Author: drdoyleeditorial

A Few Things a Writer Should Probably Do at Least Once

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At least if he or she is working in the fields of the historical or fantastic:

  • Fire a rifle or handgun.   If you don’t have the sort of friends who own firearms and back pastures where they can set up tin cans on fence posts, visit a shooting range.  (But the effect of a bullet on a full tin can of dubious green beans or corned beef hash is a lot more impressive than holes in a paper target.)  If you’re working on stuff set in the black-powder era, see if you can find a black-powder enthusiast for a demonstration.
  • Build a fire starting with tinder and matches.  Starting with flint and steel, or with even more basic gear, is rather more hard core than necessary, though if you happen to know a Boy Scout or a historical recreationist who’s into that sort of thing, you should take the opportunity to observe the process if you can.  It explains, among other things, why so many fictional wizards keep a handy firestarting spell in their back pockets, and why the ancient Romans were so big on keeping a fire burning in the Temple of Vesta.
  • Try on some armor and a helmet.  Cultivating the acquaintance of some historical recreationists, again, is good for this.  You’ll most likely end up in chain mail, because plate armor is a lot more size-specific.  But the narrowed field of view and dampened sound inside a closed helm are certainly instructive.
  • Wear the clothing of another era, for insight into how movement and demeanor are affected by it.  What can and can’t you do in hoop skirt and corset, for example; or in high heels, a powdered wig, and a sword?
  • Cook and eat a meal from the same era.  Bonus points for doing it over the fire you started with tinder and matches.
  • Get far enough away from major urban areas to see the night sky unaffected by the glow of city lights, and hear the world without the background rumble of machinery and hum of electricity, and smell the world without the overlay of internal combustion engines and industrial processes.  You don’t have to stay there; just visit it for a few hours, or a day or so.

And that’s just for starters.  Not all research is done in books.

A Couple of Notes on Dialogue

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Note the first:

When you change speakers, you start a new paragraph.  Seriously, they should have taught you this one in grade school, or high school at least.  I’m starting to suspect that it gets neglected because nobody expects most students to ever need to write dialogue.  O tempora, O mores, what is the world coming to, and all that jazz.

Note the second:

When you’re writing a scene with a lot of dialogue, and feel the need to throw in small bits of action and stage business to break up the steady back-and-forth, or to show one speaker’s reaction to something the other person has said, the action bit goes with the dialogue belonging to the speaker who’s doing it.  To illustrate:

Not like this:

“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.  Jane looked at him with disbelief.

“Sure, you do.”

But like this:

“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.

Jane looked at him with disbelief.  “Sure, you do.”

Don’t make your readers have to go through a scene’s dialogue twice in order to be sure of who is doing and saying what. Accidentally confusing your readers is bad.

Confusing your readers on purpose is a different kettle of fish.  I personally don’t know why anyone would want to do it, but some writers do, and those writers have audiences, so if that’s your style, then go for it.  But if you’re going down that path, not confusing anyone by accident becomes more important, rather than less.

A Brief Guide for the Perplexed

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The book cover theory of genre fiction, as articulated by Debra Doyle, aka me:

Short (classic) form:

If it’s got a rocket ship on it, it’s science fiction
If it’s got a unicorn on it, it’s fantasy.
Once a book has a rocket ship on its cover, the only way to change it back into fantasy is by the addition of the Holy Grail

The inevitable smart-ass in the back of the room: But what if it’s the Holy Grail in the shape of a rocket ship?
Me: Then you’ve got the Hugo Award.

Special bonus side-cues:

If the cover features a person in heavy-duty powered space armor, it’s military sf.
If the cover features a person in a fancy uniform/dress coat with gold braid and similar decorations, it’s space opera.

And:
A zeppelin on the cover means alternate history.
A female person in corset and bustle, or a gentleman in a top hat, in the presence of either gears or zeppelins, means steampunk.

And finally:
Any otherwise mundane cover can be made into a fantasy cover by the addition of random sparkles.

Peeve of the Day

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I can’t decide whether this article in the New York Times is more insulting to Mormons (which I am not one of) or to writers of genre fiction (which I am):

Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness

But I do know that after a while, the unquestioned assumption that science fiction, fantasy, and young adult/children’s fiction are inherently lesser literary forms gets really, really old.

It has gotten better over the years, at least a little bit.  With science fiction and fantasy having taken over so much of popular culture, at least it’s no longer the case that reading and writing the stuff is grounds for labeling someone a dangerous weirdo, or a pathetic basement-dweller, or a member of the tinfoil-hat brigade.

No, these days it merely labels us as not serious.

(It’s worse if you’re female.  Being a girl means you start out with negative seriousness points.)

Granted, it’s good to be no longer reflexively sneered at by the likes of the New York Times.  But being reflexively patronized isn’t all that much better.

The Transience of Things

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Today’s pop-up target was my LCD monitor’s sudden affliction with creeping screen rot.  It was bound to happen eventually, I suppose; I got this monitor back in 2008 or so, and nothing lasts forever.  Especially nothing involving computers — though they do get cheaper; our very first computer, the Atari 800 of blessed memory (48 screamin’ K of RAM!  Upper and lower case letters!), cost nearly ten times as much as my most recent computer purchase.

Of course, that was back when personal computers were still mostly the domain of electronics enthusiasts, and Gates and Jobs and Wozniak and their fellows were still regarded as (admittedly, fairly well-off) nerds, rather than as giants in the earth.  These days, computers are appliances, like televisions or toaster ovens; they’ve gone from being a luxury good to something we assume most people have — at any rate, we tend to regard lack of computer access as a sign of economic misfortune, if not outright poverty.

What these changes mean for me is that I was able to order a new monitor of somewhat higher quality than the old one for less money than the old one cost, even figuring in the extra expense of speedy delivery.  And I console myself with the thought that at least the monitor died this month, when the tidal nature of freelance income meant that I could replace it, rather than last month, when I would have been left with nothing to work on but my little netbook.

Shakespeare was a Glovemaker’s Son

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This post here says it all, really.

You don’t need an M.F.A. to write.  You don’t need a B.A. in English to write.  In fact, you don’t need any sort of specialized education whatsoever to write.  (Jane Austen was tutored at home by her father and brothers; Charlotte Bronte had maybe half a dozen years of formal schooling, at least a couple of them at a boarding school so hellish she turned it into that ghastly boarding school in Jane Eyre.) You don’t even need to be a native speaker of the language you decide you’re going to write in.  (Joseph Conrad’s first language was Polish; Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first novels in Russian.)

You just need to write.

So go do it.

Fun and Games with Software

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Or, today I upgraded from Windows 8.0 to Windows 8.1, which was just as much fun as it ever is.  In the process, I’ve learned that everything is an app now, and not just the small handy things that come from the app store . . . when they say “you’ll have to reinstall your apps,” they’re talking about everything.

Fortunately, I had backups.  I did have one moment of near-panic when I couldn’t find my installation files for Quicken 4.  The newer versions of the program use a different file format than the older ones, probably because the nice people (and I use the term loosely) at Intuit want their users to keep buying new versions of their software, instead of sticking with the one that’s been doing just fine for a decade or so now, and I wouldn’t even mind it so much if there were a conversion utility or something like that available — but there isn’t.  You need, so far as I can figure out, to convert your Quicken 4 files into Quicken 6 files in order to convert the Quicken 6 files into the latest format.

Fortunately, I found the files.  And my backup Quicken data files are on a separate drive.  So that’s all right.

And I’d like to take this opportunity to plug MozBackup, a freeware utility for backing up Firefox and Thunderbird. It has saved me a great deal of sorrow and tears.

Now This is Neat

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A Roman-era sculpture of an eagle with a serpent in its beak has been found at a development site in the City of London.

I think if I lived in England I’d be afraid to so much as plant geraniums in my back garden for fear of turning up pieces of history in the process.

The Seasons Change

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Up here in the north country of New Hampshire, we’re well out of the glorious fall colors and moving into the grey-and-brown of late autumn and early winter — fitting weather for enduring the tail end of a particularly debilitating cold, and for contemplating revisions and similar work.

None of it is made any easier by having a large, plushy cat draped across my forearms as I’m trying to type.  Having me gone for over a week in mid-month appears to have made her inconveniently affectionate.  On the other hand, she’s warm, which will be a decided plus if her new behavior hasn’t moderated itself come January.

Cats, by and large, make good writer’s pets.  They’re emotionally self-sufficient, which means that they aren’t going to go into a decline if the human of the household spends a week or so in a deadline-induced fugue (but they’re perfectly capable of demanding attention for necessary things like food — quite ruthlessly, if need be.)  They don’t regard the human of the household as a minor god, or even the alpha of the pack; at best they appear to regard humans as mentally challenged, peculiarly-shaped kittens who can, with patience, be taught to understand simple commands.  This is good for keeping the writer’s ego in check.  And they can catch mice, which — considering the sorts of places writers often have to live — is  a positive contribution to household morale.

Road Trip Rerun

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Having made it through the Peterborough book signing, we’re now holed up for the night in our favorite inexpensive motel in Manchester NH, and I am pondering the question that always gets asked on occasions like this, which is:  Do readings and book signings actually do a working writer any good?

And the answer comes back, as it so often does in this business:  Who the hell knows?

My own theory, for whatever it’s worth, is that readings and similar activities may not do much to sell the particular book you’re pushing at the time, but they probably do contribute to increasing your “hey, I saw this person once and he was a nice guy, so  why not buy his new book” factor, at least a little bit.

(Don’t be a jerk to the booksellers, though.  Like the folks in Production, they have the means in their hand to exact a  subtle but devastating revenge.)