Month: April 2011

Time to Reset

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

If you visit me here more than once in a blue moon, you may have noticed that the top of the right column of this blog hasn’t changed in a long time.  That progress bar hasn’t budged in forever.  And I am a slow reader, but how long can a single book take to read?  I need to update things here.  It may be done by the time you read this.

Part of my reluctance to update is that the novel really is still only 24% complete  and I am still a mere half way through reading Old Man’s War.  I’ve set both aside.  OMW is very good; my interest simply wandered.  As for the YA novel I was working on, it was less good.  I had the milieu mapped out and the plotline woven like a cat’s cradle, but the characters were pitifully flat.  I didn’t know them at all.  I didn’t care about them.  If I didn’t care, why would anyone else?  So that project is shelved, awaiting some interesting characters to populate its redraft.

I am pleased to report that another novel has taken center stage.  It’s a project I previously shelved in favor of the YA project.  It has the opposite problems from the YA.  This one, I know the characters deeply, know their desires, their dreams, their fears.  The world, on the other hand, is the stage dressing from Our Town.  At least it has been.  I’ve revisited the first chapter and suddenly it’s reading (to me) like the first chapter of a novel.  I still may be moving the story too fast.

As for reading, I’m pretty all over the place.  I’m listening to Den Koontz’s Intensity from Audible.com.  Wow.  It’s my first Koontz experience and it’s…well, intense.  I’m also reading Steven Savile’s Silver (I’ll take a S and a V, Pat), a book that can sit on a shelf next to Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code the way Schwarzenegger sits next to Devito.  I am determined to finish this before I start A Clash of Kings, the second in GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire series.

Anyway, I plan to update the right side of the blog tomorrow.  I’ll probably toss some links into this post then, too, but I’ve found myself woefully tired all the sudden.  Good night.

The TRON Scale

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 5 Comments

I have devised a new technique for rating my stories’ narrative effect.  I call it the TRON Scale.

My wife recently purchased TRON: Legacy on BluRay and we’ve watched it like six times (our four-year-old daughter loves it).  That movie is so well done.  Foreshadowing for sequels, allusions abound to the first (“That is one big door”), the characters are interesting, and the plot is always clear (if not necessarily transparently driven).  There are little things that irk me, specifically Kevin Flynn’s eighties expressions (“radical man”) sprinkled indelicately throughout, but we’re talking nitpicks in execution; the story is quite solid.  I give it a 9 out of 10 on the yet-unexplained TRON Scale.

Then there was the original TRON film.  We borrowed it from my wife’s coworker and watched it tonight.  This receives a 1 on the TRON Scale.  The original TRON is all concept with minimally executed plot.  It was hard to stay awake through the whole thing.  The stakes were never truly clear.  The characters were literally pushed from one scenario to the next.  Characters’ decision processes were sudden and never explored.  Solutions seemed to present themselves out of nowhere.  Cool visuals (for the eighties), cool concept, cool characters, but not much as a story.  And I about fell asleep because of it.  Cool is great, but plot keeps the reader/viewer involved.

I think my stories fall short on the TRON Scale quite often, particularly when it comes to understanding character’s choices.  They do things that drive the plot because they drive the plot rather than the character’s identity compelling that action.

I intend to use the TRON scale to consider a few of my current stories and decide whether modification is warranted or if those stories should be sent to games (random TRON reference…I should be ashamed).  For the record, TRON’s cool factor increased when tied to a more cohesive plot.  surely that will help some of my cool story ideas, too.

Downs that should be Ups (or vice-versa)

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

Rejections.  😦

No one likes rejections.  I don’t.  I got four in three days week.  It always sucks to get a rejection from F&SF and IGMS on the same day.  I wasn’t really in the mood to blog about it then.  The other two were also pro markets.  Oh, how it burns.

There’s no shame in being rejected by pro markets.  Pros get rejected by pro markets all the time.  But my last sale was a long time ago.  Long.  Submitted in September kind of long.  That’s where the rejections hurt most.

But I can also look at these rejections and smile because they are different than I used to get.  My F&SF rejection came straight from the editor rather than an assistant editor, suggesting it made it past someone.  My IGMS rejection was personalized.  The other two…not so much, but that’s okay.  A good number of my rejections explain themselves now.  This is a good development.

I’m sure I’ve blogged on this topic before.  This is kind of my public pep talk to myself.  I have seven stories out right now and odds are that none of those will come back acceptances.  But some of those stories will sell.  I have no doubt.  I bet I’ll find homes for all of them, eventually.  Low pay homes for some, deeply modified forms for others, but homes where people will have the chance to read them.

In unrelated news, congratulations to my friends and visitors that are off to Clarion or Clarion West this summer. (Yay Annie/izanobu!)  Not sure who else I know that might have made it.  Drop me a comment if that’s you.  Good luck to those still applying for Odyssey.  For those who applied and are not attending, I know the pang of those rejections, too.  Only the last rejection you ever receive will be final.  Keep writing, keep sending and you’ll always be a writer.