Tag: writing

Time for a Spot of Shameless Self-Promotion

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It’s drawing on toward the end of local summer, hard as it is to believe with the temperature and the humidity being what they are – but here in far northern New Hampshire the first hints of color are showing up in the trees, so fall can’t be far behind.

If you’re one of those writers who took advantage of the long summer days (or the long winter nights, if you’re in the other hemisphere) to finish your novel or your short story, now is the time to think about whipping that first draft into better shape.

As a quick look up at this blog’s title will show, I’m here to help you.  My standard rate is a flat fee of $1500 for a standard-length (80,000-100,000 word) novel; for $100 I will edit your short story or the first 5000 words/first chapter of your novel.  Details are available here.

One of Those Summers

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Summer is always a bad time for nasty stuff to go down . . . too much heat and too much humidity and nobody ever being quite comfortable enough. Long ago, I read a piece by Judith Martin – writing in propria persona, not as Miss Manners – opining that this was the real reason why so many holidays of national independence are in the middle of local summer: too many days in a row of heat, humidity, stinky streets, and flies, and all it takes is one more incident and the next thing you know they’re hanging the aristos from the lamp-posts again someplace.

And this is an election year in America, which always makes the summers worse even when we aren’t afflicted with as polarizing a pair of candidates as I think I’ve ever seen. (Though I’m amazed that the right-wing true believers haven’t given up on hoping to pin something on Hillary by now. You’d think that after over two decades of trying and failing, during which she’s been under almost constant investigation by a regular clown parade of different interest groups, they would wise up to the fact that either there’s nothing there for them to find, or that where leading a double life is concerned she’s got Batman, Superman, Daredevil, and the Amazing Spider-Man all beat to hell.)

This year, though, it isn’t just us here in the USA. The UK has got the results of the Brexit vote to contend with, and France has mass terror attacks, and Turkey has an attempted coup, and it’s generally difficult to put your finger down at random on a spinning globe and not hit someplace that’s having a hard time at the moment. And thanks to the wonder of immediacy that is the internet, we get to have everybody’s bad day in our faces all at once, instead of getting the news delivered to us in more manageable, staggered-by-distance chunks, so that we have time to process things in between.

(Overly serious people sometimes complain that the internet is too full of pictures of people’s cats. I maintain that the ability to go look at the pictures of cute cats in Japanese train stations, in New York City apartments, and in backyards all over is a necessity in a world where we are regularly slapped in the face with bad news from everywhere, whether we’ve asked for it or not.)

Maybe when the cool weather comes back around, things will calm down a little. Probably not, but one can hope.

Meanwhile, it’s back to the word mines for me.  If anybody out there has a manuscript that needs editing, they can always get in touch with me by way of the About or Contact Me links on this page.

A Trio of Assorted Links

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A guide to semicolon usage, with illustrations.  Some people find semicolons intimidating; this is the post for them.  Other people love semicolons not necessarily wisely, but too well; I’m not sure if there is any help for us.

An article on Slate, ranting about the overuse of unnecessary synonyms for “said.”  I’ll be over here on the sidelines, waving my pompoms in enthusiastic agreement.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, “said” is all you need, assuming you need a dialogue attribution tag at all.

And Great Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council has released a digitized collection of Jane Austen’s manuscripts, including drafts and juvenilia.  I love living in the internet age, I really do . . . time was, to see something like this, you’d have had to make a trip (in the case of Jane Austen’s MSS, a number of different trips) to visit the material in person.

Time’s A-Wastin’

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vpxiGayHead LightApplications for  the Viable Paradise Writers’ Workshop are still open for this year, but the door shuts on June 15, so if you’re interested, better get your submission ready soon.  Viable Paradise is an intensive one-week residential workshop for science fiction and fantasy writers, held annually in the autumn on the New England island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Full disclosure:  Jim Macdonald and I are instructors at the workshop.  So are several other really fine people.  And instead of getting us one after the other like a parade, you (if you’re a student) get all of us at once, interacting not only with your fellow students but with each other – “This story is the wrong length; it needs to be shorter!” one instructor will say.  ‘’This story is the wrong length; it needs to be the first chapter of a novel!” another will respond.  (From which the takeaway lesson is usually that your story is indeed the wrong length, but it’s up to you to decide which way to fix it.  Also, that short story writers tend to think that problem stories need to be shorter, while novelists . . . you get the idea.)

One of the Good Things About Teaching

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— and about editing, for that matter — is the the opportunity to point with pride at a student’s (or client’s) success.

On this occasion, I can bask in the reflected glow from Viable Paradise alumna Fran Wilde’s winning of the Andre Norton Award for YA science fiction at the Nebula Awards just past for her novel Updraft, which also won the Baltimore Science Fiction Society’s Compton Crook Award for best first novel.

And as if that weren’t enough illumination, there’s a further glow coming by way of Debra Jess, another VP alumna and a Dr. Doyle’s Editorial client, for her novel Bloodsurfer, which is a finalist in two categories (best first novel and best paranormal) of the Greater Detroit Romance Writers of America Booksellers’ Best Award. The winners will be announced at this summer’s RWA convention.

Needless to say, I’m tickled pink for them both.

April Showers Seasonal Special Time

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Because it is now, at least in theory, spring (the thermometer got down to 10°F last night, so what it is in practice is something else again), it’s time once more for a Seasonal Special Offer.

Sample Spring Gift Certificate2016Small

From now through the 15th of April, in hope of warmer and brighter days to come, my usual rate for a full line-edit and critique for a standard-weight novel drops back to $1000.

Furthermore, you can purchase a gift certificate for a friend or colleague at the seasonal price, to be redeemed by the recipient at whatever future date they find convenient.  Needless to say – but I’ll say it anyway – you can also take advantage of this seasonal offer to pre-purchase a line-edit and critique for yourself on the same terms.

Also, for your amusement:  How to make a gingerbread TARDIS.

Peeve of the (New Year’s) Day

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Regarding that common colloquial affirmative:

People, it’s spelled either “okay” or “OK.”  It is not spelled “ok” in  lower-case.  “O.K.” with periods in it is defensible, but only just.

My own preference, when I get a chance to enforce it, is for “okay.”  This is in part aesthetic, in that I just plain think it looks better than “OK”, and in part a reflection of my considered belief that the etymologies deriving the term either from the humorously-misspelled “Oll Korrect” or the tip-of-the-hat-to-Martin-Van-Buren “Old Kinderhook” are, to put it mildly, full of it.  I go with the theory that the origin of the term is in a borrowing from either Choctaw or one of the West African languages, or possibly from both.  (And I certainly would never put forward the conjecture that resistance to that etymology comes from an unwillingness on the part of some scholars, back in the day, to admit that American English might have borrowed such a useful word from anything other than a lily-white source.)

As for when writers of fiction should use “okay” and when they should avoid it (personal opinion alert here):  Writers of contemporary mainstream and literary fiction have free rein to do as they choose.  Ditto for contemporary mystery and romance.  It’s the writers of historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy who have the tough decisions to make.

Historical fiction – still, of course, strictly in my opinion – should avoid “okay’’ except for eras when it was in use.  To do otherwise risks breaking the illusion being created for the reader by the introduction of a glaringly contemporary item into a careful arrangement of past details.  The same principle holds for created-world fantasy written in the high style, or created-world fantasy that strives for a non-modern sense of time and place.  Created-world fantasy written in a vernacular style, or urban fantasy, or fantasy set in the contemporary era or in some time and place closely resembling it, can use “okay” at will.  Science fiction is also an “okay”-okay zone.

Edge cases, as always, remain edgy.  Consult with your artistic conscience and use your best judgment and hope for good luck.

Because in the long run, it’s always the writer’s book, and you’re entitled to do whatever you think you can get away with.

Okay?

Okay.

I Think I’ve Finally Figured it Out

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I’ve always been a sucker for a well-done redemption arc in my fictions of choice, in both written and visual media. And I’ve always been puzzled by the vocal commentary that always arises on such occasions, to the effect that so-and-so doesn’t deserve redemption. Because – in my cultural tradition, at least – the whole point of redemption is that it isn’t something you get because you deserve it, it’s something you get because you’ve done something bad enough that you need it.

But if the naysayers are operating out of a definition of “redemption” that has no theological or philosophical dimension to it, but is instead merely a shorter way of saying “rehabilitation in the court of public opinion” . . . well, I may still think that a lot of them are full of it, but at least I can understand how they got there.

(Also – if you’re going to write a redemption arc, don’t cheat by making your character-to-be-redeemed guilty of something that they/their culture think is a Big Wrong Thing but that we, enlightened souls that we are, consider to be Not Really That Big a Deal.  They need to be really and truthfully guilty of something really and truthfully bad, or there’s no point to the exercise.)

Sometimes Life Hands You a Sack of Ingredients

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Maybe you have a friend with a garden that’s overproducing, and you get a surprise gift of a bag of zucchini and homegrown potatoes. You already know about making zucchini bread out of other people’s excess zucchini, but the potatoes deserve to have something good done to them before they go to waste, so you decide to make this;

Spinach and Bacon Potatoes

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 large or 2 medium onions, chopped (when in doubt, err on the side of more onion, rather than less)
  • 1/2 pound bacon, finely chopped (the original version called for pancetta, the which we do not have, up here in the wilds of the north country, but regular bacon works just fine so long as it isn’t maple-cured or something like that. I buy packages of bacon ends and pieces at the IGA, and they do just fine as ingredient-grade bacon.)
  • 5 large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (throw in a couple extra if your potatoes are running small)
  • 1 box of frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
  • 4 cups shredded Mexican cheese blend (cheddar will also work)
  • 1 pint heavy cream (or half and half, if you’re being economical with money or fat)

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a medium baking dish.
  • Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat, and sauté the onion and bacon until onion is tender and bacon is cooked through.
  • Alternately layer the potato slices, the bacon and onion mixture, the spinach, and the cheese in the prepared baking dish.
  • Pour the heavy cream evenly over everything.
  • Cover and bake 1 hour in the preheated oven.
  • Uncover, and continue baking 30 minutes, until bubbly and lightly browned.

The writing life can be like this sometimes, as well.  You may be going along, working on the project or projects you currently have in hand, when your personal muse shows up with a basket full of ideas and says to you, “Here.  I’m sure you can make something tasty out of these.”

Since it’s a bad idea to ignore gifts from your muse, even inconvenient ones, you’ll have to do something with all those fresh ingredients.  Maybe they can go together to make something you can whip up in a hurry before getting back to your main projects – a quick short story stir fry, as it were.  But maybe they’re better suited for something complex and long-simmering that you don’t have time for right now, so what else can you do?

Well, that’s where food preservation techniques real or virtual scrapbooks and idea files come in.  Get that gift basket full of ideas safely frozen or pickled or salted down and stored in the root cellar, and come the cold midwinter of the mind, they’ll be waiting there to nourish you.

Thought for the Day

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A piece of fiction is a carefully-crafted series of lies told to the reader, which the reader agrees to believe for the duration of the story.  Anything that threatens the fragile nature of this agreement is bad.

This is, for example, why it’s necessary to do your research – if you get something wrong that your reader is in a position to notice, the reader’s ability and desire to continue playing along with you is going to be compromised. The same goes for poorly-motivated characters and plotting by incredible coincidence.

It’s just one of the many oddities of the writer’s craft.  We are, or at any rate ought to be, scrupulously honest and careful about the small stuff, all in service of a bald-faced falsehood:

Listen. I’m about to tell you a true story….