Ha! The dark fantasy/horror/vampire/zombie/voodoo novella is FINISHED. With the first draft. It 27K words, and was some of the most fun I’ve had writing in a long time. Now, admire my wordle:
I find that wordle kind of upsetting. The name of my protag hugely overweighs everything else, and “said” is so prominent. Too much dialogue? Oh, well. It’s a first draft: much grooming to do yet.
In this case, you made it all the way through round two and into the winnowing phase. There were some rough spots, one person thought, but two others thought it was quirky and interesting enough to publish. It lost out in the winnowing phase. That’s pretty far — about 5% of all stories make it there.
Woohoo! Maybe next time.
The Martian ponders the white-haired man on the sidewalk. He is baking in the Florida sun, waiting outside the craft shop while his wife gathers materials to make another ceramic doll. His lime-green polo shirt and white slacks match her own.
His children are grown, his youth is gone, twenty thousand days and night of marriage have flown past. His days of power, of protecting and providing, have slipped away. He waits quietly in the sun, a little drowsy. There is no reason on earth for him to be there but one.
From Frederica Mathewes-Green.
If nothing else, I will be taking “Twenty Thousand Days of Marriage” as the title of a story.
“If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God that you have found.” – Thomas Merton
See, now this is a great kernel of an idea for a story.
Meme time! As suggested by csinman, here’s a brief rundown of the way that I write.
I usually start with something so small that it can’t even be called an idea. Sometimes it’s a title. (My most recent short story, The Typographer’s Dream began that way.) Sometimes it’s an image (“an old woman weeping over a river”), or a theme (“something about forgiveness”), or a more typical what-if (“what if someone stole your ability to sleep?”). These kernels by themselves are never enough for a story. I have a file where I sometimes write down my kernels, but honestly I rarely use it. Usually the kernels just sit in my head and wait to germinate.
Kernels germinate either by combining with each other, or by latching on to some snippet of plot, something I read in the news, another story I read, etc. Here I’m helped by the fact that I have a Giant Fantasy World which is vast in imagined geography and history, and which almost any kernel can find a place in. (For example, my unpublished novel An Inheritance of Stars and my recent short story The Last Free Bear are both set in the Giant Fantasy World, despite the fact that they’re very different stories with no visible connections between them.)
Once the kernel has sprouted a plot, I’m ready to think about starting to prepare to consider what I’m going to anticipate writing. This takes a long time. Even after the plot has sprouted, I’m not ready to start cultivating a story in earnest. I have to let the plot stretch and unfurl and grow some more detail. I need to know at least 75% of what happens before I sit down to write; the last 25% can come in as I’m writing. If I have less than that, the story tends wither as I get stuck not knowing what to do. (This was the fate of the last novel I started, now trunked.)
Once all of that’s in place, it’s time to sit down and write. I write my stories in plain text. Yes, the kind you can read with Notepad. Once I wrote in WordPerfect, but then I lost my WordPerfect install CD, moved to a different computer, and found I couldn’t open any of my stories. Never Again. Text is universal and eternal. However, it’s not exactly “plain” text: I actually write everything as LaTeX, with the help of the sffms LaTeX package. LaTeX and sffms are both open-source, which means that even if they did go away someday, I’m free to use and modify the versions that I have squirreled away all over my hard drives. Oh, and my text editor is Vim. I use a makefile to generate txt, rtf, html, and pdf versions from the LaTeX source, and I have Vim set up to do all that with just two keystrokes.
(This is by far the nerdiest writing setup I’ve ever heard of, but I like it.)
I usually write on the bus to and from work. My goal is 1000 words a day, but I’m happy as long as I get more than 500. I would like to write more, but my time on the bus is the only writing time I can count on getting, and that’s less than two hours per day. I figure that at 500-1000 words per day, in 6 months I can finish a novel. (That hasn’t worked out in practice, so far, but we’ll see how things go in the future.)
Once a first draft is done, I wait a little while then make a first editing pass. This is just looking for mechanical errors or really egregious writing sins. After that, I put it up on OWW and/or send it to my flesh-and-blood readers. Then I start working on something else. A few weeks (for a short story) or a few months (for a novel) later, I’ll take all the comments I got and do a really thorough edit. This is when I’ll make serious changes like removing characters, changing the order of scenes, or reworking the plot. After this, I may send it out to one or two people that I know and trust for final comments. I brush up any last issues they see—then it’s off to the cruel world.
What have I been doing? Not blogging, that’s what. Here’s some snippets:
While doing research for a current project, I found a listing of all of the death row inmates in Texas prisons. Not only do you get name, DOB, and other basic info, but photographs and descriptions of their crimes.
Creepy. Also, pure gold for research purposes!
Strange Horizons has an amazing story up today about loss, regret, and a telepathic ATM. The end literally brought me to tears.
Strange Horizons has been on a roll lately. Last week’s story was an educational “Letter to the Editor” about the history of tarot, which was unusual in that it appeared to be mostly factual. Like this piece about maps of Antarctica, it’s a story that has to be glimpsed through the slats of a verf different surface narrative. I love that kind of stuff.
Urban Fantasy is the new Generic European Fantasy.
I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing for four bucks the other day at the bookstore. This has to be one of the funnest writing books I’ve ever read, full of interesting digressions and snappy prescriptions. Even when writing about grammar, King’s writing is taut and yummy.
But then there’s this:
With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense.
The advice is fine, but: passive tense? Passive TENSE? This error occurs not once, but twice on the same page, yet the correct “passive voice” occurs twice on the next page. The only conclusion is that King doesn’t know the difference between tense and voice, or doesn’t consider the difference important enough to bother with. And neither did any of his copy editors.
Dear Mr. King and Editors: if you are going to lecture me about grammar, you should at least understand the difference between tense, and voice. Furthermore, this difference should be so basic to you that errors of this sort leap off the page like angry toads. And while you’re at it, you might add the words mood and aspect to your vocabulary, so that you can intelligently talk about sentences like She would have been shot without flopping around like a wet fish.
This proves: most people don’t know anything about grammar, and most of the ones who claim to know something about grammar don’t know very much. They should all just read Language Log.
J.S. Bangs 