by Gary A. Braunbeck

There's a great line from William Goldman's novel The Color of Light: "Life is material; you just have to live long enough to figure out how to use it."

William Faulkner maintained that any child who managed to live past the age of seven had enough material to write books and stories for the rest of his or her life and never see the well run dry; Flannery O'Connor said much the same thing.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you encounter any authors who insists that their work isn't in some form autobiographical, they're lying through their teeth.

It's not only outward, chronological events that shape our psyches and determine who we become, but our own internal worlds; imagination, impressions, prejudices, fantasies, regrets, passions, likes and dislikes, all of it is eventually filtered through the writer's sensibilities to make an appearance in their work.


Sometimes a writer has to wait until he or she has gotten enough distance, both emotionally and chronologically, to turn a fiction writer's objective eye on an event. You can't use an actual occurrence from your own life and then defend it to people by saying, "But that's how it really happened." Fiction cares nothing for how an event 'really' happened, only how said event or events fit into the natural progression of the story you're telling.

You have to learn to put your ego aside when you write a story or novel, even if you're using something from your life as fictional fodder; you have to care enough to be quiet. Let the story be your guide, not your desire to inflict yourself and your views on the reader.

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

Everything is bigger to a child; not only physically, but perceptually and emotionally, as well. A dollar found becomes a discovered treasure. A harsh word becomes a deafening declaration of war. A heap of dirty clothes in the corner becomes a nasty, fanged monster after the lights are out. A paper cut is a knife in the stomach. And a hug from a parent in times of fear becomes Perseus's shield, protecting them from Medusa's deadly power. Everything is amplified in ways adults find hard to remember.

So can you begin to imagine, just for a moment, the terror, the pain, the agony and confusion experienced by a child whose every waking moment is marked by fear and nothing but?

Childhood is over too soon under the best of circumstances; to strip a child of their trust, to despoil them of the belief that those who love you will always protect and never harm you, to commit the obscenity of taking a child and simply, totally ruining their world, to destroy the joy in their hearts ....

It is, in my opinion, the most unpardonable and irredeemable of human crimes. Period.

If you're a fiction writer, you'll see that a lot of editors shy away from stories that involve any harm coming to a child. In some genres, portraying child abuse or child murder is seen as an unbreakable taboo, and to deal with these subjects is to risk your readership if you can even get the work published.

And it often does seem like the lowest of low pandering tactics: you want suspense? To engage a reader's emotions? Then put a child in jeopardy!

And too often it is used as a cheap effect, especially in horror and suspense. Some authors do seem to sit down to write a piece and say, "Oh, I'll throw in a dash of child abuse for added depth." To do that is not only insulting to the reader and a slap in the face to those who dedicate their lives to bettering the existence of children who are in an abusive situation, but it serves to numb people to the plight of these children.

But I believe there's room for honest portrait of it in good fiction. Not to use a tale as bully pulpit or soapbox decrying child abuse, but to genuinely explore how abuse affects the human condition through the eyes of a story's characters.

If you write fiction about child abuse, probably the most important thing to remember is to keep your work from becoming what Ray Garton once called "whacking material for pedophiles." It's a hard thing to keep a graphic scene from becoming inadvertently titillating -- and sometime a story genuinely needs a graphic depiction.

To use what is probably my most uncomfortable example, take "Some Touch of Pity," a novella that appeared in Marty Greenberg's Werewolves. Anyone who's ever read that story remembers the rape scene. I agonized over that thing for weeks, not the least of which because I didn't want any element of that scene to seem even remotely titillating. Marty, God bless him, understood that a graphic presentation of the rape was integral to the story -- the central character relives this moment from his childhood on an almost hourly basis, it's what defined his view of himself, and it's what keeps him standing at arm's length from his own true heart. But Marty said that as the scene stood, it would be just too much for DAW. Understood.

I rewrote the scene so that the reader experienced it only through the sensations and impressions that the child could identify. That's the version that was published in the anthology. It was still effective, but it didn't pull the reader nose-first into the painful, filthy, bottomless pit of the character's suffering. So, when it came time to include the story in my first collection, I restored the rape scene to its original form, which is much more direct, unflinching, and brutal.

God, how I lost sleep over that. I worried that people would read it and think I was simply trying to shock them in the most depraved manner. I worried that readers would find the story offensive and unreadable. Then I realized that, with all the worries I was dredging up, the one which never crossed my mind was: is it necessary to be this graphic?

The story informed me that, yes, it was necessary to present it in this way. I'm relieved to say that, in the years since I published the uncut version, not one person has accused me of being irresponsible in telling the story in the manner that it required. Writing that story was a gut-wrenching experience, but ultimately I think it was worth it.

 

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

I was in the sixth grade when I decided I wanted to become a writer.

I was not -- big surprise here -- a very social or popular kid. I had a geek haircut and thick, Coke-bottle glasses with dark frames. I wore clashing strains of plaid. I looked like the secret son that Buddy Holly kept chained up in his basement.

One Friday in English class we were given back our spelling tests from the previous day (I got a C -- a pretty typical grade for me then). Our teacher, a great guy named Steve Shroeder, informed us that our next assignment, to be done in class that day, was to select seven words from the test and write a story using those words. Everyone groaned, including me.

Then I picked up my pencil and started writing.

Twenty minutes or so later, everyone else is sitting there staring at their papers and I'm still cranking. I wrote right up until the lunch bell rang.

It was a child's first attempt at a horror story. All about a haunted house and a photographer who snaps a picture of the moment of his own death three days before it happens and doesn't discover it until he's developing the pictures and sees himself standing in his darkroom, looking at a newly developed photograph, while behind him this slimy, awful monster is creeping through the wall behind him. He turns around just in time to see a clawed hand reach for his face. The end.

I figured the story was going to get me in trouble -- I attended a Catholic grade school and most of the faculty -- nuns and otherwise -- thought I was "disturbed." (I lost count of how many times I was called into Sister Barbara's office for a "chat" about "my problems getting along with the others.")

The next day, Mr. Shroeder hands back the papers. He had written a big-ass "A+" in bright red ink at the top of my paper, and on the back of the last page he wrote: "Great story. You should do more."

I had written stories before that I'd kept to myself for fear of how people would react to them. This was the first time anyone had ever read something of mine -- and an adult, no less -- and they'd really liked it. It was the first time in my entire childhood I suddenly felt like I wasn't useless.

That really was the first day of the rest of my life, and I owe a lot to Shroeder. I don't know where I'd be now if I'd gotten the reaction I expected to get.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, horror, writing

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by Gary A. Braunbeck


I don't know about you, but if I encounter one more horror writer (in most cases, this would be a new writer) who prefaces his or her name with:

• "The New Bad Boy/Bad Girl of Horror"
  
• "The New Queen of Terror"
  
• "The New Prince of Dark Fiction"
  
• "The New Court Second-Scribe in Charge of Queasy Sensations at The Pit Of Your Tummy"

... or some-such other b.s. handle designed to draw attention to the writer rather than the work, I'm going to climb a tower with a rifle, I swear it.

(Wouldn't it be interesting to have someone call themselves "The Nice Guy Of Horror" or "The Courteous Queen Of Terror" or "The Really Swell Dude of Dark Fiction"? I'd actually remember that, and would probably seek out their work to read just because they were clever enough to do it.)

Sometimes -- dash, repeat, italicize -- sometime these monikers are created not by the writers themselves, but, rather, by reviewers.

One case of a writer who's employed a moniker he or she didn't create her- or himself is that of John Paul Allen, one helluva nice guy and author of the novel Gifted Trust. A reviewer for that novel dubbed Allen "...the father of nightmares."

An interviewer who read that review used the phrase to introduce Allen, so it comes as no suprise that Allen has used that phrase in publicity releases -- and why the hell shouldn't he? It's an eye-catching, memorable phrase that is going to go a long way in helping potential readers remember his name. He didn't come up with it and decide to label himself, and any writer who's handed an unsolicited blurb like that is a fool not to get as much mileage as he can out of it. Yes, writing a strong novel is damned important, but once the work is published, it all boils down to bidness and marketing, and anything that draws attention to your work can and should be used to your advantage. So, good for John Paul.

However.

I have come across (or been introduced to, unsolicited) a number of writers who, both on-line and at conventions, assume a "persona" not only for the benefit of their readers (assuming they actually have any, as they claim), but for that of other writers and editors, as well.

When asked why they insist on assuming these personae, every last one of them (at least, to whom I have spoken) have answered with something like: "Because I want readers/editors/other writers to remember me. It's a way of making a strong impression."

On the surface, it might be seem like a good answer, but it reminds me of a snippet from a Bill Cosby routine wherein two guys are talking about cocaine usage; the first guy asks the second one, "What's the attraction?", and the second guys answers, "Well, cocaine intensifies your personality." To which the first guy responds: "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"

If you focus the majority of your energy on perfecting a "persona" so that other writers/readers/editors/artists will remember you, then I guaran-flippin'-tee you that you'll succeed; they'll remember you.

But ask them to name a piece of your work and see what happens; you could probably hear a gnat fart in the silence that will follow. Which is precisely what you'll merit; if you choose to make it all about you rather than the work, then you richly deserve the disdain and/or obscurity that is coming your way.

I can say this without fear of reprisal because I do not have a persona; I barely have a personality. Trust me on this.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, horror, writing

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Just to recap, in my last post on this subject I detailed my first two suggestions for promoting your book:

1. Write the best book you can.


2. Don't get stuck with a bad cover.

The things I'm discussing in this post are mainly of concern to authors and editors with small-press books. So, if you've had the good fortune to score a deal with a big house, you can skip this one.

3a: Make sure your book's listed at Amazon.

Once the cover's set, check with your publisher to make sure the book will be listed on Amazon.com. If your publisher is a small specialty press, a little (or a lot) of wheedling may be necessary. But if you've got more than 300 books to sell after preorders have been accounted for, it's best to get the book listed on Amazon.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Amazon.com; some of you may have a hate-hate relationship with them. If so, I sympathize completely. Amazon demands a 55% commission on top of account setup fees, and they've been bullying POD publishers into using their Booksurge service instead of LSI and other printers. Amazon is the 80,000-pound gorilla of book sales, and they've been taking full advantage of their status, often to the detriment of small publishing companies.

So, I understand a small-press publisher's desire to tell Amazon to go blow; the publisher's got their own site and can sell books through their own secure shopping cart just fine, so distribution's covered, right?

The problem is, for many prospective readers, if your book isn't on Amazon, it's as if it just doesn't exist. Your book's being available at the publisher's site won't help if a reader has never heard of the publisher before and is therefore reluctant to release their credit card info to them.

So: if your book's not on Amazon, you will lose potential sales. Also, because so many other sites grab book information directly from Amazon's feeds, your book's absence from that site means it will also be absent from a bunch of other sites.

(Side note: because book information posted on Amazon gets distributed far and wide, double-check that the publisher is posting accurate, complete information about your book from the start. The publisher can make changes later, but I've noticed changes often don't propagate to Amazon.uk and other sites. It's better if the book description is correct from the beginning).

I'll be discussing Amazon more in future posts, but for now, the basic goal is to make sure your book is listed. If your book is a small-run limited edition from a specialty press, the cost of selling the book on Amazon might not make sense. But if you've got more than a couple hundred books to sell, get the book listed on Amazon (and price it to compensate for their commission), or else be prepared for slow sales.

3b: Make sure your book's listed in WorldCat.

WorldCat is a gigantic database of books in libraries around the planet. WorldCat gives you basic publishing and authorship details about a book and tells you how you can borrow it for free through Interlibrary Loan. If you're the least bit of a library geek, you already know it's very cool, and you probably already wanted to be in WorldCat just on general principle.

If your book's not on Amazon, getting it listed on WorldCat is important. Why? WorldCat is the other main source of information about books that websites like Bookmooch and LibraryThing refer to. It cuts to one of the most basic goals of promotion: making sure potential readers know your book exists. Getting your book listed in as many places as possible is part of that goal, and WorldCat helps you achieve it.

Furthermore, if your book's not in WorldCat, to the librarians of the world it's as if your book just doesn't exist. And since librarians can be some of an author's strongest allies, you want to make sure they can easily reference your work.

How do you get a listing in WorldCat? In theory it's pretty simple: just make sure that at least one Worlcat-member library immediately gets a copy of your book when it comes out.

If you're an established author, there's a good chance your local library already knows about you and is planning to order a copy of your latest book (and if your local library doesn't know about you, shine your shoes, brush your teeth and go make friends with the library staff).

But if this is your first book, or if your local library's suffering from funding cuts, chances are good you will need to donate copies of your work if you want specific libraries to carry it. On the plus side, you can write the donated books off your taxes. On the down side, this usually isn't quite as simple as popping a copy of your book in an envelope and mailing it to the library (if you do this, your unsolicited book may go straight into the box of books culled for the next library book sale).

First, find out who the acquisition librarian is if you haven't done so already. Drop him or her a polite, professional email to tell them about your book and to ask if the library would like a copy for their collection. Make sure to mention that you are a local author and that your book is not self-published. Otherwise, if you and your publisher are unknown to the librarian, he or she is very likely to assume you're self-published and the answer is probably going to be "thanks, but no thanks."

Libraries have only so much room on their shelves, and to avoid being inundated with amateur work most patrons will never check out, many have explicit policies against accepting self-published books. Some may send an email back to you asking for evidence that your small-press publisher has produced a certain quantity of books; don't take this personally. Just politely send them back the information they've asked for (above all: don't piss off your local librarian).

Be prepared for a "thanks, but no thanks" response no matter what; a library may be in the midst of downsizing their collection or undergoing renovation and they may not be acquiring new books. Again, don't take this personally; follow up with a thanks-for-your-time email and query the next library on your list.

Once you've moved past the probably-small list of local libraries who'll look favorably on your work because you're a local author, you'll want to have a more formal press release to send out to promote your book. But to put together a good press release, first you'll need some good book blurbs and review excerpts ... but that's a topic worthy of its own post, and I'm out of time.

Labels: bookstores, publishing, writing

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When Random Person discovers that you're a writer, odds are that he will ask you any of several basic questions:

1. How long have you been writing?
2. Where do you get your ideas?
3. Where have you been published?

(If Random Person is a jerk, he'll just grunt "You're a writer? Never heard of you," but that's a topic for another post.)

If Random Person wants to be a writer, he's bound to ask you this:

How do you find time to write?

Hands down, this is the question I get asked most at my day job at the university. There's no shortage of beginning writers there, and most of them have written enough (or tried) to realize that time is a distressingly finite commodity. They've found themselves juggling jobs and classes and kids and housework and errands and ... well, things always seem to go unfinished at the end of the day.

And it's not just a matter of scheduling time, is it? After a 9-hour shift at the restaurant or call center, you might technically have a whopping two hours to call your own before you go to bed. But when you sit down with your notebook or computer, you find the day's left your brain wrung out, and after an hour of staring at the blank page you have maybe a sentence or two to show for your efforts.

There's no easy answer to the question "How do you find the time to write?"

Well, okay, there is; I call it the Grizzled Writer's Bluff: "You can't just find the time, you have to make the time. And if you want it bad enough, you'll do it."

It's an easy answer because while it's perfectly true, it's also perfectly unhelpful. It doesn't provide anything resembling a workable strategy or even a helpful hint; what it often does is make the newbie feel even more lost and loserish than before he asked his oh-so-hopeful question.

Time is a problem for every writer. For those of us with full-time jobs, it's an ongoing struggle not only to make time to write, but also to ensure we're in a fit condition to get good work done when the time comes. Because there's no standard life, there's no standard answer to the question. But there are some tactics writers can take, and the real secret is to try anything and everything to see what works best for you.

When I graduated from college, I started on a "career" job - the kind of job that follows you home at night - and quickly realized I could either have a well-paid life as a white-collar worker, or I could pursue my dream of becoming an author. I knew I just didn't have the energy for both. So, I made myself indispensable at my workplace, and managed to convince my boss to let me drop to part time. Part-time jobs worked well for a while until the .com bust left me unemployed and excellent hourly positions scarce. When I found another day job that didn't seem like it would suck up all my energy, it didn't pay nearly as well as what I'd gotten before, so dropping to part-time was no longer an option. However, I was recently able to switch to a compressed, 4-day-a-week schedule, and that's been helping me cut loose more writing time.

Deciding to pursue more casual jobs instead of better-paying career positions was a pretty risky choice on my part, and it's not one that everyone will feel comfortable making. But there are other time management tactics to take, although they, too, may involve difficult choices.

Start by taking a hard look at what you do during the course of an average day. Make a list of everything you do, and separate things into "work" and "play". Flip a coin if you can't decide.

First, look at your "play". Don't skimp on your weekly tennis game or thrice-weekly trip to the gym - you need to keep your body in shape to keep your mind in shape. But what about all the TV you watch at night? Tearing yourself from the tube is a prime way to find writing time. Socializing is another, harder, place to find time to write. How many parties do you go to in a month? If the answer is more than one, and your day job isn't as a promoter or DJ, you need to cut back. It's hard to say "no" to friends, and you don't want to nuke your social life from orbit lest you become a crazy, out-of-touch hermit. But if you're going out for drinks after work nearly every day, you need to gut up the courage to tell your coworkers you've got other plans.

Ultimately, you need to treat writing like a second job, because it is. Even if you're not getting paid for it yet.

Next, look at the things you've put in the "work" category. What, really, do you have to do? And what do you feel you ought to do? The "oughts" need to be weighed. You can probably cut down on the number of errands you run with a little planning. And unless your neighbors are already complaining, you can probably get by with less yard work and housework. Forget about keeping up with the Joneses - what do you really care what they think, anyhow? If you don't have to do it and you don't want to do it, by all means, ditch it. But make sure it's really something that doesn't need doing; ignoring litterboxes, for instance, can become an expensive disaster.

And gruffly blowing off your kids or spouse and holing yourself up in your office is a recipe for heartache down the road. You have to take care of your responsibilities to the people and pets living with you. Period. The carpet doesn't care if it gets vacuumed, but your daughter will care a lot if you don't go to her soccer games.

The flip side, of course, is that the people living with you may not understand the time and effort involved in writing. So, your first step is to recruit them to your cause. Explain to them that writing means a lot to you; share your dream with them. Explain. Negotiate. Tell them that you need their help to achieve your dreams; your spouse will probably feel a whole lot better about watching TV alone if he or she feels she's helping you get good work done. The kids will still want your time, of course, but "Mommy's working" is a lot easier to understand than "Mommy's ignoring me."

But what if you talk to your spouse about your need for work time alone, and he still treats your desire to be a writer like a childish phase you'll grow out of? Or, worse, he seems to outright scorn it?

For instance, a writer acquaintance of mine isn't "allowed" to write while his wife's awake. She expects him to sit with her watching TV in the evenings until she goes to bed, and then he's free to do what he wants as long as he doesn't disturb her. So, this guy writes from 11pm until 2 or 3 in the morning, whereupon he goes to bed for a few hours, gets up at 6am and gets ready for work.

Clearly, he really, really wants it. Few of us would be able to keep up that kind of schedule. And the thing is, he really shouldn't have to. His wife should have enough basic love and respect to support his ambition instead of treating his writing dream as some unpleasant character flaw that she grudgingly indulges. What she's doing is frankly bullshit. He seems to be sticking out the marriage because they have young children, but I don't see how it can last.

One female writer friend of mine had a husband who made supportive noises while they were dating, but once they were married, he acted impatient when she talked about her writing and did a lot of passive-agressive crap to interrupt her while she was working. She, too, resorted to working after he went to sleep, or she left the house and went to the library. Over the years, his snark and disrespect got worse and worse, even though she was bringing in serious money from freelance writing, and finally she filed for divorce.

I've seen other situations like that, and if the writer sticks with writing, the marriage always ends in divorce.

And that's the upshot of all this: if you are living with people who won't respect your writing or writing time, or if you're dating someone who treats your writing with veiled scorn or disdain, that's a clear sign that they just plain don't respect you. You need to get them out of your life. And although it might seem easier said than done, it's a lot easier done before the wedding bells have rung.

Life is too short to do otherwise.

Labels: writing

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

A writer friend of mine was busy making final revisions on a story he was planning to submit to an anthology. He asked me if I wold look at his story and offer suggestions and opinions. I read the story over, and while a full 75% of it was rock-solid, the final sequence seemed to me to fall victim to over-ripe melodrama.

Now, instead of just saying outright that the finale was over-baked (and a bit nonsensical), I instead pointed out to him what I saw as the place where the story wandered off the highway. It had to do specifically with the nature of a central character's physical and spiritual metamorphosis mid-way through on which the rest of the story's events were hinged. The precise nature of this metamorphosis, and what the character intended to accomplish with it, were unclear and -- I felt -- because of their nebulousness, robbed the story of any impact; instead, they had chosen to finish things off with a (figurative) loud and histrionic display of horrific fireworks.

I began asking him specific questions about the precise nature of this character's physical and spiritual metamorphosis: what exact physical change was taking place, how it affected the character's ultimate goal, and what that ultimate goal was supposed to be.

"What exactly is the nature of this change?" I asked.

"It's a supernatural transformation," was his reply.

"But a supernatural transformation into what, exactly?"

"I don't know...it's just a supernatural transformation," he again said.

"That's not good enough," I replied. "In order for you to get from the mid-point of the story to a more logical, chilling, and less cartoonish ending, you have to know exactly the nature of this transformation, how it affects the character's psychological and spiritual make-up, and what the character's ultimate goal is once this transformation has been completed."

Now, I thought this was a fairly clear, concise, and thoughtful piece of criticism. My writer friend, after throwing up his hands and sighing loudly in frustration, looked me right in the eyes and said: "Dude, it's just horror! It's not like science fiction where these kinds of specific details matter!"

No, I did not kill him, but I did make it clear that they had not only just insulted and trivialized the horror genre, but also (intentionally or not) my life's work.

I don't know anyone who would enjoy hearing their life's work reduced to a triviality, do you?

Now, in my writer friend's defense, he was dealing with a story that had been giving them problems for a while; so much so that it had been put away and only recently approached again.

I would also add that this writer has not written or read as much horror as he have science fiction and fantasy.

I would also add that he had been having a really, really bad couple of weeks personally, and as a result felt like I was attacking them.

That said (and, yes, he apologized later when he realized the remark -- however off-hand -- had offended me), his comment encapsulated for me, with disturbingly and depressingly crystal clarity, why it is that a lot of horror stories and novels being published are of an at-best journeyman quality.

It's because too many writers think, Dude, it's just horror! Too many writers think that it's okay to just say "...it's a supernatural transformation", and leave it at that, because once you've let the demon out, you don't really need to think about the Hows and Whys and How-Comes; once the Boogeyman is boogying, the details don't matter, just so long as it's exciting or suspenseful or horrific.

Wrong.

It is exactly when the Glop is slurping victims left and right that you most need to think about the details. Every story -- no matter how believable or outrageous its premise -- must follow its own internal logic; it must establish the rules for its own microcosmic universe and then adhere to those rules. Fairly basic stuff, unless you think it isn't necessary to bother establishing those rules in the first place.

Let me give you an example: the first Jeepers Creepers movie. Throughout the story, all we know about the Creeper is: he's a demon (and even that much is left for us to infer, rather than directly established). Nowhere in the first film does the writer bother establishing the Creeper's precise nature; we don't know where it came from, what it wants, why it wants it, or what, exactly, the Creeper plans to accomplish through its actions. As a result of the Creeper's nature and powers never being established, the story leaves it wide open for it to behave however it needs to in order to keep the story suspsenseful.

That's not necessarily a good thing; yes, because neither the audience nor the characters in the film know the Creeper's precise nature, it is impossible to predict what it will do next, and by default that should have generated more suspense...but it doesn't quite work. It's the very unpredictability of the Creeper's actions that works against the second half of the film, preventing it from reaching the dizzying levels of suspense that mark the first forty minutes; if we, the audience, had been given some vague idea of the Creeper's nature, had we been given just a few rules, had just a few details been established, then we wouldn't have felt so much that the writer was simply pulling things out of his ying-yang in order to make the next scene SPOOOOOOOKY.

It's sloppy storytelling, pure and simple.

Conversely, the reason Jeepers Creepers 2 was a much better-written movie was because the writer took the time to painstakingly establish the background elements lacking in the first film; because we did know the Creeper's nature, what it wanted, why, and -- an old trick that always works -- that it was functioning under a time limit, the second film generated and maintained a high level of suspense that was both intense and followed the internal logic set down by the ground rules. No, it ain't Lawrence of Arabia, but on terms of storytelling, it's light-years ahead of the first movie.

If you think I'm making a tempest in a teapot here, consider this: Stephen King went back and revised the first four Dark Tower books so that they better followed the internal logic and ground rules that emerged as he wrote the last three novels in the series; he did this because the details are important; he did this because, as a writer, he was not content to simply let gaffes in continuity remain uncorrected.

He did this because he takes his work very seriously, and part of taking it seriously means that you think about the details, you follow your own ground rules, and you (as the late Theodore Sturgeon so eloquently phrased it) ask the next questions: What is the true nature of the beast? Why does this happen? What does he or she want? What brought them here? Etc.

No, you don't have to offer these answers outright during the course of the story, but you, as the writer, have to know these answers yourself, for if you start your novel, novella, or short story with all the answers already in mind, you'd be surprised at how quickly and clearly your story will follow a logical course of events wherein these answers are shown to the reader through the actions of the characters or the progression of events.

The details are important, folks. They are vital. They are not to be dismissed off-handedly, because it ain't just horror: it's a question of careful storytelling, because it's only through genuine craftsmanship that we can offer readers a much richer and rewarding reading experience than just tossing the details out the window and just being SPOOOOOOOKY.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, horror, writing

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A few people have asked how I got my literary agent. Here's the story.

Before I was Gary's wife, I was one of his coauthors, and before I was a coauthor, I was a fan of his writing. I've known him for just shy of 10 years now, and in that decade I've watched his career grow. Because he's a decade older than me, I've looked to his writing career as a model for how things might go, and when things have not gone as well as planned, I've taken a lot of notes in the hopes that I can avoid the same pitfalls for my own developing career.

So. Many of you probably know that Gary has sold the majority of his books without an agent's help. And while that proves pretty convincingly you don't need an agent to have a career as a novelist, it's become clear that he ultimately didn't get the kind of deals that he could have gotten if he'd had a strong, involved agent going to bat for him and seeking opportunities for him. This isn't a slam against any of the people who've published his work; your support is appreciated.

But I look at the deal my own agent made for me, a first-time novelist, and compare it with the deals Gary's gotten in the past, and mine is considerably better. Clearly, having an active, involved agent makes a big difference.

But let's back up. Before he was a novelist, Gary had published a lot of short stories, many for various Tekno Books anthologies. Tekno puts together anthologies for publishers like Ace; if you've read an anthology edited by Martin Greenberg or John Helfers, you've read a Tekno Books production regardless of the logo on the spine. These anthologies are invitation-only, and you will not be invited unless you're a pro writer known to the editors, or recommended to them by one of their existing writers.

Because of his work for them, the editors at Tekno knew Gary produced good fiction, met deadlines and was easy to work with. So, when Steve Perry told them he had started but couldn't finish Time Was, they asked Gary if he wanted to take over. And so Gary got his first published novel. Gary's other books also often came about because he knew editors and informally found out about their interests and gaps in their schedules etc. A lot of business gets done in the bars at SF conventions ;-)

For that matter, both my collections happened because I knew editors who were familiar with and liked my work, and I happened to know to pitch to them when they had lulls in their schedules. HW Press has never been open to submissions, and Creative Guy was closed to submissions when I made my deal for Installing Linux on a Dead Badger.

Are you starting to get the idea that networking with other writers and editors is pretty important? Good. Because it's hugely important.

When I was finishing Spellbent, I knew from watching Gary's experiences that I wanted a good agent shopping it around for me, but I was prepared to sell the book on my own if I had to. So when the book was in what I felt was presentable condition, I started asking author acquaintances if their agents were currently taking new clients. I never once cracked a copy of Writer's Market or Literary Marketplace.

And of course I asked Gary. He'd been corresponding with author/agent Janet Berliner (they met as a result of Gary being president of the Horror Writers Association) and she said that she had started her agency up again, but that the day-to-day operations were being run by her long-time assistant Robert Fleck.

So I sent an email query to Bob last November, and he got back to me that same day saying, sure, send the synopsis and novel to him. I got the files to him the next day, and he read my novel in less than a month, said he liked it, and sent me a draft copy of the agency agreement for me to look over. The agreement looked fine, so I signed the contract with Professional Media Services (this is the only thing we've done through snail-mail; social security numbers in email is a bad thing). Contract in hand, he sent me a list of suggested changes he felt would make the book stronger. I made the edits, sent the book back to him, and he started shopping it around far and wide.

Here's my agent/novel timeline; bear in mind that for all that's here I'm actually leaving quite a lot of secondary stuff out:

11/13/2007 - I make initial email query
11/13/2007 (1 hour later) - Agent Bob requests full manuscript and novel, via email. OMG!
11/15/2007 - I email synopsis and manuscript. Chew off nails.
12/2/2007 - I email a revised synopsis and manuscript because I'd changed the last chapters and made the synopsis suck less. Sit and vibrate nervously, annoying cat on my lap.
12/5/07 - Bob: "This is a very fun book; please look over the attached agency agreement draft."
12/5/07 (15 seconds later) - Cats scatter fearfully because I'm leaping around yelling "Woo hoo!"
12/5/07 (30 minutes later) - Me: "The agreement looks fine to me. Also, did I mention this is the first of a series?"
12/5/07 (30 minutes later) - Bob: "Write synopses for the other books! We'll whip all this into shape over the holidays, and send the package out afterward."
12/6/07 - Bob snail-mails agreement.
12/8/07 - I finally realize that Bob was the managing editor for the first magazine I ever sold a story to, years ago. KISMET OR COINCIDENCE?
12/14/07 - I finally realize Bob has probably sent the paperwork to our PO Box instead of the house. D'oh. Check PO Box that night, find agreement, wish I'd found it before Friday night.
12/17/07 - Mail back agreement (missed Saturday pickup time). Announce my new agentedness on LJ!
12/24/07 - Bob receives paperwork; he emails detailed requests for changes.
12/25/07 - bob and I exchange a flurry of emails discussing/clarifying changes.
12/26/07 - I email Bob the synopsis for 2nd book in series.
12/27/07 - I email Bob the synopsis for 3rd book in series.
1/1/08 - I email Bob the revised manuscript.
1/16/08 - Bob gives me list of the first round of publishers he's sending the book to.
2/11/08 - Bob sends me the front matter for the novel package submission; I tweak some things in my bio and send it back.
2/17/08 - I discover a CONTINUITY ERROR, O NOES! After freaking out, I discover fixing it involves editing a whole two sentences. I email the repaired mss. back to Bob.
3/28/08 - I meet Bob at World Horror; he tells me he's gotten some preliminary interest from a couple of publishers, including Del Rey.
4/2/08 - Bob tells me that Del Rey likes the book, but is concerned that portions of the book are too dark for their audience; he forwards me the editor's comments. He says he's arranging for me to talk directly with the editor.
4/11/08 - After several days of quietly flipping the heck out, I talk to editor Liz Scheier. She expresses her concerns, I convince her that I will fix them.
4/11/08 (1 minute later) - I set about making requested changes.
4/14/08 - I email revised mss. to Bob.
4/28/08 - Bob emails me back to tell me Del Rey has made an offer. Cats hide under bed as I run through the house yelling OMG!
5/2/08 - Liz emails me to tell me she's pleased we'll be working together.
5/2/08 to 6/20/08 - Bob and various people at Del Rey hammer out the grisly details of the contract. When completed, it is goat-chokingly large. I read it, comprehend it, sign it.
5/9/08 - Del Rey announces the 3-book deal on Publisher's Marketplace.
6/20/08 - Del Rey cuts me an advance check.

So, that's about 6 months from query to book deal. Which is really fast in the publishing world, and as you can see, there was a pretty constant flurry of activity (and I left out things like discussing other books unrelated to Spellbent with Bob etc.)

From my perspective, the take-home messages here are:

1. Networking is crucial in making book deals, but all the schmoozing in the world is meaningless if you can't back it up with a solid publications history and a demonstrated ability to produce good work on deadline.
   
2. When it came time to get an agent, my networking and publications history would have been meaningless if I didn't have a finished novel in hand and a solid plan for More Where That Came From.
3. Luck probably plays a distressingly large role in all this.
4. I am a single data point; my experiences may or may not be reflective of what any of you might experience.

If you're looking for general pointers on finding an agent, I wrote about that a while back.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Gary A. Braunbeck

There's a certain type of story, one that I have come to call the After-the-Fact story. I have not seen many After-the-Fact stories written in the horror genre; mostly, they've stayed in the neighborhood of "literary" fiction. So, why haven't we seen more of this type of story in horror?

After-the-Fact stories are tricky little bastards, because the main action of the story has already happened before the first sentence. After-the-Fact stories do not employ flashback, nor do they resort to the obvious mechanism of having a character offer a quick recap of what happened before the reader came into it; no, in these stories, you're presented with a situation that, nine times out of ten, is in no way connected to what actually happened; you have to piece together the events by what is said and done by the characters. They're a little like walking into a room just after someone's had an argument or gotten a piece of bad news; even though you know something's just happened, no one will tell you what it was, so you have to figure it out for yourself by observing the effect it's had on those around you: you have to pay attention to the detritus, because that's all you've got to go on.

A classic example is John Cheever's story "The Swimmer". On the surface, it's about nothing more than some rich guy in suburbia who's spending a Sunday afternoon running from neighbor's house to neighbor's house to use their swimming pools. "I'm swimming my way home," he tells his friends and neighbors, all of whom laugh and remark on what a card he is as they go about mixing their martinis and discussing events at the country club. Occasionally someone remarks, in passing, " ... he's looking better, don't you think ..." or ... I'm really surprised to see him out like this, after, well ..." Then the main character comes over to them and that line of conversation is dropped. This goes on for a while, each successive neighbor becoming more surprised and anxious at seeing him, offering more whispered comments when he's out of earshot -- " ... didn't realize he was back ..." etc. -- until it becomes obvious that something fairly awful has happened to this guy sometime before the story began, and though Cheever never once directly states what happened, everything you need to know is there.

The first time I read "The Swimmer", its sudden shocker of an ending seemed to come out of left field, so I went back and re-read the story, much more slowly than the first time, and realized that Cheever had, indeed, dropped a ton of clues; unfortunately, the majority of them were hidden in the detritus, given only through subtext.

Raymond Chandler (creator of Philip Marlowe, the hero of such classic novels as The Big Sleep and The Little Sister) once gave the best example of what constitutes subtext that I've ever encountered (and I am liberally paraphrasing here):

A man and woman, both middle-aged, are waiting for an elevator. It arrives, and the man helps the woman get on. For the first several floors they are alone, watching the blinking lights. They do not speak and stand well apart from each other. The woman wears a very nice dress. The man wears a suit, tie, and hat. The elevator stops -- not their floor -- and a young woman gets on; she smiles at both the man and the woman, who smile at her in return. The man removes his hat. The ride continues in silence. The elevator stops, the girls gets off, the man puts his hat back on. A few floors later, the man and woman get off and walk together toward a door at the end of the corridor.

It was usually at this point that Chandler would ask the listener: "What's written on that door?"

So I'll put the question to you: what words are written on that door which our middle-aged couple are heading toward?

How the hell am I supposed to know? some of you may cry. No one in that freakin' elevator said word one to anyone else, and on the basis of all the nothing that happened during that boring, boring, boring ride, I'm supposed to guess what it says on that stupid door?

Yes, you are.Because an awful lot happened during that elevator ride:

1. The man and woman never spoke to each other, even while they were alone;
2. They also made it a point to stand well apart from each other even though the man helped her get on;
3. When the young woman got on, the man, obviously out of respect and courtesy, removed his hat;
4. Once the young woman disembarked, he put the hat back on; and,
5. The man and woman got off on the same floor, and are heading toward that door together.

Still say nothing happened and that you have no clues to go on?

Detritus. Subtext. The unspoken information that is conveyed to a reader through a character's behavior, actions, speech, or lack thereof. In acting, it's referred to as "nuance". It's subtle, but its implications are quite direct if you care enough to pay attention.
That is, in my opinion, what the horror field has lost over the last few decades: a willingness on the part of both writers and readers to (respectively) employ and appreciate the quieter, more delicate, and less obvious details of character and scene that can make fiction so much richer and rewarding.

Last chance; take a guess what it says on that door.

Try: Marriage Counselor.

That was an After-the-Fact story; tricky little bastard, wasn't it?

There's usually very little action in these stories; nothing much seems to happen at the core -- it's on the periphery that you have to watch out for yourself.

A handful of other After-the-Fact stories you'd do well to search out and read include Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"; Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path"; Raymond Carver's "What Do You Do In San Francisco?", "Popular Mechanics", and "Why, Honey?" (these latter two being arguably horror stories); Carson McCullers's "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud"; Michael Chabon's "House Hunting"; John O'Hara's brilliant "Neighbors" (a horror story if ever there was one); and a personal favorite of mine, Russell Banks's "Captions" -- perhaps in its way the most extreme After-the-Fact story I've yet encountered --wherein Banks details the agonizing disintegration of a married couple's existence through captions taken from newspapers or written underneath pictures in photo albums.

You've undoubtedly noticed that the above list contains no horror writers. There is a reason for this: not many have attempted an After-the-Fact story. Maybe it's because the structure of this type of story seems to self-consciously "literary" to them; maybe it's because horror readers have become far too accustomed to having everything spoon-fed to them and don't think they should have to work a little while reading a story, and so horror writers just automatically assume that All Must Be Revealed as quickly and in as simplistic of terms as possible. I don't know, I'm guessing here. But I've been going through my books searching for at least six examples of a successful After-the-Fact story in the horror field, and here's what I came up with:

• "Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly," by Dennis Etchison
• "Petey" by T.E.D. Klein
• "Red" by Richard Christian Matheson
• "Snow Day" by Elizabeth Massie
• "Taking Down the Tree" by Steve Rasnic Tem
• "Gone" by Jack Ketchum

... and that was it (even with this small a list, Klein's, Matheson's, Ketchum's, and Tem's stories almost offered too many concrete hints to qualify).

I thought perhaps Peter Straub's "Bar Talk", "The Veteran", or "A Short Guide To the City" (all from his magnificent collection Houses Without Doors) could be used to beef up the list, but that would have been stacking the deck (pardon my mixed metaphors); Straub's work is the result of an exceptionally well-read literary background, so of course the sensibilities of his work are informed from countless sources, resulting in fiction that is challenging in its approach to structure and subtext -- no more so than in the "Interlude" fictions sprinkled throughout Houses.

So no Straub; it wouldn't be playing fair on my part. Same goes for Stewart O'Nan, whose wonderful collection In The Walled City contains not one, but two After-the-Fact stories, "Calling" and "Finding Amy". (I exclude O'Nan because, though he does sometimes dabble in the horror field, he is not primarily a horror writer.)

So I came up with six stories, four of which (though superb) just barely made it onto the list. I'm sure there are other After-the-Fact horror stories out there that I missed, but my guess is, not that many.

Horror may be trying to outgrow its popular definition, but it's still suffering from a case of arrested literary adolescence -- and I'm not one who apologizes for using the term "literary" when talking about horror. It can be among our most literary forms of storytelling; emphasis on can be; we still need to take chances, even if we fall flat on our faces in the attempt.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

When people think about doing book promotions, they often think of an author going on a book tour. Doing a book signing or sitting at an author's table at a convention or book store means you get to talk to a lot of new people and (hopefully) get your books into the hands of new readers who've been impressed by your approachability and charm. This can be a lot of fun, especially if you're an extrovert who gets energized by meeting new people.

But even for the most gregarious among us, working a book table is also likely to test your reserves.

The simple act of sitting behind a book table -- whether you're actually selling any of your books or are just there to sign copies -- trips a certain circuit in a certain type of narrow skull. Namely, it triggers the conviction that you, the author, are a mere sales clerk, and therefore not a real person this Rudy McRuderson needs to show any basic courtesy toward.

When I shared a book table with my husband Gary Braunbeck, a guy in a suit came up, pointed at one of his Leisure titles, and said "Ooo, that looks like a spooooky book!" and wandered off making idiotic cartoon ghost noises. At a recent local book fair, a well-dressed soccer mom picked up my book Sparks and Shadows, read the back, then tossed it down on the table with the queenly disdainful announcement "I don't like short stories!"

More commonly, someone will shuffle up to your table, disinterestedly glance over the books you sweated blood to finish on deadline, and then say, "I've never heard of you."

And upon hearing this, your job, dear signing table author, is to give them your most dazzling smile and brightly reply, "Well, now you have! Would you like a bookmark?"

And that cuts to the most basic purpose of book promotion: it's how you let people know that your book exists, why they might want to pick up a copy, and where they can get it. And you try not to alienate anyone (including yourself) in the process.

Make no mistake: promoting your book is work. My first job involved scraping dried poo out of the bottom of snake cages; the darkest depths of book promo can seem comparable. However, the snakes never once thanked me for a clean cage, whereas I have gotten emails from people who've picked up my work at a convention as a result of seeing me read or seeing my materials and consequently became fans.

I can see some of you shaking your heads, resisting my crazy notions. Surely you would never have to stoop to the literary equivalent of scraping snake poop! Isn't writing a good book hard enough? Surely well-written books just naturally rise to the top of any book stack and find their audience like dandelions finding the sun! Isn't all that icky, tiresome promo stuff the publisher's job?

Sure. And it would be great if your publishers threw all their money and effort into promoting your book ... but what if they don't? It would be great if the big book chains automatically ordered a zillion copies of your book and put them up front for all to see ... but what if they don't? What if the publisher gets cold feet about your book's sales chances and releases it as a POD, and now no brick-and-mortar stores will stock it at all?

What then? How is your book going to fare against the hundreds of other books that are published in the U.S. and U.K. each day?

I won't stand here and tell that you actually have to do anything. You still have a book, and what you do with it is entirely up to you.

For instance, you can just be thrilled that you beat the odds and got a book published, send your author's copies to your friends and family, and let the book market remain a black-box mystery you don't involve yourself with. You've got a pretty nice life, and you reached your goal of becoming a Published Author. So what if low sales and low involvement will prevent you from selling another book to that publisher? One book's enough, right?

Alternately, you can feel cheated that your publisher dropped the promotions ball, and bitter that people aren't flocking to the book you poured your heart and soul into. You can wail and gnash your teeth and throw up your hands in defeat. Later, after you've pulled yourself from your inactive funk, you start work on your next project, hoping your first failure hasn't doomed your hoped-for career as a writer. You can always get a fresh start with a pseudonym, right?

Or you can say to yourself, "Hm. This isn't going like I thought it would, but I refuse to let my book go down as a failure without a fight. This is my book, and I know in my heart there's an audience for it out there, and dammit, I'm going to find it!"

And when you're ready to roll up your sleeves and help your book perform as well as it possibly can, that's when you need to start considering what you can do to promote it.

The first, most basic step is one I've already touched on: write a good book. Write the best book you possibly can.

You are, first and foremost, a writer. Worry about promotions after you've taken care of your craft and your deadlines. You can surely do a hard sell and essentially trick somebody into buying a mediocre book, but that reader isn't likely to come back for seconds.

The second step is this: never, ever get stuck with a bad cover.

In this instance, "bad" can mean an ugly cover, but it can also means a cover that doesn't speak to the target audience's aesthetic sensibility, or which greatly misleads readers into thinking the book will be something it's not. The old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover" is widely and utterly ignored by the reading public. People buy or ignore books all the time based purely on the cover art; buyers for book chains may double an order of a book that has a cover they think is especially appealing.

Yes, this is shallow and horrifying, but it's how the world works. A bad cover can kill your book dead. So don't let a bad cover happen to your book if you can help it.

Most big publishers have professional design staff, but these pros often work under crushing deadlines and consequently they do make mistakes. Look at their past offerings and try to get a cover approval clause written into your contract if you have any doubt that they'll give you a good cover. Small-press publishers may or may not be run by people with good art sense, but they'll generally be perfectly willing to work with you if you approach them politely with suggestions.

Not sure if you know what separates a good cover from a bad one? Then take some time to learn a little about the basics of graphic design and typography. Being "artistic" is as much a learned skill as it is a natural instinct; even if you think you're art blind, you probably can learn the basics of good design. And if after Art 101 you're still convinced that covers featuring bluish Poser people trapped in the Uncanny Valley look just fine ... make friends with an artist who likes to read the kind of books you like to write. They can help warn you when a bad cover is about to happen to you.

Developing your graphic design sense and acquiring skills with programs like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop will serve you well as you move on to more advanced book promotion tactics ... but I'm going to save that and more for future entries.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Gary A. Braunbeck

Many dim moons ago, when Reagan had just taken possession of the White House and I'd taken possession of my 20s, I decided on fiction writing as a career, unaware at the time that my decision was due to undiagnosed brain damage, the extent of which is still being determined. I was cranking out bad short stories and even worse novels on a magnificent (and if used as a weapon, potentially deadly) Olympus manual typewriter. Its loud, metallic clickitty-clack-clack became the underscore of my Grand Opera of the Imagination, a march, a rally cry, a battle hymn, always singing out You can do it! You can do it!

Yes, we all recognize the above as being Inspirational Bullshit Designed to Make You Urp on Your Shoes. The truth is, that sound used to drive me crazy, because eventually it began to sound like the Failure Police were mocking me as they danced and sang before my eyes in a Kick-Line of Coming Calamity: You're going nowhere/You're doing nothing/No one will read you/You'll die unread. Boogie-oogie-oogie. Sisyphus had nothing on me.

One of the things that used to keep me going was the thought that, if I kept at it and listened to the advice of pro writers whenever I could corner them, I would start to publish, then be paid, then be able to support myself on writing alone. Well, I did keep at it, I did listen to advice from the pros (especially a marvelously encouraging letter from Harlan Ellison to the 19-year-old moi), and I began to publish. My first short story appeared in a small press magazine when I was 22, and now--almost exactly 25 years later--I have somewhere around 200 published stories to my credit, as well as 10 novels, 10 short story collections, 1 non-fiction book, and 2 anthologies that I have co-edited. And there are nights when that chorus line from the Ninth Circle of Hell still puts on its little show, with a Sunday matinee thrown in for good measure. And I wonder why I'm on anti-depressants.

One thing that often appears to beginning writers much as the vision of the Holy Grail appeared to King Arthur is the concept of the Advance. Ah, so elusive she seems, waiting somewhere Out There in your future, wagging her finger seductively, lips moistened and eyes gleaming with yummy promise: I'm here for you, you'll see. Some day, we'll be together.

Cue soft focus, Writer embraces Seductress, Fade Out as echoing voices sing: You finally got here/Don't need to punch the clock/But you remember/There's still Writer's Block!

Ahem. Yes, the last and deadliest phase of going from part-time to full-time writer, from would-be pro to flat-out slave of the muse: the advance.

As I write this, I have a stack of book contracts within easy reach. All have been signed by the proper parties, and all have been accompanied by advance checks. There's just one little glitch in this portrait of the Writer's dream Come True.

I haven't written any of these books yet.

(Not entirely true; work has begun on all and is nearly finished on two; the point is, I've got until October to deliver all five. Boogie-oogie-oogie, cue the kick-line in the wings.)

That's the part of the Pro Writer Fantasy sequence that never enters the picture when the young You imagines that provocative seductress beckoning to you from your future. Yes, it's great to have someone hand you a stack of cash for something you haven't written yet (it's still one hell of a confidence booster), and when you're younger it's easy to think you'll never, ever, under any circumstances, have trouble producing that book you've already taken money for, but somewhere in the theatrical wings of your subconscious Jung and Freud are rolling on the floor, howling with laughter as the Failure Police don their black fishnet stockings ala Dr. Frankenfurter and wait for their cue.

I once promised myself that I would never, ever accept money up front for something I haven't written. As far as my books go, I've broken that promise every time, and so far I haven't locked up, freaked out, melted down, climbed a tower with a rifle in my hands, or taken to reading John Grisham.

But ....

But there's always the waiting chorus line in my head, kept in place by a stage manager who every so often calls: "Places for the Dance of Doom and Despair! Places, please, he's gonna crack this time, I just know it!"

Taking advances up front for something not yet written is a sure-fire way to keep you on edge, and adds (as I've found so far) a certain, feverish, almost desperate quality to the work itself, which gives definite intensity to the telling of the tale. I've had many people say one of the things they like best about my work is its strong emotional content. I appreciate that, because I do like to engage readers' emotions as deeply as possible (there just isn't story without feeling), but to be completely honest, sometimes that intensity comes not just from my imagination, but from the realization that Dear God, I've already taken money for this thing and I Have to finish it, I Have To, Dear God I HAVE TO! What if I can't? What if I go blank, become blocked, flip out, have to take a one-way ride in the Twinkie Mobile to the House of Good Pudding? What Then? What? WHAT THE #@!* WAS I THINKING?

And one lithium later I remember the why I got into this in the first place.

To meet women.

As long as they're not part of certain chorus....

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, humor, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Everyone who sets out to become a writer wants to be seen as a "real" writer, not a wanna-be or never-gonna-be. It's basic human nature to crave acceptance, status and respect. And even the crustiest, most jaded authors -- despite their protestations to the contrary -- are human beings who are warmed by praise and stung by criticism just like everyone else.

Group hug, anyone? Sure, let's all have a big, fuzzy group hug. You're going to need it. Respect can be very hard to come by in the writing world.

Have you written seven epic manuscripts but not sold anything yet? Average Joe SFWA Active will snort and roll his eyes behind your back when you declare yourself to be a writer in his presence.

Excited because you just sold your first novel? Snarky Big-Name World Fantasy Award Winner won't give you the time of day.

Have you made a long, award-winning career selling dozens of horror and dark fantasy books? Professor Condescendor at the Great North American English Department will pat you on your head and tell you it's too bad you don't do any "serious" work.

And if you've made a solid literary and commercial career writing dark works of staggering intelligence, subtle lyricism and heartbreaking genius, Teen AOL User will be quick to write a negative Amazon review of your latest opus: "This book was teh BORING! There was no action in it at ALL!"

And if you manage to write bestselling works that magically combine high art, genuine chills and compelling storytelling, if you have Professor Condescendor and Teen AOL User and Big-Name Award Winner all clamoring for your next publication ...

... you'll go visit Uncle Insurance Salesman, who'll yawn when you describe your latest book tour and ask, "So when are you gonna quit playing around with that writing crap and get yourself a REAL job?"

The moment you set out to become a writer, no matter how good you are, you're going to meet people who'll put you in touch with your inner Rodney Dangerfield at almost every turn.

So you just can't win, can you? You might as well just write what you want and pay to publish the result at Lulu.com and not worry about what anyone else thinks, right?

Whoa. Not so fast.

You might not always be able to win at the writing game, but there's a right way and a wrong way to play it. And if you play well, you'll (probably) earn the respect of the people who might matter a whole lot to the progress of your writing career.

Because when you get down to bare boards, you want that career, don't you? Writing makes a fine hobby, but hobbyists just don't get the kind of respect pros do. And the beauty of making money at writing is that it enables you to spend your time writing instead of fixing leaky toilets or taking customer support calls.

The most straightforward way of gaining respect in the genre of your choice is to write and sell a lot of excellent work in that genre.

Straightforward, sure ... but not very darned easy. Writing well is hard enough without considering that the average paying publisher might accept less than 3% of the manuscripts submitted to them.

It can take years for talented beginners laboring in anonymity to land first story or novel sales, particularly if they have decided to limit their submissions to high-profile pro markets.

So what's a newbie to do? Fortunately, there are several para-writing activities you can engage in that can both improve your skills and positively raise your profile and respect in the field (and thus your likelihood of getting published).

1. Go to Clarion or the Borderlands Boot Camp. These workshops are often described as "boot camp for writers". Borderlands Press' workshop is held in Towson, MD over a long weekend. There are three of the six-week Clarion workshops in San Diego, Seattle, and Australia. You'll have to compete to get in, pay to stay in, and it's an intense experience that galvanizes some writers and traumatizes others.

At Clarion, you'll work with established pros and other up-and-comers; the networking contacts you make can be invaluable. And if you graduate, you may find that a Clarion credit is enough to lift your submissions out of the slushpile and onto the editor's desk for closer consideration. This golden period only lasts for a year or so after you graduate, but many graduates have made publishing hay from it.

2. Get an MFA in writing. Pursuing a graduate degree of any kind can be quite expensive, and an MFA takes time and work. On the plus side, it gives you a socially acceptable way to spend a few years focusing on your writing. On the downside, MFA programs are rarely receptive to science fiction, fantasy, romance, and horror, so you'll have to bleach your genre roots and learn to put up with a lot of tedious (and potentially discouraging) lit snobbery from your instructors and classmates.

Writing practice aside, an MFA gets you an academic credential -- one that some people may be impressed with -- but not much else. However, having an MFA is a prerequisite to getting a job as a creative writing instructor at most big universities, and becoming a writing professor is a pretty good gig if you can get it. Academia is not for everyone, and MFA programs crank out many more graduates than there are waiting positions, but a professorship is more suited to a writer's creative life than most 9-to-5 jobs.

2a. Or, go to Seton Hill. Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, runs a unique low-residency MA in Writing Popular Fiction. The goal of the program is to have you graduate with a publishable novel manuscript in your hands; Nalo Hopkinson and Mary Sangiovanni and others have sold the books they worked on in the Seton Hill program. Can you get published without going to school? Absolutely. But if you want to get a Master's degree and you want to work with pros like Michael Arnzen, Gary A. Braunbeck, Lawrence C. Connolly, and Tim Waggoner, you should check out the program.

3. Become an editor at a paying publication. If you're buying fiction and poetry, you get instant credibility -- as long as you make good decisions.

Fortunately, you don't need to shell out the money to start your own publication. There are hundreds of established publications out there, and the vast majority of them are understaffed; they will gladly accept competent volunteers for proofreading and slush-reading.

You'll get to see the submissions process from the other side of the transom, and the experience can be tremendously educational. Hard work and good taste will help you rise in the volunteer ranks until you're a recognized editor. But beware: you may find yourself with so much work on your hands that you no longer have the time or energy to write.

4. Don't ignore the small presses. Yes, the small presses are small. Many don't pay well, if at all. But there are good, respected small press magazines that will get you a bit of pay and a bit more recognition in the genre. No, they can't compete with top-paying markets in terms of exposure. But competition for the best markets is fierce. The writers I've known who've written stories or novels, sent them out only to the biggest markets and given up on the manuscripts when they weren't accepted have all ultimately given up on writing.

5. But by all means, submit to the top markets. A single sale to one of the top markets will instantly raise your profile in the genre and give you much more credibility as a writer. So, if you think your work's solid, give it a shot; just don't fall into a depressed I'm-no-good-I-should-just-quit funk if you miss your target.

6. Don't give up. Did you read #5? I repeat: don't give up. Getting established as a writer will take a while. How long a while? Probably years. How many years? Get a pair of dice; roll 'em. That's as likely a forecast as any. Ultimately, it will probably take longer than you expect. But those with sticktuitiveness are rewarded.

7. Write nonfiction. Editors at paying magazines are deluged with fiction and poetry submissions, but nonfiction submissions are sometimes just a trickle. So, your odds of placing a book or movie review can be pretty good. An article credit doesn't "count" the same as a fiction credit ... but it still gets you a bit of pay and gets your name on the Table of Contents.

8. Follow the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, phrased a bit less Biblically: "The best way to get respect is to give it." Or, even more simply: don't be a jerk.

Yes, we all know certain big-name writers who are famously caustic, combative, or just plain unpleasant. Some people unfortunately find a great deal of entertainment in watching established authors snark at the expense of "lesser" writers. Consequently, some beginners mistakenly believe that they, too, can get noticed and get published if they're nasty as possible.

This tends to backfire in a bad way. One talented writer I know who kicked up a lot of dust and got himself banned from forum after forum eventually felt he'd damaged his career so much he needed to legally change his name. No one ever succeeded as a writer because they acted like a huge jerk; the huge jerks in the field have succeeded because they write like angels.

So, go forth and write like an angel and work like the devil. And remember that everyone in this business is only human.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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I was updating my website today, and it finally occurred to me that the casual site visitor might be put off by the fact that I refer to poetry and fiction sales rather than poetry and fiction publications.

"Whoa," he or she might think. "This Lucy person is all money-focused. She's all commercial. Ew. Doesn't she care about art?"

Because I have a mortgage and other bills due every month and Bad Things Will Happen if those don't get paid, and because I am not a trust-fund baby, yes, money is on my mind pretty regularly. But I expect I'm not any more money-focused than most of you reading this.

If I really cared about money above all else, I'd have gone into real estate or stock trading. I surely wouldn't be spending time writing poetry.

Like it or not, those of us who work in the arts in the U.S. have to deal with a capitalist system that doesn't cut us any slack if we've worked very, very hard on our craft all month and yet don't have any money. And the no-money situation is a pretty common one for fiction writers who don't have family supporting them.

It's hard for a beginning writer to sell a story or poem. If you haven't tried it before, you may have no clue exactly how hard it can be. It can even be pretty hard to give your stuff away to a nonpaying lit magazine.

Making a sale is essentially hearing an editor say, "I like this so much I'm picking it as better than 100 other things I got this month, and I'm going to make space for it in the publication I've staked my reputation to, and I'm going to give you money out of my own pocket."

In other words, a sale means a whole lot of editorial approval.

Furthermore, writers' organizations like SFWA and HWA define a writer's professional status by the quantity and quality of sales he or she makes. And the IRS surely demands that I keep track of individual sales; those sales define me as a "real" writer in the government's eyes rather than a hobbyist.

So if those groups are gonna define my status as a writer by my sales, I might as well too, right?

"But what about Art?" I hear some of you cry. "Where's the art in all this pursuit of filthy lucre?"

I care deeply about art. But I don't get to decide if any of my writing is artistic. Art is what happens in the reader's mind, if it happens at all. It's subjective, and I don't get to control it.

What I do get to control is craft. Good craft often translates into good art. And I work as hard as I can to produce well-crafted writing.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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Beginning writers who send out their very first stories to magazines or anthologies don't usually have much trouble keeping track of where they sent them. Why? They can't stop thinking about them!

A new writer often spends her free time anxiously second-guessing herself and her submission decisions: "Ack! A typo! I should have done more proofreading! I should have cut that second fight scene! I should have sent it to Alternate Magazine instead!"

And when the mail carrier comes, she pounces on the pile of mail, hoping for a response, day after day, month after month, but when the ominously thin SASE finally arrives, she can hardly bring herself to open it.

Once a writer has been through the wringer of the painfully long submission-rejection-resubmission cycle a few times, she forces herself to stop thinking about the darned submissions, and focuses on the work at hand: writing new stories.

And that's when the submissions can get muddled in a writer's mind. It's easy to lose track of a rejected submission, thinking that it's still being considered someplace, while it languishes on the writer's desk or hard drive. A worse case happens when a writer inadvertently starts sending the same story to multiple markets at the same time, only to end up with two different acceptances for the same story. And while this might seem an embarrassment of riches to an unpublished writer, at best it's an embarrassment. At worst, the writer is faced with the painful decision of which bridge to burn, since most editors are cranky and overworked and don't look kindly on authors pulling accepted stories out from under them.

So, writers need to have some kind of a method to keep track of their submissions. What kind should you use?

Some writers prefer the simplicity of keeping track of their submissions on paper.

"I used to be a teacher," says writer Kevin Killiany. "I have several old grade books with lots of columns and rows. Each manuscript has its own page. The titles of the stories tracked are written on the cover of the book, with stars next to the ones that sell."

Despite my abiding gadget lust, when it comes to submission tracking I'm also pretty low-tech. I use note cards in a little plastic index card box. Each story/poem/article gets its own card, and each submission is recorded on a line. When I've filled one side of the card with rejections, I know it's time to reconsider my tactics.

The editor at Albedo One approves of my card box tracker: "I would suggest your library card approach is as good as it gets. You do not need to wait for your computer to boot up. You are not snookered when there is a power cut. You have the whole story (if you forgive the pun) in one simple piece of card. In addition, you can be flexible in what you note on the card.

"The only problem with the card system is that you would find it a bit difficult to produce listings of the work you have out in the market," he says. "But then again, how often do you really need to do that?"

Others have used the box tracking method, but became disenchanted with it.

"I used to use notecards in a little plastic box, but a few years ago I switched to a very simple one-page spreadsheet, which I put in a folder with the manuscript itself," says writer/editor Lori Selke. "Same data, slightly different format, no more annoying little plastic box kicking around and getting in the way."

Horror author Yvonne Navarro combines paper tracking with computer software. "Every short story that I finish has its own manila folder," she says. "On the inside left side I write the date and name of the magazine/anthology and the date on which I should receive some kind of a reply based on their guidelines (or my estimate). If the manuscript is rejected, I write that and the date, then start all over.

"To keep track I have a little 'sticky note' program on my computer that pops up a note with the story name when the response should be here. Before that I used a big, full-year write-on/wipe-off calendar, but I never wrote on it -- I used Post-It Notes with the name of the story that I moved from date to date."

As far as computer-based tracking methods go, many writers use spreadsheets.

Writer Daniel R. Robichaud turned to spreadsheets after finding paper records unmanageable. "Once upon a time, I assembled lists on loose sheets of copy paper with the story name and market, written in the order of submission. After a while that became a complete nightmare to manage, particularly after moving a couple of times when loose sheets of paper could and did get lost."

He now keeps separate worksheets in a single Microsoft Excel file for his fiction and nonfiction. "It's easy for me to set up a reminder in the Office Mail program to send queries for submissions sitting in slush piles long after the market's posted response time expires."

Brenta Blevins prefers to use the freeware spreadsheet program found in found in the OpenOffice.org suite. "I like the nice linear quick view of the spreadsheet and being able to sort within my spreadsheet."

Other writers prefer to use online trackers offered by sites such as WritersMarket.com, Duotrope and Writers' Planner.

"The Duotrope submissions tracker is excellent because it also ties into their market listings and reports on response times," says writer E.C. Meyers. "It's online and free, but Duotrope does accept donations towards their operating costs."

"Another advantage of Duotrope is its web accessibility," says Brenta Blevins. "I don't have to have the computer with my spreadsheet -- I can update the submission record anywhere (even on vacation)."

There's a freeware program that many writers such as Bev Vincent use: Sonar 2, which was created by author Simon Haynes.

"I wrote it because I was going nuts keeping track of short story submissions," Haynes writes on his site. "This program tells me which market has each story, whether a story has been sold or rejected and which stories are gathering dust instead of earning their keep."

Of Sonar 2, writer Adam Nakama says, "It's not as powerful as high-end database software, and has a couple of quirks to it, but I don't need the full power of database tracking. (Sonar 2) has a few things built in that are nice for writerly types who don't know how or don't want to program it into their friendly database record.

"It also makes it easy for you to data mine your submissions," says Nakama. "You can see, for example, that you've been sending stories like clockwork to Magazine X for years, but that damn editor just won't accept your stuff, despite you getting frequent acceptances from other magazines on par with it. You may want to consider that your work just doesn't mesh with that editor and move on."

So, as you can see, there are lots of ways to track your manuscript submissions.

Someday, we writers may have access to neural interfaces that can update your entries just by thinking about them. In the meantime, your notebook, spreadsheet, or software is only as good as your own updates. So take the most basic step in good tracking: make sure you write down your submissions when you send them out.

Labels: technology, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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Every so often, I see a frantic message on Shocklines posted by someone whose computer has crashed -- with the only existing copy of a newly-minted short story or novella dead along with their hard drive.

If your hard drive dies carrying important files that can't be resurrected with the aid of programs like Norton or TechTool, that's a painful way to learn that you must do regular system maintenance like defragging your hard drive and backing up your files to keep them safe. But these days, keeping backups of files is only part of what you need to do to keep your work safe.

It'd be simpler if computers simply worked and didn't crash, wouldn't it? But crash they do, and some of the worst crashes I've seen in my job as a tech support agent have happened because of spyware and virus infections. The Internet has become a truly treacherous place for Windows users (Mac and Linux users are largely immune to such problems at this point) and malware infections can be difficult to remove; the best thing to do is to protect yourself.

The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have a firewall installed and have a decent antivirus program like McAfee VirusScan (my personal favorite) or Norton Antivirus, and have the program set to regularly update your virus profiles. The best antivirus program in the world won't do you any good if you're exposed to a brand-new virus that the program can't recognize because it hasn't been updated (and on that note, make sure that you check for and install system and security updates for your computer's operating system on a regular basis).

The best thing to do is to try to avoid exposing yourself to viruses in the first place. Many people get infections through spam emails that contain viruses masquerading as other types of attachments. So, don't open those attachments promising pictures of Britney Spears cavorting naked with the Queen of England, folks. Don't even touch them.

Also, don't respond to alarming emails that purport to come from your bank or credit card company. Don't click on the links they provide, don't call the phone numbers they provide, and in the name of all that is holy, don't click or call and then provide any personal information or account numbers. These emails are almost always scams intended to steal your information so that some creep can clean out your bank account or go on a credit spree on your dime. These assholes are ruthlessly efficient, and they will start doing this within minutes of getting your information. If you're worried about your account, look up the company's name in your telephone book and call them.

And finally, never, ever email anyone your entire social security number, credit card number, password, etc.

An email is about as private as a postcard, or a conversation on a crowded bus. You would be amazed at the sheer number of people who potentially have access to your emails as they make their way from Computer A to Computer B. This a good reason to never put your social security number on a manuscript that you send through email or in an emailed contract.

Labels: technology, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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In this article, I'll take a look at the practical economics of trying to make a living writing short fiction in the U.S. This topic regularly comes up on message boards and at conventions. People usually speak in generalities ("You can't make a living writing stories!" "Can, too!") or cite specific-but-individual anecdotes without other data or analysis.

I'm going to take the approach that it is possible to survive on the proceeds from short fiction; the question then becomes, under what conditions can it be done?

Let's start by looking at the U.S. federal government's standards for poverty. The 2006 US poverty threshold for a single person is $9800, which works out to $817/month. A person working 40 hours a week at a job that pays $6.85/hour -- which some rural school districts in Ohio are paying teachers, so it's not just burger wranglers bringing home this kind of paycheck -- makes about $890/month after taxes.

As millions of college students know, it's entirely possible to survive on $800 (or even less) each month if you're able to split costs with other people and you can approach your financial situation with some savvy creativity.

Let's assume, for this scenario, that you are living with a group of other people in a large house. You are not anybody else's dependent for tax or other purposes (meaning your costs are lowered but nobody's there to bail you out if you can't make your share of the rent) and you likewise do not have any dependents (not even a goldfish). You are not trying to pay off loans or other debts. You live in a city and can use a bicycle, public transportation or carpools to get around so that you don't have the expense of maintaining a car. You are willing to shop at thrift stores, get most of your books and CDs from your public library, and you're not above dumpster diving if the situation warrants it.

Furthermore, we'll assume that you are fundamentally healthy, do not have a drug/alcohol habit, and are not accident prone. The budget we're going to work will not support your blowing $60 at the bar every Friday night, nor will it support the kind of health insurance that would actually keep you from going bankrupt should you actually get sick.

Under the above scenario, you could probably rent a room in a shared house in a student neighborhood for about $200 a month¹. Your share of the utilities might come to $50, your food about $250, your transportation costs perhaps $45, plus $55 for things like aspirin and shampoo and the occasional treat at the neighborhood coffee house.

This means that each and every month, you need at minimum $600 to survive. At $600 per month, you'd be under the federal poverty level and would qualify for food stamps, but getting food stamps as a freelancer is often an unreliable prospect at best so we'll pretend this option doesn't even exist. But be aware that it could be an option, as might other forms of public assistance depending on where you live.

So, we know what you need to make; now let's focus on how you're going to make it.

The SFWA/HWA-designated professional rate for fiction is $0.05 a word. But most markets really don't pay that, and you might not have the luxury of shopping a story around much, so let's go with $0.03/word. At three cents a word, you'd have to sell 20,000 words worth of stories every month at minimum without fail.

Working from the assumption that 30% of your writing has to be rewritten/scrapped or simply doesn't sell for the required amount (and this is a very generous assumption), that output increases to 28,600. But if you think about it as having to produce 954 words a day to make your minimum, it doesn't seem that bad; most proficient writers can crank out a page an hour, so you're looking at 4 hours of butt-in-chair work each day.

By a similar calculation, if you wanted to upgrade your lifestyle and make $817/month, you'd have to write 1200 sellable words of fiction each day.

Things get much better if you're able to write children's stories and technical nonfiction. You can get $0.25/word for children's stories from the top markets; a 1,500-word story at that rate gets you $375; sell two of those and you've earned your nut for the month.

Writers with scientific knowledge and good research skills can sell short technical articles for $0.50 or $0.60 a word; a 1400-word article that might take you three solid days to research and write would earn you $800. Sell one of those a month, and the pressure's largely off. Sell two of those, and you're doing better than a 1st-grade teacher's aide in Delaware, OH. You could get a cat! (If your roommates will let you)

Things get even better if your fiction passes as literature in the eyes of the arts community and you can get yourself a grant every once in a while. (Finding and landing grants is a specialized skill in itself, but a good first step is to check listings offered by your state and local arts groups).

However, things get considerably worse if you think about how long it takes some publishers to read and respond to your work, and that many fiction markets don't pay until the work is published. If you send a sellable story out to market, it might be over a year before you see a check for it, even if it gets accepted by the very first place you send it to. Having some savings to fall back on becomes very, very important when you think about the dry spells you might encounter.

Once you've sold a stack of stories to decent publications and have started getting a name for yourself, a producer may notice one of your stories and buy the rights to it for film or television. That's like winning the lottery, both in payout and probability. More realistically, as a "name" story writer, you may be able to sell a collection. Collections are hard to sell to publishers because publishers find them hard to sell to readers, but if you succeed you may get a fairly decent advance of anything from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The advance for a story collection most often won't be as good as what you'd get if you sold a novel, unless you're clever and you've written a bunch of short stories featuring the same characters and have strung them together to make your collection look enough like a novel that publishers and readers will accept it as such.

And that's the moral of this writeup: if you want a career as a fiction writer, you need to start writing books, and that means writing novels, Harlan Ellison's career notwithstanding.

Of course, you could always try to become a creative writing professor. If you have the patience to teach and the temperament to deal with academia, a faculty position is a pretty sweet gig if you can find one. If you have a Master's degree, solid literary publication credits and luck, you might be able to find a job at a community college. If you want to teach at a large university, though, you'll need an MFA as well as lit credits and teaching experience. MFA programs can be tough to get into^2a, expensive, and will likely mean you have to move to a new state for school ^2b. Furthermore, they pump out many times more graduates than there are waiting faculty jobs.

But what if you don't want to (or find that you can't) write novels, don't want to teach (or can't do an MFA), and you don't have savings to fall back on? A part-time job that doesn't suck out your soul ³ can help tremendously. Some part-time jobs at colleges and public libraries can come with health insurance benefits; competition for these low-paid jobs can therefore be fierce, but they're worth looking for and applying to. Also, check out your local Starbucks; some stores offer health benefits for part-timers. Having a job that doesn't devour your energy but which gets you out of your room (and your own head) a couple of times a week can be a huge mental health boost.

In short, you can survive as a short fiction writer if you're healthy, single⁴, hard-working, prolific, and willing to cut a very low economic profile. A few thousand dollars saved in the bank before you start won't hurt, either.

---

1: If you live in an expensive area, $200 for a room in a 5- or 6-bedroom house may require some very hard searching and willingness to compromise your personal standards when it comes to cleanliness, building integrity, housemate appeal, and neighborhood safety; in very expensive places, it may be virtually impossible. There are other alternatives that determined writers have taken, however. I know of a young male writer who, for about a year, lived in an old van parked behind a friend's small house in California and wrote/submitted stories on a laptop connected to the household wireless network. He showered at the gym at a nearby college and was able to cook his meals in the house. Eventually he started making enough money that he was able to get a proper apartment.

2a: MFA programs can be particularly hard to get into if you've actually been getting paid for your fiction and have consequently been tainted by genre.

2b: Locals need not apply to many MFA programs.

3: The soul-sucking jobs are often well-paid but can cause despair that in turn causes chronic illness and writer's block; if you suspect you might have a soul, it's best to avoid evil jobs if you can.

4: Suffering for your art is noble; making your family suffer for it is bullshit.

Labels: economy, employment, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

If you look at a book, usually on the dustcover, paperback cover or somewhere in the first couple of pages you will see something like "'(This author's) writing is a dazzling bravura of wild imagery and nail-biting suspense.' – Reed McReaderson" or "'A wonderful book! I couldn't put it down!' – Gush Auteur".

These little cover raves are known as "blurbs".

I am a firm believer that a handful of strong blurbs can be just as effective as the same number of positive reviews; they're shorter, they're direct, and they reveal nothing spoiler-like about the work in question. This, to my mind, makes them a good alternative for potential readers who don't want to chance having a review give away too much of the story.

Some -- but not all -- blurbs are culled from reviews. Probably half the time (or more) a writer will contact other writers and ask them if they would be willing to read something with an eye toward providing a blurb. I have gotten several wonderful quotes this way, and have also provided them for other writers. (I don't always do this; in the past 4 years I have been asked to read several novels for which, in the end, I couldn't in good conscience provide a blurb because, well...I didn't like them.)

Let me quickly address a few misconceptions about writers providing blurbs for other writers:

1. Yes, a lot of the time these writers know or are at least acquainted with one another -- but that in no way means that a good blurb will be guaranteed. A writer worth any blurb value has his or her reputation to uphold, and publicly praising a bad book won't help that cause one bit.
   
   
2. I can't speak for others, but I myself do read, from first page to last, each and every book I am asked to blurb. (There seems to be a rather cynical belief that writers don't bother reading their buddies' books before giving them a blurb -- while I don't doubt that this happens every so often, it is most assuredly not the norm.)
   
   
3. Yes, any writer providing a blurb is aware that it's going to be used to entice a reader to buy this particular book, and will slant their blurb to that end -- but bear in mind that is because they like and believe in the book to begin with, so its integrity needn't be called into question.
   
   

This is not to say that things can't go wrong here, as well. If a book is saturated with too many blurbs, one gets the feeling that the publisher is overcompensating and perhaps trying to sell you a bill of goods. The first book in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series has ten pages of blurbs inside.

That's overkill, because the sheer amount of them robs each individual blurb of its effectiveness. You're so numbed by the time you reach the end of the damned things you almost don't feel like reading the book -- which turns out to be quite a lot of good, old-fashioned fun. But because it starts off by pummeling you with page after page of rave blurbs (almost none of which refer to the book itself), you go in with the creeping feeling that someone is trying to convince you a sow's ear is actually a silk purse.

My own personal cutoff point is two pages or a dozen blurbs (whichever comes first); after that, I ignore them. With blurbs, less is definitely more. (The ideal for me, by the way, is a single page containing somewhere between five and ten concise, tantalizing quotes.)

I am very careful to make certain that none of the blurbs used for my books are taken out of context -- I don't want readers to feel that these quotes have been employed to mislead them, and I don't want reviewers to feel that I've misrepresented their theses by "doctoring" their comments.

What it boils down to is that strong blurbs can serve as the middle ground for readers who want some sense of what to expect from a book but don't want to chance having anything "spoiled" for them ... and reviewers can write whatever they damned well please without fear of being accused of "spoiling" anything.

I still think the best solution is to read the first few pages of a book to figure out if you're going to like it or not. But if that's not possible for whatever reason, then seek out a review; read the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs if you want to avoid encountering spoilers. If that doesn't appeal or work for you, then turn to the blurbs.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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Have you ever seen or purchased a limited-edition book that came already signed by the author or contributors? Yeah, it's pretty neat getting a book like that, and collectors are willing to pay quite a bit extra for a book signed by a famous writer.

Some people think that the publisher rounds up all the authors for a wine and cheese party at which everybody signs the books, but that's not usually what happens. Trying to get a bunch of writers together in the same room at the same time is like herding cats, and mailing boxes of books around the world is terribly costly.

So, what publishers do is mail around stacks of pages -- signature sheets -- that the authors then sign and ship to the next people on the list. After the sheets are filled with signatures, they're added to the rest of the book's pages and bound into (or simply tipped into) the finished book.

If you aspire to be an anthology editor, be aware that signature sheets -- while they are indeed a cool thing to do for a limited edition -- are often a big huge expensive pain. This is particularly true if there are more than 10 authors involved and they're not local (if they are local, you can attempt to host the aforementioned sheet-signing party and get it done fairly painlessly).

If there are more than 20 authors from all over the country involved in your project and you've got to get everyone's signatures on the sheets, it's just like Disneyworld, if Disneyworld involved sitting in a hardbacked chair for 10 or 12 hours only to have circus midgets rush out of a closet and pelt you with dead fish at the end of your wait.

Things that will likely happen to signature sheets:

1. The post office will go "OMG! Big box = teh bomb!" and haphazardly slash it open with a boxcutter and consequently slice or otherwise munge up the top and bottom sheets in the process. *
   
   


2. At least one author will have carpal tunnel syndrome and not be able to sign the sheets for months and months.
   
   
3. While the author is recovering, one of the author's cats will climb to the top shelf where the signature sheet box has been put for safekeeping, and thoughtfully hork a big wet hairball therein.
   
   
4. While the author was recovering, postal rates went up, thus rendering the postage you included in the box insufficient. Author is dead broke due to having to pay the doctor for carpal tunnel surgery. You will have to overnight a money order to the author to enable her to send the box along to the next author.
   
   
5. Next author in line finally receives the box, then proceeds to pitch a fit because "there are way too many signature sheets" (you included 20% more in a futile attempt to compensate for boxcutters, hairballs, and coffee spills) and thus the publisher is trying to cheat him. So you have to call author up in an attempt to explain the presence of additional sheets to cover for loss, but he's not hearing any of it. Author holds entire box hostage until his wife counts up the sheets and tells him that you were right all along. He signs the sheets and sends them along without apology.



6. Somewhere between Bloomington and Boise, the post office will lose the box entirely. *
   
   Alternate Scenario: the box arrives safely in Boise, but the author's angry drunk spouse believes the box is from a lover, and throws it in the dumpster.
   
   Alternate Alternate Scenario: the box arrives, but is stolen off the front porch by a creepy stalker who's been going through the author's mail; signatures of some authors will later show up on Ebay.
   
   Son of the Return of the Alternate Scenario: After the box arrives, the author's town is hit by a flood, hurricane, tornado, volcano, alien invasion, or plague of paper-devouring locusts.
   
   Regardless: you'll have to print up a whole new set, and reobtain the first bunch of signatures.
   
   

* Both of which can happen to book shipments, too. We recently got a box of chapbooks which had been obviously opened by/broke open at the Post Office, spilled onto the floor, possibly stepped on, and hastily dumped back in the box and resealed. Moral: use strong packing tape and plenty of bubble wrap.

Labels: publishing, signature sheets, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Gary A. Braunbeck

Many of you who read my posts asked for more essays on the business and technical aspects of writing, so I've decided to offer a handful of basic -- what I hope are common sense -- suggestions on how to fine-tune your writing by avoiding certain mistakes that can sink your story in a hurry.

1: "Its" and "It's"

The first one -- and, man, am I getting sick of seeing this one -- has to do with "its" and "it's".

Look at those two words, will you?

I'm going to over-emphasize this, just to get it through your heads:

THOSE TWO WORDS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.

They do not mean the same thing.

"Its" is a possessive, as in, "Its components are too complex."

"It's" is a contraction, as in, "It's not my problem if its components are too complex."

This is not something that is up for debate.

If I seem grumpy about this, it's (meaning, "it is") because, in two recent manuscripts sent to me to read for a possible blurb, the friggin' proofreader corrected the author's use of "its" (when it was used correctly) for "it's."

Once more, with feeling:

THOSE TWO WORDS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.

"Its" and "It's" are not the same. Stop doing it. It makes you look ignorant.


2: Profanity

First of all, unless you're writing Christian Young Adult (and even that's up for debate), it would be unrealistic to write a novel or short story wherein one of the characters didn't swear at some point; our lives have become much more fast-paced and frustrating, and a result of that frustration is that people swear more now than they did, say, back in the days of Booth Tarkington's Magnificent Ambersons.

However (you knew that was coming, didn't you?), there is a difference between the way people swear in real life and how they should swear in fiction. I know a guy who would have a full one-third -- if not half -- his vocabulary hacked off at the knees if he were unable to say f**k. I've passed strangers' conversations wherein I picked up at least nine different profanities before they were out of earshot.

I remember one instance, while reading Skipp & Spector's The Light At The End, where in a single line of dialogue, one character used eleven profanities -- including all of the Biggies -- in one sentence; it was rather impressive ... but it was also way too much. Yeah, I have no doubt that there are people out there in the real world who do speak like that, but (and here comes the tip), if you over-use profanity in your dialogue, you rob it of its most important function: profanity is simply violence without action; it should be employed in fiction to either foreshadow or replace violence. If you follow this suggested guideline, you'll not only use less of it your writing, but what you do use will be so well-placed that it will have ten times the impact of an endless string of curses.

Example: in my novel In Silent Graves, there is a sequence where the main character (who's just lost his wife and newborn child) enconters two guys on a city bus who are swearing and cursing and spewing the most unbelievable filth (Andrew Dice Clay wouldn't say some of the things these two guys do); their language is upsetting a young woman who's sitting nearby the main character, and as the intensity of the profanity and filth builds, so does the main character's frustration and anger. It's the only time in the book that profanity of this level is used, and that was a deliberate choice on my part: I wanted it to be as shocking to the reader as it is to the main character, and I wanted it to build along with his anger. Everyone who's read the novel has mentioned this sequence as being very effective, and
inwardly I cheer; I wanted it to be effective, I wanted their language to be shocking, because the increased intensity of the filth that comes out of their mouths foreshadows the violence that ends this sequence.

So: remember that profanity is simply violence without action, and that it should be employed only to foreshadow or replace violence; you'll find that you use less of it, and that what you do use will be all the more effective.


3: Exclamation Points

Admittedly, this one is a personal quibble. However: The exclamation point belongs in dialogue and only in dialogue.

Whenever I encounter an exclamation point used outside of dialogue, I am suddenly pulled from the spell of the story (assuming that it was cast in the first place) and made painfully aware of the writer's intent. It's the writer telling me, the reader, that this! Is! Supposed! To! Be! Exciting! Or! Shocking! Or! Revelatory! It automatically tells me that the writer doesn't trust my intelligence and instincts as a reader enough to let me figure out for myself that something is supposed to shock or stun or scare me.

Consider the following examples, all of them lifted from recent horror stories I've read:

He realized that he hadn't locked the door behind him!
And now they were going to kill her!
They weren't alone in the house!
He was lost!

You get the idea. To say it's melodramatic would be to succumb to gross understatement. The use of the exclamation point outside of dialogue is, to my mind, a lazy cop-out all too frequently embraced by horror writers (and we've all done it, myself included). Think I'm overstating my point? Then try this simple exercise: Pick any of the above-quoted lines, and when you reach the exclamation point, imagine that it's been replaced by the first four notes of the Dragnet theme. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Makes its use seem absurd, doesn't it?

They weren't alone in the house Dum-Da-Dum-Dum.

Keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to use an exclamation point somewhere other than in dialogue.


4: Italics

Like profanity, italics are most effective when used sparingly. From my point of view, italics should only be used to:

• place emphasis on a particular word or phrase;
• indicate a foreign word or phrase;
• cite the name of a book, film, television or radio program, or musical work (as in the name of a symphony or a specific album, such as Mahler's 1st, The Who's Tommy, Warren Zevon's Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, etc.);
• to insert a brief flashback - be it a sequence of events or a snippet of recalled conversation - within the body of the current narrative; and,
• to set apart the contents of a letter, excerpted lines from a poem, or a snippet of song lyrics (which could arguably be accomplished with the use of block quotes instead, making this last "rule" more of a stylistic choice on the part of the writer).

(Parenthetical pause here: when citing the name of a song or a story, quotation marks are what's required, as in: Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" or Stephen King's "Sometimes They Come Back". The title of the album or collection in which the piece is included would be italicized, as in: Simon and Garnfunkel's Greatest Hits and Night Shift. The differences are subtle, but profound, and not necessarily as easy to discern as one might at first think.)

Remember the Dragnet-theme warning I suggested when it came to using exclamation points? Well I've got a similar warning cue to employ when it comes to italics: imagine that whatever is italicized is being either whispered or Shouted Through A Bullhorn (however circumstances dictate); it's a matter of extremes, like it or not.

An italicized letter or quoted poem? A whisper.

A panicked warning (as in: "Look out!")? A shout through a bullhorn. (And bear in mind that when you combine italics with all caps -- "LOOK OUT!" -- it's overkill; the circumstances under which something like the above is italicized give the words or passage an immediacy that presenting them in all capital letters only diminishes; it's hitting the reader over the head with your intent: DEAR GOD, THIS IS REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT AND I'M GOING TO MAKE DAMN SURE YOU KNOW IT!. Overkill. Don't do that, please. (If you've been paying close attention, you'll know that there's a spot in theis very essay where I overkilled with italics; I did that on purpose, to be annoying, just to help me hammer home the point when you arrived here.)

There is another -- and less directly acknowledged -- reason that it's a good idea to use italics sparingly: like it or not, a prolonged passage of italics quickly tires the eyes while reading. It's that simple.

As a writer, whenever I come to a passage that I know is going to have to be italicized (such as a letter or brief flashback), I apply the same rule to my own work that I do to anything that I might choose to read: no more than 3 pages. That is all that my eyes can take as a reader, so I assume that's my readers' limits, as well. After 3 pages, it just gets annoying; and the last thing you want is for a reader to become more aware of how you're presenting something than of its content.

So: a whisper or shouted through a bullhorn, no more than 3 pages, and you just might find that italics can be a useful ally.

5: Sibilant City

Read this and see if you can spot what's wrong:

"Get out now!" he hissed.

Figured it out yet?

In order for someone to "hiss" something when they speak, there has to be at least one sibilant present.

Too many writers are doing this, and it must stop.

"Stop it!" she hissed. That works because there is a sibilant present. Otherwise, it ain't hissing, folks.

To recap: It's a question of sibilants being present in speech before its hissing can happen. (Subtle, ain't I?)

---

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, grammar, punctuation, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Gary A. Braunbeck

In Part 1 we discussed an approach to characterization that was based on nuance -- specifically, visual nuance. I used an an example how much you can tell about a character from the way he or she eats a bowl of cereal. This time, as promised, we're going to take a look at how you can get to know a character from the way he or she puts on or takes off a coat.

I know this may seem silly on the surface, but it works for me. Nearly every story I have written has begun with an image of the central character doing something mundane, but it's the manner in which this mundane task in done that instantly tells me a great deal about them.

Just as a mental exercise, try this: the next you go out to a club, movie, party, or restaurant, over the course of the evening choose five people at random and watch how they both remove and put on their coats. Does this person treat their coat with care, removing it slowly, one arm at a time, and then drape it carefully over the back of their chair (making sure that the lower part doesn't touch the floor), or do they just all but let it drop off of them, and then thoughtlessly sling it over the back of a chair without a second glance, even though a full one-third of it is now spread out on the floor?

As far as putting the coat back on, watch this, as well. Do they exercise care when they do this (again, one arm at a time, slowly), taking time to smooth it out a bit once it's on their body, or do they make a bit of a show out of it, swirling it around their shoulders like Zorro's cape and then jamming their arms into the sleeves with such wide flourish there's a good chance they could take out someone's eye should that other person be standing too close?

This can tell you a lot about your character, albeit in broad strokes, but that's where characterizaton starts. The character who takes care of their coat, who is careful to remove it and hang it off the back of the chair so no part of it touches the floor (and who also exercises quiet care when putting it back on) reveals several things by these actions: this coat is something that has some meaning for them -- it may have been a gift from a family member who is no longer alive (it may even have belonged to that family member, it's your call); it may have been something for which they had to save money every month in order to purchase because they don't have a lot of disposable income; it may be that this coat is one of the few things they feel they look good in; or it may be that this is the only coat they own. The possibilities are endless.

But here is the one thing that you'll know immediately: this is, in all probability, a shy person, one who wishes to blend in as much as possible so as not to draw attention to him- or herself. This is a person who will be all to happy to join in the conversation, but will rarely begin one of their own volition.

Whereas the other person -- the one who just tosses the coat down without a second thought and then makes a bit of a show when putting it back on -- this person is not only an extrovert, but also quite probably someone who, though he or she may have a job, has never really known what it's ike to work in order to possess the basics (like said coat). The coat may have been a gift from a parent (who is still probably alive, and thus able to provide them with a new coat when this one becomes trashed by having half of it draped across the floor so many times); it may be just one of several coats they own, so what the hell do they care?; or it may be that -- like our other person -- this is the only coat they own, but because they need to foster this devil-may-care persona among their friends, they treat it with indifference ... until, of coursde, it's time to leave, and putting it back on allows them to be showy, thus making sure they remain the center of attention.

Like I said, these are broad-stroke examples, but it's a way to begin. Other factors must be called into consideration in order to enrich this scenario; the age and sex of the character in question; the kind of coat he or she is wearing (expensive, something off the rack at Target, something tailored specifically for them, etc.); the circumstances under which he or she is wearing the coat. (I imagine that our first character would exercise the same kind of deliberate care with their coat whether he or she were with a group of people or eating alone -- and wouldn't it be interesting if our second character, when alone, treated their coat with the same care and didn't make a show of putting it back on? It's fun how this works, isn't it?)

Now take it a step further: imagine what's in the pockets of each character's coat. Going with the original conceit that our first character is a shy person who, for the sake or argument, was given the coat as a gift by a deceased parent (perhaps the last gift this person ever received from said parent), they're not likely to stick a used candy bar wrapper in one of the pockets because they couldn't immediately find a trash can after polishing off ... what? (Ask yourself that: what kind of a candy bar would this person prefer, or would they like candy at all? Hmmmmm ....) I imagine that our shy perswon would keep a pair of gloves in the pockets (for when the outside tmperature gets cold) and perhaps their car keys, but little else. Simple and uncluttered.

Whereas our second character would have receipts, loose change, car keys, two or three wadded one-dollar bills they've forgotten are even in there, half a dozen phone numbers scribbled on slips of paper, and a half-eaten candy bar from six months ago that has begun to grow a fungus that is starting to breathe and develop a rudimentary language.

I could go on, but I think you probably got the point of this at least three paragraphs ago.

Keeping in mind what I've discussed, allow me to present you with someone:

Female. Mid-30s. Her coat is wool, with a removable lining. It's tan. It's in very good condition and, in fact, might be thought brand-new until you get close enough to see that it's at least ten years out of style. She removes it carefully after entering the restaurant (she's alone) and instead of draping it over the back of her own chair, places it lengthwise across the other chair at the table, so that the collar is just hanging a little over the back of the chair, and the bottom of the coat hangs a little ways past the seat of the chair, nowhere near touching the floor. She's wearing a wedding ring, but it's on the ring finger of her right hand. She takes her cloth napkin and spreads it across her lap, then smoothes it out. She picks up the menu, takes a small sip from her water glass, and begins reading. If you watch closely, you can see that her hands are trembling slightly.

What's her story? Write about her character in a single paragraph.

Labels: characters, GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Gary A. Braunbeck

I've been very lucky in that readers and many of my fellow writers feel I have a certain skill for creating three-dimensional characters. I'm often asked how I manage to do this, so I thought for my next few columns here, I'd go over some of the methods I employ for characterization. Please bear in mind that these methods are those which work best for me and are not being offered as absolutes or -- God forbid -- a template that will guarantee you'll get the same results. There is no such template; creating a multi-layered, believable, sympathetic character is, like everything else one learns about writing, a matter of trial and error.

Before getting any further into this, I need to give you a little personal background so you'll see how I arrived at these particular methods.

For the better part of a decade -- between the ages of 19 and 30 -- I worked as an actor, mostly summer stock and dinner theatre, but I actually got paid to pretend I was someone else. During those years, I worked with an assortment of other actors, all of whom had their own approach to interpreting the particular role in which they were cast.

The late Laurence Olivier was a self-proclaimed "technical" actor -- he worked from the outside in; he would find a walk, a speech pattern, various mannerisms, etc. through which the character would reveal itself to him. While rehearsing a Noel Coward play in which he played a prissy English lord, Olivier was having great difficulty getting a handle on both the character and how to play him. This semi-famous story reached its happy ending when Olivier, passing by an antique store, happened to glance in the window and see a walking stick for sale. He went in to the store, picked up the walking stick, and the moment it was in his hand, he knew the character. (The walking stick, by the way, was described by Olivier as "...one of the ugliest, most ostentatious things..." he'd ever seen, but knew that his character would think it was classy and tasteful.)

I worked with a lot of technical actors. I was one myself.

I also worked with a lot of Method actors. Method actors are an ongoing gift to the world from Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, an actor, writer, and director from Moscow who created an approach that forefronted the psychological and emotional aspects of acting. The Stanislavsky System, or "the Method."

Without boring you into a coma, I'll try to simplify what "the Method" is. It requires that, if an actor is to portray fear, he must remember something that terrified him and use that remembered fear to instill reality and credibility into his performance. The same with joy, lust, anger, confusion, etc. Stanislavsky's Method also requires that the actor know everything about the his or her character, usually by having the actor write a short "inner history" for their character, past details of their lives that -- while never used on stage -- would nonetheless give the performance even deeper authenticity.

In theory, Stanislavsky's Method is an amazing tool for an actor. It requires the complete submersion of the self into the body, psyche, and thoughts of another person so that an actor's performance rings of the truth.

I use the phrase "in theory" above because, in my opinion, too many actors use Stanislavsky's Method as an excuse for self-indulgence masking itself as research. Don't misunderstand -- when you get a Method actor like Marlon Brando (in his prime), Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Penn, Gregory Peck, Johnny Depp, Lance Henriksen, or Bob Hoskins (to name a small handful) who have the discipline and wherewithal to employ the Method to all its power, and you can have something glorious.

But I didn't get to work with any of them. I got to work with Method actors who would spend weeks researching and writing their "inner history", demand that I address them only as their character (even when off stage), and never, never make light of anything at any time.

The prime example of how Stanislavsky's Method can be turned into rampant silliness happened when I was doing a stage production of Sherlock Holmes and had to do several scenes with the actor playing Dr. Watson. (I played a slimy little safecracker named Sidney Prince.) The actor playing Watson had written a 25-page "inner history" for Watson, researched hand-to-hand combat methods used by British troops during the Boar War, studied medical procedures practiced in London in the 1800s ... and when the curtain rose each night, audiences were treated to his imitation of Nigel Bruce for two-and-a-half hours.

But that's not the silly part. The silly part always happened off stage, right before the third scene of the second act (where Watson confronts Prince). As he and I waited for our cues, the actor playing Watson would drink a cup of vinegar. I asked him why, and this, word for word, was his reply: "Because, Mr. Prince, dealing with you leaves a bad taste in my mouth."

Time to run, not walk, to the nearest exit.

I finally came to the conclusion that for me, as an actor, Stanislavsky's Method was useless. Every Method actor I had worked with wound up giving stiff, overly-mannered, obvious performances (in that it was obvious they were "acting"). I don't know that I'll ever do theatre again, but if I do, I'll use the same "technical" approach that I always used.

But I came to realize that, while Stanislavsky's Method might be useless to me as an actor, it was priceless to me as a writer. I still approach characterization -- especially during the early stages of a story or novel -- from a technical starting point, but almost always fall back on Stanislavsky's Method when it comes time to add emotional depth and authenticity to whichever character is coming to life on the page -- and I won't commit a single word to the page until said character is someone I recognize as an old friend.

I always start with two simple questions, questions that are going to strike you as being a bit silly on the surface, but questions that, for me, reveal so much more than what is simply seen; for the purpose of this column, let's say those two questions are these: How does this character put on his or her coat? and How much milk do they use when having a bowl of cereal?

Since this is already running a bit long, I'll address the second question, and we'll get to the coats next time.

Let's say that this particular character uses just enough milk to barely cover the cereal, thus ensuring that both milk and cereal will be finished at the same time with nothing left in the bowl but the spoon. That's the technical starting point, the outside. Now, let's go in and look a little closer. They do this because they don't believe in waste; they're not the type to dump the last bit of milk down the sink after the cereal is gone. (And if there is any milk remaining, they either lift the bowl and drink it, or set the bowl on the floor so the cat can finish it.)

Why do they not believe in waste? Because they can't afford to be wasteful. They work long hours at a job that manages to pay the bills, the rent, and buy a set amount of groceries each week. But no excesses, no luxuries, ergo, no wasting of the milk. This also suggests that this character may not be the happiest person you've ever met; after all, if they have to be this frugal with milk, then that frugality has to extend to every other aspect of their existence, as well, and with that comes an endless string of commonplace worries that, taken individually, may not seem like much, but cumulatively drain a lot of enjoyment from life.

This character is sitting at a kitchen table that also doubles as the dinner table, because he or she lives in a 3- or 4-room apartment; a nice-enough place that's affordable if not fancy. I'm willing to bet that stashed up in one of the kitchen cupboards is a set of china cups and saucers left to them by a dead relative, cups and saucers that they only use on special occasions, like those rare instances they have company. I'll also bet you that on this character's chest of drawers in the bedroom we'll find a jar filled two-thirds of the way with an assortment of spare change -- mostly pennies, dimes, and some quarters -- that this character is planning on using to buy themselves a nice little something-or-other once the jar is full, maybe a new pair of dress shoes at Target or K-mart.

I could keep going but I think you've got the idea. All of this from simply looking into their cereal bowl to see how much milk they used. And it doesn't matter a damn whether or not any of the information from the above paragraph makes it into the story because I am now well on the road to knowing this person; and the better I know them, the more authentic and believable they will be to the reader, and we will have achieved what Stanislavsky's Method demands: complete, unflinching, undistilled truth when depicting the human condition of the character in question.

Next time, the coats. In the meantime, you might want to think about what we might find in the pockets....

Labels: characters, GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Preface: This essay was written by Tim Waggoner and is reprinted with his permission. I, too, have had a novel deal go bad under slightly different circumstances. My situation was that I sold a short novel on proposal to a seemingly well-funded specialty publisher, got a contract that everyone signed ... and the publisher abruptly went under three months later when their .com parent company started cutting off less-profitable subsidiaries. I had a lot of the same thoughts that Tim expresses here, so I hope that those of you who aspire to become published novelists will find this piece useful.

---

"They decided to withdraw the offer on your novel."

I hesitated, not quite believing what my agent had just told me. "What? Why?"

"The editor said she was no longer 'comfortable' with the book. Whatever that means."

The publisher in question had made an offer on my novel The Harmony Society over a month before. Not for a large advance, but they had seemed enthusiastic about the book. After years of trying to sell a novel, I thought I'd finally done it -- finally was a Writer with a capital W. And now this.

My agent commiserated with me a bit before promising to keep sending the book around. I thanked him and hung up. I knew publishing was a volatile business and that this particular house had a reputation for somewhat eccentric business decisions. But no longer comfortable with my book?

I felt awful. I'd come so close to achieving my dream of being a published novelist, only to have it yanked away from me -- two hours before I was due to attend a local science fiction convention as an author panelist.

Needless to say, I didn't feel like going. Even with dozens of short story sales to my credit, I felt like a failure and a fraud. I didn't want to have to sit on panels and pretend that I knew what the hell I was talking about. Didn't want to have to face friends and acquaintances and have them ask how things were going with my writing.

I was angry at my agent for pushing the editor too hard for more money and better contract terms, perhaps scaring her off; angry at myself for having been dumb enough to believe that the offer had been a firm one in the first place. Angry that I had no clue exactly what had happened to screw up the deal and that I probably never would. But most of all, I was angry that I had wasted so much time pursuing my dream. A dream which had turned around and bit me hard on the ass.

In the end, I went to the con, if only so I'd have some friends to complain to. They were all perfectly sympathetic, of course, but several of them said with a wistful tone, "At least you had an offer."

I felt like telling them the grass was definitely not greener on this side of the fence, but I didn't. I knew they wouldn't understand. I wouldn't have either, not before.

I moped around all weekend, felt miserable, talked about quitting writing, and stuck more than a few mental pins in an imaginary voodoo doll labeled EDITOR.

Then the con was over, my friends returned home, and I was left with only my wife to complain to. But I didn't feel much like talking anymore. I realized that I'd actually been fortunate to have a con to go to. While it hadn't exactly kept my mind off my stillborn book deal, it had, if nothing else, kept me busy and provided some measure of catharsis.

But now it was Sunday night and stretching before me was my first full week as a failure. The question was, what was I going to do with it?

The next day I sat down and started to write another book.

I wanted to get back on the horse, was afraid that I might never write a novel again unless I did. I used an outline which I had completed some months back so that I wouldn't have to worry about developing a plot and characters. I could just write.

And write I did, well over ten pages a day in between teaching college composition courses and caring for my then one-year-old daughter. I took all the emotional energy churning inside me and channeled it into my book, writing like a man possessed. I finished the novel, titled Necropolis, in twenty-nine days.

I tinkered with the manuscript, editing and revising over the next several weeks, then blasted it off to my agent. But now doubts began to set in. What if I'd written Necropolis too fast, hadn't revised enough; what if it was absolute crap?

Sure, my writers' group liked it, but how could I trust them? They were my friends; they knew how emotionally fragile I was just then. I could have probably scribbled out a grocery list and they'd have praised it as a surefire Nebula contender.

The con had taught me that I needed to keep busy, but I couldn't bring myself to write any more fiction, not then. Nearly a decade earlier, I had worked as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper, but I had written very little nonfiction since. Still, I occasionally thought about getting back to it, and now seemed the perfect time.

I threw myself into reading about nonfiction writing techniques and researching markets. I tossed around different article ideas, finally deciding to write a personal essay about my experience with testicular cancer. I developed a query letter, sent it out to fifty magazines, and sat back to wait. A few days later I received an e-mail from an editor at Penthouse. He was interested in seeing the article.

A couple weeks more, and the article was finished and in the editor's hands. The check was welcome, of course, but I had gained something far more important than money: I felt like my words were valued again -- not by my wife or my writers' group, not even by an editor of a national magazine. But by me. And I needed to feel that way, needed it like a man lost in the desert needs a drink of cool, clean water.

I toyed with the idea of saying to hell with fiction altogether and writing nonfiction exclusively, but I couldn't do it. Despite the instability (and occasional insanity) of a fiction writer's life, I loved it too much to quit. I returned to working on short stories and noodling around with novel ideas. My agent called to let me know he liked Necropolis and would start submitting it to editors.

I'm not the only one who's had a book deal go sour on him, of course. SF novelist J.R. Dunn (This Side of Judgment, Days of Cain, Full Tide of Night) once had an editor send him a two-page letter of revision for a novel. Dunn made the revisions, turned the novel in, and it was rejected.

"Naturally you're going to be furious when your book's rejected," Dunn says, "but you want it to be rejected for good grounds, not a minor technical point." It turned out the editor "basically didn't understand what a radio was. I told my agent to drop the publisher and go on to another, and that's what we did." The novel, This Side of Judgment, came out two years later in hardback to good reviews. Dunn says the moral is "not all editors are idiots" and advises writers to "keep banging your head against a wall" until your book finds a home.

Editor Gordon Van Gelder says that having a book deal fall through is "definitely not common at all." He advises authors to research a publisher to determine size, longevity and stability before submitting. Smaller houses are especially precarious financially.

Van Gelder assures that there is "no stigma" for authors who've had book deals collapse on them, and that actually the book's more attractive to other editors because it had a deal before. For instance, Van Gelder once bought a book by Tanith Lee that had been abandoned after the Abyss line of horror novels folded. Not only did Van Gelder think it a fine book, but it was a sequel and he felt Lee's fans should have a chance to read it.

"It was the right thing to do," Van Gelder says, "plus I made some money for St. Martin's in the process."

Happy ending time. My first daughter is now seven, and my second is two. I've long since gotten over my anger at my agent and continue to have a great working relationship with him. The editor who rejected my book because she was "no longer comfortable with it" was fired years ago. I have a full-time, tenure-track job teaching creative writing at a community college, and I've published over sixty stories in various anthologies and magazines.

Given the mergers and downsizing in publishing over the last few years, and the fact that The Harmony Society was a slipstream novel not easily pigeonholed, my agent and I decided to investigate the possibility of placing the novel with small-press publishers. A recent start-up, DarkTales Publishing, seemed a likely prospect. They publish offbeat horror/dark fantasy novels and have brought out work by such authors as J. Michael Straczynski, Yvonne Navarro and Mort Castle, among others. We decided to give them a try.

And they took my novel, with every intention of publishing it. But after a couple of years, the publisher realized their business had grown too big, too fast, and they needed to slow things down. DarkTales would still be bring out my novel, but they couldn't say when. So, after letting out a long sigh, I decided it was off to market once more.

The Harmony Society finally found a home with Prime Books. The advance was less than that offered by the original publisher, but the overall terms are much better. More important, my book is with people who are enthusiastic about it and who intend to do their best to promote it. If the original publisher had brought out the book, while I would've made more money on the initial advance, there would've been little to no promotion, and most likely The Harmony Society would've come and gone without much notice. I'm confident that Prime will do my book justice. Who knows? We might even sell a few copies, too.

Since placing The Harmony Society, I've also published an erotic mystery novel and a short story collection. As for Necropolis ... well, it's still making the rounds. I'm hopeful that one day it'll be published too, but if it isn't, it won't be the end of the world -- or my career, for that matter.

I've learned the most important lesson an author needs to learn: I don't need publication to feel like a writer. The only thing I truly need is to keep writing.

Final note: all the novels Tim mentions in this essay have found happy homes, as well as several others he hadn't even started at the time he wrote this essay.

Labels: novel, publishing, Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Tim Waggoner

In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, magic is accomplished when wizards learn the true names of things. Discover the true name of fire, and it is yours to command. In fairy tales, if you learn Rumpelstiltskin's name, the evil sprite is banished. Speak of the Devil, though, and he shall appear.

Names have power, especially in fiction. Use the right names, and the characters and places you write about assume added depth and resonance. Use the wrong ones, and your story at best will be forgettable, at worst, laughable.

While choosing the right names is never easy for writers of any stripe, authors of science fiction, fantasy (and to a lesser degree, horror) have an especially tough time of it. Mainstream writers can use the names of friends, relatives and co-workers. They can set their stories in their hometown and use the names of its diner, high school, laundromat, altered only slightly, if at all. But where can writers of speculative fiction go to find names for the characters and places which make up their more exotic dreamscapes?

You can start the same place many expectant parents do -- baby name books. Sure, they're full of ordinary names, but they also contain not-so-ordinary ones. A glance through one of my favorites, Beyond Jennifer and Jason by Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran, turned up the following: Adria, Amyas, Diantha, Doria, Garson, Kai, Merce, Sekka, Tamar and Zaraawar. All suitable for a science fiction or fantasy story.

There are other naming resources geared specifically for writers. The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon contains, as the cover copy says, "20,000 first and last names and their meanings from around the world." The name lists are separated into categories such as Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, etc. I often choose character names by scanning the corresponding meanings. Want your fantasy warrior's name to mean brave? Try Cathasach. Want your villain's name to mean dark? How does Duvessa sound? Horror author Yvonne Navarro has complied a volume called The Reverse Name Dictionary which makes this process even easier.

Another resource that I sometimes use to come up with names is the phone book. Uncommon surnames, when used as first names, often have an archaic or fantastical feel to them. Choosing at random for this article, I found Hython, Krabill, Maddala, Norrod, Uffner ... I could go on and on.

Of course, these names don't work only for individual characters. They could just as easily be the names of alien races, or countries in a fantasy land.

Foreign language dictionaries can be of great help. If I'm writing a medieval fantasy and I don't feel like using the tired term wizard for my magic workers, I might turn to my Latin dictionary and find magus and veneficus. Neither floats my boat, so I start free-associating. What do magicians do? They perform tricks. I look up trick and one of the words I find next to it is artificium. With a little tweak, that becomes Artificer. And now I have a term that not only sounds good, it's more original.

A thesaurus works well for this too. For example, in my novel, The Harmony Society, I wrote a sequence which took place in a nightmarish hospital. I went to my Roget's, looked up hospital, and eventually came across the old-fashioned term fever house. Fever House -- what better name could there be for a place of madness and death?

And then there are those happy accidents when names just come to you. While I was in the process of plotting The Harmony Society, I was listening to the car radio and heard the singer refer to "Brother Nothing." Hot damn, what a great name! I thought enviously. But the next time the refrain came around, I realized I had misheard. Brother Nothing wasn't a name; the singer was actually saying, "Brother, nothing you can do will stop me," or somesuch. Thanks to the perversity of my own subconscious, I had a name for my novel's main antagonist.

Lest you become too self-conscious about choosing names, I'll let you in on a secret. Even such inevitable-seeming names such as Sherlock Holmes and Luke Skywalker seem that way only after the fact. It's a bit of folklore that children will grow to fit their names. It might not be true for real people, but it certainly is for fictional ones. As long as your characters' names aren't strings of unpronounceable consonants or inspired by Saturday morning cartoons -- "Look out, Commander Galaxy! Here come the Sinistars!" -- you should be all right.

Besides, I thought Luke Skywalker sounded pretty stupid the first time I heard it. And I hear the kid's gone on to do all right for himself.

---

This article was first published in the Nov. 1997 edition of Word Museum.

Labels: characters, names, Tim Waggoner, writing

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by Tim Waggoner

Have you ever thought about taking a creative writing class? Working writer or rank amateur, you can benefit from a good course in creative writing -- provided you know what to look for.

Teachers and writers have long debated the value of creative writing classes. Opinions vary, sometimes wildly. Some believe that writing can't be taught and taking such classes is at best a waste of students' time and at worst damaging to a nascent writer's development. Others believe that creative writing classes can provide a valuable educational experience, perhaps dramatically decreasing the learning curve on the way to a literary career.

So which is it?

The truth is, both views are accurate. The outcome depends on a number of factors: the instructor, the focus of the class, your fellow students and -- most of all -- you.

First, let's examine the reasons not to take a creative writing class.

Despite what you might think, instructors don't need any specific credentials to teach creative writing; though large universities generally insist upon both teaching and relevant publication credentials, many small universities and junior/community colleges only require one or the other. I've taught college courses for eleven years, and I've seen English instructors take on creative writing classes only because they thought teaching such courses would be a fun outlet for their own creativity, an outlet sorely needed after teaching endless sections of basic composition. But these instructors had no qualifications to teach creative writing -- no publications, sometimes no experience writing at all.

Other instructors have experience, but it's limited, often to poetry. Since verse is so poorly compensated in our country, poets are forced to find other avenues of making a living. And those avenues tend to be found in higher education. If you're an aspiring poet, this works in your favor. If, however, you desire to write fiction or creative nonfiction, this can be a problem. Instructors believe (or have been led to believe by the university system which spawned them) that having read and studied fiction in pursuit of their degree is somehow a substitute for actually writing the stuff.

(In all fairness, the same holds true for fiction writers who've never written poetry or creative nonfiction.)

One of my creative writing instructors in college was a published poet who readily admitted that his expertise didn't extend to fiction. But that didn't stop him from dispensing advice on how to write it.

Another problem with instructors is that they're often prejudiced against genre or commercial writing. They see anything other than literary writing as inferior hackwork. So not only aren't they as open as they could be to students who wish to write mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy or horror, they usually aren't well read (if read at all) in these genres. And even if they are broad-minded enough to accept genre writing in their classes, they don't have the knowledge and experience to help students with the specialized demands of genre writing.

Sometimes instructors are hired to teach creative writing classes on the basis of their publishing credentials, which can seem quite impressive, especially to beginning writers (not to mention a naive administration). But a long list of credits doesn't automatically translate into an ability to teach. Often, professional writers can't articulate why and how they do what they do. They see the process of creativity as something mysterious and ultimately impenetrable. These sort of instructors can tell when a student's poem or story isn't working, but they have difficulty suggesting specific revision strategies.

The workshop method is still the primary technique used in creative writing courses, and this means that the success of a particular class depends heavily on the students involved, perhaps even more so than on the instructor him or herself.

Students don't come to creative writing classes automatically skilled at giving feedback. They need to be trained. I've had students tell me that since creative writing is supposed to be completely free-form expression (or so they believe) no one can possibly criticize someone else's work. It's all creative and therefore equally valid. If students aren't taught how to effectively critique one another's work, several varieties of bad, even damaging feedback can occur.

A good creative writing class should be a supportive environment, but taken to extremes, this can result in a class where every story and poem is great and wonderful, and nothing ever needs to be revised. These mutual admiration societies might be warm and fuzzy, but they do nothing whatsoever to help a writer grow.

The other extreme is when all a class does is point out flaws, sometimes quite bluntly and harshly. Classes like this, where students struggle to outdo one another in ripping each other's work to shreds, aren't just unpleasant experiences, they can be downright poisonous.

Then there are critiques which are too nitpicky, leading to a half-hour debate on whether or not someone should have used a comma or a period to end a certain line of poetry. And given that the class contains creative people, it's no surprise that there are critiques which focus not on how you can improve your work, but rather on how the responder would take your idea and write a different story or poem (something I was guilty of back in my college days).

Critics of the workshop technique argue that student feedback leads to group think, to writing by committee, and that it produces generic, bloodless work. You're better off, they say, staying home and writing on your own.

I currently have one student who, despite my urgings, has continually revised the first chapter of her young adult novel after receiving feedback from myself and the class, as well as editors and agents at a writing conference. And each time the writing becomes more labored and less interesting. She's trying to incorporate every suggestion and forgetting what it is that she wants to say. It's not uncommon at all to have individual students with this tendency, but an instructor has to be careful not to allow the workshop process to take over the class so completely that all people are doing is washing garbage instead of moving on to the next story, the next poem.

Yet another problem with workshopping is that some students become addicted to it. They ultimately end up never finishing pieces, perhaps never starting them in the first place. Giving and getting feedback has become their primary creative outlet. This can also happen with creative writing instructors who've taught for a while. The result is a class full of people who don't actually do anything except provide feedback on drafts that will never be anything but drafts.

The final problem with creative writing classes comes from how they are evaluated. Properly, such classes should be graded on a pass/fail basis. If you meet the course requirements -- completed all assignments, participated in feedback sessions, demonstrated improvement -- you pass. However, some classes, usually due to school policy, are graded A through F. But creative writing is difficult to evaluate in this fashion. Assigning a grade of D (poor) or F (failure) isn't too tough, but just how does one rank a story or poem objectively as excellent, good or fair (A, B or C)? In the professional world, critics can't always agree on a work's merits, so how can a single set of faculty at one school arrive at a codified set of guidelines for determining the quality of student work?

The answer is they can't, and grading is often left up to the subjective tastes of the individual instructor. Work is deemed excellent -- or good or average -- for no other reason than because the instructor says it is. If you don't care about grades, then this doesn't matter. But if you do care about them (and most students do), then this can create a class where students try to figure out what the instructor thinks an A story or poem is, and then attempt to write such a story solely to get the grade. You can argue that this situation approximates writing for a specific audience's tastes, and therefore might be a valuable learning experience in and of itself. But such a situation discourages students from experimenting and self-exploration, both vital aspects of education.

After all that, you might well be wondering why anyone in his or her right mind would ever think about taking a creative writing class. But despite the potential pitfalls, there are still plenty of good reasons to enroll, because when a creative writing class is conducted properly, it can be an extremely effective learning experience.

If the instructor is a working professional -- someone who consistently writes and publishes -- students can gain a great deal. The workshop method is partially based on the apprentice model, and apprenticeship has been one of the primary methods our race has used to pass on knowledge throughout history. Together, a skilled master and an eager, willing apprentice can work educational wonders.

The guidance students receive from an experienced writer-teacher can be invaluable. And this guidance isn't limited to feedback on written work. It can take the form of advice on publishing, networking and marketing. Often, professional writers are able to use their contacts to help advanced students who are ready to begin publishing.

The feedback from fellow students who've been trained to respond properly to each other's work can also be quite helpful. Several years ago, a fellow instructor of mine decided to audit my creative writing class in order to get feedback on his poetry. He came incognito, and it wasn't until the end of the course that the other students had any idea he was an instructor. So many people write in isolation that having a group of like-minded individuals to share their work with is a godsend.

Are you someone who's always wanted to write -- or used to -- but aren't able to any more because between work, family and the house you just can't find the time? A creative writing class can provide you with a structured environment and make you write. You'll have specific deadlines to meet and by the time the class is over, you should have several polished pieces ready to send out. So crunched for time that you can't make regular class meetings? Many schools now offer creative writing courses online. Assignments are emailed to instructors and fellow students for feedback and classes sometimes meet virtually in chat rooms for lecture or Q&A. You'll miss out on some of the intangibles of face-to-face feedback, and you probably won't have the same sense of community as you would in a physical classroom, but for many busy students, online courses are proving to be effective alternatives to the traditional classroom experience.

If you're already a professional writer, you can still benefit from creative writing classes.

A class can be a good way for you to stretch your creative muscles. Are you primarily a nonfiction writer? Then focus on short stories or poetry. Even if you don't switch specialties or pick up a second career, the creative techniques you learn will make your nonfiction that much better.

Are you a fiction writer? Then concentrate on poetry. The emphasis on economy and a heightened sense of language can improve your stories on a sentence level, and the focus on communicating profound experience can give your fiction more depth.

Are you a poet? Try creative nonfiction or fiction. Both can provide opportunities for a broader exploration of experience and meaning, plus the narrative techniques you'll learn can be plugged right back into your poetry, giving you a greater range of literary tools to draw on.

The workshop setting can also expose working professionals to other ways of approaching and solving writing problems. Too often writers become set in their ways, used to working with a limited number of well-used (and well-worn) techniques. Beginning writers haven't had a chance to settle into creative ruts yet, and they come up with all sorts of interesting (to say the least!) ways of telling their stories. It's this fresh perspective that can energize a world-weary (and perhaps word-weary) pro.

Suffering from writer's block? A creative writing class could be just the thing to help you break through it. The deadlines, along with feedback and encouragement from others, might well be just the thing to get you going again.

Ever thought about teaching or conducting workshops? There's an old saying that the best way to learn something is to teach it. The opposite also holds true: one of the best ways to learn how to teach a thing is to first be a student of it. Take a creative writing class and pay attention to how the instructor teaches. You can pick up a wealth of information on various teaching techniques and exercises (which you can swipe for your own classes), but it can also teach you about classroom management, and how to effectively -- and often tactfully -- give feedback to students. Plus, your instructor can become a resource for you to consult when you start teaching your own classes.

So what should you look for in a creative writing class? How can you tell a good one from a bad one?

First, check out the instructor's credentials, both publishing and teaching experience. Ask for a bibliography of the instructor's work and try to read some of it before signing up for the class. If the instructor is a published author, has had at least some teaching experience, and you like what you read, then it's time to take the next step.

Meet with the instructor if you can, or speak with him or her on the phone. Ask to see a sample syllabus for the course and the textbooks, if any. Find out what sort of methods the instructor uses to teach creative writing and what sort of goals the instructor has set for the course. Find out what you should get out of the course -- what sort of knowledge and skills -- by the time it's over. During this conversation, ask about the instructor's writing and teaching philosophy, and try to get a sense of your prospective teacher as a person. Is this someone who you think you could work with and learn from? Someone you can see apprenticing yourself to for the next several weeks?

And if you're a working writer yourself, find out whether the instructor is going to feel threatened by having you in the class. Some teachers -- especially if they've had little training or limited experience -- might not be able to handle what they see as a challenge to their expertise and authority. And you definitely don't want to spend a semester locking horns with your instructor in order to determine who's the alpha-writer.

As with anything in life, there are no guarantees. The creative writing course you sign up for might turn out to be a frustrating waste of time or it could be one of the best educational experiences of your life. But if you take care in selecting the right course and instructor, you'll have done a great deal to ensure that the creative writing class you take will be the best one for you.

---

This article was originally published as "How to be Class Conscious" in WRITERS' Journal, July/August 1998.

Labels: Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Tim Waggoner

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

That bit of conventional "wisdom" is often cited by writers to explain everything from rejection letters to the lousy state of publishing. It's not my fault, they think. It's the publishing good-old-boy network keeping me out.

There's no denying that networking is important -- perhaps even vital these days -- in creating a writing career. But too many people hold a narrow view of what networking is. They imagine standing around at a publisher's party at a conference, free drink in hand, schmoozing with editors and agents, regaling them with wit and wowing them with a verbal description of their latest (planned) 300 thousand word opus. But in its purest sense, networking is simply about making connections, and you don't have to be a mainstay of the New York publishing scene to do it effectively.

One of the first ways that writers can start making connections is by taking classes. Creative writing classes are offered through colleges and universities, of course, but they are also sponsored by adult continuing education programs, libraries and local arts organizations. Taking a creative writing class can provide an excellent opportunity for feedback from a (hopefully) skilled instructor, and from other student writers. But it can also provide the beginnings of a writer's network. Your instructor will be able to point you toward resources -- reference books, writing programs and conferences in your area -- which can, if nothing else, decrease you writing career learning curve.

Your instructor should be able to give you advice on publishing, perhaps even provide you with some contacts. But the truth is that many creative writing courses are staffed by instructors who've published little, if at all. Always try to learn something about an instructor's credentials if you can before signing up for a class. Ask to see a bibliography of the instructor's published works, and try to track down and read some of them. Caveat emptor.

But even if the instructor is far from a best-selling author, that doesn't matter much. Because the most important networking opportunity is the chance to connect with your fellow students. From creative writing classes, writers' groups are born. Groups which can continue providing feedback on your work long after the class ends; groups which also can pool their knowledge of marketing and submission strategies.

But what if there aren't any creative writing classes offered in your area? How can you establish a writers' group then? By advertising, naturally. Put up notices in libraries and bookstores. WANTED: ONE WRITERS' GROUP.

Author readings and signings are other excellent networking opportunities. You might be able to chat with the author for a bit and ask questions. (Maybe even more than a bit since signings and readings are notorious for being poorly attended. You may well have the author all to yourself.) You can also meet other beginning writers. Take a notebook with you and, at an appropriate time, announce you'd like to form a writers' group and pass the notebook around for interested parties to write down their addresses and phone numbers. You can also pass out business cards if you have some (and you should).

The Internet has been a boon to writers. You can take classes online and connect with other writers via newsgroups and chat rooms. You can exchange stories for critique through e-mail and of course share those all-important marketing tips.

Author web pages are also wonderful resources. Not only do authors sometimes post articles on how they got started or offering advice to newcomers, often authors' e-mail addresses are also provided. Got a question or two? Go ahead and e-mail an author, though don't be surprised if he or she's too busy to respond. And don't bombard them with "where's my reply" follow-ups. Annoying people is not an effective networking strategy.

Writers' organizations are also great networking resources. Often, you need to have only one pro story sale under your belt to join as an affiliate member. You won't be able to vote in officer elections or for awards, but you'll be entitled to receive the organization's publications, such as handbooks, newsletters, even directories of members (with those handy e-mail addresses). Even if you haven't made a pro sale yet and don't qualify for membership, you can still often purchase and subscribe to an organization's publications.

Conferences and conventions are prime networking opportunities. Not only can you attend workshops and informative panels on writing, but you can often speak with program participants -- authors, editors and agents -- in the hall after a panel or at other slow times during a conference. Come prepared with questions and always bring along a manuscript or two. Never thrust your work upon someone, though. Always wait to be asked.

You can also become a program participant yourself with only a few sales to your credit. I began sitting in on panels at Science Fiction conventions after only having sold a handful of stories. All I did was write the conference's director of programming, introduce myself as a local writer, list my credits, and relate my desire to be on a few panels.

My first convention as a program participant made all the difference in my career. Not only did the other writers see me more as a peer, I was able to find a writers' group which counted several published novelists among its members. I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned from them, and far more important, I made some great friends.

And that's what networking is all about, really. Not cold-bloodedly using other human beings to advance your career. It's about making connections, making friends. I began this article with a bit of writing wisdom. Let me close with another: Good writing happens when good people get together.

Good careers can happen, too.

Labels: networking, publishing, Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

This is going to bounce around a bit like a paper cup caught in the wind, but will hopefully come together at the end, so bear with me.

One of the things I promised myself when I agreed to take part in this blog was that I would try to avoid offering advice to aspiring writers. This is not arrogance on my part, nor is it my assigned covert role in some labyrinthine conspiracy designed to make certain that basic necessary knowledge for starting one's writing career is kept concealed from you, thus eliminating any potential competition you and your work might pose in the marketplace.

The reason I am uncomfortable offering advice to aspiring writers is simple: I'm still learning how to do this myself (and I hope that I'll never stop learning). Many of the things I discovered through trial and error no longer apply, and I wouldn't dare try to tell someone else how they should go about managing a writing career.

But there is one piece of advice that, when pressed to, I gladly offer to aspiring writers -- and it's one that is often met by blank, confused stares: Forget Genre.

If you sit down and say, "I'm going to write a HORROR story," you might -- consciously or not -- start grafting traditionally horrific elements onto a story where they don't belong, and you can hobble a story by trying to force it to fit within the "traditional" (read: popularly accepted) boundaries of a particular genre, rather than expand those boundaries by not worrying about how it's going to be categorized. View it only in terms of the story you want to tell, not the one you think readers are going to be expecting.

Two things happened recently that prompted me to revisit this subject for myself: 1) Reviews for my novella In the Midnight Museum and my new Leisure novel, Keepers started appearing, and, 2) A member of a local writers' group made a statement so naive as to be almost -- almost -- laughable.

About the former: much to my relief, the reviews for both Museum and Keepers have thus far been overwhelmingly positive, but in almost every case, the reviewers have said something along the lines of "...it's both horror and not", or, "...I guess horror is as good as anything to call it..."

You get the idea. Neither work fits easily into any single category, and it's making some people crazy trying to figure out where to put them. My response is: how about just addressing them as stories and leave it at that?

My guess is that readers and reviewers begin reading a story labeled "horror" (or "cyberpunk", or "fantasy", or "mystery", or what have you) with certain ingrained expectations; they have come to anticipate certain elements to appear to a particular type of story, and are surprised -- sometimes not pleasantly so -- when those expectations are not met and/or indulged.

Only half a dozen times in my career have I sat down and said, "I'm going to write a HORROR story," and then proceeded to do just that, always bearing in mind what readers expect in a horror story, and making damn sure I worked in as many of those expected elements as I could. Six times I've done this, and six times I've produced stories that are just, well...awful. And they're awful because I did not forget genre, genre was the overriding factor in their creation -- and telling a good story was secondary.

Shame on me.

Now to the latter point before I bring all this together.

I belong to a local writers' group that is composed mostly of fantasy and science fiction writers. Many of these folks are unpublished or have just begun publishing; some of the folks have a decent amount of fiction already published; and a small handful of them, including myself and Charles Coleman Finlay, have got a fairly decent body of published work out there.

In a recent discussion, one of the members -- who writes heroic fantasy -- commented that she'd noticed a "...larger than usual number of horror-type stories" being submitted for critique, and could we possibly cut down on that because she and several other members don't 'get' horror. When prompted for further comment, she also admitted that she's read "...some Stephen King" but otherwise tends to read almost exclusively in the field of -- you guessed it -- heroic fantasy.

She is not alone in this; members who write exclusively mystery fiction have quit the group because they didn't 'get' fantasy, and the science fiction folks didn't 'get' mystery.

What's to 'get'? Somebody explain this to me -- on second thought, please don't, it wasn't an actual request.

It doesn't matter a damn if your story is horror, or mainstream, or fantasy, or erotica, or any other genre or sub-genre -- it is, must be, must always be, first and foremost a good story.

Why don't more readers and writers understand that? Have we become so tunnel-visioned in our expectations that we have given up the hope of ever seeing any genre attempt something new and/or different? Or have we been trained through a steady diet of the same old same-old to want nothing more than journeyman-level storytelling, storytelling that challenges neither the mind nor the heart (forget about those "traditional boundaries" I mentioned earlier)?

If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, I think it's quite possible that you're the type of reader or writer who's come to think in terms of "genre" far too much for your own good.

Far too many writers -- both new and established -- think too much in terms of the type of story they're writing -- and what's worse, far too many of them read almost exclusively in the field in which they want to publish. While it is important to be be well-read in your chosen field, it's vital that you read outside that field as much as possible, otherwise you'll eventually be writing nothing more than a hip imitation of a pastiche of a rip-off of something that was original two decades ago but has now fallen far too deep into a well-worn groove to offer a challenge to either writers or readers.

I read all over the place, and do not restrict my influences to those giants in the field from under whose shadows I hope to emerge.

As a result, yes, both of my recent works are and aren't horror; they're both also fantasy and not; each is and isn't a mystery, a romance, a mainstream character study. What they are, are two pieces of which I am very proud because they were the best stories I could make them ... because I followed my own advice and Forgot Genre.

Approach any work as being simply a story, and you'll always "get" it; think only in terms of "genre" and you'll have a hobbled story by the third paragraph.

That is the best piece of advice that I have or will ever have for aspiring writers. I hope you found something useful contained here.

Now go read Theodore Sturgeon's magnificent The Dreaming Jewels and put someone into brainlock when you ask them to tell you what kind of a novel it is.

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

Labels: fantasy, GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, genre, horror, science fiction, writing

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We writers are particular. We're careful to find space for our books and our desk, and jealously guard our writing time. We crave quiet so that we can concentrate on our work. We're happy to type away in the dead of night or at the crack of dawn.

Ah. Quiet, so very quiet ... except for the sound of the sound of the cat licking herself. Phew, did the dog just fart again? And what's that creaking noise? The room seems ... smaller somehow. Are the walls closing in on you?

Ack! It's too quiet! You've got cabin fever! You've got to get out of here, escape to the beach, a writers' convention, or even just the neighborhood coffeehouse.

Thing is, you'll be leaving your desk behind, and you've got stories to finish. What do you do?

Pens and paper work just fine for many writers. "That way, it looks like you're taking notes at the office meeting instead of writing a short story in which a woman escapes an office meeting," says Haddayr Copley-Woods.

"I carry a Hipster PDA with me at all times," says writer Wade Rockett. "The index cards fit nicely in most size pockets and are flexible enough that if I have to carry them in my jeans they don't bulge or make it uncomfortable to sit. I use the Fisher Bullet Space Pen to write with. It's small and writes well.

"When I have to take extensive notes, like at cons, I bring my Moleskine notebook," says Rockett.

Moleskines have been around for over 200 years. They come in several varieties, but the classic design is a small notebook with a sewn binding (which in addition to being stronger than glue lets you open the notebook flat), a reinforced pocket, and elastic band to secure the pages. Many authors have used and loved Moleskines, including Neil Gaiman and Ernest Hemingway.

Other writers prefer other styles of notebook, like the Rhodia pad or basic reporters' spiral pads. As attractive as rich leather-bound notebooks are, few working writers actually use them. Their expense is a hard justification for many, and others find that attempting to write on fancy pages is mainly a recipe for writers' block.

Danny Adams carries a notebook with him everywhere, but agrees that it isn't a perfect writing solution. "The disadvantage, as with all hand-writing for me, is that I usually can't scribble fast enough or long enough to keep up with my thoughts."

Author Richard Parks carries a laptop with him out of necessity. "On the few occasions I've been forced to take notes with pen and paper, half of it is unreadable by the next day," he says.

The best on-the-go writing device is one that is light, durable, easy to use, and affordable, just in case it gets dropped in the lake while you're walking in the woods.

Laptop computers are certainly much more affordable than they used to be: new Macintosh and PC portables can both be obtained for less than $1000, and older used models can go for just a few hundred. Plus, laptop computers let you carry those crucial-for-creativity tunes and movies with you wherever you go.

"I tend to write exclusively on my Mac (desktop computer)," says writer Dave Klecha. "Since I don't have a Mac laptop, and I want to keep all my writing in one place, I have something running on my Mac called VNC Server. Properly configured with my high-speed internet access, it lets me access my Mac (and my writing program) from anywhere I am that has a high-speed Internet."

Karen Swanberg says, "I usually write on my 12" Powerbook. I got the smallest one for portability reasons. When I don't want to carry that, I write on my Zaurus PDA with an infrared keyboard. The problem with that is I have to have a flat surface, so I can't do it on my lap unless I have a clipboard. And well, if I have a clipboard, I might as well have my Powerbook."

As nice as it is to have all your notes, music, and movies available in a single device, full-sized laptops can be too delicate, expensive, and bulky if you find yourself running to catch a plane. Like Swanberg, many writers have found that modern PDAs work as fine pocket-sized substitutes for laptop computers. Those who don't want to juggle a cell phone, PDA, and external keyboard have found devices like the "smartphone" Treo very useful.

But built-in thumb keyboards are difficult for those with large fingers or joint issues, and even a $400 device is too expensive for many working writers. Author Nalo Hopkinson is the happy owner of an AlphaSmart Dana, a light, durable PalmOS device built into a full-sized keyboard. The AlpaSmarts start at $139 new for the 3000 model and are compatible with both Mac and PC desktops.

Hopkinson reports that she gets 30 hours of use out of her Dana before she needs to recharge it; more recent models claim to operate over 700 hours on 3 AA batteries.

Because the device can run on AAs instead of just the built-in rechargeable battery, she can take it to any country and not worry about adapters for the charger.

"(My AlphaSmart) weighs just over a pound," says Hopkinson. "I can pick up my email on it if I'm at a hotspot. Plus, I don't have to transcribe my notes afterwards. I love the thing.

"It's meant to survive a four-foot drop, and I can attest that it does," she says. She further thinks the device would probably survive a dive off a rooftop with at least its memory card intact. "AlphaSmart products are made to be used in schools, so they can take a beating."

Hopkinson once read of a horrified mother who discovered that her son had squashed a fresh peach into his AlphaSmart's keyboard. "She took the keyboard keys off and washed them, carefully wiped down the machine and put the keys back on. It worked fine."

The AlphaSmart gets my personal vote as the portable computer wandering writers should investigate for themselves. It seems likely to survive coffee spills, backpack bumps, and may perilous trips through airport security.

Labels: technology, writing

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

After a while, regardless of how well-focused, disciplined, and determined you are when writing a book, you just don't, well... see it any more. It happens to all of us at some point on every project. You spend so much time writing, cutting, revising, and polishing, that you risk either not seeing the forest for the trees or become so over-focused on one particular tree that you don't notice the forest fire until it's too late.

Okay, carried that metaphor just a little too far, sorry, but hopefully you've already discerned the point: that there comes a time during a book-length project when you've spent so much time working on it that you lose perspective.

Here's the thing: by the time you, as a reader, pick up a copy of an author's book, the author him- or herself has read it over at least three times -- and this is after the countless hours spent writing, re-writing, and polishing. If you want to include all that, as well, then I think it's safe to say that by the time a book goes to print, its author has read it through, from beginning to end, a minimum of seven times, probably more.

This is a necessary evil. Editorial suggestions and changes must be considered and/or made, the manuscript must then be read through to make certain that these changes mesh with the overall story (tone, narrative arc, continuity, etc.), and if a problem is then discovered, it must be fixed, and the whole process starts over again.

I'm oversimplifying this because to describe the process in painstaking detail would not only rob the reading experience of some of its magic, but bore you to tears.

But when the book is finally out there, and everything looks good, the author and the editor can sit back and smile at having done their job to the best of their abilities. Authors often cite their editors as having been "instrumental" in helping to shape a book that may have encountered some rough spots along the pot-holed road to publication. Editors deserve all the credit that an author cares to cast their way, no arguments here.

But there is a group of unsung heroes in the publishing process, people whose names often don't appear anywhere in the book, but without whose effort, insight, and input, a lot of us would look like illiterate fools.

I am talking about proofreaders, those folks whose thankless job it is to go through your manuscript once you've ceased being able to see it anymore and look for the signs of a possible forest fire (see over-extended metaphor at the beginning). Many people think a proofreader's sole responsibility is to check spelling and punctuation.
While that is definitely right up there on their list of duties, many of them go the extra mile -- hell, many of them go several hundred extra miles -- to ensure that the book they're working on is the best it can possibly be.

And they do this by deliberately searching out those elements that you, the writer, ceased to be able to see somewhere around Draft #3.

Two personal examples: a few weeks ago, right before my second Cedar Hill collection, Home Before Dark was being prepped for the printer, one of Earthling's marvelous proofreaders noticed that in my story, "Palimpsest Day", the age of the mother did not add up if one stopped to consider her dates of birth and death. Now, I know that a lot of people tend to read such details with a quick eye and don't stop to do the exact math ... but that's no excuse for sloppiness, and that is exactly what this mistake was -- sloppiness on my part. I had become so over-focused on fine-tuning the story so that it fit into the overall arc of the Cedar Hill cycle that I overlooked a small but significant detail -- making sure the mother's age added up. While a mistake of this sort probably wouldn't have ruined the story, its mere presence would have lessened the story's value. I had read through the manuscript so many times that I simply didn't see this problem any more, and thanks to a sharp proofreader, neither will you.

Second example: up until its fourth round of proofreads, my novella In the Midnight Museum contained a glaring continuity error that, while in and of itself quite small, would have damned near pulled the rug out from underneath the entire story had it not been caught by the proofreader. It was a quick, minor detail that very well might have been overlooked by most readers, but those readers who would not have missed it would have had the entire second half of the story ruined by this nagging inconsistency. (You've noticed, haven't you, that I'm not telling you the exact nature of this mistake? That's because I am so embarrassed by it that I dare not share the specifics, lest you think me, well ... simple. "My God," you'd say. "A sponge would have seen that." And I'd prefer you leave this essay thinking I have an IQ higher than my shoe size.)

But, again, this potentially destructive detail was overlooked by me because I had stopped seeing the whole of the moon and focused only on the crescent (I figured it was time to switch metaphors).

So consider all of the above to be a preamble to this: a song of gratitude to all proofreaders, those unsung heroes who labor over our manuscripts almost as long and intensely as we do, whose unblinking eye often catch the flaws that we can no longer see, and whose objectivity gives us a fresh perspective just as we need it the most.

I'm going to end this by getting even more specific: Paul Miller, Don Koish, Deena Warner, John Everson, Ron Clinton, Robert Mingee, Jack Haringa, and -- my own personal major domo, Mark Lancaster ... thank you. A thousand times, thank you. Thank you for caring about my work enough to go those extra hundred miles and always pointing out even the smallest problem, no matter how testy I get about your nitpicking. You are why I look like a good writer.

My gratitude and admiration knows no bounds.

Now see how many mistakes you can find in this blog entry. Just don't tell me about them or I might throw a hissy fit.

---

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, publishing, writing

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These rules are from Mark Twain's wicked 1895 essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", which is mainly a criticism of Cooper's story "The Deerslayer".

Twain wrote: "I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that 'Deerslayer' is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that 'Deerslayer' is just simply a literary delirium tremens."

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
   
   
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
   
   
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
   
   
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
   
   
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
   
   
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
   
   
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a minstrel at the end of it.
   
   
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
   
   
9. Events shall be believable; the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
   
   
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
    
    
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.
    
    

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
    
    
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
    
    
14. Eschew surplusage.
    
    
15. Not omit necessary details.
    
    
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
    
    
17. Use good grammar.
    
    
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.

Labels: writing

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

Unless you're writing in the Christian Young Adult genre (and even that's up for debate), it would be unrealistic to write a novel or short story wherein one of the characters didn't swear at some point. Our lives have become much more fast-paced and frustrating, and a result of that frustration is that people swear more now than they did, say, back in the days of Booth Tarkington's Magnificent Ambersons.

However (you knew that was coming, didn't you?), there is a difference between the way people swear in real life and how they should swear in fiction.

I know a guy who would have a full one-third -- if not half -- his vocabulary hacked off at the knees if he were unable to say "f***". My wife talks in her sleep; though she strives to be polite in her speech, her most common nocturnal utterances are some combination of "christ", "sh**", "f***", and "what?" I've passed strangers' conversations wherein I picked up at least nine different profanities before they were out of earshot.

I remember one instance, while reading Skipp & Spector's The Light At The End, where in a single line of dialog, one character used eleven profanities -- including all of the Biggies -- in one sentence; it was rather impressive ... but it was also way too much.

Yeah, I have no doubt that there are people out there in the real world who do speak like that, but if you overuse profanity in your dialog you rob it of its most important function.

Profanity, at its core, is best used as violence without action.

It should be employed in fiction to either foreshadow or replace violence. If you follow this suggested guideline, you'll not only use less of it your writing, but what you do use will be so well-placed that it will have ten times the impact of an endless string of curses.

For example, in my novel In Silent Graves, there is a sequence in which the main character (who's just lost his wife and newborn child) encounters two guys on a city bus who are swearing and cursing and spewing the most unbelievable filth (Andrew Dice Clay wouldn't say some of the things these two guys do). Their language is upsetting a young woman who's sitting near the main character, and as the intensity of the profanity and filth builds, so does the main character's frustration and anger.

It's the only time in the book that profanity of this level is used, and that was deliberate: it's supposed to be as shocking to the reader as it is to the main character, because the increased intensity of the filth that comes out of their mouths foreshadows the violence that ends the scene.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, profanity, writing

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It is widely known that writers -- but particularly poets -- have higher incidences of mental ailments such as depression, alcoholism and bipolar disorders than the general human populace. Few people have an image of poets as being perky and gregarious, especially since some fairly well-known poets have ended their lives with suicide:

• John Berryman
• Thomas Chatterton
• Hart Crane
• Sergein Esenin
• Adam Lindsay Gordon
• Randall Jarrell
• Vladimir Mayakovsky
• Sylvia Plath
• Sara Teasdale
• Marina Tsvetayeva
• Anne Sexton

Many more people who've been amateur or aspiring poets have also killed themselves, but at the same time, many poets (professional and otherwise) avoid or never even consider depression's final solution. While the reasons for poets' suicides are varied, a pair of researchers published a paper comparing the work of nine of the above poets (see footnote) with work from a closely-matched control group of nonsuicidal poets. The researchers found that the language choices of suicidal poets held some telltale signs of their downward spiral.

James Pennebaker (a psychologist at the University of Texas) and Shannon Wiltsey Stirman (a psychology grad student at the University of Pennsylvania) published their research in an article called "Word Use in the Poetry of Suicidal and Non-Suicidal Poets" in Psychomatic Medicine in 2001.

Instead of finding verses that overtly dwelled on doom and death, they found that suicidal writers' work displayed a sense of isolation and detachment from other people and extreme introversion.

"One of the most telling words of all is the word 'I'." Dr. Pennebaker told a reporter for a Reuters article. "People who are suicidal or depressed use 'I' at much, much higher rates, and there's also a corresponding drop in references to other people."

The closer the poets moved towards suicide, the less they used words like "listen", "share", or "talk"; nonsuicidal poets tended to use such references to human interaction more and more as they aged. And while the suicidal poets did use more sexual and death-related imagery, they didn't especially dwell on topics like hate or anger. There was no real difference in the emotional content (whether positive or negative) between the two groups of poets.

Pennebaker cautions that not everyone who writes self-preoccupied poetry is going to kill themselves; their research just indicates a higher risk, not a guarantee.

---

The poets listed here who were not included in the study were Thomas Chatterton and Marina Tsvetayeva. Please send me a message if you know of other poets who should be included here.

An abstract of the Pennebaker/Stirman article can be found at: http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/content/full/63/4/517

Labels: poetry, writing

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In the 1990s, dark fantasy became regarded as being "code" for horror. Why? Major publishers who flooded the market with awful, horrible, no-good novels in the 1980s to cash in on horror's popularity decided it was the genre's fault when readers were unwilling to buy mass-produced dreck.

But, the market watchers noted, fantasy sold just fine. So major publishers responded by deciding to market books with otherworldly elements as fantasies and books with nonsupernatural crime elements as thrillers; most anything else was rejected as unpublishable and left for the small press to peddle.

Both horror and dark fantasy explore the nature of evil and the darker sides of human nature and create a creepy or frightening atmosphere. Thus, when asked what the difference between dark fantasy and supernatural horror is, some people will say that there is no difference, or that the difference is that horror goes to greater extremes of sex, violence, and, well, horror, than dark fantasy.

To my mind, that's a bit of an oversimplification: there are some books and movies that are squarely fantasies that are also extremely gruesome and thus get sold as horror. While a broad gray area certainly exists between the two genres, there are a few ways to distinguish the two.

(The standard disclaimer applies: these are general characteristics I've noticed rather than "rules", and those trying to separate the fantasy from the horror should look at a work as a whole, rather than latching onto a single element and thinking something like "Aha! Everybody dies at the end, so this must be horror!")

Setting

Horror is about an intrusion of the frightening and unknown into a mundane, everyday world the reader is familiar with. It doesn't have to be a present-day world, though; you can easily set a horror novel in a historically-accurate past. The intrusion doesn't have to be supernatural (a deranged serial killer will do just fine) though it often is.

Dark fantasies have an established setting that is fantastic or otherworldly. Such a fantastic setting can range from the overt sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock's Elric saga to the subtle magic of many of Ray Bradbury's tales to the action-comedy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you start out in a world where vampires or ghosts or magic are treated as a "normal" occurance by the characters, it's a fantasy world.

Book and movie series that start out as horror may then travel into dark fantasy genre because what was unknown and frightening in the first book -- say, a world crawling with zombies -- is established and known, though maybe only slightly less scary.

Characters

The protagonists of dark fantasies are often heroic. They choose to face the dangers presented to them in the book, story or movie in order to save others or to achieve some greater goal. They are often experienced with the occult or in possession of special skills, knowledge, or powers. Clive Barker's private investigator Harry D'Amour (portrayed by Scott Bakula in Lord of Illusions) is an example of such a heroic character operating in a horrific dark fantasy universe.

The protagonists of horror stories and movies are often survivors. They're regular everyday people who have been thrust unwillingly into a frightening, awful situation, and they may be hugely unprepared to deal with it. But deal with it they must, or they die in often spectacularly nasty ways. Kirsty, the young heroine of Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart is an example of horror's archetypical survivor character.

Plot

In many dark fantasies, there's an implied comfort to the reader: the rollercoaster will stay on its tracks. The characters the reader cares about will usually make it out alive in the end, and the day will be saved.

Readers don't get that comfort in many horror novel and movies; the cars might go off the tracks at any time. The protagonist may surive the zombie hordes only to be shot by a redneck deputy in the final scene. Everybody might die. It's horror.

Censorship Issues

Horror has a reputation for being "nasty" and has, in the past, been accused of promoting Satanism because it explores the occult. I've met writers with a prudish streak who steer clear of horror simply because they feel it would somehow give them a bad reputation.

There's a long-established assumption in some quarters that science fiction (and, by extension, traditional fantasy) is "juvenile" literature, and thus is mainly reading material for teenagers. So, many speculative fiction magazines have been reluctant to run stories with profanity or graphic descriptions of violence or sex. Much horror is squarely adults-only stuff that doesn't flinch from any subject or description.

It might seem, then, that horror is especially vulnerable to censorship due to pressure from groups who seek to squash objectionable content. Some feel that the dark fantasy label is mainly used to camouflage horror from conservative attack.

However, dark fantasy ultimately doesn't provide much cover; bear in mind what's happened to the Harry Potter books, which have been wildly popular (and increasingly dark) children's fantasy novels. A few fringe groups have been vocally protesting that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft, which therefore promotes Satanism. The protests wouldn't have even come up if not for the books' huge popularity, because magic is a staple in practically any fantasy novel I can think of, including Christian-influenced works like Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia

Thus, I submit that most horror/dark fantasy stays off the nutters' radar because it's not the kind of thing they'd ever seek out to read, and the press doesn't draw their attention to it; they never were part of the market for these books, and publishers listen to the market.

Protests, in fact, have been good for book sales in some cases, because people run out to buy a copy to see what all the fuss is about.

It's when groups can exert sufficient pressure on local stores and libraries to keep certain books off the shelves entirely that the trouble starts. But at least in the modern world, most adults can bypass local efforts at thought control and get their books online.

Labels: dark fantasy, genre, horror, writing

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Literary journalism refers to the use of fictional techniques in writing a work of nonfiction. In other words, it's a true, well-researched, journalistically-sound story that might normally be written in a dry newpaperly manner that has been instead written with style, vivid description, and narrative flow that immerses the reader in the story. The quality of the writing used to tell the story is just as important as telling the truth of the story.

The terms "digressive narrative nonfiction", "creative nonfiction" and "New Journalism" are synonymous with literary journalism. The term "New Journalism" was coined by Tom Wolfe in the mid-60s to describe the stylish writing done by that era's up-and-coming Young Turks of magazine journalism who were kicking down the doors of dry, objectivity-first, "just-the-facts-ma'am" traditional journalism. But fewer people use this term today because "new" journalism didn't replace "old" journalism by any stretch.

Furthermore, what is today considered "literary" journalism has a long past. Writers such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Clemens, Stephen Crane, James Agee, and Ernest Hemingway all wrote nonfiction in a vivid, narrative style.

In more recent times, authors most often associated with literary journalism include:

• Truman Capote
• Joan Didion
• Edward Hoagland
• Tracy Kidder
• Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
• Norman Mailer
• John McPhee
• Richard Preston
• Richard Rhodes
• Mark Singer
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Tom Wolfe

Literary journalism is cousin to nonfiction genres such as travel writing, personal essays, memoirs, and to pseudofiction (fictionalized accounts of true stories). Capote's grim nonfiction crime novel In Cold Blood is a classic example of literary journalism, as are Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Detractors of literary journalism accuse the genre of lacking objectivity and factuality; however, the best literary journalists make sure to keep the covenant of truth between themselves and their readers and maintain the essential factuality of their stories. But, for editors and readers who prefer dry factual nonfiction writing, literary journalism may never give them the black-and-white reality consensus they crave.

---

References:

Literary Journalism edited by Mark Kramer (Ballantine Books)

A History of American Literary Journalism by John C. Hartsock (UMass Press)

http://www.utoledo.edu/~pmany/litjournal.html

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"Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion."
-- Douglas Winter, 1982

As a literary genre, "horror" can be loosely defined as any work that creates as atmosphere of fear or dread and provokes those reactions in the reader.

Many people associate horror with spooky tales of the supernatural: ghosts, demons, vampires and the like. Such stories are often the modern-day equivalent of old tales about the unknown dangers that lie in the shadows beyond the comforting light cast by the campfire.

But in this modern age, we have lit virtually the entire planet, and so the midnight world has lost much of its mystery and fear. So others insist they couldn't be frightened by a story unless it dealt with a scenario that could really happen: being stalked by a serial killer, being trapped in a basement with hungry rats, etc.

And still others insist they can't be spooked at all by a story ... but they can be plenty grossed out by one. These people associate horror fiction with the sense of revulsion that gory descriptions of decay and mayhem can create.

Thus, to a certain extent, horror is in the eye of the beholder; it can be quiet or over-the-top, fabulist, surreal, or mundane. Horror sends its tentacles into virtually every other genre: mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, romance, erotica, etc.

The basic qualities of a good horror tale are ideally the same as for any other story: a compelling plot and sympathetic and interesting characters. There should be plenty of atmosphere and suspense; if a good horror story can't make jaded ol' you want to sleep with the lights on, it should at least give you a delicious shiver now and then.

Horror became hugely popular in the 1980s due to the burgeoning popularity of authors such as Stephen King in the mid-to-late 70s. Publishing companies were eager to cash in on the trend, and by the late 80s, bookstore shelves were absolutely flooded with hastily-commissioned, poorly-written novels. The good stuff was lost in a sea of crap, and disenchanted readers naturally stopped looking to horror for entertainment.

The horror market crashed, and throughout the 1990s major publishers shied away from horror novels from beginning writers. King and other authors such as Anne Rice continued to sell very well, but the industry as a whole treated horror as a dead genre. Good novels continued to find publication, of course, but they were most often marketed as thrillers or as dark fantasy. Unestablished writers of works that could be marketed as nothing but horror had to seek publication in the small press.

The commercial prospects for horror started to improve in the late 1990s, but the re-emergence of horror as a popular genre has been slowed by real-life horrors such as the Columbine school shootings and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Horror is a bit like science fiction: it's popular as long as the real thing isn't readily available in the Real World. Just as many people lost interest in science fiction movies when the space program was going full steam, many people lose their taste for horror when the evening news is full of it.

A few subgenres

• Apocalyptic: horror stories that deal with the end of the world, or the threat of it if the protagonist fails. Stephen King's The Stand and Robert McCammon's Swan Song are examples.
  
  
• Splatterpunk: this term was coined by David J Schow at the World Fantasy Convention in Providence in the mid-80s to describe really extremely visceral graphic horror. Think of the literary equivalent of Dead Alive without the goofy humor. Some argue that this subgenre is outdated, and doesn't exist anymore because of the backlash against horror towards the end of the 80s. However, there are still plenty of people who want to see plenty of blood and guts and extreme violence in their stories.
  
  
• Supernatural: ghosts, goblins, exorcisms, vampires, zombies, and other elements of the occult populate supernatural horror stories. Parts of The Bible even fall under this umbrella, and the ghost story and haunted house story are well-established in mainstream literature.
  
  
• Gothic: creepy stories of romance and romantic suspense, set in a backdrop of cursed families, crumbling castles and decaying Southern plantations. Not to be confused with stories about goths.
  
  
• Lovecraftian: stories which are written in the style of H.P. Lovecraft or which use elements from the Cthulhu mythos he created. Look for references to Elder Gods, tentacled horrors, cults, and general doom for mankind.
  
  
• Quiet: the quiet horror story goes about its creepy business without much mayhem or blood. Such stories may very well be otherwise classed as mainstream stories; consider Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", for instance.
  
  
• Psychological: tales of disturbed human minds. These stories can deal with psychotic killers, but they can also warp the mind of the reader, leaving him or her wondering what's real and what isn't.
  
  
• Erotic: this type of horror fiction puts plenty of sex in the mix. The idea here is that the sex and desire are integral to the plot of the story, and the reader gets creeped out as much as he or she gets turned on. If you've seen the NC-17 version of David Cronenberg's movie Crash, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
  
  

Labels: genre, horror, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Magazine and book editors are cruel oppressors who delight in rejecting and demeaning True Art. In short, they are evil. So your mission is to join the Fellowship of those who seek to inspire editors to fling themselves or coworkers from high windows or commit hara-kiri with their letter openers.

The best way to cause an editor's mind to wander to despairing thoughts of self-destruction or to throw her into a mindless murdering rage is to present her with a manuscript of such astonishing quality that her mind is broken. But like Sauron's mighty Uruk-hai, editors are a tough bunch; don't expect your first effort to do much more than cause her to drink a bit more than usual at Happy Hour.

Thus, you must send her many, many manuscripts, and encourage your friends to do the same!

1. Prepare for your writing by exposing your mind to the right material. This means you absolutely must watch every Hollywood fantasy movie you can lay your hands on -- the ones from the 80s are especially helpful. Optionally, you can read Tolkien and Robert E. Howard's and L. Sprague DeCamp's Conan books. Don't bother reading any other old fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis, Charles Perrault, Howard Pyle, Sir Thomas Malory, or Lewis Carroll, and don't trouble yourself with modern fantasy writers like Gene Wolfe, Jonathon Carroll, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles De Lint, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, or China Mieville.
   
   And whatever you do, don't read outside the fantasy genre, or else your work could be subject to all kinds of foreign literary influences that could destroy the purity of your high fantasy prose.
   
   
2. Develop your ideas carefully. Nothing helps you develop your storytelling like a few hundred hours of D&D! Make sure you write down everything that happens in your latest Dragonlance campaign; this will form the backbone of your first novel. If you feel you need help coming up with good dialog, try some live action roleplaying -- the quips and barbs you'll cast at each other when you're all running around the local science fiction convention hotel at 3 a.m. will be pure gold!
   
   
3. Research. Researching mythologies, legends, and history on your own is a complete waste of time -- real authors don't worry about that kind of thing. It's fantasy; they just make stuff up off the tops of their heads! And anyway, everybody knows that fantasy should be all about orcs, dwarves, elves, and dragons, with maybe a unicorn or a few fairies or demons thrown in for good measure. If you feel you need something more exotic, use a creature from the D&D Monster Manual. Take your settings directly from Tolkien or Dragonlance -- readers like to feel they're in familiar surroundings. You'll earn bonus points from readers if you lift scenes directly from the Lord of the Rings movies!
   
   
4. Set your story free. You might have heard writing instructors talking about stuff like "internal logic", "consistency", and "maintaining the reader's suspension of disbelief". Don't listen to them -- they're just trying to stifle your creativity! Fantasy is all about magic, and anything can happen in magic! Internal logic's so boring; keep the reader entertained with surprising and unprepared-for events!
   
   
5. Give your characters memorable names. You'll want your readers to know right away whether characters are good guys or bad guys; it's also helpful if the name describes the main feature that distinguishes that character from all the others. For instance, your lovely elfin princess could be named Arewynne Fairmaid. Your evil orc could be named Argh of the Skullkrusher Clan. The brave blacksmith could be named Hammerclang Strongheart. Don't confuse the reader with subtlety.
   
   
6. Write your dialog carefully. You don't want to spend too much time on characterization, so it will need to be conveyed in dialog. Make absolutely sure your reader knows what the characters are feeling:
   

   "I'm going to kill you, snivelling creature!" Argh shouted menacingly.
   "Please give me the ring, master!" wheedled Gorrum flinchingly.
   

   Be sure to add in the funny quips and sayings you picked up while you were gaming! Readers love it when you throw in hip, modern language to spice up that old style stuff:
   

   "Thou art troubling me!" growled Blackmane Stabmaster. "I shall run thee through with mine Sword of Stabbyness!"
   "Come and get some, beeyotch!" Puck replied defiantly.
   
   

7. Create a powerful opening. Make sure to ground your readers in your fantasy world with lots of description right away. Make sure to spend several paragraphs describing the room your main character has just awakened in; no detail is too insignificant to be dwelled upon. You shouldn't introduce any dialog or plot for several pages lest you break the spell you're weaving for the reader.
   
   
8. Use language skillfully. You've probably guessed that you should borrow terminology and descriptions from Tolkien and Dragonlance as much as possible. But what you might not realize is that adverbs are your friends -- you should use plenty of adverbs: slowly, quickly, menacingly, woundingly, etc. And! Use! Exclamation! Points! Wherever! Possible! For! Emphasis!!!
   
   And if you learned a particularly cool, long word (such as antidisestablishmentarianism or omphaloskepsis), figure out ways to use it as much as possible. Editors will be awed by your intelligence if you use the longest, most complex words possible to spice up simple actions. For instance, "said" is terribly overused; try using "enunciated" or "phonated" instead. Heck, while you're at it, invent some cool-sounding words, use them frequently, and don't leave any clues or context to let the reader know what they mean! Readers love a good mystery.
   
   
9. Titles are vital. Make sure your title is catchy, and includes words like "doom", "ring", "fellowship", "champion", "lord", "sword", "bane", "wyrm", "faery", or "blood". You get extra points if the title gives away the ending. "The Baneful Fellowship of the Sword Lord's Wyrm Ring of Doom" would make an excellent title. Be sure it's subtitled as being Part One of a 12-part series.
   
   
10. Rewriting and proofreading. The best, truest stuff will come to you in the first draft. Don't tamper with it by rewriting it -- it's your Art! And don't bother checking your spelling -- real authors don't worry about that kind of mundane stuff. After all, the editor's got to have something to do!
    
    
11. Make sure your manuscript stands out. You might have heard about something called "standard manuscript format" -- that kind of thing is for chumps! Single-spacing saves paper, and you should always use the most exotic fantasy font you can find to put the reader in the right mood. And speaking of moods, white paper is so dull. Printing your opus on purple paper makes a powerful statement.
    
    
12. Handle rejection like a pro. If an editor sends you a rejection, don't despair! Instead, write her back immediately demanding an explanation. If she did give you reasons, just ignore them -- she's only trying to keep you down. Write her back and tell her what an idiot she is -- show her you can't be cowed! And then change the title of your tale, write a new opening paragraph, change the names of your characters, and send your manuscript right back to her.

If you follow these simple steps, you'll have created a work that makes even the most black-hearted editor tremble ... and, if you're lucky, wish she could ask the court for a restraining order!

However, if you need a model to inspire your efforts, be sure to read The Eye of Argon. If every manuscript matched The Eye's sublime qualities, editors would quit or slaughter themselves in droves.

---

Explicating My Satire

Just in case anyone thinks I'm disdaining Tolkien, I'm not. His work is classic, wonderful, and timeless. His work is so great that 80% of the high fantasy fiction I've read as magazine submissions or for writing workshops completely rips him off. Fantasy goes way beyond orcs and elves -- go read some Gene Wolfe, Jonathon Carroll, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles De Lint, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, or China Mieville and you'll see that the genre has gotten pretty broad over the past 50 years.

And if you've read any of my movie reviews, you know I carry a torch for many 80s fantasy films. I also have nothing against Dragonlance books or any other gaming or movie novelizations. Several friends of mine write such books, either because they enjoy doing so or because they need to pay their rent. Would I write a gaming novelization? Hell, yes; I co-wrote a story for a Xena: Warrior Princess anthology a couple of years ago.

Gaming novelizations can be a lot of fun. Some are not well-written, others are surprisingly well-written and contain original ideas. It depends on how adeptly a writer who is given rigid guidelines and a deadline can exercise his or her originality.

In short, novelizations can be a tasty part of your well-balanced literary diet.

But I've run into way, way, way too many budding fantasy writers who read nothing but fantasy, or worse, nothing but a particular writer or series. A writer who reads nothing but the work of a single genre or author -- be it Margaret Weis or Jane Austen or Tolkien -- is like a runner training for a marathon on a diet of nothing but yogurt and gatorade.

Labels: humor, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

"Drunkards, deadbeats and bummers"

This was how Harvard president Charles W. Eliot described reporters as he rejected Joseph Pulitzer's offer to endow a journalism school at that university.

Eliot's disdainful comment reflects a common stereotype that writers are alcoholics, but there's a lot of truth to that image. The creative urge often comes from a troubled or depressed mind that the posessor tries to numb with alcohol. Other writers, when faced with a deadline and writer's block, turn to alcohol or drugs to silence their internal critic and encourage the words to flow. Some writers find that alcohol has become such a crutch that they are afraid to try to write without it.

And while reporters are more consistently paid than many of their freelancing bretheren, most are not by any means well-paid. Newspaper journalism has been described as being "a young person's profession" because single people in their early-to-mid 20s are better able to deal with the long hours, low pay, and crushing deadlines that come with the job. Most reporters either switch to editing or burn out and leave the profession entirely after they get into their 30s. Of the die-hards who stick to their typewriters into their 40s and 50s, a fair number of them will be recovering or functional alcoholics.

And then there's the issue of lifestyle. Some hard-nosed, old-school newspaper reporters seem to style themselves as the writer's equivalent of detectives or private investigators, and the PI's legendary hard drinking becomes part of their style. And gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thomson served as the role model for many reporters. Thompson's drinking and drugging were the stuff of legend; he turned Eliot's "drunkards, deadbeats, and bummers" slur inside-out and vulcanized it into a battle flag under which he invited all the young turks of modern journalism to rally.

But many reporters, particularly those on crime beats, have more than an image to maintain or deadline and financial stresses to deal with -- they may be trying to forget the horrors they've seen in the course of doing their jobs.

There are certainly journalists who drink little or not at all. But I have to say that I've never seen a group of people drink quite as enthusiatically as the working journalists I've seen. They've out-drunk even goths and jazz musicians.

When I was in journalism school, I interned at a Society for Environmental Journalism conference. At the Saturday night gala at the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science (a really neat interactive museum), all these professional journalists, who'd been arguing over ethics and integrity the entire weekend, descended on the cash bar like locusts. About a third of the guests were staggering drunk at the end of the evening (I still remember our coordinator slurring to me, "You guys are such great interns. Get me another Rolling Rock, wouldja?") The the drunkest of the drunk stumbled off to hit the bars after the party was over.

Alcohol seems firmly entrenched in the journalistic culture, at least in the U.S. One of my j-school professors told me that, during his newspaper days, he'd gotten promoted off the police beat and into the desk editor's chair. His buddies took him out to the bars to celebrate, and one of them bought him a bottle of Night Train as a symbol of all the transients he'd seen the police pull from alleyways and gutters, victims of murder or overdose.

The professor still has that bottle of Night Train, unopened, sitting on the bookshelf in his office.

Labels: journalism, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Writing a query letter for fiction or poetry is a bit different from writing a query letter for a nonfiction piece.

Short Fiction and Poetry

In the case of short stories or poetry, you in general won't be writing many query letters; editors may be mildly annoyed at getting a query letter about a piece when their guidelines clearly state that writers should simply submit such pieces. Thus, you will write query letters in only a few circumstances:

1. You're writing to find out if the publication is currently accepting submissions; do this only if your market research has yielded conflicting information. This type of query should be short and to the point:
   

   Dear (insert title and editor's last name here),
   
   Are you currently accepting materials for NAME OF PUBLICATION? I have a (5,000-word/50-line/whatever) (science fiction short story/poem/whatever) that I wish to submit. My work has appeared in (list relevant credits).
   
   Thank you,
   (your name here)
   (phone and email)
   
   

2. You're writing to find out if they're willing to look at a piece that falls outside their submissions guidelines (for instance, you might have a short story that's a few thousand words longer than what they say they'll take).
   
   
3. You're trying to get into an invitation-only anthology or chapbook.

In the latter two cases, you will be writing a letter similar to the one for the basic are-you-accepting-work? query above. There are a few things to keep in mind when writing such a query:

• Make sure you've got the editor's title and name correct; this is basic, but to mess this up really hurts your chances. Not figuring out that Editor Pat Smith is female rather than male and then addressing her as "Mr. Smith" is a common mistake.
  
  
• Do not try to summarize your poem or story. This is a huge turnoff for most editors. Give them the length and its genre and, if relevant, its topic.
  
  
• Include your relevant publishing credits ("My fiction has appeared in publications such as NEAT-O STORIES, TALES OF THE UTTERLY FABULOUS, and EEK! IT'S FICTION"). Demonstrating that you are a published writer -- and therefore likely the author of competent, readable work -- will help your cause. If, say, you're an unpublished fiction writer but you've had poems published in magazines that run both fiction and poetry, you can sneakilly rephrase things ("My work has appeared in publications such as TALES OF THE UTTERLY FABULOUS and GRINDSTONE QUARTERLY"). If you are well-published, don't list the whole shebang; pick and choose which publications are likely most recognizable to the editor. A maximum listing of two or three lines is sufficient.
  
  
• Don't include biographical information unless it's quite relevant to the piece you wish to submit (for instance, if you've written a thriller novellette based on the time you were held captive by guerillas in El Salvador)
  
  
• If a better-published writer known to the editor has suggested you send your work to this market, by all means mention this. If you're trying to get into an invitation-only anthology, this is pretty much crucial: "(writer name) suggested I submit this piece to you."
  
  
• Keep a businesslike tone. Don't try to be funny unless you are VERY sure of the editor's sense of humor. It's way too easy to inadvertently offend someone and have your attempt at humor backfire.

A lot of the above advice will equally apply to writing cover letters when you submit a story or poem to a publication.

Novels

Novel queries can be simple documents, or they can be complex works that will take you weeks to properly prepare. It all depends on what the publisher says he or she wants to see. If they say they want a query letter and the first chapter or three of the novel, that's essentially what you send.

Piquing their interest is crucial in getting them to ask to see the rest of your novel.

You will be summarizing the plot and character interactions of your novel. You will also want to include publishing credits and relevant biographical/expert knowledge. In short, your opening letter will be much like a query proposal for nonfiction.

Writing a novel synopsis is a complex topic worthy of its own article (which I'll cover sometime in the future).

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

In the inevitable event that you get a rejection letter from a publisher, you should, in the vast majority of cases, not take it personally.

Rejection is hard. But as a writer, you must learn to be serene when you open and read the contents of the too-thin SASE you've just gotten back in the mail.

You should never, ever reply to a rejection, unless it's to send the editor another piece at his or her request.

You will eventually get a rejection that comes off as an insult or otherwise absolutely infuriates you. "How dare he!" you'll think. "After the crap they ran last month, how dare he say this about my story! I'm gonna give that bozo a piece of my mind!"

Don't. Seriously, don't.

Even if the editor was way out to lunch, don't send him a rebuttal or explanation. I once got a rejection in which the editor clearly failed to read the last three pages of a story, and missed an important plot twist that addressed everything he criticized about the story. Oh, how badly I wanted to write back, "Sir, if you'd just read the whole story! Please!" and as a result I had to sit on my hands, whimpering to myself, for days. The story found publication, so in the end all was well.

Editors are rushed, they're distracted. Even a small publication that pays half a cent a word may get over a hundred submissions each month, some of them quite long. These small press folks are all holding down day jobs in addition to trying to get through the slushpile and put out a magazine. Editors won't read all the way through stories if their attention wanders. Chances are good, if your story doesn't grab them in the first page, that's as far as they'll read.

Editors are overworked and grumpy. They are less than diplomatic, sometimes even outright rude (all of this is why so many editors use form rejections; they're quick and neutrally-written so as to avoid inadvertently offending people). They'll misread stories. They'll reject very good stories that aren't to their taste (for instance, I know of a pro writer who had a story rejected because the protagonist had a toy poodle, and the editor hated poodles). That's just life.

Responding to an editor to say that he or she is wrong or made a mistake will nearly always backfire. You'll have at least annoyed the editor and possibly ruined your chances with that market. And editors are friends with other editors. If you write a real corker of an angry letter, the editor may be so POed that he tells his buddies about it over beer or IM: "I got this crazy letter from this John Doe guy today. Guy sounds like real trouble. If he sends you something, just don't even reply to him."

Thus, sometimes rejections do become personal rejections. Editors are human, too, and have human reactions. If the editor recognizes you as the person who sent an angry letter, or as the person who started a nasty flame war on the writer's board the editor reads, that editor is very likely to look upon your story with a jaundiced eye. Being a jerk in private messages, on boards, at conventions, etc. never helped anyone's career in the long run.

When you get a rejection, read what the editor has to say, if anything, in the way of critique. Then let his or her advice settle for a while, and see how much of it rings true.

Most editors of paying publications know a lot about writing; their advice should be listened to because (1) it's sound advice, and (2) they've got the money and the magazine space you want. For instance, if Ellen Datlow gives you advice, listen to the lady.

Some editors are seasoned pros who have little or no money to offer but run the best work they can get; their advice is just as valid as the advice of editors in the first group, and chances are good these nonpaying editors have more time to devote to giving your story a critique. If you've read their publications (which you should do any time you're submitting to an unfamiliar market) you'll have a notion as to whether the editor has good taste or not; if so, listen to what he or she has to say. If not, it's probably best to not submit to that market in the first place.

A very few editors are opinionated oddballs who can afford to run a magazine and pay professional rates; their advice should be listened to in the event that you want to see your work in the pages of their publications.

Sometimes, it's hard to tell which category an editor falls into. The only thing you can do is keep writing and re-writing, and keep submitting.

The people who get published are the people who persevere.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

"The publisher is just the middleman!"

I've heard many an aspiring writer make a statement to this effect. And, really, who can blame them? We live in an era where print-on-demand has made hardcopy publication something that regular people can afford, and anyone can put up a web site or burn content onto a CD.

The faltering economy has made the big publishers more conservative. They've cut back, been less willing to take risks on new writers. Publishing houses have been sucked up by international megaconglomerates whose core interest is the Almighty Dollar, Pound, or Euro; art is of little concern if it doesn't sell to the increasingly text-jaded masses who turn to TV and video games for their pasttime pleasures.

So electronic publishing and POD technology and Amazon.com have been a godsend to the small press and the savvy self-publisher. Almost all of us have heard of a success story of The Little Author Who Could.

"Yeah!" many writers think. "The only thing standing in between me and my audience is those darned publishers! Who needs 'em anymore? I can do this myself!"

And I know people who have done it themselves.

Heck, if your needs are simple and you just want to have your work read and appreciated by others, you're in the right place: many places on the Web provide an instant gratification to writers that you can't find anywhere else.

But if you want to carve out a career as a writer, make no mistake: becoming a commercially successful self-publisher is several metric tons of hard, hard work. And, as promising as electronic publishing is, readers haven't flocked to it. Readers want to buy a book with real pages they can dogear and read out in their hammocks. It's very rare for anyone to make much money off an electronic book. You have to go hardcopy.

Here are some things to consider before you try your hand at self-publishing:

• Can you get your manuscript in professional shape? Many of us make poor self-editors. It's only natural; you spend hours upon hours staring at a manuscript and mistakes start to look like they belong there. Do you have access to people who are competent, eagle-eyed proofreaders who will be willing to give you the hard news if your manuscript needs more work than just a grammar cleanup? If you don't have acquaintances willing to do this for you, can you pay a freelancer to look over your manuscript?
  
  
• Can you properly design your book? You'll need desktop publishing and typography skills to do your book right. And what about the cover? Do you have graphic design skills and access to pro-level software? What about photography or artwork? Once again, if you want your book to compete with the books produced by the publishing houses, you have to produce a professional-looking product. If you don't have design/layout skills, you'll need to find someone who does.
  
  
• Can you pay for a printer? POD is much less expensive than traditional printing ... but it's not cheap. You're still looking at a few thousand dollars for a print run of any size. And POD has its limitations -- you often don't get to use decent paper, and some color schemes will look muddy on the covers. If you decide to go with a regular printer, perhaps a local print shop, you're looking at more money -- and more decisions. Do you know how to choose paper? What about preparing camera-ready copy? Do you know about computer file formats if the print shop can work from a disk?
  
  
• Can you promote your book? Have you done your research to figure out who your audience is and where they're most likely to see your ads? Sure, printing out some bookmarks to distribute at local bookstores is a good start ... but only a start. Do you have the money to take out some ads in relevant magazines? Can you design a compelling ad? Can you set up a website to promote your book? Do you have the time and money to schmooze at conventions? Can you write promotional copy and news releases to send out to newspapers? Can you set up and coordinate readings/signings at regional bookstores? Do you have the time and money to get promotional copies into the hands of reviewers? Can you promote yourself without coming off as too pushy?
  
  
• Can you properly distribute your book? It's relatively easy to get a listing for a POD on Amazon.com or BN.com, but getting your books into brick-and-mortar stores -- where people will be able thumb through your work and buy it on impulse -- is another matter. You can get local stores to carry copies on consignment, but what about stores in other cities? Do you know how to secure a deal with a national distributor? And what about international publishing? Do you know how to reach foreign-language audiences overseas?
  
  
• Can you handle sales? Some POD printers will offer an online shopping cart and they will process and mail orders for you. If you go with a regular printer, though, you'll have to do all this yourself. If you want to sell online, you'll have to get a shopping cart on a secure server or work through PayPal (which is pretty simple, but I've heard many trouble reports). Otherwise, you'll have to process checks or money orders. Are you organized enough to keep track in case your book does do well and the orders pour in? Do you have the space to keep the many boxes of books clean and dry and ready to be shipped? Do you have the money and time to promptly ship individual copies of your books hither and yon? Do you know how to handle the new tax issues your little enterprise will bring?
  
  
• Do you have legal expertise? Most authors don't have to worry about charges of libel from an angry acquaintance who sees him- or herself cast in a despicable light. Nor do most writers have to worry about lawsuits from the parents of children who hurt themselves trying some dangerous stunt they read about in your book. But what would you do if you were one of the unlucky few? And what if you discover another writer has plagiarized parts of your work? Or if a foreign press translates and publishes your work without permission or payment? Do you have money for a lawyer to go to bat for you?
  
  
• Can you negotiate for the sale of your book's rights? There's money to be made in the sale of film, audio, and foreign-language rights. Do you know how to negotiate this kind of thing?
  
  
• If, after having done all that hard work, can you deal with scorn and disrespect? Because unless your book pulls in some serious critical accolades or sales, you'll be dismissed by many as a hack amateur who couldn't find a "real" publisher. And you'll have to resist the overwhelming urge to beat these people into a pulp.

Publishers are seeming a little less middling now, aren't they?

Big publishers and even established small presses have access to tremendous resources that you as a self-publisher will not. Yes, you will inevitably have to do some promotion on your own even with a deal from a major publishing house. But there's so much more that goes into making a book than just the selling.

Don't sell yourself (and your book) short. Take the jump into self-publishing if you feel confident in your skills; heck, you might find you have a real taste for it and discover a new career for yourself as a small press publisher. But it really might behoove you to try the traditional routes first.

Labels: publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Most of us first encounter the notion of plagiarism while we're in school. Countless schoolkids unwittingly become plagiarists when they write their first few research papers: they copy verbiage verbatim from an encyclopedia or Web article. Even elementary school teachers are quick to tell kids that's a no-no if they realize their students have done it. Often, though, the students are instructed to "put the material in their own words", and they dutifully do some rewording. The student (and, often, his or her teacher) thinks this is fine, when really even a reworded passage still technically counts as plagiarism in academia if it's not cited properly.

Teachers (usually) crack down on plagiarism harder in high school, and most of us who had decent English instructors got citation and footnoting pounded into our heads. In my high school, unwitting plagiarism would get you marked down, but being caught willfully copying a paper would get you a zero for the whole project, potentially causing you to fail the entire class.

The stakes get higher in college; many professors have a zero-tolerance policy, and if they catch you plagiarizing a paper, they will flunk you without a second thought.

But you can always re-take a class. It's expensive, and being flunked is embarrassing, but you can chalk the whole thing up as a learning experience and move on.

Once you leave school and enter a profession in which your livelihood is tied to your publications, a plagiarism charge is a deadly serious prospect. If you are a reporter, novelist, scientist, or academic, being outed as a plagiarist can simultaneously wreck your professional reputation and put you at risk of an expensive lawsuit. In short, it can break you.

The trouble is, it's actually pretty easy for a working writer to unintentionally commit plagiarism. I've known of two good authors who unwittingly committed plagiarism. I've changed their names, even though one involved a public court case:

Case #1: John Doe and the Plagiarized Novel

John Doe is an up-and-coming writer, not a big name, but he's made some story sales and sold a first novel. His younger brother Sam is really excited about John's publishing success, and Sam says he had a great idea for a book. John agrees to write his next novel based on his brother's ideas. Trouble is, Sam had gotten all his ideas from an older, not-well-known horror novel written by a very prolific well-known writer we'll call Mr. Big. John doesn't know this.

So, Sam outlines the plot and characters -- taken almost verbatim from Mr. Big's book -- and gives his notes to John, not realizing that what he's doing is wrong and dangerous. John thinks his brother's ideas are awesome, and starts writing the novel. The novel is in John's style and his own words, but the characters and plot are almost identical to the other book. Sections of dialog, courtesy of Sam, are identical. When it's finished, he gives it to his agent (who hasn't read Mr. Big's book) who thinks it's great. The agent sells it to a publisher who also hasn't read Mr. Big's book.

When the novel comes out the next year, other people read it who have read Mr. Big's book. Someone sends Mr. Big a copy of the novel -- and he's furious he's been ripped off by some punk upstart.

John, still not realizing what his brother's done, insists he's innocent. Mr. Big takes the case to court. John is found guilty of plagiarism and is ordered to pay Mr. Big a fairly large settlement. John suffers a great deal of public embarassment, loss of professional reputation just as he is actually starting to have one, and has to pay Mr. Big the equivalent of a small house mortgage for many years. He suffers tremendously because his brother was copyright-stupid and John didn't think to ask where his great ideas were coming from (and also because neither he, his agent, nor the publisher were well-read enough to catch the novel's problems, but that's another issue).

Case #2: Sally Smith and the Plagiarized Story

Sally is a published story author and academic. Like many writers, she keeps a notebook of ideas she jots things in as they come to her. She also jots down particularly cool, quotable passages she finds in the many books she reads. She is always careful to note where she found the passages -- except once, she slipped up. She wrote down a paragraph from another writer's short story, but got distracted before she cited it.

Ten years later, Sally's published a metric ton of her own fiction in books and story collections. She's asked to write a story for an upcoming anthology, and so she starts thumbing through her old notebook for an idea. She spies a nifty paragraph -- the one from the other writer's story -- and inspiration strikes.

She sits down and writes a story that flows effortlessly from her fingers; it feels familiar to her, but by now she's written hundreds of stories and she dismisses the feeling. The finished story is very similar to the other writer's story. Not identical, not even similar enough for many people to call foul over ... but she's got that one paragraph in there, and it's word-for-word the same.

Her story's published in an anthology, and then she sells it as a reprint to another anthology. Nobody notices anything's amiss. Then, one day, one of her readers sends her an email: "I really enjoyed your new story, but wasn't it a lot like Richard Roe's story in New York Tales?"

Her memory pings. She digs out her old issues of New York Tales and finds Roe's tale. Sick horror overwhelms her as she reads his story and realizes why writing her recent story felt so familiar to her -- she read it ten years before, and used it in her notebook!

She realizes that something like this could ruin her reputation, and on top of that she feels horrible for inadvertently ripping off another writer. So, she sends Roe an apologetic letter explaining what happened, and asks Roe what he wants her to do.

Roe's met Sally before, enjoys her work, and respects her as a writer. He accepts her explanation, and says that he'll be satisfied if Sally sends him the money she got for the story with the understanding she will never try to sell it again. And finally, he has her copyright the story under both their names. He doesn't take her to court, and the matter remains private among him, her, and their agents. Sally's cost is a few hundred dollars and some personal embarrassment. Her reputation remains intact, and everybody goes on with their lives and the incident is pretty much forgotten.

There's always a price to pay for committing plagiarism, even unintentionally. But by coming clean and being upfront and contrite about your mistakes, you can potentially avoid the worst. If you gamble that nobody will notice, you run the risk of having the charge taken to you by an angry author who won't be much inclined to believe your explanations (especially if you cop a bad attitude with him or her). If you try to cover up, you make yourself look guilty, and you're not likely to do well in court.

If somebody accuses you of plagiarism and you genuinely think the charges are unfounded, by all means, fight them -- but first, make sure they are unfounded. Don't cave to a crackpot who thinks that just because you also named your main character William Ballinger that you owe him a chunk of money. But if you know you screwed up, just 'fess up and try to do damage control.

Labels: copyright, publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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The Traditional Path To Being Agented

When you're trying to sell your first novel, you're stuck in a terrible Catch-22: many publishers won't look at your work unless it's represented by an agent, but it's very hard to get a legitimate agent without a published novel under your belt or a publishing offer in hand.

Joe Haldeman once told me that the single best way to get a decent agent is through a combination of shopping your own novel around and networking with other writers. The best way of getting noticed in the slush pile is to have a track record of short story sales -- even a few credits look a whole lot better than none. Novel writing is very different from short story writing; some folks do the one well and the other poorly. However, having short fiction credits shows that you have marketable skill writing fiction. Heck, in some instances the editor might actually recognize your name. Whatever you can do to get your manuscript out of the slush pile and into an editor's hands is a very good thing.

If you're starting to get short work published, joining professional writers' organizations like the National Writer's Union, SFWA or HWA can be a huge help; these organizations will help you develop professional relationships with established authors who've already been around the block a time or two when it comes to agents and who can recommend someone when you've finally got a bite from a publisher. They'll also help steer you clear of known scam artists.

In some instances, these professional organizations offer you other opportunities to get in touch with publishers. For instance, the Horror Writers' Association has set up pitch meetings with book editors at this year's World Horror Convention. While pitch meetings can be a terror some writers don't want to deal with, they can yield very good results for those who present themselves and their work well in person.

When you get an offer back from a publisher, that's the time to call up your author aquaintances and see if they know of decent agents who'll be willing to look over the contract. The 10%-15% agent commission is well worth having someone knowledgeable check the contract to make sure you're getting what you should and, possibly more important, aren't selling away important rights.

Evaluating An Agent

Sometimes, though, you don't have contacts, and you're not a story writer. What then? How do you separate the hordes of scam artists and bogus amateurs posing as legitimate literary agents from the real McCoys?

You should probably look elsewhere if an agent:

• isn't located within easy driving distance of the New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or London areas. These are major publishing centers, and if an agent works elsewhere, he or she will not be as efficient at working with editors and getting your work out there.
  
  
• isn't a member of the Association of Authors Representatives (AAR). There's no reason for a legitimate agent to not be a member of this professional group. Ideally, an agent should also be a signatory to the Writers Guild of America.
  
  
• isn't listed in the Literary Marketplace.
  
  

You should definitely look elsewhere if an agent:

• Runs advertisements in writing magazines seeking clients or runs a promotional website to drum up business.
  
  
• Charges a reading or other up-front fee.
  
  
• Won't reveal who his or her clients are.
  
  
• Can't demonstrate that he or she has sold anything to a legitimate commercial publisher.
  
  
• Charges marketing, contract, representation, handling, processing, retainer, or circulation fees -- all this should be covered by their commission.
  
  
• Is eager to offer you editing services for a fee (see below).
  
  
• Refers you to a book doctor if he or she rejects a manuscript.
  
  
• Owns or works with a vanity press.
  
  

There are other factors to consider, of course. Getting data on agents can be hard, which is why it helps to network with experienced authors. A good agent should make most of his or her money off commissions paid after your work finds a home -- if they don't sell your work, they don't get paid. An agent who charges reading fees etc. doesn't have much of an incentive to get your work out there and sold.

For a good free evaluated database of literary agents, visit http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/pubagent.htm.

Agents as Editors

A lot of scam artists posing as agents work as "book doctors" or covertly run vanity publishing companies; they pretend to be an agent so as to procure business for their press or marketing/editing sidelines. However, a few agents legitimately work as freelance editors for commercial publishers.

How can you tell the one from the other? Check for legitimate credits as an editor and an agent -- the person should be happy to provide them. A legitimate editor/agent should always agent on commission and should never solicit editing business from clients. Professionals know where the lines are drawn, and they keep their businesses separate.

Legitimate Agents Who Just Don't Work Out

An agent who does well for one writer might not do well for another. Sometimes, there's a personality conflict. Or an agent might mishandle a book in a genre that he or she is not familiar with. An agent might work very hard for his or her top-selling writers and almost totally ignore the others. An author I know experienced the latter situation; his manuscripts languished for the three years he was with a particular agent, but after he severed the relationship, he sold six novels on his own.

The key thing is that a good agent will keep the lines of communication open and will provide evidence that he or she is doing what he or she is expected to do. Agents are usually murderously busy, yes, and it doesn't do to be a pest when asking for updates. But you should see progress, and you should feel that an agent is listening to your concerns and taking them seriously.

A good agent is worth his or her weight in gold. In addition to invaluable aid on contract negotiations, he or she will save you a lot of headaches in dealing with troublesome publishers and will generally run interference so that you don't get into a fight with people and generate ill will.

But always remember, with the exception of getting your work seen by editors at houses that don't take unagented manuscripts, there's really nothing an agent can do that you can't manage on your own with some study and work.

Labels: publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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You've reached a certain level in your writing and you realize that you need feedback from people other than your friends in order to improve your work. Perhaps you've been taking creative writing classes, and you sense that your well-meaning classmates just don't "get" the genre fiction you've been writing; you yearn for constructive feedback. Or maybe you've been in workshops before, but you've just moved to a new city and you're not familiar with what the city has to offer.

How do you go about finding -- or creating -- a workshop that will serve your needs?

While there are plenty of online writers' groups that can be a big help to writers (for instance, Critters and the Online Writing Workshops), I've found that in-person writing workshops can be even more helpful because they provide more in-depth discussions. And, since many of us writer-types tend to be hermits, the regular social contact can be a real boost.

Finding an Existing Group

Finding an existing group is easier than creating a group. Your first step would be to hit various search engines like AltaVista, Google and Yahoo!. Let's say you're hunting for a group in the Columbus, OH area. You'd input searches like Columbus, OH writers group or writing workshop Columbus, OH. Most active groups with members under the age of 40 will have some sort of online presence, and by combing through the results of your search you should be able to at least find some good leads (if you are looking for a group in Columbus whose members focus on science fiction, fantasy, or horror, please visit the Writeshop page for more information).

You should also post queries at writers' bulletin boards. Your best bets are to post at boards associated with writers' guilds and associations. If you write genre fiction, posts to the boards at places like Critters and SFF.net.

Offline, you should check around at your local libraries and bookstores, as they may be hosting meetings for writers' groups, and at local colleges. If you write genre fiction, checking at the English departments may or may not yield good results, as many literary writers are unreceptive at best to the work of those of us who write science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery or romance.

Once you find a likely group, contact the group leader and chat with him or her. Find out what sorts of things the group members write, when and where the group meets, etc. Also find out if prospective members must submit materials for group evaluation before they can join. Don't be surprised or offended if they want to see your stuff before they let you in -- this is a widely practiced method of ensuring that new members are compatible with the group's goals.

If all seems well, your next step is to go to a group meeting with a piece ready to be shared and worked on in more detail. Watch how the other members behave and interact. If you feel comfortable with these folks and they seem to be giving good feedback, congratulations! You've found a good group.

Creating a Writers' Group

Sometimes, you just can't find a compatible local group, or maybe the group you joined has died because the members have moved away or lost interest. If this is the case, then you'll have to avail yourself of online groups or create a new group.

To create a new group, the first thing you have to do is to recruit members. Go to the same places mentioned in the previous section to advertise your new group: libraries, online bulletin boards, colleges, bookstores, etc. Make your flyers/posts as interesting as possible while being brief and informative. Know what you want your group to accomplish, and convey your vision in your ads. If you want to include genre writers, be sure to say so. If you wish to exclude writers of particular works, don't insult their genres.

If you already have some people committed to being in the group who are also published writers, say so. Include a sentence along the lines of Our members have been published in Strange Horizons, Flesh & Bone, Chiaroscuro, etc. Having (and advertising) members with publishing credits will attract other published writers who might fear they would be getting into a group made up of nothing but dilettantes.

Once you've got a critical mass of people who've responded (say, 10 people or so), chat with them a bit to make sure that they seem serious and able to work with other people. It's far better to head personality problems off at the pass than to have to deal with blowups and arguments within the group.

The next step is to figure out a time when most everyone could meet. If all your respondees have email accounts, so much the better; at this stage you'll want to set up a mailing list and maybe a Yahoo! Group or similar site so that you and the others can more easily communicate and share files and other information.

Once you've got a time, you need to find a place to meet. You need to find a place that is comfortable, provides adequate sitting space, and is reasonably well-lit and distraction-free. It also needs to be in a location that provides adequate parking and is otherwise readily accessible to group members. These requirements can make meeting at a member's home difficult if you have a sizeable group.

Unless you and the group are willing to pay dues, you should seek a place that doesn't require rental fees (unfortunately, many community centers charge per-hour fees for the use of their facilities). If one of your members is affiliated with a college or university, see if he or she can secure a regular space in an unused classroom or at the student union. Alternately, if one of your members works at a company that supports the arts, he or she may be able to find space after hours in a company training room or cafeteria. Failing that, many public libraries, bookstores, and coffee houses may have suitable spaces available. If absolutely everything else fails, you might be able to secure space at a local church (though this can create some strange cognitive dissonance if you end up working on an erotica tale beneath a giant crucifix).

Maintaining a Writers' Group

The key to keeping people in your group is to make sure it's worth their time. And, ultimately, it needs to be enjoyable. Read about The Milford System for advice on how to run a workshop. Try to keep things on track; get to the business of workshopping first, and save chit-chat for later. Some socializing is important, but you don't want the group to turn into a coffee klatch where no one really gets any work done. If people in your group are inclined to be long-winded, consider bringing a timer to meetings.

If a member's critiques seem needlessly (and disruptively) vicious or derogatory, chat with him or her privately; he or she may be having personal problems, or may not realize the negative effect he/she is having. If the member seems resentful of your concern/advice, you may have to ask them to leave the group. There's no easy way to handle such a situation; try to be as calm and non-judgmental as you can. But realize that just one member acting obnoxiously can make people stop showing up; inappropriate behavior needs to be addressed discreetly before it becomes a problem.

Between meeting times, try to keep people enthusiastic and involved; this is where having an email list can come in handy (charisma also comes in handy here, but if you haven't got it, personal enthusiasm and staying on top of things will go a long way). Members will be able to share market information, advice and success stories between meetings.

Once your group gets going, continue to advertise for new members. Set up some kind of a web presence so that people will be able to find your Group via Internet searches. Take the time to request a listing for your group at relevant meta directories. For instance, local arts councils will often list writing-related groups on their sites.

Once you start getting inquiries, you and the other members may decide to request that prospective members submit work for appraisal before they're admitted to the group.

Workshop groups can get too big; if you have an active group of more than 18 people who all regularly come to meetings, you might want to consider breaking the group into smaller sub-groups that meet at Different times. The ideal group size (from the standpoint of generating stories for critique and providing adequate feedback) is about 6 to 15 people per meeting. With fewer than 6 members, the group tends to run short on work for critique and the feedback can tend to run stale after a while.

If you start a group, you'll be the leader unless you pass the torch to someone else. I recommend trying to be as democratic as possible, but other people have had success with a benign dictatorship. It's up to you and what seems to work for the group. Keeping a good group running will be work, but it will be more than worth it.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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Okay. You've written your story or poem. You think it's good. Your friends say it rocks. Your creative writing instructor gave it an "A" and wrote in the margin, "Excellent work. You should try to get this published."

Yeah! Get it published! Uh, but you've never sent your work out before. What do you do?

Step One: Find a Market

Most beginning writers will find that magazines and webzines are their best options for getting their first works published. Writers can often resell their better works (sometimes many times) to anthologies after the initial sale (and, of course, after the exclusivity clause has passed).

How are web publications different than hard-copy magazines?

Webzines have certain advantages. They are often easier (and less expensive) to submit to because you can email your work to the editors instead of having to print and mail your submission. Web publications often have a faster response time and are more receptive to work from beginning writers. It's also easier to find out about web-based publications because you don't have to track down a physical copy to review as you would a regular magazine -- the sites are free and quickly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

On the other hand, hardcopy publications have a different set of advantages. Regular magazines often pay more for work, and a sale to a hardcopy pub has a certain cachet that webzines can't match. Your Aunt Wilma will be ever so much more impressed when you hand her a slick, shiny magazine than if you send her a URL. Also, hardcopy magazines that have been around for more than a year tend to be more stable.

How do I find out about a publication?

Ideally, if you're a writer, you should already be reading magazines and websites that publish the kind of work you want to sell.

But, since there are hundreds of publications out there, you obviously can't read them all, or even find a fraction of them in your local bookstore. Every year, Writer's Digest publishes a big, thick book called The Writers' Market; they also publish similar books like the Novel & Short Story Writer's Market and Poet's Market. The Writer, Inc. publishes a similar annual volume called The Writer's Handbook. All these books contain the listings for many, many markets, and you can find one to many of these books at your local library or bookstore.

However, the information in annually-published books can be stale. You can find more current market information on the Web. Do a search for magazines or market listings at places like Yahoo! Also, the following sites may be helpful:

• Duotrope's Digest
  (http://www.duotrope.com/)
• The Market List -- A resource for writers of SF, fantasy and horror (http://www.marketlist.com/)
• Ralan.com
  (http://www.ralan.com/)

Gee, I'm really busy, and it looks like I found all the info I need in this market listing ... do I really have to read the site before I submit?

Yes. Absolutely. You need to visit and read through the site. Any information you find on a market list may be incomplete, out-of-date, or just plain inaccurate. There's no excuse to not check out the site before you submit.

97% of all publications with a Web presence also have guidelines posted or offer them through email. Read them and follow them; editors all have different preferences as to how to prepare/deliver submissions. Most print markets do not accept electronic submissions unless they've worked with you before (this is changing). Many web-only publications don't accept hardcopy at all.

And, ultimately, the best way to know what an editor likes is to read what he or she has already published.

Once I'm at the site, how do I evaluate the publication?

Focus on the fundamentals. Do you like the stories and poems presented on the site? Are the stories and poems presented in an attractive, easy-to-read, error-free manner? Is the site aesthetically pleasing and regularly updated? If you like the site and think you'd like to see your work there, by all means submit.

A note on paying vs. nonpaying publications: My feeling is that you should always shop your work around to publications that pay professional rates first -- this means at least 3 cents a word. Some people feel that any pay is better than no pay and won't submit to nonpaying publications. Others feel that making $10 for a story you worked on for 20 hours is such a trivial compensation that the overall quality of the publication in terms of how the site or magazine looks and what kind of exposure it gives to authors is far more important. Ultimately, it's up to you. There are high-quality nonpaying web publications and paying-in-copies magazines out there that publish professional-quality fiction and which do provide important exposure to new and rising writers.

A note on contest/reading fees: If a publication requests a reading or editing fee, run away and don't look back. You should never have to pay to be published. Although some legitimate contests require a fee, I suggest avoiding those, too.

Step Two: Prepare Your Submission Properly and Send it Out

(Most of my comments here relate to preparing work for electronic submission)

Preparing your submission properly means adhering to the publication's guidelines. Editors don't just make up rules capriciously; they have good reasons for them. One editor may have been burned by Word macro viruses, and doesn't want to receive Word documents from unknown people. Another editor may be using a text-only email package that doesn't handle attachments well, and therefore he or she wants plain text in the body of an e-mail message.

If you do something that lets the editor know you didn't bother to read the guidelines, he/she will not look favorably upon your submission. Put yourself in the editor's shoes: "If a writer clearly didn't bother to take 5 minutes to check out my freely-available site and read the guidelines, why should I spend the 15-30 minutes to read and evaluate his/her work?"

If the editor wants snail-mail submissions in hardcopy only, don't send a disk. If an editor wants to see submissions sent in RTF, don't send an attachment as a Word document. Don't send attachments if they say they only want to see plain text. If you frustrate the editor by sending him/her something he/she can't read, you're not helping your chances.

If the editor wants to see a cover letter, write a good one. Use the same language in an e-mail cover letter that you would in a hardcopy cover letter. Make sure you've checked for grammar and spelling errors before you send -- the ease of submission makes some people sloppy in this matter. Be formal and businesslike, unless you know the editor well and have an established rapport. Don't wax eloquent about your five cats, or try to summarize your story. And don't ever, ever try to be funny unless you're very sure of the editor's sense of humor.

If you come off as a difficult person or a crank in your cover letter, the weary and overworked editor may think, "Gee, this person's stuff is pretty good, but I get the feeling he/she is going to hassle me endlessly if I engage him in any sort of conversation, so I'm better off just sending the standard rejection and not encouraging him."

If the editor accepts attachments, make sure the text of the files is in standard manuscript format, unless the editor tells you he/she wants something different.

Take a little time to learn about file formats and how to make your word processor save files correctly. It's not hard, but you will need to know the difference between an RTF and a PDF.

If you are sending out electronic submissions, be sure you understand your e-mail program, and make sure you know how to format a plain-text submission properly. Make sure your e-mail program is sending plain text and not HTML, because HTML is pretty unreadable to people using text-only email software. Special non-ASCII characters like em-dashes and typographer's quotes will need to be converted to plain text characters, or they'll mess up your manuscript with nontext symbols. Most word processing programs have a "Find/Replace" feature, so this is pretty easy to do. Italic text will need to be indicated with underscores (or whatever the editor prefers).

Make very sure your spacing and line width is set properly so that submissions don't wrap badly (72 characters is a safe line width). Some word processing programs won't give you this info, but many text editing programs will. Set the margins, then when you export the file, have it change soft returns to hard returns, then open the file in a text editor like BBEdit or Notepad (or TextPad, which is a better program) and cut and paste it into your e-mail program.

If the editor can't read your submission easily, you've got a 90% chance it'll be automatically rejected.

Make sure your system is virus-free; sending an editor a virus is not a good move.

Step 3: Be as honest as you can in your dealings with editors and publications

Simultaneous submissions are iffy. Editors don't want them because they don't want to go through the trouble of reading/evaluating something if it's already taken. Writers have a strong urge to send a single story or poem to to several markets simultaneously because of the long waits and the low chances that an editor will take something. It's frustrating. If you do this, and a story/poem gets taken while it's under consideration at other markets, be fair to the other editors and promptly send them a courteous letter notifying them that you must withdraw the submission from consideration.

Speaking from experience, it's really, really awkward when you get two acceptances at the same time for the same piece from different publications. You have your pick of where you'd like the story to appear (which is good) but if you mis-handle declining the offer from the editor of the less-preferred publication, you risk creating hard feelings that can haunt you in the future.

Don't try to resell published stories unless the market accepts reprints. If an editor buys a work and then finds out he/she's gotten a retread, he/she is gonna be pissed. This is a good way to burn a bridge and develop a bad reputation.

Editors do talk and compare notes, particularly if they're actively annoyed with a specific writer. And editors have a way of moving up in the world and turning up where you least expect at conventions and such. Today's bush-league zine editor might be tomorrow's acquiring editor at the major book publisher you try to sell your first novel to.

Don't plagiarize. I probably don't need to say this, but if you plagiarize someone else's work, you're gonna get found out, and once you're found out, you are done.

Don't resend rejected stories unless you've rewritten them significantly. Generally don't resend rewritten stories unless the editor has asked to see a rewrite or if it's been a while between submissions (I'd say at least two years, unless there's a new editor or 1st reader). Some editors have long memories, and if they recognize the same submission under a different title, they'll almost certainly reject it and they might view future submissions from you with suspicion.

Step 4: Be patient ... and be professional

Once you've sent a submission, wait at least two months before querying unless the editor has indicated shorter response times are normal. If you get no response, query again after another two months. If you still get no response, send a third query indicating that the editor should consider the story withdrawn if you receive no reply.

Dammit! They rejected my submission!

If an editor rejects your work via email, don't hit the "reply" button unless you're going to thank them for their time and offer them a new submission.

Don't ever send a publisher a nasty letter, unless you're sure you'll never have to deal with the editor again (and in most cases, you can't be sure). Particularly don't send them something like "Neener, neener X Magazine already bought my story, idiot!" So what if your story sells to another publication? Magazines aren't interchangeable -- what is publishable one place is not necessarily publishable elsewhere. And you've just demostrated a lack of good grace and sense. Likewise, don't demand an explanation if none was given, unless you really want the editor to really give you a piece of his/her mind.

Yay! They bought it, they bought it!

By all means, celebrate. No sale will ever be quite so cool as your first one.

If there's money involved, make sure you've got a signed contract, and make sure you understand the terms of the contract. Know what rights you've sold and retained. Be sure you understand exclusivity clauses, etc.

However, don't constantly send queries as to when your work will be published or posted. And, once a story is posted, don't deluge an editor with requests for corrections/changes unless the errors were introduced by the publications' staff.

Don't ever, ever start shopping an accepted story around just because you feel it's taking too long to be published. In the print world, it is not uncommon for a backlogged publisher to take two years to publish a story or poem. In the Web world, six to eight months lag time between acceptance and publication is not uncommon, nor is it unreasonable. If you think a publication has gone down, query the editor. If a message bounces, wait a week and send again. If you have a signed contract or otherwise have made an agreement with an editor, then resell the story out from under him or her, you've burned a bridge.

Step 5: What to Do If Things Go Wrong

As Neil Gaiman said, there's many a slip 'twix cup and lip in the publishing world, particularly if you're dealing with the small press or semiprofessional publications.

Sometimes, you can have a signed contract and never get published because the magazine runs into financial problems and ceases publication. In some cases, you should get a kill fee for your orphaned story. If you think a publication is going or has gone under, follow the querying advice I gave above. If after the third query you get no satisfactory reply, you can safely consider your story to be freed of the contract and ready to submit elsewhere.

Sometimes, your story gets published ... and you don't get paid. This will happen to you, sooner or later. If polite communication with the publisher does not remedy the situation to your satisfaction, you may need to see legal counsel.

I don't recommend calling a private lawyer over a $30 or $50 sale -- it's the better part of valor just to write small unpaid sales off your taxes (if you live in the U.S.) and chalk it up to experience.

Instead, what you should always do is to contact relevant writers' organizations to lodge a complaint -- organizations like Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Horror Writers Association can be very helpful to authors who run into trouble with publishers. Sites like the Rumor Mill at http://www.speculations.com/ and Preditors and Editors at http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/ are also useful.

If you think you've been screwed by an unscrupulous publisher, don't go around on web boards and newsgroups badmouthing the publisher in public. Namecalling and vicious language can easily backfire and make you look like a troublemaker that other editors don't want to deal with. Speak the truth, but do so as politely and professionally as you can.

Labels: publishing, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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From a writer's standpoint, one of the most interesting aspects of the modern Star Trek shows (Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is that their writers/producers would listen to story idea pitches from unagented writers¹. This was extremely unusual; for every other TV show I've heard of, you can't even get your foot in the door unless you've got a Hollywood-based agent ringing the bell for you.

My friend Daniel and I took a TV scriptwriting class when I was at Indiana University. Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor, who is an IU alumna, came to campus to give a talk, and our instructor met with her. Taylor, who seems like a really decent person, offered to set up pitch sessions with students from the class.

Daniel and I were the only people in the class who were motivated/interested enough to try to take advantage of this opportunity. Well, the motivation wasn't hard: if they bought a story idea (an idea mind you, not a full-blown script) Paramount would pay $5,000. We were both in full starving-student mode, so that was quite an attractive chunk of money.

So, we sent off a query letter as Taylor had instructed, and got back a packet of material that would make any self-respecting Trekker drool: character background sheets, technical backgrounders, and two brad-bound ST: DS9 and Voyager scripts, plus a partial sample script amusingly titled "The Attack of the Aliens With The Bumps on Their Foreheads."

Daniel and I got right to work. We spent several months writing/prepping a ST: DS9 spec script (which eventually got us a very nice rejection letter from Ms. Taylor) and watching endless episodes of the first season of Voyager to work up some story ideas. The problem was, we knew we were flying blind: we were trying to sell a story idea out of the blue when what we were seeing onscreen was six to nine months out of date in terms of their shooting/scripting schedule. We watched episodes two or three times, poring over character interactions and plot points.

Since we weren't in California, the pitching for Star Trek: Voyager was done over the phone. We would have three separate pitch sessions; we were told that people weren't given more than three to start with because a lot of people burned out doing them. We were also told we'd have ten minutes to pitch three story ideas (maybe four if time allowed). We'd start each story pitch with a one-sentence synopsis (the "hook"), then give a thumbnail of the plot: the A and B stories and the important changes the characters go through. So, Daniel and I worked up about 12 story ideas, then culled them down to the four we thought were strongest and fleshed them out.

We were pretty nervous for our first pitch, and got even more nervous when we were connected to executive producer Michael Piller. We went through our first three ideas pretty quickly (he politely shot them down) and then Piller said, "What else do you have?" We ended up pitching the dozen or so other ideas we'd come up with. Piller wasn't exactly Mr. Sunshine, but he was polite and businesslike and gave us some pointers for future pitches.

Our second pitch was with series writer Lisa Klink, and it went very well. Klink was in her mid-twenties and very nice. She liked one of our ideas, and took it on to the next level in which the idea was discussed at a writing staff meeting. Unfortunately, the idea ultimately didn't sell.

Our third pitch was with writer/producer Kenneth Biller. The pitch did not go well; Biller was in a foul mood from the start, and evidently decided to take his bad day out on us. He burned up several minutes slamming one of our carefully-thought-through ideas (this was particularly hard to take, considering he'd been party to the infamous Voyager episode in which Tom Paris breaks the Warp 10 barrier, resulting in him and Captain Janeway getting turned into giant space salamanders). The best part about this pitch session was that it ended.

After that, the people at Paramount said we'd been approved to do three pitch sessions for DS9 if we wanted, but we were burned out after that last pitch. It seemed banging our heads against a wall would be less painful and be more productive.

If anyone has the opportunity to do this kind of over-the-phone pitching, I say go for it. I have not heard of a pitch session resulting in anyone's ideas getting stolen by Paramount; the money they pay is (to them) small change compared to having to deploy a lawyer to fight off a plagiarism lawsuit. But know going in that:

1. your chances are low
2. you may be dealing with someone who doesn't really want to be talking to you
3. the ground rules are made by the person you're pitching to, regardless of what anyone told you before the pitch.

If you can boil an hourlong episode down into a compelling 20-second soundbite and have enough sangfroid to remain unflustered and upbeat in the face of bored rejection or condescending rudeness, you'll do fine.

1: Enterprise did not accept unagented scripts; Paramount stopped accepting unagented materials after Voyager.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

I was asked to be one of the three judges for this year's Chiaroscuro Magazine/Leisure Books short story contest. We got quite a number of submissions, and on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), the stories came in at a solid 6.5 to 7, which, I have to admit, surprised me -- if for no other reason than a handful of past judges from other contests (not just this one) had led me to expect otherwise.

To be honest, I wasn't prepared for there to be such originality among the submissions; for every mad slasher, ghost, vampire, and (insert tired horror cliché here) story I read, I found there to be at least one story whose content, writing, or central idea outshone the more predictable tales (and even the predictable stories displayed a level of technical craftsmanship that was refreshing).

But even in a majority of these original stories, certain disquieting similarities began to pop up, the most predominant one being that, somewhere past the mid-point of the story, it seemed that the writers suddenly thought: "Whoa, wait a minute -- this is supposed to be a horror story!" ... and subsequently grafted obviously horrific elements onto the narrative so it more resembled the popular concept of horror.

Example: one story dealt with a young boy's imaginary friend whose physical form and behavior changed to suit the young boy's mood; if the boy had been mistreated by his friends, the imaginary friend appeared to him as beaten-up and angry; if the boy's mother had scolded him for something he did wrong, the imaginary friend appeared to him as smaller and sadder.

You get the idea.

Now this was -- for the first 6 pages -- an absolutely wonderful piece, reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone episodes, but then--

-- Whoa, wait a minute -- this is supposed to be a horror story! --

-- the imaginary friend shows up, unbidden, in the shape of a deformed monster wielding an axe, tells the boy that he's "...sick and tired of pretending to be something I'm not", and chops the little boy up into bloody chunks (the death of the boy takes almost 2 pages, and is unnecessarily graphic).

Now, had this turnabout been set up anywhere beforehand (which it wasn't), I might have accepted it; it might have been a terrifically vindictive morality play about allowing reality to intrude too far into one's fantasy life (which it is, at least for the first 6 pages, and beautifully done); the ending might have been interpreted as the death of one's fantasy life equaling the spiritual and physical death of the Self; in other words, it might have resulted in something deeper and infinitely more disturbing than the cheap, bloody shock that the writer chose to end it with because, gosh-golly-gee, it's a horror story and you expect this sort of thing, right?

What made this doubly alarming is that, in almost every case, the writers who grafted these ham-fisted horrific elements onto their stories had demonstrated a level of skill that led me, as a reader, to believe they were going to stay true to their voice and vision (and no, I won't apologize for using that last word); until these grafted elements intruded, each story had suggested that its writer was not only well-read and intelligent, but trusted their own instincts enough to know that it's okay to do Something Different in horror; yet near the end, some mass-market, don't-challenge-the-expected-norm, lowest-common-denominator gene kicked in, and something SPOOOOOOKY or Shocking!!!! (read: recognizably horrific) arrived to bust up the party and send everyone home way too early.

And I keep wondering: Why?

Flash back to a month ago, on the Shocklines discussion board. The subject of happy endings came up, and it appears that many readers have come to expect a certain formula from horror: meet the main character, get to know/like him or her, follow him or her through the horrific darkness that ensues, and emerge alive and triumphant with him or her into the light at the end.

Mind you, I've got nothing against happy endings - providing that they emerge naturally, are consistent with the overall tone of the piece, and (this is the important point) are justified. Otherwise, it's just bad plastic surgery.

Happy endings only work when they're justified from within the natural progression (both tonal and narrative) of a story, and in my fictional universe, that rarely happens; horrific elements only work when they're justified, and in the case of many of the submissions to the contest, this just wasn't the case; too much grafting, not enough 2nd or 3rd-drafting: the writers didn't trust their own instincts enough to not take the obvious way out.

Consider if you will Stephen King's remarkable novel, Pet Sematary; here you have a story that is incredibly dark, with only the briefest flashes of light and hope sprinkled throughout. The dark (and, at best, melancholy) tone of the novel is set early on, as are the ground rules of its microcosmic universe, and King never once betrays those rules or the novel's tone: because of the expert way he sets up everything, he can't betray them and remain justified in the world-view he presents.

Many readers were shocked that King ended the novel as he did, and the reason behind this shock? As a friend of mine put it: "After all the horrible things that had happened, I was expecting a happier ending."

Not if you read it correctly, you weren't.

From almost the very beginning, you know there's no way in hell that this is going to turn out for the best. So how would you have felt if King had betrayed his story to give readers an "expected" happy ending? And even if he had found a way to cop-out with touching warm fuzzies at the end, do you think the novel would have had the effect on readers that it did? That it still has, over 20 years later?

King never flinched here, never pulled back, never hoodwinked for the sake of making things more palatable or comfortable for the reader; the result is a novel that is not only one of the most emotionally rich he's ever written, but arguably the single most horrific of his career.

And for you "...light at the end" folks, ask yourselves this - and be honest: how many of his novels and stories have had "happy" endings? I can think of maybe four - and even those aren't "happy" endings in the traditional sense. So why does his work endure? Because it's honest unto itself. From A Buick 8 may not be the best-written story he's ever told, but it's arguably the best-told story he's ever written, simply because he remains true to the tale. And sometimes that means not ending things with a gaudy display of horrific fireworks; and sometimes it means not ending things on a happy note, lest the story and the reader be betrayed.

Old William Shakespeare|Willy S. said it best, folks: "To thine own self be true."

That is, in reverse, the answer to my question about the contest submissions: these horrific elements were grafted onto the stories because their writers (for whatever reasons) have been conditioned -- be it through uninspired films, television programs, or from reading work by writers whose only influence has been said films or television shows -- to believe that readers will only accept a story as being "horror" if it has certain readily-identifiable elements -- i.e. gore/violence/zombies/ vampires/what-have-you -- that are popularly mistaken as being the only elements that horror is concerned with.

There is a new generation of upcoming writers who are being conditioned for mediocrity; they will not -- or cannot -- trust their own instincts because the popular misconceptions about horror are threatening to become the accepted rules. If that happens, if the tired, formulaic, tried-and-true become the norm once again, then I'll be more than content to make do with being a writer whose work is only read when people are in "...a certain mood."

But I will not be content to sit idly by and let the upcoming generation of horror writers betray themselves, their stories, their craft, and their chosen field by giving them the impression that it's all right to shove a bloody shock down a reader's throat because this is supposed to be a horror story.

The solution is simple: Don't do that.

If you get to a point in a story where you say to yourself, Damn, I'd better have something horrific happen pretty soon, do yourself and the rest of us a favor and walk away; come back to it in a day or two when you can approach the story fresh, on its own terms, and not those you have been programmed to think are applicable; yeah, you might not end up with a wide readership, but odds are the readership you will have will be a fiercely loyal one.

Labels: GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, horror, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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A couple of weeks back, Charlie-in-my-writing-group was recruiting a semipro SF writer who'd just moved to town to join our workshop. In his email to the new writer, he described me as "prolific".

Prolific.

No, I'm not prolific. Not by far. Take Gary A. Braunbeck, for instance -- he's prolific. 200 published stories, three collections, four novels, and five contracts for more. He's one of the folks the book publishers call up and say, "Hey Gary, we're 10,000 words short for our new anthology. Can you send us a new story that length in four days?" And he sits down and cranks out a good, publishable novella in less than a week. And his output is nothing compared to the likes of Stephen King or Isaac Asimov -- Asimov could turn out a 50,000-word novel in a week. That's prolific.

What I am is persistent. I get a rejection, I revise my story (or not) and send it right back out again. I don't stop until my stories find a home. Sometimes they sell quick, sometimes it takes years and lots of revision -- but I don't stop until they sell. It's because I can't shake the notion that if a story never sees publication -- be that publication large or small -- it's useless. To me, an unpublished story is a story that doesn't really exist.

Lots of fiction writers -- the bulk of the folks I went to the Clarion workshop with, unfortunately -- hit a couple of markets, get their rejections, and quit, deciding their work is no good.

Sure, it does no good to keep sending out something that's unpublishable -- if I've gotten, say, ten rejections on a piece, I take a long, hard look at it. But three rejections? Four? Five? Pshaw. 'Taint nothing.

The thing is, you have to develop the ability to objectively evaluate your own work -- and then you have to trust your own instincts. You have to have a little faith in yourself and your work.

And you have to expect rejections. Expect the worst and it won't sting you. Easier said than done, I know.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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I decided to do a bit of housecleaning last night and started sorting some piles of paper I had in my filing cabinet. I weeded out:

• 500-odd pages of old work that can be safely recycled
  
• copies of two X-Files scripts -- "Ice" and "Little Green Men" -- that I'm giving to my housemate, who's been watching my X-Files Season One and Season Two DVDs since I bought them
  
• a couple of novel chapters and a story I thought I'd lost forever

Finding the novel chapters made me do the Dance of Supreme Happiness. It was something I'd written on my old Powerbook 5300 and got nuked in a system crash mishap. I hadn't remebered ever printing it out -- but there it was, nice crisp hardcopy ready to be OCRed back into Word Perfect.

Finding the story was, in some ways, even better. It's a tale I wrote back in 1995 at Clarion during the week we had Tim Powers and Karen Joy Fowler as instructors. I wrote the story in a night, submitted it, and then immediately had misgivings. It was a silly piece, I knew. Fluffy. They'd hate it.

I couldn't sleep the night before the workshop, fearing the worst. When I went to the workshop room in the morning, Karen and Tim wouldn't look at me, and I knew I was in for it. They workshopped the other folks' stories first, then announced we'd break for lunch before my critique.

I couldn't eat. I was nauseated, dreading the worst. My friend Debbie found me in the women's restroom, and I cried on her shoulder. "They're going to tear it to shreds," I told her.

She told me it'd be okay, and we went into the critique room and sat down on the couch. The other 16 students came in, then the instructors.

Tim took a deep breath and began his critique of my story: "This is a perfect example of what's wrong in science fiction today ...."

And he and Karen began to tear my story apart like Cenobites dismantling an idiot who'd accidentally opened the puzzle box. Everything I feared was happening right before my very eyes. Debbie kept casting worried glances at me, wondering if I was going to crack. But I was perfectly calm. Numb. Maybe even smiling.

The majority of the other students liked my story, but with Tim's and Karen's words ringing through my brain, I didn't hear them. And it didn't matter that a couple of the other students were furious over my treatment and gave Tim and Karen a piece of their minds later that day. When the workshop session was over, I went up to my dorm room and expunged every trace of the story from my hard drive. When I later received the copies of my story with people's written comments on them, I shoved them in a file folder and forgot about them for the next six years.

Last night, I found the file and re-read the story. And you know what? I don't hate it. I like it, in fact, and the critiques from the others who also liked it make sense. It can be a decent little story; it just needs a bit of a tune-up. It didn't deserve the broad damnation Tim and Karen laid on it.

I should have had a little more faith.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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A novelette is considered by most publishers to be a piece of mid-length fiction between 7500 and 17,500 words in length. Any story under that size is considered a short story, and anything longer a novella or novel.

The novelette and novella are considered by many to be the "natural" length for many science fiction stories due to SF authors needing a bit more space to adequately create a good settings for the reader and (in the case of hard SF ) to incorporate technical detail about how the new technologies etc. in said futuristic/alien world works.

Unfortunately, many magazines, webzines, and anthologies don't publish work in the novelette range, and those that do may be reluctant to accept such work from unknown authors because a single novelette may cost a big chunk of their fiction budget for an issue and not attract many new readers to compensate. So, beginning writers will find their mid-length work harder to place than their short work.

Labels: writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

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