Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Cool link of the day: The LJ Times (created by stevenf)

I get an about.com writing newsletter which isn’t particularly useful to me. The latest issue had an article about the whys and wherefores of pseudonyms which mentioned the issues of smut-embarrassment, genre-separation, whistle-blowing and privacy in general. It leaves out some important motives for name-changing - adopting a cooler, more memorable name, hiding your gender because girls don’t write scifi or boys don’t write Harlequins. Back in the pulp days, publishers had authors use multiple pseudonyms to give the appearance of a larger pool of writers. Today, being prolific just adds to your brand name.

I’ll be away for the weekend, so don’t bother watching this space.

Word count: negative

The cool title is stolen, in honor of the blackout. We had power here in Boston; my personal experience of our Third World infrastructure consists of not being allowed to run an air conditioner off the Third World electrical wiring in my apartment building, frequently being unable to dial out on my modem because of the Third World phone wiring, and driving over the many condemned bridges and overpasses of Massachusetts.

I grew up in the First World; I’m not sure where it went.

I did lose about 150 words editing Colony, but my first draft of the Revised, Expanded Version is done. It’s a weird draft - some parts are complete as they stood in 2000, some parts are complete from 2002, and a few parts may even be complete from this month. Other parts are barely more than a paragraph and some directions, or raw talking-head dialogue.

What marks the draft as complete is the presence of 97 scenes corresponding to the 97 couplets in Locksley Hall. The original Colony used only scattered, appropriate couplets as inscriptions; part of my crazy scheme to rewrite Colony was to use the whole poem, in order. I’m surprised how many couplets still match their scenes.

Colony was 34,000 words when I posted it in 2000. As of today, it’s gained over 15,000 words, leaving about 30,000 to go for my goal of an average of 800 words per scene. I fully acknowledge that word and scene counts are no way to write a novel, but the more traditional method of waiting for the muse to drop a subplot in my lap was leading inexorably to the Borg, that last refuge of the uninspired.

Right now I need a break from Colony to pursue other fic. I think I’ll get back to it in late September or October for a second draft, if Stargate doesn’t distract me too much. I want it done in time to be eligible for the ASC Awards, although as a revision it may not be eligible at all.

Word count: 1410

I haven’t written my drabble for “Enigma” yet, but I stumbled across a drabble contest where you can win a free Gotham writing class. The deadline is August 27th. I’m guessing the winning entry won’t be a Stargate drabble.

The other 600 words for Seema went into a non-fiction article, not my fiction word count above. While surfing around for research, I noticed that quite a few domains are down (though not EatSushi.com). I suspect the big blackout.

Word count: 1115

Seema asked a question about the ominiscient point of view on Zendom - specifically, how it differed from a wandering limited POV. I said:

In the omniscient POV, it’s the narrator (generally the author) who sees and knows all. If you’re leaping from character to character and having each character tell what he himself knows, then it’s not omniscient, it’s just very choppy limited POV. If, on the other hand, you can tell it’s the author (or narrator) providing the information, then it’s omniscient. It can be hard to tell the difference.

Not surprisingly, this was misunderstood. Some writers do leap from head to head while writing the omniscient POV, and only occasionally make it clear that there is a narrator’s POV present. That makes it hard to tell the difference.

Better examples of omniscient POV convey character and feelings without leaping into everybody’s head. Tolkien was mentioned as an example, but it’s easier to open any pre-20th century work of literature if you want to see the omniscient POV in action. Jane Austen is my favorite example of what can be done mainly through the medium of dialogue, without all this modern head-banging.

So I’ve been considering shifting Colony from its original head-banging omniscient POV to a more restrained example of the bird’s-eye perspective. The scenes I’ve written recently are in limited omniscient (that is, third-person limited POV) because I’ve gotten into the bad habit of writing that way. Like most fanfic writers, my initial style was omniscient. I didn’t change until someone pointed it out to me, and now I’m starting to find it tedious to pick a POV character and follow him through a scene (unless it’s Tom). I like the idea of omniscience better.

The Internet Writing Workshop has a nice omniscient POV exercise.

Word count: 1025

You may be detecting a pattern to my word counts. It’s not that I’m not enjoying writing, but it’s hard to write more than a thousand words in what little time I have before and after my Donneresque commute. When I notice I’ve hit the mark, I bail for the night. Now that it’s the long weekend I could write more, but I think the extra free time is better spent editing or muse-thwacking. (Muse-thwacking is my new term for annoying the muse with a problem until she finds the solution.)

Besides, how would you word-count editing? You could count the additional words, but what if you ended up cutting instead? A writer’s fragile ego can’t handle negative word counts. You could check the previous version out of rcs and do a wc on the diff, but that would require extreme geekiness. More importantly, it’s too many keystrokes for someone who’s checking her progress towards that magic 1000 every ten minutes.

Word count: 1018

That’s not even counting half a Voyager filk I wrote on the side. I think someone at Boston Common doubts my 1,000 word resolution. The other linked post there says some interesting things about creativity.

Norman Spinrad’s article on style at the end of the July Analog also got me thinking about originality. (The must-read story of the issue, by the way, was “The Empress of Mars.”) He criticizes the “transparent” prose tradition of sci-fi, saying, basically, that alien worlds require unusual styles to convey them. Unfortunately his sample excerpts are of dialogue - I think the issue of suitably original dialogue is less controversial than that of an opaque prose style. Spicing up the dialogue is certainly less work than changing your entire writing style. It’s not clear that the latter is wise, if it’s even possible.

I suspect some people have styles that are like accents. Either you can drop that Boston accent and pronounce your r’s, or you can’t.

Sometime in July is my third-year anniversary as a fiction writer, so this seems as good a time as any to turn over that new leaf again, finally get serious about my writing again, write those 1,000 words a day that all the experts recommend again, submit some more stories to be rejected again, and so on.

The only new part of my resolution is reviving my NaNoWriMo habit of posting a daily word count in my blog. (I guess it’s not technically new, either.) Feel free to mock me if I slack off.

Another truism from Worlds of Wonder is that the hero is also the problem. The conflict in a story is generated by the hero’s refusal to adapt; once the hero transmutes himself (in sci-fi often literally), the story is over except for the last bit of kick-boxing. Gerrold gives Luke Skywalker as an example of the transmuted hero (farmer boy to Jedi knight). Neo in the original Matrix would be a more up-to-date version.

I almost bought that chapter of the book, I admit, until I asked myself whether all stories were really that way. I’d say not. Some heroes never change - the stock characters of the pulps come immediately to mind. Some heroes change in a way that does not affect the plot; for example, Frodo finds he can’t go home again, though there had been no moment of decision at which he broke with his hobbit past. In some stories the point is that the hero remained faithful to what he was before, rather than breaking under external pressure - for example, Faramir or Howard Roark.

Overall, I’d say Worlds of Wonder is a good source of writing exercises and truisms, but next time, I’m reading The Art of Fiction.

A while back I blogged about the annoying saying that ideas are a dime a dozen. I had an attack of ideas today and remembered that entry. If I sat down for a month and meditated, I could have a career’s worth of ideas, but ideas are infinitely compressible - I could fit that month-long collection into one book if I disguised them properly.

If you set it up properly, you don’t even have to disguise the surplus ideas. I’ve been reading volume two of the Otherland books (they’re not a series, the author claims, but a 3,000 page novel published piecewise), which have one of those structures that allow infinite variation. Multiple universe stories (with a real multiplicity of universes, rather than one universe) also allow idea-packing. You can never have too many ideas at hand.

I know, I should have been blogging, or filking, or writing Khanfic, or moving to the new host, or doing that DTD section I promised to get to, or finishing the two original stories I meant to finish last weekend, but instead I worked on The Wrong Novel. I have a new subplot involving a misunderstanding and a murder.

That’s it - no interesting new blog entry, just a messy murder.