It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Jan 10, 2011′
A new year. Time for resolutions, right?
Right. Except that a few years back I resolved to no longer make resolutions. Ironically, it’s one of the few I ever wound up keeping. Instead, I use this wonderfully arbitrary and booze-infused time of year to make plans. Because, really, is there a better time to make serious plans than when you’re halfway through a bottle of scotch?
This coming year, I’ve got a very aggressive schedule for podcasting, writing, and producing trans-media projects (and yes, I know I haven’t dropped a podcast episode in six weeks — but they are coming, and what’s coming is pretty big).
Underlying all of the goals is the word count. I’m aiming to make at least a thousand words a day for the year, for a total of 365k words for the year. Marathon pace, but everything else depends on it. To that end, I’m going to be installing word count meters and updating them daily (at least on weekdays), so that, should I fall behind, I can at least do it in public where my humility can entertain others.
And, for those that might be interested, I’ll post little tidbits that I discover along the way, and updates on what’s coming out for public consumption in the near future.
So, here’s the metrics as of this evening:
Malice Aforementioned (short)
Free Will (Antithesis, book 2)
The Auto Motive
As you might be able to tell by the title, I’m fed up with a number of the stock, boring, and stupid plots that get dressed up as “Science Fiction,” though they also show up in other forms in series drama. These tropes represent the functional equivalent of training wheels for writers, exhibit an appalling lack of creativity, and they’re really insulting to the audience.
Also, they’re fun to rant about.
So, for the first entry in this series: Plots that depend on thinly-justified character derailment.
Continue reading ‘TV SF Tropes That Need To Die, pt 1′
Time for your vegetables again — these are some of the highlights of my research journeys hither and yon in the great wasteland of cyberspace. Hope you enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 12/27/10′
The following is intended for other writers working to find their stride. I hope something in the following meanderings is useful to you as you hash out your process.
Fall is crazy, right? Halloween, Thanksgiving, School restarting, Christmas, RenFaire, Dickens Faire, conventions, festivities, and all those bleeding birds nesting in my trees and eating my pears, it’s enough to make one want to accept exile to an obscure Italian island.
After my writing binge this summer, I’ve been caught perpetually in the feeling that I’m wading through treacle, and it’s been driving me bonkers. Too much time on the road, too much Real Life ™ getting in the way, not enough time podcasting, or writing, or doing any of the half dozen other things that are in the top five of life priorities.
Continue reading ‘That Plateau Feeling is an Illusion’
It’s NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, when many of you who don’t normally write will be trying to write a short novel in 30 days (and some of you who normally do will try to get a jump start on projects that need doing).
Generally people find it easy to start a novel, not so easy to keep it going after the initial burst of action and setup. The reason is that concepts are easy. Sustaining them, particularly when you’re not practiced at it, is hard.
Concept
Concepts are the easy part. Here are a the concepts for four of my novels (three you might recognize, one is in the works:
“The National Security Advisor escapes a contract on his life by leaving the planet.”
“A group of bohemian artists gets buried in an avalanche.”
“A soccer mom hires a surly private detective to find her missing daughter.”
“On her first night in her new apartment, a woman’s car is stolen only to be returned in the morning.”
This is your elevator pitch, stripped down to its bare essentials. It’s what is technically known as your “inciting incident,” and it’s where most people start a story: an idea that can be described in a single, action-oriented sentence.
When Concepts Run Out
If you’ve got a good strong concept, it’s easy to barge into your new novel with all the confidence in the world, right up until you hit a hard wall and can’t write anymore. The story just doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
We all hit this wall at some point. Some of us hit it with every book. Some of us write short fiction splendidly, but can’t quite ever do novels, because the mystical power of sustaining action eludes us.
Well, I can give you the secret to the mystical power. All you need are the Six Magic Words.
Six Magic Words
There are six magic words that you can append to the end of any concept sentence that transforms the idea from something appropriate for a short story, a sketch, or a prose poem into one that is more appropriate for a novel. Those words are:
“…and then everything goes to hell.”
Why?
It gives you a bridge into act two. Your concept is act 1 of the traditional five act story structure. Act two is “complication,” which can be hard to get into once you’re done with all the setup. You have your scene set, and now, for drama to proceed, you have to break something. You don’t want to, cause it’s beautiful. Or you can’t figure out what to break, because you don’t know what will happen. But if everything goes to hell, your life is simpler. You can break everything, see what works, then fix the things you didn’t need to break or that get in the way of the story. Or you can stagger the order in which things break. You have options–but you don’t have to pick between them right away.
Which gives you the freedom to plunge on writing.
I’m not the first to come up with this — most writers have their version. My favorite was Raymond Chandler’s answer when a fan asked him “How do you beat writer’s block?”
He said: “Someone with a gun comes through the front door. By the time I figure out who they are and why they’re there, the story is moving again.”
Happy writing!
Welcome to the second of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode ten, part two of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty Nic’Iaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:
Food
Pacing
Screenplays
Chekov
Soulless
Racism and bigotry in the Victorian world
Douglas Adams
Thomas Mann
Cultural change throughout history
The Death of the Author
Focault
Deride
Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
POV characters
George R.R. Martin
Neal Stephenson
Shakespeare
Employing Symbolism in writing
Tee Morris
An editor friend of mine recently asked me what I would consider an ideal rejection letter, if I were a hopeless writer with delusions of adequacy and no command of grammar. (I’m pretty sure the “If I were” bit was a ruse to make her think she wasn’t talking about me, so I actually expect to receive the below letter in the mail in the next couple weeks).
Since I enjoy being entertained (even while having my manuscripts torn up), I suggested something which I would be proud to hang on my wall for the sheer conversation-starting value.
So, here is my ideal rejection letter for completely hopeless writers:
Dear [writer],
Thank you for your submission. While we do not think it advisable for you to commit suicide this early in your career, your writing displays the kind of promise and angst that have made unknowns like Sylvia Plath, Anne Frank, and John Kennedy Toole into posthumous best-sellers. These writers made the crucial mistake of dying with only one or two books to take the world by storm–don’t let yourself fall into that trap!
Unfortunately, our policy only permits us to publish fiction in your genre after your scandalous death, so we encourage you to build up your backlist and contact us again when you feel you have said your piece.
Sincerely,
[editor]
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go to the mailbox to check for today’s round of rejection slips.
What are some of the best rejections you’ve given, gotten, or heard of? Chime in in the comments!
In Peter David’s Star Trek Novel Q-Squared (which is a damn good book that stands well on its own merits), Picard gets pretty damn huffy at Q for being arrogant, as Picard is wont to do. Q replies:
“Picard, I could blast this ship out of existence if I felt like it. I could grow hair on your head. Turn your crew into embryos, force Worf to recite doggerel. I could turn your ship inside out, your reality outside in. I am not being condescending, Picard… not that I’m incapable of it, you understand, but this simply isn’t one of the times. Now, what I most definitely am, Picard, is arrogant. Why? Because I have a reason to be. I have a right to be. So… mortal… what’s your excuse?”
Continue reading ‘They Were Here First’
If you want the background for this post, check The Binge post for a description of my recent unintentional astronomical word count adventure. Short version: I wrote one hundred twenty three thousand words in fifty days. Yow.
So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days?
Plenty.
What do you need to know if you’re gonna try for this kind of marathon?
Try these on for size:
First, as you can read in my post about the health problems I developed as a result of crappy Microsoft workmanship, ergonomics are everything. You can actually seriously damage your arms, hands, and wrists if you don’t move around regularly, have a comfortable keyboard, and pay attention to your body. Being in a groove is no excuse.
Second, food. I tried a variety of different styles of eating throughout the ordeal, mostly motivated by whatever I could think to put in the kitchen that week. What I wound up discovering surprised me. I expected to want junk food—pre-prepared high calorie, high density, high-protein, ultra-tasty nibbles supplemented with fruits and finger-friendly vegetables. However, it turned out that I gravitated toward made-from-scratch fare. I actually learned to make wood-oven pizza, sourdough from scratch, knishes, and a few other things during this time, and not just because they were tasty. It’s because it gave me something else to do.
Continue reading ‘Writing Odyssey: Lessons Learned’
By the time I finish writing this article, I’ll have written 123,000 words in fifty days. The output constitutes two short-book-length works (one novel, one reference work), nine blog posts, two commissioned articles, and some odds and ends of work on another novel.
For the first half of the duration, I did it by accident. So, I thought it might be worth something to those of you who write or want to if I documented the experience.
Continue reading ‘Writing Odyssey: The Binge’
Call for submissions on a new blog series, open to all authors and podcasters:
Most of us have moments in films or books that put us in tears, and for a lot of people, those moments are pretty predictable. Tell someone Old Yeller made owning a dog painful for you when you were a kid, and everyone understands.
But sometimes, it’s the unexpected moments that get you. Reach up and bite you out of nowhere in an otherwise frivolous film or book that’s not meant to do anything other than thrill or amuse you. I’ve had a few of these, and I bet a bunch of you have too.
So here’s what I want to do: I’d like those of you with something to pimp–a book release, a podcast, an album, a transmedia project–to send me your story. Give me a thousand words or so (or less) on the most unlikely movie, story, or song that made you cry, and what it taught you about your own preferred artform, if anything. Include a short bio with links to your work. I’ll put the stories up as guest blog posts, and hopefully we can generate more traffic for your projects while giving our audiences a unique glimpse into our bizarre creative processes.
Last night I had occasion to send an email to Spider Robinson, thanking him for his recent book Variable Star, a posthumous collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein. If you are unfamiliar with Spider’s work, or have not read Variable Star, you owe it to yourself to take a gander. All royalties from the book go to fund the Heinlein prize, which is a nice bonus, but really, the book is worth it on its own well apart from that. I reproduce part of the letter below, to give you a flavor for why.
Continue reading ‘An Open Letter to Spider Robinson’
Free content – particularly in the audio fiction space – suddenly seems a lot less of a perpetual free lunch than it did six months ago, and it’s got a lot of folks freaking out in my corner of the Internet. Providers are dropping like flies this year! Matthew Wayne Selznick and J.C. Hutchins have both very publicly withdrawn from the podcast fiction space, and for the best reason there is: Money.
[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]
The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”
Continue reading ‘If You Build It, Will They Come?’
Demographic disclosure: I am an American who likes good adult (note the lack of euphemistic quotation marks) entertainment, and I am disgusted and ashamed at what thirty years of cultural conservatism has done to my country. Perhaps I’d better back up and explain…
Continue reading ‘Blood, Guts, Breasts, and Insanity’
