Armadillocon 42 is live now: 2020 convention is online and completely free

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My story "The Van Helsing Women's Shelter" now published on Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE

I'm very pleased to announce that a short story of mine, "The Van Helsing Women's Shelter," is now available on the Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE website, just in time for Halloween. In a world where vampires are real, you could hope we might create a few institutions to deal with the problem.

This story was something of a response to one called "Bitten Women's Shelter" in Daily Science Fiction...a story whose premise I loved but whose take on the situation bugged me. So thanks to author Sean Vivier for blazing that trail.

You can find my complete list of publications here.

My writing process at the moment

Rebecca Schwarz tagged me re: writing about my writing process. My process is undergoing change right now. For a year or more I was happily doing rewrites all the time and would rewrite a short story's text from scratch often. These rewrites might not change much ...wording always changed a little, but the structure of the story often did not. I was heavily biased towards a complete retype of the story to make some small change consistently throughout the story.

I was really proud of these rewrites and they made hitting wordcount goals easy. But I came to believe that they were wasting a lot of my time, and I swung the other direction, often spending many writing sessions working on the outline for a story and not writing any prose.

I'm trying to find the synthesis for those two poles now. I'm still spending a lot of time on planning; I don't like to go into a story without knowing where it is going. But I also find that I can generate ideas for a long time and often can't choose an idea without testing it with some prose.

Most recently, I was unable to decide what to do with a story where there was a magical object, and I couldn't seem to pick any one way to visualize it. The story needed a MacGuffin, but I didn't know whether it should be a magic ring or a magic juice jar or what.

After a couple of days of not writing much, I came back and sat down and just started drafting the middle of the story, and quickly settled on a shape for the object. More and more I'm finding this technique useful: generate lists of ideas, then draft to make a decision.

Okay, those are my thoughts on process today. Now I'll tag Doug Sims.

My favorite writing tip from Worldcon this past weekend

I was lucky enough to get to go to Worldcon this weekend. I only spent a day. Chiefly, I learned that a day is not enough time.

I found myself comparing it to Armadillocon a lot, because that's my only other recent convention experience. The main thing I'm looking for in a convention is panels about writing, and this one had them in plenty. On the Saturday I attended, nearly every hour had two panels of great interest to me -- which meant I found it hard to take time out to eat or go to the dealer room.

But I was going to give my favorite writing tip. This one came from a short-story panel featuring Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelley, Vylar Kaftan, and Cat Rambo. I'll state it like this:

"You'll be tempted to show character using backstory. Don't."

I found that one profound, because I'm always struggling with long backstory/flashback sequences bulking out my stories, and readers find they drag. This statement made me realize that backstory is the FIRST thing I think of for adding characterization.

I took this idea home and immediately cut a long sequence from my current story, without much pain.

The other thing I wanted to mention about this tip was that I walked away from the panel thinking that it was Michael Swanwick who said that. But when I checked my notes later, the tip actually came from James Patrick Kelley. I figure I attributed it to Swanwick just because he's more well known, and that is eye-opening.

The Big Father Essay uses permutation to drive new language

The following piece, really more poetic memoir than essay, is both a moving read, and an interesting experiment in how to make prose:

http://atlengthmag.com/prose/the-big-father-essay/

The writer used a method of permutations of sentence types (which he describes in detail). This forced him to think about sentence structure constantly.

The result is the sort of prose-poem that I really like, with a dreamy, stream of consciousness quality mixed with beats that hit you like a midday hailstone.

Yeah, ok, it made me wanna get fancy. Check it out. You won't be disappointed. I believe I found this on Metafilter.

The archive file trick: how to throw away old story notes

When I work on stories, I generate a ton of notes. I find, though, that a lot of these notes are transient things that I don't need a few days later. And I typically want to pare down the notes that I'm referring to while I work on a draft, because if the file of notes is too long, it's hard to use. Plus, as things change, notes become out of date.

Also, a lot of my notes are simply lists of ideas: as soon as I get stuck on 'what's a good way for CactusMan to defeat the Crimson Tide's Blood Tank', I start a list.

(He sticks it to 'em though, of course. That's what CactusMan does.)

But it's hard to delete notes, as I worry that I'll need them later.

In recent projects, what I do to pare things down is throw the notes I'm done with in an archive file. That way they're not deleted and if I really need them, I can go find them.

I almost never do; they just hang out in the archive notes file forever. But that's okay. Having that reduces my inhibitions about throwing things out and cleaning up, and so I can clean out the cruft more easily.

How fan fiction is good for us

This article about kids learning to write through fan fiction communities online has some interesting things to say. I'm particularly interested in groups that have editing processes, where folks get to really work on a piece until it is solid.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/13473/

Writing in plain text

So I've been working on shorter pieces lately, and using the simplest of tools: text files. And there are some advantages to that, especially when your process involves lots of rewrites, as mine currently does.

That is to say, right now I'm doing a lot of my editing by starting a new file and retyping the whole piece over again, making changes along the way.

And with plain text files, I can:

- Write on any machine. Everybody has a text editor. And since I use DropBox, my files are available anywhere too.
- I can use my pal Emacs.
- I can grep for things. I'll
- I can use a diff tool to compare two files...even more easily that when I'm using XML.

So I'm implementing some comments from some friends, and I find that several comments reveal that I dropped a detail or two in a later version, something that made a later thing make sense. I've got drafts with suffixes like _v01.txt, _v02.txt. So, I can grep for a string and find every version that contained it...and get some context around the string, too.

Thus I can not only see when I stopped having the main character consider hanging up the phone, but also HOW I phrased that in each version. I can do that across twelve versions and without opening any of the files.

Sure, for some markets I'll have to drop the thing into an RTF file and format it. But I'm completely sidestepping formatting during the writing phase, and that's a good thing.

Highlights has a fiction contest ending Jan 31

As long as I'm mentioning contests....this one is for a piece 750 wds or less aimed at small kids, and containing an "embarrassing moment." So far I don't have any ideas on this score that excite me, but this one is
a) free to enter and b) pays $1000 to three winners. These items make it stand out among writing contests.

http://www.highlights.com/highlights-fiction-contest

NPR Three-Minute Fiction contest --- new contest just started

600 words or less. Your story gets read on the air. That's your main prize, actually. Published on their site, too, though. They just released the theme for the new contest, due 1/23/11, this weekend! Information here.


I thought the winner from the contest that ended in December was pretty great. It was called Roosts.


I've been interested in flash fiction, stuff at the 1000-words-or-so length, lately. It's amazing what folks can sometimes do with very few words.

How to get published, from Making Light

Here's another iteration of some guidelines for how to get published; these are fairly simple ones.

Word count bookmarklet

So, if you're exactly like me, you'll find this useful. :)  Ok, so I'm currently reading tons of short stories online, and they rarely list their wordcount. When I read a story and I like it, I want to know how long it was, in words, usually so that I can be amazed at what the author did in a few words. ;)

This bookmarklet tells you the wordcount of the text you have selected. So it's a quick way to get that info. Before, I would copy the text to a file and then run a command-line wordcount command (the Cygwin version of wc) against it.

UPDATED 12/14/10: I realized after I wrote this that the real story here is not "there exists a bookmarklet for wordcount" but rather, "when you know about the existence of things like bookmarklets, you can search for them, and odds are someone has made something you can use already." Once this idea occurred to me, it was literally one minute before I had this solution in place. Thank you, Google!

Daily Science Fiction

I only recently found this site, which offers new sci-fi and fantasy stories every day...looks like a lot of flash fiction. They also offer the rate of $.08/word, and they publish to web, email, and iphone. It's good to find another venue for flash fiction.

Petty gods book is taking submissions

While I'm talking about Grognardia, I should mention that Mr. Malizewski is compiling a role-playing game sourcebook, a collection of petty gods for D&D-like settings. The descriptions of them are entertaining and anyone can contribute. The submissions are due by December 31, 2010. Go here for the open call page. Here's a sample petty god.

This thing will pay in prestige only; it's going to be a free pdf compilation.

An essay about The Parent Trap

If this remarkable post about the Disney movie The Parent Trap (with Haley Mills) is good example, I may be stopping by this blog a lot more often. I laughed out loud.

Misconceptions about publishing, by Charles Stross

Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes series, wrote a series of blog postings on the topic of misconceptions about publishing, and you can get to them here.

Slowly increasing the wordcount

This month I decided to go from 500 words a day to 750 words a day. So far so good. It makes me stretch just a little. Maybe I'll go to 1k/day in December.

It sort of cuts down on the odd hobby stuff. I still do crafts and whatnot, but I can only do what I can do in addition to family and writing. I'm generally happy with that choice: at the least, I'm producing art every day. Seems like wordcount alone isn't enough: I have a tendency, I think, to drag out projects without a deadline. My current project always has something else wrong with it that needs to be fixed. But more writing certainly helps.

Writing and guilt

Here's one way to get yourself to write every day:
http://twitter.com/susanorlean/status/24414323004

Green Arrow Year One...script by Andy Diggle

I was looking for comic book scripts online, to get an idea of how to write one, and this one caught my eye. It's a good read, and now I want to read the whole series (this is the script for issue 1 of a 6-issue series).

Stories for the stations of the London Underground

I bumped into this web site, Minor Delays, I think it was on metafilter. The author aims to provide a short story for each station on the London Underground. The one story I looked at looked interesting, but I can't say I've spent much time on it yet. It's just that the idea sounded interesting.

Some days everything I encounter sparks a story idea. And a lot of the story ideas, even the ones I end up writing down, don't make any sense to me later. They represent fleeting interests or enthusiasms. My current conviction is that the most important thing about a story idea is that it interest you enough to get you to finish the story.

I'm much more interested in story structure now, and believe that any story idea that is to be turned into a real and satisfying story must have a lot of work done to it. But that doesn't make me any less subject to fleeting enthusiasms.

I'll throw a small amount of work at almost any idea that I like, but on the other hand I've got several stories that I've been writing and rewriting for years. And the interesting thing here is that is still get a big kick out of working on them. Some of them are probably stories that I should just abandon. I've got one that I've abandoned several times and I still come back to it...still trying to get a solid story out of it.