Peeking Through a Crack in the Door of Licensing

If you write fiction, read Kris Rusch's business blog for this week, on licensing.

This is a whole 'nother way of looking at doing business with your fictional properties.

And as a side note, I've heard Kris and Dean mention here and there for years about how SFWA screwed them out of many thousands of dollars, but never heard the details. Now I know what happened. Wow. :/

But seriously, even if you don't feel you're in a position to take action on this right now, this is stuff you should know if you're a writer.

Angie

Story Seeds

There are some completely wonderful story seeds in this set of photos. Thanks to Jim Hines for the link.

Angie

Joanna Penn -- Retrospective and Resources

If you're a writer and you're not reading (or listening) to Joanna Penn, you're missing out. This post is a look back at her career, and her ten years of blogging and podcasting at The Creative Penn. She freely discusses what she did wrong and what she learned from it all, and flings links and resources in all directions. Check it out.

Angie

Habitica Update

So, it's been almost a month since I joined Habitica, the site that helps you build good habits, break bad ones, and get your to-do list done. Check out my first post about Habitica for a description. I figured the first day of a new month was a good time to report on how it's going.

It's going great! I wrote at least a few hundred words every day in September from the fifth on, and I wrote 34,280 in total -- a little over 30K on the novel I'm working on, plus a short story I wrote in the middle of the month. That's almost half my total for the year! Which is both depressing and exciting at the same time. [wry smile]

I've also been drinking more water, eating veggies more often, doing more Italian lessons, and replying to people's e-mails faster.

I'll admit I haven't been working on my to-dos as fast/much as I wanted, but the way I have it set up, just doing my dailies takes a while, and I've been doing well with most of my habits. To-dos are one-time projects, and I have clicked off on a bunch of them. I'm finding more free time as I go -- I only played one session on a computer game since starting Habitica, and that only for a little over an hour -- so I'll get to the rest of them eventually.

The important thing is that the shiny hasn't worn off yet. :) I'm still just as enthused as before, and it feels good to get so many things done, which makes me feel better about doing more, and around we go in a spiral of productivity.

Seriously, if you're any kind of a gamer geek, such that earning gold and experience, and levelling up your character is a strong motivator for you, give this a shot. :)

If you'd rather focus on writing (which you can totally do on Habitica, if you want; it's fully customizable) I've heard of another site called 4TheWords that's a game just for writers. I checked it out and it gives you points and such for the actual numbers of words you write. It seems to focus a lot on producing X number of words within Y time, though, sort of like a NaNoWriMo WordWar? I'm not into that -- IMO pushing to write faster than your brain wants to naturally produce story is how the whole "banging out crap" thing happens, and that doesn't work for me -- but if you are, give 4TheWords a look.

Heading off to write (and kill some goblins),

Angie

Challenge Worth Watching

Dean Wesley Smith is starting a new challenge tomorrow, to write ten novels in a hundred days. That's pretty radical even for Dean, but if anyone can do it in this day and age, he can. :)

He's blogging about it as he goes, and the posts will eventually be collected into a book. (Assuming he succeeds.)

The challenge starts tomorrow, and the introductory post is up today.

Excerpt:

This is a book about the process of writing ten novels in one hundred days. Yup, that simple and that crazy.

This book will take its original shape in blogs on my website and I hope to add a bunch more to the book in the final form once the one hundred days are complete. But the origin will be on my blog as the one hundred days goes along.

And as I write this introduction, I have no idea at the outcome, if I will be able to write ten novels or not. I am writing this introduction the night before the first day. This is a challenge for me, one that actually worries me as I start into it.

But if you are actually reading this introduction in a book, you know I managed to do it.

So I hope you get the sense, as you read this, of the fun and the pressure of this challenge. I have no idea what books I will be writing. I will think about what the first book might be tomorrow, on the first day. I have done no outlines or any prep work beyond trying to get some business projects done and out of the way.

During the one hundred days, I have at least one trip planned, a full week of a workshop to teach, my birthday, a marathon to run, and Thanksgiving holidays. And I work a lot of hours each week as the CFO of WMG Publishing, plus teach online workshops. And I exercise at least three hours a day on top of that.

In other words, I am going to do this with my real life going on.

Fleeing Into November

So, October sucked and I'm very glad it's over.

About a week and a half into the month, my gastroparesis flared up, and off to the ER we went. This is bad enough -- having your stomach working at turning itself inside-out with enough determination as to require intravenous meds is pretty sucktastic. We got that straightened out, I came home and collapsed, and then took most of a week to recover. My stomach was mostly fine as of the next day, but being that sick sucks the energy right out of me, and it usually takes five or six days to get back to my old activity level, with enough energy to actually spend most of each day conscious.

[The upside of this is that it was my first ER visit in about eleven months. Two or three years ago, my husband worked out that we had to run to the ER on the average of every four weeks, for the whole year. Yeah, I'll take an eleven-month gap and be pretty happy about it.]

Then about a week before Halloween, I snapped an incisor. :/ I was chewing on something, then felt this SNAP! and one of my (thankfully root-canalled and crowned) incisors was just sort of sitting in its socket, not actually attached any more. Crap.

This happened to me before, a few years ago. (The other large incisor, the one right next to the one that broke off this time.) I just went to the dentist on Wednesday, because we'd cancelled our dental insurance (this has been a tight year financially) and had to sign back up again. The renewed insurance didn't kick in till the first of the month, so holding pattern until then.

Even if everything goes perfectly, this is going to take months to resolve. I'm getting another implant, which is fine, but it comes in several steps, with months between each step for thorough healing before progressing on. So I've got this hole in my face (again) and I'm going to be dealing with it until, probably, some time this coming summer. Late spring at the earliest.

I decided to skip the temporary, cosmetic not-really-replacement thing this time. Last time, I got an ultra-temporary fake tooth cemented in, because I was two days from dashing off to a workshop, and there was no time to do the long-term temporary replacement at that point. The ultra-temporary was so fragile, my dentist told me not even to brush while I had it. When your dentist says not to brush, that's Fragile with a capital F. :P And it fell out three days later anyway, so that was $800 wasted.

The long-term temporary thing was what's called a "flipper," which is basically a denture-y thing with only one tooth on it. You have to remove it to eat, and although they told me I'd get used to talking with it in, I never did. And after I got my implant post put in, the periodontist did some drilling at the base of the fake tooth in my flipper so it'd fit over the cap at the top of the post, but it never did fit right, so it was even more annoying to wear and I hardly ever did. I don't remember what the flipper cost, but it was somewhere in the $$$$ range. I've decided to bail on that one too. Way too much expense for a purely cosmetic deal that's non-functional and uncomfortable. Nah, I'll skip it. If people want to stare at the hole in my face, they're welcome to do so.

At least this time when I went to the dentist for the preliminary look-around (which was basically for the purpose of saying, "Yep, you need an implant,") she mentioned that I have a very deep bite, which means when I close my jaw, my upper teeth overlap my lower teeth almost completely. That apparently puts a lot of pressure on those upper teeth, which is why I've had the breakage problem. Okay, well, there's nothing I can do about it, but I guess it's good to know why this keeps happening. :/

So, that was October. Good riddance.

Now it's November, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo. I'm AngiePen on the site, if you're playing too and want to Buddy me. I'm working on a romance novel, and things are going well so far. I've had about 46K words of this one sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, so I've pulled it out to work on. I'm pretty sure I have 50K words of it left. If not, but I finish at some lesser wordcount, that's fine; I consider finished novels a win no matter what the wordcount. :)

If I wrap the current book with, like, 30K words or so, and still have at least a week left in the month, I'll probably pull out another partial project (yeah, I have a lot of 'em [cough]) and work on that, and lump the wordcount together for purposes of NaNo. No biggie.

I've been having a sucktastic writing year, though, so doing a couple thousand words a day for multiple days in a row has felt awesome. Now if I can only keep it going.... [crossed fingers]

Who else is doing NaNo this year...?

Angie

On Ghostwriting

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff posted on Bookview Cafe on when to break up with your ghostwriting client, which also applies to editing clients and writer-writer collaborations.

I've never done a ghostwriting job, but I've collaborated on writing projects and I absolutely agree with her that you have to be able to trust your partner. If your collaborator or client starts going squirrely on you, it's time to bail.

Note that Maya was getting paid for her work regardless of whether the books got published, but bailed because she didn't want to deal with the squirrely client, money or no money. Sounds like she made the right choice.

Check it out..

Angie

Estate Planning for Authors by M.L. Buchman

Estate Planning for Authors by M.L. Buchman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Matt Buchman is one of the most organized, business-oriented writers I know. He was one of the instructors at the Publishing Master Class I took last October, and he talked a bit then about estate planning for writers. He was working on this book at the time, and I eagerly preordered a copy. It came out just a few days ago, and it's got me adding line items to my to-do list like crazy.

If you're a writer, or in any other profession where you're creating and holding the rights to IP, you need to read this book. The full title is Estate Planning for Authors: Your Final Letter (and why you need to write it now). It's not just about how you need a will (although you do), but rather it's about how to organize your business so someone else can pick it up when you're gone, and how to write a letter to your heir(s) so they can find what they need, learn what they need to know, and manage your IP estate without cussing you out, or giving up in disgust and letting your IP go dormant and fade from the public eye because straightening out the tangle is (in their opinion) more work than it's worth. Seriously, your heirs will be delighted if you read this book, and leave them a copy along with your will, your final letter, and all your files.

CONTENTS:

PART I: Getting Started
PART II: IMPORTANT TERMS
PART III: Managing the IP
PART IV: Where's the Money?
PART V: Organizing It All
PART VI: The Final Letter
THE FINAL LETTER
PART VII: A Plan of Action
PART VIII: Suggested Reading (for the author, not so much for the heir)

One of the first pages, right after the dedication, is a section called, "Purpose of this book." It says:

Your Will states who gets what.

Your Final Letter tells them what they can, and should, do with it once they have it.

This book is about the second bit. It suggests a method to write a "Final Letter" that will organize your literary estate and educate your heirs. Or, if the creator behind the estate didn't write one, this book can act as a guide for their heirs to understand what options exist to manage a literary estate.

That's the point of this book -- helping your heirs figure out what this whole writing/publishing thing is about, what they've just inherited, where it all is, and what to do with it. The book addresses different situations, from an average writer passing their books and stories down directly to their kid, to a much busier writer who owns multiple corporations and sets up a charitable trust.

You won't find step-by-step details in how to do something like set up a trust, but you'll find basic info on what the options are, why you might want to make a particular choice, and what kind of professional (CPA, IP attorney, that sort of person) to consult about it.

There are also examples of what happened in various real life cases, such as how Elvis Presley left a soon-to-be bankrupt estate and what his ex, Priscilla, did to turn that around. Or how Jane Austen's heirs sold all the copyrights to her novels for the price of 250 hardcover copies of her books, because they had no clue what they had or what it was worth.

I particularly like the story of Lucia Berlin, a short story writer who never made much money while she was alive. After her death, her heirs put together a collection of her short stories, which was published and hit the New York Times Bestseller List.

How many of you reading this are writers who think your work isn't worth much, financially? Lucia Berlin probably thought the same thing. Luckily her heirs were smart enough to manage her IP well and not only make some money from it, but get Ms. Berlin's stories in front of a huge new audience.

Getting organized and preparing your IP and your business to be handed over to your heirs, with enough information for them to hit the ground running, will make it much more likely that they'll pick up your work and keep it in print, keep it refreshed, look for new markets, new formats, new opportunities. Matt talks about organizing your computer files, including back-ups and off-site storage, managing your passwords and safely passing them down to your heirs, and keeping your contracts and tax paperwork organized and filed and findable. There's a lot of very practical info here. And a nice bonus is that once things are organized enough for your heirs to step right in and find everything, it'll also be organized enough for you to always be able to lay hands on whatever you want, right when you want it. Not that I ever have that problem [cough] but you know, in case anyone out there reading does. [wry smile]

While talking about multiple options, Matt centers his examples on his own estate planning, how he's organized his business, and prepared information and files and passwords and accounts for his heirs to take over. Matt is a very busy writer who has set up corporations for tax purposes, and has decided to create a living trust for his heirs. All the research he's done -- all along, for the business structures, and recently when planning his estate -- has filtered into this book.

Part VI contains his actual Final Letter, with specifics like [the names of actual banks and lawyers and accountants] noted out. You could absolutely take this letter as an example, pretty much verbatim, and tweak it to apply to your own IP and estate decisions. He's also included, in Part V, a link to a page on his web site with a downloadable Excel starter file. This is a skeleton copy of the master file he uses to track his own books and stories. It's a great organizational tool for your own use, aside from how wonderfully useful it would be for your heirs.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty enthusiastic about this book. It's short, it's clear, and it's a gold mine of valuable info and resources. If you've ever published anything, if you own any IP, you should read this book. And get a copy for each of your heirs; if you get hit by a bus before you can write your Final Letter, at least it'll give them a leg up on figuring out what the heck it is you've left them and what they should do with it.

Write with Fire by Charles Allen Gramlich

Write with Fire by Charles Allen Gramlich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a partial recycle, since I originally blogged about this book shortly after it came out. That was like eight years ago, though, so most folks reading my blog now probably haven't seen it. If anyone cares, Charles and I have been commenting on each other's blogs for coming up on ten years now. We're friends, more than "Facebook" type friends, but less than people who know each other in realspace, or even e-mail regularly. I like him a lot, but anyone who knows me knows that I never bullshit about writing, so my review of his book (or the book of any other writer I know) is what I actually think, untainted by the delicacies of personal admiration or friendship.

PART 1

So You Want to Be a Writer
First Words
Writer's Block No More
Tipping the Odds in Your Favor
Writing with Purpose
Don't Talk, Write!
Writing with Confidence
RQW3R
Five Habits of Publishing Writers
Quick Versus Slow Suspense
Six Steps to Creating Suspense
The Mechanics of Suspense
Creating Sympathetic Characters
Characters: The Best and the Rest
Harvesting Memories
Writing Your Past for Fun and Profit'
The First Rule of Endings
The Curse of the Lazy Ending
Endings: What's at Stake
The Physical Side of Writing
One Way to Put a Style Together
Writing for Excess (with "Barbarian's Bane")
Writing with Attitude
Selling and Reselling (with "To the Point")
The Working Man's Curse
Punctuate It and Forget It!
Problem Words
A Grammar Primer
Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite
By Example
Before You Submit, Don't Forget

PART 2

Writing Groups
Page-Turners: What Makes Them, What Breaks Them
In Praise of the Net
Blogging: Pros and Cons
Pro Versus Amateur
Expand Your Mind
Fun with Fear
Why Horror
Horror Writers: The Crazy Truth
The Horror Lists
Dream Stories
Criticism Hurts
An Error in Detail
Ernest Hemingway: A Writer's Life and Death
Jack London: Two-Fisted Writer
Ken Bulmer: Death in the Family
Where Have All the Good Themes Gone?
Writing Weather
What the Writer Wants
Rest in Peach: Short Story
Five Years Down the Road

PART 3

A Writer on the Run
Readin', Writin' and Me
Death by Prose
Interviews
Kids Insane
Fiends by Torchlight Introduction
About My Novels


This book is a stack of essays collected together into a book. I enjoy reading this kind of writing book, because it feels like sitting down with another writer and listening to them talk shop. "This is important, and this is useful, and oh, this funny thing happened to me, and here's what I learned from it. And whatever you do, do not do this, because this is what happened when I did it and it wasn't fun at all...." That kind of thing.

So while there's an essay entitled "Creating Sympathetic Characters" which is about what you'd expect it to be about, there's also one called "The Workingman's Curse," which discusses writing around a day job and how to cope when everything goes pear-shaped.

I highly recommend the latter essay, by the way, for its entertainment value as well as any actual lessons to be learned. He lists the events of one particular week when he got no writing done at all because of an ever-growing series of crises and calamities, and I have to admit I was LOLing by the end of it -- poor Charles must have desecrated a shrine or something, seriously. :D

There are discussions on punctuation and getting started and work habits, which are fairly typical of writing books, and sections on blogging and criticism and keeping hydrated, which are less so. And the whole thing is written in the very clear and readable style I've come to know while following Charles's Blog for the last ten years. I highly recommend this book to everyone, those who've been at it a while as well as those who are just starting out.

The one thing to wish for here is an electronic version -- the book is only available in paperback, which is an issue for some. This is definitely worth a read, though, even if you're not usually into books made of dead trees.

Writing to the Point by Algis Budrys

Writing to the Point by Algis Budrys

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another classic book about writing, by someone who was well known in the mid- to late-twentieth century as a writer, an editor, and a writing teacher. Algis Budrys, back when he was editing Tomorrow magazine, gave me one of my very best rejections ever, back when I was completely unpublished, so I've always been rather fond of him, despite having never met him. :)

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter One: The Basic Basics
Chapter Two: The Basics
Chapter Three: Sara Jane and What She Means
Chapter Four: The Story and the Manuscript
Chapter Five: Creative Loneliness
Chapter Six: Odd Scraps
Chapter Seven: Agents
Chapter Eight: How to do a Manuscript
Chapter Nine: Review
Appendices:
== Ideas ... How They Work and How to Fix Them
== Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy
== What a Story is

This book is so incredibly basic, that I think you have to actually be rather far along the road of Becoming A Writer before you can really understand it. Not that it's complicated, but rather because it's so simple it's hard to grasp. I remember reading this back in the day, I think I was in my twenties or maybe my early thirties, and most of it just bounced right off me. I mean, okay, there was obviously some good stuff in here, and yes, that sounds right, fine, but... what do you do with it? It was so incredibly contrary to everything I thought I knew about being a good writer back then, that trying to get practical advice out of this book was like trying to grasp fog. It was there, but I couldn't get a hold of it.

Reading it again now, it's not fog anymore, but more like rain or snow. I'm probably still missing a lot, but I can actually catch a couple of good handfuls.

Note that the point of this book is to write fiction that sells. Budrys isn't interested in teaching anyone how to write experimental fiction, or high-end literary fiction that's published in a literary magazine and read by eighty-two people. He's interested in the kind of fiction that some significant number of people will want to read, and hopefully pay some money for. This book was written well before indie publishing became a thing (and the chapter on agents, and some other advice about publishers is extremely out of date), but I think "fiction that sells" to editors who are curating a magazine or similar will also likely sell to individual readers.

Budrys says in the introduction:

I believe that if you do exactly what this book calls for, and do not do anything else, you will sell. If you are already selling, you will improve.

This will be harder than it sounds. You will inevitably try to add things you have learned from other books and instructors, and you may also feel that generally you know more than I teach. Perhaps you do, and perhaps the other books and instructors have valuable things to say. But what will happen is that you will confuse the instruction.

...

What should you do?

I think you should listen to what I have to say. I think it will help. If you listen to exactly what I have to say, it will help a lot. And you may prove to have a talent for it, as well, which will make things somewhat easier, and somewhat more pleasurable. And if you have a talent for it, you will gradually learn, by yourself, how to bend the rules I give; ultimately you will discover ways of telling stories that have rarely been done before; perhaps never been done before. But you will still cling to the things you first learned in this book, because these are the basics. They can be bent; they cannot be broken.

I think he's right, and I think this is what makes it hard. The basics he describes are so basic, you might keep thinking, as I did back when (and still felt myself doing occasionally during my recent re-read) "But there has to be more to it than that!" No, there really isn't.

This book is rather like an onion, and you start in the center. Chapter One describes what storytelling is, its development through human history, and how a story is essentially structured. Budrys describes seven basic components -- three forming the beginning of the story, three forming the middle, and one for the end.

The beginning has 1) a character, 2) in a context, 3) with a problem.
The middle has 4) an attempt to solve the problem, and 5) a failure, which are repeated a couple of times. (I've heard these described as try/fail cycles.) Then there's 6) which is victory.
The end is 7) the validation, where you let the reader know what it was all about, or assure the reader that what happened was legitimate, and that it is, indeed, all done.

Having read a lot of unpublished stories, in workshops and classes and online and just passing stories around between writers, I've always thought that the number one reason why an otherwise good story fails is that the ending doesn't work. This book explains why -- it's the validation that doesn't work, or is completely missing. And in fact, whenever I read a published short story that doesn't quite work for me at the end (I'm much more likely to keep going on a short that's not quite working for me, hoping the writer will pull it off in the end, than I am a novel), there too, thinking back to the ones I remember, it's usually the validation that didn't do it for me. This concept is definitely worth paying attention to.

At the end of Chapter One, Budrys says, "In the next chapter, we will learn that the manuscript is not the story, that writing is not the reverse of reading, and other useful things, including a demonstration of how the seven parts work. But you have already learned more than enough to get started on your career."

I think he's right, but I also think that, if you get this far, you should keep going. There's a strong feeling of, "Wait, is that it...?" at this point. Chapter Two fleshes out the basic structure, gives an example, and discusses the various parts, along with the other things he mentioned. But still, he's probably right that someone who was willing to take him at his word and do the things he discusses could probably read Chapter One and then go hit the keyboard and practice and be a lot better than they were before.

Chapter Three examines the example story (which is about Sara Jane, mentioned in the TOC), fleshes it out a bit more, improves it some, and basically goes over the seven parts again in more detail, with some focus on developing the validation.

In Chapter Four, he goes back to the idea of the story vs. the manuscript, and discusses how you can imply one or more of the seven parts, without actually showing them in the story, using some cool examples (described) that I need to go look up and read some time. At the end, he talks about novels, and how they're actually constructed from short stories, or are expanded short stories, so learning to write short stories will give you a leg up on writing novels, so you might want to start with shorts, if you want to do both.

At this point, he moves on to other topics.

Chapter Five is about how writing is an essentially lonely profession, and how if you don't spend most of your time by yourself, you're probably not getting much writing done.

Chapter Six is about work habits, setting up a place to write, deciding when you're going to write, and then defending that time from anything that might try to encroach. Once you've been working in your spot for a while, you'll have some stories, and he talks about submitting them. Budrys is of the "Start at the Top" school of market selection; that's definitely one thing I picked up on my first read-through. I've never been shy of sending my work to the best markets first; you shouldn't be either. Budrys says, "Well, as the late John W. Campbell said in relation to his magazine, Astounding, 'How dare you edit for me!'" Meaning, let the editors do their jobs. Your job is to send them stories; their job is to say yes or no.

Chapter Seven is about agents. This is the twenty-first century, so you can skip this one IMO.

Chapter Eight is about manuscript formatting and mailing. Every time I run into another writer who doesn't know how to format their manuscript, I'm amazed all over again. Make sure you get this right. Budrys explains how to do it, although it's a bit out of date, since he was talking about paper manuscripts. What I've heard more recently about formatting is, if a market is old-school enough to demand a paper manuscript, then use old-style formatting -- 10- or 12-pitch Courier, with underlining for italics, the whole nine yards. If you're submitting to a market modern enough to take electronic submissions, then something like Times New Roman is better, at least 12-point, and 14 isn't a bad idea, and italicize your italics.

The advice about mailing is pretty much obsolete, but this made me laugh: "Budrys's First Law of Manuscript Reading says that nothing publishable ever came out of a #10 envelope." I remember hearing editors ranting at conventions or online about writers who stuff a 5K-word short story into a business size envelope, so I guess enough writers did it to make it A Thing among editors.

Chapter Nine is a review of everything the book has previously told you. I read it, and found it worthwhile. Getting everything onto the stage of your mind all at one time has some value, I think. Your brain might work differently.

After Chapter Nine, swiping through to the next page, my tablet took me to the "Before You Go..." page, which isn't actually in the book, but is where they show you the covers of ten other books people who read this book have also bought, and ask you to leave a review. This makes you think the book is done, but it's not. On my tablet, the Appendices start at 64% of the way through, so there's still a lot to read.

I'm not going to go over the appendices in detail, but I do recommend you read them. Budrys is an excellent teacher, his ideas are on point, stated clearly and briefly, and he's just generally worth listening to. The third appendix, "What a Story is," is largely another repetition of the main part of the book. Read it anyway. Maybe mark down on your calendar to come back and reread this appendix every month or two, because this info is so basic and primal that it's still rather watery, and it tends to run out of your hands after a little while. Remind yourself periodically, and maybe take a look to see whether and how much your writing has improved since you first read this book.

If you can't tell, this book has my enthusiastic recommendation. Making allowances for when it was written, this is a pretty awesome book about writing, short and clear and to the point, with the absolute basics stripped down for you. Check it out.

Six Month Check-In -- Can't Believe It's July

Seriously, half the year is gone already??

The only reason I have a half decent (seriously, half decent -- just short of 95K) wordcount so far is because of the two workshops I attended, one in late February and early March, and the other in April. They both required writing, and I work best (unfortunately) with an external deadline. I need to learn to work to my own deadlines, which is proving to be kind of tough.

I had so much enthusiasm and such great hopes at the beginning of the year. My weight-loss-and-fitness thing was and is under control, and I was pretty sure I had enough spare focus to turn some of it back to writing. Guess not. Or maybe I do but I've been spending that resource improperly.

So, its July 1st. Right now, I'm renewing my determination to do more writing this year. I can still make my goal for the year if I buckle down and do the work, and I'm declaring, here in public, that I'm going to do it. I have a book about building habits and writing every day (which I'll review here after I've put it to use and seen how it works for me) and hope to get back to being productive.

It's not all bad -- I have accomplished some things, like starting up my Patreon, and my writing/publishing review series. The most important thing to a writer is writing, though, and I need to get back to that. So I'm going to stop blathering and do so.

How's everyone else doing, half way through the year?

Angie

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

The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

1. Habits
2. The Importance of Routines
3. Churning It Out
4. Getting By
5. Following the Crowd
6. Indispensable
7. Beginner's Luck
8. One Phone Call From Our Knees
9. Controlling the Creatives
10. Believe in Yourself
11. Out! All of You!
12. The Writer You Want to Be

Kris Rusch has worn pretty much every hat in writing and publishing. She writes fiction and nonfiction, at all lengths, and has won awards and been a bestseller in multiple genres. She's edited short fiction, both anthologies and magazines (including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), and is, in fact, the only person on the planet to win the Hugo Award for both writing and editing short fiction. She's been an owner, with her husband Dean Wesley Smith, of two publishing companies (they currently own WMG Publishing) and several retail stores. She was a low-level employee at a publishing company she didn't own when she was young, and worked as a radio journalist and news editor for some years. She's made her living off of writing and publishing, without having a separate day job, for about three decades. She takes the long view, which separates her from a lot of the folks who've had some success in the last year or five or ten, and give advice based on what they've done short term. Which is useful, up to a point, but if you want a long-term career, the best advice comes from someone who's had one, and is still going strong.

Kris herself is the first to say that every writer is different, and that you should examine any advice you get to see if it will work for you, or how you can make it your own in a way that'll be useful. But basically, when she talks about writing or publishing, I listen, and I usually agree with her.

This book is a collection of essays originally posted on her blog over a period of some years, all on the topic of how a writer's attitude will affect their success.

Writing and publishing is an area where about 90% of success seems to come from just doing it, over and over, year after year after decade. It's easy to kill your own career -- or strangle it in the crib -- by having the wrong attitude, looking at things from the wrong perspective, buying into myths, thinking short-term instead of long-term... so many ways of wandering off the path. Kris talks about some of the trickiest detours into the underbrush, the ones lit up in neon and advertising themselves as shortcuts or expressways or well-lit, well-trodden paths to Success! which are actually no such thing.

She starts by looking at your habits and routines, which are two different things, in the first two essays. Developing good habits and routines can make you more productive by offloading a lot of the thinking and planning. Habits are how you do things, while routines are how you organize your day. So Kris is in the habit of, whenever she cooks, cooking enough to freeze leftovers so she doesn't have to cook all the time. Going to cook? then cook a lot, is a habit. Drinking some water before a writing session, then sipping tea while writing, is another habit; it forces her to get up and move around about once every hour, to keep her from getting crippled up from spending too much time sitting and typing. Sitting down to type? Drink some water and make a mug of tea.

She gives her routine as well, from getting up to going to bed, including several writing sessions per day, and also talks about when she has to deviate from it, and how she gets back to it as soon as possible. I appreciate that she shows the bumps in the road and how to recover from them -- much more useful than pretending to be Superwriter, or urging her readers to be.

The third essay talks about the damage that comes from internalizing the idea that writing fast is bad. There's a strong meme going around the larger society, and particularly pushed by English teachers and book reviewers and agents and many tradpub editors, that anything written quickly has to be crap. It was churned out, cranked out, dashed off -- clearly it can't be any good. That's a poisonous idea that doesn't belong anywhere near your writer brain, and Kris does a good job shooting that myth and burying the corpse.

The fourth essay is about people who do just enough to get by, and how that hurts them if they're a writer. I'll admit I was one of those people in high school. High school contained little that I was interested in and less that was actually useful. I learned some things, sure, but that was a minority of what was presented, and I learned a lot more on my own. Ignoring homework to read or write might not have been great for my GPA, but I think it was the right choice in the long run, even if I didn't make that choice for such great reasons at the time. It's easy to get into the habit of doing as little as possible, though, and feel good about getting away with that. Maybe that's not so bad if you're a minimum-wage slave, but when you're doing something you really want to do, and transition to working for yourself (as all freelance writers do, essentially) then the cliche about "You're only cheating yourself" becomes very true. This essay made me think about my own habits, how they've changed over the years and how they haven't. In some ways, I bust my butt when I'm working for someone else (and always have, even with that first minimum wage retail job) but in others I'm good at doing as little as possible so I can get on to the good/fun/interesting stuff. Being conscious of that means I'm applying my highly developed "efficiency" skills where they'll actually do the most good, rather than applying them reflexively.

Number five is about following the crowd, something I've never been very good at, even if I wanted to. Probably just as well, but this is another area where I'd prefer to be able to do some "crowd following" type things -- consciously and with forethought, of course. I'm probably better off with my inner writer being stubbornly unable to, though. If you find yourself thinking, "I'd better write this, or I should write like that, because that's selling," this essay is for you.

The sixth essay talks about how writers become indispensable to their genre or subgenre, and what Kris means by that. This is one of those things you can't just do -- it's not like finishing a novel, or taking a class in how to design covers. Kris gives seven tips you can follow to give yourself the best possible chance of being one of the indispensable writers in your genre, but like success itself, all you can do is prepare, and make sure that when it starts raining soup, you're standing outside with a pair of goggles and a big bucket.

Number seven is about how fast and early success can hurt you. Not something I have to worry about :) but it's an interesting read. Having great success right off the bat sounds like a great upside risk to have to deal with, but it is a risk, and thinking about how to handle it is worth some cogitation time. And I think a lot of this applies to great success no matter when it comes; it's easy to fall into the traps she discusses, no matter when that sudden boost comes.

Number eight is about major life rolls -- some catastrophic event, like a major illness, a death in the family, a house fire, a divorce, things that happen that feel like a knife in the gut -- and how they affect your writing (along with the rest of your life.) You might not recognize that what happening is affecting you until later. Kris gives an example of how this happened to her and she didn't recognize it until months later. It happened to me in 2012, when my husband's retina tore. He needed two surgeries, months apart, and his doctor couldn't say whether his vision would go back to what it was before, or whether the surgeries would just keep it from getting any worse. Jim is legally blind and doesn't have any excess vision to play with, and I was a quiet wreck for most of that year. I was more than halfway through the year when I realized exactly why my writing had gone to hell, and accepted that it probably wasn't going to get any better until the crisis was over with. It was hard to come to that conclusion -- I had plenty of spare time, there seemed to be no logical reason why I couldn't write. I just... couldn't. Deciding not to beat myself up about it anymore (which just added to my stress) was the best decision I could've made. Good essay.

The ninth essay is about how letting the battles and bad attitudes of your fellow creatives suck you in and take up real estate in your brain can hurt you. From the sheer time lost following online flamewars (and I'll admit this is me, depending on the subject of the fight), to the slams and sneering and flaming echoing in your head and preventing you from writing what you want to write, your fellow writers can really poison the well.

Number ten is about believing in yourself and your work, and sticking up for yourself and for a book or story or series, for a genre or subgenre you want to write, for a style of writing that feels right to you, no matter who is telling you you're wrong. Kris gives some great examples -- The Phantom Tollbooth, The Cat in the Hat, and Starship Troopers, of books that would've never been published if the writers had listened to their agents or editors, books that went on to become genre-changing classics.

Number eleven is related to number ten -- it's more about sticking up for yourself, but specifically about clearing people who are actively obstructing you out of your life and work. Kris talks about the example of Sally Field, who'd had success on TV playing Gidget, a vapid airhead, and similar roles like The Flying Nun. Now she wanted to move into movies, but her agents, her business manager and her husband all told her that she wasn't pretty enough and wasn't good enough.

Field's response? "You're fired."

You're fired.

She didn't bow her cute little head and listen to their advice. She didn't let them bully her. She left her agents, her manager, and her husband (who agreed with them). She ends the anecdote with this:

[That time] was like 'Out! All of you!'

Four very important words.

Out! All of you!

All of you who don't believe, who offer bad advice under the cloak of good advice. Who recommend that something innovative get tossed because it's unusual. Better to blend in, better to be like everyone else. All of you who are afraid of risks. You--out!

There's more. This is one of my favorite of Kris's essays.

The last essay is about figuring out what kind of writer you are, what kind you want to be. It can take some time, and our early guesses can easily be wrong. Or we might change somewhere along the line. This is about exploring the territory, trying things on for size, tasting what the field has to offer rather than just deciding that the one thing we've been munching on all along is our favorite by default. I've known a lot of writers who seem to be so paranoid that they might be falling behind that they dash as fast as they can down the first road they hit -- the first genre or even subgenre they start writing, or the first one they have some success with -- that they don't even look at all the other possible paths, much less explore any of them. "Oh, no, I'll just keep doing what I do best!" is, in my opinion, one of the saddest things a writer can ever say. Also, as Kris says:

If you look at what you're doing bit by bit, piece by piece, you'll probably end up with the same kind ofhybrid that I have. A bit of traditional here, some indie there, a little self-publishing in the middle. You might end up with a preference ... and that preference might remain the same for the rest of your career.

Or it might not.

The message I get is to stay aware. Aware of what's out there, and aware of what you're doing -- all of it. It's easy to dismiss or overlook that little side project, or that "not really published" stuff you do on your blog for six years, or non-fiction that doesn't really count because... why again?

And aware of what's going on in your own head. That's really what this whole book is about -- being awake and aware of what you think and what you believe, and how it affects what you do and how you do it. There's a lot of good stuff here, enough to reward several readings at intervals. Highly recommended.

Managing Your Inner Artist/Writer by M.L. Buchman(s)

Managing Your Inner Artist/Writer by M.L. Buchman(s)

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

SECTION I THE BASICS

Chapter 1 Working with Your Inner Artist...
Chapter 2 Project Defined
Chapter 2A Four-stage Project View and the Artist
Chapter 3 Goal Basics
Chapter 4 Finding Your Big Goal
Chapter 4A Exploring for Your Big Goal
Chapter 4B Achieving Your Goal
Chapter 5 What About All Those Other GoalS

SECTION II TAKING IT UP A NOTCH

Chapter 6 Time Management Part I
Chapter 7 Working with Your Inner Artist Part II

SECTION III MAKING IT PRACTICAL

Chapter 8 Time Management Part II
Chapter 9 Risk Management
Chapter 10 The Action Plan
Chapter 11 Working with Your Inner Artist Part III

SECTION IV TAKING IT HOME AND OWNING IT

Chapter 12 Core Principles: why you do what you do
Chapter 13 Project Block
Chapter 14 Working with Your Inner Artist: a few final words

Matt and Melitte Buchman are siblings, both in artistic professions. Matt is a bestselling romance writer and Melitte is a successful photographer. Matt also spent many years working as a professional project manager before he moved into writing full time. This book is about managing the business end of a career in the arts, how to balance art and business, and how your business persona can communicate with your artist persona without bringing the creative process to a screeching halt.

One of the things I like about this book is that it gives two points of view. Usually the writers agree about a given point, more or less, but not always completely, emphasizing that there's no one right way to do things. And the writers warn the reader right up front that not every tool works for every artist. That goes for organizational and management tools too, and a reader who feels iffy about any of their suggestions should absolutely skip it. I find this refreshing; too many how-to writers try to claim that their way is not only the best way, it's the only way that works, and doing things any other way is a horrendous mistake that will cause you to become a huge, sad failure so you'd better do things their way. To which I eyeroll and move on. The Buchmans have a very realistic view of how the world works, and I appreciate that.

Another thing I like about it is the approach it takes of getting into completely different mindsets for writing (or whatever art you do) and managing/organizing. It really is like being two different people. You have to be practical and organized to handle the business end of writing, but your creative brain (or mine, anyway) isn't terribly practical and doesn't take very kindly to being organized. As a writer, the idea of putting on different personas, and thinking the way a particular character would think, actually feels pretty natural, so the approach this book takes resonates with me.

The Buchmans talk about separating these two personas, letting the inner artist be creative and play, and letting the manager organize time and space for the artist to play in, and make sure the artist has what they need to have fun with. They say:

The big key here is keep your business-person practical-self out of your playspace. The playspace is the giant room filled with just the neatest stuff on the planet. The workspace is a nasty, dark, evil quagmire that your artist-self wants nothing to do with under any circumstances.

Yeah, that sounds about right. :)

Chapter 2A talks about the four stages of a project, and what problems you might have if you're particularly strong or weak in any of the stages. We don't usually think of being strong in something as a problem, but it certainly can be, and one strength-problem resonated with me. Talking about the "Start/Initiate" stage, the authors say:

If you're too strong here:

..You have a HUGE file of ideas, none of which are done.

Umm, yeah, that's me. I have a huge file of ideas, plus I have more story starts than I want to admit to sitting on my hard drive. I'm fabulously skilled at starting stories. I could come up with story ideas all day. I could totally do that challenge that some SF writer whose name I forget now did once, starting a new story every day for a year? Yeah, I could do that, no problem. And at the end of the year I'd have another 365 story files on my hard drive, but would've finished only a few of them.

The time management chapters have a lot of useful advice, from how to carve time out of your schedule, to analyzing how you work best as an artist so you can arrange your schedule to suit your inner artist, rather than trying to jam your inner artist into the cracks of your schedule. (Turns out I'm a sprint artist. "Typically deadline-driven adrenaline junkies, they do everything except their art until, in a flash and burst and flurry of excitement, they "climb Everest" at a dead run, and then grind right back to a halt." Yeah, that. Hey, it works....)

There's a lot of good stuff here. This is a short book, but densely packed with info, advice and examples. I'd recommend it for anyone working in an artistic profession, or an amateur artist trying to make some progress even if it's not their main occupation.

Writing Fantasy Heroes, ed. Jason M. Waltz

Writing Fantasy Heroes edited by Jason M. Waltz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a non-fiction anthology of writing advice from various fantasy authors:

"The Hero in Your Blood" by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
"The Heroic Will" by Cecelia Holland
"Taking a Stab at Writing Sword and Sorcery" by Ian C. Esslemont
"Writing Cinematic Fight Scenes" by Brandon Sanderson
"Watching from the Sidelines" by Cat Rambo
"Man Up: Making Your Hero an Adult" by Alex Bledsoe
"Two Sought Adventure" by Howard Andrew Jones
"Monsters -- Giving the Devils their Due" by C.L. Werner
"NPCs are People Too" by Jennifer Brozek
"Tropes of the Trade" by Ari Marmell
"So You Want to Fight a War" by Paul Kearney
"Shit Happens in the Creation of Story" by Glen Cook
"The Reluctant Hero" by Orson Scott Card

This is a decent book, and I learned a couple of things from it. I think my major disappointment was that it was focused more narrowly than I was expecting. When you say "fantasy heroes," I think of all kinds of protagonists in all kinds of fantasy. In actuality, in this book, most of the contributors interpreted "fantasy heroes" to mean hulking Conan types, the big, barbarian hero who swings a sword and hacks limbs off of bad guys. Okay, that's one kind of hero, but there are a lot of others, most of whom weren't addressed at all.

Orson Scott Card's chapter stepped away from the mighty-thewed barbarian, but even reading that one, I had the impression that it was only a small slice of what he had to say. His chapter was entitled "The Reluctant Hero," and that's where he focused, but he mentioned a couple of other sorts, and I came away with the feeling that I was missing a lot of info. (Much of which is included in Card's other writing books -- he gives great writing advice.)

Paul Kearney's chapter, "So You Want to Fight a War" was useful at the level of how to organize a war at the classic fantasy tech level, so although it wasn't about writing heroes per se, it was still one of my favorite chapters.

Cat Rambo's "Watching from the Sidelines" discusses how and why to write from the POV of a character who's not the one hacking and casting. It's an interesting viewpoint and let me see how that kind of "from the sidelines" POV could be effective in telling a story, so good stuff there.

If you write classic sword and sorcery type fantasy, there's a lot of good, useful stuff here. In general, though, I would wish that the editor had made sure that a broader selection of hero types were discussed. Either that, or made it more clear in the title and/or marketing blurb exactly where the general focus of the book was going to be. My star rating reflects more the marketing disconnect and the disappointment I felt with the narrow range of focus than with the quality of the book over all. For me, as a writer who writes different kinds of fantasy, it was decent but not great. I don't regret reading it; I just wish it had been labelled more clearly.

Becoming an Every Day Novelist by J. Daniel Sawyer

Becoming an Every Day Novelist by J. Daniel Sawyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a few novels under my belt, but I'm always interested in what other writers have to say about the writing process. You never know when someone else is going to come up with some tricks, tips, or points of view that might come in handy, or make you think about something in a new way. And sometimes, even when you already knew something, hearing it restated can make you take another look at it, or just remind you of something you haven't thought about for a while.

There's a lot of that in Dan Sawyer's Becoming an Every Day Novelist.

The book is organized as 30 days' worth of advice, with the idea that you'll be writing a novel in 30 days. You might be doing NaNoWriMo, or you might be doing your own personal novel-in-a-month challenge, or maybe you just want some help getting your head down and developing the work habits and work pace that'll give you a shot at becoming a full time fiction writer. However you're coming at this, I think you'll find a lot of value in how Dan presents the material.

Each day's advice is tailored to where you probably are in your novel, if you're reading along as you write. There's info on how to get started, what elements you need (beginning with the "a character, in a setting, with a problem" approach), how to handle sections that are often problematic (getting through the middle, powering up to the climax, finding your ending), and discussions on how to carve out the time to write every day, what to do when life prevents you from writing for a while, and how to keep your writing habit from destroying various parts of your body.

[There are some minor glitches here and there, some spellcheckitis, and one really obvious formatting oops, but nothing that makes a line or paragraph hard to understand, which is what's really important. Not enough to deduct a star for.]

There was a lot here I was familiar with (Dan and I have some of the same mentors) but reading it was valuable anyway, and I expect to reread this at least once or twice. Good stuff -- highly recommended.

SF Workshop

I spent last week at a science fiction workshop taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It was freaking awesome, and if she offers it again (probably not for a couple of years) I strongly urge any writer who's into SF to dive in.

We started on 1 January, which is when Kris sent us a reading list:

Asimov's SF Magazine, the Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr issues
Women of Futures Past Anthology
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas 2016
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1
Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation
Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

There were some people in the class (out of fourteen students) who were writers but weren't familiar with SF, so one of the reasons for doing the reading was to get everyone on the same page about what SF is. A lot of people who try to use SF in their writing (like pretty much every single romance writer whose "futuristic romance" I've ever tried [sigh]) seem to think that if you watch Star Wars and Star Trek, there you go, you know all about SF and are ready to write it. Not so much. So reading all the anthologies and a couple issues of Asimov's gave us all some common ground. We took some time at each evening session to talk about one of the books/magazines, what we liked or didn't like, what surprised us. That also let us see how people's tastes differ.

A couple of weeks before the workshop, we got a story assignment. One of Kris's pet peeves with SF is aliens who are just humans with weird foreheads. (Glancing back at folks who think Star Trek will teach you everything you need to know about SF.) So she linked us to the Oregon Coast Aquarium's web site and asked us to write an SF story with a really alien alien, inspired by something on the Aquarium's site. I wanted to go way alien :) so I paid particular attention to the invertebrates. I read the description for the giant rock scallop, and noted how the baby scallops are free swimming, and move by clapping their shells together and spraying jets of water. Then when they grow up, they cement themselves to a rock and live there for the rest of their lives. Add in the moon snail, another mollusc, which has a tongue that can drill through shells and rocks. I got an image of a hollowed-out asteroid covered in scallops, and baby scallops flapping and jetting away into space. Everything else followed from there, and I ended up with a fun story that got great comments from Kris. It's currently out with a magazine editor. [crossed fingers]

We wrote three more stories while at the workshop -- we had one due every other day, starting when we turned in the Aquarium-alien story on Saturday -- plus we read everyone else's stories, plus we had other, smaller assignments. Plus if we messed up on the smaller assignments [ducks, raises hand] they came back covered in red comments, with "Redo" at the top. I ended up redoing three or four assignments.

It turns out I kind of suck at putting really concrete details in my work. This is important with most fiction, but particularly with SF, because the reader can't take anything for granted. If you're writing something contemporary, you might have your character enter a barn. Okay, we all know what a barn looks like. But do we really? There's the classic red barn, but some are white, some are brown, some are corrugated steel. Some are multi-story, with a hay loft like the classic barn in kids' books, but some are lower. Some are long and wide, some are compact. So if you just have your character walk into "a barn" with no details, the reader will visualize a barn, filling in those details for you. Maybe they'll match the details in your head, but probably not. So if you imagine a barn with a basement or other sub level, and mention it twelve pages later, the readers who didn't imagine a barn with a basement will be all, "Wait, what?!" Or if your barn has a main floor and some side areas, plus an equipment room, and a room with tools where stuff is repaired, but your reader was imagining just one big room, then again, they'll have a huge disconnect that'll throw them out of the story if your character starts going from room to room later on.

So if you just say "a barn" in your story, that's a fake detail.

And that's with a barn. Everyone knows what a barn is, even if the details can differ. What if your character boards a starship? Or a space station? Or is walking around on an alien planet? What does that look like? You have to be even more thorough about describing everything, using concrete sensory details, because the reader can't fill in details for you.

So for our first technique assignment, we had to describe an alien space station. We were to write five paragraphs, each one using details coming from only one sense. Here's what I wrote for the first two senses:

=====

Sight -- Alicia's first impression of the Nonapus station was that it was dark. Well, of course; sight was a minor sense for them. Nonapus stations weren't bright for the same reason Human stations ween't tasty. The water that filled the corridors and chambers was just slightly chilly, and full of tiny particulates that made it impossible to see, even with a light, much beyond the length of her arm.

Touch -- Most of the station walls were smooth. There were no floors or ceilings as such; the Nonapus have been starfaring for millenia, and the main difference between a wall and a floor or ceiling was gravity. The Nonapus expected everyone to hang on to or push off from whatever's handy, and avoid dangerous or delicate equipment as a matter of course. All controls required a firm push or pull or twist; brushing up against something was done casually while moving around, and was supposed to be perfectly safe.

=====

Not bad, huh? I was pretty pleased with them when I wrote them (in a frantic hurry, but anyway). Actually, they suck. :P This was my first non-story assignment, and it came back covered with big red "Fake!" notes all over it, and a red "Redo" at the top. A few days later, I redid it:

=====

Sight -- The only light inside the Nonapus station came from tiny, glowing white jellyfish that swam through the water, expanding and contracting in a rhythm that made it look like they were dancing, their legs rippling in time like ribbons in wind. The passageways were tubular, too narrow for a human to stand up in; it made Alicia feel cramped, and a little claustrophobic. Everything was shades of grey; there was no color anywhere, not even on her fellow refugees. They'd all been given clothes that could stand up to weeks in the water. The plain, stretchy coveralls were comfortable enough, but their uniform grey made them blend in with the walls, and the rest of the humans, as though they were all ghosts haunting the place.

Touch -- The walls were mostly smooth, some sort of soft plastic, with patches and strips of texture on them. used the way humans would use signs. Rough and smooth and sharp, with and against the grain of the ridges -- all the different textures meant something, and Alicia knew she'd have to learn them. Swimming through the ship, she brushed against the jellyfish, couldn't help it, because they streamed and clustered everywhere. These didn't sting, like the ones on the beach at home, so she could touch them if she wanted. Their little round bodies were slick, like they were coated in gel. Their legs -- or were they arms? -- slid through her fingers like limp, flat pasta, light and smooth and rippling.

=====

Much better. I got a lot more "Good" notes on that one. See how things are much more concrete, more grounded on sensory details?

I need to learn to do this in my stories. Right now, it's hard. It's not something I do automatically yet. When I'm writing, in creative mode, when story's just flowing, it doesn't automatically flow with concrete sensory details. If I think about it, and consciously put those details in as I write, I slip into critical mode, which makes the writing kind of suck. (It has great sensory details, though. :P )

"Creative Mode" and "Critical Mode" are concepts Kris and Dean use in all their writing workshops. I think I've talked about them before, but just for drill, writing in creative mode (or in creative voice, or with your creative brain) is writing the way your brain produces story. The focus is on the story, not the craftsmanship. Your creative brain (your storytelling brain) has been absorbing story since you were pre-verbal, when your parents told you stories, sang you songs with stories, let you watch TV and movies with stories. If you're forty, you've been absorbing story for about 39.8 years of that. :)

Critical mode is when your focus is on the mechanics. If you're thinking about spelling and grammar and punctuation, and about how the plot's going to go and whether your characterization is right and how to format your dialogue and whether your transitions work, you're in critical mode. This is your inner English teacher speaking. Your inner English teacher kind of sucks at storytelling; they're focused on all the fiddly details, and they tend to lose track of the story itself, which is what readers read for. Your critical brain has only been learning to write since you started to learn reading and writing skills, which for most of us was first grade. So your critical brain is about six years behind your creative brain when it comes to learning how to write.

Your creative voice is always a better storyteller than your critical voice.

I know we all worry about how our stories look at the line level, but seriously, if you're going to publish something, whether you go tradpub or indie, cleaning up all the little crap is what an editor is for. If your story is great, a copyeditor can clean up your spelling and grammar and fix your comma glitches. There you go -- clean story. If your story sucks, then even if your mechanics are absolutely a hundred percent perfect, the story is still going to suck. A fiction writer's focus should be on storytelling, in creative mode.

Of course, we want to absorb all the mechanics skills too. And we do. It takes a while, but if we work on it, eventually we'll load a new skill into the back of our brain. This is where the stuff that's become automatic goes. For example, you probably don't have to think about putting a period at the end of a declarative sentence, or getting your subjects and verbs to agree. Those are things you had to learn at some point, but then you got to know them well enough that they became automatic, and you don't have to think about them anymore. All your mechanics skills can be loaded into that same part of your brain, where they become automatic, as you work on them.

So I need to work on using concrete sensory details when I write. I'll probably do more exercises like the ones Kris gave us, and work on that until it's easy and automatic. It'll eventually show up in my creative-mode writing, without my having to stop and think about every damn word. :/ For right now, it's annoying, but I'll get it soon enough.

A lot of us in the class were having trouble with concrete details, so most of our small assignments through the week were focused on that skill. I got a lot better at it just in that week, and so did the others.

One of the things I learned last week was that I can write a truly amazing amount of fiction in one week. I was actually pouring it on from Friday through Friday, so eight days, but in that eight days I wrote 38,790 words of fiction -- four stories, two of them over 9K words, plus a bunch of bits and pieces of fiction in the smaller assignments. Just the stories totaled 30,893 words.

I've never done that before. I've written just over 20K words in a week, three times, since I've started keeping track. I've never come anywhere near 30K in a week before. O_O It's intensely frustrating. I've known for a while that I'm intensely deadline driven, and that it has to be a deadline set by someone else, with real-world consequences. Knowing that if I flake out on a story, I'll be walking into a room full of people I know, with no story to turn in? That provides an amazing amount of motivation to write like crazy, and finish a story. I can't do that for myself. I can't even do it for, say, an anthology I'd like to submit for. If I've promised a story to an editor, then that works -- having an editor get annoyed with me and have to scramble to find another writer to write something to fill the spot in the book I was supposed to fill is enough of a real-world consequence to get my writing in gear. But just, "Hey, that's a cool anthology, it closes next Friday, I'd like to write a story for it," isn't enough. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. :/ Very annoying. It's purely a mental block, but knowing that doesn't help.

It was bad enough before, knowing I can write 20K words in a week if I want to. Now I know I can write almost twice that if I'm properly motivated, which makes it that much more frustrating. Heck, I'd love to do 10K words a week. That's half a million words a year, even taking two weeks for vacation. :P

Coming up toward the end of last week, I planned to see if I could keep the momentum going. But around the middle of the workshop, Thursday or so, I started getting a bit of a tickle in my throat. Luckily it stayed at that very low level through the workshop, but as soon as I got home, I fell into bed, and when I woke up I had a raging cough, sore throat, and stuffed up nose. :( It's tough to think about writing, or much of anything else, when it's hard to breathe. I'm starting to feel more human, so we'll see how the writing goes next week.

If nothing else, I had an awesome April. :)

And seriously, Kris does a couple of genre workshops per year. If I had the money, I'd sign up for everything that's currently scheduled. (No, I don't get any kick-backs or discounts for reccing the workshops; I just think they rock.) She's teaching a Mystery workshop in September, and a Fantasy workshop next April. She's done Romance and Alternate History before. I think she did Thrillers once? I'd love to take all of them. Kris is a slave driver, but damn, it works!

Awesome workshop. Highly recommended.

Angie

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Mystery writer Cristy Fifield wrote a great post on the subject of social fears versus the best path to achieving your goals. She uses an example from basketball, about how taking free throws underhanded, or "granny style," scores more points than throwing overhand, but most players throw overhand because it's cool, and they think granny shots make them look dorky. They want to look cool (and NOT look dorky) more than they want to score points for their team. Which is all messed up if you think about it.

It's a great post, with some interesting links, and the point of it all definitely applies to writers. Check it out. (Scroll down a bit after you click through to the page.)

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

Block on Collaboration

I'm currently reading Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which is a great book on writing, a collection of his Writer's Digest columns from the seventies. There's a lot of good advice and enlightening ruminations in it, but one bit (of what I've read so far) made me laugh.

In "Writing with Two Heads," the chapter on collaboration, he says:

Here's [Donald E.] Westlake's description of the process: "First we sat down and discussed the whole thing at length. Then I wrote a fifteen-page outline of what we had discussed. I gave this to Brian [Garfield], and he expanded it to forty pages, putting in all the historical context and everything. Then he gave it back to me and I cut it back down to twenty-five pages. At this point we were thinking screenplay, and this version was shown around as a treatment. When it didn't fly, we decided to do it as a novel first.

"I wrote the first draft, limiting myself to action and dialogue -- not where they were or what they were wearing, just what they did and said. My draft ran about thirty thousand words. I gave it to Brian and he doubled it, turning each of my pages into two pages, putting in all the background and such. Then he gave me his sixty-thousand-word version and I edited it, and I gave it back to him and he edited it, and then we gave the whole mess to an editor."

"It sounds," I ventured, "like five times as much work as sitting down and writing a book."

"Yes," he agreed, "and about a quarter as much fun, and for half the money."

I've never collaborated with anyone on anything I/we intended to publish. When you're focused on the product, and thinking about how readers will like it and react to it, it does seem like the process could become rather fraught, and tempers might flare. Any writer I'd care to collaborate with is someone I'd like to remain friends with, you know?

I've done collaborations for fun, where about ninety percent of the point was the process rather than the product. Another word for this is "playing," and you can do it with two or more people in a chat room, or e-mailing each other. Everyone is playing a character, and you go back and forth, typing what your character is saying/doing. (Yes, it's pretty much exactly like kids playing Batman or cowboys or cops-n-robbers, although hopefully the folks in the chat room write better than eight-year-olds.) With the right people, and the right characters and set-up, this can be a blast and a half. I've participated in this kind of collaborative writing in stories that went on for years. We posted them online as we went and hardly anyone read them, but that wasn't the point. Hanging with friends and having fun developing characters and creating story was the point, and the fact that hardly anything produced this way is worth publishing commercially is completely irrelevant.

Some writers collaborate a lot, and they've clearly figured out a way to make the product worth whatever aggravation the process causes. Or maybe they've worked out a process is smooth and efficient, in which case I'd love to read about it.

Angie