Month: June 2009

A year of critiques

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 4 Comments

I just paid for a year membership with OWW, despite my disappointment with the number of reviews my stories have received.  The quality of the stories I’ve read there have been only marginally superior to those at Critters.  I’ve even had a crit-4-crit fail to reciprocate.  But I paid my fare and I’m in.  It’s only fifty bucks (twice what I’m making on my last three sales combined).

So why did I do it?  It’s a way to get feedback, just not as fast as I’d hoped.  Bottom line, I’ll need to do a bunch of reviewing in order to get my stories reviewed.  I have a plan: find writers I like and bookmark them so I can set up a regular crit exchange.  If I review one of your stories, you might feel the need to review mine.  If I do two or three, you’ll probably feel obligated.  Right?

Anyway, it’s an idea.  It will just take more than my free month to get there.  So I’ll try it.  If it doesn’t work out, I won’t re-up.

Not as bad as I thought

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

A while back I startedrevising “Leech Run” from both ends and had a little trouble when those ends met in the middle.  That was when I put it aside.  Going back over it helped me realize that it wasn’t that bad.  I still have a decision to make about Titan’s actions (whether to reveal them or not), but otherwise I think I ironed most of it out.  It wasn’t so bad.  A lot of the fixing I needed to do was fixing my previous fixes.

It wasn’t quite the task I imagined it to be so my revision notes are only half the coup against writer’s block that I hoped they would be.  I’ll hit the keyboard with those revisions tomorrow.  Little by little, it’s all coming back.  I knew it would.

A wedding and a possible divorce (not my wife)

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 5 Comments

I’m going to a wedding on Saturday.  (Trust me, this is related to writing; Clarion West specifically.)  Weddings are generally happy occasions with people coming to wish the new couple well.  But I suspect that every wedding has an angry spinster or two.  Or a jealous younger bridesmaid.  Or that guy whose girlfriend just dumped him.  In other words, though wishing the couple well and meaning it, there’s always someone hurting as they realize how long it will be before THEY say “I do.”

I am the spinster at the Clarion West wedding.  I want every attendee to have fun, learn, and succeed.  I am trying hard to keep up with the logs of their experiences.  But inside, there is that nagging feeling that this could have been my dance.  I can deal with that.  What I think is bigger is the issue of how long it will be before I get my turn.

Best-case scenario, I’ll be there next year.  (We are planning another baby inside a reasonable window of time there, so we may be looking at two years!  Let’s ignore that for a moment.)  I believe I will make it into one of the Clarions next year.  Does that make me egotistical?  I suspect it does, though I like to call myself “confident”.  Same thing.  I doubt it’s a stretch for a writer on the waiting list to expect to make it next year.  Anyway, that’s a long way off.  I still have to write new stories, isolate my “best”, send them out, wait out that interminable acceptance interval, get accepted (please), find the money, make plane reservations, wait until summer, then FINALLY go.  See, it feels like a lot.  Still, I know I need this kind of experience to really get me going.

Ever watch American Idol?  You know how there is always that guy that makes it all the way through the audition process and is the last guy cut, watching the dude standing beside him move on to primetime while he gets a heartfelt invitation to jump through the hoops again?  That’s me.  And the first episodes of the show are airing (or blogging) now.  I watch; I cheer; I’m sad.

I dwell on this now because I am slumped.  I can’t focus on writing.  I have other distractions contributing (notably my involvement with my church’s bible school), but I’m also inventing distractions.  I pulled out an old video game and am obsessing over it.  I started reading a book that has been on my shelf for months (though that may help).  I check my email for story critiques seven times a day.  Writing just isn’t coming out.

Face it, I’m depressed about CW.  Lame of me, but I am.  I dared to hope and now I reap the consequences.  I need something to snap me out of it.  I go camping in a few weeks; I tend to do well there (not internet to distract me).  I did some late-night freewriting for a story idea based on Japan’s Festival of the Naked Man; maybe breaking ground on a new project could get my wheels spinning again.  Or seeing some of my stories in print.  Or some forced keyboard time.  Or taking those morning walks I keep insisting I’m going to do.

I need to do something.

Moving on to the divorce part of the post, I find myself very disappointed with the SFF Online Writing Workshop.  The quality of the critiques I have received has been pretty good, but I am displeased with the quantity.  So far it’s just two apiece on the stories I posted.  Critters could usually deliver anywhere from eight to twenty, depending on the length of the story, though the quality of the comments was admittedly inferior (not immensely, but somewhat).  It’s tough to determine a consensus with only two and a consensus is what critique groups should offer best.  How do I make alterations based on that?  To make matters worse (the way plot lessons always tell you to), my one-month free trial is over in less than a week.  I need to decide: do I pay for a year or not?

I confess, a month is the time it takes for a story to reach the top of the Critters queue to get read, so maybe I need to give my stories a month at OWW to generate a reasonable number of critiques.  Still, I find some things lacking.  There is almost no incentive to offer a SECOND critique at OWW.  A story with no reviews earns double poiints, so why comment on a story with one or two?  The crit-4-crat approach may work better, but I have struck out there, too.  I opperedC4C on my longer story and have since had one taker.  I’ve been getting more attention on stories at Baen’s Bar (though, admittedly, the comments are less complete there).

We’ll see what I decide.  It may be worth the fifty bucks to try to generate a community of people who want to read my stuff (even if it’s just because I read theirs).  As for my jealous spinsterhood — this too shall pass.

The lift I needed

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I confess, despite knowing the late speculative element made “Glow Baby” a WotF long shot, the flat rejection left me wondering about the story’s quality.  After all, it was the second story I submitted to Clarion SD (along with “Leech Run”) and was soundly rejected from Strange Horizons.  Of course I know how tough the Clarion competition is and SH is a tough market (what pro market isn’t?).

I wasn’t really down on the story, but I was questioning.  I needed feedback deeper than a form rejection.  I thought about sending it to OSC’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, or Asimov’s, but even a close call there might warrant no more than a dismissive strip of paper or email. I had already passed the story through Critters and OWW seemed unlikely to produce many more useful gems (my two stories there have accumulated only two reviews each).  So where to go?  The bar.

Baen’s Bar, to be exact.  I hadn’t put anything there in a month or so.  I’m still hammering the kinks out of “Leech Run” based on their suggestions.  My other Bar graduate, “Secondhand Rush” is in the bin for WotF’s third quarter.  So I posted GB late last night and sat back to await comments.

While I value comments from every Bar Fly, the slush editors are always the comments I tremble over.  Gary Cuba sounded off on GB today.  Like the post title says, it was the boost I needed.

I won’t plaster his comments here, but I will share a quote or two.  First he said he wanted to stop reading after 200 words, then 500 words, then after 1000…(gulp), but he didn’t.  Why not?  He wasn’t sure; maybe it was “some sort of subtle tension” or “just the quality of the writing, which [he] thought was very good”, or “the slow but incessant churning of a millwheel, cracking husks of wheat, revealing more and more of the protag’s character (as well as her aunt’s) via her old memories” (my favorite), or the setting, or something else. Whatever it was, he did read to the end.  He felt the last half was “super” and liked the ending and the story as a whole.

I would go so far as to say that this may be one of those rare stories that stick with me for a while.

He agreed with something I decided a while ago: this story must be accepted in (pretty much) the form it has achieved.  The beginning can’t endure a lot of hack and slash or even reconstructive surgery.

One other thing Gary mentioned was that he thinks the story falls into the horror genre…”the best kind of horror”.  This was news to me, though others had suggested it brushed the edges.  I intend to leave “Glow Baby” at the Bar for a while, but I may eventually have to start seeking a horror market for it.  I don’t usually read horror, let alone write it, so I’m not sure where I might place a subtle horror story like this.  Market suggestions are most welcome.

In the meantime, I guess it’s back to the keyboard.  These stories aren’t going to write/edit/critique/rewrite/outline themselves.

-Oso

I hate being right

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

As anticipated, the late arrival of the speculative elements in “Glow Baby” elicited a rejection. Sigh. Joni seems to be putting a personal touch on the rejections, crossing out “contestant” and writing in the name, as well as scribbling in an invitation to submit again. Nice of her.

Now it’s time to figure out a new place to try”Glow Baby”. Can’t let it just rest.

Another day, another sale. Sweet

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

My good friends at Sam’s Dot Publishing were kind enough to accept my K-Pax inspired story, “Brother Goo” for publication in their January 2010 issue of Beyond Centauri.  This is a magazine targeting readers from 9 to 18 (an ambitiously wide range).

As I’ve mentioned before (somewhere), my very first short story appeared in one of Sam’s Dot’s (then ProMart’s) e-zines.  I think it was The Fifth Di… but it could have been The Martian Wave.  For the life of me I can’t remember.  I know it fits TFD‘s guidelines better..but I digress.

You can check my bibliography page for a complete list of my sales.  Four (now five) of those were to Sam’s Dot zines.  They are a big reason I’m still writing.

Tyree Campbell, the big cheese at Sam’s Dot, has also been very supportive of me in other ways, agreeing to let me run copies of one of his stories for my Science Fiction Club when I was teaching at UHS and agreeing to a chatroom Q&A session with my club members.  Sadly, no such session ever took place due in part to the attention span of my students (Squirrel!) and another part to the distractions of more mundane aspects of my teaching job.

I won’t break the bank with this sale, either, bringing down a massive six bucks, bringing my earnings for my recent sales to a tax-bracket-shattering twenty-four bucks.  Why do I keep a day job?  Oh yeah, writing isn’t about the money.  (Maybe someday, but not today.)  It’s about sharing a part of myself with others.

Now I can’t wait until I get my contributor’s copy in January.

-Oso

Back to life

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I just spent a nice few days in Gatlinburg and the Smoky Mountains with my family and inlaws (not as bad as it sounds).  I got no writing done.  I don’t think I got any ideas (though I got a great one off National Geographic before I left).  It wasa real vacation.

It was rough being away from the internet, only dropping by the chalet check-in office once for a fix.  I need to catch up this week.

I still haven’t heard from WotF, but my wife stopped the mail until tomorrow.  I am anticipating a rejection due to the late speculative element (page 4, not 1), but I refuse to abandon hope.

Speaking of abandoning hope, Clarion West begins on Sunday.  I gave up a long time ago on my attending, but the event’s arrival is a reminder that I’m missing out.  Humbug.  I left a nice “good luck” message on the old CW forum,though it seems largely inactive so it may go unread.  But I wish the best for Jordan, Rochita, Randy-the-Robot-Overlord, everyone else I met on the forum and everyone I did not.  I’ll be watching for CW diaries online, so don’t keep us in the dark (but don’t sacrifice your writing, either).

I still have eyes on next year.  Until then, back to the keyboard.

-Oso

Grammar: more important now then it was than

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I have critiqued a great many stories in my time.  I started out in a small critique circle through OSC’s Hatrack River website: just a group of guys that wanted to write taking turns commenting on each others’ stories.  Then came my extended stint with Critters.  Now I find myself with OWW.  Over the nine years or so that I’ve been doing this, I have found a few basic grammatical errors that keep popping back up, things that should have been mastered in high school.

Then/Than: It is one of the most frequent mistakes I see.  It usually strikes the less common definition(s) of “then”.

First I’ll take a shower, then I’ll eat breakfast.

If monkeys could talk, then they could tell us what it feels like to have a tail.

It was then that I saw she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring.

Form a brute squad, then.

All of these were correct uses of T-H-E-N.  It is used when referring to a time, usually in the past or future.  It also is used (as in the fourth example) when it is time for a new option.  Its use often has a “that being the case” connotation, as in the if-then construction in the second example above.  Any or all of these have been accidentally replaced with T-H-A-N in supposedly polished manuscripts.

She was shorter than her sister.

Rather than risk soiling his new shoes, he wore the old ones everywhere he went.

Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

These are appropriate cases for T-H-A-N.  I see these missed less often (likely because they are themselves less common constructions in fiction), though it was an error in one of these constructions that inspired this post.

Basically, folks, THEN refers to time or condition while THAN is used in comparisons.

To/Too: These little words have so many uses, it’s tough to keep up.  I get it.  Sentence constructions using the latter can be complex.  It can be tough.  Still, writers work with words.  Would you want to buy from a chef that didn’t know when to use butter and when to use shortening?  Same thing, right?

This porridge is too hot.

Michael will have to testify, too.

Oh, you are just too kind.

The T-O-O form has two major uses.  It may mean an excess in amount or quality (first and third) or it might mean “as well” or “also” (second case).  I have been told that the comma is necessary for the “as well” usage but find that, in practice, it isn’t that big a deal…at least in fiction.

As for T-O, well, it has such a diverse set of uses that I won’t attempt to list them. For the most part, it is used when you don’t want “as well” or an expression of quantity or quality (or the number 2 which is T-W-O, but I don’t see that missed much).

Mostly I see TO where TOO belongs.  This is probably the second most common misstep I see.  Maybe it’s typos rather than ignorance (errors spellcheck won’t catch).  I hope it is.  I am a teacher, after all.

Their There are other mistakes that can effect affect my enjoyment of a story, accept except they tend to be rarer.  But don’t loose lose faith; just watch you’re your homonyms, folks.  🙂

-Oso

At the mercy of the manuscript

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

It is 1:36 local time, finally time for bed.  My story (“Poison Inside the Walls”) took me hostage and refused to let me sleep untilI completed a draft.  It’s a shade shorter (a few hundred fewer words anyway) and quite a bit tighter.  There is still a story angle I wanted to fit in, but I couldn’t squeeze it.  Maybe I’ll dream about it.

Pleasant dreams.