Month: August 2011

What I’m working on at the moment:

• The novel The Hordes of Chanakra being shopped around looking for a publishing home.
• The short story “God of Thunder” out to beta readers
• A new story for the Heroes in Hell series in progress
• A story in progress for a zombie-themed anthology
• A story in progress for an orc themed anthology
• A Science Fiction novel involving spies in space in progress
• A sequel to The Hordes of Chanakra being outlined.
• A fantasy novel in a Norse setting being researched
• A paranormal romance being researched.

Now if I can just get paid for some of that.

Got back from the Science Fiction convention “Context” earlier this evening. My very first panel while I was there was a “writing with other” panel on collaborations and the like.I was on it because of my recent sale to the Heroes in Hell shared world series. Another panelist (“the” other panelist as it happened) was Mike Resnick.

Shortly after that, I was in the Con Suite having a snack and Mike Resnick walks in. We start chatting and soon he is giving me career advice. Wow. Here’s multiple award winning science fiction writer Mike Resnick giving nobody me advice on how to advance my career. Is this a great field or what?

I mean, this is Mike Resnick. List of awards and nominations as long as my arm, been in the field since I was third grade (and before my wife was born), that Mike Resnick. And he’s giving career advice to a nobody like, well, me. I have no illusions about my importance to the science fiction and fantasy field. That is something I hope to change in the future but, right now, I’m a nobody.

Excuse me there. I just had a fanboy moment. 😉

This was not the first story I sold but, due to the vagueries of publishing schedules it was the first story to see print.  There are certainly things I would change were I writing it today.  For one thing, I use entirely too much passive voice in this piece.  I am of mixed feelings of the very long and detailed description of starting a fire in the opening scenes.  On the whole, I think it was excessive and could stand to be pared back a lot.  On the other hand, it’s deliberate pace helps set up the conclusion.

Jilka and the Evil Wizard was intended as a short, comic piece.  And that’s really the only way I could get away with that ending.  It’s basically the punch line for a joke.  Today, I’d never try to get away with anything so . . . so.  Still, even today after twenty years I still find it a fun read and get a giggle out of it.

So here it is.  Enjoy!

Live and learn (or you don’t live long).  When I set up my “The Writer in Black” blog I didn’t think to check the “settings”.  Turns out that it was set so that only folk with blogger accounts could post comments.  My mistake.  That should be fixed now.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Okay, as I’m looking for what to do with my recently “completed” novel, one option is self-publishing. However, self publishing will require considerably more work on my part, including finding the professionals to do the tasks I can’t do myself.

One of those tasks is editing. Few writers are good editors, and fewer still are good at editing their own work. And I’m not one of them. That means hiring an editor. The problem is finding an editor for hire that is 1) competent, 2) not priced completely out of my league, and 3) after taking my money is going to do an honest job, including being willing to say about the story “trunk it and try something else” if that’s really what the editor thinks. Of those, #2 is the easiest to find.

There are lots of editors for hire, a quick google search turns up tons of possibilities. And I can quickly enough determine whether they are “affordable” (criterion 2 above), but how does one determine #1 and #3? How does one know that the editor in question is competent and willing to do an honest job, even to telling me things that the editor might think I don’t want to hear. (Well, I don’t want to hear “it sucks and there’s nothing I can do” but I’d rather hear that than either hear “it’s good but we can make it better” when it’s not or even “it’s wonderful, you don’t need me” when it’s not that either.

In “traditional publishing” the author doesn’t pay the editor.  The editor is instead paid by the publishing house. Supposedly, this deals with both #1 and #3.  The publishing house, supposedly, would only hire the editor if he or she were at least reasonably competent (please don’t write to tell me how wrong I am–I’m talking about the theory here, not how it works in practice). and the editor’s interest is in finding and publishing successful books, not in convincing you the author to send him or her money for “editing.”

In the not too distant past aspiring writers were warned by professionals in the field to avoid “book doctors” and many other “editing services” as people who will take your money and not really accomplish anything for you.  With the rise of self-publishing, however, the need for professional editors for hire is something that’s also on the rise.

So how does one find . . . how do I find . . . the editor that will do the job I need done?

Sarah Hoyt has a wonderful piece on that over on her blog According to Hoyt. The key point is that when you write a story you’ve got this picture of the world and the people in it (even if they’re not “people” but walking cabbages or what have you). Your reader, however, doesn’t.  They come into your world knowing nothing about it or about your characters and the only things they know are what you tell them and what you show them.

Picking the right details to show, and when to show them, so as to create the picture you want to create, while at the same time not bogging down the story in excess detail, is a constant balancing act.  Ideal is providing those relevant details in ways that push the story along.  Heinlein was a master of this, better in some cases than others but very good at the telling little detail that establishes setting.  The classic example is “the door dilated” from Beyond this Horizon.  Everyone knows what a door is.  That it “dilated” rather than opened immediately told us that we were in a world different from the normal one.

Another excellent example is the Heinlein’s novel Friday.  The opening scenes just drip with details that set the scene all without bogging down a remarkably fast-paced opening.

So dig out some of your favorite stories, stories that created a vivid impression in your mind without bogging down in detail.  Go over them to see how the writer did it and “go and do thou likewise.”

This was my story in the new Heroes in Hell book:  Lawyers in Hell. It was commissioned for the German webzine “Zauberspeigel” and published there August 11th:

Michael Z. Williamson first approached me about writing for the Lawyers in Hell, with Janet Morris’ approval, of course.  I had had little exposure to the Heroes in Hell series before that—a short by Gregory Benford in one of the “Nebula Winners” volumes and a “fix up” (a novel made by editing several shorter works together) of Robert Silverberg’s Gilgamesh stories.  But that was enough to show that the world was different from the concept of Hell I’d grown up with.  It would have been very difficult to write interesting stories in that concept: “And they were tortured for all time. The end.”

With a basic idea of the world, I needed characters.  The first was easy.  One of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s quotes was personally important to me: “If a man neglect to enforce his rights he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example.” So I had one character.  The basic plot was one I had wanted to use for some time, and it’s a classic:  two enemies forced to work together for mutual survival.
 
I wanted to do a little more with that plot, though.  I wanted to use an opponent who was a “mirror image” of the protagonist.  And so I found William Dunlop Simpson.  Both were US Civil War veterans, Holmes for the Union, Simpson for the Confederacy. 

Both were lawyers.  Holmes became a US Supreme Court Justice.  Simpson a South Carolina State Supreme Court Justice.

I had two characters and a basic plot device so I needed a setting.  As I said, I wasn’t very familiar with the Heroes in Hell series so I didn’t feel comfortable working in the main settings.  So I asked if I could maybe have my characters “fall into” another Hell, the Norse Niflehel with which I had some familiarity through an interest in the Asatru religion.  Janet approved the idea and from that point on the story just wrote itself.
 

“God of Thunder (or maybe “The Last Viking”–I suck at titles) is now done at about 3500 words. That is the draft is done. Now to see if I have the patience to let it sit for a while and go back on an editing pass.

And sometimes the bear gets you.

You know, I’ve always found that expression a bit annoying.  Wouldn’t it be:  “Sometimes you get the bear.  The bear gets you once“?

Be that as it may, the subject right now is writing, in particular getting stuck.  Most of the writers I know have had the experience of sitting down to work on a project and it just won’t come.  You sit there, staring at the page (screen these days) and the words just don’t want to come.  As I said, most writers I know have had the experience and I suspect most of the others just won’t admit it.  But I could be wrong.

The term for that is “writer’s block.”

I don’t like that term.  For one thing in every other job in the world, there are times when one doesn’t feel motivated, doesn’t feel “inspired,” when the body and mind say “I don’t want to do this.” They don’t get special terms.  There’s no “bricklayer’s block” or “engineer’s block” or “corporate CEO’s” block.  But writers?  Writers get to say “I have writers block” and people nod in sympathy and maybe buy them another beer.

You know.  I think that may explain writer’s block.

Seriously, though, there are times when the words come easily, where the story is just there.  You sit, your fingers fly over the keyboard, and words appear on the screen.  Magic.  It’s just about the greatest feeling in the world. (Just about.  I can think of one or two others that are better.)

Then there are other times, times when you sit there and write one word.  Then you sit there and write another word.  Then one more, each word like giving birth to a porcupine . . . breach.

And the thing is, at least in my own writing, there’s no difference I can tell between the results of the “easy” writing and the “squeezed out one agonizing word at a time” writing.  They’re just as likely to be good (as in “saleable”) or just as likely to be dreck.  Some of my published work is one, some the other.

The interesting thing is, writing for me rarely falls between those two.  It’s either one or the other but never, say, a little struggle to find the right words, or anything like that.  No, that’s reserved for editing.

In another Blog, the subject came up of people who claim “one true way” to write.  That if you want to be a writer, you must write this way and no other.

I answer them with this piece:

In the Neolithic Age
Rudyard Kipling

In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt;
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutr]/e, told the tribe my style was ~outr]/e~ —
‘Neath a tomahawk of diorite he fell.
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart
Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,
And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: —
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!”

. . . . .

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;
And I stepped beneath Time’s finger, once again a tribal singer
[And a minor poet certified by Tr–ll].

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow,
When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;
Still we let our business slide — as we dropped the half-dressed hide —
To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large, — seven seas from marge to marge, —
And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu,
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night: —
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And — every — single — one — of — them — is — right!