Category: Words Out

Writers Weekend Recap, Part the First

On By griffinwordsIn Words In, Words Out1 Comment

Now that I’m back home and fully immersed again in the insane stress busy-ness of regular life, I want to recap my Writers Weekend experience before I forget. It was quite a packed, long weekend so I’ll probably split this into more than one entry.

I left home early enough that I expected to get to Moclips at least an hour before 4pm check-in but ended up being mis-directed at one turn by Google Maps so I arrived right on time. The drive took me through very familiar I5-North-Between-Portland-and-Seattle territory until just past Centralia, then I explored little highways like 88 and 12, through towns like Montesano and Aberdeen.

I had never met anybody in this group before, but I had sought out a number of people’s blogs (many of the writers in attendance posted contact information in advance, as well as simple bios) so I figured I’d recognize a few. When I checked-in, though, I didn’t recognize anybody, and went off to my cabin — a real cabin, a tiny old box with rough timber beams in the ceiling, built in the 50s. This Ocean Crest Resort is a family-run place out at the end of Hwy 101, before it dead-ends on the Olympic Peninsula. The resort includes a number of buildings constructed at different times, so there are private homes converted into separate rooms, conventional apartment-style hotel rooms, larger cabins split into 3 or 4 rooms, or in my case, a single, stand-alone tiny box off at the edge of things.

The first event on the schedule was a dinner at 6pm in cabin 601, which was one of two prime activity centers for the group all weekend. Feeling a bit like the new kid, moving to a new school mid-year after everyone else already knew each other, I went on over there, made myself a name tag and had dinner. Before and after dinner there was social time. As I suspected, everybody else seemed to be familiar with at least a few other people in the room, and some like Jay Lake and David D. Levine seemed to know most of the others. Those who didn’t know everybody at least seemed drift into small groups of three or four. I don’t have much to report from this first evening. I spoke only briefly with a few people, but that was OK. I sat back, put names with faces, and oriented myself, and this was the last time I had that awkward feeling all weekend.

After things had broken up at 10pm or so, I went back to my cabin but wasn’t tired yet, so decided to seek out a beer. The resort’s lounge was upstairs from the restaurant, and next door to the conference room we’d be using for critiques and lectures all weekend. To my surprise, the lounge was not a real bar at all, but just a room with wood tables and chairs in it, where you can sit and drink wine or beer someone brings you from down in the restaurant. That was kind of weird, and I had sort of wanted to belly up to a bar and have somebody draw me a draft, you know?

Also in the lounge happened to be Peter, one of the writers I had just met (sorry, can’t link to him here because he’s proudly blog-less), along with his wife Rose, sampling from the resort’s very impressive wine list. The service was perfectly fine, and though the beer came in a bottle it was enjoyable. It one of the Deschutes brewery beers, and Peter and Rose said they were from Bend, so we talked about that for a while. Then it turned out Peter and I both knew, remembered and enjoyed each other’s stories, so we were able to talk about those at some length, and pre-critique them to some degree. Our stories were both similar in the sense of pertaining to early days of space travel, humanity trying to edge outward in the solar system (rather than the more conventional SF “way out there in the galaxy” kind of space travel), and we both had more positives to say about the other’s story, than negatives. We talked not only about our stories up for critique that weekend, but also a few other stories we had each written in the same “world.” I knew my story would confuse and/or annoy at least some people, so it was nice to get at least one positive response up front.

I felt much better after a couple of beers and an hour or so talking to Peter and Rose. Gosh, I hope I’m remembering her name correctly, because she only had that name tag the first night, but I think that’s right. I thought it was charming, the way she was familiar with all her husband’s stories and seemed to have helped him critique them, the way my wife Lena helps me with my stories until she’s intimately familiar with all my settings, characters and titles.

You’d think the relatively uneventful first night would merit a much shorter entry, but that’s how we roll, we writers… spin a tiny little idea into a whole bunch of introspective, detail-obsessed self-indulgence! Tune in tomorrow (or later today) when we reveal the untold story of Friday at Writers Weekend!

Home Again, Home Again

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I came back to Portland yesterday from the Writers Weekend in Moclips, Washington, and my wife returned from Indiana, so life is familiar again now.

I had a great time up in Moclips at the Ocean Crest Resort, and will blog in more detail about the experience of the Writers Weekend. Took part in workshops, socialized a bit, went for walks and runs on the beach, and even got to see Hell’s Belles (all-girl AC/DC cover band) at the nearby casino. The most fun, probably, was meeting and talking to a great variety of cool, fun and interesting writers of fiction.

The “writer gurus,” Jay Lake and David Levine both did a great job as critique group leaders, and David performed double-duty with a series of three presentations, including his “Mission to Mars” (see a more hurried version of an earlier presentation on YouTube here). Big thanks to Jay and David for their efforts, and also to Karen Junker who not only organized the event, but put up with a writer swarm filling her cabin for most of the long weekend.

I’ll say more in a subsequent blog post about some of the people I met, and specific things we did. The biggest surprise, to me at least, was the overall very high quality of the critiques given. I figured a lot of people would give other people’s stories a shallow reading and a careless critique, but everyone seemed to dig in, read the stories closely and think about them carefully, and make a sincere, good-faith effort to help each other improve the work. I look forward to staying in touch with many of the writers I met. Overall it was great fun, both stimulating and challenging, and something I’d recommend. So if you missed out on going to this year’s Writers Weekend and you’re considering going next year, I’d say it’s definitely worthwhile.

Upcoming Workshop Is Really Upcoming

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I’ve mentioned this upcoming Writers Weekend retreat in Moclips, Washington a few times, and I keep saying “I’ll write more about this soon.”

Here’s a link to the thing, in case anyone’s interested: http://www.WritersWeekend.com/

First of all, I’ve never been to Moclips, Washington, which is on the central coast. In fact, I’ve only been to the Washington coast once (not counting Long Beach or Ilwaco, which are just across the bridge from Astoria, Oregon), to Hoquiam, which is more of a harbor town than real ocean beach. I’m kind of an Oregon Coast snob, which was probably reinforced by briefly living in Seattle, when all the Washingtonians I knew drove down to Oregon, to Seaside or Cannon Beach or Manzanita or Lincoln City, when they wanted to vacation at the beach.

This is one part “fun beach trip” and one part “writing workshop” but I’m looking forward to both aspects. The group is about fifteen people, including two “writer gurus,” Jay Lake and David Levine — in case you haven’t heard of these guys, they’re both award-winning, widely published writers of science fiction and fantasy. The other attendees are a diverse assortment of NW writers, some already fairly skilled and having some success getting published, and others closer to the beginning of the learning curve. I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes, though I suspect I may be the only one who’s completely new to this kind of thing. I’ve done writing critiques before in classroom settings, but never a workshop like this, and I’ve done a variety of other art-related critiques as well (I’m a renaissance kinda guy like that) so I think it’ll be somewhat familiar.

These things are always a little twitchy for me, because as a critic (say, evaluating music for Hypnos which — if you’re just tuning in — is the ambient music label I run, along with my wife now) I tend toward blunt honesty. Usually I figure that’s best for everyone involved, but in these settings that doesn’t always work. I suspect these critiques may tend toward the opposite extreme… everyone finding two things to praise and two things to politely suggest tuning-up, for every story. You know, one person submits an A+ story that is immediately publishable with small tweaks, another person submits a real careless, confusing mess, and both people get critiques that basically say, “I like what you did with X, but if I were you I’d change Z a little bit — overall good job!”

That’s fine, I’m up for it. I figure with this kind of thing you make an honest effort, both beforehand with your submission, and during the event with your critiques, without sweating too much if a few of the others are trying not quite so hard. The old 80/20 rule always applies, so most of the helpful insight I receive on my own submission will come from just a few critiques, and the people who make the best use of the critiques they receive will likewise number in the single digits. You can’t know who is who until you get underway, so you just have to act in good faith. Critique groups always have a self-aggrandizer, and at least one person who’s absolutely offended at any suggestion they might change anything about their work.

But usually, there are sharp minds, good ideas, and wisdom to be shared.

Anyway, I’m expecting this should be fun, and I may even blog from Moclips, if there’s wifi. I was originally just going to take along just my iPad and see if I could go computer-free, but if there’s no wifi it’ll be useless, so it looks like the Macbook Pro (for writing and note-taking, even if I’m offline), plus iPod Touch for the drive.

If any of you fellow workshoppers happen to see this, I look forward to meeting you.

Tidbits better suited for Twitter

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I don’t have any one subject I want to focus on here at the moment, but a few things are going on.

My wife is out of town this week, and I’m not with her. This situation is common for lots of married folk, but we almost never travel separately, so it feels weird, and I don’t like it!

Here in Portland we finally broke free of over a month of rotten, lousy un-summer-like weather and for a few weeks now it’s actually been sunny and warm. This would not normally be considered “news,” but this summer at least, the sun coming out has allowed some fun stuff like hiking and trail running and even just lying out in the back yard with a book.

This coming weekend I’ll be traveling to the “Writers Weekend” event in Moclips Washington, which I believe I mentioned here around the time I signed up. (Edit: original post on this event is here) I’ve been reading the stories of other participants and making notes, getting ready. It’s something I’m looking forward to, but this week has been such a strange one (see above story of wife-lessness) that it doesn’t seem quite real. Still, I’ll have more to say about that just before, or during, or after, or maybe some combination thereof.

My own writing has been going well, too. I’ve tried some new things recently, including another effort at a story that can only be called horror. The biggest thing here is that I find the one thing I miss now that I write SF almost exclusively is writing about this world. Not that I’m considering a big shift of emphasis, more like something I’ll dip into a few times per year as a change of pace. I can write all kinds of horror-like or at least horrific stuff within SF, so the only real reason to break off and write a “real world, present day” story is that it’s fun to write about a people and places, for a change, closer to the people and places I see day to day.

Other than that, I’ve pulled back two of my short stories that I had previously been sending around, having decided they weren’t quite up to the standard of my more recent stories. Very often I find that if I’m not careful, my stories default to a sort of introspective, low-energy grasping at poetics and philosophy, short on plot and conflict. I’ve been working to address that in my more recent stories, but sometimes I crack open one of these earlier ones and say “gosh, the first scene doesn’t accomplish anything, the story doesn’t really start until page two or three, and the ending just trails off.” So back to the drawing board with these two (one of them is almost completely reworked with a much more compelling and satisfying turn of events at the end, not a twist, but certainly a kick to the protagonist’s groin, figuratively).

At the moment my “now reading” and “now listening” are Forever War by Joe Haldeman and Dreamcatcher by Stephen King, respectively. I went through a month-long stretch of listening to book-related podcasts rather than actual audiobooks (really enjoyed Jonathan Strahan’s podcasts particularly) but I felt like listening to a good, old-fashioned “grabber” of a story.

Stephen King is great for listening while driving. His voice is so informal and conversational (talking about writer’s voice here, not the speaking voice of the guy reading the audiobook) that it’s like having friends in the car telling me the story.

Forever War is just fantastic as well, though it’s taking me longer than usual as my reading time has been short recently. Technically, I suppose, this is considered Military SF, but it just doesn’t have that feel. It’s much more restrained and literary in feel, like a quiet, regretful cousin of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Really a very fine book, and it makes me want to read more Haldeman though it doesn’t seem people really talk about any of his books other than this and Forever Peace. I’ll have to do some research on this guy. I do know he just won a Grand Master award at the last Nebulas, so he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Of course, Gene Wolfe doesn’t have a Grand Master award, so what the hell?

I’m also starting to re-read Again, Dangerous Visions in little bits. I had forgotten just how much I love Ellison’s introductions and little lead-in essays for each story. Is it just me, or are there more people in this book whose careers never really went anywhere, than there are established writers with significant careers?

It’s fun sometimes to just blog about a few random little tidbits. I suppose I could Twitter this stuff, but for some reason I’m still using Twitter more to quickly check up on a number of people I’m interested in, than for something to broadcast my own particular brand of whatever. In other words, consuming rather than producing, Twitter-wise. At least I’m blogging relatively consistently. Yeah, I know you’re thrilled! More soon.

The Apple iPad As Writing Tool

On By griffinwordsIn Words Out1 Comment

It’s unlikely anyone reading this hasn’t seen or heard about the Apple iPad, which seems to have taken over the technology world this past few months. The device is portable and easy to operate, and uses a touchscreen interface so intuitive I’ve yet to find anybody who can’t figure the thing out immediately.

Much has been made in reviews of the device being better suited for consumption of media (listening to music, reading email, blogs and ebooks, or watching videos) than for producing it, but the iPad occupies an important place in my writing workflow. Most of my “real” writing happens in Scrivener, which is a Mac application with no iPad equivalent. But leading up to the actual drafting and editing in Scrivener, I do a lot of note-making, gathering and combining the various seeds and ideas that grow into the beginnings of a story. I keep all my notes centralized in Evernote, an application that I keep on all my Macs, Pcs and my iPad, but which I use most often on my iPad for the actual capture of ideas. During the drafting and revision of a story I often get ideas that I intend to apply to the story in progress, and these go into Evernote with a tag appropriate for the story. When I’m ready to work on a given story, I first check Evernote for any ideas tagged with that story’s title, and it brings together every scrap or idea or name-change I may have come up with since I last worked on it. Once a note has been incorporated into the story (or discarded), I delete the note from Evernote.

There does not yet exist for iPad a word processor or text editor application without a lot of flaws. Apple Pages is a pretty nice program and only costs $10 but there are some serious weaknesses regarding how you get your work into and out of Pages, so I don’t use that program at this time. If I wanted to draft a story scene, I’d fire up my bluetooth keyboard (the onscreen keyboard works fine for shorter bits of typing but I wouldn’t to type hundreds or thousands of words with the thing, unless I had to) and type the text into Evernote. Then next time I was at a “real” computer I could collect any such scenes, again using Evernote’s tagging feature to designate written drafts to be incorporated into Scrivener, Word, or whatever application you use to write your storise or novels.

I love my Macbook Pro and if I were to travel for any length of time with the intention of doing real writing, I would probably take that along. But for a short trip, I could definitely imagine taking just the iPad and getting all kinds of work done. I’ve always believed a lot of the work of writing isn’t just writing drafts, but creating notes, sorting through them, combining ideas into an interesting brew and then starting to outline, sketch characters, and brainstorm. All this kind of activity is perfect for the iPad, and Evernote is an absolutely essential tool for this.

Degrees of Rejection

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Even people who aren’t themselves writers are familiar with the idea that writers just starting out encounter lots of rejection, over and over, before they ever get anywhere with their work. We’ve all heard the stories of Stephen King getting hundreds of rejection slips before he became, you know, Stephen King. It’s not too different from aspiring actors going to a thousand auditions before they get their first gig, or a garage band playing all kinds of small gigs before they get a shot at a record deal.

In all these legends of paying your dues until you finally make it, the implication seems to be that you toil away without of a sense whether you’re getting closer to the goal or not, until WHAM — all at once, you’ve made it.

What I’m finding with my own writing is that although I haven’t yet had any stories accepted for publication, I’ve noticed a change in the quality of many of the rejections that leads me to believe I must be getting closer.

Non-writers may not know this, but most of the time rejection comes as a form note (more often a half-sheet than a full letter) that says nothing more than, “Sorry, we can’t use this, good luck to you placing this elsewhere.” I’ve received plenty of this, and I don’t let it bother me. It’s silly to think it’s some kind of slap in the face, when almost everyone is getting this same bulk rejection treatment. Editors have a ridiculous number of terrible-bad manuscripts to sort through, and they can’t take the time to offer coaching or suggestions or (usually) even specific reasons why they don’t want the story.

Several of my latest rejections, though, have included more encouraging language. Compared to a flatly generic “Sorry, no,” getting a rejection that says something more specific like, “Very nicely written and I like much of it, but didn’t grab me quite enough for a buy,” is more like rejection LITE. After getting a few such notes this month, I feel like I’m getting closer to the goal. Maybe I’m crazy-delusional, but I think this is a good sign.

Know when to fold ’em

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I’ve always considered myself a tough, even ruthless editor when it comes to evaluating what needs to be removed from my own writing. Even so, it can be really tough when you’ve worked on a story for over a year, written at least fifteen drafts, and already begun sending it around to magazines, only to finally realize you need to scrap big chunks of the thing.

One of my stories, very possibly the story of which I’m most proud overall, has problems. The last three editors who have sent it back have included fairly positive notes, along the lines of “interesting stuff you’re doing here, but it’s not quite completely successful.” Normally a handful of rejections wouldn’t cause me to re-think a story and throw lots of it out, but the editors’ notes just confirmed what I think I already knew.

And when I mentioned to my wife (who is a major cheerleader for my work, even at the same time she’s a helpful critic) that I was considering pulling this story off the market for a major rework to include a new beginning and a completely new ending, she agreed it was a good idea.

Sometimes it’s tempting to avoid such a major overhaul simply because of the work involved. Also, there’s the writer’s attachment to the words they’ve created, a reflexive resistance to cutting away some of those beautiful sentences. Another factor is that I’ve set myself certain goals for how many stories I’d like to complete and send out this year, and taking a story from the “finished” category and moving it back to the “working” category seems like a step back. It is a step back. Nevertheless it’s important to when the story needs a different approach, and to be willing to do that work.

That’s why this week I’ve taken a story I thought was final and cut it into little chunks, shuffled them around and removed some, and made a new outline including synopsis of two entirely new scenes. It will be better when I’m done but right now this feels like difficult work.

Sometimes you shoot for an omelet and end up with a scramble

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For a while now I’ve been planning some more “focused” entries to this blog, but this here life has been such a mad dash lately, so my entries end up being a mix of whatever comes to mind.

First there was the Writers Weekend story which I had to submit by June 15, and finished a day early. Then I came down with a nasty cold which ruined this past weekend.

More recently I’ve been back to finishing up my Writers of the Future story, a big long zoomy space story thing. I’m very happy and relieved to finally be done with that. I’ve certainly written longer stuff, but I haven’t actually finished (as in, polished all the way to a submittable final draft) a longer story than that since I started writing again last year. This thing wound up at 9,600 words and I’m quite proud of it. It introduces a new character and a new angle of exploration, plus a cool new artifact/tech device I’m anxious to explore in other stories. And I now think of it as “the WOTF story,” while I always referred to it in my head, as I was planning it, as “the Analog story.”

Now, I rarely write a story with a specific market in mind. I’m usually driven by an idea or an image, something I want to see happen, or a character I want to follow in a certain situation. Then I have to build up story and conflict and plot around that starting point, and only when I’m mostly finished do I start thinking things like “What’s this all about, then? Where will I send it?”

This time I made a conscious effort to write something less character-focused, more about plot, action and conflict. Plus I wanted technology and space travel to be prominent parts, because I really wanted to finally write a story I could see sending to Analog SF magazine. All these touchy-feely “literary SF” stories of mine, with people feeling ways about stuff, certainly have their technological components, and some of them even meet Analog editor Stanley Schmidt’s dictum that the “proper Analog story” shouldn’t function with the technology removed from it. But I wanted to write something that didn’t just sneak into eligibility as an Analog story, but was clearly, definitely about cool tech ideas, off-Earth locations, futuristic travel concepts, and a lot of focus on how human beings will one day travel from here to places very far away.

Now having finished the story, it’s occurred to me that I’m missing out on a potentially useful market for my stories by not submitting to Writers of the Future. I don’t normally enter contests, but I’m assured by all kinds of people who really do seem to know what they’re talking about that so long as you’re eligible for the WOTF contest (they only take stories from unpublished writers), you ought to enter. The prize money is good, and actually winning the thing, if you can pull it off, ends up being a nice platform to get people aware of you in a hurry. So, “the Analog story” ends up going to Writers of the Future first, and I’ll keep on entering this contest (it’s quarterly, with a mega-roundup contest for quarterly winners once per year) so long as I remain eligible.

Now I’m back to starting a few new stories I’ve had cooking, as well as revisiting some problematic or even “broken” stories I started previously and put on the shelf. I have two that are pretty close to being finished, so if I can wrap those up these next two weeks I may be in a position of actually finishing and submitting four new stories (counting the two just finished) in a period of a month. That would certainly be my greatest period of productivity, and would indicate that the extra hard work I’ve been putting in has been worthwhile.

Another Lost Weekend

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My super-focused, productive “catching up on everything” weekend turned into a miserable “I’ve got a cold so I don’t care about anything and the world sucks” weekend instead.

Things are a bit better now, but I wasn’t able to tidy up the spare bedroom aka “writing studio,” and was barely able to work on my Writers of the Future contest story, which is due by the end of the month. At least I’ve got the thing below 10,000 words. I want to get it under 9,000 (even though the contest limit is something like 12,000 words), just because that’s where it ought to be. I’m about 1/3 of the way through, and the bigger cuts will come later, when I remove the pointless subplot about the main character interacting with a prostitute who happens to be fixated on him. The prostitute stays (in fact, the five prostitutes in the story are so cool, multi-colored like easter eggs) but the pointless flirtation that never goes anywhere gets cut. Otherwise the story is pretty much fully formed, and makes sense, and I just need to trim a bunch of words so it flows more smoothly.

Observation: plot-driven stories are so much easier to keep straight than stories that are all about how a character felt about something. Please remind me to take a break from the touchy-feely stuff and write more stories where people chase each other and fight and blow shit up.

I have two other stories that are this close to being finished, if I could just get past these two I’ve been sort of deadline-chasing on this month.

Today’s blog was going to be the “degrees of rejection” blog but this whole weekend was a washout anyway, so I’m just doing a hard reset, and we’ll move on to better things tomorrow.

Habits come and go

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I do seem to run hot and cold when it comes to updating this blog. Just like the last time I took a long break from posting here, the explanation is “been busy writing lots of stories.”

I’ve been working hard to shape up a new-ish space exploration novelette, vaguely space-opera-ish, to enter in this quarter’s Writers of the Future contest. I made a large number of changes, additions and deletions based on a very useful long discussion I had with my wife Lena during one of our mega-hikes, this time up at Trillium Lake, on Mt. Hood. That story’s just about done, but I had to set that aside.

In a recent post, I mentioned a Writers Weekend I’ll be attending in July, up in Moclips, Washington. For the workshop that weekend, I could have submitted one of my earlier, finished stories but I wanted to write something new. I decided to push through to completion the recently-begun story I mentioned in a few of my most recent blog posts, trying new methods & tools for writing… remember? This is the one I started out writing longhand, and finished drafting in Scrivener, where I’ve completed all the revisions. It ended up needing very substantial changes, including at least 6-7 drafts so far, and a completely new framing intro and beginning added in the past week. Managed to chop it down from 8,000 words to about 4,500 despite adding a whole new beginning and end, and it’s much leaner and meaner now.

Sometimes all a story needs is sifting with an increasingly fine screen until it’s done, but this one needed a radical re-think, a bunch of new stuff added, and really quite a different emphasis from where it started. It’s called “The Long Tightrope,” and normally I’d send this one out at this stage, but I’m ready to hand it over to other readers in this group and take their suggestions. It’ll be a good learning experience.

Just coincidentally this new story is in the same “universe” as the novelette mentioned earlier. I don’t usually do that, work on a whole string of related stories one after the other, in fact I started several other stories between the novelette and the new one.

Things have been especially busy — extra efforts required at the day job, various weekend outings including a family beach trip, and the usual real life — but I’ve been writing steadily, lots of new words, many newly-planned stories, and keeping the finished stories in submission.

Some upcoming blog plans:

1. A mini-review of Metatropolis, an interesting audiobook project (now out in good old fashioned printed paper format) by five authors working in a connected world.

2. Another discussion of the idea of rejection (from a writer’s point of view), specifically the idea of different kinds or degrees of rejection… even “good” rejection.

3. More about this upcoming Writers Weekend

4. More book & audiobook reviews, mini and otherwise

That’s all for now. I hope to be back soon, and more regularly this next month or two.