Not Dead Yet

I bet one can tell a thing or two about how school's going by the spikes and troughs in my posting here.

I've gotten optimistic signs on a couple of my stories that are out looking for homes. Maybe I'll have good news in the next month or two. Or maybe not. The writing's not going so well right now, mostly because I'm working on schoolwork fourteen hours a day. Spring break's about twenty-nine teaching days away, after which I'll be shifting into review mode with my AP classes, so hopefully things will get better soon. And hopefully all my hard work will pay off. Some days, I swear I wish I knew how to phone it in.

I've been reluctant to send out "Spacelift." I just can't decide if it's ready or not. I did some pretty extensive revising since I posted the first draft under password protect here. I just don't have access to a lot of critters. There are places like OWW, of course, but I'm not in a position to reciprocate right now. So it goes.

I haven't been reading anybody else's blogs either. I think I'm about ready to dip my toes back into that sea. I hope people still remember me. :)

In other news, we lost Fraemie, our oldest dog, a couple of weeks ago. She was sixteen, and we knew the end was near, but it was still hard. I carried her downstairs that last morning, playing with her, and she seemed pretty chipper. We had been struggling on and off to get her to eat, but we seemed to have turned the corner with that. I fed her her breakfast, which she dug into eagerly, and went off to do some last schoolwork before getting dressed. A couple minutes later, I heard a weird noise coming from the kitchen. A couple days before she had accidentally pushed her bowl under the lip of a cabinet, and needed help getting it back out where she could eat. I initially thought the same thing had happened, and that the noise was her kicking on her bowl, trying to dislodge it. I walked into the kitchen to find her on her side in a puddle of pee, running in place. She'd had seizures before, but none like this one. We took her to the vet, where she went on to have another half-dozen or so seizures, showing signs of pain, and so we ended her suffering.

In a way that was my first experience of death. I've had (a very few) relatives pass away, but I've never been there as it happened. It was . . . well it was something that will stay with me.

This was much more my wife's loss than mine. She had the dog for a year before she met me. I was deeply saddened; she was devastated.

I was a bit disappointed that none of my coworkers asked about my emergency absence. I'd typed in my emergency e-mail that my dog was having seizures; nobody asked if it was okay or what had happened. Kids in a couple of my classes asked and expressed sympathy when they found out, but as far as the adults at my school were concerned, my unplanned absence was nothing but an inconvenience for them to deal with.

So it goes.

In happier news, today we are driving to Melbourne, hopefully to get a new puppy who was co-bred by the same breeder who bred Fraemie. She looks cute as hell in her photo. I'm really bad about taking pictures, but hopefully I'll get off my lazy ass and take a couple and maybe post one here.

Sometimes I almost believe in muses

I'm just about done polishing "Spacelift." Not, necessarily, that it's polished, but it may be about as far as I can take it. As I was thinking about it this morning, I realized that I had no idea, now, why I had made one of the plot choices that I had made. It served the ends of the story, but I don't remember consciously thinking about it. I can analyze the effect that choice has on the narrative, but it's really as if somebody else wrote it.

Jorge's goal is to get to Magda, who is injured, before

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the human doctors discover that she's a shapeshifting Catarine and not a human child.

He gets to the ship's infirmary, only to discover that she's been moved to the airlock in preparation for transfer to another ship. He gets to the airlock, only to discover that he has no time to do anything, because the transfer is happening now. And so it goes.

But why did I decide that the ship Jorge and Magda were on did not have a fully-functioning sick bay, and that she needed to be transferred? I don't remember consciously thinking about it. I knew that he had to have obstacles, and getting to the infirmary and finding her not there would work, but why that specific scenario?

Here's what I notice as a reader: not only does it serve as an obstacle--it also helps Jorge. It keeps him in the game. After all, he's trying to get to Magda before the doctors do. If his ship had a real sick bay with real doctors, I'd have to come up with some other reasons why it wasn't Game Over for Jorge. And that's what kind of dawned on me today: I hear a lot about obstacles and conflict for the protagonists, but whatever the protagonist is striving against--be it an antagonist or just cruel fate--needs obstacles too. There's something keeping the bad guy from just walking up to the good guy and shooting him in the head. Maybe the bad guy's in hiding. Maybe his henchmen are inept. Maybe he hasn't figured out who the good guy is yet.

If the bad guy doesn't have obstacles, you end up with the silliness of many James Bond movies. You know what I'm talking about. The evil supervillain dude has Bond captured and tied up. Naturally, he immediately lodges a bullet in Bond's skull and the credits roll before a stunned audience. Wait--that's not it. No, first he brags about the details of his evil plan. Then he starts his Rube Goldberg Death Machine and leaves! He can't even be bothered to watch Bond die! He just turns the hourglass that will release the rope that's holding back the pendulum that will block the laser that will unlock the cage that will release the alligators that will step on the weight-sensitive plate that will trigger the nuclear device that will kill Bond. Because I guess he wants Bond to be dead and impressed.

You ever see a competition where one player is substantially more skilled than the other? You ever see the more skilled player play at less than his best, and let the inferior player keep it close? It's not terribly sporting, but he's doing it to keep the other guy in the game. I guess phony drama is better than no drama at all.

So thanks, Muse, for doing that automatically for me, so I didn't have to think about it!

What Would Elizabeth Bear Do?

Spoilers for "Spacelift" follow, in case anybody cares.

-o-

A lot of the feedback I received for "Spacelift" seemed to indicate to me that I wasn't ending the story on a conclusive enough note. Tying into Algis Budrys's seven point structure (I finally found a link!), perhaps I wasn't sending enough validation at the end. Or maybe not. The feeling I got was that Jorge's big transformation, his big reveal, came too late, was treated too shortly, and was anticlimactic. He spends a scene arguing with Adriana about what he's going to do . . . when he finally does it there is no surprise for the reader, and no real closure.

I decided the ending would work better if Jorge transforms himself into Magda's double just a bit earlier--before his confrontation with Adriana. Have Adriana spying on him, and have her confront him when she catches him in the act. The climax of the story, I think, is their confrontation. If the transformation occurs after this, it's anticlimactic. Hopefully, with the transformation occurring before, it's not.

Moving this transformation up, though, has had a couple of challenging consequences.

One thing I struggled with is how to refer to this character after this point. Jorge or Magda? He or she? I came down on the side of calling the character Jorge, reasoning that the name is tied to the underlying identity. Besides, Jorge tells Adriana that "Jorge" is the name closest to his true Catarine name.

But what about pronouns? Is Jorge-as-Magda a he or a she? To all outward appearances, after the shift Jorge is a girl. My initial thought was to use female pronouns. (Besides, if I stick with the male name and the male pronouns, won't it be easy for readers to lose sight of the fact that a change has taken place at all?)

A couple of readers have suggested I base that decision on how Jorge sees hemself. I haven't really explored Catarine concepts of gender in the story and it would be well beyond the scope of a 5,000 word story to do so. In my mind, gender roles in a society of shape-shifters are a lot more fluid, but if my mind is as far as that goes, what difference does it make? (Does it make any practical difference that Dumbledore is gay? Is he really gay if readers are never shown or told this within the narrative? Does it matter what I say about Jorge's gender, unless I make it explicit?)

On a tangential note, I've always been drawn to art that is gender-bending. I think this is largely due to the fact that my own views of gender are out of step with the prevailing conventional wisdom. I would like to write a story that can be classified as gender-bending, but I'm walking a fine line here, with pitfalls I can see on either side. If Jorge takes Magda's form but keeps his name and keeps being, for all intents and purposes, male, then I'm not really exploring gender here, am I? He's basically in full-body drag, no? On the other hand, if I start referring to Jorge as a she because of the shape shift, then I'm basically implying that gender is a superficial thing. (We may refer to transsexual people who have had sex reassignment by their outward gender, but the outward change they go through reflects a much more profound internal process.) I believe that gender roles are societally constructed to a much greater degree than we realize, but that doesn't mean it follows that gender identity is a superficial thing, as easily changed as a set of clothes. It takes a lot of soul searching for a transgender person to identify as such, and the whole point of identifying as transgender is that gender goes beyond what is visible from the outside. I don't want to be unintentionally insensitive to this.

And then there's the much more practical issue of whether my use of pronouns throws the reader straight out of the story. Right now I have passages like this:

A crashing sound broke Jorge’s concentration, and she turned around to see the lavatory door flapping against the bulkhead. Inside the darkened stall, she could just make out Adriana, eyes wide, sliding against the wall until she was kneeling on the floor by the toilet.

Now, I don't see why this is such a big deal. I mean, the first time maybe, sure. But once you figure out that Jorge is being referred to as "she," need this continue to throw you? But my First Reader has indicated that it does. Maybe it comes down to how we view the world and how adaptable we are to things that confound our expectation (particularly when it comes to gender). Granted, I'm the writer and not the reader here, but I'm confident that something like the above would not bother me. I'm hoping that I could ease the transition by adding a sentence where the shift in pronouns was made explicit. Something like "Jorge looked down at his hands--her hands--and . . . "

So, my eight readers, what do you think?

::insert sound of torpedo tube firing::

I dropped a story in the mail today. Well okay, today's Sunday. So I put a story in an envelope, sealed it, and put it by the door. Same thing. This baby hasn't been exposed to the mean, cruel world out there yet--on the upside, it hasn't garnered a single rejection yet! I'm sending it to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Duotrope lists as one of the twenty-five hardest markets to crack. Go me.

I revised it until I thought it was as good as I could get it. Then I revised it until I thought I couldn't revise it any more. Then I revised it some more. Lots more. I've lost my first draft somewhere along the way, but I'd say I've culled two thousand words from this sucker.

You know? I think I'm getting halfway decent at this revision thing. Time will tell, but I feel as though the words, clauses, and sentences that aren't moving the story forward and need to go are starting to jump out at me. Maybe not compared to people who aren't naturally as given to overwriting as I am, but certainly compared to where I was a year or two ago.

Some day I need to look back and chart my [past] course. I'm vaguely aware that at different times over the last few years I've focused heavily on different elements of my craft, and I've seen improvement in each. I've got to think that sooner or later I'll reach the point that pushes me over the top, and makes me good enough to be professionally published. All I have to do is keep working at it.

I'm a bit torn right now over what to do next. I've got an old short story that I love that I'm thinking I ought to revise and send out. I've got a much newer short story that probably already has a lot more polish, that would probably take less effort to get out the door. I'm also feeling the urge to write something new. And then of course there's Vanishing Act. Most folks would tell me that should be my highest priority, but here's the thing: I can have one of my already-written shorts out the door in a week or two. I can have a new story written and ready to go in not much longer. Vanishing Act is going to take a lot more work. Doesn't it make more sense to do that work while some stories are out and circulating, looking for print homes? And if one of my stories should actually get bought, wouldn't that make my novel query that much stronger?

Who knows. One thing I do know is that I have learned a lot by focusing on my short stories. Short stories require a level of tightness that people tend to think novels can get away with lacking. If I hadn't focused on my shorts for the past year, maybe I'd be in that camp. Instead, I've learned lessons that I think will help my longer fiction, and that I think make me a better critter for others as well.

Now it's time to go apply them.

Don't worry, Bev Vincent, I write like a girl too . . . Or maybe we should both worry, because neither of us will ever win a Hugo award. ;)

By now most people who follow SF blogs have heard of this story. In case you haven't, the short version is that Mr. Bev Vincent received an editorial note back from an editor who had been brought in on an anthology that had already bought one of his stories, explaining at length that, like many women, Mr. Bev Vincent could not write men convincingly.

Leaving aside for a moment the absurdity of an editor looking no further than an author's first name before making all sorts of erroneous assumptions, the rigid gender profiling the editor showed in his letter hits on a hot-button topic of mine. Look at these assumptions for yourself:

The editor says: “The story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man . . . It is hard to imagine a fellow from a place like [the setting] uttering the following line.” The editor then provides three sentences from my story as examples. He or she continues, “And I can’t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family” [Emphasis his or hers]. Another brilliant insight: “Most men don’t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.” The ultimate conclusion: “She [sic] needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man’s perspective.”

I've always had problems with such gender stereotyping because I've never felt like I fit those stereotypes myself--yes, I do think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature. ;)

I lean toward thinking that traditional gender roles are societally constructed and not inborn. No, I don't have a ton of evidence for that position, and I'm comfortable in my unmanly unscientificness. I've seen evidence for traditional roles being genetically determined and found it unconvincing--I've never believed it was possible to adequately control for the pervasiveness of society's messages. Parents of daughters who, like me, tried to keep their kids away from Barbie and from the Bratz know what I mean. If you didn't do a good enough job of reinforcing society's stereotypes, don't worry: your kids still got the message from their teachers at school, from their classmates, from their friends on the street, and, most of all, from television. My kids find it odd that I'm the cook in the house--why would something that's been true for all of your life seem odd to you, unless you're hearing the message somewhere else that it runs contrary to expectations?

I'm not sure the question of where traditional gender roles come from can be answered satisfactorily, but you know what? It doesn't matter. The question is actually irrelevant. (Like the question of whether homosexuality is a choice or not, but that's way beyond the scope of this rant.) Let's suppose traditional gender roles are in fact in our blueprints; I'll concede the point. It's not the real issue. The real issue, to me, is that regardless, there will be exceptions. There will be boys and girls who don't meet your stereotypes. Artistic boys who like to cook, draw, and write, who grow into young men who focus on relationships and on their feelings. Athletic girls who like to play with toy cars and tools, who grow into young women who like to figure out how stuff works and who can opine knowledgeably on football.

The exceptions are out there, and I can't for the life of me think of a reason why anybody should have a problem with this. And because they are out there, I think we should honor our children's right to be individuals. When we as a society hammer home the message, over and over, that males are Y and females are X, we tell those children and young adults who don't fit the mold that there is something wrong with them. How damaging this is--and for what? How much healthier to send the message that there's nothing unusual about a nurturing boy or about an empowered girl. Better yet, let us send the message that all children can have the healthiest features of either gender, and all grow into nurturing, communicative, empowered, confident adults.

Anyway, enough ranting. In the wake of this story, I started seeing references and links to The Gender Genie pop up all over the place. If you're not familiar with it, the short version, once again, is that some researchers did a study of the writing tendencies of men and of women and came up with a complex formula for determining the gender of the author of a writing sample, based on the frequencies of certain key words that men were more likely to use and others that women were more likely to use.

The word lists are the most common of stereotyping: women use personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, possessive pronouns, and words like "should." You know, 'cause they always gabbing about relationships and shit. Men use prepositions, articles (Seriously?! Men use more articles than women?! How is that even possible??) and forms of the verb to be (except for "be" itself, curiously, which is a woman's word). That's because men are always building shit, so they need to look at blueprints. I guess.

No, this is not a detailed look at their methodology, just my overall impression from several hours of playing with the thing when I should have been revising a story for submission.

Anyway, I first played around with the Gender Genie, er, so to speak, two or three years ago, but seeing it again in the context of Bev Vincent's story made me want to look more closely at the supposition that a fiction editor could distinguish between manly writing and womanly writing based on the textual clues.

So I fed through the story I was supposedly revising. Gender Genie said it was written by a woman. No surprise . . . it was a first person story with a female protagonist. Probably lots of womanly words there. So I ran through "Spacelift," the story I posted here last week. It has a gender-ambiguous protagonist, but at least it's not first person. And it's on a space ship, so maybe there are more engineering words there. Nope, couldn't fool Gender Genie. That was definitely written by a woman. So I tried my coarsest, most vulgar story, which featured an unambiguously male protagonist. Written by a female, said Gender Genie again. I tried my wife's WIP next. Female. *whew*

Well, big deal anyway. Like I said at the beginning, I never felt like I fit those stereotypes very well. So it's no surprise that Gender Genie says I write like a female. Besides, writers tend to be artsy types, right? That probably skewed things. Maybe all fiction writers showed up as women on Gender Genie.

There was an easy enough way to check: coincidentally enough, it's almost time to award the Hugos, and that means most of the nominees are available online. I thought it would make an interesting experiment to run as many of those stories as I could through Gender Genie.

First the short story nominees. According to Gender Genie, all of those stories were written by men. Yes, that includes the stories by Mary Robinette Kowal and Kij Johnson.

Now I started to freak out a little bit. It's one thing to be told I write like a woman. It's quite another to discover that a sampling of the most well-received short fiction in SF this year is written in a more masculine style. Gender Genie didn't peg a single one of my stories as being written by a man, so what did that say about my chances of publication? Is this what I've been doing wrong? Am I not butch enough?

Oh, but the plot thickens. Because next I tried the Best Novelette nominees, and three out of the five were identified by Gender Genie as being written by women. Oddly enough, though, none of those three was the one by Elizabeth Bear, the only actual woman among the nominees.

Mike Resnick is an interesting case. His "Article of Faith" was written by a man, while Gender Genie thinks his "Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders" was definitely written by a woman. Don't worry Mike. I empathize with your painful gender confusion. (((Mike Resnick)))

By this point, I wasn't sure what to make of it all. Maybe the novelette form is friendlier to a more feminine style of writing because it's longer. Women write florid, dontcha know, while men use fewer words and more grunts and gestures.

I plowed on, because the alternative was productivity, and found that, among the best novella nominees, Gender Genie correctly identified the three stories written by men ("The Tear" by Ian McDonald was not available for examination) and the one story written by a woman. Thank God for Nancy Kress--finally, a woman who writes like Gender Genie says a woman should!

(Many of those were extremely close calls, though. A couple more "with"s, maybe one less "around," and we'd have some more gender confusion among SF's leading men.)

The only novel I could try, Little Brother, was correctly identified by Gender Genie as being written by a man.

So what wisdom can I take from all of this?

Beats the hell out of me. In twenty unscientific trials, Gender Genie was right ten times. A .500 batting average is fantastic in baseball, but a 50% average is not so good in school. The samples I fed were 75% by male authors, and Gender Genie guessed male 55%, which is basically comparable to results I could have obtained by flipping a coin. Beyond questioning the stereotypes underpinning the algorithms of Gender Genie, maybe we can say that some men write "like men" and some women write "like women" and some don't, and yet they all seem to please their fans enough. Or, in other words, that it doesn't matter much whether you fit the stereotype.

Nah. That's sissy talk.

Oh, and Bev Vincent is right. I ran his blog post through, and Gender Genie says he definitely writes like a girl.

Spacelift (a story)

As promised, here is a story for your possible enjoyment. It's science fiction, 5000 words, so if any of that puts you off, this may not be for you. If I know you from somewhere, including the blogosphere, and you'd like to read it, feel free to drop me a line and I'll tell you the encryption key. If you know me well enough to know which of my friends I wrote this story for, you don't even have to ask--it's that person's first name.

If you choose to make comments that will help me improve this, I'll be extremely grateful. In the first comment post under this entry, I'll point to some specific concerns I have. I'll encrypt them with the same key as the story, so that you can come to the story "cold," without any preconceived notions sparked by my leading questions.

But if you just want to read it without critting it, that's cool too. Just let me know if you enjoyed it is all.

Show encrypted text

Breakthroughs and too much to think about

I often find myself thinking, in the course of a day or week, "Gee, I should blog about that." Then the next time I'm getting ready to post an entry I feel like I've had so many of those moments they've either jostled each other out of my head, or I feel too fatigued to even do them justice. My blog posts tend to be long anyway . . . I don't want to make them longer!

I just finished the first draft of a short story I've been wrestling with, it seems, forever. I--seriously--began and abandoned it four separate times before I finally got a story I could live with. The first time I got 542 words in before I figured out it was crap. The second time, 3694. Third attempt: 430. Fourth attempt, a whopping 4672 before I figured out it was going nowhere. And finally, over the course of just three days, I pulled together a draft I'm happy with at 5132. Hopefully when I revise I'll get it under that magic 5000 barrier.

But first, 9338 words of crap.

You don't go through that much failure without learning a thing or two. At least, I hope not. Let's see if I can articulate what I did learn. I set out with the hope of taking some of the lessons I'd been learning over the past year and coming up with something shiny and new that showcased my progress. Despite that, I found myself writing dull stories about unlikeable people. (Part of my problem is that I think stories should be entertaining first, but I also want mine to be meaningful. It's challenging to pull off both.)

Then I came up with a premise that had a lot more potential, but my next attempt suffered, I eventually concluded, from being too contrived.

I think this is a new realization for me. I tend to have a pretty good idea of where I want a story to start and where I want it to end, and sometimes I abuse the crap out of it to get it from point A to point B. It was as though I were working with a living thing that was resisting the contortions I was trying to put it through. I've talked about killing darlings in the forms of phrases and scenes, and yeah, that's hard for me, but one of the lessons I think I needed to learn here was to kill my darlings among the plot points too. There were some arbitrary things I was cramming in my story that were making it not work, and I was getting writer's block trying to force myself to write something broken.

When I finally threw my story away for the fourth time, kept the premise I liked, but totally reimagined what I was going to do with it, I immediately came up with something more streamlined. For anybody into Swain, I wrote it in scenes, and pretty much glossed over the sequels to keep it short. I had the disaster at the end of each scene immediately pose the new goal, and no angsty deliberation on what to do next. Maybe it's just a fluke, but I've read successful short story writers talk about the point where they got it, where they figured out what kinds of ideas could be fleshed out in five thousand words and which could not. When I came up with that sequence of scenes, I knew I had it. I knew I could write it, and I knew I could write it in about twenty pages. Nothing seemed too contrived, and I was eager to sit down and get it all down. All that trying and failing, and the final story took three days to type.

So maybe I've had my a ha moment, at least in that regard. Only time will tell.

I also found, as I wrote this story, that each time I started to go off in a boring or meandering direction, I figured it out within a paragraph or too. It may be that I've written so much crap that I've finally become attuned to what JoeCrap smells like, and I'm getting better at recognizing it before I generate too much of it. God I hope so.

My wife doesn't understand why I've been focusing on short stories, when I have a completed novel ms, and when there's no money in short stories. Here's why: my biggest problem as a writer, I think, is my verbosity. I need to learn to write tighter, not for the sake of my shorts, but for the sake of my novels. Just because you've got a hundred thousand words or more to play with doesn't mean anybody wants to read a bunch of stuff that doesn't move the story, that you were too undisciplined as a writer to leave out. I'm focusing on short stories because if I can master the art of getting a complete, engaging tale told in 5,000 words, my novels will get better.

So I've got this story. I'm just happy it's done, and I'm happy it's not overlong. I like to think it's good, but flush from writing the thing, who am I to say?

I'll put it up here in a day or so, encrypted, when I've had a chance to clean it up. If I know you--that includes people whose blogs I've commented on and people who've commented on mine before--then you're welcome to read it and give me your thoughts. Just drop me a line when the time comes and ask me for the key. Then you can tell me if it's any good or not.

Getting back to the idea in my first paragraph . . . that's not all I wanted to talk about in this post, but I'm going to stop here for now anyway, because if not it will be too rambly.

Why do the best ideas come when the laptop is off?

Went to bed early last night (midnight) because I was passing out. Before I could fall asleep, I had a brainstorm on the idea I've been toying with for my next novel. Suddenly I was wired, with one idea after another coming to me in rapid succession. I didn't grab my journal. I knew these would keep until morning, and they did. Actually, I had to fight the temptation to get up and start working on it, but I knew if I didn't get some sleep I'd be dragging through today. Still, I'm pretty excited. I wish I could work on this now, but I have a short story to finish, revisions on a couple of short stories, and *blush* revisions on Vanishing Act.

Oh, for thirty hour days.

And it's July already! How the hell did that happen?!

As if nothing whatsoever had happened

I've been wrestling with a short story's plot lately, trying to get it not to suck. One thing I've noticed is that it's easy to use a maguffin as an excuse for poor plotting. "Oh, the plot doesn't matter because it's really about the character arc" or whatever. I think I flirted with that for a bit; luckily, I've come to my senses.

The specific problems I'm having . . . well first my subconscious threw a complication out there as I was writing, and I really liked it so I decided to keep it, but then that meant I didn't know how the protagonist could achieve his goal. Basically, I had him break his leg in a situation where a broken leg would make it hard if not impossible for him to succeed. Well good, in a way, because it shouldn't be too easy for the character to succeed. But then I spent a day being all, "crap, how *does* he get out of this?!" Then I thought of a solution for that, as well as for one of my other problems, but I began to feel that my solution was too facile; I'd pulled something out of my ass that rendered it just not that big a deal. Well if it's not all that big a deal, then it's a pretty impotent complication. I also started to realize that the toughest challenges faced by my characters were not the *last* challenged faced by them in the story, which undercuts any sense of rising action. If they overcome bigger challenges early in the story, then the later challenges never make the reader doubt that the main characters will win out, and so the ending becomes anticlimactic.

All of this led me to examine my plot more thoroughly, leading to the epiphany about maguffins posted above. I started to feel that my plot was entirely too linear. I've heard some good advice on this, but it's hard to put it into practice. Maybe every writer needs to find his or her own way. Orson Scott Card says you should throw away the first idea or two that come into your head for a given premise, just automatically, because your very first ideas will be the trite ones . . . the obvious solutions. Fair enough, but I tend to fixate on things. Having one solution to a problem, it's difficult for me to see other ones. Elizabeth Bear says it's all about writing enough. When you've written and read enough stories that hew to the tried-and-true, your subconscious mind finally begins to reject clichés and begins to throw out ideas that subvert them rather than implementing them. Again, that's great, but I'm trying to figure out how to improve *now*, not after I've written a hundred crappy stories. I mean, improving eventually is better than not improving at all, of course, but shouldn't the goal be to improve sooner?

This isn't wisdom, because I'm on the road, not looking back on it from afar, but where I am right now in the process is analyzing how I generate plot. I tend to have a starting point and an ending point, and then try to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

(This isn't about being a plotter versus a pantser, because whether you plot in advance or you do it as you go, you still plot. I'm interested in how to make that process result in more original ideas, regardless of where in the writing process I do it. I have a story out there making the rounds which has gotten very positive feedback on my writing ability, but the general sense that it's not terribly inventive or original. I'm just doing what has already been done.)

Anyway, I'm thinking that certain "Point B"s only lend themselves to certain paths from A to B, and that if I want a truly original plot, I need to change where it's going altogether. If I know the rebels destroy the death star, well there's only so many ways to make that happen. I mean, there are infinite possibilities in the details, but few in terms of the big picture. If I want to do something original, I need to veer away from the ending point I have in mind, to one that's less obvious.

Maybe.

Random Thoughts

You even notice how many blogs are titled "Random Thoughts"?

It's like people are ashamed of their randomness, and so they feel the need to warn you up front. These aren't deep thoughts, or particularly instructive ones, or even helpful--well some of them might be, but not all. Because it's random.

Dude, chill. It's a blog. Of course it's random.

-o-

Still working, still making progress, but not necessarily on the same things, and not necessarily on the things I should be making progress on. I haven't worked on my revisions for Vanishing Act for at least a couple weeks now. I had a story come back with a very nice personal rejection, and I decided I really should get all my short stories out the door and looking for homes. In this market, publishing a short story might be helpful in getting a foot in the door and getting some cred. Even a semipro sale is better than nothing, methinks. If nothing else, selling one story semipro might help me sell a later short story to a pro market.

But I've learned a lot since I wrote those stories, and I wanted them to reflect the lessons I've learned in recent months, and to be the best versions of themselves that I could send out. "Unintended Consequences"/"The More Things Change"* was pretty much ready to go, since I'd already polished it. "Cabrón" doesn't need a lot of work either, because I wrote it pretty recently. On the other hand, a computer glitch cost me some revisions, so a little bit of cleaning up is definitely in order. "War Crimes" is a story I love, but it is the oldest of the three. It's gone through many rounds of revision over time, but I wasn't necessarily looking for the things I'm looking for now. Hopefully I can make it an even better story.**

So I decided to get those three sent off and then return to Vanishing Act, but then something else came up. Back in January, I think, I agreed to an artistic gift exchange. It's just like a Secret Santa/Secret Maccabee exchange, except the gifts are stories, sketches, poems, what have you, and the identity of each gift-giver is not a secret. It sounded like a great idea, and hey, the deadline wasn't until March 15th, which was like a lifetime away. By March I'd surely have loads of time, having finished my revisions and being bored by then of spending my afternoons poolside with a margarita, wondering what the heck to do next.

Well now March 15th is looming. I've got most of a story mapped out, which I wrote trying to think of what themes and elements would speak to its recipient. I'm really excited about writing a brand new story, and trying to put in what I've learned from the beginning, instead of in the process of revisions. I've got to finish writing the thing, and soon, but it still looks like I can get it done on time.

It does mean, though, that for the last few days I've tabled the revisions on the short stories. So I've got one project tabled while I work on another, and THAT one tabled while I work on a third. Sheesh! Hopefully, though, that means when I get back to Vanishing Act I'll bring fresh eyes to it.

Oh, and look for a new short story to be posted here soon, since I've got that handy dandy encryption feature. I'll allow anybody I "know" to read it--that includes people I know in real life or from the internet, including anyone who has posted on my blog, or anyone on whose blog I've posted. You'll just have to ask me for the key, and make sure I know your e-mail. Or if you know me REALLY well, it will be the first name of the person for whom I'm writing the story.

* I realized yesterday to my chagrin that while I had changed the title in the file, I had not changed it in the filename, because I got back an acknowledgment that still had the old title.

** Yes, damnit, I will say "even." It's my blog. If I don't believe in my writing, who will?