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 Words that stuck around even though they refer to outdated ways of doing things.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.