For the Locker: Dr. Seuss

After a morning news-a-thon filled mostly with reading retrospectives about Maurice Sendak, I came across this post from an amazing site called Letters of Note that may become part of my daily reading. I am amazed at how very modern 1957 Seuss sounds in his advice and how very pertinent it still seems.

I have often thought that if I find success as an author, I shall get a P.O. box and put its address somewhere online or in my author bios and that I shall endeavor to respond to every handwritten letter that comes to me.

Maybe that's naive and romantic, but I still think it's an ideal worth striving towards.

Hopefully Letters of Note won't mind me reposting their images. Their website is silent on the issue.

For the Locker: Neil Gaiman on Art

Not much more to say than that, really, other than that this speech is inspiring and interesting, and that the shots of the students remind me that I only graduated from college three years ago. I remember sitting in the audience, sleepless, terrified, and vaguely disappointed, vividly and viscerally. I do not remember a word of any of the speeches given.

Since then, somehow, I have done many enjoyable things. And I have a career that exists at least partly in the arts.

Sometimes I forget what an accomplishment that is.

Update

I am exhausted.

Last week I paddled (well, floated, mostly) down a river in Utah for 45 miles together with 10 other people. We drove four vehicles several hundred miles each way to do it. It was beautiful, but somehow that seems wrong to me.

Since getting back, I have been juggling reading a particularly vexing submission (These, for the record, are the ones that are great in some ways and not-so-great in others, leaving me to try to decide whether I think I can work with the author well enough to create a strong whole. They are not the bad ones. Bad ones are easy) with making up for taking several days off of doing paying work. And I have been looking for a new apartment. I have not been writing much at all.

Somehow a whole week has gone by. I will be gone for much of the next three weeks, with little hope of getting any writing done then, either.

But I have been here.

 And here.

And I have been stealing moments of sleep to re-read Sandman, which feels somehow right and makes me happy.

These are good things, and I shall focus on them while the summer goes by and eventually, my life becomes cold and windy and calmer again in the fall.

Bad Signs in Query Letters

The other week I was rolling through some submissions and noticed the following bad signs in query letters (details fudged to protect the guilty). None of them is enough to make me reject a submission alone, but they're indicative of likely problems in the writing to follow. If you find any of these items in your query, you may want to get a second opinion on your novel from a critical reader before submitting.

1.) "This book can be released as (insert number) books or as one." I want to know that you've thought hard about the structure of your novel and picked the best one for it. This does not convince me of that.

2.) Random punctuation. Learning where colons, commas, semicolons, and other marks go is part of your job.

3.) Boldface. If you don't trust me to find the important elements in your query on my own, how will you trust your reader to do it in your novel?

4.) Repetition ("Dripping with power and wealth, Malcolm has a lot of money and isn't afraid to use it."). Doesn't bode well for same in your novel.

5.) Excessive passive voice. I don't hate passive voice as much as most how-to-write books do, but it has a time and a place, and every sentence in the first paragraph of your query is not it.

6.) "My book is great because it's full of great characters who do great things and have great relationships." If you tell me this rather than show it to me, it bodes poorly for the show vs. tell ratio in your novel.

Friday Wordle: Soulwoven Book Two Ch. 17

Y'know, this whole writing blog posts on "Friday" while really writing them on Saturday thing would work a lot better if I still lived in New Zealand. One of the things they don't put in the brochure is that you're perilously close to the frontiers of time itself down there, blazing a trail for the whole world through the hours to come. Which makes it possible to do things early on a Saturday and still have it count as Friday.

In other news, time seems to have been on my mind lately. Someday I will turn it into a science fiction story full of wanderings and musings and coolnesses.

...

I haven't posted a Friday Wordle in a while. Last week was a bear, writing wise. This week was better. I revised several chapters in Book Two of Soulwoven and finished a first draft of a sci-fi short story involving androids, virtual reality, ultimate fighting, newspaper clippings, first-person present narration, and several other things that I don't usually work with. It was fun, but difficult. It is now sitting quietly on my hard drive while I do other things and think occasionally about what I really want it to become.

So I've picked one of the revised chapters in Soulwoven Book Two for the Wordle. It was hard to write, because while a lot happens, not a lot HAPPENS, if you know what I mean. There are important things afoot and the characters are unfurling their sails and much beauty exists to be described, but in terms of flash-bang-whizz-make-you-turn-the-page, it's a little sparse. In that environment, figuring out how to make you turn the page anyway can be challenging. It took me about three days to get this into a shape that I approved of.

So yeah, there we go. I like the fact that the word "pants" appears prominently in this one. It opens with a funny scene involving Cole, a manservant he's been assigned, and a pair of white trousers. Interesting to me as well is the fact that Quay's name appears despite a lack of his physical presence. Speaks to what's on Cole's mind, I suppose. Lots of names in this one. New characters abound. I first wrote the chapter while under the influence of War and Peace, so there's quite a few drawing room, comedy of manners sorts of happenings.

Anyway, I continue to ponder putting chapters of Soulwoven up on Wattpad. If a few more months go by without any bites from agents, I may just do it, at which point these weekly Wordles will probably change shape to accompany the chapters going up over there.

Happy weekend. May it be full of flowers and sunshine and cool, spring temperatures.

Writing Wednesday: Confidence

On a Thursday! Those of you who have known me for a while will understand that I live in a sort of bubble that moves back and forth irregularly through the timestream. Sometimes Wednesdays happen on Thursdays. Sometimes Thursdays happen on Fridays. Very occasionally, Tuesdays happen on Mondays, but I do my best to avoid that whenever possible.

Anyway. Writing Wednesday! And confidence!

As I sit on the cozy side of the submissions desk again, one of the things that grabs my eye more often than not is confidence. Meaning, more than anything else, a willingness to be intentionally different. The Internet, the shelves of your local bookstore, and the mouths of your fellow writers are all full of advice on how to write an opening. In medias res! Start with action! Do this! Pull that! Twist here! Add a drop of lemon juice, set to 450, and cook for 25 minutes!

When you see the same elements in an opening over and over again, they get stale. I imagine that most writers-as-readers would agree. The kind of confidence I'm talking about it is a combination of the daring and the skill to say, "There's a lot of good advice out there suggesting I should jump left here. I'm going to try a misty flip instead." When I write, I try to think of it as approaching a scene from an unusual camera angle.

That's not to say that you should ignore the advice out there. It's like grammar. Learn it, then decide when and where to deviate from it for a particular purpose. But do, please, deviate from it. Imagination and beauty live in the spaces outside the normal, and experimentation is what will make you great.

Not every author who attempts a misty flip lands it. Most of them don't. Even writers who can string two or three together often don't make it to the end of a book without falling on their head a few times. But that's okay. The only way to learn how is to try, over and over again, until you get it right.

And as an editor: I notice. Even if I reject a book because the author's attempt at a double-cork 1080 takes him or her flying wildly off a cliff from which there can be no recovery, I respect the effort. It's the bold and the brash who will write the next great story.

Always Dance

...particularly at concerts.

You never know when some guy in a camouflage jacket will come up to you and ask if you want to pilot a giant robot puppet.

Thank you Black Seeds and Rubblebucket for making this happen.



...I'm the one with the blue eyes and the C-shaped robo-hands.