Free Stuff

I have a theory that for any given thing I want to do on the computer, somebody has written a free program for it. As it turns out, that's pretty close to the truth. Admittedly, the free software isn't always as powerful or intuitive or functional as the pay version, but it's rare that I need more than the basics. In most cases, I'd rather have the basics for free than a couple of extra features for hundreds of dollars.

Here's a list of some of the free software I have on my machine, most of which I use on a regular basis. I bet you can find something here you can use.*

• AdAware/SpyBot - After cleaning spyware from nearly a hundred machines, I now install these two together by default. I've yet to find a piece of spyware that one of these won't catch.
• Buddi - Budget software. Not as good as Quicken, but infinitely cheaper.
• Skype - Free video phone via the internet. Surprisingly good quality even from Thailand to Mexico.
• ZipGenius - I got tired of Window's lame "compressed folder" nonsense. I need something that can handle zip files like zip files, as well as jar, gz, rar, tar, war, and z files, without telling me my trial period is over. ZipGenius is the best program I've found for this yet.
• PrimoPDF - I know Macs deal in PDF by default, but Windows doesn't (unless you pay $450 for Adobe's solution!). This program fixes that. I love PDF. It means I can send a query package to MattyDub across the Pacific and he prints it exactly like it's supposed to be.
• DeltaCopy - A reliable backup program capable of scheduled, incremental backups.
• FileZilla - An FTP program that doesn't complain about being a trial version and supports drag-and-drop.
• SketchUp - A 3-D modeling program that's easy to learn and fun to use. I designed my house with this.
• Audacity - High quality recording/sound-editing software.
• Metapad - A slightly better alternative to Window's notepad.
• NetBeans - For programmers. A free, feature-full IDE for Java programming.
  

The following programs are also free and seem very promising, though I haven't yet used them myself. I think it's only a matter of time.

• OpenOffice - Microsoft Office for free. And better. As soon as my copy of MS Word (2002) becomes useless, I'm switching to this.
• yWriter - Novel writing software, created by an experienced programmer/novelist. I haven't switched over yet, because I have a system and it works, but I get closer with every project.
• Picasa - Photo organization software. I've seen it in action, and it's a lot better than my "name the directories with dates and hope that's good enough" method of organization. I just haven't taken the time to load all my photos into it yet.
• Avidemux - Video-editing software. For when Windows Movie Maker just isn't good enough.
• Clam AV - I have my own anti-virus solution for now, but this is the best free one I've seen.

What about you? Anything you like better than what's on this list? What other free software do you use?

* Unfortunately, while these are all available for Windows, some are not available for the Mac. I love Macs, but the open source movement doesn't always extend that far. That was actually one of the reasons I chose a Windows machine the last time I had the choice.

Characters We Hate

(Side note: I've updated the Night Sky in Chiang Mai post to link to other writers who did the same exercise, if you're interested. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry...)

Last time, I gave a list of 10 things we like in characters. The short version was:

1. Courage.
2. Fair Play.
3. Humility.
4. Draftee/Volunteer.
   
5. Dependable.
6. Clever.
7. Victim.
8. Savior.
   
9. Sacrifice.
10. Goals and Dreams.

The things that make us hate a character (also derived from Characters & Viewpoint) is almost, but not quite, the opposite.

1. Liar: Cheats, lies, breaks their promises. Their reasons for lying matter just as much as the lie itself, of course.
2. Self-Centered: Brags. Readily takes credit for accomplishments. Takes criticism poorly. Blames others, complains, or whines about their problems.
3. Self-Appointed: Puts themselves in a position they did not earn, where they are uninvited or do not belong. A usurper.
4. Arrogant: We like clever characters, but a character who knows they are smarter or better than other people (or worse, simply thinks they are) is despicable.
5. Bully: Makes others suffer for their own enjoyment or to exercise control over them.

Like the other list, these are only guidelines. Real people, and therefore real characters, are a lot more complicated than this, as are our feelings towards them. The real world can't typically be separated into "good people" and "bad people." In the same way, not every story has identifiable heroes and villains. I think it's important for writers to know what makes the reader love or hate our characters. Often the reader won't know themselves. In such cases these lists might be useful.

This is also not a checklist. It's rarely a good idea to give a villain all these traits. Just as the most lovable character is mostly good with some flaws, the best villains are the ones who are mostly evil with some sympathetic traits as well.

Above all, any good villain - any good character, actually - is the hero of their own story. No matter how evil or comical or insane somebody is, they believe that what they are doing is right. If the reader is allowed to see their version of events, they may not like them, but they will respect them and, more importantly, they will believe in them. That's the real goal.

Characters We Like

Last week, Nathan Bransford talked about what he feels makes a character sympathetic. He gave this formula: "charisma - action = redeemability" and suggested that if a character's redeemability dropped below a certain base line, that character would lose the sympathy of the reader, and if that character is the protagonist, or any other character that's supposed to be likable, the story's in big trouble.

It's a good way of looking at it, but from this author's point of view it's a little too vague to be workable. So I present to you this almost-checklist derived from Orson Scott Card's Characters & Viewpoint.

10 Things We Like in Characters

1. Courage: Does what's right even if it's risky.
2. Fair Play: Doesn't cheat. Isn't sneaky or underhanded.
3. Humility: Doesn't brag. Is modest or shy about praise. Doesn't argue to defend themselves when criticized. Takes responsibility for their mistakes. Doesn't whine or complain about their problems, but tries to solve them.
4. Draftee/Volunteer: Related to humility. If a job requires great courage, but won't bring much glory or reward, the sympathetic character will volunteer for it. Conversely, if a job will bring glory and reward, the sympathetic character needs to be drafted.
   
5. Dependable: Keeps their word as much as possible.
6. Clever: Thinks of smart solutions to difficult problems.
7. Victim: We pity a character who is a victim of suffering or jeopardy, but you have to be careful. Too much of a victim seems weak; after all, a real character would do something about it. This works best if we know the character has tried their hardest and still can't get out of the situation.
8. Savior: Rescues those in need. Readily defends someone who is being criticized unfairly.
   
9. Sacrifice: A character who sacrifices themselves for something is hugely sympathetic, but only if the sacrifice is necessary and if it's for something important and worthy. Otherwise, we'll think the character is just stupid.
10. Goals and Dreams: In general, sympathy will increase with the importance of the character's goal and the amount of effort they've already expended to try to attain it.

Of course, there are no hard rules in writing. Like everything else, these are guidelines.

It's also not a checklist. If you try to imagine a character with all these qualities, you may find yourself sickened of them. A perfect character becomes unbelievable and unlikable. The best characters - our very favorites - are ones who are mostly sympathetic, the ones who have some small, understandable flaws that make them real and (strangely) lovable.

There's also a very fine line for some of these. For example, a character who is clever is likable, but a character who knows they're clever, and acts like it, is just the opposite. I'll talk about that a little more in the next post: Characters We Hate.

Night Sky in Chiang Mai

(For Nixy Valentine's Writing Adventure Group)

Of course I understand the physics of it - suffusion of light, a terrestrial observation point, and all that. Even so, I am dumbfounded at how a handful of heated wires and gases can reduce billions of celestial furnaces into a countable collection of hazy dots in a not-quite-black sky.

MORE INFORMATION (added 3/9): The assignment was to describe the sky. This was observational, so writers were encouraged to use descriptive words more than metaphors or emotive words. Follow the links below to see how other people took the exercise:

Cora Zane - Stars Will Cry

Sharon Donovan

Adam Heine - Authors Echo

Nancy Parra - This Writer’s Life

Criss - Criss Writes

Carol - DMWCarol

Nixy Valentine

Marsha Moore - Write On!

Jesse Blair - SexFoodPlay

Jackie Doss - The Pegasus Journals

AuntSally

JM Strother - Mad Utopia

Actual, Physical Writing

Last week I was at a homeschool conference for a couple of days. One of the days, there weren't any workshops I wanted to attend, but I still had to be there with my kids. That meant either sitting in a classroom I didn't want to be in, or waiting around for a few hours.

I chose the latter, because I'm good at waiting (I always bring 2 or 3 things to do on plane trips to the States, for example). In this case, I decided to take Tobias Buckell's advice and write on paper. I took out my old moleskine, given to me by a friend like 4 years ago. I've done lots of brainstorming and pseudo-outlining in the notebook before, but never actual writing. That is, I've never written anything in the notebook that I transferred directly to my manuscript. Tobias followed his own advice and shared his experience, so I thought I might as well do the same.

The thing I liked least is no surprise: it's slow. I can type almost as fast as I can think (or at least as fast I can decide what to say). Writing by hand bugs me because by the time I write a few words, I'm thinking 3 or 4 sentences ahead, and I forget how I was going to finish the first sentence.

I also didn't like being away from my notes (my timelines, my outlines, my character bibles, my maps...). I'm a planner, which means I have faith that my outlines are pretty decent to start with - there's a reason I plan. As I spent time writing without my notes, I felt like I was getting farther and farther off my plan.

There was one really good thing about it: it forced me to keep going. There was no e-mail to distract me, no World Doc to write sudden world-building thoughts in, no dictionary or thesaurus to ache over word choice. No notes meant I didn't spend time hunting down details, so when the protagonist referenced something that happened "4 years ago," I had to write "X years ago" and move on.

One of the things that forced me to keep going surprised me: there was no room to edit. Often when I get stuck on something (even if only for a few minutes), I end up looking back and revising. But writing single-spaced in the notebook, there was only a small amount of room to edit. Once I'd changed a word once or twice, there was no more room to change it, and I was forced to leave it and move on.

In the end, I wrote 1,000 words in 1-2 hours. That's about the same speed as my normal rate (although I still had to retype the whole thing once I got home). I'd definitely do it again, if given the opportunity, but I think I'd have to study my notes ahead of time to make sure I stayed on track.

Maybe the next time I fly to the States, I'll bring my notebook instead of my laptop. It's easier to carry around and setup anyway (especially with 2-year-olds in the next seat).

The Voices in my Head

Tony Jay is an English actor, best known for his voice acting in various cartoons and video games. He's played many roles, but it was always his villains I loved. His smooth, British baritone lent an air of danger and superiority to characters like Shere Khan (though not the one in the original Jungle Book) and Chairface Chippendale.

Now you may have no idea what I'm talking about. You may never have seen Tale Spin or The Tick. Odds are good you've never played Fallout, Torment, or Icewind Dale either, all of which starred villains voiced by the late Tony Jay.

But for me, these were some of my favorite stories, and now it's presenting an odd sort of problem. See, the other day I discovered that no matter who my villain is, no matter how well I know them or plan their background and character or even pretend to talk like them - when I sit down to write the dialogue of that villain I involuntarily write the voice of Tony Jay.

Like Arad, the nigh-omnipotent tyrant of Travelers. In my head, he speaks with Tony Jay's voice. Now I didn't realize this at the time because the voice fit. Arad is a dangerous being who considers himself superior to, literally, everybody. So I thought it was just Arad's voice.

But then the other day, I was trying to write Jacobin Savage, the cruel pirate captain from Azrael's Curse (slash Air Pirates). The pirates in this world tend to speak like something between the Irishman from Braveheart and Pirates' Captain Barbosa - fast and flippant, with heavy use of slang and light use of grammar. Savage was supposed to be no different, but when I tried to write his dialogue he sounded less like Captain Barbosa and more like Commodore Norrington.

The difference is relatively subtle on the page, I suppose. For example, Tony Jay's Savage might say, "You want to change the world, isn't that it? You want to rid it of folks like the Imperium, and you think by hitting military targets instead of random merchants, you might do that. What you don't see is that you're just scratching an itch."

But Savage's words need to be more like, "You want to change the world, aye? Want to rid it of the Imperium, and you reck you can do that by hitting Navy marks 'stead of chance merchers. But you're just scratching an itch."

Subtle differences. And for all I know they both sound like Alan Rickman in your head. But it's hard when I want Savage to have a unique voice, and all that comes out is Tony Jay.

So thank you, Tony, for portraying such memorable villains that I can no longer imagine evil in any other voice. You've simultaneously enriched and ruined my life. Well done.

I Heart My Alpha Reader

I have beta readers who will read the novel when it's finished. In the meantime, I have one person who is willing to read each chapter as it comes out, even if it's weeks or months between, even when the chapters she gets are a confusing mess.

She's my alpha reader. The following is a random list of things I love about her:

• She claps in excitement when I tell her I have a new chapter.
• It's fun to watch her read. She winces and laughs and gets scared at all the right moments.
• She asks me all kinds of useful questions, especially when what I wrote doesn't make any sense.
• She doesn't put up with me when I try to argue why something I wrote is right. (Don't argue with the reader!)
• Even if a chapter sucks, she encourages me by telling me what she liked.
• Having her read each chapter, when I haven't finished the novel yet, helps keep me going. It helps me believe that what I'm writing is worth reading - or can be.
• Knowing she'll read the ending as it happens forces me to plan everything leading up to it, so it (hopefully) strikes her well.
• Her questions, and her convictions about what "has to happen next," give me ideas I hadn't considered and make the novel better.
• She doesn't give me ideas often (usually preferring to let me do the writing), but when she does they're always good.
• She believes in me.

Everyone's got their own process. For some, an alpha reader might just get in the way. For heavy planners like me, though, I recommend finding someone who can tell you how you're doing, chapter by chapter. They don't have to be a writer, just a reader. My alpha reader (who's also my wife, if you didn't already figure) has as much to do with the quality of my manuscript as I do.

She doesn't even like sci-fi or fantasy.

Random Sentence Meme

I'm mutating a meme for writers (don't worry if you're not a writer, I still have instructions for you below):

1. Open up your current work in progress. If you have no WIP, go to step 3.
   
2. Leaving it in its current formatting, copy the 5th sentence on page 21, and paste it into the comments of this post. If your WIP does not have 21 pages, go to the last page divided by 2 (round up).
3. If you have no WIP, use the 21st page/5th sentence of the book you are currently reading.
4. If you are not currently reading a book, then get off the internet right now and read one.

A Spectator's View of Publishing's Future

UPDATE: See the comments for two more interesting articles on this topic.

Everyone's been talking about the future (or sometimes the end) of publishing lately. As a spectator, I am totally unqualified to talk about it, but I'm going to anyway because it's my blog and that's the way I like it. (Likewise, if this is a little stream-of-consciousness, I apologize. I'm kind of thinking out loud.)

I used to think that authors write the books, then publishers do all the printing, marketing, and selling of it so that we don't have to. It turns out that's not true (people have been talking about that too). So if all but the best selling authors are expected to do their own marketing, what is the publisher doing?

As far as I can see, they (1) get art for your cover, (2) pay for the printing, (3) get your book in bookstores, and (4) get your book in at least the basic review places. Those are good things. It's very hard for regular people to do any but (2), and if you are self-published, you can't do (3) or (4) at all.

But how many people read those reviews and then buy the book? Is that a lot of copies there? It's some, certainly, but it's not your main readerbase (well, certainly not in my genre). Similarly, who is buying books at bookstores (other than MattyDub and me, who would live at Borders if they let us)? That's some copies as well, but the bookstores seem to be dying which implies that fewer and fewer people are buying from there. That trend might not continue, but what if it does?

What I'm saying is, if the majority of my readerbase is coming from my own marketing efforts, then what do I get by being with a publisher?

Okay, okay. You get a lot of proofreaders who know what they're talking about, which makes your book a lot better and gives it Credibility. I don't want to knock that. Credibility is good. But it's possible to write a good book, and get a huge readerbase, without the credibility of a publisher. It's hard, but no harder, I think, than getting a publisher to begin with.

I guess my real point is that all the trends seem to be moving the advantages of a publisher away from them and into the hands of small authors. The internet is enabling us more, the slow death/metamorphosis of the publishers is requiring us to take on more. If the publishers don't figure this out soon, someone on the internet will find a way to hand out Credibility to self-published books, and then it will all be over.

Well, not over. Different.

(Bonus Question: how do I self-publish books on the Kindle? No print runs, no art required. I think that would undercut almost everything that's left of Big Publishing, if it can be done.)

Turning an Idea into a Story

In Orson Scott Card's writing books Characters and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, he mentions this thing he does called A Thousand Ideas in an Hour. It's fun to do and a good way to get past writer's block.

The idea is this. You start with whatever idea you have, then begin asking these three questions: How? Why? What result? For example, you've got a princess locked in a tower. How did she get there? Why is she locked up? What happens as a result? Every answer is a branch. Some branches will end quickly, others will lead you into the rest of your story if you continue to ask the same three questions. Toss in a little, "What could go wrong?" and toss out anything that feels too cliche, and you've got yourself a story.

I did this with a class of highschoolers a year ago, and I think it was their favorite part of the class. It went something like this:

Me: Let's start with something simple. Give me an occupation.

Teacher.
Banker.
Lifeguard.
Swimmer.

Okay, let's go with the banker. What could go wrong at a bank?

It could get robbed.

Sure. I don't think we need to ask why yet, so how might this happen?

A man walks in with a gun and asks for money.
Some men take the bank hostage.
Someone blows up the safe.
Someone inside the bank robs it.

Okay, great. Let's go with someone inside the bank. Who could do that? Who's inside a bank?

Bank tellers.
Security guards.
Managers.

How could one of these folks rob the bank?

The guard could let other robbers inside the bank.
The teller could grab some money off the counter when nobody's looking.
The guard could raise a false alarm and, while everyone's distracted, go into the vault.
...or take money off the counter.
...or take money from someone's pocket.

What about the security guard. Why would he do that?

He hates his job.
He's been planning to rob the bank for months/years, and got hired so he could do it.
He needs the money for his daughter's operation.

I think around here we had to end the class, but hopefully you get the idea. It's really fun to do in a group with a leader - someone asking the questions and picking the most interesting paths to follow. I tried to follow paths that sounded more original to me and had more conflict potential. It's what I try to do with my own stories too.

Try it out and see what you come up with. Better yet, tell me how you brainstorm to get past writer's block.

Endings

I recently received a short story rejection from Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It was a nice rejection; he explained what he liked about the story and what didn't work for him. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the things that didn't work for him were things I didn't like either. One of those things was the ending.

I have a problem with endings. I always have. I can remember getting reports back in 4th grade with all the red pen on the last paragraph. "Needs a better conclusion," it would say.

One problem is I don't plan them well. For all my neuroses about planning ahead, the truth is that I plan the near parts in excellent detail, with increasingly less detail towards the end. So by the time I get there, I am often left with all these plots and subplots crashing together, knowing who wins and who dies, but never knowing how.

This happens a lot in smaller scenes throughout the writing process, and I always figure something out, but for the ending that something has to be really good. That's hard to do when so much of the story has already been decided.

My other problem with endings, I think, is that I don't care about them. Oh, I know how important they are, and my very favorite books are those with amazing endings. What I mean is, when I first fall in love with a story I'm writing, it's never the ending I'm thinking of. It might be the world, or the speculative element, or one of the characters, but it's never the ending.

My Beloved Alpha Reader told me she loves the way I end chapters - could I just end the novel like that? The problem (I told her) is that what makes my chapters are the cliffhangers. I'm real good at cliffhangers. I can pull a decent scene- or chapter-ending cliffhanger out of almost anything. But if I ended my book like that, I'd make a lot of readers mad (including myself - I hate books that end with blaring cliffhangers).

Okay, so here we are. You're all readers. What makes a good ending to you? I know the basics - the logistics, if you will: It must answer most, if not all, of the questions raised earlier in the story. It must make sense, arising naturally from the plot and characters (e.g. no deus ex machina). It should not be boringly predictable (though it doesn't always have to have a major twist). What else, then? These things make an ending not bad, but what do you think makes one good? What are your favorite endings and why?

(Be kind with your answers to that last one. Mark spoilers appropriately.)

The Pillar of Skulls

Near the gate between the first and second layer of Hell, there lies a grotesque monument of the damned. Towering more than a mile high, howling and writhing with eternal torment, is a terror to match any other in the Nine Hells.

Here lies the Pillar of Skulls. It seethes with the frustration and hatred of a billion souls, moaning and wailing in endless, hopeless agony.

Yet here, too, lies the greatest store of knowledge in all the planes of existence. For among the Pillar's eternal prisoners lie great thinkers, world leaders, teachers, scientists... the entirety of the world's lore and experiences can be found within.

And so once in a great while, a seeker of knowledge will brave Hell itself to speak to the Pillar. But should they survive the charred wasteland, should they avoid the endless legions of Lord Bel's devils, should they escape the watchful eyes of the five-headed Tiamat, they must still contend with the Pillar itself.

When a visitor comes, the billion skulls fight each other to make themselves heard. The surface of the Pillar billows and pulsates, one skull appearing - howling unintelligible obscenities - then disappearing as quickly to be replaced by another.

Even should the seeker find the right one - a soul who has the information they are after - there is a price. For every skull on the Pillar, every soul doomed to live out eternity in the Nine Hells, wants only one thing. "I'll tell you what I know," they will say. "I'll do anything you ask. Just, please, take me off this pillar. Please, I...

"I just want to be published."

Keeping Up With the Internet

Depending on how you count, there are over a hundred social networking sites out there and God only knows how many blogs. It's impossible to keep up with everything, even if you cut out all the crap you don't care about.

My own personal slice consists of 57 blogs, 23 Twitterers, and 244 Facebook friends (at current count). I interact in these venues as well, writing tweets, commenting on Facebook and blogs, as well as updating two blogs of my own.

I don't have the time to do all this, of course. I've got five kids and a novel to write. I want to share with you a couple of tools that have made my life simpler and (if you haven't already found similar tools) can maybe make yours simpler too.

1. Google Reader. In the year 2009, you have to have some kind of RSS reader (similarly, if you have a website, you have to have a feed - I'm looking at you, Homestar!). I like Google Reader because (a) it checks the feeds automatically, (b) it feels like Gmail, and (c) I heart Google - they may be the New Evil, but they know how to do a GUI.
2. Twitterfox. I started using Twitter while looking for a way to update my Facebook status and Gmail status at the same time.* I stayed there because it connected me to certain friends and the cost in time to use it was small - but only after I found Twitterfox. There are about a thousand ways to read and send Twitter updates, but I like this one because (a) it's a Firefox extension, so I don't have to open another app to use it and (b) it's quiet and unobtrusive (once you tell it not to pop-up a window).
3. Ping.fm. I like status updates. They're quick and informative. It started when some friends wrote Gmail statuses that started with "is" (as in "Adam Heine is..."). Facebook was doing the same thing when I got there. When I got around to Twitter, I found myself writing 3 separate updates to separate groups of friends. Ping.fm is a solution to that. Now I can write a single update (sent through Gmail chat even) that automatically gets sent to wherever I want.*

If these tools don't do it for you, I bet you can find some tools that do. Examine your internet surfing for areas of redundancy or wasted effort (e.g. manually checking 10-20 blogs to see if they've updated yet), then look for tools that solve it. If you look hard enough, I can almost guarantee someone has written the right tool(s) for you.

* I have found a way to get Twitter to update Gmail, but it still works less than half the time. I'm hoping they fix the problem soon, or ping.fm figures out a solution. (You hear me, Google Titans? I want you to work with other developers!).

Skipping Ahead

If you didn't already know, I'm mildly OCD. I hate reading books out of order. I won't watch a movie sequel if I haven't seen the first one. I don't even want to watch a TV series unless I start from the beginning. If I'm going to get into a story, I don't want to miss a thing.

That may help you to understand what happened to me the other day.

I was writing chapter 20, in which protagonist and friend are escaping from a pirate lord's prison. As in many of Air Pirate's chapters, there is a fight scene.* Fight scenes always stick me. Mainly because the outline says something to the effect of "Sam and Kiro fight. Sam wins," and I realize I don't know how he wins.

I'm aware that one way of getting through writer's block is to skip ahead to another scene. So I tried that. I started to type "[fight scene]" where the scene would go, intending to move on to what happened after the fight.

But hard as I tried, I just couldn't do it.

I've identified two reasons I couldn't skip ahead. The first is quite sane: I use past events to inform future ones. Minor details that I think of during one scene will come up again later once I'm aware of them. Like in one airship escape sequence (this one, in fact), the police hit Protag's ship with a harpoon-like weapon I made up on the spot. Also made up on the spot was how the protagonists then cut the cables to free themselves, leaving harpoons and severed cables hanging from the airship.

In the next scene, I realized these cables had to be pulled out, so Sam enlisted Hagai to do so. This made for an excellent opportunity to showcase Hagai's low self-esteem and uselessness, and it gave me a good place for Hagai to have a conversation with another character.

Now obviously these sorts of threads and connections can be added after the fact in revision, but as I've touched on before, I'd rather not if I can help it. I'd rather get it right, or at least mostly right, the first time.

But the second reason I couldn't skip ahead - and more likely the real reason - is far less sane. I couldn't make myself skip ahead because, just as if I'd accidentally hit Next on my DVD remote, I felt like I missed part of the action. I wanted to know what happened.

That's right. You think I'm writing for others, but the truth is I'm writing this story, and probably all the others, because I want to know what happens next. I guess that's not so insane. I'm writing for me as much as anyone.

* Out of 28 chapters, 18 have either a fight scene or a chase scene. What can I say? I like action.

Firebrand Literary's Query Holiday

Firebrand Literary, an agency known for doing things differently, is having a query holiday. For one month they are not accepting query letters, but rather first chapters (as Word attachments, no less!).

I'm kind of excited about this because I queried them in my first transport, which means (1) I thought they looked like a really good fit for me and (2) they received my crappiest query letter and sample pages. So I'm glad for this second chance with them.

If you also want to get on this, do it fast. I only just found out about it, and the month-long query holiday ends January 15th. So get there fast!

UPDATE: I just noticed their website calls this their "first annual" query holiday. So I guess this is going to be a recurring thing, which makes it even cooler.

My First Published Words

A couple of weeks ago, I announced my debut on Thaumatrope. Multiple people informed me that this makes me a professional writer, but I just remembered that a small piece of my writing has already been published for payment long ago.

In a past life, I was a scripter for the role-playing game, Planescape: Torment. A scripter is like a programmer, except instead of writing complicated graphical algorithms, I wrote simple scripts that told each character and creature what to do. Perhaps the simplest example being:

IF See( PC )
THEN
Attack( PC )
END

I was also responsible for putting the levels together. Designers designed them and wrote the dialogue, artists drew everything, and I put the pieces together so it worked. On one level, I required a piece of dialogue to inform the player that he'd have to leave his party behind before entering the Immortal's Tomb. The designer told me to write it myself. I present to you the first 72 words of my publishing career (click to enlarge):

It's wordy, I know. I mean, I wrote it ten years ago. And anyway, in a game that contains an estimated 800,000 words, seventy-two is negligible. But these are my first words written and published for money.

So I guess I've been professional for a decade now and didn't know it.

Air Pirates Query on Evil Editor

Evil Editor has done a critique (slash-parody) of my latest query letter for Air Pirates. No, the novel isn't finished, but I followed my own suggestion and wrote the query early to help me focus the novel. Evil Editor mentioned being nearly out of queries a little while ago, so I figured I'd see what he and his minions thought. What the heck, you know?

Some notes on how Evil Editor works. At the beginning of the post, he does a "Guess the Plot" feature, where various minions (i.e. blog readers) send in fake plots based solely on the title. Evil Editor then puts his critiques (and sometimes pictures) in the query letter in a different color so you can see them. These are mainly just to be funny. The really useful information comes in Evil Editor's notes at the end and the minions' comments afterwards.

Anyway, go ahead and read it. Let me know what you think, either there or here.

Bad for Borders

Depending on what cross-section of the internet you pay attention to, you may or may not know that things are bad for Borders. Really bad. Like, there-might-not-be-any-Borders-in-a-couple-of-months bad.

It's scaring some people in the publishing world. The blogging agents I read keep saying don't worry about it, people will still read books. I tend to agree with them, and as an as-yet-unpublished author, I'm not worried. Not yet. I can't find the link, but one blogging agent said that unpublished authors should push harder than ever, because by the time their books are selling (i.e. in a year or two) the economy will have turned back again and people will want things to read.

Anyway, here's a couple of other recent links on this topic. Agent Joshua Bilmes points out a few stores that are closing post-Christmas (the beginning of the end or not?), and Agent Jenny Rappaport talks about what "the end" may or may not look like if Borders does go under.

Querying Travelers, Postmortem

My previous postmortem was for the process of writing Travelers. It occurred to me there were lessons I learned in querying it as well. Although technically I'm not finished with the querying process, I'm close enough that I think I can examine it.

What Went Right

1. Querying statistics - As I've said before, I like statistics. Keeping track of who I've queried, what batch they were in, what I sent them, and if/when they responded not only helped me to stay organized, but also kept me going. I don't like rejections, but at least when they come I get to update my Excel sheet.
   
2. Queried in batches - A lot of people recommended sending queries in batches of 5-10. This is extremely good advice. It gives you a chance to evaluate your query package based on the responses you're getting. It is much easier to stay organized and make sure you send the right things to the right people. And it gives you a more-or-less steady flow of incoming responses.
   
3. Enlisted help with snail mail - I have queried something like 60 agents, half of which prefer or require snail mail. I live in Thailand, making this an expensive venture (plus we only have A4 paper out here, and I'd hate to get rejected because my paper was the wrong size). Fortunately, I had my friend MattyDub to help me with that. I couldn't have done this without him.
   

What Went Wrong

1. Queried all the best agents first - As you research agents, you'll find that some of them look like perfect fits for you and what you like to write. You should be able to separate the agents you query into an A list and a B list. Then in each batch you send out, you should have a mix of agents from both lists, so that when you get to your third or fourth batch, you still have some A list agents to query with your new, improved query letter. I didn't do this. So when my query letter was finally good enough to grab someone's attention, all my A list agents were used up.
   
2. Not enough research - I did a lot of research before writing my query letter, but I could have done more. Not just research on agents, but mostly research on writing query letters. If you're thinking about sending out that query letter, here's what I recommend you do first:
• On Nathan Bransford's blog, read every post listed under "The Essentials" on the sidebar.
• Read at least 100 posts on Query Shark and Miss Snark and the "Face-Lifts" on Evil Editor. When you start to see patterns, don't stop. When you are able to predict patterns, then try fixing your own letter.
  
3. Not enough critiques - Before I sent out my first query letter, I had some of my friends read it. As much as I love them, this wasn't very useful (except for one friend who had taken a class related to the business of writing). What I needed was a serious critique group. There are lots of these online, but here's a couple that I've found useful. These are places you can throw your query at again and again until you get it right (and you should):
   
   • The forums on AQConnect, specifically the Query Critique Corner.
   • Evil Editor (again). The turnaround time is pretty quick here. Query Shark is another good one, but she's way backed up at the moment, and you probably won't see your letter anytime soon.
     

Published on Thaumatrope

I just got a story accepted on Thaumatrope, to be published April 12th. Yeah, Easter. I'm pretty excited about that, and I got paid a whole $1.20 for it. You can subscribe to the e-zine here.

So does this make me a professional writer now?

Dealing With Critiques

Over at SFNovelists.com, Kelly McCullough suggested the attitude that "whatever book or story you are revising or getting critiqued at this very moment, is a solid piece of work that can and will be improved if you work at it and learn from comments."

That's the ideal, and I hope to have that attitude one day. Unfortunately, my attitude towards critiques tends to mirror the stages of grief:

1. Denial: "I don't need anyone's help critiquing my story. Heck, I could probably sell it right now."
2. Anger: "The story's perfect! They just don't get it!"
3. Bargaining: "Do I really need to make that fix? Maybe a smaller fix will be good enough."
4. Depression: "This story's terrible. I'll never get it right. I might as well throw it away and write something else."
5. Acceptance: "I can do this. I can make it better, I just need to work through the critiques one comment at a time."

Actually, it's a little unnerving how closely this mirrors my actual reactions - like getting critiqued is some kind of life tragedy. That's totally the wrong attitude to have, I know, but I haven't yet had enough practice with it to get better.

Really, Really, Really Short Fiction

Twitter: a free social networking/micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates of up to 140 characters in length.

Thaumatrope: A sci-fi/fantasy/horror online fiction magazine that uses Twitter to accept and publish speculative fiction of 140 characters or less.

What a crazy, great idea. They pay authors $1.20 per story. That's almost two plates of Pad Thai. I just might get in on this.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, you can read Thaumatrope for free. Either on their website or, for instant gratification, via Twitter. And because it's Twitter, you can get these stories sent to your cell phone if you want.

Ship Names and the Definite Article

The other day, I was trying to figure out if it was grammatically correct to use, or not use, the definite article "the" in front of a ship's name. This is something that never occurred to me until I saw Firefly. In one episode, Inara corrects an Alliance officer on the use of the definite article with regards to their ship - "Serenity," not "the Serenity." Grammatically, I found no consensus, but here's what I found out.

The only really useful sites I found were style guides. The US Navy Style Guide says don't use it, ever. But that's a relatively recent decision and is meant primarily for formal use, and fiction is not necessarily formal. According to Wikipedia's naming conventions, "the" is not needed, but neither is it wrong.

Ironically, the most useful discussion I found was in a forum of Wookieepedia* editors. Ironic because it's the least official of the three, but it's the most useful to me because it's the one most closely related to fiction.

Their final decision is not really relevant, but the discussion raised some interesting points. In particular, they could not decide to "always" or "never" use the definite article, for primarily two reasons: the Millenium Falcon and Slave I.** Try to use the definite article with Boba Fett's ship, or remove it from Han Solo's, and you will understand.

So for now, I'm going to make the decision on a case by case basis and keep track of what I decide in (yet another) document to help me stay consistent. Basically, I'm going to pick the one that feels right, or sounds the least stupid, and stick with it.


* Wikipedia for the Star Wars universe.

** Those weren't the only reasons, but they suffice to summarize the point.

Travelers Postmortem: What Went Wrong

On Saturday I talked about what went right while writing Travelers. Today I have some things that went wrong.

Not Enough Planning
This is controversial. Some writers prefer to just write and see what happens, fixing it later. I'm not one of them. My goal is to streamline my writing process until there are 5 steps: plan, write, revise, peer review, sell - each performed but once. Unrealistic? Perhaps. I won't beat myself over the head if I have to revise more than once, but I will figure out what went wrong to avoid it in the future.

That said, I didn't plan Travelers well enough. Characters popped up from nowhere. Necessity dictated their existence, but when I started thinking about their backgrounds I began to like them better than my protagonists.

That's part of the fun of writing, I know. But it only served to highlight how little I developed my protagonists. I just didn't care about them. In the beginning they weren't even characters, they were just points of view, giving me an excuse to explain this strange, decrepit future to the reader. I tried to fix it in revision, but I think the problem still shows. That could've been prevented if I had planned the characters and the plot out in more detail before I started writing.

The lack of planning also reared its head in certain climactic moments. I'd throw characters into a crisis and, in the outline, I'd write the ever-helpful "They escape" or "They fight and protag wins" without ever thinking about how they win. It wrote me into a corner a couple of times, and I don't like corners. When I write, I wanna run.

No Thought for Theme Until the End
This has happened to me more times than I'd like to admit. I get to the end of a story (short or long) and find myself asking, "How do I end this? What's this story about anyway?" I was just writing a bunch of cool stuff that happens, like an action movie. But like an action movie, it lacked any punch or purpose.

I never really understood theme back in highschool. I'm only starting to get it now, and realizing that it's something I should think about before I outline the plot, and then again everytime I write anything.

Useless Statistics
When I started Travelers, I didn't know what would be important. I chose to keep track of word count, # of pages, # of scenes, and dates of drafted chapters and revised chapters. The word count and dates were good, like I said, but # of pages was meaningless (being based on my personal writing format, which is very different from manuscript format) as was # of scenes.

Another problem was that I counted words only at the end of every chapter, and my chapters were really long. It would've been better to keep track of word count per week or month, in addition to chapter dates and word counts.

No Deadlines for Beta Readers
I had two beta readers. One finished reading the manuscript in 3 weeks, the other took 9 months. At the time, it honestly didn't bother me. The feedback was more important to me, and I figured it didn't cost me any time because I just worked on my next book while I waited.

In retrospect, with 35 rejections and no requests of any kind, it didn't cost me anything to wait, and it taught me a valuable lesson. Next time the beta readers are getting a deadline, and I'm moving on without them if I have to.

Travelers Postmortem: What Went Right

In the gaming and business worlds (two of my past lives), we would do postmortems at the end of a project to determine what went right, what went wrong, and how we could improve our process. I've unofficially done that on my own with Travelers, but "unofficially" means "not very well," so I'll do it more officially here now. It'll help me to think about my writing process, and I hope it can help others too.

I'll start with what went right. This isn't so much about the specifics of the story as it is about my writing process in general.

Developed Character Backgrounds Beforehand
For every major character, I made a chart like the one below. The information in these charts is out-of-date, poorly thought-out, and mostly never used, but if I didn't do it then every character would have been much flatter than they are. Knowing who the character is supposed to be, and used to be, helps when I'm writing and thinking to myself, "What would they do here?"



Random Passages
Before I started officially writing the manuscript, there were a number of scenes that seemed clear in my head. Often they were the ones that excited me most (my candy bar scenes), though sometimes they were scenes from a character's past, or scenes from a future book that may never be written.

Whenever I got stuck in my outline, or I got bored of the story or some character, I'd go write one of these scenes in a file called "Random Passages," prefixed with some note about the context of the scene. For Travelers, I wrote 9 such scenes over the course of the novel. Six of them ended up in the novel. Four of those were rewritten to the point of being unrecognizable (and one of the remaining 2 "scenes" was just a line of dialogue, three sentences long).

Even though they were almost never used as-is, writing these scenes kept me interested in the story and gave me a place to play with the characters before they were "committed" in the story. I read the scenes now and groan because they're bad and make no sense to the story anymore, but I also read them with fondness because I remember how much I enjoyed writing them.

Microsoft Word's Document Map Feature
I learned this during my life at Black Isle. Here's a quick run-down of the feature.

I didn't use the document map for an outline, though. The top-level headings were my chapters, and the sub-headings were the first lines of my scenes. It worked amazingly well to keep me organized and to remember where everything was.

Word Count Statistics
Most authors I've heard of keep word count statistics. I love statistics anyway, so for me, seeing my word count increase and dates of how long it took me to write a chapter kept me going. One of the things that motivated me to finish chapters was that I knew I got to update my stats file when it was done. It's geeky, but it worked.

Alpha and Beta Readers
Beta readers are the folks who read your manuscript before it gets sent out. For some authors, they read it when the draft is finished, for others they read it as each chapter is done. I have both, and call the former my beta readers and the latter, alpha.

For me, I had one alpha reader - my wife. She was both my encouragement and my insurance that I was on the right track. My beta readers were immeasurably helpful as well (in particular because my wife is not a sci-fi reader), but I don't think I would've gotten to the beta stage at all if I didn't have an alpha reader to push me through.

What's the Point of Writing Queries?

By and large, authors hate the query process. It's like you just spent years crafting "the perfect novel," only to be rejected by someone who never read it, who only read your short letter that you wrote in a day.

When I started this, I honestly thought query letters were just a formality. It was only after I realized that agents judge authors by the quality of their query that I started to hate the process. "Just read my stuff!" I cried at my computer screen. "I'm good for it!"

But no matter how we feel about them, query letters are a necessary evil. Agents get hundreds of these things a week. They can't read hundreds of manuscripts, or even sample pages, in a week and expect to get anything else done (like, I don't know, sell novels). They have no choice but to make snap judgments based on a 1-page pitch.

But more than that, I'm learning that the agents are right. They already know this, so I guess I'm speaking to the authors (besides, what agents spend their time on this blog? Pah!). If you can't write a solid, gripping, concise query letter, then chances are you can't write a good novel either.

Don't hang me yet! Hear me out!

We tend to think that writing a query and a novel are two separate skills, but they're not. They aren't the same skill, but they do overlap considerably. Sentence structure, word choice, clarity, word economy, etc. are just as important in a novel as in a query.

In learning how to write query letters, my novel writing has improved as well. I find myself being more concise, choosing words more intentionally, focusing on clarity and logic flow. I've also found that in focusing on what's important to the story for the query, it keeps me focused in the novel.

The biggest mistake writers make in queries is trying to tell everything that happens, losing focus on what's important. If can't stay focused in the query chances are you'll lose focus in the novel too, though it will be more difficult to see.

Finally, before you decide to execute me, remember that I said "chances are." It's still possible to write terrible queries and amazing novels, just as it's possible to write amazing queries and terrible novels. But by and large, the agents have a point; our query writing skills say a lot about our writing skills in general.

And in the end, if I, as an author, dismiss any aspect of writing as unimportant - if I am unwilling to learn how to write a query letter well because it "has nothing to do with writing good novels" - how good of a writer can I really be anyway?

Workspace

When I was writing Travelers, I usually only had a couple of documents open: the manuscript and an outline. I'd open other files as needed, like if I needed to find some old notes or update my word count statistics, but it was rare.*

The other day, I was working on Air Pirates, and one of my kids came up and said (as teenagers will), "Wow! You've got a lot of stuff open!" I have the taskbar expanded to double, and at any given time it's packed with manuscripts, world docs, outlines, brainstorming notes... Well, let me just show you an example:


I mean, just in that screenshot, I've got 2 time management docs (TODO and Writing Statistics), 4 story docs (manuscript, timeline, outline, character bible), 6 world docs and notes, plus the directory they're contained in and Firefox. That's normal. Sometimes I'll also open "Details to Remember,"** "Random Passages," or any of 100*** other files containing various notes on different story-related topics.

I don't feel disorganized yet, but I can sense that I'm getting close. If I have to write three books in this world, I may have to find a better way to manage all of this stuff.


* For example, at the time I only kept track of word count each time I finished a chapter. Travelers only has 11 chapters and an epilogue, and it took me three years to write. So I only got to open this file about once every 3 months.

** An increasingly obsolete document in which I attempt to keep track of little details, like how much money the protagonist has on him, and which leg was broken of a particular minor character.

*** One hundred twenty three, at the moment. Character notes, maps, old dead stories in the same world, old drafts, early outlines... I even have a flash animation of the world, its 3 moons, and 2 suns.

Elements of Fiction: Why?

I've been reading this book, Blue Like Jazz, where Donald Miller talks about his Christian journey in decidedly non-religious terms. It's refreshing, and I highly recommend it, whatever your beliefs.

At one point, he talks about a lecture he went to on the elements of literature - setting, character, conflict, climax, and resolution - and he (and I) began to wonder why? Why do stories have to have these elements? Nobody invented them. Nobody said, "This is how it shall be done," and so we all do it that way. These elements are in the core of our being. Humans of all cultures identify with stories that contain these elements and have trouble with stories that do not (literary fiction, I'm looking at you).

The real reason (and this isn't my idea, but Miller's) is that these elements speak to things inherent in the human condition. Let's take a look at them.

Setting. This one is obvious. The fact that we exist means we exist somewhere. We cannot experience life without a setting in which to experience it.

Character. Likewise, there is no life but it has characters in it. Even the most secluded hermit has himself in his own story.

Conflict. Life sucks; it has hard things in it from the beginning. Pain. Loss. We want something, but there are always obstacles. There is no life without conflict.

Climax. As we face more conflict and more obstacles, eventually things come to a make-or-break point. Will I ask her out? Will I try out for the team? Will I propose? Will I win the contest? Will I have a baby? We must make a choice, we must act out that choice, and the experiences and decisions we've made up to that point all play a part in determining how each climax plays out.

Resolution. Whether the climax was a success or failure, the resolution is what happens as a result. Questions are answered. Loose ends are closed. Cliffs are left hanging towards the next climax.

The fact that these are inherent to life suggests some things too. Perhaps our lives build towards a climax and have resolution - maybe death is not an abrupt end to the story, but some kind of climax itself. Perhaps also there is something after death, with conflict and climax of its own (though of what kind, I cannot possibly imagine).

Because if there is one thing that is true about all stories, it's that they never end. After one scene reaches its climax, the conflict-climax-resolution cycle starts again in the next one. A few such scenes, and you've got a chapter. Many chapters, each with their own climax, make a book. Many books make a saga. Sagas make life.

And then it all starts again.

A Classical Education: 10 (or more) Sci-Fi Books You Should Read

A while ago, Nathan Bransford asked, "What book are you embarrassed not to have read?" A lot of classics were mentioned (and a lot of people haven't read Lord of the Rings, which astounds me), but it made me think: What books should a science fiction author(/critic/fan) have read?

Some caveats: (1) this is not a top 10 sci-fi novels of all time, nor is it my favorite 10 sci-fi novels; (2) I haven't read all of these (in particular, I haven't read #7, and #5 is waiting on my shelf); (3) I totally cheated because I couldn't pick just 10, so I'm giving you some options.

Without further ado, here's my list of 10 (or more) novels any sci-fi fan should read:

1. Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. The first father of science fiction, Verne thought of things that didn't happen for 100 years, but they happened. That's like the heart of science fiction.
2. The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, or The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. The second father of science fiction. Apparently also the father of table top war games.
3. 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Classics in dystopian fiction. Really, you ought to read both.
4. Dune by Frank Herbert. I consider Dune to be the Lord of the Rings of science fiction, largely for its scope and themes. Unlike the other novels above, Dune is more about the characters and the story than the science. It's one of the best examples of what character-driven, epic sci-fi can be.
5. The Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. As mentioned, I haven't read these yet, but they're on my shelf. I have read very little Asimov, and I know this series is a must from a great science fiction author.
6. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury or Red Planet by Robert Heinlein. If Wells and Verne are fathers of sci-fi, Bradbury and Heinlein are like their sons, or grandsons or something. These two classics explore the colonization of Mars before we realized there was nothing on it. (Alternatively, try Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land).
7. Neuromancer by William Gibson or Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I haven't read either, but I've heard so much about them that I want to read both. Both books deal with the idea of cyberspace before "cyberspace" was a word my mom used. A lot of ideas seen in sci-fi since have come out of these stories.
8. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I couldn't make a list of sci-fi books without mentioning my very favorite. Like Dune, Ender's Game is more about the characters and psychology than it is about science, but that doesn't make it any less scientific. I don't care if you're a sci-fi fan or not, you have to read this book.
9. The Giver by Lois Lowry. More dystopian fiction, but more contemporary and accessible than either Orwell or Huxley. Plus, I have a soft spot in my heart for young adult fiction. It's a good book. Try it out.
   
10. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. One thing about science fiction is that it's often really, really serious. Adams takes care of that, and I think any fan of sci-fi ought to be exposed to the funnier side of the genre.

So I guess that's over 20 books. That's fine, they're all worth reading. But hey, this is just my opinion, and any top 10 list is going to be missing something. So what do you think? What books would make your list?

Self-Promotion

I hate the idea of self-promotion. Who doesn't? Who wants to be that kid who says, "Hey, everybody! Look at me!!" Okay, fine, well I never wanted to be that kid. Now I find myself on the outskirts of an industry that requires it.

So I've been researching self-promotion a little. One thing I've discovered is that I've already been doing it. I mean, the missionary "industry" revolves around self-promotion just as much as the publishing one does. Perhaps more so.

(Speaking of which, those of you reading this from Facebook might like to know that this is being imported from my other blog - my writing one. I'm still importing the missionary blog such that it appears on my wall, but not into my notes anymore. I hope that's okay.)

How you promote yourself depends, apparently, on how much money, time, and morals you have. If you have a lot of money, hire a publicist. If you have a lot of time, build a website, make profiles on social networking sites, and spend time on other people's blogs, the social net, forums, etc. - all the while linking back to your website. If you're low on morals, this time can also be spent comment spamming and writing fake reviews.

It's like this. Let's measure the amount of time and money invested in self-promotion with what we'll call your Publicity Quotient. The more you invest in self-promotion, the higher your PQ (low morals increase your PQ slightly, with an increased risk of drastically lowering it when you're found out; high morals, sadly, do nothing). With that in mind, take a look at this completely unscientific, made-up chart:

Not terribly mathematical, I know. But beyond the general guideline that the more you put in, the more you'll get out, publicity is largely luck and magic - becoming a breakout bestseller even more so.

Also, anyone who tells you how to promote yourself, without mentioning in the same breath that you need a product worth promoting, is taking you in. If your book sucks, you can sell copies with publicity but it won't do you much good in the long run (see low morals).

That's my take on the whole thing, anyway. I plan on doing self-promotion the same way I've been doing it. I'll provide places for people to get hooked in, I'll get the word out with a non-spamming announcement, and most importantly I'll try to be genuine. That means leaving comments because I have something to say, not because I have something to link to. It means making profiles on social networks that I'm actually a part of (sorry, MySpace, guess that means you're out).

And it means trusting others to do the reviewing and word-of-mouth advertising for me. If it doesn't happen, it just means I need to write a better book next time.

And when that doesn't work, I'll upgrade my spambot.

No More Crichton

This is kind of out of the blue for me. I didn't even know he had cancer, but apparently Michael Crichton has passed away.

Michael Crichton is one of my early, and still present, influences in writing. It started with Jurassic Park which I read as a teenager, after which I went on to read practically everything he wrote. Though I didn't mention him before, Michael Crichton taught me that a novel should read like a movie. Ironically, I learned that from reading Sphere, which is a great book but a terrible movie - sorry, Michael, it was.

Premise and Adam's 3 WIPs

Under extreme duress, I've added the followers widget to my sidebar. Two of you have already noticed it. Feel free to make use of it, and know that seeing little boxes up there makes me happy.

At the end of my first mission trip, we spent a few days preparing for reassimilation back to the States. One thing our leaders told us was that everybody would ask the question "How was your trip?" but not everybody wanted to know everything. We had to be prepared to answer that question, lest we just say "Good" or else ramble on until we noticed that our listener had walked away some time ago.

The leaders suggested we have three answers to the question: a 5 second answer, a 1 minute answer, and a 5 minute answer. Each answer was meant to be concise and informative, giving the listener the information they really wanted (you can usually tell who wants a 5 second answer vs. 5 minutes), yet hopefully causing them to ask questions and start a discussion.

Your novel is the discussion you want to have with someone. Your synopsis is your 5 minute answer. Your hook is the 1 minute, and your 5 second answer is your premise.

The premise is everything the story is about in one sentence, less than 25 words or so. It's the one-line blurbs TV Guide uses to describe the movies in their listings, the tagline at the top of Amazon items, the first answer to "What's your book about?" It sucks to write because you have to cut out everything, but it's a great place to start before writing a query.

Today I'm going to elaborate on the status of my works in progress, and give you a 20-word premise of each.

TRAVELERS
Premise: A father and son must rescue an extraordinary girl from an immortal tyrant in a post-apocalyptic future to save humanity. I've put the first chapter online.

Status: I've sent out 50 queries, and received 33 form rejections. Fun, huh?

Plans: I have another 8-14 agents to query. After that, I'll try revising the query at AQConnect and Evil Editor some more before querying big publishers directly. If that doesn't work, small press.

AIR PIRATES (working title)
Premise: A future-telling stone makes a young man join an air pirate crew on a quest to find his long-dead mother.

Status: Tentatively titled "The Curse of Samhain." I have just finished chapter 14, putting the manuscript at 50,000 words.

Plans: The current outline calls for 29 chapters, maybe 110,000 words. I can't yet estimate when it will be done though. During the first six months, I wrote at 2,700 words/month, but in the last six I've more than doubled that. If I can keep it up, the draft might be finished in another 9-10 months. But take that with a bunch of salt, because (a) I'm getting faster all the time, (b) life gets in the way a lot, and (c) my wife and I are still trying to balance my writing with my life/job, and the net effect of this balancing on my writing speed is unknown.

I have a three-book story arc planned for Air Pirates.

JOEY STONE (working title)
Premise: A girl who controls fire with her mind joins an academy for her kind and learns about trust and sacrifice. (Give me a break, I haven't even figured out a plot yet!)

Status: Still brainstorming. Whenever I have ideas, I jot them down in a Word document set aside for that purpose. Otherwise, I leave it alone.

Plans (such as they are): The powers in the story are largely psionic in nature, but I may decide to refer to them as mutant or witchly.* The powers are based on a PBeM world I created in another life.** I was going to set the story in that world too, but now I'm thinking about leaving it on Earth, maybe modern day or near future. Heck, if I can figure out a way to place it in Thailand, I will. You can see how nebulous this story still is.

I very, very loosely have three books planned for this story. I don't know if I will start it after finishing Book 1 or Book 3 of Air Pirates though. Right now, Joey's just a seed that I'm interested in, but not a story. That seed has to bounce around my head for a while before it really sprouts.


* And you thought that other post was theoretical. Ha!

** In the world before 9/11.

The Imaginary Line

There is an imaginary line dividing science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction is space and aliens and the future. Fantasy is magic and elves and dwarves. Right? As a reader, I'm glad it's not that simple, but as a writer, trying to find where I fit, I wish it would be a little easier. We categorize books so that readers can find what they like, and so publishers can find the right folks to sell to, but so so many books defy categorization.

Example: Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. The book is no doubt science fiction what with Martians, space travel, a sole survivor of a defunct colony on Mars, etc. But halfway through, and most peculiarly at the end, there are characters both major and minor that have become angels in Heaven. That's not science, is it?

How about McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern? It has dragons, telepathy, medieval societies... but if you've read farther you know that Pern is a colony of Earth, and dragons the result of genetic engineering. The series appeals to fantasy fans, but the author insists it's sci-fi. If there's a line between science fiction and fantasy, then Anne McCaffrey is sitting right on top of it.

Now try this. I'll give you the premise of a story, and you tell me if it's sci-fi or fantasy: "New students arrive at a private academy for witches whose highly-trained agents must oppose a powerful terrorist witch organization."

Fantasy, right? Maybe urban fantasy (the words "agents" and "terrorist" suggest modern-day). What if I told you the sentence originally said "mutants" instead of "witches" and is, in fact, the premise of X-Men?

X-Men is science fiction, but merely by changing the perceived source of their powers - not changing their powers or the story or even their costumes one bit - the genre of the movie suddenly slides towards fantasy. (In fact, Marvel 1602 does just that, calling them "witchbreed" rather than mutants, leaving their powers unchanged).

Granted, if we altered X-Men by calling them witches, the story should change, at least a little. But it doesn't have to change a lot for it to suddenly become urban fantasy. It's all in perception.

What's my point? I don't know if I have one. Just that with every story I write, I find myself sitting on top of that imaginary line and wondering how to sell the story. I wish we could call it all speculative fiction and be done with it, but it's not to be. I know.

Anyway, here's to steampunk and science fantasy. My favorite blended subgenres that will never see their own sections in a bookstore.

Hook Examples from Television

A few weeks ago, I talked about 7 things that need to be present in the hook (the mini-synopsis, the query... whatever you call it, it's the thing you send to agents and editors in the hopes that they will want to read your book). I had a hard time finding real-world examples of query letters, but I did find some examples from good, old-fashioned television. That's what we're talking about today.

One thing most television shows do is resell themselves with every single episode. You never know when a new viewer is going to tune in, and you don't want them to tune out just because they don't get it. You need to hook them from the beginning. Sometimes, that hook comes in the form of a voice over that explains the show's premise in a cool, interesting way. See if you can find the 7 things in each of these examples.

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team.

This example is 50% setup, but all the elements are there, and the setup goes a long way towards establishing the characters - not individually of course, but as a team, which is really what the show was about. After this voice over, the visuals that played during the theme song would give you a sense of the characters. In a query letter, you've still got a whole paragraph or two to do the same thing.

Knight Rider: a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man, who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

This is not a good example of specificity (what the heck is "a shadowy flight"?), but it is concise. All the elements, except for maybe setting, are presented in only 45 words. Of course this hook omits the coolest thing about the show, namely Kitt. That's what needs to go in the rest of the query (and, again, Kitt is everywhere during the rest of the theme).

The alien world of Myrrh is being devoured by dark water. Only Ren, a young prince, can stop it by finding the lost 13 treasures of Ruul. At his side is an unlikely, but loyal crew of misfits. At his back - the evil pirate lord Bloth, who will stop at nothing to get the treasures for himself. It's high adventure with the pirates of dark water!

This is from a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon I used to watch. It's crammed pack with cliche (hey, it was a cartoon!), but every element is there and it tells you what to expect: adventure, pirates, a quest, treasures, and even a little fantasy. All in only 67 words.

Water, earth, fire, air - long ago, the four nations lived in harmony, then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years later, my brother and I discovered the new Avatar - an airbender named Aang, but though his airbending skills are great, he's got a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world.

Last example. This lacks a little in that it's unclear how one can be a "master of all four elements" or what "airbending" is without being able to see the accompanying visuals. The other thing about this one is that first person in a query is a no-no, unless it's a memoir. Both of those things can be tweaked to make this appropriate for a query letter. Even so, I think the first person works really well here. Mainly because that last sentence gives you a sense, not only of Aang's character, but of the narrator's character as well.

These examples aren't perfect. I present them to show how the 7 things - protagonist, antagonist, goals, stakes, conflict, setting, and theme - can be presented in an interesting way in a short space. None of these examples is longer than 100 words. That leaves you with another 150-250 words to clarify the 7 elements, talk about your credentials, and mention why you chose that particular agent. If you can do all that concisely, you will have gone a long way towards your goal.

Last tips for today:
(1) Read your query out loud to yourself. You can catch a lot more errors that way.
(2) Imagine your query being read by the guy who does movie trailers. I'm not joking. It helps.

Why Do I Want To Be Published?

Bit of a God post. You've been warned.

In the last couple of weeks, I've repeatedly come against the question:* why do you want to get published? It's forced me to think, especially in light of the fact that writing is not, and can never be (at least for the foreseeable future) my main priority.

It's a hard question, because I won't deny that I like the feeling of being mini-famous,** but that's hardly a Christian attitude and certainly not a good thing to prioritize over my family.

* See Tip #88
** That is, famous only within small circles.

So I did what I always do when I'm in doubt. I went to the balcony and prayed. God didn't talk to me, but he opened my eyes. Or maybe by opening my heart and being quiet, I was able to see. I looked at our lawn - the lawn that only a couple months ago was a barren wasteland - and a bunch of birds flew onto the lawn, hopping around looking for bugs, and I thought, "That's cool. They couldn't do that before. Those birds are enjoying the lawn we made."

That's what hit me. I liked that the birds were enjoying something I made. I felt satisfied in my work. That's why I want to be published.

See, I already know that I love to - no, I have to - create. Writing is just my current outlet for that. And I'm completely convinced it's because I was made in the image of a creative God.*** And even God wasn't content with creating for himself. He needed someone who would get his Creation. Someone who could enjoy it.

I realized I create so that I and others can enjoy what I've created. Even though I do want to be mini-famous and make some money, my writing ultimately isn't about me. I could make it so pretty easily (and I'm sure I do in my mind all the time), but it's liberating to know the basic drive is much more pure than that.

*** That's essentially what "Author's Echo" means. We are echoes of the Author, images of him, children trying almost pathetically, yet purposefully, to emulate our Father in the things we do.

Christian Science Fiction, Revisited

A few months ago, I mused aloud on whether Travelers was too secular for the Christian market. Last weekend I found some interesting information on that very thing (if you follow the link, we'll be talking about Tips #16-18).

Back up first. There's this guy, Jeff Gerke, who looks like exactly the blend of Christian and geek such that we could be good friends, if we ever met. He writes Christian speculative fiction and is making a decided effort to try and get similar stories published (more on that later).

He has 95 writing tips (5 more to come, I guess), some of which are on the business of publishing, some on the business of Christian publishing, and some on writing as a Godly calling. Anyway, in answer to the question, "Is Travelers too secular for the Christian market?" it seems the answer is it's too speculative for the Christian market. Why? Because, says Jeff, "the main readers of Christian fiction are... white, conservative, evangelical, American women of child-raising to empty nest years," and "97% of all Christian fiction titles [are] romance, chick-lit, female-oriented Biblical/historical fiction, female-oriented thrillers, and women's fiction."

Apparently Frank Peretti, Ted Dekker, and LeHaye/Jenkins are the exceptions, and nowhere near the rule. A new author trying out a male-oriented, Christian speculative fiction novel is likely to get shut down.

So where does that leave Travelers? All it really does is close the door to major Christian publishing houses, and it tells me that I shouldn't use the word "Christian" when I'm querying agents. However, should I run out of agents to query, and should none of the big sci-fi publishers be interested, it turns out Jeff also has his own small press alternative that I will definitely look into.