Tag: adventures in the writing life

Snow Out of Season

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It’s April, but with all due respect to T. S. Eliot, no one up here in far northern New Hampshire is breeding any lilacs out of any land, dead or otherwise.

Instead, we’ve got the freeze-thaw cycle still going on, putting frost heaves and potholes into all the roads, and turning the frozen ground into deep, thick mud of the sort that used to sink Tiger tanks on the Eastern Front.   When I was an undergraduate doing a seminar on Robert Frost, I thought that mud-time was something Frost had made up for poetic purposes. Then I moved up here, and found out otherwise. (He wasn’t making up the bent-over birches, either.)

It’s always odd when you encounter in real life something which you’ve previously only encountered via art. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for legions of science fiction fans on the day the space aliens finally arrive.

Desk Job

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Sometimes I fantasize about having the ideal desk.  It’s nice and solid, in oak or cherry or some other polished hardwood, and it puts my monitor at just the right height, and it’s got three or four proper-sized drawers that I can put things away in . . . something rather like this one, in fact, which I would buy in a heartbeat if I had all the money in the world.

Since I don’t have all the money in the world, I’m still using the same particle-board desk my husband/co-author and I bought as one of a pair in a 2-for-1 sale at K-Mart the year we took up this freelance writing gig.  It’s not even a little bit ergonomic — the computer magazines were only just starting to take up that idea — and it’s ugly as a mud fence plastered with tapoles (to use an idiom of my youth), and so far it has proven damn-near indestructible.

Taking a sledgehammer to it would be cheating.

I tell myself that with a new desk, a proper desk, I would experience a sudden efflorescence of creative enthusiasm.  I know better than that, alas.  The quality of the desk has little or nothing to do with the quality of the writing.  I did a lot of very good work during the five-year span where I had my computer and printer set up on a table in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on the front door — that being the time period when the two younger children had learned how to work the latch on the front door but had not yet attained the discretion necessary to not go out and play in traffic.

Nevertheless, a writer can dream.

More Thoughts on Rejection

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Anybody who writes for money is going to become, perforce, an expert in the types and levels of rejection.

There’s the generic form rejection, which usually reads something on the order of “Your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” — which may on rare occasions mean “Your story was so bad it made our eyeballs bleed” but which usually means nothing more than what it says.  Your manuscript didn’t meet their current needs, whatever those needs may have been.  Maybe they bought a story similar to yours just last week; maybe your story was an awkward length and they already have enough stories of that length in inventory to keep them supplied for a year; maybe you happened by chance to write upon a subject that gives the editor hives.  Or maybe your perfectly competent story just didn’t quite push the editor’s “Buy This One!” button.

(That last is a dreadful stage to be at in one’s writing career, by the way.  It’s like perpetually getting B-plusses and never quite getting an A; it’s like watching everybody else in your high-school class get asked out on dates while you’re spending your Saturday nights at home with a good book. A lot of aspiring writers give up at this point.  A lot of others turn bitter and morose, and are left unable to enjoy themselves when they finally do make that first sale.  The only consolation to be had is that everybody who’s eventually sold their writing has gone through this stage first.)

Then there’s the personalized and encouraging rejection, wherein the editor takes a minute or so from a busy schedule to add something like “Keep on writing!” or “Try us again with your next.”  These notes are good and flattering things.  The wise aspirant doesn’t take them as an invitation to initiate a personal correspondence,† but files them away in the “Attaboy!” (or “Attagirl!,” as appropriate) folder to take out and contemplate on those grey and rainy afternoons of the soul that writers are so often prone to.

Then there’s the rejection letter with specific suggestions:  “Shorten this by 500 words and I’ll give it another look” or “This isn’t really our sort of thing, but you might consider sending it to Anne Editor over at Marketable Magic Realism.”  In those cases — for heaven’s sake, don’t be dense.  Shorten the story and resubmit, or send it over to Marketable Magic Realism post haste with a note in the cover letter to the effect of “Joe Editor over at Rivetty SF suggested I send this to you.”

Maybe you don’t think your story was magic realism; maybe you think it was hard sf.  (You’d read Rivetty‘s submission guidelines, after all; that much of a newbie you aren’t.)  And maybe you’re right.  But editors make their reputations by knowing how readers are going to see these things, and Marketable Magic Realism‘s checks clear just as well as those from Rivetty SF Stories.  Take the money and run.

†Really, don’t. The last thing you want to do is inadvertently consign yourself to some editor’s Creepy Stalker file.

Film and Television Aren’t Your Friends

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There are a few things — more than a few, actually, but this is a blog post, not an exhaustive list — that you’re going to get the wrong impression of, if you’re relying on film and television and not real life:

How dark darkness really is.  Scenes on television and in the movies that are supposedly set in lightless or minimally-lit places (the woods on a moonless night; a windowless room) are in fact taking place in a representation of darkness and not the real thing, and the representation has to have enough light going on that the viewers can follow the action.  You’re a writer, not a film or television director, so you don’t have access to that particular artistic convention.  You need to keep track of what your light sources are, and if you don’t want your characters to be tripping over furniture in the dark, have them remember to bring along a flashlight.

How much injury it actually takes to put somebody out of action.  If all you want to do is sideline a character for a few chapters so that, for example, other characters are temporarily deprived of their assistance, it’s not necessary to riddle them with bullets or put them in a coma.  A severe sprain, a minor dislocation, a bad case of flu or even food poisoning . . . any of those will work as well.

How loud gunshots really are.  Make that how LOUD.  Your characters aren’t going to be holding any complex conversations in the immediate aftermath.

At what speed the wheels of justice really turn.  Anybody who’s ever served on jury duty knows that the reality is a long way from its fictional counterpart.  There are fewer moments of high drama, and more moments that sound like a couple of highly-paid professional litigators playing a complex but boring game of Mother-may-I.  (If you’ve never served on a jury, do so if you’re called — the experience, for a writer, is invaluable.  Lacking that opportunity, you can sometimes find gavel-to-gavel trial coverage on television or the internet.)

The moral of the story, unsurprisingly, is that if you find yourself writing about something that you only know about through media representations . . . back off and do some research.

Another Thing it Doesn’t Pay to Worry About

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Back in the dark ages, when I was first learning to type, the Word of God as passed down from on high by the instructor (who was more interested in training 80-words-a-minute secretaries than in teaching the rudiments of touch typing to a future English major) was that you double-spaced following a period.

I never became an 80-words-a-minute typist, but those two spaces after the period were hardwired into my brain, not to mention into my spacebar-hitting thumb.

Cue the musical montage representing the passage of time, with the tappity-tappity-tappity-bing! of the typewriter fading into the musical-popcorn boop-boop-boop of the old computer keyboards, and that sound fading in turn into the near-silence of keyboards today . . . followed by the Word of God saying that it is now customary to space only once after a period.

Why is this something it doesn’t pay to worry about?  Because, one, of all the reasons an editor may have for rejecting your manuscript, the question of how many spaces you’ve put after your periods is way low on the list.  And, two, if the whole thing bothers you that much, you don’t have to sweat blood retraining your spacebar thumb — all you have to do is run a search and replace during the final edit, and change every instance of two spaces to a single space instead.

Tales of the Before Time: From Paper to Pixels

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Back when I first started writing, as a wee young sprat, it was all paper and pen or pencil — I wasn’t yet up to the level of actually submitting things, so the idea of a typed manuscript was unknown to me.  The family typewriter was an Underwood that weighed approximately as much as a boat anchor, with keys so stiff that my grade-school fingers would have buckled under the strain of pressing them.  I wrote my first short stories (which sucked) and my first you-could-probably-call-it-a-novel (which also sucked) in ink on narrow-ruled notebook paper.  I used a cartridge pen for preference, rather than a ball-point, and my handwriting was dreadful.

Time went by, and eventually I achieved a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a high-school graduation present from a maiden aunt who knew me, perhaps, better than some of my other aunts (who tended to give me things like hairbrushes and pillow-slips.)  That typewriter lasted me nearly a decade, and saw the production of numerous college and graduate school papers, plus a handful of not really very good short stories and the first five or six pages of a novel that never went anywhere.

The Smith-Corona electric in time acquired a companion, an Olivetti modern Icelandic manual that I used to prepare the first draft of my dissertation.  (Previously, with the Smith-Corona, I’d had to add in the special Old English characters by hand.)

Neither of these typewriters, however, was very good for writing fiction.  My handwriting was still dreadful, but my typing wasn’t much better — I estimated at the time that it took me about thirty minutes to produce a clean page of submittable copy.

Then came the glorious day when Atari brought out a personal computer that could be had for a price that ordinary human beings could afford.  Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was a rotten typist; the computer was a very good typist, and just as soon as I could find a letter-quality printer to hook up to it, I’d be in clover.  In the meantime, at least I had a dot-matrix printer (does anybody out there remember dot-matrix?) for the early drafts.  And when we finally did get a household letter-quality printer, shortly afterward it was manuscript-submission time.

The next decade or so witnessed our household’s march forward through advancements in printer technology — dot-matrix to letter-quality daisy-wheel to laser to inkjet, faster and better and faster again.  And we bought paper.  Lots and lots of paper.  We bought fanfold paper in foot-high stacks; we bought 20-pound bond in ten-ream boxes.

And time kept moving on.  One day we looked around the office, and realized that it had been a year or more since the last time we’d submitted anything as a printout on paper that we sent through the US Mail.  At some point while we were busy writing, it had all switched over to electronic manuscripts submitted by e-mail, and we’d scarcely noticed.

I could spend some time at this point indulging myself in nostalgia, but the truth of the matter is that I am immensely grateful for the computer and word processor combination that types better than I ever could, and the electronic mail that doesn’t insist on proper postage and a stamped and self-addressed envelope.

Bad Contracts and Worse Contracts

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Some contracts are bad.  They get their hooks into the author’s copyright; they have restrictive option clauses and punitive indemnity clauses; they want to grab not just world publishing rights but the right to publish in all forms everywhere forever, including Mesopotamian baked-clay tablets and electronic transmissions to the Oort Cloud.

Other contracts are worse than bad, they’re unconscionable.  They do all of the above, and they don’t do the one thing that could possibly induce a professional writer to sign them, which is to offer good money up front.

Just about every professional writer has signed at least one bad contract, and they’ve usually done it for only one reason:  they needed that up-front money, and they needed it right then.

Once in a while, in this business, you may need to sign a bad contract.  The roof may leak, your kid may need emergency orthodontia, the IRS may be demanding more blood than your normal turnip harvest can provide.  If that’s what you have to do, then do it with your eyes open and deposit the check before it can bounce.

But nobody, ever, has any reason to sign an unconscionable contract.

Things It Doesn’t Help to Complain to the Author About:

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The cover art for their book.  You may hate it with a passion; you may think that it misrepresents both the plot and the theme of the book in the worst way possible; you may feel that it reeks of sexism, racism, classism, and other -isms as yet unknown to social science.  Complaining to the author will not do any good, because in the hierarchy of people who have a say in a book’s cover art, the author ranks somewhere just barely above the office cleaning crew and the folks in the mail room.  With the rare exception of publishing’s 800-pound gorillas, the author’s traditional role in the selection of cover art is limited to bitching about it afterward.

Problems with the printing and typography of their book.  If your copy of the book has Chapter 27 replaced by an equivalent number of pages from Love’s Tacky Splendor, that isn’t the author’s fault.  Bad stuff can happen to good books when they go to the printer, and somewhere out there is a printing of Love’s Tacky Splendor that has Chapter 27 replaced by a chunk of impeccably-researched hard science fiction.  Those readers — and that author — aren’t going to be pleased about this either.

Problems with the sales and availability of their book.  The author’s control of these issues is approximately zero point zilch.  Finding out that there are no copies of their book to be found anywhere in the entire state of North Dakota is not going to make them any happier.

In all of these cases, as it happens, the appropriate entity to direct your complaints to is the publisher.

Some Days are Like That

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You get a lot of stuff done — really necessary stuff, too — but none of it is writing-related, so you finish the day feeling like you haven’t done anything at all.

At times like these, it’s important to remember that taking the trash to the town dump is also a vitally important chore, because if it doesn’t get done, eventually the trash bags will take over the entire house and you won’t have any room left in which to write.

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.

Q and A

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Dear Dr. Doyle:

What am I allowed to write about?

Signed,

Worried

Dear Worried:

You’re allowed to write about whatever you damned well please.

You just have to be willing to accept the consequences.

In some times and places, those consequences may be political, and they may be severe.  In which case, good luck and may the blessings of whatever deity, if any, you prefer be upon you, because you’ll need them. In other times and places . . . somebody you’ve never met may say unkind things about you on the internet.  Which is no fun, to be sure, but on a scale of zero to “taken outside and shot” is maybe a three.

What should you do if strangers are saying unkind things about you on the internet?  Most of the time — nothing.

If you’ve actually screwed up, apologize.  Then get back to work and do better the next time.

If, upon sober reflection, you decide that you haven’t done anything you’re sorry for — don’t fake it.  Get back to work and don’t waste your energy on an argument that nobody’s going to win.

Remember — if you’re arguing, you aren’t writing.  Let your work make your arguments for you.