Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Although I admire LMB’s Vorkosigan series, I haven’t felt the temptation to write series myself until this week. Although all of my original fiction is nominally set in the same future universe, recycling the same characters hadn’t occurred to me. Then I started thinking about the backstory of one particular guy/gal (at the time, I thought he might need a sex change to make him more interesting), and his backstory quickly became a prequel plus some vague notions of a third tale in between the one I was revising and the new prequel. Later it occurred to me that an older, bitterer version of my guy could assume the lead in yet another story along the same lines which has been floundering for years now.

There are definite advantages to recycling characters - creating them is enough work that recycling is better than reinventing. Think of the potential of having your protagonist walk into the story with a major chip on his shoulder - longstanding difficulties with government bureaucracy could give my guy/gal the conflict his story badly needs. On the other hand, I don’t usually like short-story series. Whenever that blurb appears about the previous adventures of so-and-so having been published in this and that old issue of Analog or F&SF, I cringe inside. I feel that I’m being cheated - I paid for an original character and I got a tattered, used one.

Fortunately, I don’t intend to read these stories, just to sell them. Personal preferences aside, there are other disadvantages to character recycling. As mentioned above, all my stories are set in the same universe, but the timeline doesn’t firm up properly for a thousand years or so. Usually it’s not a problem since I don’t mention any dates for the near future, but having a character live through more than one story puts bounds on when certain technological advances happened. (Or is that willan on-happen?) The entire milieu is determined, to some extent, by what happens in a particular story.

Nevertheless, I’m heading down the yellow brick road to a series.

I spotted this lovely link on rasfc: Maybe You Can’t: Overcoming Failure and the Myth of Success by Chuck Charleston. [It’s actually a parody, not a real book.] Here’s a quote:

Whatever it is you dreamed to be or to do, it wasn’t meant for you. The sooner you get that through your head, the sooner you will learn to embrace what life has left to give you.
On the other hand, you could waste your precious time on this sullied orb taking guitar lessons or writing novels no one will read. Do you really want to be that pathetic guy in the book store talking about his unpublishable manuscript or the local politician who keeps losing elections?

There are certainly aspiring writers out there who are wasting their time and that of their put-upon writing groups. It’s sad when someone has scads of determination and not a shred of talent to back it up. Usually, though, I think that a little failure puts people off - the average mediocrities won’t devote their lives to something that affords them no gratification. The crazy guy in the book store is exactly that - a crazy guy.

If you enjoy, say, writing fan fiction, then you don’t need determination. On the other hand, it’s rather difficult to throw your entire life away over a dream you’ll never achieve, if only because bills need paying, dinner needs cooking, and so forth and so on. Most dreams are both part-time affairs and reasonably entertaining - I don’t think they require a cure from a travelling pessimist charging $50 a ticket.

Link of the day: So You’ve Decided to be Evil

NaNoEdMo sent out a home stretch email today. There are 50 hours left in March (or so they tell me) and I have 25 hours left of my EdMo quota, and other things I need to do. Thus, I’ve added another year of not finishing to my EdMo record. But I did get the restructuring of the novel done, so it was a month well spent.

Part of my EdMo problem was that the novel gave me ideas for related stories. In my research, I discovered that the left side is the lazy half of the brain. (The right side is the creative half.) Laziness is a feature of consciousness - schizophrenics and hypnotized people are far more industrious in their non-conscious states. I suppose that explains why the muse (a non-conscious entity by definition) is so industrious, when she shows up at all.

If you see her, please remind her I have a deadline coming up.

Quote of the day: “At all times and in all circumstances, all over the globe, there exists a conspiracy, framed by nature herself, of all the mediocre, inferior, and dull minds against intellect and understanding.” –Arthur Schopenhauer

As long as I’m complaining about books, I should mention that I hate hardcovers. I want a nice little book I can read in bed, not something big enough to brain burglers. I don’t want to risk a hernia every time I visit the library. I have plenty of lovely old hardcovers that are barely larger than paperbacks, so why are all the new ones so big? So the publisher can charge three times as much for them?

I’ve seen some small hardcovers lately - The Girl Who Played Go was so short that it couldn’t have filled the standard super-sized hardcover, but Ombria in Shadow was just the right size. Unfortunately the hulking masses are still the vast majority. Someday there will be a nice e-book format (sans glowing screens), and all those cement-block-sized books will be recycled into…cement blocks.

Link of the day: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think (or see the luvly interview)

I was feeling sorry for the mid-list authors in my last entry, but since then I’ve realized that I never buy their books anyway. My primary source of reading material is the Boston Public Library at Copley Square. I find them more than adequate for non-fiction, though their sci-fi collection leaves something to be desired.

To supplement my sci-fi diet, I buy used books at local independent bookstores. My third source is Buck-a-Book, a local chain that sells remaindered books. Sometimes I’ll experiment with an unfamiliar mid-list type there, but authors don’t get royalties on either used or remaindered books so I’m not helping them any.

Only in unusual cases will I buy a book new, because even the paperbacks are insanely expensive compared to free books from the library or cut-rate ones from my other sources. When I do shell out the big bucks, it’s either to give away a book I think is amazing or to read something I feel is a significant lacuna in my sf knowledge. In both cases, the author is likely to be someone famous and Nebula-winning, not mid-list.

When I say “insanely expensive,” I mean it. There’s no excuse for the price of books today. The technology hasn’t changed in decades, if not centuries, so why has the price of paperbacks increased 333% in the last 20 years? Consider, for example, A Princess of Mars, first published in All-Story in 1912 and now out of copyright and freely available from Project Gutenberg. The tan Ballantine paperback edition cost $1.25 in 1973. A later printing with the Michael Whelan cover cost me $1.95 new circa 1982. That same book now lists for $6.50 at Amazon.

There are eleven books in the Mars series alone. When I was a kid with, obviously, no income, I begged or bought the Mars books, the Venus series (5 books ranging in price from $1.95 to $2.50, depending on the size and the year obtained) and assorted other ERB books, mostly new though even at that tender age I kept an eye out for used copies. So, say, 25 books averaging $2 a pop, for a total of $50. Today the 11 Mars books alone would cost me about $75, and the others are available only in “commemorative” editions averaging $15 a pop. The total is now pushing $300.

The industry will have to pardon me if I believe that $300 is too much to pay for pulps in the public domain. And no matter how promising your mid-list novel is, you’re probably not worth $25 hardcover or $8 paperback to me, either. The library is free. Project Gutenberg is free. Fanfic is free. Even television is free.

Most readers probably aren’t as cheap as I am, but I figure that if you have a heavy reading habit like I do then you have to find cheaper sources, and you’re likely to use those non-royalty sources for mid-list books. If, on the other hand, you’re not a heavy reader then you can spring for the occasional $10, $15 or $25 book. But what sort of book is that likely to be - something obscure in the mid-list, or a bestseller being heavily marketed by the publisher?

There’s this article on Salon at the moment about the trials and tribulations of being a mid-list author. Since you have to register or watch an interminable ad to read it, let me summarize: Jane Austen Doe got a $150,000 advance on her first novel, but now she’s suffering the slings and arrows of mid-listing. I’m playing a tiny violin…

The mid-list is either everything not on the best-seller lists, or anything the publisher chooses not to promote. Katherine Sutcliffe has some advice for getting from mid-list to best-seller list - to summarize, author, promote thyself. Jane Austen Doe has tried that, too, but rightly believes that promotion is the publisher’s job.

The trouble in the mid-list seems to be that the publishing industry is undergoing a shift from producing to gambling. Publishers want new authors who just might be the next J. K. Rowling, not a mid-list full of break-even propositions. It’s a shame, but it’s no surprise - plenty of other industries have gone down this road. For example, the WB cancels a mid-list show like Angel, and Fox doesn’t even have the decency to cancel Boston Public before breaking the set, even though there are no solid prospects on the horizon to replace them. The networks are after a sudden windfall, not a good lineup, and why should the publishers be any different? It’s about the stock value rather than pulping it out to all comers like in the good old days before television.

To be fair to my genre, I don’t get the impression that this gambling impulse is the norm for sci-fi, perhaps because the chance of any sf novel becoming a blockbuster is negligible. Maybe a fantasy writer will strike it rich once every couple of decades or so, but not sf.

Sometimes bloggers are after the big windfall, too, and when they find they’re not going to be the next Instapundit, they stop blogging. I found that link on dive into mark, who also has some interesting things to say about writers not improving and a nice passage from Tom Stoppard about putting the right words in the right order.

As a mid-list blogger, I try to avoid politics and personal stuff unless I can make it especially amusing. For me, the primary purpose of communication is amusement - political indignation is as boring as the state of your digestive tract. Like Brent Simmons and Daniel Green, I wish literary bloggers would talk about literature more and politics less, but this problem is by no means limited to lit blogs. I wish geek bloggers would stick to the geeking and fan bloggers would get back to the meta.

Just today I had to unsubscribe from Aaron Swartz because I couldn’t take the politics anymore. I vaguely recall his having something to say of geeky interest, but that was so long ago now that I’ve given up on him. Maybe he’ll recover after the election. And I have to say, Electrolite’s days in the “Writing” folder of my RSS reader are numbered. If it were funny [warning: offensive humor] that would be one thing, but it’s just politics.

I don’t necessarily mean that a blog should have only one topic - mine has 20 or so - but whenever you’re trying to communicate, you should have your audience in mind. If they came to your blog because you’re the big web standards guru, you can assume that they feel the same way you do about CSS, but not about Bush. People are interested in you for what sets you apart from the other 100,000 bloggers, and that’s probably not your political opinions.

(more…)

It’s that time of year again; my Writers of the Future rejection arrived today. I thought this story was better than my last one, but it did worse. I have two weeks to come up with something new for the next deadline.

In some disturbing publishing news, some print-on-demand publishers have lost a patent suit. IANAL, but I just don’t see how something as simple and intuitive as print-on-demand is patentable.

Flash link of the day: The Exorcist in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies

I na, I no, I edmo. My full-color flowchart outline has been finalized, with one column for the plot and one for subplot(s). It looks kind of like this:

Now that the cat has been quite thoroughly vacuumed, I need to rewrite my novel so that it goes in the order indicated above, using the handy key to scenes. It’s a good thing I decided to date all the scenes back during NaNoWriMo.

Lastly, some actual plotting advice for Seema: if you have trouble with plot, there’s an exercise I found helpful. (It’s not quite the level of cat-vacuuming involved in flowcharting your own fic, but it’s close.) Take a novel you like and write a one-line summary of each scene.

I don’t remember which how-to-write book that came out of, though I suspect Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold. [I was wrong: it was in the Novelist’s Essential Guide to Creating Plot.] There were other steps involved as well, like writing a chronological summary of the same plot and determining which scenes were spectacle and a few other bits out of Aristotle, but I found looking at my resulting outline - the bare bones of a novel - the most enlightening part. I could see how the plan all came together.

Contest of the day: win Star Trek: Voyager season 1 at startrek.com

I was going to do the index card plot outlining thing (50,000 words late) for NaNoEdMo, but then I thought why copy everything into a dying medium like paper when I already have plot summary comments attached to all my scenes? There had to be a more high-tech way.

So I searched for just the right program to simulate index cards with scene and character notes on them. I thought fondly of Hypercard. I googled at length. I read up on the history of mac outliner software. Nothing seemed quite the thing.

In the end, I came back to OmniGraffle, a sort of lightweight Visio for the Mac. I used grep to get the scene summaries out of my story file, then imported them into OmniOutliner (by opening the text file), then imported the OmniOutliner file into OmniGraffle (by opening the file). I got both programs free with my PowerBook, so this wasn’t my usual open-source approach. (OmniDictionary is free, though.)

After the import, I had about 50 little squares for my 50 or so scenes. I started coloring them in and sliding them around (because the story needs some serious rearrangement), and a great cat-vacuuming time was had by all. I think it’s been more helpful than index cards, though I was only going for a reasonable approximation of index card functionality.

Haiku of the day: T haiku

I can’t believe I re-read the whole thing. There’s something gratifying about having written something that takes hours to read, even if a third of it is raw, undisguised info-dump and nothing of note happens for the first 20,000 words or so.

On a dark day of NaNoWriMo an extra year got inserted into the narrative, and now I think that year must go. I have no subplot to fill it, and my pivotal event needs to happen earlier on. That means that two years must now become one, and not end-to-end but simultaneously. I think index cards are in order.

On the geek side, I downloaded a 4mb IPA symbols package for LaTeX (tipa) for the sake of one schwa (ə) buried deep in an infodump. I’m not counting that towards my 50 hours of editing, though.