Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

From the Department of Things I Don’t Miss at All

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There are some aspects of the writing business that the march of time has marched right on past, and I don’t miss them even a little bit.

The SASE, or Stamped And Self-addressed Envelope, for manuscript submissions, is one of them — because when you had only one good typescript of a story or a novel, you were going to want it back.  So first you had to get an envelope, or a cardboard box, that would fit your manuscript; and then you had to get another envelope or cardboard box that would fit into the first one along with the manuscript; and after that you had to get the post office to weigh first the manuscript and both envelopes (or boxes) and then the manuscript and just one envelope (or box); and before you could put the manuscript in the mail you had to double-check and make sure that the correct address and postage for the outer box had actually gone onto the outer box, and the correct address and postage for the inner box had actually gone onto the inner box . . . and when the manuscript finally got rejected and came back to you, you had to start the entire process all over again.

It’s a whole lot easier just to do the whole thing by e-mail; or if you’re dealing with hard copy, to slip in an ordinary self-addressed business envelope with a single first-class stamp on it, and put in your cover letter the magic words, “Please consider this a disposable manuscript.”

Another One from the Department of Bad Ideas

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What do I think about the recently announced Kindle Worlds development?

I think it’s a really bad idea, from the point of view of just about everybody but Amazon.

John Scalzi, unsurprisingly, lays out why it’s a bad idea considered from the viewpoint of professional writers in general.  (Short version:  Alloy Entertainment and Amazon between them take all rights, and there’s no up-front advance to sweeten the grab.)

The blog Letters from Titan covers some of the troubling issues raised from the fanfic community’s point of view.  (Short version:  Conflict with the community’s traditional gift economy; potential for attempts at corporate control; restricted subject matter by comparison with the anything-goes world of unauthorized fanfic.)

My own opinion?  Kindle Worlds isn’t going to give the world more high-quality fanfic; it’s going to give the world more lousy media tie-ins.  And I say this as someone who has in her time written original fiction, tie-in fiction, licensed-property fiction (I was one-half of Victor Appleton not once, but twice!), and, yes, fanfiction.

Tales from the Before Time: Springtime Surprise

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Today’s mail brought us the spring royalties on the Mageworlds e-books (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other e-book retailers.) The pleasant glow this cast over the morning brought to mind another springtime royalty period, some time ago — and thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

The first thing you need to know is that the book in question was an anthology of short stories, Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters.  We’d contributed a story to the anthology — “Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen” — and had been paid a good rate-per-word for it; and that, we thought, was that.  Because the second thing you need to know is that most of the time, the on-acceptance payment for a short story, whether in a magazine or in an anthology, is the only money you’re going to see from it.  Every once in a while, though, a particular story will turn into one of its author’s good children, and continue generating revenue, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The next thing you need to know is that Book of Monsters came out at the peak of the early-nineties middle-grade and young adult horror boom, when the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark series were filling up the bookstores and selling like very scary hotcakes.  Not only that, it hit the shelves in October of that year, just in time for Halloween.  It also had some really good stories in it, which probably helped a little bit as well.  At any rate, the anthology not only sold, it sold in sufficiently large numbers that it earned back its advance in the first royalty period.  (This is a thing that never happens — except, of course, for the one time when it does.)

Fast-forward to the following May.  By that time, we’d forgotten all about the anthology and our short story in it.  The money we got for the story had gone to gasoline and groceries long before, and we knew better than to expect anything more from that direction.  Meanwhile, our elder son, whose birthday was coming up, had been agitating for some time for a mountain bike, and we in turn had been pointing to the bloodless turnip that was the family budget and saying, “Think again.”

Then an envelope arrived in the mail, and in that envelope was a royalty check for roughly ten times what we’d been paid for the short story in the  first place.  Our eyes bugged out like a Tex Avery ‘toon’s, and the next thing we did, after carefully replacing the check in the envelope, was call Bruce Coville and ask him if that royalty payment was for real — because, as we said to him, we’d hate to deposit it and then have it turn out that somebody in the publisher’s accounting department had slipped a decimal point.

Bruce assured us that the check was real; and we, in turn, said to our elder son, “Happy birthday — let’s go down to the bicycle shop.”

That story continued to be one of our good children.  The anthology generated royalties for some time thereafter; there was an audiobook edition, for which we got an additional payment; and we later expanded and reworked the short story into a middle-grades novel for Harcourt, which in turn had a French edition from Hachette.

The thing is, though (and I suppose that it’s the moral of this tale) — you never can tell in advance which of your stories is going to be the good child.  All you can do is give each one of them your best shot, and then wait to see what happens.

More Cooking for People who are Thinking about Other Things

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Sometimes it’s fun to tackle a complex recipe with many steps and lots of ingredients. Then there are the other times, when most of your brain’s processing power is tied up with something else, and you can only default to frozen pizza and take-out Chinese so often before the rest of the family — not to mention the family budget — start revolting.  At that point, you need something simple but tasty, like this:

Beef with Garlic and Three Peppers

  •   1 eye round of beef (about 2-3 pounds)
  •   about 5 cloves of garlic
  •   1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns
  •   several brisk grindings (coarse) of Tellicherry black pepper
  •   liberal pinch of cayenne pepper

Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees F.

Peel the cloves of garlic and cut them lengthwise into slivers.

Heat the Szechuan peppercorns in a cast-iron pan with a scant  pinch of salt until the peppercorns go from grey-brown to brown-black and start smelling wonderful.  Then grind them in a mortar and pestle.

Take the eye round and put it on a rack in a large roasting pan.  Stab the roast repeatedly all over with a sharp knife (a Fairbairn commando dagger or a Gerber survival knife works best, because of the diamond-shaped cross-section, but any kitchen knife will do.)

Put a sliver of garlic into each stab wound, pressing down so that the beef closes over the garlic.  Meditate upon efficient weapons design.  (This is perhaps the only socially acceptable use of a commando dagger.)

Sprinkle the roast with the cayenne pepper, and then with the ground Szechuan pepper.  Then take the pepper grinder with the Tellicherry black pepper and grind it over the roast until the top looks crusty.

Cook, uncovered, until a meat thermometer at the thickest part reads 160 degrees F.  (About 30 minutes per pound, depending upon the roast and your oven.)

Take out of the oven, and let stand for about ten minutes while you make rice or instant potatoes or thick slices of toast or whatever your personal code of roastbeef says should round out the meal.  Slice thin, across the grain.

Serve.

Say a regretful goodbye to your plans for the leftover roast and tomorrow night’s supper.

Good Tech, Better Tech, Really Good Tech

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I’m as fond of toys as the next she-geek, but Really Good Tech — as in, the stuff that gets replaced at once, no question, if and when it ever dies — is something else again. In my book, to qualify for that title, the piece of technology involved has to:

1. be better than I am
2. at something I really hate doing
3. that nevertheless is usually my job to get done anyway.

This rules out my e-book reader, much as I adore it, because it just facilitates something that I’d enjoy doing regardless of the tech involved. The same goes for my crockpot, no matter how much I rely on it, because I could always fall back on the dutch oven if I had to. In fact, there are only four items, at the moment, that make my Really Good Tech list:

  • The computer/word processor/printer combination. Not for writing, but for turning what I write into a submittable electronic or paper MS. I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember the bad old days, when it would take me half an hour and an unconscionable amount of White-Out to produce a single page of submission-quality typescript. There’s a reason I didn’t start getting published until we got our first computer, the Atari 800 of blessed memory.
  • The GPS for our auto. Because it used to be me riding shotgun with my lap full of maps and triptiks, frantically doing arithmetic (at which I suck) in order to answer urgent questions like “How many minutes until our next exit?” and “What’s our current projected arrival time?”
  • The dishwasher. Because it maintains the fragile barrier between us and total (as opposed to merely partial) household disarray, and without it I would fall behind in the dishwashing and never catch up again.
  • The rice cooker. Because while it only does one thing, it does that one thing right every single time, whereas rice cookery by any other method, for me, is a project with only about a 50% chance of success.

I’ve been giving considerable thought to adding the electric wok to the shortlist, but I’m still on the fence about that one.  I could fake stir-frying in a different pan, or I could adjust my meal plans to make up for the loss if I had to, and besides, I kind of enjoy cooking and I’m not all that bad at it . . . on the other hand, I really like having a proper wok.

The observant reader will have noticed that only one of the items on the Really Good Tech list has anything to do with writing, and the one that does, has more to do with the mechanical end of the job than the creative end.  All you really need for the creative end are the contents of your own head and some means — pencil and paper, typewriter, dictaphone, computer, whatever you’ve got handy — of getting them fixed in permanent form.

For the mechanical end, there’s no magic in either retro or cutting-edge technology.  Use whatever tech you like and can afford and are comfortable with, so long as it can get your material to the marketplace in a form that the marketplace can handle.

The More Things Change

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I’ve said for a long time that the generic publishing-industry headline is “Big Changes Ahead for Publishers; Writers to be Adversely Affected.” Most working writers — like self-employed freelancers in other fields — have by necessity got their strategies fine-tuned to meet the current conditions.  Any change in those conditions is going to make their strategies unstable or unworkable, and they’re going to have to devote time and thought to changing them, instead of spending that time and thought on writing.

Understandably, this does not make writers happy.  It’s hard to concentrate on long-term strategy when you’re dealing with the fact that a previously-reliable part of your income stream has suddenly dried up or gone wonky. The body and brain have this inconvenient habit of insisting on “Food — now!” without caring whether or not there’s money in the bank to pay for it.

Thought for the Day

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There’s a reason why writers are almost as superstitious as sailors and baseball players — they’re all in businesses where you can do the best you can, and have your best actually be pretty damned good, and still get sabotaged by random events beyond your control.

In It for the Long Haul

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It’s one thing to write a polished, even gripping, opening chapter (since opening chapters are the ones most frequently workshopped and otherwise shown around, they’re usually the ones that get the most feedback.)  It’s another thing to maintain that level for an entire novel.

Unfortunately, structure and pacing are important to editors when they get around to judging the whole book.  Editors want to see whether a writer can sustain interest through the long middle parts without letting the pace of the story flag,  and whether he or she can avoid getting distracted by unnecessary details and by subplots that go nowhere,  and whether he or she can resist the temptation to skip important plot and character stuff and rush the story in haste to get to the end.  They also want to see if the writer can in fact end a book effectively — not winding things up too fast, not dragging the end out too long, not failing to supply a sufficiently impressive fireworks show for the grand finale.

In truth, however, messing up the middle of the book is far more likely to be fatal than not being absolutely perfect at the end.  By the time the readers have reached the final chapters, they’ve invested enough time and thought in the story that a lot of technical problems with the ending will be forgiven, just so long as the readers don’t feel cheated of something they’ve come to feel is owed to them by the story.  Any number of really good writers have wobbled on the dismount, as it were — Tolkien ended the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least three times before finally letting his readers stagger off into the appendices, for example, but most of his readers don’t feel cheated by the excess.

But this is why editors want to see the traditional “three chapters and an outline” even for query letters, and why the first thing they’re going to say, when you eventually get a nibble, is, “Send me the whole book.”

Follow-Up: Apple-Pie Order

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Because I can’t hand out physical samples in a virtual world, the apple pie recipe:

Apple Pie

  • 5 large apples or 9 small ones (about 1 and 3/4 pounds — a mixture of two or more pie-apple types is best), cored, peeled, and thinly sliced.
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup light brown sugar
  • 1 and 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 T cornstarch
  • 1 T butter
  • 1 tsp grated lemon peel (fresh!)
  • sprinkling of fine tapioca

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Line a pie pan with pastry.  (Use what ever pie crust recipe suits you.  These days, the store-bought uncooked pie crusts from the refrigerator case, that you unroll from their waxed-paper wrappers, have reached a respectable level of edibility, which is a good thing if you’re in a hurry, or if you’ve never had the proverbial light hand for pastry.)

If you’re making a two-crust pie, moisten the edges of the lower crust. Sprinkle the bottom of the pie crust with the fine tapioca.

Mix together the sugars, spices, and cornstarch.

Fill the pie crust with the thinly-sliced apples:  Place slices around the edges of the pie pan, then pile the rest in layers.  As you make the layers, interleave the apple slices with sugar, gratings of lemon, and dots of butter.

Top with either the other pie crust (pricked or cut to vent steam) or with streusel (see below.)

Bake 15 minutes at 450; lower the heat to 375 and cook another  25-30 minutes.

Serve hot, warm, or cool (if it lasts that long.)

Streusel

  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 2 T sugar
  • 1 T cinnamon
  • 1 cup flour

Cream butter; add sugar and cinnamon mixture alternately with flour.  Blend until crumbly.

The most recent apple assortment we’ve been using is a combination of Granny Smith, Macintosh, Rome, and Lady Alice apples.  These are all good baking or baking/eating apples.  What you don’t want are Red or Golden Delicious, or any of the other varieties that are meant to be eaten out of hand rather than cooked.  They will make your pie filling turn out mushy, and you don’t want that.  The filling in a good apple pie, like the prose in a good short story or novel, should be crisp and toothsome.

(Admit it.  You were waiting to see how I was going to work in the obligatory writing reference.)

The Return of Pie

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We had apple pie for dessert tonight.  My husband and co-author is the household’s designated piemaker, and he does a mean apple pie.  One of his secrets: using two or more different types of apple.  Tonight’s pie featured a couple of Granny Smiths, a Macintosh, and two large Rome apples.  Why more than one type of apple?  Because it give a depth and complexity of flavor that you just don’t get in pies made with a single variety of apple.

And this is related to writing, how?

Just as a pie is better when it’s made with more than one variety of apple, a novel is better when it doesn’t just have a single mood or tone.  Horror is made more frightening by being lightened from time to time with humor; adventure and mystery can often benefit from a dollop of romance.  The contrast works to add depth, and the relief of tension lures readers into a momentary security.  And it’s the momentary security that makes them jump even higher when the surprise twist comes around.