Month: November 2010

Tripping over my own feet

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Oops, I’ve let time get away from me without any new posts.  Part of that is the rush of all things distracting: school nears the semester’s end, Thanksgiving-related gluttony, Christmas-related shopping and decorating, doctor visits…all getting in the way of the normal flow of life.  Including writing.

I haven’t written much in a couple weeks I guess.  I had the urge to write bubble out of my head and into partial new stories a couple times in that span, both of which may turn into something.  But not a lick of real progress on anything.  Part of this can be blamed on one of my worst writer habits: waiting.

I have several stories out to markets that have taken longer than the median time to reply to (per Duotrope).  Some significantly more time.  But none beyond the query line.  (Okay one is, but it’s not so far over the median time, so I’ll give it a few more days.)  I spend way too much time actively thinking about these stories and their status.  Why?  Will thinking about it change the speed of reply?  Of course not.

It’s a bad procrastination.  I’ve run into a slow spot in my novel and my brain wants to focus on those finished items instead of doing the hard work.  Subbing is easy.  Even getting rejected is easy.  Writing is hard work.

I plan to put in some hard work tonight.  I need to get the ball rolling on a new part of the novel and it’s dreadfully painful to slog through, especially knowing I’ll likely cut it and/or rewrite it.  That should make it easier, shouldn’t it?

I’ve added Kevin J. Anderson’s blog to the Pro Writers blogroll.  He’s in the process of sharing advice for being a productive (and possibly profitable) writer.  I need that kind of push right now.

Good Rejections

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 5 Comments

Today I receive a wonderful rejection.  It’s always nice to get a personal, positive rejection.  It’s like hitting on  girl (when I was single, long ago) and having her say “you’re sweet and I’d love to go out with you, but I’ve got a boyfriend and we’re pretty serious.  I wish I’d met you three months ago.”  At leas I think it would be similar to that.  I usually got the cold shoulder of hysterical laughter as responses.

This email started by saying the story did not fit the anthology as well as other stories, hence the rejection.  Then it went on to say the story (TWHDotGMP) was “very, very funny” — calling part of it “brilliant” — and said nice things about enjoying my style, ending with an invitation to end more for the next antho.  Happy ego.

Alas, I don’t use that story’s in-your-face comedic style very often.  I will definitely explore it further in the future.  But gosh it’s tough to write humor.  Time consuming.  Only about 10% of my jokes are ever funny, so I need to write ten times as much to get each funny moment.  And TWHDotGMP is wall-to-wall (attempts at) humor, be it snappy dialog, absurd situations, or rimshot jokes, I packed it.  Exhausting to write so it can be perpetually amusing to read.  And then I had to push a plot in, too.

It’s a dangerous thing, writing humor.  I have a very odd sense of humor.  My target audience would also be people with odd senses of humor, but odd has a lot of directions to choose from.  Funny is subjective.  On the up side, no single rejection of a humor story should cause concern about the story’s market chances.  On the down side, this editor’s kind commentary is no guarantee that any other person (let alone editor) in the world will appreciate my razor wit.

I believe the market for SF humor is wide open.  Start naming some sci-fi funnymen.  Adams, Pratchett, Piers Anthony…I’ve received recommendations for others that I can’t recall.  I’m not just talking about stories with funny moments, I mean stories designed to be funny above all else.  There is a niche market for that and I could strive to establish myself there.  But then there’s my WotF story.  Are there any funny moments in it?  Maybe a snarky comment or two (I can’t think of any), but not really.  It’s got rape, drugs, incest, lying…no jokes.  So maybe I’m spreading myself thin by trying to write the funny and the serious.  Or maybe I’m covering all my bases.  Or maybe I’m just writing what I need to write and to hell with anyone’s opinion.  Or maybe I just haven’t found myself as a writer yet.  Or maybe I just like starting sentences with the word or.  (Ooh, I started and ended that one.)

I haven’t been able to count on sales to point me toward my niche.  What have I sold?  My two biggest earners were both fairly serious outerspace stories — one on a colony with aliens, the other on a fueling outpost near a colony.  “Excuse Me” was farcical humor, “Faerie Belches” was a lot less funny than the title implies (kind of an urban fantasy for kids), “Leech Run” was new space opera (of the Firefly vein), and flashes really are their own beasts altogether.  Oh, and a violent military vampire thing.  And time travel, serious but Twilight Zone-esque.  See, all over the place.  And my submission catalog isn’t much more focused.

So I guess I’ll keep exploring myself as a writer.  Some funny, some serious, some light, some dark…hopefully some sales.  Maybe I’ll find a career somewhere in there.

Pens and Flashbacks

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

I just did something I haven’t done in a long time.  No, not that.  I did that just…well, since I did this other thing, for sure.  And it’s none of your business when I…  Oh right, what I actually did do.

I wrote a scene by hand.  Just a scene, but it was a complete scene.  I was editing my Codex story and decided a scene was needed and grabbed a pen and wrote it out.  It felt really good.  Better than any scene I have typed in a long time.  Why was it so good?  Was it the pen-in-hand?  Or just because the story so desperately needed the scene?  I’m not sure, but I’ll likely do more.  It’s something different.  Writing by hand uses different parts of your brain, so it may well stimulate different ideas.

The scene, as it turns out, was a flashback.  (No!  Not a flashback!  Never a flashback!)  Flashbacks get a bum rap sometimes.  Don’t get me wrong, bad flashbacks are very bad.  Flashback overdose is the reason I stopped watching The Event.  But there are times when a flashback is appropriate, nay, necessary.  I tried the story without it.  It begged for the scene.  I wrote it and now I am happy.  It must mean something.

Here are my rules for flashbacks, be they for the flashback squeamish or the flashback junkie.

  1. Try the story without it. Flashbacks are like that jerk wide receiver on a football team; only keep him around if the team can’t win without him.  If it takes three guys together to take his place, do it and get rid of the bad influence.
  2. Make the flashback work harder. Parts of a story propel plot, character, backstory, milieu, ideas…the flashback should do it all.  It should be the tightest part of the story, doing more work than any other comparably long section of the story.
  3. Be proud of your flashback. If you’re ashamed of any line in it, toss that line or fix it.  There are people out there who believe that every flashback is bad.  They are wrong, but giving them ammo to deflate your flashback is going to cause doubt.  Be confident in your whole story, but especially the flashback.
  4. Don’t make the story about the flashbacks. Memento was a clever film.  Once.  Flashbacks should serve the story.  You never want the attention in a story to be drawn to the writing; you want it drawn to the story.  If your flashbacks are about style, you’re asking for trouble.
  5. All rules are made to be broken…if you have a great reason. Punctuation, spelling, syntax, continuity, all have rules that are worth breaking for effect and cause.  Know the rules and break only when it’s beneficial to the story.  If you don’t know why you chose to break the rule, don’t break it.  The same goes for these.

Besides, these are my rules that I made for my stories, not yours.  So go make your own rules.  And do it in pen, just to change things up.  You’ll love it.

Formatting and Reformatting

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I just sent off a story to Daily Science Fiction (soon to be added to my market list).  It’s a new market with excellent pro-level pay and a lot of Codexians selling there.  I like any pro market with electronic submissions.

However, DSF’s online submission form requires plain text formatting.  This caused a problem for this particular story.  It had tons of italics, all necessary for complete understanding of the story.  It also had a Cuban character used as a part-time point-of-view who thought in Spanish punctuation (upside-down ? and ! per my high school Spanish lessons), which isn’t a plot necessity but a stylistic flair I particularly liked.  And some boldfaced section breaks when the POV switches.  Thank goodness for search and replace!  As it was, it took half an hour to fix everything and make sure the replacements were right (a lot of underscores that marked italics ended up on the next line, which had to be fixed). Oh yeah, I also removed a big equation that really was only there to show off; no big loss.

This begs a question: how big a role does excessive formatting play in the story selection process of magazines?  Clearly my formatting is labor intensive even for the guy that formatted it that way to begin with.  Now if I can send a Word file once they choose to buy it (as they will in pipe dream land), then it shouldn’t be too bad for them to adapt for publication.  But the Spanish stuff is pretty specialized.  And lots of italics can be tedious.  Reading on screen can make that worse, too.  So this may be a waaaaay long shot for me. It may be time to start exploring some more semi-pro print zines for this one.  I should hear soon from DSF; their response average is around 1-2 weeks.

Long Time, No Me

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

It’s been a while since I posted.  I haven’t made any progress on my market list due to limited time.  When I do get time, I’m writing.  To make matters worse, I’m sick — not stay-home-from-work sick, just feel-miserable-and-don’t-want-to-move sick.  Trick-or-Treating with my daughter did me in.  Cold air.  My throat hurts just thinking about it.  Who am I kidding, my throat hurts anyway.

I’m probably wasting my time working on my Codex Halloween story (title abbreviation: GotJ) because the Halloween elements aren’t going to be removed easily and I honestly don’t want to.  The main characters’ names are Ghost and Boo (the former comments on the painful coincidence), the term trick-or-treat comes up (in different context), and the space station is called the Jack-o-Lantern.  I could remove the trick-or-treat reference, I guess, and it wouldn’t be too bad.  I’m a bit attached to Ghost (Geist, really, but is referred to both ways) and Boo as names.  And the Jack-o-Lantern stays.  So it will make a far easier sell for an October issue than a January (which seems more likely what’s being read for now).

I think I’m procrastinating on the novel.  I need to just get the damn thing drafted so I can edit.  I’m just a little overwhelmed.  I need to build up on my planning.  I actually like the concept of the spreadsheet J.K. Rowling used; I may try something like that.  Organization is not my strong suit.  A little effort there, though, should get me back on track.

I’ll put forth an effort to share more soon.