Tag: adventures in the writing life

A Surfeit of Good Advice

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Aspiring and neophyte writers are always looking for advice (though sometimes, I suspect, it’s not so much advice that they’re looking for as company in their struggles, and a sign that somebody out there takes them seriously), and lots of people are happy to give it to them.

People tell them, “Avoid adverbs.”

People tell them, “Don’t use the passive voice.”

People tell them, “Make your prose lean and economical; eschew elegant writing and special effects.”

So they weed out adverbs assiduously from their final drafts, and turn every possible passive sentence into an active one, and put their prose on a fitness regimen guaranteed to take it down to zero per cent body fat.  All of this is hard work, and they are proud of it when they’re done.

And usually, their prose is the better for it, because they were, after all, neophyte writers, and stood to learn a lot from that much intense concentration on their texts.

But then they start hanging out with more rarefied givers of advice, who speak disparagingly of the elimination of nuance by the compulsive eradication of adverbs, and who point out that sometimes the passive voice is just what’s needed to convey the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action of the verb, and who wax eloquent in their appreciation of leisurely, expansive prose.

And the neophyte writers bury their heads in their manuscripts and weep.   Will nobody, they say, will nobody tell them which side is right?

Alas, no.  Becoming a writer means learning to live with uncertainty.  All I can offer are some general guidelines:  don’t use too many adverbs; don’t overuse the passive voice; and try not to use more words than you need for whatever it is that you want to try.  But don’t stop trying.  It’s better to attempt something new and not have it work right the first time than it is to never try anything new at all.

We didn’t become writers because we were risk-averse.

O My Prophetic Soul!

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I do in fact have the 10:30 AM Sunday reading slot at Readercon next weekend.

My full schedule, for those who may be interested:

Friday July 12
8:00 PM   Kaffeeklatsch. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

9:00 PM    Autographs. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

Saturday July 13
10:00 AM       Intellectually Rigorous Fictional Data: Making Up Facts That Are True. Debra Doyle, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Margaret Ronald, Ken Schneyer, Harold Vedeler, Henry Wessells (leader). How do you make up convincing fictional primary sources? No, not for purposes of seeking political office, but because you need to know the facts and how they underpin the world of your fiction and the lives of your characters. Imaginary books and letters are just the beginning, even if they never appear in the narrative. Which fictional data sources matter? How much is enough to make a narrative feel resilient and whole?

Sunday July 14
10:30 AM        Reading: Debra Doyle reads from a forthcoming work.

And my co-author’s schedule:

Friday July 12
8:00 PM        Kaffeeklatsch. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

9:00 PM        Autographs. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

Saturday July 13
8:00 PM        The Xanatos Gambit. Jim Freund (moderator), Yoon Ha Lee, Scott Lynch, James D. Macdonald. The tangled webs of schemers both good and bad have always had a presence in imaginative fiction. There are the wily king-killers, the intrigue-fomenting spinsters and widows, the bard who hides the knife beside the harp, the indispensable keeper of secrets, and more. What are the challenges in writing an especially clever character? How has the role of the schemer evolved, and what versions do we no longer see?

Sunday July 14
2:30 PM        Reading: James D. Macdonald reads from a forthcoming work.

Pop-Up Targets, Unexploded Land Mines, and Snakes in Cans

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These are things that can disrupt your day, ranked in order of ascending troublesomeness.

A Pop-Up Target is something unexpected that requires immediate action, but which you have the resources and ability to deal with promptly. A suddenly necessary payment at a time when the bank account is flush, for example, or an unanticipated piece of time-critical paperwork. The target jumps up, you deal with it, and you move on, slightly more adrenaline-charged than you were before.

Adventures in the Writing Life Version:  The FedEx delivery man shows up on your doorstep Thursday afternoon with a package containing a stack of unpleasantly familiar paper and a cover letter:  Dear Author–here’s the copyedited MS for your next novel.  Please go over the copyedits and get them back to us by this coming Monday.

What you do:  Cancel your social engagements for the next 48 hours.  After a few seconds’ more thought, cancel the rest of your life for the next 48 hours.  Check your local FedEx pickup to see what’s the absolute latest you can hand over the MS and still expect it to show up in New York on Monday.  Check your bank account to see if you can afford that much money.  (If both your budget and the publisher’s schedule really are that tight, phone your editor.  Ask if you can FedEx the MS back to them on their dime, because otherwise it’s coming back to them by Priority Mail.)  Buckle down and get to work on going over the copyedits, and be grateful that you aren’t having to deal with a Copyedit From Hell.

An Unexploded Land Mine is something that you thought that you’d already dealt with, or that you were supposed to deal with and forgot, or that somebody else completely neglected to inform you about back when it should have been dealt with. Some land mines are relatively mild; others can blow you sky-high. What they have in common is that “I should have known about this one, dammit!” quality that adds a touch of frustration and outrage to the whole deal.

Adventures in the Writing Life version:  “What do you mean, I didn’t send you back the signed contracts!” Or, “No, you didn’t tell me you wanted a map for the front of the book and a glossary in the back!” Or, “I thought you were going to handle asking for blurbs, and now you’re telling me that I have to do it?”

What you do:  Send back the signed contracts with a profuse apology for your absent-mindedness, and promise never to be so flaky again.  Grit your teeth and draw the damned map and make up the damned glossary.  Take a deep breath and make a list of writers you know who might be willing to come up with a back-cover blurb for you, then start writing letters.

And then there’s the Snake in a Can. Like the trick jar labeled “peanuts” with the spring-loaded snake inside, these show up completely unexpectedly and leap right out into your face. Also, sometimes the snake is real. A heavy-duty snake has the ability to disrupt your whole life for days, if not weeks, if you can’t manage to stuff it back into the can.

Adventures in the Writing Life Version:  Your publisher goes bankrupt without warning.  Your agent, with whom you have a warm personal relationship and who has been a prime force in building your career, gets hit by a truck while crossing the street in midtown Manhattan.  The company for which you’ve happily written three potboiler tie-in novels and with whom you’re under contract for a fourth suddenly lets go all their in-house publishing staff (including the editor of your novel in progress, with whom you’ve had an excellent relationship) and replaces them with people you’ve never even heard of.

What you do:  Don’t keep all your writing eggs in one basket.  Maintain good relationships with everyone in your field, to the extent that it’s possible, so that if you’re suddenly swimming for your life in a rising flood you have people who might throw you a lifeline from the shore.  Resign yourself to the fact that sometimes bad stuff is going to happen that isn’t your fault, and that you can’t do anything about, and that is going to mess up your life more than it messes up the lives of the people actually responsible — but don’t let yourself dwell on it for too long, because dwelling on it only uses up time and energy that you could be spending on writing something better for people who will respect you more.

Writing Weather. (Not.)

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We’re in the midst of a spell of heat and humidity that makes doing anything, even writing,  seem dreary and unattractive.

Also, there are mosquitoes.

Midsummer in general has never been my favorite time for writing, despite the fact that more than once I’ve found myself head down and running for deadline daylight in the midst of the hot and sticky season.  The dead of winter — that stretch from mid-January to mid-February when this part of the word gets hit with temperatures in the subzero-Fahrenheit range — isn’t much better.  It’s hard to concentrate when your mind keeps drifting off-topic to the question of the winter electric bill.

The best seasons for writing, as far as I’m concerned, are spring, fall, late summer, and early winter.  The temperatures are moderate (for local values of moderate); the weather is mostly well-behaved; and the local insect life is at worst only moderately annoying.

Summer, though . . . ugh.  But I suppose it could be worse.  I could always be trying to write through summer in Texas.  Or any season in the tropics.

There’s a reason I wound up living — and writing —  in far northern New Hampshire.

Another Way to Make an Author Happy

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If you know an author, and are at the same convention with them, or share the same local bookstore or library or coffee shop, and you see that they’re scheduled to give a reading:

Go to their reading.

Unless they’re serious rock stars like Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin or J. K. Rowling, most writers live in fear of the dreaded 10 AM Sunday morning reading slot . . . the one where the audience consists of four rows of empty chairs and one drowsy con-goer who fell asleep in the room after the last party of the night before and is now too embarrassed to leave.

What do you get in return for taking the time to attend a reading?  Well, stars in your crown in heaven, of course, and the chance to hear early drafts of forthcoming books and works-in-progress, and the sincere and profound gratitude of the writer in question.

Especially at 10 AM on a Sunday morning.

 

Batteries Sort of Included

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Not too long ago, three out of the four Uninterruptible Power Supplies in our office setup expired from old age.  A bit of internet research informed us that replacement batteries for all three, plus shipping, would cost about the same as buying one new UPS, so — not being intimidated by the idea of opening up the dead power supplies and performing a bit of open-case surgery — we decided to go the replacement-battery route.

What was never in question was the idea that an Uninterruptible Power Supply belonged in the “replace when broken” category.  We’ve been big believers in having a UPS for our computer since the early days, when a UPS was essentially a motorcycle battery in a metal case with a plug on one side for wall current in and a plug on the other side for battery power out.

Our conversion experience, as it were, came during our time in the Republic of Panamá, where the power downtown had a tendency to fail at inopportune moments.  One weekend afternoon, my husband and eventual co-author was playing Jumpman Junior on our Atari 800, and after a session of extended play had succeeded in racking up an all-time high score.  Flushed with triumph, he went on to the screen where he could save his high score and his initials for posterity . . . and the power went out.

We ordered our first Uninterruptible Power Supply that same day.

A Bit of This, a Bit of That

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Writers and other freelance artists have more than a little in common with small farmers, and not just that people in both occupations have insanely complicated income tax forms and a tendency to get depressed when thinking about health insurance.

They also have to hold all sorts of odd jobs in order to continue working at their chosen vocation. A sculptor I once met, for example, said that most of the ceramic artists he knew kept themselves in rent and food money by making coffee mugs.  And I still treasure a sign I once saw outside a farmhouse on Route 3:

FRESH EGGS
TAROT READINGS
AROMATHERAPY
CHAIN SAWS SHARPENED

My own list of oddball writer jobs is atypically prosaic, mostly versions of “taught freshman English someplace,” though I did spend one semester in graduate school as an elderly faculty widow’s live-in companion, which was not the sinecure you might think, and a later summer answering correspondence for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Foundation.  I spent a lot of time putting together letters out of prefab paragraphs that all said, more or less, “Yes, you can retrofit your house for solar energy.  It will be very expensive.”†  I’m pleased, these days, to note that science has marched on, and solar panels have dropped enough in price that they’re even showing up in a low-income area like far northern New England.

†My favorite, though, was the guy who wrote to ask if he could use passive solar energy to run his earthworm farm. I had to take that one upstairs to the engineers, who were equally delighted to see it — apparently earthworm farming was an ideal application for passive solar.

The Benefits of Forethought

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A line of thunderstorms rumbled through northern New England late this afternoon, knocking the power out in our town (among a whole bunch of other towns) for over four hours, right about dinnertime.  The only place on Main Street with power was the local video rental, ice-cream shop, and pizza joint, because they had at some point invested in a generator.  And they were doing a land-office business, selling pizzas and sandwiches and ice cream to a whole bunch of people — including us — who didn’t want to open their refrigerators until the power came back on.  At the point we got our pizza and took it home, they had seventeen pizza orders stacked in a holding pattern waiting for oven space, and were down to their last five foot-long sandwich rolls.

And thus we see the virtue of having a good backup.

Backup plans and equipment are a good thing in the writing business as well.  Don’t throw out the old computer when you upgrade; you never know when you might be facing a hard deadline and looking at a dead machine.  (We had to drop back once from an Atari ST to a nearly-antique Atari 800, under just those circumstances.)  Don’t forget to keep backup files of completed and published works (otherwise you may find yourself laboriously rekeying something you wrote a long time ago; and yes, I’ve done that, too.)  Don’t forget to keep backup copies of works in progress — save in multiple places on your hard drive, save to the cloud (Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox; or what the heck, all three), save to removable media.  That way, if two weeks before a hard deadline the state police start knocking on doors all over your neighborhood and yelling, “Get out now, the water’s rising,” you can, if need be, finish your work-in-progress on a library computer a hundred miles down the road.

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.