Walking on the Respectable Side

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

I’m off to ConCarolinas soon. (Hooray!) I actually leave Thursday for my parents’ place for a short visit and to hand off the kiddo, then on to Charlotte.

The con got me thinking about business cards.  I mocked up a design and may or may not distribute a few while I’m there.  Anyway, business cards got me thinking about my amateurish email address.  How juvenile is it to put an unpronounceable email on a business card?  So I set out to explore the options of receiving email through this site’s domain name.  Thanks to Google Apps, it turns out it’s easy.  So now I can be reached at writer@scottwbaker.net.  I have not abandoned my old addresses, osomuerte@gmail.com or osomuerte@hotmail.com, so there’s no need to alter any contact info you have for me.  I have simply added a small degree of legitimacy to my persona.

Is it that important to portray myself professionally?  Probably not.  But here;s a short list of things I have done over the past year or so to improve my apparent professionalism:

  • Purchase my domain name.  It’s cheap, like 15 bucks a year, if I recall.  I was too late to grab the .com name, but it’s tough to mistake me for a NYC photographer.
  • Abandoned my web handle.  I’m still “Oso” in a few circles, but mostly I use my name.  A handle from a character in a role playing game is not the way to present myself to the SF world.  Not that the SF world doesn’t get it (most do), just that the SF world knows that I should know better.
  • Cons.  I’ve been a guest at a con (thanks ChattaCon!) and am doing what I can to attend cons periodically.  Why?  Connections!  I made some great ones in Chattanooga in January and I hope to continue the trend this weekend.  The best way to do that?  So far my luck has been at the bar.  Just saying…

…and that’s about it.  I’ve done so little to seem like a pro.  The most important things to do are writing (which I need to do more of) and selling (which I need to do a LOT more of).  Until then I will present myself with dignity and competence, even though I’ll still do it in a Hawaiian shirt.

A Drizzle in a Drought

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

My zombie fairy tale story “Not Rats” just sol to the Untied Shoelaces of the Mind anthology.  Yay.

This was a 750-word flash that the editor asked to have rewritten, which lead to a growth spurt to 1300 words.  Very short story, semi-pro pay…my tax bracket isn’t changing, but it’s nice to have a sale.  I’m looking forward to the contributor’s copy more than the check.  (Not that I would never turn my nose up at a check.)

My story production has slowed waaaaayy down of late.  Summer should allow me to bring things back up, but a big chunk of that will be novel work.  I need to redouble my efforts to get my current stable of stories out into circulation.  Stories don’t sell from the hard drive.

Some days you’re the shoe…

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

…some days you’re what gets scraped off.  Today has been absolutely craptastic.  Really the last 24 hours or so.  Little stuff, to be sure, but none of it uplifting.  I got a visit from the micromanagement fairy at work and got to spend twenty minutes changing grades…to the same thing they started out as.  (Let’s just say that putting restrictions on how math teachers average grades is like me telling the New England Patriots to only throw slant routs.)  Then came the twin form rejections from Digital Science Fiction and Asimov’s.  Then there’s personal stuff that’s none of your business, but it’s unhappy, too.

I’m ready for silver linings.  Better yet, acceptances!

Until then, I await June with the end of school and the coming of ConCarolinas.

Pro Zines and Amateur Mistakes

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Nothing like sending a submission email without the submission attached to make you feel like a rank amateur.  And nothing like doing something stupid to inspire a blog post.  I was sending the story to Redstone Science Fiction, a young but respected pro-paying zine, and in my eagerness I hit send before attaching the story.  Doh!  Not sure if the second try went through.  I didn’t change the subject line and did not receive a (second) autoreply.  I’ll give it a little time and follow up.

For those living under a rock, you should know that Redstone is open to submissions only for the next couple weeks.  So get your (4000-word or less) stories off to them in a hurry.

For that matter, why didn’t you know this already?  (Play along for a second and pretend you didn’t already know.)  Anyone writing short fiction should be receiving the Duotrope newsletter.  That’s how I know.  A weekly market update sent direct o your email.  A quick perusal lets you find updates on your favorite markets and quick links to new favorites.  Sign up.

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.

Summer Starts with a Con

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 2 Comments

I just booked my room for ConCarolinas.  I hadn’t realized how early CC was this year: June 3-5.  Hoorah!  That gives me a week off school before my summer con, likely the only one I’ll get to this summer.

CC has a history of being a strong literary con, strong enough that my pitiful resume didn’t get me a guest slot.  Alternative history legend Harry Turtledove will be the writer GoH.  I will most assuredly be getting my father’s copy of Guns of the South signed.  Other literary-types attending include (but are not limited to) Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books (who I met at ChattaCon), Ed Shubert of IGMS (who I met at last year’s CC and from whom I have received some lovely rejections), Gail Z. Martin (met at both ConCarolinas and ChattaCon), most of the crew from Magical Words, and Codex members J.F. Lewis and James Maxey…and those are just the ones I recognized after on quick pass.  I’m sure I’ll meet more great people/writers this year, especially since I’ll be staying in the hotel rather than with a friend that lives only a few minutes away like I did last year.  More cost but more con experience.  I missed out on a bunch last year.  Not this time.

There will also be media guests of note.  No, not Nimoy or Hamill or Spielberg or Radcliffe…not even names you would likely recognize on their own, but roles you would recognize.  John Billingsley?  He was Dr. Phlox on Enterprise (not to mention a boatload of other roles other places).  Bonita Friedericy?  General Beckman on Chuck…and Billingsley’s real-life spouse.  David H. Lawrence?  Try the Puppet Master from Heroes.  Emilie Ullerup?  Julia Prynne on Battlestar Galactica.  See, you know them.

The full guest list is at http://concarolinas.org/index.php/cc/ccguestlist/88

For those that haven’t attended a science fiction convention, they pretty much what they sound like.  Yes, people do dress up like Storm Troopers and Klingons and Ghostbusters and (oh please oh please) Princess Leia.  But not everyone.  Not half of everyone.  Costuming is a fun part of the con to behold.  I hope to eventually pull together a Dr. Horrible costume, that being WAY cheaper than say a Malcolm Reynolds costume.  But not likely for this year.  Anyway, cons also have panel discussions and an art show and a dealer room.  However, rumor has it that most business goes down outside the framework of the con…typically in the bar.  It’s been my observation, too.  My best contacts from ChattaCon were made in the bar, at parties, and/or at meals.  These are the bits I missed last year.

I have a special affection for ConCarolinas since it was the first con I ever attended.  I kind of consider it my home con despite being closer to Nashville and Chattanooga and Atlanta and probably others.  It’s big enough without being too big.  It’s got strong literary participation.  Lots of panel rooms.  A Nerf war, for crying out loud!  (Speaking of, where’s my Nerf gun?)  My folks are pretty close (90 minutes?) and can watch the kiddo.  I have a local friend.  What’s not to like?

What else?  Oh yes.  Against my better judgment, I’ll mention this here: I have booked a room with two beds when there is just one of me.  I did this with the thought that I’d split said room with a friend if I could find one attending that needed a room.  I am not expecting to be so strapped for cash that I need to split it, so I will be very selective of my roomie.  (In other words, a post like “Hey, nice blog you got.  What was your name again?  Oh, right, it’s at the top of the page.  Anyway, I’ll go halvsies on a room with you…” will probably earn a cool reception and a polite decline.  But, if we’ve engaged in conversation (real or online) and you’re thinking of attending CC and are contemplating costs, a split might be an option.  Just putting it out there.  Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure: I snore like a truck.  Yeah…I’m likely keeping the room to myself.  Just as well.  🙂

What cons are on everyone else’s hit-list this summer?

Tick…Tick…..Tick……..

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been quiet a while.  School’s been busy and stuff, but mostly Ive been waiting for some sort of responses to report.  Sunmission news has been vacuous of late.  I got a form rejection from DSF on a flash, but that’s it.  I keep waiting.  And waiting.

Full disclosure, I only have one sub that’s been out n inordinately long time and that’s to a market I knew was slow.  A couple have been out for over a month.  Two more around three weeks.  The rest are under a week.  So I’m fidgety for nothing.  Maybe it’s just having nine stories out that has me itching like a shaved dog in a fiberglass sweater.  I don’t think I’ve ever had so many, but I can’t recall.  I have more I need to push out the door, too.  For instance, I’m holding one story for Pedestal which has been closed to subs this week.  Sending it tomorrow.  And my zombie culture story should be ready to sub soon.

So what to do when the waiting gets painful?  The obvious answer — write!  That is in addition to checking email every five minutes, scouting responses on Duotrope every hour, and giving the mailman dirty looks as he drives off without returning your SASE to you.

I’m in a weird place with a few projects — in the middle of a contest for Codex, trying to turn a novelette into a novel — and my production feels incredibly low compared to time spent writing.  Maybe that’s the problem.  Or maybe it’s Brad’s fault with all his success and accolades.  🙂  Or that other writer with her top secret make-me-jealous news.  🙂  Or all these creepy smileys hanging out everywhere.  🙂

Let’s face it, I’ve followed up my WotF win (announced over a year ago) with bupkis. The issue is jealousy, but I’m actually jealous of me…me a year ago.  Where did that all go?  It’s time for me to step back and remind myself that writing is a (cliche) marathon, not a sprint.  It took a long time to get to where I am (or was last year) and it may take time to move to the next level.  Things happen lowly in this business.  I know this.  I just don’t like it.

So I return to my projects at hand.  FS goes to Pedestal tomorrow — ooh, clock says today! — and I need to get CMZ ready to fly out the door soon.  Refreshing to have a new story to start collecting rejections.  And I need to finish my Codex contest story (whether it moves to the next round or not) and get my novelization project in gear.  And pretty much in that order.  Plenty to be done; no time to continually refresh my email.

You too.  Why are you reading blog posts with so much to be done?  Get to it!

Bookstore visits: then and now

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

It’s ironic.  I love bookstores but I seldom find myself in one anymore.  For one, they are disappearing daily.  (Moment of silence.)  Second, who really goes to a bookstore when they need a book?  I just download it to my Kindle or order it (cheaper) from Amazon.  But this post is not about the invasion of the ebook market (I for one welcome our new computer overlords) or the decline of the faithful old brick-and-mortar book seller.  This is an observation on how my bookstore browsing and buying habits have changed over the last few years.

When I started writing, I always went in search of the how-to-write books first.  A decent bookstore will have a reasonable selection but seldom the ones I really wanted.  Lots of grammar books, but I can do grammar, always could.  Several write-a-novel-in-X-days books, not really what I was after, either.  I have picked up good books right off the shelf, though: Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel, several Elements of Fiction Writing books, and others that slip my mind, but I’ve plucked some stinkers, too (not listed).  After that I’d head to the science fiction and fantasy section, rounding out with a tour of clearance items.

Now it’s backward.  I hunt for cheap books first.  Why?  Because I don’t know what I’m looking for.  Just the other day I picked up The Hero (Ringo and Williamson) and The Ice Dragon, a short story or novelette that was retrofitted as a children’s story by none other than George R.R. Martin.  The latter seemed  an intriguing idea and roused my interest.  The former, well I just don’t have any John Ringo stuff.  I suspect it’s mostly the work of his co-author set in Ringo’s world, but hey, it was a buck.  So was The Ice Dragon.  Happy purchase.

Next I go to the sci-fi section to look for WotF 26.  Books-A-Million has it.  I turned it face out last time, a feat that actually put it in front of four out of five copies of another book.  They’ll have me for it, I’m sure.  But if it sells, I guess they won’t have to worry about it.  Other than randomly pimping a book that earns me no more money if it sells, I also look for names I recognize, personally or as a fan.  I seldom buy this way because my backlog is so deep.  If nothing else, it helps me decide what to shop for on my Kindle. I also look at the publishing houses and imprints on the shelves and skim for general ideas of market trends, not to copy, just to know.

The last place I look is the how-to-write section.  This time I did actually make a purchase, my first from this shelf in a while: the Gotham Writer’s Workshop’s guide to screeplay writing, Writing Movies, the victor in a brief page-flipping battle between it and another screenwriting book.  This was not a bargain book, but I wanted a good screenwriting book to balance out the bad one I have.  I’ve been happy with the chapters I’ve read so far.

My recent trip to the used bookstore was similar, but every book there is a bargain book, so it’s a little different.  I like to skim the science books for things that might spawn story ideas or better yet deepen an existing story idea.  I got a little tiny book on Multiverse theory a few weeks back.  Not even sure what it is, but it sounded promising.

Another stop was the travel books.  Face it, I’m not a traveler; can’t afford it and don’t overly enjoy it.  But it’s tough to set every science fiction book in Tennessee, so I need to expand my horizons somehow.  I picked up a 3-D guide to Paris and an insider’s guide to New York for use setting stories in those cities, two books I would never have paid real money for (I have store credit) but will surely see eventual use.  I make a point of wandering through the sf/f section, too.

Basically, I know how to write, I just need help with specific story elements.  Setting, consistency, inspiration, ties to real-world science.  Can I make a Multiverse story set in Paris?  Or a screenplay in Soho (whatever that is)?  My chances are better now.

This of course made me wonder what other writers look for in bookstores.  Maybe I’m overlooking some useful sections?  How do you shop?