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
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
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
writing

You’re nothing new.

“There’s nothing new here,” so why do we write it? – a blog post my dear friend E. Catherine Tobler wrote, and you should read.

And now I’m going to have some feelings that are too big and too angry to have on Twitter.

I have basically been told at various times since I started writing professionally, about almost every goddamn thing I’ve written, that “it’s nice, but it’s nothing new.” I’ve heard it in writing groups. I’ve seen it in reviews. It’s not new, it’s not that creative, it doesn’t add anything, it’s derivative, etc.

And as an aside, I have a particular feeling about being told that something I’ve written has been done before, almost always by a cis male writer fifty years ago, whose story I haven’t read.

It’s frustrating. It’s hurtful. It’s almost killed my ability to write, multiple times. It’s certainly killed my ability to read certain things, because being constantly told you aren’t that creative because your thing is like a thing you’ve literally never even read makes you not want to read things that might be similar to your next project. Because then at least when you get the sounds-accusatory-even-when-it’s-not verdict that “Person X already did this,” you can say, “Funny, because I haven’t read them.”

It happened within the last week, where I got recommended a book that’s in the same sort of sub-subgenre as what I want to write, and now I can’t bring myself to read it because then it’ll be like proof that I’m a pathetic piece of shit who can’t have my own ideas.

And what makes me even angrier is that it’s all subjective bullshit and it still takes up so much space in my head.

Your verdict on if something is new and groundbreaking has everything to do with what you’ve read before. So what’s new to you may not be new to someone else. And frankly, if you’ve read so much that you’re feeling jaded, why feel the need to pass that on to other people?

The idea that a work is somehow derivative because it explores similar ideas to something you’ve read before presumes that only one person can generate an idea from their experiences, and everyone else is riding their coattails. There are a lot of fucking people in the world, and it shouldn’t be a goddamn surprise that we overlap sometimes, even across decades.

I write because I’ve got something to say, because there’s a conversation I want to have, and telling me it’s not worth it because it’s not novel sounds a lot like “shut up and let other people I find more personally interesting talk.”

Something doesn’t have to be completely new or novel to have merit. I like reading things that are different, but I also like reading or watching things that are comfortingly similar to other things I’ve liked before. There’s a reason I love shows like Criminal Minds, and it’s not because they’re unique and challenging; in fact, part of their appeal is the formulaic nature, because it gives me something I know I’ll enjoy. That doesn’t mean the people involved in its production are any less artists, because they know what they’re making and they’re damn good at it.

I don’t see the benefit in novelty for novelty’s sake. I don’t believe there exists a holy Story That Has Never Ever Been Told Before By Anyone. There’s only iterations and changed details and twists and new takes, and that’s perfectly fucking fine, because sometimes the little twist will really just work for someone like it’s a light from heaven. I think the reason we tell the same stories is because they’re in our blood and bones and we’re constantly remaking them into what we need in the moment, and that is also beautiful.

And I think everything I just said is true, but it’s also defensive. These are things I tell myself when I’m feeling down so I can keep writing words. Because there’s nothing like being a “creator” when you’re constantly being told you lack the creative spark that’s supposed to animate your work. Well, I guess I’ll struggle through on sheer bloody-mindedness.

But none of that actually matters, and I’m going to go on the offensive for moment.

We stand at the nexus of countless, profound improbabilities on a planet that’s been around 4.5 billion years, and we are as different in character as grains of sand once you humble yourself enough to peer into a microscope. Unless I’ve literally typed, verbatim, what someone else wrote because I’m actually a skin bag containing infinite monkeys sitting at their typewriters, what I’ve written is a thing only I could have written, even if it’s down in the smallest of details. And I’m writing it because it’s exactly what I want to read, and if what I wanted to read was already out there, I’ve got an Xbox I could be playing instead of beating my head against a fucking keyboard so people can tell me I’m insufficiently unique.

You think what I’ve done isn’t creative enough? Fuck you, asshole. I am the only one of me that has ever existed in the history of humanity, and so is every fucking one of my writer friends.

Categories
writing

Yes, but what is your game *about*?

I’ve been meaning to write about this since I got back from ECCC, and I guess this is my first opportunity. I spent most of the time at the con hiding behind the Angry Robot table and trying to convince passersby to buy some books. Which isn’t a problem, I assure you. I don’t really like crowds, so I’d rather be safely barricaded from them via a table. That’s why I only go to ComicCon-type events when I have to.

This time was a little different because we had several people come over to the table and introduce themselves. They didn’t want to buy any books, but specifically wanted to make contacts with writers because they were looking to hire some. So at each of these, my ears perked up. I’m a writer, after all, and I do like money. (And I have done writing for games, by the way, just saying.)

But most of the conversations went the same, kind of weird way. I’ve got a game, the person would say. It’s going to be a match three game with a social aspect and microtransactions and loot boxes and replayability, and we want women in their 30s to play it. Or variations on that, which were basically a laundry list of mechanics, mostly whatever game mechanics are currently making people their money.

Okay, but what is the game about? And that was pretty much where the conversation ran aground. Most of the people who talked to us didn’t have an idea of even the broad genre the story for their game would fit in, let alone a vague outline of what that story might be. Like, I don’t know, whatever ladies in their 30s are into.

I get that there are pressures to game design as far as profitability, and mechanics are a big part of that. But listening to a lot of these really random-sounding lists of mechanics, I spent a lot of time wondering what the hell kind of story they expected to be able to wrap around all those moving parts. Definitely not a story that was going to make much sense, in many cases.

Maybe it’s a symptom of the idea that writing is somehow “easy” and only needs to be an afterthought when it comes to crafting a game. Like it’s just wrapping paper over the mechanics that you’re going to use to extract the maximum amount of money from your audience. But if you want a narrative that’s going to compel people to, say, get attached to their favorite characters so much that they’ll throw wads of money your way, you need to at least know what kind of story you’re trying to tell. The best games I’ve ever played, while they haven’t necessarily been the most well-written on a dialog level, kept me coming back because they knew what they were and they knew what kind of story they wanted to tell, and the mechanics worked with that. If you have a story, or hell, just a genre and theme you’re passionate about, it comes through.

It bothers me and makes me sad, both as a writer and a gamer, that story seems to be treated as some kind of necessary evil, and writers an unfortunate expense that must be paid to thinly wallpaper over your game mechanics.

Categories
writing year in review

2017 Writing Year in Review

Writing This Year

Novels: 2 (Blood Binds the Pack and an as-yet untitled scifi novel that I finished off at the beginning of December.)

Novellas: 0

Novellettes:  0

Short Stories: 1

Flash: 3

Feature Length Scripts: 0

Other Scripts: 2 scripts written for Six to Start

Paid Reviews/Nonfiction: 4 for Tor.com, 17 for Book Riot

Treatments/Outlines: 7

Editing: A couple of small paid 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: Without a doubt, it’s Blood Binds the Pack. I am so fucking proud of this novel. It did everything I wanted it to do and then some.

Magic Spreadsheet wordcount: I have been tracking on the spreadsheet since June 24, 2013.

  • Total words written: 501,010 this year (1,933,798 in the last ~4.5 years)
  • Average words per day: 1,373 (more than last year’s 1,276/day)
  • Days in a row written: 1,651 (over 4 years without stopping)

Publishing

Queries sent: 10
Rejections received: 8
Pending: 2
Most rejections received: This year, it’s Excerpts from the Personal Journal of Dr. V. Frankenstein, MD, Department of Pathology, Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, again. But I am going to sell this story, dammit.
Total earned: $9,872.41, surpassing last year by over $2K and making this year the most I’ve earned with my writing thus far in my life. Obviously still not at a level where I could even entertain the notion of supporting myself, but it’s heartening.

Published this year:

  1. Hunger Makes the Wolf (Barnes and Noble, and Kobo)
  2. Angel of the Blockade from Tor.com (ebook version)
  3. Past the Black Where Call the Horns in KZine issue #19
  4. Comfort Food in Haunted Futures: Tomorrow is Coming
  5. Once Upon a Time There Was a Xurit Named Xcanda from Humans Wanted
  6. Six More Miles in Giganotosaurus (3/1/17)
  7. [REDACTED]
  8. The Escapism of Romance (Book Riot)
  9. Recommended Reading for Andy Weir (Book Riot)
  10. 9 Space Magic Books for Fans of the Destiny Games (Book Riot)
  11. Reasons I didn’t finish the book you loaned me (Book Riot)
  12. Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle Earth (Tor.com)
  13. Tolkien’s Map and the Messed Up Mountains of Middle Earth (Tor.com)
  14. Speculative Fiction on Tap: Revenge of the SF (Book Riot)
  15. Hugo Awards 2017: The Wonkening (Book Riot)
  16. 7 Ways to Support Your Favorite Authors (Book Riot)
  17. Choose a Better Chosen One (Book Riot)
  18. How Deadlines Put My Reading Habits into Overdrive (Book Riot)
  19. Star Wars: Still Disappointingly Heterosexual (Book Riot)
  20. What the World of The Hunger Games Teaches Us About Global Warming (Tor.com)
  21. Arrakis, Tatooine, and the Science of Desert Planets (Tor.com)
  22. Keep Your @ to Yourself (Book Riot)
  23. Solidarity Reading List (Book Riot)
  24. The Hugo Report: Finalists 2017 (Book Riot)
  25. SFF On Tap: Pairing Books and Beers (Book Riot) (part 1 of potentially… more than one)
  26. The Hollow Woman: Female Characters in Science Fiction (Book Riot)
  27. My Glorious Return to the Library (Book Riot)
  28. Books as Self Defense (Book Riot)

Slated for 2017:

  1. Blood Binds the Pack from Angry Robot Books (available for pre-order!)
  2. As yet untitled story in the Sword & Sonnet anthology
  3. The triumphant return of Captain Ramos from Queen of Swords Press

Goals for 2017

  1. Shut up and write.
  2. Wake up and fight.
  3. Write the two feature-length screenplays I’ve outlined.
  4. Write at least one novel, probably a fantasy novel this time around.
  5. Get the birthday short written, and try for a couple of others. My short story stockpile is almost nonexistent. This of course requires remembering how the hell to write short stories.
  6. Pitch a blog post series about geomorphology and geology for GMs.
  7. Find a sensitivity reader for that novella and get it done at long last.
  8. Read at least 60 books.
  9. Finally convince Bungie to let me write that Twilight Gap novel in the style of Killer Angels. I’ve got to have an impossible dream on this list every year, right?

Other Stuff

  1. I DID get Blood Binds the Pack to Angry Robot, well-written and on time.
  2. Destiny 2 has turned me into a Striker and I don’t know how I feel about that.
  3. Started reading romance novels in earnest this year, as a form of escapism. No regrets.
  4. According to my list on Goodreads, I read 94 books this year. Having a library card really helped push this. Though as a note, some of the “books” are actually short stories/novellettes/etc from the Hugo reading list that were still listed on Goodreads.
  5. I went to Finland and Iceland this year. And despite the fact that I was incredibly sick for most of that trip, in Iceland I WENT DOWN INTO A MOTHERFUCKING VOLCANO YOU HEARD ME RIGHT.
  6. The Last Jedi is officially my favorite Star Wars film.
  7. This is the year I started vlogging as an experiment. Still having fun with it.
Categories
writing writing advice

Dealing With a Bunch of Fucking Nerds: Research and “Getting It Right”

I’ve gotten some interesting blowback since I decided to go public with my irritation over JRR Tolkien’s puzzling geomorphology. Among the “well actually” and personal insults, there’ve been a more interesting complaint, with variations. To paraphrase: “Writers shouldn’t have to be an experts on everything just to tell a story!”

Well, yes and no.

To be fair to my geological whinging (and that of many other nitpickers across a multitude of different fields), you don’t actually have to be an expert at anything to get most of this stuff right. The geology is level 101 stuff you would cover in the Freshman classes fondly called “Rocks for Jocks” at my old university. The amount of research you have to do to get particular details that are ancillary to your story correct is probably very small. Take a half hour out of your day to do some googling. Ask a friend who is knowledgeable in that area. Read a single book about it, and you’ll likely be covered.

Actually knowing that you lack the knowledge or what you’ve absorbed from other novels and TV is incorrect so that you’d better start asking questions is the much more difficult part. Because you have realized by now, right, that art and reality often diverge?

I think the much more important question here is: do you care if you get it right?

I’m going to add an extremely important caveat: There are certain topics, particularly when it comes to the lives and histories of marginalized groups, where you can and will hurt people by not doing your research. For example: books that promulgate racist tropes or racist historical narratives. Now, maybe you don’t care if you hurt people, in which case I think you’re an awful person and you probably don’t care about that either. But for the most part, we can apply the principle of “First, do no harm” here.

But the course of your river making no goddamn sense in a world where water works the same way it does on Earth? This harms precisely no one. It might irritate people who have a basic understanding of geomorphology, but irritation is not the same thing as being harmed. The decision you’re really facing as a writer is if you can handle people complaining about it, and at absolute worst not buying your next book if it pisses them off that bad. (In which case they were probably looking for hyper-realistic world-building-porn fantasy and wouldn’t really be your target audience anyway.)

Part of this is a question of audience expectation. What expectation are you setting up for them? There’s been a lot of fantasy written that projects a veneer of realism (eg: Game of Thrones, and frankly Lord of the Rings) which means that when the details fail, people with a reason to understand those details take notice. If you want to be “realistic,” you have to do the work or risk someone catching you being lazy and saying now wait a damn minute loudly and in public1. The audience is generally not going to approach something that purports to be realistic with the same expectations they will approach something that says on the package it takes place in a bananapants land where rocks float and rivers run backwards due to the population of magic-farting unicorns.

Even if you clearly project that this is bananapants-land, you’re still going to get complainers, though. This is because you’re working in a genre full of fucking nerds. And you know what nerds do? They pick apart things they hate using the lens of their specialized knowledge, and they pick apart things they love even more. And then they talk about it, incessantly.

Only this isn’t a thing limited to nerds in the classic genre sense. Firefighters shred movies like Backdraft and enjoy it in all its awful glory.  If you write a sportsball book and you get the sportsball details wrong, I’m pretty sure the people who like sportsball will eat you alive. This is a human thing. When you have knowledge, you notice when something is wrong, and then you tell other people about it.

So wait, am I saying you do have to be an expert in everything? No, I’m saying you have to be okay with experts reading what you wrote and possibly finding it wanting.

When I was doing my screenwriting coursework, there were two things I heard in every class, without fail:

  1. Give yourself permission to suck.
  2. Never let the facts get in the way of the truth.

Rule number two here means that if reality gets in the way of the story you’re constructing, the story wins. Screw reality. This is probably the reason why pretty much every movie ever made causes experts to tear out their hair.

I don’t think this should be considered blanket permission to just make everything up and not even try. There are a multitude of books and movies that are terribly researched, and the fact of the matter is, if they’d actually given reality a chance their conflicts and twists would have been a hell of a lot more interesting and challenging for the characters. But you’re writing a story, not a textbook. So write your story. Just realize that this is not a get out of jail free card from ever being criticized about anything.

(Though I will say, if this criticism of your work is dropped steaming into your inbox or tagged at you on social media, that is rude as fuck on the part of the angry nerd. If you choose to read it, that’s your problem.)

Ultimately, you have to decide what you want to get right, and what you’re fine with getting yelled at about. I’m sure all of the physics stuff in what I write is terrible, because I prefer handwavium-fueled rule of cool physics to real physics. Thus, I do not give even half a shit if someone complains that my physics suck, because I was never trying to get them correct in the first place. The people who complain are still allowed to complain, and I’m allowed to ignore them. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And even for the stuff you want to get right, I have some bad news: you’re probably not going to nail down every detail perfectly. Worlds are complex things, and there will always be nitpickers who know more about something than you. It is impossible to write a book that is universally loved and never criticized for anything, and worrying over it will induce a sort of creative paralysis that will make writer’s block look like a fun day at a water park. The fact that you are a writer means that someone, somewhere, is going to hate the thing you wrote—or love it but wish you had just gotten the right breed of horse in that one scene—and they are going to take to the internet and talk about it.

Embrace it.

1 – As an aside, actually having a basis in reality versus being perceived as realistic are often two incredibly different things, and when you’ve got an audience that lacks expert knowledge it’s another wrinkle in the expectation game. That’s why, and I will use hilariously here to mean that I’m going to laugh so I don’t scream, there are sectors of readers who think ubiquitous sexual assault in medieval-Europe-flavored fantasy is “realistic” and the presence of non-white people in such a setting is “unrealistic.” Where actual realism flies in the face of the pop culture zeitgeist of “realism,” I encourage you strongly to challenge your readers because it’s good for them. Just be ready with your research notes.