Icarus’s Labyrinth

::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

2009-07-09T01:03:00.004-04:00

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 . . .

Icarus’s Labyrinth

::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?