had been reading. Chris eyed the shelf hungrily. He would have to take a longer look later.

I suppose this isn't a horrible paragraph, but it's kind of a dead one. There are two sentences in a row that end with the "as much as ___ did" structure. It also suggests that Chris is planning on borrowing a book from Paul and Michelle. Now he will eventually do just that, but at this point he shouldn't be planning on it. He should be expecting to be there a day at most. I let my knowledge of what was coming seep into the moment. Also, when it comes to third person limited, it's not particularly tight penetration.

The thing is, though, having decided I didn't care for this paragraph, I couldn't seem to fix it. At first I was mostly trying to find a way to take out the repeated "as much as ___ did"s, so I was just trying to come up with different words to say the same thing. The problem was that I could not say the same things without some of the problems I just pointed out, but had not yet articulated to myself. I didn't know why the paragraph wasn't working, but it continued to not work no matter what words I plugged into the existing sentences.

Then I decided perhaps I shouldn't be trying so much to keep the existing sentences with just a few tweaks. Perhaps what I needed to do was delete the entire paragraph and rewrite it from scratch. I tried that, and managed to get something that I could live with.

Here's the new version. Hopefully it's better:

Though he was supposed to be focused on the rifle cabinet, something else caught his eye. All those books! Somebody here was a reader. It must be nice to be able to keep books after you read them and look at them again later if you wanted to. Chris had never had the chance to take a close look at somebody’s book collection; what you read probably said something about you. Hopefully he’d get to spend some time in this room before he left.

How do I know?!

2010-03-24T20:25:00.003-04:00

So I'm working on Vanishing Act again after leaving it dormant for a very long time. I haven't lost my passion for the protagonist and what he goes through, but I've been staying away from it mostly because it's so much damned work compared to my more recent writing projects. I learned so much while working on this and over the year or so after I finished that first draft that it practically hurts to go back and read some of the passages in this. I mean, hell, I already cut forty thousand words, and there's still fat! It's not that it can't be cleaned up, but that cleaning it up is so much less fun than writing new stories. (Another issue is the time versus what I have to show for it. In the time it takes me to wrestle with this manuscript, I can put four or five short stories into circulation with the paying markets. Any one of those could strike paydirt while I'm still cutting darlings from Vanishing Act [and I'm still checking my e-mail compulsively forty times a day for one of them in particular.])

So why am I taking it up again? Well, I figure if I'm going to seriously pitch it around, this is the time. Since it's a finalist in the Do It! Write! contest, I'm going to be able to say on my query letters that it placed [whatever] in a contest judged by an acquisitions editor from Harper-Collins, and I know that when a contest has a respected judge, that makes it worth mentioning in those letters.

So as much as I feel like I could polish and cut forever, I think the time to take that blind leap is coming quickly. If nobody takes it on, that's okay. The next book will be better. :-)

-o-

Anyway, I'm still finding places, mostly in the first third of the book, where the writing just isn't carrying its weight. Passive constructions (not passive voice per se, but telling more than showing), repeated phrases, and stuff that simply lacks polish. And I've got a good enough eye now to see what's bad, but sometimes the fixes can still be hard to find.

This is hardly new or Earth-shaking, but one thing I have to keep reminding myself is to ask myself how I know. That's my trick for making the writing vivid. Specifically, how do I know a character's mental or emotional state?

Here's an example:

“I just wanted to make sure you were all set,” she said. She seemed awkward herself for the first time all day.

What drew my attention to that sentence in the first place was that it was my third use of "for the first time" in the chapter, but the problems with this paragraph run deeper than that.

And that's actually an important point. For me, at least, repetitive phrasing is almost always an indicator of deeper problems. I use repetitive phrasing when I'm writing lazy. I'm trying to get the words on the screen, get the chapter done, whatever, and not looking for the best way to do it, which is okay, as long as I eventually revise. But clichés--even if they're just "house clichés"--are a symptom of the same underlying problem that leads to passive writing. (Again, for me, anyway.)

I struggled for a while to fix the superficial problems. One of the other two repetitions of the phrase was easy to get rid of, but one of them, I felt, needed to stay. There's no real reason not to leave this one too, but this paragraph was ringing clunky to my ear, and now is not the time to be lazy, anyway.

But I couldn't figure out how else to convey what I thought was important here--that it was noteworthy that Michelle seemed nervous, because she was the only person who had not shown any sign of nerves in what had been a very unusual day. How else could I distinguish this time from all the times she had not seemed nervous? Everything I came up with sounded even more clunky--in particular, everything I was coming up with was even more passive. Lots of "to be" verbs that indicate that you're seeing description or exposition and not action.

Then I asked myself an obvious question: How does Chris, the POV character, know Michelle is nervous?

When I thought of it like that, here is what I came up with:

The door opened partway and Michelle poked her head inside. “I wanted to make sure you were all set,” she said. She paused abruptly, as if she had been planning on saying something else and then changed her mind.

This may not be perfect. I'm telling you her pause was abrupt; is there a way I could show that instead? Maybe if I just say "she paused," and lose the "abruptly." It's still a work in progress. But for the most part, now I'm showing you nervous instead of telling you. Who knows? Maybe I could come up with a nice simile for her stopping-and-starting.

But the point is the question that broke the logjam was how do the characters know the thing I'm trying to convey? If I can't think of a way they would know, then I shouldn't even have it there, because I'm breaking POV by telling you things the POV character couldn't figure out.

This may be unbelievably obvious advice for anybody reading this. Hell, it's obvious for me, since this isn't a new advice. But what I'm working on is internalizing all the little techniques I've picked up--remembering things like that when it really counts.

Also, did you notice what else happened there? The point I was so anxious to make--the contrast between Michelle's earlier confidence and her awkwardness now, didn't actually make it to this revised version at all. And that's okay. If I've characterized well, readers will pick up on the fact that she's usually able to project confidence, but that this interaction is testing even her abilities. It won't seem out of character--readers will be able to distinguish between this quiet moment and her earlier displays of confidence. Or maybe not, but that's a chance I need to take. This is a recurring problem of mine, and a reason I tend to (tended to, really, since I've gotten a lot better with my more recent writing): Closed Captioning for the Dumb. (Heh . . . I like that so much I think I'll make it a tag. I bet I have cause to use it again.) I'm always so worried that readers will fail to pick up some subtlety or nuance that I intend that I hammer it home, over and over again. I need to have more faith in my readers, first of all. Second of all, if some readers don't see exactly what's in my mind, that's okay. Hopefully the story is entertaining and meaningful without having a direct dump of what's going on in my brain. And the things that sail over your head when you first read a story are the ones that make the story reward re-reading anyway.

Well somebody thinks I'm a winner, at least

2010-03-07T11:34:00.003-05:00

My novel won first place in the preliminary round of the "Do it! Write!" literary contest. Woohoo! My wife won this contest last year, and now she has an agent. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Other irons in the fire:

A short story being looked at by a pro market. I received an e-mail from the slush editor telling me it had been passed up the food chain to the editor-in-chief. ::fingers crossed::
Another short story at a different pro market. I haven't heard from them, but they've had the story for 37 days longer than the average time for rejection listed by duotrope, and for ten days less than the average time listed for acceptance. Hey, I know it's not much, but you have to take your positive portents where you can find them!
A contest entry for a significant national contest. The talent pool I'm up against is huge and daunting, but I feel really good about my entry--my query letter and the first two pages for Vanishing Act. I already thought I had a good query letter, and I went back and polished the heck out of it. I think I managed to improve it quite a bit.

So, you know, no action on the blog doesn't translate to no action on the writing front. ;)

Revisions on my novel just got put back on the front burner--I'd been focusing on short fiction for a bit, hoping to get a sale or two. But there's a possibility I'll get a full request or two out of this, and I don't want to squander it.

On entertainment versus "literariness" in SF

2010-02-27T00:44:00.004-05:00

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's essay "Barbarian Confessions," from the book Star Wars On Trial, edited by David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover, is temporarily available for free reading here. According to Rusch, this essay proved to be controversial. I certainly found it to be food for thought.

For the most part, the history she describes sounds unfamiliar to me, as if she's inhabited a completely different fandom than I have. In her version of reality, the reason for SF prose's waning popularity is that it has grown increasingly literary, and readers who are looking for fun escapist books are being turned away, and only finding SFnal satisfaction in media tie-ins. Literary fiction, on the other hand, has rediscovered narrative and storytelling--including classic SF tropes--and restyled itself mainstream fiction. Non-SF readers dismiss SF because it's no fun, with not enough gee-wiz and laser battles and exploring strange new worlds.

While I see reflections of reality in that version of things, it's a distorted version of my perceptions--like one of us is living in an alternate universe.

I definitely agree that literary fiction is appropriating SF tropes and being so churlish as to refuse to acknowledge it (except for Michael Chabon, of course). There are a lot of books on the literature shelf that are obviously, as far as I'm concerned, science fiction and/or fantasy, and it's just pandering to literary readers' prejudice that keeps them from being shelved there. Most notably Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife. Both authors, IIRC, have poo-pooed the notion that their works are science fiction. Bullshit; they are. (Or fantasy, if you want to argue the point in Niffenegger's case, but speculative fiction either way.)

On the other hand, the thought that what's driving mainstream readers away from SF is that it's not mythic enough, not escapist enough, not heroic enough, is utterly alien to me. What I invariably find, when I talk about my enjoyment of science fiction to people who are not fans, is that they think it's all Star Wars. In fact, I have an entirely undeserved reputation among my students as a Star Wars freak--undeserved because I never bring up Star Wars or Star Trek, but since I make no secret of the fact that I'm a big science fiction geek, everybody jumps to the most obvious conclusion. (In point of fact, while I do like Star Wars and most science fiction movies very much, I'm much more fanatical about written word science fiction.) People tell me they don't like science fiction because it's silly, escapist, unrooted in things that matter to them. It's not lack of escapism that I see driving non-genre readers away--it's the perception that escapism is all that's there.

But hell, I don't have anything like Rusch's experience or credentials. Who am I to argue with a Hugo-winning author and former editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction? (And a damn fine writer, I might add. When I was lucky enough to attend WorldCon, I voted for her to win one Hugo she did not get, but in my opinion deserved--for "Recovering Apollo 8.") If she says that's what she sees, I certainly ought to take it seriously and consider the fact that the folks I'm interacting with aren't representative of the larger readership. When she talks about the "Science Fiction Village," hell, she knows those people.

And more importantly, while I don't necessarily agree with her summary of readers' attitudes toward science fiction, I emphatically agree with her larger point:

I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.

I've played the literary game. Majored in literature, went to grad school, taught Shakespeare and Magical Realism. Hell, I'd say I played the game well. I'm all for authors aspiring to literary merit and profound meaning.

But entertainment ought to come first. If you've written a profound work that does not entertain, then in my opinion you've failed as an artist. Conversely (contrapositively?) if you have written an entertaining work that is not profound, you've succeeded. Maybe not as much as if you'd been able to do both, but more than an author who does not entertain.

As to the specific point of the essay, I'm not antagonistic to media tie-ins, but I largely don't read them. If they truly do (or potentially could) bring more readers to SF and revive the genre, then good for them. As an aspiring writer, I'm much more annoyed by celebrity novels. Those do crowd good books off the shelves, much more than tie-ins, which, after all, are written by real authors, and often real authors struggling to establish themselves and be able to do this for a living.

(A minor bone of contention: she very nearly lost me as a reader by assuming I didn't know what the word "catholic" meant. I would recommend to anyone to avoid suggesting in an essay that your readers look up a word in the dictionary. Seriously!)

Puppy

2010-02-20T21:24:00.004-05:00

That is all.

Not Dead Yet

2010-02-20T11:18:00.005-05:00

I bet one can tell a thing or two about how school's going by the spikes and troughs in my posting here.

I've gotten optimistic signs on a couple of my stories that are out looking for homes. Maybe I'll have good news in the next month or two. Or maybe not. The writing's not going so well right now, mostly because I'm working on schoolwork fourteen hours a day. Spring break's about twenty-nine teaching days away, after which I'll be shifting into review mode with my AP classes, so hopefully things will get better soon. And hopefully all my hard work will pay off. Some days, I swear I wish I knew how to phone it in.

I've been reluctant to send out "Spacelift." I just can't decide if it's ready or not. I did some pretty extensive revising since I posted the first draft under password protect here. I just don't have access to a lot of critters. There are places like OWW, of course, but I'm not in a position to reciprocate right now. So it goes.

I haven't been reading anybody else's blogs either. I think I'm about ready to dip my toes back into that sea. I hope people still remember me. :)

In other news, we lost Fraemie, our oldest dog, a couple of weeks ago. She was sixteen, and we knew the end was near, but it was still hard. I carried her downstairs that last morning, playing with her, and she seemed pretty chipper. We had been struggling on and off to get her to eat, but we seemed to have turned the corner with that. I fed her her breakfast, which she dug into eagerly, and went off to do some last schoolwork before getting dressed. A couple minutes later, I heard a weird noise coming from the kitchen. A couple days before she had accidentally pushed her bowl under the lip of a cabinet, and needed help getting it back out where she could eat. I initially thought the same thing had happened, and that the noise was her kicking on her bowl, trying to dislodge it. I walked into the kitchen to find her on her side in a puddle of pee, running in place. She'd had seizures before, but none like this one. We took her to the vet, where she went on to have another half-dozen or so seizures, showing signs of pain, and so we ended her suffering.

In a way that was my first experience of death. I've had (a very few) relatives pass away, but I've never been there as it happened. It was . . . well it was something that will stay with me.

This was much more my wife's loss than mine. She had the dog for a year before she met me. I was deeply saddened; she was devastated.

I was a bit disappointed that none of my coworkers asked about my emergency absence. I'd typed in my emergency e-mail that my dog was having seizures; nobody asked if it was okay or what had happened. Kids in a couple of my classes asked and expressed sympathy when they found out, but as far as the adults at my school were concerned, my unplanned absence was nothing but an inconvenience for them to deal with.

So it goes.

In happier news, today we are driving to Melbourne, hopefully to get a new puppy who was co-bred by the same breeder who bred Fraemie. She looks cute as hell in her photo. I'm really bad about taking pictures, but hopefully I'll get off my lazy ass and take a couple and maybe post one here.

October Sky and Good Writing, Part I

2009-12-17T17:25:00.006-05:00

I'd never heard of the movie October Sky before last year, but now I've used it in my classes two years in a row. It's a wonderful story about fathers and sons, about striving to be yourself and not who others want to define you as, about overcoming long odds, and math. :)

It hasn't yet ceased to amaze me how I'll start the movie, turn the lights down, and without me having to do much of anything, conversation and off task behavior will just die of its own accord, as the kids get totally hooked by this story. The kids are thrilled at the high points and concerned at the low ones. A quiet moment will come along, and you could hear a pin drop. Often there's applause when the movie gets to the end. This is a powerful story, and one the kids eat right up.

When you show the same movie class after class, you get a chance to move past the narrative, and see what's going on behind the magic. I've heard some folks recommend typing out or copying down published stories that you find effective so that you can get beyond the spell and see how the author accomplished it. I haven't yet tried that myself--spare time is just too hard to come by these days. :) But I can totally see how that could be good advice, because, among other things, I felt a similar effect as I saw this film repeatedly. Either way, the point is to get to where you're not pulled into the thrall, so you can see what's going on. (It's not the same exactly, but I didn't just watch the movie repeatedly; when you show a movie to kids in 50 minute increments, you do more than just watch the screen.)

I had a couple of observations I thought I could take away from watching this today, one of which I'll post now, and the other one I'll save.

A lot of what I've read on story structure talks about having disasters continually separate the protagonist from his or her goal, and either forcing the protagonist to regroup, or forcing the protagonist to revise the goal. At the end, when all seems the most hopeless, the protagonist finally breaks through. It gets to seeming like the protagonist can never have a moment of success of enjoyment along the way, and that hardly seems to represent all the fiction out there.

As I watched October Sky, it occurred to me that the pattern I was seeing was slightly different from that. There were disasters, true. And each low was lower than the low before as well. But there were highs too, and each high was higher than the one before. First Homer gets excited by the sight of Sputnik, but then he destroys his mother's fence. Then Homer gets help and builds a more powerful rocket, but he accidentally launches it in the direction of the mine. Then Homer and his friends regroup and create a launch site out of town, only to have their rockets explode before reaching a respectable altitude. Along the way he gets encouragement from Wernher von Braun, but gets discouragement from his father. He has a successful launch and gets written up in the newspaper, but then he gets arrested when he is suspected of starting a forest fire. Then we get a whole series of disasters, but once they're past, success again: Homer proves his innocence and wins the state science fair. This is followed by the biggest fight with his father yet, and by violence caused by the miner's strike.

Do you see my point? The highs get progressively higher, but always with some new disaster to make satisfaction fleeting. Until the end, of course. So it's really more of an oscillating function. Something like this, maybe:

(Yeah, I'm a big nerd, I know.)

Anyhow, I thought this was a useful way of looking at plotting, particularly for longer works. Next time I write something long, maybe I'll try to follow that kind of rollercoaster pattern.

-o-

The movie's only real moment of fail comes at the very end, and it's a minor shame. Homer's dad finally comes out to the launch site to see what he's been so obsessed with, and together they launch a rocket and watch it climb into the sky. Impressed, his father stands there, jaw agape, for a little while, and finally gives his son the first sign of approval of his choices and interests: he puts his hand around Homer's shoulder. Unfortunately, the camera's loving closeup, the father's slow arm motion, and the placement of the two actors makes it look like Homer's Dad has an entirely different sign of affection in mind. In every single class I show this movie, the spell is temporarily shattered and the class breaks into giggles when it looks like Homer's Dad is about to grab his ass:

I didn't crop it to look that way. That's pretty much a full screen shot.

The Hero's Journey

2009-12-08T22:42:00.007-05:00

I have a friend of a friend who is an author with a big house and swears by writing to the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey, or "Monomyth," is a series of tropes that are supposedly ubiquitous in stories from every culture. This was first pointed out by Joseph Campbell, and later elaborated on in the context of playwrighting by Christopher Vogler, and doubtless others as well. Here's a wikilink with a pretty thorough description of the structure.

I've seen it asserted online that pretty much every successful story can be analyzed in terms of the Hero's Journey--not that they elaborate on every stage of the journey, but that they focus on part of the journey while at least alluding to the rest of it. I'm not convinced that this is so, though. Certainly I can think of lots of novels--especially fantasy bricks--that adhere to this structure closely. I'm willing to concede that the same goes for a lot of short stories. But when I think of a story like "All I Have To Do . . ." or like Elizabeth Bear's "The Horrid Glory of Its Wings," I'm hard pressed to make the connections.

. . . hmm . . . let me rethink that. In "All I Have To Do . . . ," maybe the challenge Liz is confronted with is getting to the bottom of her ability and learning to live (or not) with it. She rejects this challenge through her drinking and her attempts to stay awake. Her road of trials could be when she befriends Ronald and they experiment with filming her and with attempts at lucid dreaming.

» Spoilers abound. Click to show/hide. «

Does that work? *frown* Arguably. But is it useful? If the connections can be as tenuous as I just outlined, how does that help me when I set out to write a new story, instead of merely shoehorning an existing story into the broad strokes of this structure?

I wish I had a good resource on the Hero's Journey for writers. Like every good English major, I have a couple of books by Joseph Campbell, but those don't focus on the craft side of storytelling, but on the analysis side. I'm not going to go out and buy a how-to book without knowing if it's going to be helpful--I have enough useless books on writing. I found precious little online on this topic.

Is steampunk a single genre?

2009-12-07T18:02:00.004-05:00

I've been dipping my toes into steampunk--as a reader, not a writer--for the last year or so, just trying to see if it's something I enjoy reading, and if it's something I thought I might be able to write at some point. If I ever do write steampunk, it will likely not sound like a lot of other steampunk prose fiction out there, because I don't think I could pull off the pseudovictorian prose that a majority of the steampunk I've read affects. I have encountered a few examples, though, where the steampunk is all about the juxtaposition of modern contrivances with low technology. I could see myself doing something like that. On the other hand, I have no great interest in writing about England, but I could have fun writing something set in the United States or in Latin America--or in some totally unheard of land.

The more I read, though, the less convinced I am that all the things being bundled together to show how trendy steampunk is are in fact one genre.

(I'm no expert of course. I think I've made this point before: My blog, my aimless and possibly inaccurate rambling. I'm just thinking "aloud" here. If my facts are wrong, feel free to tell me where.)

I perceive of steampunk as being inspired by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. The Victorian overtones in steampunk are in homage to those two authors. For them it wasn't an affectation, though--it was their era. (Of course, Verne was not a subject of Victoria. Presumably the same stylistic choices that were common in English literature were common in French, or perhaps he was simply translated that way.) I've actually seen Verne and Wells classified as examples of steampunk, but that seems patently ridiculous. They wrote science fiction. Their science fiction bears the stylistic and technological stamps of their societies, but these are not self-conscious homages to an earlier age.

When it comes to fashion, what is the difference between being steampunk and being simply quasivictorian? Goggles? When people mod their computers or whatever, that is pretty clearly steampunk, because what they're creating is a Victorian-inspired version of something technological that never actually existed in that era. This is what a Victorian computer would have looked like if there had been such a thing. That seems pretty quintessentially steampunk. But if we're just talking about top hats and waistcoats and pocket watches and monocles, where's the steampunk in that?

A lot of writing on steampunk I've read refers to the original Wild, Wild West as some sort of proto-example of the genre. I love Wild, Wild West as much as anyone, but here, specifically, is where I am most unconvinced. I'd say pseudo-historical action tales including technology that didn't exist in the period in question has a long history as a trope. In how many Indiana Jones or Allan Quartemain type movies have we seen some millenia old native treasure trove feature automated devices putatively powered by carefully counterbalanced stonework or by underground streams or whatnot? Should we label these something like "stonepunk"? I don't think so because I don't think the creators of these movies and shows had it in mind to meld science fiction with historical settings. Rather, they had a particular setting in mind, and they didn't want to let the technical limitations of that setting interfere with the cool eye candy they wanted to pull off.

I'm not convinced that Brisco County, Jr. counts either, because Brisco actually is a time traveler. That makes this as much a steampunk story as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

What it all comes down to for me, I think is this: the literary steampunk I've read is largely based on imagining what could have been if earlier societies had managed to invent high tech items based on the technology available to them at the time. It envisions societies substantially affected by these inventions, though still recognizable historical. The nonliterary examples I'm familiar with seem to be more about style--James Bond in the old west, say. What would a fan of the Will Smith movie, or of the Jackie Chan Around the World in Eighty Days, make of the Victorian prose, "gentle reader" asides, and infodumps of written steampunk?

Short Story Analysis: All I Have To Do Is . . .

2009-12-06T23:10:00.003-05:00

Good luck finding this one. It's in the Winter 2007 edition of Brutarian, and you'll spend at least as much on shipping as you will for the magazine, assuming you can find this issue for sale anywhere. Brutarian is a highly entertaining magazine featuring reviews of movies and records I've never heard of along with short speculative fiction. It reminds me a lot of the free arts weekly I used to read in Miami, crossed with Asimov's or something. I think I would seek it out if it weren't so dang hard to get a copy of.

Nick Mamatas's story was my favorite of the ones in this issue, but I'll tell you quite honestly that I'm not positive if I "got" it or not. It stayed with me anyway because the concept was fascinating to me. Liz is a teenage girl who experiences the dreams other people have of her. If someone dreams of having sex with her, she feels it, and wakes up with anal tears to boot. If someone dreams of strangling her, she feels that too. Gradually she learns that she is not only a receiver, but a sender. She can send other people experiences by way of her dreams. If I'd thought of this concept, there is still no way I would have written this story--but I wish I'd thought of it anyway. *grin*

The ending seems ambiguous to me--unless that's just me being dense. Liz starts out with plans for revenge on those who have wronged her--her parents, primarily--but claims to move beyond those fantasies and achieve enlightenment. In her enlightened state, she proposes to dream a dream of all of us, wherein we all "embrace the nothingness." She starts to do just this, and the story ends. Come to think of it, maybe it's not as ambiguous as all that. It seems to me like she decides to put us all out of our collective misery through death. She promises Nirvana, but, correct me if I'm wrong here, Nirvana in Buddhism isn't really heaven, is it? As I recall, Nirvana refers to ending the cycle of life and rebirth--to getting off the wheel. That seems to work with the whole idea of embracing the nothingness and of becoming "dead leaves on the damp earth."

This story defies analysis in terms of conventional structures I'm familiar with. Liz's ultimate goal just kind of coalesces in the last quarter. There isn't really a try-fail-try again thing going on here. I've seen it alleged that just about any story can be analyzed in terms of the hero's journey, but I'm struggling to connect this story with that structure at all, except by such vague connections that they may as well be meaningless. The only structure that seems to fit is the most fundamental of all--a character makes a choice, acts on that choice, and that choice has consequences. Liz is tempted to seek revenge. Instead, she (I think) chooses oblivion for us all, and sends us the dream that will make that happen. And then the consequence--we don't see that consequence because of course we are dead.

But all of that happens at the end of the story. I would estimate this story at about four thousand words long--again, a model of brevity for me to learn from. The first third, I'd say, serves to situate us in Liz's life. We get brief accounts of two of her mother's dreams of her, one of her father's, and one by her more-or-less boyfriend Ron. In the middle third of the story, Liz and Ron begin experimenting with the workings of Liz's experiences. She already knows what happens to her, but this appears to be the first concerted effort to really study and explore it. Then Ron threatens to use her condition against her, she turns the tables on him, suffers the dreams of others due to her newfound notoriety, and is visited by her father who explains to her that she can send as well as receive. The last third of the story, roughly, is when Liz goes to the mental hospital. There she gradually masters her ability and uses it to grant us all Nirvana.

That strikes me as a lot of set-up for that payoff. It works, though--for me at least--because the concept is so intriguing that I want to read on even before Liz figures out what it is she wants to do.

So what can I learn from this? I . . . am not sure, really. That traditional structures are a myth? The power of the concept to hook a reader? I'll have to think on this one for a bit.

Sometimes I almost believe in muses

2009-12-05T13:07:00.005-05:00

I'm just about done polishing "Spacelift." Not, necessarily, that it's polished, but it may be about as far as I can take it. As I was thinking about it this morning, I realized that I had no idea, now, why I had made one of the plot choices that I had made. It served the ends of the story, but I don't remember consciously thinking about it. I can analyze the effect that choice has on the narrative, but it's really as if somebody else wrote it.

Jorge's goal is to get to Magda, who is injured, before

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

He gets to the ship's infirmary, only to discover that she's been moved to the airlock in preparation for transfer to another ship. He gets to the airlock, only to discover that he has no time to do anything, because the transfer is happening now. And so it goes.

But why did I decide that the ship Jorge and Magda were on did not have a fully-functioning sick bay, and that she needed to be transferred? I don't remember consciously thinking about it. I knew that he had to have obstacles, and getting to the infirmary and finding her not there would work, but why that specific scenario?

Here's what I notice as a reader: not only does it serve as an obstacle--it also helps Jorge. It keeps him in the game. After all, he's trying to get to Magda before the doctors do. If his ship had a real sick bay with real doctors, I'd have to come up with some other reasons why it wasn't Game Over for Jorge. And that's what kind of dawned on me today: I hear a lot about obstacles and conflict for the protagonists, but whatever the protagonist is striving against--be it an antagonist or just cruel fate--needs obstacles too. There's something keeping the bad guy from just walking up to the good guy and shooting him in the head. Maybe the bad guy's in hiding. Maybe his henchmen are inept. Maybe he hasn't figured out who the good guy is yet.

If the bad guy doesn't have obstacles, you end up with the silliness of many James Bond movies. You know what I'm talking about. The evil supervillain dude has Bond captured and tied up. Naturally, he immediately lodges a bullet in Bond's skull and the credits roll before a stunned audience. Wait--that's not it. No, first he brags about the details of his evil plan. Then he starts his Rube Goldberg Death Machine and leaves! He can't even be bothered to watch Bond die! He just turns the hourglass that will release the rope that's holding back the pendulum that will block the laser that will unlock the cage that will release the alligators that will step on the weight-sensitive plate that will trigger the nuclear device that will kill Bond. Because I guess he wants Bond to be dead and impressed.

You ever see a competition where one player is substantially more skilled than the other? You ever see the more skilled player play at less than his best, and let the inferior player keep it close? It's not terribly sporting, but he's doing it to keep the other guy in the game. I guess phony drama is better than no drama at all.

So thanks, Muse, for doing that automatically for me, so I didn't have to think about it!

Testing

2009-12-05T13:00:00.002-05:00

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

(Thanks--and (((hugs)))--to pmmonkey for the how-to.)

Funny how "independent" and "undependable" have the same root

2009-12-04T21:50:00.003-05:00

Last week my wife and I wanted to order a book for a friend whose birthday was coming up. We each decided to take advantage of the excuse and order ourselves something as well--kind of like when you go to the fridge to get someone a beer, but get yourself one too, right? Well I have a pretty lousy memory for things like this, but I finally remembered the links I'd seen to Indiebound, and so I decided to give my money to an independent bookseller instead of to Amazon. Amazon is terribly convenient, with its wishlists, its DRM-free MP3s, its frequent deals on shipping, its recommendations based on your shopping history, and with the wide array of products they sell. But they also have some business practices I find unsavory. For one, last year they leaned on small presses to use their subsidiary POD service as a printer, saying that if they did not they would refuse to stock their books. In Europe, they demanded that publishers give them better discounts than they give brick and mortar stores. The practical effects of this is that Amazon can undercut brick and mortar stores, driving them out of business.

I like bookstores. I want them to continue to offer me pleasant places to browse through books and see what discoveries I might make. Also, the consolidation of bookselling into fewer and fewer larger players hurts up-and-coming writers, because it gives the buyers from those chains an undue level of control over what gets published. Is there a point in publishing a book that Barnes & Noble won't stock? Well there would be if there were tons of booksellers other than B&N, but with the slow heat death of Borders, Barnes and Noble and Amazon are the big players, with Wal-Mart mucking up the works with their own predatory pricing.

For this and other reasons, I try to support BN.com when I can. But beyond that, I would like to see other choices beyond the mega-retailers. So the idea of an Amazon-like site that benefited indie bookstores seemed perfect. I happily placed our order--maybe not so much happily as smugly.

Well the days passed and still no books. I guess we'd gotten spoiled by Amazon--their books always seem to arrive an hour or two after we place the order--sometimes even before I hit submit. So I went to the website of the Orlando bookstore I'd placed the order from, and it said my order was "open," and "processing." Did that mean they hadn't even shipped it yet? By this point, I was kind of hoping it meant that, because then I could just drive downtown and pick up our order myself.

I tried calling the bookstore to see . . . but no luck. They closed for the evening at six. No problem; I'd call in the morning during my planning period . . . except they were closed, because they don't open until eleven. When I finally got ahold of them during my lunch, I learned that a glitch had prevented them from even seeing my order. Further, they didn't actually have the books I'd ordered in stock, because what they do when they get a website order is order the book themselves, and then send it along to you when it comes. So it's this friend's birthday, and we have nothing. The order hasn't gone through, and the book is not in stock.

I canceled the birthday book and left the rest of the order standing; my wife says I went too easy on them.

So I did a little scrambling, then. Barnes and Noble's website will tell you which local stores have a given book in stock. None had this particular book, but I was able to find one in Orlando that had another book that seemed like a good choice.

So what's the moral of the story? As I left school this afternoon, I was thinking the moral might be that stores that become big chains are as successful as they are because, frankly, they provide better service. They send things faster, they don't lose your order, and they have better hours. I mean, seriously? Eleven to six?!

But not so fast . . .

Because it turned out the Barnes and Noble website lied to me about whether or not they had the book in stock. Their computers said they did, but it wasn't on the shelf anywhere. So I guess this story doesn't have a moral--just like the rest of real life, neh?

Anyway, when you next decide to order a book, consider ordering from an independent bookstore. Unless you also want toys, music, T-shirts, or whatever. Or unless you're in a hurry.

What Would Elizabeth Bear Do?

2009-11-27T22:24:00.007-05:00

Spoilers for "Spacelift" follow, in case anybody cares.

-o-

A lot of the feedback I received for "Spacelift" seemed to indicate to me that I wasn't ending the story on a conclusive enough note. Tying into Algis Budrys's seven point structure (I finally found a link!), perhaps I wasn't sending enough validation at the end. Or maybe not. The feeling I got was that Jorge's big transformation, his big reveal, came too late, was treated too shortly, and was anticlimactic. He spends a scene arguing with Adriana about what he's going to do . . . when he finally does it there is no surprise for the reader, and no real closure.

I decided the ending would work better if Jorge transforms himself into Magda's double just a bit earlier--before his confrontation with Adriana. Have Adriana spying on him, and have her confront him when she catches him in the act. The climax of the story, I think, is their confrontation. If the transformation occurs after this, it's anticlimactic. Hopefully, with the transformation occurring before, it's not.

Moving this transformation up, though, has had a couple of challenging consequences.

One thing I struggled with is how to refer to this character after this point. Jorge or Magda? He or she? I came down on the side of calling the character Jorge, reasoning that the name is tied to the underlying identity. Besides, Jorge tells Adriana that "Jorge" is the name closest to his true Catarine name.

But what about pronouns? Is Jorge-as-Magda a he or a she? To all outward appearances, after the shift Jorge is a girl. My initial thought was to use female pronouns. (Besides, if I stick with the male name and the male pronouns, won't it be easy for readers to lose sight of the fact that a change has taken place at all?)

A couple of readers have suggested I base that decision on how Jorge sees hemself. I haven't really explored Catarine concepts of gender in the story and it would be well beyond the scope of a 5,000 word story to do so. In my mind, gender roles in a society of shape-shifters are a lot more fluid, but if my mind is as far as that goes, what difference does it make? (Does it make any practical difference that Dumbledore is gay? Is he really gay if readers are never shown or told this within the narrative? Does it matter what I say about Jorge's gender, unless I make it explicit?)

On a tangential note, I've always been drawn to art that is gender-bending. I think this is largely due to the fact that my own views of gender are out of step with the prevailing conventional wisdom. I would like to write a story that can be classified as gender-bending, but I'm walking a fine line here, with pitfalls I can see on either side. If Jorge takes Magda's form but keeps his name and keeps being, for all intents and purposes, male, then I'm not really exploring gender here, am I? He's basically in full-body drag, no? On the other hand, if I start referring to Jorge as a she because of the shape shift, then I'm basically implying that gender is a superficial thing. (We may refer to transsexual people who have had sex reassignment by their outward gender, but the outward change they go through reflects a much more profound internal process.) I believe that gender roles are societally constructed to a much greater degree than we realize, but that doesn't mean it follows that gender identity is a superficial thing, as easily changed as a set of clothes. It takes a lot of soul searching for a transgender person to identify as such, and the whole point of identifying as transgender is that gender goes beyond what is visible from the outside. I don't want to be unintentionally insensitive to this.

And then there's the much more practical issue of whether my use of pronouns throws the reader straight out of the story. Right now I have passages like this:

A crashing sound broke Jorge’s concentration, and she turned around to see the lavatory door flapping against the bulkhead. Inside the darkened stall, she could just make out Adriana, eyes wide, sliding against the wall until she was kneeling on the floor by the toilet.

Now, I don't see why this is such a big deal. I mean, the first time maybe, sure. But once you figure out that Jorge is being referred to as "she," need this continue to throw you? But my First Reader has indicated that it does. Maybe it comes down to how we view the world and how adaptable we are to things that confound our expectation (particularly when it comes to gender). Granted, I'm the writer and not the reader here, but I'm confident that something like the above would not bother me. I'm hoping that I could ease the transition by adding a sentence where the shift in pronouns was made explicit. Something like "Jorge looked down at his hands--her hands--and . . . "

So, my eight readers, what do you think?

Short Story Analysis: Jaiden's Weaver

2009-11-21T16:49:00.005-05:00

I often go through short stories that have been effective on me, analyzing their structure in depth and trying to figure out how they work. I'm especially likely to do this with stories I can get my hands on electronically, like Hugo nominees, because then I can copy and paste them into Open Office, triple space them, turn them into Windows Journal documents, and scribble all over them. I was doing this just today when I realized that my blog would be a good place to put my observations. This way I can find my analysis again later and possibly gain new insights or remember insights I've had but forgotten. (That certainly does happen to me. I'm so disappointed when I realize I've forgotten a hard-learned lesson and been banging my head against a wall, trying to reinvent the wheel.) (Blogs are a cliché-friendly zone, right?)

Anyway, today I followed a link on Mary Robinette Kowal's blog to her story "Jaiden's Weaver." I actually remember when Diamonds in the Sky came out, but even though I'm a fan of Kowal's, somehow I apparently managed not to read this story at the time. I think because it was an educational story anthology. That's dumb of me, I know, but what can I say?

"Jaiden's Weaver" is a sweet story with a determined young protagonist who is active in pursuing her own goals. If you're not turned off by young protagonists or sweet stories, then I encourage you to go give it a read whether you're interested in my ramblings or not. And then go read everything else by Kowal you can find, if you're a science fiction fan. You'll get to see what will surely be a long and successful writing career from near the beginning of its arc. You'll thank me later.

On the surface, this story seems to follow Algis Budrys's seven point story structure. (I used to have a link to an article by him on it bookmarked on my old computer, but not on this one, and Google is only leading me to other people's write-ups of his ideas. Which makes a pretty good argument either for storing my bookmarks off of my personal computer, or for throwing links up here like I've been doing.)

The character of Jaiden is pretty well-defined through the first person narrative. I find it extremely easy to identify with characters when they tell me what they're feeling and what they want. Her problems? Feeling trapped by the (admittedly beautiful) landscape in her steep valley home, and the tight finances of her family. Her goal is to get a spider teddy, which could solve both problems for her: she could explore the valley by riding the spider teddy, and the spider teddy's weavings could be sold for a profit.

We've got the typical three attempts to attain the goal. First Jaiden asks her parents to buy her a spider teddy egg, but they tell her they can't afford that. Then she drops hints in the hopes of receiving an egg for ~~Christm~~ Bottom Day, but, to her dismay, her parents merely buy her a toy spider teddy instead, and finances are again mentioned as a reason why Jaiden's goal is unattainable. Then, in true protagonist fashion, Jaiden takes matters into her own hands. Her third attempt is to raise the money to buy the egg herself, and in this she succeeds.

All this happens in just about 2500 words, and it doesn't feel at all skimpy. There's great world-building (a little too much on the rings for my taste, but then this is for an educational anthology), effective characterization (the parents are only painted in broad strokes, but something's gotta give when you're writing in such a short medium), and Jaiden's attempts to solve her problem are well-fleshed out. A perfect example of Budrys's structure.

Except . . .

Except that at this point, the story is just over half over. Once Jaiden gets her egg, we get to see her care for it, get to experience the hatching, and we live through an apparent disaster: the fact that her teddy spider is missing a leg. The story doesn't feel anticlimactic even though it keeps going after the initial goal is attained, because there are continuing complications: her parents' initial intent to put the deformed creature down, and Kali's consternation when she first tries and fails to weave normally.

Though the story works, I was at a bit of a loss to understand the mechanics of it, until I remembered something I read on Nancy Kress's blog some time back. (I want to attribute this advice to Arthur C. Clarke, but I have a tendency to attribute all sorts of writing advice to him, and it usually turns out to be apocryphal.) As Kress related it, a good short story should have two unrelated problems, or two situations, and the resolution of one should tie up the other as well. Looked at in that light, Jaiden's Weaver isn't over when Jaiden gets her spider teddy because the family's finances are still strapped--more so if they must now care for a large disabled pet. The story can't end, then, until Kali grows a bit and manages to prove the doubts about her ability to weave to be groundless. Since this takes time to happen, the other complications basically keep the story moving until that point.

At least, that's what I'm seeing. Now I need to go back and see how she accomplishes all that she des in so few words. Kowal is a master of this; her Hugo-winning "Evil Robot Monkey" isn't even a thousand words, IIRC. Clearly she's good at making every word carry as much meaning as possible, so she doesn't have to belabor points like I tend to. (I think this may be a place where my love of detail gets in my way. Attention to detail is a good thing, when it takes the form of a few Telling Details, but I need to get away from feeling like I need to flesh out an entire universe in each short story.)

One thing I'm noticing with a quick scan through is how short Kowal's paragraphs tend to be. In particular, they seem to get shorter as the story moves on, except at key moments--when the egg hatches, and when Kali learns to weave successfully. Those are the moments Kowal describes the most thoroughly, after the first few paragraphs.

This is what I want to write

2009-11-17T19:04:00.004-05:00

(This isn't normally a book review blog, but this book got me thinking about the line between MG and YA, and on which side of it I fall.)

I was browsing the kids' department at BAM with my daughters the other day--aren't kids just the perfect excuse to be un-adult?--when I came across this beautiful cover for The Shifter, by Janice Hardy. My daughter Ana wanted to read it but didn't want to blow so much allowance on a hardcover; I offered to go halfsies on it, and let her keep it as long as I got to read it first. :-)

I was intrigued by this book--aside from the obvious SpecFic elements--because it seems to straddle the MG/YA line, just like my own writing does. I had a totally serendipitous chance to chat with a literary agent the other day, who asked, pretty much out of the blue, about my own writing, and I was fairly incoherent in trying to explain that I write YA but with protagonists that are closer to MG in age. In hindsight, I should have said something like "the low end of YA," but I hadn't been thinking in terms of making an elevator pitch. Shame on me. Anyway, I'm trying to get a feel for whether I should go one way or another, at least as an unpublished writer, so as not to defy easy classification. I look at books that are clearly MG, and I often feel like I can't write that. Sometimes--particularly when it's SpecFic--they have a twee, almost fairy-tale-ish tone about them that I personally would find condescending; other times . . . not, but I still don't feel capable of writing like some the samples I've looked at. They tend to use a more limited vocabulary than I usually want to use, and be more superficial in the emotions of their characters. (I'm not saying this represents all of MG; just what I often seem to pick up.) When I analyze my own writing, I seem much closer in tone to the YA I read--and I enjoy reading YA in general more than I enjoy reading MG--but I tend to write about younger characters.

I want to write the sorts of books I wanted to read when I was that age. (Which I still enjoy reading now. ;-) ) I guess early YA is a good way to put it. I know that there is such a thing, because I see it mentioned from time to time. (Or maybe, and here's the point, there's such a thing as "late MG," though I've never heard of that, that straddles the line from the other side.)

So anyway, I was intrigued by this book because it was shelved in the kids' section, not the teen section, but when I picked it up, it didn't seem to fall into that twee/unsophisticated category I don't care for. I mean, here are the first two paragraphs:

Stealing eggs is a lot harder that stealing the whole chicken. With chickens, you just grab a hen, stuff her in a sack, and make your escape. But for eggs, you have to stick your hand under a sleeping chicken. Chickens don't like this. They wake all spooked and start pecking holes in your arm, or your face, if it's close. And they squawk something terrible.

The trick is to wake the chicken first, then go for the eggs. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to figure this out.

This to me is a lot more sophisticated. I love the voice of this narrator. I love the matter-of-fact discussion of stealing--this suggests already that it will be a morally challenging work, which is one of the things that I think seem to separate YA from MG. (It also kind of reminds me of some of my own first person writing, if it's not too presumptuous of me to say so.)

So maybe this book's presence in the children's section was an indication that the kind of kids' books I like to read and write could possibly be MG rather than YA. I decided to read it and find out.

This book is a lot of fun. If you like to read YA or if you are buying a book as a gift for a kid, I recommend it. It features an intriguing magic system and world-building that just inspire my imagination. I totally lost myself in this world, and I loved Nya, the protagonist. I will certainly read the next two books in the trilogy.

From a writing standpoint, there is a lot for me to learn from Hardy. What really struck me as I read--because this is precisely what I'm working on at the moment--is how the tension on Nya never lets up. Literally. I don't know if I've ever read a book, written for any age, that managed that as beautifully as this one. Nya seriously never has a moment of peace. Resolving one problem always leads to the next one. And the story consists of one difficult moral dilemma followed by another. And these aren't easy choices. Nya repeatedly has to make decisions about whom to help and whom to let suffer--or whom to make suffer. Nya is a likable character who wants to do the right thing at every turn. It's not clear that she does do the right thing each time, but if she fails anywhere, it's not because she doesn't care. (And Hardy puts in repeated "save the cat" moments to make it clear that Nya really wants to help everyone that she can. Sometimes you just can't do right by everyone, though, no matter how badly you want to.)

My favorite books and stories, YA or adult, are those that pose challenging moral questions to the reader and don't answer them. I don't like being preached at, but I do like being invited to think.

It's really hard to put this book down, between the moral dilemmas and the constant worrying about what danger Nya is going to face next.

There are ways in which I think The Shifter could have been improved. Often it felt like Hardy glossed over details, like she was racing to get to the next big thing. Often I was unable to picture a setting in my mind. A character would do something that I hadn't realized was possible because my concept of the scene wasn't accurate and needed hasty revising. This certainly could have been my failure as a reader, but it's not something I often encounter in my reading, leading me to believe it was the book. Similarly, the political history and the rules of magic often felt glossed over. There were plenty of times when I was confused, and if I was confused, how much more confused would a less experienced reader be?

Additionally, there was a section at the end where all of Nya's friends basically hash over those moral dilemmas, and reassure Nya that her choices were, in fact, the right ones. (Okay, they are arguing the point among themselves, but the argument is pretty quickly resolved in Nya's favor.) As a reader, I didn't care for this. First of all, the climax had passed and I felt that continuing the story for so many more pages got anti-climactic. Beyond that, I think it cheapens the moral dilemmas. Remember my point about books that raise moral questions but don't answer them? (This doesn't exactly violate that preference, because the opinions of characters do not necessarily translate into a definitive answer. I certainly still think there is room for debate on whether or not Nya made the right choices.) Having the characters reassure Nya at the end that she did nothing wrong makes the guilt that Nya suffers feel like Mary Sue guilt--this is unfortunate, because I don't see Nya as Mary Sue-ish in general.

(If you're not familiar with Mary Sue guilt, it goes more or less like this: Protagonists should not be perfect, we are told, so the author gives Mary Sue something to have done and feel guilty for. But the author can't bear to give Mary Sue any actual faults, so instead it's a fault that Mary Sue perceives in herself, that nobody else can possibly agree with. At the end, in the big reveal, where everybody tells poor suffering Mary Sue how much they love her, all the other characters reassure her that they never saw her as flawed at all. That really isn't a fair description of what's happening here, but that scene, for me, treaded the line. I think it would have helped if Aylin, the character who questioned Nya's choices, had stuck to her conviction that Nya was wrong to do as she did. She could have stayed on Nya's side, and kept being her friend, but still believed that some of her actions were ultimately wrong. From a reader's standpoint, having likable characters who disagree reinforces the point that there are no easy answers, and gives readers permission to form their own opinions.)

In the end, I'm not sure if this book really answered my question about YA versus MG. It was shelved in the kids' section, and Harper Collins has it categorized as a children's book, but Nya appears to be around fifteen or sixteen--I don't think we are given an exact age, but I seem to recall her mentioning early on that she could pass for eighteen--putting us right in YA, agewise. There isn't any overt sexuality, that I can recall. There are some twitterpations of like, and the suggestion that Nya and Danello will have romantic possibilities as the series progresses. I seem to recall some unexplicit mentions of bad things that could happen to homeless kids, and maybe an unexplicit reference to the existence of prostitution. Certainly YA can get a lot heavier than that. If I'd simply read this book, I'd probably call it YA though, based on the sophistication of the writing--vocabulary-wise, this book makes no concessions--and on the age of the protagonist.

::insert sound of torpedo tube firing::

2009-11-15T17:42:00.002-05:00

I dropped a story in the mail today. Well okay, today's Sunday. So I put a story in an envelope, sealed it, and put it by the door. Same thing. This baby hasn't been exposed to the mean, cruel world out there yet--on the upside, it hasn't garnered a single rejection yet! I'm sending it to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Duotrope lists as one of the twenty-five hardest markets to crack. Go me.

I revised it until I thought it was as good as I could get it. Then I revised it until I thought I couldn't revise it any more. Then I revised it some more. Lots more. I've lost my first draft somewhere along the way, but I'd say I've culled two thousand words from this sucker.

You know? I think I'm getting halfway decent at this revision thing. Time will tell, but I feel as though the words, clauses, and sentences that aren't moving the story forward and need to go are starting to jump out at me. Maybe not compared to people who aren't naturally as given to overwriting as I am, but certainly compared to where I was a year or two ago.

Some day I need to look back and chart my [past] course. I'm vaguely aware that at different times over the last few years I've focused heavily on different elements of my craft, and I've seen improvement in each. I've got to think that sooner or later I'll reach the point that pushes me over the top, and makes me good enough to be professionally published. All I have to do is keep working at it.

I'm a bit torn right now over what to do next. I've got an old short story that I love that I'm thinking I ought to revise and send out. I've got a much newer short story that probably already has a lot more polish, that would probably take less effort to get out the door. I'm also feeling the urge to write something new. And then of course there's Vanishing Act. Most folks would tell me that should be my highest priority, but here's the thing: I can have one of my already-written shorts out the door in a week or two. I can have a new story written and ready to go in not much longer. Vanishing Act is going to take a lot more work. Doesn't it make more sense to do that work while some stories are out and circulating, looking for print homes? And if one of my stories should actually get bought, wouldn't that make my novel query that much stronger?

Who knows. One thing I do know is that I have learned a lot by focusing on my short stories. Short stories require a level of tightness that people tend to think novels can get away with lacking. If I hadn't focused on my shorts for the past year, maybe I'd be in that camp. Instead, I've learned lessons that I think will help my longer fiction, and that I think make me a better critter for others as well.

Now it's time to go apply them.

I'm learning to revise, but I ain't got wings

2009-11-14T19:00:00.004-05:00

Something in Jennifer Jackson's livejournal last week, along with a conversation I was having in Starbuck's with my wife today, got me thinking about how my approach to getting published has changed over the years. When I wrote Prototype, the internet certainly existed, but it wasn't quite as big a thing as it is now. Virtually no agents blogged, and most of the information I had about the publishing process came from books about publishing or writing. Some of those books were fantastic--Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy stands out as an excellent guide to writing in general, not just F&SF. (bn.com dates it as 2001, but I read my copy in 1992.) Many of them were useless. (No links to useless books, sorry.) The useless ones contained--at least, my memory, which may be faulty, says they contained--lots of platitudes but little concrete advice. And then there were the articles in Writer's Market and the novel and short story version of same.

I had no conception back then of where the bar was. I knew it was higher than I'd reached yet, but I was clueless in so many ways. The existence of agent and editor and writer blogs has really opened my eyes to what the common pitfalls are, and I've also found it easier to sift through the tons of advice out there and find the good stuff. (Maybe because reading blogs involves less committment. If I check a book on writing out of the library and it seems to suck, I'm likely to keep plowing through in the hopes that I'll find some gem in it. It's mine for a couple of weeks, so I might as well. I've already made the effort to go to the library once, and exchanging it for another book is going to be a hassle. But when I read a blog post and it's not useful, I don't keep digging for more unless that blogger has already proven him- or herself to be a source of good advice. It takes no effort to keep looking until I find the good stuff. And any OCD sense of obligation I have toward the writer (ask me why I never fail to finish books I start) is satisfied by completing a blog post--I don't have to read someone's entire oeuvre. So over the last couple of years, I've found far more good advice than I found in all the years before.

-o-

I grew up being constantly told that I was a talented writer. I always got good grades in English, I wrote for the yearbook and the newspaper (and eventually edited the newspaper). I won schoolwide writing contests. And when English teachers talked about drafting, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, because the truth was that I didn't do this. My first draft and my final draft were separated by almost nothing. A cursory read-through for typos, and that was about it. And that was good enough, because all I was looking for was grammar and spelling mistakes, and grammar and spelling have always come easily to me. I think the biggest adjustment I've made in the last couple of years is realizing that this wasn't serving me in fiction-writing. When I wrote (the perhaps ironically named) Prototype, I did my usual read-through, and my wife did a read-through. And we looked for more than spelling and grammar, it's true, but we didn't put a lot of effort into the revision process. For me, it was a lot more than I was used to doing, but in hindsight I realize how laughable it was.

The last few years have taught me that fiction takes a lot more work. My grammar and spelling are clean, but am I telling instead of showing? Am I overusing adverbs? To-be verbs? Junk phrases? Is there enough tension? Is my protagonist doing, or is s/he witnessing while others do? Am I using generic descriptions and verbs instead of vivid ones? Am I being verbose and boring? (Yes!)

I wasn't trained to look out for these things as a young writer. If my writing was clean, that was good enough. I became an effective writer, but not an effective storyteller. I'm still working on that.

My English teachers would be so happy. After all these years, I've finally become someone who writes multiple drafts and works his ass off on revising.

We all agree there is something to be learned from the music industry; we just don't agree on what

2009-11-11T14:01:00.004-05:00

I've been absent from the blogosphere for a while (duh) and I'm going through the stuff that my feed reader hasn't given up on and thrown away yet. (I'm not positive how it works, but it only seems to keep stuff for about a month before it tosses it.) I just ran across this post by Rachelle Gardner. It's been a month since the entry was posted, and it already has 122 comments, so I don't see much value in trying to sound off in the conversation over there. Either it's over, or I'll be lost in the throng. Still, it was food for thought, so I figured I'd blog about it over here.

In this month's backlog, I have encountered a lot of handwringing over what the demise of the music industry can teach us about digital rights. Most of it has expressed the belief that we as a society didn't step in to protect the music industry from those evil pirates, and now the music industry is dead, and the publishing world is next. Woe is us.

I find that version of history ridiculous. The RIAA is the victim?! Absurd. Gardner is just about the only blogger I've read this month who, in my opinion, actually gets what really happened right:

We have only to look at what happened to the music industry to see that this is exactly the kind of step publishers should be taking. The big mistake the music business made was turning a blind eye on the fact that new technology was making it easier for artists to record and distribute their own music. They refused to try and be part of the new landscape and instead tried to fight against it. It was devastating for the industry, which has never recovered. They could have joined in and been part of the innovation and revolution; they could have had a piece of the pie. Instead they lost their shirts.

Now I don't know that I actually agree with her conclusions. It's not clear to me that the situations are truly analogous. I don't have an opinion yet on the publishing side of this, except the opinion that I'm just not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion. But this matches my memory of what happened with the music industry.

I believe that back at the turn of the century, before people were set in their ways and used to not paying for digital content, people would have greatly preferred a legal, official option for buying just the songs they wanted. People by and large want to do things the right way; they don't prefer to steal. A legal iTunes or Amazon type scheme would have worked. Instead, people rejected the RIAA's insistence that they pay for an entire album for the privilege of owning one song, but finding no legal alternative, and finding easy illegal alternatives, they turned to those instead.

I'm not defending the morality of illegal downloads; I'm simply describing reality. Illegal downloads were easy and free, and the RIAA had no competing product. By the time they started offering legal downloads, a downloading culture was in place, and it was difficult to dislodge that. (Especially when the alternative we were finally offered was iTunes, a crappy product that limited the number of devices you could hear your music on, and, at the time, prevented you from converting your purchases to MP3 without a second stage of lossy compression. When you're the last guy on the scene, an inferior product is not likely to win the masses to you.) Now you get spurious moral arguments, like "it's not stealing, it's sharing." But if the music industry had not foolishly attempted to wish the internet out of existence, I think things would have played out differently.

An oldie but a goodie

2009-11-10T21:25:00.003-05:00

Elmore Leonard on writing.

I promise I'll get back to content and stop it with the link soup soon.

Some good advice on revision

2009-11-09T04:35:00.002-05:00

. . . from Jacqueline Lichtenberg. I'm quoting it here so I can remember and think about it later.

7 points to self-test a novel for "quality"

1) PLOT INTEGRITY - check to make sure what I call the "because-line" actually tracks logically. If YOU think it tracks, ask someone you don't know to read it then ask them questions about why things happened in the novel. To FIX missing links, make sure every event happens BECAUSE OF the initial event. Anything with a very tight PLOT (PLOT = BECAUSE LINE) but very little EXPOSITION will sell somewhere (that's from Robert A. Heinlein).

2) CHARACTER MOTIVATION (i.e. the STORY-LINE which is the sequence of emotional states that leads the main character to change) must be clear to the target readership (not just to you). You have to explain WHY people do things in SHOW rather than TELL -- that WHY is inside the chosen plot events. When a character DOES SOMETHING the world responds with a LOGICAL consequence from which the CHARACTER derives a (possibly illogical but human) LESSON which the CHARACTER tests by doing something different "next time" which CAUSES (plot-line) another logical consequence, until the character has learned his/her lesson (theme=lesson learned)

3) When you've got both these lines whole, complete, transparent, accessible to your target reader, and precisely formulated to the genre that the symbolism belongs to, when everything makes complete sense, REDUCE THE WHOLE THING to an outline (chapter-by-chapter, describe what happens, why, and what it means in just 2 or 3 complete sentences -- this is your sales tool for your pitch). If you can't do that reduction, there's something wrong with the structure. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE NOT VIOLATED A TROPE OF YOUR GENRE (that is the real criteria by which Manhattan Agents and Editors work - trope-trope-trope.) Trope is often the cause of the PACING issue that editors will cite when rejecting. Editors don't know what's wrong or how to fix it. They're not writers. That's your job. Readers expect you to do your job. If you don't, they call the work badly written or low quality.

4) Go back and DELETE 15% of the words, cut-cut-cut, use better words, delete all the adjectives and adverbs, and shift to well-chosen words. Then if necessary add-add-add to get the exact length for the genre. Then delete almost all the EXPOSITION. Take what's left and break it up like a sonic beam breaks up a kidney stone. Pulverize the exposition and sprinkle it here and there in LOGICAL sequence. The trick with exposition is to make the reader curious to know the fact you need to impart -- take about 50 pages to build the curiosity -- meanwhile drive up the suspense until the reader just HAS TO KNOW. Then tell them in a dependent clause buried in the middle of something -- use an oblique reference, nothing "on the nose." Make the reader FIGURE OUT what you want to tell them in exposition. That's a dodge for SHOW DON'T TELL -- make the reader think it's their own idea, not yours. If you do the work for them, they don't have any fun even though you do. Writing is selling FUN, which means you have to give away your fun in return for money. So you don't get to tell. You have to work to induce the reader to figure it out.

5) Send it out to test readers you DON'T KNOW and who don't know you personally (not work-shoppers you see every month- actual people who have no stake in stroking your ego -- yes, building a cadre of such folks you have access to is one thing online networking can do best). Get tech experts in fields you have used to check the facts.

6) NOW - after all that, you polish the text, not just running spell check, but going through the whole MS looking for word-substitution typos, bad sentence structure, wordy constructions "Well, the fact of the matter is that he lied" becomes "Well... he lied." Don't use grammar-check, learn grammar.

7) Yet another test reader, one who knows grammar, punctuation, spelling and reads books from your target publisher in your target genre. (each publishing house has a style sheet dictating grammar, spelling, punctuation). That's your final step - no sense polishing words you're going to delete. In hand-written times, that was known as "making a fair copy." On foolscap.

I'm pretty good at the grammar and polish part . . . I just need to make sure I'm doing a good job with plot integrity and character motivation.

Food for thought

2009-11-08T19:31:00.003-05:00

Nancy Kress on Al Zuckerman on blockbuster novels

I'm not interested in writing to a very specific formula, but it's interesting and informative to look at one (very educated) opinion on what people are after. As Kress summarizes, the characteristics of blockbuster novels, with notable exceptions, are:

a clear protagonist, usually sympathetic, that we want to succeed
characters who are not Everyman, but rather are "larger than life," by which he means driving hard to get whatever it is they're striving for, whatever that takes
multiple point of view (despite having one main character) to "open up" the story and let the reader know more of what's going on than the protagonist does
a "big" setting: the Civil War, international espionage, the world of the New York Mafia, the million-dollar art world, Mars
very high stakes
personal as well as professional relationships among characters on opposite sides of the struggle
a lot of action, all building to a climax that changes everything for the characters
usually, victory for the protagonist

It's just a flesh wound . . .

2009-11-08T15:07:00.003-05:00

The thing with knowing I'm too wordy/my stories are too long is that sometimes I find myself going through manuscripts pointing at chunks and saying, "This can go," with more regard for whether it's necessary than for whether it's good. Fair enough--the art of the short story is precisely the art of writing without a wasted word, no? But where is the point where I actively make my story worse, by chopping to the point where it gets, well, choppy? Sometimes I'm afraid I'm taking something that's basically okay and damaging it in the name of brevity.

No answers, today. Just questions.

New School Year, 1/4 down (Self-Analysis Edition)

2009-11-06T10:42:00.005-05:00

So the new school year is 1/4th past now. Now I have two AP preps, as opposed to last year, when I had one (and the year before, when I had none). In some ways, Calculus AB is like a new prep to me too, because I'm approaching it rather differently this year than last year. Last year my students' pass rate wasn't what I hoped it would be, so I'm trying different strategies--different and time-consuming.

Still, I tend to find the first quarter the most draining, in terms of my personal time. The reason for this is that I don't believe in spending a ton of time reviewing material from previous classes--especially when teaching honors or AP classes. So I tend to fly through the early parts of the curricula, hoping that in so doing I can free up time for me to go more slowly later on in the year, when we cover material that is actually new to the kids. The consequence of that for me is much more frequent quizzing and testing, and so a heavier pile of grading. The fourth quarter gets rough too, but that's just at the very end.

So it's time to get off my ass when it comes to writing. I've hardly done any writing or revising at all since the start of August, and I am properly ashamed about that. (In my defense, I have done more than you could tell by looking at this blog. I sacrifice blogging before I sacrifice writing. Since my last blog post, I have revised two short stories and done some preliminary planning on a new YA novel. Not a lot, I know, but not nothing.)

A huge problem of mine, and one I need to work on, is my tendency toward perfectionism--more in teaching than in writing, actually. For the past nine weeks, I have averaged around four hours of sleep a night on school nights. When I grade, I don't just mark stuff wrong--I make detailed comments explaining where student work went wrong. But most kids don't look at that; they just look at the number at the top and put the thing away. So I need to find a way to help the kids that want help, but not spend my whole life on grading. I also operate a forum where I answer questions from kids, but I tend to spend too much time on silly details. For instance, the forum doesn't support LaTeX or any other mathematical mark-up features, so I make mathematical expressions with other software, capture it as an image, and upload it that way. But then I waste time trying to get the typeface and the background to match, so that it will look as if it were actually native text instead of an image. Who the hell cares? Well, besides me, that is.

(Not all the things I spend time on are that silly. I spend several hours each weekend on lesson planning, where other teachers tell me they spend maybe a half hour. I almost never give kids seatwork in class, which means I can't get my work done while they're doing that, which means all my grading and lesson-planning and communicating with parents are always take-home work. I tutor kids four afternoons a week. I think a lot of these things make me a better teacher, but it's time for me to start thinking about bang for my buck, and about when I get time to be more than my job.)

It's not perfectionism, exactly. It's that I'm very detail-oriented. As a consumer, I appreciate that tendency in the art and craft I most enjoy. That's what I love about Disney--both their movies and their architecture. Always that little bit of extra "Ah ha!" for those of us who are looking out for it. Maybe that's why I'm such a big fan of the Indigo Girls--those amazing harmonies are like that little bit of extra detail that most artists don't bother with. That's what I loved about the original Star Wars trilogy: the sense that there was a greater storyline, and that someone behind the art already knew where this was all going. (That's probably why I'm more of a plotter than a pantser.)

I have a difficult time giving myself permission to not get the details right. I think as an artist, this leads to some of my strengths. I think I use foreshadowing well. I also think I'm good at throwing in little self-referential "symbols," for lack of a better word. Of course, this also leads to my tendency to spend too long revising.

As a teacher, this focus on details may be hurting me, and, ironically enough, making me less successful. I spend so much time doing things that nobody notices. Things that nobody particularly appreciates. I may be the hardest-working teacher I know; but I don't necessarily work smart. Who appreciates that I stay up until 2 am or wake up at 4 am to grade or lesson plan? Am I crankier or less effective during the day because I'm tired from working so hard? Am I crankier or less effective because I put my artistic dreams on hold for so much of the school year?

I had a bit of an epiphany at the end of the last quarter. I tend to fall behind on my projects because of my perfectionism. If I don't have time to do it perfectly, I'll wait until I do. Eventually, some things become emergencies, and that's when I finally give myself permission to cut corners, to do less than a perfect job. It occurred to me that perhaps on some level I fall behind on purpose, as a way of giving myself permission to cut those corners. (Ironically enough, nobody notices the difference between when I cut corners and when I don't, though they certainly do notice when I'm behind.)

The trick, then, is to learn to back off on the things I do for my day job without waiting until things are emergencies.

We'll see . . .

Cabrón (a story)

2009-07-27T02:51:00.008-04:00

This isn't strictly speaking a brand new story, but I did that "leave it alone and then come back to it in a few months" thing, and I've spent the last week or so spiffying it up. I'm hoping I've finally got something good enough to sell. Here's a teaser:

As the days passed, I began to sense my certainty that something was profoundly wrong at Fátima slip away. It all began to seem silly and embarrassing. I had taken a series of minor calamities and pieced them together into some sort of ludicrous dark conspiracy, with Hermano Leopoldo at the center. Hermano Leopoldo, who was almost certainly harmless, and who only aroused suspicion because of my aversion to his disfigurement. Nothing but the delusions of a pathetic, homesick girl.

I nearly convinced myself of this, until the night I woke up in a pool of my own vomit.

This story is my completely made up origin tale for a well-known folkloric monster, so if you figure out where it's going before the end, good for you! It's about 8800 words--a bit longer than "Spacelift" was.

Without further ado, here's the story. As before, if you know me, including if I've posted on your blog or if you've posted on mine before, then you're welcome to read it. Just drop me a line asking for the encryption key and I'll shoot it off to you. Any constructive comments you feel like making will be very appreciated, but if you just want to read it, that's fine too.

Show encrypted text

Don't worry, Bev Vincent, I write like a girl too . . . Or maybe we should both worry, because neither of us will ever win a Hugo award. ;)

2009-07-23T00:47:00.005-04:00

By now most people who follow SF blogs have heard of this story. In case you haven't, the short version is that Mr. Bev Vincent received an editorial note back from an editor who had been brought in on an anthology that had already bought one of his stories, explaining at length that, like many women, Mr. Bev Vincent could not write men convincingly.

Leaving aside for a moment the absurdity of an editor looking no further than an author's first name before making all sorts of erroneous assumptions, the rigid gender profiling the editor showed in his letter hits on a hot-button topic of mine. Look at these assumptions for yourself:

The editor says: “The story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man . . . It is hard to imagine a fellow from a place like [the setting] uttering the following line.” The editor then provides three sentences from my story as examples. He or she continues, “And I can’t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family” [Emphasis his or hers]. Another brilliant insight: “Most men don’t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.” The ultimate conclusion: “She [sic] needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man’s perspective.”

I've always had problems with such gender stereotyping because I've never felt like I fit those stereotypes myself--yes, I do think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature. ;)

I lean toward thinking that traditional gender roles are societally constructed and not inborn. No, I don't have a ton of evidence for that position, and I'm comfortable in my unmanly unscientificness. I've seen evidence for traditional roles being genetically determined and found it unconvincing--I've never believed it was possible to adequately control for the pervasiveness of society's messages. Parents of daughters who, like me, tried to keep their kids away from Barbie and from the Bratz know what I mean. If you didn't do a good enough job of reinforcing society's stereotypes, don't worry: your kids still got the message from their teachers at school, from their classmates, from their friends on the street, and, most of all, from television. My kids find it odd that I'm the cook in the house--why would something that's been true for all of your life seem odd to you, unless you're hearing the message somewhere else that it runs contrary to expectations?

I'm not sure the question of where traditional gender roles come from can be answered satisfactorily, but you know what? It doesn't matter. The question is actually irrelevant. (Like the question of whether homosexuality is a choice or not, but that's way beyond the scope of this rant.) Let's suppose traditional gender roles are in fact in our blueprints; I'll concede the point. It's not the real issue. The real issue, to me, is that regardless, there will be exceptions. There will be boys and girls who don't meet your stereotypes. Artistic boys who like to cook, draw, and write, who grow into young men who focus on relationships and on their feelings. Athletic girls who like to play with toy cars and tools, who grow into young women who like to figure out how stuff works and who can opine knowledgeably on football.

The exceptions are out there, and I can't for the life of me think of a reason why anybody should have a problem with this. And because they are out there, I think we should honor our children's right to be individuals. When we as a society hammer home the message, over and over, that males are Y and females are X, we tell those children and young adults who don't fit the mold that there is something wrong with them. How damaging this is--and for what? How much healthier to send the message that there's nothing unusual about a nurturing boy or about an empowered girl. Better yet, let us send the message that all children can have the healthiest features of either gender, and all grow into nurturing, communicative, empowered, confident adults.

Anyway, enough ranting. In the wake of this story, I started seeing references and links to The Gender Genie pop up all over the place. If you're not familiar with it, the short version, once again, is that some researchers did a study of the writing tendencies of men and of women and came up with a complex formula for determining the gender of the author of a writing sample, based on the frequencies of certain key words that men were more likely to use and others that women were more likely to use.

The word lists are the most common of stereotyping: women use personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, possessive pronouns, and words like "should." You know, 'cause they always gabbing about relationships and shit. Men use prepositions, articles (Seriously?! Men use more articles than women?! How is that even possible??) and forms of the verb to be (except for "be" itself, curiously, which is a woman's word). That's because men are always building shit, so they need to look at blueprints. I guess.

No, this is not a detailed look at their methodology, just my overall impression from several hours of playing with the thing when I should have been revising a story for submission.

Anyway, I first played around with the Gender Genie, er, so to speak, two or three years ago, but seeing it again in the context of Bev Vincent's story made me want to look more closely at the supposition that a fiction editor could distinguish between manly writing and womanly writing based on the textual clues.

So I fed through the story I was supposedly revising. Gender Genie said it was written by a woman. No surprise . . . it was a first person story with a female protagonist. Probably lots of womanly words there. So I ran through "Spacelift," the story I posted here last week. It has a gender-ambiguous protagonist, but at least it's not first person. And it's on a space ship, so maybe there are more engineering words there. Nope, couldn't fool Gender Genie. That was definitely written by a woman. So I tried my coarsest, most vulgar story, which featured an unambiguously male protagonist. Written by a female, said Gender Genie again. I tried my wife's WIP next. Female. *whew*

Well, big deal anyway. Like I said at the beginning, I never felt like I fit those stereotypes very well. So it's no surprise that Gender Genie says I write like a female. Besides, writers tend to be artsy types, right? That probably skewed things. Maybe all fiction writers showed up as women on Gender Genie.

There was an easy enough way to check: coincidentally enough, it's almost time to award the Hugos, and that means most of the nominees are available online. I thought it would make an interesting experiment to run as many of those stories as I could through Gender Genie.

First the short story nominees. According to Gender Genie, all of those stories were written by men. Yes, that includes the stories by Mary Robinette Kowal and Kij Johnson.

Now I started to freak out a little bit. It's one thing to be told I write like a woman. It's quite another to discover that a sampling of the most well-received short fiction in SF this year is written in a more masculine style. Gender Genie didn't peg a single one of my stories as being written by a man, so what did that say about my chances of publication? Is this what I've been doing wrong? Am I not butch enough?

Oh, but the plot thickens. Because next I tried the Best Novelette nominees, and three out of the five were identified by Gender Genie as being written by women. Oddly enough, though, none of those three was the one by Elizabeth Bear, the only actual woman among the nominees.

Mike Resnick is an interesting case. His "Article of Faith" was written by a man, while Gender Genie thinks his "Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders" was definitely written by a woman. Don't worry Mike. I empathize with your painful gender confusion. (((Mike Resnick)))

By this point, I wasn't sure what to make of it all. Maybe the novelette form is friendlier to a more feminine style of writing because it's longer. Women write florid, dontcha know, while men use fewer words and more grunts and gestures.

I plowed on, because the alternative was productivity, and found that, among the best novella nominees, Gender Genie correctly identified the three stories written by men ("The Tear" by Ian McDonald was not available for examination) and the one story written by a woman. Thank God for Nancy Kress--finally, a woman who writes like Gender Genie says a woman should!

(Many of those were extremely close calls, though. A couple more "with"s, maybe one less "around," and we'd have some more gender confusion among SF's leading men.)

The only novel I could try, Little Brother, was correctly identified by Gender Genie as being written by a man.

So what wisdom can I take from all of this?

Beats the hell out of me. In twenty unscientific trials, Gender Genie was right ten times. A .500 batting average is fantastic in baseball, but a 50% average is not so good in school. The samples I fed were 75% by male authors, and Gender Genie guessed male 55%, which is basically comparable to results I could have obtained by flipping a coin. Beyond questioning the stereotypes underpinning the algorithms of Gender Genie, maybe we can say that some men write "like men" and some women write "like women" and some don't, and yet they all seem to please their fans enough. Or, in other words, that it doesn't matter much whether you fit the stereotype.

Nah. That's sissy talk.

Oh, and Bev Vincent is right. I ran his blog post through, and Gender Genie says he definitely writes like a girl.

On Voice

2009-07-15T16:48:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I had what felt like an epiphany about voice while reading Nephele Tempest's blog entry on how to make a manuscript unputdownable.

I think I know voice as a reader, in that I-know-it-when-I-see-it sort of way, but haven't had a whole lot of a sense of how to create it as a writer. Once thing I've worked on that I think has made me better at it was writing in deeper third person, but I think there's more to having a really good voice than just that.

Here's the realization I came to as I read her entry: I've been approaching voice--and I think most novice writers do this--as an issue of craft, by which I mean nuts and bolts word choice and stuff like that. Style. And beyond a certain point, it's not. It is, I think, an issue of characterization. I'm thinking if your voice is not distinctive, it's because your protagonist is not. Looking back on my writing, I'm suddenly struck by the realization that I have a tendency to make my protagonists somewhat vanilla, and to have a side character that totally steals the show--or at least every scene she or he is in. (My interesting supporting characters tend to be girls more often than boys for some reason.)

I think I've been approaching my protagonists with an unverbalized sense that they're interesting simply by virtue of the fact that they're at the center of the stories. With just a little more thought on how to make them stand out, together with the lessons I've already learned on things such as deeper third, I think I could do a much better job.

Food for thought

2009-07-13T18:55:00.004-04:00

I've run across some really good advice over the course of the last week on little things that seemed to be just what I needed to hear. But as I mentioned elsewhere on the blogosphere, I feel like a newbie driver who has to consciously remember to look at the rearview mirror, the speedometer, figure out where the median line should appear to be if I'm in the right place, etc. . . . I don't seem to have it all integrated so that I can remember to do all these things without giving it much thought. I frequently find myself forgetting lessons I've learned and needing to relearn them.

So here's a sampling of recent advice that has hit home for me. Posting it here seems more sensible than bookmarking the pages, since it's little blog snippets. So I'm really doing this for me, as an easy way to store stuff I'd like to find later without cluttering my own browser. But who knows? Other folks might find this useful too.

-o-

Here is a great rundown of EVERYTHING* writers should be thinking about in order to make their manuscripts un-put-down-able. It's from Nephele Tempest's livejournal. The whole list is great, but the part that I found personally most useful was this little tidbit on "voice":

Voice. Agents talk about this all the time, and it covers a lot of territory for me. Mostly it's about what your narrator sounds like in my head. Vocabulary, chattiness, thoughtfulness, etc. Are they intellectual, sarcastic, uneducated but smart, somewhat slow, ethnic--and this is more about word choice than anything, so please don't try to get elaborate about writing accents phonetically--young, old, etc.? Whatever it is, it should be distinctive to the story and the character. It should fit, there should be a reason for it, and it should be consistent.

At some point I'll probably cross-post the thoughts that sprang to my mind when I read that, but for now I'll just say I think I understand what voice is quite a bit better now.

During Nathan Bransford's recent absence from his blog, be had other folks post guest entries. This post by editor Victoria Mixon was another catch-all of things writers should be thinking about as they polish their work. It's all great, but here's the bit that really caught my eye:

Dialog

Leave out most of the words. No kidding. Leave out oh, well, yes, no, um, uh (definitely these last two). Leave out names except for extreme emphasis. Leave out first articles and even subjects of sentences wherever possible. Do you answer a question with, "It's on the table," or with, "On the table"? Try it and see how much snappier your dialog becomes. For heaven's sake, leave out ellipses. Be like Emily Bronte and use em-dashes instead. Leave off dialog tags. Replace them with brief significant actions or, if you can get away with it, nothing at all. A book filled with characters talking the way we really talk, with tags, goes on forever and bores even the writer to tears.

Unless absolutely necessary, make characters talk at cross-purposes. How many of us actually listen to other people? We don't. We're always thinking about what to say next, when they shut up.

This morning, I ran across this entry by Mary Robinette Kowal talking about a point where she was stuck this week, and how she unstuck herself:

But! I was still stuck. I looked at the scene again. The historical figures weren’t the problem at all! It was just dull. I backed up and asked myself the usual helpful question, “What does Jane want?” and then thought about ways to deny her that. Things went much better after that.

It's not anything I haven't heard before, but that's kind of the point of this whole post. There are a lot of things I hear and forget. This was vividly stated, and hopefully I'll remember it when I'm stuck.

(I've read a handful of Kowal's short stories by the way, and she manages to write stories that are intelligent and highly entertaining--a great mix that's not as common as one might wish. I wanna be like that when I grow up.)

And finally, Lynn Viehl is doing a series of con-workshops-via-blog on her blog, and linking to others doing the same thing. She did the same thing last year--I don't know how many years she's been at it--right around RWA time, for writers and aspiring writers who are unable to attend. I found a *lot* of very useful "workshops" last year, and highly recommend to anybody that they follow Viehl's blog this week and follow all the links to other workshops she provides.

Anyway, today she was talking about the conceptual plan behind a story, whether you're a plotter or a pantser, I think, and I found this tidbit on hooks/high concept particularly useful:

A hook needs to be a lot of things, but primarily it should be brief, simply-worded, and contain the real power and conflict of the story:

1. A vampire hunter discovers her dream lover is a captive, tortured, blind vampire.

2. The secret lovechild of a powerful politician is the only witness to her father's murder.

3. A half-alien athlete trains as an assassin to kill her rapist father.

4. An outcast prostitute must save her friends and former family by harboring two spies intent on destroying them and their city.

5. A mystery writer haunted by the ghost of her worst critic tries to solve his murder.

Look at the juxtaposition of the concepts contained in the above hooks. The more conflict potential they have, the more powerful they are:

vampire hunter - blind vampire

secret lovechild - powerful politician

half-alien assassin - rapist father

outcast prostitute - enemy spies

mystery writer -- ghost critic

The situation as presented also plays a major part in the impact of the concept. For PBW's neighborhood, it has to be an almost impossible situation; what I think of as the worst possible situation for the protagonist to find themselves in. But whatever your situational preference is, the elements in the predicate you use in the hook (verbs, adjectives, objects of verbs) need to provoke a strong emotional response:

--a vampire hunter loving the a helpless vampire.

--a lovechild witnessing the murder of her powerful father.

--a half-alien assassin training to kill the rapist who created her.

--a prostitute protecting enemy spies to save those who cast her out.

--a mystery writer solving the murder of her worst critic.

Again, not anything I totally haven't heard, but specifically, what I found useful here was how she built up her examples, and how she embedded to conflict right into the hook, basically designing her protagonist as the person who would most struggle with the situation. Any old Bella can fall in love with a vampire, but what if she's a vampire hunter? I'm thinking now that maybe I don't give enough thought to why This Plot should happen to This Character.

I'm starting to think that I'm embarking on a phase of my learning where I'm moving away from worrying about polishing my prose, and moving toward an increased focus on characterization.

* Well, not really EVERYTHING, but it's pretty amazingly comprehensive.

Spacelift (a story)

2009-07-10T16:21:00.008-04:00

As promised, here is a story for your possible enjoyment. It's science fiction, 5000 words, so if any of that puts you off, this may not be for you. If I know you from somewhere, including the blogosphere, and you'd like to read it, feel free to drop me a line and I'll tell you the encryption key. If you know me well enough to know which of my friends I wrote this story for, you don't even have to ask--it's that person's first name.

If you choose to make comments that will help me improve this, I'll be extremely grateful. In the first comment post under this entry, I'll point to some specific concerns I have. I'll encrypt them with the same key as the story, so that you can come to the story "cold," without any preconceived notions sparked by my leading questions.

But if you just want to read it without critting it, that's cool too. Just let me know if you enjoyed it is all.

Show encrypted text

And now you know the rest of the story

2009-07-09T11:38:00.004-04:00

I was thinking more about last night's post this morning, and I think in my rambling and flailing around, I actually put my finger on something.

Let me tell you a bit about how story generation goes for me. I'll get the barest suggestion of an idea from whatever--a bit of nonfiction, or a dream, or a chance reverie--and I'll automatically begin to generate story elements as I see the possibilities in the premise. A scene, a complication, even just a line of dialogue. And then when I sit down to write the stories, I try to arrange the plot in such a way as to get all that good stuff in, and that's where the contrived bits come in. Because some of those ideas are like different branches of a timeline . . . the story could go this way, OR it could go that way, and I'm trying to make it go both. Is it any wonder my stories sometimes hemorrhage under the strain? It's obvious in hindsight, but I wasn't even questioning some of these ideas . . . it was all good stuff, or so it seemed, and so I wanted to include it all. Now I'm seeing that I have to make choices sometimes, include some ideas I like, and leave out some ideas that I like and wish I could have written in.

So referring to killing darlings was an apt comparison. (Or maybe everybody but me knew that killing darlings was not just about verbiage, but about plot points too, and I'm just coming to that realization late.)

-o-

It's been a hell of a summer, hasn't it? I think it will go down in my mind as the summer of death. It seems like a disproportionate number of national news stories in the last month or so have been about high profile deaths. One of them touched me personally.

You probably know about the monorail crash at Disney early July 5th that killed one driver. That driver was a former student of mine. In fact, I taught him for three years, and was also the sponsor of the FIRST Robotics Team, which he was an integral part of, for another year. America knows him, if they know him at all, as someone who was proud to be a monorail driver and loved his job. That's all true, but I also knew him as a genius, and a generous, funny kid. Monorail driving was a job he was pleased to have, but it wasn't going to be his career. He was a senior in college, and he had a very bright future.

My thoughts and feelings about this go far beyond this little banality I'm about to share here, but I try to focus on writing in this blog, and here's the connection I'm seeing between Austin's death and the writing ambitions I and my handful of regular readers share. A couple of posts back I talked about why some talented, even brilliant, people with artistic ambitions achieve them and some don't. I was talking about perseverance, basically, but now I'm also thinking about not wasting time. Austin was brilliant, but he didn't live long enough to put in his ten thousand hours. I'm sure he would have accomplished amazing things; he was just that special. It's unusual to die so young, but even those of us who live long enough to have a career and a family don't know if we'll make it to eighty, sixty-five, or just into our forties. So the thought I'm taking away from this right now is to make the most of your time, because you don't know how much of it you have.

Breakthroughs and too much to think about

2009-07-09T01:03:00.005-04:00

I often find myself thinking, in the course of a day or week, "Gee, I should blog about that." Then the next time I'm getting ready to post an entry I feel like I've had so many of those moments they've either jostled each other out of my head, or I feel too fatigued to even do them justice. My blog posts tend to be long anyway . . . I don't want to make them longer!

I just finished the first draft of a short story I've been wrestling with, it seems, forever. I--seriously--began and abandoned it four separate times before I finally got a story I could live with. The first time I got 542 words in before I figured out it was crap. The second time, 3694. Third attempt: 430. Fourth attempt, a whopping 4672 before I figured out it was going nowhere. And finally, over the course of just three days, I pulled together a draft I'm happy with at 5132. Hopefully when I revise I'll get it under that magic 5000 barrier.

But first, 9338 words of crap.

You don't go through that much failure without learning a thing or two. At least, I hope not. Let's see if I can articulate what I did learn. I set out with the hope of taking some of the lessons I'd been learning over the past year and coming up with something shiny and new that showcased my progress. Despite that, I found myself writing dull stories about unlikeable people. (Part of my problem is that I think stories should be entertaining first, but I also want mine to be meaningful. It's challenging to pull off both.)

Then I came up with a premise that had a lot more potential, but my next attempt suffered, I eventually concluded, from being too contrived.

I think this is a new realization for me. I tend to have a pretty good idea of where I want a story to start and where I want it to end, and sometimes I abuse the crap out of it to get it from point A to point B. It was as though I were working with a living thing that was resisting the contortions I was trying to put it through. I've talked about killing darlings in the forms of phrases and scenes, and yeah, that's hard for me, but one of the lessons I think I needed to learn here was to kill my darlings among the plot points too. There were some arbitrary things I was cramming in my story that were making it not work, and I was getting writer's block trying to force myself to write something broken.

When I finally threw my story away for the fourth time, kept the premise I liked, but totally reimagined what I was going to do with it, I immediately came up with something more streamlined. For anybody into Swain, I wrote it in scenes, and pretty much glossed over the sequels to keep it short. I had the disaster at the end of each scene immediately pose the new goal, and no angsty deliberation on what to do next. Maybe it's just a fluke, but I've read successful short story writers talk about the point where they got it, where they figured out what kinds of ideas could be fleshed out in five thousand words and which could not. When I came up with that sequence of scenes, I knew I had it. I knew I could write it, and I knew I could write it in about twenty pages. Nothing seemed too contrived, and I was eager to sit down and get it all down. All that trying and failing, and the final story took three days to type.

So maybe I've had my a ha moment, at least in that regard. Only time will tell.

I also found, as I wrote this story, that each time I started to go off in a boring or meandering direction, I figured it out within a paragraph or too. It may be that I've written so much crap that I've finally become attuned to what JoeCrap smells like, and I'm getting better at recognizing it before I generate too much of it. God I hope so.

My wife doesn't understand why I've been focusing on short stories, when I have a completed novel ms, and when there's no money in short stories. Here's why: my biggest problem as a writer, I think, is my verbosity. I need to learn to write tighter, not for the sake of my shorts, but for the sake of my novels. Just because you've got a hundred thousand words or more to play with doesn't mean anybody wants to read a bunch of stuff that doesn't move the story, that you were too undisciplined as a writer to leave out. I'm focusing on short stories because if I can master the art of getting a complete, engaging tale told in 5,000 words, my novels will get better.

So I've got this story. I'm just happy it's done, and I'm happy it's not overlong. I like to think it's good, but flush from writing the thing, who am I to say?

I'll put it up here in a day or so, encrypted, when I've had a chance to clean it up. If I know you--that includes people whose blogs I've commented on and people who've commented on mine before--then you're welcome to read it and give me your thoughts. Just drop me a line when the time comes and ask me for the key. Then you can tell me if it's any good or not.

Getting back to the idea in my first paragraph . . . that's not all I wanted to talk about in this post, but I'm going to stop here for now anyway, because if not it will be too rambly.

Whence these flowers?

2009-07-05T13:02:00.003-04:00

I'm just wading back into the blogosphere now after a three or four month hiatus, and one thing that's suddenly standing out to me much more than it did before is how uncharitable comments on blogs tend to be.

I don't mean my blog or those of other aspiring writers, but those blogs that are somewhat famous within the universe of aspiring writers, those agents' and editors' and authors' blogs that give lots of advice. It seems to me like a form of sucking up. Editor A says in her blog that she doesn't care for this or that little idiosyncrasy that had nothing to do with writing--an opinion she's entitled to, mind you--and then two dozen people line up to post snarky generalizations on the same point, presumably hoping to earn brownie points through their ridicule of whatever the editor wasn't into in the first place.

In other news, get the hell off my lawn!

Why do the best ideas come when the laptop is off?

2009-07-02T20:26:00.004-04:00

Went to bed early last night (midnight) because I was passing out. Before I could fall asleep, I had a brainstorm on the idea I've been toying with for my next novel. Suddenly I was wired, with one idea after another coming to me in rapid succession. I didn't grab my journal. I knew these would keep until morning, and they did. Actually, I had to fight the temptation to get up and start working on it, but I knew if I didn't get some sleep I'd be dragging through today. Still, I'm pretty excited. I wish I could work on this now, but I have a short story to finish, revisions on a couple of short stories, and *blush* revisions on Vanishing Act.

Oh, for thirty hour days.

And it's July already! How the hell did that happen?!

How far into your million are you?

2009-06-17T14:08:00.003-04:00

I'm positive I read somewhere that Arthur C. Clarke said that a writer had about a million words of crap to get out of his or her system before he or she could write good stuff. When I tried to search for the exact quote, though, so I could use it in this post, I couldn't find it anywhere. It may be one of those urban legends . . . I found tons or references to this truism, but I couldn't find the original.

Here's what I did find:

"The first half-million words are just practice." -Dean Koontz

and:

"I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story." -Jerry Pournelle

Maybe Pournelle is the originator and I've just been misattributing it. *shrug*

The current-day version of that seems to be Malcolm Gladwell's observation that talent or intelligence are not the determining factors of success. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient ones. Beyond a certain level of talent, it is not true, according to Gladwell, that more talented people enjoy more success. Once you have enough talent, what makes the difference is your drive. According to his research, it's 10,000 hours, to be much more specific. That's the number of hours he finds the most successful people have put into mastering their craft.

Well that's all well and good and even motivational, but I have no way to quantify the hours I've spent learning how to write, no way to judge how far along I am, so I'll just stick with the one million words, which I reckon must be emblematic of pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, I decided to search through whatever old manuscripts of mine I could find, and see how far along I was in this progress. My wife called it cat-waxing, but I think I just needed to have a sense or progress, even if it turns out I'm not as far along as I would like to be. Even being at the beginning of a journey is better than spinning your wheels on ice. I've been struggling lately; maybe I've plateaued, or maybe I'm getting ready for a breakthrough, but I needed some reason for optimism this morning.

I looked through whatever old typewritten stuff I could find in the den--luckily, the wordcounts were up on the front page, where they were supposed to be--and searched through my hard drive. There's tons of writing that I lost in this way. The oldest stories I still have were written my junior year in college. But what the hell; anything I wrote before I was twenty probably doesn't count anyway. I also, based on the Pournelle quote, discounted every file that was begun but not completed--a shame that, because it probably cut my number in half.

So where am I? A little over a quarter of the way. That's a little embarrassing--that someone with lifelong aspirations of being a writer should have so little to show for it. Two completed novels and a handful of short stories. On the other hand, it gives me reason for optimism. One quarter of the way is a not-insubstantial fraction.

It's also reason for hope because it gives me reason to believe that, however good I am right now, it's not the upper limit. All I have to do is keep at it and I'll get better. And thirty-something Joe has a lot more drive and dedication (and discipline) than twenty-something Joe did.

So how far along are you in your million words?

EDIT TO ADD: If you equate a million words and ten thousand hours, that averages out to a hundred words an hour. Honestly, that seems pretty realistic to me. I mean sure, when the writing's going well I write much more than half a page per hour, but there are certainly plenty of times when I have much less to show for my hours of work.

As if nothing whatsoever had happened

2009-06-14T15:00:00.002-04:00

I've been wrestling with a short story's plot lately, trying to get it not to suck. One thing I've noticed is that it's easy to use a maguffin as an excuse for poor plotting. "Oh, the plot doesn't matter because it's really about the character arc" or whatever. I think I flirted with that for a bit; luckily, I've come to my senses.

The specific problems I'm having . . . well first my subconscious threw a complication out there as I was writing, and I really liked it so I decided to keep it, but then that meant I didn't know how the protagonist could achieve his goal. Basically, I had him break his leg in a situation where a broken leg would make it hard if not impossible for him to succeed. Well good, in a way, because it shouldn't be too easy for the character to succeed. But then I spent a day being all, "crap, how *does* he get out of this?!" Then I thought of a solution for that, as well as for one of my other problems, but I began to feel that my solution was too facile; I'd pulled something out of my ass that rendered it just not that big a deal. Well if it's not all that big a deal, then it's a pretty impotent complication. I also started to realize that the toughest challenges faced by my characters were not the *last* challenged faced by them in the story, which undercuts any sense of rising action. If they overcome bigger challenges early in the story, then the later challenges never make the reader doubt that the main characters will win out, and so the ending becomes anticlimactic.

All of this led me to examine my plot more thoroughly, leading to the epiphany about maguffins posted above. I started to feel that my plot was entirely too linear. I've heard some good advice on this, but it's hard to put it into practice. Maybe every writer needs to find his or her own way. Orson Scott Card says you should throw away the first idea or two that come into your head for a given premise, just automatically, because your very first ideas will be the trite ones . . . the obvious solutions. Fair enough, but I tend to fixate on things. Having one solution to a problem, it's difficult for me to see other ones. Elizabeth Bear says it's all about writing enough. When you've written and read enough stories that hew to the tried-and-true, your subconscious mind finally begins to reject clichés and begins to throw out ideas that subvert them rather than implementing them. Again, that's great, but I'm trying to figure out how to improve *now*, not after I've written a hundred crappy stories. I mean, improving eventually is better than not improving at all, of course, but shouldn't the goal be to improve sooner?

This isn't wisdom, because I'm on the road, not looking back on it from afar, but where I am right now in the process is analyzing how I generate plot. I tend to have a starting point and an ending point, and then try to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

(This isn't about being a plotter versus a pantser, because whether you plot in advance or you do it as you go, you still plot. I'm interested in how to make that process result in more original ideas, regardless of where in the writing process I do it. I have a story out there making the rounds which has gotten very positive feedback on my writing ability, but the general sense that it's not terribly inventive or original. I'm just doing what has already been done.)

Anyway, I'm thinking that certain "Point B"s only lend themselves to certain paths from A to B, and that if I want a truly original plot, I need to change where it's going altogether. If I know the rebels destroy the death star, well there's only so many ways to make that happen. I mean, there are infinite possibilities in the details, but few in terms of the big picture. If I want to do something original, I need to veer away from the ending point I have in mind, to one that's less obvious.

Maybe.

Random Thoughts

2009-03-11T14:21:00.004-04:00

You even notice how many blogs are titled "Random Thoughts"?

It's like people are ashamed of their randomness, and so they feel the need to warn you up front. These aren't deep thoughts, or particularly instructive ones, or even helpful--well some of them might be, but not all. Because it's random.

Dude, chill. It's a blog. Of course it's random.

-o-

Still working, still making progress, but not necessarily on the same things, and not necessarily on the things I should be making progress on. I haven't worked on my revisions for Vanishing Act for at least a couple weeks now. I had a story come back with a very nice personal rejection, and I decided I really should get all my short stories out the door and looking for homes. In this market, publishing a short story might be helpful in getting a foot in the door and getting some cred. Even a semipro sale is better than nothing, methinks. If nothing else, selling one story semipro might help me sell a later short story to a pro market.

But I've learned a lot since I wrote those stories, and I wanted them to reflect the lessons I've learned in recent months, and to be the best versions of themselves that I could send out. "Unintended Consequences"/"The More Things Change"* was pretty much ready to go, since I'd already polished it. "Cabrón" doesn't need a lot of work either, because I wrote it pretty recently. On the other hand, a computer glitch cost me some revisions, so a little bit of cleaning up is definitely in order. "War Crimes" is a story I love, but it is the oldest of the three. It's gone through many rounds of revision over time, but I wasn't necessarily looking for the things I'm looking for now. Hopefully I can make it an even better story.**

So I decided to get those three sent off and then return to Vanishing Act, but then something else came up. Back in January, I think, I agreed to an artistic gift exchange. It's just like a Secret Santa/Secret Maccabee exchange, except the gifts are stories, sketches, poems, what have you, and the identity of each gift-giver is not a secret. It sounded like a great idea, and hey, the deadline wasn't until March 15th, which was like a lifetime away. By March I'd surely have loads of time, having finished my revisions and being bored by then of spending my afternoons poolside with a margarita, wondering what the heck to do next.

Well now March 15th is looming. I've got most of a story mapped out, which I wrote trying to think of what themes and elements would speak to its recipient. I'm really excited about writing a brand new story, and trying to put in what I've learned from the beginning, instead of in the process of revisions. I've got to finish writing the thing, and soon, but it still looks like I can get it done on time.

It does mean, though, that for the last few days I've tabled the revisions on the short stories. So I've got one project tabled while I work on another, and THAT one tabled while I work on a third. Sheesh! Hopefully, though, that means when I get back to Vanishing Act I'll bring fresh eyes to it.

Oh, and look for a new short story to be posted here soon, since I've got that handy dandy encryption feature. I'll allow anybody I "know" to read it--that includes people I know in real life or from the internet, including anyone who has posted on my blog, or anyone on whose blog I've posted. You'll just have to ask me for the key, and make sure I know your e-mail. Or if you know me REALLY well, it will be the first name of the person for whom I'm writing the story.

* I realized yesterday to my chagrin that while I had changed the title in the file, I had not changed it in the filename, because I got back an acknowledgment that still had the old title.

** Yes, damnit, I will say "even." It's my blog. If I don't believe in my writing, who will?

Why CTRL-F is an important tool for revision

2009-02-21T13:01:00.007-05:00

I took a break from revising Vanishing Act this week to revise "Cabrón." Yeah, I know, the logic doesn't make any sense there. Revising is horrible, tedious work no matter what it's on*. But I had three short stories lying around the house, getting fat, and I decided to send them on their way. I had to spiffy them up a bit first, though.

I finished my first draft of "Cabrón" after finishing the first draft of Vanishing Act and before beginning the revision process. So it's several months old, but it's actually the most recent thing I've completed. I haven't looked at it since August or so, and I'm actually pleasantly surprised, coming to it now. I had convinced myself that it wasn't very good, but it's actually not bad at all. I was shooting for horror and really ended up more at dark fantasy, but it's not a bad dark fantasy. This my completely made-up origin tale for the chupacabras, featuring a teenage Cuban girl at a Catholic boarding school in Puerto Rico in the 1960s, and the creepy Brother ("temporal coadjutor," if you want to get technical) she has a series of increasingly alarming run-ins with.

Anyway, I've made a list of phrases which recur in the text, and then I've been searching for them using CTRL-F, to see if I'm falling into language ruts of using the same phrasing multiple times for the exact same thoughts, or if I'm repeating words too close together. (I don't think I'm explaining that well, but it's two separate problems I'm looking for. One is a problem of unoriginal phrasing, which needs to be solved by coming up with different ways to say what I mean. The other is a problem of word repetition in a short space, which I can solve by using pronouns or alternate phrasings.) Repeated words and phrasing is a bugaboo of mine, and I rarely spot it without the aid of technology. The text basically becomes invisible to me, as the context sucks me in. A lot of people have the same difficulty when it comes to finding grammatical and syntax errors, as well as typos or misspellings. For some reason, those surface errors tend to jump right out at me, while repetition doesn't. When I use CTRL-F to jump from phrase to phrase, though, I rip the text out of its context. I can see how often I'm using the same words, and how closely together, and make a judgment call.

Today, though, I spotted an entirely different kind of mistake thanks to this technique. Again, though, it comes down to being able to take myself out of the spell of the story so I can see the mechanics more clearly.

In this scene, Cristina, the protagonist and narrator, is calling her mother on a payphone and asking her to take her out of the school. It's relatively early in the story, and she has a sense that something is wrong, but, of course, it's still too vague for the adults in her life to put any trust in it--especially because she's been trying to get out of this school for weeks. And she's somewhat hysterical and not doing the best job of explaining herself either.

I answered her in English, like I’d been doing since that first summer we spent in America, ten years ago. Eventually, she’d switch to English too, without realizing it, just like she always did. “Mami, you’ve got to take me out of here. I can’t stay.”

She sighed before replying. “¿Ahora porqué?”

“Because something isn’t right here.”

“¿Qué cosa?”

“There’s a brother who spilled hot wax on me and was smelling me, and that girl who died in my room, and another girl passed out in the same room tonight.” Christ. It sounded weak even to me. Was I grasping at vague coincidences, trying to assemble them all into some sinister delusion? Was this all a product of my unhappiness here? No, it couldn’t be. “There’s something going on here,” I concluded weakly, trying to lend strength to my meager examples by naked assertion.

Several paragraphs further down--do you see what I'm doing? Now you don't have the context either, so you can see what my Alpha Reader and I missed on multiple read-throughs:

“You said the same thing your first month at Brookshire Academy in Nueva York, but then you made friends and you got used to it. Have you made friends yet? Have you tried?”

“Sí, Mami,” I said, wondering if Elena and Clara counted. “I’m not homesick. Something is really wrong here.”

“Brothers smelling you and spilling wax on your hand,” she said. Even over a phone line, I heard the skepticism in her voice.

It's too bad I'm not writing an Encyclopedia Brown-type mystery here, no? "Who said anything about the wax being on my hands, mom?! ZOMG, you're in on it!!!1!!1!!ELEVEN!!!"

* That's why I've been slow to update. I haven't had much to say besides "Revising. It sucks." Over and over again.

EDIT TO ADD: In the above post, I use the phrase "using the same" twice. I use the phrase "but it's actually" twice, in consecutive sentences. I also have two consecutive sentences that begin with a single word, a comma, the word "though," and another comma.

See what I mean?

EDIT TWO: And in a meta-example of repetition, some of you may have noticed that the protagonist of Vanishing Act is named Chris, while the protagonist of "Cabrón" is Cristina. Um, yeah. That. I'll need to stay away from that name like forever, now. I chose the name Chris for VA pretty much randomly, as I recall. In "Cabrón," which, again, came later, I chose the name on purpose. There's a clinical vampire and, of course, much drinking of blood, and, near the end, Cristina uses her own blood as bait. The temptation to echo the Roman Catholic mass with Cristina saying, "Tome. Bebe." like some sort of twisted Christ-figure was too strong to ignore.

(And yes, the phrasing is anachronistic, because at the time in question, the mass would have been in Latin. I'm inclined to think it doesn't matter, since the reference is not intended to be overt.)

Go comfort a teacher being treated like crap.

2009-02-13T08:43:00.004-05:00

Down on the left side of the page, where I link to other blogs, is my wife's blog, Iriarte Files. She's a teacher like I am, who is also an aspiring writer. She's a great writer of fun sci-fi action with tough-as-nails female protagonists, and she'll probably get her novel sold long before I do. She has a natural talent for things I have to work for years to get.

Go read her entry called "Education Sucks," see what they're doing to her, and see if it doesn't make your blood boil. Then, if you have anything nice to say, post in her comments. (If you say something like "suck it up," or you talk about how easy you think teachers have it, then I will track you down and beat you. You've been warned. Don't think I won't: I've learned a lot about torture from her books. I can kill you fifty ways with a spoon.) (She knows a hundred.)

Follow no rule off a cliff

2009-02-09T17:19:00.004-05:00

That's what Linnea Sinclair always says. Actually, as I recall she says she got it from C.J. Cherryh.

I ran across this old blog entry today on the oft-repeated advice to "kill your darlings." Diana Peterfreund quotes Karen Hawkins, who recasts that advice as "Love the book, not the scene."

Now I've killed so many darlings in the last six months that I have a tag just for that. But those were things that needed to be cut. My protagonist playing a video game because I thought it might be fun to write about an old game I loved. Getting from point A to point B, because I'd done the research--I'd suffered for my art, and damnit, now it was your turn, dear reader. Scenes that weren't furthering the story--or that weren't furthering it enough to carry their weight in wordcount. The advice to cut things that are only in there because you wanted to put them there is good advice.

Love the book, not the scene.

I like it.

Love the story, not the phrase.

I have a tendency to write too long, so I'm always looking for things to cut. In Vanishing Act I resisted the temptation to take killing your darlings too far, mostly because I knew I needed to cut a lot more wordcount than I could by removing a phrase here and a phrase there. But in the past I've followed this advice off a cliff, and cut bits that weren't detracting from the story, that were actually good. I mean, come on, if writers cut out every turn of phrase they recognize as apt, poetic, clever, artistic, what have you, how does any great turn of phrase ever end up in a story?

Jesus, sometimes it feels like we need permission to use common sense.

Quick Question for all three of my readers ;-)

2009-02-09T00:54:00.010-05:00

Does it violate tight third to say that a POV character blushed? Would it be better to say he "felt himself blush"?

I mean, he can't see himself blush, but he can feel it and he knows what's going on, no?

I could say something like, "He felt his face heat up," but I'm not liking it for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's longer and feels clunkier to me. Secondly, his face could heat up for any number of reasons. Maybe he's angry. Maybe he's feverish. Maybe he's about to spontaneously combust.

What do you think?

Hehe . . . oops . . . poll no workee. Maybe this weekend I'll figure out what's wrong with the code. Oh well . . .

Testing again

2009-02-07T22:50:00.006-05:00

This is the only part of "Watertouch" that did not suck.

Testing . . .

2009-02-07T22:18:00.008-05:00

Show text

EDIT: W00t!

EDIT AGAIN: I should probably give credit where credit is due. Mary Robinette Kowal occasionally posts password-protected stories on her journal, allowing some of her readers to comment on them without jeopardizing any of her publication rights. I thought that was insanely kewl, and was immediately jealous that nothing like that appeared to be possible with Blogger. My friend Google helped me find the next best thing, though: Vincent Cheung's Javascript Encryption code. Very cool!

In the future I hope to do the same as Kowal, and put stories up here, inviting reader input. (I am not asking for critiques of the snippet above, though. That was just some more testing.)

Incidentally, the decryption key for this post is "joe".

My own self-important rant on what is Good in art

2009-02-05T15:24:00.003-05:00

I'm cross-posting this from a comment I posted on Nathan Bransford's blog because it's long, and because he gets like three hundred comments for every entry, and I didn't want something I'd spent time composing to get lost in the crowd.

Bransford's post was occasioned by Stephen King's comments in USA Weekend denigrating Stephanie Meyer. Bransford's question: Who decides what is "good," anyway?

I think the problem that comes up every time this issue is raised with respect to art is that we claim to be arguing about one thing, but we are actually arguing about another. We're not really arguing about what is "good." We're arguing about what is "better."

If your work of art moves someone, touches someone's soul, it is good. That's it.

Just one, I say. Who can set a minimum threshold, and say that X people have to agree that your work is good? The novel Ordinary People saved my life, I believe. If every other person who'd read that book hated it, would that make it not meaningful? Is there some Platonic Ideal Book somewhere that books are measured against, making them good or bad independent of the effect they create in a reader?

I don't think so. I think art exists only to act on the observer*. Therefore, the only meaningful measure of quality is whether or not a work succeeded in touching an observer, and it's not about discrete criteria, nor is it a numbers game.

So:

Stephen King: Good. Obviously.

Stephanie Meyer: Good.

James Joyce: Good.

Judith Guest: Good.

René Magritte: Good.

Jackson Pollock: Good.

*gulp* Terry Goodkind: Good.

Their works have resonated; their works have been powerful for someone. How can I possibly say that what resonates with me is meaningful but what resonates with you is not? Well that's exactly what we say when we say that Stephanie Meyer is no good.

The problem, I think, is that some people think something is just plain wrong if we equate Meyer's accomplishment with Herman Melville's. So we look for some way to say her art is less good than his. Or less good than Updike's. Or less good than King's. We look for flaws to point out as evidence of this. But it's all bogus, because grammar, characterization, prosody, plotting, etc. are all just means to an end: the effect on the observer. And now we come back to the fact that one observer isn't worth more than another.

All we can make are personal pronouncements. And we can certainly give reasons why we individually feel as we do, but when we try to use those as some sort of objective evidence for the universal truth of our personal pronouncements, we're missing the point. We're either saying that these criteria are more meaningful than the cumulative effect a work has, or we're saying that the effect a work has on some other observer isn't worth as much as the effect it has on me.

I'd say that Stephen King is a better writer than James Joyce. Of course, what I really mean is that King's works have moved me, entertained me, and been meaningful for me, whereas the single work of Joyce's that I read failed to affect me on all three fronts. Does that mean King is really better? No, it means King was more effective in moving me. It would be the height of arrogance for someone else to suggest that moving or impressing some famous literary critic is a more meaningful accomplishment than moving me is, but there's an awful lot of arrogance in the world.

* Of course, the artist is an observer too.

Icarus’s Labyrinth

It's not goodbye . . .

I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some Happy News

Two Steps Forward, One Backspace

An experiment in characterization

Progress Report Time (Contest Win Edition!)

Relax Mom, It's a Joke

Poetry and Mind Reading

Waxing rhapsodic about independent booksellers.

I can haz full request?

Checking In

On perspective, and experiencing your work as a reader

The big dog is not always the one doing the barking

Yikes!

Congratulations to my wife on her prize-winning essay!

On honorary men, stereotypical women, and feminized men

This

Blue Fire

On the (un)importance of getting everything right

How do you want to be remembered?

Middle Grade Musings

Tension on Every Page

Juno Good Characterization When You See It

Nick and Norah Have Way More Glamorous Lives Than You

Permission to write crap

If you get stung in your dreams, can you go into anaphylactic shock in real life?

Where do I begin . . .

Sometimes you can't simply tweak something

How do I *know*?!

Well *somebody* thinks I'm a winner, at least

On entertainment versus "literariness" in SF

Puppy

Not Dead Yet

October Sky and Good Writing, Part I

The Hero's Journey

Is steampunk a single genre?

Short Story Analysis: All I Have To Do Is . . .

Sometimes I almost believe in muses

Testing

Funny how "independent" and "undependable" have the same root

What Would Elizabeth Bear Do?

Short Story Analysis: Jaiden's Weaver

This is what I want to write

::insert sound of torpedo tube firing::

I'm learning to revise, but I ain't got wings

We all agree there is something to be learned from the music industry; we just don't agree on what

An oldie but a goodie

More linky goodness

Some good advice on revision

Food for thought

It's just a flesh wound . . .

New School Year, 1/4 down (Self-Analysis Edition)

Cabrón (a story)

Don't worry, Bev Vincent, I write like a girl too . . . Or maybe we should both worry, because neither of us will ever win a Hugo award. ;)

On Voice

Food for thought

Spacelift (a story)

And now you know the rest of the story

Breakthroughs and too much to think about

Whence these flowers?

Why do the best ideas come when the laptop is off?

How far into your million are you?

As if nothing whatsoever had happened

Random Thoughts

Why CTRL-F is an important tool for revision

Go comfort a teacher being treated like crap.

Follow no rule off a cliff

Quick Question for all three of my readers ;-)

Poll: Does reporting that a POV character "blushed" violate tight third person?

Testing again

Testing . . .

My own self-important rant on what is Good in art

How do I know?!

Well somebody thinks I'm a winner, at least