Jeremy Zimmerman's Blog, page 9

My First Clarion West Workshop

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

This weekend I attended the first of Clarion West's one day writing workshops. This first one was titled "Alive in the World" and focused on the interaction between character and setting. It was taught by Molly Gloss, who I hadn't heard of before, but others in the class were familiar with her work. I think this more a sign of how spotty my SF/F reading experience often is. I felt like the class was pretty good. I offer up my thoughts for you on the subject.

The class was predominately female. Of the approximately 12 students, only three were male. There was a vast range of experience at the table, from someone who is just starting to try and write seriously to someone who used to be an editor for Locus Magazine, with a few Clarion West alumni scattered in between. The class ran from 10 AM to 4 PM with a half hour break for lunch.

The first part of the class, which ran from 10 to about 12:30, involved a talk by Gloss with plenty of examples. We opened with introducing ourselves. In addition to our names, we were whether or not we wrote speculative fiction (I think that was all but one person) and the first house we can remember living in.

The best I can summarize from notes is that Gloss felt that with there was an increasing loss of distinctiveness when it comes to "place," both in real life and in literature. If you go to a mall anywhere in the US, you're going to see the same assortment of shops. In writing how-to books, setting is downplayed and is a distant third to character and plot. Even then, the emphasis for setting involves the objects that a character chooses in order to describe the character.

Landscape, on the other hand, is overlooked because we can't control the outside world. Using her own writing as an example, she commented that in her writing setting is important, but you then risk becoming labled as a "regional writer." (Which brings to mind a conversation I had with Nate and Torrey at type-and-gripe a few months ago, where an editor thought that someone was making a mistake by setting their book specifically in Seattle because "no one in New York would read it.") Gloss argued that specificity in place made the story more universal than less and highlighted several classic authors that were very tied to time and place, including Tolstoy, Austen and Hemingway.

Through the examples, Gloss emphasized how what you focus on shapes point-of-view. In one example, drawn from Kent Haruf's Plainsong, she points out that somethings are described very specifically whereas other things are not. The POV identifies the sort of cattle the character passes (because this is cattle country) but not what sort of birds are flying nearby. Because in cattle country the cattle are something the characters are going to know something about, the birds less so.

Gloss stated that she couldn't write a novel until she had a sense of where it was. For her, plot and theme arise from the interaction between character and setting. In addition to providing a stage and set dressing, the setting adds an emotional and atmospheric element. You can set a story in one room, but the location changes the atmosphere in the room. This change can be implied without outright stating it. In fact, the lack of naming is very important.

How a character responds to the environment can say something about their state of mind. First she used examples from Annie Dillard's The Living and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms. Then she highlighted that the emotional resonance can also be a hook to bring up a bit of background through the evocation of memory, as she showed through her own book The Hearts of Horses. Then she used a couple examples to show how a character can look at the same setting and react differently depending on their state of mind. For this she used passages from her book, Wild Life, as well as passages from Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. (Gloss highly recommends this book, feeling that it is one of the greatest novels from the 20th century.)

She talked a bit about sentence length and how long to spend on descriptions. Gloss emphasized that as long as you have a reason for it, then you can leave it in. You have to describe the horribleness of a thunderstorm to later sell a character's anger over losing an umbrella. Tied into this she used an eample from Dorothy Dunnett's The Ringed Castle. A simple scene where one character sees someone off in the distance and walks towards him is dragged out in heavy detail. Without context, it seems like a weird focus. But in the book this builds up the emotional weight that the scene needs.

There are two final comments that stand alone in my notes from this part of the workshop. The first was Gloss commenting that she couldn't stand it when authors take things through to the end. Which I believe was directed at the idea of authors used things, especially setting, without thinking of the consequences those elements would probably have. She also felt that setting was not something you could easily work back into a manuscript. It had to be something you think about in the formative stages.

After this we did some exercises. First we were asked to write down a list of the first five places where we've been that jump to mind. Then we did a pair of writing exercises, which we could read aloud should we so choose. In each we had the choice of one of two exercises to do.The first one we did there was the choice between writing about someone walking through a fictional place, what they see and how they react to it; or writing about one of the fictional places and using that to create an emotional hook where we offer a glimpse into an underlying story.

In the second one, our choices between writing about a person relocated through time to someplace before or after their lifespan, or writing about someone doing a mundane task after something extraordinary has occurred (won the lottery, found out their wife has been murdered) without saying what the extraordinary thing is.

I felt like I learned a good deal from the class. If nothing else, I got a better sense of where my weaknesses are. I felt more than a little out of my depths with most of the other participants they all seemed much more insightful and technically skilled than I. I was also more than a little anxious about making a good first impression with all the Clarion West folks. My default conversational mode is "smart ass one liners," so I've become more reserved when I meet people for the first time until I get a sense for them.

But I did eventually warm up to the group and feel comfortable joining in on the discussion. It's funny how different a room can feel when you stop feeling like they are strangers and start feeling like they are people you know.

An Experiment in Diet

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

In totally non-writing related news, the wife and I have been trying to cut out high fructose corn syrup. For her it's been part of a process of elimination of different things to see what improves her well being. After reading about last year's study at Princeton, I'm wondering if that has influenced my weight gain over the years. So, an experiment.

This obviously won't be a very scientific experiment, as there are other variables that will kick in with this. We're finding that a lot of bread uses high fructose corn syrup. When eating out and the only options are sandwiches, sandwiches and more sandwiches, then we find ourselves having to make alternate choices or just not eat a sandwich. My latest bad habit has been getting breakfast sandwiches every morning, which are now off the list.

And we're finding all sorts of weird things that are "safe" on the basis of not having HFCS. The most common thing we've found looking at nutrition information for restaurants, especially for fast food, is that it's the breadier items that have HFCS, like buns, sliced bread, English muffins, etc. Tortillas seem to be okay, so hooray for Mexican food? Breading also seems to be HFCS free, so when I had to figure out a fast meal on short notice yesterday my best option appeared to be Chicken McNuggets. (Strangely, they aren't as good as I recall.)

Parallel to this, my wife and I have decided to try walking more and come up with backup plans when the weather doesn't agree with us. This adds another factor to our potential for weight loss, so it also taints the examination of HFCS as an impact.

For the first time in a long while I've weighed myself. This morning I clocked in at 331, which isn't as bad as I thought. It's about where I was before my last weight loss adventure, so I didn't really gain a whole lot more weight than before.

Wish me luck!

Writing in Scenes

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

My friend and fellow writer, John Worsley, asked me to recap what Nancy Kress taught in her workshop. So this is the very summarized view, recreated from my notes. Since I'm not the best note-taker, this whole post will be kind of rough. I'm trying to recreate the main talking points without me filling in gaps with false details that I've confabulated. There were also handouts, which we referred to throughout the course of the talk.

I don't remember exactly when each page was covered, or what order they were presented in. (I'm mainly vague about #2 and #3 in terms if which came first.) I'll try to mention them when I think they make the most sense. Part of the delay in this post was that I was waiting for PNWA to post the handouts to their site. I can guarantee the links work now. But I can't guarantee they'll be there forever.

For those who would like more information from the source, Nancy Kress has three books on writing that have been published:

Elements of Fiction Writing – Beginnings, Middles & Ends
Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints (Write Great Fiction)
 Dynamic Characters

Ms. Kress, I'd like to apologize now for any butchering or incorrect statements I make regarding what I learned.

Opening up, Kress laid out the main characteristics of a scene:

 Purpose: You know why you are writing it. It is either advancing the plot and/or advancing the character.
Shape: I don't entirely remember this part, but my notes imply that it covered both how you open the scene and close it.
Part of Story Flow: This one is obvious. Kress emphasized the maxim of killing your babies here. If it doesn't fit with the rest of the story, it doesn't matter how much you like it. Cut it.
Dramatized: The old "show don't tell." She compared it to story telling in theater, where you have mostly have just dialogue to carry your play along and a few bits of blocking. The actors were needed to bring the tale to life. With writing, you I found it interesting that Kress had more positive things to say about dialogue in the role of "show don't tell" than I got at the Kansas workshop.

I believe it was here that she had us review the first handout, which illustrated the distinction between telling and showing.

Then she covered the different narrative modes:

Dialogue
Description
Action: Which she said was basically description in action
Characters' thoughts
Exposition

Then we did an exercise, in writing dialogue. Specifically, we were asked to write dialogue with between two characters arguing. We were asked to leave a couple spaces between each line. I can't remember if we looked at what I believe to be the second handout before or after the exercise. The handout highlighted the differences that non-dialogue description can make with dialogue.

After this we went into description, in which we were told to choose what details we use and the order we put them in. Good description should have:

Specific details
Slanted to a character
Show relationships
More senses than sight

We were also told that three details are minimum to really define a character. We did an exercise about this point where we were asked to write a description of a room at the hotel. Half the room was to write the description from the point of view of someone who loves the room, the other half from the point of view of someone who hates the room.

Between this and the third handout,  we segued into an exercise where you took our arguing people and wrote out their thoughts from each perspective. Then, since we left extra spaces in our earlier dialogue, we wrote descriptions of the non-speaking parts of the scene.

Then we covered the section on "Shape" for a scene, which I believe covered how you open and close a scene. Opening a scene you establish the orientation of : POV, time and location. And with this we wrote the opening to the scene which contained the dialogue we wrote. For the end of the scene, Kress said that it needs a rise in tension: There's a new piece of information, a statement of confusion, or something else that hints at the next scene.

From here we covered the three kinds of scenes, and I think this is where the fourth, and perhaps most useful tool for everyday writing, came: The Scene Grid. The grid breaks down a lot of things that you should ask yourself about each scene you put into the book. Anyway, the three kinds of scenes Kress talked about were:

Story time
Flashback
Expository (summaries)

She also introduced what she called "The Kress Swimming Pool Theory." The first scene is your kick off from the side of the pool. The stronger it is, the more you can glide. She also offered up a simple formula for pacing:

Pace = Events/word count

After this she talked about balancing expository scenes with what you decide to dramatize. Then she answered the question of, "How do you pick a point of view character?" Which is that the POV character should be someone who has an investment in the action and who will change. She emphasized that character is plot. (I thought that important enough to put a box around "Character is plot." The illustration of this she gave that I thought interesting was The Great Gatsby. The point-of-view character is not one of the primary actors in the story because the two main characters won't change.

And then she talked about possible outcomes at the end of the story. Options she mentioned included:

Character gets what she wants (but it should cost her something)
Character doesn't get what she wants (but you can soften that by having another character who does)
Character gets what she wants, but it costs her a LOT (the Pyrrhic victory)
Character gets what she wants, doesn't want it anymore, then goes back to what she had before.

And this all filled about three hours.

2011 PNWA Summer Conference: After Action Report

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

This year I attended my second conference run by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. This year was a very different experience from last year in many ways. It was at a different hotel, I was able to attend on Thursday and Friday, and I wasn't pitching to any agents or editors. This led to some good moments, some bad.

The Venue

The venue this year, the Hyatt Regency Bellevue,  was pretty posh. I've had the chance to visit a random sampling of hotels, many of which try to have the veneer of posh. But this is the first time I was actually impressed. It may have just been that this was a newer hotel than I usually go to, and other hotels were once this shiny looking. But I was impressed. I mean, there was a guy whose only job was to open doors for people, even though there was an automatic sliding door five feet away from him.

I also got lost a few times. The ground floor and garage is a sprawling, non-Euclidean maze that took me a long time to get used to. Also, I had a headache for all of Friday and Saturday. I'm blaming the recycled air of the hotel, though eating fast food three meals a day for a couple days probably didn't help.

Thursday

As I said in an earlier post, I decided I just wasn't going to pitch. Though I had a paranormal romance novel that I had started late last year with the hope of pitching, I did very little work on it in several months. It still sat with an incomplete first rough draft and a lot of uncertainty about how to approach it. The feedback I got from the PNWA literary contest took a lot of wind out of my sails and left me thinking I had to drastically rethink the entire book. So after a lot of thought and consultation with friends, I decided I wouldn't pitch.

I tried to cancel my appointments via email, but they had already printed up all the packets. I was told I had to turn my appointment cards in when I checked in. So, when I arrived early Thursday morning, I asked about doing just that. The volunteer didn't know what to do about that, so she turned to the nearest expert that could answer my question. That expert happened to be PNWA's president, Pam Binder. Who was incredulous that I wanted to just give these up. There would be long lines of people trying to get more appointments, and I was just handing mine in?

And, really, pitching your novel is sort of the main focus of the conference. It's why you pay $300-500 to attend, as opposed to the $50 you spend to attend Norwescon. It's a chance to make that personal connection with the person who can sell your book, rather than wasting away in a series of slush piles. But eventually she believed me and life moved on. But then I spent a lot of that day having the occasional panic attack and thinking I'd made a huge mistake.

One Day Writing Seminar, Part 1

Most of the day was spent in a writing seminar, the first half of which was taught by C.C. Humphries. Humphries was an excellent speaker, but it seemed to take him a long while to get to the meatier part of his talk. He brought a lot to the table in terms of experience, both as a writer and an actor. The part I enjoyed the most was when he got to ways to use your words. He brought up his own three Rs  of writing (Repetition, Rhythm, and Rhetoric), and talked about things like rhetorical rules and how Churchill used them to make his memorable speeches.

One Day Writing Seminar, Part 2

The second half of the seminar was taught by Robert Dugoni, who crammed a whole lot of really great information into his three and a half hours. And provided a monstrous handout that was really, really informative. I was struck, more than anything else, by his humility. He approached the class with the attitude of, "These are the things I screwed up and now know to tell you not to do." He opened with the encouragement as authors to divorce from your ego and to come to terms with the fact that "I don't know what I'm doing."

The great illustration about the importance of craft that he gave was when he used the example of playing a violin. If you gave a violin to someone who had never played one and encouraged them to just "play from the heart," you'd get something that sounded very little like music.

From there he covered a lot of pitfalls to avoid, focusing mostly on the opening chapter where you really need to hook a reader. He didn't get through his whole handout. That would have taken more than three and a half hours. But he covered a lot of things, all with an eye towards, "These are things that tend not to work, and this is why."

Boiling Down Your Book: One Paragraph to Pitch to Agents or Share with Friends

I'd sat in on a talk by Janna Cawrse Esarey on doing pitches before, but there was only one other panel in this time slot and this was the more interesting of the two. Plus I knew that she would be a good speaker. It was just as good as I remembered, but it fed into my overall anxiety over not pitching. And then she brought up that we would be partnering up to practice pitches. Not having anything I felt comfortable pitching, I bagged out to take an early dinner at Wendy's. So Janna, if you were wondering why someone from near the front suddenly bailed on your talk and you happen to read this: It's not you, it's me.

Self-Promotion for the Introvert

I signed up for this thinking, "I don't like to talk to people. I would love to learn how to promote myself without actually having to talk to anyone." Had I read the description, I would have realized how very wrong that would be. It was about overcoming your fear of talking to people. I think other people had made the same mistake, because a lot of people fled from the room when it became clear that we'd be doing some exercises used in improv acting classes.

Kim Kircher and Lorraine Wilde were both excellent presenters, and I overcame my fear to participate in their exercises. And had a good time.

The part I least enjoyed about this was the room provided by the conference. Most of the events took place in the hotel's Grand Ballroom, which were partitioned as needed. For the seminar, which had nothing opposite it, they had one big space. Then, for the first session after that, they split it up for two things. But then they didn't open it back up when there was only one thing for you to attend. So, until people started fleeing in terror of improve, the room was filled to capacity and people were unable to find seating.

Keynote Speaker Steve Berry

The day wrapped up with a dessert and keynote address from author Steve Berry. He was a fun speaker to listen to, and the piece of advice he gave that I took away with me was, "Don't write what you know, write what you love." Steve Berry, prior to his success at writing thrillers, was a divorce lawyer. The last thing he wanted to do was write about divorces. As someone who's worked a series of jobs he's disliked for his entire adult life, I found that very inspiring.

Friday

Friday morning was entirely dedicated to pitches. There was a another session on pitching, a forum with the editors to hear what they are looking for, and a forum with the agents to hear what they are looking for. I slept in and arrived in time to have lunch with a friend at Sushi Land. Because I love conveyor belt sushi and tuna salad rolls. Nothing says "Japan" like canned tuna and mayo.

Now I want sushi.

Writing Great Books for Young Adults

Regina Brooks presented a very interesting talk on the business side of YA. Since I'm working on a YA novella, I figured this was a must. I think I was hoping for an answer to the question of, "Oh, god, what have I gotten myself into and how should I write this thing?" But I didn't actually ask that and she focused mostly on the business end (average word counts, how to market, etc). I was surprised to learn that the age ranges they talk about with different sub-genres of YA refers more to the ages of the character than the audience who will read it. But, on the flip side, if you write a book about foul-mouthed tweens who engage in ultra-violence, you may have trouble selling the book.

Revision: Are You a Barfer or a Panters?

C.C. Humphries and Robert Dugoni teamed up for an hour and a half on ways to approach your next draft. They highlighted great things to look for, including examining what each scene does and phrases that you can delete to tighten up your writing. Really wonderful and informative.

Featured Speaker Jane Porter

Dinner was not a disaster (which was the case last year), but there were still long lines for the food buffet. Jane Porter's speech gave insight into the amount of rejection she went through before becoming the highly successful author she is today.It was okay, if a bit depressing.

The real highlight to the night was being able to share a table with Karlene Petitt and Linda Gray, who both write for the blog Critique Sisters. Karlene, who is also a airplane pilot (!), was also one of the finalists for the PNWA Literary Contest in the Mystery/Thriller category. It was a real honor to meet them.

Saturday

The Three Narrative Arcs to Every Story

Bill Kenower, Editor-in-Chief of Author Magazine was the man behind this talk. I had thought he was going to cover the three act story structure, but instead he spoke about the different layers of story. In addition to the physical arc (what the characters do) and the emotional arc (what emotional changes the characters go through), he presented the idea of the Intentional Arc. It's "Why Am I Writing This Story?" It's not about "to find an agent' or "to get published." In the end you're telling a specific story in the way you know how for a reason, and that informs other choices you make with the story.

I found this whole talk very empowering. I've had a lot of stories I've shelved because I thought, "Oh, this needs to be something else, because what I wanted to write isn't viable." And it really forced me to rethink that attitude and reconsider some projects I've shelved. I especially felt a lot more confident about the paranormal romance I've been working on. It may not be a Harlequin-style romance, but it's the sort of story I wanted to write. And I'm going to go forward with it.

Urban Fantasy, or the Scooby Gang Saves the World Again

Some of what I write borders on urban fantasy, and I was curious about Yasmine Galenorn (whose books I've bought but not yet read). Sadly, this session didn't do anything for me. The writing advice was stuff I'd heard before and the examples she used for urban fantasy were almost all from her books. I ended up leaving early.

Start Building Your Author Platform in Today's E-World

Susan Wingate led this presentation. She was an excellent speaker, but only covered marketing platforms or electronic resources a little bit early on. Most of the rest of it seemed to focus on query letters and pitches to agents. Which wasn't really what I was looking for.

This was the only time I went to anything in the auditorium, which was pretty fun. The seats were much more comfortable than in other rooms.

Lunch

Lunch was another quick bite at Wendy's around the corner. There I ran into Nathan Everett and we sat and chatted before he had to bolt off to an appointment. Nathan seems to be everywhere these days. I met him originally when he was organizing events for NaNoWriMo, but he was driving agents to and from the airport for the conference in addition to working a table for his publishing company, Long Tale Press. And the following day he was kicking off a 30 day road trip to promote his new book, The Gutenberg Rubric.  Very exciting stuff.

Writing in Scenes (Parts 1-3)

Saturday afternoon was filled with a three-part workshop led by SF writer Nancy Kress. It was, in short, amazing. Hands on exercises and really breaking down elements of scenes. I filled my notebook with pages and pages of awesome ways to look at structure to scene. I really felt like I'd gained a lot of insight into how to approach my writing now.

And in the end…

I bagged on the Saturday night awards dinner and didn't bother going Sunday. I was exhausted, my head hurt, and there was much less appeal to me for sticking around. Sunday only had readings by contest winners and a two hour writing seminar. The seminar looked interesting, but not so much that I wanted to go all the way over to Bellevue just for it.

The only real grip I come away from the conference with is handouts. Every session I went to was perpetually short on handouts. It wasn't until Nancy Kress's workshop that I found out why: The conference told the presenters how many handouts to bring. Nancy was told to bring 60, and she had probably twice that many in her workshop. Somehow the conference really lowballed seating and handouts for presentations. Otherwise I had a really spectacular time there and felt like I got my money's worth.

Testing. This is just a test.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Is this thing on?

Changes to blog

For those who don't follow me elsewhere, I'm considering adding to the content of this blog. I will merge my gaming blog, defconone into this, and then also include non-writing related blog posts in here as well. I will then also mirror this blog over at my site, bolthy.com.

If you have an objection, now is the time to voice it.

Several weeks ago, while talking about my submission to C...

Several weeks ago, while talking about my submission to Cobalt City: Dark Carnival, my friend Torrey pointed out with faint surprise that I actually had fun writing my story about Snowflake. And, I'll admit, I have had stupid fun writing for all the other Cobalt City stuff I've participated in. I can't say that it's strictly a matter of the publisher. My entry into Growing Dread was a very difficult thing to write. But I think overall my Cobalt City stories have allowed me the opportunity to cut loose and play with the topic a bit.
There's a lot of craft to writing well. And I learn that more and more as time goes on. The things I need to work on with my writing are endless and only seem to grow. Which is a challenge for me for many reasons. But I do work at it, and I've managed to pick up some tools to help me work with feedback. I don't necessarily have all the tools to fix the things that are wrong, but I know how to deal with criticism. Usually.

But writing superheroes for Timid Pirate allows me a bit more freedom. Superheroes are already a bit weird and cliché, and the ground is pretty well trod. I'm not creating fine art, I'm not conveying a moral lesson. I'm just having fun with superheroes. I can totally have a cross-over between a fedora wearing 1930s mystery man and a leather harness wearing swordsman and it fits in the genre. I do try to mix things up a bit, like having the female love interests have to find a way to rescue their beaus in distress. But more than anything I'm just having stupid fun.

This whole thing weighs on me a bit more as I face the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Summer Conference. The conference is a chance to learn about writing (both in terms of craft and career development), meet other writers and, most importantly, pitch face-to-face with agents.

I started writing a paranormal romance last November with the intention of pitching it at the conference. It's a part of my experiment in writing as a career. Since this started out as a NaNoWriMo project, I stopped at the end of November to focus on other stuff. My intention was to come back, finish it and polish it up in time to see agents. But other projects took longer than planned, and there was a wedding in there. And in the end, all I did was polish up the beginning and write a synopsis so I could submit to the PNWA Literary Contest in the Romance category.

I'm not a semifinalist in the contest. And the feedback I got was a bit of a slap in the face regarding how much I really knew about writing paranormal romance. Which is to say that I should have been reading more Eat Prey Love and less Dead Until Dark. Because while both get lumped under the category of "paranormal romance," one is actually romance. The other has a strong romantic element but falls better in categories as "urban fantasy" or "paranormal mystery."

Further, wrestling with my outline for Timid Pirate has slowed me down a lot and I blew my proposed deadline for that by a lot. But it left me with only a small amount of time to work on finishing my novel. This was further complicated by me misremembering the date of the conference. I was certain it was the end of August. It's actually the beginning, which I discovered a week before the conference. Any faint hope I had of a miracle has evaporated. I made a few token efforts to get back on the horse prior to learning about my scheduling mistake, but the stuff for my YA novella has been churning through my head instead. And I really need to consider how I'll approach the material novel at this point.

I talked to writer friends last night at our type-and-gripe, and the advice I got was to cancel my agent appointments so someone with a solid project to pitch will be able to use those slots. So I did that. But it also highlights some other stuff.

I love the novel I'm working on. But it's not the main thing I want to do at this moment. I have a whole slew of novels I want to be writing, but I chose this one to focus on because it seemed more commercially viable. And that's a statement on a lot of stuff I have out there. There's a lot of what or how I should be writing to be successful and professional. But to do this my focus is shifted away from ideas that I'm more afraid and excited to pursue.

So I've been mulling around the idea of focusing less on career development and more on just working on things I love. If I find some success, then that's good. But if I just write a bunch of stuff that only six people ever read, that's also fine. There are much better writers than I could ever hope to be, and they are anything but financially successful. Pinning my self worth as a writer on the book deal or the vaunted SFWA membership only seems to make miserable.

This isn't to say that I won't work to improve my writing or send stories to pro markets. But I'm going to try and worry about it less. My muse is an androgynous god of Chaos that lives in my head. (His name is Sam.) And he needs nourishment if he's going to keep spouting the madness I need to tell the stories I want to tell. I feel like he's been increasingly starved lately, and I need to let him run rampant a bit more with his pants off.

Since I made that decision, I've been a lot less stressed. But there's also this giddy anxiety that comes from being on a high place without a railing. I wonder if I'm going to be the only person not practicing their pitch obsessively at the conference this weekend.

Quick update

Writing has been coming out in drips and drabs. I finally finished my first stab at the outline for the novella, and now I have the lovely wife reading it over to provide feedback. My next deadline is to get a first draft of the outline plus the first chapter to the publisher by early September.

Submissions are still floating out in limbo. I haven't had time to ping any of the markets to find out if they had any interest.

The next issue of Arcane Magazine, which might be when my story "Kiss of Death" will appear, has been pushed back from July to October due to poor sales of the first issue. I'm a little surprised that they expected to break even with the first issue, but I also know little of the publishing end of things. All I've successfully done as the owner of a small business is run it into the ground.

I'm also considering consolidating my gaming blog into this blog, and mirroring it all into bolthy.com. I'm open to any feedback you might have for this.

And... we're back.

Life has been pretty hectic lately, especially with roller derby partially swallowing my life. But I'm going to make a concerted effort to stay on top of this and update more regularly.
I've had some success in the story submission process.

Arcane Magazine accepted my necromancers-in-love story, "Kiss of Death." I'm not certain what issue the story might appear in, and there's some concern that it could be a while. But this acceptance is a big leap in terms of quality of publishers accepting stories, going from token payments to semi-pro rates. I still haven't made the golden pro sale, but I'm hoping that things will change in the near future.

Timid Pirate Publishing accepted my submission for their Cobalt City: Dark Carnival anthology, "Beads and Trinkets." I was gratified to see that my gonzo Snowflake short story tickled the publisher in just the right way. I had a lot of fun writing it, and he seems to have had a lot of fun reading it. It's nice to be able to just cut loose and chew scenery for a few thousand words.

I've also got four stories floating around out there. A paranormal romance story written under a pen name had a re-write and has been resubmitted. I also submitted a story to the Writers of the Future Contest, a flash-fiction piece and the jinxed steampunk story that has managed to kill two anthologies before they ever started. Here's to hoping that someone bites. I also have a couple more stories to work on.

In other news, I'm working on an outline for a YA novella I've been asked to write. Along those lines I've been pinging friends and family for music recommendations. I figure I need the right music to properly tell the tale of a teenage lesbian superhero. (No, really.) After that I'm going to be back to working on the novel I hope to pitch this summer. Wahoo!

Norwescon 34 Recapitude

Over Easter Weekend, I attended our local convention of geeky goodness: Norwescon. I had a much better time this year than last, due in large part to seeing people I know throughout the event. With all the workshops and writer events and conventions I've gone to, I've managed to connect with a lot of really awesome writerly types. So I had no lack of cool people to stop and chat with throughout the weekend.

Now, for the rest of the recap.


Panels!

I primarily focused on panels geared towards writers. My favorite is definitely the presentation on public reading given by Mary Robinette Kowal. She leveraged her experience as a voice actress into an excellent instruction on simple tips to use while reading. She explored a lot of tools I have never thought of before, giving depth to the different aspects of what creates a person's "voice." As part of her bad-assness, she presented a few voices that people have trouble with, and demonstrated how each element she explained affected the sound of the voice. The woman never ceases to amaze me.

Another element I thought was interesting was how the spoken word translates back into print. I come to writing through "I love telling stories" rather than "I love words." So honing details like paragraph structure is much harder for me. This gave me a lot of interesting stuff to think about.

I also had the honor of sitting on a few panels with the esteemed Jim Butcher. I only recently tried one of the Dresden Files books, so I'm new to Butcher fandom. I hear the books go down in quality, but he charmed the socks off me at the panels he sat on.

Outside of the panels on writing, things were much more hit and miss. Rare was the panel that stayed on topic presented in the book. The most frustrating one was a panel I went to specifically because it tied into research I'm doing for my writing. The panel didn't really cover what it said it was about. They also mostly ignored people raising their hand to contribute comments and questions from the audience. A fellow writer (there for the same reason) asked a question at the end of the panel, and only received a link to an LJ community. All in all, very frustrating.

The readings I went to were uniformly awesome. There was some sort of snag, as Steven Barnes was scheduled to read but instead someone I'd never heard of before was reading: Michael Swanwick.. I heard something about Steven Barnes needing to cancel his reading last minute, so Swanwick was the replacement. The story he read was heartbreaking and magnificent. Looking through his bibliography, it looks like I've read another of his shorts before ("Dogfight" from Burning Chrome, written in collaboration with William Gibson).

Without going into a blow-by-blow of other panels, I did have the honor to meet or better acquaint myself with several other cool people. This includes, but is not limited to, horror writer , fellow Growing Dread authors Lillian Cohen-Moore and Minerva Zimmerman, Ryan Fucking Macklin from the Internet, THE Jennifer Brozek, writer Jak Koke, artist Roberta Gregory, and editor Jordan Lapp.

Fairwood Writers Workshop

This was my second year doing the workshop. This year I opted to submit a few short stories instead of a novel excerpt, since I have a few pieces that had gotten rejected by the themed anthologies I'd written them for, and I felt uncertain about their viability as-is. So I had a workshop Saturday for one of the stronger pieces and another Sunday for the two weaker pieces.

Saturday I was a bit more worried about. In part because the plot element I had (a woman being murdered and used for political purposes) made me uncomfortable. Then on top of that I had Mary Robinette Kowal as one of my critiquers. Though she's very nice and friendly, I've become a huge fan of her over the last year. Her insight into writing constantly helps, I've loved what I've read of her writing and she does a puppet show as part of her readings. The thought of her reading something and passing judgement on the quality of my writing filled me with raw terror.

My terror was a little unwarranted, though, as they thought it was good. There were some serious flaws with it, and it needed some heavy reworking, but I was constantly reassured that "It's almost there." So I came out of that feeling empowered and with a plan for what to do with the story. I could do this. I could make a pro sale out of this.

Really, Sunday was the day I should have worried about. If only I had known. The stories in that workshop were, I admit, weaker. And the flaws were repeated over and over again. What I didn't expect was that one of the pros on the panel, one who seemed so sweet when I'd seen her before, described herself as the "bad cop" and she meant it. She tore into the pieces. She didn't offer even a token comment about something she thought was good. The feedback didn't seem constructive. It just felt like a long list of things she didn't like with no suggestions on improving it. At one point I even got grilled because she thought my dialogue was awful and wanted to know if I thought people really talked that way.

With some distance I feel better about the ordeal, especially after some reassurance from one of the other critiquers post-convention. But holy moly did I spend a good chunk of time sulking. At the very least, this has raised the bar on "harshest critique ever" and I can feel comfortable in knowing I won't often face worse than this.

In Other News

I have a long list of book recommendations I received over the course of the convention, but it's all in a notebook I don't have with me. I'll try and do a notebook dump in the near future.