Category: Writing

Wow. I fell off the blog-updating wagon there for a bit, didn’t I. But I have an excuse! You see:

I’m writing a book.

(Yes, yes, and trees are producing oxygen and the sun is transforming hydrogen into helium, I know.) It’s a pseudonymous work-for-hire book, so I can’t say too much about it, but it’s been rough going in a lot of ways. Short deadline. Required a fair bit of research. And I have a thoroughly unlikable main character, which is the right choice for a lot of reasons (and I hope pretty funny), but it’s not very nice spending so much time with this person, living in their head. I think I’ve finally picked up some momentum this week, though.

For the first time in my life, I’m really working from an outline, which is weirdly helpful. If I have no enthusiasm to write? I drag myself over to my chair, look at what’s supposed to happen next in the outline, and just make it happen. I learned long ago that, in terms of the end product, it doesn’t matter if the book flows forth from my fingers with invisible ease, or whether I have to hack every single word out of the living rock: the final work is indistinguishable to readers. So I don’t worry about that much anymore, at least. If I can keep working on this thing a little every day (and a lot on weekends), I should make my April 1 deadline.

My next book under contract — a roleplaying game tie-in for Pathfinder called City of the Fallen Sky — is also extensively outlined. (A detailed outline was required before I got a contract, actually.) Which is interesting, because it means the editor has already been in touch about what the cover art might look like, and what the characters should look like at a certain point in their story, etc. — because they know the story! (I have some wiggle room to improvise, fortunately. I’ve signposted where I’m going, but I have some freedom for how I get there.)

I’m still using Scrivener, and, yeah, for these projects, it works really well. For my usual free-form vague rambling — or let’s be fancy and say “organic” — approach to writing novels, I’m not sure Scrivener would have a benefit over really any other text editor or even a notebook and a pen, but it is very helpful for more schematic works. But I confess Scrivener would in fact serve perfectly adequately for those books, too, being a lovely text editor with some good features, so, sure: consider me a convert.

I didn’t quite break 40,000 words on the book-in-progress this weekend, but I will in the next day or two. It’ll all be over in six weeks or so. Then I’ll take a few weeks, write a couple of short stories I’ve promised people, and race onward to the Pathfinder book. It’s nice to be gainfully employed.

It’s been a weird week — the kid’s doctor visit, mid-week trip to the zoo, being awake in the middle of the night with the aforementioned kid the other night, and etc. I’ve been feeling generally discombobulated and unproductive all week, with my evenings spent mostly playing Batman: Arkham Asylum and watching DVDs with the wife (United States of Tara, Californication) and reading some K.J. Parker and William Gibson and assorted graphic novels.

This is bad, because I have simply epic levels of work I need to do — like, I need to produce 80-90,000 words in the next two months. If I can write 20,000 words this weekend, I’ll be where I want to be… but that’s unlikely. I’m hoping to write 10K. But I don’t know if I’ll manage it. I’ve been in deep denial, I think, about this upcoming deadline. I’ve been doing some other work — wrote a story last weekend, and have been doing some anthology stuff I can’t really talk about yet — but I haven’t touched the novel in weeks. That has to stop. Or, rather, I have to start. I’ve never missed a deadline for a book — I’ve never even been late — and I don’t intend for this to be the first one. It’s a bit daunting. It’ll be less so once I build some momentum and start getting some words down. I’ve just slipped out of the groove, I think. Anyway — wish me luck. (Especially since I want to revise my middle grade novel this weekend, too, because I’ve been procrastinating on that, and will work better on my big project if I clear the decks first.)

I neglected to mention that my short SF story “On a Blade of Grass” is up at Escape Pod, in both print and audio form. Parasites and interstellar warfare!

The latest installment in the Alphabet Quartet is up at Daily Science Fiction, too. Go read “C is for Crate” by yours truly, Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout.

(As suggested by Jim Kelly.)

It doesn’t matter how cool and awesome your ideas are if you can’t present them in a clear and comprehensible fashion.

Being clever for the sake of being clever isn’t a good idea if the clever bits interfere with the story you’re trying to tell.

Trying to think about “plot” and “character” (and even setting!) in isolation isn’t much good. They rely on complex interactions and are inextricably entwined, and you can’t change one without affecting the other(s). For example, once you really know a character, and understand what they’d do in a given situation, the working-out of the plot largely takes care of itself.

One man’s brilliance is another man’s bullcrap. That is: what one reader finds sweet another might find saccharine; what one finds wonderfully transgressive another might find merely disgusting; what one finds charming another might find twee. Even a technically accomplished story won’t please everyone.

Try to write about stuff that matters to you, and embrace your weirdness, your idiosyncracies, and your obsessions. That’s where your individual voice comes from.

(I could have written a list with a lot more “Don’t drink that much tequila,” and “During watergun fights, avoid hiding in patches of poison ivy,” and “Fred means you no harm — probably,” but I figured I’d focus on the writing stuff.)

The Clarion Writers workshops http://clarion.ucsd.edu/ and
http://www.clarionwest.org/ are now taking applications. So maybe go to one and learn some stuff. I sure did.

My story “A Void Wrapped in a Smile” just sold to newish online magazine Basement Stories, so look for that in their fourth issue. It’s a Marla Mason story, sort of, though Marla only appears in a scene or two. It’s mostly about Joshua Kindler, a secondary character in Poison Sleep, exploring why he was the way he was and why he did the terrible things he did. It’s meant to be standalone story accessible to new readers, though if you’ve read PS it may have extra resonances. It has one of the coolest fantasy elements I’ve ever devised.

It’s Wednesday, and that means: You can read “B is for Banyan Tree” on the Daily Science Fiction website, the latest in The Alphabet Quartet series. (Subscribers got “C is for Crate” in their e-mail today.)

Life is a busy boiling cauldron of busy-ness. I need to finish up a short story this weekend, write another story next month, work on a book proposal this week, do some last revisions to my middle grade book so my agent can start sending it out, continue work on the novel in progress (due April 1!), write a foreword… I may need to make a to-do list. Possibly in multiple colors indicating triage priority levels. It wouldn’t be so bad, but we’re finishing up the monster February year-in-review issue at work this week, so I’m pretty exhausted when I get home, and won’t get a day off until Friday (at least, I hope I get to take Friday off). Things should calm down after tomorrow, though, and I can get back on track.

All this work is severely cutting into my Xbox time.

No, actually, I’m okay, apart from being at crush depth in the dreaded Deadline Sea. But my story “Terrible Ones” went up today at Podcastle for your listening pleasure (especially pleasurable because the one and only M.K. Hobson did the reading). So go enjoy.

Hey! It’s roundabout midway through another week, which means there’s another Alphabet Quartet story for lucky Daily Science Fiction subscribers, “B is for Banyan Tree”… and those of you who don’t subscribe can read last week’s “A is for Arthur” on their website! This is less flash than a bona fide short story, and the others are much shorter — we just figured we’d start you out with a bang. (By “we” I mean me and my co-conspirators Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout.)

I just signed contract for an indie filmmaker to do a short film of my story “Morris and the Machine”; I’ll say who it is when I can. (He wants to get his website updated so I can point you all toward something pretty.) He’s very passionate about the story, and has made some cool genre short films before, so I’m excited.

I’ve been working mostly on a Project That Must Not Be Named, but it’s due in April, so you won’t have to endure more than another ten weeks of occasional cryptic comments, fear not. It’s keeping me occupied, and has some interesting challenges. Once it’s done, I start writing my Pathfinder novel, which I can reveal is tentatively titled City of the Fallen Sky. That’s maybe my favorite of any title I’ve ever come up with for any book.

Two bits of writing news:

First: I got the okay to announce that one of the new book projects I’m doing is a fantasy roleplaying game tie-in novel for the Pathfinder campaign setting. They don’t want me to say much about the plot or specific setting(s) yet, so suffice to say: it will be awesome, and I looooove my characters. Playing in somebody else’s sandbox occasionally is fun, and I’m delighted to be dipping my toe into secondary-world fantasy again, especially in such a rich and varied and pleasantly weird game world.

Second: Today is the day The Alphabet Quartet, the suite of 26 flash stories I wrote with Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout began running in Daily Science Fiction. If you were a subscriber to DSF (which is free), you would have gotten our first piece, the extra-long “A is for Arthur,” delivered magically to your inbox. It’ll go up on the website for all to read in a week or so, but why delay your gratification? Sign up if you haven’t, and prepare for six months of mythic creatures, robots, superheroes, poignancy, surrealism, monsters, literary gamesmanship, jokes, sex, and willful strangeness at the rate of one story a week.

Home today with a sick kid — though it’s my regular day off, not a special sick day. Poor little guy. He just has a persistent cough and a mild fever, though, not another Abominable Pukefest, so that’s some consolation. If he feels better later today we’ll go out, since it’s supposed to be sunny. At the very least we should do some shopping for necessities and mail some letters. (I know — mail! Letters! But some things, like checks and contracts, still require a touch of the ol’ physicality.)

Speaking of contracts: Yesterday I started off 2011 right by signing and sending back not one but two book contracts. They’re both fun work-for-hire things, one pseudonymous, one under my name — I’ll tell you about the latter in more detail when I can. I’m now booked up through August 1, 2011. It’s nice to have work, even if it means writing 200,000 words in 7 months. (Actually, after last year, that doesn’t sound as unreasonable as it once would have.) This will, naturally, delay other books I have planned that aren’t under contract. If I write a sixth Marla novel this year, it likely won’t be until autumn, and may not happen until 2012.

I just finished my serial of The Nex, so if you want to read the whole thing in one gulp for the low low price of free, help yourself. I still need to do the single-page HTML version, but it’ll be along.

It occurs to me that I’ve now written and sold enough books that I can’t remember, offhand, the exact number I have published or pending; I’d have to count. That’s got to be some kind of milestone. (I could count, and without recourse to my bookshelves or any lists online to jog my memory, though. Having written so many books that I can’t even remember some of them is a milestone for another year, I think.)