Tag: words out

Back To It

On By griffinwordsIn Blogging, Words OutLeave a comment

I’ve been busy with music/Hypnos, my dad’s visit to Portland, writing, and all the rest of life. Funny, when I blog regularly I find it easy to keep on blogging regularly, and once I stop it’s very easy to STAY stopped. So many things are like this, especially exercise and creative activities. Running every single day is easy. Taking a week off running, and then starting to run again that first time is much harder.

I still write six days a week, exercise six days a week, work my day job five days a week, listen to tons of music, watch lots of movies with my wife, and don’t get enough sleep.

Lately I’m working on a lot of stories simultaneously, even more than usual for me, and the stories are all over the map. I’m writing an SF story about a group of robotic domestic helpers left behind by their humans on an Earth-like colony, a horror-tinged SF story about some weird stuff lurking in the bottom of a deep mine (not started in response to the major news story about miners in Chile), finishing up a dark fantasy or horror bit about a family vacationing at a lake house and coming under the influence of some local entities. I have another odd, dark bit about a married couple who retreat to a cabin out in the wilderness near Mt. Hood and begin to lose all connection to the world they left behind.

I’m also continuing heavy cuts on my two “salvage project” stories I mentioned before… mega-long stories that needed to lose 2/3 of their length before I could even assess how to turn them into something interesting. They’re down from 14,000 words to 5,500 and from 11,000 words to 5,300 so they’re getting close to where I can see what they need to be. This has been a really useful and interesting test or experiment, but I don’t know that I’d do it again. I could have easily rewritten these stories from scratch in less time, and with better result, but then again that wasn’t really the point.

I’ve got the same nine final drafts still circulating among various markets. My two longest-pending submissions are both Writers of the Future, for 2010-q3 (June-ending quarter) and q4 (Sept-ending). Jeez, sending those guys a story means keeping it from other markets for about six months, it appears. I realize they get a lot of submissions but it seems they could finish one quarter’s reading before opening it up to the next quarter… and then the one after that. They just announced q2 results, and they’re reading stories for q3, q4, and 2011 q1 (quarter ending December) all at once. Sheesh, talk about slush pile.

Reading notes…

I’m still reading Laird Barron’s Occultation, an absolutely top-notch collection. Seriously, some of the best strange/dark short fiction I can remember reading, not just recently, but ever. When I get through that last story and a half (I’m reading other stuff in parallel so it’s taking a while) I’ll write a real review.

Just finished The City & The City by China Mieville, and I’m very impressed. I knew it would be good, based on all the reviews and awards, and interviews I’ve read with the author. I can tell he’s just a super-sharp guy and I’ve owned copies of several of his books for a while and intended to get to them… but finally dived into one of his newest. Before I move on to Kraken I’ll probably jump back to Perdido Street Station since that’s been on the “must read soon” list since, you know, a really long time ago.

Lessee, I think I mentioned finishing Old Man’s War, which was really good, and not as lightweight or pastiche-y as I expected. I’m on to Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky, which is fully of SF-nal goodness, and pretty well written, though at times a little too heavy on the political & military detail. I’m not far into it so I’ll reserve judgement.

I did mean to blog a bit more about the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, which was a lot of fun and quite memorable. But this is a “rust buster” blog so I’ll wrap it up, and leave stuff to blog about later this week.

How I Work, 2010 Edition

On By griffinwordsIn Words OutLeave a comment

In my last post I mentioned I’ve been working harder than ever on writing fiction.

When I first picked up writing again last year, I really only dabbled a few hours occasionally on the weekend. Then late in 2009 I got more serious, and added one or two more weeknight sessions, maybe an hour or two after work.

This summer I stepped it up. I now get up at 5:30 every morning, which gives me almost 90 minutes to write, five days a week, before I have to get ready for work. Three or four times a week, after work and exercise, I might squeeze in another hour. On the weekend I write all day Sunday (8-12 hours), and often an hour or two on Saturday.

This may not be “full time” but it’s a huge improvement over what I was doing just six months ago, and it means much of my time not spent at work, or commuting, exercising or eating, is spent writing.

I’ve often seen established writers offer the straightforward advice, “write more,” and I really believe that’s the best prescription. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not only spending more hours per week, but also making the sessions more frequent and consistent, that makes the difference. When I was writing a couple times per week, every time I sat down I had to re-acquaint myself with where I left off. Now, the moment I sit down at the computer I know exactly what I want to work on, and where I stand with regard to that piece. For this reason, if I had the choice between two hour writing sessions six times a week, or a single twelve-hour marathon, I’d choose the near-daily consistency.

Because of this effect, I’m now writing many more hours per week, and each hour is more productive now than before. Effectively I feel I’m accomplishing ten times as much per week as I did a year ago. It’s exciting to finish new stories at an increased rate, and feel I’ve been able to give them all the care and attention they needed.

Rejecter and Rejectee

On By griffinwordsIn Words Out2 Comments

I usually keep my music stuff and my writing stuff completely separate. Hypnos Recordings and ambient music on the left, weird stories on the right. One side of my face is M. Griffin and the opposite is Michael Griffin, like those white-black split guys on the original Star Trek.

Sometimes, though, I think what I’ve learned by running a moderately successful ambient music record label for the past 13-ish years actually has gives me some insights I can carry over into the fiction thing. Particularly useful is the ability to see the acceptance/rejection process, in which eager young artist tries to gain the approval of the gatekeeper (editor, agent, label head). Having participated in this process from one side for so long, having rejected all kinds of work for all kinds of reasons, helps me understand what it means when I get a story back in the mail (or more often lately, receiving a “sorry, no” email). Also, what it doesn’t mean.

Iin the realm of music, sometimes I’ve received a demo when I really don’t have any more capacity to release new music, regardless of quality. That artist gets a rejection no matter whaty. More often, the backlog isn’t quite so distressingly full, but almost. There is a great imbalance between the number of people seeking to have their creative work released into the world, and the number of slots available. This means that lots of great work gets rejected because it’s too much like something else we’re already doing, or it’s perfectly competent but not distinctive enough. Maybe it’s pure genius, but slightly out of bounds with regard to genre or style.

I wrote once before about Degrees of Rejection, and because of my work with Hypnos, I know one thing for sure. Now, I’ve talked to writers who believe that a rejection is a rejection, and trying to argue that not all are equal amounts to self-delusion. The thing is, having sat on the opposite side of the desk taught me something. A huge difference exists between someone who is doing professional-level work, but missing certain details, or not quite a perfect fit, and someone who is falling far short. It doesn’t surprise me to read that editors reject certain stories on page one. I’ve rejected some demos less than a minute into the first track. Hell, some demos you can reject based on the dipshit cover letter, without having heard a single note, or based on the shirtless, Fabio-esque picture the guy enclosed. There is a great difference in how I respond to different categories of inquiries or demos, and I believe editors are no different.

The first thing an unpublished writer (or other artist) should seek to do, an interim goal they can strive for even before they actually break through, is to reach a level of competence and artistic potency such that their work is at least in the realm of serious consideration, even when it is not accepted. At that point, the gatekeeper listens to the whole demo (or reads the entire manuscript), possibly sticks it in the “maybe” pile, checks out the artist/writer’s web site, and replies with a personal note.

Of course, this all amounts to guessing and divination, trying to understand intention behind a rejection letter, which doesn’t really get you anything. That’s the kind of thing we grab hold of, though, while waiting.

iPad as Writing Tool, Part 2

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I wrote once before about how I use my iPad as a tool to aid my writing. If the subject interests you, you can find that earlier post here.

Last time I covered this subject, I was using the iPad as a supporting tool for note-making and information-gathering, but not really writing anything on it longer than an outline or synopsis. At that time I was using Evernote for almost everything, and that’s still true. The reason for this is that Evernote, while not a word processor or even really a text editor, is great at organizing, sorting and tagging small bits of text. Also with versions for iPad/iPhone, for Mac OS and for Windows, it covered pretty much all my technology bases. Now I’m using a Droid phone and there’s an Evernote version for Droid, as well. So with this free account, I can create notes (including photo or audio notes), or edit, tag/sort, or delete existing notes, wherever I am.

If you’re a writer type, you may be saying “That sucks, give me a word processor,” and I hear what you’re saying. But while Apple Pages is a decent enough word processor in some ways, and only $9.99, it lacks the ability to easily get your work on and off the iPad so you can work on your files with other computers. You can open a text document out of your Dropbox in Pages but when you’re done working, you can’t put the saved changes back into Dropbox. You have to wait until the next time you’re ready to sync your iPad, and that sucks. Maybe Apple will fix that in the next Pages rev. If so, they’d also better add a word counter while they’re at it.

So that’s why I don’t bother using my iPad for serious writing, and nobody else really does either, unless they’re using ONLY the iPad, and just synchronizing up once or twice a week to move materials off for printing and archiving.

Today I was inspired to cover this subject again because a new application just came out called Elements which runs on iPad and iPhone. It’s $4.99 and it allows you to sync files through your Dropbox (if you haven’t figured it out yet, people who use more than one computer absolutely NEED Dropbox), so you can start a file in Elements, save it, and open it later for formatting and printing on your Mac or PC… or open your works-in-progress in Elements for a little tweaking while you’re on vacation or on the subway.

I haven’t even downloaded Elements yet but I can see from looking at the web site that it’s just what i need. It even has word count!

An iPad with Elements, plus a bluetooth keyboard, would make a pretty nice mobile writing setup. Even though I already have a great Macbook Pro, and I love the giant 17″ screen, there are times I’d like to tinker with a work-in-progress on my Ipad.

To Outline, or Not, or How Much?

On By griffinwordsIn Words OutLeave a comment

Right over here (in the comments to the Livejournal version of this blog), Obadiah and I got to talking about something I’d been meaning to riff on a little bit, so here’s an opportunity.

The question is about the value and importance of outlining (or at least advance planning) when writing fiction.

Those in favor of outlining feel it’s too easy (without an outline) to meander around aimlessly, and follow digressions that seem appealing to the writer in some way. One minute you’re writing a story about a character who was headed somewhere, and eventually you realize the guy has been pursuing something tangential for 1,200 words. Some of the words may have been fun to right, but in the best case you’ll cut them (thus wasting a lot of work) and in the worst case you’ll leave them in there because you love them (thus putting the reader to sleep for those 3-4 pages).

Those against, also known as “freestylers,” argue that the fun in the creative process derives from exploration, and if you’re following a pre-Mapquested route, it becomes boring and it’s hard to get motivated to keep going. Also, some argue their subconscious will come up with interesting new twists they might never have discovered had they remained bound to an outline.

I used to be a freestyler, and now I’m an outliner. As I’ve mentioned numerous times before in this blog, my early writing involved too much wank. That is, I spent too much of my writing time just doing what felt good — fun, banter-y dialogue, cool people, inventive locales. The problem is, the stories usually amounted to little more than mood pieces. They had no cumulative impact.

Writers who can sit down and freestyle, who intuitively spin compelling plots, and whose stories end up in a place that makes perfect sense once you look back at the setup and the character in the beginning, are lucky writers indeed. I don’t doubt such creatures exist, but I ain’t them.

In my opinion, the trick (which I’m still trying to perfect myself) is to outline and plan in advance just enough to keep the writer on track. I want to give myself just enough of a hint of a destination off on the horizon that I can make my way, not wander too far off course, and yet “freestyle” a bit en route. I love the little details of discovery a writer makes when they come to a “what next?” moment in the story, when the subconscious scrambles to fill in a blank and comes up with something much more compelling, on the fly, than anything that could’ve been outlined in advance of wading into the scene.

Another way of putting it would be, you should know some important things about your characters before you start, have a general idea of where the plot will end up, then let yourself freestyle from point to point until you get to that ending, and be as inventive and crazy as you can along the way. Pack in as many outside-the-lines details as you can, like a jazz improviser who can go wild even though he knows he has to join back up with the rest of the group after the solo.

Keep it fun, but don’t waste time and effort going too far down blind alleys. Remember the need to make sense of it all by the end.

These are the tricks I’m working toward.

Catching Up After Much Distraction

On By griffinwordsIn Words In, Words OutLeave a comment

I’ve just finished a long string of social obligations and family activities, with travel for both my wife and myself (separately) right in the middle, but things are finally settling back to normal. I’ve been taking advantage of the opportunity to be extremely productive on several projects that have been hanging over me, nagging, for several weeks.

This week I finished a major re-work of a story I had previously considered “finished,” and which I had sent out to several markets and received positive notes from three different editors… but which I decided lacked a strong enough ending to pay off all that led up to it. I chopped a bit of earlier material (including the beginning, which started too slowly), rearranged two middle scenes, and then wrote an entirely new development which I feel delivers a much better emotional impact. Before, the story just sort of trailed off into a dissolution of conflict, and now things twist and twist and seem to let up, then finally twist some more.

I’m still waiting to hear back on my Writers of the Future submission, but I don’t want obsess over it. I’m also doing revisions on my Writers Weekend story ‘The Long Tightrope,’ taking into account many of the comments I received in critique, and in fact this story is in the same “world” as my WOTF story. All this work in that milieu recently has me thinking of jumping into it for one more story, but then I have in mind to write a novel in that world at some point, and I’m reluctant to “steal” my own novel-worthy ideas and spend them on another short.

Speaking of novels, I’ve made the decision I’m going to start writing one by the end of this year, not in a full-steam effort forsaking all else, but alongside continuing efforts in short fiction. Originally I had planned to wait until I’d achieved substantial publication credits before bothering with a novel, but I feel a real “itch” to explore this story, which has a more “fun” feel to it than my often more ponderous, internalized stuff. I think too many unestablished writers worry too much about career-planning and not enough about the joy of creativity, and following the ideas that get you excited.

At this point, I try to make it all about fun and following my nose.

The novel I’ll most likely start is not the concept I mentioned above (linked to my WOTF story and my Writers Weekend critique story), but another one linked to a different short story. This one is near-future SF with a lot of adventure and intrigue and ass-kicking, very heavy with the testosterone and the weapons and definitely more FUN than SERIOUS. I’ll spill more about this one here soon, but the working title (one of those working titles that I just know won’t end up being the finished title) is “Third Life.”

Other than that, I’m very relieved to be free of obligations for a while, and I’m taking advantage of the available time to crank out a lot of revisions on several almost-finished stories this month. It’s my hope that I’ll have at least ten manuscripts out to market simultaneously in the next month or two. The addition of daily morning writing sessions (instead of just on the weekends, an the occasional weekday evening) has really increased my output and my focus. Obviously I’m hoping this will pay dividends, and help me level-up “editors say nice things when they reject my stories” to the “actually starting to sell stuff once in a while” threshold.

I’ll post something more coherent soon, but here’s a quick, messy brain dump since I haven’t checked-in for a while.

Home Again, Home Again

On By griffinwordsIn Words In, Words OutLeave a comment

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.

How many balls should I keep in the air?

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Those of you casually perusing this blog might say “This fella here looks like one of them wannabe writers, who talks a lot about how he wishes he could write some day, but doesn’t actually commit any words to paper.”

I’ve known people like that, more in love with the idea of writing than with the act itself, but I’m not one of them. I don’t write every single day, but I’m pretty productive. No, the reason I haven’t said much about my own fiction yet is a bit of self-consciousness about talking my own ideas and process. Having asked myself “What’s up with that, anyway?” I’ve come to the conclusion it’s mainly due to being unpublished at this point, so I feel more qualified spouting off about science fiction books and writers, since every reader feels qualified to be a critic. I figure, though, if I have enough nerve to send my work to professional editors to consider for their periodicals (a threshold I’ve crossed), I can certainly put myself far enough out on the limb to talk about some of my own creative philosophies and mechanisms.

Rather than starting with something I feel confident about, though, I’ll begin with a question to which I don’t really know the answer. One thing I feel unsure of, and I go back and forth on this question, is this: How many stories should I be working on at any given time?

Over the past dozen years I’ve recorded a lot of ambient electronic music. That’s not what this blog is about, but it’ll come up here sometimes because it’s an important part of my life. I mention it because in all those years, having released a handful of solo albums and another handful of collaborative ones, I’ve almost never tried to work on more than one thing at once. Finish the Griffin solo album, start the Viridian Sun duo album, start the second Griffin album, set it aside entirely and make the second Viridian Sun album, and so on. The process was to start a project and either finish it or set it aside completely before starting another. I never thought about this way of working, but it made sense to me and it seemed to work.

With my writing, I’ve always worked on more than one thing at once, sometimes juggling a really large number of projects and ideas. Last month I counted twelve short stories in progress and another thirty plotted, outlined or otherwise planned (but not yet started). When I have an idea for a story I slowly add little things to the mix during the planning stage, starting from a scribbled sentence or two that could barely be called an idea, into the seed of a story, fleshing it out into a full-fledged anecdote or scene, finally combining elements of plot and character, conflict and drama, until I have something ready to be written into a story. Often I stumble upon elements that fit well only very gradually, and I feel like my best stories have benefitted from being “in progress” for long enough for this to unfold.

Recently I felt overwhelmed by the many long-pending stories hanging over me, and resolved not to start anything new until I could shorten the queue down to just a few. Though I’m not yet entirely sure I need to change what I’m doing, I’m considering this an experiment.

MANY items working at once gives me the benefit of allowing each idea longer to mature, gather a sort of richness or complexity. The drawback is, certain stories get lost in a swirl of too much going on. When I have a dozen stories working, and I’m not able to write every single day, sometimes I’m away from a given story for long enough that it becomes too unfamiliar and I have to reacquaint myself with important details before I can begin working again.

FEWER items working would help me see clearly all the balls I’m trying to keep in the air, and ensure I can give time to each of them every week without spending too long away. The flipside to this, though, is that I can’t take much time away from an idea that seems like it would benefit from being shifted to the back burner for a few weeks, because I won’t have enough other stuff to work on instead.

I’ve been on roll lately, finalizing stories and sending them out, and January’s dozen or so pending stories may be reduced by half before the end of March. This is gratifying because the more stories I have completely finished and off my plate, the more I feel like a “real” science fiction writer and not just this confused guy who’s starting to dabble in a new genre. Also I feel the stories show rapid improvement, which makes me hopeful about getting something published soon, if not with one of the stories already finished and submitted, then with something I’ll finish soon.

In Stephen King’s wonderful book On Writing (and no matter what you think of King’s own work, this really is a useful book on writing that any fiction writer should own no matter what style they’re working in) he suggests an approach not too different from my own, involving sticking a first draft in a drawer for several weeks until it can be seen more objectively, and working on other things in the mean time.

If my focus were on novels this wouldn’t even be a question, as novelists usually just hammer away on their one novel at a time, or at most take a little break to work on a short story before getting back to it. Nobody’s juggling a dozen novels in various stages of completion. I’m curious how other writers focused on short fiction do this. I suppose I’ll just try narrowing it down a bit this spring, and see if that’s better or not. If it doesn’t feel right, I could always just start a few new stories… toss a few more balls up in the air and try to keep them up.