[Big-Name SciFi Magazine Letterhead]

February 19, 2008

Dear Christie,

Thanks for letting me see “Habitat.”  The story is nicely done, but I'm afraid it's not right for me.  Please send us more of your work when you have it, though.

Sincerely,

Editor of Big-Name SciFi Magazine

So I submitted another story.  It is always such a good feeling — no story really feels *done* to me until I've sent it off to be rejected by someone who knows what good writing is.  I sent this one to McSweeney's, which is the longest of long shots, but they do say to start with your preferred markets.  For those who don't know of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and wonder why I would submit to them over any of the better-known spec-fic venues, it's because they make books — not magazines — that make me tingly to the point of indecency.  I would rather be printed there than anywhere else, because what they make is so goddamned beautiful.

So having done that — having gone over my manuscript one last time, cutting a few more extraneous words, formatting for their specifications, typing up a brief cover note and finally sending the thing off — I was left with that production greed, that sense of wanting more.  More finished product, more submissions to track, more rejection letters to collect, more of that feeling of being an actual writer.  I looked at my backlog of unfinished stories and was unhappy to see that there are fewer of them than I thought.  Two of them are very close to done.  I will need to start something new, and soon.

I went to sleep worrying about it, not knowing what to write.

Okay, that was a long break from blogging.  Sorry.  Life is in session.  You know how it is.

I'll get off my soapbox for a little while and talk about reading and writing again.  Also, sorry about the weird font size problems I've been having.  :/ 

So right now I'm basically doing two things:  reading my own novel first draft, and reading Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio.  One is going well, and one is not.

Don't mistake this for a book review.  This a statement of personal preference, not an assessment of a writer's skill or worth, (which I would barely be qualified to make if I tried.)

I'm not enjoying Darwin's Radio.  There is a style of writing that mostly involves characters telling each other what the reader needs to know, in pursuit of An Idea.  Greg Bear had a Great Idea, and though I'm certainly no expert it seems like his science is sound.  It was pretty clear in the first 100 pages what the Great Idea was, and how it was going to play out, and now I'm just forcing myself through the pages, trying to reach the end.  I really like The Idea that the book is about.  I love biology, evolution fascinates me, genetics is an area that I'm in total awe of.  It's just not enough to capture my attention for 538 pages, because the stories I like to read are about the complexities of people, and these characters are not interesting to me.  The only problem any of them has had that I found compelling was the heroine, Kaye, and her relationship with her mentally ill husband, but that conflict and its incredibly fertile field for character development was cut off within a few chapters. 

This book has won awards, and probably deserved them.  According to the back cover it was nominated for a Hugo.  The research that went into it must have completely consumed the man's life for years.  Honestly I picked it up because it's something I've seen mentioned on a number of science blogs I read, the Idea was interesting, and I happened to be standing in front of the Bear shelf at Powell's in Portland (looking for the Other Bear, That Which We Must Need.)  I'm not saying it's not a great book — obviously many people have loved it, loved the Idea and rode the wave of it happily to its end.  Art is subjective.  What I love someone else will hate, and vice-versa.  What I've discovered is what kind of writing I don't want to read, and what kind of story I don't want to write.

So, a valuable experience overall. 

The other thing I'm doing is reading my own first draft, which I've discovered is a misnomer, because after I cut the scenes that are just complete garbage what I expect to end up with is about half a novel.  I still have to write the other half.  I have so far learned that I did a crappy job with my protagonist, whose problems were clearly The Easy Way Out when I wrote it two years ago.  I have also learned that I don't know the answers the many of the questions I pose in the story.  It is simply not done yet.

That's the assessment based on having only read through the first half.  Some of it has made me want to toss the whole thing out the window, but every now and then I come across a scene where I appear to have been channeling a genuine muse.  Those scenes leave me shaking my head and saying to myself, “Did I really write that?”

I do love a number of my characters, even the broken one, and I find myself daydreaming about the story, solving little problems here and there, coming up with ideas for new scenes, connecting dots in the subplots that I hadn't connected before.  I'm having those 3:00 a.m. moments wherein I scramble for a pen and paper before sleep erases the thought.  I'm planning creative side-projects to help me flesh out some details. 

I have a few days coming up this week where I'll have lots of time on my hands, so I hope to plow through the rest of it, make my notes, and then get down to the business of writing what's missing.  I am looking forward to it.  I'm actively resisting the urge to start writing the scenes that I already know need to happen, in favor of being certain that I have the whole arc in my head when I finally do. 

p.s. The title by the Other Bear (that'd be Elizabeth, who should by no means be thought to be relegated to 2nd place in the Bear category, just that I was writing about Greg, and holy Zarquon I should totally stop worrying now) that I picked up was Undertow.  I am looking forward to it.
 

but there is just too much cool stuff to share.

This, by way of the Craft Magazine Blog, is a Flickr set of posters offering advice to first-year college students.  They are beautiful, inspiring, and applicable long after one's early 20s.

A few of my favorites:

Be Yourself
Inspiration is Outside the Studio
Take Time
Keep Your Head

… that feels good.

Dropped into Forward Motion tonight.  You know, the loyalty of that group is really astonishing.  The same core people have been there at the same time for nearly five years.  Still writing, still encouraging, still having fun.  High five, yous. :)

Many thanks to Clam for the writing prompt, which turned into 525 words of a new story.  I haven't had that much fun writing anything in a really long time. 

And since today I picked the Creative Commons license that I intend to use when I stick my crap on the web, it will eventually be online.  Huzzah!

Okay.  I think I'm off for the night.  Cheers.

Over at SFNovelists, another excellent post, this time from Tate Hallaway.

I'm like this, too.  I do have a lot of ideas piled up, but they're ideas that are piling up in the same way that stuff accumulates in a linen closet — it's not that I'm constantly having ideas, it's that I have them rarely and stick them in my mental closet until I can figure out what to do with them.  Thus we get stories that I've been working on for four years. 

I actually stopped writing down a lot of the ideas I have.  I used to write them down on whatever was handy when they struck, and then added them to a file when I could.  But when I'd then review the file later very few of the ideas were interesting to me anymore.  So now it's only the ones that stick, the ones that work their way into my brain like a splinter.  Very few new stories get started, but the ones that do are important to me. 

Part of that may be a sort of a literary dystrophy just from being out of shape.  It does seem that back when I was writing nightly I didn't have the same problem. 

Back to the read-through.

So yesterday I decided to poke a couple of stories with a stick and see if either of them responded.  One did.  With the help of a worksheet on 30-minute-outlining, I think I might have a handle on a story that I started four years ago but just didn't seem to want to gel.

Funny, isn't it, the writing time line?  It's so much longer than we want it to be.  I do know writers who can go from first draft to submission in 30 days, but I also know many like me (and know of many well-known published writers in the same boat) who don't find resolution to stories for years. 

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is online publishing.  We of Forward Motion, past and present, know that online publishing is a viable medium.  We know this because we have FM, we have Zette, we have access to people who have published that way.  But we also know about First North American Serial Rights, and password-protected forums for crits (thank you, LJ,) and we get a little nervous about certain things.

My old website is down.  I took it down a few weeks back — I was tired of the design, and unhappy with the content.  I bought www.christieyant.com and Patrick and I talked about doing a redesign (he's a web designer, among other things – check out the superhot redesign) and possibly including — gasp — my actual fiction.  This, as we know, negates the ol' First North American Serial Rights and makes any works published on the web unsalable except as a reprint.

The question is: Do I care? 

The answer is:  No.

I've been looking into Creative Commons licensing.  Let's face it — anything that I put on a website is a) still under my own copyright, and b) not good enough for the print (and online semi-pro) pubs to consider.  They've been through rejection after rejection already.  Putting them on the web really just reveals what a hack I am.  I still want to protect it, because even after six years at this game I'm a n00b, and that's what we do.

But… still.

The thing is this:  we are on the cusp.  Zette was way ahead of the curve.  Online publishing will soon be The Way To Publish — without the overhead of the traditional press, and with Print on Demand available to satisfy our booklust, and with decent PDAs and actual eBook Readers available, we would be foolish not to embrace the new paradigm.  It's coming, and we could be out ahead of the pack.  I could finish this novel, for instance, and make it available online as a PDF under Creative Commons (as Cory Doctorow did with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*,) and who knows?  Maybe it'll find an audience.

I was thinking about Clam's novel from a couple of years ago.  It was so atmospheric — there is an audience for it, it just might be a POD audience, or a Free Download audience.  And what's wrong with that?  (Of course it could be a Tor audience, too, and who doesn't want that?!)

So these are the things kicking around in my head as I try to finish 'Red Carpet' and work on editing Found Objects.  I will submit 'Red Carpet' via the traditional routes, but when I've had enough of that (and I typically only go with five rejections before I retire a manuscript) maybe it'll end up on my [new] website as a PDF under Creative Commons.

What about you? We can't all be Moosey ;) in anthology after anthology (but man would I like to be.  There is something SOOOO sexy about print — ha! Sexy.  Moosey in print.  Get it?)  Is online publishing-without-pay, or Creative Commons, something you've considered?

* I first read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a free eBook on my Zodiac PDA.  I have subsequently bought two print copies because I loved it so much and wanted others to read it.  This is the point.

Man, second day of whatever these godzilla antibiotics are and I feel SO much better already.  There are always side effects to these things, but what I've got so far is totally tolerable and much preferred over this stupid infection that I've had for a MONTH (and has survived two rounds of inferior antibiotics already.)  

I'm up due to repeated cat attacks, the house is quiet and I'm enjoying a Saturday morning:  Pumpkin Spice coffee, a manuscript, and a red pen. 

The read-through is fun.  Not because the existing work is good — most of it isn't — but because I can see right away how it could be better.  New scenes are coming up and I'm making notes on them.  I'm resisting the temptation to go write them just yet, because I want to get through the read-through first so I have the story in my head as a whole.  I want to get through this phase by the end of the month, which should be easily doable.  I just finished page 68, and I've only got 250 total.  

One of the things that I've found is that my protagonist needs a serious character overhaul.  He's not sympathetic in the least at the beginning, and instead of being a complex, multifaceted person ripe for change, he's just a dick.  Nobody wants to read about someone like that.  So he's going to need a lot of work.  

That part of my day being over now, at least for the moment, I leave you with an excellent post on the necessity of boredom from Elizabeth Bear's blog.

Also, for happy, glowy, heart-fluttering evidence that true love exists – and furthermore, lasts * — go read Wil Wheaton's post on the best thing, ever.

* (I don't doubt it.  I have other evidence, sitting in my inbox.)

And who is, in fact, much cooler than I could ever aspire to being.  Ladies, and gentlemen, I give you  Wil Wheaton – actor, writer, and professional geek — on how much we writers serve to validate each other and why it's desperately important that we do so. 

(Hang in there, Moosey.)  <3

I has a blog.

Right.  

The holidays passed without a blip from me here; it was a holiday season different from any before it, because I got to spend it with Patrick for the first time, and also my entire extended family (paternal side.)  It ranged from stressful to awesome, and deserved to be written about.  Alas.

Soooo… I'm sending off a story to Asimov's, I've pulled the novel off the shelf and have started my first read-through, I'm editing another story and thinking up a couple of new ones, and as usual it feels so good that I wonder why I haven't been doing it all along.  I mean, I know the answer, I've covered this here before — too many real issues to manage in real life makes it hard for me to sit around and daydream, which is what writing for me tends to be.  But my head is back in the clouds again, for the moment.

I'm not quite in the right blogging space, but I did want to wave my hands around a bit and say hi, I'm still here, I haven't given up yet.  In lieu of anything interesting or inspiring from me, I'll point you instead to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists Blog, and this lovely post by Alma Alexander.  

I have reason to believe that 2008 is going to kick some serious ass.  

Happy New Year.