Archive for the ‘Top Post’ Category
Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Top Post, Writing Advice
The structure and nature of short stories haven’t really changed in the digital age, as far as I can tell. They’re still told the same way mostly, same perspectives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3-7000 words). E-zines are for the most part straight forward adaptations of the print magazine format, to varying degrees. PDF magazines are identical to print magazines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hypertext features, but the stories themselves do not take advantage of of any of those features except in rare occasions.
Flash fiction, or stories under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with electronic magazines such as Brain Harvest specializing in them exclusively. Personally, I don’t find such short stories very satisfying very often, despite my involvement with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fiction). I don’t think I’ve ever written a really successful flash fiction story. I would argue that flash fiction is even less popular than regular short fiction, which is pretty unpopular in the first place.
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How Taking Pictures This Past Winter Improved My Photography
Filed Under: How-to, Photography, Top Post
Since I started getting serious about photography, I have followed a relatively predictable pattern. As soon as there has been snow on the ground, I have quit shooting for the year. I hate snow, I hate the cold, and I have never found winter to be an inspiring time for any of the kinds of photography that I like. I don’t have a studio, so almost all of my shooting is outdoors. If that sounds like a bunch of excuses, well, it’s true. More than anything else, I think I found winter a very uninspiring time. I always thought that in winter, I would sit indoors keeping my toes warm and instead work on my writing. The summer is for walks through the nature areas with my macro lens, documenting the odd lives of insects.
That’s what I thought, until this past winter, when I became determined to break the cycle and keep using my camera past October. The result has been a considerable step up in the quality of my landscape photography in particular, but in general, I feel that the effort has improved me in several ways.
Realization: Cold can Be Beautiful
The first effect that this had was forcing me to find beauty in landscapes and objects that I do not ordinarily find beautiful. The color green is perhaps my favorite, followed by red. I’ve never much cared for the cold blues, but I felt that it was limiting me to be so restrictive in the color palette that I liked.
Out here, you don’t get much choice. If you don’t like cold blues and grays, you won’t find much to photograph in the winter.
I still have my preferences for vibrant greens, but I’ve learned how to see the beauty in ice and snow better in the past winter than all the years before added up. To get good at this, I had to really stop trusting my auto-exposure meter in the camera and learn to take shots and adjust my exposure as much as a stop up or down. Snow turns out an ugly grey on auto most of the time because of the nature of camera sensors and their preference for 18% gray (some say 12%. Either way, it makes shooting white subjects harder). This means you need to force the sensor to bump it up in a predominantly snowy scene. You can sometimes fix this in Lightroom, but I’m trying more and more to get it just right in the camera, or as close as I can.
After playing around with the technical aspects of shooting in the winter, I realized that I had some really fantastic mountain vistas I could be capturing, so I started to take landscape photography more seriously than ever before. Which leads me to the next point.
It Forced Me to Get Up Before the Sun
At a certain point, cold is cold. And with my newfound interest in landscape photography, I realized, the best light really is during the “golden hour.” There’s an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset where you get a nice, warm, low-angle and diffuse light. The quality is unmatched by nearly any other light as far as landscapes go. I’ve known this for a long time, but I had always had a really hard time motivating myself to be up early enough to be in position for the sunrise, especially in the winter.
So cold is cold, and if I’m going to be out in it, being out in it a little earlier doesn’t really hurt much. Because I was working on an east coast schedule, I found it very easy to rise around 5:30 or 6 AM to be out in the mountains in time for the great light.
Being Up Early Makes Animals Easier to Photograph
If you go for a drive in a national park in the middle of the day, you’re going to see some wildlife, but it’s going to be pretty inactive. Grazers will be hunkered down chewing cud and won’t make for great shots. You’ll be incredibly lucky to see a predator. And of course, the light stinks, so photographing anything results in harsh shadows and a generally unpleasing look, unless it’s really cloudy and you’ve got a sky that has turned into a giant softbox, but even then, if you want any sky at all in your shot, it’s going to look pretty bland if everything’s just white from the horizon up.
Shooting landscapes in Rocky Mountain National Park at dawn, I realized, like a dummy, that the elk herds were most approachable and most interesting around the golden hour as well. I began to follow a pattern of shooting the sunrise for landscape work, and then moving down to lower elevations to set up and photograph elk.
Again, shooting wildlife with a telephoto in low-light conditions? Not easy. Technically, I had an incredibly hard time getting a decent exposure in focus. I had to learn how to wield ISO better. I hate shooting at anything other than 100 ISO, honestly, but my telephoto isn’t fast enough to make good use of the light. Even with in-body stabilization, I had to learn better methods of bracing my camera from the car, and I was forced to finally spend a little money on a good, decent carbon-fiber tripod. The legs can be locked into 4 different positions, it’s light weight, and it allows for a more sophisticated ball-head mount.
Shooting in less than ideal conditions really does a lot to make you think about how to get better. I spent a couple of trips and came back with nothing remotely good. Under exposed, blurry from camera shake, or worse. I could have been discouraged, but I loved being out there so much (annoying tourists not withstanding), that I kept at it, and slowly my work began to improve.
In the end…
In the end, I feel like I’ve taken my technical skills up a notch. I’ve learned to utilize natural light better than before, and I don’t trust my camera to give me the best exposure automatically in every situation. I’ve learned better methods for stabilizing my camera by hand, and when to increase the ISO to get more light. I learned a little bit about animal behavior and how to take advantage of it, but I still have a lot to learn about wildlife photography (and a lot of time I need to invest into it).
Would I have learned some of these things if I had put up the camera in the fall and waited for spring? Maybe. But I wouldn’t have learned them as quickly and in the same combination. Some I might not have learned at all, and my goal is to be a well-rounded photographer.
Pushing myself outside my comfort zone for a winter paid off in spades. I hope that some of the photographs I’ve included in this post have helped drive home that point. All of these were taken in this past winter.
Do you have a story to share regarding how pushing yourself outside your comfort zone helped you improve at something? Share your story with us in the comments.
4 Wonderful Tools for Writers in the Digital Era (That Aren’t Word Processors)
Filed Under: Recommended Media, Top Post, Writing Advice
As a designer, I’m always stumbling across useful resources and tools online, but for whatever reason, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writers’ lives easier. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. It just means you have to dig a little deeper. Today, I thought I would share some tools that can make certain aspects of the writer’s life a tad easier.
If you’re anything like me, you don’t always remember to run your backups. With recent computer troubles, I’ve been making a much bigger effort to backing up everything of importance. About six months ago, I started using Dropbox and I haven’t looked back.
Dropbox is an online versioning and backup system. You install dropbox on your windows or mac computer and everything in the folder called “My Dropbox” is constantly uploaded to the server. When you make modifications, it keeps a record of these changes and you can go to the web interface and load older versions. Accidentally overwrite a file? Dropbox can save your butt. It has saved me on more than one ocassion.
Even better, Dropbox can be installed on multiple computers, keeping your dropbox folder synced up to all of the machines. Whether you’re on your office computer or your laptop, you will have access to your files.
Finally, Dropbox users can share folders with one another. We use this feature extensively at Escape Artists to deal with our production files, contracts, and various business documents and resources.
My biggest concern when I first started using Dropbox was that it would constantly be uploading my 50+ megabyte photoshop files, and my bandwidth would be devoured. It actually tracks the differences, though, and only uploads the changed bits. I’ve never noticed Dropbox being a hog of my writing.
There’s a free 2 gigabyte account, which should be more than enough to protect your writing documents. I pay for the 50/gb a year plan for $99 per year because I truck in larger files. Dropbox is available for Mac, PC, and Linux.
I work across 3 different computers, and keeping my research notes in an easy-to-access format, while maintaining flexiblity and a variety of formats, isn’t easy. That is, until I discovered Evernote. What I was looking for originally was productivity software to help myself implement the GTD method. What I found instead was a very useful program for organizing all those little bits and pieces of things that I need to access from time to time.
Evernote works on a very simple system of notebooks and notes. You can add tags, and just about any kind of media into a note. You can clip entire webpages into a note, or just the URL. You can make screen captures very easily. And then the real power is, it’s constantly backing up your notes to the server, and syncing them with all machines you run it on. There’s a usage limit for free accounts based on data transfer, but I’ve never even gotten halfway there. I don’t tend to use much in the way of multimedia files though.
Not only do I use Evernote for sorting and keeping track of things like research notes, storynotes, and so on–I often start writing my blogposts there. Any kind of document where the format isn’t necessary, that I want to be able to access from anywhere. You can even record voice notes with the iPhone app and they will be synced to all your machines. I used this feature to take down some notes on my novel project while I was driving across Kansas alone. Very useful feature.
There are a few things about Evernote I do find lacking. For one, you can’t sort notebooks into collapsible hierarchies. I would really like to be organize my notes in a similar fashion to my email program. You can kind of fake this with saved searches for tags and so on, but I don’t really need a more detailed system of organization than notebooks/folders.
Evernote is available on Mac, PC, and iPhone. It has a very nice web-based interface as well. If you have an internet connection, you can get to your notes.
I don’t use this one currently, but not because there’s anything wrong with it. I just don’t have enough stories and submissions out that I need to keep track of anything. Sonar is a PC-only database specifically designed for keeping track of your submissions. It’s genre agnostic, as far as I remember.
Some features include:
- color-coding
- list subs by the work or by market
- sortable
- automatic daily backups
- Until the perfect online solution comes along, Sonar is my pick for tracking submissions.
When I start writing and submitting more actively again, you can bet that Sonar will be my go-to tracking software.
Bubbl.us is a mind-mapping website. It has a slick, easy to use interface, and you can export your maps out in a variety of image formats or even HTML.
My primary use of Bubbl.us is to create site maps for freelance website gigs. However, I do use it from time to time to explore various notions in a work in progress story. I find that the mindmapping method really helps me brainstorm when I’m working on things like worldbuilding or plot.
Being browser-based, it’s cross-platform, and it’s free! It’s hard to beat that.
5 Lies Writers Believe About Editors
Filed Under: SF Business, SF Publishers, Speculative Fiction, Top Post, Writing Advice
At least in the science fiction community, there’s a lot of false community wisdom floating around about the editorial process. Some of them may have been true once. Some were probably invented to mess with the heads of noobs. Some of them are carefully nutured lies, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Well, no longer. I’m here to tell you the truth, no matter how ugly it may be.
LIE #1: Editors give every story fair consideration. OR: Editors reject stories without reading them at all.
The truth is, the slush is deep, and it’s rarely an editor’s favorite part of the job. Why do you think so many places have slush readers?
Every story doesn’t get fair consideration. Not every story deserves it. If you can’t be bothered to read the submission guidelines and follow them, it’s an easy rejection. If you have five grammar and spelling mistakes in the first two paragraphs, it’s an easy rejection. If it’s a story about vampires, and I hate vampire stories, it’s mostly an easy rejection.
Most stories get at least a page out of me. Then I skip to the last 3 paragraphs, if I’m feeling generous. Some get less. Some work is so obviously bad that it’s startlingly easy to know it’s not going to work. But every story gets looked at. Nothing ever gets rejected without being partially read. Honest.
LIE #2: Editors never reject a good story.
I rejected plenty of really good stories at the Fortean Bureau. I’ve even rejected a couple at Escape Pod. The reason is pretty simple: editorial vision or scope. The Fortean Bureau was looking for a particular kind of story. Your space opera, no matter how good, was never going to appear there. Likewise, we don’t accept horror or fantasy at Escape Pod. If the story is good, and sucks me in, I will recommend sending it over to the other editors.
Stories get rejected for being too long, too short, too similiar to another story the editor has already bought… there are as many reasons for rejection as there are stories. And not all of them involve you making mistakes. There are aspects of the process that a writer cannot control. Best to just relax about it.
LIE #3: Editors don’t foster new writers like they did in the old days, and don’t care about new talent.
John W. Campbell was a meddlesome bastard who sent his writers specific ideas for stories. He was not what you call a “hands off” kind of editor. He wrote his fair share of stories, and some of the tales I’ve heard about him make me think that he was often thinking as a writer as much as he was an editor. He wasn’t afraid to rewrite someone else’s story.
For whatever bizzare reason, some people wish editors would take that level of interest in their work, and they lament that editors no longer foster new writers, giving them the kind of constructive criticism that leads to their personal growth. Everything for writers was just wonderful back then but these editors today are jerks!
Not true. Campbell may have had time to do this with a larger percentage of his submissions, but the field was smaller then. Today, there are tens of thousands of writers all trying to break in to the same publications. We simply don’t have time to give personal feedback to each submission. These days, sometimes the best you get is an encouraging rejection. My first came from Stanley Schmidt: “I like your writing, so I hope you will send more in the future.” Not very specific, but it does the trick. It tells you that you’re on the right track.
As much as I give Gordon van Gelder a hard time for his opposition to online media, the man writes a very succinct and helpful rejection letter. Even the form letters have a system to them to help you figure out why the story was rejected. I always simultaneously feared and looked forward to his short notes.
Editors do build a stable of writers. The reason most people don’t see it is because by the time you come along, the editor has already established a group of authors he or she can count on. But short story writers in particular are always going on to write novels, so openings do occur from time to time.
If you really want feedback on your work, join a workshop or critique circle. It’s not the editor’s job to help you become a better writer. Sometimes, we’re helpful, but we can’t do it for everyone.
LIE #4: Editors are people too.
“Editors are just like us.” No, we’re not. You don’t have a neverending stream of bad writing coming at you day in, day out. You get to read for pleasure, selecting material that has been through at least one filter. Whereas you turn on the tap and get a stream of nice drinkable water, we put our mouths to a sewer pipe and hope to get at least one swallow that won’t give us raging diarrhea.
I know the sentiment of the phrase is meant to imply that we’re not godlike arbiters of taste, making and breaking careers on a whim. But editors do wield power. And it changes us. Generally it makes us ill-tempered and easily distracted by shiny objects. I’ve yet to feel godlike, but I’m not ruling out the possibility. Maybe when something I’ve published wins a Hugo, I will ascend to Asgard.
LIE #5: Editors (and critics) are failed writers.
As a rule, no. A lot of us are moderately successful writers. Some of us have never wanted to write and never will. There are a few who have started out as writers and given it up for the editing/publishing game (Gordon, I think), but not all of us have.
We’re not driven to become editors out of bitterness. We all come to the position for different reasons, but I think most of us start out as optimistic and hopeful. We think that maybe we have a vision for a type of story that nobody else has seen before. We day dream about finding writers that amaze us and publishing them before anyone else.
It takes a peculiar sort of ego to take up editing. And thank god. If it wasn’t for editors, we’d all have to sort through the kind of self-published garbage that made it possible for Geocities to stay in business for so long. I shudder to think of a world without editors.
And finally, a well-known truth:
You can bribe an editor.
Most of us are broke and driven to drink copious amounts of alcohol. See the sewer pipe analogy above. That gives us a weakness you can exploit. Next time you’re at a convention, go to the bar, and buy a drink for your favorite editor. Make sure you do it early on, because seven or eight drinks in, we’ll never remember your name. We’ll be lucky to wake up in the right hotel room, or even the right state. Who bought the drinks on a night like that will be the least of our concerns when we wake up naked atop a desert mesa covered from head to toe in blue paint.
Putting a name to a face, along with a mental database note of “bought me a beer” doesn’t hurt. One of the things that makes editing easier is pretending that the stories aren’t all written by human beings with heart. Sometimes, we have to put that out of our minds. And if you find a way to politely shatter that illusion, well, it can be good for you. But only if you are likely to start selling stories anyway.
There are no great secrets to being published. Read lots. Write stories. Lots and lots of stories. Submit the work until the stories are either accepted or rejected by every market you could bear to see your name associated with. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Everything else is basically unimportant.
