The Apple iPad As Writing Tool

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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.

Words In: Horns by Joe Hill

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Just finishing up Horns by Joe Hill, in audiobook format. Hill’s first novel Heart Shaped Box was one of my favorite new discoveries of last year, a somewhat dark, edgy book of clever, compact nastiness. If you didn’t already know this, Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, and decided to try writing under a pseudonym to see if he could have a career of his own without his dad’s influence. Eventually his cover was blown, but he continues to use the name. His real-life name is Joe Hillstrom King so the pen name is really just the first half of his full, proper name anyway. Hey, maybe I should try to get published as “Michael Jay?”

The earlier book followed a somewhat washed-up rock-and-roller whose life is turned upside down when he purchases an old man’s suit that turns out to be cursed. Hill’s follow-up, Horns, likewise observes the intrusion into a character’s life of a dark influence. In this case, a year after Ig Parrish’s girlfriend is raped and murdered (a crime for which he was the main suspect, though no case is ever brought against Ig or any other culprit) Ig Parrish finds himself with a pair of devil-like horns sprouting from his forehead. And not just horns, but a strange influence over everyone he comes across, a certain power over their will, and insight into things they’ve done before that they wouldn’t want anyone else to know.

His life has already been essentially ruined as the book begins, as his girlfriend is gone, and everyone who knows them, including Ig’s own family, thinks Ig killed her and got away with it. Having hit bottom, Ig follows the power and influence of the horns, and though they bring him a lot of trouble they also help him to discover some facts about troubling events in his life, including his girlfriend’s murder.

Hill’s short story collection Twentieth Century Ghosts, followed by the top-notch debut novel Heart Shaped Box and now his sophomore novel effort Horns, are enough to establish him as one of the strongest talents working in the field of suspense and horror fiction. His writing has a lot of similarities to his own father’s early work, in particular such high points as The Shining, Dead Zone, and Carrie.

Overall I’d judge Horns to be slightly below the standard of the first novel, though still worth reading and still indicative of the likelihood of strong future work coming from this writer.

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.

The Joy of Discovering Great Things

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Remember that feeling you had, twelve years old (well, I was twelve at least — what about you?) walking out of the theater after seeing Star Wars for the first time? Maybe for you it was the first time you read Lord of the Rings, or Catcher in the Rye, or it might have been time you listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall on headphones.

Sometimes in this life — not too often or else it wouldn’t have the same magic — you come across one of these amazing things you immediately know you’ll always love, and revisit over and over. Often you don’t recognize it when you first come across the thing, and only looking back later do you try to remember that first encounter, try to remember how it felt the first time you saw that opening image in Blade Runner, with the first spine-tingling notes of the Vangelis score. In other words, we often don’t recognize the discover is so special when we first see it, and only get it in retrospect.

Once in a while you may be lucky enough to be told by a sufficient number of people you trust that you have a real special treat in store. In these case you know you should appreciate it, approach with respect and careful attention to your own sense of discovery when you finally get around to listening, reading, watching or whatever it may be.

I’ve somehow managed to miss Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun these past thirty years. I’ve seen the thing recommended so many times, with such passion, that of course I know I’m in for something great. The funny thing about approaching a beloved classic like this is that you recognize other people love it, but without understanding exactly what everyone responded to, what made it special, until you actually dig in for yourself. It was this way for me with reading Dune, for example, or watching The Sopranos. In both cases, I didn’t really “get” what was so interesting about the idea, but respected the many recommendations enough to finally give in, take a look, be swept away, and become a huge fan myself.

Same thing here, with this book. I’ve read a bit of Gene Wolfe, just a few short stories, enough to recognize the guy can write as well as anybody inside the Fantasy/SF genres, or even anybody in the mainstream. There’s nothing like the dawning recognition when you read something amazing, like Severian’s interaction with the blind librarian Ultan.

This isn’t so much a blog entry about Wolfe’s books (I’ll get to that when I’m done reading), but about that amazing experience of bumping up against true greatness. That first recognition is one of the greatest feelings in life, like falling in love, or traveling to a beautiful place for the first time. I’m so excited to continue with this book!

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.

I judge books by their covers

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When I first started making electronic music, but before I actually started releasing CDs, one of my favorite things was to imagine what my CD covers would look like. Now that I’m writing fiction, I also find myself daydreaming about what kind of design or artwork I’d like on my “someday” book covers.

I’ve always loved the art of science fiction and fantasy, but I think we’re in a period where some especially beautiful, sophisticated book design is being done. I’ve mentioned the Iain M. Banks “Culture” series here on this blog before, and the covers of those are really beautiful in both the US and UK versions, which are slightly different.

A publisher I’ve just discovered in the last couple of years (and rapidly purchased dozens of their books), a “small press” In San Francisco called Night Shade Books, has done some of the most beautiful book design I’ve seen recently. Their new, upcoming “best short fiction” collection by Kim Stanley Robinson has such a great cover, it makes me want this even though I’m only familiar with the author by reputation.

Speaking of Night Shade, they’re on a roll lately, with great books by Paolo Bacigalupi’s Wind-Up Girl (how great has it got to be for a small press to win a Nebula for one of their novels?), Laird Barron’s two short story collections, a whole bunch of fantastic short story anthologies (both themed and unthemed) by Jonathan Strahan, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.

Back to the question of book covers, though… I love the golden age science fiction imagery with weird aliens, phallic space ships, swoopy princesses in skin-tight costumes, and kick-ass heroes with streamlined metal helmets and bitchin’ rayguns. I enjoy looking at that stuff and it gives me an adolescent tingle when I see it, but I think it’s a good thing for the science fiction field that book cover artwork has become more mature, often more abstract. I don’t own this book by Banks (and I think this is the UK cover and I probably would have to buy a different version anyway) but wow!

Of course the trend is really toward character-focused book covers, where you see a good-looking, slightly dangerous hero or heroine in some kind of peril. It’s just an updated version of the pulp or golden age thing, and while I understand it, and don’t doubt that it gets people to buy books, I love the more austere and sort of suggestive, atmospheric covers. I won’t post any examples of the character-oriented artwork, because you just need to go down to your local mass-market bookstore and look at the science fiction and fantasy sections (particularly fantasy) and you’ll see any number of leather-clad heroines with purple hair, carrying a Stormbringer-ripoff sword, and displaying their particularly meaningful tattoo design along with most of the rest of their skin.

I really have to get that novel going so I can justify all this time spent thinking about book covers!

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.

Hello Strangers

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This blog doesn’t get too much traffic, normally. Somewhere between zero hits in a day, if I haven’t posted anything new for a while, and maybe 12 of 15 or 20 on a day when I pick something with tags that are interesting to a greater number of people.

So far today, my latest blog entry has something like 100 hits, so I’m trying to figure out where all these eyeballs come from. Probably people interested in Scrivener or Writeroom or something.

Anyway… hello, strangers!