Month: February 2013

If Wishes Were Horses

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Two things I wish that writers wouldn’t do:

Tell readers what, and how, they should think about their books.  Believe me, I understand the impulse.  One of the hardest things to accept, if you’re a writer, is that once your story is out there loose in the world, you have absolutely no control over how other people incorporate it into their own heads. The readers who excoriate you for crimes you had no idea you were committing are bad enough; the ones who really like your books for reasons you find repulsive are even worse; and sometimes the urge to tell everybody that They’re Doing It Wrong becomes well-nigh insurmountable.

Go back and rewrite their earlier works to make them better.   I can understand this impulse, as well.  We all like to think that we’ve improved in our art since we started working at it, and our novice-writer gaucheries can make us wince.  But rewriting one’s early stuff to bring it up to standard doesn’t usually improve it enough to make it worth the loss of the energy and reckless endeavor that often characterize newbie work.  (I know there are things that I tried to do, and at least came close to carrying off, in my early stuff that I wouldn’t attempt to do now because I know how low the odds are for success.)

As for writers who go back and revise their earlier work to bring it more into line with their later political or philosophical convictions . . . they depress me.  Sure, you don’t think that way now, I want to say to them; but an earlier version of you once did.  Trying to bring those thoughts and words around to the current standard always strikes me as like trying to kill that earlier you.

Question of the Day

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Dear Dr. Doyle:

Should I major in English if I want to be a writer?

Signed,

Perplexed

Dear Perplexed,

Only if you really want to.  And certainly not if what you’re looking for from your college degree is a ticket to a well-paying job outside of academia.   (“Well-paying job” and “inside academia” being two phrases that do not usually collocate, any more than “well-paying job” and “writer” usually do.)  Whenever magazines and web sites do one of their “Ten Least Useful College Degrees” articles, “English major” is usually number one on the list.

You’re not going to get the sort of respect that comes from doing something impractical but obviously difficult, either.  Majoring in English has for a long time been the traditional default field of study for people who want a bachelor’s degree but don’t want to work very hard for it.  And in fact, majoring in English (or another of the humanities) is kind of like writing haiku:  really easy, so long as you don’t mind doing a mediocre job of it; but really hard if you want to do it well.  Most people don’t bother trying to do it well.

That being said, I majored in English as an undergrad, and went back for another round in grad school, and over time, the degree has been good to me.  So I’d say — follow your heart, just don’t expect to get rich doing it.

Mindless Cookery Revisited

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Or, yet another no-brainer crockpot entree for those days when the mind is on other things.  Around our house, this one rejoices in the uninspired but accurate name of:

Golden Mushroom Pork Glop

  • 4-6 boneless pork chops, or pork cutlets, or pieces of a bonless pork roast sliced into collops.  (Bone-in pork chops also work, but it’s annoying to have to fish the bones out at serving time.)
  • 1 large or 2 medium onions, sliced into rings
  • 1 can Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup, undiluted
  • 1 tsp ground sage

Put the sliced onions into the crockpot; then put the pork chops or cutlets or collops on top of them.  Empty the can of Golden Mushroom soup on top of the pork, and smear it around with a wooden spoon until all the pieces of pork are covered.  Put the lid on the crockpot and cook it all day on low or for 7-8 hours on high, until the pork is tender.

Serve with your choice of starch to sop up the gravy.

 

Short Stuff

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My husband/co-author and I have sold a short story to an anthology.  This is not actually that common a thing for us, because we’re primarily novelists, and most of the story ideas that swim into our nets are novel-sized ideas.

You can’t make a lot of money writing short stories, at least not these days.  There aren’t enough markets, and the rate of pay has not increased that much over the decades.  There was a time, or so I’ve been told, when a writer of short stories could at least keep him-or-herself from starvation by writing alone; but that was also a time when magazine short fiction filled the entertainment niche occupied these days by television and the internet.

Why, then, do we write short fiction at all?

One reason, of course, is that sometimes a short-story-sized idea swims into our fishing net, and it would be wasteful to throw it back.

Another reason is that for novelists, short stories function as advertising — they keep the writer’s name out in front of the public, and they provide readers with a sample that might lure them into buying longer works.  The primary reason that people buy a book, even in the electronic age, is because they’ve already read and liked something by the same author.

Finally, while you can’t make a living writing short stories, you can — sometimes — make a reputation.  And it’s a rare writer who’ll turn up his or her nose at the idea of acquiring a modicum of extra fame.

Blizzard Warning

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To everybody in the path of the storm:

Stay inside; stay warm; stay safe.   Friday and Saturday look like good days for cuddling up next to your computer and working on your novel.  Whatever you were thinking of driving to will still be there on Monday.

(And if circumstances force you out onto the road anyway, make sure you’ve got a warm blanket or a sleeping bag in the car with you, just in case.  Some bottled water and a couple of energy bars probably wouldn’t hurt, either.  Making Light has a bunch of useful links. )

Tell It to the (Space) Marines

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This story is all over the science fiction and fantasy segments of the internet this morning, but just in case you’ve missed it, a few links:

Games Workshop, owners of the Warhammer 40K gaming franchise, slap down a self-published Amazon author in the name of asserting their trademark on the term “space marines.”

The estimable John Scalzi weighs in on the topic, as do many commenters.

I particularly like the person who provided a link to a Wikipedia list of actual space marines.  I have no idea how many, if any, cosmonauts were the then-USSR’s equivalent of marines, but I’ll bet that somebody on the internet does.

Over at Making Light, they’re on it as well.

And why did Games Workshop choose to go after a self-published author, and not, say, the Heinlein estate or any of the other fairly large gorillas who have used the term and the concept of “space marines” in their science fiction since the late nineteen-thirties at least?  For the same reason that school administrators, when they decide to implement a “zero tolerance” drug policy, go after the honor student who gives her best friend a Canadian Tylenol for cramps, rather than the apprentice hoodlums selling coke and steroids to the football team out in the school parking lot — they can get the desired result (the appearance of vigorously carrying out policy) without the fear of serious repercussions (in the form of lawsuits or busted kneecaps.)

E-Readers and Salt Cellars

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So there I was in the kitchen brewing the morning’s pot of coffee, and to while away the time while waiting for the water to boil, I propped my Nook up on the salt cellar . . . and had a thought about the depiction of technological advances in science fiction.

Part of the fun of writing science fiction is the opportunity to create a shiny bright all-new high-tech future (or a dark and grubby one, if that’s where your interest lies.)  A lot of the time, though, when we create our futures, we forget that the past doesn’t go away.  Bits and pieces of it stick around and stay in use.  If you look in the right places, you can still buy buggy whips, because there are still people who use them.  In my own small (very small — population about 2500) town, there are homes that get their energy from solar panels, and homes where the owners cut their own firewood from the trees in their wood lot and burn it in their cast-iron stoves.  The same world that has an international space station in orbit also still has sailing ships and horse-drawn plows.

Change doesn’t happen at the same rate all over the place.  And people don’t stop using old things when new things are invented:  some people can’t afford the new things, other people don’t like the new things, and some people make a hobby out of liking and using the old things even when they could easily afford the new.  Digital watches were rare and expensive, once upon a time; when they became cheap and ubiquitous, the people who cared about such things went back to wearing finely-crafted hands-on-a-dial watches instead.

Any future we think up has to be as technologically mixed-up and diverse as the present we’ve already got, or our imaginations have failed us.

This, Now, is a Cool Thing.

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The remains of Richard III have been found underneath a car park in Leicester and positively identified by DNA matching.  (There’s a guy in Canada who’s a direct descendant of Richard’s sister Anne.)

This Sort of Thing Has Just Got to Stop

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 13 Comments

It’s one thing for companies to insist on ownership of patents for things developed in their labs on their time.  At least the inventors sometimes get internal recognition, not to mention resumé cred.

But now we have a school board in Prince George’s County, Maryland, that wants to assert ownership of the copyrights not just for things like lesson plans and computer apps created by teachers in the system using district-provided iPads and other tools, but also for material written or developed by students as part of a classroom assignment.

And that is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong with a side order of extremely bad and heinous.  And did I mention, just plain wrong?

Not that I feel strongly on the subject, or anything like that.

Peeve of the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

On the subject of swearing, cussing, and general bad language in fictional dialogue:

Profanity and obscenity have their own grammar, and if you don’t know first-hand how to deploy it, don’t try to fake it.  Either leave the bad language out completely or seek out a trusted beta reader with a fluency in the vulgar tongue.  The explanation, “I’m going to be writing about this, and I want to make sure I get it right,” opens a lot of research doors, some of them in unexpected places.  It’s a rare human being who doesn’t appreciate being sought out for his/her expertise.

Period-accurate bad language seldom works as well as it should, because the shock value is lost.  Made-up future bad language, for its part, doesn’t have the shock value to lose.  In the latter case, the best bet is usually to go with contemporary expressions — or, as the science fiction writer James Blish once said, “The future equivalent of ‘damn,’ expressed in present terms, is ‘damn.'”  Sometimes this is also the best answer for historical bad language as well, though it can depend on the overall tone of the rest of the book; most of the time, a writer of historical fiction has to walk a tightrope strung over the twin pits of presentism and forsoothery (about which I will write a post someday) without falling into either one.

Which brings us around — finally — to my actual peeve:

It’s either dammit or damn it.  Writing it out as damnit, with the silent n included, makes it look like the speaker is cursing out the egg of a head-louse.