Category: Writing

NaNo Blues

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

I am a slow typist.  I’ve known this for a while.  I should probably learn to type from the home row rather than using my mutli-finger hunt-and-peck method.  But I’m not there yet.  This contributes to me being 2500 words behind on my NaNoWriMo story.  Contributes, but it’s not the cause.

I’m bogging down on my novel.  I do this, it’s part of my process.  My WotF story was flying along great until the end where it kept bogging down and kept bogging down.  It took me months to write the ending.  Why so long?  Because I was trying to write an ending that didn’t fit.  The scene I’m bogging in now fits the novel, but isn’t propelling the story like it should.  I need to cut a lot of the words I’ve written, if I’m being honest.  And I need to write a Chapter zero (can be renumbered later) so that the oddities of the story are more obvious when they arise.  It should come out a bit like the opening scene in The Matrix, only not quite so Matrixy.

I didn’t do my homework on the front (outlining) end so now I’m suffering on the writing end.  This may not have been the right project to try to NaNo.  Temptations to return to my Naked Man novel (you heard right) are growing.  Since this is more about my career than about the challenge, I’m seriously considering it.

If you don’t care what I choose to do, by all means, stop reading now and I’ll vow to be more interesting next time.

Still with me.  Really?  Okay, I guess you can watch me weigh the pros and cons of each project:

Time Travel Novel: Pros

  • Good practice to stick with one project through completion.
  • Marketable concept.
  • Flexibility in plot/characters.

Time Travel Novel: Cons

  • Will require a lot of cuts (later) to anything I write right now.
  • Lack of project enthusiasm.
  • A lot of historical research needed.

Naked Man Novel: Pros

  • Theme is integral to the story.
  • I know where the story is supposed to be going.
  • Unique and original.
  • In a subgenre where I’ve had past success.

Naked Man Novel: Cons

  • Requires a lot of cultural and language research (mostly Japanese).
  • Haven’t worked on it in 6 months.
  • Questionable marketability.

I hate the thought that this Time Travel novel may just end up in the also-ran pile of 10-20% finished novels, but it’s dreck.  I started decorating the cake before it was baked, now it’s just a flat, gooey mess.  Upside: I seem to be at a similar wordcount in these two manuscripts, so switching horses in midstream will have no real mathematical or moral dilemma when I report wordcounts to NaNoWriMo.

ZFL scheduled for EDF

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My zombie football flash story “ZFL” is on the November table of contents for Every Day Fiction.  Mark your calendars for the 19th.  I’ll post a link here the day it comes out.  No word yet on my forthcoming Daily Science Fiction story, “Ten Seconds”.  I hear the wait from sale to publication is significant.

In other news, I wrote 1800+ new words on my NaNoWriMo yesterday.  I’m not ahppy with all those words, but part of that is a voice issue I’ll iron out later in rewrites.  My little stat graph still doesn’t have me on target yet, but I’m hoping to hammer out a bunch this weekend.  We’ll see.

 

Ready or not, here’s November!

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

Wow, November starts tomorrow.  Which means NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow.  Wow.  My novel is still only slightly prepped, pretty much still at the grand-scheme stage.  I’m prepping characters and I’ll start typing chapter one tomorrow like a good NaNite (or whatever NaNoWriMo participants call themselves…I’ll have to find out).  I’ve been a seat-of-the-pants writer for years, but I’ve never finished a novel that way.  The one (bad) novel I did finish was based on a huge outline.

The story I have in my head is pretty complex, getting more so toward the end.  Twisting timelines is always complicated.  On the upside, 50k won’t be the end so I may be able to slow up the pace once I get that far.  But I won’t want to lose momentum, either.

The biggest part of my organizing will be on the back end: making sure I don’t contradict myself anywhere.  Some scenes will be repeated with small changes.  Some historic events will be referenced and/or altered.  Still, I’m not looking for a particularly deep piece so most of the history will be of the Wikipedia variety.  More importantly, I’ll have to keep track of individual’s timelines since people who travel won’t be aware of changes in their personal lives.

Paradoxes will arise, I’m certain.  It’s a time travel story, after all.  I’m thinking time travelers are immune to the effects of paradoxes,  In other words, you can kill your grandfather and still exist, but you’ll return to a world where you never existed and you have no possessions, no one knows you, etc.  Jimmy Stewart time travel.  I can have fun with that.

I need to keep my goal simple since the twists and turns are going to be confusing enough.  Multiple viewpoint characters to hop between.  Small team of time travelers, each with different personal lives that bring their own drama.  One novice PoV character so the reader can learn the ropes with her (yes, I’m thinking female).  Third person.  I’ve got the first scene in my mind.  I’d like a little more time to map things out, but let’s be honest, would I use the time?  Or just play more inFamous on the PS3?

My buddy Steve just finished 90k in 19 days for a contracted story.  He has given me inspiration that I can do this.  And let’s face it, I need to prove to myself that I can write a (decent) novel.  So it’s go time.

But first, Happy Halloween.  :^)

What Am I Thinking?!?

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Demands of the world have been making it hard for me to write of late.  I think I’ve mentioned that here.  I have decided to fight back.  How?  I’m doing NaNoWriMo.  (You fool!)  I need to get butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, words on screen.  I’m hoping a month of hammering at a novel project will get my habits back where they belong.  50,000 words in a month.  I can do this.

I found an abandoned story outline that has a lot of potential.  I think I’m going to develop it.  It’s a commercially viable idea and I’m hoping to stretch that into a “high concept” idea.  You know, that “Citizen Kane meets Harry Potter” idea or “Die Hard meets The Hangover”.  We’ll see.  Either way, I think it will be marketable if I can get it done.  We’re talking 80,000+ words done, not just 50,000, but you have to start somewhere.

Why this November for NaNo?  Several reasons.

  • I need to restructure my writing schedule
  • I have no major projects in the works (just that fairy tale rewrite…but that can wait till December)
  • I stumbled upon an old idea that I’m comfortable using
  • If not this year, when?

So I’ll give it a shot.  If I don’t finish, I don’t finish.  But I intend to give it the old college try.  If you’re NaNo-ing with me, good luck.

My Worst Heinlein Rule

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If you are writing science fiction, hopefully you already know Heinlein’s Rules of Writing.  If not, I’ll let Robert J. Sawyer explain them.  I confess that I struggle with them all.  I go through spells where rule-one comes hard.  I have at least a dozen rule-two violations on my hard drive.  Rule-three…well, I’ve never been sold on that one because I do a lot of good work in the revision stages.  Rule-four is likely the one I’m best at, but its corollary rule-five is my nemesis.

Heinlein’s Fifth Rule of Writing: You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.  If I had a dollar for every excuse I’ve used for breaking this rule, I could write full time.  Or not, since that would take away half those excuses…but I digress.

At this hour three days ago, my Duotrope Submission Tracker (you support Duotrope, right?) had four stories on it.  Four.  Meanwhile my sreadsheet that pairs stories with target markets contained twelve stories.  That’s twelve finished, ready to submit stories.  Worse, two of those stories I was tracking on Duotrope were reprints and not even on my target list.  So that was two out of twelve stories in circulation.  Those two received responses on the same day.  That’s when I realized how badly I’d let Heinlein down.

The good news: I have been using the last few dwindling hours of my vacation to remedy that situation.  And I’m still sitting at seven stories on my Submission Tracker.  (For those keeping score, I’ve gotten five of the twelve out the door.)

Why so few?  One, I have a four-year-old who is also on vacation, so she has been a bit needy.  Then there’s a wife, housework, shopping, lame excuse, boring excuse, worthless excuse…  Oh, and then there’s my overwhelming urge to violate rule-tree and revise stories I had once declared as “finished”; that takes time.  I’m hoping to get a couple more out before bedtime and I have a goal of all twelve being out by Friday.  How many of these could have sold by now if I’d just kept them in circulation?

It’s all well and good to tout a few publications and call myself a writer.  It’s another to be a writer.  There’s no boss to remind me of my menial responsibilities; there’s just me.  Time to writer up.

Bad News, Bears, and Some Good News

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

Let’s take the title in order.

The Bad News: I returned from vacation to find a form rejection from Buzzy Mag.  Buzzy is still in the start-up process and has endured some interesting, non-standard submission policies, but now seems to be aligning itself more with pro level mags.  For instance, at one time their submission acceptance process included mandatory Beta-reading, but that’s gone.  They do still take only snail mail subs, but that’s about as out there as their current process seems to be.  Not that any of that matters since they rejected TWHDotGMP.  Gosh, I need to find a market that wants that one.  I know it’s out there…somewhere.

The Bears: I saw a bear a couple days ago, as I may have mentioned on Twitter.  Big and fast.  Runs like a dog.  I see a story involving ursine aliens in my future.

And Some Good News: After a friendly query to the publisher and my good friend Jordan Ellinger, I received an acceptance email from Every Day Fiction for my zombie-football story, “ZFL”.  This will mark my third story with EDF (here are one and two), making it the clear winner for the “zine that published the most stories of mine” award.  The publisher with the comparable award is Sam’s Dot Publishing who ran five (“Decisions, Decisions!”, “Blood of a Soldier”, “Occupational Dogma”, “Faerie Belches”, and “Brother Goo”).  I haven’t sent Sam’s Dot anything in a while  I need to drop them a line…

Hooray! Fall Break!

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Whew, has it been nine weeks of school already?  On the one hand, it seems like I’ve been back to school forever.  On the other hand, it’s like I’m still getting back up to speed from summer.  Either way, nine weeks (closer to eight, technically, but it’s the first quarter) are in the books and I’ve got a week of no school!

I’ve already started my celebration of freedom by reading, commenting on, and voting for the stories in the Codex Halloween Short Story Contest.  There were 23 entries which gave me 22 to read (plus my own entry).  Time consuming.  I expected it to take me into next week, but I am finished.  I voted earlier this weekend and delayed this post a bit to avoid tipping my hand as to my identity since the contest is conducted blind.  Not that anyone is lining up to guess my identity.  I’m still fairly anonymous there.  My name is known and people engage me in discussions, but my style isn’t easily recognized.  Maybe my style just isn’t that defined?  Ah, who cares.

There are some very talented writers at Codex — award-winning types as well as those getting published regularly and those (not unlike me) who are still refining their talent into something that can be dubbed “success”.  It was tough to narrow the voting to the top 3.  That makes it extra nice to see that my story did indeed get some top-three votes.  It’s not about winning (since I don’t see that happening) but about creating a product that is viewed with pleasure.  I reached some readers and that’s something.  Now to distill the comments down into something usable so I can reach some editors.

Beyond the Codex bit, I hope to get some new writing done during my week of freedom.  To do so, I’ll have to squeeze it into a family trip to the mountains.  Don’t get me wrong, I love family trips to the mountains.  Fresh air, a nice cabin, food, Dollywood, a little hiking, food, possible bear sightings, beautiful scenery, and food.  What’s not to love?  But I want to get a barrel full of new words written and I may well be looking at a bucket-full of time.  I really want to get my fairytale rewrite written (rewritten?) and I’d also like to get some momentum on my novel project…heck, any novel project.

So my week off is a week on for writing.  Plus I have a small mountain (more a large hill) of papers to grade and a lesson plan to rewrite for personal edification.  And all the family bonding stuff.  And I think I wanted to squeeze some eating in there.

Nothing like a little down time.  :^)

Thoughtful Critiquers

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

It’s been a while since I’ve had a story critiqued by peers for the purpose of readying the story for submission.  I get critiques through Codex contests, but that’s about as far as it’s gone.  It’s been a whole lot longer still since I received a genuine, thoughtful critique.

I do non-standard stuff with my writing.  I massage the rules of punctuation, drop words that might be dropped in true dialogue, used biased narration, manipulate sentence lengths to build tension (often through repetition of short lengths), slip out of a consistent PoV, and who knows what else.  I know I do these things.

What I want from a critique is to know how well these techniques worked.  Some of them may be unintentional, but most are deliberate manipulations of the laws of good writing.

Consider if you will, my recent Escape Pod story “Leech Run”.  I received a lot of critiques on that story before I finally found a home for it at Zero Gravity.  (It was critted to death even before it became my first WotF honorable mention, then more afterward.)  One of the comments  received from 80% of the critiques regarded the scene where Reif first discovers Titan’s tattoo.  “You break out of Titan’s PoV,” they all said.  And indeed I did.  The rest of the story is from Titan’s point of view (admittedly a limited sampling of his PoV to avoid spoiling the end, but more on that later), so they were indeed right to notice and mention it.  But that’s where the comments stopped.  I don’t recall a single one of these critiques postulating as to WHY I broke PoV for that moment.

I tried writing the scene from just Titan’s point of view; it just didn’t work.  First of all, Titan couldn’t see the tattoo, so that’s one strike.  But the bigger part was the emotional impact, the intimate intensity that passes between the two, Reif being on the receiving end of most of it.  They reached an understanding at that point, one best illustrated by putting the reader into Reif’s head.  It was a poetic device more than anything.  It just worked.  But the assumption made by the critiquers was that I didn’t do this on purpose and it was wrong.

Fine, maybe it’s “wrong”.  I can live with that.  But did it work?

“Leech Run” has received a lot of comments and a few reviews since its release on Escape Pod (and a couple from Zero Gravity as well).  Not one of those reviews mentions the tattoo scene.  As readers (and/or listeners), the brief PoV shift was not apparently an issue; it was only an issue to those reading for purposes of critique.  The reviews did cite some issues, particularly some infohiding that led to an ending that was a little deus ex machina.  FWIW, that was also mentioned in the critiques.

This is just one example of critiquers assuming the worst of my writing skills.  There are dozens more.  So I plead to those of you that offer critiques to fellow writers, when something strikes you as off about the execution of a story, wonder why.  Does the deviation add something to the story?  Can you see why the writer thought it might work?  The writer will appreciate the effort you put into understanding their process and might even take more of your other comments to heart.  And that’s why we critique in the first place, right?

Too busy to write

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I suspect we’ve all said it.  I’ve said it recently.  “Too busy to write.”  Hogwash.  No such thing as too busy to write.  Maybe on a specific day or potentially a week, but by and large you can’t be too busy to write.  Writing may be your lowest priority, that’s different.

So I’ve modified my excuse: I’m too tired to write.  This is more accurate since every time I try, I get two paragraphs in and the screen gets blurry because my eyes are rolling back in my head.  Even now I’m typing with a migraine.  (They come in varying degrees and this one isn’t even making me nauseous…yet.  But definitely a migraine.)  Still not a good excuse.  (The tired excuse, not the migraine).  I’m not too tired to work or eat or take my daughter to soccer, why too tired to write?

So I’m doing something about it.  The reason I’m too tired to write is because I’m not taking care of myself sufficiently.  So starting as soon as this headache goes away (hopefully sooner rather than later), I am dedicating myself to two daily rituals to battle the too-tired-to-write syndrome.

1) I will exercise.  Time for me to use that elliptical machine in my living room for something more than a hanger for XXL shirts.  It may even make me more tired at first, but I know (as does most everyone else) that regular exercise yields more energy.  Plus it’s generally good for me.

2) I will be in bed by 10:30.  Lately it’s been midnight with the alarm less than six hours later.  Not a healthy routine and obviously one that leads to my sleepiness.

These plans do fly in the face of the “too busy to write” logic.  Exercising takes time.  Often I’m up until 12 because I’m writing.  Won’t these take time away from my writing?  Well, no.  Yesterday I got home from work and took a much needed 45-minute nap.  That’s when I should have been writing.

If you need a bigger kitchen, you have to knock out a wall and do a bit of construction, an act that will reduce the effective size of your kitchen for a while, but your kitchen is bigger in the end.  I’m remodeling my lifestyle to increase the size (and efficiency) of my writing time.

Not time, energy.  Sometimes the best solution flies in the face of logic just because you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.  I wonder how many of my stories could be improved by similar strategies?

Five ways to NOT finish a story

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I recently surveyed my file of half-finished stories and realized there are about as many of those as I have sold stories.  Not good.  That led to wondering why I had so many unfinished stories which in turn led to this post.  Now you’re up to speed; let’s do this.

5) The fatal flaw.  The story is moving along great only to realize that the clever ending I was moving toward requires one or more characters to do/know/be something impossible per other story elements.  This technically only requires massive rewriting and/or rethinking, but it tends to result in story abandonment.

4) The Research Stall: Several of my stories grind to a hault when there’s something I need to know but can’t find on Wikipedia.  I had a military sf novel rolling along great until I realized I had never been to boot camp, so how can I send my character to boot camp without it feeling like Starship Troopers and Full Metal Jacket had a baby on my computer screen?  The answer: research.  I am not at a place to physically experience boot camp, so I needed a good documentary or something.  My search for said documentary dragged and the story stagnated.  It happens more than I care to admit.  At least I know what to do to get back into the story.

3) Shiny new story!  It never fails, inspiration strikes while you’re already in the middle of something.  Oh, and it seems brilliant and exciting and it grows like a Chia Pet until it blocks out the sky.  Accepting that bait and abandoning a story — with every intention of returning to it — usually spells doom.

2)Lack of planning.  At first this was going to say “the story sucks”, but that’s not quite right.  The story sucks because it wasn’t a full story when I started writing it, just an idea or two tossed around with minimal direction.  If you know where the story is going, it’s a lot easier to get there.  (Note that #5 Fatal flaw can still occur with planning, it just means the planning was flawed.)

1) Life just gets in the way.  Daughter, job, wife, long-neglected housework, job (yes again), relatives, pets, sickness… Sometimes I just forget the story’s even there.

There are lots of other ways to kill a story before it’s complete, but these are the five I recognize from my own junkyard.  How about you?