Pamukkale, Turkey

Calcium carbonate spills coming from thermal springs under the mountain have formed a series of spectacular and beautiful pools.

Most science fiction and fantasy writers can’t come up with anything anywhere near as awesome or creative as this for their settings. I know I never have, and I can’t think of anything I’ve read that came even close, leaving out the spectacular-engineering type SF books, such as Ringworld. For natural wonders, though, whether set here on Earth or on an alien planet or in a magic-filled fantasy world, nothing can match mundane Nature.

Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t be trying.

Angie

I have to admit I recognize far too much of this. [wry smile] The tangled loops of overthinking, for example. And I wish there were a handly station for filling up on motivation and ambition. I think I have enough pride, thanks anyway; the trick is producing enough output to be proud of. [laugh/flail]

Where do you get stuck along the route…?

Angie

On the good side, I did a lot of other stuff, so at least something is progressing:

5 story submissions = 5
21K words editing = 4
story synopsis = 1

10 pts, yay!

As Josh says right off, Before we delve into what to look for in a publishing partner — and what to avoid — I want to point out that this post relates to niche publishing with small and indie presses. Much of what I’m discussing here is a non-issue in mainstream publishing. Running Press and Carina aside, m/m is still dominated by small presses and niche publishers, so that’s where the focus of the article is. That said, most of what Josh talks about is something even folks aiming at New York should at least be aware of.

Lots of good stuff here, and I’m not just saying that because she quoted me. [duck] Seriously, check it out.

Angie

Vampire Bunnies — what is it with vampire writers in the last however many years deciding that a vampire’s fangs are his or her incisors? o_O Whenever I read about a vampire’s sharpened incisors extending, or whatever, I have to laugh — I get this mental image of a psychotic Bugs Bunny or an undead beaver something. Definitely not the image most writers seem to be going for. [snicker]

How to Keep Someone With You Forever — gakked through Nagasvoice over on LiveJournal, Issendai posted this piece on how to keep people from leaving you, whether “you” is an individual in a personal relationship, or a company trying to hold on to its employees. A good subtitle would be “How to Create a Sick System.” This is important reading for anyone who might be caught up in a sick system, or who has a loved one who’s stuck in a sick system. But it’s also fascinating as a writer who might want to put a character into an emotionally poisonous situation some time. This is fascinatingly awful, and the fact that it’s real just makes it moreso.

Angie

I also got my marketing/admin doc for A Hidden Magic done and submitted, including several versions of a synopsis, at various lengths for various purposes. I’m counting that as a “synopsis” point, but I’m not counting the various bouts of sandpapering I did on the stories as “editing” because I don’t know how to handle the wordcount on that. Does editing a 5500 word story equal 5500 words of editing, or does deleting 100 words equal 100 words of editing, or does dinking with a 258-word paragraph to turn it eventually into a 261-word paragraph equal three words of editing, or what…? No clue what McKoala’s final verdict will be (and the Koala is absent until next week so I won’t find out for a while) but I’m ignoring the whole editing thing and tentatively awarding myself five points.

I’ve also submitted to a couple of markets recently (Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons) where they have a form on their web site you fill out with your name, story title, cover letter info, etc., and then you upload the story right to their site, rather than e-mailing it. It feels a bit odd, but it works, so what the heck. I remember scoffing at this sort of thing a while back regarding a novel publisher’s site — brand new baby publisher, wanted you to copy/paste your whole novel into a box on their web site, and then click a button saying that by submitting you were assigning all rights to everything forever to the publisher [eyeroll] which made them sound rather… let’s say “inexperienced” to be kind. I’d never heard of the “upload here” thing before with a legitimate market (and still hadn’t at that point IMO) so it seemed part and parcel with the ignorance (at best) of the ridiculous rights statement. I can see this working well for shorter pieces, though (and even longer ones, to be honest, although it still feels a bit weird) and neither Clarkesworld nor Strange Horizons is going for a rights-grab, so that’s fine.

On a more personal level, I tried backing off on the ibuprofen, cutting it down from 800mg twice a day to 400 twice a day. (I was originally prescribed 800 three times a day, but after a few weeks I eliminated the middle dose without much trouble.) The stuff works fairly well, but it dissolves your liver in tiny bits, and I’ve been taking it at this level for a couple of years now. :/ I was hoping I could get along with less, maybe taking a couple extra pills when I went to the gym or something. Unfortunately 400×2 leaves me too immobile to even consider going to the gym. I tried it for a couple of weeks to see whether it was something I could get used to, but it’s not. So I’m back up to the 800×2, and the screaming in my joints is starting to quiet down a little at a time. I do need to find a doctor up here, though, and get a prescription for something else. There’s got to be something I can take for the pain and stiffness that won’t do a number on my liver, or anything else similar; it won’t do me much good to maintain my already limited mobility if it means I need a liver transplant in five or ten years.

Next submission will hopefully be something for Sword and Sorceress. [crossed fingers] And if anyone else is considering that market, I found that the link I posted in the last antho call is now broken; the new page is here: Sword and Sorceress 25 guidelines.

Angie

New Animals Discovered in Borneo — I think my favorite is the stick insect, like a walking stick only a bit over half a meter long, pictured walking up the side of a guy’s head. Oh, and props to the guy, too, for having guts. The flame-colored snake is gorgeous, and the lungless frog makes me think about aliens for an SF story.

Why Content Is a Public Good — this is a guest post by Milena Popova on Charlie Stross’s blog. She talks about public and private goods, and rival and excludable goods, and the various combinations and how the market works (or doesn’t) to distribute or control the distribution of the various types. I’ve never seen the subject (primarily e-books and music, but also applies to movies and such) discussed from this point of view before. She starts at the beginning and explains the vocabulary for people who don’t have econ degrees. Definitely worth a read.

Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell — Prof. Harrell talks about avatars in computer games and the lack of variety available in avatar types, particularly for players of color who’d like their avatar to represent them as they are, particularly if they want a decent range of options beyond skin color. This is a familiar issue in gaming, but it also applies to books.

How often can a reader of color find a character who’s like them in mainstream genre fiction? Or a female reader in an adventure-oriented genre? Sure, we can appreciate and empathize with characters who aren’t like us, but white readers don’t have to do that very often, and never at all if they don’t want to. A series of characters who are all basically alike can give readers who are different the impression that this author or series or genre isn’t for them, and can give a writer who is different the impression that a genre doesn’t welcome their viewpoint. It benefits all of us to encourage a variety of character types in the media we consume, which (for those of us who are creators) means including a variety of character types in the media we create.

I Has a Sweet Potato by Littera-Abactor on LJ — I’m pretty sure I haven’t linked this here before, but it’s hilarious so even if I have, there’s no harm done.

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.

[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.]

[From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Me, yelling: What the hell are you doing?
Me: *makes haste for the kitchen and finds dog there*
Dog: *picks up entire raw sweet potato, which is what was causing the baseball bat noise, and flees for the bedroom*
Me: *chases dog, retrieves most of sweet potato, less the portion which has disappeared into dog’s gullet*
Dog: See? STARVING.
Me: …That can’t be good for you. It’s a RAW SWEET POTATO.
Dog: I had to do it. I haven’t been fed. Ever.
Me: You realize you aren’t normal. Normal dogs don’t steal raw sweet potatoes.
Dog, sadly: I was badly brought up.
Me: Yes. Yes, you were.
Dog: By people who starved me.
Me: Oh, no. I am not doing this again.
Me: *exits the room, bearing sweet potato*

There’s more. Definitely more. Click through and read the whole thing.

Oh, and I got an acceptance on a story called “Unfinished Business,” which is a sequel to A Hidden Magic, yay! It’s short and funny and is basically erotica, picking up on something a couple of supporting characters were doing about two-thirds of the way through the book. It’s scheduled for release on 26 June, just a month after HM, which is great timing.

Angie

It kind of sounded like the first chapter — or maybe the prologue — of a novel, rather than a stand-alone short. Except there really wasn’t enough pending action to support something novel length. :/ There was too much blah-blah-blah at the end, too much speculation about what the protag would do some day in response to the immediate situation. It just sort of trailed off rather than giving a firm ending. Not good. This story’s been bounced a couple of times before, and now I can see why.

I chopped off about the last thousand words and rewrote the ending. I figured out a different way the protag could respond to the situation, riskier and more immediate, but also more intense and satisfying. Hoping this one works. [crossed fingers]

Angie

What really annoys me, though, are fake cliffhangers used at the ends of chapters. Something like, “Mary answers the door, then gasps in horror and draws back with her arms curled protectively across her face!” End of chapter. Reader goes “Ack!” and quickly turns the page, imagining that Ivor Evil the Villain is there with a flamethrower or something, only to find that the UPS guy’s on the other side of the door with a stack of packages that almost tipped over. He apologizes, hands her the one or two that belong to her, gets her signature and heads off to the next apartment, at which point the conversation Mary and her sister were having before the doorbell rang toward the end of the previous chapter is picked up and the story goes on. The cliffhanger was nothing, meant nothing, and was inserted only to be a cliffhanger.

That kind of a cliffhanger is completely bogus. First, there’s no reason to break a chapter there — there’s no change of time, location, POV, or even significant activity. Second, the tension fostered in the reader was a complete fake, with nothing behind it. It’s the writer saying, “Haha! I fooled you!”

Then they do it over and over.

I’ve gotten into discussions about this particular device in the past, and writers who do this sort of thing have indignantly explained that it’s “to get the reader to turn the page.”

I have two comments for that. One, a writer who pulls this stunt might keep me turning pages through this one book, but I’ll never buy anything with their name on it again. And two, if they think they have to resort to these kinds of fake-outs to get their readers to keep reading, they must not have any faith at all in their plot or characters.

Cheap trick. Doesn’t impress anybody. Don’t do it.

Angie

PS — usual caveats, you can make this work, especially if you’re writing melodrama-style humor, etc. Doing it with a straight face, though? Yuck.

My original intention was to have it be a free extra, since it occurs right after the novel, and bangs off of something that happened during that story. I was thinking maybe it could be a bonus story included in the same file as the novel or something like that. My editor told me Torquere’s only done that once, though, and I got the impression it’d be like pulling teeth with a tweezer to get them to do it again. Which is understandable; I get that they’re trying to make a living, and with a story which falls within their wordcount range for a short story, they’d rather sell it as a short story. I was just kind of iffy about whether it could stand on its own; I had this vision of people who hadn’t read the novel buying the short and going, “Huh? What the heck’s going on here?! This sucks!” and never reading anything with my name on it again.

Another option would’ve been to post it as a free story on my web site, but that gets mainly crickets and tumbleweeds, and I’d really like for a few people to actually read the story. [wry smile]

I e-mailed it to some writers I know, none of whom had read Hidden Magic, and asked if they’d please read it and tell me whether they thought it could stand alone. (Thanks and hugs to the folks who helped me! ) They all said they thought it could, with a few suggestions. One, which I got from more than one person, was to de-couple the story from the novel, moreso than it already was. I’d been thinking I needed to fill in the reader on what had gone before, in case they hadn’t read the book, but my readers suggested going the opposite way. And… yeah, that’d work. The incident the short story is based on is funny in and of itself, and although it’s more funny if you know where it came from, it’s not necessary to enjoy the story.

So I did this big “Duh!” and did some rewriting, cutting some specific references to characters from the book and focusing the short more on Cal and Aubrey, the characters that particular story is actually about. It’s much better now as an individual story, and I’m much more confident that it’ll work out, whether a reader has read the earlier novel or not.

It’s one of the downsides of sequels, though, that they should stand alone, at least enough that some new reader who grabs a sequel first won’t be completely lost and has a chance of enjoying the story. It’s all right if there are details and references they don’t pick up on, but it shouldn’t be so obvious to them that things are flashing by over their heads that they get frustrated or annoyed by it. I’ve always preferred episodic series over single-arc series — with some exceptions, of course, for really well written single-arc stories — but the need to accommodate a new reader makes it difficult from the writer’s POV.

When I was a kid, someone gave me a couple of Nancy Drew books for Christmas one year (I think it was some sort of law that young girls had to have at least a couple of those, back in the seventies) and one thing that annoyed me even when I was eight or nine was the way every freaking book started with this infodump about how Nancy was this pretty titian-haired eighteen-year-old (and she never had a birthday either, although that’s a different gripe) whose father was Carson Drew the famous lawyer, and how motherless Nancy had been raised by their kind housekeeper Hannah Gruen. And about her friends, the cousins Bess and George, although in the first two or three books Nancy’s best friend was Helen, who was never mentioned later after B&G showed up. And her boyfriend Ned, who was about as sexless as a Ken doll. And her blue roadster. And how much the local Chief of Police loved her and thought she was just so awesome. (I don’t believe I still remember all this stuff, thirty-some years later, LOL! At least I forgot the Police Chief’s name.)

But they’d give you all this info, Every Single Time, right there on pages 1-2. After a dozen books it was annoying, and by the time I hit forty or so (which was pretty close to where I eventually stopped) I was ready to tear out the first pages of any Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on. I get that they had to present the information, but if your ham-handed repetition is annoying a kid who hasn’t even seen her tenth birthday yet, there’s got to be a smoother, less blatant way of communicating it, you know?

So all right, this is an issue writers have been having for going on a century now, at least, and I’m probably not going to come up with The Definitive Answer. But I have plans for more stories in this series, and although I want them all to be readable by anyone, I don’t want to go the Nancy Drew route of dropping infodump anvils onto readers’ heads at the beginning of each new book or story.

In the case of “Unfinished Business,” once I’d been clued in on the basic approach, I looked at the story as an individual entity, rather than as part of a series. It’s important to the series that readers have a certain amount of background on the characters and the Sentinel team and what they do, but most of that’s not necessary for a reader to read and enjoy this story right here. And although the funny in the story is funnier if you know where it came from, it’s still funny if you don’t know, and trying to explain what was going on before in a long, telly paragraph makes the story less enjoyable, so fun is maximized by leaving that out and shooting for the slightly lesser level of funny.

IOW, shooting for “Funny” and making it (I hope!) is better than shooting for “Very Funny” and having a miss turn the whole story into a “Blah.”

I’ve never had to consider this angle before; I’ve done other stories in this universe, but “Chasing Fear” and “Candy Courage” were about different characters entirely, and “Chasing Fear” is set a few hundred miles away. It’s all part of the same verse, yes, but there’s nothing to link the stories except for that, so I didn’t have to think about reading order when I wrote those, or A Hidden Magic for that matter. Now that I’ve tripped over the idea of constructing a story to stand alone based on what will make it good and enjoyable, rather than thinking of the verse or the series first, writing subsequent stories about the same characters will probably be a bit easier. At least I know what I’m shooting for.

I know a few people who read here have written series books or stories — how do you handle the new reader issue? Has it been difficult, or have things just sort of flowed for you? Any tips?

Angie