Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 199

Tomorrow Is Anothah Day

Due to Life Circumstances Beyond Our Control, the Friday writing post on combat scenes has been moved to Saturday.

In other news, I want to figure out just how that squirrel got on top of my car in the first place. But that's a story for anothah time, dears.

Related posts:Why Would You Kick The Sh!t Out Of Your Characters?
Timesuck, Timesuck, Give Me Your Answer, Do
A Small Digression…

Taken, Perry, and Reader Questions

Good morning! It's still crazy crazy release week for Taken, the Harlequin Nocturne I had so much fun writing. (The link to Barnes & Noble seems to be working now, thank heavens. For a while yesterday it was buggy.) If you want a signed copy, Cover to Cover Books is more than willing to oblige, and their shipping rates are quite reasonable. Just drop them an email through their website.

There's a Q & A with me up over at the Barnes & Noble Spotlight, where I talk about Perry and which of my characters I'd most like to have a drink with.

I have a couple more general announcements/answers, then it's time for me to get cracking on another short story.

To the people who sent money through PayPal after last week's post about stolen ebooks: thank you. I appreciate the people who apologized for pirating my work and tried to make things right. It takes cojones to admit you were wrong, to step up and try to make reparations.

Unfortunately, my conscience isn't easy with taking the money in this manner, for a variety of reasons. So…I've accepted the donations, and turned them straight over to my favorite nonprofit, Kiva.org. I believe in microfinance helping women out of poverty, and Kiva is a grand, grand organization. So, to those who sent me money: Thank you very much, both on my behalf and on behalf of those who are benefiting from your stepping up and acting responsibly.

To the fan who wrote asking "where is the library for ebooks?": look, several libraries have ebook-loaning capability. If yours does not, this is not an excuse for pirating them. Talk to your librarian and see what's available. Thank you for your letter.

To SM: Finish writing your book first. Then, after you've polished it and started another one, start looking around the Internet for advice on how to write a query letter, what to look for in an agent, etc. (Shameless plug: The Deadline Dames have a lot of good advice about this.) But finish, first.

Last but not least, to S: authors have little to no control over their covers. Sometimes I think it's a bane, other times, a blessing. I appreciate your input, but there's nothing I can do about covers at all. If a cover doesn't work, the best person to tell is the publisher, because they can actually do something about it. They also love to get that kind of feedback because it helps them make better covers in the future.

There, I think that's it. Tomorrow we have another post about combat scenes. But for now, that short story calls me.

Over and out.

Related posts:Questions, Questions
Don't Steal My Books
Played Hooky

Release Day for Taken!

[image error]That's right–the Harlequin Nocturne I had so much fun writing is now released into the wild!

Sophie Wilson never believed she was special. Avoiding a violent ex, she can't remember the last time she felt truly safe. Then vampires murder her best friend and Sophie is kidnapped by a dangerously sexy shapeshifter.

Zach insists Sophie is a shaman–someone with a rare gift for taming a shifter's savage side–and he needs her to help him save his pack. Now, with a malevolent enemy closing in, Sophie and Zach must risk everything on a bond that may be their only salvation…

Now available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Indiebound, and Amazon!

Seriously. I had so much fun writing this book. It's kind of a shock to see it out in the world; I still grin when I think about writing some of the scenes. I had a great time, and I hope my dear Readers like it.

[image error]I am also pleased and proud to present the cover of Those Who Fight Monsters, a kickass anthology premiering in March. My contribution is a fresh new Jill Kismet story, Holding The Line, and the anthology also features wonderful authors like Simon Green, Caitlin Kittredge, and fellow Deadline Dame Jackie Kessler, edited by the fantastic Justin Gustainis.

That's just one of the upcoming anthologies I'll be in this year. Stay tuned for more news!

Related posts:Short Break
Love Your Monsters
True To Form

But By The Content Of Their Character

"…not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." –Martin Luther King, Jr.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." –Ghandi

We are a very little better than we were. But it is not over yet.

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Go figger…
Trunk Fiction, And Other Fear

Why Would You Kick The Sh!t Out Of Your Characters?

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames, where there are advice, giveaways, or cool things every day.

It's time for another Friday writing post! I promised I'd talk about fight scenes, didn't I. Well…it turns out I have more to say about action scenes than I thought, so I'm going to break it up over a couple Fridays. Today I'll be talking about why you would possibly want to beat the shit out of your characters.

*pause, evil smile*

It's not just because it's fun. Or because one is sadistic. (Although those are considerations.) There are several reasons why you might possibly have to write a fight scene.

* Raising the stakes. There's nothing quite like fisticuffs or a blaster battle to tell the reader that things are Getting Real, or Getting Desperate. There's nothing like a surprise attack for making two characters who might loathe each other realize they have common cause. Pacing and tension pull a reader through a story, and several little crises along the arc of tension keep a reader interested. If you are not raising the stakes throughout your story, how are you planning on holding the reader's interest? Sure, raising the stakes can be done in other ways…but a good fight is sometimes the best way.

* Breaking a character. When I set out to write a Jill Kismet book, part of the process is figuring out just how to break her. How physically tired and miserable I can make her, how far I can push her, and what a person's mind and body does under that sort of strain. I've written before about how fascinated I am with the mechanisms of the human mind and body and how they react to extraordinary situations, how the mind breaks down or is reinforced by training. (If you're interested, a good place to start researching might be Grossman's On Combat.) I don't think you really know a character until you break them, and I am perennially fascinated by the question of endurance and why and how some people endure.

Without risk, no reward, for the character or the reader. Pushing a character toward (or over) the edge, especially when that character is the reader's point of entry into the story, makes the risk higher and the reward, when it comes, that much sweeter.

* Because life isn't fair. Life is not all rainbows and ponies and butterflies. Bad things happen. Every human being knows that sometimes, shit just happens. It's not fair, it's not right, but it's the way it is. Art is a way of transforming the world, and a lot of the impetus for art, for that transformation, is the fact that the world is messed-up and sometimes shit happens. Being relatively honest about this fact will give your story depths it might not otherwise possess. If there is no real risk, if you create a world on the page where everything is fair and there are no real consequences…well, you can write that story, you have a perfect right to, but I prefer not to. Writing that sort of story doesn't feel real to me, and reading that sort of story doesn't generally set me on fire.

* Unresolved issues. This is a tricky subject to talk about gracefully. Sometimes, writing a combat scene can help a writer process a trauma. For example, a few Decembers ago I was in a car accident (twisty road, dark and rainy, a deer with a death wish, voila) and it gave me fuel for nightmares (never a huge trick) until I wrote a car-crash scene or two. Something about writing that helped my brain and heart say, okay, that was awful, but it's over and we can put it on this shelf now.

I've had some dreadful experiences, and writing has been a chain to pull me through the soup of nasty lingering trauma plenty of times. Exorcising my demons on the page hasn't always been fun, but it works. And afterward, those experiences became much less scary for me to think about, because (this is my personal theory, YMMV) I had exercised control over them through transmuting them into words, and I had found a meaning in them. (Thank you, Viktor Frankl.)

* Pacing and practice. You may need to speed a story up, get its heartrate revving and build momentum for the big finish. Alternatively, you may want to trip your character and send them sprawling so you can get a word in edgewise and slow things down. Both are things a fight scene can do. Fiddling with a book's pacing is largely a matter of practice, and combat scenes are great practice for both for intra- and interscene pacing, as well as overall.

There are other reasons you might want to kick the everloving hell out of your characters. But only one more bears mentioning, and it is the single most compelling reason. All the other reasons are in addition to this precondition, without which there is no combat scene:

* The story requires it. It's nice to have combat scenes and they're fun to write. But, just like sex scenes (which, I suppose, a lot of the same skill set for writing combat could be used for), they must be germane to the plot.

Here is an Ideal Law of Writing Well: every piece of dialogue/sentence/paragraph/chapter/section/book must ideally do three things: build character, give the reader a sensory cue, and move the plot along. I call this an "ideal" law because it's something to aim for even though we live in an imperfect world and are working with imperfect tools. (If you can manage to do at least two of the three necessary things consistently at the sentence level and above, you're a frickin' genius and you don't need any bloody advice from me. I'll probably read your books and weep with grinding envy.) It will not always be possible to do this, but (especially when you are revising) this is a wonderful clarifying concept to keep in mind.

A combat scene is no different. It must give the reader sensory cues, it must show us something about the characters, and it must also move the plot along. If it's just thrown in for the hell of it, or thrown in the wrong place, or shoehorned in because "all these types of books have to have a combat scene", the scene (no matter how beautifully written) has a virtual certainty of failing for the reader. We don't want that. We want to maximize the reader's chances at every turn. So first, critically and crucially, before you write that combat scene, take a second to think about if it's necessary and what kind of pacing you're trying to accomplish.

You are the best judge of this while you're writing. If you're going hot and heavy and a fight scene falls out of your head, don't sweat it. Take it as a gift and move along. If you decide you need a combat scene but haven't the faintest idea of where to begin, don't lose hope. Next week we're going to talk a little bit about what a good combat scene consists of.

Can't wait. Over and out.

Related posts:I'm Ready For My Close-Up, Japh
Book Pimpage, And Combat Scenes
On Characters

Brain Needs Solids, Thanks

Today is warm and rainy. I didn't need four layers, gloves, and hat to venture out to the bus stop this morning, and I'm not shivering as I sit in my writing chair. This is a lovely change.

I want to once again thank everyone who has sent me letters, emails, and messages of support the last few days. I appreciate it more than I can say. Several of you sent varying versions of, "You probably hear more from the nasty people, and the ones who appreciate your message are probably quieter, so I thought I'd send this little message of support," which was just about the most beautiful thing ever. I did mist up a couple times. Yesterday was a very damp day.

I have a short story cooking, so even though the first round revisions on the final Strange Angels book are sent back to the editor, this does not mean a rest in any way. Which is pretty much okay, since my brain is in one of those cycles where if I don't give it something solid to chew on, it will start trying to eat itself. This is just about as pleasant as it sounds.

The only other thing I have to report is…something rather odd happening in the road. I am taking my morning run before dawn now as a matter of habit, so if the squirrels are up to shenanigans at 8AM I'm not seeing it, since I'm usually hard at work by that time instead of on the treadmill. But my writing area looks out onto my driveway and the road, and the squirrels are…well. It's weird. They will scamper out to this one particular place in the middle of the road and spend a good five minutes looking back and forth, glancing up and down the street, twitching their little whiskers. If a car comes, they dash out of the way at the last second, then return to their spot as soon as possible.

None of them are Neo. They're all too small, juveniles instead of full-grown ninja Terminator squirrels. I'm mystified. Is this some sort of teenage squirrel ritual? Are they waiting for the squirrel version of UFOs or playing chicken? Is there something buried under the concrete they wish to alert someone to? Are they trying to warn the monkeys about some dire apocalypse looming?

I'll keep you posted. And sooner or later I'm going to have to tell you about the possums, too…

Related posts:Wednesday Three
Squirrel Wars
Terra Incognita

Inconvenience Doesn't Justify Theft

I've received a deluge of email after yesterday's rant. The vast majority is supportive, and I thank you kindly for it.

The small proportion left over, well…I'll give you a sample. This one's representative, both because of its phrasing and because of a self-serving justification for stealing I hadn't noticed much before. We'll go point by point.

So, this is from a certain S.E.P. He starts out with his main thesis.

I find it extremely hypocritical talking about "stealing" e-books, when your not making sure people can actually buy them.

Oh, my. Well, if they're there to be stolen, perhaps they're also there to be bought? And how am I "not making sure" people can buy them? I'm not going door to door with cases of them? But wait, he explains further.

I have no way of legally obtaining your e-books by paying for them.

Let me repeat that, I've no way of legally paying for your e-books due to your stupid publisher. Your not loosing money by me obtaining your books without paying, because there is no way for me to pay for your e-books as your unwilling to sell them Internationally.

What? Just…what? In the first place, I AM losing money by you "obtaining my books without paying", for fuck's sake, and in the most fundamental way. You just shot yourself in the foot and didn't even notice.

In the second place, I am not unwilling to sell my books internationally. Neither are my publishers. In some cases we are unable to do so.

This particular canard is related to the argument that you are justified in stealing because the ebooks don't come in a format that fits your e-reader. Both are something I, as a writer, have as much control over as, say, the weather in southeast China. (Which is to say, none at all.) The correct people to talk to about this are the original publishers, so you can find out if foreign rights have been sold to a publisher in your country and then, ask that publisher if there are plans to release in ebook format. You can also talk to your distributor and let them know you want X book in their format. They'll listen–it means taking your money, after all. They like that.

Regardless, saying you're entitled to steal because of foreign unavailability, or because a certain distributor doesn't have my book in their format, is hogwash.

I like the Korean pop star Rain. Unfortunately, I can't get hold of most of his stuff unless it's import CDs for a hellish amount of money. This is an inconvenience to me, but I manage to avoid STEALING and torrenting his music. I refuse to steal, and I either wait until I've saved up to buy the import CD, or I go to Everyday Music and check their International section, or I go to Ebay. If I still can't find it, well. Rain doesn't get my money, and I don't get his music, and that's sad. It's a goddamn tragedy.

It is NOT a justification for fucking STEALING.

Do I wish everyone in the world could read my books? You betcha. Do I wish it was easier for people in different countries to read my books? Sure do! But this is an imperfect world, and there are things I have no control over, and those two issues are picture-perfect examples of things I have little to no control over. Not only that, but those issues are not justification for taking without paying. Because taking without paying is STEALING. How many times do I have to repeat that basic fact before it sinks in? Or, wait. It's sunk in. you know you're doing wrong, otherwise you wouldn't be attempting to justify so damn hard.

The basic assumption here is that you are entitled and someone is infringing on your entitlement. You are mistaking an inconvenience for a violation of your rights. When you're three years old, you think you have an absolute right to have what you want whenever you want it. By the time you reach adulthood, you are supposed to realize that this isn't so. But some people apparently don't get it. They feel entitled, and so they steal. You are inconvenienced by the fact that the logistics of international law stand in your way of getting an ebook, and it's easy to steal, and then you have the unmitigated effrontery to write to me justifying it when I publicly ask you not to steal from me?

I am inconvenienced every damn day too. I am inconvenienced by a long line at the grocery checkout, but that is not a justification for taking my groceries without paying for them. I am inconvenienced by the price of diamonds, but that does not justify stealing them. I am inconvenienced by the fact that there are certain countries my ebooks aren't sold in, and there are certain things I love, like J-pop, that I can't indulge as freely in as I'd like because of logistical difficulties.

I manage to refrain from fucking stealing.

As far as I know my bank converts the money into $ before transferring them to you, so what the hell is wrong with my money since they aren't good enough to pay for the books, just because my credit card and bank is in another country?

This has nothing to do with anything. The publishers would love to take your money, and I would love to have them do it because I get a chunk of it. My books are sold in several foreign countries, by foreign publishers–Brazil, France, Russia, to name only three. Those publishers would probably love to take your money too, if you asked them. In the countries that remain, if enough people asked them to carry my work, they would be all too delighted to.

This is 2011, The Internet connect us all, so stop being stupid and prevent people from paying for stuff.

I am asking you not to steal, jackass, not "preventing" you from paying.

The Internet makes it easy for people to steal and gives them the illusion that they can get away with it. (And as Laura Anne Gilman noted yesterday, "Information wants to be free" means "Information wants to be unrestrained," not "unpaid-for".) I don't think the Internet has made people more likely to steal, I think it's made it easier and removed perceived difficulty and risk, much the same way cars removed perceived difficulty and risk for bank robbers in the twenties and thirties.

You're not justified in stealing my books. You're not fricking Jean Valjean, you're a jerk who thinks he can get away with stealing and blaming the victim of the theft when she publicly asks you not to do so.

Believe it or not, this letter was actually one of the more coherent I received out of the small proportion classified as "I'm going to edumacate you in WHY I'm justified in stealing and it's all your fault anyway and how DARE you ask me not to!!onety!" (As well as the one with the least typos. The mind boggles.)

I'll bet, now that I've shot down the more common justifications for e-piracy, that the emails will only get more venomous and more exotic in their attempted justification of theft. The thing that comes through most clearly in this letter is that S.E.P. believes he is entitled, even though he knows what he's doing is wrong. This Speshul Snowflake of Entitlement is very, very common, and the Internet makes it easy for such people to steal.

If you steal ebooks, it means less stories for you. It's that simple. I will continue to ask, publicly, that you don't steal my books. In a perfect world I wouldn't even have to ask you not to steal my books. We don't live in a perfect world, but I am not going to stop calling piracy what it is–theft–and publicly asking those engaging in it to just goddamn stop.

Over and out.

ETA: It is a common misconception that ebooks "cost nothing" to produce, or that the price of ebooks is padded excessively. This is not the case. Ebooks are not cost-free, and here's why.

Comments closed, once again, for the same reasons as yesterday. My comment policy is here. Comments will reopen on tomorrow's post, probably, and my Hammer of Moderation is ready and waiting. Just so you know.

Related posts:Don't Steal My Books
Disappointment
Spectacularly Missing The Point About TTS

Don't Steal My Books

So that rant I was thinking about yesterday…well. One more straw was added to the camel's back, and I'm going to go there. If you have a problem with four-letter words, don't read any further. Go find some rainbows or ponies or something.

Here we go.

Why do I have to keep explaining to people that stealing is wrong? You'd think that should be a given. You'd think people wouldn't argue.

To the person who sent me a little note about a "just-released study" "proving" that ebook piracy actually "helps" me: number one, I'm pretty sure that "study" doesn't say what you think it does, and number two, how can I put this politely…

Oh, I can't. I can't be polite about this.

Fuck you.

E-piracy is "not a black and white issue," you say. FUCK that. Taking without paying for is called stealing. Piracy is people stealing my fucking books, and it doesn't get much more black and white than STEALING IS WRONG.

Even if that study says what you thought it did, you would still be asking me to believe that potential sales (which I can't see and nobody has any way of proving) are somehow equivalent to the thousands of downloaded copies I can see people STEALING. If you even try to pull out the "well, maybe those people stealing it wouldn't have bought it in the first place, so you should be grateful", I will only repeat, fuck you very much. This is like saying car theft increases brand visibility, so nobody should be worried or upset about it. It's just plain ridiculous.

The other thing I've had thrown at me lately–once when I politely asked someone to stop stealing my books, and again when someone on Facebook was trying to justify piracy–is that I shouldn't be writing for the money anyway, implying that I'm somehow "lesser" because I expect people not to steal books I've written. I've already written about that canard. I don't write "just for" the money, and even if I did it wouldn't make me any less of a human being who doesn't deserve to have her work stolen. Trying to say you're justified in stealing my work because I shouldn't be writing for money is so incredibly stupid, I can't even talk to you if you're going to be that willfully, obstinately stupid.

"But Publisher X GIVES AWAY ebooks and it HELPS THEIR SALES!" you wail.

Publisher X chooses to offer some of their list for discount or free, for varying reasons. They have a choice, and the content creator (the person who spent the effort to write and revise it in the first damn place) is part of that choice. This is not in any way, shape, or form an equivalent to people fucking stealing. Why do I even have to explain this?

I have a suspicion of why: because e-pirates know what they're doing is wrong. They dress it up in silly stupid arguments like the above because they are trying to cover up theft with a pretty name. It's not a new human behavior, (for lo, theft and greed in their many forms have been with us from the beginning) but it's not one I have to condone either.

It's very simple.

Piracy is stealing. Stealing is wrong. Pirating my books means I can afford to write less stories for you. If the first two sentences of this paragraph aren't enough to stop you, maybe the third will be.

Comments are closed because I will not listen to one more idiot bleating about how epiracy is somehow beneficial to me, or how I should really be grateful to the jackasses stealing my work, or how it's not really stealing because everybody feels like they deserve something for free and that's what the Internet is about, or any of the other red herrings, false equivalencies, downright lies, or self-serving idiocy that one or two assholes always have to throw into the pot every time an author objects to people STEALING his or her work. (ETA: Like another one I just noticed, the "publishers charge too much, so we're RIGHT to steal, because we're customers!" OMG. There just aren't words for the stupid.) Today I am just done with explaining. If you didn't learn in elementary school that stealing is wrong, I doubt I'm going to be able to teach you now over the Internet. But even that doesn't make stealing any less goddamn wrong.

Over and out.

Related posts:Disappointment
A Few Words On Narcissism
Ask The Working Writer, And Stealing

Subjective Monday

Oprah was in my last dream of the night, the one I remember because the alarm went off in the middle of it. This is particularly odd because I don't watch television. At all. I haven't for years, and when I have the opportunity to, I end up passing because it bores me and the ads stress me out. But apparently my subconscious decided Oprah was a good symbol.

I'm baffled.

Anyway, welcome to Monday. Monday mornings are usually slow for me, not in an objective sense (it's the same routine as every other weekday, up at five, run, make lunches, harry the kidlings into eating and getting ready, kisses and homework checks and finally the schoolbus heaving into sight) but more subjectively, because Sundays I'm not allowed to run. After a more than a year of running mostly-six days a week, my body's grown to need that endorphin rush. I'm addicted to the damn treadmill, and Sunday evenings I'm usually a bit itchy. I know my body needs the recovery time, but jeez. I get mildly cranky, and Monday mornings my body bitches very loudly at me that it's missed a day's worth of endorphins and what the hell am I doing to it now? It takes three miles or so for me to settle into the day.

Anyway. Look, medieval steampunk, sort of! Heh.

I do have a rant in mind, but I want to give it another night's sleep to marinate in before I decide to say anything. (This is my attempt at maturity. We'll see how it goes.) Today is for Revisions, Revisions, Revisions, so I'd best get started. Deadlines wait for no-one, and all that. I'm actually glad to have this mountain of work ahead of me. Hard work I can handle. Being out of work I don't like one little bit.

Hope your Monday is tranquil and productive, dear Reader. Or at least, passable.

Over and out.

Related posts:Book Must Flow
oh monday…
Monday Five

Questions, Questions

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames! There are giveaways and tons of other cool stuff. Check us out!

First, the news! The Jill Kismet series is spotlighted during January over at Barnes & Noble. And I am considering–only considering, mind you–how to turn the Squirrel!Terror chronicles into a paper book. (I have to look at what editing, formatting, and a cover would cost and decide if it's worth the time investment.) I've also spent the last couple weeks talking with Audiobook People about pronunciations for the Valentine series. Tres exciting!

So this morning, I had no idea what I would do for a Friday post. I made the mistake oferm, had the bright thought of asking for questions on Twitter and Facebook. I only have time for two or three answers, so here goes:

* Steelflower and Cover Models. Many of you asked about Steelflower. I appreciate the interest, and there are two more Kaia books in my head. (One deals with Redfist's homeland; the other deals with G'maihallan under siege.) The problem is, I am contracted pretty tightly for other things. Kaia is on the back burner for the time being.

Many of you also ask me about cover models, for example, the lovely lady featured on the Strange Angels covers. I am not the right person to ask, because I have about as much control over the covers as I do over the weather in Russia. The best way to get that question answered is to ask the publisher, they'll be more than happy to help you out.

* ARCs. I get tons of requests for Advance Reader Copies. I hate to break it to you, but I don't generally get ARCs of anything other than the very first in a series, and I normally only get two or three of those. When I do get copies of my books, it's usually slightly after bookstores get them, or, more often, when bookstores put them on the shelf. I also, as a matter of policy, do not send out e-versions for review. (Blame the e-pirates for this. Seriously.) If you have a review blog, if you want a review copy, please contact the publisher of the series in question. Ask for their marketing department, explain that you'd like to get on the list for review copies, and see what happens.

* Broken stories. The most interesting question was from friend and Reader Monica V:

Might be neat to hear your take on whether or not a story can be "fixed." I say sometimes? No.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on where it's broken. If it's a question of the story being too thin to hold up the amount of wordcount you're expecting, the fix can be turning it into a short, a novella, or a vignette rather than a novel. It can also be a signal that you need more conflict, or you need to discover the deeper conflicts and motivations that are already there.

If it's a question of one writing oneself into a corner, then the fix is a little harder. If I hit one of these (and believe me, I have) I usually set the story aside, work on something else, and sleep on the problem. Usually, upon waking the next morning, I find my unconscious has been busily chewing over the whole thing and will either present me with a relatively elegant solution that takes into account little details I didn't remember writing before (always fun) or a less-elegant solution that involves me getting rid of a chunk of text.

If the latter is called for (which is infrequent, thank goodness), here's a tip: save the chunk you've lopped out in a separate file. I title mine "title of work BITS", and stick it in the same folder with the master draft I'm working on. Sometimes that chunk is just in the wrong place because I got excited; sometimes, with a little alteration, it can be pressed into service elsewhere. Stick it in the graveyard and let it ferment, don't totally erase it. (And don't ask me how I learned that unless you're prepared for a bitter, bitter rant. Heh.)

Of course, this presupposes that a story is truly "broken" instead of laziness or fear being the problem. How can you tell if a story is broken?

This is incredibly difficult, because you are too close to it to see it clearly. The only way to figure out when a story is broken is to have practice in finishing stories, so you can understand your process a little better. Practice will help you distinguish between a truly-broken story (one you cannot write because there is no fixing it) and a story you need to work around (characters without motivations, motivations that don't make sense, plot holes, plot painted into a corner, characters behaving without rhyme or reason, the list is endless) to find the proper way of telling. Each story is unique, your process is unique, so you are going to have to practice to learn the art of distinguishing "broken".

Generally, I try to rule out everything else before I decide a story is irretrievably gone. I tend to view a roadblock in a story as a case of user error instead of bad programming, so to speak. To use another analogy, I treat it as if the story is being broadcast, but my decoding of the transmission is off in some way that causes error or, more frustratingly, creep. Once I've ruled all that out, and once I've banged my head against the wall of the story enough, I'll either ask for help from my trusty beta, or I'll move on. There are stories I thought were broken, but when I come back to them on my periodic runs through the graveyard I'll find out they were actually pretty okay, I just needed time/distance/a little more maturity to successfully deal with them.

Whew. That was a long, circuitous answer. It's an interesting and difficult question, with many layers. (Like ogres. Or pie.) I'll probably come back to it later and chew it over some more, but I've got to jet.

Tune in next week for talking about fight scenes! That was another question this morning, and one that deserves a whole post to itself…

Over and out.

Related posts:More Release Madness!
Friday Three
More Reader Questions