Archive for April, 2009

Getting Started Writing Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Today, we move back to dis­cussing writ­ing, specif­i­cally, the begin­ning of a writ­ing career.  Considering I’m barely out of that phase, it’s really the only phase I feel con­fi­dent in dis­cussing.  So:

Read Bilal wrote last week:

I have been read­ing sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy for a long time. Given that I am a sci­ence grad stu­dent I also have some sci­en­tific back­ground. I come up with ideas to write a sci-​​fi story or novel. Then I think on them and develop a gen­eral direc­tion how­ever, time lim­i­ta­tions, English being my sec­ond lan­guage and gen­er­ally poor writ­ing skills (I don’t think peo­ple like sto­ries that sound like aca­d­e­mic papers) pre­vent me from doing any­thing with them. Are there any options out there to col­lab­o­rate or a way to start writ­ing? Thanks.

Whenever any­one brings up this sub­ject, I am reminded of an inci­dent from my child­hood when I was first show­ing inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion.  In about 8th Grade or so, the three junior highs held a joint writ­ing con­fer­ence for kids like myself.  They put us into sem­i­nars with authors based on the gen­res that we were inter­ested in.  I got to meet some great writ­ers and get some feed­back.  And I met James Gunn, and I’ll never for­get it.

James Gunn was not like the other writ­ers.  He came in swing­ing for the fences.  “Most of you here will never pub­lish a sin­gle thing,” was pretty much the first thing he said to us.  He pro­ceeded to explain, in detail, why it was dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to sell sto­ries at our age.    Why, if we could, we should give up writ­ing all together and find some­thing bet­ter to do.   He went on in this fash­ion for an hour, and I have a mem­ory, per­haps false, of some of the kids cry­ing.  Me, I was excited.  Because I could see exactly what he was doing.  He was test­ing us to see how seri­ous we were.

At the end of the class, he gave us his mail­ing address and said if we were still inter­ested, he would cri­tique a story for us.  I took Mr. Gunn up on that.  I expected at the time to receive a Mamatas-​​style sav­aging of the story.  Instead, I got back a very kind and thought­ful set of line com­ments for what was prob­a­bly a truly awful, awful bit of juvenelia.

So when peo­ple ask me about writ­ing, I think of James Gunn, and I think that per­haps I should do every­thing I can in my power to dis­suade you from tak­ing up writ­ing, espe­cially writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion short fic­tion.   Reasons why you shouldn’t:

  1. The pay is crap.  The pro rate is 5 cents a word, but can some­times go higher.  What was the pro rate in the 1950s?  3–5 cents a word.  You will not get rich, or even pay the bills, writ­ing SF short fiction.
  2. It’s hard, and it takes a long time to get good at.  I’m a rel­a­tively fast learner, and it still took me 5 years of writ­ing every week before I started to con­sis­tently write well enough to sell the work.  And it’s hard work, so it’s easy to fall out of habit.  It’s not like rid­ing a bicy­cle.  You can for­get, or at least get a lit­tle rusty.
  3. It will iso­late you from every­one you know.  Because it won’t be your job, but a side gig, you’ll be doing it in your spare time.  Spare time means you sac­ri­fice things, like time with your fam­ily, or time with your friends.  You might give up TV like Jay Lake.
  4. You’ll read a lot less than you used to.  That time can be spent writ­ing! Ironically, one good way to get bet­ter at writ­ing is to read a lot.
  5. Rejection sucks.  You’ll get rejec­tions.  A lot of them.  I think I heard once that Michael Swanwick has never been rejected, but the rest of us have hun­dreds of them.   Sometimes, they’re kind, and some­times they’re nasty and make you want to never write again.  See, even the edi­tors will test you.
  6. Nobody reads sci­ence fic­tion any­way.  Like, what, 4% of books sold are SF?  And short fic­tion, the biggest mar­ket has 25,000 sub­scribers last I checked, and prob­a­bly fewer now.  They’ve been shrink­ing con­sis­tently for years.  It’s a niche pur­suit at best.

Still with me?  The prospect of dying alone, pen­ni­less, in the gut­ters doesn’t frighten you?  Well, then you have the infec­tion, and the only thing I can do is try to give you some advice to help you progress through the stages of your illness.

First of all, don’t worry about the lan­guage issue.  If you can learn to tell a story, it doesn’t mat­ter what lan­guage you write it in, and edi­tors will look past some some­what clumsy writ­ing for a great story.  You could write in your native lan­guage, and find some­one who knows English bet­ter to translate.

Starting out, I do not rec­om­mend you try to col­lab­o­rate (except maybe with a trans­la­tor).  You need to mas­ter plot­ting, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, theme, world build­ing, and a dozen other skills, and you’re not going to do that if you’re shar­ing your writ­ing duties with some­one else, in my opin­ion.  These are things you will learn on your own.

Being a sci­ence grad­u­ate stu­dent is an advan­tage.  Editors are hun­gry for hard sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries.  If you can write them, you are prac­ti­cally guar­an­teed a career.    But remem­ber, they have to be good sto­ries first.  If you write a bad story with cool sci­ence, it doesn’t do you any good.  It’s going to be rejected.

As far as start­ing? Open a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram and type words together to form sen­tences, and sen­tences to form para­graphs.   You will prob­a­bly be ter­ri­ble at first.  99% of writ­ers are.  But the truth of it is, you get bet­ter through the act of writ­ing.  Jay Lake likes to say that writ­ing is a mus­cle and it needs to be exer­cised.  I agree with this notion.  The begin­ning of any writ­ing career is going to be about sta­mina train­ing and build­ing up some bulk.    You’re not going to be com­pet­ing in the Olympics for a very long time (to strain the metaphor).

Ideas.  You’ll hear this from every­body, so I might as well break the news to you.  Ideas for sto­ries are a dime a dozen.  Ideas can help put a story over the top, but they are not a good foun­da­tion for a story.  The foun­da­tion for a story is, well, story.  The com­pelling events of a prob­lem and the peo­ple that attempt to solve it.  That prob­lem could be built around a great idea, but with­out the peo­ple and their attempts and fail­ures to deal with it, it’s just an essay or a sci­ence fact article.

I thought when I was start­ing out that I was hot shit when it came to ideas.  I thought I had the best ideas of any new writ­ers I knew, and that it was all I needed.  I wish I could go back and start over again, real­iz­ing that the ideas should have taken a back seat to learn­ing storycraft.

Read and absorb every­thing.  Because once you become a writer, your brain becomes a black hole with a vora­cious appeti­tite for ideas and infor­ma­tion.  When I go to the doctor’s office, I don’t read SF mag­a­zines.  I pick up the mag­a­zine deal­ing with a topic I know the least about, say, Woodworking Monthly, because I never know if I’m going to want to write a story about a wood­worker.   A guy who builds cab­i­nets for a liv­ing doesn’t at first seem a likely can­di­date for a pro­tag­o­nist, but you’ll learn how to do it.  You’re going to use every bit of knowl­edge you ever obtain.  Your entire life becomes one giant research effort.

After all of that and  you’re still inter­ested in writ­ing?  Okay then.  Go, you have my bless­ing, what­ever that’s worth. Do it.  Put your butt in a chair and start typ­ing, or writ­ing with a pen, or what­ever method you pre­fer.  Do it, and do it con­sis­tently for sev­eral years.  Read every­thing you can–not just SF, but the classics.

I look for­ward to read­ing your first pub­lished story.  Drop me a line when it comes out!

So how about you all?  Do you have any inter­est­ing sto­ries to share about when you were just start­ing out with writ­ing, or what­ever career you pur­sue?    Any tips to add to mine here?

How to Communicate the Importance of a Modern Web Strategy to Skeptical Clients

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My col­lege pal, artist, and teacher Ed asked last week:

I belong to a pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion of teach­ers that has been slow to embrace inter­net tech­nolo­gies. I am inter­ested in propos­ing improve­ments to their web­site but I am unsure how to com­mu­ni­cate the ideas. What for­mat­ting do you sug­gest for a writ­ten pro­posal to an organization?

I’m going to broaden the topic a bit, because the answer to your last ques­tion is, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t try to con­vince an orga­ni­za­tion with a writ­ten pro­posal. In my work, which is pri­mar­ily done for indi­vid­u­als and not orga­ni­za­tions, I only write pro­pos­als to make it clear what we’re going to do after we’ve dis­cussed it. I do the con­vinc­ing before I write word one of a proposal.

In my expe­ri­ence, you’re not going to get very far with a prospec­tive client, or very far with con­vinc­ing your orga­ni­za­tion to update their web­site, if you haven’t sold them on the ben­e­fits. The eas­i­est way to do this, in my expe­ri­ence, is to start with hav­ing them iden­tify and acknowl­edge a problem.

For exam­ple, “we’re not get­ting any leads from the web­site.” Or, “I keep get­ting email about how hard our web­site is to nav­i­gate.” Management or the client can deal with con­crete specifics. They have goals, some­times ones that they don’t even know about, so your task in early meet­ings is to iden­tify what those goals are and then explain how an updated tech­nol­ogy can solve those problems.

Problems and solu­tions may be a good for­mat for a writ­ten pro­posal as well, if you’re still deter­mined to go down that route. Provide the prob­lem, and describe the solu­tion. Relate these solu­tions to the over­all goals of the com­pany. We should improve X because it will cause Y, which is good for the bot­tom line. Or whatever.

Explaining why cer­tain tech­nol­ogy is bet­ter than oth­ers, or why a web­site shouldn’t look like it was built in 1997 can be more spe­cific and dif­fi­cult. One thing I try to explain early on is that web­sites are about pro­ject­ing an image. Your web­site should reflect the image that you wish to con­vey to your clients, cus­tomers, what­ever. If your website’s image is that of an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, that might not be in line with your organization’s over­all strategies.

There’s a lot of resis­tance to change in the world in gen­eral. Change is costly, it’s hard, and it doesn’t always result in improve­ments. I can under­stand com­pletely why some peo­ple might become resis­tant to change because of that. How you con­vince them oth­er­wise is no dif­fer­ent a task than con­vinc­ing a per­son of any­thing. Listen to their objec­tions, con­sider them, and describe how you will over­come them.

Hopefully some of these basic strate­gies will help you, Ed. If worse comes to worse, find a com­pet­ing web­site that does it bet­ter, and pull up the two sites side by side, and let them stare at it for five min­utes. Then ask, “any ques­tions?” I’ve never tried that before, but I wanted to at my last day job. Let me know how that goes if you try it.

How about the rest of you? How would you approach a skep­ti­cal boss or client that a web­site or other tech­nol­ogy needs to be updated? Do you have any suc­cess sto­ries or hor­ror stories?

Michael Bishop and Starship Sofa

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Tony has put together a really spe­cial episode of Starship Sofa this week, with a read­ing of Michael Bishop’s story, writ­ten in mem­ory of his son who was one of the vic­tims of the Virginia Tech shooting.

From Tony over at Starship Sofa:

StarShipSofa nar­rates Vinegar Peace, a SF story wrote by Michael Bishop for his son Jamie Bishop who died two years ago at the Virginia Tech shooting.

Michael Bishop says:

I wrote “Vinegar Peace” — in August of 2007 — because I had to. Our 35-​​year-​​old son, Jamie, died on the morn­ing of April 16, 2007, as one of thirty-​​two vic­tims of a dis­turbed shooter on the cam­pus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Jamie, an accom­plished dig­i­tal artist who did lovely cov­ers for four or five of my books, was hold­ing forth in Room 2007 of Norris Hall in his German class more than two hours after his even­tual mur­derer had slain two stu­dents in a dor­mi­tory on another part of cam­pus. The admin­is­tra­tion failed to issue a warn­ing — a warn­ing that might well have saved many lives — in a timely fash­ion. However, some of its mem­bers secured their own offices and noti­fied their own fam­ily mem­bers of this ini­tial event; and so the worst school shoot­ing in the his­tory of the United States claimed our son, four other fac­ulty mem­bers (includ­ing a man, Dr Librescu, who had sur­vived the Holocaust and who held a table against his class­room door until all own stu­dents could escape), four of Jamie’s stu­dents, and twenty-​​one other young peo­ple in Norris Hall, not to men­tion the first two vic­tims in West Ambler-​​Johnston dorm. Another twenty-​​eight stu­dents were wounded by bul­lets or injured leap­ing from upper-​​story win­dows. Some of these young peo­ple will live with their injuries the rest of their lives

All of the admin­is­tra­tors, with the excep­tion of a woman who later died of a stroke or a heart attack (a death that my wife and I can’t help but attribute par­tially to the stress of liv­ing with the mis­takes of the President and the other Policy Group mem­bers), remain in their posi­tions. So much for account­abil­ity, and so much for justice.

In any case, “Vinegar Peace” grew from this dis­as­ter and from a grief that I can’t imag­ine ever lay­ing totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie’s loss every day in some pri­vate way, and we think con­tin­u­ally of all the other par­ents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a sim­i­lar bur­den with them until they die. We think, too, of the par­ents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States’s optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an inten­sity not a whit dif­fer­ent from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted poten­tial and dis­fig­ured lives result­ing from vio­lence every­where. And for­give me the inad­e­quacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote a story because I could not address either my out­rage or my grief in any other way.

Mike Bishop

StarShipSofa is very hon­oured and hum­bled to be allowed to bring this story to a wider audi­ence. I know I speak for the SF com­mu­nity when I say our hearts and prayers go out to Mike and Jeri and all the fam­i­lies who have to live with this grief every day.

StarShipSofa Show No 82: Vinegar Peace, or, The Wrong-​​Way Used-​​Adult Orphanage

As Ever,
Tony

Crucial Freelancer Skill: Estimating Your Time

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

In my busi­ness as a web designer, the first thing a client often wants from me, after we dis­cuss their project,  is an esti­mate.  For me, this is purely a mat­ter of esti­mat­ing how much time a pro­posed project will take.  But that’s not as easy as it sounds.

As I advance in skill, some projects tend to take longer.  They look nicer, but they cost more.  And that’s some­thing I failed to take into con­sid­er­a­tion on my most recent project.  I’m going to eat quite a bit of time because I over­stretched myself in the design and cod­ing phase.  It took me quite a few hours longer than I had esti­mated with the client, and I still have a cou­ple of promised com­po­nents to go too.  My mis­take, cer­tainly not the client’s.

Another mis­take I made was not doing my site pro­posal process.  In my site pro­posal, I out­line the dif­fer­ent aspects of the process and how many hours I think it will take for each area.  I named a sin­gle fig­ure for this rush job, and didn’t put enough time into eval­u­at­ing the job.

Every mis­take is a learn­ing oppor­tu­nity.  Here’s what I’ve learned from this project:

  • Always do a site pro­posal doc­u­ment first.  Setting the scope out in paper makes it clear when, if the client requests some­thing that isn’t in the pro­posal doc­u­ment, it will cost more.
  • Take into con­sid­er­a­tion that you will take more time as you become a bet­ter designer, spend­ing that time on lit­tle details that make a design go pop.
  • Research the tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity of fea­tures before you offer them and include them in your designs. (oops)  Otherwise you can end up burn­ing hours of your own time try­ing to fig­ure out if some­thing is even possible.

It’s been a long cou­ple of days this week, but this project is nearly done.  I’ll do some train­ing tomor­row and fig­ure out that last bit of tech­nol­ogy when the com­pany I con­tacted writes me back.   I’m look­ing for­ward to adding the project to my portfolio.

Now, to take a break for a cou­ple of hours and rest, before div­ing back into another project.

Make Your Own Path

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m step­ping in between the reg­u­larly sched­uled reader ques­tions posts to talk a lit­tle bit about a post that I wrote at a low point at the begin­ning of the month.  I try not to let my per­sonal emo­tional life affect things on the blog, but I was really strug­gling, so I turned to my blog for cathar­sis.  Project Awesome is still in effect, and so far, it has really had an impact.  Let me quote from my first post,    The Life and Times of Jeremiah Tolbert.

Struggling  isn’t depress­ing. I am tread­ing water, unable to move for­ward or back.  I can’t move from the place that I am in, in my life, until I have some path to a future.  There are a lot of paths but I am con­strained on which ones I can accept.  Right now, the only path I can accept is one that gives me enough income to sup­port Sarah and I while she returns to school full time for 1–2 years.  After that, she can get a teach­ing job and quite pos­si­bly I can actu­ally ded­i­cate myself to the pur­suits that I love.

(Note:  the real issue wasn’t income, it’s health insurance)

The notion that my path is con­strained was an arti­fact of my emo­tional state.  When you’re down, you start to feel like your options are lim­ited.  Project Awesome, and fak­ing opti­mism, has had a pro­found effect on my life so far.   While I haven’t had much suc­cess on the job front, I have picked up or am in the process of pick­ing up sev­eral free­lance jobs.  I feel bet­ter about myself in gen­eral. I  wake up in the morn­ing and I look for­ward to the day ahead of me.  I feel more con­nected with peo­ple, and while I still suf­fer from attacks of fear and anx­i­ety about the future, I have the sense now that I can do so much more than I have.  Possibilities have opened up that I couldn’t see before.

You make your own path.  Your paths aren’t just options pre­sented to you, from which you pas­sively choose.    I’m push­ing for­ward with my free­lanc­ing career, tak­ing on excit­ing new work, even though I know that ulti­mately, I need a dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion.  But the truth of the sit­u­a­tion is that I need health insur­ance and pre­scrip­tion ben­e­fits.  It don’t need a job–but at first glance, a job seems like the only way to get it.

Yesterday, I did some Googling and dis­cov­ered that there are some ways that free­lancers can get insur­ance.  I’m not sure if we will be turned down for them like we were rejected for pri­vate health insur­ance plans last sum­mer, but I’m will­ing to ask around and inves­ti­gate my options.  There are asso­ci­a­tions through which I can try to get a plan, and I’m going to check with the local cham­ber of commerce.

The les­son I’ve learned is that when some­thing seems impos­si­ble, it just means I haven’t googled the right search terms.  I can find my way around the bar­ri­ers that seem to block my path to fol­low­ing my bliss.    Creative problem-​​solving goes a long way.   Having opti­mism seems to be an impor­tant step in lever­ag­ing that cre­ative problem-​​solving skillset.  You have to believe, despite evi­dence to the con­trary, that your prob­lems are sur­mount­able.  Starting from that posi­tion makes a world of difference.

Thank you to every­one for your sup­port.  It’s helped put me on the right path, and some of you have been watch­ing me care­fully to help make course cor­rec­tions if it sounds like I’m drift­ing off track. For that, I can’t thank you enough.  You are true friends.

Previous Advice For Author Websites (and some new)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This week, we con­tinue our trend of answer­ing ques­tions from read­ers.  Right now I have enough ques­tions to get me through at least another week of posts.  So BlueTyson asked in the post of ques­tions last week:

Not for me, obvi­ously, but ‘here’s how to con­sider doing a site about a book/​author’?

I have writ­ten about this sub­ject in great detail in pre­vi­ous entries, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so.  I’ll break things down into a few points, with links to pre­vi­ous posts:

  • First of all, hire me.  I’m avail­able, I work at a rea­son­able rate, and I know author web­sites well.  Some of my clients include Mike Brotherton, Jay Lake, Rudi Dornemann, Shannon Page, and more.
  • Plug out of the way, read this post: 10 things your web­site should have if you’re an author.
  • When con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a pro­fes­sional or even build­ing it your­self, I’ve writ­ten this arti­cle advo­cat­ing for good, standards-​​based design:5 Reasons Why SF/​F Author Websites should be (more) standards-​​based
  • At one time, your web pres­ence was pretty much lim­ited to a web­site and a blog.  Now, we have microblog­ging sites such as Twitter and social net­work­ing sites such as Facebook.  It behooves the seri­ous author to main­tain a pres­ence on each one of these services–basically any­where you might have fans, you should be.   One of the things I have started doing is, rather than just build­ing a web­site for an author, I attempt to develop a com­pre­hen­sive online strat­egy for them to develop an audi­ence and to main­tain their read­er­ship.  It’s about build­ing rela­tion­ships through the tools that are out there.  Your web­site is impor­tant, but it’s no longer the only impor­tant thing.
  • That may sound like a big time com­mit­ment, and it can be.  A good exam­ple is Twitter, which can suck up time like noth­ing else.  But you don’t need to post to Twitter 50 times a day to be avail­able and acces­si­ble.  Y0u need to answer ques­tions directed at you, make a few new com­ments each day, and respond to direct mes­sages.  Share your work, your­self, and your inter­ests on these ser­vices.   One thing I do is make man­ag­ing all these sites cen­trally very easy but installing plu­g­ins into the con­tent man­age­ment.   No longer am I just the guy who builds the web­site.  I also help you man­age all these tools.   A good designer/​developer/​web mas­ter will do so as well.

Remember: like any other busi­ness, you should think about what pur­pose a web­site serves, and what are your goals.  Everything about your web­site should reflect those goals.  It could be as sim­ple as “to sell books” or it could be com­pli­cated like “to share what I know about web design, pho­tog­ra­phy, and writ­ing. Also, cool links.  Also, to show­case my pho­tog­ra­phy and my designs.  To build read­ers for my fic­tion, but in gen­eral to make friends out there.”   Okay–so that vision isn’t very coher­ent, and could use some focus­ing.  I’m work­ing on that.  In the mean­while, you’ll still get every­thing but the kitchen sink.

Winner of the Question Contest for a copy of Federations

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It was a very tough deci­sion to make, but I felt that C. S. Inman’s  ques­tions about decision-​​making in writ­ing which I answered on Wednesday was my favorite ques­tion I received.  Everyone had fan­tas­tic ques­tions, and Each day this week, I’ll be answer­ing a dif­fer­ent one of them.  So if I haven’t addressed your ques­tion yet, stay tuned.  I am work­ing my way through them this week.

Thanks again to every­one who par­tic­i­pated.  I really appre­ci­ate your help in giv­ing me writ­ing prompts.  If there’s ever any­thing you want to hear my thoughts on via the blog, don’t hes­i­tate to ask.  As I refo­cus on my free­lanc­ing and writ­ing, I intend to pro­vide high-​​quality con­tent post each day.   And maybe some pho­tos again soon too.  I know some of you will be happy to see them return.

It’s been hard to get much pho­tog­ra­phy done, actu­ally.  I’m try­ing to use as lit­tle unem­ploy­ment as I can by get­ting free­lance jobs instead.  I’ve a sur­pris­ing num­ber of peo­ple ask­ing me about my ser­vices, and every sin­gle one of them was referred to me by some­one who read this blog, or was them­selves some­one who read my blog or Twitter.  So thank you if you have been rec­om­mend­ing my ser­vices.  It means a lot to me, and if there’s ever any­thing I can do in return, please let me know.

I hope you’ve all had a good week­end.  Monday’s reg­u­lar con­tent post will be up shortly.

The Perfect Cover Letter: things to do and don’t

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Where “per­fect cover let­ter” is to mean the cover let­ters that work best for me in my edi­to­r­ial capac­ity at Escape Pod.  I may very well con­tra­dict the writ­ten guide­lines of Escape Pod when I describe what I believe to be the per­fect cover let­ter for a mag­a­zine sub­mis­sion.  If my advice is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent, I will get those updated.  Also, I have no idea what con­sti­tutes a good cover let­ter for sub­mit­ting your novel, but I imag­ine there are a lot of folks out there that can explain that to you.

So here is what I both put in my cover let­ters and what I would like to see in cover let­ters attached to sub­mis­sions I read, as well as some things I don’t want to see, and yet occa­sion­ally and most unfor­tu­nately do.

Do These Things

  • Contact Information.  A no-​​brainer.  If we can’t write you back  to accept or reject your story, the whole process falls apart.
  • A sub­ject line that starts with the word SUBMISSION: .  A lot of ran­dom junk can end up in the sub­mis­sions box.   Your story can eas­ily be mis­taken for that if you don’t put the word SUBMISSION in front of it.  This makes it eas­ier for us to sort, and any­thing that makes the editor’s job easy to do is some­thing you should do.
  • A salu­ta­tion with the editor’s name.  When in doubt, pick the edi­tor in chief.  Do not address “Editor.”
  • Here is the most cru­cial ele­ment that is often done badly.  A short one sen­tence list of recent pub­li­ca­tions, specif­i­cally any well known and accepted major pub­li­ca­tions.  This cor­re­lates mostly to pay, but some mar­kets have high pres­tige and lower pay. More on this in what not to do.
  • I think it’s okay to men­tion if you’ve attended a major work­shop like Clarion.  It is a neu­tral point with me, maybe a slight pos­i­tive.  At the very least, it tells me you’re serious.
  • For Escape Pod, where and when the story was orig­i­nally pub­lished.  We  do accept unpub­lished work, but think about your odds here.  Your story, which has not been tested, is going up against pretty much all the fic­tion that has ever been pub­lished, ever.  Originals are going to have to be really spe­cial.  Besides, we’re like free money if you crack a major mar­ket with a good story.  Selling to us first may pre­vent you from sell­ing to them later, but not vice versa.  We encour­age you to try print mar­kets before us.
  • A quick thank you, sign off, whatever.
  • Optional:  pro­vide me a con­text for who you are.  If we met at a con­ven­tion and shared a drink at the bar, it can’t hurt for you to remind me of that. It won’t nec­es­sar­ily help, but  it pro­vides a pos­i­tive context.

Don’t Do These Things

  • Do not include a sum­mary of the story.  I don’t know who is teach­ing writ­ers to do this for short story mar­kets, but if you find out, tell them I said stop or I’ll kick them square in the kid­neys.  Nothing is a surer sign to me of a writer who doesn’t know what they are doing than when I open up an email and am pre­sented with a sum­mary of the story before read­ing it.  DO NOT DO THIS.
  • I can­not stress this enough, but let me try.  DO NOT DO THIS. List every pub­li­ca­tion and every sale or credit to every for-​​the-​​love, semi-​​pro, and local news­pa­per pub­li­ca­tion that you have ever had.  Also every award nom­i­na­tion,   and that one time your mother gave you a com­pli­ment.  Remember here that  your cred­its bit should not be more than a para­graph.  If you have the cred­its to impress me, I most likely already know who you are and what you’ve pub­lished.  If you don’t have those cred­its, list­ing cred­its that I haven’t  heard of  does the oppo­site.  It’s the Bambi rule as applied to sub­mit­ting your work.  If you don’t have some­thing nice to say about your­self, omit it.  Here are the awards I care about:
    • Hugos
    • Nebulas
    • The Campbell
    • BSFA
    • That Canadian one
    • Writers of the Future, if it was actu­ally printed
  • Do not include non­fic­tion cred­its.  Your abil­ity to write an arti­cle does not  tend to have much bear­ing on whether or not you can tell a good story.  Sorry, I don’t really need to know about non­fic­tion credits.
  • Please do not tell me that this is your first sub­mis­sion ever or that you are unpub­lished.  If you leave out the cred­its bit, which you should if you have none, then you’re doing your­self a favor.  We know what it means, but it doesn’t draw as much atten­tion to itself as when you state it.  I am a con­scious and a sub­con­scious crea­ture, and I don’t want that knowl­edge influ­enc­ing how I approach your story.  Because it is true:  if I have faith in you as a writer, I will come to your story with more faith, and will be will­ing to look past a few early mis­takes to see where the story goes.  With writ­ers who are still green, those early mis­takes are not likely to be over­come later in the story.

And Now, The Truth

Some edi­tors will tell you that they don’t read cover let­ters at all, or at least until they have already read the story to the point of mak­ing a deci­sion.  I used to be in the for­mer camp.  I read them now at Escape Pod because I am look­ing to sort out and pare down my back­log quickly.  I search cover let­ters for pub­li­ca­tions in major pro­fes­sional venues, from authors who work I am famil­iar with, in order to set them aside for later read­ing.  Does this help them get pub­lished in Escape Pod?  Not as much as you might think.  Just because Stan Schmidt liked a story doesn’t mean I will.  And cer­tainly vice-versa–I have the rejec­tions to prove it.

Cover let­ters are the very first impres­sion your story makes on me.  I would like to say that I take each story as it is, but cover let­ters in all hon­esty can do three things.

  • No influ­ence.  A neu­tral cover let­ter.  This is what you should aim for.  Informational.
  • Hopeful.   You’re a vet­eran of the field and this story was nom­i­nated for the Nebula last year.  I will admit to being hope­ful about the story.
  • Discouraged.  You’ve botched the cover let­ter so badly, so I don’t have much hope that you’re going to nail the story itself.

Yes, we are influ­enced by a bad cover let­ter.  And we get excited about cred­its from big­ger mar­kets.  But none of these are the sole basis of how we judge your sub­mis­sion.  We still read the story, or as much of it as we need to anyway.

Remember that it never counts against you to just leave them off entirely (but please still include the con­tact infor­ma­tion).  When I was just start­ing out, I didn’t even write a cover let­ter until I had a few sales from mar­kets the edi­tors would know.  Then I started includ­ing my very short cover letter.

So I hope that’s proved a lit­tle use­ful.  What do you think about cover let­ters?   Have you had good or  bad expe­ri­ences with them?  If you’re an edi­tor, feel free to point out in the com­ments where we dis­agree.  I don’t really pro­pose the above as th

You have the rest of today to hit me up with ques­tions over on Tuesday’s post.  I’ll be announc­ing the win­ner of the copy of Federations on Monday.

How to Build a Good Critique Group

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

So, to con­tinue the theme of writ­ing advice, we move on to another ques­tion from Monday’s thread, this time from the LJ mir­ror by alaneer:

Here’s a prob­lem: how does one go about find­ing a small crit group whose mem­ber have to give crits in less than 2–3 weeks? Or form­ing a crit group like that.

This is a good ques­tion.  I  have no idea how any­one man­aged to learn sto­rycraft  in the age before the inter­net.  SF writ­ers were prob­a­bly spread over as much geog­ra­phy as they are today, so how did they cri­tique each other?  Postal mail?  In-​​person work­shops?    They’d have to meet some­how in the first place.  Ah, so they went to cons?  Those cost time and money.  Luckily,  we were born at a time where we could take advan­tage of nearly free, instan­ta­neous global com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and that means find­ing peo­ple will­ing to be in a cri­tique group is the least of your prob­lems.  Finding the right peo­ple is much more dif­fi­cult.    Here are some tech­niques that have helped me.

Join one of the larger estab­lished work­shop groups such as the Online Writer’s Workshop or Critters.    Personally, I’m an alum­nus of the OWW.  So is Sarah Prineas, Elizabeth Bear, Charles Coleman Finlay, and many oth­ers.  There’s lit­tle doubt in my mind that the expe­ri­ence of putting your work tho­rugh the OWW will improve it.    Will it get you a book deal or a pro sale?  Maybe.  You’re doing most of the work, but if you lis­ten to what peo­ple have to say, I think you will come closer sooner than you would have on your own.

When you first join these work­shops, you’re just throw­ing stuff at the wall and see­ing what sticks.  You have no idea who is going to read your story and pro­vide a cri­tique, at least in the case of the OWW.  While you’re wait­ing, you should go find work that you think is at least at your level of skill, if not sev­eral lev­els higher.  Provide a thought­ful cri­tique.  They won’t always return it, but some­times they will see some­thing they like in your work as well, and this is how you start build­ing ind­vid­i­ual relationships.

I no longer use the OWW, but I have kept in touch with many of the writ­ers from that work­shop for the pur­poses of cri­tiquing and of course due to the fact that they’re my friends.   In any large group work­shop, I think tal­ent has a way of find­ing like tal­ent.  Groups are formed within, and they can be exported eas­ily from the larger work­shop.  You will out­grow together the lower-​​level issues that work­shops address par­tic­u­larly well.

Another option is to just ask authors who you admire if you could trade cri­tiques with them.    This is how Jay Lake and I ended up trad­ing com­ments on each other’s stories.

Jay taught me a very valu­able notion, which was par­tic­u­larly help­ful when I was writ­ing a story a week or more and still look­ing for feed­back.  That was to build a list of first readers/​critiquers, but make sure they know you don’t expect them to read every­thing you send out.  And vice versa.  Sometimes peo­ple have time, some­times they don’t.  In an ideal sit­u­a­tion, you’ll have enough peo­ple on your list that each piece of writ­ing you send out will get you sev­eral solid cri­tiques that will help you revise or deter­mine whether to send the story out at all.

I don’t really believe in form­ing groups per­say anymore–although I have been part of them from time to time, and I sus­pect groups like Blue Heaven are really great for what they do.  For the way I write, I just pre­fer to build indi­vid­ual, one-​​on-​​one rela­tion­ships.  Any time you get more than four writ­ers in a group, you will have pol­i­tics, and I have lit­tle tol­er­ance for that myself.  Maybe you like it? If so, form a group, set up a list-​​serve for email and go to town.

Any of the meth­ods above will help you with your ulti­mate goal, which is find­ing peo­ple with which to col­lab­o­ra­tively improve your work.   Also, you’ll prob­a­bly make good friends.  But I should point out, a good cri­ti­quer is not nec­es­sar­ily a good friend, and the oppo­site is often even less pos­si­ble.  Depending on how you react to the crit­i­cism, you end up hat­ing your best cri­ti­quers, but in a broc­coli kind of way.

Good luck.  Anyone who is inter­ested in trad­ing cri­tiques with me need only drop me a line.  I can’t agree to do so with every­one who asks, but I try to do so. I have a lot less time to cri­tique now that I am edit­ing Escape Pod.

Five (and One Silly) Ideas For Avoiding the Paradox of Choice in Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have often writ­ten about a con­cept pio­neered by Barry Schwartz called the para­dox of choice.  Basically, the idea is that the more choices you give peo­ple, the more likely they are to be par­a­lyzed with inde­ci­sion.  It’s eas­ier to make up you mind when you have fewer choices.   In yesterday’s post, C.S. Inman asked the fol­low­ing question:

When I begin a story, I do a good job with char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, with set­ting up engag­ing con­flicts, with pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­pounded prob­lems and solu­tions. From what they tell me, peo­ple gen­er­ally want to keep turn­ing pages.

Unfortunately, when I’m writ­ing past the “begin­ning” I have dif­fi­culty choos­ing which plot options should take up those sub­se­quent pages. The “mid­dles” of my sto­ries are a cross­roads where I feel like no mat­ter which path I let the pro­tag­o­nist take, I’m miss­ing some­thing bet­ter on one of the other paths. It doesn’t help when I some­times fin­ish a short story (or a chap­ter of a novel) and real­ize I have to delete 2,000 words and go a dif­fer­ent direc­tion because it’s totally awe­some, and how didn’t I see it before I wasted all that time?

Do you have any ideas about how I can either 1. Stop being a pansy and just pick one and like it or 2. Discover which path is going to be the most sat­is­fy­ing BEFORE I write the wrong one?

First of all, don’t be dis­cour­aged by this. The para­dox of choice hap­pens to every­one. I can’t tell you how many times I have stood in front of the fridge and stared at the con­tents right after shop­ping, unable to make up my mind what to cook.  In writ­ing, it’s no dif­fer­ent. What’s hap­pen­ing here is that you’re com­ing to a point where you have too many choices about the direc­tion your story can take. The key  is to nar­row down your choices, and to do so in a way that you make deci­sions and choices about the direc­tion of your story that result in a good story.  Here are a some ideas to help you do this:

  1. First of all, keep in mind that there’s no “best” solu­tion. You’ll like one more than another one day, and the next day, you’ll think the oppo­site. It’s of course all very sub­jec­tive. So relax about it and just get your first draft out. As other ideas occur to you, keep a par­al­lel doc­u­ment run­ning, and jot down your alter­na­tive paths that come to you. After your first or sec­ond draft, go back and see if explor­ing any of those notions will be any better.
  2. It can help some­times to not only have a begin­ning to a story when you start writ­ing, but to also have an idea of an end­ing. I used to think this was impos­si­ble for me to do, but the more I write now, the more I real­ize that most sto­ries only have a few sat­is­fy­ing end­ings avail­able to them once you know the setup. It’s much harder to write a story in which the pro­tag­o­nist fails at suc­ceed­ing against their cen­tral story prob­lem. It’s not impos­si­ble, but you need to know you’re going to do that when you set out writ­ing the story, because there has to be some sat­is­fac­tion to the reader in their failure–they have to suc­ceed at some­thing greater, some­thing they didn’t even nec­es­sar­ily know they wanted–but the reader should have had an inkling along the way even if the pro­tag­o­nist did not. Foreshadowing is much eas­ier to do if you know what you’re fore­shad­ow­ing. You can always write to the end and then go back and add the fore­shad­ow­ing in in a later draft, or–
  3. Maybe you shouldn’t think of those 2,000 words you cut as wasted. Some writ­ers (not many) can write a story in a sin­gle draft, and make minor edits, then send it off and sell it. Me, I have found that I write any­where from 3–10 drafts of a story before I get it accepted some­where. Without fail, the more drafts I put into a story, the more I stand a chance of suc­ceed­ing in my ulti­mate goal, which is see­ing the story pub­lished. The key here is to adjust your expec­ta­tions and to give your­self room to exper­i­ment. The 2,000 words that don’t make it into a final draft of the story can be just as impor­tant, if not more impor­tant, than the ones that do.
  4. There’s a gen­eral rule of thumb that’s often offered as writ­ing advice, which is, when you need to make a deci­sion like a char­ac­ter aspect, or a plot ele­ment, you should not go with your first notion. Or your sec­ond. Or even you third. It some­times takes push­ing past the first sev­eral ideas that come to mind because the ideas that most eas­ily come to mind are typ­i­cally cliches. Even if you at first don’t think they are, keep push­ing for an alter­na­tive anyway.Try writ­ing a story in which each time you need to make a deci­sion, before writ­ing, you come up with three ideas, and dis­card the first two you think of. See where that leads you.
  5. When faced with which direc­tion to take with your plot, I some­times go with a pretty sim­ple rule: which direc­tion will be more wildly fun? If you’re more of a lit­er­ary bent, I sup­pose you could choose which direc­tion will more prop­erly illus­trate the theme or explore the nature of your char­ac­ter. Stop and con­sider your deci­sions in light of what your goal in telling the story is. Whichever direc­tion will raise the stakes the most with­out being ridicu­lous. You can’t risk the world or the uni­verse in every sin­gle story, but you can almost always raise the stakes more than you think. Higher stakes often lead to a much more com­pelling story.
  6. If all else fails, you can always flip a coin! Or roll a die. I will admit to hav­ing rolled the dice lit­er­ally when hav­ing trou­ble mak­ing a deci­sion about a story. Hey, it works in RPGS, right?

Ultimately, I think a com­bi­na­tion of all of the above can be put to use. I’m just going to guess here, but I sus­pect Inman is not an out­line writer. I started out writ­ing sto­ries with­out an out­line, and actu­ally, many of my sales were writ­ten with­out one. Now, I almost always out­line and write pretty exten­sive world build­ing notes before I start the story. It’s pos­si­ble that sim­ply mak­ing the switch to writ­ing from an out­line, even for some­thing as short as a short story, will solve this prob­lem for you. Either way, enjoy it the process. It’s a huge part of what makes writ­ing so much damned fun.

If you have a ques­tion about any of the areas I write about here on the blog, or even areas I don’t, add them to this post from yes­ter­day. You can win a copy of Federations, the new anthol­ogy edited by John Joseph Adams con­tain­ing my story “The Culture Archivist.” I’ll be tak­ing sug­ges­tions on that post until Friday, and will declare the win­ner on Monday. There have been some great ques­tions so far, and I look for­ward to hear­ing more.