Hello, and welcome to number eleven in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. All the essays in this series are based on my fifty thoughts on writing, all of which were composed in one hot, caffeine-fueled session. That may explain why the metaphors are occasionally so bizarre. This week's essay is a little different, because it depends rather heavily on having read essay number ten, which was on the topic of validation. If you've been skipping in and out of the series (totally understandable), please take a moment to go back and skim number ten before proceeding. It's okay. I can wait.

Back yet? All right, excellent. Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #11: Suffer For Your Art.

This is continuing to touch on the topic of validation, which, as we all know, really doesn't like to be touched. More importantly, it doesn't like to be disputed, and that's what we're about today. Where is the line between seeking validation and refusing to grow? How do we deal with the human desire to hear nice things, and the author's need for critique? It's hard, and that's why our thought for the day is:

Look: if you just want validation and sugar and sweetness, that's okay. But you need to admit it to yourself, and you need to admit that you don't actually want to sell anything. Thanks to the Internet, you can have a wide audience by opening a website, and that can be wonderful and fulfilling, and you won't ever have to listen to a single harsh word. There is nothing wrong with that. I post a lot of stuff online that I don't necessarily feel like being critiqued on. Those pieces say 'be gentle,' and their safe word is 'no.' If what you want is to improve as a writer, however, and if you're looking to publish someday, change 'be gentle' to 'bring it on,' and get ready to suffer for your art.

As a writer, you're going to hear a lot of things about validation. Some of those things will be good. Some of those things will be bad. None of those things will change the fact that, as human creatures, we will occasionally require positive feedback to encourage and motivate us, and to keep us moving forward. So when is it okay to go fishing for approval? What makes validation a good thing, and not a handicap?

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my continuing thoughts on the touchy topic of validation.Collapse )

The fascinating thing about the speed at which I tend to work is the way that I always feel like I'm not getting anything done. To quote Amy, "Even though Superman can move super-fast, time feels the same for him as it does for everybody else." So while my idea of a 'slow day' may look like some other people's idea of 'so productive I wouldn't be able to move for a week,' the agonies of feeling like I've been goofing off are just as severe for me as they are for everybody else.

I get scolded for this periodically, since I tend to get frustrated and whine. Another friend likened it to that lady who only needs to lose five pounds, yet complains every time she accidentally ingests a calorie. To which I can only note that those five pounds may mark the end of a two hundred pound journey. I'm as fast as I am because I've always ridden myself to move faster, move cleaner, and get more done.

Watching other people at work is truly a fascinating thing for me, because they're chasing the same end through methods which are, quite often, entirely foreign. This is also why I say that there's no 'one true way' to write, beyond the part where all writing eventually needs to involve putting words on paper. (Although even that's questionable, since I know people who've composed and memorized stories and poetry without every writing anything down. If they perform it the same way every time, isn't it still something they wrote? Oral tradition and the rise of podcasting as a method of getting stories out there are changing 'wrote' to mean more than just the act of physically recording words on a page.)

Lilly is ecstatic about the fact that I'm writing again; she feels that my adoration of the strange clicky-box is paid for by the fact that when I'm adoring it, I tend to sit still for long periods of time, thus giving myself ample time to pet the cat. I think she senses that the ailing health of my older feline means something, but hasn't yet put together the connection between 'Nyssa isn't doing well' and 'Mommy keeps looking at pictures of Siamese kittens on the clicky-box screen.'

Won't she be surprised? And, as a secondary question, how does writing work for you?

It's time for entry number ten in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. All the essays in this series are based on my fifty thoughts on writing, and will range from the deeply practical to the somewhat more abstract. Not all thoughts will be of equal use to everyone, but you never know until you try. I will continue doing my very best to make sense if you will continue telling me when I don't. As for today's thought, here it is:

Thoughts on Writing #10: Validate Yourself As Well As Your Parking.

The topic of validation is a very touchy one, and we're going to be returning to it several times as this essay series goes on. Since this is our first time, we're basically going to validate the idea of validation -- that is, we're going to look at when it's not only okay to seek validation, it's practically required. So our thought for the day is:

When a book or an idea is new, it's okay to want validation. You're standing at the mouth of a tunnel that's probably thousands of pages long, once you calculate for discarded text and revisions, and that's scary. Ask people 'do you like my idea?'. Tell people you need to hear good things about what you're doing. It's okay to say 'it's my first time, be gentle.'

As a writer, you're going to hear a lot of things about validation. Some of those things will be good. Some of those things will be bad. None of those things will change the fact that, as human creatures, we will occasionally require positive feedback to encourage and motivate us, and to keep us moving forward. So when is it okay to go fishing for approval? What makes validation a good thing, and not a handicap?

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my initial thoughts on the touchy topic of validation.Collapse )

It's been too long since we've had one of these, so welcome to the ninth installment in my ongoing essay series on the art and craft of writing. All of these essays are based on my fifty thoughts on writing, which I basically wrote down because I was bored one afternoon. If I'd known that I was going to wind up accidentally basing an essay series off the damned things, I might have been a little more careful about what I was thinking. Only probably not, because I've met me, and I tend to regard that sort of thing as a challenge. Luckily, I'm caffeinated. Today's point to ponder:

Thoughts on Writing #9: Control Your Children.

I truly do feel that today's topic is an important one. I also feel that it's one of those things that's mildly difficult to explain -- either it makes sense or it doesn't. Since I've never been one to back away from something just because it was impossible to articulate, I'm just going to get out the hammer. The core of the idea is simple: sometimes your kids aren't perfect either. More expansively:

You know those parents with the totally out-of-control kids who run around the restaurant sweeping things off tables and screaming in the faces of all the other diners? And you know how they just sit there looking serene, because their kids are precious little angels and everything they do is wonderful? Don't be one of those parents. If your book spits in somebody's metaphorical soup, the appropriate thing to do is to apologize and discipline your text, not tell the person with the saliva slowly dissolving in their minestrone that they 'just don't appreciate the beauty of spit.' Not everyone is going to like what you do, but you can damn well make sure your kids don't trash the place before you pay the check.

What does this mean? It means that we can't please all the people all of the time, no matter how amazing we may think we are. It also means that sometimes, we aren't going to be able to defend the things our children -- our words -- can do, and we'll need to just apologize and move on. The responsibility for our creations is no one's but our own.

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on the things our kids can do.Collapse )

So several people have asked me, in amidst the more general posts on writing and formatting things and watching too much television and my cat being adorable, exactly how it is that I go about writing a book. Since saying 'I put words on paper until a novel falls out' seems a little bit twee, and I like writing things down, I am now writing out How I Write Books, or, What Seanan Does In Her Rapidly Decreasing Spare Time. This glosses a lot of the more complicated steps, since a truly accurate portrayal of how I write books would involve a lot of 'stop writing, go find a zombie movie' and 'get another DDP,' and no one actually needs to read that. Those particular steps are sort of a given.

Soooo...

( Click here and learn about the way one blonde's brain works, in the literary sense. Lots of confusion? Yeah, that's rather to be expected around here, where running three books at the same time is entirely normal, but stopping to focus on something that makes sense absolutely isn't.Collapse )

Periodically, someone will get a look at something I'm working on and demand to know why it looks the way it does. (Most common question: Why are you double-spacing? Don't you know that wastes paper? Second most common question: Why can't you use italics like a normal person?) So I thought I'd take a few minutes and explain standard manuscript formatting. Because I can.

(Note that in today's world, where an increasing number of markets will allow electronic submission, these rules may be relaxed or even changed completely. Always check the submission guidelines of a market or publishing house before you submit to them. Also, these are novel formatting instructions, not short story formatting instructions, which are similar but different.)

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Formatting Your Manuscript.

1. On the first page of your manuscript, please give the name of your project (underlined), skip two lines, and then provide your name and contact information, and the number of words in your work. Number of words is somewhat approximate, but try to stay within a hundred. Editors know. The submission rules mean that many of them can glance at a page and tell you how many words are on it. Deeply spooky. Do not screw with the editors. All this information should be tidily centered.

2. Most of us compose on computers these days. Computers have a lot more fonts than typewriters do...and you should forget about them as completely as you can. Set your font size to 12, select a basic font, and go to town. People will recommend both Courier and Times New Roman. Courier has the advantage of being monospace (every character is exactly as wide as every other character); Times New Roman, on the other hand, is so generic that it's rapidly becoming invisible. You want your manuscript to be invisible. Invisible manuscripts make for visible stories.

3. If you want something to be italicized in your final manuscript, use underlining. Seriously. You are not allowed to use any tricks your computer can do that your typewriter can't. If you want to be like Stephen King and make your readers crazy with little handwritten notes and such inside the text, become famous and talk to your editor.

4. Minimize non-essential emphasis. Titles will still be emphasized; depending on your genre, thoughts may be emphasized. But try to really consider how much underlining you have on a page, and keep it low.

5. Many rules of punctuation have become excitingly optional on the Internet. They are not optional in your manuscripts. Always put two spaces after any sentence-ending punctuation. Optional on the Internet? Yes. I don't care.

6. Begin the first chapter of your actual manuscript on line number eight.

7. Insert a hard page break at the end of every chapter. Begin the next chapter on line eight of the next page.

8. Signal intentional line breaks with either '#' or '*' alone on a line. The jury's out on whether this character should be centered or flush left. It's kinda up to you.

9. If you are printing your manuscript for submission, rather than submitting electronically, use only plain white non-erasable paper. You can get this at any office supply store. Better quality paper is always, well, better. Only print black-on-white. That's the easiest for people to read, and it's what's expected of you. Printing on weird paper doesn't make it more likely that you'll get published, sad to say.

10. Whether you're printing at home or submitting electronically, be sure to leave margins of at least one inch around all four edges of the page. This allows for taking notes, and makes it easier for people to read quickly.

11. Always double-space. If you're anything like me, this is going to look super-weird, at least at first. And yes, you'll kill a few more trees, but that's the way it works. You need to leave room for people to make notes on your document. Don't space-and-a-half, don't triple-space. Double-space.

12. Do not print double-sided.

*

There are a lot of other little tricks, opinions, and personal formatting touches that people use, but on the whole, 'black on white, double-spaced, underline instead of italics, leave plenty of space in the margins' is going to give you a really good start. There are entire books on the subject. Read one before you submit a book. You'll be glad.

Welcome to the eighth installment in my ongoing essay series on the art and craft of writing. Some of these essays are all deep and meaningful and literate and stuff. Others aren't so much. That's because they're all based around my fifty thoughts on writing, some of which are much more intellectual than others. (I think this is true of fifty thoughts on anything.) Remember that the author always responds well to bribery, and since Starbucks now has Pumpkin Spice back in the stores, bribing has just become very, very easy. And now, because I can only stall for so long, it's time for the main event:

Thoughts on Writing #8: God Made the Mosquito.

This was one of the ones that turned out to be a little difficult to summarize, hence the oddly Vacation Bible School title of today's essay. Still, it's true that, as writers, we often assume that we're going to be the final authority and our own work. And sadly, that isn't always the case. Hence today's thought:

You are the author. That makes you, effectively, God. God created the mosquito. Sometimes, God can screw the pooch in a very big way. Being the author doesn't mean that you're incapable of being wrong. Sometimes, you'll write things that are out of character. Sometimes, you'll write things that are out of place. And sometimes, you'll write things that are just flat-out incorrect and inaccurate and insane and wrong. That's not a bad thing. The bad thing is refusing to admit it.

Essentially, I'm saying that no one gets to be infallible, not even the people who supposedly are. Oh, sure, we can cover it up with claims of being all-knowing, but that's not going to stop the spread of malaria. Today we're looking at authorial mistakes, learning to spot them, learning to resolve them, and having the will not to be ashamed.

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on the fact that yes, sometimes, authors make mistakes.Collapse )

I am primarily a writer of novel-length works. I could offer a bunch of babble about how this is due to the scope of my artistic vision, but a) a lot of my friends are short story writers, and would slap me, and b) it'd be crap. I just have trouble thinking in blocks of less than twenty thousand words. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that when it does, it's pretty rare.

The fact that I recently got a rewrite request on a short story submission that was essentially 'please increase your word count' is thus hysterical.

I'm doing pretty well, by my standards; I've actually managed to finish two short stories to the point of submission in the past month (no word yet one way or another, which is entirely reasonable and understandable), and I conceived, started, and completed 'Velveteen vs. The Isley Crawfish Festival,' which is a totally new setting for me. Super-fun. Not only that, but it's a totally new setting where I have no desire to write a novel. Practically unheard of.

(By the by, there is now a 'velveteen vs.' tag which will index all the Vel stories. Because there are definitely going to be more of them cropping up over the next few months. I stretch my short story muscles! I force cranky superheroes to do things that they don't want to do! I am maybe not such a nice girl.)

I don't think I'll ever be 'a short story writer' in the sense that I naturally think in the format, but I think I can get better at achieving a beginning, middle, and end in under twenty thousand words. And that'll be a nice change.

I'm pleased.

It's time for yet another essay on the art and craft of writing, since there's nothing else going on around here. To recap our premise, this is number seven in a series of fifty essays based around my fifty thoughts on writing. The topics range from the deeply silly to the fairly serious, and that's probably why I keep doing them. That, and I don't like to leave things unfinished. As always, bribes are happily accepted, and since we're approaching Halloween -- the most wonderful time of the year -- suitable bribes are easily found. But enough about that. Here's a look at today's topic:

Thoughts on Writing #7: Write What You...Hell, No.

One of the first things most of us learn in classes on writing -- even high school-level English classes -- is 'write what you know.' We hear it from teachers, we hear it from other writers, we hear it from people who just want to help. 'Write what you know.' Well, here's my thought on the topic:

The phrase 'write what you know' is innately flawed. I don't know what it's like to be a changeling detective working the mean streets of San Francisco, or a hard-boiled journalist with a crazy twin brother, or a teenage lycanthrope with a serial killer problem. Write what you're willing to know. Everything will begin with a kernel of pre-existing knowledge -- I know folklore (Toby), zombies and blogging (Georgia), and coyotes and high school (Clady) -- and expand into a fabulous orgy of learning. Toby taught me San Francisco history and lots of ways to kill people. Georgia taught me virology and plagues. Clady taught me about snack foods. If you're not willing to write anything but what you already know, you're going to be restricted to autobiography, non-fiction, and writing the same plot ten thousand times. And that's just not fun.

I think it's pretty clear that I don't actually believe in 'write what you know.' So what does that mean? This time we're talking about writing what you know, writing what you're willing to know, and writing what you learn.

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on writing what you know -- when it's appropriate, and when it really isn't.Collapse )

So I'm in the process of translating the Big Book of Faerie -- my several-hundred-page continuity guide for the Toby Daye series -- into the wonderful Wiki that Chris set up for me. This is naturally a slow and somewhat painful process, made more slow and painful by the fact that the document got way, way too big for Microsoft Word about, oh, a hundred pages ago, and is thus full of broken bookmarks and dysfunctional hyperlinks.

I've created templates and blank pages to use as guides for the various types of page -- this is what a character needs, this is what a place needs, this is what a fae race needs. And this is forcing me to really face the fact that despite having a continuity guide the length of a novel, there's a lot of stuff that simply has never been written down.

Talk about a way to make me start twitching.

It's natural that the continuity guide would be slightly out of date: I have, after all, finished and submitted two full-length manuscripts since January, with a third currently under review prior to submission. I'm in the process of writing and editing the fourth book, and yeah, the fifth is absolutely sitting in the queue waiting for me to attack it. (I'm planning to direct all this attention squarely on Rosemary and Rue when I start having things like 'a release date,' but as I am secretly an atomic-powered robot from the future, I have a lot of energy to spare just now.) It's just...

I think part of me always thought that when I wasn't looking, all the upcoming plot twists and complications and that little subplot I'm planning in book seven and and and all just...appeared in the continuity guide. They were written down somewhere. I could get hit by a bus, and one of my friends could finish the series.

Clearly, this is not the case. And just as clearly, I've got a lot of continuity to do.

Having moved past our series of entries on people being mean to you (which is going to happen, just in case you miraculously managed to miss that memo), it's time to begin a totally new topic here in my series of fifty essays based around my fifty thoughts on writing. We're starting to get into the really philosophical, and hence somewhat more difficult to express, concepts. That means we're heading for more headaches and a lot more fun. Also, hopefully, more bribery, as we're standing at the gateway of candy corn and pumpkin products season. Remember, a bribed blonde is a happy blonde. A darling blonde. And that brings us to today's topic:

Thoughts on Writing #6: Kill Your Darlings.

That's right: I'm advocating murder. Now, before you call the police to report me as a hazard to the human race, I think we'd better take a look at the thought that goes with the title, because it's going to make a lot of things a lot more clear:

Kill your darlings. You can save their wordy little corpses in a file where you can look back on them with love -- I do -- but often, the little bits of text that we're the most proud of have no business being in the middle of the narrative. Nothing is sacred once the editing machete comes out.

This is one of the proverbs of the writing world, and one of the hardest instructions I've ever had to learn how to take. This time, we're talking about identifying your darlings, killing them mercifully, and finding a way to live with what you've done.

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on killing your darlings, doing it mercifully, and not turning your manuscript into a blood bath.Collapse )

Since we've gone a little while without a lengthy essay on writing, I figure it's time for the fifth installment in what seems really likely to be a series of fifty essays based around my fifty thoughts on writing. On the plus side, at least this means we're ten percent of the way there! On the down side...why am I doing things where 'ten percent of the way there' seems like a ringing endorsement? Ah, well. At least it's keeping me from starting the pandemic, which would be antisocial and really quite mean of me. And speaking of people being mean to you, let's take a look at today's topic:

Thoughts on Writing #5: People Are Going To Be Mean To You, Take Two.

Does this seem similar to our last topic? That's because superficially, it really is. It's only when we start digging down beneath the surface that the differences become really apparent. Get your shovel, and take a look at the original thought:

People are going to be mean to you: that's axiomatic. And sometimes, those people are going to have good and vital things to say. But people who are being mean for the sake of being mean have the potential to do more harm than good, and when you encounter those people, it's okay to walk away. Don't refuse to let anyone tell you that you're flawed. That way lies madness and pretentiousness. But don't stand around to be told that everything you think is fun is a steaming piece of shit, either.

So last time we talked about cruelty and the fine line between tough love and people being dicks just because they can. This time, we're talking about the fact that you do have a right to assess the critique you're given for its innate value and walk away when it's necessary.

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my second set of thoughts on people being mean to you.Collapse )

Well, here we are, back again, for the fourth installment in what's looking more and more like a series of fifty essays based around my fifty thoughts on writing. Never let it be said that I looked at an enormous commitment, shrugged, and declared myself to be preemptively over-booked. Besides which, this is at least reasonably entertaining, and the discussions it's sparking are really entertaining. As always, I respond well to bribery. Consider the virtues of candy corn. And in the meantime, why not check out today's topic? Which is, of course:

Thoughts on Writing #4: People Are Going To Be Mean To You.

You are a person, and you have a right to the ball! Just make sure that it's the right ball before you really get attached. Committing to the wrong ball just makes everyone sad. The original thought:

People are going to be mean to you. Full stop, absolutely, people are going to be mean to you. Some of them will be mean because they like what you're doing, and they want to see it work. Some of them will be mean because they feel like being jerks. Learn to see past the mean and get to the actual meat of what's being said. 'I don't like romance' is not the same thing as 'this scene makes no sense,' and they don't have the same potential to benefit your work.

That's right: today we're talking about cruelty, and the fine, fine line between tough love and being an absolute asshole. Because that's the sort of thing that keeps us entertained around here.

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on people being mean to you.Collapse )

I love books.

I love the feeling of them, the weight of them, the smell that you only get when you have a sufficient density of books in a room. I love the reality of them. I'm never going to be one of those people who makes the transition to electronic books, because they just aren't real enough for me. I say this as someone who writes books on a computer, and rarely, if ever prints them out before they hit the final draft; I realize it's not a rational way to be. It's just how I'm wired. It doesn't help that I'm an obsessive packrat who collects basically everything you can think of. When Pokemon was big, the core philosophy -- 'gotta catch 'em all' -- made total sense to me. I just chose to apply it to books.

All my life I've wandered through used bookstores, looking at the shelves and wondering how anyone could ever, ever let some of those volumes out of their hands. I've seriously theorized that certain books must have come from estate sales following the tragic deaths of their owners, because otherwise, how could they have wound up on that shelf? There's just no way the parting was voluntary. The knowledge that someday, my books will be on those shelves, books with my name on them, cast into the chilling world of the second-hand tome, just doesn't compute. Once you own a book, it's yours forever, right?

Right?

Recently, the rapidly shrinking floor space in my home has forced me to take a long, hard look at this philosophy, and admit that, perhaps, there are things in life more important than owning every book ever published by Leisure Horror. Like, y'know, being able to find my way to the bathroom. And not being one of those 'human interest' stories about the woman found a week after the big earthquake, smothered under the weight of her own toppled anthology collection. Also, I'm trying to raise money to go to WorldCon in Australia in 2010, and selling some of the books I have no intention of ever reading again seems like a good way to start. And I have books I'm never going to read again. I try to pretend that I don't, but I do. There are books I only get the urge to read every six or seven years, and that's one thing. There are reference books, and that's another thing. But works of fiction whose contents have long since ceased to appeal to me in any meaningful way? Yeah, those can go.

Getting rid of books is at once entirely alien to me and deeply cathartic. This book I didn't like? I'm not obligated to keep it. This book I liked just fine but haven't read since 1992, and wow, the idea of reading it now ceases to appeal after three pages? It can go. This book here that was the literary equivalent of a bad Science-Fiction Channel Original Movie? It was fun once, I'm not buying the DVD, the novelization can go. Suddenly, it's possible that I might be able to put the books I actually want back on the shelves. Suddenly, I can see the floor.

It's all very strange.

But kinda cool.

And now it's time for the third installment in what I'm pretty sure has just become a series of fifty essays based around my fifty thoughts on writing. Because what I was really dying for was another way to drive myself insane. Oh, well. I work best when I'm trying to run in seventy directions at the same time, and this definitely qualifies as a series of sprints, if not a marathon. Remember, I respond well to bribery, especially when the bribery happens to be pumpkin-flavored. In the meantime, please enjoy today's topic. Namely:

Thoughts on Writing #3: You May Not Be A Novelist (and That's Okay).

You are a person, and you have a right to the ball! Just make sure that it's the right ball before you really get attached. Committing to the wrong ball just makes everyone sad. The original thought:

Putting fifty thousand words on paper does not make you a novelist. It means you successfully put fifty thousand words on paper. You should be proud of yourself for that, because dude, it's difficult to stick with a plot and a concept and an idea and characters for that long, and I salute you. At the same time, you're not a novelist. Sweating over those fifty thousand words until you're confident that at least forty thousand of them are good ones is what makes you a novelist. Good luck.

Ready?

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on becoming a novelist.Collapse )

Welcome to the second of what looks dismayingly like it's going to be a series of fifty essays based on my fifty thoughts on writing. Because, y'know, it's not like I was doing anything else with myself in my copious amounts of spare time. Except for the part where, oh, wait, I DON'T HAVE ANY. Clearly my brain is trying to kill me. Please send help. If you can't send help, please send pumpkin cake, as it is direly needed. If you can't send pumpkin cake, well, enjoy today's topic. Namely:

Thoughts on Writing #2: Your Grammar Is Eating The Neighbors.

...what's sad is that this is actually nicer and less snarky than the first entry in this series. Just in case you'd wondered whether I was actually mellowing. The original thought:

The rules of English grammar were devised by an evil linguist who had a bone to pick with the adherents of the more traditional schools of the written word. They laughed at him in the academy, and we bastards are still paying today. You don't need to have a perfect grasp of the seventeen thousand (occasionally conflicting) rules to be a writer; that's what editors and proofreaders are for. At the same time, you can't just throw a bunch of words at the page and expect to have all your work done for you. Learn the basic rules of punctuation and grammar before you subject other people to your work. They can squabble over the Oxford commas at their leisure.

Ready?

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on grammar.Collapse )

Apparently, coming up with a list of fifty thoughts on writing wasn't enough for the teeming bag of plague-carrying bats that is my brain, because I have continued to ponder each of the points...

...thus leading to what looks very likely to be a series of fifty posts on and about writing. There are days when I look at my brain and truly wonder whether it is, in fact, a suicidal glob of fat and neurons, devoted to driving me insane and thus allowing it the sweet oblivion of death. But no matter! For the moment, there is pondering to be done, and a pseudo essay to be written. Today's topic, inspiring as it may or may not be:

Thoughts on Writing #1: You're Going To Suck.

Aren't we kind around these parts? The original thought:

You're going to suck when you start. Sucking when you start is okay. Every new project, no matter how brilliant the idea at the heart of it happens to be, is going to start by sucking. Just deal with it, and soldier through. Every sentence is a learning experience.

Ready?

Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on sucking.Collapse )

I just read On Writing again. I also just read half the books in the Howdunnit series, because it's always good to refresh your understanding of poisons and blunt-force trauma. Oh, and a couple books on pandemics and how to make sure everybody has a good time—what if we threw a pandemic and everybody came?!—but that was for fun. Also, I just revised three novels at a speed that, were the publishing world a reality show, would probably qualify me for a spot on the finale and a shot at the hundred thousand dollar grand prize (So You Think You Can Write, with your host, Warren Ellis, will be back after a short break...). The end result of all this wallowing in the technical sides of the written word, as well as all this revising? A whole lot of thinking about writing. I mean, seriously, I never spend this much time just thinking about writing, and I spend the bulk of my time actually writing. When I'm not writing, I'm whining about the fact that I'm not writing. And now? Now I'm thinking about writing.

Because I believe firmly in the art of over-sharing, I've decided to write down some of my conclusions about writing. Technique, reality, functionality, revision, critique, the whole ball of wax. Because maybe that will get them out of my head, and allow me to get some goddamn work done. Your mileage will absolutely vary. You may look at my list and go 'wow, she's totally out of her tiny little blonde mind.' You may look at this list and go 'wow, I never thought of it that way.' And either way is totally fine. My method of writing is not yours. Your method of writing is not mine. And we should all be very grateful for that, because if we cloned my muse, the world would rapidly run out of absinthe and cherry pie.

( Click here to be subjected to a variety of disconnected thoughts on the wonderful world of writing. Fifty in total. You must be at least this tall to ride this ride.Collapse )

Recently, Entertainment Weekly decided to rank 'the new classics,' and made lists of the '100 Most Influential' bits of various media in the last few decades. They had a list of movies, a list of books, a list of TV series, and so on. This, naturally, made me think, because their list looked absolutely nothing like mine would.

You know what comes next.

Books on this list aren't necessarily high literature; they're not necessarily classics; they're not even necessarily particularly good, although I think the bulk of them are. They're just the books that combined to construct a me. They are, in short, not the books I was supposed to fall in love with; just the ones that I did.

Your list will probably be drastically different. You may still want to take a look at mine. You might just find a few things that will surprise you.

( Click here for Seanan's list of 100 books that have influenced and rocked her world, and which may have influenced and rocked yours. Complete, in some cases, with commentary. Because she can, that's why.Collapse )

Saturday, I stopped in at the Other Change of Hobbit to pick up copies of the July issue of Locus Magazine and chatter with the staff, since they're all super-interested in the whole process, which means I can talk about it without feeling like I'm being a weird obsessive. (Seriously, right now, I could talk about the publishing process for about three days without stopping, and since new things keep happening, I keep getting more things to talk about. I am a faintly neurotic soul who likes to talk things to death. Having people who are actively interested and ask me questions spares all the rest of my friends from a death worse than fate.) Being as I was in the store and already spending money, I decided to browse around and see whether I could find anything I particularly wanted to read.

Now, I am a reader of urban fantasy. That's probably part of why I became a writer of urban fantasy. (My lifelong obsession with folklore probably explains the rest.) I've watched the growth of the genre with delight shading into bewilderment -- delight because there are so many awesome titles out there these days, bewilderment because about half the covers show women crouching in black vinyl catsuits and wearing impractical heels. None of my urban fantasy heroines would be caught dead in a black vinyl catsuit, wearing impractical heels. And they don't, as a rule, crouch. All the other covers show half-naked women or carefully chosen bits of women, usually accessorized with some sort of weapon. That's actually a little more understandable. There are lots of way to get a character naked.

As I sifted through stack after stack of urban fantasies I'd never heard of before, I realized one horrible, irritating thing: I couldn't tell the porn-with-plot from the plot-with-porn. I've already read most of the 'sure things' -- the books I know meet my specific preferences in terms of the balance of 'sex' to 'not sex' -- and what I was left with was a whole lotta books where their back cover blurbs could have made them anything from the next Anita Blake to, well, the next any heroine who can keep her pants on for more than six pages at a stretch.

It's not that I dislike porn-with-plot. I read romance novels -- hell, I write romance novels -- and sometimes there's a very good reason to get everybody hot and bothered. It's just that I really prefer to choose my erotica, rather than accidentally tripping over it and falling into a puddle of unexplainable fluid. This isn't the fault of the authors. This is just, well, packaging combining with genre trends to leave me deeply perplexed. But there is a solution!

The pie chart.

I say we start stamping all urban fantasies somewhere discrete with little pie chart symbols detailing the ratio of 'plot' to 'porn.' If that sounds too judgmental, we could go with the ratio of 'naked' to 'clothed,' or even 'sexual tension,' 'action,' and 'actual pay-off.' I'd wind up following series where they started with a lot of the sexual tension pie and moved on to the actual pay-off pie after I was already invested in the relationship, while other people could go straight to the 'lots of kinky sex' pie, and everybody would win! Also, I wouldn't accidentally stumble across sex scenes that would make a porn star blush. Again, everybody wins.

Now to sell it to marketing...

One month ago today, we officially sold the first three October Daye books to DAW. Rosemary and Rue, the first, had already been through the editorial wringer over here on my end of things; A Local Habitation, the second, had just started the editing process. (An Artificial Night hadn't even been touched.) One month later, book two is just about ready to be turned in -- the goal is to have the last few tweaks in place by Monday -- while book three is being industriously rewritten. I've even started thinking about working on book four.

It's all starting to feel real. Finally. It's all starting to feel less like the universe pulling some cosmic joke, and like it's something that's really and genuinely happening. It helps that the editing process is frequently painful, frequently grinding, and frequently disrupts my sleep. It's substantially harder to disbelieve something that isn't letting you go to bed.

There are roughly twenty million things still to get done. I mean, Rosemary and Rue hasn't started the editorial process at DAW (which is a whole new ball of wax), my new website hasn't launched yet, and I still need to buy my tickets to New York. There's going to be a lot of work that has to get done before I can actually start saying 'go buy my book' and praying for an audience. I know that. And it doesn't matter, because one month ago today, we sold my first novel.

I am the happiest blonde there is.

Recently, I've read two books* that presented me with a very large number of supporting characters, sketched them out in two or three paragraphs at most, and then expected me to do the work of keeping track of them. In both cases, I had some difficulty fulfilling that expectation.

The first book, Fortune's Fool, is the third installment in Mercedes Lackey's Hundred Kingdoms series. The first two books in the series were fun and fluffy fairy tale remixes/romances, and didn't require me, as the reader, to do any heavy lifting. I enjoyed them both a great deal. Not the deepest books in the world, but honestly, not everything needs to be. There's a place in this world for comfort reading (hence my addiction to Meg Cabot). I borrowed the third book from Kate expecting to find myself greeted with a refreshing, uplifting, and generally unchallenging read.

Instead, I got a book where the main characters were frankly rather boring, the romance was perfunctory at best, the writing really needed to be hit with the machete a few more times, and then -- about two-thirds of the way through -- the author introduced a rapid-fire assortment of loosely-sketched minor characters, some of them with very similar names (and at least one with no name at all). Added to the already sprawling supporting cast that came with each of the main characters, and the expectation that of course the reader remembered the minor characters from the first two books, well...it became a bit much.

I'll be honest. I never did start keeping some of the minor characters distinct from one another, and I forgot pretty much all of them thirty seconds after I closed the book. Not really the best sign. Of the three, this was the one I had the highest hopes for -- she was working with some fairy tales I very much enjoy, and in a mythos that doesn't get used enough -- and the one that I'm the least likely to read again.

Meanwhile, over in Brian Keene's Dead Sea -- a messy zombie epic taking place largely on a retired Navy cruise ship, with some rather graphic and unpleasant side-trips to other, even more dangerous locations -- we also got a wide assortment of minor characters, many of them also with similar names, many of them barely introduced before they got, well, eaten by zombies (as one does). The action is fast-paced throughout, and manages to keep itself from becoming confusing, largely by dint of blowing something up whenever too many cast members assemble in one location. (Seriously. I would not want to live in one of this man's books.) But I enjoyed it, and I'll read it again. So what's the difference?

Genre is a part of it. I love zombies and fairy tales just about equally, but there's an expectation in a work of zombie fiction that you'll start with a cast that's larger than you need it to be, so that you can feed large portions of it to the living dead. You can't have a zombie movie that only has three characters on the screen and actually maintain any real feeling of menace directed towards those characters (although believe me, I've tried). In fairy tales, the really minor characters are usually either off-screen or dead. They don't get pseudo-compelling little 'oh, and that guy, the one over there, he's super-cool, but you have to hang out with these people instead' introductions before getting shoved off the page.

There's also a lot to be said about the way those incidental characters get sketched in. There's a reason it's always the rookie in the war movie -- the one with the picture of his girlfriend in his wallet -- who dies. Don't believe me? Go watch Iron Man. The soldiers in the Humvee with Tony Stark aren't the most memorable characters in the movie. They don't even have names. But people remember them. Read The Boys, by Garth Ennis. The death of Wee Hughie's girlfriend happens so early in the series that it's not even a spoiler...but wow will you remember her.

I've done my share of juggling the really minor characters, and near as I can tell, the trick is to make them compelling enough that we'll grieve for them, or forgettable enough that we'll view them as the plot conveyances they are, without forcing the reader to keep a flow chart in order to remember which magical widget every one of them is carrying. It can be hard as hell. I have full mental dossiers on every character in Toby's world, and I think they're all fascinating, and I'd love to give them all walk-on roles. But since this isn't a zombie flick, and I'm not about to feed them all to a monster, that won't work. So they come in by ones and by twos, they take a moment to be interesting, and then they either go away or become more important. Character confetti just very rarely seems to work.

Opinions?

(*I read a lot. I mean, I read a lot. Every day, I write down in my planner what I read that day, because it helps me keep track of various essential trends in my consumption of the written word. It is now June 5th, and I've read five books so far this month. This doesn't include graphic novels, because attempting to include graphic novels would probably make me cry.)