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?

Leadership at home

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I really wish there was more to the local SF community where I am.  Tennessee isn’t devoid of skiffies (Chattanooga has a small but active community and Memphis seems to thrive), but I’m in a bit of a dead zone here between Nashville and Knoxville.  And neither of those cities really has any events worthy of a trip.  But what I really want is a group of quasi-academics that can get together and celebrate SF in all its glory without having to play a card game or have a LAN party or heaven forbid LARP.

Maybe it’s my social circles that limit me.  Most of my exposure is to high school students, recent high school grads, and a few teachers.  Thus I am fishing in a pond of mostly guppies.  I went through all the same stages: when the Empire/Jedi discussion in the movie Clerks was the model for deep philosophical debate; when a weekend meant a twelve pack of Dew, a bag of Doritos, and pirated anime; when every book I read for a year was a sequel to every other book.  These are great and important stages in the development of true geeks nerds SF fans,  but these are stages I can’t wallow in any more.

I’m looking for a social group where I can drop words like “steampunk” and “cryonics” without pausing to describe them.  I want to tell people about the writers I’ve met at WotF and cons (Niven, Pournelle, Turtledove, Tim Powers, Kevin J. Anderson, Robert J. Sawyer, Mike Resnick, Eric Flint) and get at least one nod of recognition.  I’m convinced that there is a community of such people here where I live — heck, this is the retirement capital of all places that aren’t Florida; I could hang with some septuagenarians.  But I’m not aware of any such gatherings.

So I suspect it falls to me to build a local SF community if I want to participate in one.  I am in a good position to do that, I suppose.  But I am a busy boy and this would be quite a commitment to get the thing off the ground.

It has been proposed to me that I start a writing/critiquing group instead.  I cringe at the thought of reading some gardening memoir or wanton love story as much as people who write those would cringe at the thought of reading about extra-planetary colonies or zombie humor.  No, I’m looking for a genre community.

Suppose I was to start one.  How to go about it?  I would LOVE some feedback from anyone that has ever started any sort of local science fiction community.

  1. Plant flyers at the used bookstore.  It’s the only bookstore in town and thus my only option.  I suppose I could drive west instead of east (I live in between) into the college town of my alma mater where there’s a Books-A-Million.  I don’t envision being able to draw from both towns, though, and I’m more entrenched in the east where I teach.  But it’s an option.
  2. Plant flyers in the library.  We have a nice new library in the eastern town in question, but even I have never been there.  Reports of the library’s under-use are legendary.  I suppose I could have my (as yet theoretical) group meet at the library to combat those rumors.  This may actually be working itself out…
  3. Facebook bombing.  Just get friends and acquaintances to spread the word through social media.  It’s likely that people interested will have some sort of e-presence.
  4. Offer something tangible at the first meeting.  Free books, free food, free…something.  Maybe a book swap.  Bring three books — leave with three books.  I don’t know, maybe I’m getting a little cliche now.  Would I be won over by free food or a book swap?  Not likely.  I’d just need to hear about it.

So what’s stopping me? Well, lack of success.  I sponsor the science fiction club at the high school and club membership is…well, it’s low.  I hit double digits on the sign-up sheet, but I’ll be shocked if that many show up.  It’s partly how clubs work at the school; they all meet at the same time and if you’re interested in two, you have to pick.  So when given the choice between a club with 100 people or a club with 10, peer pressure lures most students away.  Once upon a time I had over 100 kids in the club, back when different clubs met on different days.  Then again, most of those members were video game/anime/card game types that lost interest when ten minutes of club time passed without an explosion or cartoon nipple.  (I’m rambling now, aren’t I?)

So, do I start a hometown SF community?  Do I call it a club? A community? A hive?  Or do I keep to myself and avoid effort and disappointment?  This is all academic right now, but maybe someday…

[ETA] I followed up this post with some nosing around for existing local groups I might not be aware of.  All I found was my old college’s science fiction club which hosts a con.  Last year they report having around 200 attendees.  How did I not know about this?  Anyway, I sent next year’s con chair an email offering to participate in said con.  We’ll see if it amounts to anything.

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?

My Brain is Untied…and Yours Could Be, Too!

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

(Two posts in two days?  Whoa, he’s a juggernaut!)

One of my favorite feelings is to open up the mailbox and find a book inside.  Yum.  Even better is when said book is a contributor’s copy with my own story inside!  I got this feeling a couple days ago when the Untied Shoelaces of the Mind Anthology arrived.

Wow, there are a lot of stories in this book.  I counted 52, one for every week of the year (not how they were assembled, just works out that way).  It’s a touch overwhelming.  Most stories are fairly short, most under six pages.  Worth $7.99 for this trade paperback?  Probably.  Worth $1.99 for the electronic version?  Heck yeah.

My story “Not Rats” is a bonus that never appeared in the USotM ezine, so it ended up in the back third with the other bonuses.  It’s classified in the table of contents as a horror story (which is probably how I subbed it) but it’s really humor.  Fun stuff.

Buy book, read story.  You have your orders.  Dismissed.

 

Back to the drawing board and loving it

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I’m not blogging as much as I’d prefer.  I’ve groaned about that recently and I groan here again.  The day job has become a bit more demanding of late with new evaluation protocols and such.  Add to that my daughter’s soccer schedule (which I help coach) and my time shrinks to teeny-tiny bits scattered randomly.  I like to use those bits for writing when I can.  But don’t give up on Chaos Out of Chaos; I’m still here, just more sporadic than I used to be.

I recently had a steampunk adaptation of a fairy tale rejected from an anthology for being too fairy tale and only superficially steampunk.  Ever gotten a rejection and nodded?  That’s what I did because it was right, the steampunk was mostly just window dressing.  Moreover, it wasn’t an adaptation so much as a retelling in different style.  Ping, two for two in the nod department.

The editor (both editors in concert, actually) offered this analogy:

Consider two movies based off gang-interpretations of Romeo and Juliet: West Side Story and Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrman).  West Side Story is an adaptation, twisting the skeleton of the story to make sense in the new setting with new characters and new events.  Romeo + Juliet simply used guns instead of swords and used a modern setting; they used the Shakespearean words, for crying out loud.  Not an adaptation, just a change of clothes.

The editor is looking for a new story that fits the mold of the fairy tale, the way Willow was really Star Wars or how Avatar is really Dances with Wolves.  O Brother, Where Art Thou is likely too perfectly like The Odyssey.  The (bad) movie Barb Wire is too perfectly Casablanca.

Anyway, I hit the drawing board with the same fairy tale but a new plan, to make a new story that fit the mold of the fairy tale.  It helped to take (most of) the fantasy aspects out of it.  Now I have a skeleton for a stand-alone story that is a true adaptation.  Character names will likely stay the same, but the rest is history.  Who people are will change, changing their interactions and motivations, changing the events, changing the final outcome.  Whole new story that will still mimic the original in concept.  All it took was a little suggestion from the editor on how to change a key character’s role to get this whole new story tumbling out.

I confess, I was pretty happy with the first story.  If someone wants a pure fairy tale dressed in steampunk, I think it’s a winner.  Still, I felt it was too loyal to the fairy tale structure and too far from the more modern storytelling style that I usually write in, so it wasn’t quite me.  This one will be more me and I like it that much better.  As soon as I figure out where to start it, I’ll get this thing written.  Still have a while before this new draft is due, but this idea is kicking hard and is taking precedence over my Codex contest story, which is almost done but needs a significant rewrite to insert theme and structure into the freeform glob I wrote on first pass.  The glob may get submitted to the contest in favor of time for this story.  We’ll see.  Hopefully I’ll have time to write SOMETHING soon.

Cutting jokes and other painful experiences

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

A couple hours ago, I put a shortened version of “Excuse Me” in the mail to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: Flush Fiction Anthology.  I love Uncle John’s stuff and I couldn’t resist the opportunity.  (Subs must be postmarked today, by the way.)

The book will be all flash fiction.  “Excuse Me” was originally published at 1500 words, 50% beyond the flash fiction count.  And while I did have other flash stories lying around, none seemed quite right for a non-genre audience (captive though that audience might be).  “Excuse Me” seemed a good fit, particularly since there were bathroom-related functions involved in a less-than-gross utility.  So I set about trimming it to length.

It hurt.  It’s one thing to cut edgy character building or riveting backstory or eloquent description — those are all tough to do — but cutting genuinely funny jokes is like removing an appendage.  In my experience, only about one in ten of my jokes actually ends up being funny.  Occasionally I’ll string a few good laughs together and endure a long dry spell afterward to balance the universe, but one-in-ten about covers it.  So in a story with roughly twenty (alleged) jokes that are (allegedly) funny, I have to write 200 jokes.  Yes, really.  (Mostly it’s issues of rewording and timing, but there’s a distinct difference between funny and flat.)  So cutting a joke that is actually funny feels like cutting ten times as much.

So how did it end up?  Better?  Not in my opinion.  Dr. Kwack isn’t as zany and Gary doesn’t seem quite so disturbed.  And for purposes of plot continuity, I had to leave in some weaker jokes and remove some stronger ones.  I also cut the racier references to sex, diminishing Kwack’s Freud obsession.  But it’s still punchy (probably a little punchier) and still has the best bits of humor (snow cone maker, lingerie shop, Vaudevillesque stinger at the end), so I think it has a shot.  Humor is very subjective, after all.

Speaking of things that hurt, it looks like I’m missing Dragon*Con again this year.  The timing just sucks.  My wife is spending all this week working at the County Fair and I barely see her and I get to play both parental roles this week.  Exhausting.  Plus I have so much else to do and so little cash to fling around.  I wasn’t going to go down for more than a day anyway, so the loss is minimal, but it still sucks.

I haven’t been much of a writer the past few weeks.  The days have just been packed to the gills with stuff to do.  There have been small gaps that I didn’t exploit to their fullest — this one, for instance — but even those have been few and far between.  This evening represents the biggest clearing in the past two weeks and it’s being dedicated to catching up on the day job.  Must…write…soon…or…ex-…plode…

 

A Writerly Update

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Distracted as I am by the countdown and launch of the school year, I find myself pushing writing to the background. Even good news is being tossed to the wind (Twitter, Facebook, whatnot) and left to drift without much attention. So here’s an update.

*****

Poop. Technical difficulties truncated my multi-paragraph post to near nothing.  And I had links all through it.  Not happy.  Let’s try again.

The big news is that Daily Science Fiction just accepted a flash piece called “Ten Seconds”.  Happy.  DSF is a market I’ve wanted to break into for a while now.

“Leech Run” has received mostly positive comments at Escape Pod.  There is some debate over the quality of the read (which I am fond of) and a few folks that were less than fond of Titan’s character, but most people seemed to enjoy the story for the thrilling blockbuster it was meant to be.  (That’s right, blockbuster.  You Hollywood types listening?)

“Not Rats” is still scheduled to be in the Untied Shoelaces of the Mind Anthology, which was pushed back but should be out within a month or so.  Both those stories came from the Codex Weekend Warrior flash fiction contest.  Clearly worth doing again.

Another flash piece that I wrote during the Weekend Warrior contest but was not an entry got a rewrite request from Every Day Fiction, a little flash zine I am friendly with.  I rewrote the one little bit that (understandably) bothered them and now I suspect the rewrite will be accepted.  Small money, but a fun zine.

I have a few others out there: a steampunk story to an invitation-based antho that has fewer openings than previously anticipated, a zombie story that’s been lost in an editor’s shuffle, an old sale hoping for new life as an audio reprint, a zany story at a new and mysterious market.  They all have chances; none will stagger me if rejected.

All in all, a lot of good going on in my writing world.  I need to push more stories out of the stable so even more good can happen.  My cover letters are getting more impressive: WotF, Escape Pod, DSF.  I’m starting to feel like a real writer; makes me want to get back to that novel I’m supposed to be working on.  Where did I leave that thing?