Category Archives: Writing

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

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As the end of judging nears, I still haven’t received my score. Is that a good sign? Does it mean they are holding back the top candidates so they can sort out the best 100 after their first pass? Do they want to announce the winning scores all at once? Or is it that since I submitted a long time before the deadline I’m at the bottom of the virtual pile, unread?

No way to tell.

However, while I can think of positive reasons my score announcement might be delayed, I can’t think of any negative ones — unless they lost my entry, but I think we’d be able to work that out. They’ve been quite reasonable with other folks who have fallen to technical glitches. So: only good reasons for them to delay telling me my score. Most likely they just haven’t got to me yet. No reason to fidget.

Except that I’m a writer, and I’m bound by the Writers’ Code to be neurotic about stuff like this.

Thanks!

Round One Complete

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There are still several hours left before the deadline, but, well, I was done, so I submitted my entry. I just saw this message:

Seeing this screen means your entry arrived.

Finally, congratulate yourself for having the courage to say,
“I can create on deadline,” and then doing it. Yay!

There is nothing more to do; my fate is in the hands of the judges now. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for a top-100 finish. Think positive thoughts and all that crap. I’ll be posting my entry here in a while, but I’m going to reread the rules to make sure it’s OK first.

To the rest of you still working on the challenge: You can do it! Go Team Muddle!

Thanks!

Lost Weekend, Home Stretch

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With nineteen hours before the end of round one in the Cyberspace Open, I’m feeling pretty good about the way it’s going, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. I spent last night working with two of the plots from the list above. I really like the idea with the multiple personality disorders, but try as I might I couldn’t come up with a confrontation scene that could stand alone well enough to not confuse the reader. In an actual movie the viewer would already understand things that someone reading the scene cold would not know. The light of my life had a bunch of great suggestions that make the idea really intriguing, though. I’ll file the idea away for another time, when I’m drinking beers with a producer. Green light by the third round, baby!

Meanwhile, God getting distracted while making the universe will probably end up as a short story. As a scene in a feature film it actually told too much of the story. (Unless God and his rival spend the entire time messing with each other’s universes, until one universe breaks quarantine… hmm.)

Similarly waysided are the demons/aliens/whatevers taking over the Earth. Some fun ideas there, but I never came up with that sparkling moment of conversation that sells a scene. It’s probably better as a short story, too. Finally, protagonist as a criminal is actually based on an idea my sweetie and I hashed out one night which will make a great screenplay someday. I couldn’t get all the pieces right in my head to work it for this competition, though. Later, the title alone will sell it.

In the end, it’s the car chase. I don’t know why, but that’s where my creative juices flowed with the lowest viscosity. Little moments all strung together into something fun (at least, I think it’s fun). Drivin’, shootin’, arguin’, fibbin’. Mortal danger and true love. Outlaws on a two-lane blacktop.

Meanwhile, fuego is over on his side of the Atlantic, writing away. I have no idea what he’s cooking up, but it’s sure to be good. It’s too bad he’ll have to settle for second place.

Thanks!

Thinking Out Loud

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The Cyberspace Open has been going for six hours now, and I’ve got some ideas percolating. Round one, which provides an entire weekend to write a scene, may be the most difficult because there is time for over-thinking and over-editing. Then mix in the “I’ve got lots of time, I can watch cartoons” trap and there are plenty of potential pitfalls. I’m not too worried, though. I’ve spent the time since the premise was distributed (see the previous episode) coming up with different approaches. Deception, confrontation, difficult task, and somewhere in the background there’s a bad guy, pulling strings. Not bad.

I’ve spent the last few hours simply brainstorming, coming up with different ideas that are off the beaten track but contain lots of room for drama. Tonight is the night when any idea is a good one. Here are a few I’ve come up with so far, in no particular order. None of them are perfect, but they all have something going for them.

  • God is busy creating the universe when his girlfriend comes in to confront him about cheating in the universe-building contest. God has pulled five consecutive all-nighters and just wants to get the damn thing done so he can rest the next day. During the argument he accidentally creates man, or maybe the tree of knowledge. Strongly implied are ensuing hijinks.
  • Protagonist is a notorious criminal – her rival (ex-boss?) tips off her boyfriend, who is inconveniently a cop (or the father of kidnapped children?). (She spends a lot of time dealing with the police.) It turns out that this time she is trying to use her skills for good to thwart ex-boss, but that’s going to be a hard sell, (hostages at risk?). Boyfriend is plenty pissed off and not ready to provide any constructive conversation. Perhaps she’s defusing a bomb during the conversation?
  • Enemy and love interest are both the same guy – with multiple personality disorder. Enemy persona has been leaving clues for love interest persona to find. Protagonist is trying to hide the truth from the love interest persona while dealing with the enemy persona in a way that won’t harm love interest persona.
  • Powerful outsider (demon from hell, alien from outer space, whatever) has been sent to Earth to enslave humanity. All beings in the universe love hot Earth women, though (look it up!). Chance for gender bending since outsider can choose inappropriate disguise. Some swashbuckling Biff-type has tipped off the lovely Tiffany that her BFF is not all she (he/it) appears to be. Good chance for some space opera dialog.
  • Bonnie-and-Clyde-style car chase. Bonnie has just broken Clyde out of jail. While the outlaw couple are drivin’ and shootin’, Clyde mentions to Bonnie that the Sheriff told him that Bonnie’s been right friendly with a certain judge. They have to cooperate to get away, but that doesn’t mean they have to be civil about it. The argument and the chase peak when the car breaks down… and they roll to a stop just over a county line — into the jurisdiction of a friendly judge.

And there they are. They range from fairly mainstream stuff that provides a lot of room for style, to the rather ridiculous. I could have sworn there were more; I should have been writing them down all along. If I think of others, I’ll add them here. Most likely the idea I go with is one I haven’t thought of yet.

Thanks!

Here We Go!

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The first premise is out:

Cyberspace Open Round 1 Premise

Your PROTAGONIST is in a jam. He (or she) had been relying on deception in order to further his objective, but his ENEMY has figured out the ruse. Write the scene in which your protagonist’s LOVE INTEREST confronts him with this information acquired from the enemy – while in staging it in a tricky or dangerous situation.

Have at it! Pencils down Monday at 9 a.m. Pacific Time.

Wish me luck!

Thanks!

Reminder: Cyberspace Open

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Round one of the Cyberspace Open writing contest is this weekend, and it’s going to be a hoot! While I don’t know whether anyone out there is interested in participating at an official level (if you are, you must enter by the 16th), I thought I’d remind you just in case. Even if you don’t register officially, you can still play along. Whee!

From the official Web site, here is the description of round one of the competition:

Round One: Your Lost Weekend

This round is like this real-life situation: A producer calls you at 5 pm Friday and says “We desperately need a new scene first thing Monday, or production stalls, with a $50,000/hour crew sitting around!”

This is your chance to save the production. We send every entrant the same premise and set of characters by email at or slightly before 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, 2009. The premise will also be posted above on this page where indicated in case you don’t get the email.

Contestants will have the entire weekend, until 9 AM Monday Sept. 21 — but not one second more– to write and submit one final version of one scene, three to five pages long, on line.

Then, judges from CoverageInk.com, the manager of the competition, will grade each scene. Entrants will receive feedback and a score from a judge by email.

Exactly 100 highest-scoring writers advance to the tighter deadline of Round Two.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m really looking forward to participating. When I get the notification of what the scene is supposed to be about, I’ll post it here, and when I submit my entry I’ll post that here as well. If anyone else writes something based on the challenge that they would like to share, I’ll happily post that as well. It could be a movie scene, but you could attack the subject in regular prose, poetry, or even photos if you want. I’m the only one who has to please a judge. Use it as an excuse to spend some time with your creative side.

At the very least, please stop by over the weekend and cheer me on!

Thanks!

Screenplay Taxonomy

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When writing a screenplay, the word ‘scene’ has a very specific definition. More or less, whenever the scenery on screen changes, it’s a new scene. Walk from the kitchen to the living room, new scene. Walk back, new scene. Simple enough. At first blush it seems similar to the scenes of a stage drama, but it really isn’t. In a screenplay, scenes can change quite frequently, and may only last a few seconds. You can have many scenes that fill the dramatic role that a single scene does on stage. For instance, in a screenplay, the scene can change several times during the course of a running battle.

I’m working with script-writing software that allows me to rearrange scenes, but what I really want is a way to manipulate the groups of scenes that comprise the larger dramatic unit. All the scenes that are part of a chase, for instance. I’ve been fooling the software by calling the scenes that make up the sequence “shots”, so they are treated as part of the same dramatic unit. While this leads to correct formatting and lets me manipulate my script the way I want to, it subverts the meaning of ‘shot’ in a screenplay. It’s not a bid deal for me since calling shots is way, way, down the production road, but it’s still a little off to mislabel script elements like that.

From a storytelling standpoint, the larger unit is the important one — the continuous action that can span several scenes but has a clear identity in terms of the story. I think ‘sequence’ is the word I’ve heard used in that context, but it’s imperfect, and the script-writing software I’m using has no concept of the sequence to help me organize my scenes. Jer’s Novel Writer allows the user to define things like that quite easily, and JersNW performs way better than Celtx on my old laptop, but Celtx provides other shortcuts and automatically formats things in an industry-standard way.

I think it would take me two months to make a screenplay version of JersNW. (If I didn’t use the time to also upgrade the way the documents are structured, which I would do.) It wouldn’t have all the features to help production that Celtx and Final Draft have, but it would be writer-friendly. I often joke that Final Draft is a fine piece of software once you have a final draft – it’s not very good for the actual writing. Celtx seems to want to pursue Final Draft, once again at the expense of the writer.

But all that’s a digression. I really just wanted to ask folks if they knew a better term for ‘group of scenes that comprises a dramatic unit in a screenplay’. It really seems like there should be one.

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Thanks!

Bangin’ Out Scenes

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My brother sent me a link to a screenwriting contest this morning that looks like it could be pretty cool. One of the best things about this contest is that it can’t eat up a whole lot of my time. That’s the point of the exercise, in fact.

The contest is an elimination tournament of three rounds. For each round the writers are provided a premise, and writers must produce a 3-5 minute scene based on the premise. Only the best go on.

In the first round, participants have a weekend to prepare the scene. The submissions are graded and the top 100 writers advance to round two. The site promises feedback for each entry, but I don’t expect they will have time for anything terribly in-depth. Creativity is 25% of the score, and all over the site writers are encouraged to ‘think outside the box’.

Round two: A new premise for another 3-5 minute scene, and a new deadline. Overnight. The top ten advance.

Round three: Ninety minutes.

The top ten finalists will be judged at the Screenwriting Expo. Actors will rehearse and perform three finalist scenes before the expo audience, in what promises to be a pretty fun event. The winner walks away with a cool three grand and some pretty serious bragging rights.

I’m not sure how many people will be participating, but I will be one of them. It would be fun to make it to the second round, but a lot depends on whether the genius idea strikes at the key moment. I expect the competition will be pretty fierce. I’ll just sit back, relax, and let fly, and hope it sticks. With an entire weekend, the danger is over-editing or trying to do too much. The second round may actually be easier.

I’ll post each of my scenes here, as well. In fact, what the heck — I’ll do the following rounds even if I don’t advance, just for the fun of it, so there will be a total of three scenes here, no matter what the judges say. At the start of each round I’ll echo the premise in these pages, and if any of you care enough you can brainstorm rough ideas how you would treat the premise in the comments. If someone else wants to participate (either officially or as a shadow) I’d be happy to make a page here to share everyone’s results. Let’s make it a party!

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Thanks!

World Fantasy Convention!

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Well, it’s official; I’ve paid my money and everything. I’m going to this year’s World Fantasy convention, and I’m not at all sure how to prepare. It’s the sort of event I should have been attending for years now, and being able to do stuff like this is a fortunate side-effect of living in North America.

On that subject, aren’t these things supposed to have wacky names that end in ‘con’?

So what is this convention? As far as I can tell, it’s an event where boatloads of writers and publishers and agents and other industry folk gather for three days of… stuff. Elbow-rubbing. Looking for deals. Writers trying to get published, publishers trying to find writers that don’t suck. Panel discussions and whatnot. A few key people who are paid to come and encourage the masses. Others who have come simply for the love of the genre.

If all that sounds pretty vague, it’s because I’ve never been part of one of these things before. It’s an important part of my chosen profession, however, and contacts I make at this thing could turn my career. Or not. Or maybe I’ll make an impression with someone that pays off years from now. You never know.

I do know it pays to be prepared. To have things to hand to publishers and agents that they will love, things that at a glance will tell them that they are just dying to read my novel. “Stop the presses!” they will shout into mobile phones, “we have to rearrange the 2010 catalog!”

Another opportunity I have is to impress people in person in ways that anonymous submissions never can. I can talk to important people and leave them thinking “That guy’s an intelligent, articulate guy with a refreshing vision of the fantasy novel.” This will simultaneously be the easiest and most difficult thing for me to do. Once I get into a conversation with the right people, I’m sure I’ll do well. (I’ve been lying awake at night devising my elevator pitch.) The thing is, I’m really, really bad at getting into those conversations in the first place. I’ve been to other industry conventions and utterly bombed at networking (even at the conference about networks).

So, anyone out there have any suggestions? Both for specifics that I should take with me and for the more general hob-bobbing? Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

A Perfect Match?

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I am complimented on my dialog now and then, and that makes me feel good. However, I am constantly reminding myself to be more descriptive of the surroundings. Often I’ll put characters in an off-the-shelf setting and let the reader fill in the details. Lazy, and plenty of missed opportunities. (“Furniture”, on the other hand, is all about the settings. One of the reasons I like it so much.)

Yesterday I spent some time looking for writing contests with minimal or no reading fees which may fit things I’ve already written. There are a lot of writing contests out there, but almost all of them smell much more literary than most of the stories I’ve written. (Maybe this makes up for the relative scarcity of markets that consistently pay good rates for the literary genre.)

While I was poking around I found this contest, which in part reads:

The Rules: Compose a short story entirely of dialogue. You may use as many characters as you want. Your entry must be under 3000 words. Your entry does not have to follow standard rules for writing dialogue. Your entry cannot use any narration (this includes tag lines such as he said, she said, etc.). These are the only rules. Manipulate them however you see fit.

Interesting! While I don’t have a story that fits that (and in fact I just went back and added a great deal of descriptive text to a story that had some nearly all-dialog scenes), this seems like a contest that might play to my strengths. Like I have the bandwidth to take on another story right now…

Thanks!

Proof my Sweetie Loves Me

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“How’s the writing going?” People often ask me. “Not bad,” I answer, “but the selling isn’t going so well.” The problem is that I would much rather spend time writing a new story than trying to get someone to pay for a story I’ve already written. What I needed, I decided, was a way to keep track of where each story had been submitted and where next it should go. I had a partial implementation of that in place, but I thought maybe if there was something available at a glance right up there on the wall I’d do a better job keeping up.

Lo and behold! A precise measure of my slacking.

Lo and behold! A precise measure of my slacking.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a story that starts out with several separate threads that converge. Getting the timing right between the different bits has been a challenge, even with software that lets me rearrange bits easily. I thought to do color-coded post-its that I could rearrange, but first I needed to go out and buy the damn sticky notes. My sweetie was also dubious about the glue marks the sticky notes would leave all over the walls. She suggested a bulletin board.

Naturally I did nothing about these ideas, but last week I went to a friend’s house to mix beer and heavy machinery. When I got back the wall over my desk was adorned with two new features, already mounted on the wall and awaiting my pleasure. What a great surprise! The bulletin board is closer to my desk, as is fitting for its more interactive purpose while I write, while I only have to glance up and to my left to see how I’m progressing with submissions for my current short stories.

Act One of Dark War. This will get a lot messier.

Act One of Dark War. This will get a lot messier.

As far as the whiteboard goes, the stories listed cover everything from humorous flash horror to non-fiction, but most of the stories will fit at several of the markets listed across the top. Red X’s are rejections. Blue boxes are the markets to submit a story to next. Green dates indicate when I should hear back about a submitted story. As you can see, at this time only two of the eight stories are out there being read, with another awaiting a trip to the post office and another waiting for the reading period at the magazine. That’s two and two halves more than a week ago, so I have to say the system is succeeding so far.

On the bulletin board I have act one of Dark War. The threads are color-coded, and scenes that involve two threads are taped together with the significance to each thread spelled out separately. I will be finishing Dark War up as quickly as possible so I can spend the rest of the time before the World Fantasy Convention getting ready to sell The Monster Within. In the next day or two I’ll be compressing Act One up at the top of the board to make room for Act 2. Considering I’ve already written this damn thing twice, there sure is a lot of work to do.

But however much work there is to do, I have someone at my back who knows the best way to spur me on to greatness is to help me get the tools together to do my job well. That means a lot to me.

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Thanks!

The Preposterometer

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Suspension of disbelief is an important part of fiction. As fiction, a story is inherently unreal, and the reader knows it. Yet the reader is willing to pretend for a while that the events in the story could or even did happen. Readers become like the Thurmians in Galaxy Quest — treating the story as if it were a historical document.

Yet some stories make that nearly impossible to do. They cross the line from incredible to preposterous, and the story is broken. Enter the Preposterometer, a tool for rating just how far credulity must be bent to stay in the novel.

The rules for the preposterometer are not simple. For instance, some genres of literature have long-accepted preposterous ideas that the reading community has decided to overlook. In Science Fiction, a writer can travel faster than light and ignore the relativistic consequences. Physically, that’s preposterous, and to base an entire novel on it would break everything if the reader insisted that science fiction conform to science. But faster-than-light travel is fun, and everyone does it, and so we have culturally pushed that problem way down on the preposterometer scale. For science fiction, the preposterous is acceptable as long as it’s consistent.

Every genre, even literary fiction, has it’s culturally-acceptable preposterosities. Literary Fiction has the exquisite coincidence and the inexplicable connections between people (I just made those terms up). I was about to say that the only preposterosity that is unforgivable across genres is human nature – people still have to behave like people. Even aliens have to behave like people most of the time. In my poor, negelected novel The Monster Within the part that recieved the most critical feedback was when two characters who did not get off to a good start together became friends rather abruptly. Magic? Sure, no problem, but don’t let Hunter be such a pushover. It wasn’t realistic.

Romance novels might be the exception to that. There is a specially-modified range of human responses that only applies in Romance-world, where (for instance) sex with the right woman can transform a rogue into a protector. Preposterous? Of course. Acceptable? Absolutely.

So, then, when measuring a story on the preposterometer, context matters. Internal consistency matters. How the preposterous event is set up matters a great deal.

A little preposterosity (such a better word than ‘preposterousness’, though I’m still debating the spelling with myself) is good for a story. We have a word for stories where nothing unusual or amazing happens. We call them ‘boring’, or perhaps ‘blog entries’. So as we undertake to rank stories on the preposterometer, we must recognize that scoring a zero is at least as bad as scoring a ten. Somewhere in the middle is a happy, believable-yet-enjoyable range of preposterosity that turns a story into a good yarn.

It’s also worth noting that humor and satire are almost expected to push the preposterometer into the red. That’s why we have the phrase “so bad it’s funny.” So-called serious stories that over-preposterate wind up as humor quite by accident. (Not always — sometimes they’re just bad.) I’ve been thinking about my story Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy, and I don’t think it’s preposterous enough yet. When you’re parodying an inherently preposterous genre, you really have to pull out all the stops.

preposterometer

Here is a rough sketch of the preposterometer, but it’s not in a useful form yet. What’s lacking is a benchmark for the various levels. (Do we need a separate benchmark for each genre?) While I have plenty of ideas for the middle- and upper-preposterous benchmarks, I couldn’t come up with examples off the top of my head for the low-preposterosity examples. I’ll keep working on fleshing out the scale, but any suggestions you have would be welcome. Spread the word! Together we can quantify this elusive metric.

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Thanks!

Need a Little Background for a Story

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I’m writing an eclipse-inspired very short story, and I need a city in Mexico. The requirements are:

  1. Good view of the 1991 total eclipse (long totality and had good weather that day)
  2. Populous enough to have bad neighborhoods (bonus: name the neighborhood!)
  3. Bonus: humid enough to have lots of insects

It’s a silly little piece, but I like to get my facts straight. Currently I have it in Cabo San Lucas, but a larger city would be preferable, as long as the first two criteria above are met.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks!

Writing I Read When I’m Feeling Bad About My Writing

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There are times I look at the product I’m putting out and there’s just no pretending. It’s not that good. Other times I read something I used to think was good and it turns out to be a disaster of poor communication. At times like that, it’s easy to think I suck. Not just think it, to know it to the core of my being. I suck. Suck, suck, suck! Nothing I write is any good and I’m just wasting my life trying to make a living at something I suck at.

It’s not a pretty thing.

It’s hard to work when you are absolutely certain you suck. What I need at times like that is some glimmer of hope that maybe, sometimes, on the best of days, a brief moment of not-sucking is possible, a fleeting flirtation with not-so-bad that can fuel the hope I need to create the next hyperbolic, rambling train wreck.

A long time ago, on one of my first-ever golf outings, I hit a magically beautiful shot. Now I think of that shot as I search through the cactus for my wayward ball. Most of my shots end up in painful places, but there’s always that one… Likewise, when I’m scrounging through the rough trying to find any reason to keep working on a story and by extension keep working at being a writer, I think of the good shots I’ve hit in my day. Those are the stories I go back and read when I need to get myself back to the happy place.

I’m nervous when people around me are reading my work, but last year I was with my dad as he read “The Tourist“. “That’s really good,” he said. I’m not sure it stands alone; it’s better I’m sure if you’re familiar with other Tin Can stories, but I read that and it still gets me. I really like that story. Oddly, I have a hard time putting my finger on why.

The story that started the series, that the good folk at Piker Press had to call to my attention, was “Tin Can“. It’s a simple story, but subtle enough it fooled me for a while.

Then there’s Crazy Blood. It’s been rejected, so maybe others don’t see what I see in it, but I read it tonight and I have to say that I am on occasion surprised at my own word choice. I haven’t the slightest idea who might pay me money for this story. Crazy Blood might appeal to no one but me, which begs the question of whether it’s an example of writing that demonstrates that I have what it takes to be a professional, but that’s OK.

A user of Jer’s Novel Writer sent me a message after reading “Serpent“. The title of the message was was “Holy Crap!” I was already happy with that one, but that unsolicited feedback didn’t hurt. It’s a cool story, a little clunky in spots I think now, but with a sweet conclusion. It will definitely and appear in my “Piker Years” anthology, after a couple of minor tweaks.

And the novel, The Monster Within, awaiting the latest set of revisions to make it something others can love as much as I do. I wrote the damn thing and I’ve never got tired of it.

Usually, when I’m feeling that every word I write is worthless drivel, I can read some of the above and tell myself, “no, only most of what I write is worthless drivel.” That seems to be enough to keep me going.

Thanks!

I Guess this is Good

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about one of my stories recently, one I’ve worked on quite a lot because the story is very short but the ending is really tricky. I submitted it a while back to Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I hadn’t heard back. I assumed that their email rejection had not reached me due to my ongoing difficulties with my ISP (it was fine until the Germans took over). I started to get my head around the necessary modifications to the ending, but before I did anything rash, I thought I’d best contact the editor to make sure I was rejected.

It turns out I hadn’t been rejected, at least not until I asked about it. He’d been sitting on the story, on the bubble about whether to take it or not. When I asked directly, he had to say ‘no’, since he had no place to put it. Apparently the moon is common these days. Ultimately, I was almost there, but not quite, which bodes well for this story finding a home in a pro publication eventually.

Isaac Asimov, I’m told, advised writers to not revise stories between submissions. Let’s face it, the thing is never going to make a whole bunch of money and meanwhile you can be working on something new. It’s about that whole diminishing returns thing. Still, I can’t help but fiddle with this one. I’ve had endings that were lyrical, and others that were emotional, and others that were tight, but I haven’t hit all three. Maybe it’s impossible, but I have to keep trying. So I’ll tweak it, but not too much, and send it on to the next magazine.

Thanks!