Tag: writing

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It’s January 2. Am I too late to get in on the year in review parties? Did you already tear down the decorations and put away the confetti? Really? What about the rum punch?

Well, never mind. I guess I’ll have to drink my own rum.

So what actually happened this year writing-wise?

  • I finished my second draft of The Wedding of Earth and Sky and had it reviewed by two writer friends. Final draft will come out in 2013.
  • I finished a total of eight short stories.
  • I sold two short stories: The Typographer’s Folly and the The Suffragette’s Election. Both of these are going to appear in the early months of 2013.

This was hardly a breakout year, but it was decent, steady progress. The most remarkable event of the year was the fact that The Suffragette’s Election sold on its first submission, after lingering for four years in my pile of unfinished stories.

For 2013, the biggest thing that I regret is the fact that it takes me so long to finish a novel. Consider that Wedding was drafted first in 2011, second-drafted in 2012, and won’t be considered finished until 2013… which seems a little slow. In 2012 I pushed myself to finish at least 6 short stories (a target which I exceeded), and I think in 2013 I’ll be focusing on getting novels done in a reasonable time. I’m going to push Wedding through its final draft and start sending it to agents, and then I’m going to work on getting my next WIP all the way to a final draft in the same year.

The next thing that I intend to write is a novella rather than a full-sized novel, so this should be doable. We’ll see how it comes out.

Oh, and additionally, I joined Twitter just today. Content will be random and possibly nonexistent.

Here’s to 2013!

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Two weeks ago Duotrope announced that it is becoming a paid service. This is pretty big news for those of us who depend heavily on Duotrope for tracking our submissions.

If you’re one of the last three writers in America who doesn’t know, Duotrope is a website which has the most comprehensive listing of fiction markets on the web, together with features to allow you to record your submissions and responses. It then tracks your submission and response history, and aggregates those reported submissions into some very nice statistics about response times and acceptance rates.

As you might expect, this caused a lot of wailing and breast-beating among the impoverished writer set. Their Facebook page is filled to the brim with comments right now, some of them positive, some negative, and some downright nasty. There has also been rioting.. My personal take runs as follows:

  • $5/month or $50/year does seem a little steep. It seems like they could probably get away with $5/bimonthly and $25/year… though of course I haven’t seen their expenses and am totally making these numbers up.
  • Either way it’s a win for me, since I’ve had a recurring donation of $5/month set up for Duotrope for years now. I’ll probably go to a yearly subscription, though, which means that Duotrope will now be getting $10/year less from me than they did before.
  • People are rightly concerned about the quality of the stats, since many fewer people will now be adding their reports to the mix. Duotrope has some interesting counterpoints to this.

Overall, I wish Duotrope the best of luck. They evidently were never able to make ends meet with the "begging" model, and I suspect that the "charging" model will work better for them. It all depends on how many subscribers they actually get, but their early reports seem encouraging.

Good luck to them in the new year.

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Having just sent in the contracts, I’m happy to report that my cyberpunk short story The Suffragette’s Election has sold to Crossed Genres, and will be appearing in their February 2013 issue.

This story has a long and tortuous history. Its first draft was written over four years ago, but I never sent it out because of obvious problems with the ending. Essentially, I knew how I wanted the story to end, but my first attempt at writing this ending was devoid of tension and drama, and the story sputtered out in a lame and unconvincing finish.

I put the story away for several months. Then I took it out again and rewrote the ending to see if I could make it work. It didn’t. So I repeated this process four more times.

Earlier this year I took the story out again and tried one more time—and finally got something good. (The key difference turned out to be not the ending itself, but the ordering of a few scenes before the ending.) However, by this time the beginning of the story had gotten shabby from so many partial rewrites, so I had to rewrite that, too. And then, finally, I had something that I was happy with from beginning to end, and just in time to submit to Crossed Genre’s “Cloak and Dagger” themed issue.

Evidently the muses smiled on me after all that effort, because the story was accepted on its first submission. Woo!

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It’s coming. Can you feel it? It sounds like thousands of keyboards being battered all at once, their keys clattering, crying, and falling silent. You can smell it on the wind. The smell of imagination, the incense of hope, and the bitter smoke of despair. The writers approach, their eyes wide, their fingers trembling, and on their lips the mantra: fifty thousand, fifty thousand, fifty thousand.

NaNoWriMo.

I’ve plunged into the madness of NaNoWriMo once before, and emerged, miraculously, victorious. I’m told there are not many that succeed on their first foray into that ravenous land. On that occasion I was writing a novel, The Failed Apostle, and I successfully penned its first 60,000 words that November. It was very hard. I was very glad I did it.

I am foolish enough to try again, after a fashion.

This time I do not have a novel which I would like to begin. I do, however, have another kid, and a larger and more pressing set of responsibilities. Examining my current projects and the realities of my schedule, I have put myself another, more realistic goal: I shall write four short stories in the month of November. One each week.

All together, these stories will probably not total more than 20,000 words—but this is hardly the point. As any short story writer will tell you, 2,000 words of short story may take as much effort as 20,000 words from a novel. Your canvas is smaller, and so your attention to detail must be greater. Under current conditions, writing a full rough draft of a story normally takes me much more than a week, so this will still be a significant challenge to my dedication and time. I think it will be worth it.

As with last time, I do not go into battle unprepared. I have chosen which stories I will write, and slotted them into a schedule.

  1. The Heresy Trial of Friar Travolo, about a monk who proves a thesis which is scandalous to the mathematical authorities of his day. This one is cheating, somewhat, since I already have it half-written. I do not care, though. It’s a difficult story for me to write, somewhat outside my usual oeuvre, and finishing it within its allotted week will be challenge enough.

  2. Mr. Yamamoto’s Night Janitorial and Demon-Hunting Service, about a young man who is trained to empty the trash bins and, if necessary, exorcise them. This one I have pretty clearly plotted in my head. It’s something of a satire.

  3. Whalesong, a story about (obviously) sunspots. This one is only a vague idea, yet.

  4. The Blasphemous, the Cruel, and the Weak. I have no idea what this one is about. I only have the title, which I love, but I still have to discover what the plot is.

Nor do I expect that I will have finished with these stories by the end of the month. It is enough that they be complete; making them be good is the task of the months to follow.

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I need to read more Raymond Chandler.

The Big Sleep cover

Two weeks ago I went away with my wife for a weekend at a nearby bed-and-breakfast, and I took along a copy of Carver’s The Big Sleep that I had picked up from a friend. I knew Carver only by reputation, as a sort of godfather of the mystery genre, someone that many people spoke highly of. I had heard the name Philip Marlowe, and I had the vague impression that his books all took place in smoky film noir settings full of sultry dames, bootleggers, wise guys with pistols tucked into their pants, and dirty cops.

These things all turned out to be true.

However, The Big Sleep wasn’t nearly as pulpy as I expected it to be, nor as pulpy as my summary above might suggest. Chandler wasn’t much for spectacle, and he plays down the more lurid aspects of his work rather than playing them up for titillation. What I expected the least, though, was how brisk and exacting the prose was. Chandler’s style eschews florid detail and "literary" ostentation, and instead lays out his scenes and arranges his words with crisp, punchy directness. Take the opening paragraph:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

I love this line: I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. Here we’ve got setting, tone, character, and the first note of the plot, all in just a few sentences. The presentation of the first-person protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, is especially deft. We get no direct characterization of Marlowe at all, and no expansive inner monologues or deep explorations of his inner life. But this doesn’t mean that Marlowe is a cipher; on the contrary, by the end of the book you know him very well, but you know him by virtue of his actions and, more importantly, by observing the world through his eyes, noticing what he notices, and feeling the effect of the words he chooses to describe it. This is marvellously effective. The plot never slows down to reveal the characters, yet we never have to wonder about who the characters are.

The plot construction, too, is excellent, especially in the opening chapters. We get a series of questions, and then a trickle of answers, each of which brings with it new questions. There is a constant sense of progress, but never a plateau or a moment where there is nothing to keep driving us forward. By chapters:

  1. Q: Why is General Sternwood hiring Marlowe? Q: What is up with his daughter Carmen?
  2. A: Sternwood is being blackmailed by A.G. Geiger, who claims to have information about Carmen. Q: What does Geiger know?
  3. Q: What is up with Victoria Sternwood? Q: What does Rusty Regan have to do with all this?
  4. Q: What sort of business is Geiger really running out of his "bookstore"?
  5. A: Geiger lends pornographic books. Q: What’s the connection to Carmen?
  6. Q: Who killed Geiger? And what does it mean for the Sternwood?

Chapter 6 is where things really pick up, as the sleepy little blackmail case suddenly becomes a murder case, and solving the murder requires Marlowe to untangle the rest of the questions posed in those first six chapters, as well as other questions posed thereafter. Then, about halfway through, things seem to wrap up… but following the last few loose ends (including things foreshadowed in those very first chapters) leads to another, deeper layer of mystery whose resolution is more difficult and more chilling.

The internets tell me that this was Chandler’s first Marlowe book, but that it was stitched together from previously published short stories. Knowing the book’s hybrid nature, one can make out some seams here and there, but overall this is a remarkably coherent and remarkably good early novel. I’ll be coming back to Chandler.

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I’ve been busy lately: family from sundry parts of America and Romania have been visiting, bringing the total people under our roof to nine at one point. This has severely cut into my time for writing, hence the sudden lack of posts.

But a friend of mine Marlene Dotterer recently posted the Look Challenge, and I thought it was interesting enough to take her up on it.

1. Find the first occurrence of the word “look” in your WIP, and post the surrounding paragraph.
2. Tag others to do the same.

My current WiP is a short story called The Heresy Trial of Friar Travolo, and conveniently the first instance of “look” in the story is the description of the eponymous Friar:

And so I met the famed heretic. Travolo is a small man, stooped at the neck, with muddy brown eyes and a thin, greasy beard, unpleasant to look at. His chamber was floored with planks of wood and furnished only with a straw mattress and a burlap rag for a blanket, and the only source of light was what trickled in from the narrow windows set into the stone walls of the tower. I carried a lamp, but without it it was very dark, and Travolo had no lamp of his own. Yet by the lamplight I could see that he had fashioned a crude pencil from wood, and in the stone walls had begun to scratch the outlines of an exegesis right at the spot where the light would fall on it as it slipped through the window in the evening.

I tag Natasha and Corey, should either of them happen to see this. (But if you’re reading this you’re welcome to participate, even if you aren’t either of them.)

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I’m writing a story. My problem is that a big part of this story takes place in China, and outside of the usual clichés I know next to nothing about China.

Ignorance is not an unsolvable problem, of course. There are lots of books about China — I have two on my nightstand right now — and of course the internet is brimming with info. You can with a little reading and a little googling get enough of a feel for a place to write about it convincingly, or at least avoid looking like a fool.

But what you cannot get from books and googled images is insight. Even if the book you’re reading offers interesting insights, they’re somebody else’s insights, and nothing is worse than recycled insight. A revelation that somebody else has earned by living in and seeking to understand a place can only be a fact when it’s repeated to others, and by the time it comes third-hand it’s already a cliché.

Why do I need insight into China? Mostly it’s the structure of the story: the protagonist comes to China thinking that he’s looking for one thing, fails to find it, but is redirected to seeking something else instead. It would be nice if the protagonist’s failure and renewal were related in a deep and interesting way to the country that he’s visiting. The story doesn’t really require that his destination be China — it could be Vietnam or India or Brazil or any number of other places around the globe — but wherever it is, the place as presented in the story must seem authentic, and must relate organically to the character’s transformation. It will not do to have him visit Exotic Foreign Locale #12 and be impressed by the friendly but nondescript brown-skinned natives. I’m trying to be a little more original than that.

And that’s why I’m trawling my sources looking for the thing that’s going to turn him around. I don’t know what it is yet, but I trust that when I see it things will click and I’ll know how to finish my story.

(If you, by the way, have anything interesting along these lines to share, please do so in the comments. I can’t say what I’m looking for, but anything interesting and informative about the rapidly industrializing countries of Asia or Latin America would fit.)

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N.K. Jemisin recently blogged about magic. I quote:

It’s hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there’s all these rules I’m supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines. For example: I keep hearing that magic has to have rules. It has to be logical. It has to have limitations, consequences, energy exchange, internal consistency, clear cause and effect, thoroughly-tested laws with repeatable results and –

Waitaminnit.

This is magic we’re talking about here, right? Force of nature, kinda woo-woo and froo-froo, things beyond our ken, and all that? And most of all, not science? Because sometimes I wonder.

I couldn’t agree more. The point of magic, the whole reason why it’s magic and not science is that it does not submit to rational analysis. Magic is unempirical. Magic is non-repeatable. If you can reproduce it in a lab, or bottle it, and sell it on shelves, it ain’t magic. Read the Jemisin article for more details.

Having made this declaration, however, I find myself at a loss for what to call the many "magical" systems one finds in books which are not mysterious, unempirical, or non-repeatable. This category of non-magic includes Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Modessitt’s Recluce books, most of Brandon Sanderson’s books, and almost everything that goes under the rubric of D&D or other RPGs. "Crypto-science" was the first thing I thought of: the magical systems in these books basically operate under the same principles as any other scientific technology, though their mechanisms are completely fictional. Sometimes magic is distinguished from technology by requiring an innate "spark"; in other cases magical talent appears to be more like a talent for art or math, where some people have a special aptitude, but the basics are teachable to anyone.

What’s notable, though, is that in all of these cases magic is impersonal. It doesn’t depend fundamentally on who you are or who you’re dealing with. Magic, like science, works the same for everyone. So I settled on the terminology of impersonal magic to describe these systems.

We can contrast this with personal magic systems, in which the identity of the magic-user is crucial to the working of magic. In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf says the Elvish word for "fire", strikes the wet wood with his staff, and a fire starts. The other characters could talk Elvish and swing sticks around all night and not get anything other than splinters. Gandalf’s magic works the way it does not because he’s tapping into secret forces which anyone could invoke, but because he’s Gandalf.

This is different even from Robert Jordan’s case, which it superficially resembles. Rand from the Wheel of Time may be the Dragon Reborn, but his identity as the Dragon merely means that he can channel really, really well. The One Power that he channels is not any different for him than it is for anybody else, and his abilities differ in degree but not in kind from those of every other channeler in the series. The one exception may be the prophecies regarding the Last Battle, in which the person of the Dragon might play a role beyond that of merely channeling a lot (it’s not exactly clear). But if that happened it would be an exception, a mere glimmer of personality shining through what is otherwise a very impersonal system.

Analyzing the difference in terms of personality illuminates why I prefer the personal systems to the impersonal. Under an impersonal system, using magic is a technological activity; under a personal system it’s a social one. Impersonal magic derives from what you do; personal magic derives from who you are. This difference allows the personal systems to illuminate different aspects of the human experience. An impersonal system will tend to be about intellect, analysis, and power, while a personal system will tend to be about passion, relationship, and love. This doesn’t mean that I dislike impersonal magic systems, necessarily — intellect is a fine thing, and I wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise — but ultimately I find the metaphorical range of the personal magic systems more to my liking.

In The Wedding of Earth and Sky, magic is intensely personal. The driver of the plot is a spiritual strife between two of the Powers of the world, and the problems that it causes cannot be solved by mere power, but only by reconciliation. This is the sort of story that can only be told with a personal magic system, and that’s why I wrote it.

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One of the longest-lasting and most rewarding friendships of my life began in the sixth grade. I had just transfered to a new school, and being a shy, unathletic kid, I naturally gravitated to the other shy, unathletic kids, which in this case included Brett: a tall, skinny boy with glasses, allergies, and a gloriously nerdy set of interests. We played chess and read books together at recess. He got me to read Tolkien. And he got me into language.

In sixth grade Brett had already studied Latin and Old English, and his enthusiasm for arcane and obscure linguistic trivia infected me. I started studying Hebrew, we both dabbled in Tolkien’s languages, and we both tried to make our own languages. His languages were initially much better than mine, as he had a big head start on linguistics, and having two foreign languages already under his belt was a tremendous advantage for his initial language-construction forays. He taught me the International Phonetic Alphabet and the basics of phonology and historical linguistics. I don’t exaggerate much to say that my friendship with Brett changed my life: the interest in linguistics that he sparked never died out; Linguistics became my major in college, which led indirectly into my current day job; and my linguistic training was part of what motivated and prepared me to go to Romania where I met my wife.

He’s still better than me at linguistics, too, since he is in the last stages of finishing his PhD. in Linguistics, while I have a lowly B.A.

However, I do have one thing over him: I kept up the hobby of language creation (conlanging, as we call it), while he seemed to abandon it in high school. I’ve continued to develop languages for my fictional settings and my private amusement, and just the other day I completed an application for an actual paid conlanging gig. At this point I have at one well-documented language, Yivrian, and a whole slew of sketches, planned languages, and notes.

I’ve also put a lot of work lately into Praseo, the language used in my current WIP. And with the confluence of conlang-y things going on in my life right now, this seems like a good time to write about that aspect of my writing process, talking about how I use and create languages for my fictional settings, with pointers to how you can do the same if you’re interested.

Next week: a naming language.

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The advice to hurt your characters is given so often to writers that I thought it was a cliche by now. In fact, I would have told you that things had swung too far the other way, with some writers relishing in inflicting every known form of pain and suffering on their poor protagonists.

But maybe everyone didn’t get the memo? A friend of mine recently asked me to read her manuscript, and while there was a lot that was good about it, it had one glaring flaw. Everything was too easy for the protagonist. There was a conflict, sort of, but it was all worked out with a nice heart-to-heart and some convenient self-awareness. No one got hurt, no one was mean or selfish, and absolutely no one antagonized. Despite the protag’s many endearing qualities, it was very hard to really root for her, because she never had a real obstacle to overcome.

I remember, some years ago, reading another manuscript with many of the same flaws. In both cases, I think that the authors were mislead by their choice of genre to think that they could write a story without struggle and without pain. One was an Edwardian romance, and the other a light contemporary comedy — both of these being genres that generally eschew the dark and gritty. But the lack of angst and torture does not mean that you get to ignore basic requirements for plot and conflict. Rather, the struggles and the difficulties that the protag faces have to be that much more significant to the character, and the struggles that the protag goes through have to be that much more difficult in order to make their goals seem worthwhile.

Wes Anderson is the master of this. In most of his movies, the characters are moved by solely personal goals, and little is at stake other than their individual aspirations. The tone is light and funny, even when pirates take over your boat, and the angst is comic rather than dark. But this doesn’t mean that Anderson is easy on his characters. On the contrary, he throws every kind of obstacle that you can imagine in their way, and often they don’t actually get what they want, even at the end of the story.

This is how you should make a light contemporary comedy. Not by toning down the conflicts, but by turning them up, making them more meaningful and more over-the-top, and having your protagonist treat them as deadly serious regardless of how absurd they are.

(As for me, I don’t have this problem. If anything, I err on the side of dark-and-gritty. Which has problems of its own…)