Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 371
December 2, 2010
An hour in the Golden Age
The Science Fiction Oral History Association has started a series of podcasts called their Space Dog Podcast and the first of which is an interview from 1976 with Arthur C. Clarke, followed by an extraordinary panel interview with Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Lester del Rey and Gordon R. Dickson. I've heard individual interviews with Isaac Asimov and even Frederick Pohl before, but never have I heard an interview in which these four men bantered like they do here, talking mostly about science fiction and writing. For an hour, I felt like I was sitting in a room with these giants of the genre and it was an absolutely delightful experience. It made me realize how lucky I am to have read their work, and especially, how lucky I am to be considered a science fiction writer, even a lowly one, and be associated with their ranks. If you like science fiction, you must listen to this interview.
The First Night
So last night was the first night of Hanukkah. It is no secret to anyone who knows me that, while I was brought up Jewish, I am non-practicing. Other Jews have a phrase for this: I'm a bad Jew.
(This reminds me of the man who told a friend that he was getting a divorce from his wife. The friend said, "But you're Catholic, how can you do that?" The man said, "Ah, you haven't heard of the loophole?" to which the friend replied, "I know of no loophole." The man smiled and said, "I'm a bad Catholic.")
In any event, I might not be practicing, but it seemed appropriate to expose the Little Man to the experience, just as we expose him to the Christmas experience. We didn't light the candles, mainly because I don't practice and besides, the Little Man would not yet understand what that was all about, but he did open a Hanukkah present sent by his grandparents. I took video and will ultimately put together a video montage of each of the eight nights, starring the Little Man opening his gifts. One lesson I took away from last night: let him eat dinner before opening the gifts. While he generally enjoys tearing up paper, he was acutely less interested last night because he was hungry and wanted to eat. So we'll try again tonight, but only after he has a belly full of food.
If you celebrate the holiday, Happy Hanukkah. Or is it Chappy Chanukah?
Come in a lot of times
The Little Man was sound asleep when I got home from running my first discussion at the the Arlington Writers Group last night. Normally, I am the one who reads to him and then puts him to bed. He has gotten much better at this. Generally speaking, he no longer cries when I put him in his crib. I tend to linger a little longer, hugging him while he stands there, holding his monkey and his bottle, and telling him that I'll check on him before I go to bed.
So last night, as I have been doing every night for a few weeks now, I crept quietly into his room, and peeked in on him. The Little Man lay sleeping, face down on his crib, one arm around his monkey, and half-laying on his empty bottle. I lingered long enough to hear his breathing and then I went off to bed myself.
It's funny, but when I tell him that I'll check on him "later", I feel obligated to do it, even though I know he'll be sound asleep and won't know that I'm in there checking on him. I think it reminds me of when I was a little boy. My Dad would tuck me in and before he left my room each night, I'd say to him, "Come in a lot of times." Of course, I would fall instantly asleep, and I have no idea if he actually came in "a lot of times" or not. But I felt good just making the request.
Incidentally, the Little Man slept for 12 straight hours last night and woke up with morning with a big smile on his face. That's some way to start off the day!
NaNoWriMo Day 31 – Struggle for Survival
I didn't do any writing on the novel yesterday. I worked on the outline some, fleshing out the details of Part 3, but no writing. In part this was because I was busy with too many other things. But that is just an excuse. The truth is that I am pretty unhappy with Part 3 and because of that, even Part 3 has lost some of its luster. I feel like I am in a sudden struggle for survival in my attempt to finish the novel at all, let alone by December 15.
I decided yesterday that in the second draft, I am cutting Part 2 entirely. The plot just isn't interesting enough in that part of the novel. I still think I have a pretty good Part 3 outline, but some of the motivation for the actions that occur are less clear without knowing what will happen in the new Part 2. I almost feel like I need to rewrite the outline for Part 2 before I can continue with Part 3 in any meaningful way. Of course, this will mean some minor changes in Part 1 as well, but I still think Part 1 is the strongest and I don't think too much will change there. Truthfully, I feel like I could use some time away from the story. I'm tempted to set it aside and finish up another short piece I've been working on just to get my mind off of it for a little while. But that doesn't get the novel written. I know that I need to stick with it. I can push through by brute force, like I always do, and clean things up in the second draft, even if that means some wholesale rewrite.
I may use the short story as a carrot. If I can get my 2,000 words on the novel done each day, then I'll permit myself to work on the short story in the evenings–but only if I get the novel writing done first.
Anyway, since I've spoken about my daily successes, I felt a post was in order describing some of my failures. Part 2 is a definite failure and it is impacting my will to press forward. But press forward I will try. December 15 is looming ever closer and I've still got about 28,900 words to go.
December 1, 2010
Doctor, doctor, cut my throat*
My little nephew is having his tonsils removed this morning, poor little fellow, and it reminded me of my own experience with this procedure nearly three decades ago.
Back in those dark days, tonsils were taken out more readily than they are today. For me, it took about a year's worth of strep throat to convince doctors that my tonsils (and adenoids) had to come out. I was ten and I can remember a constant barrage of sore throats, and those gag-inducing strep swabs. But when the doctor told my parents that the tonsils would have to come out, I was a little nervous.
They came out in the spring and I it was the first and only time in my life that I was checked into a hospital for surgery under general anesthesia. We arrived at the crack of dawn, and I was braceleted and gowned and eventually, a nurse came along and gave me a shot that was supposed to relax me. I'm not sure why this was necessary and by the time I was wheeled into the operating room–something I remember with particular clarity, my heart was racing and I felt very unrelaxed.
The surgeon, behind his mask, asked me if I wanted "flavored" gas or an injection to knock me out. I had a friend who'd been through the procedure and he'd taken the gas and it had made him sick. If there was one thing I hated, it was the feeling of nausea (true to this day), so I said, "Which is easier for you?"
"The injection," the doctor replied, and that's what they did. I felt a slight burning in my arm as they put in an IV (the only time I've ever had one). The doctor then put the anesthetic injection into the IV and asked me to count down backward from 100. Why on earth he picked 100 is beyond my ability to comprehend. I got to 97, watching the little ball of liquid drop into my wrist and then I was in the recovery room. There was no fading to black, no steadily drifting off. No dreams, no sleep. It was what I imagine teleportation would be like. One instant I was laying on the operating table and in the very next instant I was laying in recovery.
There was blood on my pillow. I sat up and called for the nurse. Apparently, I wasn't supposed to do that, for the nurse came rushing over telling me not to talk. I later found out that I had to be taken back into the OR in order for the doctor to cauterize a bleeder, and that explained the blood on the pillow. (Although, looking back on it with twenty-eight-year hindsight, you'd think they would have given me a fresh pillow.) I asked to look at a newspaper. Why on earth I would ask for this, I have no idea but I remember doing so as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I was in a children's ward and apparently, children didn't read newspapers so none was given to me.
In the weeks leading up to the surgery, everyone told me that I would be given ice cream, all I could eat, to help with the pain after the operation. In the hospital, I got exactly NO ice cream. In fact, I got one lousy lime-flavored ice-pop that tasted more like mouthwash than anything else. The fury of this deceit burns right down to this very day.
In the evening I was released to go home. I don't remember if I was given pain medication or not, but I remember my throat hurt far worse than at any point during the year or so of Strep. So much for the surgery, right? The worst part was when phlegm would get caught in my throat. It hurt so much to hawk it up, that it would get caught there and I'd feel like I was choking on it. But by the next day, things felt a little better.
Someone (a nurse? doctor?) told me that after my tonsils were removed, I'd never have to worry about Strep throat again. I don't know if this is medically true or not, but I can say that in the twenty-eight years since I have had only the occasional sore throat, always associated with a cold, and never, not even once, had Strep throat again.
I imagine things will go much more smoothly and much more pain-free for my little nephew today what with all of the modern technology that medical science has to offer. Tonsillectomies have been taking place for 3,000 years. I can't imagine what it was like for the first guy who had those lymphoepithelial tissues removed.
* From Isaac Asimov's verse, "Doctor, Doctor, Cut My Throat" about his own experience with a throat surgery. If you haven't read it, you should. It's hilarious.
November 30, 2010
An update on my writing goals
Tomorrow, at the Arlington Writers Group meetup, I will be leading a discussion on NaNoWriMo and writing goals. In light of that, it seems appropriate to provide an update on my own writing goals for 2010.
I set out four major goals, each of which had some objectives. I've had mixed results, but I see now that my goals were incredibly aggressive and probably not entirely realistic, but I set the bar high, and with one month left in the year, I think I'm doing pretty good when everything is taken as a whole.
Goal 1: Make 5 short fiction sales (at least 3 of which should be to professional markets) and become an Active SFWA member.
Well, the fact it that so far, I've made only 1 short fiction sale this year, but it was to a professional market (Analog) and in doing so, it earned me my active member status in SFWA. That's pretty darn good, I think. At the time of this writing, I have 3 stories out. 2 of the 3 have been out for quite some time, which could be promising. The last is another submission to Analog, an attempt to strike while the iron is hot.
One objective of this goal was to write 20 new stories in 2010, which now seems absurd to me. In previous years, the best I'd ever done was 2 or 3. So far this year, I've written 7 complete new stories, and have two more in various stages of completion. It is possible that I will finish the year with 9 new stories, less than half of what I aimed for, but more than three times what I've done in any previous year.
My objective for 100 submissions was based on the fact that I could submit each of my 20 stories to 5 pro markets in the space of a year, but it wasn't well thought-out logistically. (For instance, it didn't take into consideration response times.) As of this writing, I have made 23 submissions. I've received 19 rejections, made 1 sale, and have 3 stories outstanding. It is possible that I will squeeze in 2 more submissions before the end of the year, making it an even 25, or one quarter of what I foolishly targeted.
A final objective here was to learn from my rejections and I think I have done a good job of that. Stan Schmidt at Analog had previously sent me 2 detailed rejection notes and with encouragement from friends, I finally sold him a story this year, so I must be learning something.
Goal 2: Submit my novel through an agent to one or more publishers for consideration
When I wrote this goal, I was still thinking that I might actually finish the novel I started for NaNoWriMo 2009. However, after reading through the nearly 60,000 words I'd written, I decided that what I wrote simply wouldn't work and no novel would come out of that effort–and therefore, I would have nothing to submit to agents for consideration. But it was not a wasted effort. The lessons I learned from NaNoWriMo 2009 helped enormously in NaNoWriMo 2010 and what I have so far (just over 61,000 words and counting) is much better than what I had the same time last year. This ties into…
Goal 3: Write another novel
This is what I have been doing for the last 30 days. I've successfully completed NaNoWriMo for a second straight year, and I am aiming to finish the first draft by December 15.
Goal 4: Expand my network
In this area, I have had the most success this year. I laid out a set of objectives to expand my network and get my name out there and I think I've done a good job of this and it is beginning to show:
First, I had an objective of attending more cons. In 2010 I attended Readercon in July and Capclave in October. Because of other travel, that was all I could get away with this year, but I also attended my first SFWA Author & Editors reception in New York and that was a big deal for me. I also had my first lunch with an editor in New York City.
Second, I had an objective to participate more in the convention machinery. I tried to get on panels for Readercon but I was too late this year. I will try again for next year.
Third, was to participate more online. To this end, I think I've done a remarkable job. I'm back to regular blogging and my daily visit counts are going steadily up. My Facebook and Twitter presence are helping, too, and I am getting connected to many people in the science fiction world that I never dreamed of being connected with. (And sometimes, they friend me.) I've joined the Codex Writers group, which has been a big help. And while it is not online, I've also joined the Arlington Writers Group meetup and I've looked forward to attending those meetups each Wednesday.
So over all, I'm doing pretty good. At the end of the year I'll post some metrics to show how much and how well I've done, and I plan to use these as a baseline for 2011. Instead of picking arbitrarily high goals, I'll base my goals on incremental improvements over the previous year. Stay tuned for that post toward the end of December.
NaNoWriMo by the Numbers
Now that I have completed the 30-day NaNoWriMo challenge, here is a look at what I did "by the numbers". If you ask me, it's pretty impressive:
61,131 words in 30 days. That's an average of 2,037 words/day
Wrote on 25 out of 30 days. If you count just those 25 days, I wrote an average of 2,445 words/day
Wrote every one of the first 21 days without a break
My single best day: Friday, November 12 with 3,862 words
My single worst day: Sunday, November 21 with 1,875 words
I finished the month 11,121 words ahead of NaNoWriMo pace
At my high point on November 21, I was 17,027 words ahead of NaNoWriMo pace
I spent a total of 46 hours at the keyboard doing actual novel writing
That's an average of 1,327 words/hour, or about 5 manuscript pages
Now consider that in addition to this, I also:
Wrote 6,621 words of short fiction during this time
That brings my total fiction for the month of November to 67,652 words. That is utterly mind-boggling to me and it tells me that if I put my mind to it, I can write every single day
NaNoWriMo 2010 Day 30 — The End of Part 2
Once again, I didn't get up early to write this morning and wrote at lunch instead. It is a frighteningly interesting phenomenon where I can be under an arbitrary deadline like NaNoWriMo and get up early every day and write 2,000 words, but when I am on my own arbitrary deadline, it doesn't seem to hold much weight. I think this is the discipline that full-time writers talk about when they say that it is difficult to write everyday when you don't real deadlines hanging over your head.
But write at lunch I did. I worked on Chapter 30 which is the final chapter of Part 2. The chapter contains 3 scenes and I wrote all of the first two and the beginning of the last before having to bring myself to a stop and get back to work. It totaled 2,043 words and brings me to a 30-day total of 61,131 words for NaNoWriMo.
I'll have more to say on my stats for this month in the next post.
What I want to say here is that Part 2 of my novel, while virtually finished, is going to be completely rewritten in the second draft. I don't like the direction it has taken, and while there are interesting aspects to some of it, I don't think it makes for a very exciting part of the story. I kind of saw this coming when I got bogged down in the infamous middle-muddle, but I ignored it and pressed on in order to get the writing done. What I see now are several plot problems that aren't easily resolvable, to say nothing of trying to cram too much in without being able to focus on any of the more interest aspects of what I was trying to do. I'm not sure what direction it will take in the second draft but I expect it to be a complete rewrite, and I imagine that of the 30,000 words or so that currently make up Part 2, I'll retain only a fraction of that. What that leaves me with is what I think of as a very good Part 1 and what I think will be a very good Part 3 and I'll need something interesting to bridge the two parts.
That said, I think it was a good experience just forcing myself to write because it helped me to identify the problems and start to work on ways that I could attempt to fix them. And when those fixes looked like they wouldn't hold, it helped me realize when and what will have to go in order to make this the best possible story it can be, and for me that is crucial.
A word about the next 15 days or so:
NaNoWriMo officially ends today at midnight. But for me, the process of writing my first novel continues and for the sake of consistency, I will continue my daily progress posts under the post titles of NaNoWriMo 2010 Day x. The charts that I include at the end of each post will change slightly since I can no longer make use of the NaNo website's automatically generated charts, but the principle will be the same and those following along can continue to follow my progress through this novel as I begin on Part 3. I still have some work on the Part 3 outline and I hope to get some of that done tonight. My personal deadline is to finish up the novel by December 15–two weeks from tomorrow, but my hard deadline is actually December 20, the day before I go on vacation. I do not want the novel hanging over my head when I am trying to relax.
Be sure to check out the post that follows this one if you are interested in some of my stats for the month of November.
And as always, here are today's numbers:
Addendum to the new car post
Yesterday, I posted about how we like the new car after two weeks of driving it. In that post, I said:
One thing I don't like about the car is that it doesn't warn you when you leave the headlights on the way both of our old cars did. But I suspect it shuts them off automatically if you forget, I just haven't tested it yet.
This morning, when we dropped the Little Man off at school, I tested this out. I left the lights on, shut off the car and locked it remotely, thinking maybe that would turn the lights off. Nope. We went into the school with the lights still on, and when we came out… the lights were off. Apparently there is a timer in play that shuts them off after a minute or two after the car has been shut down. This would explain why there is no need for a little alarm to remind you the lights are on, and of course, this also makes moot the minor complaint I made yesterday.
Scrivener 2.0: My month-long test drive
A preview of Scrivener 2.0 was released just in time for writers to test it as part of NaNoWriMo and I decided to take advantage of that to work on my novel this month. I've been a Scrivener user for many years and have already written about my great experiences with Scrivener 1.0. What follows are my thoughts on test-driving Scrivener 2.0 for the last 30 days.
Although I am a science fiction writer by night (or early morning), I am a software developer by day and I've worked on software in which customer feedback has played a large role. This is very clear in the first glance of Scrivener 2.0: it is a piece of software developed with the customers in mind–namely, writers–and 2.0 had introduced many features which make a writer's life (well, mine anyway), substantially easier.
Writing a novel–as I am discovering–is a complicated process. For me, it works best with a detailed outline where I can weave together the various subplots into a set of chapters and scenes that I can portion out for each day's work. Scrivener makes this easy. I used the tool to write a detailed outline, very rough at first, which I then broke into chapters and scenes. Eventually, I took that text from a single Scrivener file and split it into multiple files so that I had some 45 chapters outlined. They show up in Scrivener 2.0 as index cards and the newly added feature that lets you include custom meta-data makes it even easier to organize those cards the way you want to. It comes with some good defaults (by character, for instance), but I wanted to add meta-data for levels of tension and for certain subplots and it was easy to do this so that I could get a good visual representation of the story. Furthermore, you can now place index cards freeform on the board if you choose, which allows you to graphically illustrate your story arc–something I think is very useful.
I had a lot of characters and a couple of other proper nouns frequently used in the novel and I added those to Scrivener's auto-complete function so that when I started typing them, the Scrivener would suggest the autocomplete and I didn't have to type the entire word. This sped things up enormously and made sure that certain character names (e.g. "Derterous") were always spelled consistently.
Scrivener 2.0 also allows you to capture information about characters and places in special templates. This has proven very useful in my work on the novel because the cast of characters is large and it is sometime hard to keep them all straight. The character template even allows you to include a picture of the character, which helps me enormously in visualizing what I think they look like and adding appropriate descriptions. It is also a place to keep notes about the state of the character through the course of the writing so that you can easily reference key events or traits as the story progresses.
One thing that helped enormously during NaNoWriMo was the "Daily Target" template, which is nothing more than a normal Scrivener text file with a "goal" set for 1,667 words. When you set a goal on a text file, there is a progress bar at the bottom of the file window that crawls forward the more words you write. It turns from red to yellow to green and you can even have the system alert you through Growl when you've reached your goal. Since my personal daily goal was 2,000 words, I modified the template slightly and it worked like a charm for me. I usually exceeded my goal and Scrivener made it easy to tell how I was doing–I could glance at the progress bar–without pulling me out of my writing.
Scrivener 2.0 made excellent enhancements to its "scrivenings" functionality. You can easily select multiple documents and have them appear as one continuous document in the editor. This proved very handy in chapters which contained multiple scenes. I was targeting my chapters for roughly 2,000 words, but when a chapter had 3 scenes, I'd set the goals on each scene differently, say, 800 words, 1000 words, and 200 words. When I pulled these together into a single Scrivening, the application was smart enough to display a progress bar that was the total of all the selected goals so I was still looking at my overall target.
Scrivener 2.0 comes with a "name generator" feature that will generate character names for you. It has a bunch of nifty little options (male, female, alliterative, double-barreled, etc.). At first, this seemed unnecessary but it proved invaluable during NaNoWriMo to keep me writing and not getting bogged down in coming up with a name. For most of my main viewpoint characters, I'd already chosen names. But when I came to a scene into which new character was introduced and for whom I did not yet have a name, I'd use the name generated and within seconds, I'd have 50 names to chose from. The value here was that I had to pause for just a few seconds to get a name as opposed to stopping my progress completely, debating, searching websites, and finally choosing something. It kept me focused on writing, which is key in the November contest.
There are many, many other features which I am not even covering at this point (but which I may get to eventually). Snapshots in Scrivener 2.0 now highlight the actual differences between file version, for instance. And there was even an option to compile the NaNoWriMo novel in "obsfucated" form–scrambled–so that you could submit it for verification to the website without fear of it being copied or stolen.
All told, I spent an estimated 56 hours using Scrivener 2.0 in the month of November, writing more than 65,000 words, and in all of that time, I did not run into a single bug or glitch. Scrivener 2.0 works the way I like to work, it repsonds to my inputs in predictable ways in which I would expect and it doesn't try to do things that it is not designed to do. It is by far the best writing program I have ever used and despite the fact that Scrivener 1.x was already a good application, the development team still managed to listen carefully to customer feedback and make Scrivener 2.0 even better.
I "won" NaNoWriMo this year, my second win in 2 years. In both years, Scrivener played a big role. Winning the contest means that I am eligible for a 50% discount on Scrivener 2.0, but I would have paid full price ($45) even if I didn't win. It is some of the best money you could invest in yourself as a writer, like picking out a fine, well fashioned typewriter.
Since I have been using Scrivener, I have written stories that I have sold to Analog Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Apex Magazine. Scrivener has proven an invaluable tool in those successes, helping me better organize my thoughts, and then getting out of the way so that I can focus on the writing.
If there are writers out there thinking of using Scrivener, give it a test drive, you won't regret it. It is among the finest pieces of software I've ever come across and I highly recommend it.
