On Creativity and Judging Quality

Professor Dean Simonton is an academic who's been studying creativity, and has come to some conclusions that'll surprise a lot of creatives. My favorite quote:

One of the attributes of creative people says Prof. Dean Simonton – a University of California academic who’s been researching creativity for over 40 years –- is that they have an extraordinarily poor sense of whether the thing they’re creating, inventing or making is any 'good' or not.

In fact, Simonton thinks that it’s virtually impossible for anyone involved in a creative project to know for sure whether they’re making a masterpiece – or just a mess.

And when they do feel 100% sure –- they invariably get it wrong.

Dean and Kris have been saying this for years. A writer is the worst judge of their own work. Keep writing, keep submitting and/or publishing, write the next thing, submit or publish that, and keep going. Don't stress out over whether something's good enough or not; you don't know. No, really, you don't.

Remember, Shakespeare thought his plays were popular crap, and was very bitter that hardly anyone paid much attention to his poetry, which he considered his real art, the good stuff. If he couldn't tell which of his writings were masterpieces, fated to be beloved by millions for centuries, you and I have no hope. Which is good! No point worrying about it, just keep writing and putting stuff out there!

Thanks to Rob Cornell for the link.

Angie

2016 Anthology Workshop

It's been over two weeks since I got back from the Anthology Workshop. I meant to do a write-up about it before this, but I caught some kind of crud on the flight home (best as I can tell, looking at the likely incubation period) and I've only just gotten over the hacking and sniffling. I hate trying to sleep when my sinuses are clogged up; I think the sleep deprivation is worse than the actual hacking and sniffling. :P

Anyway. Great workshop as always. I only sold one story (an SF mystery to John Helfers for an anthology called No Humans Allowed,) but I had a great time anyway, and learned a lot. I had a chance to talk to a bunch of folks, get to know some new people and some people who've been around, but we just never had a chance to really sit down and chat before.

The whiteboard John built his TOC on. My story's on the right, in darker marker; it was a "Hold" at first, and he decided to add it at the end, when he was filling in stories to make his wordcount.

We wrote stories ahead of time, as always. About 45 attendees wrote about 250 stories, totalling 1.1 million words of fiction. The reading was like a tidal wave, seriously. We're supposed to be learning to read like editors -- who definitely do not read every word of every story that's submitted -- but it's hard when you're dealing with quality this high. If this were open-submission slush, most stories could be rejected after a paragraph or two. That's not the case here. This is a pro-level, invite-only workshop, and people who attend are ridiculously good at this stuff.

Six of the editors -- John Helfers, Kerrie Hughes, Kris Rusch, Mark Leslie (aka Mark the Kobo Guy), Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta -- had established books they were reading for. We got guidelines for one book per week we were writing, and had a week (or a bit less) to write a story in accordance with the guidelines and get it in. Dean Smith was the odd guy out this year; he read all the stories and had to put together an anthology out of the ones the six other editors didn't choose, coming up with a set of stories that created some kind of theme as he went. He ended up with a bunch of stories on the theme of Hard Choices, and he had to fight a few of the other editors for some of those stories.

It was fun to watch. :) If the editor for whom a story was specifically written doesn't want it, any other editor who thinks it'd fit their book really well can steal it. All the editors with established books had dibs over poor Dean, who often found himself wanting a story, but standing in line behind two or even three other people. By the time he put his TOC together on the last day, he said the process had been a lot harder than he'd expected. I definitely wouldn't want to have to do it, although watching him do it was educational.

Most of the workshop was spent watching and listening as the editors went through the stories one by one, evaluating, disagreeing, arguing. There were a lot of WTF?? expressions scattered through the week as one or more editors loved a story that one or more other editors hated. Discussion got pretty heated once or twice. In the middle of all of this, Kris reminded us that this was because the stories were all very good. If this were a beginner workshop, where all or most of the attendees were still learning how to write, the editors would all agree. Obvious flaws would stick out to everyone. In this group, everyone can write, so the disagreements and arguments were all a matter of individual editors' taste. Even the common disagreements that sounded like craft issues -- like Kris and Dean insisting that a lot of stories had "no setting" (since they're both really aware of setting) while John and Kerrie often loved those stories and thought they had just the right amount of setting, or that the characters and plot were so interesting they hadn't noticed or didn't care that there wasn't much setting -- were really matters of taste. There are readers like Kris and Dean, and there are readers like John and Kerrie.

And that's the point. Just because one editor, or even five editors, rejects your story, that doesn't mean it sucks. It might just mean it wasn't to that editor's (or those editors') taste. Keep trying. Some of my stories that didn't sell would've sold to one of the other editors if they'd been editing that particular volume. Which is the point. Keep going. Too many writers get a rejection or three, decide the story sucks and stop sending it out. Don't do that!

As we've done before, we had sign-up lunches in small groups with most of the editors, and a few other subject matter experts, like Christy Fifield, who writes fun cozy mysteries, and is a hotel Controller in her day job; she's a great source of info for finance and accounting and such. We also had an audio expert, and someone who writes comics for major publishers, for folks who are interested in that. I went out with John, Dean and Christy, and had a great time with each of them, and the other writers who signed up to go with.

Other days we grabbed lunch with whoever was available, and there's plenty of talent in the room and lots of brains to pick. Dinner was also chaotic in a fun way, and I hung with a lot of different people at various times. Sometimes it's fun sticking with a few friends -- I usually do that at SF conventions, that sort of thing -- but at this kind of event, the more people you can hang out with and get to know, the better. The networking at these events is worth the workshop fee all by itself.

Allyson, the Publisher at WMG, announced that they're starting up a companion line of anthologies called Fiction River Presents. These will be reprints of stories that've already been in Fiction River, remixed in various ways. Fiction River is starting its fourth year now, and a lot of people only heard about it recently. Doing the reprint volumes is a good way of giving folks different mixes of stories, so if one theme from the past didn't appeal to you, maybe another will and you'll see some stories you'd have otherwise missed.

From the WMG site: "Appropriately, the first volume, Debut Writers' Showcase, commemorates first sales by up-and-coming authors. Future volumes will revolve around themes such as family, thrillers, offbeat stories, and Readers’ Choice."

My first professional sale was "Staying Afloat" in How to Save the World, and that story will be in the Showcase volume.

Othere random bits I noted down during the workshop:

Short fiction is an entryway to your work for people who've never read any of your other stuff.

Anthologies are an exception to BookBub's one-book-per-author-at-any-one-time rule. You can only have one novel up at a time, but you can have multiple multi-author anthologies, or a novel and an anthology, or whatever combination.

If you're looking to build up your sales ranking on sites like Amazon, advertise sales on multiple sites in succession rather than all at once. Start with BookBub and then go through others week by week. BookBub will raise your book up the ranks, and the smaller lists will keep it up there.

A workshop attendee who writes romances puts out a new short story each month. He makes it free on his blog for a week, with a buy button on the page. He sells a few during the free week, then when the story comes off of free, sales shoot up. He sells the e-books for $2.99 and paperbacks for $5.99, and he gets bookstore/warehouse sales; he sees batches of 10-15 of the paperbacks selling. He does this once a month, and now makes a third of his income off of short fiction this way.

"Free" is the most popular search term on Kobo, always, no matter what else is going on or what hot book's been released.

Writers are generally pretty awful at writing our author bios. I'll admit I hate doing it, and the standard one I use isn't great. An author bio should talk about your writing. It doesn't matter that you have five cats unless there are cats prominently in your work. It doesn't matter that you like to garden or knit unless your characters are gardening, or some detail about historical knitting is a plot point in your story. What do you write? What have you published? Have you won any awards? Or been nominated? Made any significant bestseller lists? When writing your author bio, remember -- not too long, not too short, not too modest. Most of us seem to have a problem with that last bit. :P

If your story is set during a big, horrific event, it's hard to get your readers to hang on to it. If you deal with it head-on, it's better to deal with a smaller part and make it representative of the larger events, with a close emotional grab. Trying to deal with the whole, sweeping thing will probably require a lot of tell-tell-tell narrative, which can get boring. Keep the reader down IN the events, focused on a representative character. Also, use little details, like in the middle of a huge event that's caused shootings or protests or whatever, there are going to be closed streets. Have your characters deal with that, to make the larger events have an impact on their lives in a given moment.

Make your manuscript readable. Small fonts are bad. Courier is iffy.

Make sure your name and the page number are in the header of every page, because some editors still print things out to read. If they drop a stack of pages, or they go for coffee and the printer spits the pages for a dozen stories all over the floor, the editor's not going to bother to play literary archaeologist to figure out which pages belong to your story and what order they go in.

Give your story a significant file name. Some markets call out file name formats, in which case follow that. But if a market doesn't specify, don't call it "Story.doc" or "Fantasy.doc" or whatever.

Story titles should be memorable. On the one hand, that means that calling something "Aftermath" or "The Game" or "Conflict" probably isn't a great idea because that kind of title doesn't call a particular story to mind. On the other hand, words and names in your title should be reasonably familiar and pronounceable. You want readers to be able to talk about your story to their friends, and editors to be able to remember your title when thinking about their up-coming book or issue, or when talking with their staff. They can't do that if they can't remember or pronounce your alien name, or your transliterated Arabic phrase. Put the linguistic fireworks in the story, not in the title.

First person can be very distancing because the reader is NOT the person doing whatever

There's a convention of a type of mystery fiction by people who don't know police procedure perfectly and that's fine. You're just aiming for a different audience of readers than the folks who are experts on procedure and make that a major focus of the narrative.

Put something in the body of the e-mail when you sub a story, or even just edits. Blank e-mails with just an attachment end up in the spam filter. Also, you're trying to foster a relationship with the editor, so say hi, looking forward to working with you, something. Not a Christmas letter, but a line or two.

If a published story gets picked up for a reprint, gets into a Year's Best, nominated for an award, whatever, let the original editor know. They might want to use it in their marketing, and even if they don't, it's a fuzzy to them too, just to hear about it.

If you're writing about one of a series of events, what's special about this occurrence, this character? Why are you writing about this particular one and not the previous one, or the next one, or the first one? Let the reader know why this person/thing/occurrence has a story written about it.

We were talking in the workshop about the layoffs at Random Penguin, which happened while we were there. Someone there who knows people at PRH said that Nora Roberts's editor was one of the people layed off, which... seriously? How could anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together for mutual warmth argue that that particular editor wasn't pulling in enough money for the business to justify their salary?? o_O So when word came out about a week later that Ms. Roberts had taken a hike up the road to St. Martins, I wasn't at all surprised. That was a ridiculously expensive round of layoffs for Random Penguin; I'm sure someone was called to explain WTF they were thinking, or will be when the company start to feel the lack of Ms. Roberts's sales in their bottom line.



We had a funny thing happen on the way home. I rode back to Portland with Lyn, who was driving, and Laura. We stopped at Laura's hotel to drop her off, and ran into Brenda in the parking lot. Brenda had dropped Michele off at the airport and decided, spur of the moment, to stay at that hotel herself. Lyn had planned to drive farther before stopping, but with two other writers from the workshop there, she decided what the heck, that she'd stay there too, so she ran in to get a room. I think she and Laura ended up sharing. I had a room at another hotel a couple miles away, and was having dinner there that night with a writer friend who lives in Portland. Under other circumstances, though, it would've been pretty awesome to have one more "workshop" night at the hotel. Or better yet, if they'd all been in mine -- it's the hotel I always stay at when I'm flying out of Portland, and my husband got a great deal on a suite. I had a for-real suite, with a main room and a separate bedroom, and my main room had a full size dining table and six chairs. We could've stayed up for hours gabbing. :) Maybe next year.

I had a great conversation with Amelia, and a decent flight home the next morning. I came down with the creeping crud a couple of days later, but the trip itself went wonderfully well. I'm already signed up for next year, and there's still space. If you write short fiction, the Anthology Workshop is an awesome experience, and one I can't recommend strongly enough.

Thanks to Dean and Allyson for organizing the event, all the editors for helping make it happen, and all the attendees for making it rock. So long as they keep throwing these workshops, I'll keep going.

Angie

March Stuff and an Early April Mishap

Writing: 5997 words = 1
Editing: 114,093 words = 23
Sub: 1 loooong novel = 1
TOTAL = 25 points

I didn't look at my total until April, so of course I didn't have a chance to write another Three Freaking Words to get another writing point. [headdesk]



I finally finished Emerging Magic the sequel to A Hidden Magic. Actually, I finished it in February, but it took most of March to get through an editing pass and ready to submit, but it's in, yay! This sucker's taken more than twice as long as I thought it would, and having it finally finished feels wonderful. :)

I'm visiting my mom in Reno over Easter, and the world is letting me know I should've stayed home. :/ I only have one pair of jeans that fit, so I wore them up here, and brought a couple of pairs of sweats to sleep in, and bum around the house in, and hopefully wear to the gym if I can go with my brother whenever he goes. Also brought a skirt in case we go somewhere fancy for Easter dinner. So I flew up Tuesday, and when I got in, my mom made me a cup of hot chocolate. She has a tablecloth on her table, which I'm not used to, and somehow while sitting down to drink (with the cup at my place already) I managed to catch the tablecloth on... I don't even know what, maybe I sat on it somehow, although I didn't think it was that long. Anyway, next thing I know the cup's fallen over and I have HOT chocolate all in my lap and some on my top, and a second later it soaks through and it's freaking HOT! Damn!

So I go change out of my jeans and top, put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, and put my jeans and top and the tablecloth and the placemat and all in the laundry. They wash, and I put 'em in the dryer when I go to bed.

Yesterday, we're going grocery shopping so I go to get dressed. Get my jeans out of the dryer... and there's a huge shredded rip down the seam in the seat! [headdesk] Totally ruined. The washing machine just ate my jeans, and of course they're all I have. :(

I get online and go to the site where I bought the jeans to get more. Can't just go out and buy a pair; no stores I know of carry pants for women who are tall and fat both, right there on the rack. I wear a 24T, and the only way to get those is mail order, and not from very many places even that way. :/ So I go to Woman Within, and sure enough they have a nice selection. I pick a couple of pairs, both on sale yay, and order. I was originally thinking to just have them sent home and that I'd be wearing sweats the rest of my time here (got the skirt, but I don't like wearing them unless I have to) but I see the site has a super-duper express-zoom delivery option that'll get you your stuff the next business day if you order before 4pm Eastern, for only twenty dollars extra on the delivery charge. O_O Okay, yeah, it's a lot, but if I can get jeans to wear while I'm here, that's awesome. The stuff I ordered was on sale, so it sort of makes up for the delivery charge, right? :P So I change delivery to Mom's address and go for it. By this time it's like three minutes after 1 here, which is 4 on the east coast, so I'm hoping it'll sneak in and be delivered tomorrow (which would be today now) and if not then it'll come on Friday and that's still good.

I hit confirm order and it chugs along... and the confirmation screen comes up showing regular delivery to Mom's address, estimated delivery date April 14th. WTF?? O_O

I won't even be here then! :( :( :( Something screwed up, and I'm pissed off.

So I send an e-mail to their customer service address, explain what happened and why this is completely unacceptable. I tell them I want delivery expedited to arrive either Thursday, or Friday at the very latest, or I want the order cancelled, one or the other. Hit send, then we go off grocery shopping with me in my sweats.

Give them credit, by the time we got back, there was an answer in my e-mail with an apology for the screw-up. The Customer Service lady said she'd make sure I got my stuff on Friday. We'll see. If so, then cool. I still wish their system had worked the way it was supposed to the first time, but an efficient and prompt fix is what you want from a good company. Everybody makes mistakes; what separates the good companies (and people) from the bad is what they do after they've made the mistake.

I hope everyone has a great Easter, or just a great weekend if you don't observe the holiday. [wave/hugz]

Angie, hanging out in sweats in Reno

A New Writer Story

I know I still need to post March Stuff, but this is too good to wait on. [facepalm] Anyone else ever have this happen...?

I sent a story via Post Office to an SF magazine yesterday, 31 March (yes, there are still SF markets that haven't dragged their butts into the 21st century), and today I got my empty, unsealed SASE back in the mail. o_O I can only assume that my envelope came open (unstuck or torn or whatever) and scattered its contents all over the sorting room. Just as well they sent me my SASE back, or I'd never have known and would've been waiting to hear back from the editor for quite a while; even assuming they get the whole story, which is kind of unlikely, they wouldn't respond without a SASE. So thanks to the PO for delivering an empty, open envelope and clueing me in.

I'll admit this is a new one on me. I remember back when paper mail was the only way to send stories in. Heck, I remember when your SASE was the 9x12 and the larger envelope was a 10x13, because you were hand-typing your manuscripts and if it was rejected, you wanted that sucker back, rather than just the slip. I never had the whole thing fall apart, or be torn apart, or whatever happened yesterday.

The Post Office is closed for today, but I have a new package done up and will try again tomorrow. Hopefully it'll get through unscathed.

Angie, crossing a set of virtual fingers

September Stuff

Still in the writing rut. :/

2 submissions = 2 pts.
3654 words written = 0 pts. [hides under keyboard]
12,800 words edited = 2 pts.
TOTAL = 4 pts. which is extremely disappointing

If one of the subbed stories had been 2200 words longer, I'd have gotten another point for the pre-sub clean-up edit -- I need to write longer. :P Of course if I'd written more, I'd have gotten some writing points too, so....



I got an acceptance on one of the stories I subbed in August, though, so that's cool. It was for Torquere's Halloween Sip Blitz (short Halloween stories released in a bunch, sort of like an anthology only not all in one book). It's another Cal-and-Aubrey story, the characters who starred in "Unfinished Business" and were supporting characters in A Hidden Magic. They're great guys and their character dynamic together is a hoot; I love writing about them. :)

Earlier in September, my husband and I went on a late-anniversary trip (the rates were better a couple of weeks after the actual anniversary, and I'm not sentimental enough to insist on spending more money for the same trip just because of the date) to San Francisco. I'd planned on blogging about it at the time, or shortly after getting home, like I did last year, but the first four or five days were a total disaster. My, umm, natural cycles hit about ten minutes after we checked into our room, and it was a killer. I haven't had that bad a time since I was on the depakote, which messed with me something awful -- known possible side effect, and I hit the side effect jackpot with that particular prescription. Then just as that was slowing down to the point where I could consider maybe leaving the hotel the next day, my husband (who'd been going out by himself, bringing food back periodically, and generally leaving me alone to cuss and wish for menopause) came back with some wrap sandwiches from this little Mediterranean place. He got me a chicken wrap, and the chicken was a bit dry, but I didn't think much of it. About five hours later I had a case of raging food poisoning. :(

That took another couple of days of vacation time.

Once I was a few minutes' walk from death's door, we went out and had a some fun. We went to the same dim sum place we went to last year, and the food was just as good. Then we walked up to the Museum of the African Diaspora, which is small but has some cool exhibits. We watched a film about Celia Cruz, the Cuban salsa singer. I'm not really into music much, so I'd never heard of her, but the film was very good, interesting even if it's not one's style of music. They had some computerized displays with touch-screen monitors in the walls, about different kinds of foods from Africa, and another set about personal adornment, showing native styles of clothing, jewelry, makeup, hairdos, piercings, pretty much anything, and each style morphed into a style you see today in the modern West, to show descent. I hadn't thought about that, specifically, matching up modern American styles with traditional African influences, so that was interesting too.

We rode the trolley up to Castro and went to A Different Light. I got a bunch of books, and a couple were even on sale -- half off, yay! I like e-books, but I really miss being able to just look and browse. Some of the e-book vendors have done a fair job duplicating the experience (and others need to put a lot more work into it) but there's nothing like browsing actual books on shelves, you know? I'm not one for buying a lot of gew-gaws or souvenirs on vacation -- I don't hit all the fashion boutiques or the big department stores either -- but I'll usually drop some serious cash in bookstores, so I guess that makes up for it.

After the bookstore, we walked up a few blocks to a little cafe Jim had found online. The food was wonderful -- I had a really excellent macaroni and cheese -- but the chairs were horrible. They were the kind with the bars coming down from the back, diagonally to attach about a third of the way up either side of the seat. I'm sure that's a fine style if you're skinny, but if you're fat it's torture, and I'm not even kidding. It's amazing how many restaurants have chairs like this; for places that sell food, and that make more money if their customers eat more, you'd think they'd want to encourage people to come and eat, and people who eat a lot to come often. Sorry, I was in serious pain well before we were finished, and I'm not going back there no matter how great the food was. :(

We took a formal tour on our second-to-last day there; the brochure advertised a bus tour of the city, lunch in Sausalito, and then a trip up to Muir Woods where we could walk around for a while. My Great-Aunt Angie took me on what sounded like almost the exact same bus tour (no Sausalito lunch stop) thirty-some years ago, and the woods had been beautiful, so I was enthusiastic about going again. Jim agreed, so we went. Turned out this one was different. On the tour I took with Aunty, we just drove around the city while the guide did his patter, which was interesting and enjoyable, and then we went to the woods. This time there were nine stops on the tour, seven of them in SF, and it seemed sometimes like we were stopping to get out every three blocks or so. Which would've been fine except it started early in the morning and it was cool and dewy (as San Francisco is) and the first stop let us out in a neighborhood street a few blocks from the top of Lombard Street, where we were going to walk down. Getting there, I brushed against some shrubs or something hanging out into the narrow sidewalks, and my leather sandal got wet. So, wet leather strap, swells a bit and roughens, then a long walk down a steep hill with the skin at the top of my foot rubbing against the edge of the wet, rough leather strap with every step. :( By the time we got to the bottom of the hill, I was way past blister -- I had an open sore with a couple shreds of skin hanging off, and of course my sandal rubbed on it every time I took a step.

I really wanted to be able to walk around the woods, though, so I skipped about half the remaining stops -- just stayed on the bus. It actually wasn't bad; some of the stops, like Chinatown, were in places I'd been through just a year ago. And as a bonus, once we found a place to park, the driver -- who'd been basically silent the whole trip so far -- chatted with us and told us a bunch of stuff about Chinatown, which was where he'd grown up. That was pretty cool.

The Palace of Fine Arts is gorgeous, but you mostly go look at it for the outside architecture, and I could see that fine through the bus window. I got out at Grace Cathedral, because it's beautiful and I haven't been there since I was in college (I went with a couple of classmates for an art history project), and I looked at the sculpture garden outside the new DeYoung Museum, which was very, umm, modern, and I probably could've skipped that too without missing much. Lunch in Sausalito was nice, although we chose a place the tour guide recommended primarily for its speedy service, because you do not want to miss the bus on these tours. :) Then most of the tour folks caught the ferry back to San Francisco with our original guide, while the dozen or so of us going on to Muir Woods got into a smaller bus with a new guide.

If you've never been to Muir Woods, I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance because it's gorgeous. Quiet and dim, huge redwoods, laurels, a little creek running down the middle of the valley... and we saw deer! :) I know that's kind of a boring, everyday thing for some folks who read this, but it was pretty darned cool for us. The paths are fenced -- low, wooden railings on either side -- and you're not supposed to go off the paths. The deer come amazingly close to the paths to feed; it seems like they've figured out that so long as they don't get too close to the path, all the two-legged critters that walk up and down it won't bother them. The first one, a large doe, was about ten yards or so away. The second, a really small deer our pamphlet said was full-grown, just small, was within about three yards of the path, perched on a big, fallen log and reaching up for leaves over its head. You couldn't quite have bent over the railing and touched it, but it was pretty close to it. That was pretty amazing. :D

The valley is narrow, and the path runs on either side of the creek, with a series of numbered bridges. Our guide said that up to bridge three, over to the other side and back was about a mile loop. Up to bridge four and back was two miles. Usually I'd have gone for bridge four, cane and all, but with my foot still torn up I thought bridge three was the more prudent walk, and that one worked fine. We didn't hurry, and we still got back with plenty of time to spare before leaving; we sat on the railing in the middle of bridge one and just hung out in the quiet, listening to the water for a bit.

The bus took us back to Sausalito, where we took the ferry back to SF. The tour started and ended at the Ferry Terminal building, which is like a three minute walk from the front entrance of our hotel, so that was convenient both ways. At that point I just wanted to collapse and sleep, but I'd made arrangements to see a friend that night, so I took off my sandals and just sort of dozed for a bit.

I've known Karen since seventh grade homeroom. She took BART from Livermore, where she lives, to the Embarcadero stop which is about thirty seconds' walk from our hotel. (It was worth delaying the trip a bit to get back into this hotel -- great location. :) ) Karen isn't a mass transit person, so it was something new for her, but everything went well, both coming over and going home later that evening. I put on my sneakers (lucky I packed two pairs of shoes!) and we went up to the Stinking Rose -- the garlic restaurant we went up to last year) taking a cab instead of walking. The prime rib is just as big, and the garlic-cream swiss chard is just as awesome. We had something yummy for dessert, I don't even remember what, then cabbed back to the hotel. Karen stuck around a bit to talk, then went home; Jim walked her down to the BART station, not only because it was late at night, but to make sure she got on the right train okay, and that all went fine.

The next day, we came home. We got to the airport, checked our baggage, and my pants split. [facepalm] Not the classic up-the-back, luckily, but just the fabric on one side high on the inner thigh. You know, where the fabric gets worn if you're fat? It was uncomfortable but Jim assured me it didn't show, so I just ignored it as best I could and we went on. The flight was uneventful, but I lost my pedometer in the cab on the way home from the airport. [headdesk] It's like Murphy needed a couple of last pokes to remind me he was still on duty after a few good days. :P

Between this and our last cruise, where I also got sick and sprained my foot, the universe owes us about a dozen completely perfect vacations, seriously, LOL! I'd have had a hard time writing about this in a story and making it sound believable, with one thing piling on top of another, on top of another, on top of another. I don't think I'll ever be that good a writer. :) Here's to October being better. [crossed fingers]

Angie

August Stuff

Time to look back at my performance over the last month. (I took July as my month off per McKoala's rules because I completely hosed it in July. :P ) August wasn't very good either, but I've done worse.

3 submissions -- 3 points
7533 words written -- 2 points (less than 500 short of a third point, argh!)

Total = 5 points



I think part of what's hitting me now is that I have a few stories that've been circulating, but I've hit all the fast turn-around markets and now I'm stuck with some of the slowpokes. I have a story at one magazine that closed to fiction submissions in July, but I sent in my story in April. So it's been there for about four and a half months and I'm just hoping they're working through their slush pile backlog. I suppose if they open up again and I still haven't heard from them, that'll be a clue that something went astray, right? :P

I still need to do more writing, though. As awful as this month was, it was still better than any other month so far this year, so that's progress. Let's see if I can keep it up.

I hope everyone else is doing better than I am. :)

Angie

What's Talent Got To Do With It?

Charles has a thought-provoking post over at Novel Spaces today, entitled "Two Kinds of Writers." For those who don't know him, Charles Gramlich is a psychology professor. His department had a speaker at their first faculty meeting of the school year, a social psychologist named Jeff Howard. To give you the gist:

First, Howard suggested that there are two kinds of people in the world: "Performance Oriented" and "Learning Oriented." Performance Oriented (PO) folks come into every new situation looking to "prove" something to themselves and others. Generally, that means 'proving' that they are smart and capable. Thus, PO writers want to show others and themselves how smart they are in their work. PO individuals also tend to believe that writing is a "talent" rather than a learned craft, and PO folks tend to believe that if something requires a lot of "effort," then that reveals less "talent."

Learning Oriented (LO) folks come into new situations looking to improve themselves. Their main goal is to learn "how" to do a particular thing, and they don’t doubt their ability to learn that material. LO folks believe that "effort" controls outcome and is the key to success. They don’t equate less effort with a sign of greater talent.

There's more, but that's enough for my own jumping off point. I recommend clicking through and reading Charles's whole post, though.

I left a brief comment, but I didn't want to spend however many hundred words talking about my own experiences on someone else's blog. The PO vs. LO dichotomy resonated with me, though.

I'm really smart, for whatever good it's done me. I have a low-genius level IQ, and I was in enrichment programs for gifted children ever since I was tested, during the summer between first and second grades. I was in the highest level groups for things like math and reading, and I'm usually pretty quick on the uptake in general. Despite all this, though, I didn't learn all my multiplication tables until seventh grade. For reference, when I was a kid -- and possibly still today, although I don't know for sure -- multiplication was introduced (if the class or group got that far in the book) toward the end of second grade. Kids were expected to learn the multiplication tables up through twelves in third grade. After that, they just assume you knew it and moved on. So it took me an extra four or five years to cram this stuff into my head.

My childhood was all about how smart I was. I was so intelligent, so gifted! School would be so easy for me if I'd only try! Which leads to the next conclusion -- if you're smart (or talented) and you try something and fail, then obviously you're lazy. You're not really trying. Why don't you want to do this? Why aren't you trying?

When I was in fourth grade, my mom tried to "help" me learn my multiplication tables. She made me a set of flashcards and said that I'd study them -- doing nothing else with my free time -- until I had them down. I had to learn 1-3 the first day, 4-6 the second day, etc. Anything I failed to learn one day would be tacked on to the next day. She was convinced that if I'd just buckle down and concentrate, this would be quick and easy and I'd have all the tables learned within four days. There you go, problem solved.

What actually happened was that I got good at hiding from my mom, until she finally gave up. I did work with the cards for the first two or three days, but results were neither quick nor easy, and by the third day I had so much piled up it was ridiculous. Aside from the fact that long, drawn-out memorization sessions don't work, this really wasn't the way to convince a frustrated nine-year-old that school was supposed to be fun. I eventually realized, some time in seventh grade, that I hadn't had to look up or work out a multiplication fact in a while, probably a couple of months. I'd finally learned them through mental osmosis, just by using them in math classes over and over for years; use and repetition finally did what deliberate effort had failed to do.

I had more and more trouble in school as time went on. I got a 1420 on my SAT (well before they made the test easier) but graduated high school with a 2.65 GPA, which was pretty disgraceful for someone with my IQ and test scores.

I finally figured out many years later, about five years into a two-year associate degree, that I have a learning disability. I realized what all the hard stuff had in common, and what was different about the easy stuff, and realized the difference was rote memorization. If the point of a lesson is concepts -- what happened and why and what the results were, how something came about, how things hang together, what's related and what's different and why -- I can listen to a lecture or read a book, and that's it, I know it, hand me the exam. Information on a conceptual level, where everything hangs together in a logical framework, makes instinctive sense to me, and sticks easily in my brain. If the point is memorization, though -- names and dates and figures, mathematical and scientific formulas, foreign language vocabulary, all the little bits and pieces you have to Just Memorize -- then forget it, no more than a tiny fraction is going to stick.

As an example, I was taking Analytical Geometry in college, and we were doing a chapter on conic sections. I'd studied conic sections at least five or six times before, in other math classes, but except for the line and the parabola (which were introduced the earliest, in 7th and 8th grade in my case) I'd never managed to memorize the formulas. I knew the definitions, though. So I was sitting there staring at an exam where we were given certain data -- say, the center of a circle and the slope of a line tangent to it -- and had to figure out certain other data -- say, the circumference of the circle. If you know the formulas, it's easy; you plug the givens in and the answers come out. If you don't know the formulas, you either give up or you do it the hard way. I did it the hard way. I didn't remember the formulas, but I did remember the definitions of the sections. A circle is defined by its center and radius. Stick a pin in your paper at the center. Tie a string to the pin. Tie a pencil to the string such that the length between the pin and the pencil is the length of the radius. Everywhere the pencil can touch (while held vertically) is your circle. A line tangent to the circle is always going to be perpendicular to the radius between the center and that point on the circle, so knowing that tangent line and the center gives you the point on the circle. With the center and that point, the you have the length of the radius. The circumference is 2*pi*r. I did basically that for all the problems about circles, ellipses and hyperbolas, essentially re-deriving all the equations on my scratch paper, based on the definitions of the sections. I got a hundred percent on the exam, but I was also the last person to turn in my paper.

I had horrible study habits because of my memory issues, although I didn't know why I was developing them while it happened. If something made sense to me, though, then listening to the teacher explain it was enough. I got it right then, and doing homework, working exercises, whatever, was a pointless waste of time. But if I didn't get it, if I needed to memorize things, including formulas or a sequence of problem solving steps which didn't fall into logical place in my head, then doing the homework wouldn't help. I'd be just as clueless after I finished the exercises as I'd been before, so again, it was a pointless waste of time.

It took until I was in my twenties, though, to figure this out. I'd never thought about it before; I'd bought into the idea that there was something wrong with me, that I was lazy. I knew I was trying hard, but I still didn't get the results my mom and my teachers expected. I was frustrated and angry; there was something wrong but I didn't know what. It wasn't until I took a mental step back and sorted out classes I got easy As in from classes where I barely passed, that I saw it.

No one else did. No one, not my mother nor any of my teachers -- one of whom had me in both third and fifth grade -- figured out what the problem was, where the dividing line ran. Everyone was so caught up in "Angela is so smart!" "It'd be so easy if she'd only try!" that it never occurred to them to look for an actual problem. My third/fifth grade teacher actually called me "the absent-minded professor" but it still didn't click for her. They were so invested in the talent idea that an actual learning issue was unthinkable. The test scores said I had the talent to do well in school, therefore I should, and if I didn't it was my own fault. The concept that I might have a high IQ and a learning disability never occurred to any of them. Nope, much easier to just assume the whole problem was me being lazy.

Charles again:

A key difference between PO and LO folks shows up when a "failure" occurs. Say the writer approaches a major magazine publisher with a story and gets rejected out of hand. PO individuals take the failure as a sign of lack of talent, and often develop a sense of helplessness, which leads them to either quit writing or to lower their sights.

Yep, that's me. My entire identity when I was young centered on being a smart kid. It was essentially the only thing I was ever praised for, so that's what I focused on. And as a smart person, obviously things should be easy. If I tried something and failed, I turned away from it and tried something else, because failure is particularly shameful when you're supposed to be smart. Anything I couldn't get right off, I just didn't do. Except for school, because I was told over and over and over that I should be good at it, that I should love it, that it should be easy for me. It was always assumed that I'd go to college and do something intellectual because that's where my talent was, so I kept beating my head against that particular wall, long after I'd have given up on anything else. It was all just supposed to click for me, and I kept trying, and waiting for that click.

I've always been interested in writing, and I've scribbled stories (or more often, fragments of stories) since I was six or seven. When I was fifteen I submitted a story to Family Circle magazine. It was a horrible, treacly piece of garbage, and the editors quite rightly rejected it with a fifth-generation xeroxed form. It was seventeen years before I submitted anything else.

I had the drive to write and didn't quit, although I had long periods of hiatus when I was doing other things -- things I was more successful at right off. I've always come back to writing, but it took a very long time before I finally realized and accepted that I wasn't very good at it yet (there being a huge difference between being better than most of my peers and being good), but that I could study and learn and get better. It seems obvious now, and I'm sure any number of readers are eyerolling and thinking what an idiot I was, but if you're raised on the theory of talent, the idea of needing to work and study and learn and do a lot of failing while you slowly improve isn't at all obvious.

We've all heard about the "overnight sensations" who actually worked for ten or twenty years to get there, about the bestselling "first novels" that were actually tenth novels with the previous nine unsold in the trunk, but we still praise people for their talent. Maybe it's ego protection, the thought that if someone who's successful is talented -- and therefore their success came easily to them -- if we're not similarly successful then it's because we don't have that talent, that advantage. And that's not our fault, right? In that situation, talent almost feels like a cheat, something to resent as much as envy.

Whatever it is, our culture idolizes talent, assuming it trumps everything else, including work, study, perseverance and even luck. "You're so talented!" is thought to be praise, even if it comes with a bit of envy or resentment. Emphasizing talent denies the work, though, the determination and study and slow improvement everyone needs in order to succeed, no matter how talented they might be. Assuming "talent" actually exists. In my case, the emphasis on talent when I was young was certainly damaging, more than cancelling out any advantage that talent -- the "smart kid" factor -- might have given me.

Angie

June Stuff

Another awful writing month. This feels like 2008, which is very depressing. :/ I didn't manage to pull that year out of the bucket until October; hopefully I'll get it together sooner than that this time around. [crossed fingers]

On the good side, I did a lot of other stuff, so at least something is progressing:

5 story submissions = 5
21K words editing = 4
story synopsis = 1

10 pts, yay!

April Stuff

Lousy month for new writing, but an excellent month for dinking around with not-quite-there stories and getting them out the door. I always have a pile of WIPs on my hard drive; sometimes I go weeks or months without finishing anything, and sometimes I get a bunch polished up all at once. It's sort of like biorhythms that way. :) Last month I got four submissions out, which is more than I've done in one month in an amazingly long time, so that's cool.

I also got my marketing/admin doc for A Hidden Magic done and submitted, including several versions of a synopsis, at various lengths for various purposes. I'm counting that as a "synopsis" point, but I'm not counting the various bouts of sandpapering I did on the stories as "editing" because I don't know how to handle the wordcount on that. Does editing a 5500 word story equal 5500 words of editing, or does deleting 100 words equal 100 words of editing, or does dinking with a 258-word paragraph to turn it eventually into a 261-word paragraph equal three words of editing, or what...? No clue what McKoala's final verdict will be (and the Koala is absent until next week so I won't find out for a while) but I'm ignoring the whole editing thing and tentatively awarding myself five points.



I've also submitted to a couple of markets recently (Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons) where they have a form on their web site you fill out with your name, story title, cover letter info, etc., and then you upload the story right to their site, rather than e-mailing it. It feels a bit odd, but it works, so what the heck. I remember scoffing at this sort of thing a while back regarding a novel publisher's site -- brand new baby publisher, wanted you to copy/paste your whole novel into a box on their web site, and then click a button saying that by submitting you were assigning all rights to everything forever to the publisher [eyeroll] which made them sound rather... let's say "inexperienced" to be kind. I'd never heard of the "upload here" thing before with a legitimate market (and still hadn't at that point IMO) so it seemed part and parcel with the ignorance (at best) of the ridiculous rights statement. I can see this working well for shorter pieces, though (and even longer ones, to be honest, although it still feels a bit weird) and neither Clarkesworld nor Strange Horizons is going for a rights-grab, so that's fine.

On a more personal level, I tried backing off on the ibuprofen, cutting it down from 800mg twice a day to 400 twice a day. (I was originally prescribed 800 three times a day, but after a few weeks I eliminated the middle dose without much trouble.) The stuff works fairly well, but it dissolves your liver in tiny bits, and I've been taking it at this level for a couple of years now. :/ I was hoping I could get along with less, maybe taking a couple extra pills when I went to the gym or something. Unfortunately 400x2 leaves me too immobile to even consider going to the gym. I tried it for a couple of weeks to see whether it was something I could get used to, but it's not. So I'm back up to the 800x2, and the screaming in my joints is starting to quiet down a little at a time. I do need to find a doctor up here, though, and get a prescription for something else. There's got to be something I can take for the pain and stiffness that won't do a number on my liver, or anything else similar; it won't do me much good to maintain my already limited mobility if it means I need a liver transplant in five or ten years. :P

Next submission will hopefully be something for Sword and Sorceress. [crossed fingers] And if anyone else is considering that market, I found that the link I posted in the last antho call is now broken; the new page is here: Sword and Sorceress 25 guidelines.

Angie

Rewrite and Submit

I've been dinking around with this one story story for a while now, trying to figure out why it wasn't working. I finally figured out that it was the ending -- it was going well up to the last few pages, but then I wasn't sticking the landing. The immediate incident being told in the story was over, but there were ramifications for later on, and the protag had plans for what she was going to do in the future as opportunity and resources presented themselves.

It kind of sounded like the first chapter -- or maybe the prologue -- of a novel, rather than a stand-alone short. Except there really wasn't enough pending action to support something novel length. :/ There was too much blah-blah-blah at the end, too much speculation about what the protag would do some day in response to the immediate situation. It just sort of trailed off rather than giving a firm ending. Not good. This story's been bounced a couple of times before, and now I can see why.

I chopped off about the last thousand words and rewrote the ending. I figured out a different way the protag could respond to the situation, riskier and more immediate, but also more intense and satisfying. Hoping this one works. [crossed fingers]

Angie

ETA: closed to coments because of idiots spamming.

Reject and Resubmit, and a Great Resource

One of the stories I have out on submission bounced last night, although with a nice paragraph of personal comments, including the fact that they found the story "intellectually interesting." Hey, I'll take that. :) Also some comments on POV which might be valid, but reworking it as suggested would take like 90% of the suspense out of the story, so I think I'll keep it as-is and see what a few other editors think.

(I've decided to stop specifying which stories I'm discussing in the back-and-forthing, unless/until they sell. We know it's all supposed to be about the story and nothing else, but human nature says that making it easy for an editor to exercise the Google-fu and see that sixteen editors before them have bounced the story is probably not a great idea. [wry smile])

I also signed up with Duotrope and threw them a few bucks. I've been using them on and off for a while now and they're a great resource; it's only fair to contribute. For anyone who hasn't been there, Duotrope provides submission info on like a bazillion fiction and poetry markets. Their searches are easy to do and provide all the basic info you need to sort through markets, with quick links to the market's own web site for more detailed info.

Signing up lets you create an account (which is free, by the way) and gives you access to a personal database to track your submissions. You can enter info about your stories, which lets you run quicker targetted searches when it's time to send something out. It also tracks how long a story's been out, how long it took the market to respond, and what kind of response you got; collecting that info lets them display, on the market's page, what their minimum, mean average, median and maximum response times have been over the past year, what their accept/reject percentage is, how often they reject with a form versus a personal note, etc.

Good stuff, highly recommended.

Angie

Sequels

I sent in another submission (yay, it's only the second and I have another point already!) this one a short sequel to A Hidden Magic called "Unfinished Business." It focuses on a couple of the supporting characters, and picks up on something funny they were doing in Chapter 17, before the balloon went up and everyone had to scramble.

My original intention was to have it be a free extra, since it occurs right after the novel, and bangs off of something that happened during that story. I was thinking maybe it could be a bonus story included in the same file as the novel or something like that. My editor told me Torquere's only done that once, though, and I got the impression it'd be like pulling teeth with a tweezer to get them to do it again. Which is understandable; I get that they're trying to make a living, and with a story which falls within their wordcount range for a short story, they'd rather sell it as a short story. I was just kind of iffy about whether it could stand on its own; I had this vision of people who hadn't read the novel buying the short and going, "Huh? What the heck's going on here?! This sucks!" and never reading anything with my name on it again. :(

Another option would've been to post it as a free story on my web site, but that gets mainly crickets and tumbleweeds, and I'd really like for a few people to actually read the story. [wry smile]

I e-mailed it to some writers I know, none of whom had read Hidden Magic, and asked if they'd please read it and tell me whether they thought it could stand alone. (Thanks and hugs to the folks who helped me! :D ) They all said they thought it could, with a few suggestions. One, which I got from more than one person, was to de-couple the story from the novel, moreso than it already was. I'd been thinking I needed to fill in the reader on what had gone before, in case they hadn't read the book, but my readers suggested going the opposite way. And... yeah, that'd work. The incident the short story is based on is funny in and of itself, and although it's more funny if you know where it came from, it's not necessary to enjoy the story.

So I did this big "Duh!" and did some rewriting, cutting some specific references to characters from the book and focusing the short more on Cal and Aubrey, the characters that particular story is actually about. It's much better now as an individual story, and I'm much more confident that it'll work out, whether a reader has read the earlier novel or not.

It's one of the downsides of sequels, though, that they should stand alone, at least enough that some new reader who grabs a sequel first won't be completely lost and has a chance of enjoying the story. It's all right if there are details and references they don't pick up on, but it shouldn't be so obvious to them that things are flashing by over their heads that they get frustrated or annoyed by it. I've always preferred episodic series over single-arc series -- with some exceptions, of course, for really well written single-arc stories -- but the need to accommodate a new reader makes it difficult from the writer's POV.

When I was a kid, someone gave me a couple of Nancy Drew books for Christmas one year (I think it was some sort of law that young girls had to have at least a couple of those, back in the seventies) and one thing that annoyed me even when I was eight or nine was the way every freaking book started with this infodump about how Nancy was this pretty titian-haired eighteen-year-old (and she never had a birthday either, although that's a different gripe) whose father was Carson Drew the famous lawyer, and how motherless Nancy had been raised by their kind housekeeper Hannah Gruen. And about her friends, the cousins Bess and George, although in the first two or three books Nancy's best friend was Helen, who was never mentioned later after B&G showed up. And her boyfriend Ned, who was about as sexless as a Ken doll. And her blue roadster. And how much the local Chief of Police loved her and thought she was just so awesome. (I don't believe I still remember all this stuff, thirty-some years later, LOL! At least I forgot the Police Chief's name.)

But they'd give you all this info, Every Single Time, right there on pages 1-2. After a dozen books it was annoying, and by the time I hit forty or so (which was pretty close to where I eventually stopped) I was ready to tear out the first pages of any Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on. I get that they had to present the information, but if your ham-handed repetition is annoying a kid who hasn't even seen her tenth birthday yet, there's got to be a smoother, less blatant way of communicating it, you know?

So all right, this is an issue writers have been having for going on a century now, at least, and I'm probably not going to come up with The Definitive Answer. But I have plans for more stories in this series, and although I want them all to be readable by anyone, I don't want to go the Nancy Drew route of dropping infodump anvils onto readers' heads at the beginning of each new book or story.

In the case of "Unfinished Business," once I'd been clued in on the basic approach, I looked at the story as an individual entity, rather than as part of a series. It's important to the series that readers have a certain amount of background on the characters and the Sentinel team and what they do, but most of that's not necessary for a reader to read and enjoy this story right here. And although the funny in the story is funnier if you know where it came from, it's still funny if you don't know, and trying to explain what was going on before in a long, telly paragraph makes the story less enjoyable, so fun is maximized by leaving that out and shooting for the slightly lesser level of funny.

IOW, shooting for "Funny" and making it (I hope!) is better than shooting for "Very Funny" and having a miss turn the whole story into a "Blah."

I've never had to consider this angle before; I've done other stories in this universe, but "Chasing Fear" and "Candy Courage" were about different characters entirely, and "Chasing Fear" is set a few hundred miles away. It's all part of the same verse, yes, but there's nothing to link the stories except for that, so I didn't have to think about reading order when I wrote those, or A Hidden Magic for that matter. Now that I've tripped over the idea of constructing a story to stand alone based on what will make it good and enjoyable, rather than thinking of the verse or the series first, writing subsequent stories about the same characters will probably be a bit easier. At least I know what I'm shooting for. :)

I know a few people who read here have written series books or stories -- how do you handle the new reader issue? Has it been difficult, or have things just sort of flowed for you? Any tips?

Angie

March Stuff -- Editing and Cover Art and Cetera

Well, I didn't do much writing in March -- a little over 4K words :P -- but I got A Hidden Magic through edits, which was a much larger job than I expected it to be. Vincent, my editor on this project, is sneaky with comments; there are all these little notes that look like nothing when you glance over them, but end up rippling through the manuscript. [laugh/flail] I thought I'd be done in a few days, but it actually took me right up until deadline. I'll know better for next time.

This is my first novel, so I was half expecting structure-level changes. Not hoping for them or anything :/ but I've heard from other writers over the years about having to add chapters or rip out characters, add or subtract subplots, change the whole ending, that sort of thing. I'll admit to a certain amount of trepidation while waiting for edits to actually show up, and a whole lot of relief when there was nothing on that level. Vincent said reading and editing the book were a lot of fun, which is great; it's always cool to get a good opinion from someone who's not a friend, you know?

I went through the manuscript a few times and found a lot of little things I wanted to change or fix, aside from editorial comments. Some of them were mistakes which the proofreader (who gets the manuscript next) might well have caught, but I'm glad I saw them anyway. I'm a pretty good editor of my own work, but no matter how often I look over a story, there's always something, you know? And with 72K words to play with, there's a lot of room for little somethings to hide in.

I filled out the cover art request form in mid-month, and that was a lot more difficult than I'd expected, mainly because I was trying hard to be reasonable and not request anything outside the bounds set by a tiny budget. If I had a few thousand dollars and a couple of years to get on someone's schedule, that'd be something else -- heck, my first choice would be Colleen Doran, whose LOTR art and more elaborate Ovanan (these sort of elf-like aliens) from her comic book A Distant Soil I actually had in mind while developing my elves and their court. The look isn't exact, but the mood and the esthetic is about right, especially for the evil Ovanan, who are beautiful and decadent. Last I saw on her blog, though, her schedule's full for like the next year or so, and I imagine she's horribly expensive. I don't remember exactly what Torquere pays for cover art, but I think it's somewhere in the $50-75 range. Humm, I guess George Perez is out too, right...? [rueful smile]

So I was trying to be reasonable, and figure out what to ask for that'd be doable with stock photos and some Photoshop skill. I gave a few possibilities and a lot of descriptions, and I'll have to see what comes of it.

One thing I did discover, though, while browsing through stock photo sites, is that some of the photographers who upload photos to these places are incredibly optimistic. They apparently think it's worth their while to upload, say, women's portraits to the People / Portraits / Men section, apparently on the belief that their photography is Just So Gorgeous that someone who's specifically looking for a male photo will see these female portraits and instantly think, "OMG! These are absolutely breathtaking! I must have them! I'll rework my entire project concept to use female photos instead of male, just so I can use These Pictures!!" [/sarcasm]

On the other hand, maybe they're just incredibly lazy and can't be bothered to sort out their pictures properly. I suppose that's possible too. :P Whichever it is, the People / Portraits / Men section of one site I looked at was at least 25% female, which annoyed me quite a lot. It took hours to go through all the pictures, and it might have taken 25% fewer hours if the photographers would pay attention to the damn section headers and put their photos where they belong. [mutter]

I still have to fill out the marketing form, with a blurb and an excerpt and such. That should be fun; I've never had a chance to do that before.

Now that the bulk of that's done, though, I'm looking forward to getting back to writing. It's exciting to be getting that much closer to having an actual novel published, but I've missed writing for a while. I've always known I prefer writing fresh to editing (doesn't everyone?) but I've never had this much editing to do with my previous stories. And the fact that my last big push with HM before submitting it was essentially a months-long restructuring, with just as much editing and fussing around at the structural level as actual writing, means that I'm pretty burned out on editing and fussing and reworking this story anyway. :/ I'm at the point where I feel like I can't tell any more whether it's good or not; I'm too close to all the bits and pieces, characters and plot threads and fiddly little details of the world, to be able to see it the way a reader would. I suppose that's normal too, but it's still frustrating.

Oh, and I submitted a story, too, just a bit before midnight. I was working on something earlier for an anthology called Triangulation: End of the Rainbow, but it came out too long. I made a few passes through it, cutting and condensing and trying to get it down to within spitting distance of the mostly-firm upper wordcount limit of 5K, then I set it aside when edits came in. At around 11:30 tonight (last night? on the 31st, anyway) I remembered it and took another quick look. It's at about 5500, which isn't too bad. It's a dark paranormal (no sex [grin]) and I think it'll be an unusual treatment of the theme -- I hope so, anyway. So I sent it along, and we'll see what the editor thinks. At worst I'll have another slip to add to my rejection file, and at best he'll love it despite it being a little longer than he'd like. Keep a set of virtual fingers crossed for me on this one. :)

Anyway, adding things up for March:

1 pt. -- 1 story submission
1 pt. -- 4K words of writing
14 pts. -- 72K words of editing
===============================
16 pts. total



Whee! :D

Angie

Another Submission

So I was browsing through anthology listings and found one for an SF/fantasy anthology with a music theme called Music for Another World. It looks like it could be an interesting book, and the pay is decent if not spectacular. I happened to have a fantasy story with a music theme on my hard disk, so I thought, "Cool!" and sent it off.

This is the first time I've subbed a story to anyone besides Torquere in quite a while, so we'll see how it goes. If it's accepted, it'll be published under my own name, which I'd always intended to do when I got back to subbing mainstream SF/fantasy. My husband is only a couple of years away from being eligible for full retirement now, and his new job (starting in less than two weeks, ack!) doesn't require a security clearance, so he's not terribly concerned about my being outed anymore, which is cool.

If anyone here has a story which fits the theme, check out the guidelines and give it a shot. It'd be pretty neat to have a bunch of us in an antho together. :)

Angie

I Finished a Novel!

I just finished a novel-length story -- a little over 72K words -- for the first time ever yesterday. All the revising and poking and second-guessing is done; I finished it, backed it up to a flash drive, wrote up a synopsis for the submission letter and sent it off to my publisher. Whose office is closed till Monday, but hey, my book is going to be one of the first e-mails they see that morning, right? I hope they have a great weekend with lots of excellent food and go back to work in a wonderful mood. :D

It's an urban fantasy set in the same world as "Chasing Fear" and "Candy Courage," although there's no overlap with any of the earlier characters. I have no idea how long the process takes for something of this length -- either hearing back about acceptance [crossed fingers] or the editing and tweaking after -- but I'm pretty sure at least part of me will be boinging all the way through it.

This was a great Thanksgiving for me, and I'm definitely thankful to have gotten this finished and submitted. :D I hope everyone else had a wonderful day too, and has lots of excellent leftovers.

Positive thoughts and crossed sets of virtual fingers happily accepted. [grin]

Angie

PS -- am I the only one who gets all anal about chapter lengths? They don't have to be exactly the same length (which is just as well 'cause they're definitely not) but I like chapter lengths to be at least within spitting distance of one another. As a reader, if I'm going along and one chapter is twelve pages and the next is five and the one after that is nine, then fifteen, then three, then eleven... it feels jarring, as though the whole story is off-tempo. I can imagine a structural reason to do this, but if it's not clearly an effect the writer was trying for, deliberately and for a purpose, then I get uncomfortable while reading, like listening to a song where the musician can't keep the beat. So I spent most of the last day or two of my tweaking working on the lengths of a few chapters, trying to haul the worst of the outliers a bit closer to the bulk of the bell curve. Some came out better than others -- I'm not about to pull necessary info out of a chapter just for length, or add six hundred words of pointless padding -- but it's better than it was and I kept going until I hit diminishing returns. Anyone else obsess over that sort of thing...?

New Market

Holly Lisle is putting together a new sort of online magazine project based primarily around serials, although with some shorter one-shot stories too, and with issues grouped into "seasons." She explains it better than I do. :) Anyway, it's called Rebel Tales, is starting off as an F&SF market, and she has the preliminary writer's guidelines up.

The guidelines are worth reading even if you don't plan to submit; she has a refreshingly blunt, take-no-prisoners attitude toward people who submit without following instructions, or without being able to write terribly well, or without knowing what SF or Fantasy actually are, or even what a story is. I got a few chuckles while reading.

Angie

Editorial Sensitivity?

Erastes on LJ posted a link to the submission guidelines for Eternal Press. They contain this passage:

Send us a cover letter and please tell us what questionable content may be found within the MS as we do not wish to subject our editors to content that may put them at risk emotionally.

I was rather taken aback by this statement. I've never seen any such requirement in any other market's guidelines, so what's up with this? Do they really have one or more editors who are so delicate that they need to have their slush pre-screened for them? Maybe those individuals would do better working for a publisher specializing in children's books, or inspirational lit, or any other publisher that doesn't accept fiction with adult themes; there are quite a few of those, after all. Why would an editor who's that emotionally sensitive take a job with a publisher which accepts:

Mystery, sci-fi, paranormal, historical, suspense, horror, women's fiction, fantasy, thrillers, erotica, gay and all sub genres of romance as well as.

Any of those genres might well include "icky" material, but particularly the suspense, horror, erotica and romance.

[And hey, Eternal Press -- your guidelines need editing.]

They also assume their readers are just as twitchy:

We do put disclaimers about the content if it could potentially disturb our consumers

Umm, why? This isn't traditional, not in erotica and not in general literature. A few publishers have begun to do it recently, but I don't care for the practice and am never happy to see it spreading.

It's not that abiding by this requirement would be horribly onerous or anything. Everything else looks fine (although kidding aside, their guidelines really do need editing, in more than one spot, which doesn't inspire great confidence about the editing of their books) and they pay a nice royalty, but this requirement to put a warning label on the cover of your story just makes me twitch. I mean, seriously, an editor at a publisher of horror, romance and erotica who has to be protected from "questionable" material? That's like going to the vet and having to warn them ahead of time that your dog's been vomiting, because they have a doctor who's icked out by vomit. Sorry, hon, it's part of the job -- you deal with it or find work elsewhere.

It's unfortunate, but I think I'll pass.

Angie

How Not to Submit to an Agent

A truly amazing combination of nerve and idiocy here, via Cleolinda on LJ.

Someone faked up an e-mail from an agent (who'd rejected them) to make it look like they were sending a requested partial. And then sent chapters 4-6 of the book. [blinkblink]

Seriously, just how stupid-newbie do you have to be to not know that a partial is always the first three chapters?? Although I guess that goes with being dumb enough to think an agent won't remember that they didn't request anything from you in the first place. Good grief....

Angie

Submission!

I just finished a story a bit ago and sent it in to Torquere for their Halloween promotion. (I had a story in last year's and would really like to be involved this year too.) It's my first actual submission since December, and only the second story I've finished since then, so I'm pretty darned jazzed. I'm hoping this means my dead streak is broken and I'll be able to get back into the regular writing thing again now.

Everyone send positive thoughts for them taking my story? :D

Angie

Taking a Breath

I'm actually caught up right now. Well, mostly. I mean, I have a bunch of partially done projects, but I don't owe them to anyone, so they don't count when it comes to being behind or whatever. So yay. :)

I had a deadline on the 23rd (for a fic fest) and one on the 24th (for the Torquere Advent promotion) and both are done. I was actually about 40 minutes late with the first one, but the moderators said it wasn't a big deal, for which I'm grateful. And the second one was a bit late but only on a technicality. I mean, when someone says something's due on the 24th, then right before then they say they're going to be out of the office doing, like, holiday stuff until the 26th, I think I'm justified in giving myself two more days of leeway, you know? [duck] So I got it in today, about six hours ago, and hopefully that's cool and everyone who needs to like it will like it. It's a short sequel to "Chasing Fear" called "Catching Courage," about the same two characters.

And that's it. That's everything I owed to anyone in the near future. Next deadline is... I think a little over a week into January (I'd have to look at my calendar) for my next Romancing the Blog column, but I wouldn't want to write it this far in advance anyway; one never knows when some hot topic is going to go sweeping through the industry the day before your column's due, you know? :) And if not, I have a couple of ideas anyway, so that's cool.

But I don't owe anyone any fiction right now. It feels kind of loose and drifting, but at the same time it's like the world is full of potential. Everything I see or hear or read is a story idea and I could sit down and write about absolutely anything.

Often that kind of freedom is a bad thing; if I have to produce X number of words by Monday, being able to write about "anything" can give me a case of paralysis. You know, when your eyes go big and round and unfocused, and you're looking at such a huge chunk of the world that it seems impossible to focus in on any one bit of it? That's bad, and frustrating. I wrote some really putrid (to say nothing of horribly boring) compositions in high school when the teacher told us we could write about "Oh, anything!" :P

But right now I don't have that Monday deadline. Not needing to produce a finished product at any particular point means I really can write about anything, and if it starts to suck five pages in, it doesn't matter. I can start it over, approaching the same idea from another angle, or I can completely trash it and grab a new idea and try something completely different. It doesn't matter and that means I'm free to dabble and experiment and do something weird or different or just interesting. And that's cool.

Mind you, too much of this kind of freedom can also mean I never get around to finishing anything; having definite goals is a good thing, most of the time. But every now and then it's great to be able to just kick back -- to go web surfing, or read whatever I want, or play a computer game, or go browsing through story scraps and ideas from years ago -- and do whatever. Plenty of time to get all serious and focused and efficient later.

Have a great Rest Of The Year, everyone! Don't work too hard. :D

Angie