Category: On writing

GenreCon 2013 has come and gone. We both met lots of great people, talked until we were hoarse, and learned lots from the varied presenters.

As usual, we’re both blogging about it. This is my (Karen’s) take on the event. Sherylyn’s will follow in the next post.

John Connolly was superb. Entertaining, witty and targeted perfectly to his market of writers.  I would love to be able to speak like him.

Or failing that, Kathryn Fox.  She was excellent too.

The two stand-out sessions for me were the long ones that covered practical aspects dealing with writing.

The first was Damon Cavalchini’s Say It With Feeling. Damon gave practical tips and hints on how to prepare for and do readings. Useful tips on how to overcome your nerves, how long you should read for, and the impact that changing your tone and pitch has. Tips on dealing with nervous mannerisms like waving your arms about (do it, just be careful of the mic) or giggling. Tips for practising readings and using your voice. It was good, practical advice on a topic most of us never even think about until we have to do it.

The second was Alex Adsett’s Contracts and Copyrights. Again good, practical information from a woman who obviously knew what she was talking about. Alex covered the basics of copyright and permissions and then went on to cover publishing contract clauses and rights. What the various clauses mean, which are the show stoppers for her, and so on.  And she made it easy to understand, which you have to admit is hard to do when you’re talking legal documents.

Next up: Sherylyn’s take.

After reading the recent tweets from #MSWL—Manuscript wish list hashtag—on Twitter I did my own non-scientific analysis of the results and came up the following list of potential future trends.

• Historicals in different eras (MG, YA, NA, adult)
• Male protagonist who’s not beautiful/perfect or who is deeply flawed
• Lots of YA science fiction and fantasy
• Lonely kids
• Sassy contemporaries. If they’re YA, not too much angst
• Retelling of fables, fairy tales
• LGBQT and POC
• Space opera
• Epic fantasy
• YA horror
• Con/heists/mysteries/capers

If I had to pick a single trend I’d say it was historical fiction, particularly for eras that haven’t been written about before. Regency is out, Victorian, Renaissance and middle ages are in. The trend crosses over to science fiction and fantasy as well as mainstream historical.

There were a few requests for stories about lonely kids, some for non-perfect heroes, and others for sassy contemporaries without too much angst. Quite a lot for lesbian, gay, transsexual and bi-gender (LGBQT) and people of colour (POC).

I got the impression that people were looking for more uplifting stories than they have for a while.

There were lots of requests for YA horror, science fiction and fantasy. I think this is fantastic, as it means this next generation will grow up thinking of these genres as automatic ‘to reads’. Bring it on.

There was also a bigger demand for mysteries and capers than I have seen for a while.

What’s really good for us is that quite a few people are looking for space operas.

Now that’s a trend I like.

The pressure to always write ‘serious’ stuff can lead to burn out. Sometimes you need to leaven it with some fun, otherwise you’ll find you just can’t write any more.

Paolo Bacigalupi writes some pretty heavy stories. They do what great science fiction always does, they make you think—really think—about the issues that he writes about. Like the ethics of genetic engineering.

I remember reading The Calorie Man back when it first came out, just after I’d visited family in the wheat belt of the Wimmera and for some reason that visit we’d been discussing Monsanto and buying GM modified wheat. I tell you, reading Bacigalupi’s story immediately afterward made an impression that stayed with me for years.

However, I digress, I’m not here to talk about Bacigalupi, I’m here to talk about a comment he made on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea, which is part of Scalzi’s Whatever blog.

If you read science fiction and fantasy, by the way, I hope you’re reading The Big Idea. It’s one of the best places I know to discover new/unfamiliar authors.

But, back to Bacigalupi, whose new book is Zombie Baseball Beatdown.

In The Big Idea Bacigalupi says:

To be honest, I didn’t write Zombie Baseball Beatdown just for the giggle … I actually did it because it if I didn’t, I probably wasn’t going to write another one of my ‘serious’ novels ever again …

For the last two years, I’d been miserable trying to write The Drowned Cities with that Greek chorus of critical voices in my head. I desperately wanted to play creatively in a space where I no longer had to worry about who liked what, or who approved of what, or whether anyone would want to buy what I wrote.

I just wanted to create…

The Big Idea: Paolo Bacigalupi*

I know exactly how he felt.

When Sherylyn and I write we tend to do one ‘serious’ novel and then one ‘light and frothy’, before returning to another heavier story.

You can’t call our serious novels anything like Bacigalupi’s, of course, but they’re still a lot more serious than our light-and-frothies, which tend to be romps. We have written, for example, a young-adult fantasy, a rim-world science fiction and a romantic science fiction in our metaphorical time down.

Then we got an agent, and while our agent has been fantastic and not put any pressure on us at all, we put pressure on ourselves. We jumped straight from one serious novel to the next.

And we struggled. Linesman II (Acquard) has taken us twice as long to write as a normal novel, and while it’s good in parts, it’s nowhere near finished yet. We’re on the second draft and there’s still lots to clean up. Clean-up that would normally have been done in the first pass.

Like all of our writing, once we’ve finished a major draft we put the story away for a couple of months. We do this not just so that we can come back to it with fresh eyes, but also because once you have finished writing a story you’re tired of it. Put it away for a bit and you come back to it less jaded. You see what you loved about it in the first place.

So we put Acquard away and what did we do next? We jumped straight into Linesman III (Fergus).

More fool us.

Fergus was coming hard too.

Then, I have no idea why, we started a side project. A story about a demon who eats a wizard and decides to take that wizard’s place. It’s definitely a light and frothy.

We’re having fun writing again.

And not surprisingly, Fergus is coming along well too.

*p.s. Bacigalupi still manages to pack some heavy themes into a kid’s book.

Science fiction writers try to predict the future. Take a trend, extrapolate it, and there’s your future. Yet there are some things you’d never think of, even though they’re so obvious once the trend has arrived.

Selfies are like that.

Whoever would have picked a trend where people took photographs of themselves and made them available on social media?

Not me.

I could probably have picked social media. Maybe not in exactly in the same format, but some kind of interaction and exchange of social information via virtual communities.

But selfies?

In retrospect, it’s logical. The proliferation of cameras on mobile phones, combined with easy access to upload them, combined with social media. It’s obvious, but only after it’s happened.

We don’t write so much as rewrite.

Sherylyn and I go through five and more major rewrites and dozens of minor ones for each novel.

Not so for blogs. Our blogs get three drafts. The initial draft, one re-write if we have the time, and then a final polish before we post. As you can imagine, they’re nowhere near as polished as our novels.

Once a blog is posted that’s how it tends to stay. We’ll fix typos or bad grammar but mostly what you see initially is what you get.

It’s rare, but we do occasionally rewrite articles, either because it they’re badly written or because the post doesn’t get across the meaning we wanted.

The blog I wrote last week—Are you a professional writer—needs rewriting.

When we started A Novel Idea we planned to show how a story changed from first draft to final. Rather than rewrite last week’s post we decided to show what we would edit. And give the reasoning behind it.

Note. This article has been extensively edited. If you want to read the new version, please see An Exercise in Rewriting instead.
Are you a ‘professional’ writer

Wow. Poor Lisa Morton. I bet she didn’t expect the outpouring of vitriol in response to her article ‘Ten questions to know if you’re a pro‘ on the Horror Writers’ Association Los Angeles site.

In her article Lisa gives a pop-quiz list of ten things that define whether you’re a professional writer or a hobbyist. Answer yes to at least eight of the ten questions and you’re a professional writer, rather than a hobbyist.

Most of the people arguing about her article seem to take umbrage at her definition of ‘professional writer’. They argue that you are only a professional writer if you have been paid for your work.

They object to her using the term in any other way.

They also object to questions like:

• Is your home/work place messy because that time you’d put into cleaning it is better spent writing?
• Do you routinely turn down evenings out with friends because you need to be home writing instead?

with answers like, “No, my place is not messy because I like a clean house,” and “So because I want to spend time with my friends I’m not a professional writer”.

Sometimes I look back at the things I write and laugh at myself.

We started this blog in 2006. In internet time, that’s half a life ago.

In 2006 the big social networking tool was MySpace. Facebook was the new kid on the block and Twitter had just been invented. Bloggers mostly used LiveJournal or blogger.com, because only the truly keen or the truly nerdy used WordPress, especially hosting your own site.

Unpublished authors weren’t expected to have websites, although industry advisers were starting to encourage this. Industry advisers were also starting to make the web their own in our in our little writing corner of the internet. In particular, literary agents were starting to blog, dispensing lots of useful information for unpublished writers.

One such agent site was the BookEnds, LLC blog. Like many other blogs set up around the same time, it is now defunct but it was a good site while it was going, full of useful hints and tips about writing query letters, getting published and so on.

Back in November 2007 Jessica Faust wrote about websites for unpublished writers. It was good advice back then, and I even blogged about it.

Part of Jessica’s post talked about putting samples of your writing up on your site.  Here’s what I said when I blogged about it.

Jessica also suggests that posting a chapter of your novel is a good idea.

Some of the people who commented on her blog thought this was a good idea, others were a little wary. I confess to being one of the wary ones … I’m not sure about posting any of the work we are currently trying to sell.

“Huh,” is all I can say now, because seriously, one of the first places I go to nowadays on any author’s website (published or unpublished) is their sample pages. When a writer is published, those pages are my major book-buying decision tipper in many cases. If I like a yet-to-be-published writer’s samples well enough I will keep an eye on their site for when they finally are published.

The times have indeed changed.

If you write science fiction or fantasy, you end up doing a lot of world building.

If your world is part of a fantasy it may have some or all of magic, strange creatures, different plant-life, and so on. If your world is part of a science fiction then it may have some or all of new or amazing technology, strange creatures, different plant-life and space.

If you have space, then you probably have spaceships too.

If you know exactly how your space ships work and can describe the physics and technology behind them, then you are most likely writing hard science fiction. As for the rest of us, we have some idea of how our ships work but we couldn’t tell you much about the technology behind it.

But just because we don’t know every technical detail, it doesn’t mean we can forget about basic laws of physics.

Following are some of the things Sherylyn and I considered/discussed when designing our ships for Linesman.

Our ships never land on planets

They have shuttles to do that. Therefore, there are no strict aerodynamic limitations. Thus shape is not an issue.

Shuttles, however, will need aerodynamics of some sort. And they’ll need to be able to take the stresses of continual entry and re-entry to an atmosphere.

Ships will also need to be large enough to fit at least one shuttle, probably in a shuttle bay.

Our ships have artificial gravity

Given that many of our characters live on spaceships and move easily between ship, space stations (the size of cities) and planets, then our people have to physically be able to do this.

That means they can’t spend most of their time in zero gravity and only hit real gravity when they land on a planet. It would be too dangerous. Not to mention it would make our books a farce, because many of our characters are military people. They kick butt. Imagine a soldier coming onto station from months in zero gravity and taking on, and defeating, the soldiers on station.

Our ships can travel faster than light

In fact, they have a form of hyperspace. They jump through the ‘void’ from one point in space to another without having to physically move to get there. These jumps are virtually instantaneous.

This means that the ship speeds required are mostly for moving from the exit point of the jump to their destination. They don’t jump right to the edge of a planet, say. That’s too dangerous. They jump some way out and then use engines and inertia to bring them in close enough to use the shuttle.

Even so, our ships are plenty fast, and can take the stresses involved in truly fast speeds.  We’re talking hours from Earth to the moon here, days from Earth to Mars.

Fuel

In our universe we assume that our ships are powered with some form of nuclear fission device, which by then is inexpensive and relatively safe (if you could ever call nuclear fission safe).

We also use hydrogen as a secondary fuel, although we never specify how it is used, or how it is stored.

Most of the fuel will be used in bursts. One initial burst to start the ship in a direction, smaller bursts to change direction or slow down.

Our ships are large

We think of our spaceships more as modern-day ships rather than like aircraft. A cargo ship has the capacity of a container ship, and works much the same, with a cabin area for the crew and the rest of the ship given over to big spaces for cargo. A passenger ship will be more like a modern-day cruise ship with bars and entertainment like a cruise ship has. Troop carriers will be like modern-day aircraft carriers.

So all up, our ships are designed for what they are meant to do—carry cargo, carry people—rather than for aerodynamics. Think a modern office block, a cargo ship or a hotel rather than an aircraft. Their limitations are function and the ability to provide artificial gravity.

Have you read Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design? I think you could use the same rules for any project of size.

Email newsletters

I don’t know about you, but I get lots of email newsletters. Junk mail from Barnes and Noble and Amazon and some smaller booksellers I buy from, newsletters from the various writing groups I belong to, lots (and lots and lots) of junk mail from companies I purchase on-line items from.

I also subscribe to a number of author newsletters, where the author mails updates about their work to the reader. I like these, especially when they tell me close to publication date that they have a new book coming out. I’ll look for the book then.

Both the retail sellers and the authors go to some effort to make the emails look good. Adding pictures, formatting it so that it looks good, maybe even running to two columns.

I use Microsoft Outlook, and before I upgraded to Office 365 my Outlook got itself into a twist and started to resize the images. It’s a known issue, which you are supposed to be able to fix by resetting the resolution, but let me tell you, I reset everything I possibly could and nothing fixed it.

Except an upgrade to a new version of Office.

When I got emails with images in them, this was what I saw:

When what I was supposed to see was :

(Both these images were the full extent of what I saw when I opened the mail.)

The text was there, hidden beneath gigantic images that I had to scroll past to look at. After I scrolled sometimes I found the text was in one block and was readable, but other times I had to chase all over the screen to read it because of the way the mail was formatted.

If there was a link at the top of the message to view the newsletter on a webpage, then I clicked on the link.

Otherwise I simply deleted the email.

Sadly, the junk mail proponents always have an ‘if you can’t read this email click here to view in browser’ link. But I have yet to receive a single author newsletter that does.

The definition of ‘published’ is changing

Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) is, in my opinion, probably the most ‘professional’ of Australian writing groups. By professional here I mean profession-oriented, in a way that encourages and allows their authors to publish books and even make money from their writing.

Part of this has to be due to the genre. Romance novels account for around 50% of mass market books sold, so for authors it’s the biggest market around. Part of it seems to be that many romance writers are more practical, more business-oriented, than other writers. More career-focussed.

I’m a member of RWA. I joined on the recommendation of another writer I met at a speculative fiction workshop. She recommended them as, “Extremely professional, worth joining, and you can learn a lot.”

She was right, even for us, whose stories have romantic elements rather than being true romance.

Like other career-oriented writing organisations—Romance Writers of America (RWA), Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)*—RWA (and from now on when I say RWA I mean Romance Writers Australia) gives published writers extras. This includes access to special forum groups, a published author newsletter, special craft and career workshops and opportunities for promotion and to present paid workshops.

That’s not to say that RWA’s unpublished authors miss out. They get access to the monthly newsletter, to competitions that help them improve their writing, access to critique partners, e-groups and so on. Many of the competitions, particularly, are only available to unpublished authors.

At present, RWA defines “published” as …

the signing of a contract for any fictional narrative work of 40,000 words or more, excluding any self-published or vanity/subsidy published works.

Right now RWA is pondering the definition of ‘published’, because a lot of their members are self-publishing. Some of those who self-publish are selling quite a few books, but are still ineligible to be considered published members.