Tag: games writers play

What I’m Doing This Weekend

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I’m going to be at the Boskone science fiction convention at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, is what I’m going to be doing.

My schedule:

Friday 20:00 – 20:50, Mythology in Science Fiction, Burroughs ( Westin)
How have myths and fables from our past affected SF writers’ development of fictitious off-world or future-world mythology? Are most of their myth systems just the old stuff dressed up with different names, or is anybody coming up with anything truly new? Does a mere hint of myth make an SF story a fantasy?

Saturday 12:00 – 13:00, Kaffeeklatsche, Galleria-Kaffeeklatsch 1 ( Westin)
Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald

Saturday 16:00 – 16:50, The Two Sides of Gollum, Harbor I ( Westin)
Gollum is unique: there’s nobody quite like him in fantasy (or is there?) And in many ways, he is the true tragic here of the Lord of the Rings, evoking at times anger, contempt, and pity from the readers. The panel looks at the character of Gollum (whether Stinker or Slinker) and how he fits into Tolkien’s world and Tolkien’s story.

Saturday 17:30 – 17:55, Reading, Lewis ( Westin)
Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald

Sunday 11:00 – 12:00, Autographing, Galleria-Autographing ( Westin)
Debra Doyle, S. C. Butler, James D. Macdonald

Sunday 12:00 – 12:50, Futurespeak: the Evolution of English and More, Griffin ( Westin)
Will English still be the world’s most widely used language 50, 100, or 500 years from now? How might it sound or be written differently then? Which writers are ut klude to tomorotalk?

So if I’m not posting here for the next few days, that’s why.

Short Stuff

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My husband/co-author and I have sold a short story to an anthology.  This is not actually that common a thing for us, because we’re primarily novelists, and most of the story ideas that swim into our nets are novel-sized ideas.

You can’t make a lot of money writing short stories, at least not these days.  There aren’t enough markets, and the rate of pay has not increased that much over the decades.  There was a time, or so I’ve been told, when a writer of short stories could at least keep him-or-herself from starvation by writing alone; but that was also a time when magazine short fiction filled the entertainment niche occupied these days by television and the internet.

Why, then, do we write short fiction at all?

One reason, of course, is that sometimes a short-story-sized idea swims into our fishing net, and it would be wasteful to throw it back.

Another reason is that for novelists, short stories function as advertising — they keep the writer’s name out in front of the public, and they provide readers with a sample that might lure them into buying longer works.  The primary reason that people buy a book, even in the electronic age, is because they’ve already read and liked something by the same author.

Finally, while you can’t make a living writing short stories, you can — sometimes — make a reputation.  And it’s a rare writer who’ll turn up his or her nose at the idea of acquiring a modicum of extra fame.

Pipe Dreams; or, the Someday List

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Like (I suspect) most writers, I have a Someday List — “someday” here being short for “Who knows, it could happen, someday someone in Hollywood might decide that the stuffed and mounted outer skin of one of my novels might work as the basis for a movie, and decide to pay me money for it.”

My Someday List changes from month to month, if not from day to day, depending on what things I’m hungry for and what things I’m annoyed by and exactly how much Someday Money I’m daydreaming about at any given moment. (It’s a generally-accepted truth that what most starving freelancers regard as a life-changing sum is the equivalent of pocket change for a major movie studio, but sometimes I’d rather daydream about a quirky budget flick by an independent producer who might actually get part of the story right. Other times, I’m all about the money.)

Anyhow, someday:

  • I’m going to get this house repainted. In light brown, this time, with white trim, instead of the dark brown with what I think was meant to be ivory but which looks more like mustard that the previous owners preferred.
  • I’m going to replace the wooden steps leading up to the double doors that we don’t use. They were old when we moved in, and have rotted since.
  • I’m going to tear down the front porch and the steps leading to the kitchen door that we do use, and replace the whole thing with one of those solarium/mudroom deals.
  • I’m going to rip out all the old plumbing in the downstairs bathroom and put in new stuff that actually works.
  • I’m going to put in a new kitchen sink and kitchen counter and kitchen cabinets, and while I’m at it a built-in dishwasher. And a tile floor. Or at any rate, fresh linoleum.
  • And I’m going to put in oil heat. We’ve already got the ductwork for forced hot air, so a change like that might even be doable for a comparatively small amount of someday money.

In the meantime, we work, like most freelancers, from day to day.

More Nifty Internet Stuff

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If a little learning is a dangerous thing, then a lot of learning is, well . . .  pretty damned neat, actually.

For example:  Gothic for goths.

Because, face it, what up-and-coming young goth — or anyone else, for that matter — wouldn’t want to know how to say, “My fancy new black underwear is chafing”?

(Sa feina niuja swarta undarklaiþs meina gneidiþ mik, in case you’re curious.)

God, I love the internet.

What’s in a Name?

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New writers often ask, “Do I need a pen name?”

The answer, usually, is “No.  Unless, of course, you do.”

What do I mean by that?  Let me unpack a bit.

There are several reasons why a writer might have a true need for a pseudonym, of which security is the biggest.  A writer who is engaged in saying things about powerful people and entities to which those people and entities might take exception, for example, may choose to write under cover of a nom de plume, as Jonathan Swift did when he wrote a series of political pamphlets about English fiscal policy in 18th-century Ireland under the pseudonym of “M. B. Drapier.”

Similarly, a writer whose regular employment involves working with or for people who might look askance at one of their employees having a commitment to something other than the job might use a pen name to keep the two lives separate.  Writers who work for the government, or for the military, also fall into this general category.

Then there are the writers who, for whatever reason, don’t want their friends, or family, or co-workers to know that they write — or sometimes, to know what they write.  Schoolteachers, for example, are expected to be as above reproach as Caesar’s wife — if you’re teaching eighth-grade English as your day job and writing steamy romance novels on the side, you probably don’t want the school board to catch on.  (Not even if half of them are devoted readers of your other persona’s literary output.  They’ll just ask for your autograph out of one side of their mouths and decline to renew your contract with the other.)†

Sometimes the decision to use a pseudonym is driven by economic reasons.  An author whose previous output had a lackluster reception, or which fell prey to one or another of the assorted bad things that can happen to good books, may choose to start over under a pseudonym.   Opting for this course of action used to be a closely-guarded secret, rather like going into the Witness Protection Program, but readers are more savvy, usually, than publicists think, and the cats in those cases never stayed in the bag for long.  These days, the economy-driven pseudonyms are more about what the marketing types would call “establishing brand identity” — this is the pseudonym for the author’s YA work, and this is the sf/fantasy pseudonym, and that one over there is for mysteries and thrillers, but everybody knows that they’re all the same writer at the keyboard.

And finally, you get the writers who chose to write under a pseudonym because they don’t like the name their parents stuck them with, or they like their name just fine but know in their heart of hearts that nobody outside of their particular ethnic group is ever going to be able to pronounce it, let alone spell it right or shelve it correctly in the bookstore, or they prefer to draw a hard line between their writer-persona and their everyday-persona for some reason that is private and particular to them.

†My parents were teachers. It didn’t leave me with a high regard for school boards or school administrators in general.

The Fine Art of Handwaving

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If you’re going to write in the science fiction or fantasy genres, sooner or later you’re going to end up handwaving an explanation.  Other genres sometimes do it too, but other genres don’t regularly work with props and plot elements that don’t yet and may never exist.

Some handwaving is easy, because the genre as a whole expects it.  Take faster-than-light space travel, for example — sf writers have been handwaving that one for so long that all they need to say is something like “hyperspace” or “wormhole jump” and the reader is there for the ride.  Readers aren’t dumb.  They know perfectly well that if the author of the story actually had the plans for a working faster-than-light drive, he or she wouldn’t be writing adventure stories for a living.   Too much explanation, in this case, would bring on a case of Handwaving Fail — all the audience wants to know is that the author is aware of the problems with faster-than-light travel, and that for the purposes of the story, those problems have been solved.  They don’t really want all the equations plus a diagram.

Sometimes the handwaving has to be subtler.  If you’re introducing a bit of tech that you’ve postulated just for the occasion, don’t draw attention to its extraordinary or purpose-built nature.  If you talk about it and around it as though it’s been hanging around the laboratory or the workbench or whatever since well before the current problems started, the reader will think of it as just another piece of the furniture, and with that you can slip it into its place in the story without occasioning comment.

If you’re looking at the need for a really large job of handwaving, stronger measures may be required.  My husband and I once co-wrote a YA thriller for a packaged series, and found ourselves working with a plot that would have ground to a shuddering halt if the main character had ever actually sat down and talked to the police about what was going on.  We got past that difficulty — and did it without making our main character an idiot — by compressing the timeline of the novel into two or three days and keeping our protagonist on the move and short on sleep the whole time.

So.  Three general tips:

Use built-in handwaves where the genre allows for them.

Don’t point at what you’re handwaving.

And when in doubt, keep things moving fast enough that nobody has time to stop and think.

 

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.

You Never Forget Your First Time

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First publication, that is.

My first publication ever was a three-sentence paragraph on tadpoles.  No, I’m not making this up . . . I wrote it in first grade, because when I was six years old I thought that the whole egg-tadpole-frog thing was fascinating.  And my mother thought the paragraph was cute enough to send in to the “By Our Readers” page of Jack and Jill Magazine, which accepted it.  And then didn’t print it until I was in the fifth grade.

(If I’d known then what I know now about slush piles and backlogs, I wouldn’t have been so surprised.  But what does a fifth-grader know about publishing?)

My first paid publication was also my mother’s idea.  I was in the eighth grade, and prone to writing dreadful poetry.  She sent in one of the slightly-less-dreadful pieces to the “By Our Readers” page of our church denomination’s national youth magazine, and they accepted it.  They also sent me a check for three dollars and seventy-five cents (which at that point in time was three-and-a-bit times the cost of a paperback novel), and I was so deliriously happy that I ran barefoot to our next-door neighbor’s house to share the good news.

It was high summer in Texas and my feet got stuck full of sand-spurs, but I didn’t care.  Somebody who wasn’t related to me had liked something I’d written well enough to pay me actual, spendable money for it.

My fate was sealed.

You Find All Sorts of Things on the Internet

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Especially when you’re doing research.

Some of the odder and/or more interesting (and even sometimes useful) places I’ve found in the course of doing research for different projects:

An Enigma Machine simulator.

A Vest Pocket Guide to Brothels in 19th-Century New York.

A timeline of historic food prices.  With a collection of links to historic menus.

A page for converting dates to and from the French Revolutionary Calendar.  (If you’re curious, today is Décade I, Decadi de Brumaire de l’Année CCXXI de la Revolution.)

One of many online date-of-Easter calculators, in case you want to know what date Easter is going to fall on in the year 2525.  (April 15th, by the Gregorian calendar, for the Western churches.)

An on-line text of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

No wonder research is so dangerous . . . you can fall into it and never come out.

All Good Things Must Come to an End

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(In which I natter on about television, because I’m working on an editing gig and don’t want to distract myself by talking about writing.)

I think it’s fair to say that some TV series end better than others. Old-fashioned push-the-reset-button drama series and sitcoms didn’t have to do much work to tie off the story — M*A*S*H had the end of the war, The Mary Tyler Moore Show had the tv station close down, other shows just moved without a ripple into the eternal reruns of syndication — but the development of arc-based storytelling put a new burden on television writers, the need for giving the faithful viewers a satisfactory denouement, and I think we’re still seeing them figure out how to do it.

The X-Files wasn’t necessarily the first of the arc-based shows, but it was definitely the one that showed everybody else How Not to Do It. Its sins were many — lack of a clear backstory, failure to end at any one of several perfectly good stopping places, failure to redeem plot coupons the audience had been holding onto for several years in some cases — but it could, I think, have mitigated at least some small portion of its general Fail if it had only done one thing.

That thing? Establish some kind of victory condition early on, and see to it that at least some of the show’s sympathetic characters survived and met that condition. The X-Files disappointed us on almost every count: Mulder never found Samantha or got justice for her abduction/death/whatever; the big conspiracy was never revealed or thwarted or destroyed; Mulder and Scully never achieved vindication and professional recognition (in fact, their FBI careers basically go down the toilet); Scully never got to have and keep a kid; hell, not even the damned aliens got a satisfactory resolution, since they never got to do their Big Colonization Thing while we were watching, either.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the other hand, while it didn’t please all its viewers on all counts, succeeded in that one big thing. The show gave us, from the beginning, a main character with a big problem — to wit, her mystical destiny as “the one girl in all the world” — and at the end of the series not only have she and her friends defeated the final season’s Big Bad, she and they have succeeded in rewriting the terms of her destiny so that she is no longer forced to carry that burden alone.