Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 361

Managing my writing life with Evernote

I've been using Evernote for closed to 2 months now and I have been very impressed with it. I originally started to use it as part of my desire to go paperless at home (I'd already done so, more or less, in the day job). What I have found is that it is not only an effective tool for going paperless, but it helps to manage my writing life. It does this in several ways:

It has replaced Google Docs as my idea file. Google Docs is a great tool, but if I was sitting in a restaurant or walking down the aisle in a grocery store, it was a little inconvenient to pull up on my iPhone. Evernote has an iPhone app that opens quickly and within a few seconds, I can have a the idea uploaded into my writing notebook. If I am pressed for time, I can make it a voice note and simple speak the idea, tag it and upload it. Then, when I want to review my list of ideas, it doesn't matter where I am, I can pull it up on my iPhone, on the web, or on the application on my MacBook.
Clippings! Clippings! Clippings! I read a lot of science magazines. If I find something interesting in, say, a New Scientist article, I used to cut the article out of the magazine and put it into a folder for later use. Now, I go to the web version of the magazine, clip the article using the Evernote clipping tool for Google Chrome, tag it, and it is stored in the cloud in my writing notebook, with everything else, easily searchable. No paper, and much easier to find and refer to than my old system.
Paperwork. A writer's life does involve some paperwork. There are contracts and checks, for instance. Now, when I receive these, the first thing I do is scan them in as PDFs and upload them to Evernote as a note. Evernote has OCR technology to make the scanned PDF searchable, so if I search for the phrase, "electronic rights", contracts that mention these words appear in my result list. And I don't have to worry about digging through a file folder to find them. Similarly, I use Evernote to capture my writing-related receipts. Come tax time, I have a saved search I use to pull up everything related to writing and taxes. Takes 5 seconds. Can't wait to use it later this year and impress my accountant.
Blog topics. Just like story ideas, I use Evernote to capture ideas for blog posts (this topic was captured as a note in Evernote some weeks ago). If I am ever at a loss for something to write about, I can pull up my list of blog topics, pick one, write the post, and then delete the note. It has been working beautifully.
Writers group critiques. I read 2-3 stories/week for my writer's group. Typically these stories are in Word, and I will use the Comments feature to mark up the file and make my specific comments in the manuscript. I then take that manuscript and create a note in Evernote with it. The file itself is an attachment to the note, tagged with the author and the fact that it is a critique. The note is my summary of the story, my actual critique which I give to the author. It keeps a nice record not only of all of the stories I've critiqued and for whom I provided the critique, but also what my critique was. And again, it takes up no space in my file cabinet

All of these notes are stored in the cloud and synchronized to my various devices so that I can literally access them anywhere, anytime. I can take my notes from story ideas and science articles, and add them to the research section of a Scrivener document to get started on a story with all of the information I need. If I am reading an old science fiction magazine and want to capture something on the page, I can take a photo in Evernote from my iPhone and the page is captured and the text scanned so that it is searchable.

Evernote has become an invaluable tool to help me manage my writing life. Who else out there is using Evernote to manage their writing life? And what innovative ways are you using it?

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This week in writing

Let's play the game "can Jamie really do what he says he'll do?" By bedtime Sunday, then:

Write the first half (~8,000 words) of "Rescue"
Read and critique two first chapters of novels for the Arlington Writers Group
Start on my vacation in the Golden Age of Science Fiction
Write that blog post on Evernote I've been meaning to do for a week now
Encourage more people to read and consider Resnick and Malzberg's The Business of Science Fiction for the Best Related Book Hugo

And maybe, just maybe they'll be some additional story-related news to report.

Reasonable for a part time job that consumes ~20 hours week, right?

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Using the Kindle to read story drafts

My evolution of story draft reading has come a long way in the last year. A year ago, I'd print out my first drafts, mark them up in red ink and then head into my second draft. Then I tried reading the draft within Scrivener and that worked pretty well, too, but it was a little less portable than a paper manuscript, since I didn't always have my laptop with me. Reading a draft is a convenient thing to do in those small scraps of time that one finds during the day, waiting for an elevator, sitting in a doctor office lobby, waiting for a meeting to start. So when I started my work on "Rescue", I decided to try reading the draft on the Kindle and see how it felt.

As I've mentioned, "Rescue" is a novelette that I am writing by cannibalizing the first part of the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo. So in essence what I am doing is reading that first part, deciding what ideas and characters to keep and what to throw away, and then rewriting the whole thing from scratch as a self-contained story, cutting it from 35,000 words in it's novel form down to 15-to-20,000 words in story form.

Scrivener makes it easy to export a story to Kindle format. Once the story was on the Kindle, I moved it to "My Fiction" collection and started reading. If I found something I wanted to cut, or change, I'd use the Kindle's highlight feature to highlight the text, and then I'd use the Kindle's notes/annotations feature to add a note. Since the keyboard on the Kindle is QWERTY, it's easy to type and capture short notes like, "Cut this" or more extensive notes like, "I'm not sure if this character belongs in the story. Their viewpoint doesn't add much and slows the pace down. It would also allow me to cut this scene…"

I've managed to get 63% through my reading and I've made well over 100 annotations and even more highlights. Here is a typical screenshot:

I've found that I can work as easily as if I had a paper manuscript in my hands, and since I almost always have my Kindle with me, I can work on this just about anywhere. And best of all, the notes and annotations that I am making are stored on the device and can be opened as a text file, which I can then pull into my Scrivener project to use as a reference when I write the new story.

There is one downside that I have found so far:

Because I copied the story to my Kindle directly from my computer, as opposed to using Amazon's service (which would have cost a buck or two), the story is only available on the Kindle device. It does not sync up to Amazon and therefore, for instance, I can't pull it up on my iPhone.

Nevertheless, I am pleased with the overall feel of reading a draft on the Kindle and making my notes there, and it is likely the way I will handle all future drafts of stories. A story like this one would easily have consumed 150 manuscript pages. Add to that another draft, to say nothing of ten more stories this year, and this method also goes a long way toward my goal of becoming paperless at home, too.

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Vacation anticipation

Upon my office desk are currently stacked in various piles, 30 issues of Astounding ranging from September 1939 through December 1950. But the one of which I am in desperate need has not yet arrived, and I am just about shaking in anticipation. The July and August 1939 issues were among the first that I ordred and naturally, they will be the last of this batch to arrive. They shipped on the 11th. I have a tracking number and everything. But they didn't arrive yesterday, and they didn't arrive today. That means that Tuesday will be the earliest that my vacation in the Golden Age of science fiction will commence. (Monday is a federal holiday.)

It's funny but this literary vacation I have planned has just as much anticipation as any other vacation I've ever been on. They say that anticipation is often the best part of a vacation, and that has certainly been true for me. But because the nature of this vacation is different, I feel like the actual thing will far surpass the excitement I feel in just daydreaming about it. Of course, this could be wishful thinking on my part.

The most maddening thing is that I am surrounded by these magazines. I could pick up the September 1939 issue and start right in–and yet I resist. I want to do this the same way kids living in the 1930s did it. I want to experience the wonder of the Golden Age the same way that Isaac Asimov did, waiting impatiently for each issue to arrive. Of course, the bulk of my waiting is up front since once the July and August issues arrive, I will have managed to collect the first 18 consecutive issue of the Golden Age.

Still, these magazines sitting around me are making it difficult to concentrate. They are burning a hole in my soul and I long for the days (well before my time) when the post office delivered mail with greater frequency. It is almost as sweet as checking the mail box each day to see if a rejection letter has come in for a story.

I'm doing my best to take my mind off of it. I'm working on my novelette, "Rescue". I'm watching episodes of M*A*S*H to pass the time. And I'm griping on this blog.

I just can't wait for those magazines to show up. Maybe Tuesday…?

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The Business of Science Fiction for Best Related Book Hugo

There are a few good "related" books out there this year, but I want to make the case why I think one in particular is most deserving of a Hugo award: and that one is Mike Resnick's and Barry N. Malzberg's The Business of Science Fiction (McFarland). The book is a collection of 26 of the more than 50 Dialogue columns that these guys have collaborated on over the last dozen or so years and their importance to science fiction cannot be understated.

The Hugo award is voted on by science fiction fans: members of the World Science Fiction convention. "Fan" is a very inclusive term. It includes those people who read and enjoy science fiction for pleasure. It also includes probably close to everyone who has written or attempted to write science fiction. While I call myself a science fiction writer, my motto has and always will be "fan first, writer second."

There are three reasons why I think this book is important enough to deserve not only nomination, but to garner enough votes to win the Hugo:

Many of the essays in the book are attempts to save science fiction–our history, and our roots–from obscurity. The columns within the book are written as "Dialogues" and are, in their way, a kind of oral history preserving the memory of aspects of science fiction's history that might otherwise be doomed to obscurity. Twenty-six of these Dialogues are collected in The Business of Science Fiction and strewn throughout them are gems that give us insight into the evolution and history of the field. They ensure that they audience reading won't forget writers otherwise doomed to obscurity, good or bad. It is our history and it is a part of us.
The Dialogs in the book are a frank and realistic picture of the life of a science fiction writer. I've said in other places that reading this book is like having two seasoned agents, masters of the field, standing over your shoulders, telling it like it is. They don't pull any punches, but new professionals (among whose ranks I currently count myself) can only benefit from the words of wisdom on a range of topics near and dear to the hearts of writers.
The book is a fascinating roadmap through the careers of two of the most experienced, respected and admired professionals in the field. Mike and Barry are both writer's writers and though I am relative newcomer in the field, when I mention their names to other professionals as being among those writers I take as role models, I am told time and again that I have chosen wisely.  The anecdotes they provide in their Dialogues show a beginner how another one-time beginning managed to blossom into a successful science fiction writer.

There are other important books that will certainly get nods in this category, most notably the Heinlein biography by William H. Patterson and the Kornbluth biography by Mark Rich. And both books certainly deserve nomination. But Heinlein is in no danger of being forgotten. And Rich's book has already done much to resurrect Kornbluth. In each case, however, we are talking about one writer. The Business of Science Fiction and the columns on which they are based is an attempt to preserve all of science fiction. The book is half of the result of a more than decades long collaboration, demonstrating a deep fondness for a genre whose most distant past is already being lost to obscurity. There is a nobility in this book, attacking the problem on two fronts: education fandom of the history of the genre and preserving it for future generations; and teaching the new generation of writers the tricks of the trade so that there will be a future generation.

I'm nominating The Business of Science Fiction for the Best Related Book Hugo and it's the book that is getting my vote, as well. I'd encourage you to pick up a copy and read it. If nothing else, you'll learn something about the genre you never knew. And if you are anything like me, once you've read the book, you will agree that it is the book that deserves the Hugo this year.

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Full time job, full time dad, part time writer

Someone asked today that given my full time job, and the fact that I am a full time dad, how did I find the time to make 3 blog posts in a single day and when do I get my real writing done. The question demands a better answer than I gave in the comments and so here it is:

By gradually increasing my workload over time.

During the week, I will typically try to do my "real writing" (which means the writing which I hope to sell) between 5-7am. I have no problem getting up early because this is more or less incorporated into my way of life. Of course, there are occasions when I will sleep in, but I usually try to find time to fit in some writing-related task. I try to keep most of my writing related work boxed into those two hours because it is pretty much the only two hours I can have during the day when my parental-, spousal-,  or job-related duties are not needed. On a good day, I can write 2,000 words in 2 hours, first draft quality.

For roughly the next 10 hours, my day is consumed by my day job, with one exception: lunch. I always try to spend my lunch hour reading. There are only two exceptions to this practice: an unavoidable lunch meeting–and I made it clear to my coworkers that I'd prefer to avoid these. Or writing: if I didn't manage to get my writing work done between 5-7am, I'll do my best to make up at least some of that time during lunch. In fact, I've done this very thing over the last few days this week because I've had a few rough nights and decided to sleep in.

The evenings between 5-7pm are family time. Spending time playing with the Little Man, cooking and eating dinner, hanging out. At 7pm I read him 3 books and sing him 3 Bing Crosby songs (all he'll tolerate) and then he goes off to bed. The rest of the evening is open. Sometimes Kelly and I will watch TV, sometimes I'l read, or do some chores. I am rarely up late because I have to be up so early.

That explains the part time writer, full time dad and the day job, but what about the blogging?

Well, I must admit there are some smoke and mirrors, not all is as it seems. I keep a list of ideas for topics I want to write about and generally, I'll write one or two posts in the evening before I go to bed–but use the "scheduled post" feature in WordPress to scheduled them for the following morning. Thus, my first post of the day will usually appear at exactly 7am and my second post at exactly 9am. In fact, this post was written at 9:30pm on Friday evening, but you won't see it for nearly twelve hours. I will likely be doing something completely unrelated to blogging when this post appears. A few times a week, something will strike me that I feel I must write about immediately and so those things are posted as soon as I write them. These days, however, the scheduled posts outweigh the spontaneous posts by about 2-to-1. That's just a result of my limited supply of time.

There are things I give up. A lot of television for one thing, which may not be a big loss. I don't read as much as I used to either. I don't work out as much as I should. But I want to be a science fiction writer and some sacrifices have to be made. I just try (not always successfully, I'm afraid) not to sacrifice things that are really important, like time with family.

This schedule generally works well for me but as I said, it has evolved over many years. Blogging is just a part of my life now, like breathing. This is my 3,812th post. Do that many and it will be a reflex for you, as well.

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Daddy, where do stories come from?

I figured it was about time for me to write about my answer to that age-old question, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Ideas for me are, quite honestly, a dime a dozen. I have no problem coming up with them. I find them just about everyone: reading science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American; eavesdropping listening to conversations in an elevator; thinking about a story or novel I just finished reading. I used to worry that the ideas I got weren't very original, but I stopped worrying about that a long time ago, since very few ideas are truly original. But as John W. Campbell once said to Isaac Asimov, "I can give the same idea to three different writers and get back three different stories." He also said that if he gives the writer a story idea, he expects the writer to transform it into story, add something of himself to it; that he didn't waste more ideas on writers who gave back exactly what he gave to them.

So in my experience, the key question is not where ideas come from by where stories come from.

Around the time I wrote the first story that I sold, I learned something that has made all of the difference in my stories; your mileage may vary. What I learned was that for a story to work–and by work, I mean be something that an editor of a science fiction magazine would buy–it required more than one "idea." It was a fascinating discovery for me. The idea for my first professional story sale, "When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer" (IGSM, July 2007) was a kind of light romance. The title of the story, of course, comes from Whitman's famous poem, "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer" which I heard for the first time, read on the radio by Charles Osgood. The immediate idea that came to mind was what if the title had been "When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer"? What was the story behind that?

The story languished in my mind for years. I'd start it and it would never quite work out. I'd quit and come back to it a year later with the same result. The title was gold but the idea was bleh. There was no story. But I'd had this other idea lingering in my head. I'd read lots of "first contact" stories and yet I'd never read one in which the contact never actually happened. What if we discovered the exhaust signature of an alien starship–but it was hundreds of lightyears away, and heading away from us as if it had no idea we were out here. We knew they existed, but they didn't know we existed. This idea percolated up through my mind and I realized that to make a story out of "Learned Astronomer", I could combine my romance idea with the notion of this intersellar discovery.

And as soon as the two ideas were combined, the story was born, was sold, and was published.

This has been true for just about every other story that I think has "worked"–and certainly every other story that I've ended up selling. I start with an idea, turn it around in my mind, think about it from a dozen different angles, and then I try to find another idea that will compliment the first one. Together, the two ideas make a story. And as story is more than the sum of it's ideas and I think that's what makes them work. I used to worry that I'd run out of ideas and so I'd save some for a rainy day. I'd ration them: one per story. That never worked out. In the end, for me anyway, it takes two good ideas to make a story. And the ideas don't always have to be plot-related. In "Take One for the Road" which will appear in the June '11 Analog, one of the ideas was plot-related and the other was a character.

I imagine that one day, my little boy will discover that I am a writer, read some of my stories and come to me with a curious expression on his face. He'll say, "Daddy, where do stories come from?"

And I'll sit him down, and we'll have the talk: "Well, that's a very good question," I'll say. "You see when you have a couple of ideas rattling around in your head, eventually those ideas will meet. It will be love at first sight. They'll play around for a little while, feel each other out so-to-speak, and eventually, fall in love. And when these ideas get together, well, the result, son, is a story."

He'll smile knowingly and then ask, "Okay, but where do babies come from?"

"I'm just a writer," I'll say, "Go ask your mother."

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What's your sign?

(…Climbs onto soapbox…)

I have been so busy with other stuff that newsworthy items have almost gone completely by the board. I didn't learn of the events in Arizona, for instance, until a day after they happened. I had no idea the President made a speech the other night until I saw someone mention it on Facebook the next day. And I learn today of the shakeup in astrological circles over the procession of the equinoxes that seems to have the country in a panic.

I suppose that is to be expected. After all, horoscopes are printed daily in just about every newspaper in the country and their collective column inches outstrip science columns by untold orders of magnitude. People have invested a lot money in professional readings that may not be valid if the procession of the equinoxes isn't taken into consideration. Forget the fact that time and again, double-blind studies of horoscopes have shown it's predictions to be no better than chance, a change in sign could introduce complications into that age-old pick-up line, "Baby, what's your sign?'

While it is amusing to see the momentary panic of people trying to understand what the precession of the equinoxes is, let alone how it affects their horoscope, the fact of the matter is that there will be swift rationalizations for how this was all anticipated and works perfectly into the scheme for divining the future already well-established. And of course, they are right: nonsense begets nonsense.

Or as a computer science professor once put it: garbage in, garbage out.

(…Steps of soapbox and crawls back into warm, comfortable media blackout.)

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What I will be doing this weekend

According to my calendar, there is nothing on the books for this weekend, which means I'll be attempting to turn my attention to one thing:

Working on the new novelette, "Rescue".

Tune in Sunday night to see how I did.

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Eight more Astounding's in today's mail

I came home from work to find 8 more issues of Astounding:

February 1944
June 1944
September 1944
September 1946
July 1947
March 1948
September 1948
July 1950

That I have these magazines at all is due to the generosity of David Vaughn of Indiana who read my post on io9 and offered to send me some duplicate issues that he had. It was an incredibly generous offer and I'm grateful to David for sending these along. And he went a step further. Included in the package was the December 1926 issue of Amazing Stories (see photo below). This is Amazing Stories, Volume 1, Number 9:

I'm still waiting on 4 more issues that I've ordered. Once those arrive, I can actually get started reading.

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