Tuesday Update

I still exist! I haven't forgotten the blog. Real life has been kicking my butt, and I've been sort of halfway keeping up with my modified NaNo, and making tremendous progress on both the novel and the 20,000 hours project. That is all for now, but I still exist!

Wednesday Update 11/1: NaNo Update!

No standard update format this week. Sincere apologies for total lack of posting last week. I am doing a modified/accessible NaNo that I think I can actually do, so I likely won't have much to say this week either, but I do have two substantive posts half-finished right now. There will be weekly updates, but the progress bars are where the action is going to be at this month.

Names Part 1: Near Future

Reminder for near future sci fi writers: if your story is set like 50 years from now, and your characters are adults, they will have names like Brooklyn and Castiel. If your characters are teenagers, their parents will have names like that. - Shared Memory From Sept. 19, 2016

Disclaimer: The following post is based almost entirely on the US and could be wildly wrong for anywhere else. Please take with 325mg of salt.

I made this post over a year ago, and in retrospect Brooklyn seems to have been something of a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. That's a little sad for me, because I like the name, but I digress. To understand the concept we're exploring today, you need to start with two basic facts.

1. In the US, about 75% of people have names that are in the top 1000 for the year they were born. Since 75% of everyone is way more than 1000 people, that means that even names below the Top 100 will belong to a lot of people, and feel like normal names to people who have them or are of an age group with those who do. (As an aside, if I ever hear someone suggest that Stephanie was a "rare" name in the 1920s again, I'm going to throw something. It was like 128th whatever year Steve Rogers is supposed to have been born. There were plenty of Stephanies. Not as many as there were Stephens, or even Steves, but it wouldn't have sounded odd to anyone.)

2. Your idea of what constitutes a "normal" name is heavily informed by the year you were born. This is a little less true if you mostly grew up around Catholics, because of the rule about needing the name of a saint somewhere in there. (I know that rule isn't like, universally observed, but it has a certain norming effect nonetheless). If you grew up in the 20th or 21st century (and if you grew up before that, please email me, I'd like a word), you encountered two groups of names while your languagebrains were still squishy. Those of your immediate age peers, people within at most 5 years of your own age, and those of your parents, probably the generation immediately before yours, although obviously some people's parents are from the one before that, or the other end of their own. That's going to be your default for what normal is, especially your age peers, because you probably interacted with a lot more of them. Someone 5 years younger or older than you has a slightly different sense of what is a normal name. Someone twenty years older or younger than you might have a totally different one.

So let's talk about that thing where 75% of people have names in the top 1000 for their birth year. If your name is anywhere in the top 10, you were likely Jennifer S. or Connor Y. for at least a year in elementary school. If your name is in the top 100, you likely had a nickname to differentiate you from the other 5 or 6 of you at your high school. (I went to a high school of about 300 people. We had 8 Alexes and 8 Megans, not counting an Alexandria who didn't go by Alex.) If your name is in the top 1000, you probably didn't get strange looks or asked to spell it, unless it was a Zack/Zach situation. If you're in the 25% of people without top 1000 names, you're unusual, although obviously unusual is relative and whether you're a Shiloh or a Z'ev depends as much on where you live as exactly how rare your name is. (No, I don't know how to pronounce Z'ev.)

Anyway, this has Implications for near-future sci-fi and, to a lesser extent, any young adult fiction in contemporary settings. Most name trends are cyclical, so in the far future you can do whatever you want, and obviously in second world fantasy none of this is likely to apply. But if your story is set between 2025 and 2070, and you have teenagers or young adults named Jennifer, it's going to feel very strange. (That's not an arbitrary example. There were fewer Jennifers per capita born in 2016 than in any year since 1945, and its popularity shows no signs of picking back up). Obviously there's some room for having teenage Jennifers in the mid-late 21st century, because naming trends are not absolute commandments. But it's pretty common to see near future sci-fi written by Gen-Xers or Baby Boomers where, due to an entirely reasonable desire to avoid weird, made up names, everyone is called Jennifer or Amy or Natalie, and it just sounds wrong, unless there's a reason for it. (If your dystopian government feels that human civilization peaked in the 1950s, it is not at all unreasonable to have all your characters have names that were popular in the 1950s). 

Figure out roughly when your characters were born, and if it's a past year, look up what the most popular names were and extrapolate accordingly. If they were born in the future, look at patterns and try to extrapolate. Month names tend to be popular one at a time, so was 2045 a time for Aprils? Junes? Was it perhaps a time for Septembers or Februarys? Names associated with scandal and bad things tend to lose popularity for a while and pick it back up eventually, at a rate proportional to the severity and how strongly the person's first name was connected with it. There probably won't be a lot of Adolfs yet in the 2020s, and I doubt there will be many Donalds either, but we might start seeing more Monicas again. In the US, names from countries we were recently at war with also see a substantial dropoff. (The popularity of the name Adolf actually started to decline after World War One). 

This is actually also something to consider in second-world fantasy with a large cast. If you have more than 50 named characters subject to the same naming conventions, you will probably have some characters with the same name. Consider which names are common and why. If there are named historical figures, won't some people from the same place or culture be named after them? Depending on the size of their influence, might characters in *other* cultures be named after them, with differences in pronunciation and spelling depending on language differences? Actually, names in second-world fantasy really ought to have their own post. 

Wednesday update?! 10-18-2017

It's possible that going forward these will just be Wednesday updates, since apparently that's the day that they end up happening.

Reading
Not a whole lot. I have now listened to all three of the Bone Street Rumba novels, although not in order. Got partway through the audiobook of Another Fine Myth, which I have not read before, and then got distracted. I'm partway through Magic's Child. The ongoing lack of explanations is becoming frustrating. I should probably just get through the damn thing, but I have no idea how it's going to get to any conclusion under than "magic is evil" in the page space available without resorting to a massive exposition dump. We'll see, though.

Writing
Nothing but more worldbuilding notes. Fleshing out all kinds of details of the protagonist's home country, so that I don't have to be making those decisions on the fly while actual plot is happening. Trying to work out some details about what role magic plays in different jobs.

Publishing
I read a few more pieces of slush, including one that I was hoping would be a lot better than it was. I don't have anything that I can extrapolate out to a general observation about publishing, but I will say this, for writers: Your basic idea is boring. Be specific. Particularization will get you everywhere. 

Worldbuilding 1: Languages

I've been going back and forth for a while now on whether to do a post about Vulgarlang. I've found it immensely helpful as a worldbuilding tool, but I worry about seeming like I'm advertising something. But it's been an immensely helpful worldbuilding tool for me, and I've only used the free version anyway. This also seems like a good opportunity to talk about worldbuilding and choice paralysis, especially in epic fantasy.
There are a couple approaches to worldbuilding an epic fantasy story (I'm using the term broadly here: it's in a world that's not this one, there's magic, and the technology is usually less advanced, or at least very different). You can start in one place and build outward, you can build from the top down, or you can start with "Like [Existing World] but..." and address the implications of whatever the differences are as you go. There is such a thing as a generic epic fantasy setting, although it looks more like D&D and less like Lord of the Rings than most people outside the genre seem to be aware of, but there are always gonna be differences. In any case, starting something and then messing with it is to some extent a different process than what I'm talking about here, although some of the same difficulties certainly apply.
When you're creating a world from the ground up, you have to make a lot of decisions. Big decisions like what the continents are shaped like (you did remember to have more than one continent exist?) and whether there's a common language that most people speak. Fantasy specific decisions like are there dragons, and how does the magic work. Incredibly small decisions like what do they make knife handles out of. (In my protagonist's home country, mostly apricot wood). I'm realizing I should do a whole series of posts on this, because different kinds of decisions require different processes, at least when I do them. Anyway, one of the things you have to do is make a shitton of linguistic decisions. How do people's names sound (in each of the different cultures that you have)? What are the norms around last names, middle names, and nicknames? Terms of address? When you have things that don't exist in our world, are you going to make up names for them, or approximate them in English? (Or whatever language you're writing the story in, but I'm gonna just say English going forward). How are you going to keep them feeling consistent without making up an entire language (or several)? Should you just make up a language? Should you finish that before you start writing?
Some people are probably not affected by this problem as badly as I am, because most people don't seem to share my difficulties in making arbitrary decisions. And if your able to make a few arbitrary choices early on, it can simplify things considerably. You just decide on impulse or instinct what to call a few things, or what some of your main characters' names are and maybe what they mean, and that gives you some parameters for what words sound like, and a few roots to build on. (For an example of what I'm pretty sure is an incomplete language managing to feel consistent anyway, you might look at the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time, and particularly the words and phrases in which "shadar" or "shaidar" appear.) But I'm really bad at naming people, and even worse at naming places and things. I have enough linguistics to be kinda perfectionistic about how a constructed language ought to work, but not enough to know which of the things I do know about it would inform that stuff, especially given that a lot of how living languages develop is the result of crazy random happenstance which I would have to invent, because I'm constitutionally incapable of just saying "Oh, yeah, this word works differently because of random circumstances".
So I would need to build an entire language, if not in its whole vocabulary then at least all the grammar and syntax and a lot of root words, and most of those decisions would be totally arbitrary because whether the preferred word order is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object isn't gonna inform or be informed by much else in the worldbuilding, and it would take months and be exhausting.
And this is what makes Vulgarlang so damn useful. Basically, it makes random languages. The full version apparently gives you quite a lot of vocabulary and is more customizable, but I don't use it because if I needed a bunch of words and that level of control I would just build the whole thing myself. The free version gives you like 200 vocabulary words, but it also gives you the rules. Word order, what sounds exist, what word ending you use to get from a verb (so like, from "paint" (v) to "painter"), what sounds can or can't go together, emphasis patterns, a bunch of stuff that I want to have exist so I can build from it, but have no particular reason to create.
(There is nothing wrong with constructing a language yourself from scratch, but it can eat up months of writing time, and trying to do it has absolutely caused me to stall out on projects).
This is especially useful in my epic fantasy novel. If I only needed one language, I'd probably just break out the linguistics textbook and do it myself, even if I had to make some dice-rolly tables to randomize arbitrary decisions. (I love dice-rolly tables). But it's a big world. I'm gonna need dozens. Not in their entirety, but enough for names, place-names, plausible grammatical mistakes when people are speaking unfamiliar languages. Different cultures use different elemental magics, so there's gonna be terminology confusion.
So like, the lesson for the day is that it's ok to offload massive piles of work that aren't central to the story, if you have a way of doing it, and in this case I do.

Tuesday Update On Wednesday 10/10/2017

One of the things this blog is for is so that I can get a feel for what actually affects my ability to write, versus what's just unpleasant or time consuming. (Even in a really busy week, I can hit my minimum goal of one non-update post every week if I'm able to think and write at all). This past week was one of the roughest on record, and was apparently of the former sort. I'm yet another week behind on just about everything, I have bruises that I don't entirely know how they happened, and I didn't even think about blogging. I did actually get some writing done, but that was earlyish in the week.

Reading
Well, I finished the audiobook of Ashes of Honor, and...yeah, that's about it. I think. Unless finishing the audiobook of Empire of Ivory was sometime last week as well. Aside from work related stuff, the only reading I've done of an actual book was getting a ways into Magic Lessons. The world is still intriguing as hell, but the ratio of "And then another thing went wrong, delaying any further explanation for dozens more pages because Plot" to actual explanations is becoming frustrating. Also, Mere's secretiveness around some things makes sense, but she's secretive about everything, and that doesn't make sense, unless not only the character but the text itself is drastically misleading us about her motivations. At least it's a quick enough read that even when I'm stuck for hundreds of pages without an answer, it still doesn't need to be more than a day if I actually sit down and read.

Writing
Apparently I only did about an hour and a half of writing last week (94 minutes), but I got a bunch of worldbuilding work done, figuring out details like what colors are associated with what elements, and what they do about dead people. I don't even know if anyone is going to die in the book yet, but I like to have as much of things worked out in advance as possible. Of course, all of this is still only for the culture the protagonist comes from, but I probably won't build the others too intensely until I'm closer to having them actually show up in the story. I will say that starting on the ground in one spot and building out seems to work a lot better than a top-down approach.

Publishing
Very marginal progress reading slush. Little bit of movement on a project I'm not at liberty to disclose. 

Tuesday Update on Wednesday 10/4

A non-update post was supposed to go up over the weekend, but either the Blogger app is misleading me, or I messed up the post scheduling. Anyway. 

Reading
I read Magic or Madness over the weekend. It's Australian YA fantasy. Ever since, I guess probably Lovecraft, there's been this idea that using magic can make you go crazy. I've never really liked that; first of all, it strikes me as nihilistic, that this very cool thing is inherently damaging, and moreover damaging because we are unable to handle it, and I dislike the idea that magic is like, alien to humans, because most humans believe in magic more than they don't, if you scratch the surface. But also, alien things aren't what make human brains go wonky. Something totally unfamiliar and hard to understand will provoke curiosity or fear, but it's not... destabilizing, the way that, say, watching our fellow humans do horrible things for completely normal, human reasons is. (That's not meant to be Topical; I've had a thing about it for years now). Anyway, Magic or Madness neatly subverts that. If you have magic, not using it will make you go crazy. Using it shortens your lifespan, but that's plausible, if none of the magic users know how to use energy from outside themselves. 

Writing
I have a rough draft of the first chapter of my fantasy novel. It's not done, but it exists. Of course, there's a bit where it still just says [transition] in brackets, but I firmly believe it's better to do that and keep moving forward than to let yourself stall out on a promising piece because you don't know how to get your characters from one place to another.  I ended up dumping the flashback scene that was supposed to somehow help me with that, although obviously I still have what I wrote of it, and it's possible it will turn out to belong there after all. Total writing time last week was 4 hours and 48 minutes, bringing the total for the 20,000 hours project to 22.61 hours.

Publishing
It's literary award nomination season, so I've been finding out about deadlines and stuff. The Pushcart Prize has a really unhelpful website. Haven't read as much slush as I'd like to have. 

ETA: Post that was supposed to go up on the 29th has now been posted, and apparently postdated.

Cranky Facebook Round 2

Is my sample severely skewed in some non-obvious way, or do most profoundly gifted kids who struggle with multipotentiality end up becoming writers? - Shared memory from Sept 18, 2015

"If the text has independent agency, there's no reason it can't watch the news." - Shared memory from Sept 18

You know what I want to see more of in speculative fiction? Words that stuck around even though they refer to outdated ways of doing things. My favorite real world example of this is "manuscript". September 18th

I tend to think of it as sort of a... like there's just this stream of possible work of varying quality, and there's like a faucet. The farther you get along the stream, the better the average quality gets, but you have to run the faucet in order to get to where the good stuff is coming out. - September 14th (re: the ceramics thing)

I'm not bothered about things that just aren't very good getting published. It doesn't affect my life in any way. But things that are actually Wrong in some way...writers are doing their best to tell the truth they know, and readers have to trust the legitimacy conferred by publication, so if the truth a writer knows is toxic garbage, it's the job of publishers to not send it out into the world with their seal of approval.

Your magic or aliens or future technology don't have to make sense in real world terms as long as: 1. The rules for how it works are consistent. 2. Everything *else* works how it's supposed to. - September 25th

My creative writing pedagogy will be process oriented or it will be bullshit. - September 24th

I think that the "If you have to ask if a kid is a prodigy, they aren't" thing may not apply to writing, but I'm not sure. - Shared memory from Sept 24,  2015

It's not suburban! They take the bus! For less than an hour! How do you think they live in a suburb?! - Shared memory from Sept 22, 2013

Reminder for near future sci fi writers: if your story is set like 50 years from now, and your characters are adults, they will have names like Brooklyn and Castiel. If your characters are teenagers, their parents will have names like that. - Shared Memory From Sept. 19, 2016

Tuesday Update On Thursday 9/28

Update on Updates
Since Day Job is no longer a thing that happens on Mondays, Monday updates are being moved to Tuesday. Since small changes to my schedule render me nonfunctional, today's Tuesday update is, as you see, on Thursday. There will also no longer be routine updates on exactly how many hours I'm working in a week. As valuable and informative as I considered that to be, the stress of having to sit down and calculate everything before I could do an update was prohibitively stressful.

Reading
I finished The Brightest Fell. New October Daye book! Very exciting. I also finished The Gathering Storm, finally. And Underground, by Kat Richardson, unless that was Monday, and thus this week rather than last week. The entire concept of "In Which Our Hero Discovers That Homeless People are Human Beings" is inherently problematic, of course, but it's reasonably well-handled here, including how Quinton is basically OK, but most adults who are long-term homeless are not basically OK, and the role he has among them, and in interactions with service workers and community organizers as a result. In a future one of these books, it's be cool to see Harper deal with one of the ghosts or demons in Ravenna Park, and consequently interact with the homeless youth up in the U district, just for comparison's sake.
Now I'm reading The One, third book in The Selection series, which continues to weirdly not suck in terms of things like people using their words to convey their feelings to each other, and also that like, having a royal family is a problem, or at least maybe symptomatic of a problem, but it's not the problem, and it's a real job with responsibilities and challenges, including some that other kinds of leaders don't face.

Writing
No new progress on the novel, but I did write the Issue 4 editor's note for The Fantasist, and also a 600 word writing exercise, and apparently some other things because I apparently spent something like 4 hours and 39 minutes writing last week.
The 20,000 Hours Project is right now at 18.58 hours. Obviously that's sort of dismal for 2 months of work, but it's a good deal better than nothing, and it's not like I didn't know this was going to take years.

Publishing
Issue 4 is live. Did most of the editing, did editor's note, really must start reading slush for upcoming issues, am not doing so. 

In Defense of Fanfiction

Ok, so I know some people worry that they're wasting their writing time and talents writing fanfiction, but honestly, it's as good a way to practice as any, and maybe better than some.
For one thing, there's tolerance for lengths that you would have a very hard time getting published, or even workshopped in an actual class. (E.g. literally anything in the 6,000-60,000 word range, but also 100 word drabbles and sprawling 300,000+ word epics that in original fiction would be very unlikely to be accepted as a first novel, and even if they were you'd probably get told to split it up and make it a trilogy.) Novellas do occur naturally in the wild, as does very short and very long fiction, and if you're writing for fun, to learn, or to receive feedback, fanfiction means not having to fit your work into lengths it doesn't want to be at. Obviously there is something to be said for writing to length, but there is also something to be said for giving yourself control over when and in what contexts to work on that.
For another thing, fanfiction allows you to work on one aspect of your craft at a time, or at least to not worry about aspects that are tripping you up. Want to work with setting? You might actually learn more doing an AU, taking existing characters and having them interact in and with a setting you created than you would working with characters who were also your own creation, since depending on your writing process, it can be hard to tell in original fiction what's coming from your character versus the place you put them. Want to just write the damn plot you have in your head, without worrying about making up a setting and characters? That's like, most fanfiction, and it's a great way to build skills with plot and structure and pacing without getting sidetracked by research and worldbuilding and all the other super-important-but-super-distracting stuff that can prevent original fiction from ever getting off the ground. It's also an excellent vaccine against "this will definitely have to be a series" syndrome, which is usually caused by either wanting to write speculative fiction without having to explain the world, which you can really only do from the second book onward in original fiction, or by feeling like the amount of work you did creating the damn setting kinda necessitates spending more than one book there. Want to work in characterization? Make an OC and bounce them off existing characters (as with AUs, it's easier to tell what's coming from where when you didn't create all of the elements in the equation), or focus closely on one or several existing characters and really delve into their depths. The limitations created by canon will make it so you can't just have things go a certain way because you've just decided that's how the character would act. Enjoy worldbuilding but get worn down by decision fatigue? (Hi.) Start with an existing world you know and love and expand an underexplored aspect of it, or do a crossover fic and work to integrate two existing worlds. (Putting characters from different stories into contact with each other is also another way to practice characterization).
Actually, just this aspect of it is making me want to design a writing class around fanfiction. If I ever get around to it, you might see a syllabus at some point.
Probably the most important reason though is that fanfiction is the absolute best way to build an audience for your writing without either engaging in a lot of smoke-and-mirrors social media stuff trying to get people interested in your work without seeing any of it or making work available for free that you could theoretically get money, or at least a publication credit for. One of our most popular stories in The Fantasist was written by someone with a substantial following as a fanfiction author. I'm pretty sure this is also part of why anyone bought 50 Shades of Grey. Even if you do also have a blog or other substantial social media presence as a writer, it gives people (including publishers) some reason to give a shit who you are before you've published any original fiction.

Monday Progress Update 9-17

Yeah if it looks like I haven't done anything in a week, that's because I haven't. Total writing time for last week was 22 minutes, writing last week's Monday progress update. I'm not even gonna include a Writing section here, because really why.

Reading
The new October Daye book came out and I got it and I read it and it's so good you guys and finally some answers about some things, and yeah. Aside from the ongoing trend of "well of course that needed to be more complicated", I don't even really know how to talk about the things in it that made me happy without the context of the whole thing. Probably I just need more time to process it.
I did also finally finish The Gathering Storm. The ending was like the rest of the book, only moreso, in terms of Egwene being amazing, Rand being frustrating, Nynaeve being distracted, and everyone, including the reader, wishing Moiraine were there. Existential crisis on top of a very tall mountain is apparently how to solve your problems?

Publishing
I finished doing my part of the edits for Issue 4. I honestly really love editing, although obviously the time sensitive, can't correct anything you'd have to ask about nature of editing for publication deadlines is not my favorite. We do always run things by the authors, of course, because I'm not letting something go up on our website with their name on it that we and they aren't completely on board with if I can possibly avoid it, but there have sometimes been things (not in Issue 4, that I can recall), where it would have been nice to have more back and forth than was realistically possible.

Working
I mean last week I was so tired that I tried to pet my cat and she tried to head-boop my hand and I almost poked her in the eye. My fatigue-clumsiness almost exceeded a housecat's coordination.
Paid: 44 hour's, 19 minutes.
Unpaid: 18 hours, 26 minutes.
Writing time: 22 minutes.

Yeah.

Oh, also, may at least temporarily be moved to Tuesday's next week. Because I won't be working mondays for a while, at least not at my day job.

Monday Progress Update

Reading
I am like, almost done with The Gathering Storm. I gotta say, I'm glad things are finally happening. Brandon Sanderson lacks Robert Jordan's finesse at writing the attitudes towards women of male characters raised in cultures less sexist than our own, but what are you gonna do? I admit, with where everything has gotten to, I'm curious how there are to be another two books worth of things left to do.
I finished reading Poltergeist, which was a good deal better than Greywalker, although seeing familiar places altered, moved, or condensed will never not be weird. I mean I can't always figure out what neighborhood things are supposed to be happening in in the October Daye books, but at least all the bookstores are where they're supposed to be.
I finished the audiobook of Turn Coat, and almost finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. HBP is irritating, of course, and no one's actions make any sense. Small Favor has inspired a Thing I May Never Actually Write detailing the transitions between Lord of the Rings and The Dresden Files, and then between Dresden Files and Wheel of Time.

Writing
I got like one more handwritten page on this stupid flashback scene. That's... about it, really, excepting the blog. Total writing time for last week was 1 hour, 21 minutes. Not great, even by my standards. This brings the total for the 20,000 hours project to 12 hours and 34 minutes.

Publishing
Ohgogsohgodsohgods Issue 4 edits. That is all.

Working
38.93 hours paid work. (Shorter Day Job week because labor day).
28.75 hours unpaid work.

Day Job hours might be cut back to 32 because something something fiscal year, which is terrifying of course but would allow me more time to write, and like, sleep. We'll see.

Monday Progress Update

This week's progress update comes to you a day late not because I don't have my shit together, but because yesterday was Labor Day and I've sort of gotten into the habit of doing these updates from my computer at work.

Reading
In One Salt Sea, the sixth October Daye book, which I just finished re-reading, the Liudhaeg responds to a question about whether she took a class on making no damn sense by saying that it was "More of a graduate course." and that she finished it at the top of her class. This created for me the mental image of the whole Pantheon of Wizards Who Don't Explain Things: Gandalf, Dumbledore, Moiraine, Harry Dresden, Sarkan and the Liudhaeg, to name only those I can readily recall from things I've read relatively recently, actually taking a class together on not explaining what you want, or why, or what's going on. Previously, I'd assumed this was just something they had panels about in the Wizard track at the fantasy character's conference. I have no desire to write the fanfiction that obviously needs to exist about this, and I can't draw, but if anyone else wants to do it I'd be interested to see the results.
In other news I left my copy of The Gathering Storm at someone's house on Sunday, so I while I got a solid chunk of it read in the past week, I won't be making any new progress on it until it's returned to me. I'm not reading the second Greywalker book instead, and enjoying trying to figure out which cafes, bars, and bookstores are real places I just never visited, and which ones are places I have been with the serial numbers filed off.
Very little in the way of progress reading through On Writing. I keep getting irritated by things where I agree with the intent but not with some of the actual assertions he makes.

Writing
Apparently I spent 2 hours and 27 minutes writing last week, but to be perfectly honest I couldn't tell you what any of it was on, except for some work on Let Me Expand on That Part 2, which should go up sometime this week.
That brings the total since the start of this blog, and the 20,000 Hours Project, to 11 hours and 13 minutes. I was also startled to discover that it isn't possible to do 10,000 hours of anything in a year, because there aren't 10,000 hours in a year. Clearly we're going to be here a while.
I have done a little brainstorming for the short story collection, although so far what I have are premises at various levels of fleshing out, and not much in the way of actual plots. But if I just had to write something to put on the back cover, I'd be all set!

Publishing
The unprecedented quantity of submissions we received during the most recent submission period are currently having to take a backseat to me scrambling to complete edits, and an editor's note, in time for Issue 4 to go up on the 21st. So mostly my publishing thoughts this week amount to "Thank the Gods September didn't start a day earlier".
I also got some boring, business side details taken care of, but I oughtn't go into particulars there. Suffice it to say that running a magazine requires a great number of skills and decisions that have very little to do with writing, and can wind you up trying to fit your armchair lawyer hat over your business manager hat, while using Business Words that make the whole conversation feel vaguely unreal, like it must have been written for someone else.

Work:
Paid Hours: 45 hours 51 minutes.
Unpaid Hours: 17 hours 50 minutes.
In case I've never specified, writing time is part of the unpaid hours.  

Okay, Let Me Expand On That (Part 2)

"Novels are longer than you think they are." 8/24

Occasionally, in various areas of my work as a writer, publisher, and occasional teacher of creative writing (not currently, or even recently), I run into stories that the authors refer to as "novels" that are in the 60,000 word range. By and large they are also not remotely done. Once, literally once, one of these awkwardly sized creations covered the exact time period and emotional arc that it needed to, and was pretty well structured, but needed a lot more connective tissue and probably a couple of subplots. For the most part, they end way before the story does, sometimes with an epilogue or final chapter that would be a reasonable place to end the story if only we'd actually gotten there before we got there. It's very rare that these stories need to shed a third of their length and become novellas, dealing with a small part of their existing content, usually in more detail. Most of the time, they need to be longer.
I think a typical mass-market paperback is a pretty good approximation of how long a book is. They certainly seem to be a length that readers want to read and publishers think they can sell, so they have that going for them, but also people like books that length for a reason. It's a good length for a book. I grabbed a few off my shelf, and they're mostly right around 350 pages. My bookshelf also contains mass-market editions of Cryptonomicon and Very Far Away From Anywhere else, so obviously there's a range, but the middle of the bellcurve is right around 350 pages. I have never sat down with one and actually counted the words on a page. I have literally done that with the Circle of Magic books and Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, both of which have larger print and wider margins than most mass-markets for adults (VFAFAE is YA, but I suspect the layout choices had more to do with making it big enough to be visible on a shelf.) They each had about 200 words on each page. The Freelance Editor's Association defines a "manuscript page" as 250, which still seems a bit low for the actual page length of a normal book, but let's go with it. 250 words/page times 350 pages is 87,500 words. Not coincidentally, I also see figures in this range thrown around sometimes as about the optimal length to get a first novel accepted for publication. (Even authors known for writing long-ass books, like Stephen King and Neal Stephenson, did not start their professional careers writing things that were the size of dictionaries). That's a great deal longer than 60,000 words. More longer than it might feel like.
I think this might especially be an issue for people who have mostly written short fiction. Word limits at venues for short stories are a thing, and so is intensive minimalism training in writing programs. One of the big differences between a novel and a short story is that the law of conservation of detail is a lot less rigidly enforced. Not everything has to be doing at least 5 things to deserve its place on the page. You can have characters that get names and backstories that aren't going to be major players for the whole thing. You can describe something even if you aren't illustrating the world, the character's psychological landscape, the tone of the scene, and what you had for breakfast this morning. You're actually supposed to, or it's likely to end up feeling underdeveloped. Also, a lot of the details will end up serving multiple functions, but you may not recognize them immediately because novels are so much bigger and more time consuming that the planning to discovery ratio can't stay the same. You don't know what's going to matter ten chapters from now. You have a lot of space. Use it.
Also word limits create anxiety. I live with someone who writes short fiction, so I've seen it happen, the twitchiness when you realize you might not be able to keep it under 6000 words. It creates an instinct that however far past that you get, you're creating more work for yourself because you'll have to cut it down to be able to submit it anywhere. I suspect that this instinct persists even when you know intellectually that what you're writing is a novel, and doesn't need to be held to those same limitations. The longer it gets, the more nervous you get, because your feelings are thinking in terms of magazines.
Also, short stories tend to be smaller in time and scope, so often you complete the first third of a novel and get basically to the end of act 1 and feel like "Oh, I guess it's done now." Also, NaNo WriMo convincing people that a 50,000 word thing is a novel probably does not help with this.
So, if you're writing a first novel, I have two suggestions. First of all, describe everything and digress into backstory as much as you can. Second, aim for 100,000 words. Give yourself that as the space you're trying to fill, and the limit you're trying to stay under.

Okay, Let Me Expand on That (Part 1)

"Plot is more useful, easier to do, and harder to dismiss if you remember that it's basically a cartographic idea. They're literally or figuratively going from somewhere to somewhere else, and passing through or stopping at other places on the way. (Usually literally *and* figuratively). This should not be a loaded or controversial thing. It happens in most stories. It doesn't absolutely have to, but it usually does. Also there are not suptypes of figurative travel that are too boring/elevated to count as plot. Fight me." 8/23

I have a really difficult relationship with plot. For one thing, I'm absolutely terrible at it, in the sense meant above. Anyone who's been near me when I'm writing, or outlining, has heard me complain about how I have no idea where this is going. See, again, that cartographic metaphor. It's about the path, the direction, the destination. If your story doesn't have some of that, I'm not saying it's not good, or not a story, but I'm concerned.
Stephen King goes on for quite a while in On Writing about his dislike for plot. He describes himself as liking to just put characters in situations ("predicaments", he calls them) and see how they get themselves out. He thinks that plot is forced, artificial, and "the good writer's last resort"). I think there's two problems here. Maybe three. (Plot-as-process is different levels of helpful to different people, people don't both distinguishing it from plot-as-result, and snooty academics)
First of all, there's a very real extent to which no one knows what "plot" actually is or means. This is a difficulty it has in common with literally every other bit of terminology in writing except possibly "metaphor". I like the definition I used in my Facebook post because it's usually what I mean by plot, and because deciding that aspects of writing just are, that they're just tools, neither good nor bad for writing, and that their value or harm is in whether they feel right to the writer, and how well they are able to use them, allows me to feel a bit superior to people who get all ideologically invested in particular tools. You don't decide whether to put together a chair using a hammer and nails or a screwdriver and screws based on whether your tastes are sufficiently refined, or how educated you are or whether your chair is Art or just there to be somewhere a person can sit down, or even how skilled a carpenter you are; you choose it based on what kind of chair it is, what materials it's made of, the shape and style, and your knowledge of (or best guesses about) what kind of use it will be put to, and by whom, a good chair to put in the Intimidating Hallway where students have to sit before meeting with the principle is not necessarily a good chair in which to read for a few hours, and there is no reasonable argument to be made that one of those chairs is inherently better than the other. But I'm getting off track. I really like chair metaphors. It's a Thing.
Anyway, the point is that some people are talking about plot-as-thing-that-exists, and some people are talking about plot-as-process. I like to think of the latter as plotting, rather than plot, but that's not widely accepted terminology. Plot-as-process is the way in and extent to which the writer plans out in advance what is going to happen and how it is going to come about. More specifically, perhaps, it is the way in or extent to which the writer finds it intuitive and helpful to plan things out like this. Consider the apparently ubiquitous "trip to Europe". One traveler might meticulously research every place they might go, and create a detailed itinerary down to where they will eat breakfast on each day of the journey, including how much of their precisely calibrated budget they will spend on it, (They have opted to wait until they are actually inside the establishment to choose what eat within the specified price range.) and the departure and arrival times of each train that they will take between points on their journey. Their itinerary is laid out in a Google doc, and at the top of the first page for each country is an embedded table with useful phrases in the local language. Placenames include links to those places English language websites, if they have them. Of course they also carry a printed copy of their itinerary, just in case. Another traveler simply wants to go "to Europe". They choose a country at random: perhaps Spain, because plane tickets there happened to be the least expensive when they were buying them, or England because they already speak the language so it seems like an easier place to start. Wherever they begin, they plan to wander as impulse or convenience takes them. The extent of their plan is a rough knowledge of how much money they have set aside, and an intent to return to the US before they run out. It is important to note here that both of our travelers are going to have a wonderful time and come back enriched and expanded, with lots of fun anecdotes and unironic selfies with historic statues, or whatever it is kids these days are into. Of course, most of us are not at either of these extremes. Probably we know which places we're going, about how long we're going to spend in each one, and when and from where we will be going back. If we are goal oriented, we might have a checklist of things we want to make sure we do or see in each place.
If it sounds as though I'm just adding another metaphor to "pantsers vs. plotters" or "architects vs. gardeners", there's an extent to which I am, but largely because I feel like those are unhelpful false dichotomies and the people most attached to them almost always seem to be arguing that there is something superior in the pantsing or gardening approach, and as someone who prefers to plan things out, that bothers me a little bit. Most of us aren't straightforwardly architects or gardeners. We're growing bonsai trees or training roses up a trellis. There's a plan in place, a structure of some sort to build upon, and we're not afraid to use the wire and twine and pruning shears to make the story take roughly the shape we want, but it is still a living, growing thing, and just because we know how many branches it's supposed to have doesn't mean we've decided in advance where exactly all the leaves are going to be. Try to assert that degree of control and you'll kill it. And we remain open to being surprised by it, to going out one afternoon and discovering that it's gone and entangled itself with the clematis, which wasn't at all what we had in mind but they look lovely like that so now we're just going to have to make a new plan. Which is all by way of saying that the correct amount of plot-as-process is the amount that works for you. The reader isn't looking at the marks you made on the map when you planned your trip, they're hearing about the good parts after you get back.
Plot-as-thing-that-exists is both the same and different in important ways. It's also where I get way less "my definition is better than your definition". Any definition that doesn't end up being disparaging to plot is fine. But I still like a cartographic interpretation. A character, or several characters, go from somewhere to somewhere else. They stop at or pass through other places on the way. This can be literal or metaphorical. If they go through Baerlon, Shadar Logoth, and Whitebridge, or Anger, Bargaining, and Depression, that's still the part that's the plot. That part of it is a neutral thing-that-is, and doesn't imply anything on its own about the nature or quality of the story. The amount of plot can then be understood as the amount of focus that the story (not the characters) puts on the process of getting from one place to the next. You could absolutely have no plot, and just hang out in one emotional, physical, or intellectual place the whole time, or exclude almost everything from the story except getting from one literal or metaphorical place to another. As with almost everything in writing, most things are somewhere in the middle, and the extremes are harder to pull off.
The third problem is one of snottiness more than definitions, or of snottiness informing definitions. Plot gets a bad rap, and a lot of more Literary readers and writers prefer the journey that happens to be almost entirely figurative, and usually pretty short. They also tend to see going somewhere emotionally (or sometimes intellectually) as not really Plot at all, but something purer, which they might call story or narrative or something. (These are perfectly good words, and useful in other contexts, but that's a whole 'nother post and I'm making a point here). On the point that it is not Plot, they are in agreement with readers and writers at the other end of the spectrum who don't feel that anything is happening when the journey is largely emotional (or certain kinds of intellectual) and dismiss, rather than elevate, those kinds of stories for their lack of plot. A preference for one sort of plot over the other is of course perfectly valid, but it's all plot.
(You will notice that I haven't touched on "plot driven" vs. "character driven". That's because I haven't found a definition of either that doesn't make me want to tear my hair out, and I have enough problems with that as it is).

Monday Progress Update

Please note that there are two progress bars down at the bottom of the screen now. The shorter one is so that one of them actually has visible progress because doing 10,000 hours at a rate of about 2 hours a week it takes a while to start showing up.

Reading
I've gone back to actually making some progress reading through anthologies. It has been said, although possibly only by me, that only magazine editors read anthologies and only anthologists read magazines. The latter, of course, is not entirely true. One of our staff readers read the magazine before joining us, and so sometimes do authors planning to submit work, and occasionally my mom. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think there was someone out there reading The Fantasist because they actually want to, but then, I actually like reading anthologies as well. For the past year or so I've been working my way through Writing That Risks, Long Hidden, and Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. Stories (and in the case of Writing That Risks, poems) from them are regularly occurring items in my planner.
I'm hitting more things I disagree with as I get to the parts of On Writing that are actually about the craft and process of writing fiction. None of the things King suggests are wrong or bad approaches, but they aren't mine, and he very much presents them as though they are universal approaches rather than an approach he, personally, finds effective. This is what my crankypost about Plot was about, and I'll probably be expanding upon that later. As a result, my progress on that has slowed down somewhat. There was also an unfortunate moment where he suggested, as part of an exercise flipping the typical gender roles of a story involving domestic violence, that since the abuser is a woman, she should perhaps have escaped a mental hospital instead of jail. It was the 1990s, I'm prepared to make allowances, but that didn't stop me from literally throwing the book on the floor.
I'm also finally making progress on The Wheel of Time again, so like, that is a thing. Almost 300 pages into The Gathering Storm I still don't really feel like Sanderson has the handle on how these people actually talk that I would like, but what are you gonna do?
Oh, and I'm gonna be starting 1984 soon. Like, probably later today. Because it was on my reading list. See previous regarding "what are you gonna do?" I want to have read it, and the only way I know of to get that to happen is to read it.

Writing
This is where the most exciting news is! I actually got some writing done! On my novel. One of my novels. Anyway, I transcribed 849 words of handwritten draft, which counts as writing because it's also where I do the first round of line editing, bringing the types total for this project to 4044 words. And I spent about 60 minutes doing more drafting, but I don't have a word count for that because I did it by hand. Marvel at my having done a bit less than a normal day's work for a working writer this entire month. But seriously, this is progress, this is good.
Essentially I got Elu (she's the protagonist) through some more walking through the desert being justifiably very nervous, into the beginning of another flashback that I don't know exactly what it's for yet.
I also had an idea for how to make an abandoned project with a premise I loved but a plot I absolutely hated (I'm just not built to write mysteries), into a series of short stories that will let me explore more of the world world I was building, on the general theme of Government Agencies Deal With Supernatural Citizens. Very little in the way of actual story ideas yet, but I feel 1000% better about this approach, and it can work in the same world as one of two other ideas I had for interconnected collections of short fiction. So maybe I'll start writing short stories again. That could be sort of cool.
Total progress on the 20,000 Hours project as of the end of last week is 8 hours and 46 minutes. That's 0.000877% of the goal.

Publishing I was reading a piece mostly to sign off on rejecting it for handling a sensitive topic badly, only then it wasn't, and I'm just so excited by this one story we have and of course I can't say anything specific but it's just 100% up my street and I know all of those feels, and that doesn't happen all that often, even running a magazine where I like most of the work we get sent. We closed submissions for this period, so now I really have to focus on reading through my share of the Unprecedentedly Huge Pile of Potentially Good Fiction.

Work
Paid Hours: 38.25 (I had a weekday medical appointment)
Unpaid Hours: 18.27
Writing Hours: 2 hours and 2 minutes.

Cranky Things I Said on Facebook About Writing This Week

"Plot is more useful, easier to do, and harder to dismiss if you remember that it's basically a cartographic idea. They're literally or figuratively going from somewhere to somewhere else, and passing through or stopping at other places on the way. (Usually literally *and* figuratively). This should not be a loaded or controversial thing. It happens in most stories. It doesn't absolutely have to, but it usually does. Also there are not suptypes of figurative travel that are too boring/elevated to count as plot. Fight me." 8/23

"Novels are longer than you think they are." 8/24

The dates on both of these are a little misleading due to the extremely weird place my sleep schedule is at. The one about plot was very, very early in the "morning" of the 23rd. It was still basically Tuesday. I tried to post it then but apparently you can't copypaste into the Blogger App. And I said "Novels are longer than you think they are" on the evening of the 23rd but didn't have the chance to put it on Facebook until a couple minutes ago. Going forward, I might try to do a thing once a week or so of stuff I said about writing in shorter form contexts none of which was long enough to be a blog post on its own. I also might expand on some of them in later posts.

Monday progress update

Going forward, progress updates will be on Mondays, because my time-tracking week ends at midnight on Sunday, and after midnight on a Sunday I'm usually too busy to like, do anything.
Paid hours:
42
Unpaid hours
13:13 (plus some other stuff)
Writing Time
1:52, almost all of it on this blog.

That brings the total to 6 hours and 44 minutes since the beginning of the 20,000 Hours project. That's 0.000673% of the way to my goal. I'm doing some reprioritizing this week to try and get more writing done. Like I said a few weeks ago, I'm hoping this is gonna turn out to be the story of me emerging from the ashes of being too busy and tired to write.
Over on the publishing front, I have so far read exactly one piece from our current round of submissions. It's good and I think we're probably gonna take it. We also have a new staff reader, so that's exciting.

Priorities and Stuff

I was all determined to write an actual post tonight, but then real life happened and also I got to the part in On Writing where his family held an intervention because of all the drugs (p. 91, for those reading along at home), and I want to find out how he kept writing after he got sober.
Also the reason posts have gotten inconsistent is that I would mentally start drafting on the way to the bus stop and then write at the stop and on the bus, and they moved my bus stop closer to my office, and I'm just a delicate Austin rose like that. (I was gonna say an African violet, but then I couldn't decide if it would sound racist, so I looked up "hardest roses to grow". That's a lot of what writing is, actually.)

Sunday Progress Update

Last week, the Sunday update didn't happen until Wednesday, and this week it's Tuesday. Progress!


Reading
I finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, finished Small Favor, got partway into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and then my iPod suffered some kind of failure. I don't know if it will be possible to resurrect it and, if it isn't, the future is likely to hold a narrower, and yet more varied, set of audiobooks, since I'll be limited to what I have an Audible and can thus put on my phone.
Since it already was on my phone, I just re-listened to Men At Arms, by Terry Pratchett. I'm not an across-the-board Pratchett enthusiast, but I really like the Watch books. As a late...it's complicated of mine once said, "I'll take Drunks Trying to Make a Difference for $200".
Anyway, I finished that about an hour ago, and now I'm re-listening to An Artificial Night, by Seanan McGuire, because it too was on my phone already, so it was that or Dead Beat. An Artificial Night is honestly one of my favorite books, and is the holder of three of the dubious Evan Reads a Lot And Has Opinions Awards, specifically for "Only print fiction I've found genuinely scary", "Only 'creepy little kid' horror I've found genuinely scary", and "Only work in any genre to make me sort of give a fuck about Tam Lin". Mostly because the part it borrows from is the part where Tam Lin gets turned into all the different things, and Janet has to keep hold of him. And like, that's where the good metaphor is. That's the part that has anything to do with anything. Tam Lin did a stupid, or possibly just had a poorly timed moment of bad luck, when he was younger, and the process of moving past that requires that Janet be patient and be willing to get hurt a little bit while he goes through a process of messy, repeated transformation that's probably even harder on him than it is on her. (In real life, of course, you don't have to be willing to deal with that, but it's often going to be the price of staying with someone while they try to get over whatever issues they have, and it is sometimes worth it. But this is a writing blog).
I also started reading On Writing, by Stephen King, largely to find out whether some of the more annoying attitudes about craft and process that people take away from it are actually present in the text. So far, 23 pages in (to the 2002 mass-market paperback edition, if it matters), he's only said three things about writing at all. Listen to your editor (agree, although with more caveats than he puts on it), the machinery to be a writer is inborn, but not especially rare (agree), and television is bad, or at least bad for writers (strenuously disagree, although this might have been a somewhat more reasonable position to take when one's exposure to television started in 1958. Narrative fiction in all media, but especially television, has improved immensely in the intervening 6 decades).


Writing
Absolutely nothing except this blog and a couple of long Facebook and Tumblr posts. Not even pointless assignments for my Other Job, because summer term is over and fall hasn't started yet. Not counting the social media activity, however articulate and well-researched it might have been, I spent 2 hours and 10 minutes writing last week. Eventually there will be a progress tracking widget somewhere on this blog to show how far I've gotten on the 20,000 Hours project. I'd like to finish in less than 20 years, so hopefully I'll find a way to pick up the pace.


Publishing
We've got an unprecedented number of submissions right now, and needless to say, I'm behind on reading the ones that it's my job to read. I used to read all of them, a whole year ago when we opened the magazine, but that just isn't practical anymore. This is requiring us to do some rethinking about how to best implement the part where, while obviously we don't want to publish bad fiction, we want even less to not publish good fiction. Every piece we get deserves appropriate and charitable reading, but what that looks like can vary wildly from story to story, and there are hard deadlines and limited person-hours. It's a hard problem and we're working on it. Believe me, if we come up with an amazing solution, you'll hear about it.

Writing Process (macro)

Ok so please keep in mind that I have never actually finished writing a novel. Due to a combination of fast development and a slow writing process, I've never even done the thing of getting like 125 pages into a story, finishing act 1, and thinking I wrote a novel. So there's that. But this is the process that got me a decent ways into the one of my current projects that I'm a fair ways into, and that has enabled me to finish short stories and such.
My process for getting started is almost too unstructured to be worth describing. I have an idea, usually prompted by a conversation or something I'm frustrated about in writing culture or in the fiction I'm reading, or more often a conversation about those frustrations. If you're ever seriously at a loss for story ideas, I strongly recommend grabbing a friend, ranting about an unsatisfying or problematic pattern in a genre you love until a way to circumvent it shakes loose, and then writing that. (YMMV if your writing isn't generally motivated by "I'll show them! I'll show them all!). For example, the novel I'm in the middle of, Pointlessly Contrarian, started in a novel writing class my senior year in undergrad. I was irritated by the requirement to start a new project, and by that time furious with expectations to "write what you know" that hinged on "what you know" being a stable, white, middle class, suburban, vaguely protestant, able-bodied upbringing with no real pain or complication except romantic​ difficulties. So I said "You want me to write what I fucking know? Ok, you get an urban, Neurodivergent, pagan teenage drug addict going to a public alternative school and growing up in a polyamorous family." It's not all that autobiographical. Carson, the protagonist, is a lot like me, but their circumstances are a fair bit different. I grew up poor, in a single parent/only child household, neopagan but with a chill Episcopalian mom. (Chill about the religion thing, not so much about other stuff). Carson has three parents, three siblings (for broad definitions of siblings), and in the part of upper-class that generally thinks of itself as middle-class, with the combined income from all three adults coming out to a little over 500,000 a year, which isn't as much as it sounds like when you're feeding and housing 7 people, 3 of them teenagers, but is still kind of a lot.
I was also super done with "teens with issues" stories where the problem was their family, and getting more attention and going to rehab solved everything, and with identity stories where the protagonist was only a minority in one way, and usually just wanted to be normal, unless they were gay. Also with gifted-kid stories that has radical acceleration and emphasized how the gifted kid was really just a normal kid. So that's where that came from.
My other active project came out of me accidentally having a good idea when responding to a sarcastic Facebook comment about how a lot of writers only bother with worldbuilding to justify the scantily clad women and describe the cool fantasy city. I came up with a cool looking fantasy city where most people are scantily clad, and came up with a lot of particulars very fast because I had a backlog of need to worldbuild something. Then I decided I wanted my protagonist to get to the city, so I could make a whole world, and I wanted her to be from a very different place. It's a thriving metropolis in a tropical rainforest, so I started her in a small town in the desert. I'd been sorta wanting a world where most people have magic on a bellcurve ability distribution, so I put that in, and my partner suggested elemental magic. I'll talk more in another post about how I worldbuild.
The next part of the process is to start writing it. I don't do a lot of planning at first, I just start. In a novel, I'm aiming to get the first chapter done (this could happen on day 1, or take months from when I start the story). In a short story it might just be the first few paragraphs. In an essay, it isn't usually the beginning, just whatever I feel the most strongly about or have the best idea of how to articulate; generally this will be like 300-500 words.
Then I outline. In a novel I do it by chapter, in a short story by scene, in an essay by section. 1 word to 1 sentence description of the most important or overarching thing in each part, then an in-order breakdown of events, then details if I have them, including lines that I've already thought of, where there are any.
So the part of a outline of a chapter might look like
Chapter 1 Mid September
    I.  Carson talking to their mom
        A. Conversation about Carson’s Hair.
        B. Conversation about Carson’s plans for the future.
        C. Something gets Carson thinking about self injuring.
    II.  Carson in their room, trying not to cut.
        A.  Contacts Dillon for support
            1. They suggest a distraction of some kind.
            2.  Carson decides to work on a beading project.
        B. Carson works on beading.
            1.  Ends up poking themselves repeatedly with the beading needle.
        C.  Gives in and cuts.
            1.  Some description of background as well as special knife.
            2.  Fairly detailed description.
            3.  Cleans up and bandages with obvious meticulousness.
        D. Takes an Adderal and an “extra” vicodin, and settles into reading a book for senior lit.  

At this stage, later chapter outlines will probably be a lot sketchier, often a list of scenes with few or no details, or even a list of events that I don't know how the scenes break down yet.
As I make progress, I fill in the outline with more detail, and edit it as plans change, and if I go back and change something, or write it differently than I expected, I modify the outline to reflect that. For novels, this goes in a separate Notes and Outline document. This generally has the following sections
*Outline
*Logistical Notes (schedules, distances between stuff, lists of books someone is reading)
*Worldbuilding Notes
*Pressing Questions (stuff I haven't figured out yet that I need to, like "Do onions exist", or "What music does Aurora listen to")
*Characters (block paragraph descriptions with important details including relationships. What I think is important is variable. Also this generally includes every named character even if they aren't important.)
* Bits and Ends (scenes, or single paragraphs and sentences, that I've written for chapters that are still a ways off).
*Sometimes there are other sections depending on the needs of the story, like if I need to be able to quickly refer to the details of how a thunderstorm forms.

For a short story, it generally goes at the top of the story document, and for essays I will usually build the story on top of the outline, expanding bullet points into paragraphs.
Everything gets updated as needed, which is a lot. Doing that counts as writing time, and substantial expansions count towards word count.
I don't usually do much editing on short stories until they're done. With novels, I like to go back and revise at least some of the previous chapters every so often, especially if I already know something substantial needs to change. This will be covered more thoroughly in a future post about revision.

My Drafting Process (micro)

This is how I work when I'm generating new material. It's the process I use for working on novels, and usually for short stories and essays as well, unless it's an impulse driven, single-session drafting kind of thing, in the former case, or I need to refer extensively to electronic materials that are annoying to look at on my phone, in the latter.
I go outside with a notebook, a pen, some kind of liquids, cigarettes, and, if I'm feeling really, really organized, a snack. I dress for the weather, to the best of my ability. I do also take my phone, because the likelihood of stalling from not knowing a fact or an etymology or something is higher for me than the likelihood of getting catastrophically distracted. It also allows me to keep track of time, and to refer back to what I've already written on previous days if I need to. I usually know what project I'm planning to work on, but if I don't, I might have a list of active projects, or make one, and roll a die to decide. (I also have a dice-roller app on my phone). Sometimes I listen to music. If I'm feeling especially Serious, I might take the trouble to use a writing playlist, but generally I just listen to whatever I'm into lately. I try not to put my whole iPod on shuffle, because having to stop and skip something I'm not liking can break the flow. I don't have a special pen, but I like something that writes easily. I use the same notebook that I use for everything else. This is all a good deal simpler and faster than the above giant paragraph makes it look.
I sit down some way that I hope will take at least 30 minutes to make my joints hate me. I open my notebook to the first blank page, and if I haven't used it for anything else that day, I put the date at the top of the page. I often go back a few pages or look on my phone to remember where exactly I was, 'cause I'm terrible at transitions, and it's not unheard-of for me to just skip them by accident if I don't check. Then I start writing. The goal is to fill a single page; two if my current notebook is especially small or wide ruled. Crossouts and corrections are absolutely allowed, although if I have to cross out a large section (a paragraph or more, not counting single lines of dialogue) then I have to get that many lines onto the next page. Misspellings and similar get scribbled out, but anything else that needs to be corrected, I put a single strikethrough line so I can still read it. (Yeah, I was trained for science before I was trained as a writer, but it's not a bad compromise between "Never delete anything while you're drafting!!" and letting the "internal editor" get rid of something you might want later). If I realize I need to add something to a bit I've already written, I write a number in a circle where the addition goes, draw a line along the next line in my notebook, put the same circled number right under it, write the additional bit, and then put another line under it, and continue from wherever I was when I realized I needed to go back and add something. If I still feel like writing when I've done a full page, I do keep going, but unless I'm feeling really driven, I do try to stop before I'm 100% out of thoughts. If I get stuck for too long on a description, a transition, or a worldbuilding detail, I write what the missing bit, or question, is in brackets and keep going. (Yes, I write bigger or smaller depending on how much I feel like challenging my stamina).
Then, ideally right after, although it's been known to take up to 3 months, I type the new material up in the document I'm using for the thing. This is when the first round of line edits happens. I fix spelling and punctuation errors, and awkward sentences if I can think of a way to do it. If not, I'll put a comment on that says "Awkward, fix." or something. If I notice a bigger issue, like that I skipped a transition, or need to expand a paragraph, I make a note of that too. Sometimes I do it right then. Since I'm almost always tracking my word count somehow, I check the word count and record it wherever. With the exception of the 20,000 hours project, I don't usually pay much attention to writing time. It's too squishy.
Also I finished Small Favor. Tune in next time for my macro-level process. Probably.

The Different Kinds of Gods That There Are

So right now I'm listening to Small Favor, and I'm between Dresden's initial meeting with Mab and his first ever Parking Lot Argument With Fix While Thomas Hangs Out in an SUV (seriously almost this exact interaction reoccurs in Cold Days, but I digress). At one point in that conversation with Mab, Dresden refers to her as a "demigod", and now irritable fantasy writer is irritated.
About half the definitions below are ones I made up to particularize things that are fuzzy, and none of them only mean one thing. Really each term is a spectrum, and what part of that spectrum is most useful is going to depend on what you need the *other* words to mean.

God
The Abrahamic God, any comparably comprehensive and powerful deity, or anything that is straightforwardly a god, such as a member of the Greek or Norse panthrons.

god
Scope and power range starts at "Anything that is straightforwardly a deity", as above. Can be used to differentiate such beings, most of whom have limitations, from an omnipotent and omniscient God, if both are in play, or if they're showing up enough, and persony enough, that getting all reverent and capital G about it doesn't seem appropriate (both of these apply to Hades and Odin in The Dresden Files). Could also distinguish beings that are of a scope or power level with Gods, but for some reason aren't Gods, from those that are, or could describe beings of godlike power that are not actually operating on that level, or lack the attendant responsibilities. (Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is somewhere in that space).

Quasigod
If "They're sort of a god." is an accurate description, this is an applicable term. This literally just means "sort of a god". Overlaps with small g gods above, and with pseudogod and semigod below.

Psuedogod
Refers to beings that seem like gods but are not. They could be a god in a world where there are also Gods or a God, beings that are not actually on a power/scope level with gods but seem like they are to mortals, or beings that are not gods but are presenting themselves like they are.

Demigod
A being with one parent who is a god or God and one parent who is not. Usually the other one is human, but they don't have to be. I suppose this could also refer to a being both of whose parents are themselves demigods. Depending on what kind of world you're writing, they're power level, and some other things, they may also be a god, quasigod, or pseudogod. Probably they are not a God, but they might be if they have an established place in a pantheon or something.

Semigod
Rather than being half-god, they are halfway to being a god. A semigod could reasonably be a being who's about half as powerful as whatever gods are around, or one who is somehow halfway through a process of becoming a god or God.

Hemigod
Literally half of a god or God. This term will not apply in that many situations, but could apply to a god that has been physically or spiritually bisected but is still doing stuff, or to half of a deity that is a pair of beings or has a dual nature, especially if half of the pair, or the other aspect, is absent or has been destroyed.

God has stopped looking like a real word. 

20,000 Hours Project

So, context on my vague allusions to being incredibly busy. This week (shh, just pretend it's Sunday night), I spent 46 hours doing paid work, and 15 hours and 4 minutes doing unpaid work. 2 hours and 42 minutes of that were spent writing. Most of that was this blog. That's not great, but it's a hell a lot better than nothing.
I have long since "done my 10,000" hours writing. But due to somewhat inconsistent work habits in the past few years, and the knowledge that I'm never more motivated than when I have a progress bar, I'm trying to do a second 10,000 hours and actually track it. I hope you'll accompany me on this fiddly, pedantic journey.

The Dark Tower

Fiance and I saw The Dark Tower yesterday. Apparently a lot of people didn't like it, but I don't really do reviews except MovieBob, and watching his reviews means making time to go look at things that aren't on my RSS feed.

I liked it. I don't seem to need as much to like a movie as a lot of other people. And I find portal fantasy comforting as only a '90s kid can. I also liked that the protagonist, generic as he was, was genre savvy and sensible. He only wandered off on his own once, and ran away when he was told to. Plus he throws something through a portal before walking through it. Smart kid. I also couldn't help noticing the drop-spindle shape of their multiverse, and the fact that reality, all realities, are beset from the outside by demons. I have this ongoing project of connecting all the fantasy novels, although whether it's literary research or something more fanfictiony I don't know yet.
I miss portal fantasy. It seems like lately, explaining things in fantasy is supposed to be lazy, and making that easy on yourself by introducing an outsider is even worse, but that never bothered me. I like young people getting to leave their boring and/or shitty lives and experience magic as a metaphor for having some goddamn autonomy. I like interdimensional travelers who have seen it all. I like people who aren't from earth, or aren't from our earth, trying to navigate it with the help of some middle school kid who's just new enough to personhood himself that he can actually articulate things how things work. I like Earth as being this weird small town of the interdimensional community that no one really leaves or visits. I don't have a point, it just makes me happy. Now I want to reread An Accident of Stars, but I can't, because I have to work.
Oh, actual Thought. The portal fantasy of the '90s was a lot about people reading the fantasy of the 80s and thinking "But what if I could go there?!" And like, there's a tendency to think you need an "everyman" protagonist to send to another world, but you don't, and it would be really cool to see more kinds of...OMG ok I am adding to my list of things that need to exist like, a Portal Fantasy Diversity Scholarship, where people from some frequently traveled fantasy dimension help people from other worlds, including ours, who have been under-represented among the worldwalkers they've seen so far, go over there and maybe go to school there. So like you could have a couple of marginalized kids from earth, plus like, put them in a cohort with people from other worlds who are marginalized, or who aren't but have trouble accessing dimensional travel. 

Submissions from Other Languages

Every submission period, we get at least one piece from an author who clearly don't have English as their first language. These stories present an unusual set of questions, since most of them contain grammatical mistakes that we would never put up with from a native English speaker.

Is the language clear enough that we can follow what's happening in the story?
If we literally don't know what it's about, it's impossible to evaluate whether it's good enough to take it anyway.

Was it written in English, written and then translated by hand, or written and then run through Google Translate?
I don't care what language you're writing or submitting in, Google Translate is almost never the right choice for fiction. I could imagine a story using the awkwardness and inaccuracy of automatic translation as part of the story, but it would then have to be obviously good enough that we even read far enough to find out that that was going on.

How much work is it going to be to edit?
This is a question of both how many errors there are and how difficult they will be to fix. Where there are issues with pluralization, or verb tense, there tend to be a lot of them, but they're quick-fixes, individually, and I can work on it while watching The Great British Baking Show. Syntax issues are a little more time consuming, but not hard, especially if I know the grammar of the other language involved. Errors with similar sounding words with similar but not interchangeable meanings are not in any meaningful sense worse errors than the above, but they do require a great deal more thought. With a small staff and deadlines to meet, the extra time and energy cost can work against you, so it's worth taking the time to be sure whether you meant "immersed" or "emerged".

Does someone on the staff have a particular interest in the place you're from or the language you speak?
I studied Russian in college and I'd really like to read more Russian speculative fiction, so you're gonna earn yourself some extra bonus points with me if your first language is Russian, whether you wrote in English or had your work translated. A lot of us have one or more interests like that. Or we might have just been talking about how none of us has seen any speculative fiction from Place, and we wonder what the work being done there is like.

Will editing damage the writing style?
This doesn't come up all that often, but sometimes you get a great story that's written clearly enough to tell how good it is, but is still going to need so much or a kind of editing that it will obscure the writer or narrator's "voice", to the detriment of the piece.

Is it good enough to bother?
No matter where a piece falls on the spectrum of any of these questions, how much leeway there is will always be informed by how much we actually like the piece. I'm willing to do a lot more work for a story I really care about, and conversely less work for something I'm annoyed by or not excited about, even if it wouldn't take much work to get it to a point where it could , technically, be published.

Tuesday

I finished listening to White Night. It's much easier to do clever banter in stories than in real life, because you can give everyone as long as they need to think of a good response.
I've just upped my main job to 40 hours a week, from 32. Counting transit time and whatnot that brings the hours out of my week to 55. Fortunately, I take the bus, so I can get some things done during my commute, but I'm keeping energy expenditure pretty minimal until I can acclimate, or until I determine that I can't.
I did download some submissions for The Fantasist onto my phone, so I can read them. I'm also, along with my partner, now St. Louis chapter head for the Speculative Literature Foundation. Not sure what exactly that work will entail yet, other than figuring out what the speculative writing community here needs and wants, and then figuring out how to help make it happen.
Normally, lately, I sleep for 3 or 4 hours right when I get home and another 3-4 hours before I need to leave by the house, on weekdays. That split schedule means I can be awake during more of the hours that I'm actually awake, but it also means I'm running shorter on sleep this week. I'm also still learning how to be productive with that chunk of time in the middle, how to balance everything.

The Journal of Evan Not Writing

I spent 15 hours doing work things for money, counting transit time. There were lots of times in there that I could have written stuff, and I didn't, because I was exhausted. I promise this will not always be The Journal of Evan Not Writing. Eventually you will get to see me persevere and write stuff anyway, but this week you get to see me not writing and not beating myself up over it.
I did get a little reading done. With my eyeballs. It's been slow going on The Gathering Storm, despite Sanderson's prose reading faster than Jordan's, 'cause it's just harder to care. I don't have any nifty writerly thoughts about it right now.
I'm listening to White Night, but I don't have a lotta insights there either other than that it's courageous to be messing with the "several seemingly unrelated threads somehow come together" formula this far into a series, although he was sorta half-assing that part in Dead Beat and Proven Guilty anyway. And also that I wish we saw more of Molly's training, because I like apprenticeship narratives.

Making Connections

You get two posts today because I didn't get one done last night. This is actually yesterday's post; today's will come later tonight.
I don't network. I don't really understand the concept, honestly. It seems to mostly consist of pretending to find people interesting until you've interacted enough to start a Facebook message conversation with them without it being weird, and if that's different from how you get to know people normally, without networking, then I have questions about how other people interact. Maybe knowing someone well enough to strike up a conversation doesn't translate as smoothly into actually finding them interesting?
Anyway, networking is Very Important in the writing world, but like, it doesn't actually have to be a Thing, provided you're willing to make the dreaded small-talk on the way. Making actual friends is probably better for your career anyway.
My fiancee and I spent like 40 minutes talking to a random guy we met outside the cat cafe. This was very cool because we don't have many friends locally yet. New Guy, whose first name I can't remember in any case, is a filmmaker, so that's sort of cool. (Advice for all artists: be friends with other artists outside your medium. They Understand, but are way less likely to get on your nerves than people in your own medium.)
Then we volunteered to get very involved in a nonprofit for speculative writers, doing stuff that will probably let us make even more friends in the area, this time with other writers. The whole thing happened on the public internet so I could probably go into detail about it but I'm not going to yet.
Then I rather forcefully corrected someone's misconceptions about what editors actually think about the word "said", on Tumblr. And then someone reblogged it saying "yes wreck that bitch", and positive attention from strangers is always nice.
And then I spent a bunch of time reading blog posts and webcomics and watching videos on my RSS feed. My RSS feed is actually very important to my writing, and not just because some of the things I follow on it are writing related. It's also a way of keeping up with what's going on in the world without completely inundating myself in the awfulness, hearing the thoughts of people whose thoughts I like, and taking in some serial narratives at the pace a person is meant to take in serial narratives, rather than vast chunks all at once on Netflix. Oh, and it lets me get some news and facts on non-writing topics I care about, without setting myself projects I lack the time or initiative to actually do. The lack-of-initiative thing is important. It all just kinda shows up in my feed, so I don't have to remember to check 4 different webcomics two of which don't have a regular update schedule. It's also a jumble of different topics and mediums, which makes it easier to focus and sometimes creates interesting juxtapositions.
Nothing I got done this weekend was actually writing. But all of it's important to being a writer. I should be doing more of the actual writing part, but I'm not here to agonize about my writing process, because that helps no one. I don't write every day. Not everyone does. Interacting with people; just regular people who are not Useful and might not be Interesting. Being active in your local and digital writing communities. Reading different kinds of things. Learning stuff outside your field, stuff that isn't research. None of that is as important to being a writer as actually getting words on the page, but it's pretty damn important. It's really hard to be a good writer if you're not actually living in the world.

I spent most of today walking

It's very difficult to read or write while walking, so today hasn't been very productive on those fronts. I listened to some of White Night while backtracking for a pack of cigarettes I dropped, and read a little bit of a story I'm reading for my writing group. It provided a possible explanation for a thing I'd been wondering about for a few chapters, so that was nice, and an important reminder of why you read something all the way through once before providing more than sentence level feedback.
Also I smoke, and I walk most places because I don't have a car and in any case don't know how to drive. I'm just hoping those things balance each other out. I've also had a headache all day.

Shhhh.... don't tell anyone!

Hi, my name is Evan and I have a history of starting blogs and then abandoning them. I'm taking another shot at it here, but I'm just not going to tell anyone until I've managed a month or so of regular updates. That way I don't disappoint anyone if I can't actually do the thing.
I'm a writer, a publisher, and a person who reads a lot, and this blog is just going to be updates and thoughts on those things. I like hearing about other writers' processes, and their thoughts about they things they read, and I think everyone and especially writers like to hear about what goes on in publishers' heads. I'm at different spots in working on two very different novels, so probably I'll talk a lot about what and how I'm doing with those. Also, y'know, full time job, chronic illness, two adorable and amazing cats, something about balancing writing and real life.
I re-read books as audiobooks a lot, so probably I'll have stuff to say about that even if all there is to say on the writing and publishing fronts is "I accomplished nothing today."
Anyway, I finished re-listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban today. Something that's struck me listening to it, and to Chamber of Secrets, is how technically transparent they are. In a good way, like one of those penny-squishing machines that's encased in clear plastic so you can see all the gears. In CoS, people are described as being, seeming, or feeling petrified about 10 times before anyone actually gets petrified by the basilisk. It's not subtle. In PoA, there's a bit where Harry goes into the post office in Hogsmead as far as I can tell just to foreshadow the fact that tiny owls are a thing that exist? Tiny owls are not what you might call a critical plot development, but another one shows up at the very end and PoA takes the trouble to prepare us for it. In 3, 4, and I think 5 and 6 as well, we see adult wizards using spells in the first few chapters that are going to be especially important for Our Heroes in the course of that book. I could do a detailed technical analysis of how well put together the third book is, and at some point I might, but my thing here is just how easy it is to see the moving parts. And that's great because almost my entire age group, writers included, has read them. In a field with a remarkable dearth of common technical vocabulary and in the way of coherent pedagogy, the simplicity and transparency of the Harry Potter books gives us a shared thing we can learn from and point to. There's value in reading things that do this stuff more complexly, certainly, but a developing writer can't actually skip steps by reading and analyzing harder books, and not everything has to be done as subtly or minimally as possible. Gus laughing before Hazel hears the joke in The Fault in Our Stars is a harder kind of thing to know how to do than the "petrified" thing, but it's not necessarily better writing. It's not worse writing either, of course. Bad writing is a real thing, but what constitutes good writing depends on context and audience. This will likely be a Theme. That was even less subtle foreshadowing than what Harry Potter uses. I really want to teach a writing class.
Anyway two other things I did today we're vaguebooking about someone's lack of professionalism (not in the writing world), and emailing someone else to let them know that I had barely started something I said would be done two months ago and I had no idea when it would actually be done. Everyone is doing their best with limited resources. This will likely also be a Theme.