Undercover monsters or spooks you can see?

Today we have guest blogger Naomi Clark, my fellow author at Damnation Books. Her newest book, Silver Kiss, is just out at QueeredFiction. Today she's sharing her thoughts on the monsters we love to create – and read about:

It seems that in Urban Fantasy you get two types of monsters: those in hiding, and those in the open. In SILVER KISS, the monsters are out from under the bed and living in the open. The werewolves are out of the closet and very firmly among us. There are advantages and disadvantages to that, of course. But I’m interested to know what readers prefer – undercover monsters or out and proud monsters?

What makes for a better story – the solitary vampire struggling to hide his true nature from his neighbours, or the pack of werewolves trying to fit in with their community? Would you rather see the trails and travails of a lone faery finding his place in the world, or the adventures of a hoard of goblins living in the big city? Dragons hiding in caves or selkies working at the local swimming pool?

Either option brings its own conflicts and problems. I chose to have my werewolves out in the open so I could explore how they might fit into modern society. But it would be equally interesting to see how they avoided modern society. In a world where organ transplants, ID cards, and forensics are so commonplace, how long could a monster stay undercover?

I’ve got a great contest for everyone. There’s an ebook for a winner at the end of today and everyone who enters now will also be in the running for winning a signed print copy of SILVER KISS drawn at the end of the week. Just answer this simple question in your comment to be entered into both competitions:

What do you prefer – hidden monsters, or monsters in the open?

You can catch up to Naomi and take part in the contest at her website, www.naomiclark.net..

On Writing Magic

So okay, I'm halfway through writing "Hunter," the 3rd book in the alternate history series, and I'm finding myself slipping away from the rigid rules of magic established for the series. Well, semi-rigid. Actually, fairly liquid and slippery, 'cause I keep seeing new and cool applications of the underlying source of magic. The temptation is always there to simply make it into the Force, or something akin to the Force, wherein anything is possible so long as you just concentrate hard enough.

Inventing good, new, and original magic systems is really hard. Most newbies just think their heroes should be able to blink and have anything they want appear. No rules, no limitations. Of course, if the Evil Overlord has no limitations, then there can't be any conflict or Heroic intervention, can there? His Exalted Evilness gets to do anything, can dominate the world effortlessly, and the fight is over before it begins. Even Homer, author of the world's first epic fantasy, knew this. The gods of Olympus needed to work through their pet humans, understanding well that when worship withers, so do the gods.

Magic needs rules, and I believe most gaming systems have very rigid rules in place to make sure the players aren't constantly running into arbitrary deus ex machina type solutions to puzzles and people airily throwing down impossible tricks. No Hero should be good at every aspect of the magic, nor able to simply invent new possibilities on the fly. If he can conjure fire at will, he should be miserably bad with water. Maybe he's creative enough to apply old magic in new ways, but it should be after some thought, or with at least the possibility of such application in his mind. Inspiration in crisis is wonderful, but it must be foreshadowed as a possibility first.

Magic should not come easily, and it should come with a price, either in a physical toll on the body or some unpleasantness in forcing the natural to bow to the unnatural. Maybe it's painful; perhaps it shortens the hero's life; perhaps the gifts are inborn and natural to the wielder, but were meant by nature for survival, and overuse sets nature out of balance and thus becomes actively counter-evolutionary. Maybe the magic systems are so intertwined that selfish manipulation results in unintended consequences, as in Tim Pratt's wonderful story where sucking the "cloud stuff" away indiscriminately lets the silver lining go flump onto unsuspecting people below. Whoops.

Consider the source of magic. Is it natural, rooted in elemental forces like fire, water, air? Is it mental, dependent on the strength of mind and will of the practitioners? Is it physical, dependent on proper placement of stones, brewing of potions, etc.? What happens when a practitioner is cut off from the source of his or her magic? Melanie Rawn did a good job with this in her Sunrunner series. A Sunrunner without light cannot exercise power, and if mentally running shafts of light when the sun goes down, will be left mindless forever. That is both powerful, consistent magic and logically limited.

Luke Skywalker, a mental practitioner, was mostly bounded by his own fears, his own inability to set aside logic to embrace the Force. He continually thought of it as something physical that must be stronger than the object to be overcome, instead of something that could be shaped to the desired strength. But Lucas's Force apparently has no outside limits apart from the mental will of the practitioner, and perhaps the strength of the physical vessel wielding it. This system is less logical, more prone to abuse as people display sudden new and unguessed-at powers.

It is well to think through how your magic works before ever putting your hero into a situation where he needs it. For every exercise of magic, think of the counterpoint the bad guy could use to negate it. For every time the hero goes out on a limb to use his magic, think of how you can saw the limb off behind him while he's exercising it. Give your Hero, at the outside, five things he can do well with magic. Give different powers to different people, or give them varying degrees of proficiency. Above all, set down the rules of logic for your magic system, and don't violate them; otherwise, your readers will rightly call foul.

Top 10 Reasons for Not Getting Published

After hanging around cons and workshops for awhile now, and after some soul-searching and self-examination, herewith is my personal list for why some people never get published:

1. They never finish anything
2. They never send anything out
3. They never seek feedback
4. They allow rejections to rule their outlook
5. They don't research the markets
6. They are careless in manuscript preparation
7. They don't believe "Da Rools" are for them
8. They don't understand what "professional" means
9. They have a limited understanding of their own language
10. They would rather "be" a writer than "become" one

I imagine a lot of people will have different ideas about this list. I think many writers will recognize themselves to a degree in one or more of these failings, at some point in their careers. For sure, I suffered from #4 for a long time. Rejections hurt; repeated rejections induce agonies of self-doubt and intense urges to just quit the whole game and find something less painful to do with one's spare time. Were it not for the sheer, equally intense joy of creating characters and watching what they do, writing would not be worth the abrasion of the soul caused by repeated rejections of one's efforts.

That said, persistence pays, and it only takes one acceptance to restore some of that wounded ego. You don't get acceptances if you don't haul the junk out of the drawer and send it out.

Reason #3 is a major cause of failed-writeritis. Your story may be good. Or not. Aunt Martha's opinion may make you feel better, but is Aunt Martha an editor, a professional writer, an English teacher, or a bibliophile who has read everything from Kafka to Heinlein and knows the difference between good literature and bird-cage liner? Writing in a vacuum leaves you vulnerable to stupid grammar mistakes, tired plots, cardboard characters, cliches, and newbie uncertainty. Ask. For. Help. There are too many great workshops out there, freely accessible and mostly free of charge, to twiddle your thumbs in a self-imposed bubble. Unless, of course, you want to spend the rest of your life getting rejections without knowing why.

An amazing number of people blithely violate #5. Research smeesearch. They neither read the magazines they want to be published in nor even the writers' guidelines put out by same. They send fantasy to SF markets, horror to children's markets, and erotica to Christian markets because they did not bother to check what those magazines want. Nor do they keep up with what is being published to see if their story is using a tired idea or doesn't fit the writing standard the editors are looking for. Besides, what editors say they want and what appears in the magazine often seems to be a disconnect. They're people. Occasionally a story comes over the transom they just can't resist. However, the odds of yours being one of them sink dramatically by simply firing stuff off in hope.

There are many guidelines for manuscript preparation but many people are clueless anyway. This relates directly to #8. Failing to grammar- and spell-check your masterpiece is a sure road to the rejection slip. Badmouthing the editor who rejected your unreadable masterpiece is another. Professionalism means treating your writing with the same level of attention and respect that you would take to your day job. The editor is your boss. Your story is an interview, and it surely will not get you the job if it is not dressed correctly, doesn't have the proper job skills, and doesn't get there within the reading window.

Reason #8 relates to #7. Writing is full of rules, from manuscript prep to grammar. People who fall into the trap in #9 are not likely to overcome #7. Understand the language you are writing in before attempting to violate rules of grammar in the name of style. Prove you can write before you start using run-on sentences or other stylistic tricks. Get rid of the ellipses. Learn what parentheses are for. Understand what paragraphs are designed to do. Best of all, learn proper punctuation, because no editor will sit through abusive punctuation from page 1. Da Rools apply to everybody, because no reader wants to suffer in the name of art. That's your job.

And now we come to my personal favorite, #10. I used to get students all the time who, when asked, said they wanted to be web designers. These students invariably ended up in the middle or bottom of the class. On the other hand, the students who stated without doubt that they wanted to become web designers did very well. They understood the difference between dreams and the hard work required to make them happen. You can scribble words on paper all day long but it won't make you a writer. You must master the good sentence and the good paragraph before tackling the good story. Once you can string grammatically correct and pleasing prose together, you can worry less about the mechanics of the writing and more about the progress of the plot and character development. And people will be a lot more inclined to read it.

Let the quibbling begin. . .

The Joys of Writing

Okay, so I am erratic about blogging but I do enjoy it. The good news is that of late I have no time for it because I'm actually writing new stuff. What a concept! The Book in a Week challenge the last week of the year booted me back to the old writing discipline I used to have. I cranked 142 pages that week, most of which were really, really good pages, which finished that book and got the muse excited about starting the next one in the series. So now I'm over 100 pages into the new project and still wanting to face the blank page every day.

That has its drawbacks. It means I am less enthusiastic about the daily grind of making a living. I do not and will not let clients down, but I am remembering why I love to write, and how much fun it is, and how much I would rather be doing that all day, every day.

Writing, if you are not a writer, is an incomprehensible exercise in rejection coupled with continuing feelings of inadequacy. Yet we sit down every day and pull words from thin air and plop them on the page, knowing we will probably never get rich, or even famous, or even moderately well known.

That actually sucks.

Fortunately, the writing process saves us. I look forward every single day to finding out what my characters are going to do next. I don't actually know. I'm not one of those writers who sits down and sketches out everything in advance. What falls onto the page falls onto the page and somehow my subconscious, which is rather brilliant at putting patterns together (judging by my grades in school and the work I used to do for various and sundry agencies) manages to make a coherent plot out of it in the end. Sometimes the characters run off and do things unexpected, that I had not the vaguest notion of them doing. Usually that improves the plot rather than otherwise. At any rate, it makes it fun and exciting to sit down to that blank page every day. If I had to write to an outline, it would be just like being chained to a client's requirements. I can do it, even do it exceedingly well, but it's not as fun as turning the characters loose to play.

I am always amazed by where the words come from. I don't know. They just arrive, and I am grateful for all of them. I have always been able to turn the tap on and off at will, though some days it takes a little longer for the trickle to start, but eventually it always turns into a flood. Words are my friends, my enemies, and my constant companions. Without them I would not be who I am. I am a writer, and glad of it. So there!

On Writing Series . . . Backwards

Oh, my, it's been awhile but I have a good excuse: I've been writing! Other Worlds Writers' Workshop hosts a year-end Book in a Week challenge every year, and I used it to finish the second book in my alternate history series. That makes three written in the series, which brings us to the topic of this post. The first book written in that series is actually, chronologically, now the fourth. Who knew?

I sure didn't when I wrote "The Devil's Lieutenant" which is still languishing in final review at Baen and needs to go somewhere else soon if they can't give me an answer. I wrote DL as a standalone novel, thinking that was it. But the backstory is huge, and the story as it developed doesn't really end with DL, though that is, happily, one of the few actual standalone books I've written. I discovered myself wanting, really badly, to explore the backstory as well as write the two books it will take (probably, it could be more) to bring the series to a conclusion.

So now I'm writing the series backwards, which has a whole host of problems writing series forwards doesn't present. DL is finished and out the door to publishers, so I am constrained by a lot of what I wrote in there. On the other hand, it gave me fantastic structure for the 3 books that will come before it. I knew before I launched into the "prequel" trilogy a lot of what needed to be in it.

However... having just finished Book 2, "Rebel" (working title) I see some stuff I need to change in DL simply because the way things actually transpired in the Darkblood War are a bit more logical than the way they were described in DL. It may be that God has been telling me to hold up selling that one until this trilogy is finished so that it is consistent end-to-end.

The good news is that the changes are relatively minor and would not hold up a sale of DL as it stands, nor should the news that there are 3 books in the series ahead of it. They are set far away, with mostly different characters, but lead directly to the events in DL. You just don't need to have read them to make sense of "The Devil's Lieutenant."

I am so happy with "Rebel." The first third is good, the last third is excellent, the middle third needs an axe, which is what I'm working on at the moment. I hope to sub it for critique on OWWW by February, so I'm off to revision hell.

May your own series go well. Write them forward. Trust me--it's easier!

Notes on editing from Ann Wilkes

Ann Wilkes, a fellow SF writer and author of Awesome Lavratt, graciously agreed to do a guest blog post and share her thoughts on writing. Welcome, Ann! Here is her take on editing:

One of my favorite topics is word economy. It's something I practice almost every day. I enjoy the challenge of chopping sentences and paragraphs down to size. I work for a trade journal to pay the bills. One of the features I write is an excellent exercise in word economy and being concise. I have to distill a press release down to just two or three sentences.

On the weekends, when I'm editing my science fiction, I go through my first and second drafts looking for unnecessary padding that weakens the sentence and thereby the thought, bogs the story down or makes the true meaning unclear.

I write flash fiction. For those who are unfamiliar with my new love, it's a complete story composed in (usually) under 1K words. Sometimes it's under 500. Writing flash has helped my other writing because every word has to count when you only get a thousand of them to work with.

Last weekend, I hacked a 5100 word story down to under 4000 to fit the requirements of the next venue I was sending it to. I'm glad of the requirement, because losing those 1100 words made the story stronger. I only removed one scene – and with it one POV. The rest was pointless filler, indirect sentences and unnecessary details.

I have a tendency to start a story as though it’s a novel, including more characters and POVs than the shorter work can comfortably support. One easy fix is to look for the characters that don't help advance the story. Which ones will not be missed? Do they only do one or two things that are crucial to the story or to the other characters? Can another character perform those actions, or is there another way to accomplish the same objective? That's the first place I start when I'm going back to tighten things up.

Next, I look for scenes that might be descriptive, moving or clever, but do nothing to advance the story or develop the characters. This is where that old "kill your darlings" adage comes in. Of course, some of those scenes are neither moving nor clever and the choice is clear. If they're not even descriptive, shame on me.

Then I get out my scalpel for the paragraphs and sentences. Sometimes it's like solving a puzzle, finding a more direct way to say something.

Here are some examples of how I cut my 5100 word story by 1100 words, along with explanations where necessary.

In this example Jeffrey is in a school bus rolling down a hill.

Before: He watched in horror as his schoolmates were thrown ...
After: He watched his schoolmates bounce ...

His horror is evident and "were thrown" is passive.

I deleted this whole sentence: Only seconds passed before the bus slid into the water.

If I'm moving the story along, I don't need to comment on the passage of time. I later had the bus sliding into the water in the midst of immediate action, so this was completely unnecessary.

Also deleted: His ski gloves were clipped to his blue jacket.

This was a minor character with a micro part. Who cares about the gloves, let alone what color his jacket is? And "were clipped" is, that's right, passive voice.

Jeffrey didn't hear what they said about the kids whose bodies were never recovered.
The above sentence was followed by: He couldn't. He'd been in a trance. A grief-induced, mind-numbing fog.
After: He was in a mind-numbing fog.

None of that other stuff made a bit of difference. It was as though I thought my reader needed to be beat over the head with more words to get what I'm saying. Of course it's from the grief!

No one could know. No one who hadn't experienced it, too. That's why he so desperately wanted Lisa to share the experience with him. He had no one else to tell.

I deleted the last sentence above because it's obvious. The reader knows that they both experienced the same accident and that Jeffrey suspects that she is having similar after-effects.

Before: A teenager with a pimply face and greased back, mousy brown hair approached the table and asked, "What can I get for you?"
After: A pimply-faced teenager with mousy brown hair approached the table. "What can I get for you?"

My husband said I should lose the waiter entirely. I still might. But he certainly didn't warrant the previous number of descriptors. Also, if you have the speaker doing something in a previous sentence, the reader knows who says the dialog that follows in the next sentence in the same paragraph without the need for a dialog tag.

Another good way to practice word economy and being uber precise is poetry. If flash fiction isn't your thing, try writing some poems. Then apply that lean, mean approach to prose to your other writing.

You can read two of my flash pieces for free right now. In fact, the editor at Rose City Sisters is running a contest for the best flash fiction story of 2009. "Your Smiling Face," is a bitter-sweet romance with a speculative fiction bent. I get a vote as soon as you view the page. That probably speaks more to my networking ability if I win than the quality of my story, but I'd still like to win. The prize is a beautiful necklace. Not to mention the bragging rights.

In "Grey Drive ," you'll glimpse one possible direction that media storage could take in the future. This one was actually described as "cute," which is very funny to me since I don't usually do cute. My fiction tends more towards tragic and dark.

Ann runs the very informative Science Fiction and Other Oddyseys blog and has a growing collection of big-name interviews with some of the giants in our genre to her credit. You can catch more of her work at www.annwilkes.com.

Fantasy as therapy

My story "Kraken's Honor" was published today by Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a wonderful and really high quality ezine (of course, they bought my story, didn't they?) :). I am especially happy to see this one out in the world, because it helped me through a bad patch several years ago. It was written just a few days after my father's funeral, when all I could do was stare blindly at my monitor at work and try not to cry. Writing it at least got my mind focused on something else during the process, and I consider the story a real gift from my muse.

It touches on complicated themes of death and life and gods and you name it. It was kinda free-ranging, but all wrapped into very high fantasy. So I wonder, given the true escapist nature of fantasy fiction, how much we who write it turn to it to save our own sanity? I love creating new worlds and populating them with people I have not met and never will. But they are very real, doing things that are all-important to them, as our lives are to us. Life and death and love and hate weave through the pages in more dramatic fashion than in much of mainstream fiction, which is usually focused on the ordinary rather than on saving the planet. It is really cathartic, on days when the world seems just a bit too much, to be able to stick a sword in a hero's hand and let him start swinging in defense of all he holds dear.

It kinda makes up for having to let go of things we personally hold dear.

I wish my dad could have read this story. I wish he could know I am finally making that concerted effort (which is, I might add, starting to succeed, like he told me it would) to get published, do the thing I love, and get paid for it. Imagine that. Fathers really do know best.

Love you, Dad. Wish you were still here.

Sue