Some writing junk

So over the course of the past five weeks, I wrote five short stories. (One was actually a "mistake"—too long for the venue I was aiming for but also done a month early as I'd misremembered the deadline, so I have to submit it like a chump to magazines and such.) Three have been accepted so far, which is nice. Two are to appear in anthologies with the words "street" and "shadow" in their titles, just to show how creative everyone is. Also, I was happy to hear that the Kindle-only anthology Whispers From the Abyss will be going in to print. I got a renewal contract in the morning, and my fee in the evening. So it's all going well. There was even a weird anomaly this week with one of my novels—somewhere in the South Central United States, an imaginary region whose borders are known only to Bookscan, some class or book club or crazy person bought sixteen copies of my 2011 novel Sensation. Three years later, it usually sells 1-3 Bookscan recordable copies a week, so that was weird.

At the day job, we have a product page for my latest anthology, Phantasm Japan. Coming in September. Why not pre-order if it sounds interesting?

I'm also most of the way through the latest Writing Salon workshop, and this has been a tiring one. Perhaps it's because nobody has dropped out, and it's a big class full of productive people. Usually, if I start with, say, nine people, three or four drop out by the fourth week. Or perhaps it's because some of the writers are very needy and very bad. Most people don't take my invitation to email me at any time as an invitation to email *every* time they come up with something—and whose every email involves a plea for some form of positive feedback. And of course, there's conflict. As if I'm telling them lies about writing and publishing, and they think they can catch me in a contradiction or falsehood if they keep the conversation going.

I'm increasingly convinced that while taste is subjective, quality is—if not outright objective—intersubjective. One hint that this is the case is that writing is developmental. Not only do beginners make a lot of mistakes, they make a lot of the same mistakes. One can even predict, to a certain extent, what a beginning writer will write and what infelicities they'll depend on and structural howlers they'll commit based on demographics.

Young men will use scene breaks as though they were commercial breaks. Older men who read widely will use an enormous number of complex-compound sentences and tons of awkward constructions (e.g., it's not a boat it's a "floating wind-powered conveyance with auxiliary internal combustion propulsion" because it is apparently vulgar to say the word "boat" twice in the same paragraph). Middle-aged women will have their characters repeat themselves a dozen times in a row because arguments never finish and never change. Younger women often have their characters alone, brooding endlessly. Only people who read a lot of adventure fiction will ever initially have their characters experience anything in scene—everyone else details every incident of their protagonists' lives in flashback, brutally and without appeals to either mercy or common sense. But of course those adventure-lovers cannot write a decent sentence.

About three-quarters of my classes involve structural issues, which are intimately related to POV, which in turn defines character and information flow. There's a logic to point-of-view that people, raised on either television or Romantic notions of what an artist is, simply don't understand at first. They can read dozens of books without ever even thinking about their structures. TV ruins any idea of giving information to a reader in any logical or consistent way, and Romantic views means that whatever pops into one's head needs to get on that page and stay there, no matter what. (This is complicated by the rise of self-published work which makes many of the same errors, but that become successful via price competition anyway. So if I'm so smart, how come I ain't rich?)

Getting it is a slow process that requires a lot of drilling, and a lot of reading with an eye toward something other than filling one's brain-hole. Only recently have I realized how much taiji had influenced my teaching style. Drilling and corrections, drilling and corrections, principles and demonstrations-via-sparring. And, of course, in good taiji classes, practices are demystified rather than continually mystified. Any teacher that performs a trick on you without showing you the material basis of the trick is a cult-leader or simply uninterested in teaching. Other teachers are often surprised that I don't assign the reading of good stories, but I consider that just out-of-class practice—in the same way people are expected to practice their taiji forms at home and find a push-hands group outside of class as well to try out what they're learning. If one already isn't reading a novel and a handful of stories every week, it hardly matters what happens in class.

And like taiji, writing's quality can actually be measured. There is a such a thing as good and bad, effective and ineffective. Thus the importance of tuishou and sanshou sparring in taiji, and actually attempting to publish and be read in writing.