Words from Thin Air

Writing from Life

2010-05-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

The old saw "write what you know" is often, I think, misunderstood. While it seems obvious to wrap your writing in things you know well to avoid embarrassing faux pas, this can loom like the Great Wall of Mediocrity for people who think they've never done anything interesting in their lives and therefore have nothing to write about. Au contraire. No one has been to Mars, yet there are plenty of stories set on Mars. Obviously "what you know" is not a deal killer. It's called research, and lots of it.

However, every writer has a wealth of hidden information in her soul. Everything you've done in your life contributes to the pool of experience lurking in your brain, that is tapped by your muse every time you begin to write. Or it should. Trying to step completely outside your "mundane" experience will quickly get you in trouble if you're trying to set a story in New York and have never been there. Watching Law and Order won't get you there, sorry. But you have lived somewhere in your life! What's interesting about the places--and all the people who live there--that you've encountered in your lifetime? How can you re-envision them to form the background of your fantasy or SF story? This is writing from real life, with a twist.

Now, discover the real hidden treasure in yourself. Step back and take a good look at things closer to home than Mars, namely, what do you know enough about to call yourself an expert on? That doesn't mean you have to hold a degree in whatever (or it might). It could be anything that will inform your stories with authenticity. This includes:

Regional dialects/foreign languages
Familiarity with a country/region: people, geography, scenery, customs, quirks
Hobbies: crafts you're good at that could be woven into a story to make characters come alive and give the piece a new twist. It occurred to me the other day that a hobby of mine I considered absolutely useless is actually well-suited to what I write, and I have a story well underway using that knowledge.
Occupations: what have you worked at in your life that will give your story an "insider" feel? Look how well "The Office" has done at capturing corporate cubicle craziness. What will office life be like on the moon?
Areas of study: that history degree or your seven languages have more uses than you know. How can you apply the mechanics of what you learned to fantastic situations and put that knowledge onto the page in interesting ways? How do museums or archeological digs really function, and how can you use that knowledge? Can you envision a whole new language from your knowledge of human tongues? (It worked for Tolkien!)
Clubs/associations: who do you associate with? How do the clubs work? Can you use that insider knowledge to form a secret society within your fantasy world? One hopes you're using the knowledge of costuming gleaned from masquerades at cons, or your hands-on experience with recreationists, as background for enriching your fiction.
What are you passionate about? The things that really mean something to you are the things closest to your heart, that you can write about with enthusiasm and knowledge, and perhaps spin a great story out of.

I recommend making yourself a list of what you know, what you're good at, past/present associations, and anything else you never considered might be germane to your genre. You will surprise yourself, I think. And suddenly the struggle to come up with a new setting, a fresh take, or an authentic scene may just get easier.

Discovering Your Characters

2010-04-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

As promised, I'm sharing a little that I learned at Norwescon through some great conversations with the likes of Carol Berg and Brenda Carr and Renee Stern over the breakfast table and at spare minutes over the weekend. Since characters are at the heart of every story, we talked about characters a lot: what makes them tick, how to flesh them out, how to understand their part in the story. Doing so, and listening to Carol and some others read from their works, got my brain working in this regard.

Every writer goes about creating characters differently. For me, it has always been about letting them grow organically from the page. Each character develops his own personality and speaks right up for himself when something needs to be said. When seven characters are in a group, I never have to stop and think who should say what. It just flows from who they are. How they react in any situation has always helped me understand how they got there and who they are.

The problem, however, with letting characters find themselves is that they could easily come out looking all the same, especially the lesser lights. Secondary characters need to be distinctive to be memorable, fully as much as the main characters need to be different from each other. And beware, if you write series, that you don't write a new series with the same characters from the last one, just with different names. I notice that Bernard Cornwell did this with his Starbuck Chronicles, which I did not enjoy nearly as much as I did his Sharpe series, where he pioneered his stock characters of an officer and his faithful sergeant meeting all circumstances together. Even Cornwell admits the two series are similar and laid off Starbuck in pursuit of other projects.

So, how to keep your characters fresh? Brenda Carr, who just sold her first story to Fantasy and Science Fiction (good for her!), "interviews" her characters to understand how they'll react to given situations. Her imagination is a bit richer than mine, I'm guessing, so I did a matrix instead, for the first time ever, for a series I'm working on. Hoo boy! That was enlightening.

Here's something to try if you're stuck on characterization: build yourself a table in Word or Excel or on paper. My columns were:

Name of Character
Strengths
Weaknesses
Quirks
Motivations
Physical Characteristics

Discover your character's strong points, in magic or physical prowess or mental agility or what have you. Then discover what keeps him from being all powerful. These are also the things his enemies can use against him, whether it is a weakness of character like gluttony, a gap in knowledge like total inexperience with the opposite sex, or a chink in his magical armor. Both strengths and weaknesses should arise logically and not just because you think the character needs them. Maybe your guy has a withered right arm. How did it get that way? Is one of his weaknesses a terrible fear of dogs? Where did it come from? If a strength is stubborn loyalty, can that also be a weakness?

Quirks are those things that make your characters different from everybody else and instantly recognizable on the page, like a favorite expression, a nervous twitch, a weird-sounding voice, or an obsession with dirt. Here is where you turn your stereotypes inside out, like Carol Berg did by making a knightly character obsessed with his physical comforts and somewhat effeminate, clutching his scented hanky all the time. USA Network prides itself on its "characters welcome" tagline, with characters like Monk and House so far outside the normal box they are memorable and watchable just because they're so different. A really "different" character who is also sympathetic is the Holy Grail.

Understanding your character's motivations keeps him or her from becoming a cardboard cutout. It will quickly become clear if your villain is simply EVIL or driven, like Hannibal Lector, by some horrid thing in his past. Evil really doesn't work as a motivation. Good, believable characters have more than one facet, and more than one reason for doing what they do. Find them. Understand how one character's motivations runs up against another's. This is the basis of conflict, without which it's impossible to sustain the plot of a novel (or any decent short story, either).

Recording physical characteristics is not just a good idea, it's essential to keeping continuity from one end of the novel to the other. It's really stupid to allow your character's eyes to change color from one chapter to the next for no reason. And when you write it all down and start to compare them, you'll quickly note if all of your people are starting to look the same.

Other writers no doubt have different systems, more or less involved, but I think I will use this from now on to deepen my understanding of who my characters are, and to force myself not to get lazy and just let them figure it out for themselves. Even the lesser characters onstage deserve a good part!

News from the world

2010-04-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

Hmm, I didn't think it had been quite so long since last I reported in, but it's been a busy six weeks. First there was the Short Story in a Week challenge on www.otherworlds.net, my workshop, which ran all through March, then Norwescon at the beginning of April (more on that in a minute), then a frantic dash to overhaul a manuscript and get it out to Tor before the editor forgets that she asked for it. So now that's all done and I can think about some good things that happened in the course of that six weeks.

First, I did get my 8 stories in during the SSIAW challenges, which means I didn't have to skip one of the word lists, and I now have even more stories to pick through and clean up. I did sell an SSIAW recently: "Wishes and Horses" to Tales of Moreauvia, so that is a bit of a motivator.

Norwescon was wildly successful from my point of view. I subbed a couple of pieces to the writers' workshops there for feedback, and got great input. I highly recommend this venue; the critiques were thoughtful, professional, and a lot of successful pros in the genre donated their time to do them, for which I am so appreciative. I hope I can give back at next year's con. And the icing for me was running into a Tor editor, who listened with sympathy to my tale of the last MS they requested from me going into a black hole--and then asked that I send it to her. So woohoo! Maybe this time I'll actually get an answer.

Best of all, I came home fired up with new ideas, some of which I'm going to write about in the next post. Ideas that will make me a better writer, I hope, so stay tuned. I intend to share!

Undercover monsters or spooks you can see?

2010-03-03T22:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-17T15:17:00.000-08:00

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:

They never finish anything
They never send anything out
They never seek feedback
They allow rejections to rule their outlook
They don't research the markets
They are careless in manuscript preparation
They don't believe "Da Rools" are for them
They don't understand what "professional" means
They have a limited understanding of their own language
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

2010-02-01T15:28:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-08T13:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-13T22:34:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

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

Musings on Heroes

2009-11-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

The "hero" is the underpinning of genre fiction. Fantasy can't live without the heroic guy or gal thrust into the soup and forced to rise to the occasion. The type of hero doesn't matter: the noble prince, the humble farmboy, the good witch, the barbarian warrior princess. We want to identify with the good guys (usually) so we can cheer their success. We like it when they attain glory and bask in the reflected glow. But pursuit of glory wasn't what hooked us. Just the opposite.

What makes a hero a hero? It can't just be about stepping in and saving the world. It can't just be about having the right gifts to apply at the right time, be they courage or awesome magic. I've been mulling this since critting a friend's manuscript, and I finally put my finger on something that's perhaps blindingly obvious to everyone else but nevertheless something I am finally arriving at consciously, after applying it subconsciously to every book I've ever written. The heroes we remember are the ones who had something to lose beyond just their lives.

I begin to see why some of my short stories, especially some of the more hurried SSIAW ones, don't stick even in my own mind. In them, the hero has nothing much to lose. In my books, the hero always has something to lose. Something huge. Something underpinning his or her whole life. Without that most basic requirement, heroism is just another act in a normal day. Otherwise society would give medals to every firefighter who ever set foot in a burning building. Sure, they all have life and limb at risk. But what defines a heroic act over the commonplace?

Cops, firefighters, and soldiers risk their lives daily in the course of the jobs they get paid to do. They volunteered for this; nobody pressed them into service. We mourn when they die, but not everybody gets a medal for doing the job they agreed to do. The extraordinary act comes when "maybe I'll get hurt" turns to "it's almost certain I'll get hurt." This is why I take such vehement exception to the media trend since 9/11 to overuse the word "hero," cheapening it to just another valueless bit of hype. Everybody's a hero to our bored and increasingly facile and shallow crop of journalists, from the guy who catches a stray dog to the man who throws himself in front of a train to save a stranger.

The acceptance of risk above and beyond what is expected is the essence of heroism, but it doesn't need to be life or death. Heroes can risk other things of equal value: personal reputation, relationships, social standing, wealth, honor, children--the list is infinite. I loved the ending of The Crucible, when honor and a good name became more important than life. Living with a falsehood was more intolerable than death. Thus is a hero born. Better yet, a memorable hero.

My point is that when writing, make sure your hero, even if thrust into the action like Frodo being chased by Black Riders, has a painful and powerful choice to make in pursuit of the quest. Frodo has his peaceful, contented life in the Shire--and the Shire itself--to lose. He saves one but loses the other as he is irrevocably changed by the quest. Yet he does not turn aside from struggling toward the aptly-named Mt. Doom.

A character acting heroically without something potentially life-changing hovering over his head is pretty blah. Answer yourself these questions when pondering the whys and wherefores of your plot:

Who or what is left behind to follow the quest?
What will happen to the character's life, moral character, or outlook if these things are lost?
Why is the quest more important than these other things?
What gives your character the strength to turn his/her back on them? Is it strength or cowardice?
Is the quest an escape or a dreaded duty?

All of these things will define the emotional impact of that all-important decision to leave those precious things behind, and with it, the level of impact on the reader. We want to cry fully as much as we want to cheer. Whatever your character stands to gain must be equally balanced by whatever it is he or she has to lose.

Just sayin'.

Report from World Fantasy Con

2009-11-02T20:25:00.000-08:00

Oh, dear, it's been way too long since I had time to blog. Partly that comes from earning a living; partly I was trying to get ready to go to the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, which was held over this past Halloween weekend.

I had no idea what to expect from WFC, having only been to two small conventions previously. They were the dress-up-in-costume type; WFC is all business. The very first thing that was different was the swag. Oh, my gosh. There I was worrying about what to read on the plane home, and the first thing they did when I checked in at registration was hand me this enormous tote bag full of books! Boy am I glad I took the suitcase I did, because otherwise I would have had to leave most of them behind. I now have about a year's worth of reading, including a bunch of magazines I want to submit to and many collections of short stories that will help me assess what's getting published. I need to boost my writing up a notch and seeing the competition helps me do that. So right on, WFC! That membership got me more than some new friends.

The next thing that happened was that I got snagged to dinner by the one person I knew, and ended up with 18 more bodies at a great Italian restaurant. Andrea Howe of Blue Falcon Editing and Josh Langston, co-author of "Druids," sat at the end of the table and had a very merry conversation about researching historical novels, the perils of trying to find publishers, the difficulties of long-distance collaboration (Josh's writing partner lives in Edmondton, Alberta; he lives in Atlanta, GA), and many other things. Andrea is always fun to talk to because she works on the other side of the sheet, editing what we writers produce. She sees all sorts of books in all stages of readiness, and she's really good at what she does. Josh introduced me to his editor at Edge Books and I will be following up with him.

Friday I sat in on some good panel discussions and got to be part of one myself, a chance for which I was really grateful. Every panel was well attended; the ones with the big name authors were standing-room only. Since those were big meeting rooms, it was a little bit intimidating, knowing that if you put your foot in your mouth many, many people are going to witness it. My panel was about "The Last Resort," exploring the use of violence as a plot device and what makes it realistic when authors do use it. My fellow panelists included Joan Saberhagen, wife of Fred Saberhagen, Mark Van Name, Peter Brett, and Alan DeNiro. Mark has a personal history of violence from both the giving and receiving ends so he had some great insights and, as the moderator, he asked some really good and thought-provoking questions. I assume I did not stumble too badly over my answers since several people sought me out afterward over the next couple of days to tell me what a great panel that was.

And it was. The discussion ranged from Joan's reminder that most societies create people who will do violence for them: police, soldiers, and the like to Mark's "threshold moment": the one where a person decides to take violent action for whatever reason, and his take on what is happening in your head while the action is going on (not much but focusing on getting through it). Someone in the audience wanted to know the bad guys' motivations, and someone else wanted to know how we make different characters react to the use of violence. It was a thoroughly interesting discussion and I'm glad I got to be part of it.

Since WFC is all about books, it is only fitting that the dealers' room is mostly booksellers, with the biggest array of new and used genre fiction ever. I was browsing a table, minding my own business, only to discover I was standing next to David Drake, who was busy signing some books for the dealer. I held a signed copy of one of Lovecraft's books (worth $9000 dollars) and a signed copy of "A Canticle for Liebowitz" (worth $4000) and made very sure to set them down gently. On Sunday morning the pool directly over the ballrooms cracked and poured water down into the hall, but fortunately missed the dealers' room. What a disaster that would have been.

The small presses were well represented. Edge Books shared a table with Dragon Moon and a couple of others, and their books are just as interesting and varied as the big publishers' lists. So many books--so little time. I wish I had time to read for about 2 years straight just to catch up on all the wonderful-looking titles. But that would avail me nothing, as there would just be two more years' worth of wonderful titles to catch up on. I feel like even if I get any or all of my books into print, it will be like casting pearls into the sea.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, was terrific, from the two old guys from San Jose who escorted me on the public transportation system from the airport to my hotel, to my fellow writers and the attending agents and editors. Everyone is there to meet everyone else, so even the big names who have seen it all before a hundred times are very gracious, very patient with the people running around gawking at them. You are really not allowed to sit and vegetate alone. Someone will sit down at the next table or chair and strike up a conversation. And that's all good. Anyone who is shy or hesitant to go out and mingle will find plenty of people willing and eager to sit down with strangers.

I have to say that Locus throws a great party. Tor's was more staid. I can't remember who had the balloon cake, but it was great. The hotel overflowed with chocolate. How much better does it get than that?

Congratulations to Kij Johnson, who won the World Fantasy Award for her story "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss." I didn’t get to stay for the banquet but I saw her announcement on Facebook. Congrats to Kij and all the other winners. The full list is here.

That’s about it, except that I am so glad I went.

On Reviews

2009-09-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

I came away from SpoCon determined not to read reviews of my stuff, since the horror stories were so . . . horrific. But, alas, getting reviewed is part of the marketing process, necessary to getting the word out about your work, so I have been on the lookout. "Who Mourns for the Hangman?" came out on September 1 from Damnation Books, and I sent the story to a couple of review sites, The Horror Press and Rites of Romance (which seems to review anything it likes), both of which came back positive. Then I Googled Science Fiction Trails #4 to see if it had been reviewed, and got a pleasant surprise with "Message in the Dust", which Tangent Online really liked. So far so good with regard to reviews of my work, but it is early days.

It's lovely when reviewers agree with you that your stuff is just grand. But I've been keeping up with my fellow Damnation Books authors' reviews and some of them are all over the map. How useful are reviews of any sort, really, for books, movies, or anything else, when it is so much a matter of taste on the part of the reviewer? How much influence do reviews have on the buying public? Some of the worst-reviewed movies are blockbusters. Some of the best-reviewed books are so awful only the reviewers seem to read them. How useful is the whole system?

I don't actually know, but until someone can tell me, I suppose I will keep playing the game, hoping that positive reviews generate sales and any negative ones don't hurt.

On Rewriting

2009-08-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, how I hate it. Time was, I wrote a story or a book, stuck it in the drawer and forgot about it. I had indulged my pleasures by writing it; it was my thing, like other people play hockey or go to the lake. I love to write. The creation was the best part. Now that I've gone all commercial, it means dragging that stuff out and attempting to make it marketable.

There's another word I hate. Mar-ket-ing. Bleaaaahh. The stories I write satisfy something deep in me. When I workshop them and discover a disconnect between my muse and my audience, it comes down to the old, icky decision of "Do I change it or do I leave it alone?" Is it truly impossible to sell a story that says profound things you want to say but has a main character nobody likes? It is especially hard to decide when the protag is that way for a reason--not necessarily unsympathetic, but nobody wants to relate to that person. Nobody wants to live inside the skin of a coward for 200 pages, but on the other hands, cowards can really be interesting. Or funny. Or pitiable. They make us think about our own limitations, which is why no one wants to inhabit the guy's head for any length of time.

I suppose I should spend more time reading "great literature" like Lolita to discover how to make a pedophile worth reading about. Or maybe just hunt hard for an editor who looks beyond the gut reaction to the truth in the story.

Okay. Back to my difficult rewrite of a story I like very much, but even I agree the protag needs work. (And no, she's not a coward. Just terminally naive.)

Marketing Blues

2009-08-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

Heh. SpoCon was a week ago in Spokane, Washington. It was fun, even if this year's organizing committee was not quite as--how shall I say this?--organized as last year. My friend Ann Wilkes (author of Awesome Lavratt, a very funny SF book), flew up from California and stayed with me for the duration. We teamed up with Maggie Bonham, author of many fantasy books, and Andrea Howe, freelance owner of Blue Falcon Editing, and laughed and laughed and laughed. I had the great honor of sitting on a couple of panels with L. E. Modesitt and chatting with him afterward. He is a gentleman, and after glancing through a couple of his books, I am officially jealous of his talent. I figured out after the con why I had never picked up one of his books--the covers. I just really don't like covers done by that particular artist....

The panel about using social networking for marketing your work hit home for several reasons--mostly because I have done so little of it. Yet it is the wave of the future and I need to hop on my cyber surfboard and get ahead of the curve. Hence, I have made a resolve to keep up with this blog. Yo ho. We'll see how that lasts. I also created a FaceBook page for Sue Bolich, and I have had a Twitter account for a while that I never use, not being glued to a cell phone all day. That one is suebthewriter. Not that even I can remember that!

Mostly of late I have spent some time putting together a video trailer for my upcoming short story, Who Mourns for the Hangman? It will be out as an ebook from Damnation Books September 1. I like Flash, and while I originally created it to post to YouTube and Facebook, I haven't do so yet. It's full high def at high res, so it takes a few seconds to load up, but I had fun.

Marketing is something none of us writers can ignore, unfortunately, so here's to forming a game plan and sticking to it. Wish me luck.

Right Story, Right Market

2009-06-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

I've been quiet way too long, I see. After spending April biting my nails wondering if anyone was ever going to give me a contract again, the flood gates opened in May and this week was the first breather I've had since. Sheesh. It's true that it never rains but it pours. Ahh, the life of a freelancer.

I have not sent anything out the door since the end of April, barring a novel to someone I hope will become my agent. However, replies on shorts sent out before that continue to trickle in, including an acceptance from Third Order Magazine for my short story, "4000 Roads to Hell." I knew when I wrote it that there would be a limited market for it. Not only is it a weird Western, written with a strong dialect, which many editors dislike, it also has a strongly Christian message, which, sadly, would bar it from many markets. I am so happy Third Order took it. It absolutely suits their editoral slant, and that is the point of this post (aside from a little marketing pitch there. Watch for their June issue!)

Everyone wants to sell to the big markets, and that is where most people send their stuff first. Unfortunately, too many people send their stories to the "pros" regardless of whether the pro market would be interested in their story's slant at all. They just start at the top and work down. I believe in sending the story to the right market, regardless of the pay scale. While I have twice that I know of unintentionally screwed up and sent a story to a place that did not want anything remotely like it, I do try hard to match the sub to the market to avoid wasting everyone's time. People who load up editors' slush piles with junk in no way suitable for that market just make it harder for everyone else.

Genre markets are not all the same, even though some authors treat them as such. They send SF to fantasy mags and vice versa, or horror to places that state right in their guidelines they don't want anything dark. Why do people assume their deathless prose will be so great it will just break down any editorial prejudice? Guess what? The editor personally may love it, but their audience won't. And since the magazine is targeted to a particular group of readers who expect certain types of stories, the editor who disappoints them soon has no job, or no magazine.

I personally would love to get a story into Analog or Asimov's or SF&F. Hopefully some day I will. Until then, I'll keep trying to match stories to markets, and keep racking up sales.

There's nothing like motivation

2009-05-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you guys, but revising a long novel is a--ahem, not fun. Especially not when you've been tearing your hair out over the first five chapters forever. I can't count the number of revisions on this particular beast, and finally I stalled out altogether. But, being at a particularly low point here a couple of months ago vis-a-vis making a living at fiction, I gritted my teeth, hauled it out, and had a brainstorm that sort of broke the logjam. So I redid the opening, retitled the thing, rewrote my cover letter, and sent it out. Presto! Somebody asked for the manuscript. So, oh my, did that ever give me motivation to overhaul the rest double quick. For the first time, I actually feel like this novel might be done, readable, marketable, maybe even attractive to a publisher (oh, please God). I really love the trilogy (I write fantasy, so is there anything that doesn't evolve into a series?), and I really, really want to see these books in print. Somewhere besides Lulu, that is!

Keep your fingers crossed. The lesson here, I guess, is that sometimes it pays to go bass-ackwards at a problem. In my case, I tossed the query out before the thing was 100% ready to go, knowing that likely I would either not get a bite at all, or one so delayed I had to work on it. The bite came faster than expected, but it was all good, because geez, did it ever give me focus. I work especially well under the gun, for some reason. I created my own de-blocker and motivator, and I feel really good whether or not this particular agent will sign me on, which I hope, because it's a great agency. The book looks good (to me) in its current form, and I am celebrating a bit today because now I can move on to revising other stuff in the drawer and quit feeling bad that this one is still moldering in there.

When in doubt, go for it. Really, what have you got to lose?

Damnation Press Debuting with My Story

2009-05-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

I'm quite tickled to be helping to launch a new market. Damnation Books is beginning publication in September as an e-book publisher. They are starting with 25 titles, and my dark fantasy short story "Who Mourns for the Hangman?" is one of them. I'm delighted to have another sale on the year, and wish Damnation Press every success, of course.

That's a nice way to end the week!

Clients from Hell and Other Wonders

2009-04-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

Boy, it's been waaaay too long since I paused for breath, so I'm ditching a boatload of assignments to take five minutes and post. Something strange and wonderful occurred to me a couple of minutes ago--I am a writer! I've always thought of myself as a writer, but for the past few months I have been earning my living exclusively, 100%, from the fruits of my words, drawn from my little brain--from thin air. I am freelancing full-time, currently buried in work (hooray!), and managing to keep my head above water. As of this writing I'm a long way from being J.K. Rowling comfy on the financial front, but I have only just begun.

I just have to take a moment to savor the feeling. I am not getting up at ungodly hours to travel ungodly distances to chain myself to someone else's desk. I am free to knock off when I please, write with my cat in my lap, or go ride my horse when I need to breathe. I am neither rich nor (yet) horribly poor, but I am free. Halleluiah!

Having said that, part of the price of freedom is doing contract work, but even that I can mostly pick and choose. The drawback is occasionally running into a client who is, how shall I say this, less than fun to work with. I now understand why so many agents and editors, when asked the major drawback to the job, instantly list the client from hell. I recently encountered one of this species, and my sympathies are with the people who have to deal with said creature full time. Yeesh.

For good or ill, rich or poor, I am where I have always wanted to be: doing what I most love, nurturing the one true talent I have. Keep your fingers crossed. And if you're feeling kindly, whisper a little prayer that it remains so, for me and for all of us who are stubbornly chasing our dreams.

Are the stars in alignment?

2009-03-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Good grief. Last week, due to the stock market, my broker's mistake, and execrable timing, proved to be a new financial low for me despite the sustained rally. I don't wanna think about my short-lived retirement no more. I am now freelancing fulltime and sort of wedging my fiction in around the edges like always.

With that said, however, this week started with a bang and just keeps getting better. TWO sales out of the blue, including one where the editor, bless his heart, tracked me down to give me the good news after his emails repeatedly bounced back. Kudos to Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which took my story "Kraken's Honor" for publication this fall. I also want to thank Anne Niven at Pangaia for accepting my story "Master of the Bones." I've been on one of my periodic "why do I bother?" kicks of late, despite being in the throes of the March Short Story in a Week challenges at Other Worlds Writers' Workshop. Sales certainly do make life look better!

Speaking of the SSIAW, I have four stories in thus far and I'm midway through a fifth. I like the first two I posted a lot. They have stepped out of my usual comfort zone--a long, long way out, and feel much more mature to me, as though I've finally stopped being afraid to speak my mind. There is so much that is beautiful in the world, and so much that makes me angry. I am always pleased when I can rail beautifully.

So to speak.

Go check out a funny little pub called Science Fiction Trails. Yes, this is a shameless plug, as one of my stories just came out in it. You can purchase the magazine here.

The Great Short Story Experiment

2009-02-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

Twice a year, Other Worlds Writers' Workshop, where I am one of the moderators, hosts a series of Short Story in a Week challenges, which are an absolute hoot. The members submit their favorite words, I use a Javascript random generator to pick five, and post the list. Challengers have one week to use all five in a coherent short story, in intelligent ways, not just stuck in at random. The variety of resulting stories is invariably fascinating.

I like doing the challenges (they run through March, and then again all through September), because they give me a chance to experiment a lot. It's not like a novel where you have to stick with a character for 100,000 words. A short is something where, when you reach the end, you can walk away from a failed experiment without a great deal of time and anguish invested. By experiment, I mean exploring characters I would not want to use in a novel, or situations I don't much want to write about but are cool to look at once in a while, or settings that don't involve reams of worldbuilding. An SSIAW story is, of necessity, written at full speed, and I try to get in two or three in a week, so go figure on the quality of the finished product. Some of them haven't been bad, though. "An Infinity of Moments," which recently sold to On Spec, was the product of an SSIAW. So was "Message in the Dust," which will appear soon in Science Fiction Trails. But anyone going in who just can't conceive the notion of sharing a rough draft, warts-and-all story with the world is not cut out for SSIAW.

The point is to write. Just get in and write. Finish something. Meet a deadline. It's an exercise in discipline as much as it is in writing, so people who pooh-pooh the notion of trying to churn out anything of value in a week should consider that angle. There are many writers who sit around and imagine their stories to death without ever writing a word; there are others who actually get it on paper, then tinker and tweak and fuss and fiddle with it ad infinitum, never actually subbing it anywhere, either for critique or for publication. These are not real writers. These are people who call themselves writers but don't actually try to make the leap into being recognized as such by anyone but their loving kinfolk.

Back to experimenting. I am a novelist at heart. I suppose that's why I can toss of 20,000 words worth of short stories in a week and leave them moldering in the drawer for years. Only the really good ones grab me enough to want to devote the considerable time required to workshop them, polish them, and shop them around. Short story rejections break your heart fully as much as novel rejections; worse, they come back faster and generally more often. Seven times the misery. Heh. However, they are an excellent venue for trying things out: stories from the antagonist's viewpoint, stories with unsympathetic protags, stories with ultra-weird protags, stories with fantastical settings. I intent to use the March SSIAW coming up at OWWW to explore a little more than I usually do, praying all the while the word lists give my muse a creative jolt in the right direction. If not, I suppose I will settle for writing anything, as usual. But I hope for originality.

Don't we all?

Show vs Tell . . . in critiques

2009-02-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

I've been a moderator at Other Worlds Writers Workshop (also found on Yahoo Groups) for over ten years now. I've seen a lot of eager newbies, and a lot of critiques--and critters. Too often, people on both ends of the crit scratch their heads over the problems being pointed out because, in many cases, neither one is exactly sure what the problem actually is, only that there is one. The beginner is too new at the craft to know how to pick up on the flaws in his/her writing style. The critter is often unable to articulate how to fix it. The ubiquitous "this is too passive" or "you spend a lot of time telling instead of showing" crit is perfectly useless to the writer receiving one. When asked, many critters spouting these platitudes can't actually even demonstrate the difference between a Show and a Tell. They know it when they see it, but they can't (or won't take the time) to articulate it in ways that help the poor newbie fix the problem.

So what makes for a great critique? One that is on point, encouraging, and instructive all at once. Many people like to score points on fellow writers by being snarky, hiding their own deficiencies by ragging on someone's work. Others settle in to lecture, drowning the author in do's and don'ts gleaned from the innumerable how-to-write books they've read while not actually writing anything of their own. OWWW chucks out the professional critters right along with the lurkers who never participate at all. Critting should not be about demonstrating how much you know, or think you know, or about destroying some poor guy's ego, but about honestly analyzing a piece to help the writer fulfill his vision for it.

How to do that? Ah, there's the rub. It's easy to fall into the trap of trying to rewrite the piece to what you think it should be. Sometimes critiquing is a matter of telling your own instincts to get back in their cage and stretching to try and understand what the author is trying to accomplish. If you can't control your editorial urge to complete rewrite it, you should walk away and crit something else, or stick to the mechanics of "needs trimming" and "writing is really passive."

HOWEVER. . . (she said), you need to SHOW the writer what you mean when you toss around terms like trimming and passive and Tell. A really good crit takes some time and committment. It takes picking out specific examples of the writing and editing them to show where the excess verbiage lies. It means demonstrating the correct way to punctuate dialogue when the writer consistently does stuff like "I can't go out tonight." Mary said. It means showing the newbie what passive means by practical demonstration:

"Joe was walking down the street. He had just gotten off the bus, and it was raining. He had started that morning in Oklahoma, after Mary threw him out. It had been a long time coming; he had cheated on her once too often. They had been together ten years. Didn't that count? But she had said to get out and not come back. Now here he was, walking in the rain in a town he couldn't even name."

Not only does this story start in the wrong place (in my opinion), it distances the reader from the precipitating event that places the POV character where he is, losing all its emotional punch. It uses that deadly "had" to look back at the dramatic events of the morning, not to mention the "was-ing" going on everywhere, that horrible hallmark of passive writing. The reader is being Told what happened to Joe, instead of living it with him.

Now, the writer may have some perfectly valid reason for starting the story in the new town, and the critter should respect that while pointing up that perhaps it would be better started earlier. Regardless of who is right on that point, the critter can still try to help with the passive and boring opening. To demonstrate active writing and drive home the point about starting the story sooner, the critter could offer an alternative opening:

"Get out, you lying sack of scum!"

"Jesus, Mary!" Joe only just dodged the vase his housemate threw at him, the ugly one his sister had given them when they moved in together, he noted as it whizzed past his ear. It shattered against the wall a foot from his head, peppering him with splinters like shrapnel. "Ow!"

He pawed at a stinging spot on his cheekbone and brought his hand away red. "I'm bleeding!"

"Good!" Mary reached for more ammunition. "Get out, now, before I hunt up the shotgun! Go back to your barfly!"

Joe winced, ten hours later and two hundred miles away. She wasn't a barfly, he thought sadly as the bus's brakes hissed and the Greyhound rocked to a stop. But I guess Mary had a point.

Rain streaked the windows and pounded off the pavement outside. He stood up and shrugged into his coat, shuffled down the aisle between mostly-empty seats and out into the rain. End of the line. This was as far as the money in his pockets took him. A new place. A new start. What the hell was the name of this place again?

The rain beat down on his head. Maybe I shoulda married her, he thought as the bus pulled away, starting a small tidal wave up over the curb to soak his shoes. Then he grinned. She always did hate that vase.

Which version engages the senses, uses active verbs, establishes a mood, puts the reader into the action instead of looking back at it? Which establishes characterization and a sense of how the protag thinks? Which gives you a mental picture?

Of course, simpler methods exist for getting the point across: "It was raining" becomes "Rain poured from the sky as though God had upended a bucket, sluicing down the street in a solid sheet." Or even: "Joe flipped the collar of his coat up against the water dripping from his hair down his neck and ducked his head against the downpour." Guess what? We know it's raining, but we never once mentioned the word.

Pointing out every example of bad writing in a crit would be exhausting, of course, and above and beyond the duties of critters. One good example should be sufficient, with an admonition to the writer to find all the rest. Pointing out two examples of overused words should be followed by "It might be instructive to you to run a find and replace in your document on 'was'. You might be shocked by how many times you fall into the passive construction." It is not up to the critter to serve as a free editorial service for a lazy writer. If they want to learn, point out the path and step out of the way.

How do you avoid putting your stamp on someone's work, imposing your personal rules on someone's chosen style? I have received crits that were one long grammatical lesson, trying to impose "correct" Chicago style on my creative piece. Hmm. Not that helpful, all in all. A good crit should look at the story, not just the mechanics. If the plot is lame, the passives may not matter, but you should still point them out so the writer can continue to improve. Knowing the writer's skill level, self-assessed or otherwise, is a good starting point. Respecting a writer's request that you proffer no line crits, or to please focus on the characterization as a known weak spot, will always get you points, and force you to stretch out of your own critting comfort zone. It is, or should be, easy to tell the beginners from those who have mastered the basics of active writing and storytelling. The one-size-fits-all crit is just as bad as the "too much passive voice" crit.

A lot of people join workshops intending to jump right in, only to be intimidated by the thought of offering an opinion about someone else's work, especially if the writing is fairly good. I always try to remind newbies that every reader is entitled to an opinion. You are, after all, the one who is or is not going to plunk money down on a book. You will react in some way to the writing, good or bad. It is fair to tell a writer that the opening did not grab you or that you couldn't follow the wandering plot, or that Character X just didn't seem believable. You should always try, however, to point out some specific example where X was doing something you found unrealistic, or to pinpoint the exact moment at which your attention started to wander. Even if you don't quite know how to fix these problems yourself, you can still provide valuable feedback--if you Show and don't simply Tell the writer where he went wrong. In your opinion.

Good critters are generally made, not born. They evolve as they grow more proficient in their own writing. My advice to both writers and critters is to embrace the Show vs Tell rule, learn it, understand it down to their bones. Once it becomes part of your writing DNA, a good many other problems will disappear almost effortlessly. And that includes weak and fuzzy crits.

There. Those are my words pulled from thin air for the day. Make of them what you will.

Woohoo for me--I think

2009-02-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

I have to confess I'm really tired of being a bridesmaid. Today I got a lovely certificate from Writers of the Future for my story "Eternity's Child", which is better than a rejection letter, I admit. My last story there got to the quarterfinals before collecting a rejection letter. No certificate for that one. Certificates are cool, but not as much as actually winning the dratted contest.

Ah, well, it's a lovely day, it's not snowing, there is hope of spring, and it really is a pretty certificate!

Rising stars and wannabes

2009-01-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to catch up on new voices in SF and fantasy of late. One I encountered over Christmas was Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind. I really liked this book, even though I felt it took way too long to cut to the actual story. His style is fluid as well as beautiful, and I love a character that can laugh at himself. Oh, my. The scene where the hero trustingly steps off the roof is priceless.

What I did not like was the fact that at least one editor at Daw seems unable to master the proper usage of "led, lead, lie, lay" or the mysteries of apostrophes. Repeated references to "my parent's wagon," when the hero has two living parents and the wagon belongs to both of them, set my teeth on edge. Like most writers, I have my pet peeves, and the rapid demise of English grammar is one of them. One has hopes that editors and journalists live in the last bastion of proper use of the English language, but the more I read "professionally edited" material the more I have to wonder if anyone in the industry knows what this anymore.

Don't get me wrong. In general I like the books Daw puts out. Just... can we please not ruin this old-fashioned reader's enjoyment by perpetuating mistakes? Aaack.

Of snow and Pollyanna

2009-01-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, I had every intention of checking in over the holidays, but then it started to snow. And snow. And snow. Over 5 feet in less than two weeks. That's just rude. After last winter everybody was hoping for a mild(er) winter, but nooooo. We got 2' in one day and then storm after storm after storm. The good news is that after clearing the roof of my 2600 sq ft house by myself, all those Christmas cookies are history. Two jillion calories burned, wahoo! The bad news is that I have to fix my barn roof come spring. Two of the support timbers broke but it did not cave in, thank God sincerely, because my horse was in the stall directly underneath. My wonderful brother-in-law came up and helped me shore it back up. Or rather, I handed him tools while he shored it back up. I wuv my family!

The year started on a depressing note: a rejection from some soul at Intergalactic Medicine Show working on New Year's Day. Thanks, fella. Way to set the tone. However, my ego was salved when Science Fiction Trails snapped up "Message in the Dust" in less than a day. I got the contract two days later by snail mail. That's gotta be a record, which makes me wonder if I should have shopped that story around a little. That was the first place I sent it. But if the market's right, it's right, and I appreciate the sale. Let's hope the trend continues.

My New Year's resolution is to quit obsessing on all the rotten things that could go wrong and focus on accentuating the positive. At the end of the day, I want to be able to say "It was a good day." Even on Tuesday, when an expected check failed to show up and the market took a nose dive, it didn't snow! The sun was actually out for a while, and it's one day closer to spring. So let's hear it for the Pollyanna syndrome. It's working so far...

I have 18 subs out so far this month, 1 acceptance, 1 rejection. I'm looking at a lot of different markets I haven't tried before, so we'll see.

Cheers from Pollyanna!