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.