Which means that applications are now open for Viable Paradise XIX, being held this year on 18-23 October at the Island Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Come for the workshop; stay for the lighthouses, the luminescent jellyfish, and the really excellent seafood.
Also: I’m currently putting together the January issue of my newly-inaugurated newsletter. If you’re interested in receiving what should be a monthly e-mailing, you can sign up via the link in the sidebar, or click on it here.
In the spirit of making the Yuletide (or other seasonal holiday of your choice) a bit brighter all ‘round:
From now through Twelfth Night (5 January 2015), my price for a full-dress line-edit plus a 3-5 page letter of critique drops to a flat $1000 for a standard-weight novel.
This offer can also be combined with the Seasonal Gift Certificate I blogged about earlier.
Yes . . . it’s my sporadically-recurring post in which I wave my hands and point to the “Editorial and Critique Services” bit of this blog’s title, and to the About and Editorial Services links on this page. (Click on either one; the content is about the same either way. The salient details certainly are.)
Short version: One of the ways I keep the electricity and the internet running around this place is with freelance editorial and critique work. If you’ve got a short story or a novel that you’d like to spruce up for submission or for self-publication, or that you’d like to make better for some other reason (including the learning experience), then I’m available to help you out.
My base rates: $1500 for a standard 80,000-100,000 word novel; $100 for a short story or the first chapter/first 5000 words of a novel. Rates for odd lengths – novellas, extra-long novels – are negotiable. Also, if you go for the first-chapter deal on a novel, and then decide you want the whole enchilada, you get $100 off on the novel fee.
The weather is hot and sticky (well, for values of “hot and sticky” that obtain in northern New Hampshire, which means that folks in places like Arizona and Texas would think it pleasantly cool), but we’re happy anyway, because today is the day that our short story, “The Devil in the Details,” is up at Tor.com.
Enjoy!
Tomorrow – 15 June 2014 – is the last day to apply for this year’s Viable Paradise Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop.
So if you’ve been wavering back and forth all spring and part of the summer on whether or not to apply, it’s time to pull up your socks, format your manuscript, and get in that application before the deadline.
The jellyfish are calling . . . ask not for whom the lighthouse blinks; it blinks for thee.
Time to start watching the skies . . . my co-author and I have a short story coming up on Tor.com on July 2.
We sold this story back in early December of last year, after having worked on it, off and on, for longer than I care to contemplate. We’d take it out, tweak it a bit, get to about the halfway point, get stuck, and put it aside again to work on something else. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
Finally, though, it clicked . . . we rethought a secondary character, threw out all the scenes that were trying to pull the short story out of its intended shape (when you’re primarily a novelist, your mind will sometimes insist on serving up novel-type scenes even when you don’t want them), and figured out who our bad guys actually were and what they were really up to.
After that, really, finishing the story was a snap.
The moral of the story? As usual: Don’t give up.
And sometimes, the cure for being stuck is to start throwing stuff out until what you’ve got left feels right.
(Don’t trash your out-takes, though. See The Adventure of the Five Chapter Nines.)
Applications for this year’s Viable Paradise sf/fantasy writer’s workshop close on June 15th.
VP is a one-week residential workshop, held annually in the autumn on Martha’s Vineyard – eight instructors and twenty-four students, all in it together for the whole week. (Why one week? Because not everybody who wants and needs the workshop experience is at a point in their lives where they can spare six weeks or a month away from whatever it is that they normally do with their time. But just about anybody can manage to hack free a week if they absolutely have to.)
We’re also the workshop that features lighthouses and (the weather permitting) luminescent jellyfish.
Check it out . . . my co-author, James D. Macdonald, is blogging over here.
(Full disclosure here: he’s also my husband. But it took us nearly ten years of marriage and two kids before we worked up the nerve to play “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours” with our writing. Which was fun, but not nearly as much fun as the year we decided to go full-time freelance . . . which turned out to also be the year I had twins.)
This coming weekend is the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston. Arisia is one of the two big winter conventions we attend, the other being Boskone. Arisia is large and lively and skews more toward non-print sf/fantasy than does Boskone, which is smaller and more book-oriented (though it was quite the lively con itself, in its younger days); we enjoy both of them for different reasons, not entirely having to do with the chance to get out of town for a few days in cabin fever season.
(When I start humming Stan Rogers’s Canol Road – probably the ultimate cabin fever song – under my breath, I know that the walls are starting to close in.)
Anyhow, my schedule this year:
Military SF: When Diplomacy Fails Faneuil Fri 10:00 PM Duration: 01:15
Military SF has been around quite a while, starting with the works of authors such as Piper and Heinlein and continuing to this day with works by authors like Weber, Drake, and Ringo. What is the current state of military SF? How is it defined these days? What about anti-war stories that use the trappings of military SF like Haldeman’s The Forever War? Is there a unifying political viewpoint among the different authors?
Autograph – Doyle, Hunt, & Kelner Galleria – Autograph Space Sat 10:00 AM Duration: 01:15
Autograph session with Debra Doyle, Walter Hunt, and Toni L.P. Kelner.
In Search of Conflict Bullfinch Sat 11:30 AM Duration: 01:15
As writers, how do you create conflict? Not just between a protagonist and antagonist but between friends, family, nations, and even within the main character themselves? Is overt conflict, such as a physical confrontation or threat, better than an internal character struggle for some stories? There are myriad ways of showing conflict other than someone throwing a punch, what are they?
Reading: Doyle, Macdonald, and Nelson Hale Writing Sun 10:00 AM Duration: 01:15
Authors Debra Doyle, James Macdonald, and Resa Nelson read selections from their works.
And once again, Jim Macdonald and I have the 10AM Sunday reading slot. If you’re at Arisia and awake at that hour, do consider stopping by. We’re going to be reading a new short story from the adventures of Peter Crossman, hard-boiled Knight Templar.
With National Novel Writing Month receding into the past, and the midwinter giftgiving season drawing ever closer, it’s time again for a display of crass commercialism on my part.
If you’ve got your NaNoWriMo manuscript in hand, and would like help in taking that finished product to the next level, I’m here to help. My base rates are $1500 for a novel, or $100 for a first chapter sample (or for a short story, if that’s what you’ve got.) More details can be found here.
Also, if you’re looking for a present to give to the writer in your life, you can give them a virtual gift certificate for a line-edit and critique — you can purchase my services in advance at the usual rate, and they can schedule the job whenever they’re ready. If you like, I can even send you a PDF of a nice-looking gift certificate that you can print out and put into an envelope, or in a great big enormous box with a lot of packing peanuts, if that’s how you roll.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 