Adam Christopher | Steampunk and dark fantasy author. Now with added superheroes!
Adam Christopher is a New Zealand-born SF writer living in the sunny north of England.Writing Habits #5 – Scott Sigler special edition!
As if you didn’t know it, Scott Sigler is a New York Times Bestselling author, the king of podcast novels, and our Future Dark Overlord. He’s also a real gent, and his limited edition hardcover of The Rookie is due to ship at the end of the month. Just look at the blurb and pick your jaw up off the floor when you’re done:
Set in a lethal pro football league 700 years in the future, THE ROOKIE is a story that combines the intense gridiron action of “Any Given Sunday” with the space opera style of “Star Wars” and the criminal underworld of “The Godfather.”
Aliens and humans alike play positions based on physiology, creating receivers that jump 25 feet into the air, linemen that bench-press 1,200 pounds, and linebackers that literally want to eat you. Organized crime runs every franchise, games are fixed and rival players are assassinated.
Follow the story of Quentin Barnes, a 19-year-old quarterback prodigy that has been raised all his life to hate, and kill, those aliens. Quentin must deal with his racism and learn to lead, or he’ll wind up just another stat in the column marked “killed on the field.”
So to prep y’all for this rather exciting event, I spoke to Scott about The Rookie’s journey from podcast to print, his five-book deal with Crown Publishing, and his writing habits. Thanks to my good friends at the Box Room podcast, this special Writing Habits episode is available at their forum here. It’s also up on iTunes as a free podcast here – hit the subscribe button, and when I get around to going more audio interviews you’ll get them straight away.
The FDO himself, Scott Sigler
Scott Sigler himself can be found at scottsigler.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/scottsigler, and on Twitter as @scottsigler. You can order his books from Amazon and all good bookstores, apart from The Rookie which is exclusive to his website, for reasons which he explains in the interview.
I hope you enjoy the interview. I’d love to hear your feedback, so please post in the comments below!
The end is the beginning is the end
Seven Wonders is finished.
Oh yes. The bad guy got what was coming, the good guys got what was coming. There was a meeting on the moon, there was an attack on the city. There was one mother of a finale, with the superheroes of the world uniting in high orbit to defend the planet against an alien attack. Exciting and action-packed, I hope.
Except it’s not finished. The final chapter has been written, the last sentence typed. The story is complete and plot threads resolved.
Except for the middle bit of the book, which I skipped.
Now, I had my reasons. Seven Wonders was pretty difficult to get started. Although I’m a fan of and familiar with the superhero genre, it’s a new one to write in for me, and getting it right is tricky. It has to be serious but not po-faced, with all the capes and spandex and X-ray vision of comics, but without descending into parody or silliness. I cracked it in the end, and the second half of Seven Wonders really took off.
But in order to make the jump and get things rolling, I had to call it quits on the earlier part of the book. I’ve called it “Act II” on Twitter, but really it’s the second half of Act I. There is a big transition to make between all of my characters making their independent discoveries at the beginning of the book, to the giant battles at the end. This bit is really integral, the whole reason for writing the book in the first place, the whole high concept thing. I stopped writing it because I didn’t know the characters well enough, and wasn’t happy with what they were doing. What I had written turned into a series of independent events with no apparent arc or theme. So I stopped, knowing that I would return at the end and add all this in. Now that I know what becomes of the characters in the story – sometimes diverging from my original outline by quite a margin – I can go back, plant the seeds, build the arc, and push everyone where they need to go. Aceness. Currently the manuscript is at 89,284 words, which gives me just over 10k to fill in.
And then I sat down to do some outlining of this Act I.5, and it’s so long I think I’m going to need, oh, 50k to fit it all on. Well, hot dang.
As with my first novel, Dark Heart, the target wordcount is 100,000, for various reasons I have mentioned in the past, but mainly because for a first novel from an unpublished author, 99.99%-recurring agents won’t touch anything longer. While this doesn’t influence my writing to a significant extent – a story is as long as it needs to be – it is something I try and keep track of. Dark Heart ended up as 126,000-something, which means it’ll need trimming in the second draft. The second draft that I’m supposed to be working on now, in August, while the completed vomit draft of Seven Wonders sits on the shelf in as fancy Lulu POD’ed trade paperback editing copy.
But it looks – maybe – that Seven Wonders is going to be longer, possibly much longer. Well, fine. The first draft is the first draft is the first draft. As Scott Sigler said (more on my interview with him later!), you’ve gotta get that clay on the wheel. So Seven Wonders is going to be a long one, and will need maybe another month to finish up.
What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, really, except I’m a list-maker and a box-checker, and had the rest of 2009 mapped out, writing-wise. Now that schedule is out by a month, which considering the glacial pace of writing and publishing in general, is nothing major. But one frustration is seeing steampunk increase in popularity almost daily, and I’ve got a cracking steampunk series that begins with Dark Heart, a novel that is in need of rewriting before I can even begin to think of shopping it around.
But that’s just me. Steampunk won’t go away. If anything, it’ll be even more popular in 2010, looking at forthcoming books, films and TV shows.
So what do I do? I write, and keep writing, and do my damnedest to make Seven Wonders completely awesome, even if it is 150,000 words long.
Time to put some new dates on the wall planner.
Writing Habits #4 – Seth Harwood
California-based crime novelist Seth Harwood is another podcasting success story. Having introduced his high-octane detective thriller stylee to the podsphere in 2006, in May 2009, the first volume of the Jack Palms series, Jack Wakes Up, was released by Three Rivers Press. Good crime fiction is hard to write, but Seth is on top of the game. I can’t really beat Scott Sigler’s summary of the book, when he said: “Jack Wakes Up is like a Tarantino film pulled off the screen, rolled in a John Woo zig-zag wrapper and sparked up with a vintage Miami Vice lighter. Buy it now and thank me later.”
Wise words. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Seth Harwood.
Name
Seth Harwood, aka the Palms Father of Soul, The James Brown of Podcasting
Location
California, USA – the Berkeley Hills
What do you write?
I write crime novels in the Jack Palms series and literary short stories… so far. Who knows what I’ll get into next? More crime, definitely more crime!
Jack Wakes Up: A Novel, by Seth Harwood
What are your writing habits?
I write first thing or as close to first thing in the morning as possible. The sooner I can get from bed to keys, the better it seems to flow. I’ll go through periods where, honestly, all I do is work on promotion of my work. That can take the form of podcasting, blogging, interacting with fans online, and building in new media. Fortunately there are times I get excited about this so it’s not a grind.
Then there are the writing drafting times. When I’m in this mode, I’ll avoid the internet altogether until I’ve done my word count for the day. I usually set a goal of however many words (1,000 when I’m starting out and then 1,500 and 2,000 or above when I’m really into a project.) But I try not to overdo it. I’m a big believer in feeling out your limits and not going beyond. That’s how I think people get “blocked.” I’ll try to write as many days a week as I can, but usually not more than 6. Every day I make sure to stop at a point where I know what’s going to happen next; this makes starting up the next day a lot easier.
I don’t write with an outline. I like getting to know the characters and their situations as I go. If I’m getting surprised, it usually amounts to good writing, exciting for the reader. I believe in writing each sentence as best I can, and letting that one lead me on to the next. Then in revision I try to find out what I learned about the story along the way, then try to build that in from the start.
What software or tools do you use?
I use Scrivener for writing my novels and a MacBook. I used to use Word, but literally I can’t imagine how I’d write a novel without Scrivener now. I guess that’d make me do outlines – outline as I go. There’s nothing that can match Scrivener’s chapter view for seeing where the book has gone and is going. I title my chapters so I know a bit about what happens in each one and just look back at that list as my outline. I can also jump right to the parts I need to see with it, instead of massive scrolling and reading movements like I had to do in Word. Blech!
If you’ve got a Mac and want to write a novel, you’ve got to get Scrivener!
I also use 3″ x 5″ notecards. I jot stuff down on them all the time, like crazy. Stick them wherever I can.
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Seth Harwood, thank-you very much! Seth can be found online at his website, sethharwood.com, and also on Facebook at facebook.com/sethharwood and twitter as @sethharwood. The Jack Palms series of podcast novels can be downloaded for free from Seth’s website, and the original podcast novel version of Jack Wakes Up is also available for free from iTunes, while the print version can be found at Amazon.com and your local bookstore.
Take Scott’s advice and buy several copies today.
Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing Returns!
Some brief but good news – one of my favourite podcasts, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, is back in production after a 4-month hiatus. I thought it was shame (although quite understandable) when host Shaun Farrell was forced to put the podcast on hold while he moved city and changed job, and had always hoped that he’d get it back on the air sooner rather than later. And he has! The first new episode, number 78, features a great interview with Greg Van Eekhout, author of Norse Gods, a smart urban fantasy dealing with the descent of Ragnarok upon LA. I’d crack wise there about no one noticing, but I did have a good burger in LAX that one time, so no hard feelings.
AISFP – or ‘Ace-fip’, maybe – is pretty much essential listening for readers AND writers of SF. It’s fun and intelligent, and the interviews are always fascinating. Their website can be found at adventuresinscifipublishing.com, and episode 78 in particular can be found here, or on iTunes. Shaun Farrell himself can be found on twitter as @shaunfarrell.
Sweet, sweet rejection, part 2: the next step!
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that my weird tale short story The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery had been rejected by Weird Tales. Them’s the breaks. Competition is tough, especially for a top-tier magazine like that.
So, what’s next? Well, I’d still like to sell it. I think it’s a good story, and that chances are other people might enjoy it.
But first and foremost, it needs another edit. Even though it went through a set of beta-readers, and was edited and polished and in pretty tip-top shape when I did the initial submission, it’s long. Too long. While there are plenty of markets that will take a story that’s somewhere in the 6-7,000 word range, the number of publications that would look at it expands exponentially as the word count drops. If I can get it to 6,000, suddenly I’ve got a lot more options. If I could somehow reduce it to 5,000, that opens a completely new avenue. But the important thing here is to be realistic. The story can’t just be hacked to meet a certain length. Since it was returned by Weird Tales I’ve only given it one reading pass, and have already identified changed and edits starting right on the first page. Knocking it back to just under 6k should be fine. Anything lower, and the structure and style will start to be affected. It’s verbose and old fashioned on purpose, and that style does require more words than something modern and sparse.
Once the draft is down to 6,000 words, the next step is to identify new markets to try. The short fiction market has been retracting since the 1950s, although the transfer of publications from print to the internet and even to podcasts now offers some intriguing possibilities. One of the hardest parts though is figuring out where to start.
There are several online resources that list fiction markets – some are less useful than others. There are a couple of gigantic lists which just show the title, which makes it fairly hard to judge content. My personal favourite is Fiction Factor, which provides a list of markets divided by genre, with brief descriptions of each title, and indication of pay range. For Thackery, I used this to cobble together a large list of potential submissions to investigate one by one.
Now, here’s the interesting thing. I don’t recall the exact number of markets – print magazines, online magazines and anthologies, and podcasts – but my list was pushing 100. That sounds huge, but immediately about half had to be discounted as they were not accepting any more submissions. Competition is fierce, slots are limited, and that 50% are backed up with slush piles for years to come.
The next largist group was magazines that actually aren’t in print. Despite the best efforts of the list makers, not every listing can be accurate or up to date. Some magazine websites haven’t been updated since 2001 (I’m quite serious). Some say that the next issue is coming in August (August 2006, that is). I emailed a few to see if they were still around – most emails bounced, some vanished into the ether.
So far, so good – all helping to whittle the list down to something manageable. Once I’d got it down to markets that were alive and kicking and were accepting submissions, it was time to start crossing off those that, really, I didn’t have a chance for.
That’s not to say I don’t have confidence in the story, but that when a magazine says they’ll take something of this sort, it really needs to be something quite, quite special. Take Asimov’s Science Fiction. This is a prestigious, quality, SF magazine. My story fits the guidelines. Looking at their back issues, they’ve published Lovecraftian weird fiction before. In fact, they’ve even published stories that are directly tied to the Cthulhu mythos (mine isn’t). However, all of them are by Very Big Names, and they’re all very short. This kind of fiction is an acquired taste, and they need to hook the reader with a writer they will recognise, and even then, it needs to be kept brief. Asimov’s is not the only market that fits this, so that’s another handful off the list.
This leaves me with about a half dozen markets – a few print magazines, a couple of online magazines, and a couple of podcasts. The podcast option is interesting, and once this story gets below that magic 6,000-word mark, I’ll be ready to start submitting.
But even then, even with a very short list of just a dozen submission options, I could be looking at a long wait. Nearly all of the markets I investigated do not accept simultaneous submissions – that is, they won’t accept anything sent to another magazine at the same time. Which is fair enough, because you could potentially have the situation where two magazines will accept the story at the same time, which will just be a real pain to try and sort out. But if you can’t do simultaneous submissions, and the response time for magazines is anything from 1-3 months, it can be a long, long wait just to receive a rejection so you can try the next one on the list. Fortunately, with novel-length fiction, this isn’t the case, as you can simultanously query as many agents as you want. But the short fiction business works differently.
My plan is to edit, and run through a few submissions. Hopefully someone will pick it up. Some other options in the back of my mind are to put it online for free, put it on the iTunes store as an eBook, or podcast it myself as an audiobook. But still, that’s a while off. My focus is novel-length fiction. Thackery is just a bit of fun, but it would be nice to see it in print!
Writing Habits #3 – Jonathan Maberry
Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jonathan Maberry is responsible for one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year. When someone says they can’t put a book down, it’s such a cliche, but in this case it’s entirely true. His 2009 bio-tech thriller, Patient Zero, is 24 meets Dawn of the Dead, an action-packed story in which terrorists are bent on releasing a pathogen that turns people into zombies. It’s fast and furious – more than 100 chapters packed into just over 400 pages – with police detective Joe Ledger finding himself recruited into the mysterious Department of Military Sciences after a run-in with the undead. Jonathan’s tight prose skips the story along, and will have you believing that infectious animated cadavers are a perfectly realistic terrorism threat. The good news is that Patient Zero is the first of a three-book deal with St Martin’s Press, which means more trouble for agent Joe Ledger and more fantastic thrillers for us fans.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Jonathan Maberry.
Jonathan Maberry
Name
Jonathan Maberry. I have published one nonfiction book under the pen name of Shane MacDougall, and the textbooks I wrote while teaching at Temple University were written under the name John Earl Maberry.
Location
I live in Warrington, a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA. About twenty-odd miles north of Philadelphia. I was born in Philly.
What do you write?
I write techno-thrillers for St. Martins Griffin (Patient Zero, The Dragon Factory, The King of Plagues), supernatural thrillers for Pinnacle Books (Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song, and Bad Moon Rising), movie adaptations for Tor (The Wolfman), Young Adult post-apocalyptic thrillers for Simon & Schuster (Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay), nonfiction books on the occult, paranormal and related pop culture for Citadel Press (Vampire Universe, The Cryptopedia, Zombie CSU, and Vampire Hunters and Other Enemies of Evil), and comics for Marvel (Punisher, Black Panther, Wolverine, and Marvel Zombies Return. I write a monthly interview column for The Big Thrill, the newsletter of the International Thriller Writers, and have so far sold over twelve hundred feature articles to a variety of magazines. I write short stories by invitation only, and have stories scheduled for The New Dead edited by Christopher Golden (for St. Martins), and others that have appeared (or will appear) in anthologies of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
Bio-tech thriller Patient Zero, and forthcoming non-fiction title They Bite
My agent typically sells books for me based on 75 pages and a synopsis, so I have a number of books sold that are not yet written. At the moment I have two or three books due out each year. Next out for me is a nonfiction, They Bite: Endless Cravings of Supernatural Predators, co-authored by David F. Kramer. It’s a follow-up to our Bram Stoker Award-winning book, The Cryptopedia. That’s due out at the end of August from Citadel Press. Also in August I begin my run as the regular writer of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther (starting with Issue #7), and in September Marvel will release Marvel Zombies Return, for which I’m doing one installment and David Wellington (Monster Island), Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and Fred Van Lent (Marvel Zombies 4) will write the other installments. At the end of October, Tor Books will release The Wolfman, which is my adaptation of the new Universal Pictures film starring Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving.
It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye...
What are your writing habits?
I write every day. On weekdays I generally write ten hours a day and aim for a total word count of 3-4 thousand words each day. On weekends I generally do 1-2 thousand words. Part of my work day, however, is given over to marketing and publicity – such as doing interviews, working on pitches and proposals for future projects, arranging talks and appearances, working with my agent and publicist, posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and writing my twice-weekly blog. I usually find a coffeeshop where I can camp out at a table for about four or five hours, then go to the gym for an hour, and then find another coffeeshop where I finish my day.
I don’t rewrite until I finish a complete first draft, and I generally do research for the next project while writing the current one. I also alternate projects based on deadlines. I might, for example, bang out a comic book script in the morning and spend the afternoon working on a novel.
Before beginning a new novel I outline it completely and write a ‘preliminary synopsis’ of what the book would be like once it’s done. This helps me work through the logic and events of the book. However, once I start writing the book tends to grow organically and I don’t try to impose too much order on it. When it’s completely done in first draft, I read it aloud (often with my wife during long drives), and then do a comprehensive second draft followed by a polish draft. My first novel, Ghost Road Blues, took fifteen months to write. The Wolfman took seven weeks. I pay attention to my process so I know when I’m doing my best work and when I’m going completely off the rails. It helps smooth out and speed up the process of writing a book.
I also type very, very fast. I took typing classes in 9th grade, mostly because it put me as the only boy in a class of thirty girls (and that’s damn good math!), but as a result I type about 130 words per minute.
What software or tools do you use?
Microsoft Word for all text projects; Final Draft for scripts; and Photoshop CS4 for any graphics associated with my nonfiction work. For hardware I use a Dell laptop that still has Windows XP… I’m resisting moving to Vista because it has too many bells and whistles and I can’t waste time learning a new system!
Jonathan’s website can be found at www.jonathanmaberry.com, where you can find his blog and details about his writing and projects. You can also download Countdown, the short story prequel to Patient Zero, for free. Jonathan can also be found on Facebook and on Twitter as @jonathanmaberry. Patient Zero is available in all good bookstores, and of course Amazon.com.
Writing Habits #2: Phil Rossi
Phil Rossi is one of those incredibly annoying creative people who is good at, well, everything! Not just a fantastic writer and podcasting maestro, he’s also a talented musician, not only composing his own soundtrack album for his debut novel, Crescent, but performing a 3-hour concert streamed live on the internet on the book’s launch date. Me? Jealous? Well of course…
Crescent is a fascinating book. Described by New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler as “Blade Runner as written by HP Lovecraft”, I was hooked as soon as I heard the podcast version. Dark, scary, but also extremely well written, Crescent is an intriguing blend of SF, horror, and ghost story, set aboard a remote, haunted space station. After podcasting Crescent as a free audiobook (still available and well worth a listen), the esteemed smallpress publisher Dragon Moon Press picked Phil’s book up, producing a handsome print edition that was released on Thursday 9th July, 2009. On that day, Phil’s fans, listeners and readers joined the author for an Amazon rush, pushing the book to a remarkable 56th position on Amazon.com’s sales chart. I watched Phil’s launch day concert, during which he played guitar, read from his work, and chatted with fans. Launch day for book of this quality is always tremendously exciting, and with Phil putting his heart and soul into the party, it was a great few hours.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Phil Rossi.
Phil Rossi
Name
Phil Rossi
Location
Virginia, USA
What do you write?
At present, I write horror and science fiction, and often a blend of both. My writing style has been described as gritty and visceral, and I’m often paralleled to Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, and H.P. Lovecraft, which is enormously flattering. The foundation of my stories is the human experience – something I believe a reader or listener can latch onto at a very primal level. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The human experience fascinates me and I think it’s something that can be explored, even in science fiction and horror.
Though I enjoy writing short stories, I focus most of my effort on writing novels. That’s not to say that I haven’t written quite a few short stories over the past several years – I even podcasted a number of them in 2008 as part of my Notes from the Vault series, but I haven’t made a great effort to get them into magazines. Chalk it up to lack of time to engage in the submission process and maybe a little laziness.
Phil Rossi's debut novel, Crescent
What are your writing habits?
My philosophy for hitting goals and getting my writing done is to take advantage of any and every free moment that I can. I call it “guerilla writing.” Be it in the middle of the night, waiting for the ferry that brings me across the Potomac River, or on lunch breaks – I take what I can get. Even fifteen minutes spent writing is far better than zilch. In a perfect world, I like to have an hour or more to sit down and get things done, but as busy as I am, I have to be realistic. Some days, I just can’t get that sort of time to dedicate to writing. My daily writing goal – I try to write no less than 1000 words a day, most days it breaks out to be more. As far as setting and environment, there’s no such thing as an ideal place or time. The time is now, the place is here.
What software or tools do you use?
Software wise, I use Word – I used to use Copyright, but have shied away from that due to some formatting inconsistencies when importing into Word. I always travel with a small notebook shoved into my pocket and a pen – when an idea comes, I want to be able to get it down as quickly as possible. It’s frustrating to have a flash of inspiration or insight but have no way of capturing it. I’ve found saying “Oh, I’ll remember” is always a colossal self-deception.
Thank you very much, Phil!
Phil’s website can be found at www.crescentstation.net, where you can find details about Crescent and his other projects, including the new podcast novel, Harvey (iTunes link). Crescent, published by Dragon Moon Press, is available from Amazon and all good bookstores (if they don’t have it on the shelf, get them to order it in!). The original podcast of Crescent is available on iTunes or at podiobooks.com
Sweet, sweet rejection
My ears deceived me. I asked my guest to repeat his statement.
“Dogs,” the Reverend Tobias Thackery said. With a smile he bit into his cake.
Time to talk about that story that I haven’t talked about.
The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery was written over a couple of days back in May this year. My wife and I had just tripped down south for the Bristol Comic Con, and stayed at the surprisingly delightful seaside town of Portishead. I don’t know whether it was the sea air, or the slightly different atmosphere of a town that has no railway (well, I’m trying to find a pattern here), but over the two days I had a few images of a completely new story running through my head. In fact, I woke up one morning with the opening line fully formed, and spent the morning repeating it over and over as I sat at the comic con waiting for the main event (the DCU panel) to begin.
So despite working on a novel and having three reports to do for Comic Book Resources, as soon as we got back home, I had to get the story out. I’m not actually much of a fan of short stories – I find them near-impossible to write, and not so interesting to read, unless they are spectacularly good. But this was a rare occassion when I had a good and short idea, so I got it down.
Thackery – as we shall call it – turned out to be a 6,900 word Lovecraftesque weird tale. Given the initial idea – that humans are descended from dogs, not apes (which came from the sleeve notes a forgotten Pulp single from their mid-80s dark age, Dogs Are Everywhere) – I always knew it was going to be in the ‘weird’ category, and as I was immersed in a modern-day third-person novel (Seven Wonders), I took the opportunity to indulge my love of the pulp of Lovecraft and Bloch and write an antique first-person narrative.
Lovecraft and Bloch are my two favourite dead authors, and last year I managed to snag a collection of Bloch’s Cthulhu mythos story cycle, that normally goes for about £50, for just a couple of pounds. In fact, the book is so rare and expensive that Chaosium are reprinting it this year. I recommend picking it up, the collection is uniformly excellent, even though Bloch tears nearly all of the stories to shreds himself in the introduction. My favourite pieces are a roughly linked group that deal with refugees from Ancient Egypt establishing dark and terrible temples in the caves of Cornwall and Devon, where they continue to worship their unspeakably evil old gods. When it comes to weird pulp tales, that kind of juxtaposition is right up my alley. So I tied Thackery to this concept. In the story, our hero – a Victorian professor of paleontology – meets a strange old vicar with a funny idea, and travels down to the South-West of England to take a look at some remarkable evidence for himself. Cosmic horror ensues. There is a fair amount of blood involved.
Thus Thackery was done in two days. I shipped it out to my beta-readers, who came back with some very useful comments. All liked it (this is good). Some said it was too long (this is true). Some said a few bits needed some further explanation (this is fair enough). In one of those catch-22 situations which I’m sure a lot of writers find themselves in, I did manage to cut the words down by quite a bit, only to replace them with new sections expanding on a few points that some readers thought needed it. But it was done, and polished, and now I could stop worrying about it and get on the with novel.
Busy as I was I didn’t plan much in the way of selling the story. I decided to aim for the top first, and see what happened, so I sent it to Weird Tales, the very magazine that Lovecraft and Bloch wrote for more than 70 years ago. And then I waited, and waited, and got on with other writing.
Just last weekend – well within their specified response period, I should add, which was very impressive – I got a response from the magazine. It was a rejection – a form rejection, although a very well written one that made it slightly hard to tell, and I had to read it a dozen times before I saw that it was. I allowed myself one minute thirty seconds of devastation and depression, cursing my chosen profession, and deciding to pack it all in together and burn down my website.
Then I pulled myself together, and got back to writing. Note to other writers – this is how to do it. If I only ever give one piece of useful advice, it is this. Rejection feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to you, and it is at this point that I’m sure a vast proportion of budding writers just calls it quits at. But the key here is to accept it, just for that one minute thirty second period. Allow yourself to be angry, sad, and depressed. Swear and stomp around, and go outside and shout at a tree. Then forget about it, move on, and update your submission spreadsheet with the rejection and get back to working on your current project.
This was my first actual rejection, I should add, for a completed work. I had previous submitted novel proposals to a work-for-hire series, each of which consisted of the first chapter and a synopsis, and each of those were rejected. Each of those got a personal rejection, which was nice, along with a bit of advice, and also an indication that on two of the three proposals, I’d actually been in the very short list. These were still rejections, but they really were terrific news – the editor had read my proposals, liked them, seen merit and possibility, but I’d lost out to something better. But it did tell me that I was doing something right. Buried somewhere in those three story ideas was something worth working on. But they weren’t rejections on finished projects, just a 5000 word chapter and a 5000 word synopsis.
Weird Tales, in contrast, was a form rejecton. Is that “worse” than a personalised rejection? Well, yes, but the shory story market is both limited and highly competitive. That’s not to say the novel market isn’t either (and it is), but with the volume of material that the editor has to see, they just have no choice. And Weird Tales is top tier, it has that cache. My story wasn’t right for it this year.
These days, with everything done electronically, my first ever rejection slip only exists as an email. But I’m going to be traditional, and print it out, and I’m going to buy one of those receipt spikes. I’ll put it on my desk, next to my computer, and skewer the rejection from Weird Tales. Stephen King says that his rejection spike held a full ream of paper before he sold his first story. Looks like I’ve got a lot of work to do!
Writing Habits #1: Tim Pratt
Last time, I introduced the Writing Habits interview project, an ongoing weekly series in which writers and creators I admire tell us a little about how they actually get their work done.
I first discovered Tim Pratt after hearing an interview with him on DragonPage Cover to Cover. I was intrigued by the description of what was, at the time, his latest – and first – novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I must admit it took me a little while to pick it up, during which time Tim had created a fascinating ongoing urban fantasy series starring fiesty sorceress Marla Mason. But Rangergirl was a revelation – a unique blend of comicbook adventure, surreal fantasy, good old fashioned human drama, featuring well drawn characters with a highly original problem to overcome. That book has remained one of my favourite novels.
Tim’s latest project is Bone Shop, a free Marla Mason prequel novella, currently being serialised online. Bone Shop, which is something of a Marla Mason origin story, is supported entirely by reader donations – read it, enjoy it, and make a voluntary donation to support the creator. By supporting this project, you are not only showing your appreciation for a mighty fine work of fiction, but you’re becoming a patron of the arts. Each donation is welcomed and really helps out Tim and his family.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Tim Pratt.
Tim Pratt
Name
Tim Pratt, T.A. Pratt, (secret porn-writing pseudonym)
Location
Oakland, California, USA. Very near a lake.
What do you write?
Mostly stories where magic co-exists with contemporary life – variously called Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Mythic Fiction. Occasionally secondary-world fantasy. Occasionally erotica/porn, usually with fantastic elements.
The latest Marla Mason novel, Spell Games, and The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
What are your writing habits?
I like writing fiction – I find it entertaining and recreational – so I basically just write whenever I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like writing very often, so I produce a fair number of words each year. If I have an impending deadline I might impose a bit more structure on myself, but mostly, I just write as the whim strikes me. If I go more than a week or two without writing I begin to get antsy. I don’t have any particular rituals or requirements to write. I live with a twenty-month-old toddler, so if I waited for the stars to align or for perfect quiet or for several uninterrupted hours to work, I’d never get any writing done!
What software or tools do you use?
Lately I write a lot in Google Docs, or even Gmail, so that I can open up my document wherever I can find a computer and an internet connection. At home I mostly write using MS Word on my desktop. I’d love to play with Scrivener, but I own a PC, alas. Maybe someday. When I’m out and about I usually have a notebook, and have no objection to writing longhand, except that it’s inefficient time-wise, as I have to retype it eventually. I take a few notes as necessary, but don’t do extensive outlines, unless I’m writing something where the timing/blocking is unusually intricate.
Thank-you very much!
Tim’s website is timpratt.org, while Marla Mason has her own home at marlamason.net. A new chapter of Bone Shop is put up each week at marlamason.net/boneshop. Read, enjoy, donate!
Writing Habits: A microinterview project
Writing, like any artistic or creative endeavour, is one of those professions that requires constant and continual learning. It’s not something that you can ever “win”, or reach the end of. You can become a master, true, but even then there is more to do, to learn, to explore, to discover. As a writer myself I’m still at the very beginning of the ongoing journey – I’ve written one and a half novels, one novella, a few short stories, all of which amounts to (so far) less than 200,000 words. Stephen King said that you had to write 1 million words before you started writing the good stuff. I’ve taken the first steps, but I have a long way to go!
What about other writers? I read a lot (another nugget of wisdom from King – write AND read for 4-6 hours a day, otherwise you won’t improve), and have enjoyed the work of many, many authors as a reader of SF. As a writer of SF, I also look at fiction from a different perspective – how did they do that? How does that work? What makes this good? What makes this entertaining and memorable? And most importantly, what makes this better than what I’m writing?
Part of understanding at what makes writing work is to looking at what makes the writers tick, and how they go about their craft from a purely practical point of view. As a writer who has battled variously with procrastination, laziness, and the self-defeating quest for the perfect writing routine, I’m interested to see how others do it.
Starting this Thursday, I’m proud to present Writing Habits, an ongoing weekly series of microinterviews with writers and creators, that will hopefully provide a look at how worlds of fiction are constructed on a practical, day-by-day basis. I’ll be talking to a wide range of writers, big names and small, across genres and styles, poking my nose in on their daily routines and the tools they use.
Stay tuned!
