Tag: Writing

Sent out two

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I went ahead and sent “Brother Goo” to Cricket today.  Duotrope suggests it will be 3-6 months before I hear back.  I’ll miss that story while it’s gone.  If it gets rejected, I’ll have to strongly consider a rewrite.  I haven’t posted my full version (submitted slimmed down version) to Critters for review, but I will.  There seems to be no rush.

I also posted “Leech Run” to the slush mesage board at Jim Baen’s Universe.  It’s a neat idea, posting stories to a password protected page (so there is no technical publication…same as Critters does) to get comments from readers.  Editors also peek at the stories, requesting rtf files from stories they find particularly promising.  I’m running it through the “Introducing” bracket, basically contending with other writers that haven’t breached pro level markets.  If you are a Baen’s Bar member, you can give it a read and post some comments, especially if they are helpful comments.

At any rate, I’m keeping my top-end stuff out there.  Even a blind fisherman gets a nibble or two, right?

-Oso

Story for Young Readers

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

In a response to an open plea from a youth-oriented SF magazine’s editor, I wrote a story about a boy and the alien that possessed his brother.  Not the most original of ideas, but it was for kids.  As I wrote, new twists on old ideas came to me and found their way to the page.  Now I have two problems.

First, the story is too long for the market that inspired it.  The market caps at 2000 words and this story is just over 2300.  I could probably cut a few hundred words if I wanted to, but I’m pretty sure it would weaken the story.  After all, it’s not the plot that’s special, it’s the relationship between the brothers (even though one of them is not technically there).

Then there’s the other problem: I think this story is too good to start with this particular market.  This market offers only token payment and will have minimal exposure value.  I like the market and the people who run it, but I am trying to establish myself as a professional.

I may try the story in some non-genre youth-oriented publications, maybe Boys’ Life or Cricket.  I need to look up their guidelines first.  I may also try Black Gate (though I think they may be closed to submissions right now) or some other zines that insist their demographic begins with preteens.  It might prove a futile endeavor, but it would be a shame to sell a story for pennies when it might have been worth something.

I’ll probably drop it in the Critters queue while I wait for responses.  I’m having some trouble with the title: “Brother Goo or Why I Threw My Brother in the Ocean” is what I have right now.  Old school “or” format.  Unfortunately I feel like the first sounds like mucus and the second gives away too much.  I may just try “Brother Goo” and see how it is received.  Look at that, I made a decision right here in the middle of my blog and you were here to witness it.  Momentous.

-Oso

UPDATE: I checked out some of those guidelines.  Boys’ Life has a 1500-word limit.  Cricket‘s is 2000.  I went back through the story and trimmed it down to 1990 (the last cut I made was a full paragraph).  I probably could have left a little more in there.  I’ll reread the cut version in a few days, after it’s filtered out of my memory some, then maybe send it to Cricket.  It could still make the rounds of the standard genre magazines, but Analog won’t be likely to touch it.  I’ll probably stick to semi-pro markets outside the youth-oriented zines.  Time will tell how it all works out.

“Blog Faith” and other stories not yet written

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I commented on another blog (comments seem to have vanished) about some ideas for stories, particularly story titles.  It is interesting because a coworker recently was telling me that he would love to write and he feels he has the mastery of language to do so, but he has no ideas.  Maybe I’m blessed with an overabundance of ideas (not all good, but ideas galore), and I am constantly finding new inspirations.

One place I found ideas calling to me is the WordPress global tags list (http://en.wordpress.com/tags/)  This is an especially interesting place for me since the list is perpetually changing.  If you read through the tags two or three at a time, story title s are hidden there.  The ideas to accompany them must come from the mind (or soul or whatever), but it’s a kick start.

At this moment, these titles appear consecutively on the page, inspiring stories I will summarize in a line or two.  I have no fear of sharing this tactic or even the stories I think up since even if my story was directly stolen from here, my story and your story would be nothing alike.  So feel free, borrow my thoughts.  (How cool would it be to find your story by one of these titles in a mag?  Almost as cool as finding my own.)  I won’t be likely to write the stories to go with these anyway.  This is purely for my own amusement and hopefully yours.

  1. “Mp3 Kids”: There a re a couple ways to tae this one.  How far a stretch is it for a generation of kids to be addicted to Mp3s so much that all information must be transmitted this way?  Almost like uploading directly to their brains.  Or more creatively, women who can’t have children (or empty-nesters or whoever) start downloading children to their portable devices.  They care for them, teach them, discipline them, a lot like a Sims game or something.  The whole obsession could get out of control.  This is actually a lot like my story “Glow Baby” (currently seeking a market).
  2. “Real Estate Animals”: An Animal Farm-like satire where wild animals sue in court for the property rights for their habitat.  They could get insects involved and tie up some major construction project for decades, each species suing in turn.  Then the corporation files to have the cases consolidated and the animals pack the courtroom with their ilk (or elk).  Wacky hijinks ensue (pun intended).
  3. “Fiction Theology”:  Fairy tale characters (or other characters) gather to discuss their positions on God and religion.  The discussion might do well to focus on a hot topic (gay marriage? abortion?).  This could be done cleverly or very poorly.
  4. “Blog Faith”:  Protagonist searches the internet for signs from God, focusing perhaps on specific blog sites.  He/she might find hidden patterns in the postings (similar to the films A Beautiful Mind and The Number 23) and pursues a life change based on them.  Or maybe it’s all based on one post that is completely misinterpreted.  Can you imagine someone mistaking something here as a holy sign?  Let’s hope it isn’t from my Morally Unusual post.
  5. “Random Personal Thoughts”:  A pretty but naive teenage girl starts picking up thoughts from classmates.  She starts with guys: checking her out, thinking…teenage guy thoughts, maybe trying to look up her skirt.  Then she starts receiving them from girls: jealous thoughts, insecure thoughts.  Each thought might get progressively more personal, first amusing her, then scaring her, finally spurring her to action for someone’s benefit.  Basically and early psychic manifestation.  This might be a good one for me to write considering my daily proximity to teenage minds (rather their bodies are proximal…who knows where their minds are?).

I feel like there were more amusing options the first time I tried it.  Of course you could mix and match words from anywhere on the page to develop your own combination, changing nouns to adjectives and such as needed.  This is basically the same as opening a dictionary to two random words or Damon Kight’s connecting index terms on pages of a SF catalogue (the origin of his story “Stranger Station” according to Creating Short Fiction).  The PARSEC Wrighting Contest uses a prompt similar to this, as I suspect do many others.  (I advertise this one because my 2004 entry, “Chasers” was published in their anthology, Triangulation, even though it did not place in the contest.)  Try your own variation and get writing.

Morally Unusual

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I was watching some television and was inspired by some characters’ moral options.  Often we, as viewers/readers, see the options as the good option and the bad option.  No, that’s probably too simplistic.  There are very few truly bad characters who do stuff just to be bad.  Similarly, how many people do good things that are completely against self-interest?  Let me rephrase: we see the ethical option and the selfish option.

Not very interesting.  I find myself intrigued by those gray options, the ones that give you a chill up your spine that the characters managed to pull it off.  These are tough to write, tougher to make appear anything other than twist endings.  Ah, but the morally ambiguous option is a beautiful thing when properly executed.

The short story “The Catbird Seat” is decent example.  I really like it because the main character has originally chosen the most selfish (crossing into evil) option imaginable, to kill a coworker (if I remember correctly).  By the way, SPOILER ALERT!!! in case you are planning to read some James Thurber short stories for pleasure.  Anyway, he gets cold feet or lacks opportunity or whatever, instead planting a story in his target’s head so preposterous that she will surely share it and surely be thought insane, again if I recall the story correctly.  It has been a while.

The brings to mind the question, “How do I write that kind of morally gray resolution into my stories?”  I’d actually prefer they be grayer, more in the vein of putting the antagonist in a bad spot and leaving him/her a way to save face by giving the protagonist what he/she wants.  Let the killer go but take away whatever treasure the murder was committed for.  Let the cheater maintain victory as long as the true prize is abdicated.  Give up the girl by spilling the beans on the competitor.  It’s the lose-lose ending or at least the no-winner ending.  It’s best if the protagonist walks away with a sense of satisfaction and the antagonist does not, especially if the protag’s cut seems less valuable than the antag’s.

I think there are three ways to achieve endings like these, surprising third options where win and lose are relative.  One way is to luck into them, write a story that presents a clever option as you go.  These are nice but are hit and miss.  Another, plan the twist ending and build the situation around it.  For instance, start with the idea: “the braggart achieves the ultimate stunt but can’t tell anyone without going to jail” or “crook can escape but only by giving the loot to charity”, then figuring out how one would get in that situation, what type character would suffer/gain most from this, what setting would this seem most poetic, stuff like that.  That’s a lot of hard work and planning and might force the story to have an all-too-convenient feel, but I bet a lot of stories work that way.  Then finally there is the kill-the-obvious method.

The kill-the-obvious method is where you plan the obvious ending to a story, then toss that idea.  Plan another; toss that.  Maybe write out the third ending and toss it.  Toss another.  At some arbitrary point you feel like all the choices are exhausted, so you craft another one.  You might have to backtrack to foreshadow this synthetic option or even to make it plausible, but it can usually be done.

The man drinks the poison.  No, he pours it out.  No, he gets someone else to drink it.  No, he’s immune to it.  Again, no.  So what’s left?  Maybe he keeps it.  Why?  As evidence, to threaten someone, as a souvenir…whatever you want, but the point is, who would think of it first?  Sometimes a morally “unusual” choice is the most interesting.

-Oso

Critters online workshop

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

A long time ago (six years?), I went looking for a way to improve my writing. I looked around online (where else does one look these days?) and discovered the existence of workshops. This was where I discovered Clarion and its ilk, but I wasn’t ready for that and couldn’t begin to afford it. Fortunately I also I discovered Critters.org.

Critters is the world’s largest critique group (to my knowledge). It’s definitely the most open. Anyone can join and all stories can be critiqued as long as you critique a minimum average number of other people’s manuscripts — about three a month. I must confess, the first time I had a story critiqued by the group, it was politely demolished. Gradually the comments grew more positive, and now I find most of them say more good than bad.

Oh there’s always a few that carry an air of hostility, as if nothing written by anyone but them will ever be worth publishing. And there are others that just don’t prefer a specific story. But by and large, Critters leads me to believe my writing has come a long way. But what good are atta-boy comments to me?

Critters does a great job of letting me know if a story is confusing or if the pace is too slow (athough some people want every story to be a Jason Statham movie), or catching spelling and/or grammar mistakes. The members spot POV problems well, devour opportunities to say “show-don’t-tell”, and never miss a chance to question dialogue mechanics. These can be helpful because authors frequently are blind to these issues in their own work. I still run almost every story through the queue at Critters for this kind of advice plus the infrequent gem of insight someone drops in my lap.

What Critters can’t tell me is whether a story is ready to sell. Many Critters members have sold stories, but do they know what made their work saleable and what makes their other stories rejection magnets? I sure don’t. I like to think it’s a difference in taste, but I doubt it. I am confident that I am making significant errors that are fixable but invisible, often even invisible to the rejecting editor. Critters is yet to help me with those problems.

It’s not that I haven’t received comments that could push me in the right direction. I probably have. But which ones? I like to think (naively) that comments I offer to other writers are in the top quartile of significance (everyone knows they are the smartest, right?), but how is a writer to know how brilliant my comments are? Or are they rubbish? If ten people tell me that a speech pattern is hard to understand, I will probably change it. If three tell me it’s hard to understand, three rave about how perfect it is, another points out the misspellings the dialect created (without mentioning dialect at all), and two don’t even mention it, what is a boy to do?

This blog entry is not designed to disrespect Critters. Far from it, I advocate Critters to any writer, beginners to pros. What I want to do is make some suggestions on how to use it as a writer. Some day, I will assemble my thoughts on how to approach Critters as a critiquer (arguably a more valuable angle).

  1. Investigate the accuracy of line edits. Do you really need a semicolon there, or will your original comma be sufficient? What is the specific definition of the word they recommended? These people may be English professors or burger flippers and it’s important to remember that fiction has room for the styles of either. Characters end sentences with prepositions and should. Even narrators should. “Correct” may not be the best way to write. After all, “Woe is I,” is the grammatically correct sentence. But the burger-flipper may not be the guy to listen to, either. Sentence structures should be varied while still being clear. Some people want every sentence to follow the same build, as if they will be expected to diagram them and want to know where each part lies. Look it up before you change it.
  2. Never take a critter’s word as law. One person may say something that makes you slap your head and say “why didn’t I see that?” Don’t change anything yet. Consider everyone’s comments first. A problem in the story’s middle may not be caused by the writing in the middle. In my experience, Critters tend to notice different problems surrounding the same part of a story. They all suggest different fixes. Often those suggestions will fix one problem but not the others. Look for the fix that will take care of everything. Maybe that means merging two characters into one (seldom suggested to me despite the usefulness of the exercise) or merging two scenes or sometimes as simple as changing a few words. This is a vague comment but is the key to gleaning useful information from a cluster of critiques.
  3. How is the critiquer’s writing? A few typos aren’t a big deal, but if it’s tough to decipher what a critique is saying, do you want to take its advice on how to clarify your story?
  4. Sometimes the places that they “don’t know how to fix it” are the places that need the most attention. Think about it, an editor can request a rewrite with a shorter chase scene or with the flashback cut or a thousand words shorter. They can’t say “fix the part on page seven that seems not right for some reason”. I guess they could say that, but they won’t. Rewrites aren’t sales, but they are wanna-buys. If they like it but can’t put a finger on why they can’t buy it as-is, they’ll end up passing. So trust people who scratch their heads in places (in accordance with number two), they may be the most valuable comments you get.
  5. If someone is tactless, they probably don’t know what they are talking about. Critter’s policy is to use diplomatic language, expressing every thought as the critiquer’s opinion rather than hard fact. Some things will come across a little harsh (no one wants to read ten thousand IMOs), but you know when someone thinks they are God’s authority on publishing. If they were so smart, they wouldn’t be messing up the Critter’s policy. Still, you should read their comments. Almost every critique has value, if only to reinforce the comments of others.
  6. Don’t take it too seriously. Most of these people are far more focused on their own writing than they are on yours. Why should they like your story? You brought it to them to look for the flaws, they have nothing else invested in it. Editors at least want to like your story when they read it. Hey, I don’t like most of the stories I read on Critters. I only like about half of the ones I read in magazines. My opinion is worthless to you; my complaints and advice (combined with everyone else’s) can help you improve your story tremendously.

If you use it wisely, Critters can make your stories (and your writing in general) much better. It did mine. But it takes a lot more to make them good.

-Oso

Writing Books

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I wanted to run through a list of the top ten books I use/have used to learn to write. I have no formal training to write, never took a creative writing class, didn’t even take my comp classes in college (exempt by ACT score). I took the basic English classes in high school. A lot of what I know came from reading fiction, but I have used a fair number of books for writers to hone my craft and a lot of trial and error. So here they are in roughly the order they proved helpful (1 being helpful when I was a beginner, 10 being helpful today).

  1. How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (Card): This really helps put the genre in perspective.  I like to reread this one for inspiration, but it was priceless when I got started.  Anything by Card is fantastic.  (Need a good fiction read with great characters?  Try Ender’s Game.)
  2. Get through the slush pile.
    Get through the slush pile.
    The First Five Pages (Lukeman): So many of my stories had trouble getting started.  This book helped me figure out what to look for and how to fix it.  Lukeman’s follow-up book, The Plot Thickens, was far less useful to me, more a guide on how to build a story from the ground up.  It’s got its place, but First Five is an excellent guide to getting editors to read the story rather than skim and reject.
  3. The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (Bickham): I confess, when I first read this book, my stories were guilty of about ten.  It’s a good guide for training your eye what to look for when revising.  I still like to flip through the list every few months just to remind myself what to look for.  You don’t have to avoid every mistake, you just need to know when you break a rule.
  4. Harbrace College Handbook (Hodges): This is the collegiate bible for grammar and punctuation usage.  It doesn’t matter much what year your Harbrace was written since rules in fiction writing aren’t set in stone.  Again, it’s nice to know what convention is (or was) if you intend to break it.
    5. Find the best word.
    Find the best word.
  5. Flip Dictionary (Kipfer): It serves basically the same function as a Thesaurus but includes a lot of phrases and/or concepts related to a word.  For instance, you want to know what you call the referee in a baseball game.  You can look up either “referee” or “baseball” and get to “umpire”.  It’s also handy for finding words related to words related to something.  The “Flip” in the title refers more to how you’ll flip through the pages than having the definitions and words flipped around (although that description works, too).
  6. Self Editing for Fiction Writers (Browne & King): This is similar to 38…Mistakes but goes a lot deeper into the parts of the story, looking at larger pieces and more subtle adjustments like tone and voice.  The sections on dialogue are quite good, as is most of the advice in the book.  I reread this recently to fish out some of the concepts that might still be eluding me.
  7. Creating Short Fiction (Knight): Damon Knight knew what he was doing.  His knowledge has guided many writers to professionalism.  Not me yet, but it’s got me going a good direction.  This is an especially good book for dealing with writer’s block or with stories that just won’t come out right (consult Fred).  A lot of the information in this book is also in Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, which focusesa lot on the Clarion workshop, too.
  8. Writing the Breakout Novel (Maass): Eventually I had to ask myself why my stuff isn’t selling when I see a lot of junk out there that does.  I came up with two reasons: connections and X-factor.  I have found no book for establishing connections, but this book tries to take some of the mystery out of the X-factor that can make even schlock sell.  Maass, a big time literary agent, makes that X-factor something you can plan and work toward.  It’s still hard to know if I’ve got it, but it gets you moving that way.  (I think I’m around the V-factor right now.)
  9. charviewElements of Writing Fiction Series (Card, Kress, Noble, Bickham, and others): I cheated a bit here.  I had trouble selecting one book from this series, so I put the whole thing.  I found Character and Viewpoint very useful early on while Beginnings, Middles, and Ends was a bit more advanced and Plot fell pretty well in the middle.  Each book in the series was good, though Description was a little to poetic for my taste.
  10. Paragons (Wilson, ed.): This is a book of short stories by masters, each story followed by an essay by the author regarding how they achieved whatever the story was renowned for (characters, plot, tone, etc.)  I have had this book a long time and have not yet begun to use it effectively.  It was published as a masterclass to follow Clarion.  There’s a lot of skill and subtlety outlined in this book and I intend to read through it again as soon as I remember to bring it home from school.

There are a lot of other books I have used.  Many of them repeat the same information that the above books spell out better.  Some just plain sucked.  It is worth noting that I have never used or read The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) which is a renowned tool for all writers.  I think it does a lot of what I use Harbrace for.  The bottom line for me is whichever books are readable and offer advice that improves your writing (directly or indirectly) is a good book.  I hope this list might help some beginners (and non-beginners) find resources improve their craft and might inspire some discussion on other books I might have missed.

-Oso

Ouch.

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I just received an email from Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (a respected semi-pro magazine in Australia) regarding “Leech Run”. It took them an impressively swift five days to reject it. Most zines don’t even see a submission for a couple weeks. ASIM does good work and has a fairly transparent review process with three rounds of reading. I made it past level one but got axed in level two. American Idol fans, that’s like going home the first night of Hollywood week.

Now I need to find a new market for “Leech Run”. I’m afraid I exhausted some good candidates prior to a major rewrite. I probably could send it back to Fantasy & Science Fiction, but it is considered bad form to send a rewrite to an editor who did not request one. So I may try The Leading Edge or…I don’t know, someone else. There is a bit of a limited market for short space opera. Novels? They seem to fly off the shelves.

Today I attended a teacher inservice about poverty, mostly an emphasis on differences between middle-class and lower-class students (and parents’) perceptions of and responses to things. There were some good insights there that I would love to use in a story, particularly how money is spent. I’m already forgetting a lot of it and don’t have a story or character yet. I guess I’m waiting for another idea that can piggyback with this one to make a story.

I’ve worked the last couple days on a piece for middle-grades kids (not to be confused with middle-class kids…I mean 5th to 8th graders). It needs some serious editing, but I got the first draft onto the screen in record time. Now to hack away 20-30% of the length so I can expose the real story and maybe then add a little back for aesthetics.

Hmm, it’s late and I’m yawning up a storm. I’ll ramble more when I have more to say on more sleep. Thanks for reading.

-Oso

Greetings to all my fans: past, present, and especially future.

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

…and then, against all odds, something crawled out of the primordial internet and became Oso’s Blog.

If you found your way here without knowing who I am, good for you.  I currently publish under the name Scott W. Baker.  That being my actual name, it seemed a good choice.  I am toying with the idea of publishing under a nom de plume, or maybe even a pen name, but as yet I am not convinced this would be wise.  For instance, how would the dozens of people who have read my previous stories connect my past works to my current and future works?  If I did adopt a pseudomymn, I have pretty well decided it should be Oso Baker.  It’s a nice combination between my real name and my internet identity.

I guess my first post here should explain the origins of “Oso Muerte” in their entirety.  As so many nerdy nicknames do, it started with a character in a role playing game.  I wanted something tough, but my friends decided the character class I had selected resembled a dead bear.  Being that my character was supposed to be South American, I named him “Dead Bear” in Spanish.  Rather I tried to — it came out Oso Muerte: “bear death”.  Anyway, the character was fun and resembled me in more ways than anyone cares to hear, so the nickname stuck to me, at least with that very specific clique.  Seeing as no one else was absurd enough to use such a name, it became my go-to username for anything online.  Try Googling it, see if anything other than me comes up.  You’ll get my Amazon profile, maybe my MySpace page, maybe a few pages in Spanish about endangered ursines.

Still, the name comes across too Spanish for a pen name, especially considering my considerable ignorance of Spanish or Hispanic cultures.

I have maintained a blog on MySpace for a short time, but that didn’t quite suit my needs.  So I am moving in here at WordPress, growing up and getting a place of my own in the http://www.  I may move those old blog posts over to catch people up on the dizzying pace of my writing career (currently composed mostly of waiting).  Until then, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to:

CLARION!

Don’t get too excited, I am just in the application stage.  Actually I am past the application stage and into the clawing-my-eyes-out-while-I-wait-to-hear-something stage.  But currently my Clarion applications are the foremost issues in my daily writer-life.

For those who do not know, Clarion is THE workshop for budding speculative fiction writers.  It’s a six-week bootcamp taught by five professional writers and one editor, usually award winners and often workshop  graduates themselves.  All other big-time workshops are built off its model.  I have applied to both the American incarnations of Clarion: Clarion West and plain old Clarion (often called Clarion East despite its recent transplant to San Diego).  There are other workshops — Odyssey, Viable Paradise, Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp — but I can’t bring myself to take serious time away from my wife and two-year-old daughter unless I truly believed the workshop could kick start my career.  Not every Clarionite becomes a pro, but their track record is exceptional.

The story I submitted to Clarion West just earned an Honorable Mention from L. Ron Hubbard’s “Writers of the Future” contest.  A higher placing would have inspired more confidence, but HM tells me I did something right.  A simple rejection from the contest would have discouraged my hopes of attending Clarion.  Still, there are no guarantees until there are guarantees.

I submitted that same story (entitled “Leech Run”) to Clarion East as well as a more recent work (“Glow Baby”), which was inspired by my daughter’s night light.  Both stories were between five and six thousand words, though one was Firefly-esque space opera and the other is more SF invading modern life.  Both these stories are making the rounds through different markets, though I may let “Glow Baby” take a pass at the Writers of the Future contest, too.

As soon as I hear anything about either workshop, I’ll be sure to post the outcome here.  Well, maybe not right away.  First I will have to hyperventilate, tell my wife, dance around the room, call my mother, cry a little, and then I can post here.  Bad news will simply post without fanfare.

I am not basing my career on acceptance or rejection from Clarion (or CW).  I will write come workshop or high water.  But man, I could use the kick in the keyboard these workshops represent.

This blog will not be all about Clarion.  It may not all be about writing or SF, either.  It’s a blog and I’ll throw you whatever scurries though my odd little head.  Right now my head is full of Clarion.  (It has been accused of less savory fillings.)  Come back to see what other stuff I might say.

-Oso