Pre-edit your fiction submissions

Since I blogged about being a submissions editor for Apex I’ve received a few polite requests to provide more detailed critiques of people’s works.

I’m sorry, I don’t do that. I simply don’t have the time.

However, there are resources for writers who are wondering what they can do differently, or better, to improve their chances of getting out of the slush pile.

Strange Horizons has two great resources, Stories We’ve Seen Too Often, and Horror Stories We’ve Seen Too Often. If you read your story and your story does these things, take a moment to reconsider. You will have to be glaringly brilliant to get a story of this ilk past the submissions editors.

Nalo Hopkinson has written a guide to when stories go wrong. Take a look at that, and see if your story does any of those things. If so, reconsider.

Seanan McGuire has Fifty Thoughts on Writing. I think she’s up to forty-seven. Read those, and see where you stand. Some of those apply to the craft of writing, others to the business, but the advice is solid. Ponder it in your heart.

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Imposter Syndrome, A Rare Case of

I had my first moment of imposter syndrome in recent history this week. I was amused.

To wit, I, as editor, emailed someone I clearly feel is Above My Pay Grade, or Out of My League, or At a Higher Weight Class, or something, a note regarding a deadline I hoped they would meet. Now, I’m the editor. There is no “above my grade”. I’m the grade. This is true because this is how the system works; the honors go with the position, not the person. I believe this to be true. I am also arrogant to a fault.

Yet, still, every once in a while, I think “Are you kidding me? I can’t say that to THAT person!”

I say this is the first time in recent history because this was not always the case. I used to frequently feel that I was not entitled to the responsibilities and powers of a job, or that I was not personally worth enough for some other party to talk to.

It’s an interesting conundrum, y’know. Mostly, I am not worth the time of very busy people who have their own lives. If I did manage to get ahold of Michelle Obama’s email, I would never in a million years expect her to answer me. Why on earth would she do so?

That’s not imposter syndrome. That’s having a sense of perspective about the world.

Yet at some point — anthology editing is this point, for me — I have legitimate business reasons to chat people up. People I have previously viewed as Those Famous People Over There. I’m not entitled to their time, not at all. But I have a reason to be in the room. And once we’ve entered into a business arrangement, I am entitled to a few specific contractually-agreed-upon things from That Famous Person Who Is Not Quite So Far Over There As They Once Were. At that point, the feeling of I’m-not-worthy becomes imposter syndrome.

Much like I felt earlier this week, sending That One Email to That One Person.

I laughed.

I checked my email to make sure it was professional, polite, cheerful, and confident in tone.

Then I sent it.

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Greasy, shedding things

I listened yesterday to the Fuzzy Typewriter Podcast regarding the movie ALIEN. In light of the forthcoming movie Prometheus, Paul has decided to watch the four Alien franchise movies and discuss them with friends. This podcast covered the first movie, Ridley Scott’s Alien.

I’m not going to talk about the movie. I am going to talk about a feature of science fiction. Namely, that humans are dirty.

I work in a high-tech job. I’m an air traffic controller. The walls of my workspace are 3.5-meter-tall racks of specialized computer equipment, each rack mounted on a raised floor that jets cold, dry air up into the workroom. There are, if I remember the tech tour correctly, over a hundred miles of cable — computer, electrical, telephonic — in my building. The system I work on is triple-redundant. Parts can and are hot-swapped out in under ninety seconds should a component fail.

My workspace is really quite dirty.

It’s dirty because the cleaning contractors do not touch the equipment. This is right and good and proper — I don’t want a stray shot of Windex taking out my scope, and I don’t want my frequencies turned off by a Swiffer. But it means the consoles never get clean.

Occasionally large wafts of grey … stuff … comes floating down from the top of the consoles, the parts of the racks we can’t see. The stuff is, frankly, us. It’s human hair and skin and sweat. It’s the stuff of dust bunnies, writ large. It’s there because we humans effluviate. We shed, we smear, we streak.

We shed our skin every forty-five days. Where do you think it goes?

Just because the future is technologically advanced from right now doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be cleaner. Particularly if the tech involved is a set piece of important gear used by multiple people. If it belongs to no-one, no-one is responsible for cleaning it. If it’s important, then no-one will be allowed to mess with it. When one shift knocks off and the next one comes in, no-one takes the time to scrub it all down. You pick up the pen at the station, you sign in, you adjust the volume knob, and you start touching things. You get to work.

And you get your self all over everything.

I love the Nostromo. It looks right to me, it looks familiar. The old control room floor, the one I worked in for three years before we moved to the new floor, everything on the old floor was beige. Almost nothing in that room had been beige originally. It was beige because cigarette smoking had been allowed in the control room for over thirty years. The crew of the Nostromo smokes. They sweat, they exercise, they work, they sit around. They clean the galley, certainly, and I bet they clean the head. but they don’t clean the console, or the door handles, or the corridor ceilings. And those things are grimy, as they should be.

The place I work looks totally awesome. It’s full of touch screens and swivel arms and lots of HD monitors and blinky lights and there are voices calling out from speakers and people talking in assured quiet voices constantly. It is, frankly, kinda badass. I love it. But the lights are very, very dim. It is a badass high tech environment coated in a thin layer of human.

Productivity meaurement

So, a question for you all. Under what circumstances do you feel most productive?

“Feeling productive” can be measured by any means you like. It’s about how you feel, after all.

What makes you feel like you are getting things done? Do you make lists? Schedules? Stack up the finished products? Get paid? Win awards? Measure gains or losses? Do you count how much free time you have, or time in meetings, or time spent staring into space?

What makes you feel like you are getting things done?

Too tired to brain

1. Watched Rumble in the Bronx. I love watching Jackie Chan move.

2. Finished first draft of short story. It needs to sit for a day or so, and then I need to tackle it with a pen, on paper, and see if it hangs together.

3. Other short story is at beta. These two stories, they … dare I say it, they seem to be part of a series. Or, you know, a fictional universe. We’ll see what happens with that.

4. Sooooooooooo tired.

Plot- or character-driven

So, here’s a thing about storytelling. By and large, I tend to prefer stories in which the plot happens because of who the characters are, rather than plots that just happen and to which the characters, whoever they happen to be, must react.

The books I love that are most like the second sort, the plot-driven sort, are the collected works of S.M. Stirling. Great Mysterious Things happen, and our enormous cast of characters must then cope with the consequences. The initial event is a Plot thing, it has nothing to do with who these people caught in it are — but, swiftly, the story becomes very particular to those people.

But I only like sort of borderline plot-driven books. I prefer the character-driven stories. The vast majority of books I enjoy contain stories that would not happen at all were different people involved. In classic SF, weirdly enough, Heinlein’s books are most of this sort. If different, less superhuman, people were involved …

February!

I am still home from work. Blea. I have angered the snot gods, it seems.

It’s February, so my month off from writing is done. Today will be a day of sorting through my existing projects. I need to find them all, where I’ve saved them or worked on them (hard drive, google docs, Dropbox, Scrivener,) put them all in one place, and back them up to the flash drive and Dropbox. Then I need to look at the various writing contests and calls for open submissions that I’ve seen in the last month — see which are still open, which pay money. Then I’ll organize which projects are a priority.

Unless something unexpected comes up, I plan to be working on the suffrage/whaling short story and the xenobotany novel.

I have found, however, in the last month, that the idea of historical fiction holds a great appeal for me. But … but I’m not sure I have the commitment to detail required to write historical fiction that I would care to read. It’s so FINICKY. And full of unending rabbit-holes of research.

I think that what will likely happen is that I will just end up stealing vast swathes of history and reworking them into fiction. I feel slightly as though this is cheating in some way? But it’s a time-honored tradition, and I feel confident that I can uphold it.

Comics and getting published

1. I’ve gotten art from two artists in the past week, for comics forthcoming. I’m not entirely sure WHEN they will be forthcoming, or in what format. I’m hoping that the revamp on my website will be done soonish. Said revamp with include webcomics, incorporate my blog into the new site, and be pretty spiffy — if all goes according to plan. Goodness knows I’m not at all thrilled about the *production* of comics per se. But I expect physical copies will also be made available for sale, once I get the money together to get them printed. It’s a step-by-step process; pay the artist, then pay for printing.

2. If you haven’t looked at Denizens for a while, more pages are up!

3. I’ve signed two contracts this week for paid writing. A short story, and an essay. Both are due to come out in the winter, and I will have details when said details are confirmed. But … Contracts. Signed. For paid monies, in exchange for writing. I am excited enough about this that I go all affect-less and bland and perfectly calm.

I’ve been writing original stuff for a couple years now. But I’ve been blogging since about 2004-ish, maybe? And I wrote vast, unimaginable amounts of fanfic for about two solid years. I figured it out, and between everything I was writing I was putting out about 2500 words a day. Surely, surely if I could do that, I could write my own stuff.

Now, that was a sort of unsustainable amount of writing. I don’t do that these days, having replaced some of that time with sleep, in-person social events, streaming video, books,and doing more things with my family. But the practice was invaluable. The RP comms — role-playing communities, wherein one writes a fictional character interacting with other fictional characters who are written by other people — taught me an incredible amount about how to convey emotion through dialog. The ficathons taught me how to write to a specific topic, an assignment, on a deadline. The gift-fics taught me to consider my audience. The beta-readers, or betas, for all my fic writing are some of the best editors I have ever met. Insightful, critical, questioning, with an eye for consistency and detail. They are, in fact, so valued that I have them read my original works as well. Without them, I wouldn’t have signed those contracts last week. (Thanks, guys!)

Achieving goals through trickery

Every day I tell myself that I could absolutely have a caffeinated drink, I certainly could. I tell myself I could certainly have this one, right here, but, I think I’ll skip it. I can buy a coffee at the next gas station, get a chai at the next coffeeshop, get a can of Monster out of the vending machine at work. I tell myself this on the drive in to work, during my whole shift, and on the drive home. I can always get a mocha tomorrow. And then I wake up the next day and tell myself I can wait until lunch, or through dinner, or I can certainly get one tomorrow morning. I tell myself these things every day, and about once a week I have a chai or a decaf coffee, and then I start telling myself the litany again. In this way I’ve stayed mostly caffeine free — except for the once-a-week decaf or chai — since July 9th 2009.

About once a week I remind myself that I don’t need to have a cigarette right now, I can get a pack on the way home and have one then. And then I don’t, and the desire fades until a few days later, and I tell myself the same thing again. In this way I’ve stayed quit of smoking since November 30th, 2001.

Every single day in the cafeteria at work, I want a burger. Preferably a bacon cheeseburger. It’s mouthwatering to me. And every day I tell myself I can have one on the way home, from McDonalds, or tomorrow at work. In this way I’ve stayed vegetarian since 2000.

When I’ve tried to quit things in the past, I’ve tried to quit. “This is the LAST cigarette I shall EVER have!” I would say, smoking with mourning and solemnity. And then three months later I would have one. Because I was quit now, you see, so this was okay. Eventually I realized that I could never quit things. That, on some level, I didn’t believe it.

I realized that I don’t believe I can achieve long-term goals.

I’m not sure why I don’t believe this. I suspect it may have something to do with my dad, with being raised by the adult child of an abusive alcoholic. I’m pretty certain that my father doesn’t make plans. That the future is something that just happens to him. Good things happen because he is lucky, bad things happen because the world is full of people out to get him. But none of it is his fault, because none of it is under his control — in his eyes, at least.

I don’t feel that way about the world — on the contrary, I feel reasonably certain that I am in control of much of my life. When I don’t like something, I try to change it or make other plans. Yet I still have trouble with long-term goals, long-term thinking. Part of me just shrugs, internally, and says, “but who knows what will happen? You can’t make plans for that!”

I’m really, truly shocked at my own ability to keep producing comics. Seriously shocked. This is, is a plan. It’s this HUGE long-term thing. Yet . . . Yet, aside from initially writing a five-year business plan, I don’t think of Slightly Obsessed Studio as a long-term goal. I think of it as The Next Thing. As in, what’s the next thing I should do? Okay, good, what’s the next thing? What’s the thing after that? If I try to sit down and plan out everything I might need to do to become a paid comic book writer, the goal is too large. Crazy, insane-large. I don’t believe I can do it. But I believe, I know, that I can write scripts. I know I can edit them. I know I can do world-building and research. I know I can cold-contact artists. I know I can network. I know I can fill out my tax forms. I know I can write a cover letter, I know I can send in pitches. I know I can mail out orders, I know I can keep track of income. I can do each of these things, each alone, and slowly produce comic books.

If I tell myself I can NEVER have caffeine again, I get resentful and balky and trapped,and I know I’ll slip up sometime, so why not slip up right now and be happy? If I tell myself I have to get published and paid to write, it’s absolutely essential, I get depressed and angry and resentful and I stop writing because it will never work. I don’t know what this thing is in me that refuses to believe that I can achieve long-term goals. But it’s there, and I know from a lifetime of experience that I can’t bull my way through that thing. I have to trick it. So that’s what I do. I won’t have a cheeseburger for lunch today. I didn’t stop for coffee on the way into work; I might on the way home. I don’t have to produce a whole comic today, I can just email this artist back with page approvals. The constant process of choosing to take an action, over and over again, feels stronger and better to me than having some iron-clad situation from which I “cannot escape.” It’s my choice, right this minute, to not go to the vending machine and get a can of Monster. It’s in my power, it’s under my control.

And I’ll just keep making this choice for . . . for as long as I choose to make it.

Busy Wednesday was pretty good

Today was a good day. Busy from six a.m. until 7:45 p.m., but good.

1. Mailed second payment to Chicago Artist. He sent the pdf of the comic, and I just need to contact the printer.

2. Finalized deal with new artist for Next Project, to be done in July. Excellent.

3. I got another rejection letter from a magazine about the short story I’m shopping around. This letter said to send more of my work, which I have been told means exactly that. I should send them more work, they are interested, my work shows promise, this story just wasn’t a good fit. This also tells me that the story is probably a good fit for someone else, which is nice.

4. M went to child care at the Y, AND on a playdate, and didn’t have any behavior problems. Thank goodness.

5. During said playdate, J and I actually went out and had coffee and dessert like adults do. And had conversation without being interrupted. It was bliss, I tell you.

6. I got a copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire today, so I can start reading it. Most excellent.