Two Steps Forward, One Backspace

As I mentioned a couple posts back, I had the opportunity to attend the Backspace Writers Conference at the end of May. Let me come right out and say that this experience was everything I hoped it would be. I met a lot of awesome aspiring writers, pitched my book to some great agents, and, as much as anything else, walked away with a satisfying feeling of validation.

It really is energizing to spend a few days with writers--aspiring and/or published. In my daily life, so many people really just don't get what this is all about. They ask if I'm "still writing that book" or they don't get why my book hasn't come out yet. Or they suggest I get advice from the person who paid to print up her students' stories and thus calls herself, alternately, an "editor" and an "author." Or they smile and nod but clearly look at this as some foolish pipe dream that any sane person would have given up on by now. "Save me an autographed copy! Get me front row tickets to the movie premiere!" When I talk about looking for an agent, most people don't get what that's about. They think you just go out and hire an agent, or that an agent is some vaguely suspicious thing--"This person gets a percentage? For doing what?" If you do sign with an agent--like my wife did, with Amy Boggs of the Donald Maass agency--many people outside the field don't recognize that as a huge step toward reaching your goal.

The folks you meet at Backspace all get it, though. We all want the same things, and we're all comparing notes and sharing what we've learned. It's so nice to talk about these things and not have to first explain and second have it all sail right over someone's head anyway. (And not feel like people are rolling their eyes, either.) And the mix of people there--besides the aspiring writers there are the agents, the editors, and the published writers. I virtually never felt like I wasn't taken seriously by the pros. I got to hang out by the bar with professionals who understood my dream because it was their dream too, and not so long ago.

It's always hard to come down from that high--from feeling like a writer, dammit for several days in a row. It's a challenge whenever I attend a writers' conference (I can't help but feel like there should be an apostrophe after that S) or, heck, after my crit group meetings. It's not about not liking my day job--I do. But this is a passion too, and it's one that usually has to be fed in stolen moments. Stolen from grading and lesson planning, stolen from cleaning the house, stolen from having a hobby or watching television. Going to Backspace was like mainlining that feeling that I normally only get in small doses.

And I hope it doesn't sound too arrogant to say this, but this trip was also a positive for me because it made me feel like I had the goods for real. Obviously winning a scholarship helped in that department, but just getting the chance to exchange ideas, and to have people look at my work and tell me what was good and what could stand to be improved, all made me feel like it wasn't some pipe dream after all. That's not a competitive thing--writing isn't a zero-sum game, and my success doesn't come at the expense of someone else's.

There was a time when I kept writing once in a while because I couldn't seem to stop for long, but when I had pretty much concluded that I would never be published. That time couldn't be further away now.

I'll end with a pitch of my own, for any novelist who's serious about taking the next step. Go to Backspace. Get as ready as you can first, learn as much as you can, get as polished as you can. It's a good experience and a good education either way, but you'd be wise to prepare yourself to get the most from it. And save up, obviously. But even if you have to pay for it yourself, this conference is worth every penny. My only caveat is, do your damnedest to have a product worth selling. A good manuscript, a polished log line, and if you're shy, whatever source of personal courage you have to find to enable you to walk right up to people and start a conversation about your novel. I've seen this experience up close twice now, once when Lisa attended and now for myself, and no other conference I've been to compares.

Checking In

I basically haven't looked at my blog since school started, so I figured I ought to check in lest people think I fell by the wayside when it came to writing too.

This school year has been brutal--the hardest I can ever remember. There is so much paperwork and jumping through hoops. Some of it is punishment for having been a D school for two years--clearly we teachers aren't doing enough. (I'm sure the powers-that-be would take exception to my labeling it a punishment, but the shoe fits, you know?) We also have new textbooks, and I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel at every turn. I've never worked so hard, nor felt like I was accomplishing so little. I feel like the sacrifices I make, the time I put in, the things I do well, are all largely unnoticed. The things I don't get around to, though--because there's so much to do I can't possibly get around to it all--are immediately noticed and commented upon. I get to work at 6:15, on average, and leave at 4 on average, and still feel constantly guilty for every second I'm not working.

Through it all, though, I haven't let the writing slip. In fact, I've done a better job this year of being dedicated to my art and craft than I did last year. Since I'm getting up early to do schoolwork, I'm giving myself the evenings to write. Every night I put in at least a couple of hours, and progress is slow but steady.

Good News: I think I mentioned that Vanishing Act was a finalist in the Royal Palm Literary Award in the category of Unpublished Young Adult Novel. Well it won! First place! So my record in contests continues to be pretty good.

As for the submissions process--some up, some down. I'm submitting to agents at a snail's pace, because it seems better to fire them out in small bursts and be able to use whatever feedback I do get, rather than to blanket the literary world and see what happens. I can still count the number of agents I've queried without taking my shoes off. I've had a grand total of one form rejection, which I think is some kind of awesome, even with as few queries as I've sent out. I got a rejection today from an agent I'd really been crossing my fingers on. It had good feedback on it--good points, though I'm going to have to sleep on things for a bit to figure out how to make the improvements she said the MS needed. (See? Querying slowly was a good call!) To be unbelievably arrogant, I kind of have a feeling someone's going to want to represent this book, but if it doesn't happen, hopefully this agent will like my next manuscript better.

Anyway, I feel like a loser for not updating this blog more, but right now my priorities seem to be work, parenting, writing, and reading. There pretty much isn't room for a fifth thing on my list right now, be it television, going out with friends, tweeting, blogging, or reading other people's blogs. I have a feeling next year won't be much better in that regard, because I'm helping to kick off a new IB program at my school, so I'll be reinventing the wheel yet again. Hopefully someday I'll find myself teaching courses I've taught before, using materials I've used before. Certainly I've been in my career long enough to have reached that point. Now I understand why my father, late in his career, didn't want to take on the opportunity of starting a new Computer Science program at a school that didn't have one.

Speaking of reading: I've been reading Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness trilogy. Why is it so hard to find in bookstores? I thought How to Ditch Your Fairy was fantastic, but I think these are better. Razorbill is not exactly a small house, so what the heck gives? Among YA authors, Larbalestier and Janice Hardy are the ones most writing the kinds of books I want to be writing. (Among science fiction writers, in case anyone's keeping score, the list would be Steven Gould--whose writing is often so close to YA as to blur any meaningful distinction--Mary Robinette Kowal, and Elizabeth Bear. I'm probably forgetting someone, but that's who comes to mind.)

On perspective, and experiencing your work as a reader

Alternate Title: In which I wax immodest about the manuscript I'm shopping . . .


So I recently had a request for a full from an agent--

-o-

Since this is kind of a braggy post, let me gather all my recent brags together. I'll put 'em in spoiler tags, though, in case you don't want to put up with all the immodesty:

» Click to show shameless bragging - click again to hide... «

In the last few months, Vanishing Act won the "Do It Right" contest, judged by an acquisitions editor from Harper-Collins. Then Vanishing Act and "War Crimes" both became finalists for the Royal Palm Literary Award given by the FWA. Last month one of my short stories became a finalist for an international award judged by people you have definitely heard of if you like science fiction. (I'm not supposed to give anything away about it because it's supposed to be anonymous. So that's why I have to be circumspect.) Finally, I recently began querying agents for Vanishing Act. I've been taking it very slowly with this at first, and I've only queried three agents so far. I have yet to get a form rejection, and a little over a week ago an awesome agent who represents a couple of my friends asked to see the complete MS. And that was without me asking either of the clients I know* to intercede for me. It was all me, baby. ;)

* Actually, come to think of it, I "know" at least three of her clients, but only two of them well.

-o-

Ahem. Where were we then? Oh yes, the full request.

I'll never be done working on making this manuscript the best it can possibly be until it's in print (or in the trunk, I suppose), so even though I'm querying for it I'm still trying to polish it as much as I can. It's been a pretty painstaking process, going through one chapter at a time in multiple sweeps looking for different things each time, and from time to time I think I've lost sight of the forest in all these trees.

Before sending the full off, though, I went through to the end tightening wherever I could, temporarily abandoning my slow pace. As I neared the end of the process, I realized that this was the first time in a long time that I had gone through such a large portion of my manuscript in such a short period of time. While I was still working on it and picking at nits and not merely reading for pleasure, I have to say it was a refreshing change in perspective. For the first time in a long time I had a chance to get caught up in the narrative.

If you're in the same situation I've been in--with a completed manuscript you've been picking at from up close that you haven't stepped back and read for a while, I recommend you try reading it through at some point. I found myself experiencing the tension in a way that you just can't when you spend forever looking at each chapter. As I neared the end, I looked back and marveled at all I'd been through with these characters. At all the emotional moments, I found myself getting emotional myself, verklempt both when things went awfully wrong and when things went astonishingly right.

For a lot of my revision process I've been focusing on the things I didn't know when I began, and I've been amazed and embarrassed at my overuse of to be verbs, my cart-before-horse tendency to talk about what characters could see and hear rather than simply showing. When you look really closely at something, especially something you made, you can only see the flaws. Take a step back and maybe you'll see something different. When I had the chance to experience my novel more like a reader might, I felt proud. I felt like I'd created and polished and worked and, in the end, come up with something that was actually pretty good.

Lord knows if anybody else will think so. Maybe I'll get a lot of "close but no cigar" from my agent search. I have to acknowledge that so it doesn't seem like I've got a fat head, because in our society we don't like it when anybody feels too good about themselves. We slap people down for having the hubris to think they're special. But you know what? If you don't believe in your own work, who the heck will?

Where do I begin . . .

I keep thinking of things I should post to my blog, and then I never seem to get around to it. Then when I finally get time, I sit in front of the computer trying to remember what amazing insight I had and coming up empty.

I've been getting a lot of great revision done on Vanishing Act lately. I've crossed another milestone on the way down, and now I'm at 82,000 words. I really am finding that now, months later, it's easier for me to make some of the tough changes.

You're not supposed to blog about this, because allegedly agents and/or editor sometimes look up the blogs of people they're considering, and you don't want them to know how long you've been looking for or how many people have rejected you, but I sent out my very first query/partial for Vanishing Act Friday. (I guess if a really long time passes without a bite, I can always come back and edit this line out.)

While I was out, I also mailed off submissions for a writing contest for me and for my wife. There's kind of a funny story, there. I wanted to keep working on making my manuscript better for as long as I could, right up until the deadline. There were some specific searches I wanted to get done for junk words, passive constructions, and so forth. Like any metropolitan area I'm familiar with, we have a late night post office at the airport, where I tend to run things when I'm up against a postmark deadline. So I went into Friday night fully intending to get our submissions to the post office some time between 11 pm and midnight. I worked backward, figuring I should try to get there by eleven, to leave some cushion. I figured on a half hour of driving, so I should leave home by 10:30. I figured I'd give myself an hour to do all the printing and formatting (that may seem like a lot, but the contest had very specific guidelines. Names removed from manuscripts, a thirty word bio, a thirty word logline, three copies of the first fifty pages, and so forth. So I figured I wanted to be done trying to revise by nine or nine-thirty.

Well I'm not sure where the time went--I think putting the manuscript together took even longer than I allowed for--but I ended up leaving the house at 11:30. I got to the post office at 11:56, and ran in with my four packages. There wasn't a deadline really on the agent submission, so I did the three contest submissions first. As each postmarked stamp came out of the machine, I checked the date and did a little dance for each one that came out April 30th. When I finally did the one for the agent submission, it came out postmarked May 1.

O_O

Okay, maybe that was a bit closer than I intended to cut it.

Then again, I have friends who congratulate you if you get a tax refund of zero, because that means you avoided giving the government any more of your money than they were entitled to. I suppose you could call this a win, because I literally got every last possible second of revision in on these contest entries before I sent them out.

How do I *know*?!

So I'm working on Vanishing Act again after leaving it dormant for a very long time. I haven't lost my passion for the protagonist and what he goes through, but I've been staying away from it mostly because it's so much damned work compared to my more recent writing projects. I learned so much while working on this and over the year or so after I finished that first draft that it practically hurts to go back and read some of the passages in this. I mean, hell, I already cut forty thousand words, and there's still fat! It's not that it can't be cleaned up, but that cleaning it up is so much less fun than writing new stories. (Another issue is the time versus what I have to show for it. In the time it takes me to wrestle with this manuscript, I can put four or five short stories into circulation with the paying markets. Any one of those could strike paydirt while I'm still cutting darlings from Vanishing Act [and I'm still checking my e-mail compulsively forty times a day for one of them in particular.])

So why am I taking it up again? Well, I figure if I'm going to seriously pitch it around, this is the time. Since it's a finalist in the Do It! Write! contest, I'm going to be able to say on my query letters that it placed [whatever] in a contest judged by an acquisitions editor from Harper-Collins, and I know that when a contest has a respected judge, that makes it worth mentioning in those letters.

So as much as I feel like I could polish and cut forever, I think the time to take that blind leap is coming quickly. If nobody takes it on, that's okay. The next book will be better. :-)

-o-

Anyway, I'm still finding places, mostly in the first third of the book, where the writing just isn't carrying its weight. Passive constructions (not passive voice per se, but telling more than showing), repeated phrases, and stuff that simply lacks polish. And I've got a good enough eye now to see what's bad, but sometimes the fixes can still be hard to find.

This is hardly new or Earth-shaking, but one thing I have to keep reminding myself is to ask myself how I know. That's my trick for making the writing vivid. Specifically, how do I know a character's mental or emotional state?

Here's an example:

“I just wanted to make sure you were all set,” she said. She seemed awkward herself for the first time all day.

What drew my attention to that sentence in the first place was that it was my third use of "for the first time" in the chapter, but the problems with this paragraph run deeper than that.

And that's actually an important point. For me, at least, repetitive phrasing is almost always an indicator of deeper problems. I use repetitive phrasing when I'm writing lazy. I'm trying to get the words on the screen, get the chapter done, whatever, and not looking for the best way to do it, which is okay, as long as I eventually revise. But clichés--even if they're just "house clichés"--are a symptom of the same underlying problem that leads to passive writing. (Again, for me, anyway.)

I struggled for a while to fix the superficial problems. One of the other two repetitions of the phrase was easy to get rid of, but one of them, I felt, needed to stay. There's no real reason not to leave this one too, but this paragraph was ringing clunky to my ear, and now is not the time to be lazy, anyway.

But I couldn't figure out how else to convey what I thought was important here--that it was noteworthy that Michelle seemed nervous, because she was the only person who had not shown any sign of nerves in what had been a very unusual day. How else could I distinguish this time from all the times she had not seemed nervous? Everything I came up with sounded even more clunky--in particular, everything I was coming up with was even more passive. Lots of "to be" verbs that indicate that you're seeing description or exposition and not action.

Then I asked myself an obvious question: How does Chris, the POV character, know Michelle is nervous?

When I thought of it like that, here is what I came up with:

The door opened partway and Michelle poked her head inside. “I wanted to make sure you were all set,” she said. She paused abruptly, as if she had been planning on saying something else and then changed her mind.

This may not be perfect. I'm telling you her pause was abrupt; is there a way I could show that instead? Maybe if I just say "she paused," and lose the "abruptly." It's still a work in progress. But for the most part, now I'm showing you nervous instead of telling you. Who knows? Maybe I could come up with a nice simile for her stopping-and-starting.

But the point is the question that broke the logjam was how do the characters know the thing I'm trying to convey? If I can't think of a way they would know, then I shouldn't even have it there, because I'm breaking POV by telling you things the POV character couldn't figure out.

This may be unbelievably obvious advice for anybody reading this. Hell, it's obvious for me, since this isn't a new advice. But what I'm working on is internalizing all the little techniques I've picked up--remembering things like that when it really counts.

Also, did you notice what else happened there? The point I was so anxious to make--the contrast between Michelle's earlier confidence and her awkwardness now, didn't actually make it to this revised version at all. And that's okay. If I've characterized well, readers will pick up on the fact that she's usually able to project confidence, but that this interaction is testing even her abilities. It won't seem out of character--readers will be able to distinguish between this quiet moment and her earlier displays of confidence. Or maybe not, but that's a chance I need to take. This is a recurring problem of mine, and a reason I tend to (tended to, really, since I've gotten a lot better with my more recent writing): Closed Captioning for the Dumb. (Heh . . . I like that so much I think I'll make it a tag. I bet I have cause to use it again.) I'm always so worried that readers will fail to pick up some subtlety or nuance that I intend that I hammer it home, over and over again. I need to have more faith in my readers, first of all. Second of all, if some readers don't see exactly what's in my mind, that's okay. Hopefully the story is entertaining and meaningful without having a direct dump of what's going on in my brain. And the things that sail over your head when you first read a story are the ones that make the story reward re-reading anyway.

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.

::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.

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?

Good thing I waited a few days to make those resolutions

After being pretty successful with my New Year's resolution for 2008, I had some pretty ambitious plans for 2009. Then Monday came and reality slapped me in the face. I'm now sitting here at my desk, surrounded by piles of paperwork I need to get through, and coming to the realization that I need to reprioritize. I know what you're supposed to do when you finish one writing project: begin the next one. Writers write. Duh. But I've got four preps, two of which are new to me, and way more work each week than I can get done in a measly forty hours. It isn't fair, but that's the way it is: I need to devote more of my off-time to my day job.

I'm deeply conflicted about this. I don't want to be one of those people who say they want to write but always have some excuse for not doing so. How many times on this very blog have I commented on how much of this year's growth could have come sooner if I'd just pushed a little harder? But until someone wants to pay me to sit around and write, I need to make sure I keep giving my employers reasons to keep me around. Hopefully what I've done this year will keep my internal self-critic quiet for a few weeks.

Twenty, to be precise.

So here are my scaled back resolutions for 2009:

• Finish revising Vanishing Act, including the feedback from my critters.
• Send Vanishing Act to Moonrat for the critique I won, and incorporate her feedback into my submission.
• Begin sending Vanishing Act to literary agents, starting with the ones who've asked to see it.
• I can't control whether or not I sell any fiction in 2009, but I resolve to either sell something in 2009 or have rejections for at least five different works to show for myself. This isn't as ambitious as it sounds, because I have a backlog of completed and unsubmitted stories.
• Do the preliminary work for my next novel.
• This summer I will begin writing that novel.
• Complete a first draft of that novel.

That last one may be a bit iffy, if I don't even get started until June, but I can work pretty solidly for almost ten weeks over the summer, and then I'll still have about twenty weeks left in 2009.

No specific goals for writing short stories or for attending conferences and such.

EDIT TO ADD: One more resolution I nearly forgot:

• I resolve to stop bringing up my blog traffic stats anywhere else, no matter how fascinating, troubling, or just plain weird they are, because it makes me look like a total goober.

It's 2008 somewhere . . .

In 2008 I . . .

• . . . resolved to get back to writing instead of dreaming about writing, wishing about writing, and remembering how much I used to love writing.
• . . . wrote Vanishing Act, my 100,000 word 120,000 word 105,000 word 90,000 word 83,714 word urban fantasy Young Adult modern fantasy Young Adult modern fantasy Young Adult contemporary fantasy Middle Grade contemporary fantasy Young Adult contemporary fantasy novel.
• . . . stumbled across Steven Gould's blog while looking for information about the forthcoming Jumper movie, which led me to a conversation on appropriate versus inappropriate Young Adult SF content on SF Signal, which in turn led me to discover Ellen Datlow's and Nancy Kress's blogs. These were the first three blogs I began reading (four if you count SF Signal), and before I knew it I was following links and stumbling across new blogs and setting up a Google Reader account, with which I now follow the blogs of four editors, twelve writers, and eighteen literary agents, thirteen of whom represent the sort of fiction I write.
• . . . was called a raging homophobe in that same SF Signal discussion, despite being a democrat who believes gays ought to have the legal right to marry, because I apparently wasn't willing to be quite as hateful as some other people. (Interestingly enough, Firefox don't know the word "homophobe.")
  
• . . . started my own blog. Maybe some day people will find this blog as useful and interesting as I have found all the blogs I follow.
• . . . attended two regional writers' conferences.
• . . . attended three science fiction Cons: FX, ReaderCon, and WorldCon.
• . . . voted for the Hugo awards.
• . . . attended the Hugo award ceremony. (This was a Big Deal to me.)
• . . . met a ton of writers and editors I admire, including Linnea Sinclair, Elizabeth Bear, Debra Doyle, James MacDonald, Ellen Datlow, Anne Aguirre, David Hartwell, Tanya Huff, Elizabeth Moon, Nancy Kress, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, S. M. Stirling, Joe Haldeman, and, believe it or not, tons more than I can remember. If you're a nerd like me, I can't recommend WorldCon enough.
  
• . . . discovered that, while all those people are way cool and talented, Sinclair, Doyle, MacDonald, and Aguirre take cool and generous to astonishing new levels.
  
• . . . was somehow lucky enough to get a published author to agree to mentor me. I won't say who, because I don't know if that's cool. (I don't want to drive a bunch of other wannabe's to this person.)
  
• . . . put some awful crap from 2007 more or less behind me.
• . . . failed to pay off the credit cards I ran up during that awful crap, largely because of all the travel we did this year. Oh well--it certainly can't be denied that we lived well. I'm sure that will stay with us longer than the bills will.
• . . . learned a ton about writing, both as a craft and as a business.
  
• . . . pitched my novel to three agents, in person, all of whom seemed enthusiastic and interested, and all of whom requested partials.
• . . . failed to deliver said partials in anything like a timely manner, even though the novel was complete when I pitched it, because I decided it wasn't polished enough, and I didn't want to be That Guy who sends his stuff out before it's ready. Hopefully I haven't slammed any doors for myself, because these three agents, as luck would have it, are all fantastic agents I'd be thrilled to have represent me. I'll send the stuff out just as soon as my phalanx of beta-readers gets past chapter three.
• . . . entered a literary contest, which I failed to win.
• . . . submitted to an anthology right at the deadline, only to discover that, through some glitch, I sent them an empty file. Surprisingly enough, they declined to publish my empty document.
• . . . won the big prize in Moonrat's Mischief Fights Cancer raffle!
  
• . . . joined my state writers' association, and its local branch.
• . . . had three published authors read some of my novel and make very positive remarks about my writing.
  

. . . and probably a few other things that are slipping my mind. In terms of writing, it's been a damned fruitful year. I feel really close to breaking through--when I think of how close I was to basically giving up on my dream before this year, I am awestruck by how blessed I've been.

More than anything else, I am blessed to have a wife who has the same dream I do, so I never have to explain or justify what I'm doing, because she knows. Whatever sacrifices this dream takes, she's right there making them alongside me, and we're there to pick each other up in failure, and to celebrate each other's successes. She's at least as talented as I am, so even if I don't break through, I know she will. I'm lucky to get to watch her and learn from her.

Ever notice that your odometer doesn't change when you drive in reverse?

The rest of my darlings are safe . . . I'm done cutting for now.

I've gone from 120,084 words to 84,210, for a decrease of 35,874 words. Of course, the word count will continue to change as I continue to revise, but this is a good point to stop and take stock.

It took me about six months to write 120,000 words. It took four or five months to cut 35,000. The implication would seem to be that cutting is a lot harder than creating. I'll tell you what--it's a hell of a lot less fun. What's frustrating is that everyone focuses on how many words you've written as a way of measuring your accomplishment. Clarke said you had, what, 500,000 words of crap in you? What about the words you excise--don't those count toward your growth?A lot of people have a hard time grasping that I've been productive at all for the last five months, since my word count hasn't increased.

On the other hand, it really is a lot better now. So much of the stuff I cut was just crap. Stuff that, in hindsight, I'm not entirely sure why I wrote in the first place. Details, details, details. I am a detail-oriented person, but one thing I've learned is the difference between the telling detail and overwhelming the reader with minutae. Writing clichés be damned: sometimes you need to tell and not show.

I don't imagine I'm done by any stretch, but I'm finally down to a wordcount that is not totally unreasonable for YA, and that's something to celebrate.

Tomorrow, I hope to polish off my synopsis. I've got the bones of it done, but right now it's just a dry plot summary. I need to have it capture the feel of the book. After that, I'll focus on the material that agents are going to want to see in their partials. First thirty pages, first three chapters, whatever. I've got a week off coming up, so I should be in good shape to get that done. I'll also be trolling for beta readers, hopefully in the next week or so.

On looking back and realizing how stupid I was

It took me about six months to write Vanishing Act. I've now spent the better part of five months polishing it, and I'm not done. I don't remember how long I spent writing Prototype, but I spent next to no time polishing it before I began sending it out to agents and publishers alike. One read-through by my wife, another by me, and it was out the door. What are the odds that back then I made none of the same mistakes I've made in VA? One of these days maybe I'll pick it up and look, but I'll tell you the truth--I'm more than a bit scared of what cringe-worthy crap I'll find.

3.0

I've finished a round of cutting/editing/tightening up. I'm down to 103,219 words, which is still much too long. I have one or two people that I know would be interested in seeing it now, at this length, but If I'm going to have to cut another 20,000 or so words anyhow, it seems to make more sense to do that cutting before I submit to anyone. I'm going to take another look at my outline tonight and see what else I can find that could go.

On another note, I just realized that I never heard back on a story I submitted back in April. That's one frustrating thing with not doing simultaneous submissions. It takes so long for markets to get back to you that you forget all about your works that are out there. And this is at least the third story I can think of that I've never gotten a response back on. (Though at five months, it's not yet out of the question that I could get a response back before too long. I've got others that dropped off the face of the earth years ago. Including one agent's request for the full MS of Prototype. Dang it, when I spend the money to print and ship a 90,000 word MS, I'd at least like to hear back from people.)

(Before anybody mentions it, yes, I've queried the market. And on the other, older ones, yes I've long ago assumed the worst and moved on.)

Contest time

My wife convinced me to enter a short story into a contest today, and I spent all day working on that. The postmark deadline was August first, so at quarter to eleven tonight I found myself at the late night post office by the airport. Nothing like running right up against deadlines two nights in a row.

I have a great track record with writing contests . . . I won the only one I ever entered, about fifteen years ago. I'm a little afraid to put my perfect record on the line! ;)

Post-Adrenal Collapse

I just shot off my story submission for an anthology that's in the works, less than ten minutes before the deadline. I had the idea months ago, and I've been working solidly on it for weeks, and just finished last night. I spend today furiously editing. After at least a week in deathmarch mode, I feel a strange sort of restlessness. I've been getting to bed at 4, 6, 7 am. Now there's no reason not to go sleep . . . but I can't bring myself to.

It's a horror story, set in Puerto Rico in 1961, with Clinical Vampirism and all kinds of other fun stuff. To do my research, I've been googling some sick shit, so if you never hear from me again, the FBI probably has me, 'kay?

That's the thing about writing a horror story, although to an extent, it's true for all stories. You really expose yourself. It's hard, sometimes, to show someone a story, because everything in it came from you. If what's in it is vile, people might look at you and wonder at the vileness within you. Not just in horror--I wrote a scene with my bad guy in Vanishing Act where I let him be a real dick, and my First Reader was a bit taken aback by it. But I feel like my story is more compelling when I dig deep into myself, when I take that chance and expose myself. If nothing else, hopefully my antagonists are more compelling when I do that.

I Has a Pitch

Many adolescents feel invisible, like nobody sees or notices them. But for fourteen-year-old Chris Westbrook, it’s literally true. Chris has the ability to blend in, to completely escape notice when he wants to. When his drifter father and his “Uncle” Danny, a petty con-man with delusions of grandeur, find out about his ability, they are only too happy to use Chris in their grifts. After Chris is forced to take part in one particularly nasty scam, he decides he must get free of the two men--but not before trying to beat them to one final score.

Vanishing Act, my completed 100,000 word Young Adult Modern Fantasy novel, is the story of Chris’s struggle to escape from an abusive life and find a real family--one rooted in love, not opportunism. It will appeal to readers of all ages who enjoy stories with a speculative fiction element about young people trying to take control of their own lives, such as those who enjoyed Steven Gould’s Jumper and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong.

In fifteen years as a teacher of students ranging from sixth grade to college freshmen, I have worked with nearly two thousand young people and developed a sense for what issues matter most to them, such as control of their lives, their bonds within their families and communities, and their sense of justice. I believe Vanishing Act addresses these themes in a way adolescents will find compelling.

I also has one more chapter, but I've got to run. I'll blog about it later.

Only the epilogue left to go!

EDIT: Fixed the formatting glitches. Dang Blogger's interface can be annoying at times.

Too many pots on the stove

In the last week I've written chapter 22, begun chapter 23, and then been distracted. For some reason, I haven't felt like blogging. Oh yeah. Distracted.

Strange Horizon's submission window opened this week. I had this thought of subnmitting "War Crimes" just minutes after midnight Utah time, but it took me a couple days more than I expected to get it ready. First I had technical issues--my printer suddenly and inexplicably deciding not to work, until it had slept overnight, and then me losing my stylus--and then I had to work on chopping the story down to get under their maximum word count of 9,000. The printer . . . *sigh* It's a beautiful printer when it works. It's an OKI 3400, but it seems to have odd little connectivity glitches from time to time, that are a major pain to figure out. Even when I finally get it working, as often as not it's a mystery to me what finally did the trick. In this case, spending the night shut off seemed to get the printer going again. Maybe it perceived it as a warning. And then the stylus . . . a tablet PC's pretty useless without one! I spent an hour searching for it before it occurred to me to look in the pocket of the jeans I had taken off earlier.


Cutting "War Crimes" down has been eye-opening. I have put so much work into that story these past six months, and tightened it up quite a bit. I think I was so uncommonly pleased with the story when I first wrote it that I couldn't see the places where it needed to be improved. As I went through it this time, I found lots of places where I could tighten it up, remove redundant verbal diarrhea, and so on. I also found a lot of repetitive phrasing by using CTRL-F to count up how many times I used this or another specific phrase. That was eye-opening. And a bit disheartening: if it takes this much effort to clean up a short story I think is my best work, will I even be capable of tightening up my novel in the same way? I thought it would take an hour or two to get "War Crimes" ready to go out the door, and it took about three days. Hopefully the payoff will be worth it. But I don't know if I can give Vanishing Act anything like that close a reading.

Also, I haven't really gotten started looking for beta readers, but I worry that I'll get a lot of people who want to do me a favor but don't really have time to stick to the reading.

I'm debating taking a break from writing to try to read through as many of the Hugo nominees as I can, since votes are due in a couple of days. I wouldn't vote in a category in which I had not read all the contenders. No matter what, there will be categories I abstain in. On the other hand, I'm so close to the end and just twitching with every day that passes with me not finished. And even once I finish that first/second draft, there's so much I have to do before it's ready for anyone else's eyes.

Cheating

I cheated on my novel this week.

I had all sorts of out-of-town company last week--including the in-laws, who are still here--and I'm still struggling to meet my writing goals for last week, so, in order to still get to feel some sense of accomplishment, I worked on my short stories over the weekend. I revised "War Crimes" and resubmitted it, and pulled out an old short I'd never submitted and found a market to submit it to.

I think the changes I made to "War Crimes" make it stronger. They help avoid one source of confusion and they make the ending stronger. I'm pleased with the commentary I got from Baen's Bar. That said, I don't think it's going to find a home there. It doesn't seem to be generating any interest. I think a problem with the model over there is it discourages interest in longer stories. People will read a 9,000 word story that has already been vetted for quality, but not so much an unpublished one by a stranger. So almost nobody reads it, and if almost nobody reads it, how can it possibly generate the buzz necessary to get published? They seem to be looking for short little action stories, not long morality studies with literary pretensions.

Of course, it would help if their site could stay up for 24 hours straight.

The other story I submitted was "Unintended Consequences." Yeah, that's a terribly trite title; I wish I could think of a better one. And it's the dreaded time-travel story, which makes it doubly cliché. But it's not a bad little story, I think. It's not really a trunk story, because it's not like it has made the rounds and been rejected; I literally have never submitted this story anywhere before. So typical of what I'm trying to move past . . . I've written so much stuff that I've either never submitted or only submitted once or twice. It's hard to motivate myself for that side of the art. Anyway, UC is a less ambitious/pretentious story. It's just a good old-fashioned (or, at least, old fashioned) sci-fi story about scientists and the uses/misuses to which they put their discoveries. It's got what I think is a nice twist in it, and a pleasantly frisson-ish ending. And unlike almost everything else I write, it's short. I hear OSC's IGMS is looking for short science fiction--apparently they're just inundated with fantasy--how's that for a turning of the tables?--so hopefully this will be right up their alley.

Not to wax too lyrical about the process of writing--but then again, that's the whole reason I have this blog: so that I can hide these raves where nobody who isn't interested can see them--but I've really been struck by how much better my life has been since I rededicated myself to actively pursuing my dream. Better in ways totally unrelated to writing. I've noticed I'm less stressed at work. I'm not investing myself in it twelve to sixteen hours a day anymore: eight is all you get, sorry. Whatever doesn't get done today will get done tomorrow. Or at the last minute. And that's okay. But the biggest thing I've noticed is that I've lost weight. I haven't made any effort to lose it; I haven't dieted or exercised, at least not consciously. It took me until later to piece this together, but here's what I realized: I tend to snack when I'm stressed or bored. When I write, I am neither of these things, and thus, I haven't been feeding my face as much. The weight loss hasn't gotten drastic yet, but it has gotten to the point where stuff that just barely wasn't fitting now just fits, and stuff that was just fitting before now fits better. How cool would it be if this kept up?!

*sigh*

Nothing like having the first reviewer have not a single positive thing to say about the story you think is the best writing you've ever done in your life to throw cold water on the notion that you might really be a writer.

I should do some work on Vanishing Act, since I have time, but, you know what? I don't much feel like writing now, for some reason. I reckon I'll take the girls out and see a movie. Spiderwick looks fairly good.

Submitted "War Crimes"

I submitted "War Crimes," the story of mine I'm proudest of, to Baen's Universe's online slush pile. Now I feel like a presidential candidate awaiting early returns. While I waited, I read through some of the other submissions and thought, I'm not totally out of my league here. Ew, wait, that's not humble and people like humble. I don't mean I thought I was better than people. A decade and a half of no publications attests that I'm not. Just that I didn't feel unworthy to even approach the slush pile.

I really like that you get to submit and get critiqued at the same time. Nobody comes away completely empty-handed, it seems. Even if they don't end up buying your story, you get a crit out of it.

I intend to crit some of the other stories there while I'm killing time, but I'll wait until I start to get some responses of my own, just to know if I have any business whatsoever telling anybody else how to write. See? The old insecurity always raises its head, no matter how cocky I get.

But at the risk of sounding cocky again--and it's not, it's just the opposite, you'll see--I reread "War Crimes" today and was blown away. Not that I think I'm so good, but that I don't know where the hell that story came from. Even if nobody ever publishes it, if I could write like that every day, I would be beyond ecstatic. There's all these neat places where something early in the story resonates beautifully with something later, and I think, how the hell did I do that? If I could write like that every day, I'd feel legit. I'd feel like I'm not a pretentious knob calling myself a writer, regardless of whether I ever sell a work. Because that was a story I'd like to read.

But I can't write like that. I seem to have one flash of brilliance every two or three years, at best. I'm sure the conventional advice is to keep trying, and of course I will do so. But damn.

I've got a handful of other stories sitting around in my hard drive, but I'm going to wait on them a bit. I'm so impressed with the way Baen seems to work, with the fact that I can get a crit, if nothing else, that I'm inclined to give them first dibs on my stories.