writing

At one point, during Viable Paradise, we were assured by all present that short fiction venues would be closing down just as we sold pieces to them. We were not to deduce the demise of short fiction venues was in any way related to us, even if this closing happened on the very eve of their acceptance (or publication) of our work. Apparently these places open up and close at the drop of a hat, are notoriously difficult to succeed with and eke out their margins just this side of profitability most of the time. So I was saddened to note (via Merrie) that Lenox Avenue, whom I had hoped would one day publish me, is no more. I can’t take this ending as a signal from the universe to quit writing since Lenox Avenue had not accepted any of my work. I’d gotten only a positive rejection from them. Still, it’s pretty sad to see them go. They put out some great stories.

I finished “Olympus” two weeks ago (approx. 5600 words). And yes, it is still called “Olympus”. The wonderful first reader says he thinks it may lack meaning for anyone unfamiliar with the historical details. So, possibly, another story that will make my writer’s group say “Zuwha?” We shall see. Besides being a thing which I felt I had to write, I consider this a story in conversation with Jeff VanderMeer’s story “Flight Is For Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over“, which I read in his collection Secret Life. That sounds a lot more pompous than I meant it. It’s not that my story is on the same level as his or written with as much skill as his, it’s merely that it is informed by his and speaks to it. I liked his story, but it also annoyed me. If you followed the link and read the story (which is worth your time), you’ll discover in the afterword that “To accentuate the emphasis on his character, I removed any references to a particular country in the story.” He scrubbed his story clean of geographic specificity, details that I was looking for intently as I read because, as far as I’m concerned, where this happens informs character. Instead the absence of true place stripped the story of (some of its) emotional weight for me. When he made the location as well as the events fictional, I felt cheated, and a little angry. You will find, then, if you ever have a chance to read “Olympus” that it’s not even remotely abstract, and that it’s drenched in details of specific real physical spaces at specific real physical times. Setting is the first character in this story. Possibly, this doesn’t work, and that’s why VanderMeer made the choices that he did, but we all have to make our own mistakes.

I want to read more VanderMeer. He’s a talented writer. His prose is simultaneously dreamlike and evocative, his worlds strange but true. I didn’t love any of the stories in Secret Life so well as that first taste I got of him from “The Cage” (collected in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Vol. 14), which was an outstanding story. Nonetheless, most of the stories in Secret Life had great indelible moments. All but one or two I was happy to have read. Many of the pieces play with form in a way I very much admire. He has not one but two stories here in second person. One was far more convincing than the other, but both were deftly executed. He often touches on dreams, a topic I write about frequently as well, and which interests me.

I didn’t write anything last week, but I did spend a lot of time pondering the crunchier bits of YWGYSL. (Another thing we were told at Viable Paradise is that thinking about the work is legitimate. Sure, it looks to everyone else like you’re staring into space doing nothing when you claimed you would be writing, but it’s actual work and it counts as such.) One reader wanted to see the Coriolis effect, for example, since I have artificial gravity. Some of the crunch I had not thought out real well (I’m not about the hard SF, mostly) and other bits I had elided in the text but established concretely as part of the universe, and genre readers were unhappy with both positions. I was also vague about a lot of the geopolitics (though I had worked it all out, of course) and people kept assuming things that were not true because I had not told them exactly how all the pieces worked together. When I verbally explained them I got a mix of “Aha! You know exactly how these things work!” and “Noooooo, still not buying that.” This was part of what was frustrating about VP, contradictory feedback. At any rate, all that sociopolitical stuff was underpinnings and starting points to me, not part of the story, so I didn’t include it. I suppose I have a tendency to be secretive about backstory. In general, that might be useful, since the usual problem beginners have is dumping in too much backstory, but I have to learn what bits to reveal to keep people on board and happy and interested. I feel like I need to have much more of this established before I start on it again.

I think I’ve come to a useful phrasing for all those “avoid this” rules that are thrown at beginning writers (you know, “avoid passive voice”, “avoid adverbs”, “avoid using sentences that are too long or too short or all the same length”) and I think it’s this : instead of looking at it as avoiding a use, make sure any use is deliberate. If I’ve written a passive sentence just because that’s how it came off my fingers, that’s probably wrong. But if passive says exactly what I want it to, and if changing it around breaks it, then I mustn’t change it just to avoid the discouraged form. It’s just a focus shift that my contrarian nature finds more helpful than denial.

I’ve started a new story this week which is only 1500 words so far and is, as yet, untitled. I don’t know what shook loose at VP 9, but since I came back I find story ideas unpacking themselves in my mind from first glimmer to supernova at astonishing rates. A kernel idea drops into me and suddenly its unfolding or blowing itself up and it fills every available space and won’t let go until its written. Better than that, it pushes at me until it is finished. Well, maybe. Olympus did that and now the new story appears to be doing that as well, grabbing hold of me and demanding to be told and when I say “Wait I haven’t figured that piece out yet and why haven’t you got a title and what does this character lose and why is his name Jupiter (that’s the stupidest name ever) and are you really taking me to the horror gore on this one?” it says “Go, go, go.” and then it opens up some more and I say “Ooooh, pretty.” and I write it.

I haven’t done the fixes on HDYGG? yet, so I haven’t sent it out. I did not make the desired Halloween deadline. But maybe I’ll get it dressed up and out the door this week. I felt it so promising at first and now I’m starting to have doubts. It’s probably not spec. enough for the spec. fic. venues and too spec. for the non spec. venues.

Continue reading

It has just occurred to me that there are possibly potential readers of “How Does Your Garden Grow?” who might find it controversial. I’m glad the idea didn’t suggest itself to me in the writing, I might have been paralyzed by it. I have no desire to be controversial. The story was well-received when I concluded the reading of it this past Tuesday at my writer’s group. It took forever (five weeks, I think) because it clocks at a touch over 6,000 words, which in my opinion is way too long. Not a single person said “Zuwhaa?” which is the usual reception my stories get. A line was picked out by several people as particularly nice, and it was a line I liked as well, so that was gratifying. I was pleased by the reaction, content to change the small things people suggested altering and continue to feel optimistic about this story’s chances in the marketplace. Now to smooth out the rough edges and send it off to find itself a home. Still aiming at before Halloween as my deadline for submission.

The new story is hard. Its filename is “dreamsba” (Dreams B.A.) and I’m trying so carefully to get things right. I don’t think it is controversial, but I suppose it could surprise me. I have to face being an outsider – my natural state – and speaking with authority about things which I frequently think I am not entitled to speak on. Still, if the story asks me to tell it, I must tell it. That’s the pact between me and the storytelling well. I draw up the bucket and take the drink, but have no choice to turn down the tale I swallow. So here I am, with the untitled piece, which moves forward only about a hundred words or so a day but fills every corner of my brain, and which suggested to me just now that it wants to be called something mythological, like “Olympus”. “Olympus” is much too blatant, perhaps my brain can work up something subtler. I had hoped to finish it this week. That seems unlikely now, as Analía has not yet spoken to our protag (but soon will), and we’ve not even purchased the requisite plane ticket yet.

Oh. You’re probably waiting to hear about VP 9, huh? Well, it was great. Absolutely worth it. The instructors were very generous with their time and very accessible. I learned quite a lot, and have the feeling that more will be making sense as time goes on. I took copious notes, and if there were interest (this means you’d leave a comment if you wanted to hear in more detail about VP9) I could go into a chronology and the various and sundry bits of wisdom that I picked up. Jim McDonald’s plot lecture was invaluable, and I spent quite a bit of time with him and with Laura Mixon chewing over the nuts and bolts of YWGYSL’s plot. I’ve got lots of planning to do, and another from scratch rewrite probably, but I think I can make it work. I’m probably not going to have a completed novel by the end of the year, though, so there’s one goal broken.

One disappointment was that there was a mixup with my first and second draft, and three out of four instructors were critiquing the wrong draft. This even after I realized TNH had the wrong draft and asked another instructor, “Please make sure you have the right draft!” If it had been four out of four, I would have deduced that I did something wrong, but I think the mix up was at a different spot than me, which may make me guiltless but doesn’t make me any happier. Even so, I did get useful critique on both drafts. The original first scene, with Father John, was universally loved. Pity it’s got to go. On the other hand, if I can’t work it around to be a short story, that makes it good fodder for the website, so all of my blog readers may get to read it.

As usual, it was hard to get really consistent feedback. Regular workshoppers gave me a pretty uniform critique which I think may have been largely positive, though I immediately discard anything that isn’t brought up as a problem, so I can no longer be sure whether it was generally liked or not. However, the instructors (whom I was really paying attention to, of course) were all over the map. Specific things that were described as brilliant by some were categorized as terrible by others. It’s somewhat paralyzing in terms of fixing things, but I think by the end of the week I had sorted through a lot of the diametrically opposed information I was getting. It helped that I could go back and ask instructors to clarify and expand on what they’d said. Only Jim McDonald twigged to the Eden scene, and it was both strangely satisfying to have someone see the extra reference I’d shoveled in as well as gratifying to know it wasn’t so blatant that everyone picked up on it.

Just as I suspected, having a for real editor look at one of your manuscripts was one of the biggest possible advantages, the thing that not many other workshops can offer. The editor in my one-on-one session (Teresa Nielsen-Hayden) told me my copy was unbelievably clean. She insisted that were I able to see someone else’s manuscript I would be agog at how little marked mine was. I thanked her of course, but viewed such praise with suspicion (as is my nature) until I talked to other folks who were like “Did she do that line-editing thing? Can you believe how much scribbling is on your first three pages?” To which I had to admit uh, no, actually, mine was fairly free of notations. This is cause for much joy, because countless of the author blogs I read go on and on about the importance of turning in clean copy. Huzzah, I can tuck that happy little card into my winning hand.

TNH also told me not to worry about my long sentences (most reassuring, because I was getting exasperated with repeated iterations to the contrary), but to learn how to break out paragraphs. In light of what she said, I have finally realized that this is something I really need to master. Happily, adding paragraph breaks is something that my local writer’s group consistently helps me out with. I’m not sure why I have trouble telling where a paragraph ends or begins. It seems basic, something that people do on instinct, without thinking about it. When people add paragraph markers in my text I’m always like “Oh right, of course!” but when I’m writing I don’t seem to be able to see it so clearly. I never had trouble with that in school while writing essays and papers and such, so I’m not sure why I’m having trouble with it in fiction. Getting the paragraph right is critically important because TNH says that the paragraph is the basic unit of language in English. Right, you didn’t expect that, did you? Me neither. It’s not the word, not the sentence, but the paragraph. (I just added four paragraph breaks to the chunk about VP 9 so far, it had been just one thing to me until I read over it). The “aha!” moment granted to me by that small piece of information was worth the whole cost of the workshop. There were many, many of those moments, scattered throughout the week both specifically about my work and generically about the craft of writing.

If you’d like someone else’s view on Viable Paradise, one of my roommates wrote down a blow by blow of her week: part 1, part 2, part 3. I rate a couple of mentions, including the social engineering bit I did to get everyone to say their names in the opening round of Mafia on the first night. Legomancer, whose knowledge of games is deepest among my friends, tells me Mafia is more commonly known as Werewolf. It’s the sort of game I’m dreadful at, due to my complete inability to dissemble. I don’t play poker, either.

• What I learned and general impressions from Aryllian.
• An admission from VP: britzkrieg doesn’t like reading fantasy.
• sfharper is glad to be home.
• Flyby mentions (1 and 2) from the affable VPer I mentally tagged as “real estate guy”.
[As an aside, I found myself explaining about the mental tagging thing I do several times, which I found weird, because I was so convinced everyone does this. Maybe no one is fool enough to admit it?]
• A day by day roundup, most of which was written as it happened by one of the quietest people there: Going to VP, Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, and Day 5.
[Before you ask, my mental tag for her was smiling, tall woman with dark hair.]
• Reflections from Shadowmisty.
[tag : Canadian librarian (but she was colorful scarf wrapped around her hat woman first, then she quit wearing it). There were three of us librarians, and I think we formed the largest single profession block.]
• The workshop synthesized into a single and significant piece of advice by cicadabug, one of my favorite people present.
• What the workshop looks like if you’re an instructor or a different instructor or staff or the indispensable Kate.
• Picture posts from staff: people and scenic.
[Thanks, Carol! You can see me in all my sharpie-tattooed glory if you know where to look. At some point in the distant future you may be able to see some of the photos I took in our photo database but, you know, don't hold your breath. Also, I'm not in any of those because duh, I was taking them.]

iTunes says I was listening to Nobody Likes You from the album Taste the Blood of Zombina & the Skeletones by Zombina & the Skeletones when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

Continue reading

Rejection 2 arrived yesterday. Somehow I need to get more than one story circulating, so there’s still something out there when I get the smackdown. Was a very nice smackdown, by the way, at least as judged by fellow writers. I was told it was the next best thing to acceptance. Alas.

I did, however, turn the thing around and send it back out. Go, “Hindsight”, go! Find a home! Be free!

Continue reading

I fiddled and fiddled with an entry about Katrina, but some of the momentum has left me, and stuff kept changing faster than I could edit it to respond. That in itself says something. Earlier in the catastrophe things went so slowly that I could gather my thoughts and post and know what I said would still stand for days. I may still finish it out and post it but I may not. We’ll see.

This is a writing post, so if you find that kind boring consider yourself warned. I finished the story I was thinking of as “Ancient Gardener” but is now called “How Does Your Garden Grow?”. It’s very (don’t say boring, don’t say boring — uhhhhhhhh) basic. Even so, it’s extremely satisfying to have finished it, because it’s the first thing I’ve completed in weeks and weeks. In fact, August was mostly a wash for writing. I managed to send off a revised opening for “Yonder Wicket Gate, Yonder Shining Light” to VP but that was basically it. Most of those scenes were new, so it was writing work as much as it was revising work, but still, it wasn’t more than 8000 words or so.

Besides the satisfaction of completion with “How Does Your Garden Grow?”, I also feel like I can sell it. I don’t know why, exactly. It’s weird having those contradictory feelings: the feeling that it isn’t as good as much of the other stuff I have written mixed in with the certainty (completely unfounded, mind you) that I can sell this piece. It smells vaguely like literary fiction, although there’s definitely spec elements to it. It’s not magic realism, because the magic in it is weird and surprising to all involved. I’ve increasingly noticed, by the way, that people toss around the words “magic realism” without having any sort of idea what it means. A writer in my writer’s group claimed her story didn’t have to make sense because it was magic realism. I sputtered a bit in outrage, but I don’t think she noticed. I’ve also heard the term explained as “Latin American” which besides not being a particularly meaningful tag, probably discomfits Salman Rushdie a great deal, not to mention the neglect it gives to Gunter Grass.

I have to fix and revise “How Does Your Garden Grow” before anything else, but I’d like to be sending this around in a month or so. Before Halloween. “Hindsight” is back out searching for a home. It took me about a month to turn it around and send it out again. I need to be quicker than that.

I’m jumping ahead of myself a little, and trying to look back at the first year of writing already, even though I’m not to the end of it. I know I’ve not done as much nor as well as I wanted, and I’m a little concerned that when my self-imposed deadline is up, I won’t have gotten anywhere yet.

A writer friend and I had an interesting discussion last week, about the nature of the short story reader. She theorized that the average short story reader is not as intelligent as the average novel reader. I hadn’t ever considered the idea before, but it sounded a little off, if not outright backward, to me. Of course, neither one of us has any evidence to support either conclusion, but the interesting thing about our positions is that it reflects in the way we write. Her primary novel is convoluted, with twenty different plotlines and a cast of thousands that she manages adroitly. My current novel in progress is unidirectional, unlayered, with five major characters in a limited setting. On the other hand, I see short stories as an opportunity to play with form in a way that just isn’t possible or sustainable over a novel. I write most experimentally in short stories, figuring that a reader will tolerate much when it’s only three thousand words. Thus I feel free to write stuff in which not much happens, or in which there’s puzzles to be worked out, or in which there’s contraform ideas that play off against genre conventions. I enjoy using unreliable narrators, for example, or putting together a picture with fragmented bits of prose, like mosaic. I try things that are (to me) risky, like humor. Her short stories, however, are usually straightforward vignettes. Pieces that hang on a pivotal event and are played out in very closed circumstances. In essence, our somewhat opposed and unfounded preconceptions about the type of person who reads a format have guided the way we write in that format. Or perhaps, the way we write in a format has set our mind as to the reader we imagine for our words. Her short stories are generally better received than mine at our writer’s group, by the way, but of course, that’s not conclusive proof that her position is correct. After all, there’s lots of variables there, including that she may just be a better writer than I am overall.

A while back, Elizabeth Bear posted a really interesting treatise on talent in her journal. Some people say that writing requires talent, while others say it requires craft. Obviously those who believe the latter view writing ability as a form of democracy, achievable by anyone who works hard enough and long enough. Meanwhile, those in the former camp think that writing ability is, at the very bottom of the well, innate and that no amount of dressing up the words or repetition is going to get you there if you don’t have the gift. The Bear thinks it takes both. Good Las Vegas resident that she is, she compares writing to a deck of cards. “I suspect if one is going to make it as a writer,” she says,”one walks in with a free card. One thing you can do coming out of the gate. One aspect of the tremendous interwoven craft of writing that you’re naturally good at.” In that sense it’s all about talent. But after that, she explains, all the other cards you need to make your winning hand, you have to work for. This metaphor makes a lot of sense to me. Her freebie was characters, but she counted five other cards she had to master before she was published. She also counted things she was still working at. Of course this got me thinking about my own freebie (because obviously, I think I have some talent). At first I was unsure about what came first, because I’ve been writing for so long. I think the freebie I got was voice. The thing people tell me most often about my writing is that they were right there, inside the person’s head. People use the word “compelling” to describe things I write with a frequency that seems more than coincidental. They are pulled along by the tide of the character’s thoughts. I think doing voice requires a kind of emotional honesty that isn’t automatic for many people. It also requires a decent command of language, which I do have, but I think that followed the drive of voice, instead of preceding it. (Amusing anecdote, which illustrates my point : very very early in my writing career, either second or third grade maybe, I wrote a story in which a character, in dialog, used the word ain’t. I had recently read either The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or both, and I was very interested in the different sorts of ways people spoke. My teacher corrected the dialog and counted off points. I tried to plead my case, that the error was intentional, that it was dialect, that it was in speech so that would be ok. I don’t today remember who the teacher was, but I still remember her unwillingness to allow me the liberty of misusing grammar and I well remember both how embarrassed I was that she actually thought I didn’t know ain’t was not correct when I wrote it and my outrage that she would not let me express the character’s voice accurately. After all, Mark Twain did it, so it must be allowed!). Voice is a hard one to get, especially if you didn’t get dialog with it, which I didn’t. Also, unless you develop a pretty good grip on language, you end up using the same voice over and over and then – as they say in comics – your gift becomes your curse. And lastly, voice, and the language it requires can be a really tough freebie, as a commenter to the post points out, because it “hides a multitude of sins”. In this way it can keep you from developing the other necessary writing skills to succeed. If the pull of the voice is inviting enough, if the language is atmospheric enough, then when you enter the house of my story I can keep the lights low and you might not notice the stairs don’t go anywhere and the toilet has sprouted in the dining room. As an outgrowth of voice I got character, because ultimately, knowing someone’s insides reveals their outsides, but this process was not as transparent as I make it sound here. It was hard work coming up with characters to have the voices and creating consistency between their thoughts and their actions. In fact, I went through a phase where I had a lot of crazy characters, because I couldn’t always match the voice to what was happening in reliable ways. I’ve got a description card, but it’s a low value card, serviceable, but not trumping any hand. Sorely lacking from my set of cards, and made worse by some interactive story writing I did throughout high school and college, are plot and structure. The writing friend I mentioned earlier will often tell people they “need more plot” in their stories, like this was something you could just run down to the grocery store and pick up. In exactly which aisle do I pick up a can of extra plot? Of course, for her it seems easy, she’s GOT the plot card. She can add or subtract plot at will. I don’t know if she came with that one naturally or if it’s something she’s worked for, but there’s no question she’s got it. Right now I kind of cheat at plot. I have characters and I put them in a situation and then I describe what they do as a result of the situation and pass that off as plot. The primary way in which that’s not a plot is that it’s static. It’s a problem, and then the resolution (or dissolution) of the problem, but it’s not actually stuff that happens that might be variable and then interrupted by other stuff that happens. In other words, I am not adept at short-circuiting character directions, or subverting the main action, or bisecting plots. I work in two dimensions still. But the beauty of seeing your shortcomings is that you can work at them. Maybe by this time next year I will have earned a plot card. Now that’s a nice thought.

iTunes says I was listening to Hollow from the album Vulnerable by Tricky when I posted this.

Continue reading

Wow the new version of ecto looks pretty slick, despite the fact that it still doesn’t post extended entries in Nucleus. The icons are more professional looking and everything is easier to find. Lots of boring musing about writing and critiquing and my shortcomings follows. You were warned.

I started revising “Hindsight” on Tuesday, and spent about 3 hours on it. I’m probably three quarters of the way through, and will likely finish it later today. I think it will be a much stronger story when I’m done, perhaps one that I’m ready to send off. Here’s the thing, though, I’m not using any of the Critters critiques I got at all. In fact, I’ve stopped reading them, and there are right this second seven sitting in my inbox unread. I’ll have to read them eventually because I’ll have to thank the people who bothered, but I don’t need what they’ll tell me for my revision. Instead, I am using the recommendations of two people from my writer’s group, one of whom is a lady who spent many years as an editor. There were some critiques from Critters that were worthwhile, don’t get me wrong, but here’s the thing: there were too many of them and they were too divergent. Describe more, describe less. The dialogue was great, the dialogue sucked. The story was not engaging, the story was fascinating. And so on. The people who thought they didn’t get it could recite the plot back to me effortlessly, while the people who assumed I didn’t understand my own story fumbled the most basic concepts. The accusations of plagiarism surfaced at several points referencing things I’d never seen/heard/read but no one mentioned the obvious Sandman references I was concerned about (which are now gone, by the way). Others said my story was wildly imaginative and original, which made me suspect everything else those particular critters said, because if they hadn’t encountered some incarnation of the world I was playing in, they can’t have read very widely. Some people demanded that my unnamed characters (that would be all of them, in “Hindsight”) be named without seeming to notice that would fundamentally change the story. Almost universally, my descriptions were praised (though how much I described things was not). Amusing that, since I’ve always thought I suck at descriptions, and I hate doing them. In the end, I had no idea which things to disregard and which to take seriously as functional problems in the story.

By contrast, with my face to face readers/editors, I could talk about what I was getting at, and then talk about ways of making that clear. Some were astonishingly simple, and could be fixed with ten words or less. Right now, making things clear is one of my biggest problems. I allude, I cock my eyebrow, I suggest the reader pay attention to something I mention once, under my breath. Now I have to learn that it’s not insulting the reader to repeat myself. Repetition could be defined, instead, as building resonance. I’ve discovered reading for broad understanding is not something my husband can help me with. He’s far too bright, inclues amazingly well — he has ruined movies for me by revealing their endings ten minutes in — and has a cultural frame of reference that’s too similar to my own. He’s on the same page with me, and I don’t have to get him there. If he gets it, it’s there, but it may well still be too buried for the rest of the world.

Another one of my problems, suffered by “Hindsight”, but also by “Yonder Wicket Gate, Yonder Shining Light”, possibly “Egghead Kingdom”, and certainly “Cualcotel” (so far), is that apparently I have difficulty telling where stories begin. They often do not begin where I start writing them. This would seem like a totally basic proposition, but at least for me at this stage in my writing, it’s really tricky. There’s a whole load of backstory that I write in as I’m building story momentum, but which turns out not to usually be part of the story at all. I’m trying to be more careful about that, and I think “Easier Next Time”, “Found Objects” and “Ancient Gardener” may be started in the right place. All of those are working titles, and subject to change, by the way. It’s so, so, so much easier to shape them when you start them in the right place. None of those are finished yet, though. “Found Objects” and “Ancient Gardener” are both close, and I had a breakthrough on the ending for “Found Objects” last week, which had been troubling me for a while.

My big problems seem to be with beginnings and endings. I don’t tend to wrap things up as nicely as people would like and I start in the wrong place a lot. That sounds kind of hopeless, doesn’t it? Bad beginnings and unsatisfying endings. I have less of an issue with the endings, because I am not all that concerned with satisfying people who require a neat ending. It’s more important to get it right for my story. For example, I told you a while back that “Ennui” was very poorly received at WUTA (my writing group). People critiquing it assumed that I didn’t know what I was writing about, as opposed to not knowing how to express what I was writing about. That was annoying. I got a lot of “think about where the objects you describe are and why and that’s your story”. Uh. No. That may be a story, but it’s not this one. I know where the objects are and why. I know all the back story. Remains the problem of not having told my story well enough to earn reader trust on those scores, but that’s a different problem from not knowing. People were also particularly perturbed by the zero ending. Granted, I’m no Chekhov, but it was a decent attempt, I think. Sigh. Maybe I’m over-educated. At any rate, people’s suggestions for improving the story were all predicated on making something dramatic happen at the ending. Having someone eaten by bugs was a popular suggestion. Now, you don’t need to know a single thing about the story to realize that something titled “Ennui” should not end with a bang, right? If I fix the story in that way, it’s not the story I’m trying to tell anymore. Now it’s possible that the story I’m trying to tell isn’t worth telling, that’s another question altogether, but if you asked me, “Ennui” is the best thing I’ve written in the last six months, since I started writing full time. The boy (bless him) agrees with that assessment. So, you can see where having everyone else who reads it disliking it is frustrating. My opinion remains that it’s a good story, but others don’t agree.

The bad beginnings, however, I acknowledge as more of a problem, since the first few lines are what editors will judge it by for purchase. The opening has to stand out for anything to rise above the slush. I’m working on that, though. I’ve decided, for example, that part of the bad beginning problem is due to my preoccupation with provenance. I feel like I have to establish where things have come from and how we got where we currently are. I may have worked in an archives for too long. I mostly write chronologically, so that means that anything I think I need to establish must be done at the outset. This stage setting is sloppy, and now that I see it, I’m going to be brutal ripping it out. I’m tentative about time shifts, both because I’m big on time unity (especially for short stories) and because moving forward and backward from the story present deftly requires more skill than I currently possess. Still, fumbling a back or forward flash has got to be better than the what I’m currently doing. Some of the stage setting, of course, can be dropped altogether, which will help. It’s for me, not the reader. Other of it will have to be slipped in, but not at the outset. Later.

I say I don’t care if no one really likes the endings, but this isn’t completely true. I have a sneaking suspicion that I have major plot issues which possibly translates into foreshortened endings. What I mean is I have no clue how to engineer plots in stories. You can see how this might be a problem. I first started to suspect this when I did that 30 minute story idea exercise back in March. I’ve actually gone back to what I wrote in that exercise for most of the stories I’ve started since then, by the way, so in that sense the exercise was a success. Reading the list of ideas, I found that all I have written down is a bunch of questions, such as “Is there a way to tell a story without words?” and “Where does each begin/end? How do they touch?” and “Who is the collector?”. I don’t think that’s how everyone else does it. Also, I frequently hear people saying they have all these plots in their head. That’s completely not how my mind works. I have people in there, and situations, and places (really lovely places at that)…but plots? Just not there. Hopefully, plot is something I can learn to do. I’ll let you know. If I had to qualify my writing in some way right now, I’d say I do character studies. And sometimes object studies. Still lifes. I don’t know if that’s because I’m not good enough at plot and action, or because people and places are really what interests me or whether the two aspects reinforce each other. It seems like a beginnerly thing to be doing. I get, however, that this sort of thing may not appeal widely or sell at all, and at some point if I fail in marketing the sort of stuff I like to write, I’m going to have to face changing what I do. However, the writing itself may evolve to solve the problem, so I’m not going to worry about it too much yet.

So I think I’m almost done with Critters. I do like the idea, and I do think that at on some levels it works, but I have some problems with it also. For one, I went way overboard with critiquing (my percentage is still over 150 and I’ve not critted much of anything at all in weeks). It affected my word output on my own stuff. Still, I think the biggest use I get out of the site is sharpening my editing skills on other people’s writings. One can never truly edit one’s own stuff, but one can present cleaner and more workable text to be edited by others, and in this way critiquing has helped (and continues to help) me clean up my own work. As for the usefulness of other people’s critiques of my things (and to be fair, I only submitted one thing: “Hindsight”) it varied wildly. I got some pretty lame critiques, obviously done with little interest. One was a rewrite of my first paragraph, prefaced by a longwinded, self-centered paragraph about how the critic actually didn’t care for fantasy at all and would much rather be reading science fiction. Yeah. That’s helpful. The line edits are always handy, but the whole process seems a lot of effort for a few line edits when I’ve got available several extremely proficient line-editing type friends whom I could call on and whom I trust more to help me that way. People did say things that applied to my story, and which I could use to improve it, but I got far more comments that seemed like a standard spiel and didn’t apply to what I wrote. A person complained of excessive adverb use, for example. By her count, less than 1.3 percent of the words in my text were adverbs. You know, adverbs aren’t forbidden, they just have diminishing returns. I’m going to feel free to use them from time to time because that’s what they’re there for. I have no problem going over a text and excising some or trying to be careful that there aren’t too many, but please. At some point you gotta let some through, and if I’m going to pick on something, it’s not something that appears less than 2 percent of the time, you know what I mean? I also got pablum like my story is “somewhat unique”. Huh? Or comments like “I find you use ‘and’ quite a bit”. Hmmm. Sure, I can look at those dreaded “and”s (I didn’t count them, but I bet they appear more than 2 percent of the time!). I can probably even take some out. But…there’s an inner meter there, you know, that sometimes (well, often!) demands ands instead of full stops. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to shake that off. I would hope that would kind of be the beauty of the thing, you know? Ah, well. It’s probably poor form, by the way, for me to complain about my critiques and I hate to appear churlish about the whole thing. I’m actually grateful that people bothered. As I may have mentioned I was really excited when the first one arrived. I’m really just trying to show how hard it is to work with what came back.

All this work has brought to light a couple of interesting writing idioms that I wasn’t aware I had. Jury’s out on whether these are good things or not, but they are both habits I had brought to my attention by readers that aren’t strictly purposeful on my part. The interest here is that after several comments and complaints about these quirks I’ve thought about them, and I think they’re both a result of my bilingualism. A person in WUTA has pointed out that I consistently have long passages without contractions, sometimes making my language sound (too) formal. It’s true that I feel awkward and self-conscious when I abbreviate words into contractions. The one I’m most comfortable with is “n’t” as in don’t and hasn’t and won’t. The others I have to force myself to use, and usually don’t bother. I never noticed that I avoided them, though, until she mentioned it. My theory is that my difficulty with contractions can be traced to the absence of them in Spanish. I’ve racked my brain trying to think of an example of a contraction in Spanish, and all I can round up are “al” and “del” which are prepositions plus an article. We don’t use articles as much in English, so it’s really not the same thing. It’d be like contracting “to the” or “by the”, which I don’t think happens in current English (though I wonder if it did in earlier incarnations?). But, generally, I don’t think contractions exist in Spanish. Weird, huh? The other odd habit resulted in loads and loads of critters telling me “had” is a filler word and to stop using it. It’s garbage, I’m told. Dutifully, I look at every instance of “had” when I’m called on it, but, you know what? I didn’t get the memo on how to do past perfect without had. Is there a way? Because all those sentences with had? I mean them to be past perfect, I really do. It’s important to me that these things happened in a definite further past. Now maybe I’m hung up on that, and readers would rather not read the three extra letters than know exactly when things happened in relation to one another. I would think had would be nearly invisible to read, like said tags, but what do I know? In fact, to be honest, I’m often hamstrung by my lack of possibilities with verbs in English. With a simple verb tweak in Spanish I can tell you I used to do something daily, or I can tell you that I was doing that immediately before this, or I can tell you I once did that but don’t usually. I love the beauty and versatility of having all kinds of verb tenses at my fingertips, though when I was formally learning them in grade school I was all wtf am I ever going to use the present perfect subjunctive for? Maybe that versatility is what I’m reaching for when I pull out the past perfect. I never get quite what I want, though, and critics really seem to hate that I keep using had. Maybe some of that needs to come out.

I loved participating in NaNoWriMo, and I think it did me good insofar as setting my intent (as they say in yoga) goes, but its becoming clear to me that it did my writing some damage. You may find this hard to believe, but prior to Nanowrimo, my writing was frequently described as concise (often, even, as too concise). Now I’ve second-natured some word padding techniques, and I’m not pleased with that. I don’t know how difficult it will be to return to concise, but I’m going to try and get there. Clean, clear prose. That’s what I want to write. I’m kind of glad I never took people’s advice to throw in ninjas or pirates anytime I was stuck on the plot, I don’t know how I’d undo that.

I’ve thought about how often I write about writing here and how little of that writing I show to you. So today I’ve decided to append some samples in the form of rather bad poetry. Please remember that poetry is not my thing, so if you leave comments telling me you hate it, you’ll find me in complete agreement with your sentiment. I don’t know why I work on it at all, except that it’s some place to stuff ideas and images that pester me but don’t have story potential. In my writer’s group, there’s someone who is going through and writing poems, usually several verses long in senryu form (5-7-5 syllabic count, like haiku), out of biblical passages. He’s the one I usually refer to as “news poetry guy”, because he often composes poems with political overtones related to current events. Here and here are some examples of what he’s doing. A few weeks ago, someone suggested to him that he ought to winnow the whole bible into one senryu. The idea seized me and would not let go. I wrote several iterations, which I shall reproduce here for jollies. This week I read those iterations at WUTA and found, amusingly, that what I considered to be the best and most polished of the three was not the most popular among the people present. Here they are, in the order that I wrote them:

See, to me, the third one is clearly the best one of the three, though that’s not saying much. Three is the most refined, the most layered, the most complete. Almost everyone present disagreed. Most preferred the second, a few liked the first. People were also disturbed that I hadn’t found room for redemption in the poem. Not enough syllables. Several composed haikus of their own to remedy my omission, and it’s always nice to be inspiring. I wish I had them all to post here, but alas, I don’t. Anyways, faced with such widely divergent views on which version of my own is superior, it seems likely the whole judgement may be rather subjective.

You know, I had something else to say, about Merrie’s Trios, but it’s just going to have to wait or remain unsaid, because this is already way too long. This is what happens when I don’t write about writing for six weeks or more and just think about it. I’m done apologizing for post lengths, though. It is what it is, and you weren’t obligated to come all the way to the end with me.

Continue reading

In the last seven days I have critiqued approximately 65,000 words. I have written 0. I’ve also read no published writing. Something’s really broken here. I guess I’m going to have to try my hand at bringing balance to the force or something. Critiquing is really useful (as much or more to me as it is to others, at least at this stage of my writing) but it’s not an end to itself, and it doesn’t get anything written. And as much as I’ve critiqued, I’ve turned down reading and commenting on things that I wanted to and would have enjoyed going over because I had so much already. I’m going to have to put more effort into saying “No”. My Critters ratio is a ridiculous 300% (you only need 75% to be in good standing), and before I started this post I told myself I would do two more crits today. I’ve changed my mind though, after tallying my crit word count for the week. Some of that was my crits for the local flesh and blood writing group, of course, but it’s still plenty for one week. I haven’t even submitted anything into the Critters queue to be critiqued (yet). I’m thinking of putting in “Hindsight”. Be nice to get “Hindsight” into good enough shape to send out places.

Oh, and here’s a first ever for this blog, a quiz thingymabob! I’m usually not the quiz sort. I swiped this from my WUTA friend John Newmark’s blog, and now, regrettably, will be unable to lay claim to the distinction of never having posted a quiz to my blog. At least I’m still avoiding that meme thing, though I understand Tangential Cold’s trying to pass one on to me. Alas, corrupting influences surround me.

The amusing nugget of insight about the quiz is that I’ve always told people I’m the Queen of Spelling. Turns out I’m just the Duchess of Spelling, but the Queen of Vocabulary. Also, lest we forget, I rule the land of Meen, where I dispense justice by turning people who annoy me into floating eyeballs with no mouth and am ever addressed as “Sweet as Pie”. But that’s another story!

Back to wild conjecture about the meaning of a superficial quiz with far too few questions to really determine my English language lineage. I was recently having a conversation with my husband about my vocabulary. Truthfully, it’s never been outside the normal bell curve for my peers (I didn’t get any sort of standardized testing perfect score or anything) but as a youngster I deliberately cultivated and expanded my usage of words in every day language, out of devotion to the concept of “le mot juste” which I thought was a Poe thing and not a Flaubert thing as well as a speech thing instead of a writing thing (weird how wires get crossed like that, isn’t it?). So, anyway, I worked hard to always have the right word available to me. Sadly, I’ve lost the use of most of those words. My daily speech is crippled, and I no longer have access to the breadth of words I formerly used in conversations quite naturally. What happened? Well, at one point, I downgraded my speech — on purpose and with effort. I self-censored. The reason I did this was because I was consistently accused of trying to talk over people’s heads or trying to make people feel stupid. I never was, but I was mortified by the repeated and unkind suggestion that I was being a snob. I kind of wish I’d had more of a backbone and told people to get themselves a dictionary and that their limitations were not my problem, but it looks like the considerate, try-to-fit-in me won that little spat. I have no reason to speak so simplistically anymore and continue to do so merely because I’ve habituated myself to it. I Harrison Bergeroned myself, and now I think I have to somehow relearn to write the big words. Because, you know, sometimes they’re just exactly the right ones.

Of course I’d be doing good to write any words right now: small medium or large.

P.S. John, I have another religious blog recommendation for you, if you’ve never seen it. It’s Velveteen Rabbi. She’s not on my regular reading list, because a lot of what she talks about is esoteric to me, but she’s very wise and insightful, and I do like to check on her periodically.

P.P.S. All the rest of you, slacktivist did it again. Did you read his excellent Car Fish post?

Continue reading

There’s been a lot going on in the writing front, which is when I’m least likely to take the time to compose one of my writing about writing posts. Thus the result is often that I relay what I’m thinking about when I’m stuck but remain silent when things are going along less roughly, so that I fear my writing entries tend to be more negative than an objective review of my progress would show. This positive post will also hopefully serve as something to look fondly upon this next week, when Sophia is home on Spring Break and when writing time will be exceedingly hard to come by.

Yonder Wicket Gate, Yonder Shining Light stands at a little over forty thousand words as of Friday (42074, according to wc). That’s not a lot of words, necessarily, so I’m not going to start bragging about how well I’ve done, but it’s not nothing either. It may be half the novel. According to this entry, I first started working on the novel November 30, which was about 15 weeks ago. So that’s, what, ten thousand words a month or so? Ehhh. If the novel ends up being a hundred thousand or so words, which is kind of what I expect, and I can keep up the current pace it should take me about ten months, so I should be done before the end of the year. That would be excellent. Additionally, I have the entire novel outlined now. Well, I wouldn’t really call it an outline so much as a list of scenes that must happen. There may be other scenes, but the ones on the list are the ones I need to have, at minimum. Also included in this is a listing of scenes that have already happened, in which I discovered – much to my amazement – that the novel I thought was just interminably slow and endless scenes of exposition with no plot and boredom heaped upon a lack of tension spiced with nothing happening actually has quite a lot going on and even some white-knuckled moments. That, of course, is very pleasing.

Other rocketing good news : I finally submitted the first part of Yonder Wicket Gate, Yonder Shining Light to the crew at Viable Paradise. This was the impetus for the outline, actually. I normally write blind, so to speak, but I realize now that twenty thousand or thirty thousand words in is a good time for me to outline, and will probably try to do it that way in the future. It does not, as I feared, take away from the mystery of what’s going to happen. There’s still plenty of wiggle room. Instead, it just helps me make sure I don’t forget the things I know are going to happen. Since outlining includes writing up the scenes I’ve already done, it also reminds me of stuff and crystallizes the whole story in my head in a way a simple re-read doesn’t. However, this took me the better part of a dedicated day to do, and I do have to wonder how people write synopses and outlines as proposals for things they haven’t even started on. I mean it’s perfectly alright for me to diverge from an outline that I made and no one else will see, but if an editor expects a certain ending and the story ends a different way, what happens then? I suppose I’ll figure it out when I’m called upon to do it. At any rate, I do see the value of outlining when I’ve already set down a chunk of the novel, and I wonder if my lack of scene listings has caused me to lose focus and give up on things in the past. So if nothing else, I got that useful mechanics tidbit out of having to submit an outline with my prose to VP.

The folks at VP have written me email to say they’ve received my submission and are reviewing it. Of course, I’m on pins and needles about this, and way more invested in it than I should be. I’ve successfully set myself up for a no-win (if they accept me I have to come up with a thousand dollars to go, if they reject me then my stuff is not even good enough to be workshopped, much less published! Oh, the anguish.) So all in all, I’m just trying to put it out of my mind. It took me forever to prep the piece for submission. Kurt is convinced I’m using the wrong tool for formatting (I’m using groff). Still, the practice was worth it, it’s the first time I’ve had to prep and print something to send off. Even going to the post office was pretty exciting, but I imagine that will wear off.

In response to my unease about not having enough material for discards or unworthy stories, I’ve decided to comb through some of my older stuff and polish anything with promise to see if I can’t put a few things from the wayback into my repertoire of candidates for submission. This has led me back to two things : Tatiana and her friends, which I’m sure has no place in the market since everyone is probably tired of reading about vampires, and also back to Cualcotel, a story that I think there’s some real hope for, in a world that I find really interesting. So I’ve adopted Cualcotel as my big editing project, and the one I’m reading at my writer’s group for the foreseeable future. I’ve gotten some good critiques on the opening, and know of lots of places where the language needs to be tightened. I’ve even picked a couple of names for some of the characters that went unnamed for fifty thousand words! I’ve got real hope that when I’m done with a read through it will be manuscripty instead of first drafty. I love this little story, and I really want it to work. Can you imagine getting to the end of the year with two finished novels? That would be sooooooooo cool.

As a secondary response to my unease with the amount of stuff I have available for submission, I’ve decided that I’m going to try producing more short stories. I have noticed that there are moments when I’m just stuck on the novel, and I’ve realized that it isn’t against the rules if I work on something else simultaneously. I had previously thought that I’d need to just work on one thing at a time, sticking with it until I’m finished with it, but having started a novel has put me in the unpleasant position of working on the same thing for months and months at a time. Why did I think I wouldn’t need a break from that? Right, doesn’t make sense. So my friend Shas sent me to this martial arts guy’s blog. Steven Barnes is some kind judo/karate/yoga practicing writer. He puts the ninja into his writing, I guess. At first I was a little put off by everything about the man and his approach. The guy’s writing advice is a little rigid and – well, militaristic. He calls it his Year-Long Writing Program. The way it works is you follow his instructions for a year and then boom, you have as many black belts as he does. (Kidding, actually his promise is that you’ll be a published writer within the year). Then there’s all this yawntastic stuff about the Hero’s Journey (there’s more than just the one tale, ok?) and mumbo jumbo about using Chakras to write. He tosses out chewy cliches like “the meaning of a story is found in its ending“. And there’s that just keep at it and you will succeed stuff I find so annoying (despite needing to hear it from time to time). It was a little too infomercial and a little too gung-ho. But then I mulled over some of the things he said. That’s me, I’m a muller. I turn and turn and turn things over in my mind. In particular, he suggested an exercise for opening up the well of ideas. Now I’m not open to hopping on board with the year-long program necessarily, but I can give up 30 minutes for an exercise. So the gist of it is this : You sit down with a pen and plenty of paper and for half an hour you don’t move from that spot and you write every single idea that pops into your head down. He recommends trying to get a hundred ideas down, which is about 18 seconds per. So I tried it. And I came no where near getting a hundred ideas. I got about thirty four. So it takes me practically an entire minute to write down an idea for a story. But you know what? When I was done I had thirty four ideas for stories that I didn’t have (or didn’t know I had) when I started. And I had them somewhere other than floating on my back brain. I had them written down. Now I know this will probably have seemed like something obvious to do, but the truth is it hadn’t and wouldn’t have occurred to me. So now when I’m stuck on the novel I can just pick one of the ideas I wrote down and start writing on it. In a month or two, I can do the exercise again and see what else floats to the top. Because a bunch of these ideas are the total suck, but hey, not all of them have to be good, there just have to be enough good ones to keep me busy. And there are enough there, believe me. I had a problem while doing the exercise that kept me returning to like the first four or so ideas I’d written down, desperate to flesh them out. I think I might have worked along faster if I were better at letting go.

The other piece I’m going to try and take away from Barnes’ advice is the writing/submitting cycle. He says to write a story a week (or every two weeks, depending how long it takes you to write a story). And then on the third week (or whenever you get to the third story) you polish and re-edit the first story and mail it out that week. Now for me it may take longer to get through the first three stories because I’m also working on the novel, and it may be that three weeks is too quick for me to try my hand at edits and polishing. However, I like the idea of a fixed cycle, and of having a schedule on which to go back to the first story for edits and submission.

So this week, in addition to doing some words (admittedly not many) on YWGYSL, I wrote a new short story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a title, yet. But hey, new story! I kind of cheated, because I went back to the place where I’d written the only other story I’ve liked recently (”Ennui”). Still, maybe I’m just going with what works instead of being a retread and also yay, shiny, new, finished story. That’s gotta count for something.

One more thing before I close up here. I’ve been looking more closely at my writing, and I’ve noticed a stylistic quirk I have, which is that frequently my characters in monologue ask questions. They think in questions. Often these questions have no answer. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is, and I can’t think offhand of another writer that does this the way I do. If no one else does it, it’s almost certainly a bad thing. I discussed this with Kurt, and he says Stephen King does this with characters sometimes. I’ll have to wait on critiques and reviews, I suppose, before I know whether this is one of those things I’m going to have to unlearn or not. That could be a while. I hope I didn’t just make myself too self-conscious about that particular writing oddity. However, it’s not just a way I’m writing. It’s part of how my brain works too, because almost half my story “ideas” from the Barnes exercise are questions, such as “how does he react?” and “how do they touch?” and “what goes to the moon?” The blog, too, is full of unanswered questions. So is it genuine, a part of my voice, or is it just a weird, bad habit? Is it going to bug readers the way Kiernan’s unspaced adjectives bugged me? The way some people can’t stand stories in present tense or in the second person?

Continue reading

Some of you may remember that I earlier posted my thoughts on something Lois McMaster Bujold said during a speaking engagement at the National Book Festival about different types of readers, and the act of visualizing a story as opposed to absorbing the story through non-visual means, particularly focusing on the words and the language used. Several people made comments to me about that entry (not on the actual blog, of course, but in other conversations with me), so I thought it might be appropriate to link to this conversation (in which I am merely an observer, not a participant) about that same question taken from the business end : how do writers approach the writing of a story? Is it visual? Is it words? Is it movement? Scent? Action?

I’ve also been thinking about Neil Gaiman’s story in the Smoke and Mirrors collection about going to Hollywood and writing a screenplay (”The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”). It wasn’t my favorite story in the collection on a first read, but I’ve found that I’ve been turning it over in my mind since I’ve read it and finding new and interesting things about it. It was a little like the movie Barton Fink but sweet and melancholy instead of insane. There’s a couple of running gags in it: one is that everyone he meets in L.A. tells him who Belushi was supposed to have been with when he died, and the other being that everyone in L.A. is a screenwriter. I feel a little like that, today, like everyone is a writer. When I think of the number of people out there writing fanfic and the number of author’s blogs and the number of wannabe author blogs (of which, I suppose, this is one) it’s a little bewildering. I can’t imagine there’s room in all this flood of verbiage for my voices. How will I make myself heard above the drone and babble?

iTunes says I was listening to Gouge Away from the album Doolittle by Pixies when I posted this. I have it rated 3 stars.

Continue reading