2011 Writing Review
Writing-wise I’m pretty happy with this year. Here are the highlights:
– My Lovecraftian, sex tourism gone awry story, “Go Home Stranger”, was published in the anthology Bewere the Night.
– Space Squid reprinted my story “Your Mother” in their Best of Space Squid anthology.
– Shimmer Magazine interviewed me in their Five Authors, Five Questions series. That was cool.
– I sold my Joe Mitchel meets Fritz Leiber story, “Shadows Under Hexmouth Street”, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. So I should have at least one story coming out in 2012.
– Started two novels (though at the time I believed I was starting one), and will likely finish the first draft of one of them within the next two months. The other one will get written later next year.
– Four new stories went out into the world, and I have another three that need polishing. My goal was to have six in the slush by year’s end. Didn’t quite get that. Next year. I did retire a few stories this year too. Always a sad occassion, but they’re back in the leafmold now awaiting possible hyrbridization.
That’s it. I am where I am, and the view’s not half bad.
NaNoWriMo Tip
Here’s a tip for everyone doing NaNoWriMo.
Say while you’re working on your book you get an idea for a decent 2-4K short story, but are uncertain whether you should take a break long enough to write it.
Now this isn’t an instance of “I think this’ll make a good story”. No, this is the story has more or less bubbled forth fully formed out of the froth of your NaNoWriMo-fevered brain, and since you’ve been putting in long hours pounding the keys you KNOW you can write this story, polish it, and get it out the door in 24 to 48 hours.
Well, if that’s the case, and you’re at all interested in actually completing some decent fiction this month, then take the break and write the story.
Your novel draft can wait. Inspiration won’t.
You know what I forgot sucked? Puberty.
Here’s a Wednesday check in. My hay fever is raging fierce and mean so don’t expect much in the way of segues.
You know what I forgot sucked? Puberty.
Holy shit does puberty suck. You go from playing with GI Joes, drawing rainbows, and unicorns to crying uncontrollably for five hours and breaking out in zits all in the span of one week. And that’s just the early stages. Give it a few years and you’re a sanctimonious twit outraged because the book kiosk in the mall doesn’t have a copy of Naked Lunch.
But anyway, I bring this up because right before my Tuesday afternoon class (the one I teach alone) the 6th grade alpha couple (he’s a dope, and she’s a smart bully) had a big fight and broke up. Then it came time for my class. He’s not in it, but she is, and, well, the tears, my friends, the tears and I’m the “adult” in the room who, you know, has a lesson plan and wants to teach some English—but fuck all if that gets done when the season finale of Dynasty is going on in the classroom.
You know what’s really popular in Korea? “The North Face” athletic gear.
It’s so popular there are tons of knock off North Face gear. My dress sweat pants have a The Novella Face logo on them and my sneakers are The Red Face. Which only means I think of the Gas Face whenever I put this stuff on:
If I had a segue to the next part it would be here.
Mary Renault’s The King Must Die is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read this year. No fooling. First, there’s the language:
“Then I saw why Apollo had sent a bard. Cretans do not know everything, though they think so. They know how to raise stones, but not men’s hearts. The people were afraid. So I understood why I was there, and called upon the god; and he put the power on me, to feel the work and make it music. I sang his praises, and gave the time. After a while, the seven kings with their sons and barons came forward and pulled for Apollo’s honor, standing among the people. Then the stones rose up slowly, and slid into the beds the Cretans had made for them. And they stood fast.”
Second is the world building, which is Ancient Greece seen through the eyes of a person who believes himself the son of Poseidon. If you’re a fan of Gene Wolfe or Catherynne Valente it’s worth checking out. Even if you always thought Theseus was a bit of a douche for leaving Ariadne on Naxos after she helped him escape the Labyrinth. It’s still worth it.
Working like this is the only way that makes sense, even if it is tricking myself.
So I’ve got this thing I’m working on. It’s a novel, Science Fantasy, you know, with castles, vat-grown flesh, and pistols in it. Its working title is Clusterfuck, a Novel. It rose out of two distinct stacks of story corpses. The characters in both stacks resemble each other and some of the thematic stuff is similar enough that I’m mashing them together to see if they form a new entity with an actual plot.
Simultaneously I can’t forget they’re also a pile of story corpses: jagged beginnings, characters without plots, situations without resolutions, junk like that, and I’m scavenging and cannibalizing so I can make a Frankenstein Monster Draft I can then rewrite and cannibalize again to find the more supple and sleek monster within.
Writing those first thousand words, even on Draft 0, terrifies me, but taking half a dozen collapsed stories and pasting them into one document gets me so deep into the maze that I feel like I’ve rocketed past the gate and left the fear of starting behind me.
And that’s a good thing.
Five Authors / Five Questions: The End
Last week Shimmer magazine posted the fifth question on their blog. This time we talked about endings.
5. How do you craft the perfect ending for a story? How do you keep an ending from falling flat?
I didn’t say this, but thought it was pretty spot on: “I’m always a fan of stories that leave the reader in the mystery, in the wonder. Which means risking not explaining everything, thus (hopefully) leaving the reader the space to make it perfect.”
Use these links to catch up with the whole series:
4. How do you decide whose story is being told? Do you have a favorite POV to work in?
3. How do you keep a story from slumping in the middle?
Thanks again to everyone at Shimmer. It was great fun being part of the series. (I’ll spare the Internets the dollop of self-denigrating out pouring… but, yeah, thanks!) Also it was great fun reading the answers from my co-interviewees: Luc Reid, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Don Mead, and Vylar Kaftan.
Gerard Jones on Finding Your Story
Oh no, this is my third post in a row on writing (!) after I’ve said how much I hated writing posts (!!). But it’s true I do hate writing posts, only this is from an interview with Gerard Jones. I loved Jones’ Killing Monsters and Men of Tomorrow. Read them. They are great.
(Thanks to pal Jay Ridler for sending this my way and absolute stranger Meghan Ward who conducted the interview.)
The Secret To Writing
From the movie adaption of Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser. I can’t remember the exact quote from the book, but I think this is close. Possibly the best piece of writing advice you’ll ever find in a misogynistic 1950s smut novel.
Ignoring Critiques
In my continuing quest to make rules to ignore apply to myself, here’s another one:
I read two books this week. Their names don’t matter much. I liked them both. They had me “turning pages”. But both had what I’ll call critique problems.
A critique group’s job is to find faults, but not all faults need to be corrected, nor can all faults be corrected. A critique problem is that thing your critique group would suggest changing, but shouldn’t be changed because doing so would grossly alter your vision of the story. Perfection shouldn’t be your goal. Your best and the space beyond it are your target. If you have control of your material and are achieving a certain effect and if following the advice of a critique would have you alter so much that that effect would be lost then ignore the critique.
This has been my second writing post. Chuseok pictures to follow.
Control
I’m not a fan of writing posts, especially those written by unpublished, self-published, and/or “neo-pro” writers. Nor am I fan of “celebrity slushreaders” going on about how they dream a story they select might win a Nebula like they were right there writing the story beside the author, or at the very least keeping their tea mug filled, as if reading slush wasn’t the equivalent of being so much human baleen.
Bullshit on all that.
But I’ve got two writing posts itching to get off my fingers so let me just get them done between now and next week and then I won’t have to write about writing or slushing for the rest of the year. I’m putting it here for my own benefit as much as anyone else.
People talk a lot about hooks and openings and grabbing the reader so they keep on reading. And yeah I use the word hook as well, but it’s not about that at all. (Rudy Rucker has a great bit on “hooks” in his Writer’s Toolkit, which everyone should download.)
Other folks talk about establishing trust between reader and writer, and I agree with them but wondered how that trust was gained because it has to be right at the start. Then I got a couple stories in the slush this week that helped me figure it out.
What it comes down to is control.
You can do whatever you want in your story. Write it lush or transparent. Climb Freytag’s pyramid or flip it on its peak and kick it in the rear. Anything goes as long as you’re in control.
As long as each word and sentence connects to the next word and sentence and the whole thing makes a pattern where there’s nothing more you can subtract from it. That’s control. Having pieces left in your hand at the end is control.
What’s not control is starting your story with a well-groomed hook and then piling on introspection, backstory, and/or setting details. What’s not control is leaving nothing out, but throwing it all in there and hoping for the best. Lush doesn’t mean overgrown or overwriting a story so thick it collapses under its own weight.
Every word must link together. They can be ugly or oddly shaped words, but they have to fit into the story’s overall pattern (and of course that pattern can be all freak-a-deak weird, but there has to be some discernable resonance there).
That’s it. Writing post number one is done. It’s all about control.
Next week 10 Bad Slush Habits. Until then here’s Spoek Mathambo’s disturbing cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”. Don’t blame me if it gives you nightmares.
Five Authors / Five Questions
Shimmer Magazine included me in their “Five Authors / Five Questions” series. Question number one was “How do you begin a story? Does it start with the idea, a character, an image, a line of dialogue, or are all stories different?” Click here to read my answer.
Thanks to E. Tobler and the rest of the Shimmer crew for including me.
Yesterweird 