Category: On writing

Even though I write science fiction and fantasy, I am a member of the Romance Writers of Australia (RWA). I’ve been a member for years. I initially joined on the recommendation a fellow fantasy writer, who said she found it the most professional writers’ group she knew of for people who were serious about writing.

She was right.

Obviously, given what we (my co-author and I) write, I’m not the RWA’s target membership. I’m okay with that. I still get value out of the membership. And our stories do have romantic elements, so I’m not completely there under false pretences.

Recently, RWA reclassified their membership groupings. The new classifications are:

• Aspiring … developing/writing a romance/romantic elements manuscript, developing their understanding of the craft and/or thinking about or actively entering contests.
• Emerging … has had a romantic/romantic elements work commercially available or under contract for fewer than three years or … is consistently making the finals round in writing contests, is submitting and receiving requests from publishers or agents, or who has already secured an agent.
• Established … has a romantic/romantic elements work commercially available or under contract, and … consistently/actively publishing longer than three years.

The italics are mine.

Initially all members are ‘aspiring’ authors, unless they reclassify themselves. Herein lies my dilemma. Technically, I would be an ’emerging’ writer. I (we) have an agent. I (we) have a book under contract. Three books, in fact. Except … the book is pure science fiction. It’s a space opera and there isn’t any romance in this first book. (There was, initially, but we took it out to extend the relationship over the whole series.)

Decisions, decisions. Do I leave myself as ‘aspiring’ because I don’t meet the ‘romantic/romantic elements’ component? Or do I reclassify myself as ’emerging’.

Still, it’s a nice dilemma to have.

We were checking out book covers to see which ones we liked. We started on the internet, until one of us said, “Why don’t we find a bookshop and check them out on there.”

So off we go into town*, to Minotaur, which carries a large range of speculative fiction.

We’re looking at books, discussing individual covers, when the young man at the shelf beside us asks if we’re looking for something in particular and if he could help.

Most of the science fiction and fantasy readers we know are like that. Always happy to talk about books and to offer recommendations.

“We’re just looking at covers,” we say, and explain why.

That starts a conversation about covers. He likes striking covers, preferably without people. After that we move on to what makes him buy a book. Occasionally it’s the cover, but more often it’s the title. We go from there to recommending books for each other, and then move on to world building. Magic systems that work, then valid alien/fantasy races. We finish up discussing the aliens on the computer game, Mass Effect.

The three of us spent an hour discussing it all.

Spec fiction readers are great.

 

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* Technically, ‘town’ is the city of Melbourne. I only realised a few months ago that my workmates thought I was strange whenever I said I was going into town (I live and work in the suburbs) because they go into the ‘city’. Old habits are ingrained. Even though I’ve spent more of my life now in a big city than I have in the country, it’s obvious from my choice of words that I wasn’t initially from a city.

One thing wannabe writers are told is to write a million words. This makes sense. That’s the equivalent of ten novels. Or, if you rewrite—and of course you rewrite, don’t you—at least four or five. If your writing hasn’t improved by the time you have written a million words, you’re doing something wrong.

What they don’t tell you is that the improvement isn’t a steady upward line. At least, it wasn’t for us. We’d write along at the same level for a while, then get a sudden insight and improve a lot, so that the quality of one book was much improved from the previous two or three.

When we finished writing Linesman we thought it one of the best things we’d written to date. But not the best. It was one of three novels we wrote around the same time which were on a par, writing-wise.

It’s definitely the best now, because it’s been through three major rewrites since.

When we sent LINESMAN off to our agent we thought it was pretty good. Our agent made suggestions and we re-wrote chunks of it. After she started sending it out and we got feedback from editors we re-wrote it again. Then, once a publisher took it on, our editor made further suggestions and we rewrote once more.

While the base story is the same, there have been some massive changes to a story we thought was good enough to send out. We have learned a lot from our agent and editor’s input. We hope to use what we have learned to improve our stories in the future.

But your writing doesn’t always improve. The first story we wrote after we got our agent (which our agent hasn’t seen) wasn’t very good. Sometimes you slide backward in ability before you start to climb again.

That’s not to say the story isn’t better than, say, BARRAIN, which is nearly ten years old. Because it is. It’s much, much better. Even we, biased authors that we are, can see that. It’s just that we can also see it clearly needs more work to fix than the book we have just finished.

That’s probably the best part. That we can see it needs more work. Five years ago we probably couldn’t have seen that.

Combined, we’ve done our million words, or close to it. Over that time, our writing has improved. It just hasn’t been the continual ‘always improving’ that we expected it to be.

If you read Chuck Wendig’s blog, Terrible Minds, you’ll recognise the quote in the heading. It comes from a recent post of his on why you should write what you love.

Chuck’s big on lists, and he gives five reasons for writing what you love, rather than writing what you think the market wants. Read the whole list here—Chuck words it better than I can.

He makes valid points:

• Don’t write for the market because what the market wants is the stuff you can’t predict, and the stories that start market trends are generally those written by people who wrote what they wanted to
• You write better when you’re allowed to write what you want and what you enjoy
• Because you were passionate about writing it, the reader is more likely to enjoy reading it
• There’s no guarantee you’ll succeed as a writer. Why do something you may not succeed at if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing?

But it’s his last reason that struck a particular chord with me.

• Everyone dies in the end. What do you want on your gravestone?

Made mediocre art she didn’t much like because she thought that’s what someone else wanted her to do

or

Arted the hardest …

I know which one I’d prefer.

It’s the perennial question people ask of writers. “Where do you get your ideas?”

Everywhere. Anywhere. Ideas come from the strangest places, the most ordinary of places. They pop into your mind suddenly, or come back again and again, sometimes over a period of years.

They don’t all come the same way, they don’t even come when you have pen and paper handy. They just come, whether you’re ready for them or not.

Here’s an idea that popped into my head overnight.

It started with an image. The image of the two snow leopard cubs from Bronx Zoo that’s making its way around the internet right now.

This took me, via Twitter, to a site called ZooBorns—cute baby creatures born in zoos—where I read about a cheetah cub abandoned by its mother who had been paired with a puppy. The cub and the puppy will be raised together, and as they get older the dog’s body language lets the cheetah know that there is nothing to fear in new or strange surroundings. There are four such cheetah-dog pairings at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

 

This is part of a photo from the ZooBorns site. The picture was taken by Ken Bohn, at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

 

My first thought—after the initial, “Aw, cute,”—was, “Do the cheetahs ever eat the dogs?” I mean, cheetahs are fast and can bring down a sizeable prey.

I didn’t seriously think they would or the zoo wouldn’t pair them, but it’s in the writer’s mind to always wonder what if …

What if a cheetah killed its companion?

What if it killed it in front of an audience of zoo patrons?

That’s when the imagination starts to go wild. What if the dog wanted to be killed and eaten, for it knew that its essence would be taken into the cat and they’d be companions forever?

What if the companion wasn’t a dog at all? What if the cat was alien, and the companion human? What if, in this universe, there were some races who thought of humans as no more than animals?

And then, what if this human had allowed himself to be captured because he needed to meld his soul into the cat’s so that he and the cat between them could overthrow the aliens who considered both races as non-sentient?

What if …

And so it goes? The idea morphs from what it originally was into something else altogether. The final story is likely to end up as something entirely different. Like, maybe an alien feline species who always pair their soul with another sentient species, and chance upon a strange, two-legged race (which they don’t realise is sentient), and one of them accidentally ingests a human soul.

For us, that’s where it stops for this particular idea. Neither of us are enamoured with it. It’s a dead-end. But it’s only one idea.

Ideas are everywhere.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe indie publishing has peaked.

I write science fiction, and science fiction writers always trying to predict trends. And like any science fiction writer I can get it horribly wrong, but I do think that indie publishing has peaked.

At GenreCon last year I noticed that everyone, but everyone, seemed to be pushing the indie-pub option. If you look at conference schedules for the various genres this year every one of them has at least one session devoted to the subject. Many have more. Even San Diego Comic Con had a session.

Even so, I am starting to see a trend away from the enthusiastic, “Forget about traditional publishers, indie is the only way to go,” back to a more measured assessment of whether alternate publishing models work.

I can understand that, because self-publishing isn’t the nirvana everyone wants it to be. From my perspective as both a reader and a writer there’s a lot that doesn’t work for me with the indie publishing model.

As a reader

I used to buy and read a lot of indie author work. I don’t any more. It’s too hard to trawl through the badly-formatted, poorly written stuff to get to the gems. (I shop like that too. I hate sales, with those tables of sale items you have to sift through to find the bargains. I can’t be bothered.)

I used to follow a number of authors whose writing I liked and who showed promise, but their writing never improved, so in the end I gave up on them.

I still occasionally chance on new self-pubbed authors but nowadays most of those I read are authors I liked through traditional publishing who later moved on to publishing for themselves.

It seems to me too that the indie-published authors I do read are finding it hard. I read their blogs and they say it’s a lot of work. A couple have already transitioned back to traditional publishing for some of their work.

As a writer

Self-publishing is hard work. Not only do you have to write the book, you have to edit it (or better yet, organise editors—pay them, even), arrange covers, market it on your own, be your own technical person and so on. In short, you have to be the author, editor, marketing person, sales person, and everything else your agent and publisher do. Me, I just want to write books. That’s enough work on its own.

Plus, don’t discount the value of the work your agent and editor do for you. Our first book improved out of sight after our agent suggested revisions. It improved again after our editor got out her electronic red pen.

There’s also the issue of money. There is no real competitor for Amazon in self-publishing. I can see that the commission they pay on self-published books won’t stay high forever, especially if they win the Hachette-Amazon dispute.

My prediction

My gut feel is that indie publishing will follow a traditional bacterial growth curve, with logarithmic growth—as we have seen in the last few years—followed by a decline until it settles down to a stable position.

I don’t think it will go away. It has a place, and will be accepted alongside traditional publishing as a viable publishing option.

I do think, however, that the glory days of indie publishing are past us.

The internet was down yesterday.

Outside on the street I could see four massive cherry-pickers, at least twenty workers and one new power pole. I’m not sure why the internet was off and the power was on when they were working on the electricity but it was.

You would think that time off the internet would give you time to write without distractions.

It’s good if you are writing your first draft. It’s not so good when you’re in the middle of edits. Especially if you are using the cloud to share files.

Nowadays if you want to share edits and you’re both working on those edits at the same time, it will probably be via some form of server connection. For most of us, that means the internet.

If the cloud worked the way spin doctors told us it would, being off-line shouldn’t matter. I would make my edits on my version, Sherylyn would make hers on her version and when the internet came back up the two files would synchronise and all would be fine.

Except as anyone who’s tried to sync files will tell you, it doesn’t work like that. File synchronisation is an inexact science at best. It’s still very buggy. Sometimes it seems that the moons have to be aligned, you’ve touched your lucky rabbit’s foot, and prayed to all the gods you can think of just to make it work properly, and woe betide if you do these things in the wrong order.

Be paranoid. Be very paranoid. Back. Up. Everything. Every day. Twice a day if you feel more comfortable.

Check before you start working on a document, just to be sure that you have synched, because sometimes the synchronisation gets out of order and an old version overwrites a newer one.

The internet came back up at 4pm. I have to say, the editing went much faster after that.

Obtaining an ITIN, part 2

A couple of months back we posted about obtaining an ITIN (international tax identification number).

Our ITINs came through today. As you can imagine, we are happy. It was relatively painless, which we didn’t expect, given that so many people posting on the internet seemed to have issues.

In part 1 we talked about why we needed it and how to get one.

This is what we needed:

• A certified copy of our passport
• The tax treaty paragraph number
• An exception letter
• W-7 form to fill out

A certified copy of our passport

We knew we needed an apostille, which is a specially certified copy of our passport. These are provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs.

We took our passports in to the closest passport office, queued up to organise the request, paid our money (A$60 each) and went back two days later to collect them.

Very easy, and painless.

The tax treaty paragraph number

This actually caused the biggest problem, and it was totally our own misunderstanding.

When you fill out the W7 form, and give the reason for applying for ITIN, you are asked to provide the treaty country and the treaty article number. For some reason we read that as being the ID of the treaty itself, and there are around three different document numbers quoted depending whether you go to the US site, Australia or other places on the internet. So we spent some time trying to work this out, and eventually even called the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to see if they could help us with what to put there. ATO called us back and walked us through the context of the question. Thanks ATO. 🙂

You are not looking for the treaty, you looking for the paragraph number inside the treaty that refers specifically to why you are requesting an ITIN. For us, that was paragraph 12, the paragraph that referred to copyrights.

Exception letter

We thought this would be the hardest, but it was actually the easiest. We asked the people at our agency about this, they asked Penguin and Penguin supplied a letter which had everything we needed.

Penguin was great, they supplied more than just the letter. They supplied instructions and links for the W-7 form, plus instructions and links for the W8-BEN. We could have worked out everything we needed to do from their email. No research required.

W-7 form

As I said, Penguin supplied a link to the latest form. All we had to do was fill it in.

Based on other people’s experiences, we were careful to:

• Fill in every field we could, putting N/A where a question was not applicable
• Not use abbreviations

And of course, the easiest mistake for anyone who normally writes their dates dd/mm/yyyy

• Made sure we wrote the dates in mm/dd/yyyy format.

In the reason for submitting form W-7 we ticked reason a) and reason h).

 How long did it take?

The IRS said it would take 8-10 weeks to get the ITIN, and that was spot on. We sent our request mid-May, received it mid-July.

Where to from here

Now we have our ITIN, we can fill in the W-8-BEN.

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Obtaining an ITIN, part 1

Back when there was all that controversy about the SFWA Bulletin, when people were discussing what an industry magazine for the science fiction community should be, I remember that one of the commenters said,

“Science fiction already has an industry magazine. It’s called Locus.”

It’s true.

Locus is not part of the SFWA.

It started out as a newszine and while it has become easier on the eyes, it hasn’t changed much since I started reading it back when I was a lot, lot younger. It still contains the same rich information, details of upcoming books, along with a whole lot of other industry information.

Its editorial profile describes it thus:

LOCUS is a monthly trade journal, founded in 1968, whose readership consists of chain and independent book buyers, librarians, publishers, bookstore owners and managers, and other science fiction professionals, as well as dedicated SF readers. It has won the Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest honor, 30 times.

LOCUS is famous for its book reviews and author interviews, recommended titles lists and analysis of the SF field, monthly bestseller lists, monthly listings of all SF books published, and its up-to-date coverage of newsworthy events.

If you read a lot of science fiction you have probably heard of the magazine. It’s the place to get a complete list of new books coming.

If you write science fiction you should definitely have heard of it. If you haven’t, I recommend you do.

If you’re looking for an agent, Locus magazine and the Absolute Write Water Cooler Bewares, Recommendations & Background Check thread should be must-haves in your agent search.

Because not only does it list books coming out, it also lists books sold. It says which publisher bought them and which agent sold them. If you are serious looking for an agent for your science fiction novel, these are the people who are actively selling science fiction right now.

These are the agents you should be targeting your queries for.

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There is a website but this is one case where you absolutely should have the magazine itself. It comes in paper version and digital. You can order it direct from Locus or from a supplier in your home country.  Slow Glass Books here in Australia. I get my (digital) copy from Weightless Books and I’m happy with the way it pops into my mailbox each month.

One of the most common pieces of writing advice around is “show, don’t tell”, yet it’s hard to explain the concept sometimes. It’s one of those thinks you know when you see.

Writers, especially beginning writers struggle, struggle with the concept. It’s all very well to give examples like:

Don’t say the man was old and fat, show him getting up out of his chair with difficulty, his bones aching, his back bent, using his walking stick to push himself up.

It sort of works, but it sort of doesn’t too. If you try that too often without really knowing what you’re doing you end up with description soup, your story lost under the weight of your attempt to ‘show’.

You need concrete things you can do to fix your story.

Our first drafts are full of telling. Here are two techniques we use to change some of this telling to showing in the second draft.

Don’t have your characters ‘think’

Look for places in your story where your character ‘thinks’ and replace them with what he thinks about.

Chuck Palahniuk says it a lot better than us in his essay about this on Lit Reactor, Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs. He explains that if you get rid of the thought verbs: thinks, knows, understands, realizes, believes, wants, remembers, imagines, desire your writing will be much stronger. He shows some good examples too.

Try to make the story active

It’s easier to pick where a story is passive than where a story is showing rather than telling. Not only that, there are grammar rules you can apply to pick where a story is passive and change it around.

Minion Fogarty, Grammar Girl, gives a good example in Active Voice Versus Passive Voice. I’ll quote her verbatim here.

In an active voice the subject is doing the action. For example

Steve loves Amy.

Steve is the subject, loves is the action.

In a passive voice, the target of the action gets promoted to the subject position.

Amy is loved by Steve.

Another way to look for passive prose is to look for words like has, was, and were.

Let’s try a really quick example of a first draft, written passively.

There was banging on the door. It was so hard the door shuddered on its hinges. Alistair wondered if he should run or face Bo’s anger. He opened the door. Standing in the doorway was a ghost. The ghost booed at him.

Okay, so we’re not looking at award winning writing here. It’s bad, and we know it, but bear with me. It’s got all the passivity we want. ‘There was’ banging on the door. ‘It was’ so hard … and so on.

Let’s make it more active.

Someone banged on the door, so hard the door jumped in its frame.

Should he run? No. Best to face Bo now.

Alistair opened the door. A ghost stood in the doorway.

“Boo,” said the ghost.

Notice another thing. Passive text is a monologue. This happened, then that happened, then something else happened. It’s bland. As you start changing the passive text to active, you realise just how bland it is. Now that you’ve made it more active, it’s easier to see places to tweak, which helps with the show/tell.

Someone banged on the door. Hard and loud.

Should he run? No. Best to face Bo now, in the safety of his own home.

Alistair opened the door.

One of the ghosts from the waterfront stood there. The big bruiser with the red hair and the shoulders twice as wide as Alistair’s and the axe in his head. The one who’d been half-transparent the other night. He didn’t look transparent now.

He didn’t sound it either, if that had been him banging.

“Boo,” said the ghost.

The story is starting to sound different to the bland telling we started out with, and as an added bonus, we’ve doubled our word count too.