Trimming the Fat

Oh, man.  You guys, I am SO EXCITED.  I read this post from Ms. Mandy Hubbard, and even though I am not a big YA person, and even though I am especially not a big "yet another pretty white girl on the cover" person, I want to read that book so bad.  I don't even know what the plot is; just the story of how it came to be is enough to sell me on it. 

If I can stand on that point for just a second: I'm just this year dipping my toes into the World-Wide Writers' Web, but so far, it feels like the default business model is "write something, peter out, trunk it, write something else, get bored, trunk it, write something else, revise it, revise it, trunk it, write something else..."  I haven't exactly done that - even though I have repeatedly deleted EVERYTHING except for a couple of character names and traits, it's always felt like reworking the same story to me - and it's surprisingly heartening to read about somebody else who did that and ended up with a stellar, first-rate work of fiction.

Anyway, she put in her time and got there.  I gotta get there too.  So here's this week's progress, illustrated by what I will call the Delete-o-Meter:




This round, the goal is to revise according to the feedback I've gotten from my readers, and also to shrink the manuscript by at least 15%.  I've revised 4 out of the 16 chapters (I have long chapters, okay - shut up!), and obliterated over 5,000 words.  I am so dang proud of that.

Maybe I'm not doing it right, because although there have been moments of "dang, that was one pretty paragraph," it's not been blood/sweat/tears at any point.  It always amazes me, how I will finish a draft and INVARIABLY feel like it's the most perfect, untouchable thing ever, and pull my hair at the very prospect of mangling it at someone else's behest.  Six months down the road, however, I'm pink-slipping paragraphs and pages and scenes like an Enron executive. 

I suppose it's all in the vision, huh?  You will snarl and snap and cling to your masterpiece, but as soon as you can visualize its superior form, you're mangling it in the bathtub with calm, fanatical precision.

Well, I hope you are, anyway.  I'll feel awkward if I'm the only one.

One pound of flesh, no more, no less.  No cartilage, no bone, but only flesh.

Throwing Down: June Edition

Listen up, June - I am officially throwing down the gauntlet.  I have cleaned off my desk, bought paper and ink and a fresh pack of highlighters, and charged the Kindle.  By the time you are over, I will have:

--edited my manuscript, start to finish

--finished critiquing my crit-partner's manuscript

--learned how to blog, tweet, and pin the way real people do*

(*specifically: I will read and implement Giving the Bird, resurrect my Absolute Write posting habits and start visiting bloggers there, and... figure out how Pinterest works.)

I will also award myself bonus points for every book I can get read this month.  Shit.  Hopefully 29-and-a-half  isn't too old to go to the library and get one of those summer reading club sheets.

So commit with me, people!  What are YOU going to knock out this month?

For this you will need one room, which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold.

DFWCON 3: The Alliance

You know, I can distinctly remember reading about film and TV writers being forced to work through committee and even sometimes getting kicked off of their own projects, and thinking, "Man, I'm so glad I'm only doing books - everything belongs to me and I can do it all by myself."

Isn't ignorance adorable?  It's like looking at embarrassing naked baby pictures of your brain.

I mean, I always knew that there were agents and publishers and marketing gurus, all of whom you have to play ball with if you want to see your hardback on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, but I thought that the actual writing, the content of the book, was all me.  And a conference is cake by comparison, right?

So you might be able to imagine my slowly-mushrooming surprise as I realized that I'd had help from a veritable Justice League of awesome people *just to go to writer-prom*.  The list of superheroes included:

Ensemble, whose supernatural powers of wardrobe selection transformed me into a decent-looking human being

Photo-Finish, who wields business cards like shuriken and designs them too

Frankly Speaking and the Betazoids, who tirelessly heard, read, and critiqued not only my proto-pitch (often multiple times), but the manuscript from whence it came

and the Light of My Life, who heroically held the fort at home all weekend so that I could go off gallivanting.

And it was magical, marvelous, fantastic and enlightening, but having all those people behind me for this new and decidedly extroverted experience kinda made me realize how much I've already been relying on them for the long slog leading up to it: somebody to read my stuff and give me deep feedback on it, somebody to harass me about when the next chapter will be done, somebody who lets me harass *them* about arcane research questions, somebody who helped me through life and school and unemployment so that I could stay fixated on the dream.  Someday I aim to be somebody, but I would be NOBODY without my posse.

So the third and final Great Revelation from this weekend is this: if you're doing it all by yourself, you're probably doing it wrong.

Completely bulletproof - and machine washable, darling. That's a new feature.

DFWCON 2: Lessons

I wussed out of the workshop meet tonight.  I feel dirty, like skipping class to go write the paper.

Anyway, so the marvelous Ms. Vickie Motter has already written a great series about what to do for writers' conferences, the first entry of which is --> here <--  I couldn't top that if I tried, but here while it's still fresh in mind are a few things that I learned this weekend.

Smart Moves

1.  Brutal, unrelenting cheerfulness.  It was easier than I'd expected (cuz I was genuinely having a blast), but it was amazing what a people-magnet the rainbowsparkle attitude turned out to be.

2.  Commentable features.  For me it was my name on the tag (I swear I got a thrill every time somebody hollered "TEX!!!")  For this one fellow I met, it was his immaculate formal suit-jacket, tie, and BRIGHT neon yellow pants.  My hypothesis is that people are more willing to take the plunge and strike up a conversation if you offer them an easy open (such as "good GOD man, your britches are showing up on Google Earth!")  This is probably also good for jogging an agent's memory when you shoot out an e-mail months later.  "Remember me?  I was the one cosplaying Boba Fett..."

3.  Business cards.  You probably already knew that, so bonus tip: if they're just for your writer-life, maybe have a little thumbnail photo of yourself on there, so people can whip it out weeks or months later and say "oh, right!  He's the one writing an 800-page memoir from his cat's point of view."

4.  Agent homework.  No lie, I got insane mileage out of whipping out my shoddily-printed papers and making battle-strategies with other writers who didn't know who they should pitch to.  What really clinched this was having pulled and printed information not found on the agents' websites - such as, for example, this fantastic list of things Agent Sarah LaPolla absolutely does NOT want to hear about even one more time.  When you save somebody $39 and brutal disappointment, you've basically just minted a new friend.

Pointers for Next Time

1.  More agent homework, for exactly the above reason - I only had coverage for the ones in my genre, and really wish I'd taken the time for all of them.  Plus, you never know who knows whom, or who you might end up stuck in an elevator with.

2.  More pitch practice.  Not so much with my core schpiel, but with integrating it with that particular agent's interests.  I fell absolutely flat on my face with one of them, and could have prevented that if I'd really prepped the whole thing instead of trying to hamfistedly mash the two parts together.

3.  Notes RIGHT after I talk to a fabulous new person.  I collected all these super-rad business cards and scribbled contact info, but neglected to write down what we'd talked about.  Now I can't remember which of these two ladies is the Mad Men fan who writes Don/Roger slash-fic, and that's not a thing you want to get mixed up about.

4.  Questions prepared ahead of time!  I did have a couple of generic good ones stashed up my sleeve, but it sucked to walk out of a truly awesome class and only think of a first-rate mission-critical question 20 minutes after the fact.

So there you go, future-me: take these lessons to heart and go forth to ArmadilloCon armed with experience, wisdom, and a surplus of breath mints.  Godspeed.

--So that's the secret?  Hickeys and bananas?
--No, I said she'll GO bananas.

DFWCON 1: New Neighbors

This is me, still awash in the post-coital glow from the DFW Writer's Conference.  I could fall asleep and stay there for three days easily, but instead, let me take a deep drag and write down a few of the essentials.

Point #1: The conference was AMAZING.  Knock-down, drag-out, tricycle-kid-from-the-Incredibles AWESOME.  It's the only writer's conference I've been to, but now I'm dreadfully afraid that I might have been ruined for all others.  It's kind of hard to picture how any other con could be as fun, informative, well-organized, and fantastically-attended as this one.  That is a pretty good problem to have.

Point #2: Writer-types, hie thee forth to one of these things.  It will almost-certainly be inferior to this one (see above), but more than any of the particular features, one of the best - healthiest - parts of this weekend was the meeting and greeting and going and doing.  This what we do is a lonely gig, and I had not at all realized how badly I needed to get out of my own head, and give the ol' Ouroboros something new to chew on.

Point #3: I said on Twitter that this is basically Hogwarts Disneyland Woodstock carnival-prom, for book nerds.  Let me zero in for a sec on the school part of that.

The thing is, when you are in grade school, or even in college, you are constantly being exposed to new ideas and new people.  Your classes and teachers and the kid who sits next to you in 3rd period all change from semester to semester, and although you can choose your lunch-buddies and who you invite to your birthday party, a great deal of the mixing is outside your control.  That constant social influx tends to end with adulthood.  Most of us end up with fairly stable sets of people in our lives: co-workers, friends, immediate family, whatever.  One of the things I've most enjoyed about the DFW Writer's Workshop, which was multiplied about a hundredfold at the conference, is that although you can still cultivate favorite friends, you are ALSO routinely shunted into groups of brand-new folks, who have brand-new perspectives and interests that you would have otherwise missed out on.  (And unlike those four-foot-tall larval felons in grade school, these ones here aren't after your lunch money or your self-esteem.)

What I mean to say is this: we of the pennish persuasion tend to get real focused on generating new stuff - new stories and characters and whatever.  And unless you have small children or food allergies, it's easy to forget that output correlates directly to intake.  Do yourself a favor, then, and see what you can do to increase your intake not only of books and ideas and Internet-content, but of fellow carbon-based life-forms - especially those outside your genre or Twitter feed or advertising demographic - and all the exotically-flavored brain-juices they bring.

Oh, hi Trolley.  Is it time to go back to reality now?

The Avengers: What Was Missing

My mom is pretty rad.  I don't say that because she wanted us to take her out to see The Avengers for Mothers Day, but it's definitely a contributing factor.

So anyway, my social mediaverse has been dripping with Avengers-flavored orgasmic juices basically for weeks now, and of course hype is a spoiler of a different kind: if enough people tell you that it's the most awesome thing EVER, you're bound to be disappointed when you finally get there.  The fact that I STILL enjoyed the dickens out of this movie surprised me.

Here as my belated effort to catch up to the rest of the world, then, are

Five Things Missing From The Avengers (spoilers included)


1.  Romance.  Or maybe better to say 'giant protracted romantic subplot.'  I'm not dogging on romance in general, but in this movie, the given purpose is to stop Loki from screwing planet Earth, and I appreciate keeping the focus there.  Yeah, there's some hints about there being some kind of a something between Natasha and whatsisname, but that's the extent of it: hints.  Then we're back to kicking ass.  Isn't it wonderful?

2.  Angst.  Maybe this is the great side-benefit of sticking six superheroes together and forcing them to share the screen: there's not enough time for any one of them to take 20 minutes and an overwrought monologue to mope about whatever.  Everybody got a minute and a couple (excellent) lines of dialogue to get poignant.  Then we're back to kicking ass. 

3.  Poor Decision-Making.  Sure, everybody's got their own personalities and prejudices, which makes for some decidedly less-rational behavior, but at no point does the plot hinge on somebody doing something holler-at-the-screen ridiculous.  Iron Man doesn't go diva and quit the team in a huff.  Thor doesn't blow the mission trying to 'redeem' his brother.  These people are adults, pretty consistently making smart decisions to advance a shared goal, and that is unbelievably refreshing.

4.  Fight-Scene Filler.  Let's be honest: long straight-up fight sequences are boring.  Spending ten minutes watching Wolverine fight the spiky-nails chick, or Captain Jack and Norrington duking it out on top of some ridiculously convoluted hamster-wheel bullshit, is boring.  Because all you're doing is waiting to see which one wins, and you already know that even if the good guy loses, he's not going to die.  The Avengers has its share of long action sequences, but it's much less like watching a CG version of Super Punch-Out, and much more akin to extreme eye-candy speed-chess: the outcome of each encounter changes the whole board, and keeps your brain engaged even while your eyeballs are juicing. 

5.  "Strong Female Characters."  I knew this wouldn't be a problem with Joss ("the Boss") Whedon, but it still warrants a mention.  There is some kind of insidious rule that a "kick-ass" heroine must be a rude, domineering, abrasive, nigh-unbearable shrew who strangles innocent bystanders with her ovaries.  And gets naked at some point.  It was so nice to see a lady character who was genuinely kind and polite and kept her (admittedly skin-tight) clothes on all throughout, and STILL kicked major ass.  Aspiring writers of the world, please, for the love of God, take note.

You know, I'm glad that the studio dumped $220 million into this thing: it allowed for a bunch of truly top-tier actors, amazing setpieces and special effects, and some first-rate marketing.  I just hope that when the movie gurus look at The Avengers' eleventy-billion dollars in revenue and set out to emulate its success, they will realize that the secret formula isn't "expensive eye-candy and lots of it."  Good writing is cheap by comparison, and yet incredibly valuable.  It's nice to see that rewarded.

Clench up, Legolas.

Cue Training Montage

Oh, man.  Well, the unrelenting shitblizzard that affords me an income is actually starting to relent, and not a minute too soon: the DFW Writer's Conference kicks off in a mere 17 days, and I am going to need every ONE of them to get myself together.

Things to do over the next two weeks:

--write, practice, and perfect a pitch (holy crap*)
--roll out some business cards
--pick brains of veteran attendees, take copious notes
--learn how to dress for success competent adulthood

*this is easily the least-important and yet most-intimidating part; I hope I'm scheduled to go early, so I can get it done with and then kick back and enjoy all the remainder.

I tell you what: this whole project scares the dickens out of me, and no lie.  But after the months of nebulous hithering-and-thithering with feedback, revisions, and critiques, it's kind of nice to be able to drive a dart into the wall calendar and say "THIS is happening on THIS day."  I'll plan on that not happening again until that hypothetical moment when my hypothetical publisher sets a hypothetical release date.  Until then...!

Go ahead and sleep on the power couch. Your training begins tomorrow, at the crack of noon.

The Nature of the Beast

You know, I used to think that getting a book written was essentially doing battle with the Beast.  The agony of suckage and rewriting, the ecstasy of some brief stroke of genius, the back-and-forth and rest and retrial - all of it an epic struggle, yes?

Nope.  Come to find out that all of this, the writing and rewriting and feedbacking and editing?  That was just the training montage.  Eye of the Tiger, and so forth.  The Beast is actually called Publicizing - pitching, querying, networking, marketing, social-media-whatevering, please-look-at-my-stuffening - and it's licking its chops waiting for me.

On second thought, maybe I need to practice a little more with the backswing.

So it's come to this, has it? A fight to the death, mano a mano, man to man... just you and me and my... GUARDS!

The Tale of the Tilting Tower, or, Fun With Unintended Consequences

Well, life has lately been long on income-earning opportunities and decidedly short on fun, but let me pull up something from the old cranial DVR for an evening's entertainment.

In fact, let me tell you the Tale of the Tilting Tower.

By ogrish standards, Oh was something of a disappointment. She was lamentably intelligent for an ogre, and curious, and got decidedly less than the expected thrill out of ripping the limbs from living creatures.  So it wasn't all that surprising when she eventually wandered down from the Foothills of Gurn and got herself mixed up with a human adventuring party.  It was the usual story - the same vaguely-defined but creeping world-threatening menace that bands of misfits always seem to find - and eventually it led to a tower.

Which wasn't so much a tower as a giant rusted-out metallic spire, thousands of years old, which leaned precipitously to the west like the hand of a stopped clock.

Of course, long-extinct caretakers never leave anything of interest or value on the ground floor, so there was nothing to do but to get in there and start climbing.  That's a lot of stairs under the best of circumstances, and this wasn't the best of anything: the tower's tilt, combined with the rust-eaten floors and decaying supports, made every room and hallway a slow, treacherous task.

The seething nests of monsters didn't help either.

Being a sensible bunch, Our Heroes were determined to keep falling deaths to a minimum.  So it was decided that Kara, the light and architecturally-sensitive rogue, would tie one end of a rope's length about her waist, while Oh likewise girdled herself with the other end: she was careful to walk nowhere but in her companions' tried-and-tested footsteps, and her handsome ogrish weight would make her a fine anchor if Kara's explorations ever ended with a shriek and the sound of collapsing floor-tiles.

Our Heroes had made it pretty handily to the twelfth floor when yet another quick and brutal skirmish broke out, this one in a damnably cramped room full of ruined furniture.  Oh, being a strapping young lady of 10 feet and about 600 pounds, couldn't maneuver through the doorway to help her little friends.  Mightily frustrated by the sound of their struggle, she raised her great-club and smashed the wall to ruins.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" asked the DM.

"Absolutely!" said I, with a glance at Oh's 9 Wisdom score.

The monsters were helpless against the heroes' combined might, and soon lay dead or banished.  "Well!" said Regar, wiping the blade of his axe.  "Let's press on."

And so they resumed their careful exploration, the party waiting in gathered safety as Kara wound her way through empty doors and crushed corridors, delicately searching out a safe path to the next stairway...

... until, with her first giant-sized step forward, the screech of breaking iron sounded under Oh's feet.

She was gone in an instant, leaving nothing to her astonished comrades' eyes but an ogre-sized hole in the floor, a black chasm sucking up rope like a strand of wet spaghetti as Kara's terrified soprano shriek whipsawed around distant doors and portals at the speed of gravity...

They didn't die, I'm pleased to report.  A single axe-stroke broke the rope, and I think it was about the sixth floor down that finally broke Oh's fall.  But they make them of sterner stuff up in the Foothills of Gurn, and as the saying goes, "the only hit point that matters is the last one."

So ends the Tale of the Tilting Tower, and to me, its lesson is this: if you REALLY want to have fun with your characters (be they shaped by the rolls of a die or bound within the pages of a book), treat them every once-in-a-great-while to a truly disastrous mistake.  Where the Law of Unintended Consequences is concerned, you can't beat a first-rate felony. 

Oh sorry.

Backing Up the Winnebago

It's like... when you're doing your first draft, or second or maybe even third, it sucks because what you thought was awesome before turns out to look like total shit when you read back over it again.  But I'm coming up on a new snag, here, because I've finally hit the point where it all looks great to me - genius, I say! - and that means it's time to rely on other talented folks to give it an objective eye.

It's like trying to back a trailer into a parking space, or something - you can think you know what you're doing and be good at it, but ultimately the person on the ground is the only one who can really tell you how close you are to hitting that fire hydrant.

And right now I am just not sure I will ever be able to get this goddamn thing parked.

"Well," the reasonable reader might enquire, "if YOU feel like it's good to go, why don't you start sending it off?"

Two reasons, say I.  First, you need an absolutely KICK ASS beginning, and while I've gotten considerably divergent feedback on what particularly is wrong with mine, kick-ass it is not.  And second, it's not that 148,000 words is totally out of the question for big fat fantasy novels, but if you're going to try and sell that, you have got to make SURE that every single one of those words is absolutely mission-critical.  And mine aren't.  (I think it's more a case of trimming bits here and there, rather than cutting out vast tracts of irrelevance, but I have lost considerable confidence in my bit-trimming insight - again, it's gotten to the stage where it all looks pretty good from here.)

Anyway, the consolation in all this is that I already know I'm going to keep working at it until I'm dead or published, so no danger of quitting in despair.  AND I have already gotten awesome feedback from awesome people, with more yet to come.  Right now it is just real hard to see how this giant unwieldy thing is ever going to fit between the yellow lines.

Fantasia has no boundaries.