Author: drdoyleeditorial

Another Thing Not to Do

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Prologues.

And I say this who have written them.  In my defense,

  1. I was a much younger writer, then.
  2. I believed that the story demanded it.  And
  3. I think I got away with it.

Of the above, #3 is probably the most important.  Good writing is all about what you can get away with, and one of the big lessons to learn on the way to becoming a good writer is figuring out how much, and what sorts of things, you can get away with.

Usually, the answer to “how much can I get away with?” is “not nearly as much as you think.”  On the other hand, sometimes your muse doesn’t leave you with any choice except to say, “what the hell” and go for it.  At which point, you do your best and take the consequences as they come.

So, anyway, prologues.  Not nearly as many stories need them as have them, and entirely too many failed stories – especially in the Epic, or Doorstop, Fantasy genre – start out twenty years or so before the main action, with the portentous birth of the main character, or the portentous death of somebody important to the backstory, or the portentous prophecy of some future birth, death, or general catastrophic doom.  For this reason, if you find yourself feeling the urge to commence your novel with a prologue, at least stop first and ask yourself, “Can I put this same information into a flashback somewhere around chapter five?  Or into a couple of paragraphs of dialogue between the Young Protagonist and his/her Wise Mentor somewhere around chapter two? Or will this section work just as well if I label it ‘Chapter One,’ and commence the next chapter with ‘Twenty years later’?”

If you can answer any one of those questions with “Yes,” then you should probably take the hint and revise your no-longer-prologue accordingly.

In Which I Confess to Being Puzzled

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So apparently one of the things people whose cell phones have cameras in them do is take pictures of themselves. Which utterly fails to surprise me, because it strikes me that, given the ability to do so, it’s a very human thing to do. And they refer to these cell phone self-portraits as “selfies,” which again fails to surprise me, because a new phenomenon (or a new variation on an old phenomenon) needs a word to call it by, and word-making is another very human thing to do.

But apparently all sorts of other people have been getting all sorts of put out by the practice, or by the word for the practice, or both. And I’m perplexed as to why on earth it bothers them so much — surely it can’t be because a lot of the producers of selfies are young and a lot of them are female? Or is it because now the ability to produce a self-portrait is available to anyone with a cell phone camera, instead of being limited to the likes of Albrecht Dürer or Vincent Van Gogh?

Really, sometimes the things other people choose to view with alarm confuses me.

Today’s Nifty Links

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Link the first:  A newly-released on-line archive of images from the French Revolution, done as a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  There’s an article about the archive here; the bilingual, searchable archive itself is here.

Link the second:  Over at John Scalzi’s blog, there’s an open comment thread going on, with writers sharing the most valuable bits of practical craft advice they’ve received or read.

Another Burning Controversy of the Literary Kind

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Forget politics.  Forget philosophy.  If you want to start an argument in a room full of wordsmiths, raise the question of whether one space or two should follow a period.

Consider, for instance, this blast of the trumpet against the dreaded two-spacers, published back in 2011:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.

In part the divide is a cultural one, with typographers (who work with proportional fonts and are concerned with beauty and readability from the consumer’s end) on one side, and writers and editors (who have traditionally worked with monospaced fonts and are concerned with making the text clear and easy to work with on the production end) on the other side.

There’s also a generational component in the spacing war.  Older writers, who learned to type on manual or electric typewriters that produced monospaced output, were trained to space twice after a period, for clarity’s sake.  Writers who came later to the trade, on the other hand, learned keyboarding on personal computers with access to proportional fonts, and were taught the typographer’s one-space principle.

Who’s right?  It doesn’t matter.  The glory of word processing is that you can write your book whichever way you were taught, without having to worry about retraining your spacebar thumb.  Then you can go to your publisher’s guidelines, and see if they have a stated preference.  If they do, then use the mighty power of global search and replace (if your word processing program doesn’t already come with a built-in “convert two spaces to one space/one space to two spaces” option) to make your text conform to the desired standard.

If the publisher doesn’t have a preference, then go with what you’ve got.  Or, if you’re still uncertain:  If you’re working in a monospaced font (which is to say, in Courier New – there are other monospaced fonts out there, but when an editor thinks “monospace” they think “Courier New”), then space twice after the period.  If you’re working in a proportional font (which is to say, Times New Roman, because the last thing an editor wants is to read a manuscript where the author has gotten cute with the fontwork), then space once after the period.

And don’t stress out about it.

“Make New Friends, but Keep the Old….”

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“One is silver, but the other’s gold.”

Anyone who’s ever been a Girl Scout knows that song.  I remember singing it once in a bar at a science fiction convention, in the company of another couple of writers and an editor†, all of us former Girl Scouts.  (Though I suspect that, much as there are no former Marines, there are no former Girl Scouts.  Or very few, anyhow.)

This year the Girl Scouts are test-marketing a gluten-free cookie.
The list of councils where the Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Shortbread cookie is being sold is available here.

The main reason for buying Girl Scout cookies is, of course, that they are delicious, and I say this as someone who could easily consume a whole box of classic trefoils at one sitting if I didn’t stop myself.  But this year, buying Girl Scout cookies is also a way of frustrating these people, who in my opinion very much deserve frustration.

The Girl Scouts have always been a feminist organization – in some eras they’ve been more overt about it than in others, but what else do you expect from a group that has from its beginning striven to inculcate in young girls the virtues of self-knowledge, self-reliance, and sisterhood?

†Obligatory writing reference!

From the Good Folks at the OED

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Some interesting blog posts about words and related trivia:

There’s one about champagne (did you know that the big 30-liter bottle is called a Melchizedek?) and another about spies (or intelligence officers, as some of them prefer to be called.)

Or have a peevish post on reflexive pronouns (I like this one, myself.)  Or one about OED citations from film scripts and transcripts (the latter for words which appear in ad-libbed dialogue, rather than in the written script.)

Then there’s this one, on the difficulty of translating book titles (Mockingjay gets translated into Spanish with a similar bird-name portmanteau word, Sinsajo, but the German translator opted for Flammender Zorn, “Flaming Fury.”)  Or this one, on German idioms (eine Extrawurst verlangen, “to ask for an extra sausage,” means “to expect special treatment.”)

I could mess around on that site all day.

Peeve of the Day

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Listen up, people.

A tic is a small involuntary or habitual motion:  Only the nervous tic in his left eyelid betrayed his agitation.

A tick is a bloodsucking arachnid:  After his walk in the woods, he found a deer tick just above the top edge of his right sock.

They mean two different things, and they have two different spellings.

Got it?

Good.

More Thought for Food

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After spending most of the morning hunched over my computer like a vulture, feeling out of sorts with the world, I wandered into the kitchen and asked myself, “Self, what do you want for lunch?”

And Self replied, upon consideration, “You know, what I would really like right now is some tomato soup.”

Normally, under such circumstances, I would inform myself, sternly, that we have no canned or otherwise packaged soup in the house, so that idea was right out. This time, however, Self was quick to add that we had canned diced tomatoes, an immersion blender, and a microwave right there, and the rest should follow easily from that point.

“Self,” I said, “you’ve got something.”

So I took a can of diced tomatoes, and a can of light coconut milk, and some dried minced garlic and some cumin and some Tabasco and a bit of salt and pepper, and I whirled them together with the blender until they were smooth. And then I added some tomato paste from the tube in the refrigerator, to make the end product a bit less pink and add a bit more tomato kick without having to add another whole can of tomatoes, and whirled it again.

Then I microwaved the final product until it was hot, and it was good.

Links to the Past

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Writers of historical or alt-historical fiction are always in search of pictorial references for people and places of times past.  Still pictures are good (and for most of history, they’re all that we have), but for over a century now we’ve had moving pictures, as well – and the internet, bless its digital heart, preserves them and displays them for us at our command.

Herewith, a trio of links:

London street scenes, 1927, in color: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgxki8_R968

Street scenes from Berlin and Munich, circa 1900-1914, also in color: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-m9A8mY-U0

Driving around New York, 1928.  This one’s in black and white, and is a staged comedy short, but the backgrounds are the real thing.  (And it’s amazing how long some of the visual high-speed automotive tropes we’re still seeing in film and television have been kicking around.): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqz3lpUBp0

I love the internet.

Thinking About Anthologies

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Anthologies, especially in genre fiction, cycle in and out of fashion.  At the time when my coauthor and I started writing professionally, they were at the start of a boom phase – our first sale was to the YA anthology Werewolves, edited by Jane Yolen and Martin Greenberg, and we had other anthology sales afterward.  As usually happens, though, there came a time when so many anthologies were being published that reader fatigue set in, and then for another decade or so hardly anybody edited original anthologies any more.  Now anthologies are coming back in again, and once again we’re selling an occasional short story (we’re novelists; all our short stories are occasional) to those markets.

Setting aside reprint anthologies, which are a different creature, anthologies come in two basic flavors: general and themed.  A general anthology is inclusive in its scope – its guidelines don’t get much more restrictive than, say, “original science fiction under 10,000 words.”  A themed anthology can be as specific as the editor desires:  “hard science fiction between 500-1000 words about broccoli,” or “fantasy novellas or long short stories on feminist themes with an emphasis on nontraditional magic systems.”  Themed anthologies can, paradoxically, be a lot easier to write for and sell to than the more open-ended ones. Either you’re the sort of writer for whom 500 words of hard sf focusing on broccoli come naturally to mind, or you’re not – and if you’re not you already know better than to try.

The other two main flavors of anthology are the open anthologies and the closed, or invitational, anthologies.  For an open anthology, the editor basically puts up a sign saying “SF Stories About Broccoli Wanted – Apply Within,” and then reads every manuscript that the mailman or the internet brings to him or her and rejects most of them.  This is, not surprisingly, a lot of work, and rejecting that many stories can get depressing, so most anthologies are put together from a list of invited authors, or from market listings in a restricted number of venues.

How to get into such an anthology?  Well, the usual way is to write a good enough story . . . but before you can do that, you have to know where to send it, and the trick to that is to be in the sort of places where word about such things gets spread about.  This is one of the reasons for the existence of professional writers’ mailing lists and on-line forums, and also one of the reasons why writers go to parties at conventions, or hang out in the bar, or talk to other writers at signing sessions or in the dealer’s room.  Because if you’re there, and you hear word of an anthology that’s opening up, then you’re in a position to write to the editor and say words to the effect of, “I understand that you’re going to be editing an anthology of hard sf flash fiction about broccoli, and I was wondering if I could submit a story to it.”

Maybe it won’t work; maybe you’ll get a polite brush-off along the lines of “I’d love to see something from you, but unfortunately all the slots are already filled.”  But you’re just as likely to get a “Sure, why not?” – and at that point, you’ve just been invited to apply.  And while a sale is never guaranteed, you’ll be part of a much much smaller slushpile than the ever-increasing paper and digital stacks of submitted manuscripts over at Rivetty SF.

The next step:  working your way up from “and others” to a name on the cover.