Mike’s Comments (group member since Feb 18, 2013)

Mike’s comments from the First Readers (Beta Readers) group.

I'll do it! Messaging you now...

Janet -- thank you for your post! :)

Survey completed, by the way.

Nicki -- Thanks for sharing the link. I would love to see the results when you're done!

I'm sending you a pm with the email address you can send it to so I can check it out for you. Thanks!

Hi, Ashlyn. What's the word count?

*** Call for Submissions ***

Seeking psychological/science-based horror stories. Should be between 3 and 5k wc. Please send rtf attachment to mike_duron@yahoo.com with the subject line "MD Sub" (exactly as shown within the quotes). If this text string is not in the subject of your email, it'll be deleted without response. Please don't submit werewolf, bigfoot, zombie, vampire, or fan fic. Ideally, horror element should NOT presuppose the existence of supernatural forces. Pay is $20 USD upon acceptance. For use in e-book short story collection series, so no deadline. To get a (very) general idea of what I'm after, read the short stories in my "Twisted Triplets" series: http://www.amazon.com/Mike-Duron/e/B0...

Thank you for your post, Heather. I hope to take advantage of your services soon. (Please note I've moved your post to the 'General' forum. For some reason, it appeared in a new forum of its own, listed as 'general.')


~Mike D.

Great article with lots of advice from the greats.

Click Here to Read

Jeff -- Sorry. I've been offline for a while.

I'd be happy to read this! I'm sending you a pm with my email so you can send it to me. PDF or LibreOffice Writer format would be best.

Thanks!

Find it on a great page here.

Dear Writer:

Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.

I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

She told me it wouldn't.

1963

FELL OF DARK

By: Mike Duron




            "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day...."
                        ~Gerard Manley Hopkins


For the third time is as many hours, he awoke that night. He looked over at the microwave perched on top of his mini-fridge. Two fifty three in the morning. No sense in lying here daydreaming, masturbating, or torturing myself about the money I won't have enough of come Friday, he thought. The first bus will be here in an hour and thirty seven minutes. I might as well just start getting ready for work.

As the iron warmed up, he figured he'd have a beer. A little hair of the dog and all that before leaving.

            #

By four fifteen, he was waiting for the six sixteen at the stop across the street. If Sharon was driving today, she'd know he'd had his one beer again, which had turned into eight or ten, again.

Sharon wasn't driving.

"Where's Sharon?" he asked.

The new driver, he'd only seen once or twice before. He was a swollen, but clean-looking kid in his early twenties. He reacted to the question like it was a big bug that had just flown in and bitten him on the neck. The driver puckered up his face and looked at him.

"Ooh, I'm sorry to tell you, sir. Sharon passed away last night."

"Oh," he said. He showed the driver his pass, almost lost his balance as the bus moved forward. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. "She was really nice."

He took a seat in the back.

The bus was empty, except for him and the driver. Damn, he thought. I should have brought a beer with me, for the road and all that.

            #

When the girl got on, he and the driver were still the only ones on the bus. Outside, the world was still cold and dark. He thought she looked like a ghost. He remembered a painting he used to love when he was young.

She came onto the bus like Venus coming out of the sea.

She took a seat at the front, facing the aisle.

            #

He let himself look at her. She seemed oblivous to his presence, the white cord of her earbuds emerging from her reddish-blond hair, she let her head hang down. She cradled some device in her hands, which rested on her lap. She swayed, almost imperceptibly, to the music. Her soul is dancing inside her body, he thought. She's here, but she's not, like Sharon, and--

The bus hit a hard bump in the road and, when it was over, the girl looked around, then directly at him and smiled.

The early-morning beer buzz emboldened him. He smiled back, nodded, then looked down at his own lap.

He couldn't remember what he was just thinking about.

            #

Lost in fantasies and drunken early-morning daydreams, he awoke from his stupor in time for his stop. The girl was gone. In her place, sat a fat old woman with a cane.

His buzz was nearly gone.

He got off the bus and made his way across a vast, empty parking lot.

            #

As he waited for the bus that night, after work, he grabbed a beer out of the plastic bag beneath the bench. When he was done with it, he checked his cell phone for the time and figured he had enough for another. It felt good drinking that second beer, but it didn't go down as quickly as the first. That first one, he thought. That first one goes quick.

Crushing the can and tossing it onto the grass beside the bench, he remembered the girl. He thought he remembered her coming up to him while he was zoned out, or passed out, who knew which, really? He thought he remembered her sitting beside him. Wait, he thought, she did come and sit beside me.

He was elated for a few seconds, then dejected when he realized he couldn't remember what the girl had said.

Yes, he thought, she definitely came and sat beside me. She was smiling. She had a white shirt, and jeans. She said something about-- He tried to remember, but couldn't.

If I see her again, he thought, but he never did.


----------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: This is one of twenty "One-Sitting Stories" I plan to publish in e-book format sometime around April, 2013. Please keep an eye out for it -- Thanks!


Fell of Dark by Mike Duron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Exactly. I guess the idea is, "If you have references as a beta reader, share them." While it isn't necessary to have them, it will likely help you with the writers when they're trying to find readers because they know you've done it before.

Agreed, 100%.

Makes sense. You think a standard time frame according to word count, and, maybe a standard form to fill out?

What I don't want to happen is for a good and serious writer to enter into a beta-reading agreement with a fly-by-night dabbler and have that writer provide a detailed, good-faith analysis while the other person responds only after being prodded and with a flippant, terse reply at that.

So, yeah. I think it makes perfect sense. I'll work on something today or tomorrow, pm it to you and see what you think.

Thanks!

I'll post links to the stories I find online, as well as analysis. These are the legendary, the infamous, the beloved, the studied, &c.

Here's the first:

"Why Don't You Dance?" By: Raymond Carver

Good ideas. I'd leave the requirements and reference requests up to each individual writer if they want them though. The reason being that we wouldn't want to discourage avid readers by having them think they need references in order to participate at all. The same goes for other qualifications.

What sort of requirements were you thinking of, by the way?

When I first set this group up, I thought it would be best to make it a private group. The reasoning was that, with greater control over who joined, the quality of beta reading would be higher than it would if just anybody were able to join the group.

I've since reconsidered and think this logic is flawed because, first of all, the smaller the group, the fewer the beta readers available. Secondly, the smaller the group, the fewer the number of offered works. Put these together and you wind up with a pretty stagnant group with very little member activity.

So I've gone ahead and made the group public in order to increase the number of members. Where, before, only members could browse the discussions, now everyone can. Where, before, one of the mods had to send an invite or else approve a request for membership in the group, now, anyone can join.

I'm hoping this might attract non-writers as well. Avid readers are a valuable resource for writers who are looking for high-quality beta readers to catch not only the great blunders but also the subtle slips that shadow their way into our manuscripts.

As far as the quality of beta reading going on, I'll just put my faith in 'the invisible hand of the market' (in this group for good beta reads). I'm confident things will balance out.


Thanks!

Rebecca wrote: "Oh, either pdf or .mobi is fine. Whatever is easiest."

Thanks. I just sent them -- all three pdf files compressed into one zip.

This article was very influential for me. I was something like 18 when I first read it. Funny how some stuff stays with you through the years... lol