Tag: adventures in the writing life

One of Those Days

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Every so often, a day comes along when absolutely nothing gets done.  Today was a day like that.

Well, I did make a beef stew and push on with the current editing gig, but as accomplishments go that doesn’t count for much.

I blame the weather, because — well, why not?

And just one heartfelt plea:  before you send out your finished manuscript, take a minute to go over the rules for English dialogue punctuation and double-check to make certain that you’ve been following them.  Pretty please? With sugar on top?

Your beta readers, editors, and copyeditors will thank you.

A Useful Bit of Kitchen Trivia

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Sometimes you need to time a quick one minute, or a quick three minutes, of cooking time.  (Stir-fry recipes in particular are fond of directions like that.)  And sometimes you don’t have a kitchen timer handy, or maybe you’ve got two or three one-minute steps right after the other with no time to set a timer in between.

At times like these, it helps to know that a dramatic recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” all the way through — no rushing or mumbling — takes about one minute.

(Medieval recipes would give similar timing directions.   “A Paternoster while” is the length of time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin once through — about thirty seconds if you don’t rush it.  “Two Aves and a Paternoster” is about a minute.)

When you’re messing about in the kitchen, knowing a handy estimator like that one is as useful as knowing — in a writing context — that a page of 12-point Courier in standard manuscript format equals roughly 250 words and will take about a minute to read aloud.

Tales from the Before Time, Round Two

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All writers have a few horror stories to tell.  This is one of ours.

It happened quite a while ago, back when one of the ways that young (or youngish, anyhow) freelance novelists made their grocery money was by writing work-for-hire YA series novels for book packagers.  The way the process usually worked was like this:  a book packager would come up with an idea for a six-book series — I’m still not sure why six was usually the magic number — and sell it to a publisher.  Then the book packager would find one or two or even six hungry writers to write the individual volumes, based on a series bible created by the packager.  The deadlines were usually short, the pay was usually low, the royalties were in almost all cases nonexistent, and the series bibles were either laughably nonspecific or so nitpicking as to be ridiculous.

But groceries have to be bought, so there we were.

We’d written the second book in a YA series which shall remain nameless, and I flatter myself that we’d actually done a pretty good job working within the constraints of the project.  We’d finished the manuscript and turned it in; we’d done the necessary revisions; we’d gotten back the copyedited manuscript and gone over it and turned it back in; we’d gone over the galleys and sent them back in; and as far as we knew, we were done.  So we packed up the mini-van and went down to New York for a few days to visit my husband and coauthor’s old family homestead — and returned to find an “attempted delivery” FedEx notice on our front door and a “Call me right now!” message on our answering machine from our editor at the book packager.

What had happened while we were away:  The cover flats for the novels in the series had come back from the printer  (in packager-land, in those days, the covers were often printed before the novels were even written), and only then did the editor discover that the graphic designer had made the spine of the novel too small for the contracted word length of the novels in the series.  Reprinting the covers was out of the question — too time-consuming and too expensive.  Instead, each of the novels in the series was going to have to lose 10,000 typeset words.

We were lucky.  We got a copy of the galleys (that was the FedEx package), and I got to go through it removing single words and parts of sentences with a pair of tweezers sharp red pencil while keeping a running count of the total on a handy scratchpad, which meant that by the time I was finished, the novel — while considerably attenuated — at least still made sense.  The first novel in the series had entire paragraphs and even whole scenes removed with a hatchet by the editor, because it was scheduled to go to the printers the very next day.

(Before you ask:  I don’t know what happened to the graphic designer.  But I do know that it always pays to be nice to the publisher’s art department, because if they decide that they don’t like you, they have it in their power to do dreadful things.)

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

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Last night it got down to twenty below.  Fahrenheit, that is; -29 Celsius.  Trivia fact:  The point where the two scales match is forty below zero, which is also the temperature at which soap bubbles freeze in mid-air and shatter when they hit the ground.

Weather like that is one reason why I go to science fiction conventions in Boston in January and February:  It’s warmer down there.

Cabin fever is another reason.  Up here, when the snow gets deep and the roads get bad, we don’t get out of town very much.  After a while, the walls can start to close in.  (I have a perverse fondness for “Canol Road”  by the late Stan Rogers for this very reason.)

One reason that isn’t the reason I go to sf/fantasy conventions is “to promote my books.”  I go to cons because I like going to cons, and if book promotion happens along the way, that’s a nice thing but it’s gravy.  I was a con-goer long before I was a writer.

Should you, as a newly-published or aspiring sf/fantasy writer, go to conventions?†  Only if you think going to conventions is fun.  And if you’ve never been to a convention and are planning to go to one, go to it for the new experience (which you may or may not like), not for the publicity or the networking or anything like that.  If you do like the experience, you’ve got a new hobby and a new group of friends to help get you through the essential loneliness of the writing life.  If you don’t like it, don’t worry; con-going fans are a small subset of the greater sf and fantasy reading public, and you don’t have to court them in order to succeed.

(If you do decide to give the convention scene a try, it helps to go to your first con in the company of a knowledgeable regular.  And whatever you do, don’t make your first sf convention a worldcon —  that’s like starting your swimming lessons by jumping off the high board into the deep end of the pool.)

†Of conventions in other genres, such as romance and mystery, I lack the experience to speak.

New Year’s Day

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My mother always used to say, “What you do on New Year’s Day, you’ll do for the rest of the year.”

So today I  wrote some, edited some, and cooked a good meal at dinnertime.

Could have done a lot worse.

May all of y’all reading this have a happy and productive 2013.

Caffeine: A True Story

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Once upon a time there was a writer (who bore an uncanny resemblance to the owner of this blog) who was pulling an all-nighter in an effort to finish a book.

She started out in the morning of the day before, drinking hot tea with milk and sugar — a soothing and respectable brew, one that stiffens the sinews for the work ahead.  I can’t be certain, but I think the tea was English Breakfast.                                     .

She worked through the morning and into the afternoon, and at some point in the process she switched to coffee — no sugar, but plenty of cream — and kept on going.  I don’t know what she made for dinner that night, but it was probably something simple and mindless, because her brain was deep into that writing space where the internal world has at least as much reality as the external one, and things like complex recipes are beyond it at such times.

And she kept on writing, throughout the afternoon and on into the evening.

At some time around midnight she switched to instant hot chocolate made up using strong black coffee as the liquid — a truly deadly brew, but a potent one.  Fueled by several cups of the coffee-and-chocolate mix, she finished the first draft of the novel, then collapsed into bed at 4AM, weeping with exhaustion and the conviction that the book in question was utterly hopeless.

(It wasn’t.  But it would take a cast-iron ego to believe that, at 4AM on a caffeine jag.)

I’m not sure that there’s a moral to this story, other than “Caffeine necessary; too much caffeine bad,” or maybe “Writers on a deadline have been known to do silly things.”

Funny. Scary. Hot.

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That’s humor, horror, and erotica for you, right there.  Three genres where the success or failure of the project depends upon the effect it has on the reader.  Humor that doesn’t make you laugh, horror that doesn’t make you afraid, and erotica that doesn’t turn you on — they’re all failures.  And given that what amuses, scares, or turns on an individual reader varies widely from one specimen of the human race to another, it’s pretty much inevitable that a piece of writing in one of these genres is going to fail at least part of the time — and it’s no wonder that writers in those genres have a tendency to go quietly nuts.

(Or sometimes, not so quietly.  There have been some spectacular author meltdowns, especially in the horror and humor fields.)

Snow, Still.

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But at least I’m no longer quite so peevish.  Snow that looks like it’ll stick around instead of melting and then refreezing into sheets of ice is good.  A large part of what passes for the local economy up here runs on winter tourism, especially snowmobilers, and last year’s lack of heavy snowfall was devastating.

Meanwhile, I chase the words “THE END” on the current deadline like Achilles trying to catch that blasted tortoise.

The Dreariest Part of the Year

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In my opinion, at this and higher latitudes it’s the stretch from mid-November through the winter solstice. Right now, in other words. The days don’t just get shorter, they spiral down into darkness, with twilight arriving at 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon.

On the positive side, when the solstice comes around, it’s a real pleasure to see the days getting perceptibly longer right away — it’s obvious, in that context, why so many high-latitude cultures have got a “Hey! Wow! The sun came back!” holiday scheduled for that time of year.

(The coldest time of the year is something else. Around here it’s mid-January through mid-February, and I don’t associate that season with darkness, I associate it with the kind of bright, cold sunshine that you only get when there’s snow on the ground and the temperature is somewhere well below zero Fahrenheit. Beautiful weather, but absolutely pitiless.)

..what does this have to do with writing?  Not very much.  Except that I find it hard to concentrate on fiction when my feet are cold.

How to be a Patron of the Arts on the Cheap

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We can’t all be Lorenzo de’ Medici.  But even without a family banking fortune and the resources of Renaissance Florence to draw on, there are things an average Joe or Jane can do.  For example:

Buy your favorite authors’ books. This will not only earn them royalties, it will help keep them in good odor with their publishers.

If your favorite authors are self-publishing their backlist, or their beloved but quirky projects that never caught the eye of a regular publisher, buy those, too.

If you run into one of your favorite authors in the sort of social venue where such things occur, offer to buy him or her a drink.  (Some of us learned to drink good scotch back when normal human beings could afford to purchase it.  Now that a bottle of Laphroaig  costs $55 and up even before the taxes kick in, we’re not likely to buy some unless we’ve got an advance check burning a hole in our pocket.)

In a similar vein — many authors attend conventions and related gatherings, either for the sake of furthering their careers or for the sake of getting away from their keyboards and having some much-needed social interaction.  Often (the writing life being what it is) they’ll be doing it on a shoestring.  In which case, you can earn your Patron of the Arts badge by saying, “Can I take you to dinner?”  If they’ve already promised elsewhere, they’ll say so; if they’re flushed with funds or burdened by pride they may decline; but the odds are very good they’ll be delighted, and tell you so, because even writers who are flush with funds today are keenly aware that the same may not hold true tomorrow.

You can be political.  Programs like art in the schools, or library funding, or state grants to artists and writers, are always in danger of being defunded, and most of them contribute to the income stream of working artists.†  Fight to keep them going.  And continue to push for better health-care options for self-employed people — since the passing of Obamacare, it’s no longer quite as easy as it used to be to depress a room full of writers just by whispering the words, “health insurance,” but things could still be better.

†Your average working artist has a mixed income stream very similar in most respects to the income stream of small farmers — a bit of this and a bit of that and a little of something else on the side. Or, as  a sign on Route 3 once said: “Fresh Eggs. Aromatherapy. Tarot Card Readings. Chain Saws Sharpened.”