Archive for July, 2009

Writing: Your Subconscious and You

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have a very rocky rela­tion­ship with my subconscious.

On the one hand, my sub­con­scious is the font of my best ideas.  Even when I writ­ing some­thing that has come mostly from ego-​​brain think­ing, it inserts cool things, catches ideas that I missed the first time around.  It’s some­times like hav­ing a bet­ter writer sit­ting on your shoul­der catch­ing your missed opportunities.

On the other hand,  my subconscious’s inter­ests are not always mar­ketable inter­ests.  My sub­con­scious feeds me sto­ries about Kansas about once a week.  The state needs to start writ­ing me checks for the PR.  Lord knows they need a pos­i­tive face what with all the wackos that pop­u­late my home state.  So I write a lot of sto­ries about Kansas or set in Kansas. I’ve yet to find a mar­ket for that stuff, and I doubt any­one wants to read about it.  And yet my sub­con­scious per­sists.  I’m wrestling with Potatohead (that’s what I call my sub­con­scious) right now about a story that involves mole men and Kansas.    Excited to read that one? Yeah, didn’t think so. I keep telling him, we need postsin­gu­lar­ity sto­ries that use the entire galaxy as their set­ting.  We need fan­tasy sto­ries that take place in the New York sub­way sys­tem.  What does he feed me?   A story about a woman whose abu­sive dead hus­band comes back made out of pota­toes after being buried int he garden.

Yeah, I actu­ally wrote that one.  The rejec­tion Nick gave it at Clarkesworld was enough to put me off writ­ing for a year.  Not one you’ll prob­a­bly ever read. There are a lot of these.

On rare occa­sions, one of us presents an  idea that the other finds just as fas­ci­nat­ing.  My story “The Yeti Behind Me”  is a good exam­ple.  The idea of ghosts of extinct ani­mals popped up in con­ver­sa­tion.  I felt the indi­ca­tion of Potatohead’s inter­est in the form of an explo­sion just behind my right eye.  Potatohead is not sub­tle.   But if we agree on some­thing straight away, I know it’s got legs.

Problem has been, lately, I have stopped trust­ing Potatohead.  He’s fix­ated on the same things much of the time.  He’s not giv­ing me ideas that I can get excited about.  And vice versa.  I spend all day think­ing of story ideas and ask­ing “Hey, Potatohead, what do you think of this one?”  His response is gen­er­ally a resound­ing “meh.”

I feel like the two parts of my brain are at war lately  Each one knows some­thing use­ful about writ­ing, but they are not agree­ing on things nearly often enough for me to feel like I’m mov­ing for­ward with my “career.”  I can write sto­ries based pri­mar­ily on the input of one half, but those sto­ries are flat, and aren’t going to take me anywhere.

There’s one other, unre­lated thing about Potatohead that ticks me off.  When I’m asleep, peo­ple can talk directly to Potatohead.  I have had long and var­ied con­ver­sa­tions in my sleep that I con­ciously have no rec­ol­lec­tion of.  The thing that gets me into trou­ble is, Potatohead doesn’t know that I/​we are married.

Sarah has come to bed late on sev­eral occa­sions, only to see me shoot upright in bed and demand “Who is that?”

“It’s me,” she says.

“Me WHO?” Potatohead asks.

“Sarah,” she says, begin­ning to be a bit more exasperated.

“Sarah WHO?”

And that’s the last straw.  “Your WIFE,” she snaps.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh.  Okay,” says Potatohead and down he goes back to where he came.  And the only indi­ca­tor I have that this con­ver­sa­tion ever hap­pened is that my wife is pissed at me all morn­ing for no appar­ent reason.

How does one force his or her two minds to sit down and come to some kind of ami­ca­ble agree­ment?  We have crap that needs to get worked out if we are going to con­tinue to make a career of work­ing together.  This part­ner­ship is turn­ing sour, and I need to straighten things out quickly.  I also need to get it through Potatohead’s half-​​brain that ask­ing “Sarah WHO?” is not a good thing for either of us.  If any­one has any sug­ges­tions, I’d love to hear them.

On Richness

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Lately, I’ve been try­ing to iden­tify where my writ­ing really dif­fers from the stuff that’s great, great writ­ing. There are a hell of a lot of places, but I’ve fix­ated for a while now on this con­cept of richness.

The sto­ries that *really* blow me away exude infor­ma­tion and con­fi­dence. They are full of a rich­ness of detail that is bog­gling. Telling details show up in nearly every sen­tence. The entire story works to con­vince you of this place, these char­ac­ters, these events.

A great exam­ple of a story with amaz­ing rich­ness was David Moles’ “Finnisterra.” I think China Mieville’s nov­els demon­strate it pretty well too. I see it in many of the sto­ries I have read by Gord Sellar as well. Basically, I see rich­ness as one of the defin­ing qual­i­ties of award-​​winning writing.

The rich telling details are rarely fab­ri­cated whole cloth. They’re believ­able because they draw from some real world knowl­edge. David uses mul­ti­ple lan­guages and cul­tures effort­lessly because he knows them inti­mately. China writes about cities because he dwells in them com­pletely. London is not so dif­fer­ent from his fan­tas­ti­cal cities. And Gord is so immersed in Korean cul­ture it can’t help but ooze onto the page in a totally engag­ing way.

I strug­gle with rich­ness in par­tic­u­lar because I’m not sure there’s any way to learn rich­ness other than to immerse your­self in a sub­ject like they do. I think the rea­son many new writ­ers work fall flat for me is because the only thing they are immers­ing them­selves in is writ­ing and SF/​F. The mark of some­one who really wants to get out there seems to be some­one who takes pas­sion for some­thing else and really dri­ves that home in a story.

There may be veins of rich­ness to tap into from my life, but I’m not sure. It leaves me wish­ing I could pack up and do some for­eign travel for six months all while read­ing trav­el­ogues and his­tory books. I feel like I just don’t have enough packed into my brain that isn’t about com­put­ers and web design that can be used to enrich my work.

So that’s the next big thing I’m work­ing on in improv­ing my writ­ing. What’s yours?

Why You Should Apply to Attend LaunchPad Next Year

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

TheLaunchPad Astronomy Workshop has been held three times now, each sum­mer in Laramie, Wyoming. This project is the brain­child of Jim Verley and astronomer/​SF writer Mike Brotherton. The goal of the work­shop is to help expand the audi­ence for sci­ence lit­er­ate fic­tion and other pop­u­lar endeav­ors. This year, we not only had sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers in atten­dance, but also come­di­ans and poets. Utlimately, I think it would be great to have some screen­writ­ers for film and tele­vi­sion attend­ing as well. Especially con­sid­er­ing how much we harp on Armageddon dur­ing the workshop.

The goal of the work­shop is not to turn you into an Analog–style hard SF writer. The goal is to make sure you under­stand some of the basics of astron­omy so that, even if you’re writ­ing fan­tasy, you can get those details right. So that maybe you will *want* to write a story about the phases of the moon or about orbital mechan­ics in some way. Each year, sev­eral straight-​​fantasy authors attend and get just as much out of it as the nerds like me who already have a decent amount of astron­omy sci­ence under our belts. I even had one major mis­con­cep­tion of mine cor­rected. About the Earth’s axial tilt.

It’s a week of intense class­work, tele­scope view­ing when the weather works, fun meals, a hike, and gen­er­ally just get­ting to social­ize with amaz­ing peo­ple (many who hap­pen to be writ­ers). It will feel like, to quote Gord Sellar, a “pig has shit galax­ies into your head.” Ultimately, it’s knowl­edge, and knowl­edge has a way of mak­ing you a bet­ter, richer writer.

When appli­ca­tions open up again next year, I will post about it here, and I expect all of you to flood Mike and Jim with appli­ca­tions. Heh heh.

On July 20th, 1969…

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I wasn’t even a gleam in my father’s eye. Or, as my mother some­times claims, my genetic mate­r­ial had yet to be manip­u­lated and pre­pared for inser­tion by the grays who would abduct her 7 years later.

Still… yay, Moon land­ing! Had hoped I would see some­thing play out like that in my life time, but I don’t really expect it now.

Light Blogging This Week

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I prob­a­bly won’t have the usu­ally sched­uled posts up on Wednesday and Friday. I’m going up to Laramie to par­tic­i­pate and help with the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop and I don’t think the sched­ule will allow me the time to blog.  Some of you will be very pleased at this, judg­ing from the grum­bles I’ve got­ten on Twitter this week about my last post.  Enjoy your vaca­tion from me!

Maybe I will actu­ally start writ­ing hard sci­ence fic­tion after Launchpad.  Not likely, but who knows.  Maths are hard.  Much eas­ier to just make up stuff!

BREAKING: F&SF’s Gordon Van Gelder Does Not Want to Drink The Blood of Your Children

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Last week, we had a lovely mini-​​controversy over the poorly announced inten­tions of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to launch a work­shop for newer writ­ers run by Gardner Dozois.

The details that we were able to gather were:

  • The work­shop will be online.
  • The work­shop will be lim­ited at first to around 100 writers.
  • Gardner will be able to choose up to 3 sto­ries a year from the work­shop sub­mis­sions to appear in F&SF.

The details that we do not know:

  • When will the work­shop launch?
  • How much will it cost?
  • How much face-​​time will you get with the work­shop admin with 99 other students?

The issues that  weren’t clear to some:

  • Whether or not Gordon would pay for the sto­ries that come from the work­shop like any other story
  • Whether the cost of join­ing the work­shop would in fact include the price of the soul of your first-​​born child?
  • Whether this is a vio­la­tion of Yog’s Law, in which money flows from the writer to the pub­lisher? (“money flows to the writer”)

The con­tro­versy to me was exactly the same as Amazon’s screw-​​up a few weeks back regard­ing the data­base and adult/​gay con­tent being removed from list­ings.  It boiled down to this:  poor infor­ma­tion con­trol and release.  It was a PR fubar.

Perhaps I assumed the bes in that work­shop­pers selected for the pub­li­ca­tion would be paid just like any new writer, that Gordon was not plan­ning to sell my unborn chil­dren into slav­ery to the Mi Go  and that Yog’s Law was per­haps sim­ply bent, but not in a way that was unprece­dented.  Ultimately, I shouldn’t have to assume, nor should any­one else.  Once again, the issue is that, in the absence of real infor­ma­tion, the inter­net will invent a con­tro­versy.  WhateverFails are spon­ta­neously gen­er­at­ing every­where on the web because a rumor has got­ten out of hand and real infor­ma­tion has not stepped into to fill the void.

What could F&SF Done Differently?

Gordon and his staff prob­a­bly should have acted quickly to cor­rect any mis­in­for­ma­tion being spread (and to their credit, they did so, but I don’t think they did it com­pre­hen­sively enough).  He should have issued a full press release in the first place, out­lin­ing every detail of the project, from cost, to dura­tion to “here’s the web­sites, go sign up.”  The first any­one should have heard of this project should have been when every detail was sorted out and  ready to go.  If you are vague on any aspect, it just gives peo­ple an oppor­tu­nity to see bog­garts where there prob­a­bly aren’t any.

Information about this seemed to leak via hearsay on one blog, and the con­tro­versy built rapidly in this infovoid.  Damage con­trol would have been to imme­di­ately release all infor­ma­tion.  Unfortunately, I think not every aspect of the project as nailed down, so it seemed that they were rushed to release what they knew so far, which wasn’t and as far as I know, still isn’t every­thing.  I put my name on the list of inter­ested par­ties and I look for­ward to learn­ing more.

In gen­eral, I think F&SF needs to con­trol its online pub­lic rela­tions bet­ter (I imag­ine Gordon might think ‘great, yet another new job I don’t need and didn’t sign up for.’  Sorry, man. ).  The prob­lem is, and jus­ti­fi­ably so, they see relat­ing with the pub­lic online to be an antag­o­nis­tic thing.  n this posts, I am care­ful not to say ‘Gordon should do…” which is way too easy with F&SF.  I’m try­ing to say “the orga­ni­za­tion should do…”  Because I know F&SF has a team of peo­ple, pri­mar­ily dri­ven by Gordon.  Being the only editor-​​owned mag­a­zine of the Big Three in the field, its easy to place the blame or put a face to any per­ceived prob­lem with the ‘zine.  Gordon, for bet­ter and for worse, is F&SF in the pub­lic eye.  You can’t nec­es­sar­ily do that with the Dell Magazines. Their edi­tors gen­er­ally aren’t mak­ing the busi­ness deci­sions.  So the crit­i­cisms of F&SF often come across as too personal.

That’s unfor­tu­nate.  F&SF is a good mag­a­zine and Gordon is a great edi­tor.  The orga­ni­za­tion needs to reset their inter­ac­tions with the online world entirely, and design­ing a good PR plan would be a nice place to start, in my opin­ion.  I have some ideas of how to go about that which I will go into in more detail at a later date.

What Could We the Public Done Differently?

We should be bet­ter at real­iz­ing when we have par­tial infor­ma­tion and we should be less eager to jump to con­clu­sions based on that par­tial infor­ma­tion.  Perhaps our first instinct should not be to write a blog post or to start a com­ment thread on a forum.  Perhaps, when we have sus­pi­cions or are con­sid­er­ing cast­ing asper­sions, we should con­tact the par­ties involved over email or phone and ask our ques­tions.  If we don’t get sat­is­fy­ing answers, then maybe that is the time to scream from the rooftops.  Also, apply some com­mon sense.  What in Gordon or Gardner’s long career would ever make you think they weren’t going to pay writ­ers?  Yes, it’s impor­tant to make sure you get paid as a writer–but these guys are NOT the enemy. I have dis­agreed with Gordon on mat­ters elec­tronic in the past, but I know that he is a con­sum­mate professional.

This lat­est con­tro­versy is made up of mis­takes on both sides.  The bur­den of pro­vid­ing clear, accu­rate, and com­plete infor­ma­tion rests with the publisher/​project run­ners.  The bur­den of the rest of us is to not jump to assump­tions with­out ask­ing ques­tions first when we receive only par­tial information.

Keeping an Ideas File

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When I first started writ­ing seri­ously, I kept a lit­tle text file on my desk­top where I would rapidly jot down ideas for the premises of sto­ries. Eventually, this turned into a note­book that I tried and failed to carry around. Then it turned into a col­lec­tion of ran­dom doc­u­ments on Google Docs. It’s cur­rent incar­na­tion is a folder on my EverNote account.

With ever­note, I can record voice notes, type ideas in on the com­puter or my phone, include pho­tos, and more. Pretty much any­thing I want to remem­ber and have acces­si­ble from any­where, I throw into Evernote these days, and that includes story ideas.

But I wanted to talk about the impor­tance of cap­tur­ing more than just the premise for sto­ries. I’ve started try­ing to cap­ture any kind of fas­ci­nat­ing tid­bit that I think might be use­ful at some point. When I see a per­son with a trait that I think would make an inter­est­ing con­cept for a char­ac­ter, I put it in. Collect every­thing, because I am find­ing that when inspi­ra­tion is run­ning a lit­tle low, these notes can be the ker­nel of cre­ative energy I need to steam­roll through a project.

I also carry around a flexible-​​cover Moleskine note­book, and I do jot down story ideas in here, but I also use that for web­site thumb­nail sketches, doo­dles, and more. Because I do all my writ­ing on a com­puter, it works very well for me to have this cen­tral, search­able tool for my ran­dom bits of ideas.

Somtimes, writ­ing a story is like play­ing Katamari Damacy. You just keep rolling the sticky ball of your brain around until it accu­mu­lates enough junk to let you go to the next level.

Another Appearance on Drabblecast

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Fresh off my appear­ance from last week, I have another appear­ance on Drabbelcast. It’s another story from the Daily Cabal, a short tale of cre­ta­ceous ocean ghosts. I keep return­ing to that well, just like I keep return­ing to gigan­tap­ithi­cus. Some things loom large in my ima­gia­tion I guess.

I just glanced through the com­ments on last week. It’s the usual mix of com­pli­men­tary and less than com­pli­men­tary. One par­tic­u­lar bit that would nor­mally upset me but has only left me amused is “dull.” It finally sinks in for once that it’s just one (or maybe a cou­ple) people’s opin­ions. The edi­tor didn’t think it was dull, and that’s pretty much all I care now! Financial neces­sity really hard­ens you to pub­lic opinion.

The tri­fecta also includes two other good stories:

Aqua Vita by Stephanie Campisi
Jake and the Carpet Sharks by Michelle Howarth

This Week’s Editoral Advice: Do Not Reply to Rejection Letters

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This is still hap­pen­ing from time to time with my work for Escape Pod. I had kind of thought by now that argu­ing with an edi­tor over their com­ments in a rejec­tion let­ter was com­monly con­sid­ered a bad idea to be avoided at all costs, but I’m still get­ting these at Escape Pod. Let me put it to you all straight.

Nothing makes me more dis­in­clined to pur­chase your work than you argu­ing with me about me not buy­ing a story.

There are a lot of minor mis­takes you can make as a slush writer. I over­look most of them. For instance, we get sent things as attach­ments when our guide­lines call for them to be in the body of an email. I might men­tion it briefly to the sub­mit­ter, but I don’t hold it against them much. There are so many dif­fer­ing e-​​submissions sys­tems that I can under­stand why this hap­pens. No big deal.

But when you decide to quib­ble with an edi­tor over the points of his or her rejec­tion let­ter, you’re cross­ing a pro­fes­sional line. You are enti­tled to your opin­ion. It’s a good thing if you have enough faith in your story that you will con­tinue to send it out, because one editor’s opin­ion doesn’t amount to much, which is why I say my edi­to­r­ial com­ments are not intended as writ­ing advice.

The main thing it will lead to is an edi­tor not pro­vid­ing you any detailed feed­back at all. We will sim­ply write form rejec­tions for your work from then on out. Because noth­ing is more annoy­ing to me, at least, than some­one decid­ing to bicker over a rejec­tion. It’s not going to change our minds. It’s only going to make you look worse. So we’ll stop giv­ing you points to quib­ble with. This is not good for you. We don’t want to do this.

It is a no-​​win sit­u­a­tion for the writer.

So just don’t do it. Stick to cre­at­ing your edi­tor voodoo dolls and slag­ging us off to your cats. Take out your frus­tra­tions another way, even if the edi­tor is dead wrong. It doesn’t matter.

And another thing– I would rather not see replies, even short thank yous, at all. It clut­ters up my inbox, which I work very hard to keep orga­nized, and your con­tin­u­ing sub­mis­sions with us is thanks enough. Tack what you want to say on to the cover let­ter of your next sub­mis­sion. I would pre­fer that.

Also, Machine Gun Submissions

Oh, and finally, one last thing– it does you no good to send me story after story after story when I’m read­ing them quickly, when you get rejected every time. You should cool it and wait a bit between sub­mis­sions. Probably want to wait and let me for­get about how I rejected 3 sto­ries in an hour. Because I do notice, and I know other edi­tors do too, espe­cially with e-​​submissions at ‘zines with rel­a­tively fast turn­around times. Nick Mamatas even had a sub­mis­sions limit. I’m con­sid­er­ing imple­ment­ing one if this keeps up. At the very least, you’ll stop get­ting such rapid replies.

Don’t Damage Your Brand as a Marketing Twhore

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Twitter is fast becom­ing a pim­ple on the back­side of my social net­work­ing life. It’s always been an odd thing, under attack by spam­mers of the tra­di­tional sort as well as non­tra­di­tional. I block social media experts, SEO experts, and porn stars on a daily basis. They don’t care what I have to say, they just want to sell me stuff. Twitter’s a great way to share things, but straight-​​up prod­uct pitch­ing has been really get­ting on my nerves.

But in the past month, I’ve noticed an even more unset­tling trend on Twitter. I am not going to be polite about how I describe this. I’m call­ing this twhor­ing. A lot of other activ­ity on twit­ter has been assigned this term, but this is a bet­ter sub­ject for that descriptor.

What is Twhoring and Twimping?

Twhoring is hap­pily advertising/​spamming prod­uct names as hash tags to your entire fol­low­ers list for the off-​​chance that you might win some piece of tech. Twhoring ranks lower than actu­ally adver­tis­ing or pros­ti­tu­tion because adver­tis­ers and pros­ti­tutes actu­ally get paid for what they do. Twhores tweet away with a slim chance of get­ting any­thing for their pub­lic­ity efforts.

The same sort of peo­ple who will com­plain about ads on a web­site or on a TV show seem to lose their senses when pre­sented with an easy oppor­tu­nity to “win” a Apple prod­uct. You might think you’re clever and start tag­ging the hash­tag to every one of your tweets. This is what the twimps like Boxyspace and Moonballz want you to do. Strut their stuff, spread their brand­ing far and wide. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll give you a snack cake. A Twinkie perhaps?

It doesn’t help that I loathe both com­pa­nies involved in twimp­ing out their prod­ucts with twhores. “Build your own web­site” com­pa­nies gen­er­ally offer shoddy prod­ucts and com­pete with pro­fes­sional designer/​developers such as myself. No drag and drop sys­tem is going to build you a bet­ter web­site than some­one who has done it for years. And if it does, then you’re prob­a­bly a designer your­self and you didn’t need their soft­ware any­way. But that’s beside the point.

You may think that tag­ging your posts once and a while doesn’t do any harm, but when every­one on Twitter is doing it, it becomes old real quick. There for a while this week, I’d say 30% of the tweets I saw had MoonBallz attached to it. It’s like a twitterly-​​transmitted dis­ease. It spreads rapidly, and it makes you ooze mar­ket­ing pus.

Disinfect your­self, my friends. Stop being a twhore and start hold­ing out for some­thing of real value, at the very least. This isn’t a con­test you’re par­tic­i­pat­ing in, it’s a unnat­ural viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign that makes the par­tic­i­pants look gullible.

Too many peo­ple I respect have fallen prey to this. You are giv­ing it away, folks. Value your brand. It’s worth more than a laptop.