It’s birthday time again, I have several friends and coworkers with birthdays around this time of year.  Most of them are about my age (42) and almost none of them are celebrating their birthday.  That always seemed odd to me.

I get that some people might not want to be reminded of their advancing age.  Life always seems better in retrospect, youth is magical and infinitely desirable…at least according to Madison Avenue.  Birthdays can be depressing, things undone, opportunities missed.  The frustrations of life can well up and make the thought of celebrating another year of life taste like ash and bitter herbs.

That’s why it’s so important to celebrate our birthdays.  The candles on the cake are a fire we light to stave off the darkness all around us. The noise and signing can drown out the whispers of our mortality and the grumbles of everyday life.  The cake itself is to remind us that life can be sweet.

And life can be sweet.  Find things you enjoy and focus on them when the monsters from the id come knocking on the door.  Spend time with your friends, they’ll be gone soon enough.  Do something you love, while you can.  Make the day special. Celebrate. Burn bright.

The alternative is to let the darkness win.

Unrelated (mostly), I finished another short story. This one actually has a happy ending.  I’m still not sure if the ‘voice’ is clear and pseudo-authentic enough.  We’ll see what the Wordslingers think in a couple weeks.

Writing is another way to keep the darkness at arms-length, for those of us who have the bug.  Seriously, if you’re feeling miserable, write.  Maybe it helps by letting you escape this world and wander into one of your own making. Maybe it will help purge the bad feelings by putting them on the page. Maybe it will just distract you long enough for your body to come back into balance with your mind and spirit.  But it works, whatever it does.

Write.

Well, I got my un-birthday present early last night. I didn’t make it into Clarion West this year either.  Swing and a miss.  0 an 2.  Didn’t even get on the waitlist.

Seriously, I’m pretty much done with beating myself up trying to get into this exclusive club.  Fuck it. I’ll do it on my own.  I can get as much if not more writing done this summer on my own. I’ve proved that at the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat.

I’m not going to pretend I’m not disappointed.  But I’m not going to quit writing over this.  In fact, I started another short story this morning.  I still don’t know what they’re looking for but apparently, I’m not it. So be it. I have an unaccountably high opinion of my own writing skill, for someone who’s had one sale so far.  I’ll keep writing, keep getting better, keep submitting my work.

Eventually, it will happen, whether I have ‘Clarion West’ or ‘Clarion’ or ‘Odyssey’ on my writing resume or not.  Hell, I’m doing this because I love writing and telling stories, not because I want validation.

So.  We keep going.  Forward momentum.

Sorry for the lack of posting. Amazon is keeping me busy.  This is just some more accountability posting. No deep insights :)

I am getting to write something every day, though right now it’s in half-hour sips instead of the two hour blocks I prefer.  Ah well, that’s what the weekend is for, right?

I had an interesting dream/story idea.  Basically a Native American take on the silkie legend starring a young warrior who runs down a doe and finds more than he expected.  I’d like to jump on this story right away but first…sigh…yeah, work.  And IM gaming tonight.  It’s ok. I got the story outlined before I left the house and this gives me the chance to do a little research.

I also finished my Smooth Running read-through, the last one before I send it off to Manny Frisberg for editing.  Getting closer to getting that thing published. 

The Smooth Vengeance rough draft is ticking along as well. I can see that there’s going to be some scenes that will get cut and some new scenes that will need to be inserted. But the important thing is to get the rough draft done. If I get lucky or work calms down a bit, I might be able to get finished by Norwescon.  That would be cool.

Once the rough draft is done, I think I’ll go back over my short story idea list and bang out a few new ones, send them out into the void – I mean, submit them to editors.

Life is good. Writing is fun. Nice to have a job, no complaints.

There are rules to writing, don’t let anyone tell you different.  W. Somerset Maugham is quoted as saying, “There are three rules for writing a novel. The problem is, nobody knows what they are.”  Which is a witty way of saying that you can break any of the real rules of writing, assuming you do so with style.  Added to that is the fact that every writer is different and will have different rules for themselves.

But all those cavets aside, there are rules, spoken and unspoken to writing. Rules like: don’t bore me.  That’s a good one for all writers. But I also have rules for myself.  Like a lot of my advice, I don’t always follow my own rules, but my writing is stronger when I do.

So here are mine:

1.       Pay attention to spelling, grammar and sentence construction.

2.       Create characters readers will identify or sympathize with.

3.       Grab the reader with the first sentence.

4.       Break scenes/chapters with a hook.

5.       Treat every character as a real person.

6.       Make action clear, vivid and plausible.

7.       Specific details beat generalities.

8.       Write dialog that sounds like the character might actually say it.

9.       Everything has consequences, often unintended.

10.   Make the stakes high and personal

11.   Pick the exotic over the mundane.

Ok, now that I have the list done, let’s talk briefly about each one.

You have to write cleanly first of all. Nothing will throw a reader faster than bad spelling/word use, clunky or run-on sentences and random punctuation.  Now I do tend to write a sentence fragment or two but I do so deliberately.  I don’t try to write paragons of prose but I try to avoid mistakes. (though, as this now doubt blog proves, I still make them.)

Second most important thing to me is characters. I have to like a character to want to read about them.  I should want to be them, want to know them, want to protect them.  Ideally, my characters should be sympathetic but if they aren’t, they’d better be cool.

I’m a believer in the great first line.  A great first line will definitely make me want to read more.  Dean Koontz did this to perfection, especially in his early books.  The first line should be bold, intriguing, make you want to know more. It should never confuse the reader.

Related, breaking a scene with a hook or stinger will make it much easier to keep a reader’s interest once I have it.  The last line of your scene or chapter should raise a question the reader wants answered immediately. 

There are no throwaway characters. Everyone that appears in a story should have a life ‘off stage’.  They all should have reasons for what they’re doing or saying.  If the plot demands they do or say something, I make damn sure I know why they do it.  If you treat your characters with respect, it’ll show through to your readers.

I like action in my stories. But fights (whether gun-, sword- or fist- variety) need to serve a plot purpose and they need to be easy to visualize.  That’s how I write them, by seeing the fight and then describing what I see.  I try to keep the sentences short and keep internal/external dialog to a minimum. (again, something I don’t always succeed at). Finally, I try hard to make each fight plausible. That can mean physically blocking out a fight sequence, heading down to the range or using after action reports from police and military sources.

This is something I often need to fix in revision but specific details beat general details every time.  A man giving a woman a flower means less than Davide giving Michelle a daffodil.   Mention street names, building names, character names every chance you get without bogging down the flow.  I have characters point a Glock 21 at someone, not just ‘a gun’. The more specific your details, the more vivid your story.

Dialog is something else that matters to me. It needs to sound real. Most people don’t speak in complete words and complete sentences. And when a character of mine does so, it should be for a reason. Similarly, dialog needs to match the character; an educated person will use different words from a street thug, though if the thug likes to read fantasy novels in his spare time, that may toss in a quirk or two, dialog-wise.  Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake and David Simon (creator/writer/bottle washer on The Wire) do dialog very well for contemporary fiction.  George R.R. Martin comes to mind as someone who writes fantasy dialog well.  Those are my models. Find authors who do dialog well and read them compulsively.

Every decision someone makes in a story should have consequences.  Best of all are the consequences that are unintended.  A fun way to do this is to imagine how thing can go wrong.  Then ask how they can get worse.  Then see if you find something worse (or funnier) than that.  I want to write stories that feel real but take place in a heightened reality.  Unlikely but cool/terrifying/horrific consequences will grab readers much more than pedestrian choices.  Every decision needs to matter. Even small decisions can lead to interesting plot developments.  Oh and before I forget: each decision should have a clear, believable motivation.  Character’s shouldn’t take actions just to make the plot move.  See rule #5.

This is related to rule #9 but try to make the events in your story matter.  For every decision, ask ‘so what?’.  If your protagonist fails to stop the killer, ‘so what?’  What happens if the character fails?  What happens plot-wise and, what happens to the character, personally.  Have the character’s decisions make a personal difference. Your character should have skin the game, so to speak.  A politician with a child in the combat arms who faces a vote on a declaration of war is much more interesting than some fat, entitled scion who’s never worked or served a day in their life.  Choose characters and plots that will matter to the character. It will make the decisions matter to the reader as well.

This comes down to the stories I choose to tell. I want a sense of wonder, a sense of ‘that’s cool’ in my stories.  I want to see magic, high technology, strange and unusual worlds.  I doubt I’ll ever make a great contemporary mystery writers but if you set a mystery on space station or in ancient Rome, I’m immediately interested.  It also helps that I like (and do a pretty good job at) world building.  But when you’re building your world, make interesting. Show us something that’s different from every-day life.  That’s one of my beefs with ‘grim and gritty’ fantasy. Who wants to read about the legitimately crappy lives of the serfs?  A farmer who works his whole life IS heroic but it takes a better writer than I am to make it riveting reading.  (Edward Rutherfurd can pull it off)

There we go. My rules of writing as of 2012.  We’ll see if my rules change. I’m sure they will, they already have since 2010.

Another short story out the door, I sent “The Witch’s Test” off to Lightspeed. We’ll see if that’s the right home for that little fable.

Most submissions ask you for a cover letter. I never know what to say in those.

Should I be lighthearted and joke-y?*

Should I be listing off my qualifications?  Listing the workshop’s I’ve taken, name-dropping writers I’ve studied under?

Should I start the cover letter with ‘Hello’ or just lunge right in without preamble?

 Should I be writing an author bio here? 

Should I be talking about the story, ‘selling it’ as it were?

Or should I keep it very short and just say, ‘here’s my story. I hope you like it.’?

So many questions. And for once, I don’t have any advice to offer myself here.  I’m not sure what the expected behavior is for cover letters.  Most of the submissions pages don’t offer any guidance here either.

So far, I’ve been defaulting to ‘short’ and ‘professional’.  Short has to be good. After all, I just want them to read the story and tell me how much they love it.  And professional, well, you may regret things you don’t say but you WILL regret things you do.  At least in my rambled-mouth experience.

There are so many things we seem to need to learn through trial and error.  Ultimately, all we can do is keep trying. Tell interesting stories as honestly as we can.  The rest will have to sort itself out.  Oh and share the love.  You can’t go wrong being nice to people. And buying them lunch.

*No. Avoid humor in email/text. SO many ways for that to go wrong for normal people, let alone someone like me who even my friends can’t tell when I’m joking, sometimes.

There is one kind of news, one kind of milestone that every aspiring author wants to shout out.  I think I have just that kind of news.  I'm holding off on talking about it until it's official but...it's been a great week.

Never stop trying. Never stop writing. Never stop sending your work out.

And a quick postscript:
The kitten is safe.  We had to have the furnace cut open to get her out but she’s none the worse for her adventure.  The little rascal.  Important note for anyone getting a new kitten, weigh down your vent covers. 

I also sent off The Island of Lost Gods to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Here’s hoping.

One thing that came out again from the Rainforest Writers Retreat: Writers are terrible judges of the quality of their work.  I talked to a number of good writers and listened to their stories about award-winning tales:  Some were, at one point, over edited within an inch of their life before getting returned back to a simpler form.  Some were dashed off in a couple of days.  Some had favorite scenes that didn’t make it into the final story.  Most just stayed out, getting submitted over and over until they sold.

Other writers did readings, and told excellent, entertaining stories. And some of them told me about stories that had sat on their hard drive for years or decades even before they finally were sent out and sold.

We are not good judges of the quality levels of our stories.  I’ve talked before that writers need a certain amount of arrogance just to get their work out there.  But at the same time, most of us are the most self-critical and insecure people imaginable.

We need both parts of our makeup at different times in our story’s lifecycle.  When we are writing, we need to be stupidly self-confident.  When we are editing, we need to be viciously critical. And, this is important, after we do a revision pass, we need to go back to that state of stubborn, stupid confidence when it comes time to send it out.

Yes, by all means, cut out favorite scenes that don’t advance the plot, especially if they were fun to write. Or if they’ll amuse your critique group. Or if they contain inside jokes.  The phrase ‘kill your darlings’ is very appropriate.  Every scene needs to serve the story.  Every scene needs to advance the plot, develop the world, grow your character. If they don’t do all three, then the scene needs to change, combine with another scene* or get killed entirely.  When you are revising, you need to be cold and brutal, a calculating killer of words and scenes.

But you can take that too far.  When you’ve done your revision, you may end up looking at your story and thinking: ‘this is terrible’, ‘this will never sell’, ‘no one will find this amusing/arousing/exciting/intriguing/etc..’  Then you take the story and put it away. You try to tell yourself that, at best, you’ll try to learn from your “failure”. You haven’t failed.  You haven’t failed unless you don’t send it out. Then, yes, you’ve failed. You’ve given up. You’ve killed your story.

Don’t kill your stories.  When you first had that idea, that spark, that ‘what if…’ moment, you conceived of your story.  When you wrote it, you gave birth to it.  You loved that story, once.  Love it enough to send it out and see if, like you, someone else may love it, too.  Don’t stay in that self-critical mindset.  Reconnect to that feeling you first had, that made you want to write the story in the first place.

A lot of writers, including some at the Rainforest Writers Retreat, call their stories ‘Their Children’.  Yes, edit your stories, yes be critical of your favorite characters, scenes, what have you.  But don’t judge your own work.  That’s what editors and, ultimately, readers will do.

Kill your darlings, not your babies.

*Still haven’t mastered this one.  Feels weird just thinking about it but everyone swears by it.  Maybe some of you can try it and tell me how you did it.

Well. That was a lot of writing and a lot of fun. I started a new novel last week at the Rainforest Writers Retreat.  The book is “Smooth Vengeance” the sequel to “Smooth Running”.  I got a lot of work done, writing about 1/3 of the first draft in about 3 and half days.  In ended up writing 41,766 words. If that’s not a personal best, it’s damn close.

The Rainforest Writers Retreat was a blast. Easily the most fun I’ve had at a convention or other writerly event.  I met a lot of really wonderful writers.  Everyone was just there to write.  No one was there to do business, really.  It was very supportive and very welcoming.  I am totally going back next year.

There was something addictive about being able to get up each day and just write.  It was good for me.  No doubt there are going to be some serious edits to what I wrote this past weekend but I’m getting that first draft done and done fast.  I highly, highly, highly recommend attending the Rainforest Writers Retreat next year if you have the means.

I’m hoping I’ll bump into a lot of the same faces at Norwescon next month.

There are a couple of wrinkles going on in my life, though.  I need to do a read-through of Smooth Running before I hand it off to the editor I’m hiring prior to putting it up on Amazon/B&N, etc…  That’s going to take time.  I also need to edit “The Mageborn Mechanic” and get that sent off to beta readers.  I also want to keep the momentum going on “Smooth Vengeance” and keep that going.

Sigh.

And one of our kittens got into the air vent right when I was getting ready for work. No, she’s still not out.  After wasting time trying to find her or hear her, we left the vent cover on and a put a light on by the opening.  With luck, she’ll have gotten herself out by the time I get home. If not…more stress.

I need another vacation.  Maybe a Rainforest Readers Retreat. :)

Review: Caszandra

This is the last book in the Touchstone series by Andrea Host.  The whole series has been entertaining and I’m glad I read it. 

In this last book we have the true enemies revealed (no, it’s not the cats) and the true threat to the world(s) revealed.  We also see the pendultimate expression of Cassandra’s power: she can literally create things from pure imagination, will and pain. If there’s a more clear parallel to being a writer, I don’t know of it. 

Although we do get a clear resolution to personal relationship plots as well as the world-shaking events of previous books, this was my least favorite of the trilogy. It’s the Return of the Jedi of the series, if you will.  I’ll try to explain.

Things I liked:

I loved seeing the ultimate expression of Cassandra’s power. The ability to replicate objects, settings and even people from sheer imagination is something I haven’t seen in literature very often. Not unless we go back to the ‘Lathe of Heaven’ by Ursla K. Leguin.

Relatedly, the author’s use of these powers, but the main characters as well as the supporting character’s, shows imagination and a clear vision.  The action is always easy to visualize and exciting.  Which is why I wish there was more of it.

Cassandra finally comes into her own as a hero here, acting and moving to shape events as opposed to being a tool moved around by others.

The conflict is also huge here, with mass death and destruction –mostly off stage- and very high stakes drama in everything but the main character’s personal life.

Speaking of relationships, I did like the way Cassandra and Kaoren’s relationship is depicted. It’s a little idealized but, damn it, I like that sometimes.  Real relationships are full of disappointments, it’s nice to see fictional characters having a happy ending.

What I didn’t like:

The action, so vivid and exciting, starts to wind down in this book.  Cassandra is considered too valuable to go on monster-clearing patrols, to the book’s detriment.  Too much of the story takes place in bedrooms and hospital labs, moving those scenes to locations of danger and action as in the second book would have helped.

The main characters, who is 18, ends up adopting three children and this REALLY slows down the pace and drama in the story.  As happens elsewhere in the book, with the loss of liberty and privacy, the main character raises the issue that maybe an 18 year old newlywed isn’t the right person to be raising three children. But that is papered over pretty quickly and the main character starts playing house.  That doesn’t mean that those scenes aren’t well written. They were and Cassandra’s actions all seemed in character. It just felt slightly more unbelievable than her ability to create dragons. (Which might be unbelievable but is also very awesome)

There isn’t enough cost to victory.  Lira’s eventual fate has Deus Ex Machina that had me saying ‘Come on’ aloud when it was revealed.  There is a lot of death and destruction and one previously-high-profile character does get badly wounded.  But that isn’t enough. The author is good enough to recognize these issues and even address them but she seems to shy away from ‘pulling the trigger’ as it were.  But maybe the Mega-Happy Ending is expected in YA.

Characters that we spent a lot of time with in the first book are pushed to the background and nearly forgotten. I’m thinking most of Zan and Maze, who were so prominent and supportive when she needed it. But once she hooks up with Kaoren Ruuel, he and his Forth Squad take center stage.  This actually is very realistic, new relationships can crowd out old friendships, but I think it’s a flaw from a story viewpoint.

I didn’t like Ys as a character.  She doesn’t play ‘hard to get’, she plays ‘hard to want’, to quote Ford Fairlane.  I just didn’t like her and couldn’t really see why Cassandra would spend so much time and attention on her.  It could be that Cassandra is just a pushover. I’d buy that as a reason.

There is a clash of cultures that is barely touched on.  One culture has slavery. One is a very Liberal technocracy.  This would be a great novel in and of itself, so I almost don’t blame the author for glossing over it.  But that begs the question: why bring it up if you’re not going to explore it? There’s no plot reason for slavery or indentured servitude.

The climax happens too fast. The whole series has been building up to this moment. It deserved a lot more time and resolution to give an appropriate emotional climax and release.

The ‘dénouement’ after the climax goes on too long.

Summary:

  The last book in an interesting trilogy, this is a required purchase and it should charm readers of the first two books. Indeed, there is even an inexpensive fourth book-let for those readers not yet ready to say good bye to living, breathing characters of the Touchstone books.

  The book does go off in the last third into ‘what happened after’ rather than staying focused on the story. This is one area where an editor’s voice would have helped but on the whole, I am very impressed by the author and this series.  Those same rough spots were deliberate choices by the author and lets her voice and her decisions drive the story. 

I think Andrea Host is a potent counterpoint to anyone who says there’s nothing by a self-published author is any good.

Reccomended