Author: Scott W. Baker

Like every other superhero, I have more than one identity. By day, I am Mr. Baker, not-so-mild-mannered high school math teacher. By night (and weekends, holidays, a lot during the summer...) I am Scott W. Baker, science fiction author.

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.  😉

And it’s off

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No weather issues holding me back.  Found printer paper at the local Dollar General (saving me a half hour of driving).  All is well.  Got to the post office in time for today’s postmark.  All is well.  I just sit back and wait 2-4 months for my HM.  I guess it could go semi-finalist if some of my risks pay off, but I’ll be surprised.

Still hoping I’ll never have to find out.  Very proud of my Q4 story.  We’ll see.

Me in a nustshell

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

Finished!  My WotF Q1 (Writers of the Future – first quarter, for those who don’t speak the lingo) story is finished!

Well, that may be a bit strong.  Try again.

Ready!  My WotF Q1 story is ready!  Well, almost ready.  I went to print the thing and my printer was out of paper.  So I went to the paper stash and realized that the stack of paper there and the length of my manuscript were going to be very close.  I grabbed the stack anyway, then realized one of the corners was bent up.  Yes, the whole stack had bent corners.  Now it was nothing that couldn’t be dismissed as postal damage, especially if I banged up that corner of the envelope before sending it.  (Devious, aren’t I?)  But I couldn’t risk the paper jamming my printer.

So where does this leave me?  Hopefully picking up some printer paper in the morning and squeezing out a manuscript in time to hit the post office.  But the weather here is questionable at best, icy at worst, and ever since I totaled my truck in a sudden snowfall I’ve been a cowardly weather driver.  If the roads are icy in the morning, I won’t be leaving the house.  (Tennessee doesn’t clear roads very quickly.)  Push comes to shove, I could email the story to a friend that has both better weather and available paper and ask them to print and send it for me.  I bet my parents could do that.

Anyway, it hardly seems worth the effort when I look at the story.  Very experimental, formatting marks galore, creative  accents, and an ending that veers away from the action in favor of summation.  (If KD can figure out which story it is from this, well, disqualify me.)  It’s inventive, clever, and experimental, so it’s definitely not garbage, but I’m doubting it’ll score above HM.  It reminds me of my Q3 story, “Secondhand Rush”, only moreso.  On the upside, I won’t be pacing in front of my computer waiting for these results.

Thanks for taking a couple minutes to share my angst.  Night all.

Update to my status update

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While rewriting my story, I realized that my most recent rewrite wasn’t that bad.  A little unbalanced in the POVs, but I still kind of like it.  It’s at least better than the rewrite that was never going to get finished.

So I got out the scissors (metphorically) and I’m cutting and pasting the drafts together.  It won’t be the finest work I’ve submitted to WotF, but it will be different enough to garner some attention, I hope.

The good news: it should be ready to mail tomorrow!  Go me!

Sci-Fi under my tree

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As I type this, I am wearing/using one of my Cristmas presents: th uCrown2 head massager from Osim.  Maybe it’s the improved circulation in my head, but it’s giving me story ideas left and right.

Picture a hat used for reading minds or controling an avatar or whatever else aSF hat might do to your brain.  That’s what it looks like, with a cord sticking out of the back and running to a hand controller.  A little creepy, but I tried the hat on and fired it up…without reading any directions.  Yeah, I now.

The first thing that happened is the hat tried to squeeze my head until my eyeballs popped out.  It uses air pressure like a blood pressure cuff would, but it has pressure points that I guess are supposed to be like fingers digging into my temples, browline, and the base of my skull.  Just when I expect my skull to cave, a capm feminine voice says “You are sitting in a very comfortable chair.”

It goes on to knead my head into a stiff dough before my scalp erupts with the most extreme cell phone vibration imaginable.  To which the hat of course says, “Relax.”  As the squeezing and shaking and Zen commentary continue, I start to suspect that my scapl is bleeding.  A moment’s investigation reveals that it was not, rather the hat is heating my head.

I turned it off.

It is not the most soothing of massages, but a little fine-tuning has me appreciating the gift more.  I still hate the voice, but I can set it for nature sounds which are pleasant enough.  It’s supposed to be good for my migrains.  We’ll see.

Anyway, the uCrown2 is definitely the most science fictional gift I have received in my life.  If ever a gift could inspire a story, this one could.

Merry Christmas to all.

-Oso

I’d Dance with That Smurf

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 4 Comments

The James Cameron film Avatar is getting some very mixed press right now.  Some critics – from what I can tell, the best-known critics – have christened it just short of a masterpiece.  Others have dubbed it the sci-fi equivalent of Dances with Wolves, aka, Dances with Smurfs.  I’ve seen other variations, but that’s the idea.  So which is it, a fantastic new world of CGI and brilliant storytelling or a tired old plot regifted in technicolor wrapping paper?

It’s both, but it’s mostly the former.

Face it, there is no new plot under the sun.  Humans siding with aliens, especially in ways that bring attention to some political hot topic, has been a science fiction staple in literature for a while.  It can be as small-scale an alien presence as ET or as large-scale as an interplanetary war (specific works escape me).  People have gone so far as to accuse Cameron of plagiarizing Poul Anderson’s novel, Call Me Joe.  I’ve not read the latter, but come on, how many people have thought up stories they thought were brilliantly original just to find out they are cliche.  A vampire private detective?  The aliens are really humans?  Anything with a dwarf in it?  plagiarism has to go deeper than a synopsis.

So what was good about Avatar?  Of course the effects were outstanding, Lord of the Rings – calibur CGI.  The environment was beautiful even if it did look a tough like Batman Forever in the jungle.  The 3d was quite good but still distractingly like a pop-up book; I’d rather watch it flat.  The aliens’ tribal culture was convincing.  Yes, it reeked of Native American influence; every alien culture has to come from somewhere. The plot was solid if unoriginal.

Bottom line, it is the execution that makes the film brilliant, not its originality.  It is feverishly predictable throughout, mostly through its own heavy-handed foreshadowing.  So what?  The pacing was great, not always the case in a 2 hour 4o minute movie.

I’m going out on a limb and calling Avatar the best sci-fi movie since The Matrix.  I may have forgotten one or two contenders, but I’m pretty confident in my statement.  It is possible to recycle things to make something better, especially when combined with something cutting edge.  Avatar is a must see.

CW Forums

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Clarion West has finally created a forum for 2010 applicants.  

Last year, I met a lot of other CW applicants through that forum.  It was very active, very pleasant, and very supportive.  I hope it will be the same this year.  I’ve already posted a greeting and await replies from other applicants.  Of course you don’t have to be applying to participate in the banter, but most participants are either applicants or alumni.  

So if you haven’t checked out the forums at CW, do it.  They’re a little slow yet (read: dead), but they’ll pick up as the deadline nears.

Pulling myself together

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

It’s amazing how real life can get in the way of writing.  More astounding is when real life gets in the way of real life that was already interfering with my writing.

Case and point: the bout of illness that has struck my house like the plague.  I got sick and got behind grading papers.  My wife got sick and I couldn’t catch up grading papers.  I got sick again and got way behind grading papers.  Through all this, there was no time for writing.  Heck, I had trouble finding time for little things like sleeping and eating and pooping (yep, I said it).  What little I did manage to write was always trite, cliche, and totally directionless because I couldn’t find time to think, to plan.  Bottom line: no production in two months.  None worth keeping, anyway.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  I hit slumps periodically, often longer than a couple months.  There was one year where I only finished one story (but tinkered on all my half-baked novels).  One.  I don’t even recall which story it was.  But I came back from that stronger than I had been when I slumped.  Maybe I’m in for another of those rebounds.  Maybe.

The family seems to be on the mend, myself included, and the papers are almost caught up, just in time for the end of the fall semester.  I already did Christmas (so to speak) with my parents when they came to town for my daughter’s birthday, so that’s one Christmas distraction I can avoid.  There are always others, but it looks like I can finagle some quality writing time during this semester break.  I’ll be scurrying like a rat on the Titanic for the rest of the week while finals are going on, but at least there is light at the end of the tunnel.  Time for a deep breath and a system reset.  Time to be a writer again.

I suspect I’m not the only part-time writer, full-time flunky that gets in these jams.  They’re natural.  Stressful situations are good for a writer.  I hope to use mine, build on it, make my stories deliver the kind of I-can’t-escape-the-vortex stress that I’ve been battling.  Ironic that I need that stress to settle before I can create it in fiction.  It shouldn’t be that way, I should be able to write through the hurricane.  I’m not that organized…yet.  It will come.  It will take a lot of work, but I’ll get there.  Right now, writing is my hobby and hobbies have to take a back seat to jobs that bring home pork products.  I need to be a better teacher in order to be a better writer.  No, that’s not true.  I need to be a more productive teacher in order to be a more productive writer.  Production comes from organization, not chaos.

I simply have to get my $#!+ together.

-Oso

My Writing Must Have Made Karma Unhappy

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If it’s not one thing, it’s three others.  Now that my wife is finally starting to emerge from her bout with pneumonia, I seem to be battling it (or some close cousin, perhaps bad bronchitis).  I just pray my daughter doesn’t get it.  This clearly seems contagious.

Needless to say, I have gotten no writing done.  None.  It’s been a month and a half (I think) since significant words were added to one of my stories.  It’s just really tough to focus when I’m trying not to drown in my own phlegm.  (Too much?)

I have decided, however, that I should try to resurrect an older story in time for the WotF Q1 deadline.  “Thinking Out Loud” was a promising old story that I didn’t write from the correct POV.  I have since rewritten it (at least parts) from every character’s POV.  That’s right, all eight characters from the original story (there was a ninth, but pure cardboard set-dressing).  The idea was to rotate through all eight POVs when they were most important to the story.  That proved a touch exhausting (though still a cool idea, just not for these characters).  The next idea was to cycle through the four original antagonists.  Better, but I found I was only really interested in one of them.

So now I plan to rewrite the story just from this interesting character’s largely unsympathetic POV, changing a few plot points (more monkey wrenches in the works) and tweaking some characters (make some more exaggerated), all in about a month that includes Christmas and my daughter’s third birthday.  After that, I plan to pull a rabbit out of my…

In an effort to make this blog more educational and less personal, I hope to highlight some of my story wrestling here.  For instance, I have gotten away from outlines almost completely.  Soon I will explore the possibility that this is a causal factor of my current block (that and phlegm).  A no-brainer, but a boy has to sort out his issues somewhere.

Eventually.

-Oso