Matt Weber's Blog, page 16

a love letter

CROSSED GENRES’ April theme:

32: Portals (Submissions: April 1-30. Publication: August 2015)

“…look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.” Alice’s rabbit hole, Chell’s blue and orange teleports, the T.A.R.D.I.S.’s doors… or a computer monitor, or the pages of a book. A portal can open across time, space, and imagination… and it can be closed to them as well.

There’s a story I’ve been meaning to write to this theme. It’s a follow-on to a novella I wrote on Wattpad last year. As soon as the realization came, so did the ideas, with set pieces to match. An orangutan demon, searching among rows of meditating monks like cabbages, looking for the man he’s supposed to deliver a message; war at the foot of a mountain, prayer-powered mechsuits against high sorcery; a dragon who eats the documents that Heaven has no room for in its file drawers. Two points of view (the two lovers in the letter below), told by two tellers, each with his or her own sympathy, in a frame story, and all of it converging on a girl I barely wrote about in THE EIGHTH KING—but for whom I have big plans, if I ever clear the decks enough to write the sequel.

CROSSED GENRES’ word count maxes out at 6000 words. I cut a point of view from the plan, cut the frame story, began. Two weeks and 3000 words in and Lin Ben isn’t even out of the monastery, isn’t even answering to his real name. Probably I could cut that in half, but it wouldn’t be enough. I have to concede what, in some chamber of my heart, I probably always knew: This is a novella, 20,000 words minimum. To do it right.

And, because it follows a novel that’s in queries and a novella that’s on Wattpad, it’s not a priority. I need to finish the War of Songs books—shit, I need to finish THE CLAIM—or I need to finish THE FLAME BENEATH THE STONE.

But, if I can’t finish the thing because I can’t sell it, at least I can share a bit of it. This is the first time I’ve written a love letter. I think I did all right.

Dearest Ben,

With my heart in such a furor, I feel I ought to profess ignorance of where to begin. But there is only one possible beginning; for, if you throw this letter away in frustration, thinking it some delusion or, worse, a cruel prank, then all I have done to find you again is lost.

My name is Chesa. I grew up in the colonies of Therku, in the cold pine forests where the lumberjacks live. I met you on the way from Rassha to the Summer Palace, around a campfire. We had resolved to visit my father and speak to him of a marriage. At the palace, I fought a monster when you were called away, and I died. After a short interval, I began a new existence as a page of the Court Celestial, where I toil to this day.

I know it is a great deal to ask you to believe. I pray the nature of the being who delivered this message will convince you.

My Ben—if mine you still are—I have spent the years writing letters to you, on whatever spare scraps, with whatever broken or discarded implements, I could cadge or find. I could send you the book of my afterlife, if anyone would deliver it. As it is, I have relied on the indulgence of a demigod who finds me useful, and she tells me a single sheet is all she may slip into the subpoena-serving demon’s freight, lest it take notice of the document’s thickness and inform some more influential functionary. I hope the thought of receiving a summons from the Court Celestial did not fill you with too much dread; but perhaps the dread will prove worthwhile, in the end.

But I have already wasted too much time on salutations. I bid you, Ben, to contemplate the substance that now connects us, the stuff that catches ink in the shape of characters and faithfully conveys them to the faithful correspondent. (Are you faithful, Ben? The question does not gnaw at me as once it might.) These characters, of course, are not the perfect, dire shapes that form a summons from the Gentian Circuit; but there are many such summonses, and more each day, a copy of each remanded to some box in some closet in some hall built from bricks of hardened cloud, bound together with a mortar of ground starlight mixed with new rain. The Gentian Circuit alone must produce tens of thousands of sheets each day, each inscribed with the writing of the greatest spirits, demigods, and beasts on Earth, Hell, or Heaven, each summarizing events of consummate importance and all-permeating consequence.

Keep such things together long enough, and a certain kind of energy begins to collect where they are stored, and eventually to grow, and take on forms. They must be culled and gotten rid of periodically, after their usefulness has passed. Or so this demigod tells me, so she claims. It is a strange claim, but I have seen stranger things transpire in these unending hallways, and I can name no reason that she should wish to deceive me.

The Court’s preferred repository for paper that has passed its usefulness is a creature called the Shoat of the Sky, whose specialty is eating the inedible. It lairs at the summit of the Fragrant Heap, the great peak which looms over the Tanggang mining colonies. The tribute will be made on the first new moon of the coming year, when fireworks and festivities will preoccupy the mortals of the outlying towns.

The feed will begin half an hour after the sun has quit the sky. It will be hours before the last paper enters the Shoat’s gullet.

Do you understand, Ben? A door from earth to heaven will be open on that night. And I will be at the threshold, waiting.

I pray this message reaches you in time. I pray it does not betray its true nature to its carrier. I pray it finds a Ben who cares enough for me to climb a hill and dodge a pig. My prayers defy enumeration. I pray that you can read these words. Did we never speak of books, Ben, in all those weeks? How not?

Well, there is your subpoena. Be timely in answering it, I beg you. The Court Celestial barely runs without you, as any heaven fails without a sun.

Yours,

Chesa

A nobody’s primer on publishing

A friend just finished a draft of a novel (STAR WARS fanfic, for context) (EDITED: Actually original fiction; reading comprehension error) and wanted advice on publishing. I spammed the relevant Facebook thread with this beast, then realized that I might have some followers who might enjoy a highly condensed, ultra-basic take on publishing from someone who hasn’t achieved more than beer-money-level success at it.

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If it’s fanfic, you’ll probably have to give it the ol’ E. L. James treatment if you want to sell it–not billionaires and light bondage (necessarily) but filing off the serial numbers. I’m given to understand that the people responsible for publishing STAR WARS novels tend to know what they want written; they’re not that interested in spec work. Then again, it’s not like I’ve ever submitted a STAR WARS manuscript and actually heard from an editor that they’re not interested in spec work… so do some research if this is the way you want to go.

If you’re interested in traditionally publishing it, the first piece of work is obviously revision. Then you can send it to agents and/or publishers; most people recommend agents, but there are at least a couple of science fiction publishers that will consider unagented manuscripts (Tor and Daw, anyway; possibly others?). The SFWA should have a list of reputable novel publishers; Query Shark has good advice on query letters; Preditors & Editors has a very comprehensive list of agents, and I think Robert J. Sawyer has a list of agents who represent a lot of science fiction, although his list may be out of date (I last looked at it in 2011 and I think it was a little old then) (edit: it appears to have been updated in 2013).

If you want to self-publish it, I highly, highly recommend listening to the Self-Publishing Podcast and the Creative Penn podcast. SPP is entertaining enough that you can pound through the archive in a few months of listening, and it’s worth it; the hosts have made huge progress since they started recording, and looking at their career trajectories (and at the changes in the landscape) is really instructive. The Creative Penn is less entertaining, but Joanna Penn is a bit smarter about things like rights, derivative works, &c, and her guests are pretty different.

The over-under on self-publishing versus traditional is roughly: Traditional publishers will do a lot for you, but it’s hard to get their attention and (reputedly) hard to get them to do much marketing for you, so you’re responsible for getting your books sold, and you need to sell a lot of them because you’re only making 15%. If you self-publish, you’re responsible for creating or contracting everything–the ebook, editing, cover, product description, marketing, everything–but Amazon (and the other platforms: B&N, Apple, Kobo, Google, &c) will pay you 70% of each sale, so you can do well on a lot fewer sales. Charlie Stross has an essay called “Why I don’t self-publish,” and he’s also published an essay by Linda Nagata called “Why I do self-publish”; the compare/contrast may be interesting. Stross also has a series of essays on the publishing industry (I think permalinked on the sidebar of his blog) that are definitely worth the read.

Not that I’ve been thinking about this for a while or anything. Happy to follow up on anything & everything. (That goes for you too, you legion of loyal readers, you.)

the big syringe

You want to look into the nightmarish hellscape of a writer’s mind? 4am, staring at the ceiling and thinking, what was that like? Finding the way into essentially independently inventing modernist drama. Five or six years of experimenting in prose, and then, damn, WAITING FOR GODOT, and you’re off. Even the supposedly minor works – I re-read ALL THAT FALL the other night — are revelatory. (Seriously. If you don’t know that one? Find it and read it. It’s devastating.) And you stare at the ceiling and just think, what would that have been like, to invent a whole goddamn thing? When the clouds barely part in your own mind maybe three or four times in your life, but for those people there are entire days of sunshine where everything is clear? And maybe, just maybe, his body isn’t completely decomposed yet, and you could dig him up and siphon the talent from his bone marrow and inject it into your face with that big syringe you keep in the kitchen for dosing meat with marinades.

Warren Ellis, from his mailing list.

Deer antler velvet

Featured in my spam queue a couple of times. Apparently people use this to get a six-pack? I wouldn’t kick a six-pack out of bed, but this does not seem like the right way. I mean, maybe if you chased the deer down yourself, and tore the antlers off with your bare hands. But spraying yourself with some kind of tincture made from the largely decorative head bones of an animal not renowned for its intelligence in the hopes of becoming more attractive… I don’t know, the whole thing seems like some weird Kline bottle of self-referential meta-comedy. Wikipedia says “Antlers are considered one of the most exaggerated cases of male secondary sexual traits in the animal kingdom, and grow faster than any other mammal bone.” I mean, this is beyond Freud spinning in his grave; this is like Freud had been balefired. Burned out, not only of the future, but the past. Deer antler velvet has rendered him supernumerary throughout the time stream.

This was going to be about writing, or at least I had some idea that it might become about writing. And it is, obviously, in the same sense that it’s about any damn thing worth doing, which is just to say you won’t find the easy button in the stolen headboobs of an innocent animal that never wanted any part of your weird ambition. Or words to that effect.

I queried a novel today, for what it’s worth. Truly I did. I’d better go to bed.

Little steps

And lo, the realm of Jersey was once again overtaken by the Plague, followed close on by the Snow, whereupon the Small Children were Cooped Up and Like to Explode; and out of the House of the Writer there came a great Silence.

We’re digging our way out, though. Little steps. The current program is: 200 words and one for lack of a better word biz-ops thing every night. (This doesn’t count.) Last night’s was grabbing a few more agents to query for THE EIGHTH KING; tonight’s is writing the query. I’m hoping some of the ops stuff will be less time-consuming (e.g., “query one agent”) so I’ll have time to write more. But, for the moment, little steps.

Numbers

A while back, I ran the numbers on writing THE CRESCENDO during NaNoWriMo. A nice exercise, but of course NaNo is one month out of the year; where I really should have been running numbers is the other 11.

I’m proceeding on the assumption of 1000 words/day on weekday mornings, before work, and 200/day every day, before bed. The morning writing gives me 20,000/month; the evening writing adds let’s call it 6000. If those are real rates, then I can finish a 50,000-word War of Songs book in two months, or the projected 150,000-word DANDELION KNIGHT sequel in six. In reality, I probably lose 10-20% of that to random fatigue and logistical stuff–e.g., tomorrow morning I have parent/teacher conferences starting at 8:15, so I lose my 1000 words unless I can get up early, and by early I mean 4:30. So now we’re looking at 9-10 weeks for a War of Songs book, 7-8 months for the TDK sequel.

This also gives me a comparative timeline for the two paths: I can finish the War of Songs trilogy two to two and a half months ahead of the TDK sequel. And, unless I can find ways to boost my word count, it means the choice of what I do next is the choice of what I finish in 2015.

Best not to think about this too hard just yet. What I really need to do is track my word count for a month and get an actual handle on this.

One weird old trick

Wrote close to 1000 words this morning, wrapped a big scene. I’ve been doing the writing longhand because I’m trying to end every evening with 200 words, which means I don’t want to get pulled into the rabbit hole that is the Internet; but that means the bigger chunks get put in the notebook too, because I don’t want to keep switching back and forth. I don’t seem to be materially less productive in terms of words per unit time. I wonder if this is the one weird old trick that will shoot my productivity into the stratosphere. (I fear it’s the one weird old trick that will cause my writing to get lost in a flood or a fire, or just out of common-or-garden carelessness. There’s an older version of THE CLAIM that’s still sitting in longhand in a blue notebook, waiting to be mislaid or destroyed.)

(“One weird kernel trick” courtesy of Daniel Drucker, who is better at machine learning humor than I am.)

Battery drain

Ha, my first day of “I’m going to check in here daily” and I nearly miss it. I have an excuse; I always have an excuse. One of our cars wouldn’t start this morning. It was at the bottom of the driveway, blocking the one that would start. I think we actually got the kids out earlier than usual, but then I had to get AAA to jump the car so I could drive it to the mechanic &c.

Luckily, the problem appears to have been limited to the battery. As I was standing out in the 2-degree morning, waiting for the tests to finish, Patrick from AAA told me that the cold makes the batteries drain faster. It was an oldish battery anyway, and it got through the single-digit temperatures last winter; the last few weeks probably pushed it over the edge. I don’t think I’ve written more than 200 words a day for the last couple of weeks, so this intelligence comes as something of a ray of hope. Maybe I’m just weak from cold; maybe the spring will bring vitality.

Back to work. Kill the word beast. Even a 200-word word vermin is better game than nothing. (“Kill the word beast” by Molly Crabapple, as always.)

The prodigal

Good morning. It’s been a while. How are you?

Me, I spent a week in London trying to learn to be a software engineer, and another two at home trying to figure out how to get work done while the kids were homebound due to excesses of snow or snot. Other than the trip to and from Heathrow, my London experience was more or less confined to the fifteen-minute walk between my flat in Shoreditch and my job in Shoreditch; so, despite my hopes to tap into the mythic half-forgotten London that animates China Miéville’s New Crobuzon and Alan Moore’s FROM HELL, I spent most of my time pondering the curious popularity of Mexican and fusion Mexican cuisine (falafel with guacamole?) and rubbernecking at some admittedly pretty amazing graffiti:

By “most of my time” above, I of course mean “most of the time I wasn’t learning how complicated it is to write apps,” which is a lesson I honestly haven’t fully grasped just yet.

But now I’m home, and the snow and snot have cleared, and I’m trying to figure out where I’m going. The main issue is finding time to write for an hour a day. I’d like to do more, of course, but if I can do that, I can make progress. But with the office right at home, it’s hard. One really liberating thing about the otherwise horrible commute to Philadelphia was that it gave me a solid block of downtime every weekday. Now all time is potentially uptime, and I need to make choices. So far, I’ve been making them to the detriment of writing. That’s going to have a pretty bad effect on my mood and motivation if it continues.

Beyond that, we have issues of strategy. THE CLAIM is stalled midway through Chapter 8. If I can write 5000 words a week, it’ll be done in two weeks. I’m somewhat resolved that I ought to finish it… but with THE CANDIDATE still unwritten, that decision isn’t as clear-cut as it used to be. With two or even one and a half books done in January, I could still think of the War of Songs as a winter-and-spring project, with the latter half of the year devoted to polishing those books and writing the sequel to THE DANDELION KNIGHT. With THE CLAIM not even done yet, the pull of the sequel is a lot stronger. Before, I thought I was looking at 50,000 words to finish the War of Songs trilogy; now I’m looking at 100,000+, which makes the 100-150,000 likely words of the DANDELION KNIGHT sequel (many of which are already written) a lot more palatable by comparison. And that will close a loop that’s been open two or more years now.

And then we have the business side of things. This website is suboptimal in any of a dozen bleedingly obvious ways; I still need to write a coda to the JaNoWriMo project; I still need to work on list-building, collecting blurbs, getting some of my work free on Amazon. I’m also trying to teach myself about marketing and entrepreneurship, notably through Copyblogger’s free ebook library, but reading time is a bit thin on the ground. Bandwidth is my big blocker right now, and I can’t even scrabble for more by waking up early, because my son is awake at random times between 3:30 and 6:00 and I usually need to help out.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t things I can do better.

I’m going to start, though, by trying to check in here daily, at least on weekdays. This is, at least in theory, where my business lives; I’m hoping that more regular contact with the site will keep my writing head where it needs to be. Nothing this lengthy, I think–again, more along the lines of morning.computer, wisps and stretches.

And I’ve spent about half an hour more on this than I meant to, which means it’s time to bring home the bacon. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Maybe sooner; who knows?

 

Development diaries, 1-28-2015: The Pomodoro method

Normal day, the first of its kind in two weeks. Didn’t drop off the kids, but started at 9:00 anyway—took some time to walk around in the cold and plan the chapter in my head. It feels like it worked, but it also feels like something else worked. After nearly an hour bereft of focus, I tried the Pomodoro method, or my own adaptation of it: Write without interruption for 25 minutes, read A Game of Thrones for 5. I averaged over 500 words in each of those 25-minute intervals. I think repeated Pomodoros may be conducive to mental exhaustion, though; after five, I’d written almost 3000 words, but then I took an hour break for lunch and exercise that metastasized into another hour of useless Internet meandering. Two more intervals left me at about 4100 words for the day—which would be below quota, if quota meant anything at this point, but is a decent figure. (This, BTW, is why I have so many bracketed word counts in the day’s words—tracking my efficiency.)

This is the first day I’ve approached my SEPTA rate of 1000 words in 50 minutes; actually, I’m almost precisely there. Which makes me think that I have the determinants of my writing speed exactly wrong. I’ve been assuming that I could write fast on SEPTA because of Pavlovian conditioning: train <> writing. But it may be that the important thing isn’t the association, it’s the fact that there’s an endpoint. When I have the whole day ahead of me, with just lunch and evening to structure my time, it’s hard to write hard and hard to limit my breaks. Writing hard for 25 minutes is pretty easy, and five minutes of reading time is fun enough not to be frustrating, which actually kind of surprised me—AGoT is the kind of book it’s easy to get sucked into. Anyway, maybe it’s all down to novelty—and I’m sure the outlining in my head on the morning walk played an important role as well—but I’m pretty optimistic about using this in more time-limited contexts in the future. If two Pomodoros can reliably bag me 1000 words in an hour before or after work, that’s amazing. Apimac Timer has stopped working on my computer, so I used Timer-Tab, which was great.

I’m headed to London next week for my first week at the new job. I need to start modulating my expectations now. A week without kids feels like it’s going to be all free time, even with eight or more hours a day at work, but (a) I may wish to socialize or explore in the evenings, (b) westbound jet lag is the worst, and ( c ) I should sleep while I can. Remind me of this if you find me posting 2000-word updates at 0300 GMT, please. Also, (d)—and I always forget this—although being free of kids and family is fun and liberating, it is also almost always depressing. This may be yet truer in a strange city where I can’t afford to use my phone.