Paul Mannering's Blog, page 2

Start of something

A girl at a well is attacked by a boy she knows. Written while thinking about power and how fragile our water supply really is.

That means some triggering issues are going to exist – so be warned, in the post below is a scene of a woman being assaulted. If you are offended by her standing up for herself, then avoid it too.

It’s not the start of a novel. It’s not even a short story. It’s just something I needed to get written down to prime the writing pump for the stuff I do need to be writing.

The Well 

“Pump’s broke,” were the first words Mayla heard as she set her family’s bottle down in the dust.

She straightened, sweeping the loose fringe of her dark hair back from her eyes and regarding the well with a sullen expression. A’Dan, apprentice to the mechanic, Kyle, smiled at her with teeth as yellow as his hair, from where he leaned against the well-side hitching post.

“When will it be fixed?”

A’Dan shrugged, “Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.”

“We need water today,” Mayla scowled from under her fringe.

“You can have water, if you pay for it,” A’Dan didn’t move, he just smiled at Mayla’s grimace.

“Forget it,” she said and lifted the empty water bottle. The walk home would be easier without the weight of a day’s water in it, but she was already thirsty and the sun had barely risen.

A’Dan followed her, stepping quickly in his heavy boots, the whisper of his dusty leather jeans alerting Mayla to his approach. She spun around, the bottle ready to club him across the head. A’Dan laughed, and shied to one side. Mayla stepped backwards, bottle against her chest, afraid of what he might try and do.

With the sun at her back, Mayla had an advantage. A’Dan stood a foot taller and he had the strength of a man, though they were both only sixteen.

He lunged at her and lifted the girl off her feet, sending her crashing into the dust.

“Get off me!” Mayla tried to cry out, but the fall had winded her and she could barely whisper. She lashed out with her feet and fists. Once, A’Dan might have wrestled with her like this as a game, they were no longer children and his breathing had an eager raggedness to it.

Mayla yelped as fabric tore. Her shirt had been carefully mended by her mother and handed down from her father. Finding another shirt would be difficult and expensive when she did.

With a desperate punch she knocked A’Dan’s head to one side and twisted under him. Scrambling in the dust she tried to crawl away. A’Dan growled and threw himself on her back. She went down again and clenched everything in terror as she felt his hand pulling at her belted trousers.

A black boot, worn and faded from years of dust, marked with a tarnished buckle of shining metal, filled her vision.

A’Dan’s weight on her back vanished with his shout of alarm. Mayla twisted into a sitting position and scuttled away on her butt. Pulling her torn shirt over her chest again.

The man in the black boots had tossed A’Dan aside. He was a stranger to Mayla, his dusty clothes, ragged hair, and sun-torn face telling her he had been out in the wild for a long time.

“Are you his?” the stranger asked.

Mayla shook her head, she would never be A’Dan’s.

“You shouldn’t have attacked me,” A’Dan said, standing and spitting blood into the dust.

“Stand down,” the man said. Mayla could see A’Dan’s hand hovering over the hilt of his knife. He loved that blade and kept it sharp enough to harvest the pale hair from his forearms.

“I didn’t attack you, I pulled you off the girl.”

The man stood with a casual stance that reminded Mayla of the way her father would appear, right before he exploded and killed someone.

“You had no right to,” A’Dan said.

“You had no right!” Mayla shouted.

She stood up, her fury fueled by her disgust. She ran at A’Dan, fists clenching as tight as rocks. Her punch caught the boy in the gut with the wet slapping sound of knuckles against bare flesh. A’Dan grunted and doubled over. Mayla lashed out again, this time her boot struck the back of A’Dan’s knee, sending him to the ground.

“Never touch me again,” Mayla snarled.

A’Dan laughed through the pain, his face half-masked by the dust pressed into it. “Or what? You’ll kill me?”

“I will cut bits off you until you have no hands and nothing to hold at night,” Mayla said.

The energy of her anger and fear left her shaking. She stumbled away, snatching up the empty water bottle and running through the mud huts of town towards the place her mother waited.

Sir Julius Vogel Award Voter Packet Download

Originally posted on SFFANZ News:

Items nominated for this year’s Sir Julius Vogel Award are available for downloading. Full instructions for downloading the voter pack can be found here.

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I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This. . .

brokensea:

Mark Mullen writes a fascinating essay on humanity’s relationship with technology, and reviews Engines of Empathy along the way.

Originally posted on Intelligently Artificial:

I’m not even going to pretend that there isn’t a conflict of interest here.  A better, more ethical person would take steps to maintain their objectivity and protect their sense of integrity.  But in a world where news anchor Brian Williams can singlehandedly drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and the US Supreme Court has declared that money is people, I will simply press on.  In the immortal words of Brian Williams, once more unto the breach!

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Where The Wild Thinks Are

A couple of years ago I spent the day at a High School, talking to English classes of students aged 15-17 about writing. It was a fun day, the kids were smart, engaged and I like to perform.

During a library Q&A session a girl asked, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

It’s the most common question authors get along with, “Why?”

My stock answer is, “I order my ideas online. They come from a factory in China, in a cardboard box labelled Tractor Parts.”

I then went on to talk about how it works. For creative types (which is anyone who actually stops long enough to poke at a random thought) ideas come from everywhere.

The best ideas come from asking What If?

The rest is just typing until your fingers bleed.

There does come a point where, as the poet said, “You have to shit, or get off the pot.”

For me this comes after that first rush of inspiration, the heady romance of new love. The dreaded, Bright Shiny Thing Syndrome (BSTS) that I have suffered from. It is where the delirium of the creative rush ends and the hard work begins.

Depending on your writing style, you might edit as you go. Write a first draft, then re-write it (once or a dozen times). Or you might just write it and edit and send it off to your publisher (who has a professional editor to do all the tedious stuff like correct your grammatical errors).

Once that high wears off – many writers stop. They coast to a halt. They say, “I have writers block!” Then they go off and write something else, and repeat the process.

If you want to be a shitter, not a sitter, then you have to abandon all bathroom analogies – because straining is exactly the wrong way to have a successful bowel motion.

In writing, like in pooping, you should be relaxed. The strategies I use for moving through a blocked plot point or a dead end include:

Write something else.

Don’t abandon your current WIP. Just refocus your mind. I write short stories, or work on another novel idea (I have about 8 stories ranging from short to novel length in the works at any one time). When you have had a break, be it an hour, or a weekend, come back to the thing and have a fresh look at it.

What Would Lassie Do?

In writing, WWLD? means look at it from a different perspective. Think outside the box. Consult your muse, your beta readers, ask your dog for advice. Whatever works for you. Put yourself in your character’s shoes, or the shoes of someone else in the story and think about what is happening from their perspective. Why is this scene important to them? You don’t have to jump heads and write from the villain’s viewpoint – but give some thought to what others are doing in the scene and use it to build detail.

Listen

What are your characters saying? Seriously – just because you hear voices doesn’t mean you are Jesus. I talk (using my inside head voice) to my characters all the time. I’ll say things like, “Man, that guy is a total jerk. He shot your girlfriend, he shaved your cat, he knocked over your snowman. What are we going to do about it?”

They come up with the best ideas – because they are the ones who know best what they would do. Obviously, I’m not a zombie killing expert, or a special forces veteran, or a paramedic with a vampire to support, but the characters I write are all these things – so they know what to do to solve the challenges they face in their stories.

If however, you hear voices telling you that everyone around you is an alien reptile, you might want to talk to someone about that.

Write It Out

Stop thinking and just write. I had a scene in a story yesterday where a character needed to recite a list of known Gods and what they were the god/dess of. It was a comedy story, so it was pretty easy to come up with a few, like Queezycocktail, the god of hangovers, Al’Bhumin, god of omelettes, and Polysisticos, goddess of fertility. If I kept going, I’d probably come up with some great ones – but I realised I was thinking too hard – so I just started writing names. A kind of free-thought exercise – and soon had a list of 20 ridiculous deities which made the joke about the culture having more gods than people even funnier (Varicousia, goddess of roads and map-makers was a personal favourite).

Veinous, goddess of spurned lovers and revenge also just came to mind.

Feel free to leave your comic deity suggestions in the comments, it might end up in the story…

Go Back a few steps

If you write yourself into a corner, where you really don’t know what the Hell is going on anymore, then stop. Go back to where you did know what was happening, and start re-writing from there.

Avoid the [Just then three suffragettes descend from the sky

On an old fashoned wooden deus ex machina, singin’–] deus ex machina of giving your protagonist a tool or surprise knowledge that gets them out of the dire situation. It’s almost cheating.

Doctor Who is a classic for this – David Tennant’s reign was pretty much – point and click – sonic screwdriver can get you out of anything. Worst part of the entire reboot really.

You’re a better writer than that. Go back to the point where you strayed from the path and work out what happens to move your story forward without having to resort to cop-outs or maiden-rescues. Thinking about that, I realise that in Tankbread 4: Black Snow I’m dangerously close to a situation like this. Our heroes are in the deep-doo-doo and it would be easy to send in a cavalry and rescue them – but that would be a cheap solution. Character growth and plot advancement requires that you challenge your characters. 

Make ‘Em Bleed

No one wants to read a story where nothing happens. It is important to make sure that something happens to people we like. Even the imaginary ones.

Your hero (of whatever gender they identify with) is challenged – that is the story. We don’t care if they live a life as dull and pointless as ours – 90,000 words about a day job just like mine isn’t a book I want to read.

They are heroes for a reason. Just like we aren’t.

So you challenge them. Here’s an example from a story I am working on for an anthology with the theme of blood ties.

Pietr is a Russian American living in New York. His grandmother raised him from a baby and she is the only family he has. However, health insurance is expensive and grandma is dying of a rare form of blood cancer which means she needs transfusions once a week. The hospital has declared her terminal and withdrawn care. She is living at home, with her paramedic grandson to take care of her.  

In desperation, Pietr has taken to kidnapping late night pedestrians with matching blood types and draining them to keep the old lady alive.

He isn’t a sociopath, or a psycho, he is just desperate and is wracked with guilt.

Already we have challenges: the poor Russian guy is in a real bind. He is driven by an obsessive love for his grandmother (he owes her everything) and is horrified by the idea of having to commit murder – but he does it.

With a brief intro to set the scene, the murder of a late night-jogger, the transfusion process and the background shown in dialogue and so on, we now ready to start the story. The previous 12 months in these characters lives are irrelevant – we have summed that up in a few hundred words. We have arrived here and now in the story – because this is where things get worse. Worse – is where stories start. Helluva lot worse – is where stories should take us.

For Pietr our Russian-American paramedic and reluctant killer, he makes the mistake of selecting a pretty young woman to be his next blood donor – and she is a vampire – who is bored and curious – so she goes along for the ride.

Unlike Pietr, the vampire is all about the killing – and she revels in his horror and guilt. She blackmails him and uses him to bring her victims while she uses her blood to keep Grandma alive. Of course, things have to get a lot worse for Pietr before the story is resolved.

 It must be resolved. It might not be a happy ending, but it will be an ending. I know how it ends and Pietr has to suffer, because he has killed the innocent. He also must also be redeemed because he did it for love. But, boy is he going to suffer first.

Keep It Real

Real of course depends on the rules of your story Universe. In Pietr’s case, it’s New York (as I see it from TV, novels, movies and my own seedy imagination). I’ve never been there, but I think I can describe a New York at night, where vampires stalk the streets.

Cars drive, people jay-walk, neon flashes and a beautiful, if somewhat pale, young woman sleeps during the day in a drainpipe under Central Park.

Aliens (the raygun type, not the immigrant types – though, Mexicans armed with with alien weapons technology invading the US would be a cool story) are not going to happen in this story.

Dinosaurs are not going to happen in this story. Flying cars, superheroes or talking cats are not going to happen.

You need to keep things straight in your world*. People will accept anything as long as it is plausible (or imaginable). If I was writing about talking cats, flying cars, and superheroes – then those things would be part of the world I wrote around this idea.

Engines of Empathy is a complex world – very like our own, but just different enough to be even more interesting (even the boring day job bits).

When I write interstellar sci-fi, boring day-jobs aren’t really the focus. Epic battles between leviathan star-ships battling over control of jump gates to distant star systems – are more the thing.

*Bizarro is the genre where this rule doesn’t apply. It’s amazing stuff to read.

 

 

Writing for a LAF

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” ~ Winston Churchill

I learned some new management-speak today. In a culture that thrives on keywords, catch-phrases and some really incomprehensible assaults on the English language, this one stood out in a good way.

Lead. Align. Follow.

I immediately thought of how this applies to writers. We are a constantly moving organism with a million individual writers and artists, each of us working in isolation for the most part. We read widely, we write furiously.

We join email and Facebook groups and face-to-face groups for support, advice and critique. We follow the latest trends in marketing and push ourselves to find a new way to get our heads above the turbulent seas to hopefully be rescued from drowning in mediocrity by a passing readership.

LEAD – A writer produces something new. Sure it is the same as every other book. A hero goes on a journey and experiences or encounters all the same archetypes as in every other book. The uniqueness comes from when it strikes a chord with the reading public. You get breakout hits like Harry Potter, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey. They become part of popular culture and writers and publishers and anyone else connected to the marketing of new entertainment rushes to align.

ALIGN – Zombies are so hot right now. TV shows like, The Walking Dead, iZombie, Z-Nation, and the thousand zombie novels that publishers like Permuted Press release each year (including all of mine). This is when everyone moves to align themselves with what has the reading public’s attention right now. We ride the crest of the wave, sure we don’t achieve the breakout success of the original, but we tap into the market for those who want more of the same. Zombies, vampires, paranormal romance, abusive relationships thinly veiled as BDSM, mainstream porn, alien invasion, private eye novels… pick something and there is an entire genre or industry aligned to re-creating the same stories to the same audience.

FOLLOW – You might think that following is a bad idea. Treading the same ground as thousands of other creators who came before you. Following has a lot of merit however, you can develop your skills, sell to a ready made market, apply your own customisation and always have something that you are familiar with.

New and experienced writers will always find times and stories where they write to one of these aspects. We all strive to lead, but we can do that while aligning and providing our own style and voice to our chosen genres. Following is always an option if you want to take an idea and develop it further. 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan-fiction after all.

The Right To Arm Bears and Orang-utans

 Save the bears! (Save the world) is the message in Candy Crush Soda Saga, the latest diabetic nightmare of a cascading sugar high game.

This is a world where candy makes up 98% of the earth’s crust and chocolate invades like late stage cancer.

You are the world’s only hope – and for some reason you are in the form of a young girl, who in spite of the complete lack of any other nutrition source than refined sugar, seems to be doing okay.

Much like the first season of Heroes you find yourself compelled to move on to the next episode and find out what new challenges await.

Much like the later seasons of Heroes, you completely lose track of why you are doing this and wish it would all just stop.

 So you keep lining up the candies, 3 or 4 or 5 at a time and hacking your way through acres of faux-dairy trans-fats and crystalline sucrose in a vain attempt to break green Gummy Bears out of the ice-pack.

 Around Level 68 it occurred to me. What if the bears don’t want to be saved?

 It seems possible that they have retreated from the constant onslaught of hyper-glycemia and diabetes by evolving into a species that can only survive if they remain in the nearly impenetrable environment of the frozen waste.

 Evolution isn’t about organisms adapting and changing because they want to, it is about them adapting and changing to environmental conditions. This is why evolution doesn’t always make sense. It’s a hit and miss kind of thing. The successful adaptations are better suited to survival in their habitat and those genes are passed on to future generations.

 Bears avoiding an early death by terminal acne, heart disease, rickets, scurvy and a lot of other terrible conditions (my god there are a lot of you) from eating far too much sugar – makes sense.

 So why the hell are we digging them up?

 Like most environmental disasters, it comes down to corporate greed.

 King, the company behind Candy Saga and Candy Saga Soda Saga and the yet to be released, Captain Cavity’s Soft Food Saga, make so much money from these games that their founder has uploaded his entire brain into a prototype robot. This artificial person completes all the mundane activities, like attending shareholder meetings, executive board meetings, and floating face down in his candy themed swimming pool.

 This leaves Mr King able to pursue other interests, like running weekend seminars in Las Vegas for Colombian drug lords on how to make their product really addictive.

 What can we do about this? Well nothing really. Like most awareness raising cries for environmental oopsies, being aware ain’t gonna change shit.

 It’s like Palm Oil in chocolate. I don’t buy palm oil based chocolate because it tastes nasty. I don’t think that my boycott will in any way help save the last few orang-utans though. My suggestion (declined by that other multinational money making corporation Greenpeace) was to provide the Orang-utans with weapons. Teach them to fire and maintain an AK47. Let Cadbury and Hersheys and all the others pry the palm nuts from their cold dead primate hands (and feet).

The Tattooed Baby Kickstarter Castle Whale

If you call yourself Save the Whales, every once in a while you have to save a whale.

~ Tom Ahern

 Once upon a time… if you wanted to go into business you worked a day job, saved up some money. Wrote a business plan and went to the bank and seriously considered giving oral pleasure to the loan officer behind the desk in order to get the funds you needed to maybe get your business off the ground.

I speak from experience, having been self-employed before in ye olden days when crowd-sourcing didn’t exist.

Now we have easy investor recruiting with sites like Kickstarter, PledgeMe and a host of others.

The principle is sound. You offer people the chance to invest in your product or service. In return they receive acknowledgement and something related to the product as a reward.

In reality, you see some shocking examples of professional begging and outright larceny. I’ve seen a well-respected editor promoting a Kickstarter campaign for publishers where the rewards included passing the slush-pile and getting your novel (not your submission to the anthology) read by an actual acquiring editor.

Nice. However, the target figure for fundraising was massive. The editor and the publishing company were not looking to cover the costs of producing an anthology – they wanted to make their profit (and pay their freelance editor her $5000 fee) before they even published the book. That makes sales irrelevant and that means contributing authors are effectively buying their way into being published. The term for that is vanity publishing.

Ethically, I find that reprehensible.

At the other end of the scale, you have examples of where Kickstarter style campaigns explode. Michael Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, has a Kickstarter for a new card-game called Exploding Kittens. The concept is awesome. The card game looks like a lot of fun.

They wanted a reasonable $15,000. Seven hours after the Kickstarter campaign launched, they had total pledges of over $1,500,000.

That’s a helluva lot of cards!

What you don’t do (as I saw this week) is announce yourself as a publisher, ask for $15,000 from crowdsourcing and offer ridiculous rewards (pay $500 and get a free book!).

Correct spelling in your Kickstarter campaign page is also essential. As is paying authors, especially as you are asking them for money up front. I have to say, for pledging $500 I expect to see your firstborn with my website address tattooed on their forehead.

In the middle ground is my experience with Kickstarter campaigns. Set a realistic goal for your fundraiding (sic) and offer reasonable rewards for backers.

This works. You get enough funds to cover your actual costs (for example for book production) but you are not asking for so much that people point and laugh.

Beyond Kickstarter some basic business sense is necessary. Businesses are built by hard work and careful investment. If you have a quality product and work hard – the money will come. Include great service, innovation, be different. That is how a business succeeds. Of course many businesses fail too – but at least you only have yourself to blame.

This work-for-reward approach seems to be increasingly lost on us as we turn more and more to Kickstarter to get the castle before we have earned the crown.

 

 

Dying of Exposure

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

~ Groucho Marx

 

The Universe isn’t sentient.

Readers are sentient (mostly)

Neither the Universe or the reading public owe me a favour or charity.

It is popular to say, There is a remarkable sense of entitlement among writers. We all expect (nay, demand!) overnight success and that every man and his dog (good dog) read our every word and buy our books and leave reviews and so on and so forth.

Of course we all want that. However, the line that Shall Not Be Crossed, is the dotted yellow one with the ‘WARNING: DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE!’ sign above it.

This line is the difference between having readers, reviews and sweet, sweet cash, and being an entitled asshole.

But Paul! (you cry) How do I avoid crossing the line of demarcation?

Glad you asked. It is quite simple: you have to earn the rewards.

The simplest way to do that is get good at what you do. People become better at many things with practice; brain surgery stand-up comedy, driving, pleasing your partner sexually, and of course writing.

By all means, if you are the like the first fawn of spring, taking those initial tentative steps into the lush meadows of the publishing world, then you should be submitting to markets that don’t offer a cents-per-word payment, or a flat rate fee upon acceptance. You can settle for that mystical currency that only exists in the indie publishing short-story world called “Exposure.”

Exposure is the common term for Hypothermia. People die from Hypothermia. They die in the wilderness, lost, alone and wondering why no one read their stories.

You can be damn sure that the publisher (who may have funded this expedition with a dodgy crowd-sourcing fundraising campaign) got some money out of it. They can publish through Amazon and Createspace for nothing. Even if their mum is the only one who buys 100 copies of the magazine or anthology that you contributed your story to for Exposure! They still come out on top of the mountain. Which means the Search and Rescue helicopter finds them and they get to go home, have a hot cocoa and plot their next mission leading the naïve up a mountain and into the whiteout of no reward.

So, let’s say you cut your teeth on this type of payment for your fiction. You get some good feedback, you learn some grammar and your style asserts itself and people you don’t know start saying “Your story in the April issue of Exposure Only Magazine ($19.95 in eBook format) was really good.”

Years may pass while you write and submit, write and submit (this is where you might like to use a montage in your mind’s eye movie).

Finally, no longer the tremulous fawn taking those uncertain steps, now you are a 16 Point stag, lord of your literary domain and godsdamnit, Respect – it’s what’s for dinner.

 If you are going to start defending an Exposure Only market don’t lump all writers into the fawn stage of their writing careers. Some of us have been humping this monkey for long enough to expect professional payment for professional work. That doesn’t mean we expect guaranteed acceptance to magazines or anthologies. It doesn’t mean we feel entitled to sycophantic praise and the love of a good woman (or a man).

It does mean that if I’m going to sub a story to you crowd-sourced anthology project – I’m going to expect details of the payment up front and if it’s a non-paying market, then I’m going to politely decline laugh at you and post long diatribes about what a waste of fucking space you are for any self-respecting, experienced keyboard jockey.

 The exceptions to this (for me) are the charity anthologies. I happily donate stories to charity anthologies. Some of them are damned awesome. Baby Teeth and Gates of Hell (now preparing for subs to volume 3) are two examples of great anthology projects where the proceeds went to charity.

 But shit, if you are looking to make money out of my story, then I sure as fuck expect to be paid for it.