The Perfect Program

So, I’ve geared up to destroy the last project I have on my plate (at this point) for White Wolf.  I have my plan of attack and my detailed outline ready. (Detailed is a lie. Anal is the word I’m looking for.)

So in my planning and outlining stages I do all kinds of other silly things that aren’t necessary. I have spread sheets for shaming myself into beating yesterday’s word count. I have web pages I might reference tabbed together on my browser, I even shuffle my PDFs around in a folder so I can find them if I think they’re relevant. They rarely are. And that’s just on the computer. I have two white boards, three colors of dry erase markers and sometimes, colored pens for writing on my hands. –Well, that last part is more with my creative writing than this freelancing stuff.

And yet, and YET I still feel like I don’t have enough prepared or organized. I want programs. I want computer programs that will do everything for me. I want them to organize my time, congratulate my successes and berate me for my failures. I want programs that do my dishes, but of course, that isn’t going to happen. I think this endless search for the perfect free writing program is a distraction I’ve created for myself so I have something to procrastinate about while feeling like I’m working. If it does exist, it’ll cost money, and I don’t make any money yet, so that’s out.

I’m sure if I found something that could track multiple projects (There must be colors! And visuals! And motivational speeches, well, not that, maybe.) keep track of due dates and contracts plus payments… Well hell, I’d probably come up with something new I wanted even if I did find it. Ah well, the search goes on.

The important thing is the word count, and that goes. I’m just praying for the program that will organize everything so perfectly that I’ll suddenly double my production while getting all Donna Reed on my house. Ha, right? Ha.

Yes, I'm the Lady With the Words on my Chest

So GenCon, right?

It was big, incase you hadn’t picked that up yet, it was super duper big and I really really wasn’t prepared for just how big. (This would contribute to later acts of what might appear to have been screaming-fan-girl-it is I’ll address later.) I was there for the table top gaming, of course, and networking, but I figure I should address the general experience first, and maybe talk about the other stuff later.

First, let me get this out of the way. Yes. I have a tattoo on my chest. Yes, it has a naughty word in it. Yes, you can read it. Honestly, I have to wonder what people thought I put it there for if not for people to read. Incase you haven’t seen it or read it,

And yes, you can ask me about it. If I’m not on fire or clearly busy, why wouldn’t I want to tell you why the word WHORE is in the middle of my chest. (Other than how cool PTA meetings are going to be.)

That said. I cannot believe how many nerds there are. Like, I knew there were a lot of us intellectually, (how many World of Warcraft players are there?) But I guess I suspected on some level that most of the internet was three guys complaining about everything.

How wrong I was.

I really loved seeing the scope and variety that creativity manifests itself. No matter how ridiculous the costumes, no matter how potbellied the Princess Leila’s (thanks Chuck) no matter how absurd the debates of ‘who would win in a fight’ (Hint: The answer is always Bruce Campbell.) What it truly expresses is a love and passion for the creative force. A real and legitimate effort to socialize in ways that work for people who are very different from the norm. Separate from it and not so overwhelmed by it, I love it and I’m glad I can see that now.

Things I truly loved:
The White Wolf people were SUPER friendly and kind despite my obvious shell shock. I have a lot of thank you Emails to write. (Matt, Jess, Kelly, Joe, Ethan, Marty, a Viking, Chuck, Bethany, John, Eddy, other people who’s names I got and forgot because its all a blurr, THANK YOU.)

The guys who did ‘The Gamers’ movie at a booth looking like famous movie stars. (No kidding, some of those dudes are HOT.)

Tshirts that said insane things like ‘Nerd Famous.’

Half naked people with no shame. Providence bless the unashamed.

My husband.

A dude at the Palladium Booth wearing a Coalition dress uniform. I was trying to be all professional and slip my card and my CV to Kevin Sembiada and the other guys there, but instead my heart was pounding and I got all squishy and gushy. I hope I left an impression of passion and not idiocy. I’ll find out, I’m sure. (My brother will never stop making fun of me for that, I’m sure.)

The games! But more on that next time!

Behold The Mini-Psudo-Disscussion Panel

I just got a nice chunk of submissions to various and sundry contests and anthologies. With a second to breath, I thought I'd share with you a heck of a conversation I had.

I love the internet and its potential for spontaneous discussion and random pseudo-interviews. Here's the set up. Earlier in the day I had this conversation I had read THIS agents blog. A quote in it stuck with me.

"The type of writing a query requires is so far removed from the kind of writing a fiction writer does that, to me, it’s the equivalent of a dancer going to audition for the role of The Sugar Plum Fairy, and being made to stand perfectly still and DESCRIBE her movements, rather than simply being allowed to dance. Unless that dancer, then, is also a singer and has a way with words, that dancer may the most incredible Sugar Plum Fairy that troop will ever see, but the dance company will never know this." - Sandra Kring

So, I put it up in my G-Chat message. (That's THIS thing if you don't know.)

A few minutes after I posted the thought for all the internet to read I got a message from my friend The Man From Free Planet X.

Jared said to me: "Do you believe that? The ballerina metaphor, I mean?"

A answered: "I know queries make me want to cry." and then "The idea of using 200 words to prove to a stranger that my 89,000 words are good enough is jarring."

"Look at it this way," Jared said. "In a bookstore, you have only, what? A 7 word sentence to do the same thing? 200 words is a luxury."

I didn't find that much comfort, and told Jared that. He laid it back out for me like this: "It's like brick-laying. As a bricklayer, you're going to have to learn how to smooth out the mortar after to you place the bricks. Does this, matter, really? Does this make the wall any less stable? Or more? Not really. But it's a skill you need to have in order to get more people to hire you bricklay."

A little bit later in internet time, he came back with: "Which is why I feel like the ballerina metaphor misses the point It might be better if, before the ballerina auditioned, the director said "Wait. Let's see if you fit in the costume first."

That resonated a great deal and I'm really rather grateful for his opinion on the matter. Thanks Jared.

(Oh, and about five minutes later, Jared said, "That said query letters are horrible.")

At the Risk of Sounding Like a Screaming Girl.....

ZOMG!

I have been published in my first print mag!

You can pick up your copy over at Mouth Full of Bullets.

Thank you, Mr. Borg for including my Jack Doe short story "The Baked Bank Job."

It's Not Real Celebrity, but it Will Keep You Warm at Night

My friend Jared, the Man from Planet X was kind enough to ask me to sit down with him and talk about writing, the interwebs, and all the marketing I should do but don't do yet.

You can listen to that here.

In doing so he reminded me what a small world the internet is after a fashion and how we're all working and should all work to pay it forward. With that in mind, I'm off to fix up the links page on my website to make sure all the people who touch me get touched back. (In a very clean and wholesome PG kind of way, of course.)

TTYL!

How Pulpwood Can Teach You to Write

If you know me in person, you've heard me say before that I enjoy the maxim by Raymond Chandler.

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

You laugh, I laugh, but the truth is, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. At it's most basic and direct translation, Chandler just means that in the rough and tumble world of hard-boiled detecting, there's always one more gun-totting goon more than willing to speed your plot along with a .44 and a foreboding entrance.

Did Chandler intend any deeper wisdom? Any wider concept in that simple statement?

Hell if I know, and yet, I still see the wider reason there. Let's look at a few examples of that concept that popped into my head at three in the morning last night when I should have been sleeping.

So let's say you're writing a science fiction, maybe some kind of great big beautiful space opera full of characters -way- cooler than Lucas.*

Let's say you've just described (in thirty pages no less) what the intake of the engine looks like and how it is the ship is powered for interplanetary travel. Also, there's a three page essay on toilets in space.

Even your characters seem a little bored waiting around for something to happen.

Try having an enemy space pirate ship show up and threaten to “blow them out of the sky!”

Why? --because pirates are cool-- I mean, because action is what makes pages turn. Dry data and technical speculation is really one of the cool parts about hard science fiction on a grand scale, however, if you really want to get the reader to the part of the story where you discuss the ships air recycling system, you might consider throwing in --pirates-- action in order to get them jazzed about reading on.

Don't do Scifi? No problem.

Let's say that you write Fantasy. More than that, you're writing the next great Epic Fantasy Novel. Tolkeen can eat your shorts by the time you churn out all 300 thousand words of this baby.

The first half of the book is written, and you've described the millennia of historically important points. You've written three complete languages-- including two dialects of your gnomish language because your beer gnomes speak with a drunken slur. You've established the political climate and described in long flowery detail how each of the worlds nations could at any point fall into war with each other.

So what's next? Well, why don't you take that farm boy who doesn't know he's 'the one' who will fulfill some ancient prophecy and have him shot full of crossbow bolts on his way home from the market. I'm not saying you -have- to kill him, but I'm saying nearly killing him might sure as heck change the scope of your story and give your readers something to sit up and take notice of. A 'the one' full of bolt holes who can't fulfill his destiny and has to pass it along to the fat pig farmer next door would certainly put a lot of epic fantasy on its ear.

Another example.

Let's say you're writing paranormal romance. (Why not, there's a market for it.) So let's say you've just had three pages of hawt smexy vampire on vampire hunter luvin and now that you feel the need to shower off and maybe pop into a confessional, something has to happen....

Chandler know! Have one of the other vampire hunters burst through the door with a flame thrower in his hand and turn Lestat into so much dust buster fodder.

Why? Besides the fact that it's funny? It's unexpected. In the romance industry, you here over and over again people berate the genre for being formulaic and repetitive. So do something WAY outside the box, like lead your readers on with hawt vampire luvins only to destroy your vampire and -really- put your heroin into a new and exciting world of revenge and luvin.

Okay, right, genre writing is for the illiterate and people who drool on themselves?**

No problem, Chandler's line works even in the literal literary world. Take a piece of good old fashioned contemporary literature.

Let's say your angsty but thoughtful hero is at work (he works at a coffee shop, of course, while he's trying to get his writing off of the ground.) Let's say for this example that you've spent the last ten pages with him thinking about his quirky family, bad childhood, and disastrous break up. From here, you could have him decide that the world is a lie and that ultimately all things fall into nothing....

Or you could have someone walk into the cafe with a gun, rob the place, and shoot a co-ed while your hero is all but powerless to stop it.

Why? Because that's real life. It makes things happen, and it's a real honest to God tragedy that will really give your hero something to wax eloquent about for days at a time!

Action is good, it stretches all your thinking muscles and it gets the pages turning. When things happen in a book, things happen, and that's what makes a story a story and not just, say, a three hundred page blog entry.

*Not a comment on my opinion about Lucas, just an example.

**Not my opinion, forgive the hyperbole.

Networking?

So the idea is that as writers it's recommended that we branch out and make as many associates and allies in the field as possible. I have images of the Shellys sitting down to dinner and laudinum with Byron and his doctor friend.

I'd think in this universe of intertubes the potential of being in contact with a world of writers is endless. I say I 'think' because I haven't actually gotten that far yet. As a matter of fact, the only writers I talk with regularly are my local friends, most of whom I've known since high school with only barely more (or considerably less) experince in the field than I have.

So, thinking about it, it seems like there's two ways to go about it. There's all of these social networking sites. (Seriously, hundreds, horrifying staggering numbers of them.) What's cool, some of them seem to be designed for writers to do their thang not unlike MySpace was orginally for bands to get their music heard.

The problem I'm having with that in particular is I have NO idea how to make contacts. I imagine I have to post all over the place and stroke a lot of egos to get similar affection.

Or... I could spend that time writing. Ha.

A friend of my husband's in the music industry is of the opinion that the sorts of fans and contacts you make at places like MySpace are rabid fans who will never buy anything you produce. I don't know how true that is, but it's a bummer to think about and makes me very hesitant to invest a lot of time into it.

There's blogging and websites and such, but as you can see, that hasn't gotten off the ground much for me. I've a site and this blog but I haven't been able to see any clear evidence of it making me any money or building me a fan base. I may be counting chickens before they've hatched however, and I can admit that to myself.

There's also just personal contact with authors you like. Duh. I have sitting in my email box right now a congratulatory email from an author I really like. Have I written him back yet? No. Why? I'm shy on a lot of levels and don't want to appear to be kissing his butt or wasting his time. Yeah, I know that's dumb and I'm going to correct it immediately. (Or like, later tonight. Or tomorrow... hehe.)

I imagine a resourceful and brave little writer could reach on out into the intertubes and send out emails to all their favorite authors. Most of the big names will probably hit me back with a form letter, but there's always the possibility that rising stars might be more interested in what ever I can offer in exchange for what ever they can. It's worth a shot, anyway.

So I'll see how that goes.

TTYL