Month: January 2010

Progress and egress

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Why is it that when I’m making great progress on a story, I somehow find the irresistible urge to take a break to tell people I’m making great progress?  That’s what’s going on now, a brief exit from my work to brag about how well I’m working. Self inflicted irony.

To be honest, the act of stringing well-turned phrases together is exhausting.  Some good character development through a beat of action followed by a surgically placed infodump while the character stews followed by a brief laugh and into some significant foreshadowing, more revealing dialog, and a plot milestone all while fitting a little sex into the scene break.  Of course none of that happens while I write.  Okay, very little of it.  That’s the fruit of revision.  Brilliant as Heinlein was, I can’t work with his revise-only-to-editor-request method.  I’m more like a cake decorator, globbing the story on there in one big hunk then going back with the spatula to smooth it out (and later with the frosting gun or flowers or doilies or whatever).

It often happens to me with a story that I get 40-70% of the way through and just stall out because the story lost its inertia.  I have two fixes for that.  One, cut the last page or two out and try again with focus on building up speed.  I use that tactic playing RollerCoaster Tycoon, too.

The second thing I try is going back to the beginning with that spatula and trying to make the story flow as smoothly as possible for as long as possible.  That was my approach tonight.  The characters weren’t developed, the subplots (we’re talking novella or at least novelette) weren’t connecting, and I was getting a whole “who cares” vibe about my main character.  I know he’s the right character, but I was making the action center around someone else.

I started by changing the very first scene.  Same people, same plot points, but the staging was different.  Instead of waiting outside the front door the character was asleep in a bed.  I streamlined the story-pushing infodump in favor of more setting information.  That changed the transition to the next scene and poured a whole lot more emotion (and less melodrama) into scene two.  It also helped roll into scene three without stopping the action and starting again, a very good thing considering how brief that scene is.  In fact I think I managed to remove three or four line breaks (the blank line or # or ***) from my story’s first couple thousand words.  Nothing wrong with a hard break like that, they just seem like a crosswalk in the middle of the story.  Too many and you can hardly drive for fear of running someone over.  (Worst thing about Gatlinburg.)

This process, for me, involves a lot of cut-and-paste, usually out of the story and into a blank document.  I highlight a section that’s working, paste it in, then trim it like a bonsai sculptor to make it what I want it to be.  Then I find another section that was working and figure out how to string them together better than I had the first time.  Often it’s a matter of replacing creative language with straightforward explanations.  Other times it’s changing the angle of approach: an angry character becomes scared instead, an empty street becomes a bustling marketplace, a nameless pawn’s words come out of an important character’s mouth.  Alton Brown (my Food Network hero) refuses to buy a kitchen tool that will only do one job.  I try to do that with story elements, exchange unitaskers for multitaskers.  Sometimes this means combining elements into one, others it’s changing where the story was going to flow more naturally from one important element.  The same ring that turned Frodo invisible also attracted the Nazgul, weakened his resolve, turned allies against him, lured his guide, gave reason to distrust that guide, and was the ultimate goal of his trek.  It got him in trouble and out of trouble (more in, really).  That’s what I want out of inanimate objects in my stories, too.  They seldom (never) go that far.

Well, a quarter after midnight and I’m off to frost more story.  And no, the first draft isn’t done yet.  I think this one’s at 40%.  Shameful, I know.  And a lot of my frosting job will actually be removing unnecessary portions of the cake I’ve already made.  And yes, I’ll just have to write more cake that I’ll have to frost later.  But this process works for me better than forcing the cake into the oven and hoping I can frost it all at once.  There are likely better systems, but this one has me happy for now.  That’s all I can really ask.

Redactions

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 5 Comments

I just went back through my blog and did some redactions, just to play it safe.  There was a title I don’t want associated with my name because….

…I’m a finalist for Writers of the Future!!!!!

My story, along with seven others, goes to a few big shot pro writers to be judged for the three big prizes (including inclusion in the anthology).

Too psyched to type more.  Woohoo!

The good, the bad, and the oops

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Well, I’ve been at the hotel for my wife’s photography convention since Sunday and I’ve done some writing.  (This qualifies as good.)  I started to look through some unfinished work to see if there was anything I could modify or fix up to submit to the Clarions.  I found a few novel chapters that I had abandoned because it was so tough to write.

The novel was very slow-going because it was a comedy in the vein of Douglas Adams: lots of farsical situations and overblown hyperbole and just ridiculous science.  That’s hard to write, especially at the rate that the jokes were flying the first few pages (jokes, not necessarily laughs).  Well, I decided to try to turn that into a short story.  Hey, I was having trouble transitioning anyway, so why not?

Now the first draft of that story is complete (good!), half of it spliced together from pieces of a few false starts, the other half fresh writing.  And the  count on this draft is…6600 words/35 pages.  Oops.  I was aiming for 6000/30.

I think I can go back and cut and/or shorten some sections (good), but possibly at the cost of some of the jokes (that’s bad–all the story’s got going for it is the jokes).  I won’t be subbing it anyplace until I get some commentary from OWW or even Baen’s Bar (I hear they’re still operating for critiques) as my sense of humor is not reknowned for being universally appreciated.  If this stuff isn’t funny, I’ve wasted my whole writing spree (bad!!!).

I need to let it sit a few days before trying to edit.  I’ll poke my nose back in some other work tonight, maybe try paring down ***** some more for Clarion.  And who knows what else is hiding on this hard drive, waiting to become a 6000-word or less story?

Trouble with numbers

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

Maybe I’ve been aiming at Writers of the Future too much, but I’m having trouble finding stories to submit to Clarion and Clarion West.  My stuff is just too long.  The story I just finished is 8000 words, 33% too long for a C-SD story and quite a few pages longer than CW wants.  “***************” (still hate the title) came in at 6600 and 34 pages, still too much for either.  The naked man story will be at least novelette length, so finishing that up isn’t going to help.

Stay with me while I think out loud…or skip to the next paragraph.  I sent “Leech Run” last year, so that’s out.  I have “Secondhand Rush” that’s shorter (3000 words or so?) but I wrote most of that maybe five years ago.  It did pull an honorable mention from WotF, but so did “Leech Run” and I didn’t quite make it.  “Brother Goo” is kiddy stuff and very derivative, by intent but still out.  I don’t think “How Quickly We Forget” is quite strong enough to send and it’s too short for C-SD.  “Excuse Me” is too…well, it sold to The Rejected Quarterly, so…  If I need to go short-ish, “Faerie Belches” is probably my next strongest piece, again a little too short for C-SD; it’s kiddy stuff, too, but more original.  I’m not happy enough with “__________” to send that.  Maybe I could check the word count on “Chasers”…but that was published in an anthology called Triangulation 2004.

Bottom line, I need to get a new story from zero to publishable in about two months.  Don’t get me wrong, if “****” comes up big in WotF, I’m sending it.  I have an edit that pulls it down to 6200 words (I think) and 32.5 pages.  (It’s hard to remember; I’m a math teacher and not real good with numbers.)  It looks like I need a new idea, something deep enough to inspire a story with umph.  I thought of using my fear of snow-driving as a catalyst (hence the rambling blog post a couple days ago), but it hasn’t taken me anywhere yet.  I have a few little vampire ideas in my head, but really?  Okay, one is pretty good.  No actual vampires needed, but I haven’t found the speculative angle to it yet.  Nothing says it needs one specifically, but I’d like to sell it somewhere.  It’s not a story I need to write, so it’s probably not the one I’m looking for.  Nor is the zombie idea.

I don’t seem to have any good science fiction ideas floating around my brain.  Too bad, because I think I do sci-fi better than fantasy or horror.  I’ve definitely sold more.  Even that wacky talking hat of a Christmas present hasn’t given me any good ideas.

I’m playing writer for the next few days.  All day, typitty-typitty-tap-tap.  (Note to self: still need to send in lesson plans to school.)  It’ll be out of town so maybe the change in scenery will help.  Not a workshop or anything, just escorting my wife to a photography conference.  I need to get something at least planned and started while I’m there.  I’ll bring along some science stuff to get the old brain rolling: Popular Science (because no one writes stories from those ideas, right?), a Michio Kaku book or two, explorations into the fourth dimension, light reading like that.  Not that any of it matters.  Ideas hit when and where they please.  I got an idea for a whole novel based off the title of a book I bought out of a bargain bin(And no, my idea was in no way related to the book in question.)

Maybe I’ll try some workshop techniques.  I could interview a stranger.  Maybe I’ll end up with a photography story idea and be in the perfect place for inspiration.  We’ll see.  Until then I’ll be trying to finish up some lingering projects.  And praying we can get the car up the hill and out of the subdivision.

On finding an ending

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

Maybe this post will have a little more direction than my last one, the rambling mess about my fear of driving in snow.  (It’s still out there, man…)

I recently mentioned that my WotF Q2 story (candidate at least) ended with more melodrama than I prefer.  I tried to rework it today, scrapping the old ending and three new ones, finally settling on the quickest finale I could devise.  I still think it’s a bit over the top.

I may have set myself up.  My attempts to twist the protagonist until his head pops off have…well, forced his head to pop off.  There’s no gentle ending.  I think I can dial down the soap operatic final scene a little, but not much.  The question is, do I end with him popping his top or come back for a touchy-feely moment of morality?  So far I’m with the former.  The Aesop’s ending just doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the story.

I’ve had trouble with endings a lot of late.  I’m not sure why.  Part of it is lack of planning.  I plan a story to the middle and get so excited I have to write it.  I think Stephen King does that, too.  (Really, the hand of God?)  I blame the few times I had endings jump out of my subconscious fully formed and perfect.  My first sale, “Decisions, Decisions!” was one.  My biggest sale, “Chasers” was almost another (a reader’s misinterpretation made it better).  “Brother Goo” and “Faerie Belches” both evolved similarly.  Hey, these are all my sales here!  Let me check my bibliography…  Well I had the ending of “Blood of a Soldier” from the beginning (not terribly original, though); the end of “How Quickly We Forget” gave me a little trouble, but it was flash, as were “Occupational Dogma” and “In or Out”. The end of “Excuse Me” was kind of a stinker (no pun intended), but it really couldn’t have ended any other way.

So what does this mean?  Does this mean that my flashes of brilliance are so good that they sell my stories?  Or are my agonized-over endings so bad that the stories can’t sell?  Hmmm…

[Further analysis of stories deleted because no one really cares.]

So what can I do to bring about those strong endings again?  I could outline more, but that doesn’t guarantee the ending I plan will be the right one or even a good one.  I could start my planning with the ending, but that’s just asking for a Jar of Tang. I really think the problem I’m having is away time from the stories.  It’s tough to recapture the voice I was writing with three to six months ago.  Over the course of a long story or even a novel, that change in voice can be consumed by character growth.  But walking away from a struggling ending may make the ending feel tacked on or disjoint.  Or maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing.

Anyway, it’s time to get some readers for this story now, once I get a title, that is.  I’ve been calling it “Sound Story” for lack of title, but that ain’t going to work.  [Edited to remove title…I’ve been careless with contest entry titles of late.]  I’m sending it to my dad tomorrow.  I may post it to SFF OWW too, but it’s a bit long for that (8000+ words).  Good length for WotF I think.

I’m not sure if this story had any more direction than the last one.  Not much of an ending, is it?

Reasonable but irrational fears

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I just got back in from playing in the snow with my daughter.  It”s always fun playing with her (okay, usually fun), but the snow is too powdery and cold to enjoy properly. Won’t hold a snowball, can’t sled on it, and wow did my fingers get cold fast.

Before we tried to play in it, I tried to make a quick drive through it.  It’s only a couple inches, but I couldn’t get up the hill to get off my street.  I probably could have made it if I’d built up some speed.  Or driven something better equipped than my truck (rear wheel drive).  Even my wife’s Kia was probably a better call.  But the trip wasn’t very important.

Oh yeah, and I’m terrified of driving in the snow.

It happened about three years ago.  It had been raining for hours and was turning to snow about the time the school busses were starting to roll.  The Director of Schools postponed school for an hour or two but did not cancel.  Apparently the snow hadn’t reached her end of the county.  The snow was coming down in flakes the size of dust bunnies.

I was going down a slight hill when I lost traction.  It was a gentle slide toward the side of the road.  I couldn’t recover.  I went rumbling over the white-blanketed grass.  I saw the gas line sticking out of the ground in front of me, but the truck was bouncing and slipping; there was no avoiding it. I smashed over it and kept going.  The fence and tree loomed ahead of my unresponsive vehicle.  I wanted so hard to do something — anything — I honked the horn.  The tree did not move out of the way.

I was okay.  The plastic bumber had prevented any sparking from contact with the gas line.  It was a small line and put up no resistance.  It hissed a lot but was closed down and repaired quickly.  The next car to come by was a coworker who took me back home.  Things could have been a lot worse than they were.  But the experience really rattled me.

I am obsessed with traction now.  Hate driving in snow, prefer not to drive in the rain.  I can do it (the latter always, the former as long as it doesn’t stop me from crawling down the road, like this snowfall did) if I must.  It just seems irrational to risk driving through poor conditions for frivolous reasons.

What’s my point?  That fear is a subtly powerful emotion, a force that makes decisions for me in my life.  That is the kind of feeling I want to be able to sew into my characters when I write, things that seem reasonable to the character despite seeming almost paralyzingly neurotic to others.  And I want to be able to play against those feelings.  For instance, I could get up that hill if I needed to take my daughter to the hospital, but the hill might influence my opinion of what needs to be taken to the hospital.  Push a character to do something against their normal urges.  That’s conflict.

Found gem

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I’m back to school.  The weather has been shortening the days (too cold for bus stops) and Thursday’s supposed to bring snow (yay!), but I’m back nonetheless.  Back to having difficulty finding time to write.

I tried to get a start on the 3000 words I resolved to write this (and every) week by reading the stump I had of a story.  This story I’ve worked on for maybe 3-4 years now.  The science comes from an idea my father had.  It took a while for him to explain it to me and a whole lot longer for me to figure out how to make it a story.  Every time I’d get some momentum going on the story, I’d hit a wall.  Those walls stayed in my way until I forgot what the wall was, read it through, and got rolling again.  Hence the long gestation.

Well, I read and was thrilled with the opening scene (save a few small touchups I couldn’t resist adjusting).  It was awesome.  Then I read the next scene: great tension and emotion.  Next scene, well-layed monkey wrench.  Now the plot was rolling.  Next scene, tension built, things spiralling out of control for the characters.  Everything I had was outstanding (if I do say so myself).

So what wall had I hit?  I had tried to keep the story rolling, keep spinning the characters out of control the same way for another few thousand words.  The same kind of chaos.  It wasn’t working.  The story was naturally trying to bring itself to an end (at just over 7500 words) and I was fighting to keep it going.

So I just put it out of its misery and let it close where it was.  It didn’t leave the main character in quite as much anguish and turmoil as I had wanted, but he was pretty gosh darned miserable.  Not a happy ending.  And how many of my 3000 new words did I write?  273.  I was 273 words away from the end of my story and I didn’t even know it.

I think I can attribute part of this epiphany to George R.R. Martin.  I’m currently reading A Game of Thrones in which Martin really finds ways to heap the crapola atop his protagonists.  But the pile on their heads only gets so thick before he changes flavors.  I wasn’t doing that.  But I knew the story wasn’t going to end on an up-note and I knew my protagonist was on a pretty doggone low note, so I just let it end through a final act of self destruction.  (No one dies, though.)

I may not keep this ending as written.  I probably won’t.  It lacks some subtlety and it’s almost 2AM, so I’m sure there are flaws I don’t see, but that’s a matter of revision now.  Revision is more artistic than the delivery-room process of writing is for me.  I have a very sturdy draft at last.  Now I can get some sleep.

Only 2727 words left to go this week!  Come on snow days!

How did I get here? (And where am I?)

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 4 Comments

There are a lot of factors that led me to being a writer of speculative fiction.  The foremost is probably being a reader of speculative fiction.  I look at my daugter and wonder what I can do to foster that same love of genre in her that I have in me.  So I’m tracing my footsteps through life to figure out how to get my little girl to be a geek like me.

I’ve loved reading as long as I can remember.  The first SF author I probably read was Dr. Seuss: Wocket in my Pocket and The Grich and the conservationally mined Lorax.  I read some of that to my girl now.  Of course all the reading I can do with her will help turn her into a reader.  Seeing Daddy read can’t hurt either.

When I started reading chapter books, my favorite was Encyclopedia Brown, really more collected short stories than chapters.  The thinking was great for me, I suspect.  I always loved the ones where he helped his dad with real crimes.  I also read my share of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume.  These days, Harry Potter would just about fit that level, maybe a step above.

The local library had a summer reading program that we took part in annually, attempts to get our paperdoll hot air balloon higher than other people’s.  I always took pride in reading books at or above my level while other kids would read the kiddy stuff and take credit for it…but I digress.  It kept me reading through summers and my mother placed priority on that.  I hope to do something similar when my girl gets old enough (a year or two).

Next came the Choose Your Own Adventure books.  Remember those?  Theyprobably did a lot to guide me into writerdom.  Start at page one, then if you go to the spooky hotel you turn to page 47, if you stay with your weird Aunt Velma and her snoring cats you turn to page 111.  They were good to read over and over without being the same and really turned out to be more short story than they were novel, based on the pages you read.  I had a ton of them and checked out a ton more from the library.  Space opera, high fantasy, straight mystery, you name the genre, I read a CYOA from it.  It helped me find my taste.  I bet I could still find a bunch on ebay…

I think the book that made me a fantasy fan was either The Riddle and the Rune by Grace Chetwin or Castle Roogna, the third Xanth novel by Piers Anthony.  The latter was a gift from my grandmother who heard that was what kids my age were reading.  I still own the first 12 Xanth novels and several scattered others.  I visit Piers Anthony’s website often though I haven’t read any of his books in a few years.  He was my favorite author for many years, funny and a little out there.  There is no doubt he inspired me.  I wrote to him when my first novel was “accepted” by Publish America.  Thankfully he warned me away from them as a scam vanity publisher…but I’ve gotten off topic.

As for Chetwin’s book, I’m not sure where I got it.  It was a great read for a kid, very Harry Potter but more in the linear quest format.  There were three other books in the series (one before, two after) which weren’t quite as good, but good enough.  She also responded to a query I sent her about publishing, since she now publishes her fantasy novels and a few other books by herself.  But again…focus, Oso.

As for science fiction, I recall the Tripod Trilogy being a milestone in my reading.  I may go back and reread those since I’m trying to write a YA sci-fi novel…  Still, I think I ran with fantasy for a long time before discovering Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, of course.  I may have been in college by then.  In fact, I think I was out of college!  Late bloomer.

There were other things.  I subscribed to Analog for several years, but many of those stories were over my head in high school.  Television and movies kept my sci-fi spark alive while I wasn’t reading it.  I read Fahrenheit 451 in for a high school book report, and Piers Anthony’s novelization of Total Recall for another.  I read Narnia books out of order, which made them a little complex to swallow but I still read them.  Of course Lord of the Rings.

But it was when I read the Harry Potter books that I started to think “I can do this.”  I was in college at the time and my mom gave the first three books to me for Christmas.  My girlfriend (now wife) worked in a bookstore (okay, a store that sold a few books) and told me they were kids’ books.  I eventually poked my nose in the first one and was sucked into the world.  By the time Harry was at Hogwarts, I was hooked.  By the time he was in the Tri-Wizard Tournament, I was a writer.

I keep a lot of these books around so my daughter can experience them herself.  Will there be others that get her there instead?  Probably.  Thankfully the Twilight craze should be gone by the time she’s old enough to get into it.  Maybe I’ll be publishing the next craze.  (Wishful thinking.) I just wanted to share books from my journey in case other people need some guidance on their own (or their children’s) journey to speculative fiction geekdom.  You have to start young.

Oh wait!  I can’t conclude a post about speculative literature for kids/young adults without mentioning the magazine Beyond Centauri, specifically because their new issue has my story “Brother Goo” inside.  That’s right folks, Beyond Centauri issue 27.  Go buy a dozen copies.  Or one’s fine, too.

[More links forthcoming]

Five resolutions for me to break

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

Happy New Year to all.  Like so many others, I have a list of changes I’d like to make in my life.  What better time for them?  Some are ambitious, some are desperately needed.  I wonder how many I can pull off?

  1. Get more organized at least a little organized. I am the personification of chaos, to the point that my principal has started rolling her eyes at me.  My classroom is a mess, my house is a mess, even my truck is a mess.  I’m not planning to go from zero to OCD overnight.  Baby steps.  For now, I’m taking a few minutes at the end of the school day to put things back where they belong.  Same at bedtime.  Little by little I’ll become a functioning human being.
  2. Eat healthier. This is not a diet, just a vow to make healthier choices in the overabundance I consume.  More fruit and veggies, less soda, more fiber, less sugar.  I need to lose weight, but I’m pretty bad at that, especially when the rest of my life isn’t perfectly in line (see #1).
  3. Play more actively with my daughter. My little girl loves to run and jump and squeal and frolic.  I love watching her, but I don’t have the energy to join in.  Well, I’m going to start thinking of our play sessions as my workout regimen.  I’ll work up a sweat and get my endurance up so we can play the way she deserves.
  4. Write 3000 words a week. Not a lot, I know, but it’s doable.  And if I get my 3000, I’ll likely get more.  It’s usually the first few dozen words I have trouble getting out in a writing session, be it time or mental constipation to blame.  I’ve been slow to the point of wondering if I still fit my own definition of a writer.  Must write.
  5. Get stories in the mail. Stories don’t sell from a drawer.  I need to do a better job getting them out there.  I only have three out right now, two of them to WotF, despite having four or five unsold stories that have been sent out before that remain unsold.  If they were good enough to send before, they’re good enough to send again.  I intend to get one out a week through this month, that giving me enough time to read them through and brush them up first.  Besides, the staggered submissions will stagger responses and hopefully lead to less blocks of wonder-time.  Wonder time always seems to kill my productivity.

Well, those are my goals.  There are smaller things: apply to (and attend) a Clarion workshop, apply to all four quarters of WotF (or lose elligibility, even better), train my mutt, put valuable writing content in my blog, sell some stories (slightly beyond my control short of #5), and on and on.  Five is probably more than I can pull off.

Here’s hoping that you find the strength to follow through with your resolutions and that 2010 is a great year for you.  Now I need to go start working on some of these.  You probably should, too.  😉