Categories
writing year in review

2021 Writing Year in Review

Well. This is going to be painful.

Writing This Year

Novels: 0

Novellas: 1 (IP Project)

Novelettes: 0

Short Stories: 3 (all fanfic)

Flash: Wrote a couple of interstitials for Alasdair over at The Full Lid.

Scripts: 2 audio scripts

Paid Nonfiction: Book Riot newsletters and posts; a lot of stuff on my Patreon. Also I wrote a little how-to guide for Six to Start on writing nonfiction scripts.

Editing: I did a lot of editing this year, including the first time I’ve been hired to edit scripts. So that was exciting! I also got to work on a project helping someone with their maps, which was really fun.

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: None this year.

Best/Favorite story of the year: I’m really happy with the IP thing I finished up, but I am not allowed to tell you about it right now. I’ll squee later.

Statistics

Words: 333,201

Time Spent: 197:05

Days Written: 267 out of 365

Not too different from last year, in a way. About 1.5K more words, 5 less hours. But I worked 26 fewer days… that’s almost a month off. So I did about the same amount of words in less time. Not sure if that’s good or bad.

Publishing

Queries sent: 2

Rejections received: 2

Pending: 0

Most rejections received: Probably Glamazon vs. Deus Ex Machina Man at this point. Because it’s a very awkward size for a story and I have no idea what to do with it.

Gross Earned: $12,040.39

My income is up about $3.5K this year, and that’s basically a combination of how much editing work I picked up, plus the payments I got for the scripts I wrote and the IP project I completed last year but got paid out for this year. Patreon and the newsletter I write for Book Riot are also relatively small but very steady income streams that I appreciate a great deal. I made a little over $550 this year in royalties again, which is actually impressive considering I didn’t publish anything new in the last year that would get me royalties.

Published this year:

  1. Interstitials for The Full Lid, 6/4 issue

…well, that was grim. The other stuff I’ve turned in this year hasn’t been published yet. How does it feel? Feels bad, man. I wrote an awful lot, and I made a sum of money I really can’t complain about, but it’s funny how I still feel like I did nothing. Wait, not funny. The other thing.

Favorite Patreon posts for the year:

  1. The Matrix: Resurrections
  2. Alone in the Dark
  3. F9
  4. Liveblog of Geostorm

How did I do on last year’s goals?

  1. Continue averaging 6,000 words a week. Stretch goal: 6,500? Well, I did 6400 average per week, so I hit that.
  2. Write 3 short stories. I am counting fanfiction as valid here, even if I haven’t showed it to you.
  3. Finish drafting The Smallest God and The Greatest Baking Show in the Galaxy. *sobbing*
  4. Finish editing at least one of the above and make it DongWon’s problem.
  5. Do NaNoWriMo I actually started drafting a new Captain Ramos story for this, then had to devote the word count to an IP project. But I did it!
  6. Finally start the goddamn epic fantasy book. New outlines need to be done first because things have shifted.
  7. Read at least 60 books. I read 64! If you’re curious about what I’ve read, I do a monthly book post at my Patreon.
  8. If possible, finish the collaborative project (WE ARE SO CLOSE!) and start on the next book.
  9. Focus more on writing sprints. Figure out a routine that works with day job. I’m getting there. The strategy that seems to work is on days when I have work, I need to eat dinner, play video games for a couple of hours, THEN try to write.
  10. Work on expanding the Patreon audience; keep up faithfully with the obligations there. I’ve definitely got a bigger audience than when I started in January, but I seem to have plateaued. I have mostly kept up with the obligations I set myself, though I think I need to reassess the amount of work that goes into the TV write ups versus the reward.

I’m not going to lie… this has been a rough fucking year, just as bad as 2020, if not worse. I’ve had a lot of tired-and-sad-all-the-time brain, which has made it almost impossible for me to work on my own original content. All that’s kept me writing is when I’m under contract with someone else. Having that deadline imposed from without manages to kick me into a place where I get the thing done, because I have to. I’ve never claimed to be a brilliant writer, but dammit you will get your thing on time if not early when it’s coming from me.

I’m excited that I’ve started getting more contract work (especially IP) and that I seem to be slowly building a client base. It feels great to have people who will come to me because they need something done quickly, and they know I’ll get it to them on time, to their specifications. What I am missing is also having my own work out there, and I’m feeling a little bit lost as to how to get going on that again. I’ve got partially finished novels. Hell, I have two finished novels that just need some editing. Doing it has been the hard part, because this has indeed been 2020-Won, and because it is a lot more difficult to go to other people to be rejected, as opposed to having people come to you with a job they already know they want you to do.

Thank you to everyone who has given me work to do this year and trusted me to get it finished. It’s been a lifeline when I’ve been unable to self-motivate. (The money has been great, too, definitely.)

Goals for 2022

  1. Keep shooting for the average of 6,000 words a week.
  2. Finish drafting The Greatest Baking Show in the Galaxy. Stretch goal: The Smallest God.
  3. Sit down and freaking edit We All Burn.
  4. Finish the Captain Ramos novella I started and write another one.
  5. Superhero novella–get it outlined and maybe started?
  6. Finish that collaborative project. It’s going to happen this year. I can feel it.
  7. Keep up with Patreon and Book Riot obligations. Expand the audience if possible.
  8. Start dipping toes back into short fiction.
  9. Read at least 60 books.
  10. Do more posts on this blog. 2 per month seems like a reasonable goal.

Final Thoughts

The best thing I did for myself this year was I massively curtailed my Twitter usage. I’m still feeling burnt out and depressed, but I think it’s helped immeasurably. I’ve also greatly curtailed my news consumption; I read the local paper, I keep track of headlines, but I’m not the news junky I was before and I think it’s helped me a lot. The 24 hour news cycle is basically designed to make us feel constant impending doom so we keep watching, and it sure had that effect on me.

The other thing that’s helped me a lot, perhaps weirdly, is Bungie enabling crossplay for Destiny 2 so I can play my silly video game with more people. I’ve made a lot of friends in this isolated pandemic hellscape, and I think we’ve all worked to keep each other slightly more sane.

Compared to 2020, this year felt like we were settling in for a long haul, and the Omicron variant has only cemented this. I finally gave in and took a proper staycation this last week, and I’m… glad I did so. I needed some time, even if all I did was spend it in my house, playing video games and reading. I’m still trying to find a way to make my life work, and I know full well I’m a lucky person in that I’ve got my health and I’ve got a job that lets me work from home. That acknowledged, I still have to figure out how to live it… and then write in it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading, thank you for sticking with me, and thank you for hanging in there. I wish you peace and happiness and strength for the coming year.

Let’s buckle down and do this.

Categories
writing year in review

2020 Writing Year in Review

Writing This Year

Novels: 1 (finished editing)

Novellas: 1 (finished editing)

Novellettes: 3

Short Stories: 1

Flash: 0

Paid Nonfiction: Book Riot newsletter and a couple of posts

Editing: Several small freelance editing gigs

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: None this year.

Best/Favorite story of the year: I’d have to say it’s actually One People, One Purpose, which is my first ever IP story.

Statistics

Words: 331,712

Time Spent: 202:45 hours

Days Written: 293 out of 365

Wow, this is a big jump over last year. Probably helped by NOT having any of my bones fused. It’s weird, because I don’t feel like I’ve been more productive, yet I definitely have been. And that even though this has been the worst year ever, basically.

Publishing

Queries sent: 8
Rejections received: 6
Pending: 1
Most rejections received: That would be Raising the Steaks, which finally did get published this year by Andromeda Spaceways! I’m so proud of that story.
Gross earned: $8,457.39, almost $3k less than last year. Which was unfortunately already down from the year before. The good thing is, this is more than I expected to make! I had one big project roll in unexpectedly during the summer, and a couple of sales, but this was mostly several regular revenue streams (Book Riot Newsletter, Patreon, and my regular freelance proofreading gig) just adding up together; I only made about $550 from royalties this year.

Published this year:

  1. The Books That Hate Us for Sarah Gailey’s Personal Canons series (8/18/20)
  2. One People, One Purpose for the 10th Anniversary of Blizzard’s StarCraft II (7/28/20)
  3. Raising the Steaks in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine #78 (6/18/20)

Well, if my word course made me feel like I’d actually been productive this year, this list sure just set me straight, didn’t it. I’ve at least also put up some content on my blog and Patreon, but that’s really not the same as someone else publishing it.

Favorite Patreon posts for the year:

  1. Well, I read It (public)
  2. Jiu Jitsu
  3. The Lighthouse (2019)
  4. Chapter 17: How It Feels

Favorite blog posts for the year:

  1. Quiz: Protoss or Ikea Furniture
  2. Thoughts on Turning 40
  3. Slush v Solicitations: Just Tells Us Where We Stand

How did I do on last year’s goals?

  1. Figure out how to incorporate writing time into my new work week; achieve an average of 6,000 words per week.
  2. Write at least 3 short stories. (Additional: I really want to write a story to sub to Silk & Steel so one needs to be early in the year.) I actually technically did this, though only one of them is an original short story, the one I wrote for Silk and Steel. Which did not make it into that anthology, so I am sentenced to the hell of trying to sell it elsewhere.
  3. Finish both of the novels that I started this year. I get half credit for this one; I finished one of the novels, made some progress on the second.
  4. Do NaNoWriMo. Finished it again!
  5. Read at least 60 books. Read 75!
  6. More blog posts. I think? Does Patreon count?
  7. Refocus on character, character, character.
  8. Put fair share of time in on ongoing collaborative projects.
  9. Spend less time on Twitter. LOLOL

Considering what a goddamn dumpster fire 2020 was, I actually did really well on my goals. Shockingly so. Even if goal #2 is completed on what feels like a technicality. And yet I’ve come through the year without much of a feeling of accomplishment, even after crossing all these things off. I think that’s mostly linked to how little I had published this year, even though I felt like I was working my ass off under very trying circumstances. My writing income has shrunk two years in a row, my credits have shrunk, and it doesn’t feel great. Financially, this is not me panicking; I got a new job back in 2019 and I’ve been working it for a solid year now, and I’m in the best place financially I’ve been since I got laid off in 2016.

The new job has come with a lot of new challenges, one of which has been trying to figure out how to write around the brain drain of 40 hours a week of mental labor, which was not something I had to do when I was working in construction. (Then, I could be physically exhausted at times, but I still had a lot of unstructured waiting time where I could literally pull out my laptop and write while I was waiting for crews to get their shit together.) The financial stability that’s meant I haven’t had to scramble so much to do other people’s work and stress constantly about money has instead meant I don’t have as much energy to do my own work. I’m sure there’s some kind of irony there–though I’m certainly not complaining, because at least, as I mentioned before, I’m not constantly freaking out about money which is its own kind of brain drain.

I think ultimately my feeling of discontent and sadness at the end of 2020 is partially just because the year generally sucked. And the other part is the anxiety of being a writer, where you’re absolutely certain that the minute you aren’t publishing something, you will disappear and be forgotten. Social media does not help this, and honestly neither does my Book Riot gig where I’m constantly tracking what new things are coming out. When you’re never the new thing, and all of your peers seem to have a lot more in the pipe than you, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve sunk beneath the water. There’s a certain amount of “keep your eyes on your own paper” that comes into play; everyone’s career is unique and you cannot measure yourself by the achievements of others if you don’t want to lose your fucking gourd.

But on the other hand, I’m also only human, and at this point even deleting Twitter forever wouldn’t stop me from noticing how much everyone else is doing because it’s kind of my job to pay attention to that. So I’m just going to have to deal with the constant, choking feeling of inadequacy and soldier on. The most annoying thing about writing is I can’t even soldier on in the determination that in the future, my day will come. While I can do things to try to reach that goal, it’s ultimately out of my control. All I can do is set my shoulders and keep doing the work.

Which is an answer, and maybe the only answer, but it’s not a very satisfying one for hollow feelings.

Goals for 2021

  1. Continue averaging 6,000 words a week. Stretch goal: 6,500?
  2. Write 3 short stories.
  3. Finish drafting The Smallest God and The Greatest Baking Show in the Galaxy.
  4. Finish editing at least one of the above and make it DongWon’s problem.
  5. Do NaNoWriMo
  6. Finally start the goddamn epic fantasy book. New outlines need to be done first because things have shifted.
  7. Read at least 60 books.
  8. If possible, finish the collaborative project (WE ARE SO CLOSE!) and start on the next book.
  9. Focus more on writing sprints. Figure out a routine that works with day job.
  10. Work on expanding the Patreon audience; keep up faithfully with the obligations there.

I’m a little unsure face about refocusing on Patreon (since depending on someone else’s infrastructure is always frought), but it was an important income source for me this year and I think I can do a better job with it. It’s a more viable platform for me than a newsletter model, I think. I already write two newsletters a week for Book Riot and I cannot currently brain more.

Final Thoughts

Well, that was sure a year, wasn’t it. A year horrible enough to be a capstone on four already horrible years, and I’m not some fool that thinks things are magically going to be better because it’s 2021, but I’m not a cynical hope-eater, either. I don’t have anything profound to say about how fucking awful things were (or will probably continue to be for another half a year at least) other than we got through it because we’re the lucky ones, and the only way to truly honor that is keep fighting for both justice and kindness and flipping the bird to the people who have tried through hatred or ignorance or selfishness to kill us.

This is my tenth year doing year-end writing reviews… I started in 2010 but somehow ended up skipping 2011? I don’t know. I was in grad school and very busy. If you’re curious about a walk down memory lane just check out the year in review category.

I think me of ten years ago might be impressed that I was making money in the thousands from my writing. Would be seriously excited that I have an agent and have had books published. And would be sad that it’s not nearly enough money for me to be doing things full time. But 2010 me was also pretty realistic about things.

This year, I:

  1. Bought an ebike with the intention of regularly doing the 36 mile round trip for work that way. And… yeah. That sure didn’t happen. But I’m still really enjoying the bike.
  2. While I know that the lockdown isn’t necessarily a good measure of one’s ability to work from home because of these weird, stressful circumstances… I think this did tell me I could do it. If somehow I could make enough writing income to cover my bills, I could keep my shit together and get the work done. Especially because I’d be able to leave the house on occasion, unlike this year. I’ve actually really enjoyed working from home, despite the circumstances.
  3. Had a hysterectomy and it’s literally the best thing I’ve ever done for myself medically. As surgeries go, it was way less horrible than the foot surgery, too. Three cheers for gender-affirming care!
  4. Got hired to do IP fiction writing for the first time ever, which was cool and fun and I loved the work I did and the people I worked with.

Here’s hoping 2021 will be exponentially better. And I wish us all the strength and stamina to do the work that will make that happen.

Categories
awards eligibility

Awards Eligibility 2020

Since it is that season… again… here is what I’ve done this year.

  • One People, One Purpose – A story written for Blizzard (which still counts as a thing I’ve written!) about the Protoss trying to figure out how to move forward and come together as a people. I’m really proud of this story. (Published July 28, 2020; Wordcount: 10, 141)
  • Raising the Steaks – A near future low-stakes science ficton story about a cooking competition and collaboration between the arts and the sciences. (Published March 2020; Wordcount: 9,382)
Categories
writing

Quiz: Protoss or IKEA Furniture

So you may or may not know, but I wrote a novelette for the 10th anniversary of StarCraft II: One People, One Purpose

I am super duper proud of this story! And in celebration of that, I started an EXTREMELY SILLY Twitter quiz.

I will recreate the quiz below, and then put the answer key under the fold so people can check their answeres!

Choose the Protoss from each of these pairs of names! (The other is definitely IKEA furniture.)

Karax or Kallax

Galjon or Garudion

Kivik or Lyrak

Morabo or Mojo

Nyon or Alseda

Talis or Tarva

Vuku or Urun

Telbrus or Summera

Kaldalis or Sakarias

Marius or Mohandar

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANSWERS BELOW!

Categories
writing writing advice

Slush v Solicitations: Just tell us where we stand

Last updated: 8/4/20

I’ve recently written a couple of real salty twitter threads about the issue of short story venues–I mostly mean magazines, but anthologies can count, too–and their complete lack of transparency regarding just how much of their content they actually take from the slush pile versus how much is solicited.

A little background if you’re a new writer finding this:

Solicited Story: The editor contacts you personally and asks you to write a story for them. This may or may not come with the guarantee of publication.

Slush Story: You send your story cold into the slush pile and hope that the editorial staff will like it enough to buy it from you.

Backdoor Submissions: The venue says it’s closed to submissions, but a select group of people have been told that it’s still fine for them to send in stories.

Secret/Private Submissions Portal: The venue says it’s closed to submissions, but a select group of people have access to a submissions portal, for which the URL is not public.

And yes, all of the above things happen. All the time. I’m sorry to break it to you, new writer. This is something that it took me YEARS to figure out, when I was working to break into short stories. It sucks. I spent a lot of time looking longingly at anthologies and wondering how I kept managing to miss the submissions call. Well, the answer is that there are plenty of places that never issue a call for submissions because they know exactly who they want in their anthology/magazine, and it’s not someone who’s still trying to scrabble to the top of the slush pile. When I figured this out, I felt real fucking lied to, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did, too.

While you’re filing your teeth to razor points, I want to try to inject a little nuance into this. Because this isn’t intended to be a grand indictment of the practice of soliciting submissions–as much as it sucks for those of us who never or only rarely get invited–so much as the fact that there’s so much secrecy around it. I don’t know if this thing being an open secret that new writers have to figure out for themselves, like it’s the Westing Game except instead of an inheritance you get a potentially fatal blow to your ego, is an intentional snub. In all honesty, I have a feeling that this is just The Way It’s Always Been Done, starting back from the days when there was a relatively small collection of writers and they were almost all white cis dudes publishing each other in a congratulatory circle jerk and occasionally smugly noting how women and non-white men obviously didn’t write scifi instead of honestly understanding that when you’re a white dude and all your buddies are white dudes and therefore everyone you invite to your parties are also white dudes, that literally precludes anyone else getting a piece of the action.

Being an editor in general is a gatekeeping practice, filtering stories through taste and life experience and desired final product; soliciting stories is an even more direct act of gatekeeping because by its nature, it excludes the new and unknown. Again, I’m not here to say this is in any way inherently or necessarily evil. In my threads of salty saltiness, I came up with a multitude of examples where this power can be used for good, such as, say, soliciting stories from a few big name authors to drive sales of an anthology, and then slipping some new or less well known authors in so they can get more visibility. But I think not being open about the practice is also incredibly disingenuous, if not outright dishonest depending upon how one’s product is advertised.

My problem begins and ends with the lack of transparency. That’s the thing that, I feel, hurts the most when you’re standing on the outside and you cannot understand what’s preventing you from getting in. Yeah, it sucks to be told “this isn’t a venue for you; we’ll call you when we want you”–but then at least the expectation is set and understood. You know not to waste your time or emotional energy on a useless want.

But unfortunately, that’s not how things are done, for the most part. There are venues out there that run almost exclusively on solicited stories or only allow backdoor submissions, and the only way you’d know is the whisper network, which while useful, is something I always regard with a little bit of skepticism. And yeah, you bet I’ve heard stories about which venues do what, which has only fueled my salt levels; the reason I’m not naming them is that I sincerely hope they’ll be honest on their own, but also because I don’t feel comfortable making into assertions of fact that which I’ve been told (if multiple times) as rumor.

Everyone that’s said one way or another [that I know of] is in this twitter thread. (Other factors may affect the way the slush is handled at different magazines; I do not know how individual magazines handle these factors, and I did not ask because it was beyond the scope of this inquiry. But for example, writers who have sold to that place before might get passed along automatically, or award winners, etc. Slush isn’t a pure meritocracy, but it’s a way to edge your foot in the door.)

Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with soliciting content. If you’re honest about it. If you’re willing to tell writers what their odds actually are. If you’re not building your reputation on the appearance of being open to the new and untested while not following through. The whole point of this, other than my residual anger at yet another stupid, unwritten rule of the business, is that I don’t like it when people waste my limited time on this planet, particularly since most SFF venues don’t allow simultaneous submissions. If you only buy two stories a year from your slush and it’s going to take you six months to get to my inevitable rejection, at least have the basic fucking courtesy to let me judge what my odds really are.

Trying to get anything published is a hard enough task when you already know what to expect. It’s at times an incredibly demoralizing slog. The lack of transparency with regards to how much slush actually makes it through only makes this worse. Because those of us on the outside can feel that something is wrong, even if we don’t understand what, and the instinct of the writer is often to blame it on ourselves, or on our stories–when in fact the reason for what we sense is that there was never space for us to begin with.

So once again, I call on short story markets to be transparent about how much of their content they actually take from slush. Don’t leave writers to figure it out on our own. And if you do solicit most of your content and don’t want to say, maybe you should aks yourself why that is.

Appendix: Responding Venues (summarizing responses in the thread that starts here)

Analog SF – 100% slush with the sole exception of one story for the 90th anniversary issue

Asimov’s – 100% slush

Anathema Magazine – Trying to be 100% slush, solicits when necessary to fill out magazine, mostly art. (For detail, see this excellent thread.)

Apex Magazine – 90% slush for regular issues, 50/50 on theme issues.

Apparition Lit – Ficton all slush, will solicit nonfiction and guest editors.

Arsenika – Other than issue 0, all slush

Augur Magazine – At most 1 solicited piece per issue

Beneath Ceaseless Skies – >90% slush

Cast of Wonders – Bulk of episodes straight from slush, solicit 2-5 reprints per year

Clarkesworld – With the exception of the 100th issue, all slush all the time

Crossmass Infinities – Currently 100% slush, may consider soliciting 3 stories a year

The Dark – 100% slush

Diabolical Plots – All slush except for one piece that was a rush replacement

Escape Pod – Originals 100% slush, reprints 85% slush

Fantasy & Science Fiction – 100% slush

Fireside Fiction – At least half of every TOC is from slush

Fusion Fragment – Has solicited one reprint; vast majority will always come from slush

The Future Fire – 100% slush

Ghostwood Books – Anthologies filled from slush first; stories are solicited after if the slush is insufficient.

Glittership – 95% slush; solicits tend to be special cases.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine – 100% slush

Jellyfish Review – 1-2 pieces per year solicited, everything else slush

Kaleidotrope – All slush

Lackington’s Magazine – Solicited for first issue, all issues since have been slush

Metaphorosis Magazine – Ceiling for solicited content is 23%; at least 77% of magazine content is from slush. All themed anthologies are “private.”

Podcastle – Originals are slush EXCEPT for the Christmas and Eid specials. Sometimes will solicit reprints.

PseudoPod – Similar to Escape Pod, but with “a somewhat lower percentage of our reprints from slush”

Strange Horizons – Regular issues are 100% slush. May solicit for fund drives or special issues.

Timeworn Lit – 100% slush.

Translunar Travelers Lounge – 100% slush

Truancy Magazine – After first 3 issues, all new stories from slush with solicited reprints and 1 poem.

Uncanny Magazine – Solicited authors are listed on each year’s kickstarter. (Back of the envelope calculation by me looks like that comes to 4-6(?) pieces solicited per issue between short story, poetry, and nonfiction.)

Wizards in Space – All slush

Categories
writing year in review

2019 Writing Year in Review

Writing This Year

Novels: Have written 40k on one and 70k on another, but none finished.

Novellas: 3 novella-length WFH books

Novellettes:  0

Short Stories: 0

Flash: 1

Paid Nonfiction: Book Riot posts, newsletter

Editing: Several small freelance editing gigs

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: None this year.

Best/Favorite story of the year: N/A since I didn’t really finish anything as such this year.

Statistics

Since I stopped doing the magic spreadsheet last year, I’ve decided to try a different tracking scheme. I’ve been tracking raw word count, the number of days I’ve been writing, and time spent on things like editing that are writing tasks but don’t directly generate word count.

Words: 290,850

Time Spent: 115:55 hours

Days Written: 267 out of 365

Obviously I’m not on the “Write Every Day” train any more. Did this work for me? I’m not sure. It’s been a weird fucking year.

Publishing

Queries sent: 5
Rejections received: 3
Pending: 1
Most rejections received: This year, it’s The Devil Squid Apocalypse… which then sold to Giganotosaurus! WOO!
Gross earned: $11,153.59, about $2.5k down from last year. The bulk of this income came from work for hire; I didn’t sell anything that paid an advance this year, and royalties probably amounted to less than $1.3K total.

Published this year:

  1. Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures
  2. The Devil Squid Apocalypse
  3. The Stoker and the Plague Doctor in Straight Outta Deadwood
  4. Speculative Fiction on Tap: Romance Takeover Edition
  5. 25 of the Best Sci-fi Audiobooks to Listen to in 2019
  6. Pictures Worth a Thousand Nightmares
  7. Little, Brown to Publish Transphobic Novel That Erases Historical Trans Man
  8. From Audio to Paper: Deciphering Heard Words on the Page
  9. Speculative Fiction on Tap: Winter Books, Winter Beer
  10. One-Nighter Reads

How did I do on last year’s goals?

  1. Get back into writing nearly every day; get writing endurance back up to 1-2k words per day.
  2. Finish novella project and turn it in.
  3. Suck it up, find the money, and put at least the TV pilot script on the Black List. Submit to more contests.
  4. Make an actual effort to find out about work for hire for video games instead of just whining about it.
  5. Work on at least one collaborative project.
  6. Write one novel. Two as a stretch goal, but unlikely with the amount of freelance work I’ve frontloaded with.
  7. Finish editing Flash Memory and make it my agent’s problem.
  8. Read at least 60 books. (I read 63!)
  9. Do the birthday story, as usual.
  10. Do posts on my personal blog more often. My ability to write blog posts has kind of atrophied, and I need to practice it. (And convince myself I have interesting things to say, which is sometimes the harder part.)

Six out of ten ain’t bad, I guess?

Goals for 2020

  1. Figure out how to incorporate writing time into my new work week; achieve an average of 6,000 words per week.
  2. Write at least 3 short stories. (Additional: I really want to write a story to sub to Silk & Steel so one needs to be early in the year.)
  3. Finish both of the novels that I started this year.
  4. Do NaNoWriMo.
  5. Read at least 60 books.
  6. More blog posts.
  7. Refocus on character, character, character.
  8. Put fair share of time in on ongoing collaborative projects.
  9. Spend less time on Twitter.

As always, the challenge for making goals is answering the 3 questions: Is this something I can control? Is this actually achievable? Is this helping me?

Final Thoughts

If last year was a sucky year, this year was… perhaps less personally sucky, since it didn’t involve me having two screws put in my foot this time around. But it was a really weird year. Mostly positive personally, for all the world is a trash fire, but still definitely weird and I’m still trying to figure out how to work things out.

This year, I:

  1. Finished recovering from surgery, got off disability, went back to my full workload with stern warnings from my orthopedic surgeon that I needed to find a new job.
  2. Found a new job that’s a desk job, which also pays much better than my old job… but has a lot less available down time.
  3. This new job pays well enough that I no longer need to scramble for work for hire to cover my bills. So I came to the realization that I can now focus just on my stuff…
  4. Which has also come with the realization that my writing time is a precious resource and I need to be thoughtful about what I use it to write. I still have long term goals about screenwriting, but right now I need to focus on novels. Because hopefully novels will help me get to a place where I can have more time to work on other projects I want. But running around in all directions isn’t doing anything but stressing me out, because I’m doing multiple things halfway instead of one thing all the way.

One year out from 40, I’m still trying to figure out how to configure my life. I’m still trying to figure out who I am as a writer. And looking back on this year, despite the fact that I wrote almost 290K words, I feel like I didn’t do anything. Which is an illusion; I did a lot. I covered student loan payments with my writing. But finishing work for hire stuff and finishing your own stuff feels very different. And I finished damned little that belonged to me this year. I sold very little that belonged to me. It’s difficult to not have a massive internal crisis about this–I am having one, to be frank. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write. Others, I feel like I am only, to quote, “competent, but unremarkable.” There are obviously far worse things to be, but I’m ambitious enough to want to achieve more.

Next year, I hope, will be different. As always, the solution is to do the work. That is the one thing I can control.

Also, Parasite was the best movie of the year. Pass it on.

Categories
awards eligibility

Awards Eligibility 2019!

It’s a somewhat short list, but I did do some things this year!

Short Stories

The Devil Squid Apocalypse (~7050 words), published on 12/1/2019 in Giganotosaurus

The Stoker and the Plague Doctor (~4600 words), published on 10/1/2019 in the anthology Straight Outta Deadwood

 

Novella

Wireless (~24,700 words), published on 4/15/2019 in Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures (NOTE: Wireless is the only story in this collection that had not been previously published.)

 

Fancast

Shaun and Jen are still letting me be part of the Skiffy and Fanty Show, and we’re still eligible for Best Fancast!

Categories
tv writing

Maybe it’s just bad writing

In general, I don’t have opinions about Game of Thrones because I haven’t watched it and I haven’t read it, and I don’t particularly care to. And yet my attention was drawn to this piece at Wired: Why the Writing in Game of Thrones Season 8 Feels Off

Reader, I am annoyed. Miffed. One might even say, irate. I have no opinions about the writing quality of any season of this show, obviously, though I know there are sure a lot of opinions floating around out there because I’m a human with a smart phone and a Twitter account. What has my back up here has nothing to do with the Game of Thrones bit and everything to do with what the author of the piece, Daniel Silvermint, points to as the culprit.

It all comes down to how stories are crafted, and for that, we need to start with two different types of writers: plotters and pantsers. Plotters create a detailed outline before they commit a word to the page. Pantsers prefer to discover the story as they write it—flying by the seat of their pants, so to speak. Both approaches have their advantages. Since plotters know the story in advance, it’s easier to create tight narratives with satisfying conclusions. But that amount of predestination can sometimes make characters feel like cogs in service of the story. Pantsers have an easier time writing characters that live and breathe. They generate the plot by dropping a person with desires and needs into a dramatic situation and documenting the results. But with the characters in charge, pantsers risk a meandering or poorly paced structure, and they can struggle to tie everything together.

…really.

And his conclusion is:

In so doing, the showrunners moved as far to one end of the plotter/pantser continuum as Martin is to the other. They weren’t trying to resolve every character arc or pay off every last bit of world-building. They knew the destination Martin had in mind, they understood the dots they had to connect to get there, and they wanted to maximize fan entertainment along the way.

So apparently, Game of Thrones is now bad because George is a pantser and the showrunners are plotters and thus they’ve made the characters unutterably shitty and ignored development in the service of plot.

Here, I will offer an alternative reason for the season pissing so many people off: Maybe it’s just bad writing.

I know that writers at times like to pop off about their particular take on process, and some might want to start yet another iteration of the plotter versus pantser wars on their social media of choice because it’s great for getting engagement numbers. People talking in terms of if they’re a plotter or pantser when addressing process is easy shorthand when you’re on a panel at a convention and well aware that no one wants to hear you gush for ten straight minutes about how you in particular like to monkey around with your words. But frankly, setting this up like a dichotomy between “plotter” versus “pantser” is a gross oversimplification of something that is a full spectrum, one that writers often move back and forth on depending on what they’re working on, or if they’re trying to challenge themself, or even where in their career (or their book) they’re at.

Frankly, as someone who tends to be more on the plotter end of the spectrum, I feel rather personally insulted by the caricature of how writers who do this work. The point of writing a story is that you have to find a balance of plot, character, and pacing for the story that you want to tell. Acting as if outlining plot is wholly divorced from character reads to me like a massive misunderstanding of how one outlines; obviously I speak only for myself now, but much of the plot comes from the characters, and requires understanding them, and you’re damn right that I rewrite my outline if the characters demand it. Sure, you can use an outline that treats characters as pawns for you to shuffle around the chess board, whether the move makes sense for them or not.

But you know what that’s called? Bad writing. If your outline forces the characters to act in ways inorganic to them, it’s a bad outline and it should feel bad.

When you really dig into Silvermint’s thesis, beyond the irritating plotter/pantser redux, the more troubling implication is that there are story types or flavors that are inherent to a basic process. That, if you pick up a novel, you can tell by reading where the writer falls on the plotter/pantser scale, and that a story written by, say, a plotter would be inherently impossible for a pantser to pick up and effectively continue.

I do think it’s probably possible to tell something about a writer’s process if they’ve done it poorly. If the novel feels like you’re watching characters get dragged by the ankle through set plot points while carrying the idiot ball, all right. Failure mode of plotter right there. If you read a novel and it’s utterly disjointed and the plot doesn’t really get you from point A to point Z, then you can probably safely bet it was the failure mode of pantser.

But note what I said: Failure mode.

Writing is an art. We create something that is supposed to be greater than our process. One might argue that if we do our jobs right, all of the horrible mechanical bits should be entirely concealed because you’re so distracted by the excellent edifice we’ve built. The story is the towering, shining superstructure and you, the reader, should have no idea about the absolutely hideous foundation we cobbled together beneath. Hell, that’s even related to one of the perennial discussions about the Best Editor Hugo category–how do readers judge when someone’s done a good job as an editor, when if they’ve done a good job it means their work is invisible?

When I’ve read a good book or a good short story, I cannot tell if the writer was a pantser or a plotter, and I daresay most other people can’t either. Everyone makes a lot of hay out of George being a pantser (or gardener, in his lingo), but the reason anyone even knows that’s how his process works is because he told us that it had gotten him in a spot of bother with the books. Seriously, if someone picked up A Song of Ice and Fire and had no idea who George was or anything about him, would they really be able to toss his book down after finishing it and proclaim, “Well, that was definitely some excellent pantsing”?

Give me a fucking break.

Trying to pin this on basic process is, frankly, an insult to writers. Maybe the writers on Game of Thrones were in a tight spot because they had a limited number of episodes, but whatever thing has fans upset is not an inevitability of having a process where someone writes an outline. If the issue is that they’ve been allowed too few episodes and have too much to wrap up, then the triumphant return of pantsing wouldn’t magically expand the length of the season. If they asked for too few episodes, if they had a bad plan, then it’s not that failure was destined because they’re plotters touching the sainted product of a pantser, it’s that they needed to write a better fucking outline.

No matter the personal process used, every writer is capable of producing some utter crap, so maybe call it what it is: bad writing.

Categories
writing year in review

2018 Writing Year in Review

Writing This Year

Novels: 0

Novellas: 2

Novellettes:  0

Short Stories: 5

Flash: 2

TV/Movie Scripts: 1

Other Scripts: 2 scripts written for Six to Start

Paid Nonfiction: 22 for Book Riot, 3 short textbooks written

Treatments/Outlines: 2

Editing: Several small freelance editing gigs

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: None this year, maybe because I’ve been completely ignoring my short stories in favor of long stuff.

Best/Favorite story of the year: Probably Siren. You can read it in Sword and Sonnet.

Magic Spreadsheet wordcount: I stopped tracking this year, which may have been a mistake. I felt like I finally hit a place where I could be productive without really flogging myself with daily tracking…and then everything basically went to shit from August onward, mostly thanks to having surgery on my foot. I’m trying to get back into the habit now, and in the new year I think I’m going to start tracking my word count and editing hours again so I can set more concrete goals.

Publishing

Queries sent: 25
Rejections received: 21
Pending: 4
Most rejections received: This year, it’s The Devil Squid Apocalypse, but I’m going to keep trying goddammit. I LOVE THAT STORY TOO MUCH.
Gross earned: $13,645.47, surpassing last year by over $2.8K. Which I’m finding even more personally impressive because I only had one advance payment for a novel this year. The bulk of the rest was freelance income or work for hire.

Published this year:

  1. Blood Binds the Pack
  2. Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures
  3. Excerpts from the Personal Journal of Dr. V. Frankenstein, MD, Department of Pathology, Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in We Shall Be Monsters
  4. 40 Facts About the Strip Mall at the Corner of Never and Was in Shimmer #46
  5. Siren from Sword and Sonnet
  6. The Best Fantasy Short Stories and Where to Find Them
  7. The Weird Libertarian Trojan Horse That is the Little House Books
  8. 10 Great Underwater Sci-fi and Fantasy Works
  9. 5 Books Over 500 Pages That Are Well Worth Your Time
  10. All Issues of FIYAH Literary Magazine Removed from Goodreads
  11. WorldCon 76 Report: Hugo Awards, Lodestars, and MAGA Hats
  12. Overdrive vs. Libby: Which Will Serve You Best?
  13. 12 Books to Pierce the Filter Bubble
  14. WorldCon Updates Programming in Response to Critiques from SF Creators
  15. How WorldCon Failed Marginalized Creators With Programming and Communication
  16. Tor Hits Libraries With Lending Delay
  17. The Ripples of #Cockygate
  18. 35 of the Best Fantasy Audiobooks
  19. #Cockygate Continues: The Best Bits of the Recent Hearing
  20. My Housemate Explains The Fountainhead to Me
  21. 5 Speculative Fiction Takes on Sherlock Holmes
  22. The Most Ambitious (Literary) Crossover Event in History
  23. Thank You, Naoko Takeuchi, for Sailor Moon
  24. Reader Shame: Award Season Edition
  25. Speculative Fiction on Tap: The Light Side of Beer
  26. Brain Armor: 6 Books for Skeptical Self Defense
  27. Author Banned From Attending WorldCon
  28. Science Fiction Short Stories to Read Online (and where to find them)

Slated for 2019:

  1. The Plague Doctor and the Stoker in Straight Outta Deadwood
  2. The second installment of the collected Captain Ramos Novellas from Queen of Swords Press
  3. Those text books I wrote this year–and I have three more I’ll be writing next year.
  4. Looks like I’ll be doing some TTRPG writing for Laser Kittens!

Goals for 2019

  1. Get back into writing nearly every day; get writing endurance back up to 1-2k words per day.
  2. Finish novella project and turn it in.
  3. Suck it up, find the money, and put at least the TV pilot script on the Black List. Submit to more contests.
  4. Make an actual effort to find out about work for hire for video games instead of just whining about it.
  5. Work on at least one collaborative project.
  6. Write one novel. Two as a stretch goal, but unlikely with the amount of freelance work I’ve frontloaded with.
  7. Finish editing Flash Memory and make it my agent’s problem.
  8. Read at least 60 books.
  9. Do the birthday story, as usual.
  10. Do posts on my personal blog more often. My ability to write blog posts has kind of atrophied, and I need to practice it. (And convince myself I have interesting things to say, which is sometimes the harder part.)

Other Stuff

  1. HUNGER MAKES THE WOLF WON AN AWARD!!!! I’m still fucking blown away by this.
  2. I read 68 books this year, which is two short of my goal of 70.
  3. I fucking love my Destiny clan.
  4. Got back into baking this year, and I want to continue next year. Goals include: curry goat pie (hot water crust pastry), learn how to make bread, something involving meringue, make a puff pastry once so I never feel the need to do it again
  5. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is my pick for best movie this year, and definitely the one that made me feel happiest. Close second is Black Panther.

Real talk: while I managed to do better monetarily than last year (and I’m proud of the work I’ve done), this year has kind of sucked for me on a personal level. Mostly because I got taken out by an injury at work in March, and it’s just been that drama ceaselessly since. I’m on the road to recovery now, but it’s slow, and it’s fucking painful, and I think that’s really hurt my ability to write since August (when I had surgery). Beyond that, it’s forced me to do some really painful self-assessment about what I can even physically do any more, at the ripe old age of 38, and what that means from aspects of my life from my leisure activities to my ability to do my current job. And that’s also been a major, ongoing source of anxiety for me. Like this is probably the most continuously stressed out and anxious and internally fucked up I’ve been since my last year at AT&T, when I was so depressed I literally stopped sleeping.

So yeah. Here’s hoping 2019 is calmer.

Categories
awards eligibility

Awards Eligibility 2018

I just realized I ought to do this for the reference of anyone who might care, and in a much more permanent form than on Twitter. Because I did do a thread on Twitter, you see, but that hardly counts when I can’t even manage to find it myself.

So, what the fuck did I have published this year?

Novel

THAT’S RIGHT I HAVE A SECOND FUCKING NOVEL OH YEAH – Blood Binds the Pack, written under the pen name Alex Wells. It’s the sequel to Hunger Makes the Wolf and I’m incredibly proud of it because I feel like I really leveled up my writing game here.

Novella

I did have a new novella published this year too! The title is The Flying Turk and you can find it in the collection Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures.

Short Stories

Three short stories out this year:

Excerpts from the Personal Journal of Dr. V. Frankenstein, MD, Department of Pathology, Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in We Shall Be Monsters

40 Facts About the Strip Mall at the Corner of Never and Was is in the final Shimmer

Siren was published in Sword and Sonnet

(If you’d like to read either of these and don’t have a copy of the magazine or anthology, contact me.)

Other Writing

I’ve been writing at Book Riot all year. I think my three best/favorite bits are:

All Issues of FIYAH Literary Magazine Removed from Goodreads (Book Riot)

How WorldCon Failed Marginalized Creators With Programming and Communication (Book Riot)

My Housemate Explains The Fountainhead to Me (Book Riot)