The “Greener” Other Side of the Fence

by 9 Comments

Agent Jessica Faust of the BookEnds, LLC blog, on “Offering Representation to Published Authors,” seeks to reassure new authors that things could be worse for them: they might have a track record.

If a previously published author comes to me seeking representation, I need to, of course, look at the new work to see if it’s something I would even want to represent, and then if it passes that test I must consider the sales figures for the author’s previous work or works, and this is where things can get sticky. In case anyone has forgotten, this is a business, and when considering a new author a publisher’s, and therefore an agent’s, primary consideration needs to be how money can be made and how much. An author who only two years ago had incredibly poor sales numbers is going to have a hard time crawling out from under that. Bookstores are going to look at those numbers when placing orders and editors are going to look at those numbers when making an offer. So, unless the book is absolutely phenomenal, or a completely new direction for this author, it’s going to be a difficult sale for me.

[Read more…]

Share

Line Burners

by 3 Comments

You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

[Read more…]

Share

Why I Read Terry Pratchett

by 5 Comments

Actually, there are a myriad reasons. (And I can’t think of a single legitimate reason not to read him. Uninformed reasons, yes, and/or reasons based on the faulty assumption that fantasy/SF has nothing to do with reality — or that funny has nothing to do with serious. But legitimate ones? Nope.)

This brief bit from Witches Abroad pretty much boils it down for me. The bare context you need at this point is that a conversation is taking place among three witches. Old Mother Dismass, the subject of this passage, has the ability to see into the future.

“You can’t tell me that’s worth tuppence,” said Old Mother Dismass, from whatever moment of time she was currently occupying.

No one was ever quite sure which it was.

It was an occupational hazard for those gifted with second sight. The human mind isn’t really designed to be sent rocketing backward and forward along the great freeway of time and can become, as it were, detached from its anchorage, seeing randomly into the past and the future and only occasionally into the present. Old Mother Dismass was temporally unfocused. This meant that if you spoke to her in August she was probably listening to you in March. It was best just to say something now and hope she’d pick it up next time her mind was passing through.

The writing is just right; even that “as it were,” which in a lesser writer’s hands might function as mere filler, adds an ironic distance between the author and the things and events which he’s describing.

I love the turnings of the mind behind this passage. Given a common convention of speculative fiction — second sight — just stop. Stop, and ask yourself what it would really mean to have this “gift.” Mightn’t life and thought actually be a little more unpleasantly complicated for the (ha ha) lucky seer than we normally take for granted? How would this power, if someone actually had it, affect those who had to deal every day with its bearer?

Finally, take that whole reductio ad absurdum of a notion and package it up into a supremely funny digression…

Damn. I’d love to be able to do that, and do it repeatedly, over the course of 25+ years (and counting).

Share

Paying Attention to History

by 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

[Read more…]

Share

The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing

by 6 Comments

Cover of D. Hoffman's 'Poe Poe Poe [etc.],' by Anita KunzFor Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).

The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” because it seems to be a topic my thoughts revisit every few years. (My favorite book about Poe is Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (yes, seven Poes); the picture at the right is by Anita Kunz, from the cover of the cover of the 1985 paperback Vintage Books edition.)

Here’s Poe laying out a challenge for writers, in a passage often quoted — especially by writers:

[Read more…]

Share

Short Fiction: The Iron

by 4 Comments

Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown says something about writing a story from the point of view of a character other than the author’s own sex. I don’t remember the exact words, don’t have my copy with me, and can’t find the quote online. But she says something like this: “Until and unless you can write convincingly about a protagonist who’s the opposite sex from you, you can’t say you’re a mature writer.”

I thought this was challenging, to say the least. Who doesn’t want to be a mature anything? Who wants to believe they’re not already mature?

So I tried a couple things. For one, I made the protagonist of Crossed Wires a woman. I also did a handful of short stories from a woman’s POV.

“The Iron” is one of those stories.

It also is one of those stories which has been workshopped and revised to within an inch of its life — some would say beyond, probably. Agent X (whom I spoke of here) hated one element of the story, which unfortunately was the central element: a steam iron’s place in a position of importance in a story about a married woman.

(Agent X’s point, as she explained it, had something to do with the iron as a symbol of the oppression or outright enslavement of women, and hence an unsuitable vehicle as an object of a wife’s wonder. Something like that, anyhow.)

As you will see, the steam iron in question has many features unlike those of ordinary appliances. Hope you like reading “The Iron” — regardless of your (or the author’s) sex. Here it is.

Update, 2008-10-08: Thanks to Marta’s gentle prodding in the comments on this post, I finally managed (thanks, Amazon!) to find exactly how Rita Mae Brown’s Starting from Scratch addresses this subject (emphasis added):

You must create men who love women and women who love men or your books will be lopsided. In the beginning of everyone’s work the dice are always loaded toward one’s own sex or sex preference. Learning to unload those dice, to throw the bones honestly, is what maturity as an individual and as a writer is all about.

Share

More on Setting: Height, Width, Depth, and…?

by 2 Comments

[Image at right: artist’s rendering of a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract]

Walter Tevis, who died in 1984, was the author of several popular novels made into very successful movies: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But he began his career writing straight-up science fiction. Among his earliest stories was “The Ifth of Oofth,” originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1957 and anthologized numerous times thereafter.

In the story, the narrator visits a friend of his named Farnsworth. The latter has constructed a little doohickey of a gizmo which he wants to share, and hands it to the narrator:

[Read more…]

Share

Don’t Embarrass the Dog

by 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before, The Missus and I have a recent addition to our household population: a Yorkshire terrier named Sophie. That is not Sophie over at the right — it’s one “Lexi Ann,” from the dogsinduds.com site. But it’s a good place to start this post.

We got Sophie as a “rescue dog,” which is to say that she was extracted from a bad, potentially dangerous situation by our local Big Dog Rescue group. (Yes, big: ha ha.) Many of the dogs in such situations have been in them from the start; Sophie’s case was different, in that her original owners had loved the bejeezus out of her, had taken exceptional care of her. It was just that their situation was about to change, and change radically.

From the evidence provided by Sophie’s behavior, we’ve concluded that she was probably very much spoiled by her original owners. For instance, together with her favorite toys and beds and such, we also got an entire basket of doggie clothes — some at the extreme of the “bad to the bone” outfit in the picture. We have almost never put any of these clothes on her and she seems happy with their absence. (Apparently kinda like the way many humans feel when they first “go commando.”)

The other night, The Missus’s sister and brother-in-law were coming over. Laura had already met Sophie, but Gary hadn’t. In order to give him the full benefit of The Sophie Experience, The Missus decided that Sophie should be wearing something cute when she met him. So saying, shortly before L&G’s arrival, The Missus put the dog into something that resembled a pale-blue pullover sweater.

[Update 7:06pm EDT: The Missus informs me that per usual, I here demonstrate shaky memory of a lady’s wardrobe. Only vaguely, apparently, could Sophie’s outfit be described as a pullover sweater, nor was it pale blue. It was a purple T-shirt… perhaps with some pale-blue trim and/or rhinestones. Please make the necessary adjustments as you continue reading, with gratitude for The Missus’s zeal for accurate reportage. :)]

Here’s what happened:

First, when she saw The Missus get the basket of clothes, Sophie meekly sat at her feet, her shoulders hunched over. She knew what was coming, see? And with an air one could describe only as glum, she accepted the selected sweater.

Second: The Missus brought Sophie out of the bedroom into the hall. However, Sophie would not by herself come into the living room. She lay down right at the threshold. C’mon, Sophie, said The Missus, it’s all right. Come on into the living room.

Nothing doing.

So then The Missus picked her up and carried her. When she placed the dog on the living-room floor, Sophie immediately sank to her belly and slunk around to the back of a chair.

If The Missus hadn’t removed the sweater at that point, we’re convinced Sophie would still be there. Cowering, in the glare of public attention.

But — surprise! — this isn’t a post about Sophie, not really, nor about dog ownership in general. It’s a post about writing.

In her two most recent posts over at the writing on the water blog, Marta has asked two seemingly unrelated questions which, it happens, are actually two sides of the same coin.

In the first of these two posts, she asks a writer’s eternal question:

…how do you know when a story is done?

In the second, the question is thornier (because its answer depends on the answerer):

What do you do if your negative feelings about your work threaten to overwhelm you? What convinces you that a writing life is not so bad?

Now, in the first, she’s asking about a story; in the second, about writing — the process, the career, the life. Yet the questions both boil down to the same thing: How do you know when to stop?

Of the replies to those questions, I think I most liked Shelly Lowenkopf‘s; he was answering the first, but (again) it works for the second as well:

I know a story is done when the things I attempt to pile onto it will have none of my embellishments and keep falling off of their own accord.

That (for me) is exactly the point where I know I’ve gone too far. It’s the point where the Yorkie, having meekly accepted the human’s decision, nevertheless slinks away to a corner — where someone new to it will (if the Yorkier is lucky) not see it at all.

And like I said, if you think the preceding paragraph is talking about a dog, you’re not reading carefully enough.

Apropos of nothing, although I guess if pressed I could say I’m trying to balance doglove with catlove, here’s a poem which will mean a lot to feline enthusiasts — and to any human, really, willing to accept the notion that cats might have something to teach us. It’s from today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac.

[Read more…]

Share

Paying Attention to Setting

by 6 Comments

Taino, Dominican Republic (photo by Dr. Lynne Guitar)

A few weeks ago, I read a blog entry somewhere about the claim (phrased variously) that the setting in a given work “becomes like [or even is] a character itself.” It drove the blogger crazy, because setting and character (in his/her opinion) have so little in common. Whatever my other reactions to the rant, it got me thinking about setting. About whether I’d ever really paid much attention (due or otherwise) to place in my fiction.

I didn’t think I’d ignored setting; in fact I’d mentioned in a comment somewhere else, shortly before, that I knew of a brief passage in Merry-Go-Round in which I’d described an old hotel in a way which — yes — almost made it seem, in retrospect, like a character. But I couldn’t think of any examples where I’d done much more than (say) list the geographical features of a town, the layout of a room.

Eventually I filed the question away, and forgot about it.

I’ve mentioned before, here on RAMH, that I’ve been spending several weeks going back to look at the book which (as the cliche goes) I think I may be meant to write. The working title, which I’m not completely satisfied with but use because I’ve got to refer to it somehow for chrissake, is Grail. (Don’t be misled by that title, though. This isn’t a medieval romance or historical novel. Events for the most part occur in the mid-1980s.)

I’ve taken it through 2½ drafts so far (the first in 1991). In this pass, I’m just recording in a word-processing document certain key events and character traits from the drafted version(s), so I can look at Grail‘s whole structure with fresh eyes, away from the words in which it’s cast. This is based at least in part on the theory that I’ve learned a lot about writing in the last 17 years (more or less), and therefore will probably want not just to edit a fresh draft of the book but honest-to-God rewrite the thing, from scratch.

So anyway, I’m going through the text earlier today, transcribing information, and I came to a chapter whose events are described in flashback.

It’s a memory of a character named Albert (Al) Castle who is — to the extent anyone is — the central figure in the book. The time is May, 1945. Corporal Castle, Seventh Army, USA, is in Germany. And he goes out for a walk– a walk that will change his life.

And that’s when I came across the specific passage to which I link below. I don’t make any claims to this as an example of setting-as-character; but I’ve gotta say, I was surprised by how much attention I’d paid to setting here.

(By the way, the photos on that page are just meant to be illustrative. They don’t depict exactly where this action takes place — in one case, not even roughly the same time.)

[Link to Grail: Excerpt]
Share

Getting It Out of My System (2)

by 5 Comments

(Part 1 of this N-part series was here.)

'Skydiving' by amab7 of sxc.hu (click for original)Let’s see, where were we… Oh. Right. I’d just posted excerpts from the Prologue to Crossed Wires, my 1992 mystery, and Chapter 1 from its never-published sequel, Trapdoor. And I said that the differences between those two excerpts sprang from “something” that happened in the roughly one year that elapsed between their two writings — something whose principal result was to relax me.

This isn’t the story of how I came to write Crossed Wires. (A lot of that crosses over into autobiography — not relevant right now.) No, it’s the story of what happened after I wrote it.

[Read more…]

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights