…the Academy was founded to detail the story of how Fremont’s Children directed the outcome of the Making War. This is the incredible and unlikely story of how a brother and a sister, and other young heroes, created the balanced forces that drive us today. Although this is a tale of our past, it is still a story in the making. We uncover new bits of information regularly. We invite you to drop in from time to time to see it.

Brenda Cooper, co-author of Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, contacted me a couple of months back, interested in how I might help publicize the release of the third book in her series, The Wings of Creation. I jumped at the chance to get involved.

The first thing I did was tackle the books. In this series, Brenda has built a strong cast of young characters and an interesting setting that is both recognizable and alien at the same time. They’re good “all ages” science fiction, and I really enjoyed them.

From reading the books, I suggested developing a website for the series as if the site was the digital presence of an actual institution in the world. The website would provide samples of the books for reading, and an encyclopedia of information–a kind of reader’s guide, if you will.

The Academy of New World Historians is the organization responsible for assembling the historical texts that make up Brenda’s series. Each book opens with excerpts of interviews conducted by these historians. The goal of the website is to share their publications with the rest of the Five Worlds.

The site is built on a WordPress framework, using a custom theme. It’s fairly straightforward in design and construction to reflect a culture that values simplicity and usability in interfaces. The design uses some jQuery effects here and there for some pizazz–I was really interested in trying out the “expanded navigation” method that I’ve implemented on the home page. You can hover over the section titles and see additional information for the section, such as links to specific topics.

Overall, Brenda has been a joy to work with. I hope you will all check out the site and her books. They’re good stuff, and I would recommend them even if Brenda were not a client.

Click on the thumbnail image to view the full size chart.  Did I miss any steps that you would have considered?  Do you think I am insane for drawing up a flowchart for something like this?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

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.

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.

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.

It’s Not Personal

Rejection letters aren’t personal. I find it very hard not to take them personally because by god, I wrote the story, I poured my self onto the page, and so it hurts to see that rejection come in most of the time. My stories are like the mind-prosthesies I never really asked for. And they transmit pain like any real limb. Er, so to speak.

Doling out rejections, many to fine writers whose work I love in a general sense, it’s really hit home. The rejection is always for the story at hand, and it’s not about you. Great writers get rejected. You will too.

I walk a very fine line in trying to avoid offense with my rejection letters. How much detail does a Hugo-nominated writer need when you bounce his or her story? Do they need a reason other than, just didn’t sync up with my inventory needs at this time? I don’t want to be in the business of handing out writing advice in my rejection letters. I tend to err on the side of less, rather than more, information. Which brings me to my next point.

My Rejection is not Writing Advice

Most of the time, my rejection letter says the same simple line: “didn’t grab me.” I stole this one from F&SF, because it’s succinct and a polite way of putting the truth. When I write this, it means that I did not finish your story because I got bored with it. Sorry, but that’s the truth. And that’s why I don’t write what I literally mean in the rejection letter, because I am not a callous monster. When I do provide feedback as to why I am not buying a story, it’s just based on my personal experience of reading the story. Every editor brings their own peculiar biases and interests to the table. There are some ideas that always grab me more than others. Biological SF will win out over asteroid mining every time, until you write that asteroid mining story that proves me wrong.

New writers should most definitely not be looking for writing advice in their rejection letters. Other writers, and a critique group, are the best way to gain this insight. It’s not the (short fiction) editor’s job, especially not today, to cultivate the writer’s talent. We support your talent, but we don’t have the time to fertilize it. You need to turn to other sources for advice.

I can understand the impulse to seek feedback from editors. Writing is a solitary game, and it’s hard to find methods with which to measure your progress. How do you know if you’re getting close?

Again, time to be blunt. You’ll know you’re getting close because the editor will tell you. When your rejection letter asks for more of your work, that’s not just being polite. That’s because we think you have the chops and we’re just looking for the right story. When rejection letters turn from “didn’t grab” to “didn’t work for me, for the following reasons” that’s a step up.

Trust me, the pain is only beginning when you’ve made those first couple of sales. You’ll want more, and if lighting has struck a little early, it can be painful to go quite a while afterwards.

At the same time, if you go from encouraging rejections to a non-encouraging one, it doesn’t mean you’ve backslid. It probably just means the editor has gotten a bit too busy to give you special attention.

I Liked It, but I Didn’t Love It

I get to buy 52-ish stories a year, and I probably select those from ten times that many at least. This means I am not only looking for good stories, but I’m looking for stories that leave an impact on me. I reject a decent number of good stories, because I can’t use up all my slots buying just good stories. They have to be good, plus some. That spark is the most elusive thing you’ll seek as you develop as a writer.

I personally haven’t broken past this phase. My rejections are very often in the “this is a good story, but I didn’t like it enough to buy it” variety. I sell ocasionally, but this is my career wall at the moment. I think I’m close to understanding why, but I may never know, and I may never take the step forward. Especially if I don’t write more than I have been these past few years.

Doesn’t Fit My Needs at This Time

This is very similiar to the “like it, didn’t love it” rejection letter. Under different circumstances, I might have, probably would have, bought this story. But maybe it’s a bit dark in tone, and I’ve been buying way too many of those lately. Maybe at the moment, I need more light-hearted pieces. Maybe I bought an asteroid mining story shortly before you submitted yours, and they’re too similar in subject matter.

This is the “shit happens” rejection letter. I find they’re the hardest and easiest to take at the same time. They’re frustrating, but at least you can put these to the capriciousness of fate, rather than your own personal skills. It helps.

So that’s a little bit of the thinking I’ve been exploring regarding rejection as I work to select stories for Escape Pod. It’s definitely given me a better perspective on my own rejections. If it were possible, I would recommend every serious writer find a way to read slush some day. Not only do you learn to spot the most common mistakes, you start to get a little empathy for that poor soul on the other side of the transom.

You’ve probably already written about 1,000 posts on it already, but motivation is my sore spot at the moment. As in, “sit thy butt down and just write!”

Also, when I do write, I sit and stare at the blank white screen for a lonnnng time. I am finding it hard to even churn out “free-writes”.…

My advice to you is simple. Don’t force it. If you’re going through a period of low motivation, you may need to recharge your creative batteries. This is something that I’ve had to learn the hard way.

Creative energy is a very poorly understood topic in my experience. Some manage it very well and are able to be consistently, highly productive. See Jay Lake write a novel in a handful of weeks. Others struggle for a decade. The product isn’t necessarily better in either case.

It’s very important to give your self opportunity to write. But if you don’t write, it’s not necessarily because you’re lazy. Your energy could be low. You might not have anything to say right now. Maybe you’d rather draw, or take a photograph to express what you’re feeling. Who knows. The important thing is not to beat yourself up.

Lastly, I’d like you to go watch this presentation by Amy Tan from the TED Talks recently. She talks about how we percieve creativity, and she makes some very interesting points.

Watch the Amy Tan talk here.

Do any of you have any further advice on the subject? I’m really curious to hear what others think about creative energy. It’s a topic that I’m only just starting to develop some theories about, especially as it pertains to my own work.

I don’t have a website or blog. And I don’t know if I want one.

I understand if I’d create a blog for nattering on, but most of that itch gets scratched by Twitter. I’m not much of an essay writer, because I think I find others who say what I’m thinking better than I would.

That leaves self-promotion, possibly, of my fiction (plays, poems, short stories). If I don’t want to go the full Doctorow and Creative-Commons license everything, then how do I decide how much of my work to publish online?

I’m not going to be the type of writer who obsessively searches for online theft, but I need to find a way of talking about what I’m doing before I’m published regularly by magazines, online or otherwise — learning how to be part of a writing SF/F/H community, I guess, but without my questions getting lost on web boards.

First of all, I don’t think every writer needs a website or a blog. Anyone who says they do is probably selling something (to paraphrase The Princess Bride). Now, I sell web design services, but I would never try to sell a writer on a blog/website if they didn’t have any interest in maintaining or updating it. It sounds like you know what you like, and that’s Twitter. That’s great! You can do a lot to build a reputation and an audience with just that service. I tend to recommend a more comprehensive strategy. I think of it as being like fishing. You can fish all day in one spot if you want, and you’ll catch fish. You’ll catch fish if you change up your lure and move around too. Now, readers aren’t fish, but potential readers/fans can be found in a lot of different places. Unlike fishing, you can be in multiple places at one time. So it’s more like having a couple of poles in the water.

Okay, that metaphor is stretched to the breaking point. Moving on.

I used to blog rarely, thinking basically that I didn’t have anything unique to say. But I don’t think that’s true of anyone, especially anyone who writes. Why do we write if we’re not compelled do to do so by a need to share something we feel is unique? Everyone has something unique to say. Maybe not on every topic or issue, but everyone has within them, in my opinion, the potential to write a great and gripping blog. Sometimes this involves living a very public life, sharing your deepest embarrassments. Sometimes, it means sharing the little bit of knowledge about writing you’ve garnered. But if you’re sure, no big deal. You don’t need to have one. Nobody’s going to order you to have one.

Now, how do you decide what fiction to release online if you don’t want to go the full Creative Commons route and release absolutely everything? My opinion is, unless you’re really, really certain of it, don’t release it online unless it’s been published somewhere. I’ve written possibly a hundred short stories. But only about a dozen are available for anyone to read outside of my close friends and family, and only one of those was self-published online.

It’s hard to build authenticity as a self-publisher. It’s not impossible, but the thing is, there is a lot of stuff to read online. People are looking for reasons to key in on things to read, and just throwing your writing out there all on its own can be a very hard way of building authenticity. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I personally wouldn’t want to go that route.

Now, say you’ve sold a couple of stories. You might want to release some of them online, but let’s backtrack and remember that we don’t have a website. How do we release fiction online and get it out there to be read if we don’t have a website? Well, you can throw up a quick free website with a service like Blogger or LiveJournal. Or you can sell your fiction as downloads with Fictionwise. Or you could upload it to Scribd and take your chances. There are a lot of ways to put your work out there without having a website, but you take your chances with each one of them. It’s really, really hard to get people to pay attention to you online.

I find that it’s best to try online reprint sales first.  Might as well get some money from it, right?  That’s more respectability than just publishing it online yourself.  Most sites will archive it for a long time.  The podcasts like Escape Pod, Drabblecast, and Starship Sofa  are another great way to get your fiction online in basically a permanent fashion.  The main difference here is that someone else is lending credibility to your work by selecting it for their publication, as opposed to you putting it up on your personal website.  If one place liking a story gives cred, imagine that two places means even more cred.  Same principle behind the Year’s Best anthologies, I think.

As to how much of your work should you get online?  That’s up to you and I can’t give you a satisfactory answer.  I personally try to get every single story online via the ways I’ve listed above.  If I can’t sell something as a reprint or podcast, I’ll format it nicely on my website and throw it up myself.  Especially if I want to do a cool illustration to go along with it.  Once you’ve made all the money you can from a story, why not put it out there for free?  Stories are disposable most of the time.  If you write a story so great that you can resell it dozens of times, then, well, someone will post it online for you whether you want them to or not.  Try Googling the title of a classic SF short story, and you’re likely to find a bootleg copy online on some poorly policed .edu site as much as anything else.  Might as well be the person to be in control of it, right?

The last aspect of the question above deals with how to become a part of the community and take part in a conversation without being lost amongst the noise. This is very easy. I’ll break it out in bullet points.

• Pick four or five blogs or forums and haunt them. Check them every day if you can.
• Provide helpful answers to questions. Key word here is helpful. Don’t be negative or critical unless it’s asked for. Talk about yourself and your work only if it relates directly to the topic at hand. Be positive. Try to find a unique perspective on the posts you comment on.
• Do that over and over again. You’ll get a reputation quickly.

There are other ways, but I think this is the easiest way. It involves putting in a lot of time, but being a part of a community isn’t easy. I have a really hard time keeping up with all the writer blogs and forums I would like to read in an ideal world. I try to stay on top of a few specific ones as best I can. I’m not very good about my second point of advice, so bear that in mind, but I think if I could do things over again, that’s how I would approach it.

I hope some of these answers prove helpful. If anyone else has any advice for CDThomas, please share it in the comments.

It’s all about time management and cost/benefit analysis. Because stories are purchased not based on the time it took to write them but how many words they contain, the actual hourly wage you make varies depending on how much time you spend on a story. And the more time you spend, the less money you’re making.

For example, I generally write first drafts at a speed of 1000–2000 words an hour. At a moderately decent payrate of 5 cents a word, that puts me at $50 an hour, if I were to sell my first draft. That’s a very nice hourly wage. Each draft you do, and each hour you spend reworking your draft, is reducing your potential hourly income. Spend as much time revising as you did writing the story, and now you’ve cut your hourly in half. Spend three times as long revising the story as you did writing it and now we’re talking working at McDonalds wages. I guess it’s better than digging ditches.

However, I personally am not a writer who can churn out a sellable first draft. I find the story in revision, much like Pixar does. Partly this is because I often start writing a story before the idea has fully fermented. Partly this is because I write so fast when I am on the first draft that I miss good opportunities. It’s only in subsequent drafts that I can tweak the machinery of story into a form that actually runs.

When I first started out writing, I was with Heinlein all the way. One draft, and be done with it. And I sold a couple. I also never sold dozens. When you think about it, was that really making me any more money as a writer? Almost certainly not. It’s probably a wash, if I sat down to figure it out.

These days, I not only redraft and redraft, I also sit on stories for months or years. Yesterday, I broke out a story that I wrote almost 2 years ago and began revising. It’s probably now on draft 5 or 6. And it’s most likely still not there.

These days, I’m much more concerned with making money from my writing than I was before. That’s because I have no regular source of income. So I’m looking at the Heinlein way again. It’s wishful thinking though. I’m not a first draft writer, and that’s okay. Even if my hourly wage works out to be something akin to minimum wage, it’s still better work than just about any job that actually pays minimum wage. Unless that job has health insurance.

What’s your approach to revising? What’s the longest you’ve ever tinkered with a piece before sending it out?

The idea with this design was to evoke the feel of the book, which has the blacksmithing elements, as well as a Norse mythology element. The scarred wood is reminiscent of a well-used workbench, and the masthead includes the sword and a blacksmith’s hammer, making the connection very implicit.

If you are interested in discussing freelance work with me, contact me through the Clockpunk Studios site. Or drop me an email. I’m always looking for more projects.